Another day had passed and the south wind still blew gently, neither increasing nor decreasing in force, so that the log showed that theEmperor of the Moonhad progressed between a hundred and fifty and two hundred miles farther north. Farther north, as all said now, but not to Bombay, since they had abandoned all hope of reaching that port in their present short-handed condition, and without obtaining fresh assistance--but towards the Seychelles. That was the harbour of refuge to which their thoughts and aspirations pointed at this time; the spot where, even though they should obtain nothing else, they would at least be in safety, and the one from which they could be taken off by some other ship if they were not able to find the means of working their own.
But, even as this day was drawing towards its conclusion--a day hotter, it seemed to all on board, than any they had previously experienced, and when neither the awnings nor the breeze that came aft protected them sufficiently to allow of their being on deck, unless duty demanded that they should be there--a change was perceived to have taken place in the condition of one or two who had been attacked by blindness. Mr. Fagg had declared that he was regaining his sight, and that, although he could not distinguish small objects with any amount of clearness, he was nevertheless able to see large things, such as the form of a man or woman, in a blurred, indistinct manner if he or she happened to enter his cabin; while Wilks averred that his sight was also returning rapidly to him.
'For, see here, sir,' he said to Charke, who, learning what was happening, or said to be happening, had gone forward to question him on the subject, 'I can walk aft to the break of the poop without stumbling against anything or over anything either. May I show you, sir?'
'Ay,' replied Charke. 'Show me. Let's see what you can really do,' while at the same time he motioned to a sailor, who happened to be by the mizzen-mast, to throw down gently a coil of rope he held in his hand so that, when Wilks neared the spot where it was, they would be able to observe whether he could see clearly enough to avoid it or not.
Meanwhile, Wilks, having received the necessary permission, had started from close by the fife-rail, where the conversation had been going on, and was making it perfectly clear that what he had stated was undoubtedly the truth. For, independently of the coil which the sailor had deposited abreast of the mizzen-mast, there was at this moment a good deal of raffle lying about the deck, as well as a bucket or so, and also a squeegee alongside the saloon skylight. But Wilks saw them all and steered himself along, avoiding each and every object both great and small, while, when he approached the coil of cable, he passed round it in almost precisely the same manner that a man in possession of his ordinary eyesight would have done. Then he looked back--at least he turned his face back--towards where he had started from, and, with a gratified grin on his countenance, asked Charke if he was not all right.
'Yes,' replied Charke, 'or getting so. If one or two more of your mates would only recover in the same way, we might bend another sail and, so, make a few more knots. Yet, curse it!' he muttered to himself, 'as one gets well another gets ill.'
This was unhappily only too true, for not an hour before he had been called to observe that Wilks seemed to be on a fair way towards recovery, he had learnt that Pooley was, although not stricken with the blindness, yet rapidly becoming blind. He had himself discovered such to be the case when, after lying down for an hour, he had been unable to perceive anything clearly on awakening. And, in another hour after this had been found by him to be the case, he was obliged to acknowledge his darkness of vision was becoming more intense, and that he feared his sight would be entirely gone by nightfall.
This was, perhaps, the greatest blow of all to several on board the unfortunate ship; on Bella it fell with overwhelming force. For now she recognised that, of all others, the very man she most feared and dreaded--though she could not have explained why that dread should have taken possession of her--was in absolute control over the ship, and could indeed do what he liked with it. Her uncle, she understood, could of course still issue orders, but--how was it to be known that those orders were being obeyed?
Then, strong-minded as she was, and feeling more so, as well as more self-possessed because of the presence of her lover in the ship, she again forced herself to discard such miserable and--as she termed them in her own mind--ridiculous fears, and set herself about the task which had now for some time developed on her of attending to the catering of the ship and looking after the sufferers generally. For, from Mrs. Pooley, Bella had not at any time received much assistance, owing to the fact of the poor lady having been quite ill since the calamities on board began to follow each other in such frequent succession, while, now that her husband was struck down, she appeared to have collapsed altogether. Indeed, at this present time, she was doing nothing except lying on the plush-covered sofa of the saloon, while moaning feebly that they were all doomed, and that, even if the ship was not utterly cast away and lost, there would soon not be a living soul on board who would be able to see.
'And then,' she sobbed, 'what can happen to a vessel--in the night, especially--full of men and women who are all blind and cannot find their way from one end of the deck to another?'
'Nonsense, aunty, dear, nonsense!' Bella replied, while endeavouring bravely to dispel her aunt's forebodings, which, in solemn truth, she shared to the full with her, though not for worlds would she acknowledge that she did so. 'Are not some already getting well--Mr. Fagg, and the sailor, Wilks, and Bengalee----'
'While at the same time others succumb to the blindness,' Mrs. Pooley interjected, still with a moan. 'And now your poor uncle, of all others.'
'Well,' said Bella, still stout of heart, 'we have this comfort: it soon passes away. Let me see. Bengalee has been blind about a fortnight, Wilks and Mr. Fagg about twelve days--whatever is that noise!' she exclaimed, breaking off suddenly.
