Maryon had spoken to Captain Carton concerning me. For, the captain came straight up to me, and says he, " My brave fellow, you have been Miss Maryon's bodyguard all along, and you shall remain so. Nobody shall supersede you in the distinction and pleasure of protecting that young lady." I thanked his honor in the fittest words I could find, and that night I was placed on my old post of watching the place where she slept. More than once in the night, I saw Captain Carton come out into the air, and stroll about there, to see that all was well. I have now this other singular confession to make, that I saw him with a heavy heart.
Yes; I saw him with a heavy, heavy heart.
In the day-time, I had the like post in Captain Carton's boat. I had a special station of my own, behind Miss Maryon, and no hands but hers ever touched my wound. (It has been healed these many long years; but no other hands have ever touched it). Mr. Pordage was kept tolerably quiet now, with pen and ink, and began to pick up his senses a little. Seated in the second boat, he made documents with Mr. Kitten, pretty well all day; and he generally handed in a protest about something whenever he stopped. The captain, however, made so very light of these papers, that it grew into a saying among the men, when one of them wanted a match for his pipe, "Hand us over a protest. Jack!" As to Mrs. Pordage, she still wore the nightcap, and she now had cut all the ladies on account of her not having been formally and separately rescued by Captain Carton before anybody else. The end of Mr. Pordage, to bring to an end all I knew about him, was, that he got great compliments at home for his conduct on these trying occasions, and that he died of yellow jaundice, a governor and a K. C. B.
Sergeant Drooce had fallen from a high fever into a low one. Tom Packer—the only man who could have pulled the sergeant through it—kept hospital aboard the old raft, and Mrs, Belltott, as brisk as ever again (but the spirit of that little woman, when things tried it, was not equal to appearances), was head-nurse under his directions. Before we got down to the Musquito coast, the joke had been made by one of our men, that we should see her gazetted Mrs. Tom Packer, vice Bellott exchanged.
