The convict mattress was hard, and the pillow was hard, and the blankets as coarse as manufacture could contrive; yet I would not have exchanged them for my own soft bed and linen at home. I was now sleeping as Tom did: I was on board a convict ship as he was; and some of the company I should be forced to keep were scarcely less rough than the felons below. I should be doing work by day almost as hard, perhaps, as Tom would be put to; I was, therefore, not only hand in hand with my love in the sympathy of suffering, I was bearing almost as heavy a burden as weighed upon him; and even his degradation was as much mine as though I, too, were a convict, for he was my sweetheart, and one day, God willing, would be my husband, and whatever touched him touched me as though we had been one.
These were my thoughts as I pulled the convict blankets over me and put my head upon the little, hard, convict pillow, and lay for a while listening to the torrent of foam that thundered past the porthole. I then fell asleep, and my sleep was deep and dreamless as death, so exhausted was I; and when I awoke, the cabin was glimmering out to the light of the newly-broken morning, and I beheld the young man Frank standing beside me.
He told me it was time to turn out; the steward was calling for me; there was the cabin deck to scrub and the cuddy to be got ready for breakfast.
‘I’ll follow you in an instant,’ said I.
‘Do you know,’ said he, going to the door, ‘dot you vhas very goodt-looking? It vhas lucky you hov goodt teeth, you show them even in your sleep. I sometimes belief I must hov seen your sister. But hov you a sister?’
‘No,’ said I, rubbing my eyes and troubled by these questions, and wishing he would go.
‘Vell, I vhas a waiter for two or three months at the Brunswick Hotel in der East India Docks, and I remember a handsome young lady dot came in once or twice in dot time. She vhas so much like you she might easily hov been your sister.’
He went out when he had said this. I had no time to reflect, but certainly I had found no air of suspicion in his manner. It took me but a minute to plunge my face in cold water and go out, having lain down for warmth, fully dressed, save my cap and shoes. On showing myself, the steward told me to get a bucket and go on the poop and fetch water from the pump, which the apprentices and some ordinary seamen were washing down the deck by.
I mounted the companion-ladder and found the morning brightening into sunshine. The sea in the east was radiant with sliding hills of silver; the sky was a delicate azure, high, with small feather-shaped clouds linked like lacework. Passing us at the distance of a mile was a large ship with flags flying. She was bowing the sea somewhat heavily, and made a noble picture as she crushed the brine into snow under her massive forefoot, yielding to the surge till the line of her green copper showed with a long, wet flash, whilst the soft whiteness of her canvas ran trembling in shadows to her trucks with her tossing, where it blended with the feather-shaped clouds, so that you could scarce tell one from another.
Our own ship was clothed with sail to the royal yards, with dark lines of damp where the reefs had been lately shaken out. I was too far aft to see the main-deck. Smoke from the chimneys of the two galleys blew black and brisk over the bow, showing that the wind nearly followed us. The sailors were washing down, the head pump was going, and buckets were being handed along from the forecastle, where stood the sentry in a grey coat with his bayonet gleaming like silver. The first person I saw on the poop was my cousin Will. He and several others were scrubbing the deck hard with brushes, whilst a broad-shouldered apprentice flung pailfuls of water along the planks. Will turned his head and saw me, but took no further notice. Mr. Bates, the chief mate, stood near the wheel, and I observed that he watched me whilst I filled my bucket at the little pump that was kept a-gushing by an active young seaman. It was a strange real picture of shipboard life on the high seas. The cold of the night was still in the wind, and not yet had the sun extinguished the melancholy of the gray dawn in the distant recesses of the west.