It was Philip Brandon's last day at Oxford. Behind him lay four
pleasant years spent partly in dawdling through the Honors schools,
chiefly in gratifying his own various tastes for athletics, social
intercourse, and contemporary literature. In front of him lay--what?
The thought stuck in his throat; so, in an unsettled spirit, he lit a
cigar and sauntered out into the High, with a vague idea of doing the
rounds as he used in his schoolboy days, and taking a last farewell
of the old city's 'coronal of towers.'
Passing a gunsmith's, he remembered he wanted some cartridges, and,
going in to buy them, saw there that fatal air-gun, which he
afterwards declared to himself was the cause of all his troubles.
Curiously enough this shirking of the responsibility of his own acts
was not in his case a sign of weakness, it was his very directness of
mind that made him perceive and value the morality of his own conduct
with the same remorseless logic as he extended to his neighbors, and
would have made him intolerable to himself had he not taken refuge in
some such obliquity of mental vision. A man who is free from
self-deception is not a man at all, but a monster. Self-hypocrisy,
after all, is only another form of self-respect, and it is part of
human nature to desire our own good opinion no less than other
people's.
To outward seeming the air-gun was merely an ordinary hazel
walking-stick with a crook handle, and the closest examination would
barely reveal its real nature. In his restless mood this novelty in
puzzles took Brandon's fancy, and he bought it on the spot. There
was something sinister and secret about having this unsuspected
weapon. He was pleased with it, as he had been pleased when a boy
with his first sword-stick; and he determined then and there to tell
no one that it was more than it actually appeared--an ordinary
walking-stick.
He had packed all his luggage and warehoused his furniture in
readiness for his start to Ireland in the morning, so there was
nothing left to be done but to wonder why he was going there at all.
His uncle had hitherto paid his way through school and college, but
had recently told him that his income had been so diminished by the
depreciation in Irish land, that he could no longer afford to
continue his allowance or start him in a profession, as he had
originally intended; so that, on leaving the 'Varsity, Philip must
shift for himself, but would be welcome, if he chose, to come on a
visit while 'looking about him.'
This invitation Philip had accepted, though without much feeling of
gratitude to his uncle. He felt that he had been hardly used. He
had been led to expect a fair start in a profession; and now, at an
age when most other avenues of employment were closed to him, with a
useless general education and no means of supplementing it with a
special one, he was calmly turned adrift. It would have been kinder
to have cast him off earlier, when his tastes were still unformed and
his notions less refined. Even now he could not help feeling that it
would only have taken a slight effort on his uncle's part to redeem
the tacit pledges he had given; but with all his easy good-nature,
the old man had the failing, which so often goes with it, of intense
selfishness, and had no idea of curtailing his own pleasures in order
to set his nephew upon his legs. It would do the young man good, he
thought, to knock about a little at the outset. But he had made a
mistake: Philip's nature was too intense to take kindly to such
discipline, it was apt to strike in too deeply, and there was no
knowing what the result might be. As it was, Oxford had performed
its part for him, as for so many other penniless young men, of
totally unfitting him for any professions but the pulpit and the
birch-rod, the two which his soul most utterly abhorred.
Perhaps it would have been wiser under these circumstances to have
started work at once, but Philip felt a desire to take breath before
his plunge into the stream of life. Hitherto his life had been a
series of preparations for some one definite event,--his
examinations, the end of his school life, the end of his university
life. Now he had come to the end of the latter, and he found that it
was not an end nor even a beginning. The whole of life lay spread
before him to choose from, with no means of making a choice.
Contemplating it in the mass, the boundless indefiniteness of the
prospect bewildered his gaze and paralyzed his energies. The world
was so large he did not know where to begin upon it. He was not
close enough to it to recognize that there, as elsewhere, only a
single stage of the journey occupies our attention at a time. He
shrank aghast into himself and took refuge in habit. His habit led
him to his uncle's house.
Arrived in the cheerful island of his birth, what with the dampness
of the climate, and the dulness of country life at Lisnamore, his
lassitude grew upon him and enveloped him as with a miasma. He was
always a great reader, and now did little else but read novels. Real
life pressed so heavily upon him, that he was driven to take refuge
in a world of unrealities. But they increased rather than diminished
his malady. This cloud of alien personalities obscured his own,
acting upon his mind like an anæsthetic, so that for weeks he lived
and moved in that atmosphere of unreality which constant
novel-reading engenders, and which is so apt to unfit one for the
stress of actual life. A melancholy and moodiness of humor possessed
him, so that he passed whole days with scarcely speaking a word, and
to the other inmates of the house he appeared a very different person
from the light-hearted and good-natured lad of former visits.
