He carefully placed the basin in his patient’s lap, with the spoon ready to his hand, and drew back, watching the peculiar curl at the corners of the boy’s lips as he slowly passed the spoon round and then raised it to his mouth.
A few seconds later the spoon went round the basin again and was followed by an audible sip, on hearing which Poole went to the window, thrust out his head, and began to whistle, keeping up his tune as if he were playing orchestra to a banquet, while he watched the dart and splash of a fish from time to time about the surface, and the shadowy shapes of others deep down below the schooner’s stern-post, clearly enough seen in the crystal sunlit water set a-ripple by the gentle gliding through it of the vessel’s keel.
After waiting what he considered a sufficient time, Poole said loudly, without turning round—
“There’s plenty of fish in sight.”
But there was no reply, and he waited again until in due time he heard a sharp click as of metal against crockery which was followed by a deep sigh, and then the lad turned slowly, to see the midshipman leaning back in the berth with his hands behind his head, the empty basin and spoon resting in his lap.
Poole Reed did not say what he would have liked, neither was there any sound of triumph in his voice. He merely removed the empty vessel and asked a question—
“Was it decent?”
And Fitz forgot himself. For the moment all his irritability seemed gone, and the natural boy came to the surface.
“Splendid!” he cried. “I never enjoyed anything so much before in my life.”
And all that about a dingy basin of soup with fragments of onion and spots of fat floating therein. But it was the first real meal of returning health.