"AIR, LIGHT, AND WAVE SEEMED FULL OF BURNING REST."
Morning dawned. The sun shot up from his liquid bed, a ball of fiery
splendour, purpling the vast immensity of a sailless ocean, shining down
with rapidly increasing and merciless heat upon the speck formed by the
impromptu raft amid the utter boundlessness of that blue-green, slimy,
and now most horrible expanse. Not another object was visible far or
near, not even so much as a stick of wreckage which might have come to
the surface. Had they drifted with some current far from the scene of
the night's awful disaster?
Roden Musgrave, supporting himself by resting a light grasp upon the
hatch, had been swimming mechanically all these hours, and well indeed
was it that the water in those semi-tropical seas was more than
ordinarily buoyant, for this and his coolness of brain had enabled him
to spare all superfluous waste of energy. He had managed to secure his
unconscious companion to the ring-bolts with a piece of cord which he
had thrust into his pocket in view of some such emergency, and this
timely precaution saved much expenditure of valuable strength in holding
her in her otherwise precarious position. Yet now, upon himself, the
night's exhaustion and horror were beginning to tell; and he was, as we
have said, swimming mechanically and as one half-asleep.
Now a hand stole forth and rested softly and caressingly upon his head.
"Love, why did you not leave me to my fate?" The voice, low and dreamy
in its sweetness, resumed: "It would have been all over by now. Yet you
threw away safety to come back and give your life for mine."
The voice, the touch, awakened him, roused him to consciousness as wide
as it ever had been.
"I would not be in such safety now if I had the opportunity," came the
reply, from the swimming head. "Our chances are desperate, yet I am
happier at this moment than I have been at any time since--that day."
"My darling, how selfish I am, resting at ease here while you have been
struggling all these hours in the water," she said. "Come up here and
rest beside me, sweetheart. The thing will carry us both. Then we can
talk nearer--closer to each other."
"No. It will hardly carry you dry and comfortable. Besides, I might
capsize it, and what then?"
For answer she began deliberately to untie the knots of the lashings
that secured her.
"What--what are you doing?"
"I am going to take your place. Then you will be able to rest."
"Mona! Mona I don't be foolish. You can't swim a stroke."
"But the lifebelt will keep me up, and I can get the same amount of
support you are having."
"No, no, I tell you. Don't loosen the knots. I might not be able to
lash them again so easily. Stay. I will try if the thing will hold us
both, if only for a little while."
By the most careful and wary manoeuvring, and alert to lower himself if
the hatch listed dangerously, he managed to worm himself upon it. Even
then, lying beside her, the additional weight submerged the impromptu
raft by nearly a foot. Still, by avoiding any violent or sudden
movement, the position was comparatively a safe one. Then, for the
first time for many hours, the first time since rising to the surface
after being drawn down in the vortex of the foundering ship, they
kissed, and there, crouching on their few feet of planking, it the only
frail support between them and the vast green depths of that awful ocean
abyss, themselves not even entirely above the surface, with all the
terrors of their indescribably appalling position vividly brought home
to them by the oozy, lifeless silence of the deserted sea, and the
fierce, darting rays of the ascending sun, these two alone together were
happy--strangely, mysteriously, awesomely, but most unequivocally,
happy.
"We are not altogether without supplies," said Roden, almost
light-heartedly, as he produced the water-tight cartridge bag and began
to extract some of its contents, using the utmost care lest a drop of
sea water should by any chance be splashed upon the latter. "But we
must be as sparing of them as we know how, for Heaven only can tell how
long our cruise is likely to last. If any of the boats of the
_Scythian_ are picked up we shall be searched for."
"And if not?"
"We must take our chance. We cannot be out of the track of the mail
lines."
His hopeful tone was full of comfort to Mona, who quite overlooked the
vastness of ocean, and the comparatively small area commanded from the
bridge of a mail steamer, also the well-nigh invisibility of so small an
object as the hatch of a ship, which, presenting a flat surface, would
hardly attract attention even at a very short distance. She ate a
morsel of the biscuit and concentrated soup, and sipped a little of the
weak spirit and water out of the pewter flask, then declared that she
felt able to go for a long time without more.
"But what are you doing, dearest?" she cried, as having satisfied
himself that she was in earnest, he had deliberately shut up and
replaced the supplies. "No, no, I won't allow that. You shall not
starve yourself."
"I don't want anything; not yet, at any rate. The rest has set me up
more than food would do."
But to that sort of pleading Mona would not for a moment listen. Not
another morsel would she touch until he had taken his share, she vowed.
Besides, putting the matter on the very lowest and most selfish grounds,
if he starved himself, how would he keep up his strength to watch over
her?