As she uttered that exclamation there had come a sudden racket above their heads, the noise descending through the wide-open skylight. A noise which seemed first like the yelp of a dog in pain; then another which resembled somewhat the spitting of a cat, followed by a shrieking kind of growl, and then the voice of Charke exclaiming angrily: 'I'll have the infernal thing thrown overboard. Here you, catch hold of it--make a loop and fling it over its neck. Catch it, one of you!'
'Oh!' cried Bella, forgetting everything else for the moment, and rushing towards the companion, 'it's Bengalee!' Then she swiftly ran up to the deck, and saw the tiger-cub standing close up by the frame of the skylight and growling at Charke, whom it regarded with terribly vicious eyes. And she noticed, too, that it held up one of its hind legs as though it were injured.
'What are you doing to the creature?' she cried. 'You have been kicking it again, you----' she was going to say 'brute,' but restrained herself. 'And you shall not have it thrown overboard, as I heard you order the men to do!' she continued. Then she went towards the creature perfectly fearlessly, and spoke to it, and eventually stroked its back, so that at last its growls subsided altogether.
The chief mate's face had presented an appearance of scowling rage as she reached the deck, while it had on it an expression that boded ill for any extended existence being accorded to Bengalee had she not appeared at the moment she did. Yet, by the time she had ceased petting the animal he had managed to control himself considerably, and to smooth out the look of temper from his countenance. And now he said:
'Oh, of course I did not really mean to do that, Miss Waldron. Though it will have to be got rid of eventually. It is impossible that it can be kept much longer. And, you know, we have enough work to do without attending to such an animal as this. Just think! I am the only officer fit for duty, and I have only four able men to work with--since Wilks cannot be called well yet.'
Honestly, Bella felt sorry that she had spoken as hotly as she had done, since she did indeed recognise the almost superhuman amount of work that had fallen on Charke's shoulders just now. He seemed never to sleep but was on deck night and day, sometimes steering, sometimes even going aloft alone, and hardly ever snatching a quarter of an hour for his hasty meals. She murmured, therefore, some words of regret, and was going on to say how sorry she was for having been excited, when he stopped her.
'No, no, Miss Waldron. It was nothing--nothing. The thing did spring at me angrily as I passed where it was sleeping, and I kicked it. I am sorry, too. And you know I would not injure anything you liked,' while, as he spoke, he bent his dark, handsome eyes on her.
Perhaps it was a pity he uttered these last words, since in her own heart she did not believe that they were true. She had seen his glances more than once directed at Gilbert when he had not known that she was observing him, and she thoroughly believed that, in them, there was a malignant look, a look of hatred, which belied his words. And she had seen--shethoughtshe had seen--something else in those glances when Gilbert was first attacked with blindness which, if not gloating, was very like it. She said, therefore, now, as she turned towards the ladder: 'Then you won't punish it, Mr. Charke, will you? You won't let it be thrown overboard in any circumstances, will you?'
'It shall be as sacred to me as you are,' he replied. 'Its life as sacred as yours.'
But all the same, she told herself as she went back to the saloon, that, if there was anything Charke hated in that ship, or rather, any two things he hated more than all else, those things were her lover and Bengalee.
Presently, not ten minutes later, she again heard his voice, calling out loudly to one of the men this time: 'If we could only get another on her we could make two more knots, I believe. If only some of those who are blind but not otherwise incapacitated would help on the braces and get the yards round, we could do it.'
She was not the only person who heard these words. Not a moment had they left his lips before the curtains in front of Gilbert's and Mr. Fagg's cabins were pushed swiftly back with a metallic jangle, as the rings ran along the rod, and each of the young men appeared in the saloon and began making his way guided by his hands, towards the stairs leading up to the deck.
'Oh!' cried Bella, not quite understanding what it was Charke wanted done, or what assistance could be rendered by persons who were blind, 'what are you going to do? Gilbert, don't do anything rash! Nor you, Mr. Fagg!' though she saw by their faces and the smile that came to each that she had overrated any harm that was possible.
'We'll get that sail on,' exclaimed Gilbert, as he felt his way up the stairs, and Fagg said: 'We will so,' as he followed him after they had each jostled the other at the foot in a slight collision which their sightlessness had caused, and, a moment afterwards, Bella and Mrs. Pooley were left alone in the cabin. Yet they could hear, plainly enough, the words of approval bestowed on Gilbert and Fagg for their promptness, when the meaning of it was recognised by those on deck; and they caught, too, the orders bawled with great rapidity by Charke the instant he had received this extra assistance. Also, they heard him ordering one man to the starboard main braces and another to go forward and loose the jib.
A moment later they heard something else as well.
The cry of two or three voices together, the roar of Charke, and then his trumpet-tones, exclaiming:
'My God! he's overboard!'
And Bella, with the image of one man alone in her mind, reeled backwards towards the sofa where Mrs. Pooley lay, and gradually slid, fainting, on to the cabin floor by her side.
