The captain went to the side of the girl and picked her up off the cushioned locker with the ease of a man lifting a child. With her motionless form in his arms he gained the deck and laid her in the boat, passing her under the after-thwart, so that her head lay low in the stern-sheets. He sprang for a colour in the flag-locker and placed the bunting that was ready rolled under her head. She never sighed, she never stirred. Not paler nor calmer could her face have shown on the pillow of death.
Now the boat was to be lowered, and he went to work thus: he cast adrift the gripes which had held the boat steady betwixt the davits, and then he slackened the falls at the bow, belaying the tackle, and then he slackened the falls at the stern, belaying the tackle; and so by degrees the boat sank in irregular jerks to the surface of the water. He sprang on to the bow tackle and descended with the nimbleness of a monkey, with wonderful swiftness unhooked the blocks, and the boat was free. Next he stepped the mast upon which the sail lay furled, then the rudder; then shoved clear and hoisted the small square of lug, and in a few minutes he was blowing away gently into the boundless blue distance, looking all about him with a proud but ghastly smile for a sight of his missing boy, whilst the girl lay like the dead in the bottom of the boat.
CHAPTER XII. JULIA CALLS "JOHNNY!"
It was about half-past two o'clock in the afternoon and the sun shone hotly. The breeze was a pleasant wind for that boat, and the captain put her dead before it and blew onwards into the boundless distance, squarely seated at the amidship helm, with the white and placid face of the drugged girl at his feet.
He would often look at her with a passionate eagerness, and then direct his brilliant eyes over the sea, and his countenance was now shocking with its expression of real madness, charged with the ghastly illumination of his one maniacal belief, that the girl, who was fresh from the sea when he missed his boy, knew where he was and would take him to the child, and then they would return to the ship, and once more the drum would rattle and the whistle awaken the birds in the rigging.
Never before in all human tradition of ocean life had fate painted upon the bosom of the deep a picture more wonderful by virtue of its secret and tragic meaning. There would be nothing in the mere scene of a beautiful clipper ship under all plain sail, her canvas hollowing inwards visibly, to all intents and purposes derelict; there would be nothing in the spectacle of a little open boat borne onwards by the humming heart of its swelling square of canvas, steered by a lonely figure, the other being hidden. It might be to a distant eye the flight of a single survivor from a floating pest-house. But it was the story of the thing which makes it so extraordinary that I who am writing pause with astonishment, dismayed also by the lack of the exquisite cunning I need to submit the truth.
The girl had been drugged with morphia, but in what dose, and in what doses the men, it is impossible to conjecture. The madman reading the book of directions may have understood it, but insanity had rendered memory useless when it came to his mixing the poison with the liquor and the wine. But she was not dead; he would have found that out if he had bared her breast and put his ear to the white softness. But would she die in that sleep which was as death? for I believe it is the heart's action that fails in such cases, and at any moment her soul might return to God.
But he! poor unhappy wretch, if he understood what his mad but most moving love for his child had impelled him to do, his perception would not be as ours. His heart burned with desire that she should awake and tell him in which direction he should steer, for already the ship was a toy astern, three spires of ice-like radiance dipping to the eye on the brows of the blue swell as the boat rose and sank, jewelling the water with two foam-threaded lines of little yeasty bubbles.