"Your father may be a very clever man," said Captain Layard, "but I have no faith in doctors. I have never met a doctor who did me any good, and I have been ill in my time, believe me. They let my wife die."
He paused as if in some passage of deep emotion. In this interval Hardy thought to himself what an extraordinary conversation for the quarter-deck of a ship, close upon midnight, in a dense fog!
Some hanging fold of canvas flapped aloft. In a voice as changed as though he was acting, the captain exclaimed:
"That's the speech of a sail that asks to be furled. The glass is high, and there's no foul weather anywhere. If the breeze freshens by ever so little, or if this light air draws ahead, call me, sir."
There was positive refreshment in this plain speech of the sea to Hardy, who on replying to the captain found that he had gone, and in the steaming faintness hovering in the companion just caught a sight of his head disappearing.
Eleven bells had been struck, and Hardy was beginning to think that it would be eight bells soon, which must signify shelter, freedom from the dwarfish drench of the vapour, as fine but as penetrating as rain in Lilliput, a warm blanket, half a pipe, and then oblivion for an off-shore spell of nearly four hours, when on a sudden the dog barked. The tones were deep and constant, and to the first roll of those organ notes the loose wet canvas beat the masts aloft in a sudden heave of the whole fabric, and an element of alarm and even of fearful expectation entered the black void and thickened it, and seemed to close it round about till the smoking colour of light on forecastle and quarter-deck dimmed into the preternatural faintness of the salt sea glow when it shudders a fathom deep under some smooth tropic surface.
The dog continued to bark, and there was an importunate vehemence in his notes, a bounding pulse of urgency as though the noble creature with instincts superior to man's knew that a matter of life or death was concerned in his sentinel bugling. Voices sounded forward, you heard a hurry of feet; again the ship leaned, and the sails smote the masts with an alarum sound of metal; and to the accompaniment of this midnight concert, made ghastly by blackness, by the overwhelming blindness of fog and by the presence of danger, Hardy rushed forward, taking his chance of what might be in the road.
"Jump for a port-fire, one of you," he shouted, sending his cry slap into a very web of seamen's growling voices, the owners of which were no more to be seen than the ship's keel. "What is it, Sailor?"
And now he was alongside the dog, and with his hand on its head felt in the direction of the creature's muzzle, and found that it was delivering its notes straight away over the head-rail, about two points on the weather bow.