It was not to sleep that Emily returned when she carried the water to Elsie of Shanghai and, crouching in the cramped space, took the woman's scorching head in her lap. Elsie was murmuring in a semi-coma, sometimes in English, but more often in Chinese. Occidental though she was, this woman's long, hard years in the gateways of the Far East had breathed in her the Orient's spirit of fatalism. The stoicism of the children of the sunset lands was hers; the immobility of feature which marks them was sealed in her striking, irregular features. Her manner of speech and expression were theirs.
"I wonder if they will burn me in hell this way," she gasped as Emily put the cup to her avid lips.
"No, no, you mustn't have such thoughts," Emily whispered.
Elsie was in pain. The difficulty with which she breathed told that. Yet only now and then did a hardly audible moan escape her lips.
"He said I must be brave—that I was brave—that I must be patient," and Emily Granville knew that this strange woman was thinking of what Lavelle had said to them in the morning. "Did you ask him—the captain—for this water?" she asked after a seemingly very long time.
"No," Emily told her with a feeling of guilt. "He made me bring it to you. He said it would be all right."
"God, what a white man—what a white man! Oh, I know men, my dear child," and Emily imagined that a sneer was upon her lips. "I know them as the Canton money lenders know their gold." She spoke with a fierce tenseness. "I've trafficked in them—traded in them—as they trade in guns—and opium at Macao." Her breath stopped in a quick gasp. Emily pressed another sup of water between her lips.
"Are you afraid of death, my dear?" Elsie whispered.
"I—I don't know——But you mustn't think these terrible thoughts," and yet as she spoke Emily Granville wondered at the calmness which possessed her. A different person than the Emily Granville she had known for twenty-four years seemed to be speaking and thinking in these wild and strange surroundings.
"I will not get better—I know," said the Shanghai woman presently. "It is pneumonia again—the women of the lighted houses cannot stand the open." She sat up quickly, clutching at her breasts. "I am like fire—and lead—in here. Oh, God, it is so hard to breathe!"
"Can't I think of something to do for you?"
"Only hold me—just this way," and she sank in Emily's lap again. "I saw the way you held him. You are—very kind. You were made for—for the mother of men—strong men—like my—my captain out there. No; do not draw away from me. You would trust him if you could have seen him—him and that Chang—that night in Shanghai. There was a place for everybody—everybody—but the women—the toys from behind the green jalousies. Ask Chang—he—he will tell you. They picked us out—of the dark river. It's very dark now, isn't it? Very dark——" Her whisper trailed away in a low moan. Emily tried to make her take a drink of water, but she refused it. "Will you say, 'Our—Our Father'"—and Emily repeated the Lord's Prayer very slowly and sensed that the other woman's lips were following the words dumbly. "Ask him—my captain—please if he—will not speak to me," Elsie murmured after a long silence.
Emily heard a movement aft and, pushing back the flap of the rug, saw Chang relieving Lavelle at the helm. The dawn was just pinking the eastern sky.
Lavelle saw Emily's hand beckoning and he crept forward. Elsie held out a hand to him and he took it. Her pulse flashed to him a history of what she was suffering. A glance at her face revealed to him the touch of death upon it.
"I'm going away—going home," Elsie whispered. "Will you hold——The dawn!"
Lavelle understood her glance upward and pushed away the rug. He got behind her and lifted her into a sitting posture. She still clung to his hand.
"Isn't it wonderful?" she asked, looking toward Emily and then up into Lavelle's face. He nodded. "I am not afraid, captain. I've learned—last night I learned—from you—to die unafraid."
A marvelous smile lighted her face. The marks of her hard years sped from it forever in the glow of the new day which suffused the sea and the sky with a spirit of the infinite mystery this waif of life was on the threshold of solving.
"Our Father, who——" she whispered. Then, starting suddenly from Lavelle's clasp she put out her hands to the dawn. "Mother—mother o' mine," she called ecstatically. "Moth——"
Elsie of Shanghai fell back into Lavelle's arms, with a sigh of peace parting her lips in a smile.
Emily looked up at Lavelle and, as he turned away quickly, the pent-up misery and loneliness in her gave vent in a flood of tears. The sobs which she could not choke back aroused the sleepers forward. Death had come and a soul had sped so quietly that it had not disturbed their slumbers.
Starting to his knees, Rowgowskii beheld Lavelle just laying the burden out of his arms along the fore-and-aft seat near Chang. The helmsman might have been an image. The Chinese sailors arising from the bottom of the boat were seized immediately by the awe of the mystery that had so swiftly come among them. They huddled together on their haunches, muttering over some talisman held in common.
Emily followed Lavelle and sat at the feet of the shell of clay, smoothing down the bedraggled dress over the delicate ankles and feet.
"I—you understand—sometimes we can't find words——" he said to her gently, and she nodded in understanding. Nothing he could have said would have conveyed more to her. The gentleness, the kindness, the comprehension of this man were battering a breach in the barriers of her terror and hatred of him. Falling on her knees beside Elsie's body she prayed for strength and fortitude and forbearance.
Emily started up amid a silence broken only by the breeze and the boat snoring away before it. Lavelle was sitting opposite, his gaze upon her. She sensed in the faces of Chang and the others a new mystery of expectancy. Lavelle stood up and handed her into his seat.
One of the Chinamen crawled aft and passed Lavelle a piece of rope and an iron block which had been left in the bow of the boat when Chang cut the fall away. Lavelle turned so that what he did with these things was hidden from Emily's sight, but she understood. As he faced her again she saw that the block was fastened to Shanghai Elsie's ankles, although he had endeavored to hide it beneath the silken gown.
"Do you know—would you wish to say a prayer, Miss Granville?" he asked.
Emily stood up and met his gaze. He was asking her to do something; he expected something of her and she was helpless.
"I know only the simple prayers of the sea," Lavelle added. With that Emily found her voice.
"She—she would want you to say those—and so would I—if——" Her eyes closed, and as from a great distance she heard him intoning the Lord's prayer. She realized that never before had she known its full meaning. There came a pause and she looked up. The boat was fluttering into the wind. The Chinamen, save Chang, who had to stand to the helm, and Rowgowskii, were on their knees.
