SHE SEES HER SWEETHEART
The convict mattress was hard, and the pillow was hard, and the
blankets as coarse as manufacture could contrive; yet I would not
have exchanged them for my own soft bed and linen at home. I was now
sleeping as Tom did: I was on board a convict ship as he was; and some
of the company I should be forced to keep were scarcely less rough
than the felons below. I should be doing work by day almost as hard,
perhaps, as Tom would be put to; I was, therefore, not only hand in
hand with my love in the sympathy of suffering, I was bearing almost
as heavy a burden as weighed upon him; and even his degradation was as
much mine as though I, too, were a convict, for he was my sweetheart,
and one day, God willing, would be my husband, and whatever touched
him touched me as though we had been one.
These were my thoughts as I pulled the convict blankets over me and
put my head upon the little, hard, convict pillow, and lay for a while
listening to the torrent of foam that thundered past the porthole. I
then fell asleep, and my sleep was deep and dreamless as death, so
exhausted was I; and when I awoke, the cabin was glimmering out to the
light of the newly-broken morning, and I beheld the young man Frank
standing beside me.
He told me it was time to turn out; the steward was calling for me;
there was the cabin deck to scrub and the cuddy to be got ready for
breakfast.
‘I’ll follow you in an instant,’ said I.
‘Do you know,’ said he, going to the door, ‘dot you vhas very
goodt-looking? It vhas lucky you hov goodt teeth, you show them even in
your sleep. I sometimes belief I must hov seen your sister. But hov you
a sister?’
‘No,’ said I, rubbing my eyes and troubled by these questions, and
wishing he would go.
‘Vell, I vhas a waiter for two or three months at the Brunswick Hotel
in der East India Docks, and I remember a handsome young lady dot came
in once or twice in dot time. She vhas so much like you she might
easily hov been your sister.’
He went out when he had said this. I had no time to reflect, but
certainly I had found no air of suspicion in his manner. It took me but
a minute to plunge my face in cold water and go out, having lain down
for warmth, fully dressed, save my cap and shoes. On showing myself,
the steward told me to get a bucket and go on the poop and fetch water
from the pump, which the apprentices and some ordinary seamen were
washing down the deck by.
I mounted the companion-ladder and found the morning brightening into
sunshine. The sea in the east was radiant with sliding hills of silver;
the sky was a delicate azure, high, with small feather-shaped clouds
linked like lacework. Passing us at the distance of a mile was a
large ship with flags flying. She was bowing the sea somewhat heavily,
and made a noble picture as she crushed the brine into snow under her
massive forefoot, yielding to the surge till the line of her green
copper showed with a long, wet flash, whilst the soft whiteness of her
canvas ran trembling in shadows to her trucks with her tossing, where
it blended with the feather-shaped clouds, so that you could scarce
tell one from another.
Our own ship was clothed with sail to the royal yards, with dark lines
of damp where the reefs had been lately shaken out. I was too far aft
to see the main-deck. Smoke from the chimneys of the two galleys blew
black and brisk over the bow, showing that the wind nearly followed
us. The sailors were washing down, the head pump was going, and
buckets were being handed along from the forecastle, where stood the
sentry in a grey coat with his bayonet gleaming like silver. The first
person I saw on the poop was my cousin Will. He and several others
were scrubbing the deck hard with brushes, whilst a broad-shouldered
apprentice flung pailfuls of water along the planks. Will turned his
head and saw me, but took no further notice. Mr. Bates, the chief mate,
stood near the wheel, and I observed that he watched me whilst I filled
my bucket at the little pump that was kept a-gushing by an active young
seaman. It was a strange real picture of shipboard life on the high
seas. The cold of the night was still in the wind, and not yet had
the sun extinguished the melancholy of the gray dawn in the distant
recesses of the west.
I saw no convict, but when I returned to the cuddy with my bucket full
of water, on looking through the windows which commanded a view of the
main-deck, I observed a number of the felons all hard at work brushing,
swabbing and cleaning. For an hour I worked with Frank, scrubbing the
cuddy deck, drying it, replacing the lengths of carpet and so on. The
steward then told me to get a hook-pot from the pantry and go to the
galley for some hot coffee for Frank and myself. I found a hook-pot and
stepped on to the quarter-deck, meaning to walk forward by the narrow
gangway; but a number of seamen on some job there blocked it, so I went
past the sentry at the barricade gate.
