It was evident what had been Garaska’s intention. He wished to present him with an Easter egg according to Christian usage, and Bargamot was for taking him to gaol. Perhaps he had brought the egg a long way, and now it was broken—and he was crying. Bargamot imagined to himself that the marble egg he was keeping for Jack was broken, and how sorry it made him.
“”Ere’s a go!” said Bargamot shaking his head, as he looked at the wallowing drunkard, and pitied him as intensely as he would have pitied a man cruelly wronged by his own brother.
“He was going to present——” “He is also a living soul,” muttered the policeman, striving albeit clumsily to render the state of affairs clear to himself, and feeling a mixture of shame and pity, which became more and more oppressive.
“And you would have run him in! Shame on you!”
Sighing heavily as he bent down he knocked his short sword against a stone, and sat down on his heels near to Garaska.
“Well,” he muttered in confusion, “perhaps it is not broken.”
“Not broken! Why yer was ready to break my snout for me. Brute!”
“But what did you shove for!”
“What for——” mimicked Garaska. “I was going——like a gentleman to——and him to——the lock up. Think that’s my last egg? Yer lump!”
Bargamot sniffed. He did not feel in the least hurt by Garaska’s abuse; through his whole ill-organized interior he felt a sort of half pity, half shame, while in the remotest depths of his stout body something kept tiresomely wimbling and torturing.