Ten years afterwards, Mrs. Lawrie went on board a steamer at
Southampton, bound for New York. She was travelling alone, having been
called suddenly from Europe by the approaching death of her aged father.
For two or three days after sailing, the thick, rainy spring weather
kept all below, except a few hardy gentlemen who crowded together on the
lee of the smoke-stack, and kept up a stubborn cheerfulness on a very
small capital of comfort. There were few cabin-passengers on board, but
the usual crowd of emigrants in the steerage.
Mrs. Lawrie's face had grown calmer and colder during these years. There
was yet no gray in her hair, no wrinkles about her clear eyes; each
feature appeared to be the same, but the pale, monotonous color
which had replaced the warm bloom of her youth, gave them a different
character. The gracious dignity of her manner, the mellow tones of her
voice, still expressed her unchanging goodness, yet those who met her
were sure to feel, in some inexplicable way, that to be good is not
always to be happy. Perhaps, indeed, her manner was older than her face
and form: she still attracted the interest of men, but with a certain
doubt and reserve.
Certain it is that when she made her appearance on deck, glad of the
blue sky and sunshine, and threw back her hood to feel the freshness of
the sea air, all eyes followed her movements, except those of a forlorn
individual, who, muffled in his cloak and apparently sea-sick, lay upon
one of the benches. The captain presently joined her, and the gentlemen
saw that she was bright and perfectly self-possessed in conversation:
some of them immediately resolved to achieve an acquaintance. The dull,
passive existence of the beginning of every voyage, seemed to be now at
an end. It was time for the little society of the vessel to awake, stir
itself, and organize a life of its own, for the few remaining days.
That night, as Mrs. Lawrie was sleeping in her berth, she suddenly awoke
with a singular feeling of dread and suspense. She listened silently,
but for some time distinguished none other than the small sounds of
night on shipboard--the indistinct orders, the dragging of ropes,
the creaking of timbers, the dull, regular jar of the engine, and the
shuffling noise of feet overhead. But, ere long, she seemed to catch
faint, distant sounds, that seemed like cries; then came hurry and
confusion on deck; then voices in the cabin, one of which said: “they
never can get it under, at this rate!”
She rose, dressed herself hastily, and made her way through pale and
excited stewards, and the bewildered passengers who were beginning
to rush from their staterooms, to the deck. In the wild tumult which
prevailed, she might have been thrown down and trampled under foot, had
not a strong arm seized her around the waist, and borne her towards the
stern, where there were but few persons.
“Wait here!” said a voice, and her protector plunged into the crowd.
She saw, instantly, the terrible fate which had fallen upon the vessel.
The bow was shrouded in whirls of smoke, through which dull red flashes
began to show themselves; and all the length and breadth of the deck was
filled with a screaming, struggling, fighting mass of desperate human
beings. She saw the captain, officers, and a few of the crew working
in vain against the disorder: she saw the boats filled before they were
lowered, and heard the shrieks as they were capsized; she saw spars and
planks and benches cast overboard, and maddened men plunging after them;
and then, like the sudden opening of the mouth of Hell, the relentless,
triumphant fire burst through the forward deck and shot up to the
foreyard.
She was leaning against the mizen shrouds, between the coils of rope.
Nobody appeared to notice her, although the quarter-deck was fast
filling with persons driven back by the fire, yet still shrinking
from the terror and uncertainty of the sea. She thought: “It is but
death--why should I fear? The waves are at hand, to save me from all
suffering.” And the collective horror of hundreds of beings did not so
overwhelm her as she had both fancied and feared; the tragedy of each
individual life was lost in the confusion, and was she not a sharer in
their doom?
Suddenly, a man stood before her with a cork life-preserver in his
hands, and buckled it around her securely, under the arms. He was
panting and almost exhausted, yet he strove to make his voice firm, and
even cheerful, as he said:
“We fought the cowardly devils as long as there was any hope. Two boats
are off, and two capsized; in ten minutes more every soul must take to
the water. Trust to me, and I will save you or die with you!”
“What else can I do?” she answered.
With a few powerful strokes of an axe, he broke off the top of the
pilot-house, bound two or three planks to it with ropes, and dragged the
mass to the bulwarks.
“The minute this goes,” he then said to her, “you go after it, and I
follow. Keep still when you rise to the surface.”
She left the shrouds, took hold of the planks at his side, and they
heaved the rude raft into the sea. In an instant she was seized and
whirled over the side; she instinctively held her breath, felt a shock,
felt herself swallowed up in an awful, fathomless coldness, and then
found herself floating below the huge towering hull which slowly drifted
away.
