When Roger had gone he examined with some interest the soap which had been given to him. It was a thin and wasted cake, very heavy, and of a harsh and gritty substance. But what was chiefly interesting was that it lay in a little metal casket which had a lock on it. This simple fact led Jeremy’s mind down a widening avenue of speculation. He dragged himself away from it with difficulty, and was in the middle of washing and shaving when Roger returned. It was at least a relief to find that the razor had a practicable edge.
Roger sat on the bed and watched Jeremy in silence. There was nothing specially perplexing in these new clothes, which comprised a thick woolen vest, a shirt, breeches, and a loose coat, and were obviously the garments of a race, or a class, used to a life spent largely out of doors. Jeremy put them on without difficulty until he came to the shapeless bunch of colored linen which served as a tie. Here Roger was obliged to intervene and help him.
“How absurd!” Roger exclaimed with satisfaction, standing away and regarding him when the operation was completed. “Now you look like anybody else. And yet yesterday, when I found you, you looked like some one out of one of the old pictures. It’s almost a pity....”
“That’s all right,” Jeremy sighed, still fidgeting a little with the tie and trying to see himself in a very small shaving-glass. “I want to look like anybody else. It’s a great piece of luck that only you and your uncle know that I’m not. I feel somehow,” he went on, with an increasing warmth of expression, “that I can rely on you. It would be unbearable if all these people here knew what I had told you.” He paused, while the vision thus suggested took definite shape in his mind. “You see,” he ruminated, lost in speculation and half-forgetting his hearer, “I know that nothing would ever make me believe such a story. I know they would look at me out of the corners of their eyes and wonder whether there was anything in it. They’d begin to take sides and quarrel. The fools would believe me and the sensible people would laugh at me. I should begin to feel that I was an impostor, a sort of De Rougemont or Doctor Cook ... only, of course, you don’t know who they were——” He might have rambled on much longer without realizing that there was a certain ungracious candor in these remarks if his interest had not been attracted by a change of expression, a mere flicker of meaning in Roger’s eyes.
“You haven’t told any one?” Jeremy cried with a sudden gust of entreaty.
“No—well ... no one of importance ...” Roger answered, averting his glance. “But I didn’t know—you didn’t say—— And there’s my uncle——” He paused and considered.
“But——” Jeremy began, and stopped appalled. The pressure of experience had taught him that it was not only an error but also gross ill-behavior to make large claims of any sort whatsoever. He strongly resented finding himself in the position of having to assert in public that he had lain in a trance for a century and a half. Surely Roger should have understood his feelings without warning, and should have respected his story as told in confidence under an obvious necessity. There flashed through his mind the question whether any newspapers still survived.
He burst out again wildly, fighting with a thickness in his throat. “Will your uncle have told any one? Isn’t it much better to say nothing about me? At least, until I can prove——”
“But what do you mean—prove?” Roger interrupted. “Why shouldn’t every one believe you as I did? There are some men who will believe nothing, but——” He shrugged his shoulders and dismissed them. “But, whatever you may wish, there’s my uncle.... He rises very early—I saw him here half-an-hour ago, after Mass.”
Jeremy opened his mouth to speak and forebore.