A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS
I received Gerry’s more explicit congratulations in private. The poor
little Professor continued to bemoan our desertion of the quest with
such heart-breaking insistence, that the merest suspicion that it was no
stern necessity that bade us sail north would, we felt sure, induce
paroxysms of fury. We cheered him to the best of our ability, by
picturing our early return refreshed for deeds of high emprise in rock
climbing, and with perfected means for their accomplishment. But he
continued to bewail himself.
It was about six days after we had turned our backs upon the great rock
wall, that the wind began to get up strongly from the north, and we had
to thrust our way slowly enough through the great surges that rolled
down upon us mercilessly from the Atlantic, with four thousand miles of
gathered impact at their back.
Our good little boat cleft her way through their white manes with a
sturdy shove and shake of her prow, sending the spray swinging in jets
before her cutwater, and flooding her decks as she dipped to the rollers
and sent them roaring down beneath the bridge.
Two men had to be lashed to the wheel, and the crew took their stations
between watch and watch, only by the activity with which they dodged the
incoming billows. Two of our boats were swept from the davits, and half
the deck-house windows were smashed before we got them battened over.
The cook kept a fire in the galley by the display of the most
extraordinary agility, and our meals were snappy and disconnected. Nor
did we take much pleasure in them. Gerry and I had found our sealegs to
a certain extent, but poor little Lessaution was a terrible sufferer,
and we found it hard to take a neighborly interest in his behavior—he
would insist in coming on deck, though he had to be lashed there—and
afterwards find appetite for the cook’s hastily improvised dainties.
We had twenty-four hours of this sort of thing, and then it began to get
monotonous. The wind dropped little by little, but the sea was nearly as
high as ever, and the evening closed down upon us with our wretchedness
still supreme, and the waves pervading everything from the cabins to the
stoke-hole. We joined Eccles in the engine-room, where, if not dry, we
were at least warm, and toasted our steaming clothes before the red glow
of the furnaces, while we took exercise by bracing ourselves to avoid
being dashed into the heart of the machinery by the great heaves and
struggles of the fighting ship. It was a way of passing an evening which
came with some originality and freshness to both Gerry and myself, and
we stayed there late confabulating over our prospects, and wondering
whether our attempt at an interview with our young women would be
successful, and what sort of greeting we should receive.
“It’s all very well for you now,” said Gerry despondently, “you’re all
right. You’ve got your title and an income, which might be worse by a
long way, but where do I come in? I’m as badly off as ever. You’ll have
to work your new-found influence pretty vigorously to get me any sort of
billet to satisfy my ma-in-law.”
“That sort of thing’ll have to come later,” I answered. “Probably we
shan’t get more than an hour with them, if that. Port Lewis isn’t such
an enticing sort of place, from what I’ve heard, that the _Madagascar’s_
likely to stay there long. They’ll just coal and that’s about all. But
_if_ Denvarre and his brother haven’t settled matters by now—which the
Lord forbid!—I think it won’t do us any harm to remind our young women
that we’re alive and still taking an interest in them. But with Denvarre
for competitor I don’t see that you’re worse off than I am. Don’t let’s
brood, though, old chap, but let what will betide. If our chances are
gone from us completely, then we’ve got the best possible
counter-irritant to depression handy. We can turn back and find our
excitement still waiting for us at the foot of that stupendous wall.”
Gerry smiled hopefully, bending forward for a light for his pipe. A
dreamy look crossed his face as he swayed apathetically to the roll of
the ship, and as he rose and braced himself with his arm around a
stanchion I could see that he was musing mistily over the future. I felt
a little that way myself, and there was a silence between us for a time,
broken only by the regular beat and clang as the great piston rods
thrust themselves backwards and forwards, and the eccentrics jolted
round clamorously.
Suddenly from the deck above came a hail, and Janson thrust his face,
glistening with salt-foam flecks, into the disc of light where the
man-hole gave upon the darkness.
“Light on the starboard bow, my lord,” he bellowed, to make himself
heard above the jar of the machinery and the shriek of the storm. “The
skipper thinks there must be a whaler afire.”
Gerry and I snatched at our oilskins, which we had doffed when we had
descended from the sousings of the deck, and climbed the little iron
ladder unsteadily. We were still ploughing our way into the trough of
the head-sea, we found, when we gained the deck, but the great rollers
did not come shooting over the bow and down the slippery planks as they
had done an hour or two before. The sea was evidently going down, but
was heavy enough yet to make us pity from the bottom of our hearts any
poor wretches who had to battle with it in open boats.
Far away, very dimly and intermittently as we rose on the crest of wave
after wave, a light flickered now and again away to starboard, shooting
up occasionally into brightness as we and the burning craft stood out on
the top of a sea together, lost utterly when both of us sank back into
the trough between the seas, and evidently drifting towards us rapidly
before the force of the northern gale.
