"Do you suffer from attacks of the kind, sir?" inquired Hardy.
"To tell you the truth," responded the captain, with a peculiar smile, keeping his gaze fastened on the forecastle, "I had one just now. The left side grew importunate in nonsense; the right side was all right, and quite understood that things were wrong. The trouble was preceded by a curious beating of the heart in the ear. It sounded as though a wooden leg was hollowly tramping round the galleries of the brain—thump, thump, thump! It was like the noise of a wooden leg coming into a theatre when some actress of genius has stilled the house into breathlessness by her witchery."
"This man is mad," thought Hardy. "He would never converse with me in this fashion if his head wasn't in two."
The drum and fife ceased. Johnny, seeing his father, came running aft, and the Newfoundland trotted by his side. It was four bells, and the sun vanished as the metal chimes trembled away to sea; the breeze slightly freshened on a sudden, a sound of foam arose like the song of a full champagne glass held to the ear; delicate streaks of white flashed about the ocean breast in the twilight like some milky wings of sea birds; the ship strained a little aloft and hardened her breasts, and stars of the east shone upon the dark brow of the soaring night.
The breeze blew with a little edge, but it was still the dog-watches, and the sailors, though abruptly deprived of the drum in which they delighted, started on another dance to Dicky's merry and excellent whistling.
"Father, Sailor likes dancing," said Johnny.
"All sailors like it," answered the captain, stooping to press his lips to the child's forehead. "Cut below now, my darling, you and the drum, and put it away and wait for me. I sha'n't be long, and then we'll go to supper."
The boy, with the obedience of a man-of-war's man, saluted Hardy with a flourish of his little fist to his golden curls, ran to the companionway, and vanished, and the noble Newfoundland vanished with him.
"There is no weather in the glass," said the captain. "If this breeze freshens we shall make up for lost time. You'll not spare her, Mr. Hardy."
"No, sir."
"Those are my orders to the second mate. I want to maintain the reputation of this ship; the freighters love her. I have no fancy for steam, but you can time it, and so tacks and sheets are bound to go; but I'll make a bold fight for old tradition," he cried in a curious tone of enthusiasm, "and what we can't carry we'll drag."
The second mate had come on deck at four bells, and was pacing to leeward in the deeper shade that dyed the atmosphere there when the freshening of the breeze heeled the ship. There was nothing particularly noticeable in this man, of whom a fair sight could be caught as he passed through the area of light diffused by the cabin lamp, which was burning in brilliance under the skylight. He was pale-faced and fat of cheek, very light eyes, lashes like white silk, yellow hair, and great ears which stood out in eager bearing as though they sought to catch everything which was said. He was dressed in blue serge and a cap, and this was his first voyage in the ship. So the captain and the two mates were sailing the York for the first time in their lives.
It was Hardy's watch below; he crossed to the second mate, gave him the course and so forth, and descended into the cabin. Little Johnny without his drum was sitting on a locker talking to Sailor, who was looking lovingly up into his face, and often the bright-haired little chap glanced at the cabin servant, who was preparing the table for supper. The York had been built to carry cargo; she was not a passenger ship, though at a pinch accommodation might have been found for three or four persons, friends of the owners, say, or people to whom the next ship sailing with immediate despatch might be a supreme need. In this age they would probably equip such a vessel with a deck-house for the master and mates. Her cabin was small and comfortable, very plain, with a seawardly look that suggested sturdiness, a very different cabin from the luxurious interior of the Glamis Castle! A few berths stood aft, and these were occupied by the master and mates, and one was a pantry.
Hardy stopped to speak to Johnny.
"You play your drum splendidly," said he. "But what's the good of a drum if you're going to be a sailor, sonny?"
"I'll play the drum when the bo'sun plays his whistle," answered Johnny, manfully. "And it will make the sailors quicker in running up aloft."
"So it will," answered Hardy, laughing heartily, for the image submitted by the boy's words tickled his fancy—a bo'sun piping "All hands!" down the forescuttle, and the captain at the break of the poop beating thunder out of a drum to hurry the men to the reef-tackles!
He lingered a little to talk to the boy, for it charmed him to look into the sweet handsome face with its arch eyes; 'twas as gladdening to his heart as the song of a bird or the scent of a nosegay, and somehow the child always put tender thoughts of Julia Armstrong into his head by the sheer charm of his smile. He caressed the Newfoundland whilst he talked to the little lad, and then went to his cabin to change his coat and brush his hair for supper, musing over much, but particularly over his last talk with the captain, who never before in the Channel or after had spoken so oddly or looked so strangely. "If the man is off his head," he thought, "my responsibilities will be enormous," for he perfectly understood the position that command confers upon the shipmaster; he was God Almighty aboard; mad or not mad, his orders must be obeyed; he could steer the ship to the devil and clap the mates in irons for interfering, and unless the crew mutinied—which few crews durst do, knowing how heavily the law presses upon seamen, even though they are able to justify their actions—they must go on obeying the master's commands, though the fires of hell should be visible right ahead past the horizon.
Thus Hardy mused whilst he changed his coat and brushed his hair, and he also thought of Julia Armstrong, and wondered how she was faring, and what progress her ship had made.
The Glamis Castle had hauled out of dock five days before the York sailed. She had slept upon the silent stream of the Thames one night, and early next morning was taken in tow by a tug, which released her off Dungeness; then with the stateliness of a frigate she broke into a sunshine of canvas, and, if the wind had prospered her, she should be some five hundred miles ahead of the York. But it was sail, not steam, and short of the report of a passing ship, no man could have safely conjectured her situation. But one trick of seamanship Smedley possessed: he never admitted the existence of a foul wind; he never sweated his yards fore and aft; he was no lover of the bowline, nor of the shivering leach. It was always "full and bye" with him, though he was points off, and thus he made a fair breeze of every head-wind, for his slants to leeward of his course gave him two feet of sailing to the one he would have got out of a taut, shuddering luff, and he never looked over the quarter for leeway.
At half-past six Hardy stepped out of his berth and found supper ready, and the captain sitting at the head of the table with little Johnny on his right. You will consider it early for supper, but at sea the last meal is always called supper, and after this they eat no more in the cabin. There was plenty, and it was good of its kind: ham, cold fowl, cold sausage, salt beef, biscuit, cheese, and salt butter. A decanter of rum glowed deep and rich within reach of the captain's arm. A large globe lamp sparkled brightly overhead, and the scene was a sea-picture of hospitality and comfort, sweetened into a tender human character by the presence of the boy who sat on the right hand of his father. Sailor, the great dog, lay beside the captain on the deck. He was too dignified to beg; too well trained to expect. He knew his time would come, and lay patient in the nobility of his shape.
Hardy sat at the foot of the table. It was the custom in this ship for the captain and mate to eat together, and when the mate was done he relieved the deck till the second officer had finished. The captain gave the little boy a slice of cold chicken and a white biscuit, and filled his glass with water. The swing trays swayed softly as pendulums to the delicate heave of the evening waters, the bulkheads creaked, the rudder jarred as the swell rolled, and you could hear faintly the jump of the wheel chains to the sharp but swiftly arrested shear of the tiller.
