The sight of this woman following after him held Paul Lavelle bound for
the moment in the inertia of awe. All sense of their common and great
peril left him. Wonder robbed him of the power of thinking just as it
had on the island when she had drawn his head to her and pressed her
lips upon his. He comprehended the thing by instinct alone.
With the powerful, sweeping overhead stroke of a practiced swimmer Emily
overtook him on the crest of a foaming surge. The plaits of her hair had
been washed by the sea into a free golden mane. The grace of a Nereid,
of the ocean itself, was in her. She might have been borne of the deep.
The myth of Thetis must have had such a conception.
As she swung up to him, shoulder to shoulder, Lavelle turned on his
side. With a toss of her head she brought it clear of the water. The
light of her countenance said to him as plainly as words could have
done: "I am here! I am thine!" He caught her and drew her face to his.
His lips went to hers and clung in a wild, fleeting second of union.
Then, side by side, they struck out to meet their destiny.
Taking the weather berth, Paul set the pace toward the strange vessel.
It was already to leeward of the island's median line. The send of the
swell, however, more than balanced the craft's swift drift in the
swimmers' favor. Yet the half-mile of their turbulent course was a test
for the strongest and bravest. The willful, tenacious power of love
sustained Emily until they came within hail of their goal. Here flesh
and blood struck. Her spirit remained undaunted, but the body refused
the spirit's demands upon it.
Sensing that Emily was failing, Lavelle put out a hand and turned her on
her back. In that moment he realized, too, that he was near exhaustion.
The ridge of a gigantic surge lifted them higher than the rail of the
bark. Paul could distinguish every fixture of her deserted decks. The
sea dropped away with them. The next instant the vessel's leaden-colored
side and half of her copper-painted bottom were reeling over them. They
might have been looking up at her from the bottom of the ocean. Her
masts appeared to pierce the blue, sun-shot sky.
Although convinced there was no ear aboard the vessel to hear Paul drew
on his rapidly waning strength to send a yell down to her. The sails
flung back a faint, mocking echo. All the while his eyes were searching
for some means of boarding. Being an iron vessel the bark's sides
presented no chain plates or channels for a hand hold. Deeply laden
though she was the bights in which her braces trailed were far beyond
his reach even when she rolled.
The belief that he might be able to climb aboard with the aid of a lee
brace had been with him when he took to the water. From the island it
had seemed that this gear swept the sea with every surge. Not so much as
an eyebolt offered a ray of hope. The boomkins were as possible of
touching as the tops. He turned toward the bows. There might be a chance
forward, but he felt certain that Emily's strength would never withstand
the mauling of the sea that must follow catching hold of the bobstay.
Lost for a moment in the eagerness of his search, the bark had drifted
down upon them until a stroke would have brought them together. The
sensation of being drawn down made him aware of it. It shocked him into
action. Dragging Emily with him, Paul plunged away just in time to
escape a terrific suction produced by the vessel's laboring.
Hardly were they clear of this new peril, which he instantly realized
must be taken into account, when something wound itself around Paul's
legs with a jerk. It clung like the tentacle of a monster. It snatched
him toward the vessel. The bark was lifting at the moment. He and Emily
were falling away in a valley of beryl. Instinctively he threw himself
on his back, kicking as best he could to free his prisoned limbs. A
glance, as his feet came clear of the water, transported him from the
depths of fear and hopelessness to the heights of hope. He was entangled
in a rope's end which was attached to the bark. He caught it just as it
was slipping away from him. Overhauling it with one hand he found it to
be a gauntline which trailed away from a block at the end of the lee
main yardarm. To his sailor mind it told how the vessel's small boats
had been hoisted out of her.
It was with misgiving that he drew the line toward him. It came so
freely that he was certain that it was but another mockery. At each pull
he expected to see its length come darting through the block. Presently
it held; it sustained his weight. It was fast aboard the vessel. His
heart bounded at the discovery. He passed a bight round Emily's waist
and darted from her side forward. Hurling himself into the smothering
suction under the bows, he clutched the bobstay as it buried itself.