This told. He yielded, or pretended to, at any rate, to the extent of a
slight moisten from the flask.
"I don't want any food; I couldn't eat, even if we had enough to last us
a year."
This was simply the truth. The man's high-strung nerves, with the
excitement and peril, and consciousness of the success with which
single-handed he had met and so far overcome the latter, had thrown him
into a state of strange exaltation which lifted him above mere bodily
cravings. There was something too of a sensuous witchery, a
fascination, in floating there in the warm lapping heave of the tropical
waters, rising all smoothly in imperceptible undulations. It was as
though they two were in a kind of intermediate state, between earth and
Heaven, the world far away, floating in a Nirvana dream of stirless and
peaceful rest.
Not a word had escaped Mona as to that ghastly midnight struggle. The
discovery of Lambert, and his fate seemed to leave not the faintest
trace in her mind. If not wholly unconscious at the time, the incident
must have seemed to her as nothing but an illusive dream. She did not
even speculate as to how she had been placed upon this bit of wreckage
which was supporting her, supporting them both, thus providentially.
So the day went by--the long, glaring, blinding day--and floating there
these two waifs lay and talked--talked of strange things unseen, of the
Present and of love; and in the midst of the vast immeasurable solitude
heart opened to heart with well-nigh the unearthly voicing of the
spirit-land. Again the sun dipped his red run to the lip of the liquid
world, and plunged out of sight in a bathing flood of glory.
"I have never known what happiness meant until this day. I tell you, my
Mona, although there is nothing but a plank or two between ourselves and
death, speaking selfishly, I have no wish to be rescued, no wish for
further life. I have done with life and its illusions. For your sake I
trust that help may come, for my own it is the last thing I desire."
"Darling, I don't want to live without you. But think--think what life
will mean to us together. Do not say, then, that you have no wish for
rescue."
"I have thought--and a presentiment has been upon me for some time.
Hope and trust in me are dead. I said it was with life and its
illusions I had done, for the two are convertible terms. I have had a
strange foreshadowing of what has happened, and that it would be for the
best. Love--my love--so strangely, so miraculously recovered, when I
looked upon you for the last time on that day it was with the flash of a
sure and certain conviction that I should behold you again--how and
where I knew not; only that it would be at the hour of death, in some
sort of magnetic extra-natural way as that in which I beheld you before
in my dream, there in the burning house."
Solemnly, unimpassionedly the words were uttered, and the voice was that
of a man who has done with life, and is glad that it should be so. A
sob shook Mona's frame, and her tears rained down, mingling with the
oily smoothness of the tropical sea. She clasped him wildly to her in a
warm, passionate embrace, and their lips, wet with the salt brine, again
met and clung.
"Love, love!" she whispered. "What a sweet word that is, since it can
turn to sweetness and light such an awful position as that in which we
now are. For I know the peril of our position--know it and realise it
to the full. Coward that I was to let you go as I did. No wonder you
turned from me with scorn and loathing, you who alone taught me what
love really was. But I will not let you go again. We will live
together or die together. We will not be separated again. We will
not--we will not!"
In truth the scene was a passing strange one, a marvel. Her voice
warmed and quivered with tenderness, and the smile which curved her lips
and threw a melting lustre into her eyes was radiant, as though those
words were uttered in peaceful security with a lifetime of happiness
opening out before her--before them both. Yet, half submerged, upborne
by the frailest of supports, they two were floating out upon the
stupendous expanse of dusking waters--drear, solemn, silent--horrible in
their awesome loneliness as in the far back ages of the world's birth,
while yet darkness brooded over the face of the deep.
Thus closed the first day.
Then, as the blackness of night fell, a faint breeze stirred the water,
and there came a change, one of weird and unearthly splendour. In their
countless myriads the stars sprang forth, and great constellations
gushed redly through the spheres, throwing a revolving ray athwart the
lesser luminaries in the transcendent brilliance and beauty of a
tropical sky. Roseate meteors, too, falling in streaks, and lo, the
whole surface of the sea blazed with phosphoric incandescence.
And the effect was wondrous, for bathed from head to foot in the
phosphorescent flame, clothed, as it were, in shining clusters of stars,
Mona's splendid form was as that of some inexpressibly beautiful goddess
of the sea; the oblong of the planking whereon it rested framing her as
with a golden glory. And stirred by the cool night breeze, the gentle
lapping of the ripples rose and fell in strange musical cadence as of
the far-away sighings of a spirit world, varied ever and anon by the
gasping snort of some mysterious monster of the deep.
