Story 12.
A Compact.
It was at the ‘George Hotel’ at Portsmouth (said Gordon, as we paced the deck of the ‘Trojan’ on our voyage home) that I spent my last evening in England with my brother. The next day I was to see him off for Cape Coast Castle, where he was going to serve with his regiment in the Ashantee war.
To-day I can remember the dingy old smoking-room in which we sat till late at night, talking over the home and school days which were over, and our lives, which having always run together, seemed then to be branching far apart. We had no other relations alive; our father had died that year. The old castle in Sutherland, in which we had been born, had been sold to a rich London stock-broker, and our old life seemed to have come to an end. My brother, he was the elder, had chosen the army for his profession. He would have little but his pay to live upon, but it seemed to him to be the proper career for one of his race. I had determined to make money; it had been my dream that I would make my fortune in some distant part of the world where fortunes were to be made easily, though I did not quite know how. I was to come back to Scotland and settle down there, and we Gordons were to take our own place again. A few days after my brother sailed I was to start for South America, the country I had at last determined to be the land where that fortune would be soonest made. My brother had listened to all my schemes; and then we had talked about the campaign for which he was going to start. I think we both thought a good deal of the terrible climate he was going to face, and we became grave as the idea came into our minds that the next day’s parting was likely to be a long one. There was a story in our family that both of us must have been thinking of, for while it was in my mind my brother Donald suddenly spoke about it. The story was of a compact made between our grandfather and his brother. They were both soldiers, and their regiments were on service, one in Spain and the other in America. The agreement was that if one of them were killed, he would, if he were allowed to do so, appear to the other. Our uncle was killed in America, and it was always believed most religiously in our family that he was allowed to perform his promise, and that on the day he was killed my grandfather, who was in Spain, saw him and knew of his death. It was of this story, as we grew more thoughtful, on that last evening we were to spend together, my brother reminded me. “Let us make the same promise; the one who lives will be the last of our name and race, and perhaps it would be as well for him to know it at once,” he said to me. We had both become grave and earnest enough, and as we grasped each other’s hands and made that promise I think we felt it was not one lightly made. The next morning I saw him off. He said no more about our promise, yet as he stood on the deck of the troopship and I on the dockyard, I think we both thought of it.
Neither King Koffee or the more dire potentate King Fever hurt my brother, and he came home well and in good spirits, and got on in the service, and of what fighting there was managed to see plenty.
I am sorry to say that, unlike him, I did not fulfil the career I had mapped out for myself. I went to South America and did not succeed; and then tried one country after another, until one day, some nine years after I left England, I found myself in South Africa, finishing a long tramp from the gold-fields to the Diamond Fields. So far that fortune which I had gone out to seek was as far away in the future as ever. I had ceased even to hope for it. I had been a proverbial rolling stone and had gathered no moss. I had tried my luck in Canada, Australia, and South Africa, and had found each country worse than the one I had been in before.
My experiences were not very interesting, and they would only make a tale which has already been told many a time before. I had begun to laugh grimly at my old hopes of making a fortune and buying back some of the family property. And yet my ideas had not been so absurd either; I had seen men whose chances did not seem to be much better than mine succeed and make something like the fortune I had dreamt of. Still I laughed when I contrasted my life with what I had expected it would have been. Certainly there had been plenty of incident in it; but it was a better life to talk about than to live—a life full of long dreary days of rough uncongenial society, and I am sorry to say, of coarse, brutalising dissipation and of degrading poverty brought about thereby. I failed at first from bad luck, and afterwards from my own fault. After one or two failures I came to South Africa and went up to the Diamond Fields. Kimberley, when I came there, seemed to be the city of the prodigal son. He was there devouring his substance and getting the worst of its kind for it, and feeding the swine, or rather, minding a bar, which is a good colonial equivalent, and only too ready to eat of the husk he served out. I had little substance to devour, and when I had used it up was not even as lucky as the prodigal, for I got nothing to do at all. From there I went up to the gold-fields in the Transvaal, and two years of varied luck in digging ended in my being on my way tramping back. I had not done much towards making my fortune, I had not a penny in my pocket, my boots were worn out, and I had not had a meal for twelve hours, and I was very doubtful as to how or where I should get the next one. I was doing my last day’s tramp. Far away across the veldt I could see the mounds of earth that had been taken out of the Kimberley mine, and as slowly and painfully I dragged across that weary flat they seemed to grow longer every step I took.
It was with little feelings of hope I saw the distant view of that most hideous of towns, Kimberley. When I left the gold-fields I had thought that I could hardly be worse off than I had been there, and that I would get some work at the diamond mines. But, weary with my long journey, and weak from hunger and dysentery that had come over me, I had lost all strength, and thought that the best I could hope for would be that I should be allowed to crawl into the hospital at Kimberley and die there. Every step I took pained me, for my feet were sore and swollen. I remember I had been thinking a good deal about my brother and contrasting his career with mine. Already he was known as one of the most promising young officers in the army. I had not heard from him for years, for I had left off writing, and he did not know where to write to me. But I had seen by the papers that he had gained the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan. I thought of him and I thought of myself, and cursed my luck then, for I was too weak and out of spirits to fool myself; I cursed my own folly, which I knew had been the cause of my having come down so low. Slowly and hopelessly I stumbled along through the sand. “When should I get to Kimberley, what should I do when I got there?” I kept asking myself, and I felt too dull and tired out to answer the question. I had very few friends there, and my appearance, ragged, almost barefooted and obviously penniless, would not tell in my favour. “What was the good of walking any faster? I might as well sleep there on the veldt as go on,” I said to myself; and then stumbling over a stone, I half fell, half threw myself down beside the road, and lay there exhausted, thoughtless, and almost insensible. I was roused by some one lifting me up and pouring brandy down my throat.