‘Put your fingers in your ears, George, or I shall find a word to scorch you. You are the poorest thing in Nature’s bag of samples. A well-bred woodlouse wouldn’t employ you for a scavenger. If you shrank to your soul’s dimensions you might wander lost for a century on the point of a cambric needle. You are the last rarefied essence of the contemptible—the final word of the genius of the mean.’
This was not shouted, but was sent out in a steady trumpet-note that swelled fuller and fuller, like the voice of a great speaker in haranguing a clamorous audience, rising steadily, as if measured just to dominate clamour, and no more. In the pauses of his speech the camper-out had heard the noise of running feet. The sound seemed still faintly audible, though perhaps only fancy caught it. He sent out one clarion cry of ‘Good-bye, George!’ and surrendered himself to a fit of uncontrolled laughter. This coming to an end of sudden gravity, he took up the letter, which had fallen on the moss between his outstretched legs, and looked at the superscription.
‘Madge!’ he said. ‘Poor little Madge!’
He put the envelope to his bristly lips and kissed it. Then he broke the seal and began to read:
‘My own darling Husband,
‘You must have the enclosed, and George has promised not to rest until he finds you and lays it in your hands. The last lines your father ever wrote in this world——’
‘What?’ he said aloud. ‘What?
‘The last lines your father ever wrote in this world arrived on Saturday, the twentieth, and news of his death reached me by wire on Monday, the twenty-second.’
‘That’s a big enough dose for one day,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand any more.’ He thrust the letter into his breast-pocket. ‘Another impossibility. No prodigal’s return to end that story. Veal was never a favourite meat of mine. Lord! I could laugh to see what a mess I have made of things. I could cry if anybody else had made it, and had meant as well, and hoped as blindly.
‘Monday, the twenty-second. That was the day I came here. Strange it is—strange! I’d have sworn he was alive that night—that first night in the tent here. I seemed to feel him near me. We had that knack—the old governor and I—poor old chap! He could jog my mental elbow when I was a thousand miles away from him, and I could make him talk of me at any time.