Down he went with it, dragged further and further until it seemed that
he must let the sea have him. A monster with an hundred beaks tore at
his lungs. Another clawed at his eyes. Still another gnashed at his
heart. A bare glimmer of consciousness marked the end of the downward
pitch. As the bark rose he continued to climb. At the end of the rise he
was clear of the sea and halfway to the cap of the bowsprit. The fangs
which reached for him did not get him again.
Half an hour afterward Paul Lavelle found himself lying on a deck with
water hissing over him and round him. It gurgled in his ears and foamed
across his throat. It was being spat at him out of three or four
scuppers and a bulwark port on his right. He was in the waist of a
vessel. This was a hatch coaming against which his left side was
pressed--the coaming of the vessel's main hatch. He sat up and saw Emily
lying across the hatch unconscious. The bight of the gauntline was still
around her. As he struggled to arise, only to fall back again, his cheek
swept one of her feet which dangled over the edge of the coaming. Yes,
he had torn that woman out of the sea's arms. There she was in evidence
of that, but where he had found the strength, how he had done it or when
he had done it, he had no idea.
The names Emily and Daphne were mixed in his thoughts. It took a severe
mental struggle to identify his own name. He repeated it two or three
times before he recognized it. Emily was the name of the woman on the
hatch. But Daphne? This name puzzled him until his wandering gaze found
a row of deck buckets in a rack on the edge of the forward house.
_Daphne_ was painted on each bucket. Then slowly it came to him that he
had seen it on the bows of a vessel aboard which he had climbed a long
time before.
His senses were bogged in the reaction of the despair of
exhaustion--that hopeless dejection which follows a supreme mental or
physical exertion and whose poignancy is the greater according to the
successful degree of the effort. He slipped back to his full length in
the water and lay staring up at the sky.
"Paul! Paul!"
His name called in a plaintive tone over his head was what finally
aroused him to a realization of his situation. The voice touched a chord
in his being that impelled him to action. It sent a wave of emotion
through him. He rose to a sitting posture. Again his cheek brushed the
gold woman's feet, and at the touch he bent his head quickly and kissed
them. It was not the first time he had done this, but it startled him
now, for he sensed that she was conscious of what he did. Yet thus on
the island he had kissed her reverently and sacredly when he had bound
her burns.
As he struggled to his feet Emily sat up. Her hair fell across her
shoulders and bosom and across her limbs in a golden shower.
"Oh, woman of all the world," he murmured, "we still live!"
This woman was his. She had challenged him against the sea--matched him
against all its brute force--and he had won her.
For a second only Emily met and held Paul's glance. Then, lowering her
head and throwing herself in abandon across the hatch, she burst into
tears. So did the reaction of all she had passed through come upon her.
Paul turned away, chastened by those tears. He realized that no word he
might utter then would assuage one drop of them. Action called to him,
but he seemed to be unable to put a hand on the situation. A long
weather roll caught him unawares. It flung him across the deck and he
brought up against the fife rail around the mainmast. His limbs
quivered under him; his knees knocked together in weakness. Every muscle
of him throbbed and twitched from the effects of the battle he had waged
with the sea. A momentary dread that he would never recover his strength
seized him.
It was in that instant that his gaze snapped a glimpse of the island far
up to windward. It appeared very small. He marveled that the bark could
have drifted so far. A lee roll cut the bit of land from his view. He
started to call Emily, but forbore at the sound of her sobbing. As if
fascinated he waited until the bark lifted on the shoulder of the next
swell. Like sugar melting in a teacup the island dissolved in his sight.
It stirred him mightily. It aroused in him the spirit of combativeness.
It made him realize that the sea would stand not on his dalliance. It
ordered him to action and to confront the mystery of the ocean's traffic
with the abandoned _Daphne_.
