‘You will never get me to leave you!’ said I, jumping up and grasping my sweetheart’s arm.
‘You’re tired, dear; the air is soft on deck, the evening is cloudless and beautiful. Wrap yourself up and I’ll carry a chair for you on to the deck-house roof.’
But matters were to come to a head more swiftly than ever I had dared dream. We had left Tristan five days behind us. In all this time the brig had gnawed her way to windward on a taut bowline, the breeze holding fresh and steady off the bow, the blue seas flowing in long, deep lines. Rotch throughout was waited upon by Mr. Bates. And first as to this man Rotch.
I frequently questioned the mate about him, and gathered this: He spoke little and ate poorly; he craved for drink as though he burnt with a perpetual thirst of fever; and Bates put plenty of fresh water into his cabin, and rum enough to poison him out of hand, if ever he should have a mind for what I would now call a Barney-Abram drench. Bates told us the fellow was growing very thin in the face and falling away in the body; already his clothes were fitting him ill. He was restless, and Bates seldom entered his cabin without finding him pacing the little square of deck. It was Tom’s wish that Bates should attend to the man; he was afraid to trust himself with him; and Will was young and green, and might by some well-meant whisper balk my sweetheart’s scheme to terrify the man into a confession of truth.
Once, when Bates went in with the prisoner’s dinner, Rotch, leaning against his bunk with his arms folded—so the mate described him—asked where they were sailing the brig to. Bates answered plainly, ‘To England.’ Rotch said: ‘What does the man Butler mean to do with me?’ Bates replied: ‘He means to keep you with him till you prove his innocence; time will be granted; if you then fail, he’ll hang you. He’s a man of his word; when you made a convict of him, you made a devil of him. He no longer holds human life in value. He’d shoot you through the head with as easy a heart as a felon brains a warder.’ ‘Suppose I do what he wants—what then?’ asked Rotch. ‘I don’t know,’ answered Bates. ‘Find out,’ said the man. (When this was put to Tom, he said: ‘Let him confess, let the document bear his signature and be properly witnessed, and I’ll hand him over to you, Bates—to you and to Will along with this brig and cargo—I’ll leave you in the Channel by the first Frenchman who’ll put me ashore in his country; what Miss Johnstone will do we’ll consider. First let the man confess.’) This was repeated to Rotch, who said to the mate: ‘What would you do with me?’ ‘Establish Captain Butler’s innocence,’ answers the mate. ‘The sooner you do it, the better you’ll be used.’ Rotch made no answer.
From this time, during the days I am now dealing with, he continued obstinately silent, a sullen, scowling figure of a man as Bates pictured him, losing flesh as though he fasted, asking for nothing but fresh water to mix his rum with; for nothing but that. The brig had a few books; the mate placed two or three in Rotch’s berth; they were never touched. Thus it was with Captain Samuel Rotch, whom I never once set eyes on after the day when he had been ordered into his berth and locked up by Tom. He was perfectly quiet; I’d sometimes fancy I heard a noise like a muttering, and I’d creep to his door to listen, hoping to hear him babble about Tom in a fit of delirium or out of the liquor which Bates told us he swallowed in quantities. But it was always imagination on my part; his berth was for ever as silent as a coffin.
As for Nodder—Mr. Bates waited upon that man for the reason that he waited upon Rotch. Tom distrusted his own temper, and was advised by me and Bates never to go into the forecastle. It was the mate’s own wish to attend upon Nodder; he told me he was gaining a sort of influence over the fellow, who was miserably ill and suffering fearfully from some internal trouble, and who, attempting once at Bates’s suggestion to quit his bunk and come on deck for fresh air, was in such agony when he stood that he fell down in a swoon, and Bates had to put his head through the scuttle and bawl to Will to help him pick the man up and put him into his bunk again.
I never can forget Mr. Bates’s kindness at this time. The tears stand in my eyes, and I find myself loving his memory as that of a dear friend when I recall his unwearied anxiety and efforts to get the truth from the two villains. He was a person of a religious cast of mind, and in that, I think, strange as it may seem, lay his influence over Nodder, who seemed fully sensible that he was a dying man, and found a sort of consolation in conversing with the mate. It luckily happened that there were one or two points of sympathy between them. For example, Bates’s mother had been a native of Nodder’s birthplace; he knew the seaport well, and mentioned names, street’s, shops, and the like, with which the man of course was well acquainted. Then the mate had sailed with a man who commanded a ship in which Nodder had made a voyage, and this man was the only person for whom Nodder had a good word.
This and much more the mate would tell Tom and me on his return from his forecastle visits. But all the while the villain answered no questions as to my sweetheart’s guilt or innocence. He was too wary to say a word about Rotch, though Bates directly challenged him on one occasion about that point in Collins’s statement, when during the drunken quarrel Nodder had asked the other what had become of the fifty pounds he had promised him.
‘Yet,’ said the mate to me, in the course of a long earnest talk, ‘I honestly believe, Miss Johnstone, the fellow will shell out before he dies. How long he’ll take in sinking I don’t know. His looks aren’t sweet and lively; I’ve known pleasanter minutes in my time than talking to that carroty head, bolstered up, flickering out to the slush lamp with a dirty old blanket drawn to its throat. Yet he’s now fallen into the trick of a wall-eyed look that makes me hopeful. I seem to see the truth rising like a whale coming up to blow, though before it touches the surface it settles again.’