For an instant the two looked at each other, and then Rufus Dawes was seized from behind by his collar, and flung with a shock upon the deck.
Leaping to his feet, his first impulse was to rush upon his assailant, but he saw the ready bayonet of the sentry gleam, and he checked himself with an effort, for his assailant was Mr. Maurice Frere.
“What the devil do you do here?” asked the gentleman with an oath. “You lazy, skulking hound, what brings you here? If I catch you putting your foot on the quarter-deck again, I’ll give you a week in irons!”
Rufus Dawes, pale with rage and mortification, opened his mouth to justify himself, but he allowed the words to die on his lips. What was the use? “Go down below, and remember what I’ve told you,” cried Frere; and comprehending at once what had occurred, he made a mental minute of the name of the defaulting sentry.
The convict, wiping the blood from his face, turned on his heel without a word, and went back through the strong oak door into his den. Frere leant forward and took the girl’s shapely hand with an easy gesture, but she drew it away, with a flash of her black eyes.
“You coward!” she said.
The stolid soldier close beside them heard it, and his eye twinkled. Frere bit his thick lips with mortification, as he followed the girl into the cuddy. Sarah Purfoy, however, taking the astonished Sylvia by the hand, glided into her mistress’s cabin with a scornful laugh, and shut the door behind her.
Chapter II.
Sarah Purfoy
Convictism having been safely got under hatches, and put to bed in its Government allowance of sixteen inches of space per man, cut a little short by exigencies of shipboard, the cuddy was wont to pass some not unpleasant evenings. Mrs. Vickers, who was poetical and owned a guitar, was also musical and sang to it. Captain Blunt was a jovial, coarse fellow; Surgeon Pine had a mania for story-telling; while if Vickers was sometimes dull, Frere was always hearty. Moreover, the table was well served, and what with dinner, tobacco, whist, music, and brandy and water, the sultry evenings passed away with a rapidity of which the wild beasts ‘tween decks, cooped by sixes in berths of a mere five feet square, had no conception.
On this particular evening, however, the cuddy was dull. Dinner fell flat, and conversation languished.
“No signs of a breeze, Mr. Best?” asked Blunt, as the first officer came in and took his seat.
“None, sir.”
“These–he, he!–awful calms,” says Mrs. Vickers. “A week, is it not, Captain Blunt?”
“Thirteen days, mum,” growled Blunt.
“I remember, off the Coromandel coast,” put in cheerful Pine, “when we had the plague in the Rattlesnake–”
“Captain Vickers, another glass of wine?” cried Blunt, hastening to cut the anecdote short.
“Thank you, no more. I have the headache.”
“Headache–um–don’t wonder at it, going down among those fellows. It is infamous the way they crowd these ships. Here we have over two hundred souls on board, and not boat room for half of ’em.”
“Two hundred souls! Surely not,” says Vickers. “By the King’s Regulations–”
“One hundred and eighty convicts, fifty soldiers, thirty in ship’s crew, all told, and–how many?–one, two three–seven in the cuddy. How many do you make that?”
“We are just a little crowded this time,” says Best.
“It is very wrong,” says Vickers, pompously. “Very wrong. By the King’s Regulations–”
But the subject of the King’s Regulations was even more distasteful to the cuddy than Pine’s interminable anecdotes, and Mrs. Vickers hastened to change the subject.
“Are you not heartily tired of this dreadful life, Mr. Frere?”
“Well, it is not exactly the life I had hoped to lead,” said Frere, rubbing a freckled hand over his stubborn red hair; “but I must make the best of it.”
“Yes, indeed,” said the lady, in that subdued manner with which one comments upon a well-known accident, “it must have been a great shock to you to be so suddenly deprived of so large a fortune.”
“Not only that, but to find that the black sheep who got it all sailed for India within a week of my uncle’s death! Lady Devine got a letter from him on the day of the funeral to say that he had taken his passage in the Hydaspes for Calcutta, and never meant to come back again!”