Dawn rose at last--the dawn of the second day. Of how many more days
would they behold the dawn, these two, cut off from the world, from all
human help? How many more days before languor, weakness, exhaustion,
should overtake them, before their scanty stock of provisions should
fail? Yet no lingering, maddening agonies of hunger or thirst should
attend their dissolution. Death would be easy and swift, and, above
all, would involve no separation. Both spoke truly in denying the grim
King his terrors.
The sun hung like a ball of fire in the unclouded blue of the heavens;
the sea was of that translucent green so inseparable from the tropics.
Mona, who had been intermittently sleeping, awoke to find herself alone.
An affrighted cry escaped her; and but that she was secured to the
ring-bolt she would have fallen into the sea.
"Love! love! where are you?"
"Here. Don't be alarmed, my dearest," was the soothing reply. "I have
been swimming a little, as before. I thought you had been under water
long enough."
For the raft, relieved of his weight, was now floating level with the
surface. The dews of the tropical night, as well as the soaking effect
of her long immersion, had given way to the potent rays of the sun, and
Mona felt quite warm and dry. Still, with it she felt a shivering
feeling which was ominous, together with a languor and depression such
as she had not hitherto shown. The lustre, too, had gone out of her
eyes, leaving them dull and heavy. Was it the beginning of the end, of
failing vitality, of final exhaustion?
Upon her companion and protector, too, the strain was beginning to tell,
nay, as he recognised to himself, was much more than beginning. Pale,
and hollow-eyed, he seemed to be putting forth a good deal of effort,
swimming as before, with one hand upon the hatch. With the weakening of
their bodily state a reaction had set in, dispelling the exaltation of
the day before. Both seemed to recognise the imminence of a grim
alternative--an early rescue, or a speedy end.
And now, as he swam thus, Roden's glance lit upon an object the sight of
which caused his blood to tingle in a curdling, creepy thrill, a small
object, dark, wet and glistening; and a great horror came upon him, for
he knew that object well. _It was the triangular dorsal fin of a
shark_.
Here was a new and truly appalling peril. Strange that up till then
this form of it had hardly occurred to him. Infested as the tropical
seas are with these horrible creatures, yet from the swiftly moving
steamer none had hitherto been sighted. In all the excitement of
getting clear of the sinking ship, in the hour of effort and of action,
his whole mind had been centred on the means of keeping themselves
afloat, and once afloat, of the wherewithal to sustain life as long as
possible. Now the imminence of this hideous peril was forcibly thrust
upon him. He momentarily expected to feel the sudden crunch of one of
these voracious monsters "rising" him from the depths beneath.
He looked at the wet, gliding fin. It was moving _away_ from their
frail floating refuge, _increasing_ the space between. This conveyed
but small comfort. He had known sharks swim round and round a ship for
hours, ever keeping at a respectful distance, ever appearing to be
moving in the contrary direction; yet somehow there they were ever about
the same distance ahead. This one was not going to leave them: no such
luck. Besides, where there was one there were more.
"Mona, dear. I think I will get up on the hatch again, and rest a
little," he said, wishing to spare her the alarm, the consternation, of
his terrible discovery.
She reached out a hand to him with a murmur of welcome. He climbed to
his former position, for he, too, was growing very weak, and he wanted
to rest and think. And as he did so, his eyes fell upon another
glistening fin, seeming to appear on the very spot where he had seen the
first. Great Heaven! there were two of them.
And the result of his thinking was that Roden Musgrave, himself no
stranger to peril, came to the conclusion that if ever living mortal had
found himself in a situation of more unique and ghastly horror, why,
then he had never heard of it. The raft, submerged by their double
weight, might afford a sufficient depth of water for the sharks, growing
bold, to snatch them from it, or possibly to capsize it. On the other
hand, were he to resume his swimming he might be seized at any moment,
and certainly would be sooner or later.
Suddenly he became conscious of a shock, a slight momentary jarring, as
though their precarious support had bumped, had touched a sunken reef;
yet not, for there was a most distinct feeling that the impact was that
of something living. Quickly, but carefully he looked forth, just in
time to catch a glimpse of a long, hideous, ill-defined shape changing
from white to dull ugly green, as it turned over with serpentine writhe
and sank out of sight in the opal depths.
Mona saw it too, and a low cry of horror escaped her. She started up,
shivering with fear, her eyes wild and dilated. The hatch listed
dangerously on its balance. Then in a tone of unutterable terror which
curdled her listener's blood, she cried,
"Look! look! It is coming again!"
