THE FACE IN THE DARK
Patricia lifted her white face from her hands. "We rode that dreadful
wave?" she cried incredulously.
"By God's mercy, yes," said Landless gravely.
"Is there any hope for us?"
Landless hesitated. "Tell me the truth," she said imperiously.
"We are in desperate case, madam. The boat is half filled with water.
Another such sea will sink us."
"Why do you not bail the boat?"
"The bucket is gone; the tiller also."
She shivered, and Darkeih began to wail aloud. Landless laid a heavy
hand upon the latter's shoulder. "Silence!" he said sternly. "Here! I
shall lay Regulus' head in your lap, and you are to watch over him and
not to think of yourself. There's a brave wench!"
Darkeih's lamentations subsided into a low sobbing, and Landless turned
to her mistress.
"Try to keep up your courage, madam," he said. "Our peril is great; but
while there is life there is hope."
"I am not afraid," she said. "I--" The pitching of the boat threw her
against Landless, and he put his arm about her. "You must let me hold
you, madam," he said quietly. She shrank away from his touch, saying
breathlessly, "No, oh no! See! I can hold quite well by the gunwale." He
acquiesced in silence, only lifting her into a more secure position. "I
thank you," she said humbly.
The storm continued to rage with unabated fury. Flash and detonation
succeeded flash and detonation; the rain poured in torrents; and the
wind whooped on the angry sea like a demon of destruction. The Bluebird
pitched and tossed at the mercy of the great waves that combed above
her. Time passed, and to the darkness of the storm was added the
darkness of the night. The occupants of the boat, drenched by the rain
and the seas she had shipped, shivered with cold. Regulus began to stir
and mutter. "He is coming to himself," Landless cried to Darkeih. "When
you see that he is conscious, make him lie still. He must not move
about."
"Do you know where we are?" asked Patricia.
"No, madam; but I fear that the wind is driving us out into the bay."
"Ah!"
She said it with a sob, for a sudden vision of home flashed across the
cold and darkness; and presently Landless could hear that she was
weeping.
The sound went to his heart. "I would God I could help you, madam," he
said gently. "Take comfort! You are in the hands of One who holds the
sea in the hollow of His hand."
In a little while she was quiet. There passed another long interval of
silent endurance, broken by Patricia's saying piteously, "My hands are
so numbed with cold that I cannot hold to the side of the boat. And my
arms are bruised with striking against it."
Without a word Landless put his arm around her, and held her steady
amidst the tossings of the boat. "You are shivering with cold!" he said.
"If I had but something to wrap you in!"
She drooped against him, and the lightning showed him her face, still
and white, with parted lips, and long lashes sweeping her marble cheek.
"Madam, madam!" he cried roughly. "You must not swoon! You must not!"
With a strong effort she rallied. "I will try to be brave," she said
plaintively. "I am not frightened,--not very much. But oh! I am cold and
tired!"
He drew her head down upon his knee. "Let it lie there," he said,
speaking as to a tired child. "I will hold you quite steady. Now shut
your eyes and try to sleep. The storm is no worse than it was; and since
the boat has lived this long in this sea, she may live through the
night. And with morning may come many chances of safety. Try to rest in
that hope."
Faint and exhausted from cold and terror, she submitted like a child,
and lay with closed eyes in a sort of stupor within his arms.
There was less lightning now, and the thunder sounded in long booming
peals, instead of short, sharp cannon cracks. The rain, too, had ceased;
but the wind blew furiously, and the sea ran in tremendous waves.
Regulus stirred, groaned, and struggled into a sitting posture. "Lie
down again!" ordered Darkeih. "We 's all on de way to Heaben, but if
nigger shake de boat, we'll get dere befo' de Lawd ready for us. Lie
down!" Regulus, muttering to himself, looked stupidly about him, then
dropped his head back into her lap. In three minutes he was snoring.
Darkeih's whimpering died away, and her turbaned head sank lower and
lower, until it rested upon that of Regulus, and she, too, slept.