It required but a glance for him to confirm his estimate of the vessel's
size which he had formed in his first view of her from the island and
while he swam beside her. She was not less than 1,200 tons burden--about
200 feet long and less than forty feet beam--and heavily sparred. Her
lower masts and topmasts were of iron or steel. They were pole masts;
that is to say, in one continuous piece. The lower and double
topsail-yards also were built of iron or steel. Everything bespoke the
fact that she had been built for driving.
Calling to Emily that he would be gone but a minute, Paul drew an iron
belaying pin from the fife rail and started aft. He armed himself
against surprise, although he felt instinctively that he and Emily were
alone. Still, all to be seen about decks indicated that the bark had not
been long abandoned.
A teakwood door was open and hooked back against the cabin's forward
bulkhead. A similar door on the starboard side was shut. Through the
open door he entered the after-living quarters. A slamming of doors and
the familiar sound of the hard woods in the cabin's trim, working in
their joinings, answered the invader's hail flung from the threshold.
Once inside, he found himself in a white-painted alleyway at the end of
which a banging door gave him a glimpse of the forward cabin or saloon.
His nostrils first caught a stench of lamps which had flickered out in
oil dregs.
All ships are so ordered in their appointments that a seaman is never at
a loss to find his way in any. Lavelle could have gone about the
_Daphne_ blindfolded. He did not have to look at the brass plate over
the first door off the alleyway on his right to tell it was the room of
the chief mate. The door was open, but something behind it kept it from
swinging more than a couple of inches as the vessel labored. He gave it
a quick shove and stepped inside the room, only to pause with a gasp of
horror.
At the invader's feet, bathed in the morning sunlight which poured
through two ports, lay the stark body of a young, lithe-limbed son of
the sea. Barely more than a boy he had been. There was a gaping bullet
wound between his eyes. It was a wound of exit--where the lead which had
killed him had sped away from its work. It cried out a story of
assassination to Lavelle; it shrieked to him that the young fellow had
been shot from behind, possibly as he slept in his berth with his back
toward the door. The rolling of the ship had brought the body to the
deck where it lay.
The lockers of the room were wrenched open. Everywhere were signs of
disorder; the marks of hurrying, marauding hands. Yet the room had been
the castle of a man of order and cleanliness. Lavelle looked
particularly for the bark's log book which ordinarily should have been
on the small desk at the foot of the berth. It was missing.
With a thought of how sweet life must have been to this young fellow and
with his wrath hot against his slayers, Lavelle stepped across the
alleyway to the second and third mates' room. Its door opened at a
touch. Here, strangely, the sour, unmistakable odor of the forecastle
met him. Instantly the searcher visualized the coarse type of men who
had occupied these quarters--the rule-of-thumb sort, who may spend a
lifetime at sea without ever winning to a rank above second mate. Here
disorder was not apparent because disorder was a natural thing.
There was a stateroom abaft the mate's. It was empty. A door immediately
opposite had been forced. It was another stateroom filled with stores.
It was plain that a quick draft had been made upon these supplies.
Darting into the forward cabin, only the echo of his own hail answered
him. A red tablecloth lay on the deck where it had been swept by some
person hurrying by or else in a struggle. A white metal castor rolled
under the dining table and made a tinkling noise among its broken
cruets. The pantry and three more staterooms opened upon this cabin. The
staterooms reported only emptiness. They had not been recently
occupied. The pantry's cleanliness and order might have been produced by
a careful housewife's hands.
The doors leading into the after cabin were open and hooked back. Like
the forward compartment, it was done in Indian teak, bird's-eye maple,
and mahogany. It was furnished with two comfortable easy chairs, a small
center table, and a divan built into the bulkhead against the starboard
side. A tiny piano stood between the forward entrances. Through the
after end a companionway led up on to the poop.
There were two more staterooms here. They were empty and gave no signs
of recent occupancy. They were on the port side. To starboard was the
chart room. A litter of books, charts, and chart pipes covered its
floor. The chronometer case stood open. A glance told Paul that it had
been wound within forty-eight hours. He bent his head and quickly caught
a tick of even, smooth escapement.
