My reverie was disturbed--for Cliffe stood silent by my side--by the sight of the boy coming along with the cabin dinner, and presently the captain and I were seated at table.
This was my first meal aboard, and I often laugh silently when memory returns me the image of my little skipper sitting behind a roast fowl, blinking and stretching his lips at it, then rising and lurching over it, being too short to carve it sitting. He saw amusement in my face, for on beginning to eat he said he often lamented that he had come in at the tail end of his family when nearly all the height had been served out. He was the last born, and arrived when not very many inches were left. He had a brother six foot high, and his mother was a big woman. He told me that he once dined with a company of people when the Queen's health was proposed and everyone stood. His neighbour requested him to stand up as the Queen's health was being drunk. He answered he _was_ up. These were the sort of mortifications, he said, to which little men were subjected.
After a bit, talking always as I now did on the subject of the 'Lady Emma' and our chances of finding Miss Otway alive in the wreck, I asked if the boatswain of the brig--that jumping seaman who had been whaling seven years--had ever sighted the New Orkneys?
'I didn't think of asking,' he answered, 'but I'll soon find out, sir.'
He at once told the boy who waited on us to send Bodkin aft. In a few minutes the man came; by this time we had dined, but the captain lingered to hear what this boatswain had to say before he went on deck to send the mate to his dinner.
'I've been telling this gentleman,' said the captain, leaning his little figure against a stanchion and discharging a whole broadside of grimaces at Bodkin, who stood staring at us and around him, astonished at the summons, 'that you've been a-whaling seven years in the Pacific and Southern Ocean.'
Here Bodkin lifted his hand to his forehead in the seaman's salute to me.
'Know anything of the New Orkneys?' said the captain with nervous abruptness like the briskness of a bird.
'Well, sir, bin off 'em again and again.'
'Sit down,' said I. 'Boy, give Mr. Bodkin a glass of sherry.'
Bodkin put down his cap and sat; he had evidently been called from some heavy work, and his face and hairy arms bare to the elbows, and his well-baked throat naked to the iron-grey hairs upon his chest, shone with sweat. He took the glass and tipped down the wine.