The Argosy — page 56: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Debt of Honour. 43 that black cloud which came over him, strangely enough the presence of any German, the sound of that language, which was the one spoken by those who put his father to death, throws him into the wild state of excitement you saw to-night. ‘There, Holbrook! Now you know all. Can you wonder that I feel myself a murderer? Can even your cheerful optimism stand against a case like thisP” For some minutes I could not speak, the strange and tragic tale had absorbed me completely. The old church clock struck one, the night jar was busy with his eerie whirr in the dark and fragrant meadow close by. At last I recollected myself, but all the words that rose to my lips seemed hopelessly lame and inadequate to meet such a case as this. ‘My poor Atherstone,” I said, ‘you do wrong to embitter your life with these vain and needless self-reproaches. You and they were the victims of a cruel accident; that was all. From the first you acted from the highest motives; that is the most we can any of us do. You are not to blame; indeed, you are not to blame for any part — of it.” “Tl am to blame,” he said. ‘‘An undisciplined nature, carried away by every hasty impulse, is always to blame, and may, like me, bring more fatal woe upon its fellow-creatures than many a wretch who is hung on the gallows.” “ Do not allow yourself to magnify your share of the blame—since you insist upon its being such—in this extravagant way,” I said. ‘‘Is not this in itself one of those ill-regulated tendencies which you con- demn so severely? Is the prime of your life, the years that are ripe for achievement, to be squandered in useless regrets and that vain misery of remorse in which no man has a right to consume the powers that still remain to him for the service of mankind? When once a lesson is learnt, when once it is well branded in, then away with this enervating paralysis of remorse, which is in itself almost as mischievous as crime.” I was mounted on my favourite hobby now, from which it is always difficult to dislodge me, but I spare my readers the bulk of my discourse. For some time longer I exhorted and argued with him, but I doubt whether I succeeded in lightening any portion of his load. It is seldom that it is granted to any human creature to be of much real help or comfort to any other where his need is the sorest. We got through the next day very well on the whole. Hans was temporarily banished from the scene, and poor Luigi resumed his usual docile and smiling demeanour, though occasionally he looked about him anxiously, in the way that some people do when they feel that there is a cat in the room. I discovered, however, that one power had remained to him in the general wreck. He had the most sympathetic and beautiful voice I ever heard, and sang with a power and expres- sion that must have been purely instinctive, seeing that the words on connicloooks (C(O) im