Lavelle stood with Elsie in his outstretched arms, facing an arc in the sky where a blush of the dawn still lingered. The breeze seemed to pause. As Chang checked the boat's way Lavelle bent over and laid the burden in his arms upon the sea. So might a mother have put down a child to rest.
"'We therefore commit her body to the deep,'" he said very distinctly, "'to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of this body, when the sea shall give up her dead.'"
His gaze lingered overside for a moment and then he added:
"It's a clean grave, little woman."
Turning quickly away from the sea he seemed another man.
"Sail on!" he snapped at the helmsman.
Emily would not eat until at noon that day Lavelle commanded her to do so. Watching him, she saw that he ate hardly as much as the little that passed her lips. She did not see him drink at all. Neither had he drunk at the morning meal. As she recalled this his words as he had given her the water in the night came back: "I will straighten it out." This was the way he was "straightening it out." The thought brought tears to her eyes and made her ashamed.
The sense of loneliness that was borne of Elsie's passing had grown upon her with the hours. She was yearning for sympathy and she would have turned to Lavelle, but she sensed that somehow a new barrier had arisen between them—a wall not of her building, but of his. When he spoke to her his voice was very gentle, but neither his manner nor his speech invited her to say anything.
As Lavelle lay down at Chang's feet, shortly after luncheon, to take the sleep which he must have to meet the night, Emily remarked in a tone of anxiety that he had removed the bandage from his head.
"Yes," he answered simply. "It is all right. The clean salt air is a good physician. The sea hurts, but it also heals—if one will only let it."
His face might have been a mask. The gray eyes closed wearily as he spoke and he buried his face in his arm and away from the sun's glare.
The years had taught Paul Lavelle how to suffer alone. He was suffering now. When he looked up from Elsie's dead face that morning into the gold woman's he thought he saw something in her eyes to make him pause. He had surprised the glance again, he imagined, as he turned round from the burial. He knew life too well not to understand whither a woman's sympathy might carry her.
Emily, looking down at the long, lithe body stretched in the bottom of the boat, kept repeating to herself: "The sea hurts, but it also heals." She sought a meaning in the words which she felt she had missed.
Rowgowskii, drawing near, interrupted her thoughts with a pleasant salutation in French. This big dark man had a finish and poise familiar to her world and he could talk with a brilliance which made it possible for her to forget momentarily the unpleasant familiarity of his black eyes, and the pendulous underlip which signaled the sensuous animal in him. During the morning he had made an effort to be sincerely comforting and reassuring and she was thankful to him. After a few idle words Rowgowskii's gaze wandered down to Lavelle.
"He feels badly over the death of that woman?" he asked, looking up at her with a strange directness. Emily answered with a nod of acquiescence. A smile passed over his face. With a significant shrug, he added: "I understood aboard the ship—theCambodia—that they were—très intimes." He searched the face of the golden-haired woman to see if his dart had found a mark. But he mistook Emily Granville. She was not one who could be read as one ran. She was silent.
"Men of his kind—well, they are a strange, strange lot," he went on.
"I have no desire to discuss Mr. Lavelle," said Emily.
"Of course not. Pardon me, Miss Granville. I was told the painful story aboard the ship. I understand your feelings. You will pardon me, I hope. It is because of what this man is that I fear for you. These Chinamen would do murder at his word. He is armed; I am helpless, but I will find a way."
Rowgowskii leaned nearer and whispered:
"We should be sailing in the opposite direction. Did you know that, Miss Granville? Over to the east we should be going."
Emily met his gaze now, with a pallor beginning to overspread her face.
"But do you think he does not know?" she asked, and her voice trembled.
"If you will remember it was he—this man—who changed the course of theYakutat," answered Rowgowskii. "I have been thinking that you might induce him to change—to do right."
Consternation seized her at the mention of theYakutat. It bore quick doubt in her heart; then fear. Her new faith was torn from its moorings. Her mind lost all sense of its bearings.
"Why have you not spoken to him?" she asked.
"I mentioned it this morning. He ignored me. That Chinaman there"—he indicated Chang with a glance—"that beast there—told me that I could walk ashore if I did not like the way things were done here."
Neither had observed Chang for some time, but now Emily looked up at him and was startled by the steadiness with which his gaze was fixed dead ahead. He stood tense like a hunting dog at a point, his nostrils twitching nervously. Rowgowskii followed the direction of the giant's gaze, but could see nothing. Emily started to speak to Chang, but her lips opened only to gasp.
"Land ho!" cried Chang.
"Where away?" answered Lavelle, leaping to his feet.
"Two points—starboard bow, master," and Chang pointed one of his powerful and sinewy arms straight ahead.
Emily, Rowgowskii, and the coolie sailors looked eagerly in the direction in which he pointed, but could see nothing. They turned toward Lavelle, who, with his hands shading his eyes, was driving his gaze toward the southwest. The tensity of the moment was terrific. It impinged upon him in every glance. He was the commander; his was the task to bring this boat to land; his was the responsibility. They saw his lips move as if he counted something. As he finished he dropped his hands.
"It is land," he said, speaking directly to Emily, and his voice trembled. "We should be up with it before sunset, Miss Granville. God grant it means your succor—your deliverance."
"What land is it?" she asked eagerly.
"I don't know. It puzzles me."
"I saw you counting—what was that?"
"Trees—I was able to make out three." Turning to Chang he said: "Haul her up until you bring the land two points off the lee bow and then let her go."
Emily noted that Lavelle's voice rang with genuine happiness.
With the enthusiasm of a boy Lavelle next ordered a drink of water for all hands in celebration of Chang's discovery. Never was a health in rare wine drunk with finer appreciation than the simple tepid draught which these waifs quaffed from a tin cup.
Lavelle took the helm himself and a half-hour before sundown fetched a low-lying island which appeared to be between three-quarters of a mile and a mile long from north to south and about half a mile broad. It had a rise in its center like a camel's hump. The northern side of this and the lower land abutting upon it were sprinkled sparsely with cocoanut palms. There was not a visible sign of life.
Emily, standing alongside of Lavelle as they came within sound of the sea breaking against the island's weather shore, saw the happiness which had come into the commander's eyes suddenly depart. It was replaced by an intense seriousness. She could not help asking what was the matter.
