"A girl."
"A girl," the captain repeated, while even amongst all the roar of the cannonading, Glew seemed to think he heard a tone of disappointment in the other's voice.
"So-so!" Thorne exclaimed a moment later. "Well, carry down my love to my dear wife. I must not leave the deck now. Say--say--that I will be below ere long. Say that I--am--rejoiced."
* * * * * * *
Meanwhile, what was passing below in the captain's cabin--which had been set aside for his wife ever since her hour drew nigh; he sleeping in a spare one close by? Independently of it being now a chamber in which a young and beautiful wife had just become a mother, as well as a room in great disorder, there were other things which, in any circumstances, must have caused it to present an appearance of extreme confusion. Naturally, all the pictures had been unshipped, since the concussion of the guns would otherwise have brought them from the bulkheads to the floor, or deck, to say nothing of shivering any glass they might possess. And also all china and glass in the cabin, and the pretty knick-knacks which Thorne had bestowed about it, were removed from their usual positions. Whereby the apartment in the Ariadne, in which Mrs. Thorne had but recently presented a child to her husband, was even more disarranged than it would ordinarily have been, Likewise, every port and scuttle was opened, so that thus some of the concussion should be avoided, and the cabin was thereby made less hot and stuffy than such a place would otherwise have been in this climate. Yet it was but a poor place in which to bring a fresh body and soul, into a troublous world--a poor place in which a child should first open its eyes upon the light.
"Dear, dear!" said Mrs. Tickle, the wife of the master-at-arms, she thinking thus, as she wiped the perspiration from Mrs. Thorne's face. "Dear, dear! What a place for the sweet young thing to give birth to a babe in. Yet," and, as she spoke, she took a sip of rumbullion from a cannikin close to her hand, and then passed it over to Mrs. Pottle, the wife of the ship's corporal, "it might have been wuss. My first was born in Havant Work'us', Tickle being away with Captain Clipperton at the time."
"Ha!" said Mrs. Pottle, as she in her turn took a sip of the toothsome liquor. "Indeed, and it might have been wuss. Even now it may be so. What if one of them forts should plump a round shot into us below the water-line? Then there won't soon be no Captain Thorne, nor Mistress Thorne, nor baby either."
"Nor yet no Mrs. Tickle nor Mrs. Pottle," said the other. Whereupon each took another drink at the rumbullion to calm their nerves, which, in truth, needed little calming, since this was not the first battle, or rather bombardment, in which these good ladies had taken part. For, in those days of a century and a half ago, it was common enough for the wives of the petty officers and the lower-deck men to sail on board ships with their husbands, they doing much such work therein as, in these days, is done by soldier's wives who are on the "strength of the regiment." They could also turn their hands to other things, even as Mrs. Tickle and Mrs. Pottle were now doing. For they were almost always excellent nurses, understanding much about wounds and fevers and other complaints, and quite capable of working under, and sometimes of advising, the raw sawbones whom the Admiralty sent into the ships of war to cure--or kill--the sailors.
"Is the battle over?" Mrs. Thorne asked feebly, opening her eyes now as she spoke, and endeavouring in her newly-developed maternal love, to turn them down upon the tiny mite lying on her breast.
"Over, deary!" said Mrs. Tickle, sinking the character of the inferior woman who was in the presence of the superior, and speaking only as a good-hearted, motherly creature, which indeed she was, to another who needed her care. "Not yet, poor lamb. Lawk's sakes," she whispered to her comrade, "can't she hear the guns a-belching? Ah! drat you all," she muttered, as at this moment a larboard broadside bellowed forth, causing the ship to tremble at her keelson; "that's them lower deck twenty-four pounders at it again. Poor dear, she don't seem to hear or feel them, anyhow."