I clambered up on to the bridge beside Waller, and bawled into his ear.
“Shall we be able to help,” I questioned stentoriously, “or is it too
late?”
“Too late to do anything for her,” he shrieked back, shaking his
dripping head, “but we ought to stand by for her boats, if they can live
with them, poor wretches.”
The stress of conversation was too great to indulge in further. I
grasped the rail before me and stood at Waller’s right hand, straining
my eyes into the night. We needed all our strength, really, for the
screw, but at Janson’s suggestion, the dynamo was set going, and our
little searchlight streamed out in a thin shaft of light into the
darkness. It tinged the frothy breakers with a dead white glow as of
hoarfrost.
So we rode forward into the storm, the wind shrieking through our
strained cordage, the spray fell like the lash of whips on our
glistening decks, and the thud and swish of the surges against our bows
answering the regular thump and rattle of the anchor-chains in the
hawse-pipe, and the racket of the groaning machinery that echoed up from
below.
Far ahead the little zone of golden light flashed before us, dancing and
winking amid the tossing of the seas, darting here and there, pulsing
quiveringly down the shaft of brightness that fed it from our top,
flitting like some brilliant petrel of the night from crest to crest,
spurning the foam, glittering through the veils of hissing spray that
fell behind it like cascades of radiant jewels. And after it we waddled
along steadily, fighting the rollers, flinching before the sting of the
flipping drift, nosing into the depths of the green combs of angry
water, rolling, pitching, jarring and quivering, but ever following like
some trustworthy and attentive duck trailing after an evasive
hummingbird.
The sheen of the furnace upon the sea was gleaming nearer. At times the
glimmer of its flames was hid from us, as some mountain-like wall of
water flung itself in between, but the glow of it was never lost to us.
We could see the sparks stream up like puny rockets, as the gale planed
them off the edge of the blaze, flinging them in clouds to leeward, as
the ungoverned hulk swung heavily between the seas. The masts were
pillars of living flame, that streamed into the night in bannerets of
fire. Out of the main hatchway a solid white-hot glow of light was
projected, shot with red streaks as burning splinters floated up in the
strong sea-draught. From stem to stern the unfortunate bark was wrapped
in a fiery sheet as the conflagration leaped and roared about it,
devouring the seas that broke aboard into clouds of rosy steam.
“God help the poor wretches,” I shouted to Waller; “there’s no one left
alive on that.”
“No, my lord, not this half-hour back. It’s their boats I’m watching
for,” he answered, as, with the peak of his cap pressed over his eyes,
he strained his gaze into the night. “It’s a ten to one chance against
any boat living in this sea, but—well, there’s always a but, my lord.”
Janson was flirting the searchlight about and about the blazing hulk,
like a very will-o’-the-wisp. It fled round it questioningly, picking at
and dipping to every floating piece of wreckage, but never a one showed
the sign of boat or human being. With our steam to help us, there was no
danger in approaching the floating furnace as near as we thought well,
and we slid up towards it as it lurched past us, till the heat of it
blistered across the red seas on to our salt-cracked faces smartingly.
The sparks skipped by us, and hissed like little adders on our streaming
planks, but gaze as we would, nothing but charred timbers and leaping
breakers met our eyes. We plunged forward into the darkness again, as
she lumbered by before the wind.
“We ought to hang about in the direction she came from,” explained
Waller thunderously. “The boats, if they lived, wouldn’t keep her pace.
They aren’t so much exposed to the gale.”
I nodded, still gripping the rail before me, not wishing to waste breath
that was twisted from one’s very lips by the wind, before it could frame
a single intelligent word.
So we plodded on for a quarter of an hour or more, seeing nothing. I
could but remember what agonies the unfortunate victims of this
mischance must be suffering, if by any terrible hap they were swinging
near us on those hungry seas, seeing help and safety at hand, and yet
without a hope of rescue save by utter chance. And I thanked God for the
wet deck below me that I had been cursing but a short hour back.
“I suppose the oil caught fire?” I asked Waller, as a slight lull gave
one a chance to make oneself heard. “I shouldn’t have thought any ship
could have flared like that in this sea.”
“She’s no whaler, my lord,” returned the skipper decidedly; “I can’t
quite make out her build. More like a liner, only no liner would be down
this far south. She had big engines, judging by her funnels. Looked for
all the world like one of the old Black Cross Line.”
