The mighty reflux, which, after a short struggle, overpowered the rush
of water from the windows, and carried Grace Carden's helpless body away
from the tree, drove her of course back toward the houses, and she was
whirled past Little's window with fearful velocity, just as he was going
to leap into the flood, and perish in an insane attempt to save her.
With a loud cry he seized her by her long floating hair, and tried to
draw her in at the window; but the mighty water pulled her from him
fiercely, and all but dragged him in after her; he was only saved by
clutching the side of the wall with his left hand: the flood was like
some vast solid body drawing against him; and terror began to seize on
his heart. He ground his teeth; he set his knee against the horizontal
projection of the window; and that freed his left hand; he suddenly
seized her arm with it, and, clutching it violently, ground his teeth
together, and, throwing himself backward with a jerk, tore her out of
the water by an effort almost superhuman. Such was the force exerted by
the torrent on one side, and the desperate lover on the other, that not
her shoes only, but her stockings, though gartered, were torn off her in
that fierce struggle.
He had her in his arms, and cried aloud, and sobbed over her, and kissed
her wet cheeks, her lank hair, and her wet clothes, in a wild rapture.
He went on kissing her and sobbing over her so wildly and so long, that
Coventry, who had at first exulted with him at her rescue, began to rage
with jealousy.
“Please remember she is my wife,” he shrieked: “don't take advantage of
her condition, villain!”
“Your wife, you scoundrel! You stole her from me once; now come and take
her from me again. Why didn't you save her? She was near to you. You
let her die: she lives by me, and for me, and I for her.” With this
he kissed her again, and held her to his bosom. “D'ye see that?--liar!
coward! villain!”
Even across that tremendous body of rushing death, from which neither
was really safe, both rivals' eyes gleamed hate at each other.
The wild beasts that a flood drives together on to some little eminence,
lay down their natures, and the panther crouches and whimpers beside the
antelope; but these were men, and could entertain the fiercest of human
passions in the very jaws of death.
To be sure it was but for a moment; a new danger soon brought them both
to their senses; an elm-tree whirling past grazed Coventry's plane-tree;
it was but a graze, yet it nearly shook him off into the flood, and he
yelled with fear: almost at the same moment a higher wave swept into
Little's room, and the rising water set every thing awash, and burst
over him as he kneeled with grace. He got up, drenched and half-blinded
with the turbid water, and, taking Grace in his arms, waded waist-high
to his bed, and laid her down on it.
It was a moment of despair. Death had entered that chamber in a new,
unforeseen, and inevitable form. The ceiling was low, the water was
rising steadily; the bedstead floated; his chest of drawers floated,
though his rifle and pistols lay on it, and the top drawers were full
of the tools he always had about him: in a few minutes the rising water
must inevitably jam Grace and him against the ceiling, and drown them
like rats in a hole.
Fearful as the situation was, a sickening horror was added to it by
the horrible smell of the water; it had a foul and appalling odor, a
compound of earthiness and putrescence; it smelt like a newly-opened
grave; it paralyzed like a serpent's breath.
Stout as young Little's heart was, it fainted now when he saw his
bedstead, and his drawers, and his chairs, all slowly rising toward the
ceiling, lifted by that cold, putrescent, liquid death.
But all men, and even animals, possess greater powers of mind, as well
as of body, than they ever exert, unless compelled by dire necessity:
and it would have been strange indeed if a heart so stanch, and a brain
so inventive, as Little's, had let his darling die like a rat drowned in
a hole, without some new and masterly attempt first made to save her.
To that moment of horror and paralysis succeeded an activity of mind
and body almost incredible. He waded to the drawers, took his rifle
and fired both barrels at one place in the ceiling bursting a hole, and
cutting a narrow joist almost in two. Then he opened a drawer, got an ax
and a saw out, and tried to wade to the bed; but the water now took him
off his feet, and he had to swim to it instead; he got on it, and with
his axe and his saw he contrived to paddle the floating bed under the
hole in the ceiling, and then with a few swift and powerful blows of
his ax soon enlarged that aperture sufficiently; but at that moment the
water carried the bedstead away from the place.
He set to work with his saw and ax, and paddled back again.
Grace, by this time, was up on her knees, and in a voice, the sudden
firmness of which surprised and delighted him, asked if she could help.
“Yes,” said he, “you can. On with my coat.”
It lay on the bed. She helped him on with it, and then he put his ax and
saw into the pockets, and told her to take hold of his skirt.
He drew himself up through the aperture, and Grace, holding his skirts
with her hands and the bed with her feet, climbed adroitly on to the
head of the bed--a French bed made of mahogany--and Henry drew her
through the aperture.
