"But I must mind it!" shouted Dick. "When I think of how I've been treated, and plenty more like me, loyal men who run straight and do their best, I declare to God I feel I don't know which I hate worst, the English Government, that pitches its friends overboard to save its own skin, or my own countrymen, that don't know the meaning of the word gratitude!"
He turned again upon Larry: "And upon my word and honour, Larry, I didn't think that your father's son would have been tarred with that brush, anyhow!"
"Now, Major," broke in Dr. Mangan, again, "you know we agreed that there was no use in attaching too much importance to that transaction. Barty and Larry here were in a very difficult position, and even though you and I might not have approved entirely of their action——"
"But, Doctor," interrupted Larry, bewildered, and dismayed, "You—I thought you had advised Barty——"
The Big Doctor frowned at him, and winked too, while he laid his huge white hand on his watch-pocket, tapping with his middle finger on the spot which, as he knew, the average layman dedicated to the heart. He trusted to Larry's quickness, and did not trust in vain.
"A sort of heart attack," Aunt Freddy had said.
"I'm most frightfully sorry, Cousin Dick," Larry began, hurriedly, before a worse thing happened. "Somehow, I never thought—you see I was out of the country—it seemed to me that——" he was going to repeat those comforting sedatives about leaving the man at the helm to bark for you—(Heavens! He had been on the point of saying that! Was he going to laugh?)—but he couldn't give Barty away. He rushed into apology, regret, abuse of his own ignorance, and imbecility, and the Big Doctor, at each pause in the penitence, poured a little oil and wine into the wounds for which Larry and the Carmodys were jointly responsible, and Dick's anger, like the red that had flared to his face, fell like a spent flame.
"Say no more, boy, say no more," he said, dropping into the chair from which he had leaped in the course of his apologia pro vita sua; "I daresay you knew no better—anyhow, you didn't mean to do me a bad turn——"
Larry took his hand. "You know that, Cousin Dick," he said, in profound distress. "Of all people in the world—the very last. If there was anything I could do now——"
"Well now, I'll tell you what you could do!" cut in Dr. Mangan, jovially, "you could tell our friend Evans to bring in the Major's tumbler of hot milk and whisky, and to look sharp about it too! I ordered he was to have it at six o'clock——"