The captain with his cap off disclosed a lofty but receding brow, rounding with something of the curve of the egg-shell at the temples, and his long hair and the growth about his cheeks and chin made him look more like a poet than a salted skipper. Hardy had taken notice that he stared at the man he talked to, which is contrary to the notion that the insane have a wandering eye. But that Captain Layard was not absolutely right in his mind the young sailor was convinced, as he sat at the foot of the table cutting himself a plate of beef and ham.
"Captain Pearson made poor passages on the whole, I've understood," said Captain Layard, referring to the commander he had replaced. "He was a very cautious man, furled his royals every second dog-watch, and would snug his ship down to the first hint in the glass to save calling all hands."
"I was told he was loved by his crew, sir," answered Hardy. "And he seems to have been the most humane commander that ever sailed out of the port of London."
"Well, it is right that sailors should be treated as men," said Layard, staring at Hardy; "but most of them are fools, they are children, they don't or can't understand things." He put down his knife and fork, drew out a handkerchief and wiped the palms of his hands, then poured a wine-glass of rum into a tumbler, and filling the glass with water swallowed the ruddy draught.
"Some more biscuit, father," said the child.
An expression of tenderness, even like that which might spring from a mother's heart, softened the captain's singular and striking face as he looked at the boy whilst he gave him a biscuit. He stared again at Hardy.
"Sailors," said he, "don't see things from a right point of view. There was a seaman who wanted a Blackwall cap to wear at the wheel. To make it he cut up his go-ashore breeches, and to trim and bind the edges he cut up a new Dungaree jumper. The cap cost him a pound, but he believed he had got it for nothing because he had made it himself."
Whilst Hardy was laughing, for the captain told this story in a dry manner, and with a twinkle of eye that certainly did not hint at insanity, a voice was heard in the companionway:
"There's a heavy fog rolled down upon us, sir, and it's as thick as cheese to the ship's sides."
It was the voice of Mr. Candy, the second mate, and a moment after his step could be heard in the plank overhead as he walked to the bulwark rail.
The captain sprang up and went on deck; Hardy continued to eat his supper, and talked to the little boy. It was his watch below, and he was too old a shell to quit the meal until all hands should be summoned, which a quiet fog, however dense, topped by a reassuring barometer, was not very likely to occasion.
The fog, nevertheless, had rolled down quickly through the gloom of the early night on the gust of the black breeze, still nor'west. Black it was. Nothing was visible of the ship but a few spokes of light, like the arrested darting of meteoric fibres spiking from the glass on the skylight in a fiery arch. When the darkness of the night dyes the darkness of fog then the universal blackness is so deep that you might think the solid globe had vanished, and that you hung in the centre of space, death-dark and silent, moonless and starless, chaotic with dumb masses of the deep electric dye.
This night the fancy would have been easily inspired by the hush upon the sea, for the sails floated stirless; there was not wind enough to brush the salt curve into the expiring hiss of foam, and the invisible swell so lightly swayed the eclipsed fabric that only now and again did you catch the sad note of the sea, sobbing along the bends, and hiddenly passing away into the short wake in sighs and tones of weeping.
"Mr. Candy!" called the captain.
"Sir!" came the answer out of the soft invisibility in which the bulwarks abreast were buried.
They came together in the spokes of radiance about the skylight.
"Clew up all three royals and furl them. Let go all three topgallant halliards; the sails may hang. Haul up the mainsail; brail in the mizzen, and down flying and outer jibs, topmast and topgallant staysails, but leave the sails unfurled. See that your side-lights are burning brightly, and bend your sharpest ear over the water for a noise. Was anything in sight before this smother rolled down?"
"I saw nothing, sir. It was a bit thick before the fog came along, and then it came in a wall."
The captain went to the side to look over and mark the ship's pace, and the second mate began to sing out. One watch sufficed. There was little to do but let go with the drag of the downhauls; and the clews of the great mainsail rose to the slings to the sound of a few ocean yelps and a "Chiliman" chorus. The men were not to be seen until they ran up against you. They felt for the ropes, and their footfalls were like the pattering of dead leaves on a pavement to a sudden air of wind, strangely threading with the shore-going sound the squeak of the sheave, the rasp of rope, and the soft scraping of parrel descending the greased topgallant heights. The side-lights were reported as burning bravely.
The ship now had little more than steerage way, and the captain, after looking into the compass, and after repeating his instructions to the second mate to keep his best ear seawards and on either bow, said he would send the dog on deck, and returned to the cabin.
Captain Layard entered the cabin and called to the dog, which instantly sprang up.
"Sailor, go on deck and keep a lookout," said he, and in a breath the Newfoundland rushed up the companion-steps and vanished.
"He hasn't had his supper yet, father," exclaimed the little boy.
"I will send it forward to him," answered the captain, seating himself in the chair he had vacated, and helping himself to a piece of chicken.
Hardy had risen when Layard entered, but seeing the captain sit he resumed his place. His watch would come round at eight o'clock. There would be little time for sleep if he withdrew to his berth. He had supped well, had drunk a glass of grog, had enjoyed his chat with the little boy, whose charming face and sweet, ingenuous, yet manly prattle delighted him; he was comfortable, and the captain inspired no feeling of restraint nor sense of intrusion, so he sat on.
"The fog is as thick as mud in a wine-glass," exclaimed Captain Layard. "Some go fast and some go slow through these smothers. The fast man holds that a ship is under more immediate control when travelling; I am a slow man when I can't see. In fact," he continued, with a look of exaltation, with a smile of profound self-complacency, "I claim to know my business. There is no man afloat who is going to teach me what to do when a thing is to be done, and done properly."
"If all ships would heave to," said Hardy, witnessing the captain's mind in the expression which subtly interpreted it, "then it would be the right thing in a fog to stop your engines, or back your topsail. But it's the other fellow you can't see that makes the fear." He immediately added, "Your dog is extraordinarily sagacious, sir."
"It amused me to train him," replied the captain, smoothing Johnny's little hand as it lay upon the table. "There is no fog-horn which equals the screams of an irritated sow. A sow once saved me from a collision by causing a dog, in an invisible ship close aboard on the starboard bow, to bark. That put the idea into my head. Sailor has the voice of a trombone, and he didn't need much training either; he is now perched between the knight-heads with more searching eyes and clearer ears than the whole ship's company could put together if they made their heads into one."
Hardy laughed.
"Don't forget Sailor's supper, father," said Johnny.
"I'll not forget," answered the captain.
As he spoke the words the man who waited on the cabin came down the steps.
"Is it still very thick?" asked the captain.
"Blinding, sir," was the answer.
