Page:Stevenson and Quiller-Couch - St Ives .djvu/166

 hardships, the crushing fatigue, the savage cold, of our pilgrimage, I had early ceased to hope. I did for him what I was able,—nursed him, kept him covered, watched over his slumbers, sometimes held him in my arms at the rough places of the road. "Champdivers," he once said, "you are like a son to me—like a son." It is good to remember, though at the time it put me on the rack. All was to no purpose. Fast as we were travelling towards France, he was travelling faster still to another destination. Daily he grew weaker and more indifferent. An old rustic accent of Lower Normandy reappeared in his speech, from which it had long been banished, and grew stronger; old words of the patois, too: ouistreham, matrassé, and others, the sense of which we were sometimes unable to guess. On the very last day he began again his eternal story of the cross and the Emperor. The Major, who was particularly ill, or at least particularly cross, uttered some angry words of protest. "Pardonnez-moi, monsieur le commandant, mais c'est pour monsieur" said the Colonel: "Monsieur has not yet heard the circumstance, and is good enough to feel an interest." Presently, after, however, he began to lose the thread of his narrative; and at last: "Qué que j'ai? Je m'embrouille!" says he, "Suffit: s'm'a la donné, et Berthe en était bien contente." It struck me as the falling of the curtain or the closing of the sepulchre doors.

Sure enough, in but a little while after, he fell into a sleep as gentle as an infant's, which insensibly changed into the sleep of death. I had my arm about his body at the time and remarked nothing, unless it were that he once stretched himself a little, so kindly the end came to that disastrous life. It was only at our evening halt that the Major and I discovered we were travelling alone with the poor clay. That night we stole a spade from a