THE CONVICT SHIP

VOL. II.

NEW LIBRARY NOVELS.

UNDER SEALED ORDERS. By Grant Allen. 3 vols.

A LONDON LEGEND. By Justin H. McCarthy. 3 vols.

THE TREMLETT DIAMONDS. By Alan St. Aubyn. 2 vols.

THE DRIFT OF FATE. By Dora Russell. 3 vols.

BEYOND THE DREAMS OF AVARICE. By Walter Besant. 1 vol.

THE MINOR CHORD. By J. Mitchell Chapple. 1 vol.

HIS VANISHED STAR. By C. Egbert Craddock. 1 vol.

ROMANCES OF THE OLD SERAGLIO. By H. N. Crellin. 1 vol.

VILLAGE TALES AND JUNGLE TRAGEDIES. By B. M. Croker. 1 vol.

MADAME SANS-GÊNE. By E. Lepelletier. 1 vol.

MOUNT DESPAIR. By D. Christie Murray. 1 vol.

THE PHANTOM DEATH. By W. Clark Russell. 1 vol.

THE PRINCE OF BALKISTAN. By Allen Upward. 1 vol.

London: CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly.

THE CONVICT SHIP

BY
W. CLARK RUSSELL
AUTHOR OF
‘THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR’ ‘MY SHIPMATE LOUISE’
‘THE PHANTOM DEATH’ ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES—VOL. II.

London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1895

PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON

CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME

THE CONVICT SHIP

CHAPTER XVIII
SHE IS TAKEN BEFORE THE COMMANDER

I was awakened from a deep slumber by the glare of a lantern upon my eyes, by the weight of a heavy hand upon my shoulder, and by a deep voice roaring out: ‘Here y’are, then! Another convict, is it? Who’s to say what’s right aboard a craft where everything’s wrong? Out you come, my lively!’ And, still half asleep and blinded by the light and deafened by the fellow’s roaring voice, I was dragged as though I had been a child out of the sail and held erect.

A second man holding a lantern raised it to my face and peered at me. I had seen both fellows in this place before; they were the boatswain and the sailmaker.

‘What are you a-doing down here?’ said the sailmaker.

The boatswain now let me go, and I stood upright before the two men, still dazed and horribly frightened, though my wits were slowly returning.

‘I’m doing no harm,’ said I, blinking at the light, which, as it was held close, put an insufferable pain into my eyes. ‘I hid myself. I want to get to Australia.’

‘Australia, is it?’ thundered the boatswain. ‘Why, you young rooter, d’ye know we ain’t bound to Australia? Where did ye come aboard?’

‘Woolwich.’

‘D’ye know this is a convict ship?’

‘Yes, I know it.’

‘Has he been a-broachin’ of anything?’ said the sailmaker, holding high the lantern and slowly sweeping its light round the interior.

‘What are ye?’ said the boatswain, whose voice was louder than that of any man I had ever heard or could dream of.

‘A runaway boy,’ said I. ‘Take me on deck. I’m sick for the want of light.’

‘Sails, d’ye hear him?’ said the boatswain. ‘By the great anchor, as my old mother used to say, but here’s one I allow as has squeezed through the hawse-pipe on his road to the quarter-deck, for, hang me, if he hain’t a-hordering of us already.’

‘What’s your trade, Jimmy?’ said the sailmaker, addressing me. ‘Nuxman or jigger, or are you a lobsneaker, hey? Self-lagged, by the Lord!’

‘Come along aft and see the capt’n,’ said the boatswain.

He then spoke to the sailmaker about the sails which they had apparently descended to view, and, catching me by the arm, walked me under the hatch, where he came to a stand.

‘Been here since Woolwich, ye say?’

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘All in the dark?’

‘Yes.’

‘What have you eaten and drunken?’

‘I brought some food with me.’

‘Are you one of a gang?’ And here he rolled a pair of large glassy eyes over the casks and coils of rope. He was a very powerful seaman, deeply bitten by small-pox and without a right ear.

‘I am alone,’ said I.

‘Up ye go!’ he cried, and he partly hoisted and partly tossed me through the hatch on to the upper deck.

It was broad day, though the interior of the forecastle into which I had emerged was gloomy. Beyond the forecastle-entrance the white and windy sunshine was coming and going to the frequent sweep of clouds athwart the sky. The brightness of that light thrilled my eyes with pain, and I turned my back upon it, putting my hand to my head for a few moments.

‘’Tisn’t everybody, mates, that goes to sea afore the mast as signs on,’ said the boatswain, generally addressing a few sailors who had risen from their sea-chests or lounged out of the shadow forward to look at me.

‘If this here was a female convict ship, Mr. Balls,’ said one of the men, ‘you’d find that that there covey was after one of the gals.’

‘Let him wash hisself,’ said another seaman, speaking with his hands plunged deep in his pockets, ‘and there’ll be nothen likelier aboard us. Dummed if he don’t remind me of my Mary Hann.’

‘Let’m sit,’ said another of the sailors. ‘I’ve got a drop of grog in my chest. I started on my first voyage in the fore-peak and knows what head seas mean down there to a country stomach.’

‘Sit and breathe,’ said the boatswain, backing me to a chest. ‘Fetch your sup along, Joe. He don’t look much of a rascal, do he?’ And I observed that he eyed me very closely and with looks of surprise and doubt which somewhat softened the fierceness of his one-eared, glassy-eyed face.

I was glad to sit. My strength had been fearfully overtaxed by confinement and by my mental sufferings and want of air. I was afraid I should faint and my sex be discovered. A pannikin with a dram of black rum in it was given to me. I smelt the fiery stuff and asked for water.

‘Neat, my warrior, neat, and down with it!’ cried the fellow who had given me the rum. ‘Water’s for washin’ in. Don’t talk of rum and water. Soap and water, my heart; that’s it.’

‘Give the lad water,’ said the boatswain. ‘Blowed if I’m going to take him aft drunk.’ One of the fellows brought a pannikin of water and turned a small quantity into the rum. I looked up into his face and thanked him with a smile and drank.

‘Ever at sea afore, Jacky?’ said a sailor.

‘D’ye hear the grit of old hoss in his squeak that you asks that?’ said the deep-lunged boatswain.

‘And to think,’ said a surly-looking sailor, ‘that the town-crier’s still a-ringing for him and his grandmother still a-calling at every public-house to see if he ain’t there!’

‘What d’ye say to a rinse, bo’, afore ye lays aft?’ said the fellow who had offered me the rum. ‘A clean face may stand the little chap in with the old man,’ said he, addressing the boatswain.

‘Have a clean-up, young ’un, afore I takes ye aft?’ said Mr. Balls.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

The boatswain stepped out, and in a few moments returned with a tin dish of cold water and an old towel. ‘Turn to now and polish away,’ said he. ‘Bear a hand. A clean face is like a clean shirt; it gives a man a chance.’