In another moment there was one at her side. “Lay your hand on my
shoulder,” he said; and when she did so, swam for the raft, which they
soon reached. While she supported herself by one of the planks he so
arranged and bound together the pieces of timber that in a short time
they could climb upon them and rest, not much washed by the waves. The
ship drifted further and further, casting a faint, though awful, glare
over the sea, until the light was suddenly extinguished, as the hull
sank.
The dawn was in the sky by this time, and as it broadened they could
see faint specks here and there, where others, like themselves, clung to
drifting spars. Mrs. Lawrie shuddered with cold and the reaction from an
excitement which had been far more powerful than she knew at the time.
Her preserver then took off his coat, wrapped it around her, and
produced a pocket-flask, saying; “this will support us the longest; it
is all I could find, or bring with me.”
She sat, leaning against his shoulder, though partly turned away from
him: all she could say was: “you are very good.”
After awhile he spoke, and his voice seemed changed to her ears. “You
must be thinking of Mr. Lawrie. It will, indeed, be terrible for him to
hear of the disaster, before knowing that you are saved.”
“God has spared him that distress,” she answered. “Mr. Lawrie died, a
year ago.”
She felt a start in the strong frame upon which she leaned. After a
few minutes of silence, he slowly shifted his position towards her, yet
still without facing her, and said, almost in a whisper:
“You have said that I am very good. Will you put your hand in mine?”
She stretched hers eagerly and gratefully towards him. What had
happened? Through all the numbness of her blood, there sprang a strange
new warmth from his strong palm, and a pulse, which she had almost
forgotten as a dream of the past, began to beat through her frame. She
turned around all a-tremble, and saw his face in the glow of the coming
day.
“Leonard Clare!” she cried.
“Then you have not forgotten me?”
“Could one forget, when the other remembers?”
The words came involuntarily from her lips. She felt what they implied,
the moment afterwards, and said no more. But he kept her hand in his.
“Mrs. Lawrie,” he began, after another silence, “we are hanging by a
hair on the edge of life, but I shall gladly let that hair break, since
I may tell you now, purely and in the hearing of God, how I have tried
to rise to you out of the low place in which you found me. At first you
seemed too far; but you yourself led me the first step of the way, and
I have steadily kept my eyes on you, and followed it. When I had learned
my trade, I came to the city. No labor was too hard for me, no study too
difficult. I was becoming a new man, I saw all that was still lacking,
and how to reach it, and I watched you, unknown, at a distance. Then I
heard of your engagement: you were lost, and something of which I had
begun to dream, became insanity. I determined to trample it out of my
life. The daughter of the master-builder, whose first assistant I was,
had always favored me in her society; and I soon persuaded her to love
me. I fancied, too, that I loved her as most married men seemed to love
their wives; the union would advance me to a partnership in her father's
business, and my fortune would then be secured. You know what happened;
but you do not know how the sight of your face planted the old madness
again in my life, and made me a miserable husband, a miserable man of
wealth, almost a scoffer at the knowledge I had acquired for your sake.
“When my wife died, taking an only child with her, there was nothing
left to me except the mechanical ambition to make myself, without you,
what I imagined I might have become, through you. I have studied and
travelled, lived alone and in society, until your world seemed to be
almost mine: but you were not there!”
The sun had risen, while they sat, rocking on their frail support. Her
hand still lay in his, and her head rested on his shoulder. Every word
he spoke sank into her heart with a solemn sweetness, in which her whole
nature was silent and satisfied. Why should she speak? He knew all.
Yes, it seemed that he knew. His arm stole around her, and her head was
drawn from his shoulder to the warm breadth of his breast.
Something hard pressed her cheek, and she lifted her hand to move it
aside. He drew forth a flat medallion case; and to the unconscious
question in her face, such a sad, tender smile came to his lips, that
she could not repress a sudden pain. Was it the miniature of his dead
wife?
He opened the case, and showed her, under the glass, a faded, pressed
flower.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The Brandywine cowslip you dropped, when you spoke to me in the lane.
Then it was that you showed me the first step of the way.”
She laid her head again upon his bosom. Hour after hour they sat, and
the light swells of the sea heaved them aimlessly to and fro, and the
sun burned them, and the spray drenched their limbs. At last Leonard
Clare roused himself and looked around: he felt numb and faint, and he
saw, also, that her strength was rapidly failing.
“We cannot live much longer, I fear,” he said, clasping her closely in
his arms. “Kiss me once, darling, and then we will die.”
She clung to him and kissed him.
“There is life, not death, in your lips!” he cried. “Oh, God, if we
should live!”
He rose painfully to his feet, stood, tottering? on the raft, and looked
across the waves. Presently he began to tremble, then to sob like a
child, and at last spoke, through his tears:
“A sail! a sail!--and heading towards us!”