Gib
shook himself like a great dog, and fell to his breakfast without a
word. I found the thin brose provided more palatable than the soup of
the evening before, and managed to consume a pannikin of it. As I
finished, I perceived that Gib had squatted by my side. There was
clearly some change in the man, for he gave the woman Isobel some very
ill words when she started ranting.
Up in the little square of window one could see a patch of clear sky,
with white clouds crossing it, and a gust of the clean air of morning
was blown into our cell. Gib sat looking at it with his eyes
abstracted, so that I feared a renewal of his daftness.
"Can ye whistle 'Jenny Nettles,' sir?" he asked me civilly.
It was surely a queer request in that place and from such a fellow. But
I complied, and to the best of my skill rendered the air.
He listened greedily. "Ay, you've got it," he said, humming it after
me. "I aye love the way of it. Yon's the tune I used to whistle mysel'
on shipboard when the weather was clear."
He had the seaman's trick of thinking of the weather first thing in the
morning, and this little thing wrought a change in my view of him. His
madness was seemingly like that of an epileptic, and when it passed he
was a simple creature with a longing for familiar things.
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