My father remained an hour.  He could not perceive the drift of my objection to go either to Bulsted or to Riversley, and desire that my misadventure should be unknown at those places.  However, he obeyed me, as I could always trust him to do scrupulously, and told a tale at Bulsted.  In the afternoon he returned in a carriage to convey me to the seaside.  When I was raised I fainted, and saw the last of the camp on Durstan much as I had come to it first.  Sickness and swimming of the head continued for several days.  I was persecuted with the sensation of the carriage journey, and an iteration of my father’s that ran:  ’My son’s inanimate body in my arms,’ or ’Clasping the lifeless body of my sole son, Harry Richmond,’ and other variations.  I said nothing about it.  He told me aghast that I had spat blood.  A battery of eight fists, having it in the end all its own way, leaves a deeper indentation on its target than a pistol-shot that passes free of the vital chords.  My convalescence in Germany was a melody compared with this.  I ought to have stopped in the tent, according to the wise old mother’s advice, given sincerely, for prudence counselled her to strike her canvas and be gone.  There I should have lain, interested in the progress of a bee, the course of a beetle or a cloud, a spider’s business, and the shaking of the gorse and the heather, until good health had grown out of thoughtlessness.  The very sight of my father was as a hive of humming troubles.

His intense anxiety about me reflected in my mind the endless worry I had concerning him.  It was the intellect which condemned him when he wore a joyful air, and the sensations when he waxed over-solicitous.  Whether or not the sentences were just, the judges should have sometimes shifted places.  I was unable to divine why he fevered me so much.  Must I say it?—­He had ceased to entertain me.  Instead of a comic I found him a tragic spectacle; and his exuberant anticipations, his bursting hopes that fed their forcing-bed with the blight and decay of their predecessors, his transient fits of despair after a touch at my pulses, and exclamation of ’Oh, Richie, Richie, if only I had my boy up and well!’—­assuming that nothing but my tardy recovery stood in the way of our contentment—­were examples of downright unreason such as contemplation through the comic glass would have excused; the tragic could not.  I knew, nevertheless, that to the rest of the world he was a progressive comedy:  and the knowledge made him seem more tragic still.  He clearly could not learn from misfortune; he was not to be contained.  Money I gave him freely, holding the money at my disposal his own; I chafed at his unteachable spirit, surely one of the most tragical things in life; and the proof of my love for him was that I thought it so, though I should have been kinder had he amused me, as in the old days.