‘If we’re not eaten by the maggots or the sharks, you may be yet. There’s few servants didn’t own to more ’n one master.’
‘What in life has hurt you to leave you so embittered?’
‘Not embittered — practical — for seein’ what the likes of you persuade ’emselves don’t exist.’
‘You too, are given to imagining,’ Mrs Roxburgh said. ‘I am not all that you believe, for instance. I know and understand hardship — though I’ve grown away from it — and had it easy. I can remember winter nights when a teddy-cake was a luxury.’
‘Am I right then, in imaginin’ you was the servant who took ’is fancy?’ Mr Pilcher had never looked so odiously vindictive.
‘I was never anybody’s servant. If Mr Roxburgh asked me to be his wife, it was — I believe — because he loved me. In a sense I am under obligation, but choose to serve someone I respect — and love,’ she added.
While they were engaged in what could have been an ‘imagined’ conversation in so far as it was related to her humble, and consequently, unreal past, the shadows had been enshrouding them. Now a moon was rising, like a single medal of the honesty her mother-in-law liked to arrange in vases, because it was so reliable and needed no further attention. Against a drained sky, the present moon might have passed for transparent to those who had not made a study of its face and learnt its peculiarities.
Thinking she had worsted her opponent, Mrs Roxburgh was preparing to break away. ‘My husband will be expecting me.’
But the mate’s eyes were glittering, like her own hands she realized, as they held the empty pannikin.
He pointed to her rings. ‘Will ye give me one?’
‘Why ever should you want it?’
‘As a memento!’ He laughed, apparently embarrassed.
‘Perhaps we’ll never wake! And if we do, will you want to remember this bad dream?’
‘I’m not one that can afford dreams, and might get meself out of some future hole if I have a little something to fall back on.’ As he spoke he fell to fingering the nest of garnets.
‘Take it!’ she said. ‘I no longer have any use for them. For that matter, I’ve never truthfully felt they were mine.’
She stretched out her hand, and he practically dragged the ring off, and fitted it on a little finger. Held to the light for him to look at, the garnets smouldered back at him.
‘Now you too, can be counted among the capitalists,’ she told him in making her escape.
She was glad of the accompaniment provided by her skirt, sweeping coral and brushing scrub, as she returned to the camp and a mouthful of rancid salt pork.
In the twilight before dawn the Roxburghs were awakened by voices and a sound of canvas, to find that their shelter was being dismantled. The men at work were not unkindly disposed towards them, and one went so far as to apologize to the tenants for the inconvenience they were causing them.
‘Bosun’ll bawl at us,’ he explained, ‘if we’re not stowed afore the captain finishes ’is prayers.’
Mr Roxburgh laughed rather too heartily at the sailor’s joke, then made a mental note to commend them all to their Maker when a more suitable moment offered itself. Since the greatest need for it arose, he had lost the habit of prayer, he was ashamed to realize, but his wife no doubt included him in her own petitions. Prayer, he had always suspected, came more easily to women through their cultivating a more intimate, emotional relationship with God. Or was that so? Could one be certain of anything?
His reflections ended by making him grumpy. ‘If you don’t get up, Ellen, you’ll put them against us. They’ll be in a bad enough temper as it is.’
‘Yes,’ she murmured drowsily, but could not yet bestir herself in the delicious grey which stretches between sleep and waking, not even if her sloth caused the Lord God of Hosts to abandon them at full gallop. ‘Yes,’ she repeated sharper, and sat up too quick, wondering how she should dress for the day ahead, before realizing there was no choice.
She might at least have inquired after Mr Roxburgh’s health had not her own heavy mind, and perhaps Mr Pilcher’s scorn, been against it. More than anything her pregnancy outweighed her solicitude for others.
‘Shall I give you a hand?’ Mr Roxburgh offered magnanimously.
She was grateful to be pulled to her feet, and now that they were facing each other, she kissed him; it was still dark, though possibly not dark enough to satisfy Mr Roxburgh. Because she could feel a quivering in his rigid fingers she was careful to avoid the mouth.
After the launching of the boats, which developed into a turmoil of emotion, oaths, torn skin, bruised vanity, and barely suppressed hatred, they were able to set course for the mainland thanks to a wind the captain and his first officer had been hoping to catch. But still the long-boat limped. Mr Courtney was disconcerted to the extent that he decided on hailing the pinnace. An excess of shouting drew their attention, and when the distance between the two boats had sufficiently diminished, Mr Pilcher flung an unwilling hawser. Mr Courtney himself seized upon it with what appeared to Mr Roxburgh the air of a man taking up a gage. He made it fast. No doubt it would have gone against the grain to admit, even from between his clenched teeth, that the long-boat was once more dependent on the good graces of the pinnace.
Mr Roxburgh recalled his resolution to say prayers, but again the moment was not propitious; his heart was still padding irregularly he felt, as the result of his recent exertions, and someone had jobbed him in the eye with an elbow during the general mellay of clambering aboard in a stiff surf.
Remembering his wife’s condition he deflected his thoughts ever so slightly in her direction, and was prompted to remark for her moral sustenance, ‘We can thank God, my dear, for bringing us a few yards closer to civilization.’
He spoke at an instant when the wind veered, giving every indication of wanting to hustle them away from the coast and out to sea. As in so many of nature’s manifestations, the squall seemed only to some degree capricious, beyond which it was driven by an almost personal rage or malice. Mrs Roxburgh dared wonder whether the Deity Himself were not taking revenge on them for their human shortcomings.
In the circumstances she was not sustained by her husband’s untimely remark. Physically she was at her lowest. She had the greatest difficulty in preventing her head from being dragged by its unnatural weight down upon her slack breasts, above her swollen belly, and was only alerted by overhearing a colloquy hurled back and forth between the long-boat and the pinnace. Mr Courtney had resumed command of the former in the absence of the captain’s faculties, and was upbraiding his subordinate Pilcher for making no move to adapt his rig to meet the sudden emergency.
Mrs Roxburgh’s dull eyes and woman’s ears did not adjust themselves to a situation as technical as it was masculine, until forced out of her apathy by the untoward emotion of the contestants and the sight of Pilcher taking an axe and hacking at the hawser on which they depended.
It was soon done: the long-boat was free to flounder on her chosen course, to the best of her poor ability, and if Providence liked to favour her.
In the beginning, none of those aboard dared give expression to his thoughts. Glad of the occupation, some of the crew took of their own accord to bailing, for the water had started seeping through the martyred timbers in spite of the attentions received while beached on the cay. Mr Roxburgh joined them willingly. So did his wife when the tin abandoned by other hands floated towards her.
During a pause from his work it occurred to Mr Roxburgh to ask, ‘What has become of the boy, Ellen? He didn’t surely abscond to the pinnace?’
Because death promised to become an everyday occurrence in which tuberose sentiments and even sincere grief might sound superfluous, she answered in the flattest voice, ‘No, he was drowned yesterday evening, gathering shellfish from the reef.’