The two tongues went fast for three minutes. As little boys they had played together, romped together, worked mischief together, teased Molly together, and together had usually made up to her afterwards by spending their joint pennies on splendid bull’s-eyes, wherewith to comfort her wounded feelings. For nearly five years the two had not met.
“We weren’t beaten in fair fight, don’t you think it,” Will asserted with his chirrupy cheerfulness. “Got caught in a trap. Damaged in a gale off Cape Finisterre, and then when ’twas as much as we could do to keep afloat, two seventy-gun French frigates bore down upon us. If she’d have answered her helm, we’d have got the best of it, in spite of all; but though we had a hard fight, ’twas no go for us. They raked us fore and aft, and we got riddled through and through, so we were bound to give in at last. I say, you set to work and eat something. We’ve a long way to go.”
Roy followed the wise counsel of experienced boyhood, and did eat, feeling better for it. Also, Will’s familiar and plucky face brought a sense of something like comfort.
“We’ll keep together as long as we can,” Will said.
Then on again they marched, the middies and Roy simply handcuffed; the Royal Navy sailors and the merchantmen sailors chained together, two and two. The boys kept up a brave heart, at least in outward seeming, however weary and footsore they became; and Roy held out as resolutely as anyone. He seemed to himself indefinitely older than Will; though in some respects Will was more a man of the two, having fought in two or three engagements, and had one wound, besides coming in for a nice sum of prize-money some months earlier.
Now and again Roy would recur in thought to Ivor’s long march from Valenciennes to Verdun, all the way on foot, though weakened by illness, and then Denham’s pale face at the moment of their parting would come up; was it only that same morning? Already it began to look like months ago. Roy felt years older than when he had stood on the ramparts, watching a crowd at the gate. Was that indeed only two days earlier?
Later in the day, when another halt was made, a third company seemed to be waiting to join them. A company of—were they prisoners? Impossible. Roy gazed in perplexity. For these were French faces, sullen and downcast, with French manners, and French style of dress. Yet they too were coupled together, like the English sailors, two and two, by connecting chains. They too were under an escort of gendarmes.
“Are they convicts?” Roy exclaimed, and the merchantman-master, Captain Boyce, replied—
“Bless you, sir, no. Those are conscripts for the Emperor’s grand army, dragged from their homes, belike, without a will-he nor a nill-he, and driven to war like sheep to the shambles.”
“Poor wretches,” Will remarked, with his experienced air. “I’ve seen a lot of them before, on our way across France.”