"Nothing," said he simply, but the felt that he was withholding something from her.
Lavelle was reading signs which made him pause. First he had noticed the absence of any reefs—an invariable and natural formation of islands in that region of the world. The shore rose abruptly and sheer from the sea. The land was brown and raw-looking.
The wind was heightening, and this fact, in combination with the swift approach of darkness and the unweatherly qualities of the boat, determined him to abandon a momentary impulse to seek the lee side of the island.
Just to the southward of the hump or camel's back Chang sighted what seemed to be a beach. With the coolies and Rowgowskii at the oars Lavelle laid the boat toward this point, bow on, taking the precaution to drag the sea anchor astern so as to prevent her from broaching to in the heavy sea that was making.
Chang, with the painter in his hand, leaped ashore as the boat grounded. One of the coolies followed him. He heaved on the painter with Chang and then ran hack toward the boat to keep her from slewing round. Lavelle saw him reach the side of the boat. The next instant he had disappeared—straight down in the twinkling of an eye.
Everybody in the boat, looked on with dumbness. Not even Emily cried out. They sat in their places appalled.
Lavelle took a running leap from the bow of the boat and landed beside the laboring Chang. With their combined strength they pulled the craft safely clear of the water. Then, he ran back and, before he would permit the others to leave the boat, handed Emily ashore.
As Lavelle released the precious weight he felt the ground under him wobble. Emily staggered where she stood and reeled against him.
"I have forgotten how to walk on land," she said in innocent embarrassment and with an attempt at a smile.
Lavelle made no answer. His worst fears were true. They had landed on a floating island. Any moment might see it engulfed.
Lavelle caught Emily by the arm as the island's heaving reeled her against him and held her. The tense, startled expression which she saw in his face drove the faint smile of embarrassment from hers. It frightened her.
She followed his glance, which was sweeping their surroundings. They were standing in what had evidently been the bed or course of a creek or large brook. It gullied its way clear across the island from east to west, following the base line of the hill.
"What is it?" Emily asked in dismay. "Something is wrong, captain."
Before Lavelle could form an answer the island gave another heave. The shell of earth rippled as if it had been so much water.
With a cry of terror and warning Rowgowskii sprang away from the boat's side and went scrambling up the hill. The two coolies, still a-tremble with the fear which the sudden and mysterious death of their mate a moment before had put in them, followed him shrieking.
Chang leaped to Lavelle's side, the spot where he had been standing filling with water as his feet left it.
"Lun, master! Lun, lady!" shouted the giant.
"Come!" said Emily to Lavelle, starting toward the hill. She took but a step. A sharp cry of anguish, which she tried hard to suppress, escaped from her. Her limbs refused to carry her. They seemed to be breaking with the pain born of the cramped life in the boat.
With a murmured word of understanding Lavelle snatched her into his arms and carried her halfway up the hillside. Chang pushed him as he went. When he put her down in a mat of grass and taro plant tops she still clung to his hand as a child might have done.
On this higher ground the movement of the island was not less terrifying.
"Was—is it an earthquake?" Emily whispered in awe.
Lavelle shook his head. His gaze went searching up to windward and then darted across the island to leeward where the sun was tobogganing down a bright yellow sky—such a sky as invariably presages wind. He turned to windward again.
For an instant despair overwhelmed him. This islet was but a bit of waif land—the bait of a cruel trap which the sea had set for him. Even as he watched it the surf piled higher and higher against the sheer weather shore. This was the fanged jaw of the trap; and it was closing. The swiftly rising wind which whipped his face seemed to chuckle in glee.
To drive the heavy boat through that surf and back to sea was a task which seemed to him to be beyond the force at his command. Nor could that crew get it across the island to make a launching from the lee side.
Despair enters the breasts of strong men only to refuel their fires of determination. So it was with Paul Lavelle. Emily saw the gloom pass from his face. A conquering light of resolution succeeded it. His jaw set again in its familiar line of purpose. Thus she had beheld him on the deck of the doomedCambodia. Thus he had looked as he had come to her that night.
"We must put to sea again," said he, facing her quickly and in his tenseness pressing the hand with which she was clinging to him. He read her apprehension. "Morning may see this bit of earth mixed with the ocean. It is but a piece of waif land—a thing without an anchorage—something torn from its mother mass by the ocean in anger. For us it is a trap—one of the sea's countless treacheries." He glanced over his shoulder at the surf. "There is no time to lose," he added.
Emily met this revelation of new peril so calmly that Lavelle paused in wonderment as he swung away from her.
"Can't I—do something to—help you?" she asked. She might have been craving a boon.
"Just hold to your faith. We'll win through if you keep that, won——"
The wind snapped his words off there. She did not know that he had hailed her as "wonder woman." Yet she glowed at the glance of frank admiration which had accompanied his words.
Lavelle called Chang. The giant started up from his haunches a few feet away, where he had been crouching and listening with eager ear to every word which had fallen from his master's lips.
"Him clay-zee islan', master! No good!" avowed Chang.
"To sea!" was Lavelle's answer. He drove his purpose into the serang with those two words and a gesture. The giant hesitated so long as it took to look from Lavelle to the surf and back again. There was doubt in his eyes.
"Jump! Night soon!" cried Lavelle. The command electrified the serang.
Chang faced up the hill, beckoning and calling Rowgowskii and the coolies to descend. They were perched on its crest like banderlog hypnotized by fear. They did not move.
"Come down out of that!" yelled Lavelle in anger at the white man and instantly repeating the command to the coolies in their own tongue.
"It is unsafe! I will stay here!" Rowgowskii cried back.
The coolies, chattering to each other, settled again on their haunches from which they had half started. They were taking their cue from the black-bearded white man beside them. They would not trust themselves to the earth below which trembled and swallowed things like the sea.
"Bring 'em down, Chang!" snapped Lavelle.
The giant sprang up the hill at the order, hurling at the coolies a curse which consigned forty generations of their ancestors to an additional century of grilling in the fires of eternity. It started them, but Rowgowskii did not move. Then, out of Chang's belt flashed a long knife. He raised it to hurl at the white man.
