I remember again, one afternoon, that I was sent with a tray of seltzer and glasses to the poop. The commander of the ship was seated in company with the doctor and the two military men. An awning was stretched overhead, and its shadow was pleasant with the breath of a small breeze off the beam, and it danced with a strange pulsing of lights from the diamond twinkling of the brilliant blue sea.
We had by this time crossed the Equator; I believe our latitude was about three degrees south. Sentries paced the fore part of the poop as usual; the sentry forward sheltered himself in the gloom of the corner of sail; a few convicts were lounging in a lifeless manner betwixt the barricades. Tom was one of the convicts. He sat at the foot of the mainmast in the shadow of it with his elbows on his knees, his brows betwixt his clenched fists, his head hanging down, his eyes rooted to the deck, his whole posture extraordinary with its suggestion of that sort of grief which turns a man into stone.
Captain Sutherland and the others sat near the foremost skylight that stood but a short distance from the break of the poop. The captain told me to put the tray down on the skylight and fetch a bottle of brandy. I returned with the brandy and a corkscrew, when, just as I was about to draw the cork, the doctor lifted his hand, and with an odd pleased look, bade me stand still and make no noise. Then it was that I heard a sound of singing; the melody was a hymn, but I cannot give it a name; I have since believed it was the air of a well-known hymn sung to words which were written by some convict converted into an honest man by the doctor during a previous voyage.
I judged by the volume of sound that about ten men sang; they sat under the hatch where the gratings made a frame like a bird-cage, otherwise we should not have heard them. They sang well, in good time, and one deep voice was noticeable for its manner of working into the singing in a harmonising way as though the fellow knew music.
‘Hush, I beg of you,’ said the doctor, with a face of grave satisfaction.
No one could have listened to the voice of the finest Italian opera-singer of the day with more relish and ardent attention than the doctor to the chanting of the convicts.