“Yus,” said the boy thoughtfully, “I dahn’t think! Yer’d myke me chuck it. Yer’s particler as a orspital nuss,” he added, with a recollection of a brazen woman in gaudy uniform whom a kind lady had thrust upon his mother’s humble home just before he had gone aboard.
Demaine was in acute necessity. “Look here,” he said, “get me some bread.”
“Whaffor?” asked the boy.
Demaine nodded mysteriously, and once again was his gaoler torn between a desire for some ultimate gain and the certitude that no present gain was obtainable.
He was a London lad, with all the advantages that London birth implies, and it had already occurred to him that Demaine’s accent, manner and cuticle differed in a strange way from those of your stock stowaway. He had been impressed in the matter of the food; he was more impressed by certain little turns of language which he associated with those hateful, but, as he had been told, wealthy people, who came down and did good amid his mother’s neighbours in the East End; and when he had thought it well over and tamed his prisoner further by one more well-chosen epithet, he went off and came back with a hunk of bread.
“Yer lucky,” he said as he returned, “thet yer on a short trip. Otherwyes t’d uv been biscuit....” Then he added, “and gryte wurms in ut!”
George did not reply. He bit into the bread in ecstasy, and his eyes, which his acquaintances in London commonly discovered to be lifeless, positively gleamed upon this summer morning.
“They gotter communicyte wiv the orfferities fust,” said the boy pompously.
“Yes?” said George with his mouth full.
“Ho! yus, it is!” sneered the boy, who thought there was something of the toff in this use of the simply affirmative. “An’ after that they’ll land yer, and yer’ll ave the darbies on afore breakfast-toime.” He added nothing this time about hanging. The details of the moment were too absorbing.