FAREWELL AT ONCE, FOR ONCE, FOR ALL AND EVER.
Richard II.; ii.--2.
Fenton's reflections as he sat in the train that evening, bound for New
York, were varied rather than pleasing. There are crises in a man's
life when it is perhaps quite as wise that he should not attempt to
reason; he cannot do better than to keep his attention occupied with
indifferent subjects, trusting to that instinct or higher self, or
whatever it may be within us which works independently of our outer
consciousness, to settle all perplexities. Some idea of this sort was
in Arthur's mind as he sped along towards the Sound steamer. He could
not prevent himself from thinking more or less of the situation of his
affairs, but he made no attempt to consider them reasonably or in order.
"It would have saved me an awkward interview," he reflected, "if Mrs.
Glendower could have taken herself opportunely out of the world. If we
may trust the usual form of mortuary resolutions, Divine Providence is
habitually pleased with the removal of mortals from this sublunary
sphere; and in this case I should share the sentiment."
His musings took on a darker tone as time went on. He thought with
bitterness of the failure of his past, and he loathed himself for what
he was. The hateful mystery of life tormented him with its poisonous
uncertainty. He groaned inwardly at the curse that one day should still
follow another. Then the phrasing of his thought pleased him, and with
veering fancy he went on stringing epigrams in his brain.
"After all," he thought, "what we call a fool in this world is a man
who has his own way at the expense of the wise. There's Candish, now; I
call him a fool and he goes ahead and is damned virtuous and stupid and
exasperating, and gets through life beautifully; while I, who wouldn't
be such an idiot for any money, am always in some confounded scrape or
other. I wonder, by the way, what's the connection between sanctity and
a waistcoat put on hind side before. Candish and Edith wouldn't make a
bad pair. She wouldn't mind his ugly mug in the least, and his idiocies
of temperament would be rather pleasing to her. Heaven knows it was an
ill day for her when she fell into my clutches. I can't say that it
seems to have been any great advantage to any woman to be fond of me.
Helen was awfully cut up when I went back on the Pagans, and as for
Ninitta, I've played the very dickens with her. Upon my word I have my
doubts if I could be really respectable without cutting my own
acquaintance."
Fenton retired to his stateroom almost as soon as he went on board the
steamer. He was tired with the strain of the last weeks, he hated the
vulgar crowd one met in travelling, so that to sleep and avoid his
companions seemed the only course desirable under the circumstances.
He was dimly conscious of the progress of the boat, the bustle in the
saloon, which gradually subsided as the evening wore on; and then his
slumber grew deeper. Even the frequent whistling which the
ever-increasing fog made necessary only caused him, now and then, to
turn uneasily in his berth. His stateroom was well aft, and in his
drowsy, half-waking moments, he was conscious that the sea was running
heavily. He remembered that the wind had been east all day, and that he
had seen the danger-signal floating that afternoon.
Toward morning he grew more wakeful. The whistling of the fog-signal,
which had now become almost constant, vanquished at length his
inclination toward slumber. He found his watch, but it was too dark to
tell the time. He raised himself up in his berth, and, pulling open the
window blind, was able with difficulty to make out that it was almost
four o'clock. Outside, he saw a bank of fog, as impenetrable to the eye
as a wall. He pulled the blind to, with an impatient sigh.
"This confounded fog," he thought, "will make us late, and I sha'n't
have time to see those pictures at the Academy."
He lay back in his berth, broad awake, with an objurgation at the
whistle, which was shrieking furiously, and which, he suddenly became
aware, was being answered by the dull bellow of a fog horn blown near
at hand. At that moment the engines of the boat stopped, with that
cessation of the quivering jar which is so terrifying. Fenton could
feel the steamer losing its headway, and being more heavily tossed
about by the waves as it did so. He sat up in his berth with a startled
consciousness of danger, and at the same instant something struck the
steamer with a terrific crash which seemed powerful enough to rend
every timber apart. A tumult of sound broke forth, amid which a
piercing human shriek rang out with awful sharpness. Fenton was thrown
from his berth by the shock, and landed on the floor, bruised and
half-stunned, but otherwise unhurt. His valise was dashed against him,
but after the first concussion there was no further violent movement,
and, as soon as he was able to recover himself, he had no difficulty in
getting to his feet. The terrible cries which continued, reinforced by
a babel of screams and confused noises, seemed to him to come from some
stateroom near at hand. It was evident that some one had been seriously
hurt in the collision which must have occurred. The trampling of feet,
the voices of men and women and children, the sound of the wind and of
the water, and those formless noises which are the more terrifying
because it is impossible to tell whence they arise, filled the air on
every side, and told Fenton that some serious calamity had befallen the
steamer.