Hurrying aft from the chart room, the castaway came to what he knew to
be the skipper's room. The door to it was shut. Its middle panel was
splintered. Something made him turn the knob with gentleness.
Just inside the door to the left a man in pajamas sat at a small
writing desk, his head cast upon his arms as if sleep had suddenly
overtaken him. His head swayed as Paul looked down at him. It was
lending itself to the swing of the vessel, but the motion was so natural
that, for the moment, Lavelle was deceived. A strange hope sprang into
his heart.
"Wake up, old man! Wake up!" he called. He even shook him by the
shoulder, but the man at the desk was sleeping a sleep that knows no
mortal awakening.
Under the stiff arms Paul spied the log book which he had missed from
the mate's room. He pulled it out and the dead man's head rolled back
and compelled his disturber to meet the gaze of his wide-open, staring
blue eyes. A pen rolled out from under his right hand and dropped from
the desk.
This undoubtedly was the _Daphne's_ skipper. He had been a man of
powerful build, standing in life as tall as Lavelle himself. Even in the
laxness of death his jaw bespoke indomitable determination. The nose was
of a splendid aggressive type. Death had taken him in the beginning of
his best years. He could not have been more than forty years of age.
A crimson splotch just below the chest line told where the man's life
blood had gone out. Measuring its location by sight with the height of
the door's splintered panel, Lavelle ventured a deduction of how the
_Daphne's_ master and mate had been assassinated. The master had been
asleep or, at any rate, he had retired. His apparel, his disturbed berth
told that. He had heard the shot which did for the mate, or, perhaps, he
might have gone to the door unsuspectingly to answer a knock or summons.
His hand turning the knob had been the signal to the assassin on the
other side of the door to send a bullet crashing through it into his
midriff.
But how the skipper had come to have the log book in his room it was not
possible to surmise unless, after being shot, he had had the strength to
make his way to the mate's room and back again. Again he might have
taken the keeping of the log into his own charge. Could he and the mate
have quarreled? Asking himself this question, the searcher's eyes ran
down the pages at which the book had lain open and stopped with a shock
at three words:
"The second mate----"
That was the final entry.
It was written in a hand which had begun the formation of the letters in
a tight style and ended in the scrawling of a schoolboy, a blot and a
splattered dash. Where this dash finished there had death touched the
fingers which held the writer's pen.
Whatever had happened aboard the _Daphne_ it was the second mate who was
responsible for it. Paul was convinced there was no escape from the
indictment in those three words.
It was a P.M. entry under date of March 29. According to Paul Lavelle's
account of time it was now March 31. Some time during the night of two
days before--on the 29th--mutiny had lifted its red hands on the
_Daphne_.
The log was written up to eight o'clock on the evening of the 29th. It
must have been the last thing the fair-haired boy now lying cold forward
had done before turning his lamp down for his eternal "watch below."
But as startling as was the tragedy which loomed so boldly out of the
three simple words which have been quoted was the _Daphne's_ position
given as of noon of that day: "Latitude 32:30 north; Longitude 176:28
east."
This instantly destroyed Paul's idea of the island's position. The bark
had drifted up on the island out of the southwest. Then, according to
the most reasonable assumption, she had been to the southward of it when
she was abandoned. That put the island between three and four hundred
miles to the northward of where the castaways had believed it to be all
the time. Its drift must have been to the north and east instead of the
southwest. This explained the absence of the trades; the variable
quality of the winds which had prevailed. The island had drifted across
the spot, or within a short distance thereto, of where the _Cambodia_
had found her grave.
Paul decided to let the observation which he planned to make at noon
settle the puzzle of position. The moment demanded that he should give
his thoughts to it and the living, and not to the past and its dead.
Still as he laid the log down on the desk again he turned to the page
which began it and read, in the style of the ancient sea formula:
"Log of the bark _Daphne_, 1,252 tons burthen, of Liverpool, England,
John McGavock, master, on her voyage from Sydney, N. S. W., toward San
Francisco, U. S. A."