It was. Emboldened by their apparent helplessness, the tiger of the sea
was bent upon making another attempt to obtain his prey. The grisly
snout, the cruel eye, the white belly, the long glutinous tail, every
detail of the sea-demon stood clear, as it rushed straight through the
water with an unswerving velocity, which should throw it right upon the
hatch. But, with lightning swiftness, it sank, and, as it passed
underneath, again that shock was felt, this time with increased
violence. Then, as they looked forth, behold several of those gliding,
glistening, triangular fins, cleaving without effort in their stealthy,
creeping way through the mirror-like surface. Here, indeed, with only a
few square feet of submerged planking between them and destruction in
the most hideous and horrible of forms, they realised their utter
helplessness. The ravening monsters closed in nearer and nearer.
And now as the very lowest depths of despair seemed reached, hope dawned
once more, faintly enkindled, but still, hope. Low down upon the far
horizon hung a dark vaporous cloud. It grew, waxing larger and larger.
The smoke of a steamship.
Both had seen it, both with their heads on a level with the surface of
the sea. Then came another jarring shock, followed immediately by
another, and a rushing swirl as the tigers of the deep, now growing bold
in their impatience, as though divining that their prey would soon be
snatched from them, darted to and fro, striving to capsize the cranky
support.
"We are saved! But--will they see us? Will they see us?" gasped Mona,
in agony, straining her eyes upon the now rapidly advancing object. The
latter became plainer and plainer every moment, and resolved itself into
the masts and yards, then the funnel and hull, of a large steamship.
And the course she was steering could not fail to bring her very near.
But the heads of two people do not constitute a very prominent object of
attention on the surface of the wide sea, even at a short distance. The
vessel drew nearer and nearer, till she was almost abeam. But not
nearly so close as they had at first expected.
By now they were in the midst of a perfect shoal of the ravenous
monsters; black fins glistening above the surface; dull, tumbling, snaky
shapes, writhing, turning over beneath it; the glint of a ravening eye;
the gap of a frightful month, armed with its bristling rows of pointed
teeth. The sea boiled and babbled with the rush of the hideous beasts.
Scarcely a minute went by without bringing with it the shock of their
onslaught. And the ship was passing--passing.
Then both these castaways, lifting up their voices, sent up a long, loud
ringing shout. But what avail was that in the great immensity of space?
Why, the clanging of the engines, even the chatter of the passengers on
board the passing vessel, would be enough to drown it.
But the cry on Mona's part ended in a wild, quavering shriek of terror.
There was a shock greater than any that had hitherto occurred, and a
most horrible crunch of something. The hatch rocked terribly, trembling
upon the very verge of capsizal. A huge shark had risen, and turning
over had seized a portion of Mona's robe which trailed out beyond the
edge, at the same time crunching splinters out of the hard wood; and it
was the lash of his tail as he discovered the empty nature of his find,
and sounded again into the depths, which had come so near capsizing the
hatch. Well indeed might Mona scream and nearly lose her mind with
horror, as she realised what would have happened but for her being
secured to the ring-bolt. Nature would bear no more. She was half
fainting.
Her companion saw it all too; realised what had happened as thoroughly
as she did; more, he realised what would happen, failing one
alternative. With the rapidity of mind which was characteristic of him,
that alternative had already presented itself, and it was a ghastly one.
This was it. _One of they two must abandon the hatch, abandon it
altogether_.
The quiet, easy death of the deep waters, the death by drowning, he
would have welcomed, did they but share it together. But now? The
picture of her, rent limb from limb by these tigers of the sea! Horror!
That put another face on the affair. The ship was already passing.
With two on the hatch, the latter was submerged, and their heads
presented no point of attraction. But with only one upon it, it would
float flush with the surface, and its dark, oblong shape would stand a
far greater chance of being sighted from the passing steamer. Further,
it would be almost secure from capsizing.
"Kiss me, Mona! Mine in death!"
They lay close together on the hatch. Shuddering, shrinking still with
the horror of that last terrible fright, she clung to him, and thus--
their lips washed by the phosphorescent brine of the tropical ocean, in
the extreme moment of their peril--they kissed. Gently, but forcibly,
parting her grasp, Roden raised his head, and sent forth over the waste
of waters a long, piercing, pealing shout. Then, sliding from the raft,
he sank.
The hatch, relieved of his weight, rose immediately, floating square
upon the surface, the dark wood framing its white burden in its midst.
But the moments vent by, and still no hideous stain rose to empurple the
green translucent plain of liquid light. Had the dauntless resolution
of his sacrifice carried him down into immeasurable depths, whither even
the ravening sea-tigers did not penetrate? It seemed so. "Love! love!
where are you?" whispered Mona, her exhausted voice wild with alarm.
And then such a curdling, piercing shriek rang out over the immensity of
space as even to surpass that call for help uttered with the last breath
of a dying man. "Love! love! you have given your life for mine! O God!
O God! take mine, for it is worthless to me now!"