CHAPTER IX. THE INDIAMAN'S BOAT
The seas were breaking fast and fierce from the bows, and the wake flashed into the windy distance in a fan-shaped splendour as of sunshine, and hands were aloft furling the fore and mizzen royals, and some fore-and-aft canvas was rattling hanks and lacing on their stays to the drag of down-hauls; the ship was sonorous with the music of the sea, and by looking over the weather side you could have seen the green sheathing sweating with foam, storming through the dazzling smother like a wounded dolphin whose blood is sweet to dolphins; yet this was but a fragment of the magnificent picture of foaming seas and flying cloud, with the lofty swelling ship shearing through the heart of the day in a thunder-storm of prisms and of spray, lovely as the heights of heaven when some stars are green and some shine like the rose.
Hardy came on deck. He stood and looked about him, refreshed by a shift of clothes and by a nip of grog. He had worked out his sights, and before mounting the steps had stood a minute at the captain's door listening; he heard the poor man's voice, and judged by its solemn imploring note that he was praying, but the noise of the sailors above made him hurry, and though it was his watch below he felt that he was in command, and that the safety of the ship was in his hands.
Any seaman will understand this mate's critical and difficult situation. A captain is not to be lightly deposed; drunken captains and—unless they grow frantic—mad captains must be obeyed or endured or it is mutiny, with heavy penalties awaiting the arrival of the ship; and the mate of a merchantman may, though by conscientious act, lose power of earning bread for himself and his home unless as a foremast hand, for the law is hard, and the shipowner harder still.
"You had better take the mainsail off her, Mr. Candy, and furl the main-royal," said Hardy. "She has more than she wants."
The stu'nsail was in and so was the boom, and Hardy gave other directions, but they need not be repeated because minuteness is tedious, and the language of the sea cryptic to millions. When Sheridan was asked how the poetaster described the phœnix, he answered, "Just as a poulterer would!" The poulterer is not good in art, and the beak, talons, and all are merits when left out.
It was about a quarter to one, and the cabin dinner would be coming aft soon. The cook was busy in his galley, and black smoke was smothering the bulwarks abreast from the chimney. Hardy paced the deck watching the seamen at work, Candy superintended the business. There was plenty for the mate to think of. The grief planted in his kind heart, by recollection of his hopeless effort to rescue the poor drowned child, was overwhelmed by thoughts of the captain, his undoubted madness, the state of the ship; and then his mind on a sudden went away to Julia Armstrong; he wondered what would be her fortune, if luck would attend her in India, if her love for him—he would not pretend aught else to himself—would hold her unwilling to remain, that she might return in the vessel and meet him once more. "In which case," he declared to himself, "I will marry her and chance it."
The ship was rushing onward like a shooting star, and the wind clothed the sails with the thunder of its power; but she was comfortable and dry. The bright bursts were flung clear of her by the rush of the breeze, and she took the seas with that perfect grace of leap and curtsey which sails alone do give.
As Hardy walked, the cabin servant came up to him and reported dinner on the table.
"Have you told the captain?"
"Yes, sir."
"Is he at table?"
"Yes, sir."
Hardy went below. The captain was in his accustomed place cutting at a big meat pie; his brow was knitted, and with the whole strength of his soul he seemed intent upon this job of cutting the pie. His long hair and the hair upon his cheeks and chin accentuated the expression of his pale face, which was one of wildness and of grief so subtle that it might scarcely be known as grief by the heart that ached with it; but when he raised his eyes, Hardy saw a darkness upon his vision as though the shadow of death was on his eyelids.
"Will you have some of this pie?" said he, quite sanely.
"Thank you, sir," answered Hardy.
"We'll shift for ourselves," said the captain, turning to the attendant. "Bring whatever else there is in a quarter of an hour."
The man left the cabin. The captain, with knife and fork poised, without serving Hardy viewed him intently during a short passage of silence, and then said:
"Johnny has strayed away from this ship and he's left his drum behind him, but," he added, smiling with his heart-moving smile of superiority, "I shall find him."
He loaded a plate and thrust it at the length of his arm toward Hardy, who took it.
"Are not you eating, sir?" said Hardy.
"How's the ship?" was the answer.
Hardy reported the sail she was under. The question, the all-important question, whether sights had been taken, was not asked. The captain took a piece of meat out of the pie and gave it to the Newfoundland, who sat beside him on the deck.
"I don't like rich clergymen," he said, abruptly. "The man who steers his ship to the glowing gates of heaven should be rich in heart and love. The precious freight is that; let him despise the devil's cargo. I once said to a wealthy parson, 'Take up your cross and follow me. D'ye remember it, sir? but you and the like of you give your cross to the coachman and get inside.'"
