“Well, go for’ard and take a nap. I shall want you to-night perhaps; it may be not till to-morrow night.”
The small boy went forward, as he was bid, and, leaning over the bulwark of the Nora, watched for a long time the rippling foam that curled from her bows and slid quietly along her black hull, but Billy’s thoughts were not, like his eyes, fixed upon the foam. For the first time in his life, perhaps, the foundling outcast began to feel that he was running in a dangerous road, and entertained some misgivings that he was an uncommonly wild, if not wicked, fellow. It is not to be supposed that his perceptions on this subject were very clear, or his meditations unusually profound, but it is certain that, during the short period of his residence in the school of which mention has been made, his conscience had been awakened and partially enlightened, so that his precociously quick intelligence enabled him to arrive at a more just apprehension of his condition than might have been expected,—considering his years and early training.
We do not say that Billy’s heart smote him. That little organ was susceptible only of impressions of jollity and mischief. In other respects—never having been appealed to by love—it was as hard as a small millstone. But the poor boy’s anxieties were aroused, and the new sensation appeared to add a dozen years to his life. Up to this time he had been accustomed to estimate his wickednesses by the number of days, weeks, or months of incarceration that they involved—“a wipe,” he would say, “was so many weeks,” a “silver sneezing-box,” or a “gold ticker,” in certain circumstances, so many more; while a “crack,” i.e. a burglary (to which, by the way, he had only aspired as yet) might cost something like a trip over the sea at the Queen’s expense; but it had never entered into the head of the small transgressor of the law to meditate such an awful deed as the sinking of a ship, involving as it did the possibility of murder and suicide, or hanging if he should escape the latter contingency.
Moreover, he now began to realise more clearly the fact that he had cast in his lot with a desperate man, who would stick at nothing, and from whose clutches he felt assured that it would be no easy matter to escape. He resolved, however, to make the attempt the first favourable opportunity that should offer; and while the resolve was forming in his small brain his little brows frowned sternly at the foam on the Nora’s cutwater. When the resolve was fairly formed, fixed, and disposed of, Billy’s brow cleared, and his heart rose superior to its cares. He turned gaily round. Observing that the seaman, who with himself and Jim Welton composed the crew of the sloop, was sitting on the heel of the bowsprit half asleep, he knocked his cap off, dived down the fore-hatch with a merry laugh, flung himself into his berth, and instantly fell asleep, to dream of the dearest joys that had as yet crossed his earthly path—namely, his wayward wanderings, on long summer days, among the sunny fields and hedgerows of Hampstead, Kensington, Finchley, and other suburbs of London.
Chapter Nine.
Mr Jones Takes Strong Measures to Secure his Ends, and Introduces Billy and his Friends to some New Scenes and Moments.
Again we are in the neighbourhood of the Goodwin sands. It is evening. The sun has just gone down. The air and sea are perfectly still. The stars are coming out one by one, and the floating lights have already hoisted their never-failing signals.
The Nora lies becalmed not far from the Goodwin buoy, with her sails hanging idly on the yards. Bill Towler stands at the helm with all the aspect and importance of a steersman, but without any other duty to perform than the tiller could have performed for itself. Morley Jones stands beside him with his hands in his coat pockets, and Stanley Hall sits on the cabin skylight gazing with interest at the innumerable lights of the shipping in the roadstead, and the more distant houses on shore. Jim Welton, having been told that he will have to keep watch all night, is down below taking a nap, and Grundy, having been ordered below to attend to some trifling duty in the fore part of the vessel, is also indulging in slumber.