Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/202

188 harmed a woman in his life met his death in clearing his name from the aspersions of a woman whom, out of sheer good-heartedness, he had befriended in time of need.

Despite the difficulty of breathing caused by the pressure upon his lungs and the agonising pain from which he suffered, his mind was vigorous and his interest in all questions relating to South Africa unabated to the last. Nothing but his passionate will to live kept him alive. When at last he was compelled to admit that his end was approaching, he still clung to the hope that his life might be prolonged so as to enable him once more to return to England before he died. He wished to come home. A cabin was taken for him on the steamer, but when the hour came it was impossible to remove him from the room in which, propped up with pillows, he sat awaiting the end. Messages from the King and Queen and from friends all over the world were cabled to the sick-room at Muizenberg, and those loving messages of sympathy and affection helped to console him in the dark hours of anguish.

During the whole of these terrible weeks there was only one occasion on which he spoke on those subjects which in the heyday of his youth were constantly present to his mind. On one occasion, after a horrible paroxysm of pain had convulsed him with agony, he was heard, when he regained his breath and the spasm had passed, to be holding a strange colloquy with his Maker. The dying man was talking to God, and not merely talking to God, but himself assuming both parts of the dialogue. The attendant in the sick chamber instinctively recalled those chapters in the book of Job in which Job and his friends discussed together the apparent injustice of the