In fact, up to this point in his life the easy good-nature common to
the rest of his family had been his most salient characteristic upon
the surface, and he had taken for granted that it was part of his
real nature. So long as the world had treated him kindly he had met
it in his turn with a most amiable countenance. It is true that he
had not been widely popular at college, but he had explained this to
himself by ascribing it to too great self-reliance on his own part.
His epithets for his own character in the secret places of his heart
were 'strong' and 'original'--epithets which he had justified to a
certain extent at Balliol by going his own way irrespective of Dons
and lectures, and by a certain readiness to act without reference to
conventional standards or traditions, together with a disdain for the
ordinary grooves of life, which made his conduct under any given
circumstances difficult to foretell. Nevertheless, he had been liked
by his own set; and when he did go out of his way to cultivate an
acquaintance, perhaps partly owing to this very fastidiousness of
his, he rarely failed to attract.
But now that his lot had become soured, he surprised himself at times
indulging in moods and fancies, that showed him there were
unsuspected forces in his nature which had hitherto lain dormant, but
which might spring into activity at any instant. In his moments of
introspection he sometimes dimly wondered now if he were not in truth
just a little bit selfish at bottom, else how to account for this
extravagant solicitude about his own fortunes.
The fact was that the unsettlement of the conditions of his
existence, the gravity of this first appearance of his upon the
platform of every-day life, and the dreariness of the outlook had
affected his nature more deeply than he was himself aware. His life
at Oxford, with its atmosphere of ease and luxury, had unfitted him
for the stern realities of the world in which he was now called upon
to earn his bread. The hopelessness in modern life of effecting
one's aim had thus early begun to impress him. Nowadays, as
heretofore, he saw that effort is not wasted, but that it produces a
result absurdly inadequate to the force expended. Everywhere around
him he saw men of brilliant parts and dauntless courage ground
beneath the wheels of that modern Juggernaut, the soul-destroying
round of mechanical toil; men whose ambition originally would not
have strained at kingdoms, reduced to hack writers for journals and
ushers in a school. A young man aims at the moon and hits a suburban
cottage. Pegasus is put to grind a mill. Seeing all this, he felt
shut-in upon every side. For a time he beat the pinions of his mind
helplessly against his prison-bars. Then the black moodiness of
despair enwrapped him in its folds. He had no tools with which to
shape his destiny, so he apathetically left the issue upon the knees
of Fate.
But he was young and buoyant, and this depression could not last
forever. The first sign of its breaking up was a desire for outdoor
exercise. He roused himself from his lethargy, and to escape its
influence determined on a fishing excursion to a distant mountain
lough. He thought that the drive and the fresh air would
re-invigorate him. And indeed by the time he had accomplished the
twelve miles there, and had caught a few trout, he was more like his
usual self; but by noon the weather had settled down into one of
those broiling days which one occasionally meets with in Ireland,
generally in October, and fishing had become hopeless. The fish were
small, but plentiful, and now they rose all round him, and flapped
his flies with their tails in a tantalizingly derisive manner.
He had brought his air-gun with him, and to while away the time, he
got it out and began shooting at the fish as they rose. He soon
found that, by allowing for the curve of the pellets, he could hit a
spot the size of half-a-crown at a dozen yards with some certainty,
and at this sport he amused himself for the rest of the afternoon,
until he had acquired a fair command of the weapon. Gradually as he
continued his pastime, the vicious snick of the bullets in the water
infected his blood, and gave rise to curious thoughts within him. He
grasped his weapon more tightly, the perspiration stood out upon his
forehead, and a fierce satisfaction surged through him each time he
hit his aim. Suddenly he came to himself with a start and recognized
the emotion that had been driving him. It was a feeling of murderous
revolt against that society which had given him expensive tastes
without the means of gratifying them. All those yearnings of his for
fine books and pictures, the pleasures of the palate, and the love of
women, for everything which can be bought by money, or, rather cannot
be procured without its possession, must run to waste and remain
forever unsatisfied. It was against the possessors of all those good
things which he had not and could never hope to have, that in his
mind he had been directing those bullets with such fatal accuracy.
