"Look here," I said, "we've known each other some years now. I'm not the man, as you've probably discovered, to butt into a fellow's private affairs or worm confidences out of anyone, but if you're in trouble of any sort, and it would help to get it off your chest——"
He hesitated for an instant, and in that moment he looked somehow pathetic; awfully young and boyish and in need of advice. "I'm a good deal older than you are, Mouldy," I went on, "and I've been through my own Valley of the Shadow in my time."
He took a long breath, and for a second I thought the floodgates were going to be loosed. Then the painful reserve and shyness of his nature closed on the impulse like a vice. "No, sir," he said, "no ... thanks awfully.... I just wanted to get away ... just that."
Whatever fox was gnawing under his shirt, he preferred to hold on to it rather than another eye should see his hurt. Well, I think I liked him all the better for it. I never found talking about my trouble lightened it. It's a matter of temperament, I suppose.
"Right-o!" I said instantly. "I'll see what can be done. In fact I'll go further. I'll promise you all the change and danger and excitement you could possibly want." And with that I sent him to turn in.
7
My relief turned up three days later, and that night they gave me a farewell dinner in the Wardroom. It was like all shows of the kind—a mixture of wild joviality and moments of sentiment, real or stimulated by the cup. I had to make a speech, of course, and altogether was not sorry when it was at last possible to escape to the Quarter Deck. I had given no reason for my abrupt departure from the ship, and I was conscious that I had succeeded in surrounding myself with a sort of glamour of mystery. Bunje (he was our First Lieutenant then) would have it that I was about to contract a matrimonial alliance with an exiled princess, and made a moving speech after dinner that was not in all its features fit for reproduction in these pages.
The Young Doctor stoutly maintained that I had decided to embrace Holy Orders, and insisted on borrowing the Padre's cassock to wear while he outlined my probable career as a missionary in the valley of the Yangtse-Kiang.
It was Thorogood who joined me on the Quarter Deck where I was finishing a final pipe before turning in, and he fell into step beside me, linking His arm in mine in the boyish, spontaneous manner in which his affectionate nature revealed itself.
"We'll miss you awfully, Commander," he said.