With uplifted hands and crying that he would obey, Rowgowskii stood up. Chang lowered the knife and paused in his ascent. The leader of the mutineers motioned to the coolies to precede him. They clambered along the rocks, darting glances over their shoulders as if measuring to descend as far from the reach of Chang as possible.
Whether it was Rowgowskii or one of the coolies who did it neither Emily, Chang, nor Lavelle, watching from below, could tell, but a large round boulder was dislodged by the feet of one of the three. It crashed down the hillside with the ricochet of a spending shell, missed Emily by a hair's-breadth, and plunged through the side of the boat.
A moment of awful silence followed the destructive work of the boulder. Even the wind seemed to pause in its flight and the sea in its surging to behold what man would do in the face of this disaster.
Rowgowskii and the two coolies lay in a heap on a mass of loosened earth on which they had been swept down the hill in the wake of the rock. Emily had risen to her feet where Lavelle had left her seated. Her gaze was fixed on him. He stood with his back to her and facing the boat. Chang stood to the eastward of her, motionless. His gaze, too, was fixed on the master.
Lavelle was the first to move. A stride carried him to the boat. A glance revealed to him a hole in the starboard bilge through which he might have crawled without difficulty, big man though he was. Four of the ribs were smashed. The keel was shattered for half its length. Any but the stoutest heart must have admitted the craft to be an irreparable, hopeless wreck.
With a weird cry of insensate rage Chang, who had run to Lavelle's side, turned away toward Rowgowskii and the coolies. No one who saw him and the manner in which he carried his long knife could have doubted but that the serang meant to visit instant death upon the mutineers. His gigantic form trembled with the passionate intention of the slayer. Rowgowskii and the coolies stood in a paralysis of fear.
A word from Lavelle stopped the serang.
"More better kill! Now!" cried the giant to his master and with a characterization of the mutineers that was blood-chilling in its anathema.
"Give me that knife," ordered Lavelle quietly. Meeting his gaze and holding it for a moment Chang thrust the blade into Lavelle's hand. He was conquered, but the glow of an heroic splendor was upon him.
"Kill me—kill Chang, your servant, master."
There was a bare note of defiance in the Chinaman's voice. He dropped his hands at his sides in token of submission and bent his head for the blow he invited.
"I will kill when I choose to kill. Go. Clear out this boat," said Lavelle.
"You are master," answered the serang, and he turned to summon the mutineers.
Rowgowskii and the coolies under Chang's driving began a rapid transportation of all of the boat's provisions and equipment to a point halfway up the hillside indicated by Lavelle. The master knew that this was no time for punishment. He must have every ounce of strength he could command.
Straightening up from a contemplation of the hole in the boat, his brain busy with plans of repair, he looked toward the sea.
"I'm not beaten unless you drown me in the next three hours," he flung in a mutter at the growling deep.
Turning away, he found Emily Granville beside him. She was looking up at him through a mist of tears. Her own misery of body and soul had been swept away in the instant she had heard the boulder go crunching through the boat's thin skin. She could think only of what this cruel stab of fate must mean to the man captaining the handful of life which he had been chosen to save. Her capacity to think of another and not of herself in this common crisis was a sign of growth which would have pleased her if it had been possible to pause in self-analysis.
And this man, meeting her pitying eyes, smiled at her quizzically! If he had confronted her with a hopeless curse she would not have been surprised. Now she could but gasp in amazement. The comforting words which she had planned to speak would not lend themselves to utterance. In this second she realized that thus would he meet death—undaunted; smiling.
"Fate is treating you—very unkindly, Miss Granville," said he. He spoke in his usual low tone.
"Us," she corrected him, resenting, as she had come to do all that day, his insistence upon classifying her apart.
"Us, then," he answered with a nod.
"Does this mean——Is this the end?" she asked calmly, and she drew his eyes to the hole in the boat. His answer was a question.
"Do you feel that it is the end?"
"No," the woman answered, searching his face and reading there a message of infinite faith.
Yet even as she spoke the island was a-quiver under the increasing force of the sea's assaults. Nor had it been still at any time since they had put foot on it.
"No man may tell the life of a floating island," Lavelle explained. "In weather like this it is very—very short——"
"Can you repair this boat? Do you intend to mend this hole?"
Her eyes opened in wonderment, for he nodded affirmatively.
"Remember what Browning said: 'To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall. And, baffled, get up and begin again——'"
"All clear, master!" called Chang, interrupting Lavelle and leaping out of the boat with the mast and oars in his arms.
Lavelle summoned all hands. They heaved the boat over on its undamaged side. With a strength which peril had trebled, they dragged it out of the miry, jelly-like ground on which it lay and brought it to a ledge on the hill. Man's work though it was, Emily Granville gave her hands to it, with a strange new will, heaving and pulling beside Lavelle until he called that the task was done. And the while she kept repeating to herself, "'To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall. And, baffled, get up and begin again.'"
Just as the boat was laid on the ledge the sun dropped behind the horizon.
Rowgowskii had seen some wood while he and the coolies had been on the hilltop. Of his own volition he climbed after it and brought down sufficient to make a fire. There was driftwood also in the bed of the creek or gully and Chang sent the coolies to gather it.
As the fire sprang up Lavelle worked the faster where he ripped out the boat's after air tank. With its metal he planned to cover the hole.
No thought of food nor drink had he, though he ordered Chang to serve rations to the rest. Emily carried a cracker and a cup of water to him, but he would not pause.
"Give me plenty of light; that's all," he answered her urging. "Light to work by——"
A racking shudder passed through the island. It flung Emily headlong. The earth on which Lavelle knelt slid from under him. The island's middle, following the base line of the hill, rose like a monster cat arching its spine and hurled him backward, stunned, breathless, helpless.
There was a breath-long silence. It ended with a chorus of wild cries. Then, the great earth mass fell with a thunderous crash, rending the island in twain. The triumphant sea leaped out of the breach it had made and swept the crumbling shore with a mighty wave.