They were now on the false ceiling, and nearly jammed against the roof:
Little soon hacked a great hole in that just above the parapet, and they
crawled out upon the gutter.
They were now nearly as high as Coventry on his tree; but their house
was rocking, and his tree was firm.
In the next house were heard the despairing shrieks of poor creatures
who saw no way of evading their fate; yet the way was as open to them as
to this brave pair.
“Oh, my angel,” said Grace, “save them. Then, if you die, you go to
God.”
“All right,” said Henry. “Come on.”
They darted down the gutter to the next house. Little hacked a hole in
the slates, and then in the wood-work, and was about to jump in, when
the house he had just left tumbled all to pieces, like a house of sugar,
and the debris went floating by, including the bedstead that had helped
to save them.
“O God!” cried Little, “this house will go next; run on to the last
one.”
“No, Henry, I would rather die with you than live alone. Don't be
frightened for me, my angel. Save lives, and trust to Jesus.”
“All right,” said Little; but his voice trembled now.
He jumped in, hacked a hole in the ceiling, and yelled to the inmates to
give him their hands.
There was a loud cry of male and female voices.
“My child first,” cried a woman, and threw up an infant, which Little
caught and handed to Grace. She held it, wailing to her breast.
Little dragged five more souls up. Grace helped them out, and they ran
along the gutter to the last house without saying “Thank you.”
The house was rocking. Little and Grace went on to the next, and he
smashed the roof in, and then the ceiling, and Grace and he were getting
the people out, when the house they had just left melted away, all but
a chimney-stack, which adhered in jagged dilapidation to the house they
were now upon.
They were now upon the last. Little hacked furiously through the roof
and ceiling, and got the people out; and now twenty-seven souls crouched
in the gutter, or hung about the roof of this one house; some praying,
but most of them whining and wailing.
“What is the use of howling?” groaned Little.
He then drew his Grace to his panting bosom, and his face was full of
mortal agony.
She consoled him. “Never mind, my angel. God has seen you. He is good to
us, and lets us die together.”
At this moment the house gave a rock, and there was a fresh burst of
wailing.
This, connected with his own fears, enraged Henry.
“Be quiet,” said he, sternly. “Why can't you die decently, like your
betters?”
Then he bent his head in noble silence over his beloved, and devoured
her features as those he might never see again.
At this moment was heard a sound like the report of a gun: a large tree
whirled down by the flood, struck the plane-tree just below the fork,
and cut it in two as promptly as a scythe would go through a carrot.
It drove the upper part along, and, going with it, kept it perpendicular
for some time; the white face and glaring eyes of Frederick Coventry
sailed past these despairing lovers; he made a wild clutch at them, then
sank in the boiling current, and was hurried away.
This appalling incident silenced all who saw it for a moment. Then they
began to wail louder than ever.
But Little started to his feet, and cried “Hurrah!”
There was a general groan.
“Hold your tongues,” he roared. “I've got good news for you. The water
was over the top windows; now it is an inch lower. The reservoir must be
empty by now. The water will go down as fast as it rose. Keep quiet for
two minutes, and you will see.”
Then no more was heard but the whimpering of the women, and, every now
and then, the voice of Little; he hung over the parapet, and reported
every half-minute the decline of the water; it subsided with strange
rapidity, as he had foreseen.
In three minutes after he had noticed the first decline, he took Grace
down through the roof, on the second floor.
When Grace and Henry got there, they started with dismay: the danger
was not over: the front wall was blown clean out by the water; all but
a jagged piece shaped like a crescent, and it seemed a miracle that the
roof, thus weakened and crowded with human beings, had not fallen in.
“We must get out of this,” said Little. “It all hangs together by a
thread.”
He called the others down from the roof, and tried to get down by the
staircase, but it was broken into sections and floating about. Then he
cut into the floor near the wall, and, to his infinite surprise, found
the first floor within four feet of him. The flood had lifted it bodily
more than six feet.
He dropped on to it, and made Grace let herself down to him, he holding
her round the waist, and landing her light as a feather.
Henry then hacked through the door, which was jammed tight; and,
the water subsiding, presently the wrecks of the staircase left off
floating, and stuck in the mud and water: by this means they managed
to get down, and found themselves in a layer of mud, and stones, and
debris, alive and dead, such as no imagination had hitherto conceived.
Dreading, however, to remain in a house so disemboweled within, and so
shattered without, that it seemed to survive by mere cohesion of mortar,
he begged Grace to put her arm round his neck, and then lifted her and
carried her out into the night.
“Take me home to papa, my angel,” said she.
