“Yes,” said Margaret. “And thank the Lord it is.”
IV.
A CABIN COUNCIL
“Captain Chilver’s gone to sea.
Ay, boys, O, boys.
Captain Chilver’s gone to sea
In the brave ‘Benjamin.’ ”
Captain Chilver.
The wind had gone down gradually all through the day. The morning’s rain had kept down the sea. When the Broken Heart “took her departure” that evening, from the distant Lizard, Captain Cammock crossed his main royal, out of lightness of heart. He had a fair wind and clear weather. He was thankful to have escaped arrest at Falmouth. “He was within smell of Virginia,” he said; so now he would crack on and drive her, sending her lee-ports under. The three days of storm had been of use to him. They had shaken the hands into shape, and had bettered the ship’s trim. Now, he flattered himself, he knew what his ship would do, and what his men could do. He was ready for the Western Ocean. The guns were housed, their breeches down on the carriage-beds, their tompioned muzzles lashed to the upper port sills. The light brass quarter-deck guns were covered with tarpaulin. Life-lines were stretched fore and aft across the waist. Windsails were set. There were handy-billies hooked along the hammock nettings ready for use. Forward, on the fo’c’s’le-head, the hands had gathered to dry the clothes soaked in the storm. Some of the hands, lying to windward, against the forward guns, began to sing one of their sea ballads, a dreary old ballad with a chorus, about the bonny coasts of Barbary. Old Mr. Cottrill had the dogwatch. The other mate, Mr. Iles, a little “hard case” from the James River, was playing his fiddle on the booby-hatch, just abaft the main-bitts. He sang a plaintive ditty to the music; and though he did not sing well he had listeners who thought his singing beautiful. Several of the hands, as he knew very well, were skulking as far aft as they dared, to catch his linked sweetness as it fell from him. Cocking one leg over the other, he began another song with a happy ending, no particular meaning, and a certain blitheness:—
I put it up with a country word.
Tradoodle.
“There,” he said. “There, steward. Gee. Hey? I can sing all right, all right. What’s that song youse was singing? You know. That one about the girl with the wig?”
“Oh, seh,” said the old negro, Mr. Iles’s chief listener. “Oh, seh. I can’t sing with music. I haven’t had the occasionals to do that, seh.”
“By gee, steward,” said Mr. Iles, turning to go below to his cabin in the ’tween-decks, “if you can’t sing to music, b’ gee I don’t think you can sing much.”
Mr. Cottrill turned to Captain Cammock.
“A smart young sailor, sir,” he said. “Mr. Iles keeps ’em going, sir.”