Had Bella known more about a ship and its intricacies she would have understood that, notwithstanding some one had undoubtedly gone overboard, the sailor, whoever he was, could not by any possibility have been one of those who had gone to help in squaring the yards. Instead, she would have been aware that such an accident could only have happened to some seaman who had either gone aloft or out on to the jib-boom. And, in fact, the latter was the case; the unfortunate fellow, a man named Brown, falling off the boom while endeavouring to set the flying jib, and being struck a moment later by the frame timbers forward as he fell. Yet the unhappy sailor seemed still to have some life left in him, as those who rushed to the port side could see, since, as he was passed by the ship, he was observed to rise to the surface--his head all shiny with blood--and to strike out manfully. But what could that avail, since, by the time theEmperorcould be brought to the wind and a life-buoy thrown overboard, he was half a mile astern? To lower the boats in time to save him would also have been an impossibility, even if it could have been done at all; and, moreover, the swift-coming instantaneous darkness of the equator was at hand, so that the man himself was, by now, almost invisible.
'Steer her course again,' Charke called out, therefore, to the man who was at the wheel, in a voice in which regret for the unfortunate sailor was mingled with a tone denoting some other sentiment that, perhaps, none would have been able to understand, even though they had been swift to observe it, as, in their excitement, none were. Then, at once, in a few moments, theEmperor of the Moonwas again heading towards where the Seychelles lay.
What was that other sentiment which now pervaded the breast of this strong, masterful sailor; this man who had worked untiringly for hour after hour on stretch, and who seemed to rise triumphant over Nature's command that both sleep and meals should be properly partaken of? The man who had not changed his clothes for three days, nor even had them off his back when he sought a quarter of an hour's rest here or ten minutes there? What was this sentiment? Nothing but a certainty that this was the last voyage the ship was ever to make--a feeling of intense conviction, which had been growing upon him for some time, that all in the ship were doomed. For he, at least, could see--hewas not blind yet--and, more than all else on board, perhaps, could feel; and his sight showed him things over the water, in the density of the atmosphere, even in the appearance of the brassy heavens above, which told him that, ere long, the slight whispering breeze which blew would be changed into a hurricane howling across the ocean. His feelings, his nerves, the moisture of his skin corroborated, also, what his sight proclaimed.
'It will come,' he muttered to himself, as now he paced the after-deck, with his eyes never off the light sail that the ship was carrying. 'It will come soon, and then we are done for, even though I get every inch of canvas off her first. This man's death leaves me and three other sailors as the only persons to work the ship. It is strange if, even under bare poles, we continue to swim.'
Then, as he turned his head towards where Bella (who had soon recovered from her faintness) was now standing talking with her uncle and her lover, he muttered another sentence to himself--a sentence which, should a romancist or a dramatist inspire one of his characters with it, would, perhaps, be deemed unnatural, yet which this man of iron will and fierce determination muttered to himself as calmly as he would have given an order to one of his few remaining sailors.
'If it blows, as I believe it will, twenty-four hours will see the end of us all. She--oh, my God! she will be dead--but so will he and so shall I. Well, there's consolation in that. If I can't have her, no more can he. That thought makes the end mighty cheap.'
Here he strode towards those three standing by the break of the poop, and touching his cap to Bella--he was, as she had observed, a gentleman, and in all that became the outward semblance of a gentleman he never failed--he said quietly to the poor, blind captain standing by her side with his fingers resting lightly on her arm:
'We must get in all the sail, sir, now. There is a change coming; I know it--feel it. The glass, too, stands very low, and since we cannot work the ship in a storm, short-handed as we are, we had better commence at once. It will be pitch dark in ten minutes and there is no moon.'
'Good God!' exclaimed Pooley, 'what is to happen next? The glass low, you say? Well, that means a change of some sort, though not necessarily bad weather. What are these feelings you speak of, Charke?'
'The feelings of a sailor,' he replied. 'You know them as well as I do. Ha!' he exclaimed, 'there's lightning in the south. No time to be lost.'
Then he seized the boatswain's whistle, which he had hung round his neck and used since the man himself had become disabled, and blew it as a signal to his three remaining hands to be ready for his orders.
'Now then,' he cried, 'up with you and stow the few sails that there are. What do you say?'--to one who muttered something--'tired--been working all day? Why, damn you! haven't I been working too.' Charke rarely swore, but he was impelled to do so now, especially as he had moved out of Bella's hearing. 'Do you see that lightning down there in the south? Do you want the ship to be blown over and go to the bottom in her? Here, you stop at the wheel,' addressing the man who was already at it, 'we others can do it somehow. Follow me'; and away he went to the topsail yard, selecting the most arduous part of the business for himself. While he muttered to himself as he did so: 'Now, if I should go, too--fall off the yard--they are doomed beyond all help. Nothing then can save him.' Which thought caused a strange, weird kind of smile to be on his face as he sprang up the ratlins.
And, stirred to action by his own indomitable energy, the men did set about the work and managed it somehow, the sails being stowed in a very unshipshape fashion (or what would have been an unshipshape fashion if the proper quantity of sailors had been there to do the job) and in such a manner that the first gust of the coming tempest would be as likely as not to blow them clean off their lashings. Still, it was done at last, and not too soon either, since, ere they had concluded their work, the lightning was flashing incessantly and huge drops of rain were falling.