Landless sat very still, holding his burden lightly and tenderly, and
staring into the darkness. Against the steep slope of the sea, a picture
framed itself, melted away, and was followed by others in long
procession. He saw a ruinous, ivy-grown hall, and an old, grave, formal
garden, where, between long box hedges broken by fantastic yews, there
walked a boy, book in hand. A man with a stately figure and a stern,
careworn face met the boy, and they leaned upon a broken dial, and the
father reasoned with the son of Right and Truth and Liberty, and
something touched upon the Tyrannicides of old. The yew trees drooped
their sombre boughs about the figures, and they were gone, and in their
place roared and swelled the Chesapeake.... The sound of the storm
became the sound of a battle-cry. He saw a clanging fight where sword
clashed upon armor, and artillery belched fire and thunder, and horse
and man went down in the melee, and were trampled under foot amidst
shrieks and oaths and stern prayers. The boy who had leaned upon the
dial fought coolly, desperately, drunk with the joy of battle, stung to
fierce effort by his father's eyes. The great banner, blazoned with the
Cross of Saint George, streamed in crimson and azure between the battle
and the lonely watcher in the storm-tossed boat, and the vision was
gone.... The spires of a great city, where men walked with long faces
and church bells made the only music, rose through the gloom, and he saw
a dingy chamber in a dingy stack of buildings, and within it, bending
over great tomes of law, a man, impoverished and orphaned, but young,
strong, and full of hope,--a man well spoken of and allowed to be on the
road to high preferment. The chamber wavered into darkness; but the city
spires flashed light, and the slow ringing changed to mad peals from joy
bells. Some one had been restored--to drop balm upon the bleeding heart
of a nation, to bring light to them that sit in darkness,--so said the
joy bells.... He saw a loathsome prison, and the man who had sat in the
dingy chamber lying therein under accusation of a crime which he had not
committed. He saw him pining there, week after week, month after month,
untried, forgotten, at the mercy of an enemy to his house whose day had
come with the Restored One.... The prison vanished, and the waves that
tossed around him were the waves of the Atlantic. A ship ploughed her
way through them. He saw into her hold,--a horrible place of stench and
filth and darkness,--a place where hounds would not have kenneled. Men
and women were there who cursed and fought for the scanty, worm-eaten
food that was thrown them. Some wore gyves: they were heavy upon the
wrists and ankles of the man of his vision. He saw a face looking down
upon this man, a handsome supercilious face, with insolent amusement in
the languid eyes and in the curves of the lips. The hatches were
battened down upon the cargo of misery, and the ship with its brutal
captain and its handful of gold-laced, dicing, swearing passengers
vanished.... He saw a sandy, grass-grown street, and a row of mean
houses, and a low, brick building with barred windows. There was a crowd
before this building, and a man standing upon the platform of a pillory
was selling human flesh and blood. He saw the boy who had stood beneath
the yews of the old Hall, who had fought at Worcester beneath his
father's eye; the man who had lain in prison and in the noisome hold of
the ship, put up and sold to the highest bidder. He saw him carried away
with other merchandise to the home of his purchaser. He saw a Virginia
plantation lying fair and serene beneath a Virginia heaven; and a wide
porch, and standing therein an angelic vision, all grace and beauty,
vivid youth and splendor.
The picture vanished into the night that raved about him, and with a
long shaken sigh he let his eyes fall from the watery steeps to the face
of the woman who lay within his arms. He had not looked at her before,
conceiving that she might be awake and feel his glance upon her. Now he
could tell from her breathing that she slept. He gazed upon the pure
pale face with the golden hair falling about it, in a passion of pity
and tenderness. She moaned now and then in her sleep, or turned uneasily
in his arms. Once she spoke a few words, and he bent eagerly to catch
them, thinking that she had awakened and was speaking to him. They
were:--
"Ah, your Excellency! where I reign there shall be only good Churchmen
and loyal Cavaliers--no Roundheads, no rebel or convict servants!" and
she laughed in her sleep.
Landless shrank as from a mortal blow, then broke into a bitter laugh,
and said to himself, "Thou art a fool, Godfrey Landless. It were but too
easy to forget to-night what thou art and what thou must seem to her.
Thou art answered according to thy folly." He sighed impatiently, and
withdrawing his gaze from the sleeping face, fell into a sombre reverie.
He was roused to active consciousness by a sudden and death-like pause
in the gale. The lightning showed the pall of cloud hanging low, black,
and unbroken; but the wind had sunk into an ominous calm. He looked
anxiously around him, then softly disengaging himself from Patricia,
leaned across her, and shook Regulus awake. The negro started up, stupid
from sleep and from his wound.
"What is it, massa?" he queried. "Wake mighty early at Rosemead.... Lawd
hab mercy! we 's still on de Chesapeake!"
"We will be in the Chesapeake in a moment," said Landless sternly, "if
you stagger about in that way. Sit down and pull your wits together. You
are like to need them all directly." He touched Darkeih and said, as her
eyes, wide with alarm, opened upon him, "Listen, my wench! Whatever
happens, you are to trust yourself to Regulus. He is a strong swimmer
and he will take care of you. You hear, Regulus!"
"What is it?" exclaimed Patricia, as he bent over her. "Why have you
waked Regulus? And oh! has not that dreadful wind died away?"
"It has stopped, madam, stopped suddenly and utterly," he said gravely.
"But it will come upon us from another quarter, and it will bring the
sea with it." He raised her, and held her with his arm. "Trust yourself
to me when it comes," he said gently. "If I can save you, I will."
