“Seen him? No, my dear. He’s shut himself up, like he does sometimes; but I could hear him in the kitchen, walking all over my head, just like a wild beast in a cage, and now and then he began talking to himself quite out loud. It’s all your fault, Master Aleck, for he was as good-tempered as could be this morning when I went in to ask him what I was to get ready for dinner, and what time.”
Jane closed the door after her with these words and left Aleck with the tray.
“Yes,” he said, bitterly, in his pain; “it’s all my fault, I suppose, and I’m to go away from everything I like here.”
He raised the cover over the plate as he spoke, and a pleasant, appetising odour greeted his nostrils; but he lowered the cover again with a gesture of disgust.
“I couldn’t touch it,” he said, with a shudder, “even to do me good. Nothing would do me good now. My face feels so stiff, and my eyes are just as if they’d got something dark over them.”
He went near the window again to look out in the direction of the sea, with some idea of watching the birds, of which so many floated up into sight above the cliffs that shut in the Den. But it was an effort to look skyward, and he sat down by the window to think, in a dull, heavy, dreamy way, about his uncle’s words.
And it seemed to him, knowing how stern and uncompromising the old man was, that it would be a word and a blow. For aught he knew to the contrary letters might have been written by then, making arrangements for him to go to some institution where he would be trained to enter into some pursuit that he might detest. Time back there had been talk about his future, the old man having pleasantly asked him what he would like to be. He had replied. “An officer in the Army,” and then stood startled by the change which came over the old man’s face.
“No,” he had said, scowling, “I could never consent to that, Aleck. I might agree to your going into the Navy, but as a soldier, emphatically no.”
“Why doesn’t he want me to be a soldier?” mused the boy. “He was a soldier himself. I should like to know the whole truth. It can’t be what he said.”
Aleck sat wrinkling up his brow and thinking for some little time. Not for long; it made his head ache too much, and he changed from soldiering to sailoring.