'I ALMOST DREADED THIS MAN ONCE'
The Indian Ocean lay beneath the purple-scarlet rays of the setting
sun as calmly and as peacefully as though, across its treacherous
bosom, nothing more violent than a cat's-paw had ever swept. Indeed,
so calm and peaceful was the spaceless sheet of cobalt that, almost,
one might have thought he gazed upon some quiet tarn, or inland lake,
shut in and warded off from any breeze that might blow or any tempest
that could ever roar. Only--he who should stand upon the pebbly
beach of a little island upon whose white stones the surf hissed
gently as it receded slowly and faintly--as though it were asleep and
languid--would have known that, for thousands of miles ahead of him,
there was nothing to oppose the tempests of the east and south, or
prevent them from lashing that now calm and placid ocean into madness,
or from exerting their powers of awful destruction.
A little island set in that glittering, sapphire sea, with, all around
its circumference of five miles, a belt of white bleached stone and
sand, and with, inland and running up from the belt, green grassy
slopes, in which grew tall palm trees, vast bushes or tufts of
bananas, orange and lemon trees, mangoes and yams. There, too, were
grassy dells through which limpid streams of pure cool water ran until
they mingled with the salt ocean; there the wild turtle-dove cooed
from guava and tamarind tree, the quails and guinea-fowls ran about
upon the white silvery sands; while, to complete all these natural
advantages, neither mosquito nor sandfly existed.
A little island girt by coral reefs--the ocean's teeth, strong,
fierce, and jagged; teeth that can rip the copper sheathing off a
belated vessel as easily as a man can rip the skin from off the
island's pink and golden bananas; teeth that can thrust themselves a
dozen or twenty feet into the bowels of forlorn and castaway barks and
tear them all to pieces as the tusk of the 'must' elephant tears the
bowels of its victims. A little island, one of a thousand in that
sometimes smiling, sometimes devilish, sea--such as are in the Chagos
Archipelago, or the Seychelles, or the Cormoras, and, like so many of
those islands, untrod, unvisited by man. Unvisited because, where all
are equally and bounteously supplied by Nature, there is no need for
any ship to draw near this solitary speck that is guarded from all
approach by those belts of coral, and also because, to this small
island, there is no natural harbour should rough winds blow.
Now--as still the setting sun went swiftly down amidst its regal
panoply of purple and violet and crimson, while, above those hues, its
rays shot forth great fleaks and flames of amber gold--it was not
uninhabited, not desolate of all human life. Upon a grassy slope a man
lay, his head bound up with linen bands; one of his hands being
swathed, too, in similar wrappings. And his eyes were closed as though
he were sleeping--or dead. To her who gazed on him it seemed almost as
if it must be the latter--the greater, the more everlasting sleep,
that had fallen on him.
For there were two in this island now; she who thus looked down on the
prostrate man being a woman clad in a long dress, which once had been
of a soft, delicate white fabric, but, now, was stained and smeared
with many splashes and marks, and was rough and crumpled with hard
usage and by the effects of seawater. Her hair, too, was all
dishevelled, uncombed and unbrushed; tossed up in a great mass upon
her head; bound with a piece of ordinary tape. And still she was as
beautiful as she had ever been; beautiful in this negligence which was
the result of shipwreck and of battling with tempest, of cruel
buffetings from merciless waves and jagged rocks--beautiful, though on
her face and in her eyes was now the sombre beauty of a despair and
misery too deep for words. For he whom she loved, he whose wife she
was to have been, was not upon that island with them, and had no more
been heard of since, in the arms of Stephen Charke, she had been
plunged into the sea and, in those arms, borne to safety and to life.
She gazed down on him now, in the last glimmering beams of the golden
light that shot athwart the island, while regarding him with some
expression in her glance which caused that glance to be not altogether
a reflex of her own misery and despair. An expression that seemed to
denote a supreme pity, an almost divine regret for him who lay before,
and beneath, her, in pain and suffering.
'How brave--how strong he was!' she murmured inwardly, her lips not
moving. 'How he fought with that storm--fought with Death to save me
and himself! No!' she broke off, still uttering her meditations to her
own heart alone--'why do him such injustice even in my thoughts? It
was not to save us both, but me alone. There was but one desire in his
soul--to save me!'
She turned and went to a small heap of fruit that she had gathered
earlier in the day, and selected one of the great pink bananas--pink
with a lustrous beauty which those who only see them when they arrive
in northern climes could never believe they have once possessed--then
she took a scooped-out cocoanut shell, and, going to a little babbling
rill that ran through the grassy defile, filled it with water. After
which she returned to where the other lay, and, kneeling by his side,
gazed on him again.
'My God!' she whispered. 'I almost dreaded him once. Feared him for I
knew not what. Feared him! Him! And he has been my saviour.'
He seemed to know that she was by his side and near him; for, even as
she murmured these words to herself, Stephen Charke opened his eyes--a
faint smile appearing in them--and gazed into hers.
'You are better?' she asked, as she gave him the shell with the water
in it, which he was not too weak to be able to take and raise to his
lips, while she tore off the rind of the banana. 'Your forehead,' she
went on, while putting her hand upon it calmly, as a sister might, 'is
cooler. Are you still in pain?'
'No,' he answered. 'No--only very weak. Are--are--any more saved from
that?' and he directed his glance to where, two hundred yards off from
the island, lay something protruding above the water which looked like
the rounded back of a whale, but was, in truth, the torn and lacerated
keel of the _Emperor of the Moon_. In her last struggles--in her last
convulsions as the gale had hurled her on to the coral reef--she had
turned almost completely over.
