THE SHARK'S TOOTH REEF.
Meanwhile the night grew on, and with it there was that accompaniment
which is so common in the tropics: the wind rising, and from blowing
lightly soon sprang up into what the sailors call half a gale.
Now and again, far away to the east, flashes of rusty red lightning
might be seen also, the almost sure heralds of a storm later.
The wind blew, too, over the dense masses of orange groves and other
vegetation which go to form the tropical jungle that hereabout fringes
the seashore; compact masses that, to many endeavouring to arrive at
that shore, would offer an impenetrable, an impassable, barrier.
Though not so to those acquainted with the vicinity and used to
threading the jungle, nor to the Indians and half-castes whose huts
and cabins bordered on that jungle, since they knew every spot where
passage might be made, and the coast thereby reached at last.
Zara knew also each of those passages well, and threaded them now with
the confidence born of familiarity; with, too, the stern determination
to arrive at the end she had sworn to attain, if such attainment were
possible.
She had left the room where Madame Carmaux had been confronted, not
only by her but by all the others, in the manner described; had left
it suddenly, though mysteriously, even as to her maddened brain a
thought had sprung, dispelling for the moment all the agony and
passion with which that brain was racked. The thought that, as she had
sent the man she loved to his doom, so, also, it might not yet be too
late to avert that doom--to save him.
The Indians who were bearing him to the old ramshackle sailing-boat he
possessed (a thing half yawl and half lugger--a thing, too, which she
supposed those men had been instructed to pierce and bore so that it
would begin to fill from the first, and should, thereby, sink by the
time it was in deep water) must necessarily go slowly, owing to the
burden they had to carry, while she--well! she could progress almost
as swiftly as the deer could themselves thread the thickets that
bordered the coast.
Surely, surely, lithe, young, and active as she was she would overtake
those men with their burden ere they could reach the yawl; she would
be able to bid them stop, and could at once point out to them the
fatal mistake that had been made. She could give them proof, by
bidding them take one glance at the features of the senseless man they
were transporting, of the nature of that mistake.
So she set out to overtake the Indians with their burden; set out,
staying for nothing, and allowing nothing to hinder her. For, swiftly
as she might go, every minute was still precious.
And now--now--as the night wind arose still more and the rusty red of
the lightning turned to a more purple-violet hue--sure warning of the
nearness of the coming storm--she was almost close to the beach where
she knew Sebastian's crazy old craft was kept in common with one or
two others; namely, a punt with a deep tank for fish, a scow, and a
boat with oars. She was close to the beach, but with, at this time,
her heart like lead in her bosom because of the fear she had that she
was too late.
"No sound," she muttered to herself. "No voices to be heard. They are
gone. They are gone. I _am_ too late!"
Then, redoubling her exertions, she ran swiftly the remainder of the
distance to where she knew the boathouse--an erection of poles with
planks laid across them--stood.
And in a moment she knew that she was, indeed, too late. Where the
yawl usually floated there was now an empty space; there was nothing
in the boathouse but the punt and the rowboat.
"Oh! what to do," she cried, "what to do!" and she beat her breast as
she so cried. "They have carried him out to sea, even now the yawl is
sinking--has sunk--they will be on their way back. He is dead! he is
dead! he must be dead by now!"
While, overcome by the horror and misery of her thoughts, she sank
down to the ground. But not for long, however, since at such a crisis
as this her strong--if often ungovernable--heart became filled with
greater courage and resource. To sink to the ground, she told herself,
to lie there wailing and moaning over the impending fate of him she
loved, was not the way to avert that fate. Instead, she must be prompt
and resolute.
She sprang, therefore, once more to her feet and--dark as was all
around her, except for the light of a young crescent moon peeping up
over the sea's rim and forcing a glimmer now and again through the
banks of deep, leaden clouds which the wind was bringing up from that
sea--made her way into the boathouse, where, swiftly unloosing the
painter of the rowboat, she pushed the latter out into the tumbling
waves and began to scull it.
"They must have gone straight out," she thought, "straight out. And
they would not go far. Only to where the water is deep enough for the
yawl to sink, or to encounter one of the many reefs--those jagged
crested reefs which would make a hole in her far worse than fifty awls
could do."
Then still bending her supple frame over the oars, while her little
hands clenched them tightly, she rowed and rowed for dear life--as in
actual truth it was!--her breath coming faster and faster with her
exertions, her bosom heaving, but her courage indomitable.
"I may not be too late," she whispered again and again; "the boat may
not yet have filled. I may not be too late."
Suddenly she paused affrighted, startled; her heart seemed to cease to
beat, her hands were idle as they clutched the oars. Startled, and
despairing!
For out here the water was calmer, there being on it only the long
Atlantic roll that is so common beneath the roughness of the winds;
except for the slapping and crashing of those waves against the bows
of the boat with each rise and fall it made, there was scarcely any
noise; certainly none such as those waves had made, and would make
against the boathouse and the long line of the shore. So little noise
that what she had heard before she heard again now, as she sat
listening and terrified in her place. She caught the beat of oars in
another boat, a boat that was drawing nearer to her with each fresh
stroke--that was, also, drawing nearer to the boathouse.
The Indians were returning. Their work was done!
"I am too late," she moaned. "I am too late. God help us both!"
Then, too, she heard something else.
