MISS PRINGLE CALLS ON MR. CLEGGETT
But the rushing onset of events struck them apart. Out of the night
leaped danger, enhancing love and forbidding it. From the starboard
bow Captain Abernethy shrilled a cry of warning, and the heavy,
bellowing voice of Loge shouted an answer of challenge and ferocity.
The wind had fallen, but the lightning played from the clouds now
almost without intermission. Cleggett saw Loge and his followers,
machete in hand, flinging themselves at the rail. They lifted a hoarse
cheer as they came. The fire from the Jasper B. had checked the
assault temporarily; it had not broken it up; once they found lodgment
on the deck the superior numbers of Loge's crowd must inevitably tell.
Loge was a dozen feet in advance of his men. He had cast aside the
light sword which belonged to Cleggett, and now swung a grim machete in
his hand. Cleggett flung down his gun, grasped a cutlass, and sprang
forward, his one idea to come to close quarters with that gigantic
figure of rage and power.
But before Loge reached the bulwark on one side, and while Cleggett was
bounding toward him on the other, this on-coming group of Cleggett's
foes were suddenly smitten in the rear as if by a thunderbolt. Out of
the night and storm, mad with terror, screaming like fiends, with
distended nostrils and flying manes and flailing hoofs, there plunged
into the midst of the assaulting party a pair of snow-white
horses--astounding, felling, trampling, scattering, filling them with
confusion. A rocking carriage leaped and bounded behind the furious
animals, and as the horses struck the bulwark and swerved aside, its
weight and bulk, hurled like a missile among Cleggett's staggered and
struggling enemies, completed and confirmed their panic.
No troops on earth can stand the shock of a cavalry charge in the rear
and flank; few can face surprise; the boarding party, convinced that
they had fallen into a trap, melted away. One moment they were
sweeping forward, vicious and formidable, confident of victory; the
next they were floundering weaponless, scrambling anyhow for safety,
multiplying and transforming, with the quick imagination of panic
terror, these two horses into a troop of mounted men.
This sudden and almost spectral apparition of galloping steeds and
flying carriage, hurled upon the vessel out of the tempest, flung, a
piece of whirling chaos, from the chaotic skies, had almost as
startling an effect upon the defenders. For a moment they paused, with
weapons uplifted, and stared. Where an enemy had been, there was
nothing. So doubtful Greeks or Trojans might have paused and stared
upon the plains of Ilion when some splenetic and fickle deity burst
unannounced and overwhelming into the central clamor of the battle.
But it is in these seconds of pause and doubt that great commanders
assert themselves; it is these electric seconds from which the hero
gathers his vital lightning and forges his mordant bolt. Genius claims
and rules these instants, and the gods are on the side of those who
boldly grasp loose wisdom and bind it into sheaves of judgment.
Cleggett (whom Homer would have loved) was the first to recover his
poise. He came to his decision instantaneously. A lesser man might
have lost all by rushing after his retreating enemies; a lesser man,
carried away by excitement, would have pursued. Cleggett did not relax
his grasp upon the situation, he restrained his ardor.
"Stand firm, men! Do not leave the ship," he shouted. "The day is
ours!"
And then, turning to Captain Abernethy, he cried:
"We have routed them!"
"Look at them crazy horses!" screamed the Captain in reply.
The animals were rearing and struggling among the ruins of the broken
gangplank. As the Captain spoke, they plunged aboard the ship, and the
carriage, bounding after them, overturned on the deck--horses and
carriage came down together in a welter of splintering wheels and
broken harness and crashing wood.
A negro driver, whom Cleggett now noticed for the first time, shot
clear of the mass and landed on the deck in a sitting posture.
For a moment, there he sat, and did nothing more. The pole broke loose
from the carriage, the traces parted, and the two big white horses,
still kicking and plunging, struggled to their feet and free from the
wreckage. Still side by side they leaped the port bulwark, splashed
into the canal, and swam straight across it, as if animated with the
instinct of going straight ahead in that fashion to the end of the
world. Cleggett never saw or heard of them again.
"Bring a lantern," said Cleggett to Abernethy. "Let's see if this man
is badly hurt."
