CHAPTER XXVI:  MY FATHER REACHES HOME, AND DIES NOT LONG AFTERWARDS

My father could walk but slowly, for George’s boots had blistered his feet, and it seemed to him that the river-bed, of which he caught glimpses now and again, never got any nearer; but all things come to an end, and by seven o’clock on the night of Tuesday, he was on the spot which he had left on the preceding Friday morning.  Three entire days had intervened, but he felt that something, he knew not what, had seized him, and that whereas before these three days life had been one thing, what little might follow them, would be another—­and a very different one.

He soon caught sight of his horse which had strayed a mile lower down the river-bed, and in spite of his hobbles had crossed one ugly stream that my father dared not ford on foot.  Tired though he was, he went after him, bridle in hand, and when the friendly creature saw him, it recrossed the stream, and came to him of its own accord—­either tired of his own company, or tempted by some bread my father held out towards him.  My father took off the hobbles, and rode him bare-backed to the camping ground, where he rewarded him with more bread and biscuit, and then hobbled him again for the night.

“It was here,” he said to me on one of the first days after his return, “that I first knew myself to be a broken man.  As for meeting George again, I felt sure that it would be all I could do to meet his brother; and though George was always in my thoughts, it was for you and not him that I was now yearning.  When I gave George my watch, how glad I was that I had left my gold one at home, for that is yours, and I could not have brought myself to give it him.”

“Never mind that, my dear father,” said I, “but tell me how you got down the river, and thence home again.”

“My very dear boy,” he said, “I can hardly remember, and I had no energy to make any more notes.  I remember putting a scrap of paper into the box of sovereigns, merely sending George my love along with the money; I remember also dropping the box into a hole in a tree, which I blazed, and towards which I drew a line of wood-ashes.  I seem to see a poor unhinged creature gazing moodily for hours into a fire which he heaps up now and again with wood.  There is not a breath of air; Nature sleeps so calmly that she dares not even breathe for fear of waking; the very river has hushed his flow.  Without, the starlit calm of a summer’s night in a great wilderness; within, a hurricane of wild and incoherent thoughts battling with one another in their fury to fall upon him and rend him—­and on the other side the great wall of mountain, thousands of children praying at their mother’s knee to this poor dazed thing.  I suppose this half delirious wretch must have been myself.  But I must have been more ill when I left England than I thought I was, or Erewhon would not have broken me down as it did.”