Joe slept heavily, and the lad looked at him enviously.
“I couldn’t sleep so peaceably as that,” he said half aloud. “How can a fellow sleep when he doesn’t know but what his father may be dying close by from starvation and weakness. It seems too bad.”
Gwyn opened the lanthorn and found that the candle was half burned down, and for a moment he thought of setting up another in its place, for fear he should go to sleep and it should burn out.
“Be such a pity,” he said, “we don’t want light while we’re asleep; only to wake up here in this horrible place is enough to drive anybody mad.”
Then he closed the lanthorn again.
“I sha’n’t go to sleep,” he muttered. “In too much trouble.” And he began thinking in a sore, dreary way of his mother seated at home waiting for news of his father and of him.
“It’ll nearly kill her,” he said. “But she’ll like it for me to have come here in search of poor dad. It would have been so cowardly if I hadn’t come, and she would have felt ashamed of me. Yes, she’ll like my dying like this.”
He paused, for his thoughts made him ponder.
“We can’t be going to die,” he said to himself, “or we shouldn’t be taking it all so easily and be so quiet and calm. If we felt that we really were going to die, we should be half mad with horror, and run shrieking about till we dropped in a fit. No,” he said softly, “it isn’t like that. People on board ship, when they know it’s going to sink, all behave quite calmly and patiently. There was that ship that was being burned with the soldiers on board. They all stood up before their officers, waiting for the end, and went down at last like men. But I don’t feel despairing like, and as if we were going to die.”
Then he began to think of his peaceful home life, and of the days at school till about a year ago, when he had come home to study military matters with his father and Major Jollivet, prior to being sent to one of the military colleges in about a year’s time.