He felt about in the darkness for his clothing, then pulled open the
shutter hastily, and dressed himself in the dim light as well as he was
able. He was excited but not panic-stricken, yet the time seemed long,
although in reality it was but a few moments before he was ready to
open his door into the saloon. As he came out he had a startled
impression of finding himself in an unexpected place, and then he
realized that the side of the boat had been broken in clean through the
range of staterooms, and that he was looking out into the heavy wall of
fog through a hole made by the collision. He could see dimly the shape
of a ship's prow, and the broken end of a bowsprit was not yet wholly
disentangled from the rent in the side of the steamer. The two vessels,
locked together like a pair of sea-monsters that had perished in the
death grapple of a desperate encounter, tossed up and down on the long
swell, swayed by the wind which seemed to be increasing in fury every
moment.
On the floor of the saloon just before him, Fenton saw a wounded man,
ghastly with blood, and moaning terribly. Half-dressed people hovered
about him in utter bewilderment, while others continually hurried up
simply to hasten away again in frantic confusion. The wounded man was
in his night clothes, and a half-dressed old woman, her gray hair
straggling about her face, seemed to be attempting to stanch the blood
which was flowing freely. She was evidently a stranger, since from time
to time she appealed to those around to take her place, and let her go
and look after her own folk, but the kindly old creature plainly could
not bring herself, even in that hour of peril, to desert one hurt and
helpless.
On every side were the evidences of panic. Stateroom doors were open,
people in all stages of disarray were hurrying wildly along, or
clinging frantically to each other. The hysterical sobs of women,
piercing cries from the thin voices of children, deep-toned curses and
wild ejaculations from men sounded on every hand. People were donning
life-preservers, some putting on two or three in their eagerness and
fear; and here and there fighting for the possession of an extra one in
a mad fury. The whole saloon was filled with a wild and terrifying
tumult. It was a frenzied scene of fear and awful bewilderment.
However great his mental pluck, Fenton was physically a coward, and he
knew it. The New England climate and life have given to most of her
children, of any degree of cultivation, a nervous organization too
acutely sensitive to pain for them to be physically brave; but to this
disposition the New England training, the inherited manliness of sturdy
ancestors, has added a splendid moral energy to overcome this weakness.
In the first terrible shock of fear which followed his discovery that
the steamer had been run down, Fenton's body trembled with terror. He
felt a wild and dizzy impulse to rush somewhere madly; but in a moment
his will reasserted itself. He was intensely frightened, but he beat
down his fear with the lash of self-scorn, as he would have whipped a
hound that refused to do his bidding. He steadied himself for a moment
against the doorway with tense muscles, setting his teeth together. He
drew a deep breath, turned back into his stateroom, and put on a cork
jacket. He was cool enough. Before he buckled it he transferred his
wallet and papers from the pocket of his coat to that on the inside of
his waistcoat. Then he hurried out through the saloon on to the
afterdeck. The place was crowded, and the confusion was indescribable.
Fenton's first impulse was to put his hands over his ears, to shut out
the horrible din. The officers were shouting orders and getting the
boats manned, for even in this short time the steamer was settling. The
hissing swash of the waves beating into the breach, the prayers, the
imprecations, the hysterical sobs, the agonized cries of the struggling
passengers, the darkness, the terror, the yawning abyss of death
beneath them,--combined to sweep away all human feelings save the
instinct of self-preservation. The brute side of human nature revealed
itself with a hideousness more horrible than the terror of the night
and the sea. Unprotected women were crushed and trampled, and as the
boats were lowered a fierce hand-to-hand conflict ensued, men fighting
like wild cats to force their way into them. The officers beat them
back, and made way for the women as well as they could, struggling at
the same time with the difficult task of maintaining discipline among
the crew.
Shrill amid the uproar, a child's cry smote Fenton's ear as he came out
upon the deck. Directly before him a man was trying to pull a
life-preserver off from a boy, while a woman fought with him in a
desperate endeavor to shield her child. The lad was about the size of
Caldwell and in the confused light not wholly unlike him. With a sob
and a curse, Fenton struck the man full in the face with all his force,
sending the brute reeling backward into the crowd which was too dense
to allow of his falling. The mother hurriedly pulled the child into the
dense stream of people crowding toward the boats, and Fenton saw the
pair disappear over the side of the steamer, helped by one of the
officers.
There ran through his mind a momentary speculation of their chances of
escape, and the thought brought him back to the consideration of his
own situation. A sudden unreasonable disgust of the conditions which
made his salvation so improbable seized upon him. He reflected that he
might still baffle fate by taking his own life, and for an instant the
idea of thus escaping from all the vexations which surrounded him
presented itself to his mind in alluring colors. The idea of
self-destruction was one with which he had played so often that he
entertained it without a shock; and he realized now, almost with a
conviction that the fact forced him to suicide for the sake of
consistency, that his death under these circumstances would surely be
attributed to accident. He even began to fumble with the buckles of his
life-preserver; then with a smile of bitter scorn he looked down at his
hands, of which the fingers were trembling with nervous fear.
"Bah," he said to himself, "why should I pose to myself? Fate is too
much for me; if a gentle and beneficent Providence intends to make away
with me, so be it. I haven't the nerve to anticipate it."