Awakening to a bewildered consciousness Emily Granville opened her eyes in a glare of light which stung her vision so sharply that the lids shut instantly in intuitive defense. She could feel the soothing warmth of a fire near by. She was prone on her back. An attempt to move her limbs produced a sensation of being bound. Turning her head slightly from the direction of the fire she opened her eyes again timorously upon a sky burgeoning in a new crescent moon and a myriad of stars. The moon and stars seemed so close that she fancied that all she had to do was lift a hand to touch them. Lowering her gaze she saw the sea and heard its wild white horses neighing.
With a cry of fright the castaway started into full consciousness, every part of her racked and a-throb with pain. By a great effort of will she struggled into a sitting posture and then to her knees. The firelight blinded her. All was still within its radius. An apprehension that she alone had survived the riving of the island overwhelmed her.
She remembered the cataclysmic upheaval which had flung her headlong as she stood beside Lavelle where he worked at the boat. She had gone to him to ask him to pause but a minute to take a little food and drink. He had answered her harshly, she had been thinking; and then a mountainous wave had hurled him against her; into her arms, in fact. She had held him with all her strength, but the sea must have been stronger. It must have taken him. Her memory stopped there.
"Captain! My friend!" she called in anguish to the night. It returned no answer. The wind lashed her face and throat as if determined she should be still. She breasted it with the fierceness of abandonment, lifting her aching arms and sobbing to the heavens:
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why did you take him and leave me?"
Even, as this supplication burst from her Chang entered the circle of light, carrying an armful of wood. Rowgowskii followed at his heels, similarly burdened.
"All lite, lady! No be flaid!" called the Chinaman. He dropped the wood as he spoke and ran to her side. Her gaze went expectantly beyond him into the darkness. But the one for whom she looked did not appear.
"The captain—where——"
Emily could not utter another word. She sank back, supporting herself by one arm. She was afraid to listen to the giant's answer.
"Him all lite—bimeby, lady," said Chang.
Her heart surged in joy.
"He is alive?" she gasped. "Where is he?"
She straightened again on her knees.
Chang drew back the edge of the boat sail, a part of which had also covered her. There lay "The Shadow" of the lostCambodiawith the bullet wound in his brow reopened where the sea had mauled him.
"Thank God," Emily murmured, seeing Lavelle stir.
She crawled on her knees to his side and felt the pulse of the hand which Chang drew out of the canvas. Its faintness killed the gladness which had come so swiftly into her heart.
"He—he—is dying, Chang!" she cried.
"No can be; no can be," answered the Chinaman with fiery emphasis. "Him more stlong. Go-an get better more klick. No can kill master so leasy."
"How long has he been this way, Chang?"
"Not more one hour. How you feet, lady?"
For the first time Emily was conscious of a tearing pain in her ankles and insteps. It was more intense than the stab-like thrusts which were piercing the rest of her body. Wondering what could have happened to her she turned so that she could see her feet. The trim, delicate ankles were swollen and the insteps were bruised and bleeding.
"Velly solly, lady," said Chang soothingly and in the manner of a father comforting a little child. "You velly blave. You velly stlong."
As he spoke the Chinaman gently lifted one injured foot. She shrank from his touch and put out a hand to thrust him away.
"You be 'flaid flor Chang?" asked the giant wistfully. The glance with which he looked up at her made the woman ashamed that she had obeyed the impulse of littleness. She caught Rowgowskii staring at her from across the fire. His glance was a challenge to all the fineness of her being.
"I beg your pardon, Chang. I am not afraid of you," she said. She withdrew her protesting hand.
"You my master flen. He say by me when I tell him you hol' him han' in boat: 'Chang, maybe I go-an die. All hell kom-men you go-an save she.' Bimeby to-night when big sea kom-men you save my master. You save Chang. You like me die—I go-an die flor you. You must no be flaid."
The while Chang talked his long yellow fingers were going swiftly over Emily's feet. A surgeon's skill was in their touch. His head was bent, hearkening, where he manipulated the ankle and toe joints, for a sound which would betoken a fracture.
"No bone bloke," he announced with finality.
"Thank you, Chang," Emily said gratefully, and presently she drew from him an account of what had happened following the upheaval.
Chang had been standing near the fire on the hillside. He had been thrown down even as she and Lavelle were. The island had broken apart and a great sea had come and gone quickly. The earth went out from under him. It flaked away, carrying him down to the sea with it. He could not stop himself. Just as he was rolling over the edge of the cliff he felt an arm and caught hold of it. It checked his descent. It was Lavelle's arm that he caught and, drawing himself up, he found her clutching Lavelle with both hands around his other wrist. Her feet were twisted in the root of a tree which the sea had washed out of the earth. It was this root which had saved all of them.
Emily could understand now how she came to feel like one who had been broken on a wheel. She could not imagine where she had found the strength to withstand the terrific forces which, according to the giant's description, had beset her. She believed she had acted unconsciously, but at least, she thought, she had proved herself not useless. She found comfort in this momentary reflection, nor did she suspect that a great, new power—a power like unto which there is no other—had dawned in her life.
"I catch him master," added Chang, "but you hol' flor him like a marther hol' him litty bit chile when him big bear kom-men in winter. Chang bring you here flor topside. You eye close. Him master eye close. Him head must flor stlike 'gainst boat: maybe lock hit him. Him boat all go way."
A weary faintness made Emily's eyelids droop for a second. Chang leaped to his feet and crossed to the other side of the fire. She watched him where he lifted one of the boat's breakers and poured a cup full of water. He was back in a moment offering it to her. She drank sparingly. She refused to eat anything. She asked how long it had been since the sundering of the island and when Chang told her that not more than an hour had passed she found it hard to believe him. It seemed to Emily that it must have happened many nights before.
The giant's answer was hardly away from his lips when a shudder went through the hill on the crest of which he, driving Rowgowskii to help him, had fixed the encampment and rebuilt the fire.
"What flor? Whachamalla you?" snarled Chang at the menacing earth. The next breath brought a scolding tone into his quaint voice. "Him go-an be night velly long time, Mr. Islan'. More better you go-an sleep, eh?"
The whimsicality of this speech and the half-quizzical expression in Chang's face brought a faint smile to the lips of the white woman.
"You're a rare soul, Chang," she whispered.
