“He picked up with us, father—” began Mark; and then he caught the doctor’s eye and changed his lone, saying hastily, “He was a poor fellow in distress, father.”
Here Mark stopped short, for he had returned to the hotel with the full intention of pleading the poor invalid’s cause, and he felt that he had commenced by speaking in a way that must increase his father’s irritation, for Sir James had been quite upset by the heat of the place and the discomforts of the miserable hotel to which he had been directed when on board the liner as being the best in the port.
He literally glared at his son, and Mark shrank and turned to look at the doctor.
Sir James waited till he saw his son lower his eyes, when he too turned to the doctor and looked at him fiercely, the two men exchanging a long questioning glance.
It was a painful silence, but there was virtue in it, for when it was broken it was by Sir James, who said after drawing a deep breath, “See if you can open that window a little farther, Mark. This place feels like an oven.”
Mark sprang to his feet and drew the window a little forward, and then pushed it outward again, but only back in its former place.
“Hah! That’s better, my boy,” said his father, quite cheerfully. “Why, doctor, what a blessing a bucketful of ice would be here—if it wasn’t lukewarm, Dean, eh?”
The boy addressed tried to laugh at his uncle’s joke, but the production sounded hollow, and the silence recommenced, the doctor cudgelling his brains the while for something to say that should thoroughly change the conversation; but he cudgelled in vain.
At last, though, to his great relief, feeling as he did at the time that all the responsibility of the unpleasant voyage rested on his shoulders, Sir James cleared his throat as he sat back in a wicker chair mopping his forehead, and said quietly, “A beggar, Mark?”
“No, father,” cried Mark eagerly jumping at the chance of saying something to divert his father’s smouldering anger; “a poor English sailor.”