“Beg pardon, sir,” apologised Dobbs, the gunroom steward, who from his comical little screwed-up eyes and manner must have been first cousin to my old friend the waiter at the “Keppel’s Head,” noticing the disdainful expression with which Tommy Mills continued to glance round the empty table, seeking in vain something appetising in the way of food for his hungry eye to rest upon,—“Beg pardon, sir, but the bumboat woman didn’t come off this morning. Sunday, you know, sir.”
“That’s all gammon, steward,” said Master Tommy, still looking about here and there and finding nothing but a desert of empty dishes and dirty plates. “You ought to have sent one of the ship’s boats ashore if you didn’t have enough on board for everybody in the mess. Our steward in the Illustrious always kept a good look out and sent himself for them when the things were not brought off in time. Why didn’t you do the same?”
“I’m sure I’m werry sorry, sir,” answered Dobbs, humbly, awed by the way in which little Tommy spoke to him; for my old comrade, I noticed, had lost none of his cheek since our separation, and now put on the air of a post captain at the least. “Begging y’r pardon, sir, but getting ashore from Spithead, with a northerly wind a-blowin’, ain’t quite so easy as landing from Point and you’re moored over against Blockhouse Fort!”
“That may be, but it’s none of my business,” said young Mills, loftily, waiving Dobbs’s plea aside as a mere trivial matter. “I want some breakfast. What have you at all fit for a christian to eat? I see nothing here, nothing at all.”
“Got some werry nice cold ’am, sir, in my pantry,” cried Dobbs, with effusion, at this opening, glad of having something he could offer. “Shall I cut you a plate o’ that, sir—just try a wee bit off the knuckle end, sir?”
“All right, if there is nothing else, but I suppose it will be all bone and gristle, or as hard as a cat-block,” replied Tommy; heaving a most portentous sigh of disappointment, though winking slily to me to show that he was only ‘putting all this on’ to astonish the other fellows, who were gazing at him with open mouths in wonder at his assurance and grand seigneur manner. “You may get me a couple of eggs, also, while you’re about it, steward. Mind they’re fresh and have no chickens in them; I don’t like poultry in the morning so early!”
Of course there was a loud guffaw at this, the three purser’s clerks, who were eating bread and butter at the lower end of the table, not daring to put in a word of objection to the fare, seeming to enjoy the joke mightily.
Not so, however, Dobbs.
“Werry sorry, sir, but there’s no heggs,” he replied to this somewhat imperative order from Master Tommy, looking absolutely crestfallen at having thus to confess the shortcomings of his commissariat. “The caterer of the mess, sir, forgot to horder ’em, sir.”
“No eggs!” cried Tommy, in the tone of tragic denunciation which Cicero might have used when exposing the iniquities of Cataline. “This is really impardonable!”