‘What’s the coveys made up of?’ said the second speaker.
‘I asked Bob that. “All sorts,” said he. “One’s a parson.”’ Here both sailors laughed loudly. ‘A harbour missionary, lagged for fishing through the slit in the mission box.’ Both men laughed loudly again. ‘You’ll know him, maty, by singling out the cove as carries his hands as though he wore long thread gloves. Bob told me to twig him by that.’
‘Only one sea-captain?’ said the second speaker. ‘It must be the next ship, then, that’s a-bringing of them out?’
Eight bells at this moment were struck; the boatswain sent some thrilling message through the ship with his pipe; and, unwilling that the two speakers should know that I had been a listener, I went softly round the galley and made my way aft.
The reference to Tom in this conversation had struck me as strange. The men undoubtedly meant Tom when they spoke of one of the convicts as the only sea-captain amongst the prisoners. How should that be known? The doctor was doubtless acquainted with the felons’ antecedents, but he never talked and rarely answered questions. The convicts, then, had made the discovery amongst themselves; this I thought extraordinary. Tom might have admitted his calling to the fellows who shared his sleeping berth, to the prisoners who formed the mess he was in; but how should it be known to two hundred and twenty-nine convicts that the two hundred and thirtieth was the only sea-captain amongst them? Perhaps I mistook; a few had learned Tom’s calling, and one of those few had talked with the sailor whose conversation with his mate I had listened to.
I did not give the matter much thought; I should have given it much less thought had not Tom been the man the sailors referred to. That some of the sailors should have found friends amongst the prisoners was quite in keeping with the looks of a few of the crew. I had often thought that were the forecastle hands to shift clothes with the malefactors, they would make wickeder-looking convicts than the bulk of the prisoners.
CHAPTER XXIX
SHE IS ALARMED BY WHAT IS SAID BY THE OFFICERS
The convict ship Childe Harold drove steadily down the North Atlantic with the trade-wind, and then, losing those prosperous gales something north of the Equator, crept stealthily through a wide, white, gleaming zone of calms, blurred with fainting catspaws as a mirror is dimmed by the breath. No incident of any sort broke the profound monotony of the routine of shipboard life. Captain Barrett and the subaltern killed the time by firing at a mark with pistols, by cards, chess, deck quoits, fishing for sharks, and the like. Their duties were trifling. The sergeant of the guard seemed to do all the work. The discipline of the sea had the regularity of the tick of a clock. Sights were punctually taken, the log hove, the watch relieved—so it went on. The crew came and went to the sound of Balls’s pipe or to the warning voice of the officer of the watch.