Hardy stood waiting for the captain. It was not for him to order the topsail-yard to be swung until the captain spoke. All the seamen were forward standing in groups waiting for the command, and the boatswain, in the face of the general grief, could find nothing for them to do until the quarter-deck started them.
It filled Hardy with anguish, though he was only a mate in the British Merchant Service, the one unrecognised condition of our national life, spite of the pleading of its heroic traditions and the claims of its English seamen of to-day, upon the admiration of their country, to think of the poor, desolate, brain-afflicted father below, seeking in his madness his beloved little boy. He knew that this man had tenderly loved the mother of that child and mourned her loss with a sailor's heart, and that the bright and spirited lad, whom God had summoned, had been his constant companion since his wife's death, the light of his life, the flower whose fragrance had sweetened the loneliness of command.
He stood waiting, soaked to the flesh. Suddenly the captain appeared.
"Johnny is not below," he said. "He's somewhere in the ship. When did you see him last, Mr. Hardy?"
And still Hardy could not answer him. The Newfoundland had followed his master, and the whole frame and benign eyes of the noble creature, to whom and to whose like man denies a soul, yielded preternatural token of loss and disquiet that was human in eloquence.
The captain did not seem to heed Hardy's silence and manner. He looked with great eagerness and a certain wildness along the decks, and then putting his hand to the side of his mouth, with his face turned forward, where the men stood watching him, he shouted in an imperious voice as though he would frighten an answer from the concealed child:
"Johnny!—It is strange," said he, in a low voice, turning and looking at Hardy, "Is he aloft?" And he turned his eyes up and scrutinised the rigging, the tops, the crosstrees, the yards, stepping to the rail so as to obtain a view past the leaches of the canvas.
"Shall I order those yards to be swung, sir, and way got upon the ship?" said Hardy, speaking with difficulty.
"I want Johnny," was the captain's answer, and he walked slowly forward, looking to right and left of him, as though the little lad must be in hiding somewhere, flat beside a forward coaming or behind a hencoop, or under the long-boat, for his figure had been small, and he could have concealed himself within the flakes of the halliards coiled down upon a pin.