He spoke this in a voice of thunder, and his face was grotesque. Hardy was eating with difficulty. The chatter of the afflicted brain is a pain to the hearer, for the sane strokes make the inconsequential talk as ghastly as the lifelike motions of the electrified corpse.
From time to time the dog got up and moved about the cabin sniffing. He was missing Johnny. He would come to Hardy's side and turn his gentle, affectionate eyes up at the mate's face in such dumb inquiry as would be holy if it were human; then he would go to the captain and do the like. The poor man played with some meat out of the pie, but did not eat. He had been educated at a great public school and his speech and voice had the culture of breeding, and the lapses and diversions of the talk that he addressed to Hardy made his language more pitiful than shocking. He as often spoke wisely as insanely, but Hardy saw, even whilst he sat, that the loss of his boy had confirmed in him his lamentable prepossession. He was mad, but in such fashion that unless he acted visibly the madman's part the crew would fail to see it.
The attendant came down with more food for the cabin, and this the captain did not touch. Presently he abruptly rose and entered his berth, reappeared with his cap on, and slowly stepped up the companion-ladder.
It was Hardy's hope that the poor fellow might give such orders as would induce the men to suspect him mad, although he felt they would believe he was only temporarily deranged by the bitter loss which had left him heart-broken; and yet some heedless or absurd order, some unintelligible shifting of the course, for example, some needless setting or reduction of canvas, must act like a surgical operation and quicken their scent, which would help him to come to a decision as to the right thing to be done; and whilst he went on munching his dinner he found himself repeatedly glancing at the telltale compass and listening for the captain's voice. But the ship sped steadily straight forward, and the captain remained silent though his tread was audible.
A little while before the mate had finished his dinner Mr. Candy came below. This was unusual: in the ordinary movement of discipline he should have waited to be relieved by Hardy.
"The captain told me to go and get my dinner, sir," said the second mate.
"All right," said Hardy.
Mr. Candy sat down and began to help himself. Hardy had no particular fondness for this man: he was the son of a pilot, and one of those people who add nothing to the dignity of a service which in its day, in point of breeding, in all art of seamanship, in structure of vessel, was as good as the Royal Navy. Witness, for example, the men and ships of John Company; for if no line-of-battle ships flew the flag of that company, and the flags of the owners of fleets of stately craft, ships of commerce had been and were still then afloat as lordly in build, as gracious and commanding in star-searching heights, as the finest of the frigates of Britannia. But Candy was second mate of the ship, and to that degree was important.
"Captain Layard is very down," said Hardy. "It's a cruel bad job. I loved the little boy, and the dog that loved him too wouldn't let me save his life."
"It was plucky of you, sir, to jump overboard," said the second mate. "All the time the captain walks he looks to port and starboard, hunting like with his eyes over the sea for the little drummer. Strange he can't satisfy himself that the younker is drowned, dead and gone."
He was feeding heartily, and spoke in the intervals of chewing.
"This shock," said Hardy, who saw that the man was not to be talked to confidentially, "may have a little weakened the poor father's mind for a time. We'll assume it so for the common preservation; therefore, in your watch on deck should he give orders which might prove him thinking more of Johnny than the ship, call me at once."
"Ay, ay, sir!"
This said, Hardy went to his berth to smoke a pipe and get some rest, for he could not know what lay before him, and sleep is precious at sea.
At four o'clock Candy aroused him. The captain, he learnt, had been below an hour. Nothing worth reporting had happened during Candy's watch. Hardy went on deck, and did not see the captain throughout the first dog-watch. The breeze was slightly scanting; the main-tack was boarded and the main-royal loosed and set. Hardy, like a good many other chief mates, was always for carrying on whenever he was in charge, and the breeze blew and the girls of the port he was bound to always hauled with a will at his tow-rope. Besides, there was the night's detention to be made good, and the clipper was making it good as she sheared through the coils of the sea, boiling in dim rose to the westering light. It was like a field of hurdles to a favourite, and she swept them with a bounding keel, slinging rainbows as she went, and the surge sang in thunder to the melodies of the rigging.
Hardy's whole thoughts concerned the captain. He quite remembered that in the cabin of the stricken father stood a medicine-chest full of deadly poisons. Would he take his life? Full often the demon of madness goes on beckoning to the ghastly Feature till it springs. But what could the mate do? It was not within his right to remove the chest. If he durst act in any way he would lock up the captain at once, but he had the talk and opinions of a crew of seamen to consider, and if the captain should be revisited by the same degree of sanity that had enabled him to navigate the vessel to this point, how would Hardy stand, supposing—and supposition here involved a very possible contingency—that the captain, to preserve his own position, should charge him with the ugliest breach of discipline a merchant officer could be guilty of?
