Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘There, there!’ said Armstrong; ‘it comes natural to lie, and I’ll not tempt ye. Not another word. Ye’ll go to your chamber, and ye’ll stop there till ye’re in the mind to confess. There’s the fruits of your crime marked on your lips this minute, and Dick saw ye at the sweet-stuff shop. Away with ye, before I lay hands on ye!’

Paul’s hob-nailed boots went lingeringly up the uncarpeted stairs to the attic room, and there he spent the long, long afternoon. There was nothing to do, nothing to think about, nothing to read. He stared at the tinman’s shop opposite, and at the cheesemonger’s fat widow, and at the window of the Berlin wool shop next door to the cheesemonger’s, and when a customer went in he speculated idly on his purchase. He was very hungry and lonely and dull, and the three other attic rooms which were open to him were as uninteresting as his own. Evening came on, and he seemed to be forgotten. He took off his boots, and crept to the lower flight of stairs and listened. Everything was going on just as it would have done if he had not been alone and miserable and martyred Well, he could starve and die and go to heaven, and then perhaps they would all be sorry, and discover some little good in him. Evening deepened into night, and still he sat there. A little insect behind the wall-paper against which he leaned his disconsolate head ticked and ticked like a watch. Paul had heard of the death-watch, and this, of course, was it, and its token was, of course, of his own untimely end. He wept luxuriously.

By-and-by he got up, and crept on tiptoe past the door of the best bedroom, which stood a little open, and invited him inwards by the mysterious gleam on the ceiling and the thrilling shadows of the great four-poster with its dusky hangings—a family heirloom, hint of far-off family prosperity, big enough for a hearse and quite as gloomy to look at. A heavy, solid mahogany chest of drawers stood near the window, and Paul, aided by the gaslights glistening amongst the polished tinware in the shop opposite, went through every drawer. His hands lighted on something done up in tissue-paper—an oblong parcel. He investigated it, and it turned out to be a big sponge loaf. He had seen one like it before, and guessed that it came as a gift from the old-maid cousins at the farm. He pinched off a bit from one of the bottom corners, and nibbled it He had not known till then how hungry he was, and the cake was more than delicious. He pinched off more, and was frightened to find how much he had taken. Detection was sure, and who but he could be suspected? Nothing could save him now, and though he had never heard either proverb, he acted on both—‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ and ‘As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.’ A voice and a footstep below startled him, and he fled guiltily. Now he was a thief, and then he was a beleaguered citizen, forced to make excursions by night, and live at risk of life on the provisions of the foe. He lay on the bed, and watched the lights on the ceiling until the cheesemonger’s shop and the tinman’s were closed; then he went to sleep, and in a while Dick came and awoke him.

‘You’ll get nothing to eat till you confess,’ said Dick, ‘and then you’ll get a licking.’

‘Then I shall die,’ said Paul. ‘I shan’t confess what I never done.’

He undressed and got into bed, and was more of a Christian martyr than he had ever been before. He slept fairly well, all things considered; but when in the morning his father’s deep, asthmatic cough sounded on the stairs, he felt as if his heart had slipped through his spine and had dropped upon the floor. He sat up in bed as his father entered the room.

‘Well, sir, are ye in any mind to tell the truth yet?’

‘I didn’t take it, father; I never seen it’ ‘Vary good; yell just stay there.’

Dick, with his hair staring from his head in all directions, pulled on his boots and trousers, and, gathering his other belongings in both arms, went off to make his toilet in the back-kitchen. The heavy day began for Paul, and when he had dressed he prowled disconsolately about his prison limits. In the ceiling of one of the back rooms there was a trap-door, and he began to wonder if he could open it There was a crippled three-legged table in the next apartment, and two old chairs, the rush bottoms of which had given way. He lugged these beneath the trap and mounted. He had two or three tumbles, and anything but a cat or a boy would have broken its neck several times over; but at last he succeeded in forcing the trap, and scrambled up. The joists of the roof and the rough inside of the slates were all he saw at first; but in a while he discerned a solid-looking shadow in the near distance, and made towards it. It proved to be a small table, and on it, covered thick with dust, were a broken jug, a broken cup, and a broken table-knife. What brought these things in so curious a place Paul never knew; but there they were, and the spot in an instant was a robber’s cave, and full of the most palpitating and delicious fears. He seized the broken table-knife as a weapon, and dashed back towards the trap-door. His movement towards the table must have taken him over some protected place—some region where a wall or beam made the lath-and-plaster flooring sound beneath his feet. But in his backward dash he missed this. The thin and fragile stuff gave way beneath him, and he came through with a tearing crash, and fell on the floor of the room beneath with a shock which snapped his teeth together and left him dizzy and half stunned. There was a big rent in the ceiling, and the floor was covered for a square yard or two with hairy plaster and fragments of wood.

Paul thought at first that he was broken all over, but, coming to gather himself together, found himself whole. He transferred the crippled table and the chairs to their original places, and stowed away the knife between the cords and the mattress of his bed. Then he listened dreadfully to discover if the noise of his fall had awakened any answering commotion below stairs. Growing easy on this point, he began to be aware that he was hungry again, and bethought him of the remnant of the sponge loaf. Nothing much worse than had already happened could befall him, and after brief temptation he kicked off his unlaced hobnails and stole downstairs. With some such vague idea of disguising crime as a thievish monkey might have had, he packed up a pair of neatly folded towels in the paper which had once held the loaf, and so retreated to his prison. All day long the familiar noises of the house, exaggerated into importance by his own loneliness, went on. Feet travelled here and there, voices called, the tingling shop-bell rang. The little servant came to make the bed, and treated him with the disdain which befitted a convicted criminal. In a while she went away, and left him lonelier than before. Even disdain had something of human companionship in it.