I dipped a corner of the towel into the water and rubbed my face, and when I had looked at the towel I judged I had wanted washing very badly indeed. By this time some fourteen or fifteen seamen had come about me; they lounged and stared, and commented freely in growling, very audible voices upon my appearance and new suit of pilot cloth. It was the forecastle dinner-hour, whence I concluded the time was something after twelve. Nearly all the ship’s company were below, some seated on their chests, eating, a few in their hammocks, smoking, and looking at me over their swinging beds; some, who had drawn close, brought their dinners in their hands, a cube of beef or a hunch of pork on a biscuit, that served as a trencher; these fellows flourished sheath- or clasp-knives, and they chewed slowly, as men whose teeth had long grown artful and wary in the business of biting on shipboard.

The interior was indeed a grim, gloomy, massive picture; the men were rudely and variously and some of them half savagely attired; the place was roofed with hammocks; tiers of bunks arched into the head where they vanished in the gloom. A lamp swung under a great beam, and its light was needed, despite the brightness of the day outside, and of the shaft of daylight that floated through the open scuttle forward and hung in the obscurity like a square of luminous mist, as a sunbeam streams through a chink of closed shutter. A number of stanchions supported the upper deck, and suits of oilskins hung upon nails swayed against these wooden supports like hanged men as the ship bowed and lifted her head. The atmosphere was scarcely supportable with its mingled smells of strong tobacco and the fumes of the kids or tubs in which the greasy boiled meat had been brought in.

‘Aft with us now, youngster,’ said the boatswain, ‘and give an account of yourself. And may the Lord ha’ mercy on your soul! This here’s a convict ship; there’s nothen going under six dozen. Everything over that’s a yard-arm job.’

He grasped me by the arm and walked me out of the forecastle, but not, I thought, with the temper he had dragged me out of my hiding-place with. By this time my sight had strengthened, and, though the broad daylight outside brought the tears to my eyes, the pain passed in a moment or two.

I glanced at the deck of the ship, but should not have known the vessel as the Childe Harold. Strong barricades, studded with iron spikes, had been erected a little way abaft the foremast and upon the quarter-deck, leaving a narrow open space betwixt this after-fencing and the front of the cuddy. Each barricade had a gate. At the after-gate stood a red-coated sentry, with a loaded musket and fixed bayonet. At the great central or main-hatch stood another sentry. In the recess formed by the overhanging lap of the poop-deck was a stand of arms. The barricades made a huge pen of the waist, main-deck, and part of the quarter-deck. On the left or port side ran a strong barrier, like a great fence, leaving a narrow gangway betwixt it and the bulwark. This I afterwards understood was to enable the sailors and others to go backward and forward without constantly obliging them to pass the sentries and enter the space barricaded off for the convicts.

I glanced behind me as I walked with the boatswain, and saw a sentry stationed at the forecastle, and two more, each with muskets and fixed bayonets, paced the break of the poop athwartships to and fro in a regular, pendulum, sentinel swing, which brought them crossing each other always in exactly the same place. I had young, very keen eyes. All these points I had collected before we had gone half the length of the main-deck gangway. Not a convict was to be seen. I had caught a sight of two men walking together on the poop right aft, near the wheel, and I also saw Will on the poop standing to leeward beside another young apprentice; and on the other side of the deck, at the head of the poop-ladder, was the officer of the watch.

As I advanced with the boatswain I saw Will look, make a step toward the brass rail which protected the fore-end of the raised deck and stare a moment; he then wheeled round, walked to the side and gazed at the white wash of passing water. The ship was under a great spread of canvas, heeling over and sailing fast, and the yeasty swirl alongside was swift and dazzling. I could not see the horizon over the weather bulwarks; but to leeward it was all open sea, green, ridging and flecked, with a cold blue sky over the trucks and many large white clouds sailing down into the west. Two or three women, with shawls over their heads, sat on the edge of a little square hatch under the break of the poop; some children were running about near them. These women stared very hard at me as I passed.

‘Hullo, bo’sun!’ called out the man who was standing at the head of the poop-ladder. ‘What have you got there?’

‘A stowaway, sir.’

‘When did you find him?’

‘Just now, sir.’

‘Where?’

‘Under the forecastle.’

‘Step him up here.’

The boatswain made me ascend the poop-ladder, himself following. This was a deck well remembered by me; I had spent a long hour upon it with Tom and Will when we visited the ship in the docks. All was unchanged here; the boats swung in their davits; the sweep of deck went white as a freshly peeled almond to the grating abaft the wheel; the skylights sparkled and the bright brass binnacle-hoods mirrored the sun in crimson stars. On high the full-breasted canvas rose in space after space of milky softness with a stately swaying of the button of the truck, as the ship leaned to the sea and lifted to windward again.

The person who had ordered the boatswain to bring me on to the poop was, as I afterward got to know, the second mate, Mr. Thomas Masters, a full-faced man, short and strong, his nostrils tinged with purple, no visible throat, and a strange, leering smile upon his mouth when he looked or spoke. Will left the poop by the other ladder; his fellow-apprentice leaned against the lee rail staring at me. The second mate turned his face in the direction of the two men whom I had observed walking aft abreast of the wheel.

One of these two cried out: ‘Who’s that, Mr. Masters?’

‘A stowaway, sir,’ answered the second mate.

Both persons approached. As they advanced along the deck, a third man came up out of the cuddy or saloon through the companion, and joined them. The three stepped up to me. One was Joseph Sutherland, the captain of the vessel, a lean man with a slight stoop, about forty years of age. His face was thin; the skin had a look of leather from long exposure to weather; his eyes were a weak blue with a tear in each corner, which kept him mopping with a pocket-handkerchief. Yet I liked the expression of his face; there was the heart of a man in it.

The second person was Surgeon Russell-Ellice, R.N., the doctor who had supreme charge of the convicts. This man was without any hair on his face; and the hair on his head was cropped as close as mine was or a convict’s. He had large, soft brown eyes and a brown skin, blue on the cheeks and lip, where he shaved. His mouth was firm, with an expression that seemed to lie between scornfulness and self-complacency. He had a manner of thrusting out his chest and backing his head when he spoke, and of so holding himself when he stood or walked as to stretch the inches of his stature to their limits.

The third person was Captain James Barrett, of the —th Regiment of Foot. He was the captain in charge of the guard. He was of the average type of British officers; smart, well-dressed, good-looking, with a glass which he put into his eye to examine me.

I ran my gaze over the faces of these three, not then knowing who they were, though I guessed by their air that they were chiefs in the ship. I did not feel afraid; my end had been triumphantly accomplished. I needed but look over the rail on either hand to know that we were out upon the wide ocean, that, though England indeed could not be very far astern, yet the land was as far away for my purpose as if it had been a thousand leagues distant. And then there was the consideration of my sex to give me nerve; these people were gentlemen. I had but to declare myself to make sure of tender usage. But though I did not mean to do this, and prayed heartily that no occasion might arise to force me into it, yet the sense of it was a refuge that wonderfully supported my spirits, the more particularly now that I had observed there were women on board and quarters where, should the worst come to the worst, I could live with my own sex.

The captain and the doctor (as I shall henceforth call Surgeon Russell-Ellice for the sake of brevity) eyed me all over for some moments without questioning me—the captain with looks of surprise and wonder that came very nearly to commiseration, the other with frowns and suspicion like fire in his gaze.

‘What are you doing on board my ship?’ said Captain Sutherland.

