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.