He was at the time in that lowest condition of misery, mental and physical, which is not unfrequently the result of “a chopping sea in the Channel.” It seemed to him, just then, an unbelievable mystery how he could, at any time, have experienced pleasure at the contemplation of food! The heaving of the great white ship was nothing to the heaving—well, it may perhaps be wiser to refrain from particulars; but he felt that the beating of the two thousand horse-power engines—more or less—was child’s-play to the throbbing of his brain!
“And this,” he thought, in the bitterness of his soul, “this is what I have sacrificed home, friends, position, prospects in life for! This is—soldiering!”
The merest shadow of the power to reason—if such a shadow had been left—might have convinced him that that was not soldiering; that, as far as it went, it was not even sailoring!
“You’re very bad, I fear,” remarked a gentle voice at the side of his hammock.
Miles looked round. It was good-natured, lanky, cadaverous Moses Pyne.
“Who told you I was bad?” asked Miles savagely, putting a wrong—but too true—interpretation on the word.
“The colour of your cheeks tells me, poor fellow!”
“Bah!” exclaimed Miles. He was too sick to say more. He might have said less with advantage.
“Shall I fetch you some soup?” asked Moses, in the kindness of his heart. Moses, you see, was one of those lucky individuals who are born with an incapacity to be sick at sea, and was utterly ignorant of the cruelty he perpetrated. “Or some lobscouse?” he added.
“Go away!” gasped Miles.