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It was a spare sail which covered the silent and motionless forms of those whose loyalty to their country had led them through the gates of death to "the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns," but whose fadeless record is inscribed in the hearts of a grateful nation.
The fact that it was evidently intended for Roden's private eye did not seem to affect one or the other of these two men, who had travelled, with difficulty, along the road to fortune, only reaching their bourn at last with a light stock of scruples and a shattered code of honour. Then he folded it, and handed it back. He was not likely to forget a word of it. "I suppose you will go," he said.
He is a detestable braggart, but he knows his business!" This was one of the decisive moments of the race. The crowd was silent; expectation was at the utmost pitch of tension, and Dada's eyes were fixed spell-bound on the obelisk and on the quadrigas that whirled round the bourn. Next to Hippias came a blue team, and close behind were three red ones.
The lad could see it all, as he listened, wishing that he had lived in those stirring days, never dreaming in how little was he of different mould from the stout-hearted pioneers who beat out the path with their moccasined feet; how little less full of danger were his own days to be; how little different had been his own life, and was his our pose now how little different after all was the bourn to which his own restless feet were bearing him.
Gerard dismounted without a word, and took the burgomaster's purse from his girdle: while he opened it, "You will soon be out of this hateful country," said his guide, half sulkily; "mayhap the one you are going to will like you no better; any way, though it be a church you have robbed, they cannot take you, once across that bourn."
"There at last it lay," cries Burton, "the bourn of my long and weary pilgrimage, realising the plans and hopes of many and many a year," the Kaaba, the place of answered prayer, above which in the heaven of heavens Allah himself sits and draws his pen through people's sins. "The mirage of fancy invested the huge catafalque and its gloomy pall with peculiar charms."
His high spirit found fit occupation in the armies of foreign princes: and pilgrims and minstrels brought home such reports of his prowess, that the people of Bourn no longer regarded him as a turbulent young scapegrace, but considered him as their pride and glory.
It is there for ever will be there at least until they find another God to worship than their own paltry selves. Hence it came that the bourn between the two spiritual estates yawned a little wider at one point, and a mist of dissatisfaction would not unfrequently rise from a certain stagnant pool in its hollow.
Tom Taylor's fine historical drama Clancarty is pretty, but there is no trace of the true poetry which made the farewell letter of Périchole so touching, or of the true comic force which projected Général Bourn.
We have ourselves heard this feeling expressed by them, and seen the unaffected horror with which they will sit in their gossipping hours, and tell frightful stories of that "down river," which to them is "That undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns."* * A slightly inaccurate quotation from Hamlet, Act III, scene I, lines 369-370.
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