Now morphia gives you but sleep if it does not kill you, and reason with many is immediately active when slumber is ended; but the captain's face alone would have sufficed to stimulate the most sluggish consciousness into clear perception, and without understanding the reason of it she grasped her situation.
She was alone in a boat with the mad captain of the York, and there was nothing in sight save the everlasting circle of the sea girdling a small broken vessel toward which the boat was running, for the captain had his hand upon the yoke, and the little fabric was dead before it once again.
Despair laid the ice-cold hand of death upon the poor girl's heart. What could she do? What would he do?
As the sun slowly floated down the slope he was glorifying, the moon brightened her broken face. Julia's lips were dry; her tongue had the rasp of a cat's upon the roof of her mouth.
"Is there water here?" she asked.
"Oh, yes. You shall have water. Put your hand upon this. What sha'n't you have who have helped me to find him!"
She extended her hand and held the yoke steady, and he went into the bows with the glass and filled it from the breaker, all as sensibly as though he was right in mind; but he stood two or three moments to look at the vessel they were nearing and talk to her.
She drank with the thirst of fever, and then perfect realisation possessing her, a little impulse of hope quickened the beat of her heart, for she thought to herself, made cool by hope, "There are people in that ship, and I shall be saved."
The vessel was a small brig, floating on a cargo of timber. She showed a tolerable height of side, and judging from her condition she had started a butt, and the inrush had overmastered the pump, and as her davits were empty her people had no doubt got away in the boats. She made a churchyard picture for forlornness, with the broken moon hanging over her, though daylight still throbbed in folds of cloud in the deep west.
Julia saw with a fainting heart that the brig was deserted, and she turned her eyes up to God and asked what should she do?