'No,' she replied, her face an awful picture of despair and anguish.
'None are saved but you and I. Oh!' and she buried that face in her
hands and wept aloud, piteously, heartbrokenly.
'God rest their souls,' he said solemnly. 'God pity them! Why I, too,
should have been spared except to save you, I do not know. I might as
well have gone down with them.'
'No! no!' she cried. 'No, Mr. Charke. You must be spared for better
days, for greater things. Oh,' she exclaimed, 'how bravely you
battled with it all! Uncle told us,' she went on through her tears,
'when we were below and before I became insensible, that your
efforts were superhuman; that, if the ship could be saved, it would be
by you alone. And,' she continued, 'how you saved me I do not know.
Only--only--I wish I had gone with him, with Gilbert.'
'Nay,' he said--'nay. Do not say that. And--and--I ask you to believe
that, had it been possible, I would have saved him too. But it was
impossible. Impossible to so much as slip a life-buoy over his
shoulders. The end was at hand, the ship broken in half. It was
impossible,' he repeated earnestly.
'How,' she asked, as she sat by his side gazing out across the calm,
waveless sea through the fast-coming tropic night, and watching the
great stars--almost as big as northern moons---sparkling, incandescent
like, in the blue heavens above--'how did you do it? I remember
nothing till I found myself lying there,' and she pointed down to the
white sand, from which there came, through the sultry night, the
gentle hiss of the sea, 'and saw you lying near me, and dead, as I
thought.'
'Nor do I remember, or only very little more than you can do. I
dragged you from the saloon, and, after fixing a life-buoy on to each
of us, leaped into the sea with you, striking out vigorously to avoid
the ship. And I can recall my battlings with the waves for a few
moments--only a few--then feeling my breath knocked out of me. And,
then, nothing more until I came to and found you looking at me here.
It was the life-buoys that saved us.'
'In God's mercy. Under His Providence. Yet--yet--if it were
not wicked to say so--if it were not for my poor dear mother at
home--I--should----'
'No, no!' he almost moaned. 'No, no! Not that!' Then, after a moment
or so of silence, he said: 'Do you know how long we have been here?
Can you guess?'
'This is the second night, I suppose,' she answered. 'When I came-to
yesterday morning, I imagine it was the first one after the wreck.'
'Possibly. And have you seen nothing pass at sea, either near or far
off?'
'Nothing. Yet I have gazed seaward all the time it has been light on
each day. Where do you think we are?'
'If the island is uninhabited, I think it must be one of the
Cormora group, since it can scarcely be part of the Chagos
Archipelago--they are too far to the east. And all the others in the
Indian Ocean--certainly in this part of it--are inhabited.'
She made no reply now--she did not say what almost every other woman
in her position would undoubtedly have said--namely, that she hoped
they would in some way be taken off the island. For, in absolute fact,
she did not hope so. To be saved from this desolation, to be put on
board some ship which might be going to any part of the world, even
though that part should be England itself, meant leaving Gilbert
behind--leaving him to his ocean grave. And she would not--certainly
she would not yet--consent to believe that he had met with such a
grave. The _Emperor of the Moon_ was still there, a part of her above
the water although she was almost turned upside down, or 'turned
turtle,' as she knew the sailors called it, and--and--might not some
of those who were in her when she struck be still sheltering, clinging
to some portion of the wreck that happened to be above water? She did
not know much about ships, this awful, fateful voyage being her only
experience, wherefore she thought and hoped and prayed that such a
chance as this which she imagined in her mind might be possible.
While, too, she remembered that Gilbert and her uncle were both blind.
Therefore, if they were still alive, they could not cast themselves
into the sea to escape out of the vessel--they would not, indeed, know
that there was an island close to them, and, probably, would imagine
that the ship was wrecked upon some reef or rock, so that it would be
doubly dangerous to venture to leave her. And, again, even if they
could by any wild chance have guessed that there was an island near,
how would they in their blindness have known which way to proceed to
reach it?
Thus, by such arguments, she had endeavoured to solace her sad, aching
heart, and now, as she rose to leave Stephen Charke for the night, she
put into words the thoughts which had been present to her mind from
almost the first moment she had discovered that they themselves were
saved.
'Do you think,' she asked, standing there gazing down on him once
more--'do you think any who were in the ship when we escaped can be
still alive? Is there any hope of that?'
He looked up at her swiftly as she made the suggestion, then--because
he felt that it was useless to encourage such vain longings--because,
also, he knew that such a thing was impossible--absolutely, entirely
impossible, he said: 'No, no! It cannot be. Those who were in the
cabin would be submerged as the ship went over, and those who were on
the deck would be thrown into the sea.'
She gave a bitter sigh as he answered her--and it went to his heart to
hear that sigh, since now his pity for her was heroic, sublime, in its
self-abnegation--as great as were also his love and adoration; then
she asked:
'And where was Gilbert--Lieutenant Bampfyld?'
'He--he--was lying by the wheel. God pity him! He was a brave, noble
officer. Even in his blindness he had crept up to help at the wheel,
and was determined to do something towards saving the ship if
possible. Then--then--he fell down from exhaustion. He----'
'--is dead!' she muttered, in a voice that sounded like a knell.
'Dead! oh, my God! he is dead. I wish I were dead, too!'