After that, day after day went on and I scarcely kept count, until somehow I found out it was the last week. They partly told me on the Sunday. The parson—a good, straight, manly man he was—he had me told for fear I should go too close up to it, and not have time to prepare.
Prepare! How was a man like me to prepare? I’d done everything I’d a mind to for years and years. Some good things—some bad—mostly bad. How was I to repent? Just to say I was sorry for them. I wasn’t that particular sorry either—that was the worst of it. A deal of the old life was dashed good fun, and I’d not say, if I had the chance, that I wouldn’t do just the same over again.
But didn’t I feel that it hadn’t paid? That we should have been fifty times better off by sticking to honest work, and not had to bear the frightful fear and anxiousness poisoning every hour and day of our lives? Yes! I did feel that. What was the profit of it all? A few short years, with a deal of hard work, hiding and danger crowded into it; very little pleasure, and the lot of us dead or dying to finish up with.
Sometimes I felt as if I ought to understand what the parson tried to hammer into my head; but I couldn’t do anything but make a jumble of it. It came natural to me to do some things, and I did them. If I had stopped dead and bucked at father’s wanting me and Jim to help duff those weaners, I really believe all might have come right. Jim said afterwards he’d made up his mind to have another try at getting me to join with George Storefield in that fencing job. After that we could have gone into the outside station work with him—just the thing that would have suited the pair of us; and what a grand finish we might have made of it if we ran a waiting race; and where were we now?—Jim dead, Aileen dead to the world, and me to be hanged on Thursday, poor mother dead and brokenhearted before her time. We couldn’t have done worse. We might, we must have, done better.
I did repent in that sort of way of all we’d done since that first wrong turn. It’s the wrong turnoff that makes a man lose his way; but as for the rest I had only a dull, heavy feeling that my time was come, and I must make the best of it, and meet it like a man.
So the day came. The last day! What a queer feeling it was when I lay down that night, that I should never want to sleep again, or try to do it. That I had seen the sun set—leastways the day grow dark—for the last time; the very last time.
Somehow I wasn’t that much in fear of it as you might think; it was strange like, but made one pull himself together a bit. Thousands and millions of people had died in all sorts of ways and shapes since the beginning of the world. Why shouldn’t I be able to go through with it like another?
I was a long time lying and thinking before I thought of sleeping. All the small, teeny bits of a man’s life, as well as the big, seemed to come up before me as I lay there—the first things I could recollect at Rocky Flat; then the pony; mother a youngish woman; father always hard-looking, but so different from what he came to be afterwards. Aileen a little girl, with her dark hair falling over her shoulders; then a grown woman, riding her own horse, and full of smiles and fun; then a pale, weeping woman all in black, looking like a mourner at a funeral. Jim too, and Starlight—now galloping along through the forest at night—laughing, drinking, enjoying themselves at Jonathan Barnes’s, with the bright eyes of Bella and Maddie shining with fun and devilment.
Then both of them lying dead at the flat by Murrynebone Creek—Starlight with the half-caste making his wild moan over him; Jim, quiet in death as in life, lying in the grass, looking as if he had slid off his horse in that hot weather to take a banje; and now, no get away, the rope—the hangman!
I must have gone to sleep, after all, for the sun was shining into the cell when I stirred, and I could see the chains on my ankles that I had worn all these weary weeks. How could I sleep? but I had, for all that. It was daylight; more than that—sunrise. I listened, and, sure enough, I heard two or three of the bush-birds calling. It reminded me of being a boy again, and listening to the birds at dawn just before it was time to get up. When I was a boy!—was I ever a boy? How long was it ago—and now—O my God, my God! That ever it should have come to this! What am I waiting for to hear now? The tread of men; the smith that knocks the irons off the limbs that are so soon to be as cold as the jangling chains. Yes! at last I hear their footsteps—here they come!
The warder, the blacksmith, the parson, the head gaoler, just as I expected. The smith begins to cut the rivets. Somehow they none of them look so solemn as I expected. Surely when a man is to be killed by law, choked to death in cold blood, people might look a bit serious. Mind you, I believe men ought to be hanged. I don’t hold with any of that rot that them as commits murder shouldn’t pay for it with their own lives. It’s the only way they can pay for it, and make sure they don’t do