The knowledge came home to him with a sudden shock, and
horror-stricken at himself he hastily put up his rod and started on
his homeward journey. The sultriness of the day, as is often the
case in the hour before sunset, had become even intensified. There
was not a breath of air, as he jogged quietly along in the evening
light. All nature seemed to perspire, and a dull yellow haze covered
the surrounding country. The road stretched straight and dusty
before him between its walls of sod; and upon either hand spread a
flat and uninteresting expanse of bog and moorland. The approach to
the town was signalled by the change from the clay to a limestone
soil; and instead of the occasional ditches of sod or huge drains,
which divided the country and restricted the wanderings of a few
isolated cows and donkeys, frequent stone walls began to appear,
built by piling odd stones together without cement of any kind, and
separating fields of hay, wheat, and potatoes.
Rather more than half the distance had been traversed, when an object
detached itself from the haze in the middle distance and rapidly
approached. As it drew near he saw that it was a car, with a man
sitting upon one side, and the other side turned up; and as it came
still closer he recognized in the driver a cousin of his own, the
land-steward of the Duke of Ulster. The other was going to pass with
a wave of his whip. But a sudden revulsion of feeling had come over
Philip. Nature had taken upon herself the oppression of his own
spirits, and had shamed him out of his febrile emotions by the
spectacle of her larger melancholy. So now that he had met a
fellow-creature he was glad to escape the surrounding monotony and
was seized with a sudden craving for conversation.
'Hullo, Dick, whither away so fast?' he shouted. 'Here, have I not
seen you for a whole year, and you cut me as dead as if you owed me
money.'
Both pulled up their horses, and Dick replied: 'Sorry, old man.
Didn't mean to offend you, but I've got a lot of money here, so I'm
in a hurry to get home, and have it off my hands. Been collecting
the quarter's rents, and have got about five thousand pounds in cash
to take care of.'
'Pooh, you're codding. Why didn't you put it in the Bank?'
'Couldn't. Shuts early on Saturdays. And no safe in my office to
keep it in.'
'Well, but after all there wouldn't be so much harm done, even if you
did get it collared. I suppose you've taken the numbers of the
notes.'
'Why, my dear fellow,' replied the other, 'all the tenants are small
farmers, and pay either in coin or in one pound notes, that would be
just as difficult to trace.'
So saying he put his horse into a walk to pass him. At that moment
feeling for his whip, Philip's hand fell upon that demon-possessed
air-gun, which he had left loaded on the cushion beside him. An
electric thrill passed through all his nerves. Almost without
volition the weapon flew to his shoulder. He saw Dick's temple
turned sideways towards him for a moment. There was a whip-like
crack, a thud, and his body swayed heavily and fell backwards on the
stone ditch beside the road. Both horses stood still. All nature
held her breath. A vast silence brooded over the landscape. There
wasn't a figure to be seen within the horizon.
He sat there quite still for at least five minutes, still grasping
his infernal instrument. He did not realize at first what had
happened, and waited for Dick to rise up again. It was as though
something outside himself, that did not belong to him, had done this
thing. His murderous thoughts of the forenoon had borne unexpected
fruit. Presently Dick's horse began to crop the grass by the
wayside. The crunching sound broke in upon his stupefaction. Dick
himself did not move. He got down and walked up to him, keeping
carefully on the grass all the way, so as to leave no trace of
footsteps. He had fallen with the back of his head upon a stone, and
even to Philip's inexperienced eye it was evident that he was already
dead. He had not expected this, but it was better so. He felt his
heart, to make sure. It had stopped beating.
Then he got on the car to search for the money. First he looked in
the well. It was not there. A cold perspiration burst over him.
What if Dick were only joking after all? But soon he found the bag
under the end of the cushion his cousin had been sitting on. He
started off the horse with a lash of the whip, which he laid down
again beside the dead man, rolled a large stone into the middle of
the road to account for the accident, carried the bag to his own car,
wrapped it in his mackintosh, and quickly drove on home.
At first his faculties had been stunned with a physical numbness by
the sudden shock of his own action, and everything that he had done
hitherto had been merely mechanical. But now his mind began to
recover its tone. It rushed at once to the other extreme of an
almost painfully intense activity. Thoughts whirled through his head
at lightning speed. In one illuminating flash he saw himself in his
naked reality. His seething ambition, his easy-going temper, his
constitutional dislike of running in grooves, and his recent
despondency, all rose and confronted him in the guise of a colossal
Egoism, a selfishness which desired exemption from the common lot of
mankind, a lot of hopeless futureless toil; while a yet darker
suggestion loomed dimly forth from the background of his mind. He
recognized that his good-nature at ordinary times was really only an
absolute indifference to other people's affairs, except when they
touched him nearly. Even in his own concerns his cold logicality of
intellect kept him supine except in cases of the extremest
importance. This was really the first important crisis of his life.
