CHAPTER XVI.

A

ANDREW HAS AN ARGUMENT WITH

CAPTAIN ROSCOE.

NDREW had lain for several hours awake, every

hoarse call and every footfall on the deck above him emphasising the sense of his misery; but at last he fell into a troubled slumber, haunted by nightmares of the imagination and weird travesties of his recent adventures with which sleep peopled his dreams. He was aroused by the order "Up hammocks." He tumbled out, and with the help and direction of a sailor who seemed to have taken compassion upon him, he rolled up and stowed his hammock. While he was thus engaged, the Captain's coxwain approached him, and said with ominous solemnity, "The Captain wants to see you, Prosser -that's your name, is n't it?"

Andrew nodded, and with a heightened colour and some trepidation, notwithstanding the firmness of his nerves, he followed the coxwain upon deck. The weather had changed during the night. The wind had shifted into the north, and the atmosphere had the clearness and transparency which accompany a wind from that quarter. The frigate was on a taut bowline, and heading north by east, clothed with

canvas up to the trucks. The sails, distended by the wind, looked as if they were carved out of marble, the yards were braced with mathematical exactitude, and nothing but the shivering of the weather leech of the main-royal reminded the onlooker that those towering masses of canvas were only subdued to majestic rigidity by masterly seamanship. The wind, engulfing itself into those gleaming concavities, boomed off the resisting contours with a monotonous roar.

Captain Roscoe was walking to and fro on the weather side of the quarter-deck, dressed in full uniform-white kerseymere knee-breeches with gold buckles, gold-braided coat, and cocked hat with its broad glittering band. A knot of officers were standing talking together on the opposite side of the deck, and when Andrew approached the Captain, they stopped their conversation to observe the interview, which appeared to their practised eyes to be fraught with some significance.

Andrew raised his cap and then replaced it on his head as Captain Roscoe stopped short in his walk and surveyed Andrew with a look of chilling severity and that air of calm superiority with which tall stature reinforces official dignity. The next moment the coxwain with a smart blow sent Andrew's cap spinning upon the deck.

"Dowse your truck on the quarter-deck, you lubber," he growled indignantly.

Andrew's eye flashed, and he turned fiercely round towards the coxwain as if for a moment he meditated reprisals; but the Captain's cold and authoritative voice checked his first hasty impulse.

"Fall back, coxwain," he said, "and moderate your zeal with new-comers. Ignorance is always pardonable."

Andrew looked at Captain Roscoe, and inwardly confessed that he had seldom seen a nobler specimen of manhood. Besides being unusually tall, he was broad-shouldered, and as straight, though not as stiff, as a ramrod. His features were finely moulded, or perhaps chiselled would be the more appropriate word, the cheeks spare but glowing with health, the full blue eye sparkling and piercing in its steady gaze, the lips thin and firmly compressed, the chin and jaw square, and the brows meeting in a straight line. The absence of curves and rounded outlines gave a severe expression to his features, but his voice was clear, sonorous, and agreeably modulated.

"Pick up your cap," he said calmly, “but do not outrage the coxwain's sense of etiquette by wearing it at present. You wished to speak to me?" "I did, sir."

"I was pressed last night," Andrew began in an indignant tone.

"But, sir, that is an outrage. I am a peaceable citizen

"Say subject: citizen has a Gallic sound which grates upon my ears."

"I regard it as an act of brutal tyranny and oppression to drag me away from my vocation”

"You were on board a smuggling lugger," said the Captain, coldly. "Instead of defrauding the King's

revenue, you have now an opportunity of acting an honest and loyal part."

"I was never a smuggler, sir."

"Well, if not, you have been sailing very near the wind.”

"But it is an invasion of the liberty of the subject," Andrew went on with less assurance. "My concerns on board the lugger are nobody's business. I presume the British constitution is not yet identical with the Spanish Inquisition."

"You are paying out too much slack, my friend. We are not here to discuss abstract politics. But as you seem to be a man of education, I am willing to hear a personal statement. What was your occupa

tion before you were impressed?

"A schoolmaster."

"Where?"

"In a Scottish village," Andrew replied with some hesitation, for he perceived that he was treading on rather dangerous ground.

"Its name. ""

"Fownie, sir."

"Where is that?"

"In Forfarshire."

"How came you to be steering down Channel then ? You must have been giving your pupils a long holiday. Speak, sir, and don't hang in the wind, if you please."

"I had the misfortune to incur the enmity of an important person in the neighbourhood.”

"Who?"

"Lord Wimpole."

"How was that?"

"The reasons are of a delicate nature, and if you will excuse me—”

'Certainly I pry into no man's secrets. Well, what do you want!" "To be liberated."

The Captain smiled faintly.

"Impossible!"

"I am to be treated as if I were a negro slave? I have been kidnapped, trepanned!" cried Andrew, hotly.

66 'Pitch your voice in a lower key on the quarterdeck," said the Captain, sternly. "And listen to me. From your training and occupation you are under the empire of words; you are rhetorical. That's all very well in its own way, but on board ship we are categorical; we leave sentiment, rant, phrasemongering to the French: but I have no objection to reason with you. You will have to obey, of course, but it is best to obey from conviction. From your account you have forfeited your situation; consequently it is an advantage for you to find one ready-made for you." "But you will own that it is a hardship for an educated man to be bullied and browbeaten

"You won't be bullied if you obey orders."

“But I have lost my liberty," said Andrew, with tears in his eyes.

"We all have," said the Captain, tranquilly. "I too obey orders-sealed orders not unfrequently." "But if I cannot conscientiously obey these orders?" objected Andrew, with a look of desperation.

"You will have to get rid of such an upstart and contentious conscience. You will have to keep it under hatches and well battened down."