‘I wish to get to Australia, sir,’ said I.

‘What! Without paying? Do you know that this is a convict ship?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I could have him brought to the gangway for this,’ said the doctor. ‘Has he been searched, bo’sun?’

‘No, sir.’

The doctor stamped his foot. ‘Search him!’ he cried.

Captain Sutherland looked on as though he recognised a superior in the doctor. At this moment Will came up to the lee ladder and leaned beside the other apprentice, listening and watching. The boatswain threw open my pea-jacket and drove his huge hands into my pockets. I was thankful not to feel the blood in my cheeks; had this piece of rude handling reddened my face the doctor would have found me out. His soft but scrutinising eyes were upon me.

‘He’s a plump young man,’ exclaimed Captain Barrett, in an aside to the commander of the ship. ‘What’s in your hold to make him fat?’

The boatswain drew out my handkerchief, the two new clay pipes I had put in my pocket that I might seem a man when the crowning occasion arose, and the tinder-box and matches. Happily I had left the little parcel of candles in the sails. The boatswain dived his immense tarry fingers into the pockets of my waistcoat and found nothing.

Whilst I was being searched I observed that one of the sentries who marched athwart the poop was the man who had looked over the rail when I was in the boat alongside off Woolwich. I met his glance and saw he did not remember me. I never once turned my eyes in the direction of Will.

‘Is that all?’ said Dr. Russell-Ellice.

‘That’s all, sir,’ replied the boatswain, replacing my cap on my head, after feeling the lining.

‘Where do you say this lad was found?’

‘Just for’ards of the bulkhead under the fo’c’sle.’

‘It’s a store-room,’ said Captain Sutherland.

‘Has it been searched?’ exclaimed the doctor.

‘I dunno what ye mean by searched,’ answered the boatswain sullenly, resenting as a merchant seaman the imperious manner of the Royal Naval surgeon.

‘Captain,’ cried the doctor. ‘You know what I mean; explain to this man.’

‘Have you overhauled the store-room, Balls, for others of this fellow’s pattern?’ said the captain.

‘No, sir.’

‘Then go with the sergeant of the guard,’ said the doctor; ‘examine every nook and corner, and make your report.’

‘Ay, ay, sir,’ answered the boatswain very sulkily again, and swinging round on his heels he quitted the poop with a sullen walk eloquent of malediction. The doctor drew back as if he would admit it was now the commander’s right to ask questions. Captain Barrett gazed at me strenuously through his eye-glass. His intent regard made me feel very uneasy.

‘What’s your name?’ said Captain Sutherland.

‘Simon Marlowe, sir.’

‘What are you?’ I hung my head. ‘No need,’ he exclaimed, ‘to ask if you were ever at sea; your hands are like a woman’s.’

‘He’s a deuced good-looking chap, doctor,’ said Captain Barrett in another aside. ‘Plump as a partridge, by the great horn spoon! What runs a chap to fat down in your hold, captain?’

‘What have you come to sea for?’ said the captain, speaking with a severity whose forced note my ear could not miss. Indeed, he seemed to find a sort of pleasure in looking at me.

‘I want to get to some friends in Tasmania, sir,’ I answered.

‘What names?’

I was ready for him; for weeks I had been rehearsing too diligently the part I was now playing not to be ready. ‘Satchell, sir.’

‘Where do they live?’

‘At Hobart Town.’

‘What’s their address, boy?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I’ll find out when I arrive.’

The doctor grinned gravely.

‘“Arrive!”’ cried the captain. ‘How do you know I’ll allow you to arrive, as you call it? “Arrive,” you monkey! You’ve committed a felony; you’ve broken into private premises; for all I can tell, you may have broached the cargo of the ship. There are men in that prison down there,’ said he, pointing to the main-hatch, ‘who are being transported for life for smaller crimes.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I would do nothing wrong. I will gladly pay for my passage with my labour if you will give me work—such work as I can do.’

The doctor put his hand on the commander’s arm and whispered in his ear. Captain Barrett exclaimed: ‘If you’re satisfied with the lad’s account of himself, Captain Sutherland, he shall wait upon me, if you like.’

‘What work have you for two servants?’ exclaimed the doctor.

‘I like his pluck, d’ye know,’ answered Captain Barrett, ‘and just now he happens to be rather friendless, Ellice.’

The doctor looked annoyed and walked to the rail.

‘Where do you come from?’ asked the commander.

‘London, sir.’

‘Who are your people?’ Again I hung my head.

‘He is in the right to look ashamed,’ said the doctor. ‘Take it that he has brought great grief and distress upon a respectable family by his mysterious disappearance. I don’t believe for a moment,’ continued he, eyeing me sternly, ‘that he has friends at Hobart Town. It’s just an ordinary runaway case. He may have robbed some kind employer—perhaps defrauded his own father. His clothes are new and good. Where did you get the money to buy these clothes with?’ he asked. I kept my head hung. ‘Lads of your sort,’ he continued, ‘get hold of cheap romancing works—vile, lying fictions—books which represent Jack Sheppard as a greater man than Wellington. Little by little they advance till they end there,’ said he, pointing, as Captain Sutherland had, to the main-hatch. ‘Down there, weighted with irons, branded as criminals, leaving their native country for ever, expelled by the just laws of an outraged community, are many men who have begun as you have begun—nay, who may have started on their downward career with a great deal more of modesty than you have exhibited.’

Captain Barrett let his eye-glass fall, whistled softly and lounged aft to the wheel.

All this while the decks had remained comparatively deserted. Just at this moment a boatswain’s mate tuned up his whistle, and a number of seamen came out of the forecastle and went to work in various parts of the ship forward. The doctor continued to lecture me; but I was looking at the strange, grim scene of decks and did not heed him. You would have thought, at sight of the barricades, that the ship was full of wild beasts; that man-eating and ravening creatures took the air in the space inclosed by the savage, iron-studded, bristling fence work.

Suddenly, the sentry at the main-hatch stiffened his figure, as though to a sudden call to attention. He guarded a door at the extremity of a short wooden passage, broad enough to allow one person to pass through at a time. A man clothed as a convict stepped through this door. On perceiving him the doctor broke off, and went to the brass poop rail and overhung it, gazing eagerly. A second and a third convict appeared, then a fourth; this man held a fiddle in one hand and a bow in the other.

And now I heard a sound of heavy clanking footfalls, as though a long end of chain cable was being dragged along the deck, and one after another, to the number of perhaps seventy or eighty, issued the convicts, every man, saving the first four, wearing iron rings and chains upon his ankles, the chains triced up to the waist. They were clothed in the same garb I had observed on board the Warrior; a dingy sort of gray striped with red and a kind of Scotch cap. The convicts who had led the way cried out sharply: they delivered their orders fast and fierce, like a drill-sergeant savage with yokel recruits. The fellows ranked themselves into a line with something of the discipline of soldiers; then the fellow who held the fiddle put it into his neck and began to screw out a march.

‘Attention! Left turn!’ shouted one of the unshackled convicts. ‘Quick march!’

The fiddle played, and away stepped the line of men, all keeping time to the music, faltering but a little to the movement of the ship, and their irons clanked and their chains rattled as they tramped.