"Him all same clay-zee, dlunken sailor man, this Mr. Islan'," the giant chattered on. He saw that he amused Emily. And always he spoke of the future certainly. So far as his speech and manner were concerned he might have been safe in port with a pleasant city in view instead of on the border line of the world beyond. Like Lavelle, he possessed the marvelous power of renewing one's faith.
Of his master the Chinaman spoke as the children of the Orient speak only of their strange good gods. He told how Lavelle nine years before in Rangoon had saved his life from the murderous hands of a drunken, mutinous crew and how his way thereafter had been the captain's way and would be to the end. He recalled, too, the night in Shanghai of which Elsie had told her. He wrung tears from her in recounting the fearful winning of theKau Lungto Yokohama. She saw the knife scars on the arm lying outside the sail and the scars on Chang's. The wounds of these men assumed a sacredness in her eyes.
"My master all same Chang joss," was the way the giant summed up his hero. "No 'flaid flor enny-sling! Nobody! Him say, 'Chang, die.' Must flor me die."
Emily recalled the strange scene between them at the boat and she understood the truth of this.
Lavelle, stirring with a moan, interrupted the serang, who bent his head and listened, ear close to the unconscious man's lips.
"Him sleep now—more better. No sleep las' night. No sleep to-day. Him velly tli-ed."
Emily leaned over at the giant's whisper and caught the measured, easy breathing of a tired sleeper. Yet she heard something else also.
"—home soon—dearheart. Gold girl—wonder——" he murmured, and Emily wondered what manner of woman it was who was waiting across seas for this man's home-coming. It was not thus he would speak of the mother to whom he had set out to return. It could not be such a woman as Shanghai Elsie. The remembrance of what Rowgowskii had said to her in the boat flashed into her mind. She put it away instantly. She resented it. She knew, as only it is given to a woman to know, that it was not to a mate like Elsie that this man would go.
"God bring him safely to her," she prayed in her pity for the woman of whom "The Shadow" dreamed, and she knew not that she prayed for herself.
Day was breaking as Lavelle awoke to a realization that he still lived. He found himself in a silence so awful in its intensity and mystery that it made him catch his breath sharply like one does at a sudden immersion in cold water. The peace of eternity seemed to have breathed a spell upon the pitiless deep. It slept.
His long sleep had refreshed him and his mind instantly leaped back to the events of the night before. A glance round him discovered Chang, a hundred feet away, searching the horizon. Rowgowskii lay stretched on the opposite side of the fire.
Just as Emily had imagined him lost so Lavelle for a moment believed her gone. His senses went crashing, but they reordered themselves instantly at the touch of a warm body at his side.
Putting his left hand out to raise himself it fell on Emily not half an arm's length away. There exhausted nature had bent her head in slumber at midnight when the wind hushed. There Chang had covered her again with the boat sail. She lay with her right arm under her vivid head and her face toward the new day. One long golden braid curled across the hilltop's wet grass where it had been flung unconsciously in her sleep. The other hung across her exquisite bosom, rising and falling gently with her breathing, and its end trailing the ground. Such an expression as Lavelle had so often seen in the faces of play-weary children was in hers.
"Wonder woman," he murmured. "Wonder woman."
Slipping out from under the sail, not daring to breathe, Lavelle gently drew the canvas back over the sleeper's shoulders and stole toward the Chinaman. A slight giddiness assailed him for a moment and with it there came a reminder of the old pain which he had felt upon awakening first in the boat.
"Master, master," called the giant worshipfully, springing toward him.
Chang's first glance was directed at Lavelle's forehead and what he saw there pleased him.
"Him all lite, master; all lite," he said. "Him stop bleed."
But it was of the night that Lavelle would hear, and the Chinaman rapidly unfolded the wondrous tale of how their lives had been saved by Emily. The wrecked boat was gone. Emily, Lavelle, Rowgowskii, and Chang alone remained of those who had escaped in their party from theCambodia. The two coolie sailors had been gathering wood at the foot of the hill when the upheaval came. They were gone. At the end he whispered: "You lose him plistol out you plocket. Nobody know—only Chang, master."
The ocean bore no trace of the half of the island which had been torn away. In the heavy wind and sea which Chang reported of the first part of the night it was Lavelle's opinion that the derelict mass, bound together only by a mattress of interlaced roots and vegetation, must have resolved its parts with the waters.
Owing to Chang's having placed the water, provisions, and the boat's equipment high on the hill when the craft had been emptied in the evening, the sea had been able to steal but little. The treacherous bit of earth which remained offered, too, an important contribution to the food supply in a wealth of taro plants, the tuberous substitute of the potato in the islands of the Pacific. It is of this that the Hawaiians make their poi.
By the bearing of the rising sun Lavelle noted that the island had swung round completely during the night. The side of the camel's back-like hill, which had been toward the south the preceding evening, was turned to the northward. The crest of this hill was at least two hundred feet above sea level. As the island lay now its northern side sloped easily for perhaps fifty yards and then broke off abruptly in a sharp cleavage fifty feet sheer to the sea.
The hill's base was slightly less than the island's half-mile width. A gentle slope marked what had become the eastern shore; a straight palisade rise of two hundred feet, the western side. A gradual slope on the hill's southern side blended at the foot with an undulating meadow, green with grass and taro, and about three-quarters of a mile in length. A lone palm tree rose in the center of this patch.
The top of the hill presented a flat surface of a city half-block square. At no distant time a thatched hut had stood there. It was of the remains of this that Chang and Rowgowskii had built the fire.
While he sipped a cup of water which Chang brought to him, Lavelle took stock of all these things. Not one thought of solace could he draw from the bitter, hopeless scheme which unfolded itself to his gaze. By the time the non-arrival of theCambodiawas read into disaster and a searching ship sent into these seas the end would have long since come to this island. Well he realized the emptiness of this stretch of ocean and the one chance in ten thousand which might bring a stray merchantman or trader stumbling upon them. Well he realized the slight tenure of the crust of earth which held him. Judging from its assumed position it had drifted a phenomenal distance for that latitude. He believed it must have been ripped away from one of the islands of the Hawaiian group. That it had survived so long seemed to him miraculous and but emphasized the imminence of its early dissolution. What had already happened since the landing confirmed in his mind that the next storm would be the mother of the island's oblivion and all it held.
