XCVII
It came from the southwest with hail and blizzards of snow in it. Tents scattered at its breath like autumn leaves—iron roofs of Army store-sheds took wing like flights of frightened rooks. Thunder cracked and rolled incessantly—fierce blue lightnings cleft the mirk with jagged yataghans of electric fire. Huge waves beat upon the narrow beaches, and leaped upon the towering cliffs, dragging mouthfuls of acres down. Ships and steamers, large and small, crowding the Harbor, were jumbled in wild confusion. The smashing of bowsprits and cutwaters, bulwarks, paddle-boxes and stern-boats may be better imagined than described. Outside in the Bay, Hemp, Iron, and Steam waged war with the unleashed elements of Wind and Water. And through all, the siege-batteries of the Allies went on bellowing; and from the wonderful array of Defense Works that had sprung up as by magic since the Army of the South rolled away on the road to Simferopol—Sevastopol answered, with canister, and round-shot, and shell.
As store-ships and troop-ships beached, and pivot-gun war-steamers foundered—and great line-of-battle ships staggered out to sea—The Realmset herself to ride out the gale with full steam up and both anchors out. But as red sparks and black smoke weltered out of her funnels, andthe great iron cables rolled off her capstan-drums—one after the other those port and starboard anchors went to the bottom with a roar. And the gale took the brand-new two-thousand-six-hundred-ton Government transport, twisted her round, lifted her up and broke her, as a child breaks a sugar ship that has come off the top of a birthday-cake.
A petty officer of artificers—his rating is unknown, but he ranks as Second-Class Scoundrel—had been bribed with the sum of fifty pounds not to clinch the cable-ends. When the great stern-wave lifted the doomed ship, this man, with another, was on the poop. He shrieked to his mate to dive, but the heart of the poor wretch failed him. And the Second-Class Scoundrel dived—and, looking down into an awful gulf of sliding black-green water, his mate saw him swimming like a frog, far down below the surface, straight for the open sea.... And thenThe Realmbumped thrice—and broke into barrel-staves and flinders. And her cargo of good goods and bad goods—bogus goods and no goods—and nearly every living soul aboard her—went to the bottom of the Euxine. And young Mortimer Jowell, who had skirted the Harbor on its windward side, and climbed the towering wall of rock that gates it from the Bay, shut up the Dollond telescope through which he had witnessed the tragedy—and sat down upon the hailstone carpeted ground behind a big boulder of pudding-stone to recover and think over things....
“O God, save those poor beggars!” he had groaned out over and over, as the little red and black specks that were men bobbed about in the boiling surf. It was quite clear to him that they were shrieking, though the howl of the sleety gale had drowned their cries.
“Damn the old man! He’s done it, as he said he would!” he muttered, hugging his knees and blinking as the stinging tears came crowding, and a sob stuck in his throat. “And I used to chaff him for being such a thundering old Dodger! Gaw!” He shuddered and dropped his haggard young face into his grimy, chilblained hands.
He knew he could never again face his brother-officers. He knew he could never, never again go home. He roused himself out of a giddy stupor presently at the sound of voices. Two officers of the Fleet had taken refuge fromthe blizzard in a buttress-angle of the Fort wall, not far distant. They were talking about the wreck ofThe Realm, and, sheltered as they were from the wind, their voices reached the ear of Jowell’s son.
“It’s a gey guid thing for the Contractors,” said one man. “They’ve saved their bacon by letting the Army salt-pork and junk go to Davy Jones’s locker, ye ken!”
And his companion answered significantly:
“Supposing it ever was aboard!”
“Ay!—now I come to think of it,” said the first man, who had a North of the Tweed accent, “that was varra odd the way the port and starboard cables went ripping oot o’ her. Will we be getting any explanation of that circumstance, do ye suppose, later on?”
“Undoubtedly, if we wait until the Day of Judgment,” said the second speaker, who seemed a bit of a cynic. “And meanwhile—I’ll bet you a sovereign that more stuff will be proved to have gone down in her than ever could have been got into her holds. She’ll be the scapegoat of the Commissariat—and by Gad! they want one!”
Said the other man:
“Ay! do they—gey and badly! Come, let’s be ganging doon. I’m sorely wanting a nip!”
And their figures crossed the threshold of the broken doorway, and Mortimer Jowell heard the pebbles rolling under their sliding feet as they negotiated the downward path.
“If I were the kind of man I’d like to be, I wouldn’t even take the twenty-five thousand poundshesettled on me when I got my Commission,” he muttered. “No, sir! I’d send it back—and send in my papers—and get a berth in the Sultan’s pay. Turn Bashi, perhaps, though I hate Turks, filthy beggars! Still.... Gaw!... that ain’t half a bad idea!”
Momentarily he forgot his keen unhappiness in contemplation of a glowing portrait of Mortimer—not Jowell Pasha—riding to war upon an Arab charger of dazzling beauty, presented by his royal master in conjunction with a gold and jeweled scimitar—in recognition of His Excellency’s distinguished services as Commander of an Imperial Order.