'It's a south-easterly wind,' said Gilbert to Bella, turning his cheek towards it. 'Where will it blow us to now?'
Charke thought he knew, as he listened to the remarks, since he had returned to their vicinity after coming down from the topsail-yard, but he uttered never a word. Even now he loved the girl by their side too much to frighten her more than was necessary. Yet, had he said that he knew that, short of a miracle, it must be the bottom of the ocean--as was the case--she would probably not have heard him, since, at this moment, with a devilish shriek, the gale was upon them. Upon them and almost pooping the ship as it struck her right aft, and then driving her forward in the churned sea with a horrible, sickening motion, while, since she was fairly deeply laden, she recovered herself from the avalanche of water but slowly. An avalanche that, sweeping over the poop with a roar and a swish, took Bella and Gilbert off their feet and hurled them forward staggering, and buffeted against each other.
'Below--go below, all of you!' roared Charke to them, and also to Pooley, who had himself been sent sliding along the deck and was now hanging on to a belaying-pin, even as he called out to know where Bella was. 'Below, I say! We must close the hatches, or she will have the sea in her. Below, quick!' and, rushing towards Bella, he led her to the after-companion, dragging Gilbert with his other hand and returning for Pooley. And now the tropical lightning--that violet-hued lightning which is so beautiful and also so sure a sign of awful turbulence in the elements--played incessantly on the ill-starredEmperor of the Moon; the seas were mountains at one moment, valleys at another. The ship, too, was rolling so that it seemed as if everything on her deck must be pitched off her into the sea--as was indeed the case with many of the smaller things which went to form the raffle lying all about--and each time that she went over to port or starboard she took tons of water over her side. Then, a still more gigantic wave caught her on her port-bow, and absolutely threw her up, it rolling directly afterwards under her counter and letting her drop directly afterwards into the trough, while over her poop, again, came that which seemed to be not a wave but the whole Indian Ocean itself.
Amidst it all Charke still stood at the wheel, holding on to it as perhaps few solitary men had ever held on to a wheel in such a sea before; his arms actually bars of iron, yet appearing to him as though deprived of all sense and feeling. He stood there silent, determined, resolved, awaiting death, knowing that it must come and not dismayed--because it must come to that other, too, that man below in the saloon who loved and was beloved by Bella. Then, suddenly, he knew that he was not to die there alone at his post while his rival expired in his sweetheart's arms, or she in his; he knew--he discovered that not to him alone was to belong all the bravery and the resolution.
Creeping up from below, thanking God that the hatch had not yet been closed, feeling his way by his hands and gradually reaching the wheel--buffeted here and there; knocked down once, then up again--Gilbert Bampfyld crept to his side, and, an instant later, was fingering and, next, gripping the spokes.
'Let me help you!' he roared, so as to be heard, while feeling as he did so which way the other man who already had hold of the wheel was exerting his force. 'Blind as I am, I can do that. Who are you?'
'Stephen Charke,' the other answered, also shrieking his name. 'Help, if you like. But it is useless. We are going.'
'I know it,' Gilbert answered. 'Well! we will go down standing.'
And Charke, still endeavouring to hold up the ship, still to protract life from one moment to another, muttering inwardly: 'Curse him! he is a man. One worthy of her.' Then, unceasingly, he continued his work, wrenching, striving, endeavouring in every way to save the ship from being pooped or flung over as the waves took her and cast her up like a ball, or hurled her down like a falling house into the gaping, hellish troughs that lay below, yawning for their victim.
But still the lightning played upon the doomed craft, illuminating her from stem to stern, showing the fore top-gallant mast gone and the jib-boom carried away, broken off short, three feet from the bowsprit head. Also it showed something else--something that, had he had time to think of aught but preventing the ship from falling off the course he was endeavouring to steer, might have struck a feeling of wild horror to his uncanny breast.
For some of the blind, stricken men forward had crept by now out of the forecastle and other places where they had herded, and were crawling about the foredeck, holding on to whatever they could clutch--belaying-pins, the fife-rail, the racks, even the ring-bolts. Amongst them, too, was the tiger-cub, an almost unrecognisable lump, except for the topaz gleam which his eyes emitted: a gleam that, as a sea, which was in truth a cataract, washed it from the foremast almost to where he stood, appeared to Charke malignant, devilish, threatening. And he heard those unhappy men's voices, cursing, blaspheming, praying: roaring that they feared no death which they could see, but that they wanted to go neither to heaven nor hell enveloped in utter darkness.
'No Jack who ever sailed,' they screamed, 'feared a death that he could face, but we fear this. And if we had but our sight, maybe there'd be no death at all!'
