“How could I tell them?” Harry asked; “they don’t understand me when I speak to them, and I never half know what they say. I should think they might know how to speak their own language.”
By the time night came they had seen the new Thames Embankment, and Madame Tussaud’s waxworks show, Trafalgar Square, and Pall Mall, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and several of the curious old churches, and had walked through the Strand and Fleet Street, and many more of the busy parts of the city. And within forty-eight hours the Scilly signals were set in motion again, and over the wires flashed the brief announcement, “Passed, steamer North Cape, for New York.”
CHAPTER XI.
A VOYAGE TO MARSEILLES.
BETWEEN being a cabin boy with no responsibility beyond setting the table straight and keeping the cabin clean, and being a supercargo with a large and valuable cargo to look after, there is a wide step, as Kit realized when the North Cape lay once more at the wharf in front of Martin’s Stores. Harry Leonard set off gayly for home before the ship was fairly moored in her berth; but for his own part, with nominally far more liberty, he could not think of going further away than his employers’ office till all the cargo was out; and he could not tell whether even then he should be able to take a long enough holiday for a run out to Huntington.
“You see these things work both ways, Harry,” he said to the cabin boy before the latter set off. “You complained in London about not being able to go ashore, but I am just as badly off here, where I have so much to do that I cannot leave the wharf for a week at any rate.”
“But you don’t complain about it, Kit,” Harry answered. “I don’t believe you ever complain about anything.”
“Why should I complain about this,” Kit asked, “when it is my work that keeps me and I am glad to have the work to do? What would the owners think of the Captain if he said he could not sail on the day they ordered, because he had some business of his own to attend to? No, I am not complaining about it, but just telling you the fact. And I spoke of it because I want you to take a little bundle up to Huntington for me, and tell my folks that nothing but my work keeps me from going home at once. I shall know in a few days whether I can get home this trip, and of course I have written.”
There was no reason why the supercargo should explain to the cabin boy that the “little bundle” he sent home was the result of many visits to Peter Robinson’s, in Regent Street, and to another London place known as “Louise’s,” in the same street; and that it contained some things whose buying required as much care on his part as the stowing of a cargo. It was not such a little bundle, either, nor so light; but Harry took it cheerfully, and promised to deliver all of Kit’s messages.
Instead of Kit applying to the Captain now for information about the ship’s movements, it was rather the other way. As supercargo it was his business to know what the next cargo was to be, and where it was to be taken. But for some days neither of them knew, and it was impossible to learn, because the charterers did not yet know, themselves.