“It’s like a punishment to me, for trying to forget that which I ought always to bear in mind,” he said at last, with a sigh. “How horrible! and how strange that two people could be so much alike!”
Dick played with the band in the mess-room that evening, and one or two of his comrades told him he looked ill; but he laughed it off, and tried to make them believe that the little fit of weariness was a mere nothing. But his face told a different tale, and that night, when he went to his bed, sleep refused to come; and to the accompaniment of his comrades’ heavy breathing—that being the most charitable term that can be applied to it—he once more went over his old life at Mr Draycott’s, from his first entering the great coach’s establishment up to the morning he had left.
At last sleep came—a miserable, feverish slumber, from which he was aroused by the reveille.
“There,” he said to himself. “I shall be all right now,” as he took his dripping head out of the bowl of cold water, and felt refreshed by the scrub he gave himself; but somehow he did not feel right. His head burned, and he was glad to get out in the open air, in the hope that a little exercise would clear his brain and drive away the cobweb-like fancies which seemed to interfere with its working.
Vain hope! The thoughts only came the faster, and at last he began to ask himself whether he was going to be ill.
“Mark’s dead!” he found himself saying mentally; “and there are no such things as ghosts—education killed the last of them years ago. But it does seem horrible to come suddenly face to face with a fellow so like poor Mark that I should have felt ready to declare it was he. Nature does make people different; and yet that officer is as like him as can be. Of course, he would have grown set and more manly. And—oh! but it’s impossible! He’s dead! he’s dead!”
He had gone back into the band-room, where, as of old, some twenty men were blowing hard, each working up the parts of new pieces, and utterly regardless, as well as unconscious, of his neighbour—use having given the bandsmen the ability to practice away deaf to the noise produced by others. Here he sat down in his own corner, and began to look over his music, expecting that before long Wilkins would be there to try over a few pieces in proper harmony instead of discord. But the crotchets and quavers became people, and the staves the roads along which they passed; and, the more he tried, the more excited he grew.
For a few minutes he enjoyed a rest, for his eyes suddenly rested upon Brumpton, who, looking wonderfully fat, shiny, and happy, sat back, with his jacket unbuttoned, pumping away at the huge brass instrument, whose coils he nursed at his breast while he boomed and burred and brought forth bass notes of the deepest and richest quality.
Then Brumpton’s smooth, round face grew dim, and in its place there was the haughty, self-satisfied young officer, proud of his regimentals and scornfully gazing at the young bandsman as he passed.
Dick could bear it no longer; he felt that he must get back into the open air, and to some place where he could be in peace while he made up his mind what to do.