Chapter Twenty Seven.
It was very different to be a prisoner now alone. I longed for Mercer’s companionship, but it was so that I might punish him for what I again and again called his miserable cowardice, which seemed to me to make his crime ten times worse. And so I walked up and down the little room restlessly, thinking over the times when my school-fellow had talked about the watch, and his intense longing to possess it, or such a one.
Nothing could be plainer. He had given way at last, and taken it on that unlucky day when he was hanging about talking to me as I lay on the grass with my head throbbing, and then walking away toward the tent or to where he could get a good look at the cricketers.
“Too much for him,” I said,—“too much for him, and I am to take the credit of his theft. But I will not. If he is such a mean coward as to let me take his stealing on my shoulders, he is not worth sparing, and he shall take the credit for himself—upon his own shoulders and not mine.”
“Oh, what an ass I have been ever to make friends with such a fellow!” I cried, after a pause. “I ought to have known better. Never mind, I do know better now, and to-morrow morning I’ll ask to see the Doctor, and I’ll tell him everything, and—get him expelled!”
That set me thinking once more about his people at home, and as I did, I began to waver, and call to mind how terrible it would be, and that I liked him too well in spite of all.
For I did like him. I had never had a brother, and he had seemed to fill his place, so that now, for the first time, I fully understood how we two lads had become knit together, and how terribly hard it would be to speak out.
I sat down by the window at last, to let the cool breeze play upon my aching temples, and as I leaned my head against the side, the cheery voices of the boys in the field floated up to me, to make me more wretched still.
“It’s nothing to them,” I said to myself. “Nobody there cares, and Eely and Dicksee were only too glad to have their revenge upon me. I don’t know, though,” I said; “they both thought I took the watch, and believed all they said. But it was a triumph for them.”
I sat thinking.