He had in a measure that habit of self-analysis, which goes with a
cold and self-centred brain, though it was chiefly of the flattering
sort, and he knew that his nature was of an almost elemental
simplicity and directness; but he had rarely suspected before to-day
that when deeply stirred an elemental cruelty was one of its
ingredients.
These moments of self-revelation come in the life of all of us, when
our ordinary every-day self, familiar to ourselves and our home
circle, is suddenly brought face to face with that other deeper lying
and often semi-barbarous self, which crouches hidden beneath the
veneer of civilization and the mask of social habit, and we are
forced into a swift mental comparison of the two. Happy is the man
in whom these two selves are identical; for his shall be a stagnant
life, and is not that the life of the gods? But these flashes of
insight do not remain long with us. We make haste and cover them up,
and put such importunate thoughts away from us, and only a vague
uncomfortableness remains in the memory for a short time.
So in Philip's mind the first clearness of the impression of his own
baseness soon faded, and was swallowed up in consideration of its
consequences. His act, that concrete expression of his character,
could not be glossed over. It remained behind there in all its naked
hideousness in the person of his murdered cousin lying in the road.
Questions of expediency came first. Could he risk finding the body
and taking it home with him? It was not yet too late. No, the money
would prevent that, though otherwise it might be the best plan.
There was only the one road and he must have met his cousin
somewhere. But he had almost walked his horse hitherto, it was still
quite fresh, and now if he drove hard, he could say that he had met
Dick two or three miles nearer home, and the time would agree all
right. And the money? It might very well appear that some tramp had
come by and taken it, after the accident had occurred. For
himself--offenders that did not belong to the ordinary criminal
classes, were always detected through their own folly. They couldn't
control their countenances, or were overcome by remorse or betrayed
the hiding-place of their spoil through over-anxiety. He had no such
weaknesses. His education had at least done him the service of
eradicating from his breast all scruples of conscience and
superstitious fancies. He would conceal his gains in a safe spot he
knew, and leave the country, so that he could not rouse suspicion.
Next year he could return for the money, and it would go hard with
him, but it would help him on the road to fortune.
He was ambitious. He had felt that he had ability above the
ordinary. But the world had afforded him no opening. Now with five
thousand pounds to back him the world was at his feet. He would
select a congenial profession, which should draw forth all his
energies, and would gain experience. Brains, experience, capital,
each was almost useless by itself. But with a combination of the
three what could he not do? The world was his oyster, and what he
had been pining for latterly was the lack of an oyster-knife to open
it.
Then Dick again! His thoughts reverted to him, poor chap! What of
him?--how had it all come about? How had he come to do what he had
done? Of course, in the first instance, it was the result of the
opportunity of the moment and what he now saw to be his morbid
craving after wealth for the last few weeks, the unhealthy dreams of
a sick imagination. But to probe deeper. He was a fatalist, and it
was no good crying over spilt milk. But let him at least be honest
with himself; let him know the full meaning of his own action. Did
he regret what had happened? would he do the same if he had to do it
over again? Probably not; simply because in spite of the
philosophers a man never does act twice alike under the same
circumstances. But he felt that he would not have restored his
cousin to life now, had that been possible. His main feeling was a
guilty satisfaction that things had fitted in so well. He was not a
coward, and before this the thought of suicide had come to him as a
way out of his perplexities. For he had no near relations to think
of, no ties to bind him to life. The worst that could now happen to
him was almost preferable to the mediocre existence of mean and
monotonous drudgery, which had formerly seemed his only prospect.
But gradually, as he brooded over the events of the afternoon, he
began to lose sight of the benefit which had accrued to him. The
idea had already become familiar by assimilation, and now his
thoughts tended to dwell rather upon the danger which he had
incurred, and whose proportions increased the longer he regarded it.
A vague sense of irritation and injury began to grow up in his mind
against his cousin as the author of his trouble, and even against the
inanimate instrument of his violence, 'It's all the fault of that
air-gun,' he muttered; and again, 'What business had he to meet me in
the mood I was in with his babbling confidences? He has only himself
to thank for his fate, and he has put my neck in danger too by his
folly. Damn him!'
