The boy flushed up with pleasure.
“Thanks awfully, Mr Elvesdon,” he said. “I’d like to get on in the force. The dear old dad was always rather against my coming out to join: said it was like enlisting as a private in the Army, and so on—and that I’d much better try for a clerkship—a lot of good I’d have been at quill driving! No, I didn’t want that sort of life, but I was going to do for myself so here I am.”
“That’s quite right,” cut in Thornhill. “You’re the sort of chap we want out here, Parry. And even if you don’t stick to the force a few years’ training in it’ll do you all the good in the world.”
And then the boy, all ideas of the difference between a Police trooper and the Resident Magistrate forgotten for the time, opened his heart, and got back to his home in the pleasant English country, and his schooldays, only, comparatively speaking, a matter of yesterday. He had not been coddled either, but had had to take the rough with the smooth—and more rough than smooth—therein. And eagerly and enthusiastically did he let himself go to his older listeners, his fellow-captives, here, in the night-gloom of this savage hut, lighted only by the dimness of the dying fire: forgetting everything, forgetting that he might never see that English home again; might never see the setting of another sun; and causing them almost to forget it too. Poor boy! Poor boy!
He was eloquent on the big trout he had taken out of the mill-pool in the rippling moonlight in the sweet early summer, with a white moth; the big two-and-a-half pounder he had tried for so often; on the sparrow-hawk’s nest in the straight, slippery stemmed Scotch fir on the border of the most carefully watched covert of the countryside, also in the moonlight, and the hanging on by one hand—for an awful half minute to a greasy, slippery bough, with sixty feet of clear drop beneath him—on his brothers and sisters, and the first pipe which he and two of the former had smoked, with doubtful satisfaction, in the depths of a clay-sided ditch overhung with brambles, a little way below the vicarage garden—on the splendid old copper-beech beneath which they used to take tea on sultry summer afternoons. Elvesdon, listening sympathetically, encouraged him to talk on—Thornhill was already snoring. At last the boy himself grew drowsy.
“Well, Mr Elvesdon, I’m keeping you awake,” he said. “But I can’t tell you how kind you have been to me. I hope, if we get out of this, and you are ever in England you will go and see my people, and I hope still more that I shall, by some chance or other, be there too to welcome you. I’m so thankful we’re together again; it was awfully lonely stuck away there all by myself among these brutes.”
“Why Parry, that’s a first-rate after-dinner speech,” laughed Elvesdon, dropping a kindly hand on the lad’s shoulder. “I hope all that you say, too. And now—go to sleep.”
The other obeyed. Elvesdon however, sitting there, did not feel in the least inclined to follow suit. He felt uncomfortably wakeful, and unwontedly depressed. He groped around for some fresh twigs to throw on the fire, and found a scanty remnant. As the flame flared up, making a shimmer on the shining backs of innumerable cockroaches studding the domed roof, he got out his pouch, and as he filled his pipe he thought how there was about enough to stand him in for another day’s smoke, and that only. He also thought of Edala.
It was nothing new. He had been flunking of her all the time. Now, however, he thought of her with a vividity of concentration that almost seemed to bring her presence here within this squalid hut. Would she miss him, or would her anxiety be all on account of her father? He did not know what to think—he could only hope.
His companions were slumbering peacefully. Hour followed hour and still he sat. The fire burned low, then went out altogether. The keen breaths of the night air chilled him to the bone. Rolling his blanket around him—they had been allowed the use of a blanket apiece by their captors—he lay down and suddenly sleep came to him.