"Get the dog's supper, and take it to him on the fok'sle," said Captain Layard. "See that he has water; it may be an all-night job for him. Pearson was a very humane man," he went on, addressing Hardy. "I might guess that by the medicine-chest he's left me. I overhauled it before we sailed, and wondered at the quantity of sleeping and death stuffs it contained. I found out that in one of his passages home from Calcutta several men died of cholera, and he was at his wits' ends for drugs. Ships bound to India should always carry a surgeon; they would—they must, if there are passengers. But glauber salts are good things for Jack: 'tis an all-round physic, as good for smallpox as for indigestion." He laughed somewhat heartily, and continued, "Pearson's men might have died to a man, for his medicine-chest showed badly like the end of a long voyage. Fortunately half of them took it into their heads to live, and they got the ship home. After this Pearson never went to sea without plenty of drink for cholera. He's left some doctor's handbook on the diseases of sailors, and there's a volume on poisons full of pencil marks. His humanity was unwearying, but he got the sack all the same. Johnny, my darling, it's time for bed. Come along, my lamb."
He took the boy by the hand, and they went into the captain's cabin, the child crying as his father opened the door, "Good night, Mr. Hardy."
It was half-past seven; Hardy went into his berth to smoke a pipe before relieving the deck. The captain's cabin glowed with the soft illumination of an oil lamp screwed to a bulkhead, and swinging in its bracket to the heave. It was a fine large cabin, equipped with a table covered with green baize on which were writing materials, nautical instruments, and such things; a fore-and-aft bunk for the captain, and a brass cot at the foot of the bunk, safely secured to the deck, for Johnny. It was comfortable with a carpet, chairs, a short sofa, a chest of drawers, and washstand. Close beside Johnny's cot on the deck was the boy's drum.
The captain began to undress the little fellow, who talked to him of Mr. Hardy; he said he wished Mr. Hardy could sleep with them. No mother ever used a tenderer hand in putting her child to bed than did this strange sea-captain, mad or not mad. His eyes were tender, twice he kissed the boy's fair brow; he seemed reluctant to make an end of this undressing, as though he loved to have his hands upon the child, to have his face close to him.
"Now your prayers, Johnny," said he. And the boy knelt by his cot, and in words he had learnt from his father, prayed that his mother would look down and watch over them both, and that God would bless his father and himself.
The captain stood by in devout posture, and whispered the words which the child uttered, then hoisted the little fellow into bed, covered him up, and kissed him.
"Mayn't Mr. Hardy come and see me in bed?" said the child.
"Ay," answered the captain, and he stepped to the door, and called the chief officer by name.
Hardy instantly came out, leaving his pipe behind him.
"Come and see my boy in bed," said the captain.
Hardy, not knowing that this was due to the child and not to the father, was secretly astonished, for though he had always lived on very good terms with the captains he had sailed with, he had never met any commander who treated him just as though they occupied the same platform.
He followed him into his cabin, and the boy with his bright hair on the pillow smiled a greeting.
"It is a beautiful bed, Johnny," said the mate, stepping close to the cot, and looking at him with the affection which such a child as this will excite in a sailor's heart at sea, moved by thoughts of home and of the fair land he has left, of his own childhood perhaps, and visited by that mute sense of solitude, peril, and the holy and brooding presence of the Great Spirit, which is the impulse of the deep, and understood by those to whom the ocean, eternal and boundless in the constant recession of its horizon, is an interpretable face. He turned to the captain and exclaimed:
"If your boy ever dreams, sir, it is of the angels who guard his bed."
He kissed the little chap, and was going.
"A moment, Mr. Hardy," exclaimed the captain, who did not seem to have caught or noticed what the mate said. "This is an example of old Pearson's forethought and humanity."
He stepped, followed by Hardy, to a corner of the cabin, in which stood a small mahogany chest, and lifted the lid. This lid was furnished with scissors, syringes, and the like, and the contents of the chest consisted of a number of stoppered green bottles, as well as sticking-plaster, lint, and surgical instruments. The captain, pointing to the bottles as he spoke, said:
"This is laudanum; this is labelled morphia; this is atropine for the ulcerated eye; this is chlorodyne. Here are drugs enough to start a man as a chemist. This is a book," said he, half lifting a thin volume from a pocket and letting it slip back, "that tells you how to make use of all this stuff; ay, even the right dose of Glauber's salt is given."
"I hope there's no chance of Master Johnny handling those bottles, sir?" said the mate, who, though he gazed with curiosity at this revelation of the open lid, was not inattentive to the expression of the commander's face, which was one of superiority, as though he had appropriated and was triumphing in the merits of the kind foresight which were certainly not his but Pearson's.
"You will never look into this chest, Johnny?" said Hardy.
"His mother was the very soul of honour," exclaimed Captain Layard, "and that child cannot but be the spirit of truth and honesty itself."
He shut the lid and added, "Where, I wonder, does the human soul come from? The father cannot give his, or a portion of his, to the child, nor can the mother, for that might involve the forfeiture of their title to immortality. The great poet must be right; the soul which informs a child, which spiritualises it in the womb and at its birth, must come from God, who is its Home. What a wonderful thought! What a revelation it has been to me! What an assurance and promise!"
He stood gazing steadfastly at Hardy, who, saying, a little uneasily, "These are matters quite beyond me, sir," again made for the door, through which he passed in silence, the captain standing motionless, his hands clasped before him, and his eyes seeming to see something beyond the bulkhead, upon which he had fastened them.
At eight o'clock Hardy's watch came round. He went on deck in a very thoughtful state, and the deep dye of that tremendous void of black vapour was very well qualified to darken his mood into the hue of the crow—a bird deemed portentous in ancient seafaring. He stood in the spokes of lamp-sheen about the skylight and called to Mr. Candy, who came upon him suddenly out of some part of the deck like a man walking through a glass in a dark room. He exchanged a few sentences with this second mate, but they wholly concerned the business of the ship. Candy was not a person to take into one's confidence; his silver-white lash shaded a pale eye that marked one of those souls which, as you cannot make up your mind about them, you resolve to distrust; otherwise Hardy, in defiance of all law of discipline, and even of sea-breeding, would, in the humour of anxiety that then possessed him, have been glad to hear Mr. Candy's opinion of the commander.
The second mate went below to bed after reporting that he had visited the forecastle, and found the Newfoundland awake and vigilant, also that two hands paced the forward-deck as lookouts.
The air of wind was still northwest; it breathed with just weight enough to steady the topsails and the foresail. As the ship leaned with the languid heave of the sea, the sails hanging from the yards on the caps, and the festooned clews of the invisible mainsail, flapped in strokes of the pinions of mammoth birds winging betwixt the masts. The lap of the brine against the bows, which were slowly breaking the hidden waters, saddened the blindness of the night with a note of supernatural pain and grief. The ship was moving slowly, and, as before, nothing of her was distinguishable but the dim lustre smoking in hurrying streams and wreaths of vapour about the skylight and about the binnacle-stand.
