John Want shook his head, and looked at Crayford with a dreary smile.
“I don’t think I shall have the honor of making much more bone soup for you, sir. Do you think yourself you’ll last long, sir? I don’t, saving your presence. I think about another week or ten days will do for us all. Never mind! I don’t grumble.”
He poured the bones into the mortar, and began to pound them—under protest. At the same moment a sailor appeared, entering from the inner hut.
“A message from Captain Ebsworth, sir.”
“Well?”
“The captain is worse than ever with his freezing pains, sir. He wants to see you immediately.”
“I will go at once. Rouse the doctor.”
Answering in those terms, Crayford returned to the inner hut, followed by the sailor. John Want shook his head again, and smiled more drearily than ever.
“Rouse the doctor?” he repeated. “Suppose the doctor should be frozen? He hadn’t a ha’porth of warmth in him last night, and his voice sounded like a whisper in a speaking-trumpet. Will the bones do now? Yes, the bones will do now. Into the saucepan with you,” cried John Want, suiting the action to the word, “and flavor the hot water if you can! When I remember that I was once an apprentice at a pastry-cook’s—when I think of the gallons of turtle-soup that this hand has stirred up in a jolly hot kitchen—and when I find myself mixing bones and hot water for soup, and turning into ice as fast as I can; if I wasn’t of a cheerful disposition I should feel inclined to grumble. John Want! John Want! whatever had you done with your natural senses when you made up your mind to go to sea?”
A new voice hailed the cook, speaking from one of the bed-places in the side of the hut. It was the voice of Francis Aldersley.