I lost all sense of my situation when I saw those convicts. I made a step to the side of the doctor, and my eyes seemed on fire as I gazed. Tom was not one of them. I guessed that this was a gang brought up to exercise and take the air according to the notions of Doctor Russell-Ellice. It sickened my heart, but it made my spirit mad to witness those wretches marching round and round within the wild-beast-like enclosure, to listen to the mocking squeak of the fiddle threading the dull metallic tramp of the ironed felons, to feel that Tom was one of them and amongst them below, ironed as they were, apparelled and disciplined as they were, guarded by soldiers with loaded muskets—himself as innocent as I, as the dark-eyed doctor beside me, as the commander of the ship, who appeared to have forgotten me in watching this strange march of felons clanking round and round to the tune of the fiddle.

‘That’s my idea,’ said the doctor to the captain. ‘That’s the way to keep them in health. You may judge by their manner of marching that they enjoy the music.’

The captain looked at his second mate and smiled sarcastically. Another person had by this time arrived on the poop; he, like Captain Barrett, was attired in undress uniform. I afterward learned that he was Lieutenant Chimmo, one of the two officers in charge of the guard. They approached and looked hard at me—so hard that I imagined Captain Barrett had divined my sex. Their observation won the attention of Captain Sutherland, by whom I had been unheeded whilst he watched the convicts. He said: ‘Get you down there to leeward and wait till you’re wanted.’ He spoke sternly, but almost in the same breath of his speech his face relaxed, and he exclaimed: ‘Are you famished!’

‘No, sir.’

The doctor shrugged his shoulders, as though vexed that the captain should pity me.

‘Get you down to leeward,’ repeated the commander; and I went and stood at the rail.

Will was aloft in the mizzen-top and the other apprentice in the ratlines of the mizzen shrouds at work there. I looked up at Will, who kissed his hand. The act was boyish and indiscreet, and I averted my face, for I did not then know he was not to be seen from the other side of the poop.

The clear wind was sweet and refreshing after my many hours of confinement. I glanced over the side and watched the feather-white swirl of cloudy foam; the yeast burst in a rainbow splendour from the bow and raced astern in ridges of snow, and I saw the spreading wake of the flying ship dancing miles distant in the airy green that ran in a twinkling horizon round the sky. Far ahead slanted a sail, and far abeam to leeward was a dash of dusky-red canvas, whence I concluded that the coast was not very remote.

The tramping convicts marched round and round in single file to the tune of the fiddle. Some of them were little more than boys, eighteen or twenty years of age, and one or two of them were gray-haired men. Their dress was so levelling, and it seemed besides to stamp so strong an impression of rascality upon their faces, that one could not look at the ironed gang without supposing them all rogues and criminals of the worst sort. And yet I’d fancy, as they came facing aft toward the poop, I could see some countenances which would have passed in the streets and in company for comely, honest faces. But the general type was very villainous; the brow low, overhanging, and scowling: the eye small, deep-set, and restless; the mouth coarse and heavy, and the jaw strong, thick, defined like a beast’s.

My eye rested upon one man. I was certain I had seen him before. He was immensely broad-shouldered, pitted with small-pox. His arms were too long for his body, and the thickness of them and the fists were a giant’s. His eyebrows were black; his eyes a deep and fiery black; his nose coarse, spread, flat and heavy at the nostrils. He had the look of a Jew, and after I had watched him a little while, I said to myself: ‘Yes, now I remember. He is Barney Abram, the prize-fighter, who was under sentence of transportation for life in Newgate when I visited Tom in that jail with Uncle Johnstone.’

I craved to see my sweetheart. I waited for the hideous fiddle to cease squeaking, and for the gang to go below and a second gang to take its place, hoping that Tom might be one in this second gang. I say I waited. Rather, I stood hoping. Why they kept me waiting down to leeward on that poop I could not imagine. I guessed it would shock me horribly to see Tom with irons on, marching in convict’s attire, a mere machine at the will of warders, themselves convicts; yet did I passionately wish to see him that I might make sure he was on board, for though I never dreamt that Will had mistook, still I yearned to satisfy myself with my own eyesight. But the gang continued to march round and round to the strains of the fiddle. Oh, the mockery of the blithe Irish tune the fellow played, timed by the metallic tramp of felons on the echoing deck!

CHAPTER XIX
SHE IS QUESTIONED BY THE DOCTOR

I was kept waiting, I knew not why, and used my leisure to gaze about me. I was without fear. I had scraped, with a stout heart, through the worst part, and cared little for what might follow. I had made up my mind to avow my sex if they should send me into the forecastle to live. I was very sure I should be unable to keep my secret amongst that body of rough, blaspheming, joking sailors. Nor should I be equal to the work of a seaman—I mean as an ordinary seaman or boy. It turned me dizzy to look aloft and think of climbing those towering heights.

Whilst I thus thought, I used my eyes and examined the ship. Opposite the main-hatch, within the convicts’ inclosure, stood a tall box, something like a sentry-box; over it a bucket was hung by an iron bar, and there was a short length of rope attached to the bucket. I supposed the box was a sort of shower-bath for the prisoners. The main hatch was the only visible means of entering and leaving the prison quarters. It was extraordinarily protected, first, with heavy gratings with a manhole for the passage of one body, then by a strong railing of oak stanchions of a triangular shape, thickly studded with iron nails (the tops or heads of these stanchions I could just see as they sank like the vertical wires of a cage from the sides of the hatch down to the lower-deck), then by a strong bulkheaded passage or corridor with a door at the end, as I mentioned when I spoke of the sentry stationed there. I saw two galleys. The forward one I guessed was for the ship’s use, the after for the convicts; for in this galley I had observed a man in felon’s dress. A huge long-boat lay stowed in chocks athwartships just forward of the ship’s galley.

Such details to me entered like the very spirit of prison life into the gleaming fabric of the ship, soiling, debasing, so flavouring her that there was no magic in the pure freshness of the ocean wind to purge her into sweetness. Marvellous that human sin should subtly enter and find expression in timber and hemp and canvas, in bricks and mortar, in old hulks, in prison piles—it matters not what—subduing all suggestions to its own inspirations. I had noticed how the sordid influence and degrading quality of human wickedness had worked in dismantled hulks, making more hideous that which was already hideous with felon-carpentry; and now here was all beauty in this buoyant and bounding picture of a ship in full sail, leaning from the shining breeze, pouring into her wake the snow of the crested and dissolving surge, dimmed and defiled and saddened by her errand and cargo, by the aspect of her decks, and by the noise of men marching in irons.

All this while the doctor stood at the break of the poop with his hands upon the rail, watching the convicts exercising, and sometimes nodding in time when the fiddler changed his tune; the captain likewise watched the convicts from the head of the weather poop ladder; the two officers patrolled the weather deck, and both of them constantly looked at me when their walk brought them with their faces forward; the second mate was near the wheel, and the two sentries, with shouldered muskets with shining bayonets, crossed and recrossed each other at a little distance from where I stood.

By-and-by the boatswain and a soldier with stripes upon his arms came along the narrow gangway from the forecastle. They arrived on the quarter-deck, and the soldier, looking up, saluted.

