Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/79

Rh He looked for, and found, a nail in the whitewashed wall. He tried it. It was firm and strong, quite able to bear the weight of a man's body. He carefully attached the rope, and then examined the space below with a faint smile of irony, as if he sought to fix in his memory for ever the slightest detail of the breadth of line which would soon be covered by himself. Now that this matter was settled, there was no hurry, and he sat him down on the rough bench that lined the locutory — the bench made for beggars and suppliants and ruined men such as he. One thought gave him intense delight. "If my father was a good jester, I am as good!"

He sat himself down on the bench with his head between his hands pondering over many things. It would seem that all he had ever done, all the places he had ever seen, the faces he had kissed, those whom he had ruined or fought with and wounded, one or two he had killed, had joined together as if he must behold them — see them — be tortured by them in this moment. The oath of the man he had run his sword through rang through his brain. Tremulous hands seemed to clutch at him from space. The wind as it entered seemed to bring sighings, wailings, reproaches. He saw his mother's face, and he wondered how it was he had forgotten to visit her grave. Then he laughed inwardly at the scandal of the town to-morrow — he should not hear it — it would be no morrow to him, and at the clatter of tongues his death would arouse amongst the gossips of Toro. Death! Well, there hung Death! that rope dangling across the wall. A rope and a gurgle in the throat, that was Death. Nothing so terrible, after all, except to fools — not to men like him of blood and valour, who had faced and defied it every day for the last fifteen years of his life.

Then he rose, and with bended brows leant against the Rh