‘It might have been worse than awful!’ he exclaimed. ‘The ship has been struck! Luckily, the thunderbolt went overboard. Had it gone through the bottom we should have followed it; nothing could have saved us. But it’s all right with the old hooker; the well’s just been sounded again and she’s as dry as a rotten nut.’
I looked at him eagerly; my heart all at once grew so full, that I felt I must speak or shriek out; I set my teeth on my lip and bit till I tasted blood, and clenched my hands till my arms stiffened as though I had been poisoned, whilst I turned my head that he might not see me. He said: ‘I must be off. Why don’t you go to bed? There’s nothing to keep you up. A fine night’ll be coming along by eight bells and they’ll be making sail.’ With that he went up the ladder.
I had barely arrested speech in myself: but for that supreme effort I should have warned him, and he would at once have carried the news to the captain.
I stood in the door, gazing at the ship that flashed out and vanished, no longer scared by the flames and the thunder. I could think of nothing but what to-morrow was to bring forth. Men in scores lay below in the prison quarter, stricken into motionless logs by fright. Were they and the like of them capable of a victorious uprising? And suppose the ship seized, what was to follow? I dared not think how the convicts might serve those who were not of them. I asked myself: If they put Tom in charge of the ship, what will he do with her, and how will he act so as to escape from the ruffians and secure his own liberty? Then I thought to myself: he is an innocent man now, though suffering as a criminal; but if the ship is seized by the convicts, he’ll be taken as having helped them, as being one of the two hundred and thirty, as being the one who navigated the ship afterwards, and who was as answerable as any of the rest for all that happened. He will then be a criminal in terrible earnest. Indeed, the business might bring him to the gallows. But then, thought I, he is a convict now in any case. He cannot be worse off. He never can—he never would—return home. Whatever happens cannot blacken his future. The darkness over which that lightning is flashing is not deeper. If the convicts rise, he may escape and get his liberty, free himself from his felon clothes, and hide with a changed name in a foreign country. Oh, cried my heart, God grant that I may be spared to escape with him wherever he goes!
Thus ran my thoughts. After all these years, I put them dully and coldly; but they boiled in me then. They were as the electric fluid itself whilst I stood in the doorway of that cuddy, mechanically watching the great fabric of the ship glancing out green and violet and yellow to the lights of the storm over the bow.
Shortly after eleven the sky cleared in the south; the clouds rolled away in black masses into the north, and the moon shone out, and the sea was again beautiful with her light. A soft wind blew and the decks grew busy with the life of seamen’s figures running here and there, and pulling and dragging and making sail to the noise of hoarse cries and choruses. The steward lurched up to me, and his breath filled the atmosphere around with a smell of spirits. He said, with a hiccough: ‘You can turn in.’ So I went below and lay down, fully clothed, in my bunk, but not to sleep.
CHAPTER XXXII
SHE DESCRIBES THE SEIZURE OF THE SHIP BY THE CONVICTS
My head was full of Tom, of that change into fierceness which I had noticed in his whispers, and I dwelt upon his sad, wild saying that I did not know his heart, by which he meant that his heart had been transformed by the wrong that had been done him and by his punishment and sufferings. Never had I felt madder than when I thought of him. I put my hands together, and prayed that if the convicts rose they would successfully seize the ship.