Jeremy’s mind had been elsewhere; and it was a minute or two before the sense of these words penetrated to him. When it did, it brought him sharply back to the actual world. But he did not speak at once. His natural caution interposed, his natural diffidence bade him consider.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked quietly after an interval.
“What I say,” the Speaker answered. “If you succeed in what you have to do, you shall be rewarded. If you don’t succeed, I shall not be able to reward you, even if I wish to.”
Jeremy desired very strongly to point out that this was unjust, that whether the guns would be a decisive factor in the coming battle depended almost entirely on chance. But he refrained. He refrained, too, from asking the Speaker precisely where the Lady Eva came into the scheme. Fortune appeared to him like a great, glittering bubble, which a miracle might make solid at the proper time for his hand to seize it. He dared not question further: he dared not think how much he was influenced by the Speaker’s determination not to consider the consequences of defeat.
And as that crowded week wore on, his mind settled into a sort of calm, like the apparent quietness of a wheel revolving at high speed. That would be which was written. In his anxiety to be sure that there was an adequate supply of shells (he did not hope to have more than thirty for each gun) he quite forgot that one of them might suddenly blow him into eternity, together with all the Speaker’s chance of success.
A great part of his time in the workshops was now spent alone—alone, that is to say, as far as the Speaker was concerned, for the old man was busy at the Treasury, mustering his army and making ready for it to march. As for the octogenarians, Jeremy felt little more kinship with them than if they had been a troop of trained animals. Communication with them was so difficult that he confined it to the most necessary orders. But when he realized that these ludicrous old men would have to come with him to the battlefield to fire the guns, for want of time to train others, he began to feel for them a kind of compassionate affection. He regarded them rather as he would have done the horses of the gun-teams than as the men of his battery; but towards the end of the week he found himself talking to them, quite incomprehensibly, as he might have done to horses. It seemed to him pathetic that these witless veterans should be led out to war and set to the highly hazardous venture of firing off the guns they had themselves manufactured.
So, between the hours which he devoted to elementary instruction in loading, aiming, and firing, he gave to them his views on the situation in which he found himself. His views were, by reason of fatigue, strong emotions and bewilderment, of a confused and even childish sort. He told Jabez, the wizened expert in explosives, the whole story of Trehanoc’s dead rat—a story which, brief as it was, covered more than a hundred and seventy years. He confided to Jabez his desire, his impossible craving, to see the rat again. It was perhaps a little ridiculous to hanker so much after the society of a rather unpleasant animal. Nevertheless he and the rat were in the same boat, and in his more light-headed moments he felt that he ought to seek it out and take counsel with it. He was sure that the rat would understand. At other times he had a suspicion that it would have adjusted itself much more easily to the changed world than he could ever hope to do. Perhaps it had not even noticed that there had been any change. Jabez, wrinkled, skinny and toothless, listened complacently while he went on fumbling with his work, never letting a sign appear to show whether he did or did not understand a word of it. Jeremy reflected that it was perhaps better to be quite incomprehensible than to be half understood.
At the end of the week, on the afternoon of the sixth day, he decided that all was done that could be hoped for. He put the gun-crew again through its drill, and desisted for fear of scaring away what little sense its members still retained. Then, after overhauling the guns once more, he returned to the Treasury to report to the Speaker that he was ready.
As he entered the building he met the Lady Eva, who had just come in from riding. His mind was too dull and heavy to respond even to the sight of her vigorous, flushed beauty. He merely saluted her—he had queerly taken in the last few days to using again the old artillery salute—and would have gone on. But he saw her hesitate and half turn towards him; and he stopped and faced her. But when he had done so, she evidently did not know what to say to him. She stood there, tapping her foot on the ground and biting her lip, while he waited, bowed, lethargic, incapable of speech.
At last she said, with a jerky effort: “I do not know how my father is expecting you to save us ... but I know that he is....”