He did not meet the captain again till the supper hour. The ship was then under all plain sail. The west was glowing like a furnace, and the ocean was calming to the softening of the breeze. The captain came from his berth into the cabin as Hardy stood beside the table. The meal was ready, and they sat down. There was a curious look of satisfaction in the captain's face. The acute eye of Hardy easily saw that some soothing delusion was in possession of the man. He asked two or three questions about the ship, and quite sanely said:
"What did you make the latitude and longitude to be at noon?"
Hardy answered the question.
The captain began to eat hungrily, and all the time his face gave token of an inward content, lifting indeed into the pleasure of assured expectation; but somehow there were visible in this lunatic web of emotion threads of cunning clearly perceptible to Hardy, who, perhaps, as the son of a doctor whose professional experiences he had often listened to, was able to see a little deeper than the vision of a plain seaman could penetrate.
"There is no doubt, Mr. Hardy," suddenly said the captain, "that I shall be able to find Johnny."
"I hope so, sir," answered Hardy, gravely.
"I have no doubt," exclaimed the captain with a sparkle of triumphant cunning lighting up his eyes. "I must be patient and wait, for I've got to hear where he is."
Hardy was silent.
"It may come to me in a dream," continued the poor man, "or it may be revealed to me in a whisper. I believe with Milton that the air is thronged with millions of spiritual beings. I have in my watches, when a mate, heard whispers in the dark! I believe in God the Father Almighty"—and he recited the Apostles' Creed whilst he stroked the head of his dog, who sat at his side. "It is a glorious confession, Mr. Hardy. What should make a man more religious than the sea life? They think us a breed of blasphemers, but to whom is the glory and the majesty and the power of the Supreme unfolded if not to the sailor? We behold the birth of the day, and witness the sublimity of the Spirit in the glittering temples of the east, from which the sun springs, to reveal the marvel of the ocean and the heavens to the sight of man; and we witness the death of the day, gorgeous and kingly in its departure, over which the angels spread a funeral pall sparkling with the diamonds of the night."
He pressed his hands to his brow and sighed with that long tremor in which the broken heart often vents itself.
The night passed quietly. The breeze yet slackened and was blowing a gentle wind at midnight. There was a moon somewhere in the sky, and her light fell upon the dark waters, and the sight of the small seas, curling in frosted silver through the radiance, was as beautiful as the picture of the ship stemming softly, her canvas stirless as carven shields of marble.
The captain came and went throughout the night, and no man aboard saving Hardy would have dreamt of holding him mad and irresponsible. Candy, when his watch was up, had nothing to report but this: that the skipper would walk the deck fast, abruptly halting at the weather-rail to stare at the ocean in pauses running into minutes, then crossing to the lee-rail to stare again in passages of dumb scrutiny. What more conceivable than that the afflicted man should be full of the memory of his lost child, and that he should break off in his walk to meditate upon the mighty grave in whose heart his little one was sleeping?
Candy thought thus, and so did the helmsman, who would find the men he talked to about it of his own mind when he was relieved at the wheel and went forward.
And so the night passed into the sad light of dawn, which brightened into the glory of a morning full of sunshine. The breeze had shifted three points, and the ship was sailing slowly with the yards square and the weather-clew of the mainsail up.
Now was to happen the strangest incident in this ship's adventure. It was Nelson who said that nothing is impossible or improbable in sea-affairs. There is no invention of man that can top the grim, the grotesque, the beautiful, the sublime, or the touching facts which the great mystery of liquid surface yields to human experience.
A seaman, who was sitting astride of the starboard foretopsail yard-arm, busy with marline-spike on some job that the lift needed, hailed the deck.
"Where away?" shouted Hardy from the quarter-deck.
"Right ahead, sir," answered the man, who looked a toy sailor, his white breeches trembling, and the round of his back sharp-lined against the blue.
Hardy fetched the glass, and going to the mizzen-rigging pointed it. He caught it instantly. It was a boat, how far off it was impossible to say, for distance, when a small object grows visible, is very difficult to measure with the eye at sea, but she was plain to the naked sight of the man on the yard-arm; the telescope brought her close, and Hardy counted five figures in her, one of whom was standing on the foremost thwart waving something,—a shirt or a piece of canvas. Her mast was stepped, but the sail was down, and she lay waiting, vanishing and reappearing as the shallow hollows ran sucking under her.
When Hardy dropped the glass he found the captain by his side.