'Ay, but there would, though,' muttered Charke to himself--'there would. Ha! by God, look there,' he cried aloud, forgetting that the only man who could hear his words was blind. The ship had given another hideous plunge--had wrenched herself as a giant might give a wrench in endeavouring to free himself from the chains that bound him--then down! down! down! she went into the hollows of the ocean, so that up above her on either side were nothing but vast walls of sea. Walls that would, that must close together, Charke understood, fifty feet above their heads, leaving the ship beneath them. And then he turned to the other man by his side, saying calmly: 'Now is the time! You love Bella Waldron. So do I. And neither of us will ever set eyes on her again. Farewell--my rival!'
'How in Heaven's name has she ever done it?' muttered Charke to himself, three minutes later, as, dripping like a dog dragged out of a pond, he still stood by the wheel while holding on like a vice to the spokes. And still both he and Gilbert had each got their legs twisted in the radii to prevent them from slipping, since now the ship lay over frightfully to starboard and did not recover herself at all. 'Ah, well,' he continued, 'it does not matter much how. Another five minutes and over she goes--turtle. It is a hundred to one she has six feet of water below.'
How had she done it? That was the wonder, the marvel; the more especially a wonder if, as Charke thought, she had six feet of water in her, since twice that amount would have taken her to the bottom even though she lay in the most tranquil waters of the universe. It was impossible she would have risen again, if overloaded thus. Yet, water in her or not, she had accomplished a marvellous feat for any craft that ever left the shipbuilder's yard. For, from down below in those awful depths, with, on either side of her, and glistening all around her in the glare of the lightning like the sides of a crevasse, those walls of sea, she had still risen above them and had (a moment or so after they seemed to be closing in on her and shutting her out for ever from the world above) been once more poised on the crest of a huge billow. She had done it, and now lay listing over on to her starboard side, as some great wounded creature might do whose right ribs had all been broken in by the blows of a pole-axe. But still she travelled through the water in the darkness of the night; for now the lightning was ceasing and, also, she carried no lighted lantern since there were none to attend to such things--while, even though there had been, the beating of the gale would soon have extinguished them. She travelled swiftly, too, cutting her way through billow and wave, taking in huge seas aft which swept her decks--yet going still. But with some of those spectral forms, those blind groping men, departed for ever; swept down the sloping deck by tons of water, down and over into the ocean. And of the few, the three who had still their sight, one lay with a broken neck at the foot of the foredeck companion-way, having been flung down the hatch-way head foremost; the other two were drunk. They had broken into the steward's room, where there were none to control them, and had found some bottles of beer, as well as one of brandy and one of rum--and this was the result!
At that moment the wheel spun round in Gilbert's hands, dragging him with it in its revolution, so that he thought he would have to let go or be thrown in a somersault over into the sea; then, as he forced it back, he heard Charke's voice bellowing at him:
'Can you hold her up for five minutes? I can grasp the spokes no more; I am done. I would not have let go like that, God knows I wouldn't, but I have lost all sensation in my arms and hands. I will lead Fagg out. Perhaps he can help.'
'I may hold her steady,' Gilbert answered, 'but no more. What can a blind, stricken man do?'
'It is enough,' Charke said. 'Sight would not aid you to do more, and, after all, it is of no use. We but prolong life for nothing. Yet, here goes.'
He made his way below, falling, sliding down the companion-ladder, tumbling along in the darkness to where he judged the door of Fagg's cabin was; he fell over things that had been hurled out of the steward's pantry on the port side--broken dishes, plates, tin utensils, potatoes peeled ready for cooking, and a joint of meat--he felt all these with his feet and benumbed hands, and found a bottle, too, which his smell told him was rum. Then he tore the cork out of it with his teeth and drained a tumblerful of the raw spirits. That gave him fresh life and energy; the blood coursed and danced through his veins again, his fingers began to feel, his arms to strengthen. Sliding back the door of Fagg's cabin he called him by name, and, receiving no answer, felt in the berth to see if he was there, while, even as he discovered that the bed was empty, he trod on an upturned face, and then stooped down and felt it and the head, and found the latter all broken. Whereby he understood what had happened to the unfortunate young officer, and knew that he had either been hurled out of his bed against a bulkhead, or, being out of it, had been dashed to death.
He would have gone back now to relieve Gilbert, and was turning to do so when his eye caught the glimmer of a light down the narrow gangway leading to the saloon, and he knew at once that somehow those within had managed to get the bracket-lamp over the table lit. Whereon he went towards that saloon, intent on seeing how those who were in it--especiallyonein it--were preparing to meet their end. Were they bearing up bravely? Was she--was that girl who maddened him, that girl, through his unrequited love for whom, he knew, he felt, that all his better qualities had been driven out of him--preparing to meet her death nobly, valiantly?
The sight he saw might have struck horror to a bolder, a better man than he. A sight more fitting to meet the eyes of one who gazed into a catacomb or charnel-house than into what had been, not long before, a pretty, bright saloon. Mrs. Pooley lay flat upon her back, moaning feebly, her stout body rolling backwards and forwards with every swing of the ship and every plunge it made. The captain was on his face, and above him lay half the debris of the shattered, sea-wrecked cabin.
But Bella! She frightened, startled him!
'The others may be dead,' he whispered, 'but she, surely she is alive. God! how her eyes stare, yet--yet how lovely she is still.'
