"They're likely men, sir," said the boatswain, speaking in a softened note of respectful compassion.
"They'll expect their wages."
The boatswain answered he thought that was likely.
"No," said the captain, "we'll transship them, and send them home."
He rounded on his heel, and sat upon the skylight, and gazed at the dying lights in the west. What could be more sane than this man's answers to the boatswain? Hardy had overheard them, and perplexity was deepened in him. Who was going to convince the sailors that their captain was mad unless he talked to them as he did to him and Julia? And the captain sat looking at the dimming glory, and did not seem to remember that he had been conversing with the girl, or to know that she had left him.
It was fine weather throughout that night, and the moon shone, and the heaven of stars swarmed in sparkling hosts toward the grave of the sun until the pallor of the dawn, like the face of the risen Christ, put out those fires of the dark; the ship, bathed in the ice-white radiance, stole phantom-like over the boundless cemetery of the drowned, the perished sailors whose tombstones were in every breaking surge. All had been quiet aboard that stealing ship, clad to her trucks in the raiment of her day. The captain would pass a long time in his cabin, then appear on deck, and walk it for a little space self-engrossed; and it seemed to Hardy when his watch came round, and when the captain showed himself, that the man's isolation and silence expressed, perhaps, a still dim but growing perception of the fate of his little boy, in which case the delusion would leave him, and his mind recover at least the strength it possessed when they made sail in the English Channel.
When the sun rose the ocean rolled in mackerel-tinted mounds, and the ship swayed as she floated onwards at about five knots. Stu'nsails had been set by order of the captain when he came on deck at dawn, and, whitening the air on high, the swelling cloths carried the sight to the heavens, which arched in a miracle of motionless feathers of cloud, a glorious canopy of delicate plumes, in sweet keeping with the airy graces of the queenly fabric which proudly bowed upon its mighty throne.
A sail was in sight on the starboard bow, and in two hours she would be abreast. The Newfoundland, coming on deck with the captain when the light broke, instantly barked its report of her, and now, a little after eight, Hardy was viewing her through the ship's telescope; for the sane instructions which had reached him were, that the four men were to be transferred to the first ship which would receive them.
The four men were on the forecastle watching the coming vessel; they were good specimens of the English seaman of those days, sturdy and whiskered, bronzed in face and bowed in back, with that steady air which made you know that, like most British sailors, they were to be trusted beyond all breeds of foreign mariners in the hour of sea peril, when the ship was grinding out her heart upon the rocks, when the belching hatches were blackening the air into a storm cloud, when the blow of the stranger's bows had riven the side into a gulf, when the yawn of the started butt was burdening the hold with tons of ship-drowning brine.