And with something of boyish pride the keeper of the log--it was not in
the skipper's writing--had posted his name with boldness at the head of
the list of the ship's company: "William Elston, chief officer." It was
the imagination of youth gilding the rank. It seemed to speak that the
_Daphne_ had given the boy his first berth as mate.
"And they murdered you, William Elston, and you, too, John McGavock,"
said Paul with a sad bitterness, turning away from the desk.
A frightened cry from Emily, a smothered sob and the patter of her bare
feet carried Paul through the open door, but not quickly enough to cut
off her view of the still occupant of the skipper's room. She shrank
into his arms shuddering, and as he pressed her to him she tried to
crush her sobs against his breast.
"Don't be frightened--don't be frightened, dearheart," he crooned to
her. His lips found her brow, her eyes, her mouth.
"I--I----Oh, Paul, I thought you had gone--away," she sobbed. "You
were--were so long."
Paul had not been away from the deck more than five minutes, but the
time had seemed to her thrice and thrice again as long.
Brokenly she told him how, as she had entered the door through which she
had seen him disappear, her eyes had found the figure of the mate
stretched in his room.
"Then--there is another--one--in there!" she went on. "Oh, Paul, never
leave me again! Will you, dear! Will you? Not until death comes to take
us both?"
Her teeth were chattering from cold and nervous exhaustion.
"No, dear; not until death," he answered her pleading, but the kiss
which he pressed on her mouth spoke in greater reassurance to her heart
than his words. "Much has happened here--much that I don't understand;
much that we may never understand. But just now we must think of
ourselves. We must think of living; of fighting on. You're going to
fight on with me, aren't you? You're going to be brave and never lose
hope? You don't know how brave you've been. You have been the
inspiration of the battle all along. Look up at me."
His powerful arms held her away as he spoke and she glanced up at him
timidly.
"It is not hard to be brave with you," she said, and he drew her to him
so fiercely that she could not help crying out.
He released her in alarm. His arms dropped to his sides.
"I'm a brute; I've hurt you, dear."
"No, no," she protested with a smile of love, but her eyes sought a red
mark on her round, gleaming shoulder, and for the first time each of
them became conscious of the meagerness of her attire.
"Did I bruise you that way?"
"No, no, Paul. It happened when you were dragging me over the side. The
rope did it."
As she spoke she drew the yoke of her long white gown higher on her
shoulders. Her cheeks mantled red with shame and he turned away from
her. Yet in the next instant her cheeks crimsoned a deeper hue in shame
of that shame, for it came to her as a truth that in the sight of this
man there could be no abasement.
Paul reëntered the skipper's room, remembering that he had seen an
ulster and a mackintosh hanging in a corner to the right of the desk. He
swept them on to his arm in his bewilderment. It was one thing to outfit
a man; another to garb a woman. His eye caught a pair of socks hanging
over the edge of a half-open drawer under McGavock's berth. He snatched
these. He added a pair of straw sandals, whose toes protruded from under
the settee across the rear bulkhead, to his collection and also a
blanket--a fine white California blanket which lay in a roll at the foot
of the berth. It was the best he could think of doing at the moment.
Emily was shivering on the divan when he returned to her.
"Lie down there, dear," he said, "and I'll tuck you in and bring you
some coffee--something warm, anyway--and some food."
"No, no, no," she said, starting up. "Don't leave me here--alone. Not
now. I know the dead can't hurt one, but--I must go with you. When all's
said and done, Paul--I'm only--only a woman----"
She took the ulster from him and slipped it on. It was large enough to
have wrapped her round twice. She plunged her feet into the warm woollen
socks and gave a little sigh of pleasure.
"I--I feel better already."
"Now put these on."
Paul handed her the sandals, and as she took them she studied them for a
second, only to glance up at him with a startled expression.
"These are a woman's, Paul," she whispered. "And that----"
She indicated the mackintosh, and he held it out before him.
"This is a woman's, too," he said in the same breath with her.
"A woman? A woman?" he repeated, and he wondered if here was the key of
the mystery of the _Daphne_.