I was trembling, and felt myself pale. There were many convicts
about, and any one at a moment might turn and prove to be Tom. Some
were coiling ropes away, some slapped the deck with swabs, some were
cleaning the paintwork; they were all ironed. The decks, dark with
brine, were greasy, the motions of the ship quick and uncomfortable,
and the irons, robbing the limbs of all elasticity, caused many of the
unhappy wretches to slide and stagger as they moved about, for which
they would be sharply and sometimes brutally yelled at by the convicts
who overseered them. The prize-fighter was savagely swabbing near the
main-hatch. He struck the deck as though he would split it. I was
obliged to pass him close. He saw me and nodded, and said in a low,
thick, sarcastic voice, ‘Dice work to put a gentlebud to.’
‘Attend to what you’re about there!’ roared a man on the other side of
the deck.
I pushed on. A convict stood at the ship’s side, coiling a rope over
a pin. His face was averted, but as I neared him he moved his head to
look in the direction of the poop. It was Tom. Our eyes met. He did not
know me and turned his gaze away, then looked again, then stared as if
paralysed. His hands were arrested as though he had been struck dead;
his face whitened to the complexion of death. I brushed past him close,
saying in a low voice, but distinctly, ‘Tom, dearest, it is Marian. We
are together and shall yet be happy,’ and so saying I went on without
again looking and entered the ship’s galley.
But the sudden encounter, seeing him in irons, so affected me that
I could scarcely draw my breath. I noticed with a pang of exquisite
distress that he looked ill; his complexion an unhealthy white, his
cheeks sunk, his eyes hollow and leaden. When I was in the galley I
stood struggling to get my breath before attempting to speak; then I
heard a commotion outside. The stout cook pushed past me, and, putting
his head through the galley-door, cried, after staring a few moments:
‘Blowed if it don’t look as if the poor chap was dying!’
I sprang through the door and saw Tom supported by two or three
convicts. He lay in their arms in the posture of a man lifted on to his
feet but unable to stand. In a minute or two he struggled and stood
erect, and I heard him say: ‘There, lads, I thank you. Just a passing
faintness. Take no more heed of me;’ and, picking up the rope, he
continued in his task of coiling it over the pin. I watched him coil a
second rope away and then re-entered the galley.
‘I wonder them coves ain’t a-fainting every hour,’ said the cook, as
he filled my hook-pot with hot coffee. ‘No grog and no baccy! Think of
that; and a vindier diet than fo’c’sle allowance. Burgoo may be good
eating for them as thinks the bagpipes good music; but you may take it
from me, my lad, that it ain’t the sort of stuff for a growed-up man
to go to bed on. There’s too much sop a-going in prison fare. A gent
who’s brought himself up for years on champagne, salmon, and the best
of eating, signs the wrong name to a bit of paper and’s put aboard a
ship like this, where he gets nothen to eat but cocoa and ship’s beef
and burgoo. Can the likes of such men help fainting? Ask yourself. I
dessey the covey as swounded just now was a nob in his way before he
was took. There’s no telling who’s who down below. Out of the road now,
my lively! Here’s the sailors a-coming for their tea.’
I got into the narrow gangway and so made my way aft that I might not
again pass Tom. My dread was for myself rather than for him. If I drew
close and once more looked him in the face, my passion of love must
vent itself in some desperate betraying manner. Girl as I was, I found
a curse in my heart for the barbarity that weighted my sweetheart’s
ankles with iron, and a curse for the law that had suffered two
villains to swear his liberty, fortune, happiness away and make a
broken-hearted convict of him.
I drank a little coffee in the pantry with my fellow-servant, but
ate nothing. The German supposed I was fretting over having run away
and good-naturedly tried to cheer me. However, as the time passed,
my spirits improved, for now I knew beyond all doubt that Tom was on
board; and he also knew beyond all doubt that I was with him, and it
comforted me to reflect that without any further explanation he would
understand why I had made no attempt to bid him farewell at Woolwich.
And still I was anxious. He would soon discover, by observing me as I
passed to and fro, that I had been put to menial work unfit for the
lady of his love, for the girl of his heart, for a woman who had been
greatly indulged, who knew nothing of hardships, whose means were
ample for one of her degree. I feared his spirit would chafe and fret
over the thought of my being a common helper in the cabin--cuddy-deck
scrubber, a ship’s scullery boy--and that to deliver me from these
degrading offices he might betray me, tell the story of our love,
and exactly reveal my condition, not doubting, I dare say, that
Captain Sutherland would then charge me for my passage and treat me
as a passenger. And, indeed, I should have been very willing to be
a passenger, to pay any exorbitant sum for that privilege, had the
thing been contrivable now that I was on board. But could it have
been managed? No. Because whether I revealed myself as a woman with a
secret which nothing could make her avow, or whether I owned my sex and
frankly declared that I had followed Tom because of my love for him, in
either case the stern and suspicious doctor would either oblige me to
land at any port we had occasion to water at, or compel the captain to
pass me into the first ship that would receive me.
