"Suppose he didn't do it?" said Captain Layard, letting the telescope sink and turning his face slowly to Hardy, who thought, even in that moment of horror and astonishment, that the captain had spoken nothing saner since the voyage began. "Fill on your topsail," continued the captain, in a trembling voice, his face distorted by passions and fancies beyond the penetration of reason. "I wouldn't have Johnny see that sight; they'll keep him swinging till he has ticked out the minutes his soul has taken to arrive in hell. Fill on your topsail, sir. And what'll the beggars do? They'll wait for help to come along."
The mate was walking a little way forward, and the captain, with his back upon the barque, stood muttering to himself. It was a pleasant breeze, and the ship took the weight of the sunlit gush of blue wind with a buoyant heel, and then she broke the waters at the bow. In two hours the barque was glimmering like the crest of a sea in the liquid ether far and far astern. Her topsail was still aback, and doubtless, as Captain Layard had said, she was waiting for the help that must soon come along.
CHAPTER VIII. LOST!
And now for another week of this ship's adventure. There is little to record. As she drove to the south and west the breeze freshened by strokes, and the foam, white as daylight, seethed with a leeward roll to the channels, whose plates flashed jewelled fountains from her side.
It was noble sailing with a buckling stu'nsail boom, and every taut weather-shroud and backstay spirited the sea-whitening keel with sweet, clear songs of rejoicing. All the crew loved little Johnny, and the great Newfoundland, placid, stately, and benign, was ever at his side, courting the boy, with looks of love, to play. Always in this fine weather the sunny-haired lad, in the miniature clothes of the bluejacket, would of a dog-watch take his drum upon the forecastle, and roll out a good rattling accompaniment to the cheerful piping of the whistle. Then the sailors would dance whilst the ship's stem rent the water into sweat, and the bow-sea rolled away in glory, and the western heavens grew majestical with sunset.
And all this time no man spoke a hint as to the captain's state of mind, because, as I have said, the sailor has no eyes for the human nature of the quarter-deck until it should become as visible and demonstrative as a windmill in a wind.
This Captain Layard was not; his moods and motions were of too subtle a sort to be interpretable by the forecastle gaze, and all the strange unconscious discoveries of himself he limited to Hardy, scarcely ever speaking to the second mate unless to give him an order. But even when he talked to Hardy, no man could have sworn that he was madder than most dreamers are. It was only, as Hardy thought, that his talk was so cursedly inconsequential. He reminded him of a diver who if you look to port comes up to starboard, whose spot of emergence is always somewhere else.