In a little cubical space with iron sheeting above, below and all round, and a dirty porthole still streaked with the salt of the sea, the prospective Warden of the Court of Dowry sat upon the floor in a despondent mood.
There was already a slight swell upon the vessel; his dungeon was far forward and he felt it to the full. They had brought him some detestable mess or other in a battered pannikin at noon. He had sent it away untasted. Whither they were taking him, what would be his fate, had formed for too many hours the subject of his speculations.
The movement of the ship was beginning to drive even these gloomy considerations from his mind. He had already discovered two things: first that the term “irons” was a purely conventional one; and signified no more than that his harsh treatment might be made indefinitely severe. Secondly, that he was permitted to communicate with an extraordinarily lop-sided boy of some fifteen years who acted as general drudge in the ship and was deputed to bring him his food from the galley. He was about to discover a third feature in his new life.
A person evidently containing mixed the blood of the Caucasian and of the Negroid races approached him in his confinement and ordered him in broken English to follow up on deck.
The sea air revived him somewhat, but George was far from well when the half-breed, kicking towards him a lump of something which reminded poor Demaine of a diseased brick, a bucket of dirty water and a large and peculiarly evil mop, bade him scrub.
But George’s first attempts at this new trade were such that his overseer after looking at him first in astonishment and then in anger, assured him that any lack of good-will would necessarily be followed by some form of physical compulsion, the which, so far as his victim could gather from the torrent of broken English, would probably consist in a larruping with the rope’s end.
Doggedly and despairingly the poor fellow scrubbed away. He scrubbed perhaps too hard; at any rate he produced a patch of surpassing brilliance though of exiguous dimensions; and as the result of his efforts turned faint and ill with something worse than sea-sickness. He rose from his knees and tottered to his legs, and began aimlessly swabbing the odd patch of cleanliness with which he had diversified the beastly decks of the Lily.
But the friend and brother (if I may so term the Eurafrican) could bear no more, and seizing the unstable landsman by the arm he thrust him, stumbling, down the stairway, and locked him again into his cell.
The exhaustion of nature had caused the unfortunate politician to fall into a troubled doze, when he was aroused by a gentle kick, and saw before him the boy, the battered pannikin, a piece of bread which had unfortunately dropped upon the deck aft of the funnel on its way, and, within the tin, a peculiarly loathsome liquid compound upon which, like the magic island of Delos, floated at large a considerable glob of fat.