But When He Got
To The End Of His Journey On The Confines Of That Vast Country, After
Travelling Many
Weeks on horseback, it was only to hear that the men
who had formed the garrison two years before, had
Been long ordered
away to another province where they had probably been called to aid in
or suppress a revolutionary outbreak, and no certain news could be had
of them. He had to return alone but not to drop the search; it was but
the first of three great attempts he made, and the second was the most
disastrous, when in a remote Province and a lonely district he met with
a serious accident which kept him confined in some poor hovel for many
months, his money all spent, and with no means of communicating with
his people. He got back at last; and after recruiting his health and
providing himself with funds, and obtaining fresh help from the War
Office, he set out on his third venture; and at the end of three years
from the date of his first start, he succeeded in finding the object of
his search, still serving as a common soldier in the army. That they
were brothers there was no doubt in either of their minds, and together
they travelled home.
And now the old father and mother had got their son back, and they told
him the story of the thirty years during which they had lamented his
loss, and of how at last they had succeeded in recovering him: - what
had he to tell them in return? It was a disappointing story. For, to
begin with, he had no recollection of his child life at home - no
faintest memory of mother or father or of the day when the sudden
violent change came and he was forcibly taken away. His earliest
recollection was of being taken about by someone - a man who owned him,
who was always at the cattle-estates where he worked, and how this man
treated him kindly until he was big enough to be set to work
shepherding sheep and driving cattle, and doing anything a boy could do
at any place they lived in, and that his owner and master then began to
be exacting and tyrannical, and treated him so badly that he eventually
ran away and never saw the man again. And from that time onward he
lived much the same kind of life as when with his master, constantly
going about from place to place, from province to province, and finally
he had for some unexplained reason been taken into the army.
That was all - the story of his thirty years of wild horseback life told
in a few dry sentences! Could more have been expected! The mother had
expected more and would not cease to expect it. He was her lost one
found again, the child of her body who in his long absence had gotten a
second nature; but it was nothing but a colour, a garment, which would
wear thinner and thinner, and by-and-by reveal the old deeper
ineradicable nature beneath. So she imagined, and would take him out to
walk to be with him, to have him all to herself, to caress him, and
they would walk, she with an arm round his neck or waist; and when she
released him or whenever he could make his escape from the house, he
would go off to the quarters of the hired cattlemen and converse with
them. They were his people, and he was one of them in soul in spite of
his blue eyes, and like one of them he could lasso or break a horse and
throw a bull and put a brand on him, and kill a cow and skin it, or
roast it in its hide if it was wanted so; and he could do a hundred
other things, though he couldn't read a book, and I daresay he found it
a very misery to sit on a chair in the company of those who read in
books and spoke a language that was strange to him - the tongue he had
himself spoken as a child!
VII
A THIRD STORY OF TWO BROTHERS
Stories of two brothers are common enough the world over - probably more
so than stories of young men who have fallen in love with their
grandmothers, and the main feature in most of them, as in the story I
have just told, is in the close resemblance of the two brothers, for on
that everything hinges. It is precisely the same in the one I am about
to relate, one I came upon a few years ago - just how many I wish not to
say, nor just where it happened except that it was in the west country;
and for the real names of people and places I have substituted
fictitious ones. For this too, like the last, is a true story. The
reader on finishing it will perhaps blush to think it true, but apart
from the moral aspect of the case it is, psychologically, a singularly
interesting one.
One summer day I travelled by a public conveyance to Pollhampton, a
small rustic market town several miles distant from the nearest
railroad. My destination was not the town itself, but a lonely heath-
grown hill five miles further on, where I wished to find something that
grew and blossomed on it, and my first object on arrival was to secure
a riding horse or horse and trap to carry me there. I was told at once
that it was useless to look for such a thing, as it was market day and
everybody was fully occupied. That it was market day I already knew
very well, as the two or three main streets and wide market-place in
the middle of the town were full of sheep and cows and pigs and people
running about and much noise of shoutings and barking dogs.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 9 of 65
Words from 8231 to 9233
of 66164