“Sir Richard Devine left no other children?”
“No, only this mysterious Dick, whom I never saw, but who must have hated me.”
“Dear, dear! These family quarrels are dreadful things. Poor Lady Devine, to lose in one day a husband and a son!”
“And the next morning to hear of the murder of her cousin! You know that we are connected with the Bellasis family. My aunt’s father married a sister of the second Lord Bellasis.”
“Indeed. That was a horrible murder. So you think that the dreadful man you pointed out the other day did it?”
“The jury seemed to think not,” said Mr. Frere, with a laugh; “but I don’t know anybody else who could have a motive for it. However, I’ll go on deck and have a smoke.”
“I wonder what induced that old hunks of a shipbuilder to try to cut off his only son in favour of a cub of that sort,” said Surgeon Pine to Captain Vickers as the broad back of Mr. Maurice Frere disappeared up the companion.
“Some boyish follies abroad, I believe; self-made men are always impatient of extravagance. But it is hard upon Frere. He is not a bad sort of fellow for all his roughness, and when a young man finds that an accident deprives him of a quarter of a million of money and leaves him without a sixpence beyond his commission in a marching regiment under orders for a convict settlement, he has some reason to rail against fate.”
“How was it that the son came in for the money after all, then?”
“Why, it seems that when old Devine returned from sending for his lawyer to alter his will, he got a fit of apoplexy, the result of his rage, I suppose, and when they opened his room door in the morning they found him dead.”
“And the son’s away on the sea somewhere,” said Mr. Vickers “and knows nothing of his good fortune. It is quite a romance.”
“I am glad that Frere did not get the money,” said Pine, grimly sticking to his prejudice; “I have seldom seen a face I liked less, even among my yellow jackets yonder.”
“Oh dear, Dr. Pine! How can you?” interjected Mrs. Vickers. “‘Pon my soul, ma’am, some of them have mixed in good society, I can tell you. There’s pickpockets and swindlers down below who have lived in the best company.”
“Dreadful wretches!” cried Mrs. Vickers, shaking out her skirts. “John, I will go on deck.”
At the signal, the party rose.
“Ecod, Pine,” says Captain Blunt, as the two were left alone together, “you and I are always putting our foot into it!”
“Women are always in the way aboard ship,” returned Pine.
“Ah! Doctor, you don’t mean that, I know,” said a rich soft voice at his elbow.
It was Sarah Purfoy emerging from her cabin.
“Here is the wench!” cries Blunt. “We are talking of your eyes, my dear.” “Well, they’ll bear talking about, captain, won’t they?” asked she, turning them full upon him.
“By the Lord, they will!” says Blunt, smacking his hand on the table. “They’re the finest eyes I’ve seen in my life, and they’ve got the reddest lips under ‘m that–”
“Let me pass, Captain Blunt, if you please. Thank you, doctor.”
And before the admiring commander could prevent her, she modestly swept out of the cuddy.
“She’s a fine piece of goods, eh?” asked Blunt, watching her. “A spice o’ the devil in her, too.”
Old Pine took a huge pinch of snuff.
“Devil! I tell you what it is, Blunt. I don’t know where Vickers picked her up, but I’d rather trust my life with the worst of those ruffians ‘tween decks, than in her keeping, if I’d done her an injury.”
Blunt laughed.
“I don’t believe she’d think much of sticking a man, either!” he said, rising. “But I must go on deck, doctor.” Pine followed him more slowly. “I don’t pretend to know much about women,” he said to himself, “but that girl’s got a story of her own, or I’m much mistaken. What brings her on board this ship as lady’s-maid is more than I can fathom.” And as, sticking his pipe between his teeth, he walked down the now deserted deck to the main hatchway, and turned to watch the white figure gliding up and down the poop-deck, he saw it joined by another and a darker one, he muttered, “She’s after no good, I’ll swear.”
At that moment his arm was touched by a soldier in undress uniform, who had come up the hatchway. “What is it?”