He said he would; and tried to find his way to the road which he knew
led up the hill to Woodbine Villa. But all landmarks were gone; houses,
trees, hedges, all swept away; roads covered three feet thick with
rocks, and stones, and bricks, and carcasses. The pleasant valley was
one horrid quagmire, in which he could take few steps, burdened as
he was, without sticking, or stumbling against some sure sign of
destruction and death: within the compass of fifty yards he found a
steam-boiler and its appurtenances (they must have weighed some tons,
yet they had been driven more than a mile), and a dead cow, and the
body of a wagon turned upside down: [the wheels of this same wagon were
afterward found fifteen miles from the body].
He began to stagger and pant.
“Let me walk, my angel,” said Grace. “I'm not a baby.”
She held his hand tight, and tried to walk with him step by step. Her
white feet shone in the pale moonlight.
They made for rising ground, and were rewarded by finding the debris
less massive.
“The flood must have been narrow hereabouts,” said Henry. “We shall soon
be clear of it, I hope.”
Soon after this, they came under a short but sturdy oak that had
survived; and, entangled in its close and crooked branches, was
something white. They came nearer; it was a dead body: some poor man or
woman hurried from sleep to Eternity.
They shuddered and crawled on, still making for higher ground, but sore
perplexed.
Presently they heard a sort of sigh. They went toward it, and found a
poor horse stuck at an angle; his efforts to escape being marred by a
heavy stone to which he was haltered.
Henry patted him, and encouraged him, and sawed through his halter;
then he struggled up, but Henry held him, and put Grace on him. She sat
across him and held on by the mane.
The horse, being left to himself, turned back a little, and crossed the
quagmire till he got into a bridle-road, and this landed them high and
dry on the turnpike.
Here they stopped, and, by one impulse, embraced each other, and thanked
God for their wonderful escape.
But soon Henry's exultation took a turn that shocked Grace's religious
sentiments, which recent acquaintance had strengthened.
“Yes,” he cried, “now I believe that God really does interpose in
earthly things; I believe every thing; yesterday I believed nothing. The
one villain is swept away, and we two are miraculously saved. Now we can
marry to-morrow--no, to-day, for it is past midnight. Oh, how good He
is, especially for killing that scoundrel out of our way. Without his
death, what was life worth to me? But now--oh, Heavens! is it all a
dream? Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!”
“Oh, Henry, my love!” said Grace imploringly; “pray, pray do not
offend Him, by rejoicing at such a moment over the death, perhaps the
everlasting death, of a poor, sinful fellow-creature.”
“All right, dearest. Only don't let us descend to hypocrisy. I thank
Heaven he is dead, and so do you.”
“Pray don't SAY so.”
“Well, I won't: let him go. Death settles all accounts. Did you see me
stretch out my hand to save him?”
“I did, my angel, and it was like you: you are the noblest and the
greatest creature that ever was, or ever will be.”
“The silliest, you mean. I wondered at myself next minute. Fancy me
being such an idiot as to hold out a hand to save him, and so wither
both our lives--yours and mine; but I suppose it is against nature not
to hold out a hand. Well, no harm came of it, thank Heaven.”
“Let us talk of ourselves,” said Grace, lovingly. “My darling, let no
harsh thought mar the joy of this hour. You have saved my life again.
Well, then, it is doubly yours. Here, looking on that death we have just
escaped, I devote myself to you. You don't know how I love you; but you
shall. I adore you.”
“I love you better still.”
“You do not: you can't. It is the one thing I can beat you at and I
will.”
“Try. When will you be mine?”
“I am yours. But if you mean when will I marry you, why, whenever you
please. We have suffered too cruelly, and loved too dearly, for me to
put you off a single day for affectations and vanities. When you please,
my own.”
At this Henry kissed her little white feet with rapture, and kept
kissing them, at intervals, all the rest of the way: and the horrors
of the night ended, to these two, in unutterable rapture, as they paced
slowly along to Woodbine Villa with hearts full of wonder, gratitude,
and joy.
Here they found lights burning, and learned from a servant that Mr.
Carden was gone down to the scene of the flood in great agitation.
Henry told Grace not to worry herself, for that he would find him and
relieve his fears.
He then made Grace promise to go to bed at once, and to lie within
blankets. She didn't like that idea, but consented. “It is my duty to
obey you now in every thing,” said she.
Henry left her, and ran down to the Town Hall.
He was in that glorious state of bliss in which noble minds long to
do good actions; and the obvious thing to do was to go and comfort the
living survivors of the terrible disaster he had so narrowly escaped.
He found but one policeman there; the rest, and Ransome at their head,
were doing their best; all but two, drowned on their beat in the very
town of Hillsborough.