I found an opportunity after the cuddy breakfast things had been
cleared away to write a letter to Tom. I wrote in my cabin and used
the pencil and paper my cousin had given to me. Whilst I wrote I had
not felt so tranquil in spirits, so easy, nay, so happy in my heart,
for months. Tom was near me. Nothing but death or ocean calamity could
separate us till we arrived at Tasmania, and then I should be in the
same land with him, with opportunities that I could not now imagine;
this writing was like talking to him, and the sweeter because it was
secret; no governor would first read my letter.
I wrote very small, in pencil, that I might put much into narrow
compass. I told him of the arrangements I had made before leaving home,
why I had dressed as a boy, why I had hidden myself in this convict
ship instead of following by a passenger vessel. I gave him my reasons
for desiring to continue as a boy, and wound up by begging him to keep
up his heart, to be sure we should be happy yet in the new land, and I
implored him to feel easy as to my situation, my duties being light, my
berth comfortable, and my associates civil and obliging.
I folded this letter into the smallest square I could pack it into, and
put it into my waistcoat pocket ready to convey to Tom at some such
another opportunity as had befallen that morning. But as it turned
out, the weather changed that day, and for four successive days it
blew hard, with incessant rain, which often flashed in whole sheets
of water betwixt the reeling masts, and not a convict appeared on deck
except the messmen at meal-times to pass the food below.
During one of these wet and howling days, when the ship, under small
canvas, was swinging over the hills of pallid water, I stood in the
recess under the break of the poop. My work was done; I had stepped
out to look at the ship before going to bed. The vessel rushed through
the night in darkness, and the night itself lay black as ink around
the sea with a little faintness over our mastheads as though there was
a moon there. I was about to go to bed, when Will came off the poop
and, distinguishing me in the light that lay on the cuddy windows, he
screwed himself into a dark corner, and called. I went down the slope
of deck.
‘I have been talking about you to the chief mate,’ said he. ‘I have
told him that by an accident I have found out who you are. I said your
mother’s name was Marlowe, and that your father, in his life, was a
client of my father’s. Mr. Bates supposes that your mother married
a cousin of her own name. I told him I knew that you were thoroughly
respectable, and that you had left your home because your stepfather
led you a dog’s life.’
‘What was the good of your telling him all this?’ said I, feeling very
angry, though I controlled myself. ‘But I know how it’ll end. You’ll
talk and talk till you betray me, and then that odious doctor will
take the first opportunity to turn me out of the ship. All that I have
suffered and passed through will go for nothing, and I shall lose sight
of Tom, and perhaps be separated from him for ever,’ and now I felt as
if I must cry.
‘Don’t talk like a fool,’ said Will; ‘I’m not going to betray you. I
want to go on helping you as I helped you from the start, but as I
ought never to have helped you. How are you going to get any clothes?
Think! Don’t talk of the slop-chest. You’re not on the articles.
There’ll not be a farthing coming to you. You’ve been searched, and, as
you said yourself, it’s out of the question you should produce money
now. Will the captain trust a stowaway? Of course not. So there’s no
slop-chest so far as you’re concerned. Yet how long d’ye think those
clothes of yours are going to hang upon your body, scrubbing and
messing about in them as you are all day long? And when wear has turned
them into Irish pennants, what are you going to do for a shift of duds?
Why, you must come to me, of course. But how can I help you if I don’t
know you in some such a way as to justify me in taking an interest in
you? Now do you see what I would be at?’ cried he, giving me a soft,
playful chuck under the chin.
‘Yes, I understand now. I ask your pardon. You are clever and look
ahead.’
‘Well, that’s all right,’ said he; ‘and now I shall be able to give you
a shift of linen and to mostly rig you out. Most of what’s in my chest
was given to me by you. Nobody can say a word when it’s understood
that your father was a client of the old man’s. It’ll raise you in
the general esteem, also. So, say what you will, I’ve done you a good
turn this blessed night. And now get to bed away out of this filthy
yowling. Look how sweetly it rains! And I’ve still three hours to
stand!’
With that he made a spring on to the poop-ladder and disappeared.