He started toward the boats, and at that instant he caught sight of the
face of Ninitta. She was standing perfectly quiet, with her arm around
one of the small pillars supporting the covering to the deck. She was
fully dressed, though her head was uncovered and the rings of hair
clung about her face. Fenton forgot everything else at sight of her. In
a moment of supreme egotism there flashed through his mind the
consequences of Ninitta's being here. The consciousness of all that lay
between them made him keenly alive to the evil construction which might
be placed upon her having fled from home on the same boat which carried
him. He realized, with a profound feeling of impotence, that if they
were lost together he should be forever unable to explain or to dispel
the suspicion to which her presence might give rise; he felt with keen
bitterness how useless would be all his cleverness, and his heart
swelled with rage at the thought that his adroitness would be wasted
for lack of opportunity.
He forgot the danger, the terror of the wreck, the shrieking of the
women, the brutality of the men, and, for the moment, felt with the
keen desperation of enormous vanity the danger to his reputation. He
forced his way madly across the deck and confronted her in the ghastly
light of the swinging lantern and the gray foregleams of the coming
dawn.
"You followed me!" he cried with bitter harshness.
She looked at him in a calm, stunned way, as if she were past suffering
and almost past feeling. The recognition in her eyes came slowly, as if
she were dazed or as if some powerful mental stress held her attention.
"Now," he began, "your boy"--He was going to add, "will grow up to
believe you ran away with me;" but his manliness asserted itself and he
could not continue. It was like striking a woman, and the brutal words
died on his lip.
At the mention of her boy a sudden passion flamed in her eyes. She
loosed her hold upon the pillar and a sudden lurch of the sinking ship
threw her into Fenton's arms. She clung to him frantically.
"My boy!" she moaned. "My boy!"
Like quickly shifting pictures, there ran through Fenton's mind the
images of Nino, of the boy whose life-preserver he had saved, and of
his own son, asleep in safety in his nursery at home. With a quick
revulsion of feeling came the desire to save Ninitta, and with
instinctive quickness he hit upon a possible means of escape. As he
came through the saloon he had seen a man, a dim shape in the fog,
clambering through the shattered staterooms to climb over the broken
bowsprit into the vessel that had run them down. Hastily drawing
Ninitta along, he forced his way back into the saloon. The body of the
man who had been hurt in the collision lay dead and deserted on the
floor. He lifted his companion over it and made his way to the side of
the steamer. Others had discovered this road to safety and he had to
fight for his foothold amid the waves that now washed over his feet.
The men on the stranger vessel were sawing off the broken spar which
was entangled under the steamer's upper deck, lest their craft should
be dragged down by the sinking boat. He urged Ninitta forward, swinging
her by main force up into the tangled rigging.
"No, no," she cried, endeavoring to throw herself back. "I do not want
to go. It will be better for Nino."
The sublimity of her self-sacrifice smote him like a lash. He could not
stop to argue, but he forced her forward, and one of the men above,
feeling himself in safety, caught her by the arm to drag her up. But at
that instant the spar, cut nearly through, broke with a sharp crack
like the sound of a gun. The end fell, and with it the wretched woman
was carried down. She shrieked as she went, the water cutting short her
cry of mortal anguish. Fenton saw her face an instant, and then in the
fog and the darkness the lapping water closed over her.
An awful sickening shudder ran through him, a fear too great to be
resisted. There rose from his heart a despairing prayer; and the
unbeliever has sounded the depth of agony when he calls upon God.
At that instant a beam loosened from the upper deck, dragged downward
by the ropes of the falling bowsprit, fell with a crash, dashing him
downward into the gulf below. He felt the awful stinging pain of the
blow, like the thrust of a spear; a mighty wave seemed to mount upward
to meet and to engulf him. Then he lost all perception of what he was
doing or of what happened to him; and it might to his consciousness
have been either moments or hours before he found himself struggling in
the icy water. He swam instinctively, and he even remembered to try to
increase his distance from the steamer, that he might not be caught in
the eddy when it went down. He heard still the cries and shrieks, but
the noise of the sea at his ears was like a mighty uproar confusing
all. He could not tell in which direction lay the vessel; a mighty
pressure crushed his chest, and innumerable lights twinkling against a
background of intensest black seemed to shine before his eyes. He was
past thinking clearly. His memory was like a broken mirror whose
shattered fragments reflected a thousand bits from his past life,
confused, detached, and meaningless.
Then with a last supreme effort his strong will asserted itself in a
command upon his consciousness. For one intense instant, briefer than
the flash of the tiniest spark, he realized everything, save that the
blow or the nearness of death seemed to have dulled all sense of fear.
The most vivid thought of all was the reflection that he might have
been saved but for his efforts to help Ninitta. The grim humor of the
situation tickled his fancy, and in the very flood of death he faintly
smiled at the irony of fate which thus balanced accounts. And this
flash of cynical amusement was the last gleam of his earthly
consciousness.