‘Step up, sergeant, and you, Mr. Bo’sun, if you please,’ said the doctor. ‘Well,’ said he, when they had mounted the ladder, ‘what have you found where the lad’s been hiding?’

I was prepared to hear that they had discovered my stock of provisions and the bottles of water, and possibly the parcel of wax candles. But I was not uneasy; I was ready with a story. The sergeant, speaking with an Irish accent, answered: ‘We have found nothing, sirr.’

‘Did you thoroughly overhaul the place, Mr. Balls?’ said the captain.

‘Ay, sir. We’ve likewise been down into the fore-peak. All’s right for’ards.’

I was astonished, for I had never doubted that they would light upon my tins of meat and the bottles. Whether they had honestly overlooked the nook in which the things were stowed or whether, having met with them, they had resolved to keep the stuff to secretly eat and enjoy, is a question I cannot answer. Suppose this, they’d say nothing about the bottles of water, lest one discovery should force them into owning the other.

‘Captain,’ exclaimed the doctor, ‘I shall want that lad locked up until I have satisfied myself as to his motive in hiding!’

‘I’m quite willing to lock him up,’ answered the captain, ‘but I’m an old hand, and I may tell you that there’s never much need to scratch deep to find out your stowaway’s reason.’

‘I’m not satisfied,’ said the doctor, turning his head and staring at me very sternly; ‘you’ll lock him up, if you please.’

‘Clap him in your jail; there’s a proper prison below,’ said the captain.

‘Certainly not!’ cried the doctor, with a toss of his head, seemingly insensible of the sarcasm of the captain’s suggestion. ‘He’s no convict, sir, he’s the ship’s prisoner.’

The sergeant eyed me very steadfastly. He suddenly saluted the doctor, and exclaimed: ‘May I list him, sir?’

‘Try him,’ said the captain, dryly. ‘It’s a sure sign a young chap wants to ’list when he hides in the fore-peak of an outward-bounder.’

‘Leave that matter, sergeant. Captain, you will be so good as to lock up that boy,’ said the doctor.

On this the captain told the boatswain to send the steward to him. A man with prominent, purple-tipped cheek-bones and blue eyes, very narrow shoulders and legs arching out to a degree I had never before beheld, wearing a blue jacket decorated with rows of buttons, came out of the cuddy. The captain called him on to the poop.

‘That lad’s a stowaway,’ said the captain, pointing to me. The man looked. ‘By order of the surgeon-superintendent he’s to be locked up. Where? In the forecastle? In the soldiers’ quarters? You have spare cabins in the steerage?’

The man answered: ‘Three.’

‘Very well,’ the captain said. ‘Take him below and lock him up.’

‘You’re his jailor,’ said the doctor, ‘and I hold you responsible for his safe keeping.’ The steward looked uneasy and astonished, and cast a glance at the marching file of convicts.

‘Here,’ said the captain. The steward approached him close. Something was said. The steward then came to me and exclaimed: ‘Come along, young man!’ I followed him down the steps on to the quarter-deck. At this instant the fiddle ceased, the echoing tramp of the felons was hushed, the convict warders as before cried out sharply and fiercely.

‘This way,’ said the steward; and I walked after him through the cuddy door. Here was a bright, cheerful interior. The Childe Harold was a passenger ship, and her accommodation aft was rich and fine. She was a convict ship now, but they had made no change. The bulkheads, ceiling, and trunk of the mizzen-mast were beautiful with gilt carving and paintings; narrow lengths of brilliant mirrors flashed back the light that streamed through the skylights; the chairs and lounges were choicely upholstered. Whilst I gazed, my imagination figured the grimy, barricaded, sentinelled, ’tweendecks prison in which Tom was to live. I caught sight of myself in a looking-glass. I had omitted to pull off my cap when I entered the cuddy—an oversight that might have convicted me to a keen eye. I scarcely knew myself in the glass. Spite of the rub I had given my face in the forecastle, I was still dark with the dirt of the store-room. It was as good as a mask. No one would have suspected the delicate skin of a woman under the grime on my cheek.

‘This way!’ said the steward.

He led me down some steps that fell from a small square of hatch close against the inside of the cuddy front. It was gloomy down here. A corridor ran fore and aft, and on either hand were two or three cabins. The steward put his hand upon the door of the first of these cabins.

‘Step in,’ said he. ‘Is this your first appearance in quod, youngster?’

I did not understand him. He leaned against a bunk, thrust his hand into his trousers’ pockets, and looked me over. ‘What’s brought you into this day’s mess?’ said he. ‘Wasn’t you ’appy at home?’

I resolved to answer the man civilly, trusting he would befriend me.

‘I have friends in Tasmania, and wish to join them. I’m willing to work for nothing if you’ll give me work I can do. I’m not strong, sir.’

He asked me where I had come aboard, if I had known before hiding that this was a convict ship, where I had hidden, and how I had managed for food. ‘You’re a young gent,’ said he; ‘that’s clear. Them ’ands have never done dirtier work than quill-driving in some office, I’ll swear. Hope for your soul’s sake you haven’t run away for wrong-doing, and that there’s no kind ’arts at home a-haching for you.’

I declared in the most solemn and impassioned tones that I had not run away for wrong-doing, and that I had hidden in this ship for no other motive than to reach Tasmania. He inquired my name, and said: ‘Well, I don’t mind saying I like your looks. I believe you’re honest and there’s no ’arm in you. What does that there doctor mean by turning me into a jailor? I’m head-steward. That’s what I shipped for. He gets his living by looking after criminals at sea; and them as ain’t criminals, according to him, must be tarned into tarnkeys, is it? He be blowed! Ye’ve had a tidy spell down for’ards. Since Woolwich, hey? Well, the capt’n told me to give ye a mouthful of grub, and that looks well. I’ll turn the key upon ye, because it’s the capt’n’s orders. But as for that there doctor—he be blowed!’

He went out, leaving me easy, I may say almost happy, so different had been the usage I had received from what I had expected; though, to be sure, the doctor had yet to settle accounts with me. But what could he do? If he kept me locked up, I was still in the ship that was carrying Tom across the seas. If he threatened me with the gangway, there was my sex. I might know—nay, I would swear, myself a sailor’s daughter—that there was never a seaman on board that ship who would allow a hand to be lifted against a girl.

I took a view of the little cabin I was in. It was a steerage-berth, designed for the use of second-class passengers. Two mahogany bunks were affixed to the ship’s wall under the circular porthole. In a corner near the door was a convenient arrangement of drawers and wash-stand and a flap, which, on lifting, I found to be a looking-glass. I went to the bunks to look through the porthole at the sea, and beheld in the upper bunk, on the bare boards, a large parcel. I could scarcely credit my sight. It was, in truth, the parcel of wearing apparel I had made up when I put on my boy’s clothes and addressed to the care of the captain of this ship and left in my Woolwich lodging, on the bare chances of my landlady sending it to the vessel! I say it was truly extraordinary that those clothes should be lying in the very cabin in which I was now lodged.

Whilst I stood looking at the parcel and musing upon the associations it recalled, and speculating upon the ideas the landlady had formed of me, the key was turned and the steward entered.

