"Tell me where it is," he cried, starting to his feet.
She told him where the breaker was and the glass, and the parcel of provisions. He rushed out. The contents of the breaker could not be hurt by the flying brine and rain; and mercifully the provisions had been so placed that the breaker and the planks between which the captain had placed them kept them dry.
Hardy ran into the deck-house with the food, put the glass in his pocket, and returned again with the breaker, from which only two or three drinks had been drawn.
"Thank God for this!" said he, and he felt almost happy.
She had but little knowledge of the sea, and could not interpret their condition to the full of its tragic significance. Her heart was almost joyous because her sweetheart was at her side; though death was hovering over that reeling fabric, its shadow was not upon her spirit. She was rescued by the man she loved from the horrors of loneliness on the wide sea, from imaginations which had been excited in her by those two mysterious strokes on the bell, and by her horrible association with a madman. The brig reeled and groaned to the sweep of the strong wind in the canvas, which was like to stream from the yards in hairs of cloth if the weather hardened. Again and again Hardy left the girl's side to step on deck and see how it was. The sky was a yellowish thickness down to within a mile, out of which the flying comber flashed, and the scene was a giddy pantomime of racing seas. This old bucket of brig was taking it gallantly over her bows. Hardy went forward to see if the only boat survived, and found her sitting secure, seized to eye-bolts, and ready for turning over and launching by tackles when the weather permitted.
This comforted him, and he stepped into the little caboose which some lee sea might hurl into the scuppers at any moment. Here, to his great delight, in a drawer he found some twenty or thirty ship's biscuits, a bottle half-full of rum, and a large piece of boiled pork on a tin dish; he also found a black-handled knife and fork on a shelf where stood a row of china plates, one of which he took down.
With this booty, half pocketed and half in arms, he returned to the deck-house, at whose door the girl had stood waiting for him, and spite of the flying brine, and the sickly reel of the half-foundered brig, and the thunder of the wind aloft, and their own dreadful situation, the vision of Bax's farm rose before his mind's eye as he saw her standing in that door in the old incomparable posture, the straw hat slightly cocked, the head a little on one side, the left hand on the hip.