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."