CHAPTER XIX. THE CAMILLA OF THE SEA
Within ten weeks of the date of the sailing of the clipper ship York from the River Thames the vessel was about two hundred miles to the westward of the coast of Portugal. It was a leaden day. The ocean was breathing deeply after a long conflict with the gale. The swell ran in sullen masses, lifting with the lazy sickness of oil, but the breeze was light and scarcely creased the moving knolls, and the shadow of cloud hung like tapestry in a darkened chamber, low down in ragged skirts upon the winding line of the sea.
The ship looked wrecked aloft. All her spars were standing indeed, but her mizzentopsail hung in rags, and the bolt ropes made a skeleton of the fabric aft. The foresail was split in halves, and with each weary roll gaped like a cut in an india-rubber ball when pressed. Rags of the outer jib fluttered from lacing or hanks. The maintopgallantsail had been blown loose and had gone to pieces, and was shaking from the yard in lengths like Irish pennants in the rigging. The ship was rolling drearily, and the channels would often slap white thunder out of the sulky brow of the swell, and she groaned greatly throughout her length and made some dim sound of lamentation aloft.
Hardy stood alone at the wheel. He was fresh from a long and desperate fight with the sea, and you read the character of the struggle in his face. His beard was a week old: in the hollows under his eyes lay a little whiteness, the encrustation of salt; this gave him the ghastly look of the life-boat man who steps ashore after standing two nights and a day by a stranded ship with frozen figures in her shrouds. His hair was a little long, and this gave a something of wildness to his aspect. His looks were haggard, his eyes wanting in their usual lustre, his lips were pale; he looked worn. For ten days he and Julia had been fighting a gale of wind. In ten days they had managed to obtain but two or three hours sleep in a day of twenty-four hours. But happily for them it never blew so hard but that they could keep their course shaped for the English Channel. It never blew so hard that a ship well manned would have needed to heave to. It came in roaring weight upon the quarter, and one midnight the mizzentopsail burst in a blast of cannon, and shortly after the maintopgallantsail was blown into shreds out of the gaskets, and next morning, in the screaming fury of a bleaching squall, the outer jib flew into pennons from the stay, and the veil of the fore-course was rent asunder. But the reefed maintopsail, the foretopmast-staysail, and the inner jib were as faithful to their duty as Tom Bowline in the song, and the ship rushed on in foam to the figurehead, whitening acres of the sea abaft her, passing a brig hove to in the haze; passed by a ship that would not stay to speak; passed by a Fruiter schooner from the Western Islands, whose spring over the surge was the glance of the albatross, whose envanishment in the haze ahead, into which the York was for ever rushing, was the extinction of a meteor in a cloud.
And now the gale was gone the sea would shortly smooth its panting breast; it was the early forenoon. Hardy called the dog, but he did not exert the powerful voice that was familiar to Julia.
The Newfoundland came out of its kennel and looked up in affectionate expectation at the sailor.
"Go below and bring her up!" said Hardy, pointing, and the dog perfectly understanding disappeared down the companionway.
His hands were almost raw with grasping the spokes. His arms were almost lifeless with their long resistance to the mulish tug of the wheel-chains in response to the kick of the rudder. His feet ached with standing, knots seemed to have been tied in the muscles of his legs; but in the gauntness of his looks was visible the spirit of a noble heart, and there was no better or more fearless sailor in the world than that grim, unshorn figure that stood alone at the helm of that reeling ship.
You will think it strange that a man, a woman, and a dog should have brought a big, full-rigged ship in safety down to the present hour through some thunderous Atlantic parallels. Yet this ship's adventure is not so strange to me as the mysterious good fortune of the ocean-tramp of to-day that washes through the Bay of Biscay without her funnel, and quietly discharges her cargo without any one feeling one penny the worse. Take, for instance, the second mate of an ocean-tramp. He walks the bridge; there are three foreign seamen in his watch, one of whom steers the ship, whilst the other two paint her. By secret compulsion, well understood by the owner and the captain of the ship, the second mate quits the bridge and helps the two sailors to paint the ship. Who looks after the ship whilst the person in charge of her paints? The ship herself.