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"I wish to hear the name from you, Arthur," repeated the master. "All right! Mark Railsford, Esquire, M.A. That's the name, isn't it?" Railsford started back in his chair as if he had been shot, and stared at the boy. "What! what do you say? Arthur had never seen acting like it. "All right, I tell you, it's safe with me, I'll keep it as dark as ditch-water."
They stood passive, dry-eyed in misery, looking on whilst the little treasures of their household lives were swept away forever, and ignorant what fate by fire or iron might be their portion ere the night was done. They saw the corn that was their winter store to save their offspring from famine poured out like ditch-water.
Belonging to the comfortable ninety, they felt, in fact, the need of slinging names at one who obviously was of the ten. Others of its critics, belonging to the ten, wielded their epithets upon Antonia, and the serried ranks behind her, and called them Pharisees; as dull as ditch-water and so, I fear, they are.
"For my part, I should be ready to drink ditch-water," exclaimed Desmond; "I never felt so thirsty in my life." Many others were in the same condition as Paddy, but no one complained. A small quantity only remained, which was willingly given up for the use of the poor wounded men, who of course suffered greatly.
Here, without a glimpse of daylight; visited by no one except Austin at stated intervals, who neither answered a question nor addressed a word to him; fed upon the worst diet, literally mouldy bread and ditch-water; surrounded by stone walls; with a flagged floor for his pillow, and without so much as a blanket to protect him from the death-like cold that pierced his frame, Jack's stout heart was subdued, and he fell into the deepest dejection, ardently longing for the time when even a violent death should terminate his sufferings.
In the meantime the young married lovers, caring no more about their blood than about ditch-water, were intensely happy happy, that is, in the descending scale which, as we all know, Heaven in its wisdom has ordained for such rash cases; that is to say, the first week they were in the seventh heaven, the second in the sixth, the third week temperate, the fourth reflective, and so on; a lover's heart after possession being comparable to the earth in its geologic stages, as described to us sometimes by our worthy President; first a hot coal, then a warm one, then a cooling cinder, then chilly the simile shall be pursued no further.
Sugar, cocoa, and condensed milk were produced from the biscuit-tin, and the jam-pots having been filled with the steaming beverage, the company seated themselves round the stove, in which there still smouldered some remains of the morning's fire, and prepared to enjoy themselves. From the first, however, the proceeding's fell as flat as ditch-water.
For weeks together in each year we dared not keep our rendezvous at the Stag, but were fain to hide in Brakes and Hollow Trees, listening to the pursuit as it grew hot and heavy around us; and often with no better Victuals than Pig's-meat and Ditch-water.
As if I had not drunk all that ditch-water cup to the dregs years ago! They went on for some time in silence, till the officer, turning to him 'And may I ask you, my quaint preserver, whom I would have thanked before but for this foolish faintness, which is now going off, what and who you are? 'A flea, sir a flea nothing more.
But you cannot understand him, unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision lonely in a world wholly bereft of it: a man for whom all skies were transparent, and the solid earth without opacity, but with the luminous worlds shining through wherein Apollo walks, and all the Masters of Light and Beauty; unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision moving in an outer world, a phase of civilization, old, tired, dying, dull as ditch-water, without imagination, with no little vestige of poetry, no gleam of aspiration, with wit enough to sneer at him, and no more; by no means with wit enough to allow him to save it from itself and from ruin.
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