As soon as the breakfast was finished, a morbid feeling of vexation came over me. I was angry because I had touched it, and wished that I had sulked, and shown myself too much injured to go on as if nothing had happened. But it was too late then.
After a while, Mr Rebble came back, looking very severe. He watched the maid as she took the tray, but the girl gave me a sympathetic look, and then I was once more left alone.
Hard people think they do not,—they say, “Oh, he’s only a boy; he’ll soon forget,”—but boys suffer mentally as keenly, or more keenly, than grown people. Of course they do, for everything about them is young, tender, and easily wounded. I know that they soon recover from some mental injury. Naturally. They are young and elastic, and the sapling, if bent down, springs up again, but for the time they suffer cruelly.
I know I did, shut up there in disgrace, and, as I sat or walked about my prison, it made no difference to me that it was a plainly furnished, neat bedroom, for it was as prison-like to me in my vein as if the floor had been stone, the door of iron-clamped oak with rusty hinges. And as I moved about the place, I began to understand how prisoners gladly made friends with spiders, mice, and rats, or employed themselves cutting their names on the walls, carving pieces of wood, or writing long histories.
But I had no insects or animals to amuse me, no wood to carve, no stone walls upon which to chisel my name.
I had only been a prisoner for a few hours, you may say.
Quite true, but, oh, what hours they were, and what agony I suffered from my thoughts!
I spent most of my time at the window, forcing myself to think of how things were going on in school, and I pictured the boys at their lessons—at the Doctor’s desk at Mr Rebble’s, and Mr Hasnip’s. It was German day, too, and I thought about our quaint foreign master, and about Lomax drilling the boys in the afternoon. He would be asking them where I was; and the question arose in my mind, would the boys tell him, or would they have had orders, as we did once before, about a year back, when a pupil disgraced himself, not to mention the affair outside the school walls.
My spirits rose a little at this, for it would be horrible for Lomax to know, and go and think it over. And I seemed to know that he would take it more to heart about me than if it were any other boy, for I was to be a soldier, and, as he would have expressed it, “One of ours.”
Dinner-time at last—the bell ringing, and the shouts and cries of the boys, “All in! all in!” though we used to want very little calling for meals.