The girl was sitting upright upon the saloon sofa, her hands gripping the head of it as though, all unconscious as she appeared to be, she still knew that she must do that to save herself from being flung down, and her lips moved faintly. Then he wrenched the bottle of rum from out of his pocket, he having put it there with a view to administering some to Gilbert when he regained the deck, rival though he was, and moistened her lips with it.
'Miss Waldron--Bella,' he whispered, allowing himself in those last moments the luxury of calling her by the name that he had whispered so often softly to himself. 'Bella! for God's sake, say something. Tell me that you are not dying.'
And she did whisper something--a word that he heard above all the roar of the hurricane thundering aloft, above the awful concussions of the ship's sides as again and again the tons of water struck at her, heavily, savagely, and as, also, she struck at them in her maimed progress; above even the rattle of ship's furniture rolling about, and the sickening thumps of the unlashed piano as it beat against the stem of the mizzen-mast. She whispered a word or so.
'Gilbert,' those white, cold lips muttered; 'Gilbert, my darling, we are dying together. Clasp me to your arms now. Hold me in them to the end.'
With a moan, not a curse!--a curse would not have availed or eased him now--he started back in that dim cabin, hurling the bottle from him as he did so. His rival! his rival! again, even now! His name the last word on her lips, his image the last thing present to her in the hour of death. Then he fled from the cabin back again to his post, back to the wheel to which he swore he would lash himself, and so go down thinking of nothing but his duty. There was, his fevered mind told him, nothing but that--but his duty--left. As he went along he noticed, distraught though he was, that the vessel was making a kind of rotatory movement under him; that she seemed, indeed, to be gliding round and round in a circle although beaten back more than once by the awful force beneath her.
'He has left the wheel!' he cried, his swift and accurate seaman's knowledge and intelligence telling him at once what had happened. 'Is he mad--or dead?'
And clutching, grasping at everything that offered a hold to him, he forced himself back to where the wheel stood, only to find when there that Gilbert was lying senseless by it. Senseless but not dead, as one thrust of Charke's hand under the other's wet clothes, towards the region of the heart, told him very well. An instant later he had resumed his hold on the spokes, and was endeavouring to put the ship on her course before the howling winds, to keep her straight on into the dark, impenetrable depth of blackness ahead of her.
Again the marvel was that she did not go over, or did not suddenly sink beneath the weight of water that was pouring in on all sides--sink like a stone. And he began to tell himself now that, as she had borne up so long, as the storm could, by no possibility, become worse and must, at last, abate, there was still a hope. A hope of what? That he and Bella might both be saved; be saved, and saved alone, together. 'She is alive and I am alive. The others are dead, or dying. Oh, God! if she and I are spared----'
But that sentence was never finished!
For, as he partly uttered it there came an awful crash, a crash that hurled him back, then flung him over and over on the poop--a grinding, horrible concussion, followed by the most terrible thumps and by the sudden cessation of the ship's passage. And, a moment later, the vessel heeled over, though still beating and thumping heavily, so that now the water poured into her forwards, and, gradually, her fore-part was entirely immersed. But still the pounding and the awful grating continued, while growing worse and worse.
'She has struck,' he muttered to himself. 'Struck on a reef or a rock. The end has truly come.'
In a moment he had picked himself up from the poop-deck, and, difficult as it was to move with the vessel beating backwards and forwards, had dragged himself down to the saloon--down to where Bella was, the woman whom he would save or die with.
The lamp had gone out with the concussion. All was in darkness, and, above the roar of the tempest outside, he could hear the furniture beating about the saloon as the ship swayed and wrenched. Yet he went on towards where he had left her ten minutes before; on towards the sofa on which she had been sitting almost unconscious.
She was not there he found, but, instead, lying insensible at the foot of the sofa. Insensible, he knew, because, to his words, his summons, she returned no answer. Then, in a moment, he had seized her in his arms, had lifted her up, and, with her head upon his shoulder, was groping his way with unsteady, stumbling feet towards the gangway.
Her head upon his shoulder now, her hair brushing his face now, in this moment, in the hour of destruction--for one, for both of them! Her head upon his shoulder! And he a mortal man! It was beyond endurance; more than he could bear! Acknowledging this, recognising it, he slightly moved, with the hand which was around those shoulders, that face so close to him, that face so close, so cold and chill--and kissed her long and passionately.
'She will never know,' he muttered, 'never know. Yet--yet it has made death sweeter. Death! the death that will be ours ere many more moments have passed.'
Yet, near as that death was, so near as to be beyond all doubt, as much beyond all doubt as that the rocking, shivering ship was breaking up fast, he felt his way towards where he knew the life-buoys were, and rapidly fitted one on to each of them; while, as he did so, he murmured again and again:
'If any are saved it can only be she and I. Yet even of that there is no hope.'
