Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/203

Rh Governor of the world. It was strange to hear Mr. Rhodes stating first his case against the Almighty, and then in reply stating what he considered his Maker’s case against himself. But so the argument went on.

“What have I done,” he asked, “to be tortured thus? If I must go hence, why should I be subjected to this insufferable pain?”

And then he answered his own question, going over his own shortcomings and his own offences, to which he again in his own person replied; and so the strange and awful colloquy went on, until at last the muttering ceased, and there was silence once more.

Beyond this there is no record of what he thought or what he felt when he fared forth to make that pilgrimage which awaits us all through the valley of the shadow of death. He had far too intense vitality ever to tolerate the idea of extinction.

“I’m not an atheist,” he once said to me impatiently; “not at all. But I don’t believe in the idea about going to heaven and twanging a harp all day. No. I wish I did sometimes; but I don’t. That kind of æsthetical idea pleases you perhaps; it does not please me. But I’m not an atheist.”

“I find I am human,” he wrote on one occasion, “but should like to live after my death.”

And in his conversation he frequently referred to his returning to the earth to see how his ideas were prospering, and what was being done with the fortune which he had dedicated to the service of posterity. Some of his talk upon the subject of the after-life was very quaint, and almost child-like in its simplicity. His ideas, so far as he expressed them to me, always assumed