He waved his gloved hand, deprecatingly, watching Desmond with the same intentness.  The boy was dumb:  he might also have been deaf.  Diggle drew from his fob an elaborately chased snuffbox and took a pinch of fine rappee, Desmond mechanically noticing that the box bore ornamentation of Dutch design.

“If I were not your friend,” continued Diggle, “I might say that your attitude is one of sheer obstinacy.  Why not trust us?  You see we trust you.  I stand pledged for you with Angria; but I flatter myself I know a man when I see one:  si fractus illabitur orbis—­you have already shown your mettle.  Of course I understand your scruples; I was young myself once; I know the generous impulses that rule the hearts of youth.  But this is a matter that must be decided, not by feeling, but by hard fact and cold reason.  Who benefits by your scruples?  A set of hard-living money grubbers in Bombay who fatten on the oppression of the ryot, who tithe mint and anise and cumin, who hoard up treasure which they will take back with their jaundiced livers to England, there to become pests to society with their splenetic and domineering tempers.  What’s the Company to you, or you to the Company?  Why, Governor Pitt was an interloper; and your own father:  yes, he was an interloper, and an interloper of the best.”

“But not a pirate,” said Desmond hotly, his scornful silence yielding at last.

“True, true,” said Diggle suavely; “but in the Indies, you see, we don’t draw fine distinctions.  We are all bucaneers in a sense; some with the sword, others the ledger.  Throw in your lot frankly with me; I will stand your friend.”

“You are wasting your breath and your eloquence,” interrupted Desmond firmly, “and even if I were tempted to agree, as I never could be, I should remember who is talking to me.”

Then he added with a whimsical smile, “Come, Mr. Diggle, you are fond of quotations; I am not; but there’s one I remember—­’I fear the Greeks, though’—­”

“You young hound!” cried Diggle, his sallow face becoming purple.  His anger, it seemed to Desmond afterwards reflecting on it, was out of proportion to the cause of offense.  “You talk of my eloquence.  By heaven, when I see you again I shall use it otherwise.  You shall hear something of how Angria wreaks his vengeance; you shall have a foretaste of the sweets in store for an obstinate, recalcitrant pig-headed fool!”

He strode away, leaving Desmond a prey to the gloomiest anticipations.

That evening, when the prisoners were squatting outside the shed for the usual hour of talk before being locked up for the night, a new feature was added to the entertainment.  One of the Marathas had somehow possessed himself of a tom tom, and proved himself an excellent performer on that weird instrument.  While he tapped its sides, his fellow Maratha, in a strange hard tuneless voice, chanted a song, repeating its single stanza again and again without apparently wearying his hearers, and clapping his hand to mark the time.