"Oh, my eye, Mas'r Harry! Dear heart, dear heart, how bad I do feel!"
"Why, you kept laughing at me, you wretch," I said, as I rejoiced at
Tom's downfall.
"_Surely_, so I did, Mas'r Harry--I did, I did--but I didn't think it
was half so--so bad as this here. Oh, my eye! how badly I do feel!"
"You old humbug, you!" I cried in my triumph, for I was getting over my
troubles, "sneered and jeered and pooh-poohed it all, you did, Tom, and
now it has you by the hip at last."
"No, it hasn't, Mas'r Harry," he groaned. "It aren't the hip, it's more
in the middle. Oh, my eye! how ill I am!"
"I'm precious glad of it, Tom," I said.
"Well, I do call that cowardly, Mas'r Harry--I do really," groaned
Tom--"'specially as you wasn't half so bad as I am."
"Why, I was ten times worse, Tom," I cried.
"Oh, Mas'r Harry! don't say that," groaned the poor fellow, "because
it's unpossible. If--Oh, my eye! how ill I do feel!--if you'd been ten
times as bad as I am, you'd have died ten times over. Oh, dear! oh,
dear! How is it the doctors can't cure this horrid--? Oh, dear me! how
ill I do feel!"
It was very unfeeling, of course, but all the same I sat down close to
poor Tom as he lay upon the deck, and roared with laughter to see his
miserable yellow face, and the way in which he screwed up his eyes. But
it was only three days before when I was really ill that Tom was
strutting about the deck ridiculing sea-sickness, and telling me what a
poor sort of a fellow I was to knuckle under to a few qualms like that.
For I must confess to having been one of the first attacked when we were
well out at sea. It was the first time I had ever seen the blue water;
and no sooner did a bit of a gale spring up, and the great steamer begin
to climb up the waves and then seem to be falling down, down, down in
the most horrible way possible, than I began to prove what a thorough
landsman I was, and, like a great many more passengers, was exceedingly
ill.
I remember thinking that it would have been much better if I had stayed
at home instead of tempting the seas.
Then as I grew worse I called myself by all sorts of names for coming
upon such a mad expedition.
Then I vowed that if I could get on shore again, I'd never come to sea
any more.
Lastly I grew so bad that I didn't care what became of me, and I felt
that if the steamer sank I should be relieved from all my terrible
pains.
And all this time Tom was skipping about the deck as merry as a lark,
chaffing with the sailors or making friends with the firemen, and every
now and then coming to me and making me so cross that I felt as if I
could hit him.
"Now do let me fetch the doctor to you, Mas'r Harry," he kept on saying,
pulling a solemn face, but with his eyes looking full of fun.
"I tell you I don't want the doctor. Don't be such an ass, Tom," I
cried.
"But you do seem so ill, Mas'r Harry," he said with mock sympathy. "Let
me see if I can get you some brimstone and treacle."
"Just you wait till I get better, Tom," I said feebly. "You nasty
wretch, you. Brimstone and treacle! Ugh!"
My sufferings ought to have awakened his sympathy, but it did not in the
least, and I found that nobody thought anything of a sea-sick passenger.
But at last I got over it, and, to my intense delight, all of a sudden
Tom was smitten with the complaint, and became more prostrate than even
I.
I did not forget the way he had tortured me, and you may be sure that I
did not omit to ask him if he would try the brimstone and treacle. I
behaved worse to him, I believe, for I tortured him by taking him cold
fat pork and hard biscuits, and paid him various other little attentions
of a kindred sort, making him groan with pain, till one day--it was
while the sea was very rough, and I thought him too ill to move--he
suddenly got up.
"Tell you what, Mas'r Harry," he said, "I'm not going to stand your
games no longer. I shall get up and be better;" and better he seemed to
grow at once, so that by the next day he was almost himself again, and
we stood by the high bulwarks watching the great Atlantic rollers as
they came slowly on, as if to swallow up our ship.