"What is in sight?" he exclaimed, speaking with something of breathlessness, as though his heart was tightened.
"A ship's boat, sir, with five people in her," answered Hardy.
"I shall find him," exclaimed the captain, and the old look of superiority to all human intelligence, and the pathetic sparkle of cunning with which the diseased brain will often illuminate the eye, were perceptible to Hardy. "Give me the glass, sir."
The captain levelled it and was a long time in looking, and all the time he looked he breathed slow and deep like a man in heavy slumber.
"Stand by to back the foretopsail," he exclaimed. "Let a hand be ready with a line and others to help them aboard, for twice I have fallen in with people so weakened by distress and famine and thirst—O God, that awful part of it—that we have lifted them like babies over the side."
Presently the boat was close under the bow; the foretopsail was aback, and the ship, heaving slowly without way, was alongside the little fabric.
Her people were four men and a woman. The men were seamen, apparelled in such clothes as the merchant sailor went clad in. They staggered a little as they stood up, and one in the bow reeled as he caught the end of the line. The woman was sitting in the stern-sheets. She wore a straw hat, the shadow of whose brim darkened her face as a veil might. She was clothed in a black jacket, and the material of her dress was dark. Her head was a little sunk, as though she was too weary to hold it erect.
The captain, overlaying the rail, stared with bright devouring eyes into the boat. He did not seem to heed the people in her; he was looking for something else.
"Are you able to help the lady aboard?" shouted Hardy.
"No, sir," answered the man who had caught the line; "we've been adrift two days."
His weak voice proclaimed the truth of his words. At the sound of Hardy's cry the woman in the stern-sheets lifted her head, and the shadow of the brim of her hat slipped off her face. Hardy instantly recognised her.
"Great God!" he exclaimed.
He was struck motionless by astonishment, but his faculties rallied in a breath; in a minute he had sprung into the main chains, and a jump carried him into the boat.
"O Mr. Hardy!" shrieked the girl, and she tried to rise to clasp him, but her exhaustion was too great and she could only sob.
"On deck there!" shouted Hardy, who was usurping all the privileges of the captain in that moment of tumultuous sensations. "Send down a chair and bear a hand." And whilst this well-understood order was being executed—it meant simply a tail-block at the main yard-arm and a line rove through the block with a cabin-chair secured to the end of it—and whilst the four nearly spent sailors of the boat were being helped by the men in the ship, Hardy was talking to Julia.
"What a meeting! What has happened to your ship?"
Her lips were pale and a little cracked, her eyes were languid, and dim with tears, a shadow as of hollowness lay upon each cheek. She spoke with difficulty.
"The Glamis Castle was burnt two days ago in the night. We have been drifting about since then without food or water. Oh, thank God for this! thank God for this—and to meet you!"
"Bear a hand, my lads, bear a hand," shouted Hardy, whilst the captain with his head showing above the rail stood staring into the boat. The mate would not tax her with speech; she might be dying! Some alert seamen were in that clipper, and to the instincts and humanity of a British sailor no form of distress appeals more vehemently than the open boat in which they see no breaker, than the open boat in which men and women may be dying of thirst. Swiftly, as though the crew of the York were the disciplined and gallant hearts of the battle-ship, a chair, well secured, sank from the yard-arm and was seized by Hardy. He lifted the girl on to it, took a turn round her with a piece of line which had come down with it, and she soared from his nimble, skilful hands, and vanished from his sight behind the bulwarks. He gained the deck in a few instants, and was at the girl's side before the sailors could liberate her from the chair.
"She is a dear friend of mine," said he, loudly, that the men might understand that more was in this thrilling passage than humanity only. And passing his arm round her waist to support her he helped her to walk aft.
The captain's face looked dark with disappointment, and as Hardy drew close to him he heard him mutter, "They have not brought him, they have not brought him!"
"I will take this lady below, sir," said Hardy, speaking rapidly. "Her ship has been burnt. They have been without food and water for two or three days," and he passed on with the girl to the companion-hatch, whilst the captain stood dumbly following them with his eyes, with the noble Newfoundland standing beside him.
In silence the two descended the cabin ladder, and with the tenderness of a lover, which in such men as Hardy has the sweetness of a woman's love, he placed her upon a locker and poured out a little water. She drank with the passion of thirst, and asked for more with her eyes, but Hardy knew better and gave her a biscuit, which would lightly soothe the craving of the hunger that is often felt after thirst is assuaged. She bit a little piece of biscuit, and said:
"Won't you give me a little more water?"
"Very soon. Eat that biscuit."