At the thought a sudden passionate wave of hatred, roused by the
prick of personal fear, surged through his bosom. He was already
beginning to set a higher value on life than heretofore, and he hated
Dick that he had brought him the danger along with the benefit. He
felt that he was unreasonable, but that only made him hate his cousin
the more. After all, he had never seen much of Dick, and he was
always a fool; he showed that even in his death--snuffed out like a
candle. If it had been he, he would have made a harder fight for it
than that; there was something contemptible about giving in so easily.
By this time he had reached the house. He carried the bag in under
the mackintosh, and the walking-stick in his hand. The latter he put
in the stand. He had used it constantly of late, and its absence
would excite remark.
The bag he wrapped in oil-cloth to keep it from the damp, carried it
out into the garden at the first opportunity, and hid it in an
apple-tree, high up among the branches, in a hole, which had been his
secret alone since boyhood.
Late that night the rumor reached the house that his cousin had
fallen off his car and broken his neck. They all scouted the idea,
and Philip mentioned having met him that afternoon a couple of miles
out of the town, but Dick wouldn't stop to speak to him. The next
day the rumor was confirmed: Philip had been the last person to see
him alive.
For himself, Philip was physically prostrated, he could hardly move,
and ached in every limb and every muscle: the fatigue resulting from
the emotions which had racked him on the previous day was so much
greater than any mere bodily fatigue he had hitherto known. The day
afterwards--the Monday--he received a visit from the police-sergeant.
He went cheerfully down. It was to summon him, he supposed, as a
witness at the inquest, which was fixed for the morrow. Judge, then,
of his surprise when he was arrested on a charge of having murdered
his cousin.
He was very angry at first. Then the absurdity of the situation
struck him, and he laughed aloud. Here had this lumbering country
lout stumbled on the truth by accident, where a cleverer man would
not have dreamt of looking for it. But it might prove no laughing
matter for him, once the scent had been struck. The sergeant had
applied, it seemed, to the magistrate for the warrant, upon his own
responsibility, on the strength of a rumor that Philip was at the
bottom of the affair somehow. How the rumor originated he never
discovered--probably from some distortion in the repetition of his
own story of the meeting. But it made matters very unpleasant for
him for the time. He said that he would go quietly to the
police-barracks if he were not handcuffed.
When he arrived there, the officer in charge--the District Inspector,
and an old friend of Philip's, named Fitzgerald--cried out:
'Hullo, young 'un, what have you been doing now?--run in for being
drunk and disorderly?' He thought that Philip had dropped in to see
him, and that the presence of the sergeant was only a coincidence.
Great was his surprise when he heard that the young man was really a
prisoner--and upon what charge? He was more angry than Philip had
been, and called the sergeant a blundering idiot, only in stronger
language. At last he cooled down again and said:
'Well, never mind, you'll have to stop here to-night, but you'll be
let loose again to-morrow, and everybody will think it only a good
joke.'
'Yes, that's all very well,' replied Philip; 'but Richards, the
coroner, has a grudge against me. As you know, he is the town baker;
last year he set up a carriage, and heard me call it the bread-cart.
He is sure to seize the opportunity of taking the change out of me.
And I entirely fail to see where the joke comes in.'
When he arrived in the court next day, everybody was talking and
laughing. They thought it an absurd farce that he should be accused
of such a crime at all. Even the police-sergeant had been sneered
out of his momentary inspiration of shrewdness long ago. Philip
alone knew what a hair's-breadth removed from earnest the affair was
capable of proving. He was like a man sitting on a powder magazine
with people ignorantly letting off crackers all round him, one of
which might at any moment blow him into eternity.
The body of the court was crowded as usual with corner-boys--a
shiftless race of loafers peculiar to Ireland, who hang about the
streets and the corners of the public-houses, and never do a day's
work from year's end to year's end. They sponge upon their wives,
spending all the money that they can beg upon drink during that short
portion of the year that they are not retained in jail at their
country's expense. 'God presarve yer ahner, wherever ye may go,'
cried one of these as he entered. Philip had given him many a screw
of tobacco, and knew that it was not for him, but for the loss of his
tobacco that the man feared.
That bit of smartness about the bread-cart cost him an anxious time.
