‘Why, the fellow unharnessed him. After which, I got up. And the horse heaved himself to his feet. He couldn’t stop trembling.’
Mr Roxburgh too, had begun to tremble, with annoyance, and his ineffectual love.
As the ship lurched farther on its voyage, the diners seemed contained by a flickering of light rather than by timber.
Mr Courtney asked to be excused.
By the time the cloth was removed, and the captain as well, Mr Roxburgh doubted he would ever learn to speak to his wife in simple words.
They continued sitting at the table which Spurgeon had concealed under a dull garnet-coloured plush. Mrs Roxburgh induced her husband to join her in a game of piquet. Neither cared for cards, but now they played.
At last Mrs Roxburgh pushed the game away from her. She began to laugh. Her elbows protruded sharply from the sleeves as she clasped her hands behind her head. ‘Were you entertained by the captain?’
Mr Roxburgh grumbled in gathering up the disordered cards.
‘Why’, she asked, ‘do you suppose he told it?’
‘Why do people speak? For the most part to fill in the silences.’
They fell silent after that. As her lips came together he would have devoured them contrary to his habit, but it might have given her too rude a surprise.
The ship was shaking with an odd, self-destructive motion while they prepared themselves for bed.
Mrs Roxburgh thought she would never fall asleep. Had he succumbed? She listened. She touched her face and could tell it had grown haggard. She would not sleep that night, but must have dropped off eventually, to be drifting through whichever element it was, hair blown or flowing behind her, while her face tried on credible expressions. Suddenly she was lashed. It was her hair turned to knotted cords. I will, I must endure it because this is my only purpose. She kissed his hands. And kissed. And looked down into his facelessness. Just as the beam, inexpertly fixed, perhaps deliberately, by the carpenter at Hobart Town, began slipping. It is piercing my husband’s heart. It is lying embedded in the yellow waxen always unconvincing flesh. Ohhhhh! A mouth grows egg-shaped under the influence of despair.
Mrs Roxburgh awoke and looked down at the lower berth. Her husband was seated on the edge, head bowed, legs dangling. She recognized the whorl in the crown of dark hair which would have served as an identification mark in the most horrible circumstances.
‘What is it, my dear?’ Alarm made her voice sound raucous.
She was already climbing down, ungainly in her haste, her hair impeding a strained progress.
‘It’s the pain, Ellen! Oh God, the most awful pain yet!’
At once she rummaged for the little flask containing the tincture of digitalis and administered the drops in a finger of water. She kneeled at his feet, chafing his knees. At least she could now do something which would prevent anyone accusing her. She would infuse him with her own excessive health and powers of resistance. As she kneeled, she willed him to accept what she had to offer.
‘I’ll not have you suffer,’ she was mouthing; ‘you can depend on me, my dearest.’
‘Oh, I’m not going to die!’ Mr Roxburgh ground it out from between his teeth, and laughed without mirth, for the vise was still squeezing him.
Yet he was soothed by his wife’s touch. He closed his eyes, and thought to hear his mother’s voice, her commands for his welfare, as she proceeded to allay one of his coughing fits.
Now the world had shrunk to its core, or to the small circle of light in the middle of the ocean, in which two human souls were momentarily united, their joint fears fusing them into a force against evil.
As soon as she could safely leave her husband Mrs Roxburgh put on her mantle and resolved to see whether it were possible to procure some milk. She had eased him back upon the pillows, from where his expression and the regular rise and fall of his chest suggested that he might be dozing, or at least enjoying the relief which comes from exhaustion.
She herself was exhausted, she realized as she scrambled out upon the deck, but her condition added to the splendour of the night: the breathing of canvas overhead sounded the stronger and deeper for her almost drunken reeling through the forest of her hair, while short bursts of light from a recurring moon transformed the ship, despite its heaving, into solid sculpture.
Mrs Roxburgh made her way towards the galley, and was guided in her final steps by snores rasping in discord against the integrated sounds of sea and sail. It was Spurgeon the steward-cook, who had spread his blanket on the floor of his official sanctum.
‘My husband’, she explained, ‘is sick,’ before begging a little of the milk they had taken on at Sydney.
Spurgeon was confused by the light he made after a fumbling with lucifers. ‘You may be lucky,’ he growled. ‘If ’twas tomorrow evenin’ I doubt there’d be enough to wet a baby’s whistle. Milk will be off. If ’tisn’t that already.’ He stuck his nose inside a blackened can.
She waited patiently, determined there should be milk enough for her invalid, while Spurgeon, who seemed to have discarded the conventions to suit the hour and the circumstances, repeated mumbling, ‘Sick, eh? With gentlefolk, I thought it was mal de mur.’
Too tired to compose an answer, Mrs Roxburgh pretended not to hear; while he warmed the milk on a reluctant fire in an atmosphere stuffy with sleep and charcoal.
When the milk was ready she was so grateful Spurgeon grew quite pleased with himself. He smiled along his nose at the favour he had done her, and glanced down at her wedding ring, or so it appeared.
‘That’s the lot,’ he announced, ‘ma’am!’ and laughed, and added, ‘I wouldn’ do the same for any other lady.’
Mrs Roxburgh was undecided whether she liked or disliked Spurgeon, but was free to hurry away. Slopping the milk slightly in her haste, warming her hands on the greasy vessel, she was panting with achievement; she would allow neither the steward’s ambiguous behaviour nor the swaying of the night to confuse her.
When she returned to the cabin, the candle had burnt low, but Mr Roxburgh opened his eyes and looked as though prepared to check an inventory of her every feature.
‘I’ve brought you some warm milk,’ she said.
Tranquillity perhaps made him forget to remind her of his loathing for the skin of boiled milk.
She helped him into an upright position, and supported him in it with an arm, after first pouring into a cracked cup the greater part of the milk ration.
‘There!’ she coaxed.
As he sank his mouth she greedily watched, until she saw the string of milk hanging and swinging from his lower lip. Well, she thought, he has forgot about that at least. She recalled her father supping at a cup of hot milk in the kitchen after lambing. Pa liked to soak his bread. He was greedy as herself for food, in the days when she had to make the most of a little.
But the beard of milk was trembling on Mr Roxburgh’s lip. She almost wiped it for him, when she saw him suck the milk-skin into his mouth.
While the two of them rocked and swayed together on the bosom of the sea, and she explored with her eyes the cracks and knots in their roughly constructed berths, she thought how she would have loved to taste a door-step of fresh-baked bread, dripping with warm, sweetish milk such as he used to offer her when she was still a little girl, his hands in which the cracks never seemed to close, and the thumb with the horn-thing which always repelled, and sometimes frightened her.
She must have dozed, for she had allowed her husband to slip lower and the cup she was holding to tilt.
Austin Roxburgh appeared restored to an acceptable level of reality. He was gently sleeping. Once or twice he groaned, not in pain, rather for the dryness of an open mouth. Which he closed to moisten. Opening and closing, to suck at the air, and alternately, dredge for moisture. She was surprised to find how calmly she could contemplate his cheek fretting against one of her breasts. The breast had escaped from its covering, at its centre the teat on which his struggling mouth once or twice threatened to fasten.