“A stowaway with an attack of asthma! I think I see my poor young fellow! Why, they’d hear you wheezing in the hold, and you’d gasp out your whole story before you were in the Bay of Biscay! No, no, my fellow; you’ve taken your line, and you must stick to it, and stop with me till we can think of something better than a long sea voyage. If you say you won’t, I say I’ll make you—to save you from yourself—to save us both.”
There was no mistaking the absolute intention in this threat; it was fixed and final, and the boy accepted it as he accepted his oppressor’s power to make good his words. It was true that he might have escaped already; the nearer he had been to it, the less chance was he likely to be given again. So reasoned Pocket from the face and voice now dominating him more powerfully than ever; but it is an interesting fact that his conclusion neither cowed nor depressed him as it might have done. There was actually an element of relief in his discomfiture. He had done his best to do his duty. It was not his fault that responsibility had been wrested from his shoulders, and an evil hour delayed. And yet there was a certain, an immediate, a creature comfort in such delay, which was all the greater because unsought by him; it was a comfort that he had both ways, as the saying is, and from all points of view but that of his poor people wondering what had become of him.
“If only they knew!” he cried; “then I shouldn’t care. Let me write to one of them! My mother needn’t know; but I must write to one of the others, and at least let them know I am alive and well. My sister would keep my secret; she’d play the game all right, I promise you! And I’d play any game you like if only you let me write a line to her!”
The doctor would not hear of it at first. Eventually he said he should have to inspect the letter before it went; and this proved the thin edge of consent. In the end it was arranged that Pocket should write what he liked to his sister only, and that Baumgartner should read and enclose it in a covering letter, so that everybody need not know it was a letter from the missing boy. Baumgartner was to have it posted from St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to destroy all trace of a locality which he now refused point-blank to disclose even to the writer. And in return for the whole concession the schoolboy was to give his solemn word and sacred promise on the following points.
He was not to set foot outside the house without Baumgartner, nor to show himself for a moment at the windows back or front.
On no account was he to confide in the doctor’s niece Phillida, to give her the slightest inkling of his connection with the latest of London mysteries, or even of the scene, or any of the circumstances of his first meeting with Baumgartner.
“You are bound to see something of each other; the less you say about yourself the better.”
“But what can she think?”
“What she likes, my young fellow! I am a medical man; medical men may bring patients to their houses even when they have ceased to practise in the ordinary way. It is no business of hers, and what she chooses to think is no affair of ours. She has seen you very ill, remember, and she had your doctor’s orders not to let you out of the house in his absence.”
“She obeyed them like a little brick!” muttered Pocket, with a wistful heaviness.