The Indian Ocean lay beneath the purple-scarlet rays of the setting sun as calmly and as peacefully as though, across its treacherous bosom, nothing more violent than a cat's-paw had ever swept. Indeed, so calm and peaceful was the spaceless sheet of cobalt that, almost, one might have thought he gazed upon some quiet tarn, or inland lake, shut in and warded off from any breeze that might blow or any tempest that could ever roar. Only--he who should stand upon the pebbly beach of a little island upon whose white stones the surf hissed gently as it receded slowly and faintly--as though it were asleep and languid--would have known that, for thousands of miles ahead of him, there was nothing to oppose the tempests of the east and south, or prevent them from lashing that now calm and placid ocean into madness, or from exerting their powers of awful destruction.
A little island set in that glittering, sapphire sea, with, all around its circumference of five miles, a belt of white bleached stone and sand, and with, inland and running up from the belt, green grassy slopes, in which grew tall palm trees, vast bushes or tufts of bananas, orange and lemon trees, mangoes and yams. There, too, were grassy dells through which limpid streams of pure cool water ran until they mingled with the salt ocean; there the wild turtle-dove cooed from guava and tamarind tree, the quails and guinea-fowls ran about upon the white silvery sands; while, to complete all these natural advantages, neither mosquito nor sandfly existed.
A little island girt by coral reefs--the ocean's teeth, strong, fierce, and jagged; teeth that can rip the copper sheathing off a belated vessel as easily as a man can rip the skin from off the island's pink and golden bananas; teeth that can thrust themselves a dozen or twenty feet into the bowels of forlorn and castaway barks and tear them all to pieces as the tusk of the 'must' elephant tears the bowels of its victims. A little island, one of a thousand in that sometimes smiling, sometimes devilish, sea--such as are in the Chagos Archipelago, or the Seychelles, or the Cormoras, and, like so many of those islands, untrod, unvisited by man. Unvisited because, where all are equally and bounteously supplied by Nature, there is no need for any ship to draw near this solitary speck that is guarded from all approach by those belts of coral, and also because, to this small island, there is no natural harbour should rough winds blow.
Now--as still the setting sun went swiftly down amidst its regal panoply of purple and violet and crimson, while, above those hues, its rays shot forth great fleaks and flames of amber gold--it was not uninhabited, not desolate of all human life. Upon a grassy slope a man lay, his head bound up with linen bands; one of his hands being swathed, too, in similar wrappings. And his eyes were closed as though he were sleeping--or dead. To her who gazed on him it seemed almost as if it must be the latter--the greater, the more everlasting sleep, that had fallen on him.
For there were two in this island now; she who thus looked down on the prostrate man being a woman clad in a long dress, which once had been of a soft, delicate white fabric, but, now, was stained and smeared with many splashes and marks, and was rough and crumpled with hard usage and by the effects of seawater. Her hair, too, was all dishevelled, uncombed and unbrushed; tossed up in a great mass upon her head; bound with a piece of ordinary tape. And still she was as beautiful as she had ever been; beautiful in this negligence which was the result of shipwreck and of battling with tempest, of cruel buffetings from merciless waves and jagged rocks--beautiful, though on her face and in her eyes was now the sombre beauty of a despair and misery too deep for words. For he whom she loved, he whose wife she was to have been, was not upon that island with them, and had no more been heard of since, in the arms of Stephen Charke, she had been plunged into the sea and, in those arms, borne to safety and to life.
She gazed down on him now, in the last glimmering beams of the golden light that shot athwart the island, while regarding him with some expression in her glance which caused that glance to be not altogether a reflex of her own misery and despair. An expression that seemed to denote a supreme pity, an almost divine regret for him who lay before, and beneath, her, in pain and suffering.
'How brave--how strong he was!' she murmured inwardly, her lips not moving. 'How he fought with that storm--fought with Death to save me and himself! No!' she broke off, still uttering her meditations to her own heart alone--'why do him such injustice even in my thoughts? It was not to save us both, but me alone. There was but one desire in his soul--to save me!'
She turned and went to a small heap of fruit that she had gathered earlier in the day, and selected one of the great pink bananas--pink with a lustrous beauty which those who only see them when they arrive in northern climes could never believe they have once possessed--then she took a scooped-out cocoanut shell, and, going to a little babbling rill that ran through the grassy defile, filled it with water. After which she returned to where the other lay, and, kneeling by his side, gazed on him again.
'My God!' she whispered. 'I almost dreaded him once. Feared him for I knew not what. Feared him! Him! And he has been my saviour.'
He seemed to know that she was by his side and near him; for, even as she murmured these words to herself, Stephen Charke opened his eyes--a faint smile appearing in them--and gazed into hers.
'You are better?' she asked, as she gave him the shell with the water in it, which he was not too weak to be able to take and raise to his lips, while she tore off the rind of the banana. 'Your forehead,' she went on, while putting her hand upon it calmly, as a sister might, 'is cooler. Are you still in pain?'
'No,' he answered. 'No--only very weak. Are--are--any more saved from that?' and he directed his glance to where, two hundred yards off from the island, lay something protruding above the water which looked like the rounded back of a whale, but was, in truth, the torn and lacerated keel of theEmperor of the Moon. In her last struggles--in her last convulsions as the gale had hurled her on to the coral reef--she had turned almost completely over.