Over the waters, over the rolling waves, there came to her ears the
clear sounds of a man singing in a high tenor--it was almost a high
treble--a man singing a song in Maya which she, who was of their race,
knew was one that, in bygone days the Caribs and natives had sung in
triumph over the downfall of their enemies. A song which, when it was
concluded, was followed by a little bleating laugh, one which she knew
well enough, a laugh which only one man in all that neighbourhood
could give. Then she heard words called out in a half-chuckling,
half-gloating tone, still in Maya.
"'Sink him beneath the sea forever,' she say, 'forever beneath the
sea.' And Paz he never for get, oh, never, never! Now he sunk," and
again she heard the bleating laugh, and again the beginning of that
wild Carib song of triumph.
Springing up, dropping the oars heedlessly--her heart almost
bursting--the girl rose from her seat, then shrieked aloud--sending
her voice in the direction where now there loomed before her eyes a
blur beneath the moon's glimmer which she knew to be a boat. "Paz,"
she cried, "Paz, it is not true, say it is not true. Oh! Paz, where is
he?"
"Where you wish. Where you tell me put him," the other called back,
while still beneath the brawny, muscular strokes of the Indians rowing
it, the boat swept on toward the shore. "Beneath the waves or soon
will be. Breaking to pieces on Shark's Tooth Reef. Paz never forget."
"Beast! devil!" the girl cried in her agony, forgetting, or recalling
with redoubled horror, that what had been done was her own doing, was
perpetrated at her suggestion. "Return and help me to save him. Oh!
come back."
But the boat was gone, was but a speck now beneath the moon, and she
was alone upon the sea, over which the wind howled as it lashed it to
fury at last.
"The Shark's Tooth Reef," she murmured. "The Shark's Tooth Reef, The
worst of all around. Yet--yet--if caught on that, the yawl may not
sink. Oh! oh!" and she muttered to herself some wild unexpressed words
that were doubtless a prayer. Then she grasped the oars once more,
which, since they were fixed by loops on to thole pins instead of
being loose in rowlocks, had not drifted away as might otherwise have
been the case, and set the boat toward the spot where the Shark's
Tooth Reef was as nearly as she could guess.
"If I can but reach it," she muttered to herself. "If I can but reach
it."
But now her labours were more intense than before, her struggles more
terrible. For, coming straight toward the bow of the boat, the
Atlantic rollers beat it back with every stroke she took, while also
they deluged it with water, so that she knew ere long it must sink
beneath the waves. Already there were three or four inches in the
bottom--nay, more, for the stretchers were half-covered--another three
of four and it would go down like lead. And each fresh wave that broke
over the bows added a further quantity.
"To see him once again; only to see him though if not to save," she
moaned--weeping at last; "to see him, to be able to tell him that
though I sent him to his doom I loved him," while roused by the
thought, she still struggled on, buffeted and beaten by the waves;
breathless, almost lifeless--but still unconquered and unconquerable.
Suddenly she gave a gasp, a shriek. Close by her, rising up some
twenty feet from the sea, there was a cone-shaped rock, jagged and
serrated at its summit; black, too, and glistening as, in the rays of
the fast rising young moon, the water streaming from off it. It was
the Shark's Tooth Reef, so called because, from its long length of
some fifty yards (a length also serrated and jagged like the under jaw
of a dog), there rose that cone-shaped thing which resembled what it
was named from.
And again she shrieked as, looking beyond the base of the cone,
peering through the hurtling waves and white filmy spume and spray,
she saw upon the further edge of the base of the reef a black,
indistinct mass being beaten to and fro. She heard, too, the grinding
of that mass against the reef, as well as its thumps as it was flung
on and dragged off it by the swirling of the sea; she heard, how each
time, the force of the impact became louder and more deadly.
"To reach him at last," she cried, "to die with him! To die together."
Then it seemed that into that quivering, nervous frame there came a
giant's strength; it seemed as though the cords and sinews of her arms
had become steel and iron, as though the little hands were vises in
the power of their grip. "To die together," she thought again, as,
with superhuman efforts, she forced her boat toward the battered,
broken yawl.
Now, she was close to it--now!--then, with a crash her own boat was
dashed against the larger one, its bow crushed in, in a moment, its
stem lifted into the air. But, catlike, desperate, too, fighting fate
with the determination of despair, she had seized the top of the
yawl's side; had clung to it one moment while the sea thundered and
broke against her feet below, and had then drawn herself up onto the
deck over the side.
And he was there, lying half-in, half-out the little forecastle cuddy,
bound and corded--insensible.
"I have found you, Sebastian," she whispered, her lips to his cold
ones. "I have found you."
With an awful lurch the yawl heeled over, the man's body rolling like
a log as it did so, and then Zara knew that the end had come. Even
though he lived, nothing could save him now; his arms were bound
tightly to his sides, the cords passing over his chest from left to
right. He was without sense or power.
"Nothing can save him now--nor me," she said. "Nothing."
Then she forced her own little hands beneath those cords so that,
thereby, she was bound to him; whereby if ever they were found, they
would be found locked together; she grasping tightly, too, the top
ply, so that neither wave, nor roll of sea, nor any force could tear
them apart again. And if they were never found--still--still, nothing
could part them more.
"Together," she murmured, for the last time, her own strength ebbing
fast, "together forever. Together at the end. Always together now--in
death!"