It was damp, depressing, heart-subduing. The philosophy of the mariner, which is one of endurance, and of that species of submission which is attended with sea blessings and the profanities of the ocean-parlour, breaks down in the fog. Here is the helplessness, here is the sealed eye, the spiriting of groping anxiety, which is a sort of anguish. It is not his ship or himself that he fears; the emotions bred by fog are ahead or abeam, and it need not be steam, for a dirty little brig or schooner, with her half-dozen of a crew shouting their consternation under the foretopmast stay, has been known to smite and sink an ocean palace full of light, of superb machinery, of saloon tables glowing with fruit and plate, and populous with diners.
The deck was not to be comfortably measured in a quarter-deck walk, in blackness so dense that if you swerved by so much as two degrees of angle of foot you thumped your breast against the bulwarks. Hardy laid hold of the wet weather vang on the quarter and fell into reflection, for loneliness breeds thought, and no man is more lonely than the officer of the watch on board a merchantman. His mind went again to Julia Armstrong, but it had found an unsettling fascination in Captain Layard, and it quickly returned to him. He could not doubt that he was a little mad; his ideas were strange, yet his speculations showed thought and culture. He was insane to one to whom he talked freely, but to his crew, to whom he would not and did not talk, he must be the commonplace "old man" of the quarter-deck, and in this way Hardy feared he might prove dangerous even to tragedy.
The ship's bell was hung in the wake of the galley, and a little clock, illuminated by a bull's-eye lamp, was hung up under a penthouse on a timber erection just before it. A lookout man would walk to the clock to see the time, and at ten he struck "four bells," at which hour it was as black and thick as ever after its first coming; the light breeze blew, and the ship swayed softly through the void.
Hardy made his way forward to see to the dog. He struck between two men who were walking the deck, and one muttered, "What cheer?"
"By God, my lads," said Hardy, "you'll not find out what a wolf's had for dinner by squinting down his throat!"
There was a faint haze about the forescuttle: it came up into the inky thickness from the forecastle lamp. It was a slight relief, and even a rest for the eye, but the shadow forward was deeper than it was aft, for up there in the void was the raven thundercloud of foresail and foretopsail, and further forward yet, like ebon waterspouts soaring from sea to topmast head, were the midnight dyes of the jib and staysail.
Hardy found the night-lights burning brightly, and going toward the heel of the bowsprit he touched the Newfoundland lookout with his foot. He patted the invisible, shaggy head, and passed his arm around its neck, and pressed the creature's long wet jaw to his breast, a token of love and encouragement which the dog acknowledged by a grunt or two of happiness.
"Keep a bright lookout, Sailor," said Hardy, patting the shaggy, invisible head again, and knowing there were two human lookouts somewhere about, he called, and they answered out of the black blankness to leeward. Well, he could not tell them to keep their eyes skinned, for the sight of man and even of dog lay dead upon that forecastle, but he directed them to listen with all their might, to go often to the head-rail and strain their ears, and they answered, "Ay, ay, sir."
Very plainly on this forecastle did you hear the sulky sob of the sea like something large and timid, gasping to the rude shock of the stem. The ocean hissed a little here and there, but the light wind could not give life enough to the glance of the curl of sea to strike through it to the eye, even though one looked straight down over the rail.
Hardy slowly made his way aft, and on approaching the binnacle discerned the captain standing in the faint sheen close to the helmsman.
"I never remember a thicker fog," said the captain, and he asked questions about the lookout, the dog, and the side-lights. Then walking out of the binnacle haze he struck the bulwarks almost abreast, and Hardy followed and stood alongside.
"Whenever I am in this sort of thing," said Captain Layard, "I think of the blind. It is terrible to wake of a bright morning to the eternal darkness of one's life. I should fear the presence of visions in that everlasting gloom. It would be haunted with phantoms, and as thick-set with wild, grotesque, horrible, brassy faces as the human eye when morphia closes the lid."
"My father is, as you know, sir, a doctor," said Hardy, "and I've heard him speak of the blind. He declares they are less to be pitied than the stone deaf." The captain pshaw'd. "He would say," continued Hardy, "contrast the faces of the two afflictions. They both force the mind's eye more deeply inwards, but in the one there is the pain of attention ever strained and a baffled, helpless look, whilst the other is mild and restful as though it had found peace in its communes with God."
"Your father may be a very clever man," said Captain Layard, "but I have no faith in doctors. I have never met a doctor who did me any good, and I have been ill in my time, believe me. They let my wife die."
He paused as if in some passage of deep emotion. In this interval Hardy thought to himself what an extraordinary conversation for the quarter-deck of a ship, close upon midnight, in a dense fog!
Some hanging fold of canvas flapped aloft. In a voice as changed as though he was acting, the captain exclaimed:
"That's the speech of a sail that asks to be furled. The glass is high, and there's no foul weather anywhere. If the breeze freshens by ever so little, or if this light air draws ahead, call me, sir."
There was positive refreshment in this plain speech of the sea to Hardy, who on replying to the captain found that he had gone, and in the steaming faintness hovering in the companion just caught a sight of his head disappearing.
Eleven bells had been struck, and Hardy was beginning to think that it would be eight bells soon, which must signify shelter, freedom from the dwarfish drench of the vapour, as fine but as penetrating as rain in Lilliput, a warm blanket, half a pipe, and then oblivion for an off-shore spell of nearly four hours, when on a sudden the dog barked. The tones were deep and constant, and to the first roll of those organ notes the loose wet canvas beat the masts aloft in a sudden heave of the whole fabric, and an element of alarm and even of fearful expectation entered the black void and thickened it, and seemed to close it round about till the smoking colour of light on forecastle and quarter-deck dimmed into the preternatural faintness of the salt sea glow when it shudders a fathom deep under some smooth tropic surface.
The dog continued to bark, and there was an importunate vehemence in his notes, a bounding pulse of urgency as though the noble creature with instincts superior to man's knew that a matter of life or death was concerned in his sentinel bugling. Voices sounded forward, you heard a hurry of feet; again the ship leaned, and the sails smote the masts with an alarum sound of metal; and to the accompaniment of this midnight concert, made ghastly by blackness, by the overwhelming blindness of fog and by the presence of danger, Hardy rushed forward, taking his chance of what might be in the road.
"Jump for a port-fire, one of you," he shouted, sending his cry slap into a very web of seamen's growling voices, the owners of which were no more to be seen than the ship's keel. "What is it, Sailor?"
And now he was alongside the dog, and with his hand on its head felt in the direction of the creature's muzzle, and found that it was delivering its notes straight away over the head-rail, about two points on the weather bow.
"Wheel, there!" he roared. "Starboard your helm. Let her go off five points."
"Starboard it is, sir," came back the answer.
"See that sheen out to starboard there, sir?" rang out a voice which sounded clear through the barking of the dog.
"Hush! Sailor. Down, sir. Hush, my beauty," cried Hardy, and the dog was instantly silent. "Hark! now."
