“Now, then,” said Mark, nodding to a woman who was dressing her three children at no great distance from him—and the grin upon his face had by this time spread from ear to ear—“Hand over one of them young uns according to custom.”
“I wish you’d get breakfast, Mark, instead of worrying with people who don’t belong to you,” observed Martin, petulantly.
“All right,” said Mark. “She’ll do that. It’s a fair division of labour, sir. I wash her boys, and she makes our tea. I never could make tea, but anyone can wash a boy.”
The woman, who was delicate and ill, felt and understood his kindness, as well she might, for she had been covered every night with his greatcoat, while he had had for his own bed the bare boards and a rug. But Martin, who seldom got up or looked about him, was quite incensed by the folly of this speech, and expressed his dissatisfaction by an impatient groan.
“So it is, certainly,” said Mark, brushing the child’s hair as coolly as if he had been born and bred a barber.
“What are you talking about, now?” asked Martin.
“What you said,” replied Mark; “or what you meant, when you gave that there dismal vent to your feelings. I quite go along with it, sir. It is very hard upon her.”
“What is?”
“Making the voyage by herself along with these young impediments here, and going such a way at such a time of the year to join her husband. If you don’t want to be driven mad with yellow soap in your eye, young man,” said Mr. Tapley to the second urchin, who was by this time under his hands at the basin, “you’d better shut it.”
“Where does she join her husband?” asked Martin, yawning.
“Why, I’m very much afraid,” said Mr. Tapley, in a low voice, “that she don’t know. I hope she mayn’t miss him. But she sent her last letter by hand, and it don’t seem to have been very clearly understood between ’em without it, and if she don’t see him a-waving his pocket-handkerchief on the shore, like a pictur out of a songbook, my opinion is she’ll break her heart.”
“Why, how, in Folly’s name, does the woman come to be on board ship on such a wild-goose venture!” cried Martin.
Mr. Tapley glanced at him for a moment as he lay prostrate in his berth, and then said, very quietly:
“Ah! How indeed! I can’t think! He’s been away from her for two year; she’s been very poor and lonely in her own country; and has always been a-looking forward to meeting him. It’s very strange she should be here. Quite amazing! A little mad perhaps! There can’t be no other way of accounting for it.”
Martin was too far gone in the lassitude of seasickness to make any reply to these words, or even to attend to them as they were spoken. And the subject of their discourse returning at this crisis with some hot tea, effectually put a stop to any resumption of the theme by Mr. Tapley; who, when the meal was over and he had adjusted Martin’s bed, went up on deck to wash the breakfast service, which consisted of two half-pint tin mugs, and a shaving-pot of the same metal.
It is due to Mark Tapley to state that he suffered at least as much from seasickness as any man, woman, or child, on board; and that he had a peculiar faculty of knocking himself about on the smallest provocation, and losing his legs at every lurch of the ship. But resolved, in his usual phrase, to “come out strong” under disadvantageous circumstances, he was the life and soul of the steerage, and made no more of stopping in the middle of a facetious conversation to go away and be excessively ill by himself, and afterwards come back in the very best and gayest of tempers to resume it, than if such a course of proceeding had been the commonest in the world.
It cannot be said that as his illness wore off, his cheerfulness and good nature increased, because they would hardly admit of augmentation; but his usefulness among the weaker members of the party was much enlarged; and at all times and seasons there he was exerting it. If a gleam of sun shone out of the dark sky, down Mark tumbled into the cabin, and presently up he came again with a woman in his arms, or half-a-dozen children, or a man, or a bed, or a saucepan, or a basket, or something animate or inanimate, that he thought would be the better for the air. If an hour or two of fine weather in the middle of the day tempted those who seldom or never came on deck at other times to crawl into the longboat, or lie down upon the spare spars, and try to eat, there, in the centre of the group, was Mr. Tapley, handing about salt beef and biscuit, or dispensing tastes of grog, or cutting up the children’s provisions with his pocketknife, for their greater ease and comfort, or reading aloud from a venerable newspaper, or singing some roaring old song to a select party, or writing the beginnings of letters to their friends at home for people who couldn’t write, or cracking jokes with the crew, or nearly getting blown over the side, or emerging, half-drowned, from a shower of spray, or lending a hand somewhere or other; but always doing something for the general entertainment. At night, when the cooking-fire was lighted on the deck, and the driving sparks that flew among the rigging, and the clouds of sails, seemed to menace the ship with certain annihilation by fire, in case the elements of air and water failed to compass her destruction; there, again, was Mr. Tapley, with his coat off and his shirtsleeves turned up to
