Demaine had once or twice noted how strangely glad the houses of men seem from off the sea, but as he was familiar rather with Calais and Dover, with Ostend, Folkestone and Boulogne than with other ports, and as he had more often approached them in winter weather than in the London season, there was something miraculously new to him in this vision which had been the delight of his forefathers: England from the summer sea.
The clear spirit bubbling within him encountered another and muddier but forceful current as his eyes fell upon the first officer.
That individual surveyed him with hatred but did not deign to throw him a word. He bade the lad stand by George in a particular place upon the deck till he should be sent for; he next threatened several of the boy’s vital organs if his prisoner were not properly kept in view, and having pronounced these threats, lurched away.
“Th’ old man’ll want yer soon, ter fill in is sheet,” said the lad by way of making conversation. “Myebe ee’ll ave ye larrupped, myebe ee wahn’t. Ee didn’t the larst un,” he put in as an afterthought, as though it were the custom to larrup some seven stowaways out of eight by way of parting, and to make capricious exception of certain favourites.
“Yer’ll ave to tyke thut sheet wiv yer; leastwyes whoever’s in charge of the baht’ll ave ter, an thye gives ut to th’ cops, and th’ cops shahs ut to the beak. As to do ut, to ave everyin roight and reglar. Otherwyes they cudden put yer awye—and they’re bahnd ter do that: not arf!”
But Demaine was not heeding the discomforting comment of his warder. He was balancing in his mind the poor chances of the morning, and as he balanced them they seemed blacker with every moment.
The shore was perhaps half a mile away: the hour say five, perhaps half-past. By six, or half-past six at the latest, the earliest people in Parham would be astir.
The fixed inveterate hope of the governing class that a gentleman can always get out of a hole, had dwindled within him to that dying spark to which it dwindles during invasions and at the hour of death.
He did not trust his accent, he did not trust his skin, he did not trust his parentage, he did not trust his wealth—alas, his former wealth!—to speak more accurately, his wife’s former wealth,—to speak still more accurately, the former wealth of his wife’s father.
He trusted nothing but blind chance, his muscles and flight.