He stepped to the pantry where some brandy was kept, and poured a tablespoonful in a wine-glass, and this filled up with water he gave her after she had eaten the biscuit. The stimulant helped her, and even as he stood watching her with his heart beating fast with this wonder, this miracle, of almost unparalleled meeting, he witnessed symptoms of a reviving spirit, of a reanimated body in her face.
At this moment Captain Layard came down the companion-steps and approached them with an eager, strained expression. His eyes, alight with mania—for madness has its expectations and disappointments—rested with a searching gaze upon the girl.
"Have you seen him?" he asked.
"No, sir," answered Hardy, quickly trying to catch Julia's eye, but she was staring with alarm at the captain, as you would, or I, under such conditions of inexplicable confrontment. "She is a dear friend of mine and is ill with the sufferings of an open boat, but her presence in this ship may mean more than we can dream of now."
The captain's face changed, his eyes took a fresh illumination with his smile.
"See to her, Mr. Hardy, see to her, and I'll start the ship afresh."
He left the cabin.
"May I have another biscuit?" said Julia.
Hardy handed one and smiled, for he saw again the sweet unconscious cock of her head, not the less fascinating to him because her eyes were dim, her cheeks a little hollow, her lips pale.
"Was that the captain?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered.
"What was he asking? Is he right in his mind?"
"His only son, a little boy, a beautiful bright-haired little boy, fell overboard and was drowned, and—But we will talk about the captain and your adventures when you are stronger."
He mused a moment or two, and then added, "You will take the rest you need in my cabin, and a berth shall be made ready for you. A good long sleep will restore you. So come."
He put his arm through hers and caused her to rise, and indeed she still needed the support he gave her. He took her to his cabin, and as she walked she looked about her with growing animation, which is a cheering sign, and once she exclaimed, "Thank God, I am safe! Thank God, I have met you! But how wonderful—oh, how wonderful!"
She sat on his sea-chest whilst he smoothed and prepared the bunk. It was a little cabin; the bunk was under a port-hole, and plenty of light came flashing in off the trembling, feathering sea. You might hear the tramp of feet overhead, and the thump of coils of rope flung off their pins. There were none of the garnishings which often make pathetic such interiors as this; when a young officer hangs up the picture of his wife with their first baby on her knee, neither of them to be kissed and clasped for months and months, even if God be merciful to the poor fellow and his ship; no rack full of pipes, no odds and ends of curios—in short, nothing ornamented the wall of Hardy's sea-bedroom but a long chart of the English Channel, which it was his custom to study when he lay in his bunk smoking, to get absolutely by heart the lights which gem the coast of our island, and the verdure-crowned terraces over the way.
When the bunk was prepared he removed her hat and gave her a hair-brush, and took down a little square of mirror and held it up before her. He greatly admired the beauty and the abundance of her hair, which was parted on one side.
"Nothing so refreshes one as to brush one's hair," said he.
"How ill I look," she exclaimed. "How could you have recognised me so instantly?" and she lifted her eyes, full of caress, to his face.
"Will you be strong enough to get into that bunk unhelped?" he asked.
It was a low-seated bunk, and she looked at it and answered, "Yes."
"Then I will leave you," said he, and he walked out hurriedly, and shut the door behind him.
He went on deck to see how the captain was dealing with his ship and found the vessel sailing along, with her yards properly swung and everything right. The boat from which the people had been received was visible at the tail of the ship's wake. The captain had sent her adrift, which was sane or not in him, just as you think proper. The sailors were coiling down and otherwise busy; the four men had been taken into the forecastle, where they were eating and drinking and yarning to a few of the watch below about the burning of the Indiaman Glamis Castle. The moment Captain Layard saw Hardy he called him.
"Who is the lady?" he asked.
"Miss Julia Armstrong, the daughter of a retired commander in the Royal Navy," was the reply.
"Where have you lodged her?"
"In my cabin for the present, sir, till I receive your orders to get another one ready for her."
"Oh, yes, have that done—have that done," the captain said in a smooth, perfectly sane voice. "Do you know what she was aboard the ship?"
Now Hardy was like the squire in Dickens's exquisite sketch—"he would not tell a lie for no man!" At the same time he did not wish Captain Layard should know that Miss Armstrong had shipped as a second stewardess, so he replied she was going to Calcutta with a letter of introduction to the bishop of that place. Her father was poor, and the girl wanted to find something to do in India.
But the captain was dreaming. One with eyes for such faces as his could easily see that he was thinking of something else, or did not understand. He continued to look in silence for a little while at Hardy, and then the baleful sparkle suddenly brightened his stare, he folded his arms and said, with an expression of triumphant hope and conviction:
"She is fresh from the sea and knows where Johnny is, and she shall help me to find him!"