But the negro was not injured. He rose to his feet as the Captain
brought the light--the storm was now subsiding, and the lightning was
less frequent--and stood revealed as a person of surprising size and
unusual blackness. He was, in fact, so black that it was no wonder
that Cleggett had not seen him on the seat of the carriage, for unless
one turned a light full upon him his face could not be seen at all
after dark. He was in a blue livery, and his high, cockaded coachman's
hat had stayed on his head in spite of everything.
Even sitting down on the deck he had possessed an air of patience.
When he arose and the Captain flashed the light upon his face, it
revealed a countenance full of dignified good humor.
"Where did you come from?" asked Cleggett.
The negro removed the hat with the cockade before answering. He did it
politely. Even ceremoniously. But he did not do it hastily. He had
the air of one who was never inclined to do things hastily.
"From Newahk, sah," he said. "Newahk, New Jehsey, sah."
"But who are you?" said Cleggett. "How did you get here?"
The negro was gazing reflectively at the broken carriage.
"Ah yo' Mistah Cleggett, sah? Mistah Clement J. Cleggett, sah, the
ownah of dis hyeah boat?"
"Yes."
The negro fumbled in an inner pocket and produced a card. He gave it
to Cleggett with a deferential bow, and then announced sonorously:
"Miss Genevieve Pringle, sah--in de cah-age, sah--a callin' on Mistah
Clement J. Cleggett."
He completed the announcement with a dignified and courtly gesture,
which seemed to indicate that he was presenting the ruined carriage
itself to Cleggett.
"You don't mean in that carriage?" cried Cleggett.
"Yes, sah," said the negro. "Leas'ways, she was, sah, some time back.
Mah time an' mah 'tention done been so tooken up wif dem incompatible
hosses fo' some moments past, sah, dat I cain't say fo' suah ef she
adheahed, or ef she didn't adheah."
He glanced speculatively at the carriage again. Cleggett sprang
towards the broken vehicle, expecting to find someone seriously injured
at the very least. But, from the ruin, a precise and high-pitched
feminine voice piped out:
"Jefferson! Kindly assist me to disentangle myself!"
"Yassum," said the negro, moving forward in a leisurely and dignified
manner, "comin', ma'am. I hopes an' trusts, Miss Pringle, ma'am, yo'
ain't suffered none in yo' anatomy an' phlebotomy from dis hyeah
runaway."
With which cheerful wish Jefferson lifted respectfully, and with a
certain calm detachment, the figure of a woman from the debris.
"Thank you, Jefferson," she said. "I fear I am very much bruised and
shaken, but I have been feeling all my bones while lying there, and I
believe that I have sustained no fractures."
Miss Pringle was a woman of about fifty, small and prim. Prim with an
unconquerable primness that neither storm nor battle nor accident could
shake. If she had been killed in the runaway she would have looked
prim in death while awaiting the undertaker. She must have been wet
almost to those unfractured bones which she had been feeling; her black
silk dress, with its white ruching about the neck, was torn and
bedraggled; her black hat, with its jet ornaments, was crushed and hung
askew over one ear; nevertheless, Miss Pringle conveyed at once and
definitely an impression of unassailable respectability and strong
character.
"Which of you is Mr. Cleggett?" she asked, looking about her, in the
lantern light, at the crew of the Jasper B., as she leaned upon the arm
of Jefferson, her mannerly and deliberate servitor.
"I am Mr. Cleggett."
"Ah!" Miss Pringle inspected him with an eye which gleamed with a hint
of latent possibilities of belligerency. "Mr. Cleggett," she
continued, pursing her lips, "I have sought an interview to warn you
that you are harboring an impostor on your ship."
At that moment Lady Agatha joined the group. As the light fell upon her
Miss Pringle stepped forward and thrust an accusing, a denunciatory
finger at the Englishwoman.
"You," she said, "call yourself Lady Agatha Fairhaven!"
"I do," said Lady Agatha.
"Woman!" cried Miss Pringle, shaking with the stress of her moral
wrath. "Where are my plum preserves?"
And with this cryptic utterance the little lady, having come to the end
of her strength, primly fainted.
Jefferson picked her up and carried her, in a serene and stately
manner, to the cabin.