She next tried to warn his simple victims against venturing their little all in an unequal contest with an artful, designing man. In both cases her good intentions were frustrated. The want of employment, and the tedium of a long, dull voyage, protracted under very unfavourable circumstances, an insufficiency of food and water, the want of the latter in particular rendering them feverish and restless, made the emigrants eager for any diversion sufficiently exciting to rouse them from the listless apathy into which many of them were fast sinking. They preferred gambling, and losing their money, to the dulness of remaining inactive; and the avarice of their opponent was too great to yield to a woman's arguments. Mr. Lootie was a person who held dogs and women in contempt, and in return, he was hated and defied by the one, and shunned and disliked by the other; the unerring instinct of the dog, and the refined sensibility of the woman, keenly discriminating the brutal character of the man.
In the cabin, the Lyndsays fared very little better than the emigrants in the steerage. Tea, sugar, and coffee were luxuries no longer to be thought of; they just lasted the six weeks; and one morning Sam Fraser, with a rueful face, displayed the empty tea-pot, and conveyed the melancholy intelligence that "they were out of everything fit for Christians to eat or drink."
"Can't be helped, Sam," said the Captain, shrugging his shoulders. "We may be thankful that things arn't worse. There is still water in the hold."
"Not much of that either, Sir. It's just the colour of tea, Sir—if it had but the flavour."
"If"—ah! that terrible if. What a difference it made to all concerned in its introduction into that sentence—"if it had but the flavour!" The smell of the water, when it entered the cabin, was bad enough to sicken the keenest appetite; it was sufficiently disgusting to make the strongest individual there wish that he had no nose, no taste, no recollection of a better and purer element, while drinking it. The water was dead, corrupt, and had been so for the last fortnight; but it was all they had wherewith to slake their thirst.
The breakfast this morning was reduced to a small plateful each of oatmeal porridge, made with the said rich water, with porter or Edinburgh ale for sauce.
A very little of this strong food satisfied Flora. The Captain and Lyndsay pronounced it "not bad;" while poor James Hawke ate it, with the tears running down his cheeks into his plate, to the great amusement of Boreas, who told him "that he had discovered a sauce for stirabout he never saw eaten before."
They had scarcely concluded their scanty meal, when Sam presented the Captain with a dirty, three-cornered note, which, he said, Mr. Lootie had ordered him to deliver instantly!
"What's in the wind now?" said the old sailor. "I'm not a very good scribe, and the fellow writes such a cramped fist that I can't make it out. Do, Mrs. Lyndsay, oblige me by reading it."
The note was very brief, very insolent, and certainly to the point. The S, which commenced the Sir that headed the missive, had a most forbidding appearance. The loop was formed like the lash of a horsewhip, and reached half down the epistle; thus—