He saw the Pasha, followed by a lengthy train of aide-de-camps, orderlies, and pipe-bearers, returning to hisluxurious tent at nightfall, to be welcomed by his mother—an English lady of pleasant but dowdy appearance—and His Excellency’s young and lovely bride. And he put his hand into his breast and pulled out a note-case—and took from this the oddest little scrawly letter—that had been brought to him at the camp of the First Division before he went to the Front.
“Honored Sir,“I am told it is thus one begins a letter to a gentleman of Ingiland. Pardon me if I am wrong! When my nurse binds the pencil to my wrist with a ribbon I can write as the Ingliz ladies at the school at Pera taught me, though it is not so well as I speak.“I have much heard of your deeds at the Alma Battle, and of your noble answer to the false messenger of the English Emir, and I am proud to the bottom of my heart! For so brave a man has told me that he loves me. Honored Sir, you have given me what I thought to have never! I pray Our Lord Isa and the Lady Maryam to bless and guard you! Do we, I wonder, meet again?“Honored Sir,“I am yours respectfully,“Zora,“Of the House of Jones.”
“Honored Sir,
“I am told it is thus one begins a letter to a gentleman of Ingiland. Pardon me if I am wrong! When my nurse binds the pencil to my wrist with a ribbon I can write as the Ingliz ladies at the school at Pera taught me, though it is not so well as I speak.
“I have much heard of your deeds at the Alma Battle, and of your noble answer to the false messenger of the English Emir, and I am proud to the bottom of my heart! For so brave a man has told me that he loves me. Honored Sir, you have given me what I thought to have never! I pray Our Lord Isa and the Lady Maryam to bless and guard you! Do we, I wonder, meet again?
“Honored Sir,“I am yours respectfully,“Zora,“Of the House of Jones.”
The Ensign folded up the funny little letter and kissed it—and put it back in his note-case, and stowed the note-case away. And then he remembered the sergeant and section, waiting at what was left of the Commissariat-Sheds, and hoisted himself by that rope of Duty, up upon his stiff and aching legs.
He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. The storm that had brewed and burst with the diabolical suddenness peculiar to Black Sea hurricanes had begun to pass over. Tears in the pall of sooty vapor rushing north-east showed patches of chill blue sky and blinks of frosty-pale sunshine. The batteries had never for an instant ceased bellowing and growling. Now men who had left off work, or play—to stare from the cliffs at the sight ofwar-steamers buckling up, and transports smashing like matchwood—went back to play or work again.
But, where the cliff lowered to a saddleback below the Fortress, a rescue-party of men of both Services—with lifebuoys and lines and a rocket-apparatus—were energetically busy—and the Ensign joined them and asked the reason why? When they pointed to the brink of the cliff, he crawled on his hands and knees, and, craning his neck over—saw that shipwrecked mortals no bigger than swarming bees were clinging to a fragment of wreckage—jammed amidst jagged rocks and boiling surges, a sheer three hundred feet below.
The question argued was, who should be lowered down and make fast a line, by which these perishing wretches might be hauled into safety? They would have settled the thing by drawing of lots. But Fate stepped in in the person of the bullet-headed young subaltern of the Cut Red Feathers, who shouted as he unbuckled his sword-belt, untied his sash, and threw off his mud-stained fur-coat.
“I’m the owner’s son, and this is my affair, I’m blest if it ain’t! I’m dam’ if anybody goes down that cliff but me!”
He had not the least desire to die, but it had suddenly been revealed to him as by a mental lightning-flash, that there was but one way to cleanse the tarnished name of Jowell. Not by discarding it—but by good deeds purifying it, and sweetening it in the nostrils of honest men.
As they made fast the line about him, he fumbled in his breast and pulled out a little note-case, calling out:
“I want some fellow to take charge of this!”
No one volunteering, he scanned the faces of the throng about him—and lighted on one that, despite a shag of crimson beard—he knew. He said, moving over to the owner, a tall, broad-shouldered, ragged soldier, in the tatters of a Lancer uniform, and holding out his hand to him:
“You’re the man who saved me in the wreck ofThe British Queen, and wouldn’t tip me your fist afterwards. Have you any objection to doing it now?” He added, as Joshua Horrotian complied shamefacedly: “And as you’re a kind of cousin, you might look after this ’ere note-case. There are some flimsies in it, and two letters that are to be posted, supposing I don’t come up from down there! You can keep the tin in the event I’ve mentioned, andspend it as you choose! Do you twig? And have my sword and sash sent to my mother! Now, ain’t you beggars about ready to lower away?”
And they lowered away—swimmingly for a hundred-and-fifty feet or so, and then the gale—that had been crouching and holding its breath—roared and leaped. And the hope of the house of Jowell was beaten into a red rag against the face of those stupendous precipices of pudding-stone, in less time than it takes to write these lines.
He sobbed out “Mummy!” as the life went out of him, and something plucked at the vitals of a dowdy woman, separated from him by thousands of miles of dry land and bitter water, and she cried out: “My boy!...” And then there was nothing left for those on the cliff-top, but to haul the limp and broken body up again.