“Oh, dear, pup! what a night!” he murmured, with a burst of sobbing.
Yet it never occurred to him to purchase his liberty by giving up little guilty Dan.
Some more hours rolled on,—slow, empty, desolate,—filled with the whine of the pup for its mother, and the chirping of unseen martins going in and out of the roof above-head.
“I suppose they mean to starve me to death,” thought Bertie, his thoughts clinging to the Duke of Rothsay’s story.
He heard the tread of Big George on the ground outside, and his deep voice cursing and swearing, and the children running to and fro, and the hens cackling. Then the little Earl remembered that he was born of brave men, and must not be unworthy of them; and he rose, though unsteadily, and tried to pull his disordered dress together, and tried, too, not to look afraid.
He recalled Casabianca on the burning ship: Casabianca had not been so very much older than he.
The door was thrust open violently, and that big grim black man looked in. “Come, varmint!” he cried out; “come out and get your merits: birch and bread-and-water and Scripture-readin’ for a good month, I’ll go bail; and ’t ’ud be a year if I wur the beak.”
Then Bertie, on his little shaky shivering limbs, walked quite haughtily towards him and the open air, the puppy waddling after him. “You should not be so very rough and rude,” he said: “I will go with you. But the puppy wants some milk.”
Big George’s only answer was to clutch wildly at Bertie’s clothes and hurl him anyhow, head first, into a little pony-cart that stood ready. “Such tarnation cheek I never seed,” he swore; “but all them Radley imps are as like one to t’ other as so many ribston-pippins,—all the gift o’ the gab and tallow-faces!”
Bertie, lying very sick and dizzy in the bottom of the cart, managed to find breath to call out to the woman on the door-step, “Please do give the puppy something; it has been so hungry all night.”