I instantly walked forward, and whilst I walked I heard the voice of the doctor on the poop.
‘Let the people fall in. Let the captains rank them on the starboard side, where they’ll get a good view.’
I went up the forecastle ladder, at the head of which stood the sentry. He was the husband of the pretty young woman—the Dick who had been on duty when I visited the barracks.
‘Is it you?’ said he. ‘You mustn’t get yarning with the convicts. It’s against the orders.’
‘Yarning!’ said I. ‘If a prisoner wishes me good-night and asks me questions about the moon, I may stop to be civil, I hope?’
‘It’s against the orders,’ said he, and with a swing of his figure he resumed his walk.
The greater part of the crowd on the forecastle stood in the bows or head of the ship. The whole of the crew was assembled; the soldiers’ wives, some of them holding children by the hands, swelled the crowd. I stepped to a part of the forecastle rail where the deck was vacant and looked out to sea. The hush on the ocean this side the storm was unutterably deep, and the distant tempest did not vex it, though the great masses of vapour had risen considerably and the lightning was running all over the breast of it in rills of fire, and the thunder boomed along the level plain of sea as though some leviathan mermen or Titans of the brine were playing at bowls upon the horizon.
I looked up at the moon and beheld the shadow of the earth touching the crystal edge of the satellite like a ring of smoke. The reflection flowed gloriously under the luminary in a spreading wake of greenish silver, whose hither extremity trembled to the vessel’s side. The convict ship, sleeping upon the dark and breathless surface of water, her white sails gently fanning at long intervals to a delicate motion of the hull; the dark figures of the convicts grouped in a mass on one side of the main-deck, their faces pale in the night-beam as they gazed at the moon; the crowd of seamen and women talking in subdued voices in the bows of the ship, where beyond them soared the jibs floating like gossamer in the moonlight; the dark ocean stretching, stirless and silent, into the north, star-studded, whilst southward it was lighted up by the distant, sunbright and violet flames of the electric clouds; the face of the patient, silver moon, with a shadow of the earth painted in a corner of her—this was a scene so rich in poetry, so vital, besides, with a strange, bitter human significance, that at any other time I would have abandoned my whole spirit to it and lost myself in contemplation.
But I could think of nothing but my conversation with Tom, the change my quick ear had detected in his nature, his assurance to me that I did not know his heart—above all, his statement that before to-morrow night the ship would be in possession of the convicts. I believed him, but I could not realise his meaning. Yet I remember very well that conversation I had overheard between two sailors who talked of the convicts, knowing that Tom—I guessed they meant Tom—was the only navigator among the prisoners.
I tried to settle my spirits, but my heart flung a fever into my blood and I longed to laugh out, to cry out, to run about. As the shadow deepened upon the moon, the crowd upon the forecastle fell silent. I looked over the side into the dark water and beheld a fish-shaped phantom of phosphorus sliding slowly along close under the surface; there was a little bubbling of fire about the centre of this strange shape where the fin of it projected. I knew what it was, yet glanced once or twice only without curiosity and went on thinking.