“The Black Cross Line!” I repeated wondering; “why, that’s a funny
thing. Some friends of mine have gone cruising in one of their steamers
round ——” and then the frightful horror of it took me by the throat, and
I could have shrieked aloud. The Black Cross Line! The _Madagascar_ was
one of their boats, yacht-fitted for cruising. Oh! the thing was
impossible. It was some coincidence that fate had raised up to frighten
me. Waller just spoke in the haphazard way men do when they make
comparisons. Of course, he had served on some vessel of the fleet, and
his thoughts strayed back to it. And yet—and yet—no ordinary liner would
be sailing these seas. And the _Madagascar_ was expected in these
latitudes. My God! it was a thing too wanton for even my luck to have
conceived and brought about. No fate could be so devilish as to drag me
out these weary thousands of miles to see my love’s agony of death in
these desolate southern seas. No; no God that ruled the universe could
allow it. I wrestled with the cold reason that insisted that these
things could be, and that it was stretching the limits of mere
coincidence to say they were not.
Into my tortures of despair a hail from Janson broke, and he swung the
leaping flash-light from before our bow like a lightning streak. It
streamed, a path of light across the billows, to port, and centered
there on a tumbling, reeling object, buffeted by the bluster of the
breakers, half hidden by the curtain of the spin-drift. Together Waller
and I tore at the wheel, and slewed the ship towards it. Slowly, ever so
languidly, the bows came round, and began to edge across to where the
disc of light hovered unblinkingly. The dark object leaped up ever and
anon, poised upon the dancing surge, only to drop back as if engulfed
absolutely in the dark abyss behind the roll of the breaker. A white
object fluttered, as we could see between these intermittent eclipses,
streaming out against the yellow light glaringly. Round this, as we drew
near, we could distinguish a huddle of misty outlines, animate or
inanimate we could not tell.
We circled heavily to windward, and Waller roared his orders to the
crew. The oil-bags were hung outboard, and as they dribbled lingeringly
across the surface of the foam, the tossing died down as by magic.
Half-a-dozen seamen clustered at the side, and with uplifted hands,
swayed coils of rope above their heads. The engines slowed as the
engine-room bells clanged, and we half stayed. Then with the blow of a
great roller upon our lifting keel we staggered on again.
Still nearer we floundered, drifting broadside on, to the round yellow
patch wherein the dim mass still danced uncertainly. Nearer still, and
we hovered over it, reeling under the thunderous blows that the windward
waves hammered upon us, and rolling nigh bulwarks under into the oily
calm to leeward. Nearer again, and the ropes lashed out like whip-cords
across the interval from the waiting crew, and were caught and hauled at
desperately by the eager wretches aboard the pitching boat. Nearer now,
almost under the churn of our wash, and the searchlight stared down
unquivering into every crevice of its wild confusion, swathing each face
in its glare. And white and set, silhouetted haggardly against the
blackness of the outer night, the face of my love—my own dear
love—looked up into my unbelieving eyes.
[Illustration:
OUT ... OF THAT BLACK YEASTY WHIRLPOOL CAME MY LOVE.
_Page 103._
]
I heard an exclamation from Waller as I flung myself from the wheel, and
heard him grip his breath as he braced himself to meet the plunge of the
ship alone. I was but human, and who was I to stand unmoved beside him
there when the light of my eyes was swayed in the grasp of death before
me? I took a leap on to the wet and slanting deck, and fell upon my
hands, but rose beside the bulwark unhurt and panting. Then a hail from
the boat reached across to us above the raving of the wind, and I saw
our men tug frantically at a rope that tautened suddenly. A dark body
came swiftly flying up to the bulwarks as the men hauled, and with eager
hands we seized it, fending it from the jumping list of the timbers. A
single glance showed me Lady Delahay’s face, sunken and shriveled with
fifty new lines of haunting fear. Another hail, another strenuous pull,
and Violet fell into the arms that Gerry held out to receive her. And
then—ay, then, and till I go out into the eternal beyond, the memory of
it will be vivid in my inmost soul—out of the swirl and uproar of that
black, yeasty whirlpool came my love into my embrace, and lay upon my
breast.
We bore them into the cabin, and poured cordials between their white
lips. We chafed their frozen hands and fetched hot bricks from the
engine-room to place beneath their feet. We tore off their outer
garments—for ceremony flies through the porthole when death is knocking
at the door and wrapped blankets round them and rubbed their limbs
furiously. We did everything that men can do, of a good purpose but
unhandily, to bring them back from the edge of the eternal sleep whereon
they hovered, and soon—in the younger women’s case at least—with
success. Then as their eyes opened, and the color began to creep back
languidly into their cheeks, and they sat up in utter wonder at their
surroundings, we left them, with every appliance we could furnish forth,
to revive in her turn their mother, giving them but little explanation
of their whereabouts, and being eyed by them with a surprise that we
could but hope had pleasure at its back. But this was no time for
sentimental musings, and we hurried on deck to see what had betided to
the others.
