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.

Conceive to yourself the keeping watch over a fountain choked in its
spouting, incessantly labouring