'No,' she replied, her face an awful picture of despair and anguish. 'None are saved but you and I. Oh!' and she buried that face in her hands and wept aloud, piteously, heartbrokenly.
'God rest their souls,' he said solemnly. 'God pity them! Why I, too, should have been spared except to save you, I do not know. I might as well have gone down with them.'
'No! no!' she cried. 'No, Mr. Charke. You must be spared for better days, for greater things. Oh,' she exclaimed, 'how bravely you battled with it all! Uncle told us,' she went on through her tears, 'when we were below and before I became insensible, that your efforts were superhuman; that, if the ship could be saved, it would be by you alone. And,' she continued, 'how you saved me I do not know. Only--only--I wish I had gone with him, with Gilbert.'
'Nay,' he said--'nay. Do not say that. And--and--I ask you to believe that, had it been possible, I would have saved him too. But it was impossible. Impossible to so much as slip a life-buoy over his shoulders. The end was at hand, the ship broken in half. It was impossible,' he repeated earnestly.
'How,' she asked, as she sat by his side gazing out across the calm, waveless sea through the fast-coming tropic night, and watching the great stars--almost as big as northern moons---sparkling, incandescent like, in the blue heavens above--'how did you do it? I remember nothing till I found myself lying there,' and she pointed down to the white sand, from which there came, through the sultry night, the gentle hiss of the sea, 'and saw you lying near me, and dead, as I thought.'
'Nor do I remember, or only very little more than you can do. I dragged you from the saloon, and, after fixing a life-buoy on to each of us, leaped into the sea with you, striking out vigorously to avoid the ship. And I can recall my battlings with the waves for a few moments--only a few--then feeling my breath knocked out of me. And, then, nothing more until I came to and found you looking at me here. It was the life-buoys that saved us.'
'In God's mercy. Under His Providence. Yet--yet--if it were not wicked to say so--if it were not for my poor dear mother at home--I--should----'
'No, no!' he almost moaned. 'No, no! Not that!' Then, after a moment or so of silence, he said: 'Do you know how long we have been here? Can you guess?'
'This is the second night, I suppose,' she answered. 'When I came-to yesterday morning, I imagine it was the first one after the wreck.'
'Possibly. And have you seen nothing pass at sea, either near or far off?'
'Nothing. Yet I have gazed seaward all the time it has been light on each day. Where do you think we are?'
'If the island is uninhabited, I think it must be one of the Cormora group, since it can scarcely be part of the Chagos Archipelago--they are too far to the east. And all the others in the Indian Ocean--certainly in this part of it--are inhabited.'
She made no reply now--she did not say what almost every other woman in her position would undoubtedly have said--namely, that she hoped they would in some way be taken off the island. For, in absolute fact, she did not hope so. To be saved from this desolation, to be put on board some ship which might be going to any part of the world, even though that part should be England itself, meant leaving Gilbert behind--leaving him to his ocean grave. And she would not--certainly she would not yet--consent to believe that he had met with such a grave. TheEmperor of the Moonwas still there, a part of her above the water although she was almost turned upside down, or 'turned turtle,' as she knew the sailors called it, and--and--might not some of those who were in her when she struck be still sheltering, clinging to some portion of the wreck that happened to be above water? She did not know much about ships, this awful, fateful voyage being her only experience, wherefore she thought and hoped and prayed that such a chance as this which she imagined in her mind might be possible. While, too, she remembered that Gilbert and her uncle were both blind. Therefore, if they were still alive, they could not cast themselves into the sea to escape out of the vessel--they would not, indeed, know that there was an island close to them, and, probably, would imagine that the ship was wrecked upon some reef or rock, so that it would be doubly dangerous to venture to leave her. And, again, even if they could by any wild chance have guessed that there was an island near, how would they in their blindness have known which way to proceed to reach it?
Thus, by such arguments, she had endeavoured to solace her sad, aching heart, and now, as she rose to leave Stephen Charke for the night, she put into words the thoughts which had been present to her mind from almost the first moment she had discovered that they themselves were saved.
'Do you think,' she asked, standing there gazing down on him once more--'do you think any who were in the ship when we escaped can be still alive? Is there any hope of that?'
He looked up at her swiftly as she made the suggestion, then--because he felt that it was useless to encourage such vain longings--because, also, he knew that such a thing was impossible--absolutely, entirely impossible, he said: 'No, no! It cannot be. Those who were in the cabin would be submerged as the ship went over, and those who were on the deck would be thrown into the sea.'
She gave a bitter sigh as he answered her--and it went to his heart to hear that sigh, since now his pity for her was heroic, sublime, in its self-abnegation--as great as were also his love and adoration; then she asked:
'And where was Gilbert--Lieutenant Bampfyld?'
'He--he--was lying by the wheel. God pity him! He was a brave, noble officer. Even in his blindness he had crept up to help at the wheel, and was determined to do something towards saving the ship if possible. Then--then--he fell down from exhaustion. He----'
'--is dead!' she muttered, in a voice that sounded like a knell. 'Dead! oh, my God! he is dead. I wish I were dead, too!'