A sort of oozing of light, dimly scarlet, wild and weak and wet as some ghostly star of death hovering over a grave, was visible to windward, a trifle forward of the fore-rigging. "Hark!" cried Hardy, and sure enough amid the greasy slopping of water, falling lazily from the thrust of the ship's bow, they could hear a distant noise of shouting, of cries reëchoed as from one part of a deck to the other, with a deeper threading of some throat hoarse in a speaking-trumpet.
"Is the mate forward?" sang out the voice of the ship's carpenter.
"Fire one right away off," shouted Hardy, knowing what the fellow had got and meant.
In a few heart-beats a stream of sun-bright fire was pouring like water from a hose over the bow, but its lightning illumination touched but a narrow stretch of the dark water. The foresail turned of a sickly yellow, and the staysail soared wan as the wing of the albatross in dying moonlight. All above and abaft, and then forward to the flying-jib boom end, yards and sailcloth lay steeped in the impenetrable smother, and within the area of the light the fog drove slowly in a very Milky Way of silver crystals. But the men could see one another, and helped by the light Hardy sped aft to be near the wheel, and there he found Captain Layard.
"There's a ship off the starboard bow, sir," he exclaimed.
"They'll never see that port fire," answered the commander. "They're burning flares, or we shouldn't see her. A foreigner, by the row. How's she heading?"
That question was answered even as he asked it by the revelation of a ship. It had the suddenness of a magic-lantern picture flung swiftly. They saw at the range of a pistol a lurid shape, which they easily distinguished as a barque with painted ports, a tall poop, and a tall topgallant forecastle. She was burning flares upon her main-deck and waist, and the red flames, winding tongues of fire into feathers of soot-black smoke, jewelled the whole apparition with red-hot stars. They pierced through the fog like sunlit rubies from glass and brass, from wet plank and mast, and the grease of spars. She was so close that she shone out clearly, and made light enough for the people of the York to see by. Her helm was hard up and she was slowly paying off, but her flying-jib boom must catch the mizzen-rigging of the Australian clipper. You heard the splintering of wood aloft, the crash of nearer timber, broken off carrot-like betwixt a lazy roll of both ships.
The barque's decks were a sight for the gods. Figures of men could be seen rushing frantically here and there. They were all shouting; men on the poop were screeching orders, and nothing but the helm gave heed; men on the forecastle were roaring and flourishing their fists. The flames duplicated the shadows of the running figures; painted lines of the rigging upon the planks writhed between the water-ways, like serpents snaking their attenuated lengths overboard. Never did any sea light flash up a more startling, a wilder, a more ghastly tapestry. 'Twas like a painting in flames and ruddy stars upon the black canvas of the fog, and the hull, with its lines of ports like the keys of a piano, reeled slowly off on the lift of the brine, yard-arm to yard-arm, the beating canvas of each red as the powder flag, and dying out up aloft like the reflection of a burning ship upon a cloud.
It was all too breathless for action aboard the York. Before a brace could be let go, before an order could be yelled, the stranger's flying-jib boom was crackling and gone, and her topgallantmast, with its canvas, was plastering the topsail; and then it was almost channel to channel, and the barque's poop was abreast of the York's quarter-deck.
"Great God!" cried Hardy.
A figure standing near the stranger's mizzen-rigging fell, and another figure fled aft, but at that instant some back draught of breeze thickened the crystals of the fog smoking close to the stranger's taffrail with a dense feathering of the black stench from the flares; the burning picture vanished out astern, as though to the fall of a curtain of midnight hue, the sounds of shouting sank, and in the hush that fell upon the York's deck, nothing was to be heard but the dreary lamentations of broken water under the bows, and the weeping noise of eddies under the counter.
"A close shave!" said Captain Layard, fetching a deep breath. "She has not hurt us, I think."
"I saw a man fall as if stabbed," said Hardy.
"Back the topsail! I'll keep the ship hove to till we can see," exclaimed the captain, whose attention, concentrated by the sudden blackness into which the ship had floated, was wholly in the manœuvre he had commanded.
The order was sung out, the sailors came groping their way aft to the main-braces, the yards were swung, and the ship was brought to a stand, lightly rolling her masts with a slap of hidden pinion, which made you think of some gigantic navy signal-man waving flags.
"My noble dog has saved my ship," exclaimed the captain. "I am a remarkable man!" And, to use a Paddyism, Hardy could hear in the skipper's speech the expression of exaltation which his face did undoubtedly wear. The skipper whistled, and in a few moments felt the snout of the fine black creature pressing lovingly against his thigh.
"Come along below," said he, passing his hand caressingly along the invisible feathers of the dog's back, "till I dry you and see how you look, and we'll take a peep at Johnny." And he and the dog vanished.
Just at that moment eight bells were struck. It was midnight, and the starboard watch must tend the ship till four. Whilst the last chimes were trembling into the damp, depressing, flapping sounds which clothed the obscured heights, the chief mate was hailed by a man whose voice proceeded from abreast of the gangway. Hardy stepped to the companion where the sheen lay, and exclaimed, "I am here." At the same moment Mr. Candy came out of the companion and joined him. Before one could address the other, three figures entered the space of faint saturated light.
"Here's a man," said one of them, "that's jumped aboard us off the barque. He come up to me and asked to see the capt'n."
"Which is the man?" said Hardy, straining his sight.
One of them said, "I am, mister. I am French." And then in French he asked if Hardy spoke that tongue.
"No," answered Hardy. "Come below into the cabin to the captain."
And after a few words with Mr. Candy, who heard now for the first time that they had nearly been run into by a tall French barque, he went down the cabin steps, followed by the Frenchman.
In this interior plenty of light was shining, and it was as noontide after the midnight of the deck. The captain was near the table drying the dog with a cloth, and talking to him, and praising him as though he were a man, and the creature's mild and benevolent eyes looked up into his face, and you read gratitude and affection in the noble brute.
"Who's that?" said the captain, throwing the cloth down, and looking with a knitted brow at the Frenchman.
"He will explain, sir," Hardy answered.
"Softly," exclaimed the captain, "an angel lies asleep in that cabin," and with a melodramatic flourish of his arm, he pointed to the door of his berth.
The Frenchman looked at Hardy. He was a man of middle height, in a drill or thin canvas blouse, over which was buttoned at the throat a rough, old jacket, the sleeves hanging loose. He wore blue trousers patched with black, stuffed into half-boots bronzed by wear and brine. His black hair curled upon his shoulders, and he held a cap fashioned out of some sort of skin. His face was a ghastly yellow; his lips a vivid red; his nose long, lean, and humped, and the black pupils of his eyes sparkled in the flashes of the swinging lamp amid their whites, which, by the way, were crimson with drink or gout, or both. It was a face to peer at you, malevolently, from a time-darkened canvas, very picturesque, very romantic, but something that you would not like to think was treading behind you on a lonely road.