Floating islands are uncommon in any but the most placid waters. Yet in the phenomena of the sea's scheme of things they are common occurrences. The charts of all big waters are dotted with their records. Shipmasters come to port reporting an island where one was never before and where it would seem against all reason that one should be. Still man imbued with the unconquerable mystery of the sea writes this report on his charts for all times. First he writes it as a fact, justifying its assumption as such. According to its reported size, ships go searching for it—men-o'-war, leisurely merchantmen, vagrant traders. No island is found. Only sea is there. But man does not trust the deep; he never will. He does not erase his record. He marks it "P.D."—position doubtful. Years pass without further report of an island in this locality. Then he goes as far as he dares. He writes on his charts "E.D."—meaning "Existence doubtful."
How many a well-found ship, sailing in a sea charted clear and deep, has blundered into islands like the one which held theCambodiacastaways and suddenly come unto her last port? No man may tell. Seldom, however, do ocean traffickers meet with these waif lands north or south of the twentieth parallels.
With never a dream that this could be one—here in the thirties—though the absence of reefs and the raw and broken aspect of the island shore had given him pause, Lavelle had trapped himself. He had captained her, for whose salvation he would gladly lay down his life, into a prison to which death held the key.
It was with this bitter, self-blaming thought, and tortured by it, that he turned away from the sea to behold the gold woman coming toward him with a wistful smile. He ran to meet her and his soul cried out at the denial of its impulse to fold her to his heart and soothe her hurts.
Three days of life-renewing, hope-burgeoning weather had followed that silent dawn—days of placid seas and gentle breezes; and nights alight with stars and a growing moon. The island had been motionless. It might have been one of the Blessed Isles in a world where life was everlasting.
Isle of Hope Emily had christened the bit of floating earth, nor could she have told why optimism reigned in her heart and soul. She was unaware that she was reflecting only what the manner of Paul Lavelle gave forth. His every act and word was a reassurance of faith and themotifof her ever-increasing wonder of him.
Yet it was but a mask of service which Lavelle had determined to wear for this woman's sake. He had put it on in that daybreak when he had met her coming toward him and heard her calling:
"We still live, captain."
There had welled in his heart at that moment the gentle Stevenson's prayer for grace—a prayer which had sustained Lavelle often in peril and sorrow—and it poured from his lips to find an echo in the woman's, for she, too, knew it:
"'Grant that we here before Thee may be set free from the fear of vicissitude and the fear of death, may finish what remains before us of our course without dishonor to ourselves or hurt to others, and, when the day comes, may die in peace. Deliver us from fear and favor; from mean hopes and cheap pleasures. Have mercy on each in his deficiency: let him not be cast down; support the stumbling on the way, and give at last rest to the weary.'"
To help this woman's spirit to be unafraid was all that was left for him to do for her. It was the most he would ever be able to do for her. Of this Lavelle felt certain. He knew the sea too well to deceive himself with a false hope that its kind mood would continue long. But while life lasted it was his purpose to live it fearlessly and as if years still measured the span and not swift minutes.
Under his hand the discipline of shipboard prevailed. There was not a moment, by day or night, when a lookout for sign of succoring sail or light went unkept. With Chang, his right hand, Lavelle divided the night watches, not trusting Rowgowskii. Even Emily, according to her wish, helped in the tasks of preparing the food and tending the fire by day. An out-of-doors woman by tradition and inclination, a powerful rider and swimmer, the pride which she had always taken in her physical well-being was standing her in good stead now.
Rowgowskii, in the first realization of the extremity which had come to pass, had abandoned himself to despair. It was incredible that he had ever been, as he claimed, an officer in the Russian navy, or otherwise a commander of men. He was absolutely spiritless; an exemplification of the truth that cowards die many times before their deaths.
But with the coming of the second day of fair weather his funk lifted and he went to his appointed tasks with a willingness which was emphasized by his previous sullenness.
Having observed at the outset that the island's wood supply was limited, Lavelle had been husbanding it by burning sod. He used the wood solely for the signal fires of the night.
Now on this morning of the fourth day he again put the Russian to cutting turf from the hillside, the while he and Chang, armed with the boat axe, set forth to cut down the palm tree in the meadow. Rowgowskii, the preceding evening, had suggested its addition to the signal fuel.
"You will not be long, captain?" asked Emily as Lavelle paused to look back at her in leaving the crest of the hill.
"No longer than is absolutely necessary."
"And you—you will be careful," she warned, and unashamed of the tremulous note of anxiety which crept into her voice. He nodded. This man's presence had become very necessary—very precious to her.
"It's your watch on deck, you know," Lavelle called cheerfully. Then, with a quizzical lowering of his brows and in a tone of pretended sternness, he added: "Hold your course. Steady as you go—and keep a sharp lookout."
"Aye, aye, sir," she answered, simulating the speech and manner of a sailor to an officer.
"You make him velly good sailor man," Chang chuckled in delight.
"We'll be back in a jiffy," said Lavelle. With that he and Chang swung away down the hill.
Emily went to the edge of the slope and watched them descend, the yellow man always leaping ahead to test and examine the ground. At the foot Lavelle looked back. He paused upon discovering the watcher and waved to her. An impulse to follow him seized her, but remembering that he had intrusted her with the lookout she overcame it. With a wave of the hand she answered his signal of cheer, and as through a mist saw him go away from her across the meadow toward the lone tree.
Just as Lavelle paused at the foot of the hill and waved his hand, Rowgowskii looked up from where he was cutting turf on the eastern slope. Unconsciously his hand went to his flattened nose. It was an action which invariably had come to accompany any glance which had Lavelle for its objective.
Emily was hidden from his view, but the Russian could imagine her standing up there on the crest answering Lavelle's signal. He knew well, too, the light there must be in her eyes. He had surprised it there many times in the preceding three or four days, even as she had startled the animal lust in his.
Rowgowskii dropped the piece of metal which he was using for a cutting tool. It was part of the boat's air tank with which Lavelle had planned to repair the damage done by the boulder. His gaze followed the two men crossing the meadow until he saw Chang stop suddenly and look back. He started as if the Chinaman had the power of reading his thoughts. A guilty conscience is ever the quick prey of an honest eye. With much show of industry he picked up his cutter and resumed the stripping of turf. This activity lasted but a minute. Then, his gaze wandered around the empty sea, only to return to the two men below.
