[CHAPTER VIII]
STORM
The storm brewed long in gray banks of cloud that hung in the west and north. It drew around the Rose of Devon from north to east with a slow, immutable force, as yet perceived rather than felt, till she sailed in the midst of a circle of haze. At night the moon was ringed. The sun rose in a bank of flaming red and the small sea-birds that by their presence, mariners say, tell of coming gales, played over the wake.
Captain Candle from the poop sniffed at the damp air: and studying the winds as they veered and rose in brisk flourishes and fell to the merest whisper of a breeze, he puckered his lips, which was his way when thoughts crowded upon him. Martin on the beakhead pursued his noisome task of cleaning it under the watchful eye of the swabber (who took unkind joy in exacting from him the utmost pains), and cast furtive glances at the gray swell that came shouldering up from the east.
"Holla, boatswain," the captain cried.
"Yea, yea!"
"Our foresail is old and hath lost its goodness. Look to thy stores and see if there be not another. Have it ready, then, to bend in haste if there be need."
"Yea, yea!"
"And lay out thy cordage, boatswain, that if sheet or halyard or tackling shall part, we may be ready to bend another in its place."
Descending thereupon into the forehold with his boatswain's mate to fetch and carry, Boatswain Marsham fell to work overhauling the bolts of sail-cloth and the hanks of cordage and the coils of rope, till he had found a new foresail and laid it under the hatch, and had placed great ropes and such cordage as headlines and marlines and sennets so that a man could lay hands on them in a time of haste and confusion. For the Rose of Devon was heavily pitching and the seas crashed on her three-inch planks with a noise like thunderclaps; and when she lifted on the swell, the water rumbled against her bilge and gurgled away past her run.
Very faintly he heard a sailor's voice, "The pump is choked." There was shouting above for a time, then the cry arose, which brought reassurance to all, "Now she sucks," and again there was quiet.