"Who are you?" said the captain, putting his hand upon the head of the dog, in whose body a sort of rolling noise might have been heard, not quite a growl, but a note as of suspicion grumbling deep down below the throat.
"You speak French, I hope, sar?" said the man.
"And you speak English!" responded the captain, with a side look and a grin at Hardy. "It's no business of yours whether I speak French or not. Start your yarn."
And the man, clearly understanding what was said, began.
I have said that the man, clearly understanding the captain's meaning, began; but it was not a beginning, nor a middle, nor an end, that could be set down in black and white in that Frenchman's speech. It was most barbarous English, yet intelligible when helped along by the captain's and Hardy's questions. It must be given in plain words to be readable, and thus spoke that sinister-looking man:
"My name is Pierre Renaud. I am chief mate of the barque that was just now nearly running into you. We are from Cape Town to Bordeaux. That dog threatens my throat."
The man flashed the poniards of his eyes at the Newfoundland, who was like an organ with one key going, trembling in its shaggy and splendid bulk with a low, sulky, dangerous growling.
"Down!" said the captain, and the animal stretched its fore legs. "What brings you aboard us?"
"Fear," replied the man, with a slight shrug and a look of arching eyebrow at his questioner, and a roll of the eye over him, as though he saw something singular in his face and manner. "A man loves his life and will jump to save it. I thought we should crush our bows in and founder."
"You did not stay to help your captain and encourage the men to preserve your ship," said Captain Layard, dabbing the dog's head to keep him quiet.
"The captain fell dead in a fright," responded the Frenchman, with another shrug, "and I chose to save myself."
"I saw a man fall," exclaimed Hardy. "Was that you that rushed along the poop?"
"How can I answer you?" replied the Frenchman. "We were all rushing."
"The captain fell dead!" said Captain Layard, in a musing way. "It's evident that French sea-captains die easily. When did you strike this fog?"
"I cannot say precisely. Some hours since," was the reply. "When we heard the barking of a dog we knew that a ship was near, and we judged by the barking that she was approaching. We lighted fires upon the decks, and when the glare gave us a sight of you the sailors lost their senses, and ran about shouting and screeching. They were too mad to obey orders. The captain fell as I ran past him, his hands clasped upon his heart, and as he had all along complained of the weakness of that organ, I am certain he died of disease."
"Your countrymen are not good sailors," said Captain Layard.
The Frenchman grinned ghastly, and Sailor rumbled afresh with a stiffening of his level fore legs as though he must rise.
"If I had been your captain," continued Layard, "I should have saved my flying-jib boom and topgallantmast, and my sailors would not have rushed about and torn their throats open with the shrieks of fear—that womanly spirit!"
His smile was lofty, his self-complacency inexpressible, you guessed if there had been a mirror at hand he would have admired himself in it.
His talk, but not his face, was past the Frenchman's comprehension. He rolled his eyes upon Hardy, then upon a decanter half-full of rum, standing upon a swinging tray, timing the pulse of the sea.
"He asks for a drink, sir," said Hardy.
"Give him a tot," replied Captain Layard, "then let the second mate tell the bo'sun to find him a hole to lie down in. I don't like his looks."
He walked abruptly to his berth, followed by the dog, but before he entered he turned to the animal and exclaimed, "On deck, Sailor, and keep a lookout till the smother thins," and the Newfoundland sprang up the steps.
The Frenchman, with a smile at Hardy, touched his brow. The mate, without noticing the fellow's gesture, took the decanter of rum from the swing tray and gave him a glass of grog. As he handed the tumbler to the man, he said:
"Was your captain the man who stood near the mizzen-rigging?"
The Frenchman took a long pull at the glass before answering, and then said, "Yes."
"Do you think he fell dead, or was he struck down?" said Hardy, looking critically at the wild and dangerous face, whose eyes stared into the Englishman's vision with the fixity of a buried bayonet.
"He fell dead," was the answer, and down went the remainder of the grog.
"I believe I saw a man rush from him aft when he fell," said Hardy.
An expression of anger deepened the ugly devil's look of malevolence, but he held his peace.
"Your captain is dead and you are here," said Hardy. "Your second mate will take charge of the barque, I suppose?"
"Our second mate was drowned a week after we left the Cape," answered the Frenchman.
"What will the crew do?"
"They will go to hell!"
"Follow me," said Hardy, and they climbed the companion-steps.
The wind was sleeping. It was now a dead calm, and the fog steeped in night was lifting into the sight—conquering blackness off an ocean that seemed to be boiling upon some furnace of earth miles deep. Damp draughts of air blew with the rolling of the ship, and the canvas beat out hollow notes like the blasts of guns heard underground. The chief mate called the name of Mr. Candy, who stepped out of the impenetrable profound of the quarter.
"This man," said Hardy, talking in the skylight sheen, "is mate of the barque we were foul of just now. Take him forward to the bo'sun and find him a bed anywhere, and food if he needs it."
"I don't need it," said the Frenchman.
"Come along," said Mr. Candy, and they disappeared.
Hardy paused to listen and peer. There was nothing to see, but he might have heard a sound of weeping all about, as though old ocean was mourning over its blindness. He then went to bed, but not to sleep right away. The Frenchman's insolent touching of his brow had accentuated his own deep suspicion of the captain's sanity, and very grave, though perplexed, reflection attended his thoughts of Layard, and the tragically perilous situation of the ship in charge of a lunatic so subtly mad that no one but his chief officer might have understanding enough to see how it was with him.
At eight bells in the middle watch he was aroused by Mr. Candy, and was on deck in a minute or two, for he was a smart man all around; the first at the yard-arm in reefing when his duties had carried him there, the first to spring to the cry, no matter the command, swift in relief, and for ever on the alert whilst the responsibility of life, cargo, and fabric was his. The fog was still very thick, but a thin wind had sprung up out of the east, and the streaming of the waters was like the shaling of a summer tide upon shingle. The braces had been manned when this weak air came, and the yards swung to hold the maintopsail aback; the ship rolled gently under the arrest of her canvas, and there was nothing to see and nothing to do but let the fog soak into the spirits.
"A spare bunk in the forecastle has been found for the French mate," Candy had said. The fellow had grumbled, muttered that he had been an officer on board his own vessel, and deserved better usage. Candy said he was lucky to save his life, and to find a bed in a British forecastle. The Frenchman growled that he considered himself important enough to sleep in the cabin.
"What did you say to that?" Hardy had asked.
"I said, 'You be damned!'" Candy replied.
Not until five bells, half-past six, in Hardy's watch did the fog show signs of breaking up. It thinned in places, and presently through the stretching ceiling of it the cold, pale dawn looked down upon the sea, and made it piebald with granite-coloured spaces. The breeze then freshened and the fog began to fly. Columns of it moved away stately like pillars of sand on the desert; it swept in Titan cobwebs between the masts; it sped like silken veils streaming from viewless fleeting spirits over the trucks. Wide vistas opened to windward; large blue eyes, soft with the moistness of their light, floated upon the trembling eastern brine. The sun darted a pale yellow lance, and as the captain put his head through the companion-hatch the scene of deep, saving a blankness in the west, opened around, and it was a shining morning with a bright sun and a blue sea and an azure sky and a pleasant breeze of wind.
