Now, whatever may be said of this remarkable document, at any rate it bore on the face of it a passionate veracity.  But it gave the lie to every word of his letter to his wife.  Tyson had dashed it off in hot haste, risen to his work, and then he must have sat down again to write that letter.  Taken singly, the three documents were misleading; taken altogether, they formed a masterpiece of autobiography.  The self-revelation was lucid and complete; it gave you Tyson the man of no class, Tyson the bundle of paradoxes, British and Bohemian, cosmopolitan and barbarian; the brute with the immortal human soul struggling perpetually to be.

He put the diary into his dispatch-box.  It was found there afterwards, and published with a few other letters.  Everybody knows that simple straightforward record; it shows Tyson at his bravest and his best.  If he had tried to separate the little gold of his life from the dross of it he could not have succeeded better.  He looked over the postscript hurriedly.  When he came to the words, “Knowing myself to be incapable of the feeling women call love,” he compared it with the other letter, “There would have been far more excuse for me if I had been simply incapable of the feeling.”  The two statements did not exactly tally; but what else could he say?  And it was too late to mend it now.

He laid down the sheets and opened Stanistreet’s letter.  It was short; it gave the news of Molly’s death with a few details, and these words:  “In any case it must have come soon.  Your going away made no difference.  It began before you left—­the fever was hanging about her; and they say her brain could never have been very strong.”

He sat staring at the canvas of the tent till it glowed a purplish crimson against the dawn.  The air choked him; it reeked with pestilence and death.  O God! the futility of everything he had ever done!  The lie he had written was futile; it had come too late.  His coming out here was futile; he had come too soon.  If he had waited another three weeks he could have gone without breaking Molly’s heart.  “Her brain could never have been very strong.”  At that he laughed—­horribly, aloud.

The sound of his own laughter drove him from the tent.  He went out.  As he strained his eyes over the desert, the waste Infinity that had claimed him, he seemed to be brought nearer to the naked sincerity of things.  There was no pity for him and no excuse; but neither was there condemnation.  He knew himself, and he knew the hour of his redemption. Ex oriente lux! It was as if illumination had come with that fierce penetrating dawn that was beating the sand of the desert into fire.

Ah—­that was a shot!  The outpost stood a hundred yards to the left of him reloading.  A black head started up behind a curve of rising ground, a bullet whizzed by, and the man with the musket fell in a little cloud of sand.

And now the bullets were crossing each other in mid-air.  The camp was surrounded.