He grasped the hand held out to him with a firm and nervous clasp; then relinquishing it gradually, an expression of peace and repose overspread his face, the laboured breathing ceased. His respiration became more natural and easy, but the ashen hue of his face showed yet more colourless and grey. The tired eyes closed; the massive head fell back on the pillow of rugs; the lower portion of the features relaxed; a slight shiver passed over the frame. Wilfred bent closely, tenderly, over the still face. The faithful spirit of the last male heir of the house of Warleigh had passed away.
When the stock-riders returned that evening after the long day’s tracking and heard of their leader’s death, many a wild heart was deeply stirred. At day-dawn they dug him a deep grave beneath a mighty spreading mountain ash, and piled such a cairn above him that no careless hand could disturb the dead. As they removed his clothes for the last sad robing process, two small volumes fell from an inner pocket.
‘Ha!’ said Neil Barrington, ‘one of them is the book I saw him poring over that day. I wonder whether it’s a novel? By Jove, though, who’d have thought that? Why, it’s an old History of England. The poor old chap was getting up his education by degrees. It makes the tears come into one’s eyes.’
Here the good-hearted fellow drew his handkerchief across his face.
CHAPTER XXIV
GYP’S LAND
The cattle were tracked down and regathered without difficulty. In the virgin forest no slot but their own could possibly exist. When they quitted the scene of their encounter, the explorers passed into a region of grand savannahs and endless forest parks, waving with luxuriant grasses. Each day awakened fresh raptures of admiration. But the rudest stock-rider never alluded to the ease with which they now followed the well-fed herd, without a curse (in the nature of an epitaph) upon those who had robbed them of a comrade and a commander.
‘A magnificent country,’ said Argyll, as on the third day they camped the foremost drove on the bank of a broad river in the marshy meadows, on which the cattle spread out, luxuriating in the wild abundance of pasture; ‘and how picturesque those snow-peaks; the groves of timber, sending their promontories into the plains; the fantastic rocks! It is a pastoral paradise. And to think that the only man of our party who fell a victim should be poor Warleigh, the discoverer of this land of promise!’
‘The way of the world, my dear fellow,’ said Ardmillan. ‘The moment a man gets his foot on the threshold of success, Nemesis is aroused. Poor Gyp had been fighting against his demon for years, and had reached the region of respectability. He would soon have been rich enough to conciliate Mrs. Grundy. She would have enlarged upon his ancient birth, his handsome face and figure, with the mildest admission that he had been, years ago, a little wild. Of course he is slain within sight of his promised land.’
‘We had all got very fond of him, and that’s the truth,’ said Hamilton. ‘He was the gentlest creature, considering his tremendous strength—self-denying in every way, and so modest about his own endowments. It was very touching to listen to his regrets for the ignorance in which he had been suffered to grow up. I had planned, indeed, to supply some of his deficiencies after we were settled.’
‘I should think so,’ said Fred Churbett. ‘I wouldn’t have minded doing a little myself. I don’t go in for “moral pocket-ankercher” business, but a man of his calibre was better worth saving than a province of savages. Amongst us we should have coached him up, in a year or so, fit to run for the society little-go; and now to think that one of these wretched anthropoids should have slain our Bayard!’