Chapter Eight.
It was a pleasant sound: sometimes a mere humming, sometimes the melody sung to a few of the words.
For Carey was lying in his berth with his head turned so that he could gaze through the open port-hole at the glorious, glistening sea, and as the doctor very softly pushed the door a little open there came clearly to the listeners’ ears a scrap of the old sea song, “The Mermaid”:—
“And we jolly sailor boys were sitting up aloft,
And the land-lubbers lying down below, below, below,
And the land-lubbers lying down below.
“Hullo! Who’s that? Oh, you, doctor! I say, what a time you’ve been! I’m so hungry. Mayn’t I get up?”
“Good signs those, my lad,” said the doctor, cheerily; “but not yet,” and he sat down, after easing the poor boy’s bandages, to chat to him about the state of affairs, every word of which was eagerly drunk in, while Bostock played the part of cook and warmed up some gravy soup.
It soon became evident that Carey was going to develop no bad symptoms from the injury to his head, and that his sufferings were to be confined to the broken collar-bone, which, under Doctor Kingsmead’s care, gave promise of a rapid knitting together. There was pain enough to bear, but the boy’s bright elastic temperament was in his favour. He was what the doctor called a good patient, and health and youth joined to help him on.
As soon as possible he was allowed on deck to watch the making of a raft and use his uninjured glass in studying the shore of the island, with its constant change of hue. Then, too, there was the reef with the clouds of spray, and the beautiful lagoon, alive at times with the fish which came in with the tide through an opening in the reef, beyond which there was the heaving, open sea.