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But I could guess the reason; and I am ashamed to say that it revolted me much less than did the notion of making a public fool of myself on a cricket-field. My gorge rose at this as it no longer rose at crime, and it was in no tranquil humor that I strolled about the ground while Raffles disappeared in the pavilion.
Come on now and punch my head. I promise you that I won't hit back." Singh advanced to him immediately with doubled fists, and Glyn stood up laughing in his face and put his hands behind him. "No," cried Singh. "Come down the cricket-field behind the trees, and we will take two of the fellows with us and have it out, for I am sick of it, and I'll put up with no more."
The technical slang of the modern cricket-field is ever a weariness; at the moment it was something worse, and I resigned myself to the silent contemplation of as wild an over as ever was bowled at Lord's. A shocking thing to the off was sent skipping past point for four. "Tripe!" muttered Raffles to himself. A very good one went over the bails and thud into Garland's gloves like a round-shot.
In the first place, mirabile dictu, there were one or two even greater duffers than I on the Abbey cricket-field. Indeed, quite early in the week, when it was of most value to me, I gained considerable kudos for a lucky catch; a ball, of which I had merely heard the hum, stuck fast in my hand, which Lord Amersteth himself grasped in public congratulation.
Ah, that's better!" continued Glyn, as, finding the impediment rather unpleasant, the animal turned off at right angles and reached out with its trunk to remove the obstacles attached to its leg. "Why, we are anchored! Oh, now he's off again. Why, where's he going?" "I think he's going to make for the hedge where he came through first, in the cricket-field."
Alone on the crag, with the sea tumbling and plashing round them, growing and gaining so much on their place of refuge, that his terror began to summon up the image of certain death; alone, wet, hungry, and exhausted, with the wounded and delirious boy, whose life depended on his courage, he prayed as he had never prayed before, and seemed to grow calmer by his prayer, and to feel God nearer him than ever he had done in the green cricket-field, or the safe dormitories of Roslyn school.
He could tell you of the vanished estate of Sir Peter Bone, long since cut up for building, and how that magnate ruled the country-side when it was country-side, of shooting and hunting, and of caches along the high road, of how "where the gas-works is" was a cricket-field, and of the coming of the Crystal Palace.
Then, almost before the event which provoked it, I heard my own low groan. Doe stopped, and staggered slightly backwards. His cap fell off, and the wind blew his hair about, as it used to do on the cricket-field at school. He recovered an upright position; he smiled very clearly then folded up, and collapsed.
Habit sometimes brought the phrases of the cricket-field, but these generally ended in a shudder of self-recollection and prayer. The delirium only came with the accesses of fever, and when sensible, he was very quiet and patient, but always as one weighed down by sense of failure in a trust. He never seemed to entertain a hope of surviving.
Patriotism, with the sauce of a luxurious expedition at no cost to the private purse, restrains them. Moreover, there is no sign of any one of the others intending to quit the expedition; and Mr. Semhians has done a marvel or two in the cricket-field: Old England looks up where she can.
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