And he brought the ship to her course. He did not greatly like the look of the weather. For perhaps an hour and a half he had been sleeping; this was a good "turn in" for a sailor-man who signs articles to work for the shipowner for twenty-four hours in the day, a brutal and inhuman tax upon suffering men, in no other walk of life to be heard of. Anyhow he could not leave the ship in Julia's charge with those dimly winking stars growing sparer yet, with increasing moisture on the wing of the wind like the early breath of a wet squall.
"I don't expect the wind to shift," said he, "but it's bound to come on harder presently. Get you into that hen-coop and rest your limbs if not your brain. I expect I shall be wanting you before midnight."
She obeyed him as though she had been a sailor or a dog, and dissolved into the black void of the hen-coop. You could not see the faintest glimmer of her face, nor the dimmest outline of her shape. The Newfoundland had come aft and berthed itself. The animal knew that when Hardy was at the wheel it was its watch below.
Now the ship was under such small canvas that her cloths were not more than she could stand up with if it blew half a gale from abeam or abaft the beam. Those were the days of single topsails, and in all three topsails a single reef had been tied by the survivors of the crew in the heavy night before they left for the Frenchman. It would then come perhaps to a drag upon a staysail down-haul and to letting go the outer jib-halliards, leaving the unfurled sail to convulse itself into bulbs and bellies of canvas upon the jibboom. Certainly Hardy single-handed could not lay out upon the jibboom and furl a big jib: he did not mean to try.
As he expected, the wind freshened, but without the shift of a quarter of a point. The ship raced nobly through the gloom: she blew white steam from the nostrils of her bows; the white water to leeward widened with her pace and flashed with the emerald and diamond of the sea glow into the long, the streaming, the joyous homeward-bound wake. There was no more dead leviathan in the air; it was full of the salt sweetness of Swinburne's rushing sea verse. But the stars were gone; there was no light upon the sea but the light of its foam. The ship was plunging, the seas raced her in black curls, and burst with a pallor of dawn from her side, and onward she swept, bowing and rolling to the music of the bagpipes in her rigging, controlled by a single hand—a fearless and a valiant hand—the hand of a British sailor.
However, he made up his mind to "crack on" in a sort of way, and the meaning of "cracking on" at sea is the carrying in bad weather of more canvas than the judicious would approve. I have known an old skipper to furl his fore and mizzen-royal and stow his flying jib every second dog-watch in dead calm or catspaw. The ladies reckoned him a safe man, and he made the voyage from the Thames to Sydney Bay in four months. Hardy had the instincts of a mate, and was always for carrying on; but he had not much confidence in staysail and jib-sheets, and at half-past eleven, seven bells of the first watch, somewhat benumbed with his grip of the spokes, he resolved to shorten canvas, and shouted to his girl. She came out of the coop like a figure from a clock.
"Is it a storm?" said she in his ear.
"Let's thank God," he answered, "like the sailor in the song, that there are no chimney-pots in the air. I wonder if I can trust you with this wheel? It doesn't kick very much, and I sha'n't be long."
"You don't want to turn in, then?"
"Love ye, no," he answered. "Get a good hold of these spokes, and I'll stand by."