The doctor gave his evidence that there were two injuries upon the
body of the deceased--a cut upon the back of the head, which had been
caused by falling off the car onto a stone, and a very small bruise
on the temple. What had occasioned the latter, or if it were
connected with the accident, he couldn't say. But neither injury was
sufficient to cause death. That had resulted from stoppage of the
heart's action, which had long been diseased. Philip paid little
attention to this; he was sufficiently honest with himself to
recognize that he had committed murder in intention if not in actual
fact.
Then the coroner wanted to know could the bruise on the temple have
been caused by a blow from a whip or a stick? The doctor thought
not. Nevertheless Philip's whip and all his sticks were fetched.
The servants gave evidence as to the one he had used that day; it was
handed round. Everybody was surprised at its lightness. Philip's
heart stood in his mouth. The doctor and the coroner examined it
minutely. If either of them had a grain of penetration, he was a
lost man; but he could reckon with confidence on their stupidity.
The air-gun preserved its secret well; for once it did not betray
him. Its lightness proved even in his favor. The doctor decided
that it was incapable of inflicting a stunning blow, that it was
probably hollow, and would break on slight provocation.
He was acquitted, a verdict of accidental death returned, and the
jury remarked severely upon the hasty action of the sergeant in
adding to his natural grief at his cousin's death by such an
unnatural accusation.
But Philip was in a fever until that wretched air-gun should be
safely disposed of. At any moment it might change its mind and
inform against him. He hooked his arm in Fitzgerald's directly the
inquest was over, and said, 'Come along, and have a bathe after this
beastly stuffy court; and as you have the custody of my sticks, I
suppose you won't mind letting me have one now?' Fitzgerald laughed,
and he took the air-gun. The other wanted to look at it, and see if
it was really as light as they all made out. But Philip was not such
a fool; the officer's trained eyesight was likely to prove too sharp.
They went to bathe in the river channel, a couple of miles below the
town, and about half a mile from its mouth. When they had undressed,
Philip threw the stick as far as he could into the middle, under
pretence of sending Fitzgerald's retriever in after it. But the tide
was on the ebb and the stream ran strong, so, as he knew would be the
case, the dog turned back long before he reached the stick. Philip
hoped never to see the wretched thing again. Suddenly a terror
seized him; he could not leave it to the mercy of blind chance like
that. What if the sea gave up its prey?--the next tide might wash it
ashore again. Some one might find it and return it again, or worse
still, find out the secret. He must get rid of it more effectually
at all hazards. He plunged in after it, and quickly reached it; then
pretending to put his feet between his hands, while holding the stick
at either end he snapped it in two and cast it from him.
Meanwhile he had not noticed that he had rounded the last turn in the
channel in its journey seaward. He had got into the strength of the
current, and it swept him away like a leaf. He swam against it
aslant with all his strength, but could not reach the edge, and in a
moment he was among the breakers on the bar.
For a short time he succeeded in swimming over the waves or diving
through them, and hoped to be able to get right out to sea. But soon
he was seized by a huge roller, the ninth wave, and carried
resistlessly back again upon its crest. The edge of the breaker
curled thin beneath him like a shaving, dissolving into spray. He
looked down as he reached the bar, and suddenly the water seemed to
vanish under him. One moment he was ten feet in the air, the next he
fell with stunning force upon the sand, covered only with a couple of
feet of surf. Before he recovered his senses, the broken water of
the next wave was upon him, and the black-surge of the first was
fighting with it for him. He was rolled over and over. Sand entered
his eyes, mouth, nostrils, and ears. He was conscious of swallowing
oceans of water. He struggled blindly for a time; he, at any rate,
would not give in until the last gasp. But gradually there stole
over him a feeling of drowsiness, of disinclination for further
effort, a feeling that Fate had been too much for him. 'It's all
that damned air-gun's fault,' he muttered again obstinately; and the
waters closed over him.
When he came to himself again, he was lying on the strand, and
Fitzgerald was bending over him. He had been washed by chance into
the corner of an eddy near the shore, the D.I. had run along the
bank, rushed in and rescued him before the life was quite buffeted
out of him.
Thanks, old boy,' he said, looking up at his friend; 'you have saved
my life, and I won't forget it.'
'Oh, nonsense; you would do as much for me any day.'
They dressed in silence. At last Philip remarked:
'That stick was hollow after all; it snapped like a twig in my hands.
I suppose it will fill with sand now and stop at the bottom of the
sea.'
'Yes; you will never see it again, and a good job too: it was near
being the death of you.'
'Yes,' said Philip, with a slow smile; 'it was very near being the
death of me.'