The child had to be
carried to the carriage, and was thoroughly out of order for several
days. Poor little girl, we neither of us knew that it was the
beginning of her darker days!
Of Harold's doings in Australia I can tell less than of those at
home. He kept his promise, dear fellow, and wrote regularly. But,
alas! his letters are all gone, and I can only speak from memory of
them, and from what Dermot told me.
Making no stay in Sydney, they pushed on to Boola Boola, avoiding a
halt at Cree's Station, but making at once for Prometesky's cottage,
a wonderful hermitage, as Dermot described it, almost entirely the
work of the old man's ingenious hands. There he lived, like a
philosopher of old, with the most sternly plain and scanty materials
for comfort--a mat, a table, and a chair; but surrounded by beautiful
artistic figures and intricate mathematical diagrams traced on his
floor and wall, reams of essays and poems where he had tried to work
out his thought; fragments of machines, the toys of his constructive
brain, among which the travellers found him sitting like a masculine
version of Albert Durer's Melancholia, his laughing jackass adding
tones of mockery to the scene, perched on the bough, looking down, as
his master below took to pieces some squatter's crazy clock.
When Harold's greeting had aroused him, Dermot said, nothing could be
more touching than the meeting with Prometesky, who looked at him as
a father might look at a newly-recovered son, and seemed to lose the
joy of the prospect of his own freedom in the pride and exultation of
his own boy, his Ambrose's son, having achieved it.
Pages:
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283