It might prove a job, for his shipmate was a girl; yet much harder jobs, girl or no girl, were to be got through at sea. But until the weather calmed he could not think of the boat, and if the weather did calm and left the brig afloat, which was very probable, and he managed to launch the boat, then, bethinking him of Julia and himself in that small squab fabric, his heart grew cold; because next to the raft the open boat in mid-ocean is the greatest desperation of the sailor. Nearly every chapter of its romance is a tragedy. One dies and is buried, one goes mad and springs overboard to drink of the crystal fountain which is gushing in the sweet valley just there. Another is hollow-eyed with famine, and the gaunt cheeks work with the movement of the jaw upon the piece of lead or the die of boot-leather, which helps the saliva. Hardy knew it all, had tasted some of it, and he could not think of Julia and that little open boat and the flawless horizon, more pitiless to the wrecked mariner than the cordon of soldiers to the famished city, without feeling his heart turn cold.
And now happened something which I fear the reader will think more incredible than any other incident in this volume.
After talking a little while together, these two people rose from their chairs and knelt down in prayer. Hardy believed in God and in the mercy of God, and so did Julia, and he asked God in the simple language of the plain English seaman's heart to protect them and be with them, and he thanked him for the mercy he had already vouchsafed; and depend upon it no British sailor will consider this an unnatural act on the part of Hardy, because always the proudest heart of oak in the hour of triumph, the most depressed heart of oak in the hour of trial, has been accustomed to look up to God and thank or beseech him, for it is he who shares the loneliness of the seaman on the wide, wide sea.
But let me assure the reader, also, that lovers do not make love in shipwreck as they do under the awning of the passenger liner, or in the bower of roses ashore. Death is too near to allow passion to expend itself in the form made familiar by the novel. Their talk often went to Captain Layard and the amazing cunning he had exhibited in inventing the trap they had all fallen into.
"I believe," said Hardy, "only two are dead on board. He had a book to give them the doses, and his brain was clearly equal to understanding what it said. But would the rum absorb all the poison? Would not one man get more than his whack? A few grains more would have done for us all. The beggar took care not to drink himself, and none of us thought of asking him to."
"How did you feel when you awoke?" she asked.
"Much as you did, I expect," he answered.
But talking was not very easy in this interior. The water, sheeting against the deck-house, seethed through speech and confounded it. There was the thunder of the fallen sea forward, and the incommunicable maledictions of a sodden brig in the trough filled the gale with bewilderment as it flew. Every fabric afloat has a voice of her own, and like her sailors, she knows how to swear when injured.
In the course of the afternoon Hardy stepped into the after-berths, but found nothing to reward his search. The papers of an old timberman are uninteresting; the letters of an auld wife of Sunderland to her Geordie are sacred, and saving three or four clay pipes and some tobacco, for which Hardy was grateful, there was little to be seen worth mentioning. If this gale slackened into moderate weather the girl should sleep in one of these berths; if not, near the door in the interior on the best sort of bed he could contrive, because, as he meant to keep watch and watch himself throughout the night, she would be close by to rescue if some thunderous surge should discharge the deck-house from its obligation of sticking. He had searched for candles and had found none; a few boxes of matches were in a sort of desk fixed to the bulkhead near the bunk. So he came out of the captain's berth with an old mattress, and then he brought some wearing apparel, a heavy coat with big horn buttons, and a pair of north-country breeches, which, if seized to a stay for fresh air, might fill up and stand out like the half of a Dutchman in a jump.
"What's all that for?" said Julia.