In the second that the Russian's eyes picked them up again a menacing oscillation passed through the earth and brought him in terror off his knees. He saw the Chinaman pitch headlong out of sight. The next second whipped Lavelle from his view. The palm tree remained the single object in the meadow.
Rowgowskii hesitated a moment, hearkening for a sound from above him or from the meadow. The silence was unbroken save by the purr of the morning breeze.
With the sneak of a stalking panther in his tread he darted around to the southern slope. A second's pause, a flashing glance behind to reassure himself that "The Shadow" and the yellow man were, indeed, gone, and he sprang up the hill.
Emily held Lavelle and Chang in view until they were halfway to the tree and the Chinaman halted and looked back. It was as if the giant had flashed a message to her. Her heart gave a throb of apprehension. Her breath caught in her throat. Her limbs trembled. She realized that she was alone on the hill with Rowgowskii. Only her own soul knew her repugnance of this man which had grown with the hours since they had come to the island.
Even as her mind bore the thought Emily became ashamed of her trepidation and self-consciousness. It was unworthy of the kind of woman that Lavelle's fearlessness of soul and fortitude made her desire to be.
Mortified, and with a flush mounting her cheeks at what she considered her mean selfishness, she turned from the meadow and the stretch of ocean southward. She walked across the hilltop. North, east, and west her gaze met an empty blue expanse of water. The hill oscillated and she swayed with it unconscious of the motion. Her attention was held by the glint of a white wing high against the cloudless azure sky to the northward where a frigate bird went seeking a mate.
"Oh, if we but had your wings!" she exclaimed.
"But we haven't," whispered a voice close to her ear. With the words an evil, burning breath struck her cheek and Rowgowskii's two powerful arms encircled her.
At the touch there leaped to life in Emily that furious strength which has been given to women to defend themselves or their offspring from besoiling or destroying hands.
With a shriek she twisted herself in the brute's clasp and hurled him from her, but not before he had succeeded in crushing his hot, sensuous lips against her throat. She struck him in the face with both hands clenched. Landing where Lavelle had smashed him in the boat the morning after the wreck of theCambodia, the blows drew blood and swept him from his feet. He went over backward and, falling, carried with him the boat mast which was stepped in the center of the hilltop for a signal staff.
Sending a piercing shriek toward the meadow, Emily ran toward the southern slope. Rowgowskii staggered up in her path with outstretched arms as if to stop her. He hesitated and stepped aside. The unaccountable action arrested Emily.
"Go on yelling!" he said wrathfully. "There is nobody to hear. We are alone—you and I."
A sight of the meadow confirmed his words. Lavelle and Chang were not there.
The Russian laughed as she faced him helplessly and incredulously, her strength, for the moment, gone from her. She had no distinct thought. The capacity of thinking and feeling seemed to have never been.
"They went like that," the brute went on with a snap of his fingers. "Just as we are going to go—in a—in a very little while." A lingering quaver went through the hill. He started cravenly. "Feel that, eh? The end is very near."
Emily was silent. Her gaze darted away from her torturer and around the sea. It came to rest for the smallest part of a second on the western edge of the hill. Determination was born of the thought which the glance suggested. Here was a means of escape.
The cliff was perhaps an hundred feet from where she stood. If she could only get over there a step would carry her into the presence of her God unashamed. Her purpose was formed. There was nothing left for which she cared to live. The camp fire was between her and her goal, but she heeded it not.
Rowgowskii's gaze, following every movement of the glorious figure of womanhood before him, set the fires of his fiendishness flaming in new desire. He advanced a step in front of her. She retreated a step.
"I wonder if you would have treated Lavelle this way if he had come to love you? Eh?"
There was no answer for him, but Emily's lips moved in murmuring what her numbed senses could recall of Lavelle's prayer for grace.
"Would you have treated him this way? Tell me,ma beauté," he leered. He took another step toward her. Again she retreated. Still advancing, the passion of the brute in his eyes scorching her, he said:
"Death will not be so unpleasant. You are very beautiful. You——"
His voice broke in a stammer. A piece of burning sod rolled out of the fire behind his prey.
"Look out!" he cried.
Emily gave no heed. She put one foot on the sod and smoke curled up where it burned through the sole of the canvas sandal which Chang had made for her. Then she lifted the other foot beside it.
Nor did this woman cry out in pain nor a feature so much as wince. An immortal glory was in her countenance. The look she bent on the man before her sent him back, cowering in fear and awe.
In the instant that the sublime spirit of the gold woman conquered the beast who baited her Lavelle burst over the crest of the hill from the southern slope.
Like the captain of an avenging host marching with banners of flame he came into Emily Granville's vision. A pallor as of death was in his face; a fire of irrevocable decision in the glance with which he swept the scene before him into his comprehension.
As that glance touched Emily she started toward her deliverer only to stop.
Lavelle's hand fell on Rowgowskii's shoulder and hurled him round before him. The craven crumpled to his knees. The beginning of a cry of terror died in his throat in a mute gasp. To him this man who stood over him was come back from the dead.
"Pray—if you can," said Lavelle in a grim voice of fate. He stepped back a pace as he spoke.
It was a pronouncement of doom that he had uttered. Rowgowskii's gaze went from Lavelle to Emily. His hands went out to her in supplication. His lips moved but made no sound.
"Captain," she called pityingly.
She took a step toward him. Without turning "The Shadow" raised a staying hand.
Rowgowskii turned from Emily at her call to meet again the merciless gaze of Lavelle.
"Pray," said Lavelle, moving toward him.
The light of all reason went out of the doomed man's face. A maniacal cry burst from him. He leaped to his feet. Lavelle sprang at him. With a speed of a hawk's swoop the Russian turned and fled to the cliff. A second he hesitated on the brink and then plunged over it headlong.
A moment of silence, then a splash and a lingering cry echoed up the face of the cliff. The gold woman's tortured nerves relaxed. Senseless she dropped where she stood.