‘The stores’ll be clean and sweet enough, I dare say—bolts of canvas, casks of stuff, spare lines and such things. I’ll be able to put myself out of sight if your bo’sun or any other man should come down with a light. I shall need water to drink. How about that?’
‘You’re talking as if the job was settled.’
‘It is settled,’ I cried, taking him by the shoulders and playfully pushing him backward in a sudden transport of mingled emotion. ‘Is not fresh water to be sneaked below whilst the ship’s fitting? I’ll think it over and tell you how it may be done.’
‘I’m not coming to you to learn my business,’ said he with a toss of his head that ran a gleam from his eyes like a sparkle of water swept by a sudden wind.
‘What are you going to do this afternoon, Will?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Come with me to the East India Docks, and we’ll board your ship and talk things over. We’ll then go the Brunswick Hotel, drink tea there and settle everything.’
He eyed me doubtfully; his heart was not yet in it, though the dear fellow was coming my way. I went upstairs to dress myself for the trip, the hour being about three, with daylight enough to follow to serve my end. Yet though we were together till eight o’clock that night, talking and planning and scheming, I found him still as reluctant at the end as at the beginning. He had three objections. First, he considered that his keeping the matter secret from his father and mother was like telling them a lie. Next, Tom might not prove one of the convicts of his ship. Suppose he (Will) should be unable to communicate with me in my hiding-place until I had been carried too great a distance from England to be set ashore; I should be in a convict ship, a woman locked up with rogues and villains, sailing to Tasmania for no purpose at all, with the chance of missing my sweetheart and never meeting him again in this world. And, third, the young fellow seemed to shrink from the notion of my being alone in a colony.
I began to despair of him at last, and, growing defiant after three or four days of talking with him without his drawing closer to my wishes, I resolved to look about me and see how I might help myself, and I plainly and hotly told him that, whether he chose or not to give me a hand in my enterprise, he would find me on board his ship all the same, if it came to my spending a year’s income in bribing the lumpers and riggers at work on the vessel to conceal me.
He went away from this talk and nothing then was settled; but on the following morning he came by appointment to go with me for a turn on the river as far as Woolwich, and on our way to Blackwall he said he had made up his mind to help me.