Van Diemen declined to tell him.

But seeing the young man look stupefied and wretched he took a turn
about the room, and said: "I have n't robbed," and after more turns,
"I have n't murdered." He growled in his menagerie trot within the four
walls. "But I'm, in a man's power. Will that satisfy you? You'll tell
me, because I'm rich, to snap my fingers. I can't. I've got feelings.
I'm in his power to hurt me and disgrace me. It's the disgrace--to my
disgrace I say it--I dread most. You'd be up to my reason if you had
ever served in a regiment. I mean, discipline--if ever you'd known
discipline--in the police if you like--anything--anywhere where there's
what we used to call spiny de cor. I mean, at school. And I'm," said
Van Diemen, "a rank idiot double D. dolt, and flat as a pancake, and
transparent as a pane of glass. You see through me. Anybody could. I
can't talk of my botheration without betraying myself. What good am I
among you sharp fellows in England?"

Language of this kind, by virtue of its unintelligibility, set Mr.
Herbert Fellingham's acute speculations at work. He was obliged to lean
on Van Diemen's assertion, that he had not robbed and had not murdered,
to be comforted by the belief that he was not once a notorious
bushranger, or a defaulting manager of mines, or any other thing that is
naughtily Australian and kangarooly.

He sat at the dinner-table at Elba, eating like the rest of mankind, and
looking like a starved beggarman all the while.

Annette, in pity of his bewilderment, would have had her father take him
into their confidence. She suggested it covertly, and next she spoke of
it to him as a prudent measure, seeing that Mr. Fellingham might find
out his exact degree of liability. Van Diemen shouted; he betrayed
himself in his weakness as she could not have imagined him. He was ready
to go, he said--go on the spot, give up Elba, fly from Old England: what
he could not do was to let his countrymen know what he was, and live
among them afterwards. He declared that the fact had eternally been
present to his mind, devouring him; and Annette remembered his kindness
to the artillerymen posted along the shore westward of Crikswich, though
she could recall no sign of remorse. Van Diemen said: "We have to do
with Martin Tinman; that's one who has a hold on me, and one's enough.
Leak out my secret to a second fellow, you double my risks." He would
not be taught to see how the second might counteract the