"Four pounds a month."
"Does she sign the ship's articles?"
"All the same as if she were an A.B.," replied Smedley.
There was another pause, during which the captain lighted his pipe.
"I can promise nothing," said he, looking at his wife as though he was trying to gratify her instead of helping the girl; "but I'll see to-morrow if some berth as second or assistant stewardess can be contrived. I shall see Mrs. Lambert—that is the stewardess's name, and I don't doubt that I can get the office to recognise the need of assistance, as I understand we shall be a full ship with a good many children."
"You are a real friend," exclaimed Hardy. "It is more than I dared expect from you," and he turned to witness the effect of the kindly captain's words upon the girl; but her expression was as one who gazes at a cheerless prospect. Observing that Hardy watched her, she exclaimed, in a low voice, "I can but thank you, Captain Smedley," and she bowed her head, leaving it bowed.
There was not much more to be said upon the subject after this; indeed it was easily seen that the girl's heart was with Hardy, and as he was sailing for Australia she wanted to go there too, which perhaps was not idle in her, because it was impossible for her to realise that he could not marry her, even if he loved her, which she had no right to imagine, as he could not support her ashore, nor as a mate, nor even perhaps as a captain, take her to sea with him. But things are felt and understood which may not be expressed, and a little before Mrs. Brierley and the maid came in with the tea-tray and the cakes it was arranged that Hardy should accompany Miss Armstrong on board the Glamis Castle, which lay not far from the York, when Captain Smedley hoped to be able to tell her that he had managed to find a berth for her aboard his ship.
"It will save a vast deal of anxiety and of time, and it will rescue you from the horrors of the emigrant ship," said Hardy to Julia, who smiled faintly and looked as though the least expression of sympathy would compel her into a passion of tears.
Mrs. Brierley spread a liberal tea upon the table, but not much appetite attended it. The subject of the assistant stewardess was dropped, and Mrs. Smedley listened with attention, and Julia with fictitious interest, to the conversation that was almost entirely carried on by Hardy and his friend. They had been shipmates, as we have heard—Hardy as midshipman, Smedley as third mate, both occupying the midshipmen's quarters in days when Blackwall Liners used to sail with twelve or fourteen reefers in buttons and badges, who had sole charge of the mizzen-mast, the poop or quarter-deck, the quarter-boats and the gig. John Company's flag was then flying, but they had not served in that employ. They afterward came together, Smedley as chief mate and Hardy as third, in a vessel called the Asia, a ship with long skysail poles, a stem nearly as up and down as a cutter's, black as night, half the length of her aft sparkling with round ports. They talked of this ship and of her wonderful passages; how her captain would carry fore, main, and topgallant stu'nsails, and pass by ships which thought they were cracking on with a topgallantsail set over a single reefed topsail.
Sailors who have been shipmates love this sort of memories, and it is like watching the coil of the sea—one blue ridge dissolving in the base of another, with the laughter and the thunder of heaving and racing brine—to hear them.