“Never thought we’d keep him from it,” said Crow. “If the bobby hadn’t turned up, I do believe he’d have wanted to smash the windows also.”
“You’re making all this up,” I said, half amused, half angry, and almost beginning to wonder whether all that was being said of me was true.
“Not likely,” said Doubleday; “the fact is, I couldn’t have believed it of you if I hadn’t seen it. By the way, Wallop, is it true the Field-Marshal was run in?”
“No, was he?” exclaimed Wallop, and Crow, and I, all in a breath.
“Well, I passed by Daly’s this morning, and he told me he hadn’t been home all night, and he supposed he’d have to go and bail him out.”
“What a game!” cried Wallop.
“You’d call it a game if you had to hand out forty shillings, or take a week,” replied Doubleday. “A nice expensive game this of yours, Master Batchelor. It’ll cost you more than all your eel-pies, and lobsters, and flash toggery put together.”
Fancy, reader, my amazement and horror at all this! It might be a joke to all the rest, but it was anything but a joke to me. Instead of the Field-Marshal it might have been I who was caught last night and locked up in a police cell, and what then would have become of me? My “friends” would all have laughed at it as a joke; but to me, I knew full well, it would have been disgrace and ruin!
I was in no humour to pursue the conversation, particularly as Jack Smith entered at that moment, composed and solemn as ever, without even a glance at me.
My only escape from wretched memories and uncomfortable reflections was in hard work, and that day I worked desperately. I was engaged in checking some very elaborate accounts under Doubleday’s direction the whole day. It was a task which Wallop, to whom it fell by rights, shirked and passed on to me, greatly to my indignation, a week ago. But now it proved a very relief. The harder I worked, the easier my mind became, and the more difficult the work appeared, the more I rejoiced to have the tackling of it.