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Day after day we lay in our narrow berths, too sick to read, too unhappy to talk, watching the cabin lamp as it swung uneasily in its well-oiled gimbals, and listening to the gurgle and swash of the water around the after dead-lights, and the regular clank, clank of the blocks of the try-sail sheet as the rolling of the vessel swung the heavy boom from side to side.
"Little chance of that, I'm afraid," observed the captain; "but, Gerald, tell the mate to have the dead-lights closed. The sea will be getting up presently, and we shall have it washing through the stern windows." "Ay, ay, sir," answered his son, who knew that an order given must be delivered immediately, and was about to go.
"The first lieutenant is in the forehold, sir; all the marines have got their dead-lights still in, and the master is working-up his log, the gun-room steward says. I hope these will do, sir; they are the greatest idlers in the ship, I believe." Lord Geoffrey Cleveland was the second son of the third duke in the English empire, and he knew it, as well as any one on board.
The same broadside I lost my leg old Pew lost his dead-lights. It was a master surgeon, him that ampytated me out of college and all Latin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged like a dog, and sun-dried like the rest, at Corso Castle. That was Roberts' men, that was, and comed of changing names to their ships Royal Fortune and so on.
It blew a regular gale now, and a very rain of straw debris fell through the cane-bottomed chair on which the Captain sat, as he vainly essayed to sooth his friend by earnest, pathetic, and even tender adjurations to "clap a stopper upon that," to "hold hard," to "belay", to "shut down the dead-lights of her peepers," and such-like expressive phrases.
Anthony from this man of enigmatic words her father. Presently he observed that the sheen of the two deck dead-lights of Mr. Smith's room had gone out. The old gentleman had been surprisingly quick in getting into bed. Shortly afterwards the lamp in the foremost skylight of the saloon was turned out; and this was the sign that the steward had taken in the tray and had retired for the night.
When he had lain a good while in all the agony of suspense, the boy tumbled headlong into his apartment, with such noise, that he believed the mast had gone by the board; and starting upright in his bed, asked, with all the symptoms of horror, what was the cause of that disturbance? The boy, half-stunned by his fall, answered in a dolorous tone, "I'm come to put up the dead-lights."
It was his watch on the main engines, you see, twelve to four. Our berth was flooded. There was a couple of inches of water on the floor, and at every sea the water flew through the leaky joints of the dead-lights, all over old Croasan. To and fro on the floor my slippers were floating and a torn magazine swam into the room from the alleyway as I opened the door.
We had been examining the machine-shop, the cat and I, and whatever his views about it may have been mine were of great satisfaction; for when I had got the dead-lights unscrewed so that I could see well about me I had been delighted by finding there everything that my boat-building project required.
The gale when fully "brewed up" proved to be no mean descendant of the family of storms which have tormented the celebrated bay since the present economy of nature began; and many of those who were on board of the troop-ship at that time had their eyes opened and their minds enlarged as to the nature of a thorough gale; when hatches have to be battened down, and the dead-lights closed; when steersmen have to be fastened in their places, and the maddened sea seems to roar defiance to the howling blast, and all things movable on deck are swept away as if they were straws, and many things not meant to be movable are wrenched from their fastenings with a violence that nothing formed by man can resist, and timbers creak and groan, and loose furniture gyrates about until smashed to pieces, and well-guarded glass and crockery leap out of bounds to irrecoverable ruin, and even the seamen plunge about and stagger, and landsmen hold on to ring-bolts and belaying-pins, or cling to bulkheads for dear life, while mighty billows, thundering in-board, hiss along the decks, and everything, above, below, and around, seems being swept into eternity by the besom of destruction!
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