There was no time for more. Above them broke a new and more terrible
storm. A ball of fire shot from the cloud into the sea; it was followed
by a crash that seemed to shake the earth. A cataract of rain descended.
From the northeast there swooped upon them a wind to which the gale of
an hour before seemed a zephyr. It drove the boat before it as if she
had been the bird from which she took her name. It piled wave on wave
until the sea ran in mountains. Athwart the storm came a dull booming
roar, and above the great hills of water appeared a long ridge crested
with white.
"It is coming," said Landless.
Patricia looked up at him with great, despairing, courageous eyes. "I
have caused your death," she said. "Forgive me."
There came a vivid flash, and a loud scream from Darkeih. "De lan'! de
bressed, bressed, lan'!"
Landless wheeled. Silhouetted against the lit sky he saw a fringe of
pines, and below it a low, shelving shore where the waves were breaking
in foam and thunder. The Bluebird, driven by the wind, was hurrying
towards it in mad bounds. The great wave overtook her, bore her onward
with it, and sunk her within fifty feet of the shore.
Ten minutes later Landless, breathless and exhausted, staggered from out
the hell of pounding waves and blinding, stinging spray on to the shore.
Unlocking Patricia's arms from about his neck, he laid her gently down
upon the sand and turned to look for the other occupants of the hapless
Bluebird. They were close behind him. In a few minutes the two men,
battling against wind and rain, had borne the women out of reach of the
waves, and had placed them in the shelter of a low bank of sand. As
Landless set his burden down he said reverently, "I thank God, madam."
"And I thank God," she answered, in the same tone.
He tried to shield her from the wind with his body. "It is frightful,"
he said, "that you should be exposed to such a night. I pray God that
you take no harm."
"Would it not be more sheltered higher up the shore, under those trees?"
"Perhaps, but I fear to risk you there with the lightning so near.
Later, when the storm subsides, we will try it."
He seated himself so as to screen her as much as possible from wind and
rain, and a silence fell upon the party so suddenly snatched from death.
Regulus stretched himself upon the sand and pulled Darkeih down beside
him. Within a few minutes they were both asleep. The white man and woman
sat side by side without speaking, watching the storm.
By degrees it raved itself out. The rain fell in less and less volume,
the lightning became infrequent, the thunder pealed less loudly, and the
wind died from a hurricane into a breeze. In two hours' time from the
swamping of the boat the booming of the sea, and a ragged mass of cloud,
lit by an occasional flash and slowly falling away from a pale and
watery moon, were the only evidences of the tornado which had raged so
lately.
"The storm is over," said Patricia, breaking a long silence.
"Yes," said Landless. "You have nothing to fear now. Would you not like
to walk a little? You must be sadly chilled and weary with long
sitting."
"Yes, I would," she answered, with a sigh of relief. "Let us walk
towards those trees, and see if forest or water be beyond them."
He helped her to her feet, and they left the slaves sleeping upon the
ground, and moved slowly, for she was numbed with cold, towards the
fringe of pines.
Landless walked beside her without speaking. A while ago she had been
simply a woman in danger of death--something for him to protect and to
save. He had well nigh forgotten: he knew that she had quite forgotten.
She was safe now, and was become once more the lady of the manor to
whose soil he was fettered. He had remembered, and she was beginning to
remember, for presently she said timidly and sweetly, but with
condescension in her voice;--
"I am not ungrateful for all that you have done for me to-night, for
saving my life. And, trust me, you will not find your mas--my father,
ungrateful either. We will find some way to reward--"
"I neither merit nor desire reward, madam," said Landless, proudly and
sadly, "for doing but my duty as a man and as your servant."
"But--" she began kindly, when he interrupted her with sudden passion.
"Unless you wish to cut me to the heart, to bitterly humiliate me, you
will not speak of payment for any service I may have done you. I have
been a gentleman, madam. For this one night treat me as such."
"I beg your pardon," she said at once.
They reached the belt of trees and entered it. Outside, the broken
clouds had permitted an occasional gleam of watery moonshine; within the
shadow of the trees it was gross darkness. Above them the wet branches,
moved by the wind which still blew strongly, clashed together with a
harsh and mournful sound, showering them with heavy raindrops. Their
feet sank deeply in cushions of soaked moss and rotting leaves.
"There is nothing to be done here," said Landless. "It is better beneath
the open sky."
There came a last, vivid flash of lightning that for a moment lit the
wood, showing long colonnades of glistening tree trunks, with here and
there a blasted and fallen monster. It showed something more, for within
ten feet of them, from out a tangle of dripping, rain-beaten vines
looked the face of the murderer of Robert Godwyn.