Scarcely had the captain's head shown when Hardy, looking seawards over the quarter, exclaimed:
"There's the barque that fouled us last night, sir. She's got a wift at her mizzen-peak."
She could be no other vessel than the barque; the morning light was strong and she lay within a mile, and you could see that she had lost her foretopgallantmast and jib-booms. Her maintopsail was aback; she had clearly hove to after losing her mate and splintering clear of the ship and the smother. Her backed topsail curved inwards like carved ivory, her ruddy sheathing flashed its wet length to the sun as the heave rolled her light, tall shape, with its slanting stare of black ports, upon the wide white line that girdled her.
"Why is she flying that gamp?" said the captain, taking a telescope out of the companionway; but before he levelled it at the ship he sent a glance full of scrutiny aloft to gather if his vessel had been hurt in the night, which was distinctly professional and sane, and quite enough to have convinced the Jacks that the "old man" knew the time of day, even if they suspected that the compass of his mind was wrong by points.
The gamp, as he termed the wift, consisted of the French flag stopped in the middle, that is, bound by a rope yarn into the appearance of a gamp umbrella. It tumbled at its block, and was a syllable of sea talk signifying "help!" The skipper whistled to his dog, which had kept a brave lookout throughout the night without relief, and which, seated on the heel of the starboard cathead, seemed to be listening with a grave countenance to the remarks of an ordinary seaman who was addressing him. The beautiful and dutiful creature came bounding aft and pawed his master to the shirt-front, rising nearly his height.
"You had better lower a boat and go and see what that fellow wants," said the captain, and he motioned the dog into the cabin and told it to wait there for breakfast.
"They're lowering a boat, and mean to come aboard of us," exclaimed Hardy, whose eyes were on the barque.
A boat dropped awkwardly from the vessel's tall side, and in a minute or two the gold of brandished oars sparkled upon the delicate feathering of the water. The men were washing down aboard the York. In those days they carried a head pump which they rigged, and the bright water was passed in buckets and sluiced over the planks, the boatswain standing by and giving the scrubbers heart by his inspiriting cries, roars, and oaths. It was a common scene of shipboard life, full of colour, movement, and business.
Hardy looked along the decks for the French mate, but did not see him.
The captain exclaimed, "We'll send the fellow aboard in his boat. A good riddance. How some faces damn the souls which animate them! You seldom err in judging of a man by his looks. The expression is formed by the character. But affliction may deceive you, I allow; a harelip, for example, or a cock-eye."
"Shall I pass the word for the Frenchman, sir?" said Hardy.
"Oh, yes! oh, yes, rout him out of it!" answered the captain, smiling with that air of superiority which would have convicted him in the eyes of a keeper.
The word was passed, and the Frenchman, with the aspect of a pirate in a boy's book, rose through the scuttle as the boat came alongside. The man who had steered her scrambled into the mizzen-chains and sprang on to the quarter-deck with a salute of French courtesy. He was close-shaven and dark, habited in loose blue breeches and a jumper, and looked a good sailor spite his nationality, that was as marked in gesture and bearing as though branded on his brow.
"Can I speak to the captain?" said he, looking from Hardy to the skipper. His broken English was good.
"Glad you speak my tongue," said the captain. "What do you want?"
"I have served in American ships and can speak English," answered the man. "I am brother of the captain of that barque. He was stabbed last night and is dead. Our second mate, too, is dead. The first mate is missing. I'll swear he killed my poor brother, and then drowned himself. We are without a navigator. What are we to do?"
"You shall have a navigator," exclaimed Captain Layard, and he looked toward the forecastle, but the Frenchman had disappeared.
The man bowed and said, "It was a cold-blooded assassination. They had been quarrelling all the voyage. The villain chose the right moment, and the sea is easier than the guillotine."
"I saw your captain fall," said Hardy, "and the man that killed him is aboard us."
The fellow started, and so did his eyeballs in their sockets as he flashed them eagerly and fiercely along the decks where the sailors were scrubbing, and the boatswain encouraging them with the pleasant promptings of the British forecastle: "Scrub it out of 'em, my lads. D'ye want to drown the ship, you sojer? Slap it along the lee-coaming and be damned to you, Dick! Ain't it as thick as yer eyebrows there? Hurry up, hurry up with them buckets. Are we a hexcavator with the steam turned off?"
"A hand fetch that Frenchman out of the fok'sle and bring him aft," shouted Hardy.
"What do you mean to do with him?" asked the captain.
"I will call the crew together and consider," answered the man with a hideously significant glance at the main yard-arm.
"If you hang him," said the captain, "who'll navigate you?"
The fellow folded his arms tightly upon his breast and sank his head, sending a level look of patient hate through his eyelashes toward the forecastle.
"What's your rating aboard your ship?" inquired the captain.
"Boatswain, sir," was the answer, and the man did not turn his head to say it.
The dog at this moment came out of the cabin and stood with his fore feet on the plank at the coaming, staring at his master. He seemed to plead. The human spirit could not be more eloquent in the gaze; but the captain did not heed him, for just then the man who had been sent to fetch the Frenchman was coming aft, shoulder to shoulder with the Frenchman himself. The men forgot to scrub; the head pump ceased to gush; the boatswain left off conjuring and damning. All eyes were turned aft. The silence of a moment fell upon the ship, and nothing broke it but the low growling of the Newfoundland.
The Frenchman, fresh from the forecastle, was ghastly pale; his walk was defiant; when abreast of the main-hatchway he came more quickly than his companion, who stopped. He walked up close to the boatswain of the barque and said, in his native tongue:
"Well!"
The other dropped his arms; his hands were clenched, his eyes charged with that deadly cold light of hate which is more dangerous and fearful than the flame of fury. He spoke slowly in French, and what he said was this:
"You did not drown yourself, I see, after assassinating my brother."
"You lie in your throat! I sprang to save my life. Your brother is a live man for me."
"Liar, and villain, and execrable coward!"
He stepped to the rail and said to the men, in French of course—but you shall be told what he said:
"The assassin is in this ship. He pretends that he sprang for his life; he killed my brother, our navigator, and would have consigned us, helpless, to the desolation of the sea."
He returned, and was followed by a howl of passion from the boat alongside.
All in a minute, and just as the man was posting himself again in dramatic attitude close to the murderer, the huge Newfoundland, with an indescribable roar of rage, sprang with the whole weight of his body upon the French mate, and bore him to the deck with a thump of lead, like the fall of a twelve-pounder ball, and they thought that the brute's teeth had met in the wretch's throat. Hardy and the captain made a rush and dragged the animal off the fallen man, and the captain, grasping the creature by the coat of his neck, hauled him, growling fiercely, to the companion, and drove him below.