Eight men had been hauled by main force from the tumbling boat, which
had reeled more and more tempestuously as her living ballast lightened,
and the last poor fellow, with no restraining hand on the far end of the
line, had been bumped fearfully against the bulge of the hull as we
rolled back. But bruises were the worst that any man had received, and
we hustled them into the smoke-room unceremoniously.
Janson was still flinging the searchlight rays across the tumbling waste
of water, but a word from one of the half-drowned mariners made us stay
him.
“Not another two spars are afloat together of the other boats,” he
gasped, as the blood began to flow again in his frozen veins. “Every one
was matchwooded against the side as they left. Ours was carried off,
half full by a wave that broke the painter, or I shouldn’t be here, and
thank God for it.”
“How many aboard you?” I asked, shuddering to think what a toll the
night had taken; “you’re the _Madagascar_, aren’t you?”
“Yes, we’re the _Madagascar_,” he answered slowly and with surprise,
“though I don’t know how you know it, seeing you’ve let the boat drift.
An hour ago she was the finest pleasure craft afloat, with a hundred and
twenty passengers and fifty crew as jolly as could be. And now there’s
_us_,” and he flung his hands out towards his fellows with a gesture of
weak despair.
“An hour ago!” I demurred, “more than that, my man, surely. She could
never have blazed up to a bon-fire like that in the time.”
“I tell you, sir,” he answered obstinately, “that less than an hour ago
six score of happy men and women were feeding theirselves as contented
as could be in her saloon. And now,” he added grimly, “they’re feeding
the fishes. And in that boat for three-quarters of an hour we’ve been
tossing over their dead, drowned carcasses, reckoning that every minute
would see us join them. And Captain—my captain, what I’ve sailed with
this ten years past—he’s down there among them, and I’m here, and ought
to be thankin’ God, and I keep cursin’ every time I give myself leave to
think. And that’s what comes of followin’ the sea, sir,” and he laid his
rough, damp, grizzled head upon the table, and burst into a storm of
hysterical tears.
The others were coming back to consciousness one by one. Baines touched
me on the shoulder.
“There’s one here that won’t last long, my lord, I fear,” he said,
leading me towards the other end of the saloon, where another limp body
was stretched across the table. “We can’t bring him round at all.”
It came as no shock of surprise to recognize Denvarre’s face and
drooping yellow moustache. His eyes were closed; his cheeks fell in
limply against his jaws; the breath came in a thin wheezy hiss from
between his white lips. He was in the last stages of cold and
exhaustion. They tried in vain to force brandy between his set teeth. He
had not the muscular power of swallowing left. It did indeed look as if
Baines was right.
I won’t stop to tell you the thoughts that seethed and ran riot in my
brain as I saw him fighting for his life with the cold that had nigh
mastered his pulses. They belong to the category of devilish
inspirations that come to a man when some wild battle with nature
furnishes forth a throw back to pure animalism; when self is uttermost
and honor unborn. They are monstrous phantasms of the brain too dark to
materialize into wholesome words, and best forgotten save when the
system needs a purge of shame. God forgive me my desires at that single
moment—for a space of mere seconds saw me myself again.
Suffice it to say that with every aid we could devise we joined him in
his wrestle with the death that was gripping him for the final throw. We
fetched spirits, and rasped every part of his body with rough towels
soaked in whisky. We smote with our palms upon his rigid limbs, and bent
and kneaded his unyielding joints; we thrust heated bricks against his
feet and hands; finally, at Janson’s suggestion, we collected handfuls
of the sleet that was falling on the decks, and grated them furiously
upon his skin. And at last the life began to flicker in him.
A tinge—faint and barely perceptible at first, but growing in
strength—began to filter into his cheeks. A sigh burst from his throat
and the tense lips parted. We tilted brandy drop by drop into his mouth,
and heard his spluttering cough with joy. And then of his own effort he
stirred and whispered faintly.
“Gwen?” he queried in a faint, far-away voice, and it was for me to
answer him.
“Safe, and on board,” said I cheerily, as my heart sledge-hammered at my
ribs, and my hands twitched to grasp his throat and tear the chords of
speech away from him eternally. “Quite safe, old man, and coming round
nicely.”
He smiled a happy, drowsy smile that stayed and slept upon his face as
he wandered back into consciousness. And then I left him to his
brother—who was among the rescued—and to Baines, and went stolidly up on
deck, the fires of hell burning in my heart, and rage—the insane,
unreasoning rage of disappointment—astir in my blood.
“Gwen, Gwen,” I repeated to myself, as I flung myself out into the gale
that still slashed cuttingly down the deck. “Gwen she is to him, and,
curse him, she’s Gwen no longer to me.”