Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘And yet you love me, Madge?’ said Paul. She made no answer, and he drew nearer to her, and put an arm about her shoulder. ‘You love me, little Madge?’ he urged her.

She gave a sigh of acquiescence, a half-breathed ‘Yes.’

‘And you could deny your own heart and mine? You could let me go away alone, and live alone yourself, with an empty heartache?’

Her answer came, like an echo of a former tone, just the same half-breathed token of assent. There was a quiet resolution in it, for all it was so softly spoken, which bound him to silence for a time.

There was more strength of resolution, more power and purpose, expressed thus simply than he had ever been conscious of himself, and he recognised that fact quite clearly.

They walked from this time forth in silence, until at the outskirts of the town they reached the small and retired hotel at which the girl had taken lodgings, and there they parted formally enough.

‘You will write?’ she asked, holding out her hand to him in token of dismissal.

‘I will write,’ he answered, taking her hand, and bowing over it.

There were some Sabbath loiterers in the street, and it was necessary that the two should part undemonstratively.

Paul, as he walked to his own more pretentious hostel, recognised the fact that for good or evil he had shot his bolt There was nothing at that hour of which he was more certain than that his present destiny and the destiny of Madge lay in the hands of a woman he had never seen, and he did not even attempt to disguise from himself the overwhelming probability against an affirmative answer to his hopes. He was very miserably certain that he had no right to hope, and that accusing conscience of his which never permitted him to stray without rebuke, and yet had never been worth a farthing to him in his whole career, worried him without ceasing. But he knew enough of himself already to have learned that the fault of character which had wrecked him was half made up of reluctance to add pain to pain. It is not always the wholly selfish wrongdoer who is answerable for the greater sorrows of life. It is assuredly not he who suffers in his own person; but, worse than that, the tender-hearted, conscience-worried man of feeble will is always afraid of causing a slight grief by retracing a mistaken step, and so goes on inevitably to the creation of troubles which appal him when he comes to contemplate them in after-hours. And to have a full theoretical knowledge of this fact enforced by years of experience is to be gifted with no safeguard. ‘To be weak’—there is no wiser saying among the utterances of the wise—‘to be weak is to be miserable.’ To be a fool and to know it is the extreme of misery, and this extreme does not fall to the lot of those who are extremest in folly.