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