"I don't know," said Tom. "How should I? I want you to tell me that."
She looked up in his face, puzzled. His old self-confident look seemed strangely past away.
"I will tell you" he said, "because I love you. I don't like to show it to them; but I've been frightened, Grace, for the first time in my life."
She paused for an explanation; but she did not straggle to escape from him.
"Frightened; beat; run to earth myself, though I talked so bravely of running others to earth just now. Grace, I've been in prison!"
"In prison? In a Russian prison? Oh, Mr. Thurnall!"
"Ay, Grace, I'd tried everything but that; and I could not stand it. Death was a joke to that. Not to be able to get out!—To rage up and down for hours like a wild beast; long to fly at one's gaoler and tear his heart out;—beat one's head against the wall in the hope of knocking one's brains out;—anything to get rid of that horrid notion, night and day over one—I can't get out!"
Grace had never seen him so excited.
"But you are safe now," said she soothingly. "Oh, those horrid
Russians!"
"But it was not Russians!—If it had been, I could have borne it.—That was all in my bargain,—the fair chance of war: but to be shut up by a mistake!—at the very outset, too—by a boorish villain of a khan, on a drunken suspicion;—a fellow whom I was trying to serve, and who couldn't, or wouldn't, or daren't understand me—Oh, Grace, I was caught in my own trap! I went out full blown with self-conceit. Never was any one so cunning as I was to be!—Such a game as I was going to play, and make my fortune by it!—And this brute to stop me short—to make a fool of me—to keep me there eighteen months threatening to cut my head off once a quarter, and wouldn't understand me, let me talk with the tongue of the old serpent!"