Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

He would sit there at his tent door buried deep in his thoughts, and often, without his being able to trace the faintest sign of any action in his own mental mechanism, his father’s voice would wake him with an interjection of, ‘Exactly!’ or ‘That’s the point, Paul!’ There was no sound, and yet the voice was there, and the old familiar Ayrshire accent seemed to mark it as strongly as it had done in his father’s lifetime. It was all very well to deride it as a mere delusion; it was easy to put it on one side for a moment and to stand over it in an intelligent superiority, tracking it to its sources in some obscure action of nerve and brain. But howsoever often he might eject belief from his mind, it came back with a clinging, gentle insistence which would not be denied; and little by little, though sorely against his will, he began to have a sence of it. A verse of ‘In Memoriam ‘was often in his mind:

‘How pure in heart, and sound in head,
With what divine affections bold,
Should be the man whose heart would hold
An hour’s communion with the dead.’

He began at last to think that his own unfitness for such a communion helped him to his disbelief in its possibility, and from that hour the feeling of his father’s nearness weighed more and more upon him.

Sitting at his tent door hour on hour, feeling himself, with the passage of each day, more completely isolated from the world, he seemed forced to a clear appreciation of the inner truth of his own retrospect; and, so far as any exercise of will was concerned, he found it a record of folly and weakness. There had been hours of high good fortune there, but they had been barely of his seeking, and of his own actual making not at all. Folly and weakness had stung him many and many a time, but it was not until he had reached the last recorded effort of memory that they had laid a weight upon his shoulders. Now he knew that he had tied a millstone about his neck; that he had permanently denied to himself all the sweet and vivifying influences of the higher social life. Sometimes detached from him, as though it watched from outside and waited for further confessions from his memory, and sometimes seeming an intimate part of him, as if it were a constituent of that desolate ache which filled and possessed his soul, there was always there the image of the gray old father, wistful, sagacious, patient—no ghost, but veritably a haunting thought, and at last, in spite of all contention, as real to him as his own hands. Yet when he went back to his dreams his obsession vanished, and it was only in the pauses of his vision that it returned.

Here were the dreams again.

He had come to understand quite clearly that a trick had been played upon him, but he was not constantly unhappy in its contemplation, or altogether resentful at it Annette improved in health with a startling rapidity, and he had the doctor’s assurance on that head.

‘Mrs. Armstrong is as sound as a roach, sir, and will probably outlive either of us.’

‘That is well,’ said Paul, and he set himself to bear the burden he had gathered.

At this time he found the greatest happiness in work, and alike with Darco, and for his own hand, he laboured unceasingly. Money came fast—more money than he had ever hoped for. Fame came also, in a fashion, and many genial societies were open to him. But Annette was not a person to be defrauded of anything she conceived to be a right, and he soon found upon how slight a thread domestic content might hang. Invitations to Mr. Paul Armstrong were plentiful, but of Mrs. Paul Armstrong his world had no knowledge outside the jolly bachelor contingent which overflowed house and table upon Sundays. When these single invitations came Annette invariably retired to her bedroom, and, having locked herself in there, refused to hold any sort of intercourse with Paul.

‘My dear,’ he would say to soothe her, ‘I am not going without you; but I can’t force people to invite you, and we must just make the best of things.’