‘Here’s some lush and a mouthful of grub for you,’ said he. ‘It isn’t every stowaway who’s waited on by a head-steward, I can tell you. But it’s the cap’n’s orders, and luck comes with looks in this blushen universe.’

He placed a mug of red wine and a plate plentifully heaped up with cold boiled beef and ship-baked bread upon the wash-stand and again left me, turning the key. I ate heartily, and the wine did me good. I should have been mightily thankful for soap and water, but had not dared ask the steward for such luxuries. I walked about the cabin and looked through the portholes, and killed the time by thinking. I was used to being alone, and after the darkness forward, with the furious motion of the ship’s bows and the noises in the hold and the thunder of seas smitten by the thrust of the cutwater, this lighted cabin was heaven with its tranquillity and gentle motion of deck. I thought of Tom, and struggled to realise his prison quarters. Gloomy I knew they must be, heavily grated and shrouded by its sentinelled doorway as the main-hatch was; gloomy and evil-smelling, repulsive and inhuman, with spiked barricades and a prison and hospital. But I could not witness the picture in imagination. How and where did the prisoners sleep? How and where did they eat? And what was their fare?

And what would my uncle and aunt think if they knew where I was? I imagined them opening that door there and looking in and seeing me dressed as a boy and leaning on the edge of the bunk. So far my love had marched to a conquering tune. And it was not only that I had overcome several wonderful difficulties for a young woman to encounter single-handed; it was not only that I was in the same ship with my sweetheart, bound to a land where we should be together, where in God’s good time and with patience we might come to dwell together as husband and wife, happy in our love, happy under new skies, happy in our eternal severance from the odious and inhuman associations of our native country; I, too, should have suffered with Tom, and taken my share of his misery, if not of his humiliation and degradation. This was a sweet and noble supporting thought. It was the one triumph of my love which gladdened me most to think of.

After I had been locked up two or three hours, and whilst the sun was still strong over the west, filling all that part with a moist scarlet light, the key was violently turned and Doctor Ellice walked in. My blood was fired by his insolent entrance, as though he were a warder with a right to break in upon a prisoner at any instant; but I swiftly cooled when I recollected that he did not know I was a woman. In truth, for the moment I had forgotten my masquerade. And, indeed, there is nothing so hard to sham as the airs and behaviour of the other sex. A woman may look a young man to perfection, as, indeed, I did; but her female tricks and instincts will be breaking through if vigilance sleep an instant. You will find this so by observing even the most accomplished actress in male parts.

‘I have come to talk to you,’ said the doctor, very sternly. ‘I don’t understand your presence in this ship. Your explanations to the captain and to myself are not sufficient, and are unsatisfactory so far as they go.’ And then he began to question me. Who was I? What was my age? Would I swear that I was going to Tasmania to seek some relations? Would I swear that my name was Simon Marlowe? By this time my blood was on fire again, and, weakened as I was by what I had passed through, I might guess the old flashing lights were in my eyes as I looked at him.

‘I’ll tell you this much about myself,’ said I, stepping up to him and swelling my breast and tossing my head after my fashion when I was in a rage: ‘my father was a sailor, and I know enough of the sea to inform you that the master is the only head and authority which the people on board need recognise. You are not the master of this vessel. What right have you to come here and talk to me as you do, and to insult me as you lately did in the hearing of others, with your doubts as to my honesty and my motives for leaving home and the rest of it?’

He gazed at me in silence with the utmost astonishment. Indeed, he looked crestfallen. His lips lay apart in a sort of yawn of wonder, but he quickly recollected himself, as you will suppose of a man who, as I afterward learned, had made several voyages in charge of convicts, and was used to felons. His face darkened with temper, but his self-mastery was fine, and there was no passion in his tones.

‘You do not understand. You are insolent and ignorant, though you are educated and refined, and altogether superior to the situation in which you have placed yourself. On this I base my suspicion and I must have the truth. I am supreme in this ship. The captain obeys my orders. This is a Government ship, and you are subject to my discipline.’

He then began to question me afresh very deliberately. But I observed that he no longer insisted upon my swearing that my name was Simon Marlowe and so on; and indeed it was wonderful that so sensible a man should ask questions which only a fool would put; for, let me have answered him as I might, would he have believed me? I struggled with my temper and replied to him; now and again I would not answer, and he passed on. Once he threatened to bring me to the gangway, by which he meant that he would order me to be flogged; I folded my arms when he said that and looked him in the eyes.

He continued to question me very sternly nevertheless; demanded full particulars of my coming on board; asking whether I had travelled directly from my home wherever it might be, or loitered at Woolwich before hiding in the vessel. I told him I had stayed a short time at Woolwich.

‘Are you acquainted with any one of the convicts on board this ship?’ he exclaimed, bursting out with this question abruptly, as though to catch me unawares.

My eyes sought the deck. I went to the bunk and looked through the porthole, turning my back to him.

‘Answer me,’ he cried.

I slowly confronted him and said: ‘Yes, I know one of the convicts.’

‘Which is the man?’

‘Barney Abram.’

He stared in good earnest, made a step the better to see me, my back being to the porthole, and said: ‘You know Barney Abram? Probably one of the worst characters in this ship. You are a friend of his?’

‘I did not use the word friend, sir. I know Barney Abram by sight. I recognised him as he paced the deck this afternoon.’

‘Where have you met him on shore?’

‘He was pointed out to me.’

‘Where—where?’

I paused to let him know I was not to be frightened by his imperious manner, and answered: ‘In Newgate Prison.’

‘Were you a prisoner?’ he asked quickly.

‘I was a visitor.’

‘Whom visiting?’

‘The jail.’

‘Who pointed the man out to you?’

‘My companion.’

‘Who was your companion?’

‘I’ll not answer that question,’ I replied, ‘because if I tell you who that companion was, I shall be acquainting you with more than I intend you shall know. But neither will I tell you any lies.’

He looked hard at my hands. I held them up close to his face and exclaimed: ‘Judge for yourself, sir. I have been no prisoner!’ and laughed.

‘You are the most impudent young dog I ever met,’ said he, with a sort of admiration in the anger of his looks. ‘Where were you educated?’

‘I never went to school; I was educated at home,’ I answered, feigning an air of shyness and swinging my leg.

‘Is your mother living?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Father?’

‘I have a stepfather,’ I answered.

‘And his is the home you have run away from, I suppose.’ He mused for a few moments and then said: ‘Put on your cap, and follow me.’

He led me through the saloon on to the main-deck, and so through the gate in the after barricade where the sentry stood. I followed him without alarm, though I wondered with all my might why he should bring me into this convicts’ inclosure. Did he mean to send me below to live among the felons, or to be locked up in their bulkheaded prison? Not very likely. But what did he mean to do?

There was not a convict to be seen within the barricades. The sunset was rich and thunderous, and the air full of red light; the wind had freshened and blew very cold. The watch on deck were shortening sail, and the three royals and the mizzen top-gallantsail and some fore and aft canvas were slatting and jumping overhead, with a few seamen hoarsely bawling at the clew-lines, and some hands sprawling aloft. The first mate was now in charge, and he stood on the poop looking up, watching the fellows climbing. This man I had seen aboard the ship in the East India Docks. Tom knew him and had shaken hands with him. The captain was walking with the two military officers, the sentries crossed and recrossed the poop-break, and round about the little booby-hatch, close against the cuddy front, were two or three soldiers and a few women and children.

