“Glad?” he said with a groan.
“Oh, well, it was all your doing. Feel proud, don’t you?”
His eyes gazed fully in mine, and their lock said plainly, “I’m weak, helpless, and in misery. I’m full of repentance too, now. Don’t, don’t, pray, cast my sins in my face.”
But somehow my tongue seemed to be out of my control. I wanted to take pity on him, and to do all I could to make his position more bearable, but all the time I kept on attacking him with the sharpest and most bitter reproaches.
“You ought to be proud,” I said. “You can lie there and think that through your blackguards the ship has been blown up, and is now burning, and would burn to the water’s edge if we couldn’t stop it. The captain looks as if he were dying; you are nearly killed; you’ve nearly killed poor Mr Denning, who came this voyage for the benefit of his health; you have had Miss Denning insulted and exposed to no end of dangers; poor old Neb Dumlow has a shot in him; and we’ve been treated more like dogs than anything else; while now your beautiful friends have turned upon you, and left you to be burned in the ship they have set on fire, for aught they care. Yes; you ought to be proud of your work.”
He groaned, and I felt as if I should like to bite my tongue off, as I wondered how I could have said such bitter things.
“I say, don’t faint,” I cried, and leaned over him, and sprinkled his face with water, for his eyelids had drooped, and a terribly ghastly look came over his face. But even as I tried to bring him to, I felt as if I were only doing so to make him hear my reproaches once more.
He opened his eyes after a few moments, and looked up at me.
“Here,” I said roughly; “I’d better fetch the doctor to you.”
“What for?” he cried. “He will only try and save my life, when it would be better for me to die out of the way. I want to die. How can I face people at home again? No, no, don’t fetch him. It’s all over. There is no hope for me now.”