Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
Jacky gave a little moan. “Yes, um can do a little more before he go and
hide him face where there are a good deal of trees.”
Then Jacky went almost on tiptoe, and fetched another calabash full
of water and placed it by George's head. Then he went very softly and
fetched the heavy iron which he had seen George use in penning sheep,
and laid it by George's side; next he went softly and brought George's
gun, and laid it gently by George's side down on the ground.
This done he turned to take his last look of the sick man now feebly
dozing, the little book in his drooping hand. But as he gazed nature
rushed over the poor savage's heart and took it quite by surprise. Even
while bending over his white brother to look his last farewell, with a
sudden start he turned his back on him, and sinking on his hams he burst
out crying and sobbing with a wild and terrible violence.
CHAPTER XLI.
FOR near an hour Jacky sat upon the ground, his face averted from his
sick friend, and cried; then suddenly he rose, and without looking at
him went out at the door, and turning his face toward the great forests
that lay forty miles distant eastward, he ran all the night, and long
before dawn was hid in the pathless woods.
A white man feels that grief, when not selfish, is honorable, and
unconsciously he nurses such grief more or less; but to simple-minded
Jacky grief was merely a subtle pain, and to be got rid of as quickly as
possible, like any other pain.
He ran to the vast and distant woods, hoping to leave George's death a
long way behind him, and so not see what caused his pain so plain as
he saw it just now. It is to be observed that he looked upon George as
dead. The taking into his hand of the book of his religion, the kind
embrace, the request that the door might be opened, doubtless for the
disembodied spirit to pass out, all these rites were understood by Jacky
to imply that the last scene was at hand. Why witness it? it would make
him still more uncomfortable. Therefore he ran, and never once looked
back, and plunged into the impenetrable gloom of the eastern forests.
The white man had left Fielding to get a richer master. The
half-reasoning savage left him to cure his own grief at losing him.
There he lay abandoned in trouble and sickness by all his kind. But one
friend never stirred; a single-hearted, single-minded, non-reasoning
friend.
Who was this pure-minded friend? A dog.
Carlo loved George. They had lived together, they had sported together,
they had slept together side by side on the cold, hard deck of the
_Phoenix_, and often they had kept each other warm, sitting crouched
together behind a little bank or a fallen tree, with the wind whistling
and the rain shooting by their ears.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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