The man rose; his nose was bleeding, and after he had run the length of his sleeve along it his face looked like a decapitated head placed on the upright body it had been struck from.
"I want to swing my yards," said Captain Layard. "I've been hove to all night through you. Take that man away; I don't parley-vous myself, and don't follow your talk. He'll navigate you home; he looks a good navigator." And he smiled with some sense of superiority of meaning, which made his face fitter for comedy than for the tragedy of this passage.
The French boatswain swept his hand with an infuriate motion toward the rail.
"If I go with this man he will kill me," said the blood-stained French mate.
"Not he. The ship wants a navigator," replied Captain Layard, with a cheerfulness supremely inconsequential.
"If you do not come," said the French boatswain, in his native speech, "I will call the men up, and they will throw you into the boat."
"Why can't you speak in English?" said Captain Layard. "He'll understand you, and we can follow your meaning."
The French mate turned on his heel and was beginning to walk slowly forward. As a cat springs when started by a dog, so sprang the barque's boatswain upon his brother's murderer. With the strength of the fiends before they were cast out he rushed the bleeding scoundrel to the rail and yelled to his men. The French mate grasped the mizzen-shrouds and struggled and kicked in awful silence; but in less than a minute three stout sailors, out of the four who manned the boat's oars, swarmed up. Eight enraged hands then tore the French mate from the mizzen-rigging as the sweep of the hurricane uproots a tree. All in a heap, struggling, wrestling, groaning, they got him past the after-swifter, and to an order, shrieked through his teeth by the French boatswain, they hoisted him lengthwise to the rail, and dropped him into the boat. The French boatswain then made a sort of salaam bow to the captain and Hardy, and the whole four disappeared in the twinkling of an eye over the side amid shouts of laughter from the seamen who had been washing down the decks.
"Get all sail upon her, Mr. Hardy," said Captain Layard; "but I shall keep my topsail to the mast for awhile until I see what they mean to do with that barque."
The sailors dropped their buckets and scrubbing-brushes, and fell to howling at the halliards. Topgallant and royal-yards rose, the mainsail was left to swing with its clews aloft, and the York was now a full-rigged ship, hove to, but clothed to her trucks, leaning with the swell as though by swaying she was knitting her frame together for the start.
A ship when under sail on the ocean is alive; watch her closely and you will discover that she has human intelligence in her methods of helping, and at the same time influencing, the reason that governs the helm and incarnate walks the quarter-deck or bridge. It was about a quarter-past seven; the sailors resumed the business of washing down; the decks sparkled as the brine flashed along the planks, and the boatswain stimulated this sweetening process by the inspiriting language of the land of the slush-lamp. The captain stood right aft watching the receding figure of the barque's fat boat. The placid heave of the deep was crisped by the delicate crumbling foam curling from low, blue brows to the gentle gushing of the pleasant breeze, like some scene of swelling land enamelled with white flowers; the blankness to leeward had melted into azure, and it was all blueness and brightness, and you heard a song that was sweet with its summer note upon the harp-strings of the lofty spars.
"What will they do with him?" said the captain, going to the companion and resting his hand upon it as though in a moment he would descend.
"I am wondering, sir," answered Hardy, who stood near. "I should not like to be in the power of that bo'sun after I had killed his brother."
"Death drugs revenge; I would not kill my enemy," said the captain, putting on one of those incommunicable looks which always alarmed Hardy with thoughts of the ship's safety. "I would keep my brother's murderer alive—at sea. There is the middle-watch and the ghastly face of the moon! Whispers aloft and God's eye in every star! The ghostly figure should walk the quarter-deck with the assassin, should enter his berth with him, and sit beside his bunk and watch him. That is the revenge that kills the soul—the very thought makes me sweat."
His face changed into an expression of agitation, and with a sudden hurry he disappeared down the companion-steps.
Hardy watched the French boat draw alongside the barque. He wondered that the captain should have left the deck at such a time; it was another illustration of his insanity, no doubt. "He has gone to see to little Johnny, perhaps," the mate thought, what had happened having faded in the chaotic muddle of his reason. Here was Captain Layard, who was determined to make a swift passage, keeping his ship hove to and going below to talk to his bright-haired boy, to help him dress maybe, and to muse in lopsided moralising over the medicine chest.
He took the glass, and levelled it at the barque, and saw the boat slowly ascending in spasmodic jerks to the davits. A few men dragged at the falls, and upon the port quarter of the poop the rest of the ship's company apparently had assembled, and were clearly discussing the recapture of the mate with the heat and passion of the French when excited. They gesticulated, they surged and reeled, and Hardy again saw one or another of them fling his hand in the direction of the fore yard-arm.
He could not see if the mate stood amongst them, and all forward was vacant deck, pulsating with the shadow of swinging sail. There was nothing else in sight all away round the girdle of the deep, though this was a frequented sea; and the two vessels, to a distant eye, might have seemed abandoned, so aimless was the look they got from the white cloths incurving to the masts.
About ten minutes after the boat had been hoisted, Hardy, who continued to watch the barque through the glass, saw several men go forward, and shortly after a man got into the fore-rigging, and crawled aloft and gained the fore-yard. The powerful lenses brought the barque close, and Hardy easily saw, as he followed the man sliding to the yard-arm, that he carried a tail-block in his hand. He made this block fast to the extremity of the yard, and whilst he was doing this another man got into the fore-rigging holding a line, the end of which he gave to the fellow on the yard, who rove it through the block, and then came into the fore-rigging grasping the line, and both men descended to the deck.
Hardy rushed to the companionway and shouted down the hatch, taking his chance of the skipper hearing him, "They are going to hang that mate who killed the captain!"
A moment or two later up came Captain Layard.
"What's that you sang out?" he cried. "What's wrong? I'm with Johnny."
"Look for yourself, sir," answered Hardy, and he gave the glass to him. The captain pointed it. Mad or not mad, he knew what a yard-arm whip was, and what in this case it signified. He saw a crowd of men on the forecastle; he distinguished the figure of the mate, with his arms pinioned behind him, standing within a fathom of the rail rounding to the forecastle break. As he gazed he saw a man bandage the wretch's eyes with a red handkerchief. The same man next secured the end of the line to the man's neck, and the captain, with the telescope at his eye, began to mutter, and Hardy saw that his face had turned a greenish yellow, but he could not understand what he said, nor clearly perceive, as did the captain, all that was happening aboard that tragic barque, with its wift at the gaff-end beating the air like a human arm in agony.
In the captain's glass the bulk of the forecastle crowd melted and could not be seen on the main-deck. One who was left—and the muttering captain thought that he was the boatswain—held a book and seemed to be reading from it. The two men kept the barque's victim pinned to the rail; the man who was reading closed his book and raised his arm straight up, looking toward the main-deck. The two men sprang back from the murderer, whose figure soared aloft, a ghastly shape of man flying wingless to the yard-arm.