Will, who acted as cook this first morning, prepared a tolerable breakfast. Coffee had been found and marmalade; the lad fried a dish of the Childe Harold’s ham, and these things with biscuit and sugar furnished us with a meal. The provisions we had brought with us from the convict ship had been stowed by Bates and Tom in the store-room. Had we met with nothing on board, that stock we had come with would have lasted a month or six weeks.
I spied three eggs amongst the dead hens in the coop, and told Mr. Bates of them; they were the last efforts of the poor, unhappy, starved poultry. The mate wondered that the rats had spared them and the birds. He picked them up and Will cooked them, and they proved—ah! I laughed to see Mr. Bates holding his nose and throwing the cocks and hens overboard; such work fitted ill with the dignity of a man who was just now chief officer of one of the finest of the Blackwall liners.
That we might break our fast together whilst one of us steered, the dishes and cups were set upon the deck and we used our knees for tables. The brig went along so quietly that you could let go of the wheel for minutes at a time, without a quarter-point of deflection in the compass bearing. We were hungry and thirsty; the boat’s sail overhead cast a pleasant shade upon us; the breeze blew through the little gangway on either hand of the house and fanned us whilst we breakfasted.
Mr. Bates and Will talked much of the convict ship, of the chance of her people, and the like. Tom sat quiet, and I thought moody. Often he fastened his eyes upon me, but with a look as though he saw something beyond. I feared that he was overwrought and dead wearied, and I longed to pillow his head on my arm that I might watch him sleeping. All on a sudden he flushed up and, with a hard, small, satiric smile, whilst his eyes seemed to brighten into fire as though taking light from the contrast of the blood in his cheeks, he cried:
‘Bates—but what right have I to call you Bates? I should “mister” you, hey?’
‘Oh, Tom, dear!’ I exclaimed.
‘Why, see here, now,’ he continued, and he spoke fiercely: ‘I’m a convict, Bates. There’s no getting away from that. Do you call this liberty? No more than the liberty of a wretch who breaks from a hulk, who’s a convict while he swims, who’s a convict when he lands, who goes to his grave a convict, though he keeps free.’
The mate looked at me with alarm.
‘You’re a good fellow. I believe,’ Tom went on, ‘and you think me a wronged, innocent man. But I’m a convict always. Why, haven’t you watched me whilst I tramped in a gang to the tune of a fiddle, watched me at a felon’s work about the deck of the ship you were chief mate of, watched me with the irons upon my legs as I shuffled out of the hatch to the cries of a brother-convict? You’re a respectable man—oh, very respectable! So was I once, but they swore my liberty and honour away and broke my heart. Doesn’t this association with a convict and his familiar accost of you as “Bates” shock your respectability?’
I could not bear his wild looks nor to hear more. I flung my arms round his neck and burst into tears.