‘The villain!’ cried the woman. ‘I hope they’ll not give him a chance with his tricks here.’
‘I’m sorry for that chap, somehow,’ said the soldier. ‘If I was a painter I’d like to draw his picture. I’ll point him out some time or other, and then you take notice, Jim, of his melancholy face. One picks up a lot on sentry.’
‘A bad lot,’ said another soldier, spitting.
I listened eagerly and longed passionately to ask questions, but durst not. Yet I might be sure that the soldier spoke of Tom, and I loved the fellow for speaking of him kindly; and it was another proof that my sweetheart was in the ship.
A child came and stood in front of me and looked up into my face. It was a pretty little girl. I stooped and patted her cheek and kissed her, took her by the hands and jumped her into a little dance, which kept her laughing. I knew which was the child’s father by the pleased look one of the soldiers regarded me with. It was the man who had spoken kindly of Tom. When I found this out I kissed the child again and talked to her of the ship and the sea. I observed that my manners and speech controlled the listeners. They all knew I was a runaway stowaway, and though they could know no more they might suspect a great deal more. And yet they viewed me respectfully and talked with a sort of civil reference to me as though I was a gentleman, listening.
The lights were burning very red but gradually dimming in the west, and the sides of the seas slipped away from under the ship in hard, dark-green slopes, laced with spray, and the froth of their heads was faintly coloured by the sunset. The heel of the ship was sharp, and she broke through the billows in thunder. There was a mighty noise of whistling and raving aloft, and the strange shrill shrieking of the foaming and dissolving salt alongside made me wonder what that sound in the wind was.
An apprentice came off the poop and struck a bell suspended this side of the quarter-deck barricade. A minute or two later a convict passed through the door of the main-hatch and placed himself beside the sentry; a second and then a third emerged until a considerable number of men had assembled; they formed in a close-packed column which stretched about half-way to the convicts’ galley; the soldier with whose child I played, seeing me looking at the convicts, exclaimed: ‘They’re getting their supper. Them’s the messmen. As the fellows receive their cocoa or whate’er it be, from the galley, they carries it below, one by one.’
I imagined that Tom might be amongst that set of convicts, and made a movement with the idea of walking some distance forward, where I should be able to see; but I stopped myself on reflecting that the doctor was probably at the poop rail overhead looking on.
‘’Taint bad discipline, taking it all round,’ said the soldier, speaking to all who chose to listen, though I seemed to find his remarks intended for my amusement or enlightenment. ‘It’s mostly settled aboard the hulks before the parties come aboard. So I’m told. The convicts they think proper to trust are made petty officers of. There’s first and second captains, captains of divisions, captains of wards. Then some of them are made cooks of, t’others barbers, and every mess has its head. With this sort of arrangement they keeps each other in order.’
‘Do any privileges go along with these appointments?’ asked one of the soldiers.