“Well, Blunt,” says Frere, pausing with the impatient air of a man who expects to hear bad news, “what is it now?”
“Only to tell you that it is all right, sir,” says Blunt. “She's come aboard again this morning.”
“Come aboard again!” ejaculated Frere. “Why, I didn't know that she had been ashore. Where did she go?” He spoke with an air of confident authority, and Blunt—no longer the bluff tyrant of old—seemed to quail before him. The trial of the mutineers of the Malabar had ruined Phineas Blunt. Make what excuses he might, there was no concealing the fact that Pine found him drunk in his cabin when he ought to have been attending to his duties on deck, and the “authorities” could not, or would not, pass over such a heinous breach of discipline. Captain Blunt—who, of course, had his own version of the story—thus deprived of the honour of bringing His Majesty's prisoners to His Majesty's colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, went on a whaling cruise to the South Seas. The influence which Sarah Purfoy had acquired over him had, however, irretrievably injured him. It was as though she had poisoned his moral nature by the influence of a clever and wicked woman over a sensual and dull-witted man. Blunt gradually sank lower and lower. He became a drunkard, and was known as a man with a “grievance against the Government”. Captain Frere, having had occasion for him in some capacity, had become in a manner his patron, and had got him the command of a schooner trading from Sydney. On getting this command—not without some wry faces on the part of the owner resident in Hobart Town—Blunt had taken the temperance pledge for the space of twelve months, and was a miserable dog in consequence. He was, however, a faithful henchman, for he hoped by Frere's means to get some “Government billet”—the grand object of all colonial sea captains of that epoch.
“Well, sir, she went ashore to see a friend,” says Blunt, looking at the sky and then at the earth.
“What friend?”
“The—the prisoner, sir.”
“And she saw him, I suppose?”
“Yes, but I thought I'd better tell you, sir,” says Blunt.
“Of course; quite right,” returned the other; “you had better start at once. It's no use waiting.”
“As you wish, sir. I can sail to-morrow morning—or this evening, if you like.”