‘Pass the word for Barney Abram,’ said the doctor to the sentry at the door of the main hatch.

The soldier did so, and after a minute or two the prize-fighter, with irons on his legs and a chain triced up to his waist, came through the door, attended by a convict warder, or ‘captain.’ He was a fierce and brutal-looking creature when you saw him close. His face was pitted with small-pox, and embellished besides with the scars of many bloody conflicts in the ring. He wore an extraordinary expression; it was not a grin; it was not a smirk; it was a fixed, crafty leer of knowingness.

‘Abram, look at this young man and tell me who he is,’ said the doctor.

The prize-fighter, resting his elbows in the palms of his immense hands, leaned his ugly face forward and stared at me; he contracted his brows whilst he looked as though he hunted through his memory. At last he exclaimed: ‘I devver saw the young gentlebud before.’

‘He says he knows you,’ says the doctor.

‘By sight,’ I exclaimed.

‘That’s dot ibprobable,’ said the prize-fighter, with a glance at the sentry and a complacent look-round, and holding up his head.

‘Look at this young man,’ said the doctor. ‘Where have you met him?’

‘Debber saw bib in all by life. S’elp be as true as by ’air’s growig,’ returned the prize-fighter.

‘He says he saw you at Newgate.’

‘I was there,’ answered the prize-fighter, pursing up his leathery under-lip.

‘Observe him well and try to recollect if he was a prisoner?’

‘Dot in by tibe,’ said the prize-fighter.

This insinuation, after what I had said, enraged me. ‘You know I never was a prisoner, sir,’ I cried. ‘You are acting inhumanly in trying to confirm your hopes, but not your suspicions, that I was one. I was on a visit to the jail for my entertainment. My companion and I were conducted to the prisoners’ visiting-room. There I saw Mr. Barney Abram in conversation with a stout, dark lady, gaily attired, and I looked at him with attention because he was pointed out to me as the greatest prize-fighter of the age, and that is why I mentioned his name when you asked me whether I knew any of the convicts on board.’

A savage glow of pleasure brightened the prize-fighter’s eye as he listened; my audacious address, my reference to the brute’s fame, acted upon his spirits like a can of drink. The sentry eyed me askant; the warder with a satisfaction which his flat, ruffianly face could not conceal.

‘You saw be talking to by wife,’ said Barney Abram!—‘a stout, splendid woban, ’adsobly dressed as you put it, sir. The circumstance is all correct.’

‘You can go below,’ said the doctor.

I received a fierce, exulting, congratulatory glance from the bruiser as he turned about in his shackles to re-enter the door. He might have meant to applaud me for my fearless speech, or, which is more likely, he might have meant to wish me luck in the scheme which had brought me into conflict with the surgeon, and which he would naturally hope and believe was criminal.

The doctor now told me to pass on to the quarter-deck, and I thought he meant to take me below and lock me up again. Instead of which he left me standing outside the barricade and went on to the poop, where he joined Captain Sutherland and his military companions, all of whom had been gazing at us from over the brass rail whilst we talked with Mr. Barney Abram. I could not understand the meaning of this doctor’s purposeless questions and behaviour, but I dare say I was right when I supposed he intended to let everybody see and understand he was first in the ship.

Always, in the days of the convict ship, the unhappy criminals were dispatched across the sea in charge of a naval medical officer appointed by the admiralty, and called the surgeon-superintendent. The ship was virtually placed in his hands to do what he pleased with, and, though I don’t suppose he was empowered to interfere in the navigation of the vessel, he was undoubtedly privileged to order the master to call into such ports on the way as he (the surgeon) might choose to name; thereby retarding the voyage of the ship, and perhaps imperilling her, as was the case with a certain convict ship which was nearly lost through the surgeon ordering that she should make Simon’s Bay under conditions of season and weather which the captain declared dangerous. Hence there was usually a strong feeling between the surgeon-superintendent and the captain and mates. I suspected something of the sort here, and believed Doctor Russell-Ellice had given himself a great deal of unnecessary trouble to prove me a rogue, merely that the captain and the mates should see what a very clever fellow he was, and how very much in earnest also in his resolution to strut to the very topmost inches of his little dignity and his brief authority.

CHAPTER XX
SHE CONVERSES WITH HER COUSIN

Presently I stepped leisurely into the recess under the poop where the soldiers and the women were. One was the pretty young woman who had given me a smile when I came on board the ship at Woolwich. She viewed me with her soft, dark eyes with a wistful admiration, but I could not observe that she remembered me. The three or four soldiers without belts, their jackets unbuttoned, lounged against the bulkhead, smoking their pipes. I was now used to being stared at, and gave them no heed. Whilst I thus stood waiting for what was next to happen, Will came along from his berth forward. When he saw me, he seemed to pause, as though not knowing what to do. With the most pronounced air I could contrive I averted my face and looked into the saloon through the window, and when I glanced again my cousin was out of sight. I was very much in earnest that he should not get in trouble through me; nay, I desired that for a long time yet he and I should keep as wide apart as the two ends of the ship. He was boyish and imprudent, and might at any moment say or do something that would lead to the disclosure of my sex, and, for all I knew, to the revelation of my motive in hiding in this ship.

The soldiers talked of the convicts, and I pricked up my ears, thirsty for all information of the gloomy, hidden quarters where Tom lived. One asked if the people were kept in irons throughout the voyage. Another answered, No; he believed the irons were taken off after the ship was out of the Bay of Biscay.

‘I couldn’t ’elp laughing,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘I was on sentry below and heard a chap say to some others: “I don’t mind praying, but cussed if I’m going to pray for the Governor of Tasmania! I’ll pray for rain if it’s wanted, but not for a bloomed Governor.” “Who asks ye?” says one of the convicts. “It’s to be a part of the prayers,” said the other. “Me pray for the Governor of Tasmania!”—and here he swore and used such language that I had to caution him.’

‘I wouldn’t pray for ne’er a Governor if I was a convick,’ said the pretty young woman, with a toss of her head and a side-glance at me. ‘It’s a shame to make a joke of sacred things. Should a convick be made to pray for his jailer? Would the Lord listen to the prayer of a sailor who asks a blessing on the bo’sun who’s just been flogging him?’

‘There’s some queer chaps downstairs,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘There’s a fellow they call the smasher—a little, gray-haired man with the kindest of faces, and speaks as soft as pouring out milk; he’s lagged for one of the most awful crimes. There’s a play-actor—dunno what right he’s got down there. They sails under false colours. Dessay if he’d got his right name ye’d find him some one as had been tiptop at Drury Lane and the best of theayters. There’s a quiet, pleasing-looking chap, lagged for scuttling.’ A woman asked what that was. ‘Sinking a ship by making a hole in her.’

‘The villain!’ cried the woman. ‘I hope they’ll not give him a chance with his tricks here.’

‘I’m sorry for that chap, somehow,’ said the soldier. ‘If I was a painter I’d like to draw his picture. I’ll point him out some time or other, and then you take notice, Jim, of his melancholy face. One picks up a lot on sentry.’

