II
Kit slid down the companion ladder.
The lower deck was half awash, and foul with smoke. There was a stink of dead men, bilge, and powder.
But what a change from when he was last here!
Then sights so ghastly that he dared not recall them: screams of torn men, rending of torn planks; howling terrors on every side, shattering his head, bursting his heart, dissipating his mind.
Now silence everywhere, beautiful silence, the silence of Death.
And those leaping devils with the hoarse throats, who had barked themselves red-hot then, were strangely hushed now. Loosed from their moorings, they huddled, together beneath him half under water, like so many great black beasts, cowed, it seemed, almost ashamed; here a huge breech showing, there a blunt snout, and again a thrusting trunnion.
As he crawled along in the gloom among blackened corpses he thanked God for the stillness. It was comforting to him as water in the desert to a man dying. He drank it in gulps.
A sound in the darkness and silence stopped him.
Out of the deeps a shuddering voice rose up to him, mumbling a Litany of the dead,
"Lord ha mercy on me a sinner—
Lord ha mercy on me a sinner—
Lord ha mercy on me a sinner."
The boy crept to the forehatch and peered down.
One tiny yellow star flickered in the pitch blackness beneath.
"Mr. Lanyon!" His voice was frightened of itself. "Is that you?"
The Litany ceased. Some one cleared his throat.
"That's me, sir," came a voice from the pit. "I'm back where I belong—in her bow'ls."
The Gunner was squatting in a powder barrel, a lighted purser's glim between his teeth, and a pistol in one hand. Kit caught the glimmer of naked shoulders, the wet gleam of eyes, and the shine of sweat on a face black as a sweep's.
"I was ummin all the bawdy bits I know to keep me company," called up a voice husky as a ghost's and cheery as a robin's: "It's lonesome-like kickin your heels in the dark against the powder bar'l you're goin to ell in next minute. Not that it's ell I mind. Ell's all right once you're there. It's the gettin there's the trouble—the messin about and waitin and that."
"You won't have to wait long now," replied Kit in a voice so still and solemn that he hardly recognised it himself. Nothing was very real to him. Even the words he uttered were not his own: they were machine-made somehow.
"They'll be alongside in a minute. Commander Harding says you're to wait for his whistle. Then—"
"Amen. So be it. God save the King."
The Gunner dropped his voice to a whisper, rolling up his eyes.'
"Say, Sonny, are you afraid?"
"No. I can't take anything in."
"Nor'm I; and ain't got no cause neether," came the voice from the darkness, defiant almost to truculence. "I only ad but the two talents—lovin and fightin; and they can't say I've id eether o them up in a napkin. They can't chuck that in me face."
He spat philosophically between his thighs.
"On'y one thing I wish," he continued confidentially. "I wish all the totties was settin atop o that clift to see Magnificent Arry go aloft. Ah, you mightn't think it to see me now, Mr. Caryll, squattin mother-naked in this bar'l, but I been a terror in me time. Sich a way with em and all!"
"You might think about something more decent just now," said the boy coldly. "Good-bye. I'm afraid you haven't lived a very good life."
As the boy groped his way back, the parched voice pursued him from the nether hell.
"My respects to the old man. We seen a tidy bit together, him and me; but reck'n this last little bust-up bangs the lot. I'd ha gone through a world without women for its sweet sake, blest if I wouldn't…. And now," came the voice in a sort of chant, "avin lived like a blanky King I'm goin to die like a blanky cro. Arry the Magnificent always and for h'ever!"