Chapter 20

--"Come, and get thee a sword, though made of a lath:
They have been up these two days."--_King Henry VI._

While the little by-play that we have just related was enacting on the
fore-yard-arm of the Rover scenes, that partook equally of the nature of
tragedy and farce, were in the process of exhibition elsewhere. The
contest between the possessors of the deck and those active tenants of the
top, so often named, was far from having reached its termination. Blows
had, in more than one instance, succeeded to angry words; and, as the
former was a part of the sports in which the marines and waisters were on
an equality with their more ingenious tormentors, the war was beginning to
be waged with some appearances of a very doubtful success. Nightingale,
however, was always ready to recall the combatants to their sense of
propriety, with his well-known wind of the call, and his murmuring voice.
A long, shrill whistle, with the words, "Good humour, ahoy!" had hitherto
served to keep down the rising tempers of the different parties, when the
joke bore too hard on the high-spirited soldier, or the revengeful, though
perhaps less mettlesome, member of the after-guard. But an oversight on
the part of him who in common kept so vigilant an eye on the movements of
all beneath his orders, had nearly led to results of a far more serious
nature.

No sooner had the crew commenced the different rough sports we have just
related, than the vein which had induced the Rover to loosen the reins of
discipline, for the moment, seemed suddenly to subside. The gay and
cheerful air that he had maintained in his dialogue with his female guests
(or prisoners, whichever he might be disposed to consider them) had
disappeared, in a thoughtful and clouded brow. His eye no longer lighted
with those glimmerings of wayward and sarcastic humour in which he much
loved to indulge, but its expression became painfully settled and austere.
It was evident that his mind had relapsed into one of those brooding
reveries that so often obscured his playful and vivacious mien, as a
shadow darkens the golden tints of the field of ripe and waving corn.

While most of those who were not actors in the noisy and humorous
achievements of the crew steadily regarded the same, some with wonder,
others with distrust, and all with more or less of the humour of the hour,
the Rover, to all appearance, was quite unconscious of all that was going
on before his face. It is true, that at times he raised his eyes to the
active beings who clung like squirrels to the ropes, or suffered them to
fall on the duller movements of the men below; but it was always with a
vacancy which proved that the image they carried to the brain was dim and
illusory. The