Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

Dick said that stood to reason.

‘And they played in their kilts, and they didn’t wear pads, and they had their bats all made of iron, and the ball was iron, too. It was a cannon-ball, and they fired it out of a cannon, and the wickets was a mile and a half apart—no, a mile and a quarter—and one man hit the ball, and the other men shouted, “Run it out!” and he ran sixty-four runs. Then he dropped down stone-dead, and Mr. Murchison read the funeral service.’

Then the talk drifted. Next Sunday the Rev. Roderic Murchison, M.A., read out from the pulpit a text which gave over all liars to fire and brimstone. Paul went quaking all day. Dick and he slept together in a gaunt attic chamber. Mary, their sister, twenty years Paul’s elder, saw them to bed, put them through a rough form of prayer, and took away the candle. Dick, with nothing on his conscience, went to sleep. Paul lay and sweated, dreading fire, and wondering with open-eyed horror, ‘Why brimstone?’ and imagining extraordinary terrors from its addition. At last conscience would have no Nay, and brimful of fear and contrition—for the one was as real as the other—he woke up Dick in the black hollow of the night This was hard work, but he was bent on self-purgation, and would not confess until Dick was really wide awake.

‘Dick!’ he said, gripping his brother in the dark and straining him in his childish arms. ‘Dick! Oh, Dick, I’ve been a liar, and I daresn’t go to sleep. Do you remember what I said about the Highlanders last Thursday?’

‘Blow the Highlanders!’ said Dick. ‘What did ye wake me up for?’

‘It wasn’t true, Dick,’ the penitent whimpered. ‘I never saw a Highlander, and father didn’t take me to Scotland with him. It was all made up.’

‘I know that,’ said Dick. ‘You are a fool to wake a chap up in the dark to tell him that.’

That was the child’s first remembered penitence and confession. The man remembered how he had sobbed himself to sleep. Why had he lied, and was a portion his in the lake of fire and brimstone, and what was the good of being repentant and confessing, and being called a fool for one’s pains?

When the childish Paul came out of the kitchen-door into that three-sided well of a brick-paved yard, and walked towards the printing-office at the far end of the narrow strip of garden, the first door beyond the pump-trough led him to a flight of stairs. The flight of stairs, dirty and littered, mounted to a lumber-room, where there were great piles of waste-paper, refuse from the shop and office. There were many torn and battered old books here, and most of them were deserving of the neglect into which they had fallen. The father had bought old books literally by the cart-load at auction, and had weeded from the masses of rubbish such things as promised to be saleable. The rest were Paul’s prey, and there were scraps of romance here and there, and fugitive leaves of Hone’s ‘Everyday Book,’ and the Penny Magazine, with dingy woodcuts. One inestimable bundle of leaves unbound held the greater part of ‘Peregrine Pickle,’ the whole of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and part of ‘The Devil on Two Sticks.’ Brother Bob, dead and gone these many years, had once kept pigeons in that lumber-room, and had driven a hole in the wall, so that the birds might have free going out and in. This was one of the family remembrances. Before there had been so many mouths to fill and so many small figures to be clothed, there had been room in the Armstrong household for some things which were not wholly utilitarian. This keeping of pigeons was, as it were, a link with a golden past, a bright thread in the tapestry of the bygone, which hung on the eye of imagination in contrast with the sordid present, where few of the threads were bright except to the inexhaustible fancy of a child, who can see brightness almost anywhere.

The lumber-room had many memories for the dreamer in the tent-door. He was often banished there for punishment, and he sometimes confessed to faults which were not his, if they were not of too dark a dye, in the hope of being sent thither. There he would grub amongst the mouldy refuse of the place, and would find treatises of forgotten divines on Daniel and the end of the world, and translations of Ovid on the Art of Love sadly mutilated by rats, and nautical almanacs of a long bygone date, and much other doubtful treasure.