“Very well,” said I bitterly; “you are sixteen men, while I am one only; if you are absolutely resolved to perpetrate this act of monstrous ingratitude I cannot prevent you. But I positively refuse to help you in any way whatever—you have no power or means to compel me to do that—so the best plan will be for us to part; this lady and I will take the boat, with sufficient provisions and water to enable us to reach Table Bay, and you may find your way round the Horn as best you can.”
O’Gorman simply laughed in my face.
“Take the boat, is it?” he exclaimed, with a loud guffaw. “Oh no, misther; that won’t do at all at all. We shall want the boat for ourselves. And we shall want your help, too, to navigate the brig for us, and we mane to have it, begor’ra!”
“I fail to see how you are going to compel me to do anything that I may resolve not to do,” retorted I, putting a bold face upon the matter, yet momentarily realising more clearly how completely we were in their hands, and at their mercy.
“You do?” exclaimed O’Gorman; “then wait till I tell ye. If ye don’t consint to do as we want ye to, we’ll just rig up a bit of a raft, and send ye adrift upon her—alone; d’ye understand me, misther—alone!”
“No,” interposed Miss Onslow, “you shall do nothing of the kind, you cowardly wretches; where Mr Conyers goes, I go also, even if it should be overboard, with no raft to float us.”
“Oh no, my purty,” answered O’Gorman, with the leer of a satyr, “we’d take moighty good care you didn’t do that. If Misther Conyers won’t be obligin’, why, we’ll have to spare him, I s’pose; but we couldn’t do widout you, my dear; what’d we do—”
I could bear no more. “Silence, you blackguard!” I shouted, while vainly striving to shake off Miss Onslow’s tenacious hold upon my arm, that I might get within striking reach of him—“silence! How dare you address a helpless, defenceless woman in that insulting manner? What do you expect to gain by it? Address yourself exclusively to me, if you please.”
“Wid all me heart,” answered O’Gorman, in nowise offended by my abuse of him. “I simply spoke to the lady because she spoke first. And bedad, it’s glad I am she did, because it’s give me the opporchunity to show ye how we mane to convart ye to our views. Navigate the brig for us, and ye’ll nayther of ye have any cause to complain of bad tratement from anny of us: refuse, and away ye goes adhrift on a raft, while the lady ’ll stay and kape us company.”
To say that I was mad with indignation at this ruffian’s gross behaviour but feebly expresses my mental condition; to such a state of fury was I stirred that but for the restraining hold of the fair girl upon my arm—from which she by no means suffered me to breakaway—I should most assuredly have “run amok” among the mutineers, and in all probability have been killed by them in self-defence; as it was, my anger and the bitterly humiliating conviction of my utter helplessness so nearly overcame me that I was seized with an attack of giddiness that caused everything upon which my eyes rested to become blurred and indistinct, and to whirl hither and thither in a most distracting fashion, while I seemed to lose the control of my tongue, so that when I essayed to speak I found it impossible to utter a single intelligible word; moreover, I must have been on the very verge of becoming unconscious, from the violence of my agitation, for I had precisely the same feeling that one experiences when dreaming—a sensation of vagueness and unreality as to what was transpiring, so that, when Miss Onslow spoke, her voice sounded faint and far away, and her words, although I heard them distinctly, conveyed no special significance to my comprehension.