‘A bad lot,’ said another soldier, spitting.

I listened eagerly and longed passionately to ask questions, but durst not. Yet I might be sure that the soldier spoke of Tom, and I loved the fellow for speaking of him kindly; and it was another proof that my sweetheart was in the ship.

A child came and stood in front of me and looked up into my face. It was a pretty little girl. I stooped and patted her cheek and kissed her, took her by the hands and jumped her into a little dance, which kept her laughing. I knew which was the child’s father by the pleased look one of the soldiers regarded me with. It was the man who had spoken kindly of Tom. When I found this out I kissed the child again and talked to her of the ship and the sea. I observed that my manners and speech controlled the listeners. They all knew I was a runaway stowaway, and though they could know no more they might suspect a great deal more. And yet they viewed me respectfully and talked with a sort of civil reference to me as though I was a gentleman, listening.

The lights were burning very red but gradually dimming in the west, and the sides of the seas slipped away from under the ship in hard, dark-green slopes, laced with spray, and the froth of their heads was faintly coloured by the sunset. The heel of the ship was sharp, and she broke through the billows in thunder. There was a mighty noise of whistling and raving aloft, and the strange shrill shrieking of the foaming and dissolving salt alongside made me wonder what that sound in the wind was.

An apprentice came off the poop and struck a bell suspended this side of the quarter-deck barricade. A minute or two later a convict passed through the door of the main-hatch and placed himself beside the sentry; a second and then a third emerged until a considerable number of men had assembled; they formed in a close-packed column which stretched about half-way to the convicts’ galley; the soldier with whose child I played, seeing me looking at the convicts, exclaimed: ‘They’re getting their supper. Them’s the messmen. As the fellows receive their cocoa or whate’er it be, from the galley, they carries it below, one by one.’

I imagined that Tom might be amongst that set of convicts, and made a movement with the idea of walking some distance forward, where I should be able to see; but I stopped myself on reflecting that the doctor was probably at the poop rail overhead looking on.

‘’Taint bad discipline, taking it all round,’ said the soldier, speaking to all who chose to listen, though I seemed to find his remarks intended for my amusement or enlightenment. ‘It’s mostly settled aboard the hulks before the parties come aboard. So I’m told. The convicts they think proper to trust are made petty officers of. There’s first and second captains, captains of divisions, captains of wards. Then some of them are made cooks of, t’others barbers, and every mess has its head. With this sort of arrangement they keeps each other in order.’

‘Do any privileges go along with these appointments?’ asked one of the soldiers.

‘The privilege of being appointed.’

I listened, but asked no questions. I dared not exhibit interest. I could not forget that these soldiers formed a portion of the convicts’ guard.

‘I notice,’ said one of the soldiers, ‘that they puts them there malefactors to all sorts of ship’s work. They were helping the sailors wash the deck down this morning. They work hard, as though eddicated under the muzzle of the carbine. A sight of difference there was ’twixt the sailors’ scrubbing and their’n.’

I was watching the convicts whilst I listened to the soldier’s talk, when some one inside of the cuddy called out: ‘Marlowe!’ I forgot my feigned name, and did not respond. The voice again called, on which, with a start. I looked through the cuddy door and saw the steward.

‘I reckoned as much,’ said he, with a laugh. ‘’Taint every purser’s name as fits like old boots. Step this way.’

I entered. Just then the doctor came down the companion-steps at the end of the cuddy and entered an after-cabin on the port side. He paused a moment, as though to observe me, but did not speak. A young man, whom I supposed to be an under-steward, was lighting the cabin lamps, but there still lived a wild flush of western light, and you saw plainly by it.

The steward began by informing me that I had no business in the ship; that by stowing myself away on board a convict ship I risked the chance of being made a felon of, of receiving six dozens at the gangway, of being hanged at the yard-arm. In thus reassuring me he gave himself the airs of the captain of the ship. He then added: ‘However, I like your looks, as I told you before, and I’ve put in a good word for you with Captain Sutherland, who, I may tell you, don’t think any the worse of a youngster like you for squaring up, as he’s heard you’ve done, to the doctor. The doctor himself owned to the captain,’ said he, lowering his voice and looking aft toward the surgeon’s cabin, ‘that he got rather more from you than he knew what to do with.’ He then abruptly inquired if I possessed any clothes besides those I wore. I answered I had not.

‘Got any money?’

‘How much ought I to want?’

‘How much ha’ ye got?’ said he.

‘All I shall need on my arrival,’ said I.

He looked puzzled, eyed me all over, then approaching me by a step he exclaimed with an earnest, confidential face: ‘Jokin’ apart, young man, who are you and what’s your object in cutting this here caper?’ Finding I did not reply, he continued: ‘You’re to have all the money you want when you arrive? And you haven’t money enough to pay your passage to get what’s awaiting for you?’ He paused. ‘Well, now, see here. You’ve got no business aboard, and you stood to be whipped, and you stood to be hanged for hiding in a Government transport. You’ve got to be fed, and gent or no gent, you must work.’

‘I’m willing and anxious to work.’

‘The captain’s handed you over to me. There’s plenty of hands for’ard, most of them about as sarviceable at a pinch as you’d be likely to prove. We’re short of a man aft, and you’ll do for the post. Can you wait at table?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Well, you may rise to it. We’ll see. You’ll be wanted to carry the dirty dishes for’ard for the cook’s mate to wash, to help bring the dishes along from the galley, and to hang about here whilst the officers are eating, ready to run to the galley on arrands.’

‘I’ll do all that willingly,’ said I.

He then told me that the second steward slung his hammock next door to the pantry in the steerage, but as there were two or three empty cabins down there I was welcome to use a bunk in the one in which I had been locked up. ‘As for a bed,’ said he—‘you’d better ask the sailmaker to give you a piece of old canvas, and the butcher to give you a bundle of straw; you’ll get all the mattress you’ll want out of that. If I can meet with a stray blanket you shall have it. That pilot jacket, though a good coat, ain’t quite up to the knocker for table work. Pity you haven’t got a little loose cash upon you. I’ve got a spare jacket which,’ said he, taking a view of my shoulders, ‘would fit you for breadth to a hair. But not to button across; why, I never see such a chest on a young fellow. And now you can turn to,’ said he; ‘the table’s to be got ready for dinner and you can help.’

I requested him to lend me some soap and a towel. He grinned and asked me if there was any perfumery he could oblige me with. ‘But you’re right,’ said he. ‘You’re in want of a wash-down.’ He left me, and presently returned with a piece of marine soap and a coarse towel. He then told me where I should find a bucket, and recommended me to draw some water at the head pump on the forecastle, and to be careful not to spill any on the deck as I brought it along if I did not want to be sworn at by the officer of the watch.

I took a bucket from a rack near the mainmast and went along the gangway, as I term the alley betwixt the barricade and the bulwarks. My heart was almost light. The work I was to be put to was just such as I should have chosen out of the whole group of duties of the big ship. It was work that would keep me away from the forecastle hands; it would not put more upon me than my strength was equal to. Best of all, I was to occupy a cabin alone, which was an extraordinary piece of good fortune.