Colonel Thorndyke's Secret

by G. A. Henty

“I have to thank you, Thorndyke, for this. I will pay off my debt some day, you make take your oath.”

“A sad case, Mr. Thorndyke—a sad case,” the judge, who had greatly complimented the Squire on his conduct, said to him as he was disrobing afterwards. “I don't know that in all my experience I ever saw such a hardened young villain. With highwaymen it is a point of honor to assume a gayety of demeanor on such occasions; but to see a boy of eighteen, never before convicted, exhibiting such coolness and effrontery is quite beyond my experience. I suppose his record is altogether bad?”

“Altogether,” the Squire said. “His father has, during the last two years, been quite broken by it; he owned to me that he was in bodily fear of the lad, who had on several occasions assaulted him, had robbed him of his savings by means of forgery, and was so hopelessly bad that he himself thought with me that the only possible hope for him was to get him to enlist. I myself recommended the East India Company's service, thinking that he would have less opportunity for crime out there, and that there would be a strong chance that either fever or a bullet would carry him off, for I own that I have not the slightest hope of reformation in such a character.”

“I would have given him transportation for life if I had known all this,” the judge said. “However, it is not likely that he will ever come back again—very few of them do; the hulks are not the most healthy places in the world, and they have a pretty rough way with men who give them trouble, as this young fellow is likely to do.”

Mr. Bastow, as soon as he had given his evidence, had taken a hackney coach to the inn where he and the Squire had put up on their arrival in town the evening before, and here, on his return, John Thorndyke found him. He was lying on his bed in a state of prostration.

“Cheer up, Bastow,” he said, putting his hand upon the Rector's shoulder. “The sentence is fifteen years, which was the very amount I hoped that he would get. The more one sees of him the more hopeless it is to expect that any change will ever take place in him; and it is infinitely better that he should be across the sea where his conduct, when his term is over, can affect no one. The disgrace, such as it is, to his friends, is no greater in a long term than in a short one. Had he got off with four or five years' imprisonment, he would have been a perpetual trouble and a source of uneasiness, not to say alarm; and even had he left you alone we should always have been in a state of dread as to his next offense. Better that he should be out in the colonies than be hung at Tyburn.”

“How did he take the sentence?”

“With the same bravado he had shown all through, and as he went out of the dock addressed a threat to me, that, under the circumstances, I can very well afford to despise. Now, if you will take my advice, you will drink a couple of glasses of good port, and then go to bed. I will see to your being awakened at seven o'clock, which will give us time to breakfast comfortably, and to make a start at nine.”

“I would rather not have the wine,” the Rector said feebly.

“Yes, but you must take what is good for you. I have ordered up a bottle of the landlord's best, and must insist upon your drinking a couple of glasses with me. I want it almost as much as you do, for the atmosphere of that court was enough to poison a dog. I have got the taste of it in my mouth still.”