"And you want to do him an injury!" said Mackay, with grave consideration.
"No, I don't," said Percival, angrily, as if replying to a suggestion that had been made a thousand times before, and flinging out his arm with a reckless, agitated gesture. "I want to do him a service—confound him!"
There was a silence. Percival lay with his outstretched hand clenched and his eyes fixed gloomily on the opposite wall: Mackay turned away his head. Presently, however, he spoke in a low but distinct tone.
"What is the service you propose doing me, Mr. Heron?"
"Doing you? Good Heavens! You! What do you mean?"
"I suppose that my face is a good deal disfigured at present," said the steerage passenger, passing his hand lightly over his thick, brown beard; "but when it is better, you will probably recognise me easily enough. But, perhaps, I am mistaken. I thought for a moment that you were in search of a man called Stretton, who was formerly a tutor to your step-brothers."
Percival was standing erect by this time in the middle of the floor. His hands were thrust into his pockets: his deep chest heaved: the bronzed pallor of his face had turned to a dusky red. He did not answer the words spoken to him; but after a few seconds of silence, in which the eyes of the two men met and told each other a good deal, he strode to the doorway, pushed aside the plank which served for a door, and went out into the storm. He did not feel the rain beating upon his head: he did not hear the thunder, nor see the forked lightning that played without intermission in the darkened sky; he was conscious only of the intolerable fact that he was shut up in a narrow corner of the earth, in daily, almost hourly, companionship with the one man for whom he felt something not unlike fierce hatred. And in spite of his resolution to act generously for Elizabeth's sake, the hatred flamed up again when he found himself so suddenly thrust, as it were, into Brian Luttrell's presence.
When he had walked for some time and got thoroughly wet through, it occurred to him that he was acting more like a child than a grown man; and he turned his face as impetuously towards the huts as he had lately turned his back upon them. He found plenty to do when the rain ceased. The fire had for the first time gone out, and the patience of Jackson could not now be taxed, because he was lying on his back in the stupor of fever. Percival set one of the men to work with two sticks; but the wood was nearly all damp, and it was a weary business, even when two dry morsels were found, to get them to light. However, it was better than having nothing to do. Want of employment was one of their chief trials. The men could not always be catching fish and snaring birds. They were thinking of building a small boat; but Jackson's illness deprived them of the help of one who had more practical knowledge of such matters than any of the others, and threw a damp over their spirits as well.
Jackson's illness seemed to give Percival a pretext for absenting himself from the hut in which the so-called Mackay lay. He had, just at first, an invincible repugnance to meeting him again; he could not make up his mind how Brian Luttrell would expect to be treated, and he was almost morbidly sensitive about the mistake that he had made respecting "the steerage passenger." At night he stayed with Jackson, and sent the other men to sleep in Mackay's hut. But in the morning an absolute necessity arose for him to speak to his enemy.
Jackson was sensible, though extremely weak, when the daylight came: and his first remark was an anxious one concerning the state of his comrade's broken leg. "Will you look after it a bit, sir?" he said, wistfully, to Heron.