FATE'S FINAL WORD
Storm, darkness, despair--these had been the sole comrades for the two
who lay bound in their old quarters in the _Santa Margarita's_ lazaret.
Within a few minutes of the moment in which Padre Sigismondi had
succumbed to the islander's treacherous hospitality, those who had
sought his protection had been prisoners once more, and the felucca's
mast had been stepped anew. For three hours it had bent before the
strength of the northern wind--the hot, oppressive breath which seemed
to blow no longer from Nature's lips but in her very face. For it was an
unnatural wind--in temperature, in the quarter from which it came, in
dampness. The rigging slackened in the humid gusts, but the great sail
bellied out magnificently. They had torn across the broad waste of
waters at racing speed. Captain Luigi announced with legitimate pride
that they had come a matter of five and fifty kilometres. The land
loomed up before them mountainously a short five miles away.
Landon peered into the darkness. Lights shone far to the left of their
position--lights in rows, lights white, lights dusky orange, and far
beyond the main mass of the illumination one red star which winked in
solemn intervals.
"Messina," explained Luigi, tersely. "The red beam? That is the Faro."
"And we land where?" asked Landon.
"Here, if the Holy Mother gives us her protection," said the skipper,
and pointed straight ahead. "In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred there
is no difficulty about it. The port police--there are three of them--are
cousins of my own and, it is needless to say, controlled by the Society.
In fifteen minutes you will see."
"The hundredth chance?" said Landon. "That is--?"
"The Carbineers, Signor. Or rather one Carbineer--Sergeant Pinale, who
has been at the bottom of many an honest contrabandist's misfortune.
_Brutta bestia!_ He will not keep to any ordered sequence in his goings
and comings. But the men of the Society will know. If they answer our
signals, all is well."
Landon looked at him debatingly.
"Who is to answer signals at this hour of the night, my good Luigi? Your
colleagues will be in their more or less virtuous beds."
The smuggler smiled a superior smile.
"The Society never sleeps, Signor, and it has trained the men in its
ranks to remember as much. High on the blank wall of hill above the port
is a watch-tower, though only a private dwelling-house to all seeming.
There is a need for the sons of the Mafia to have an open door into
Sicily at any moment of the day or night."
He called one of the hands to the tiller as he finished speaking and
went forward. He came back, holding a ship's lantern. There were wings
of glass on hinges on either side of it--one red, one green.
He knelt and busied himself in lighting it in the shelter of the
companion. The breeze had driven them right in under the shadow of the
land by now. The steep above the shore seemed almost to overhang them.
Here and there a faint oil lamp flickered along the Marina; a larger,
nearer, and brighter gleam was evidence of a tiny jetty which was washed
by waves which were dwindling under the protection of the land.
Luigi lifted his lamp and held it clear of the companion. Rapidly he
shut the green shield over the untinted glass, as rapidly opened it
again, shut the red wing twice in quick succession, and finally left the
green signal closed.
Landon's eyes probed the darkness. His companion stood silent, his face
raised towards the hill. There was no apprehension in his attitude, only
expectancy.
Quite suddenly it seemed that the wind had dropped. The shelter of the
shore might account for this in part, Landon mused, but surely not
altogether. It was weird, in a sense, this abrupt alternation to perfect
stillness after the uproars of the outer seas, but it was not
unpleasant. It gave one a sense of relaxation; but the heat, untempered
by the faintest breath of air, was incredibly oppressive. December was
aping the temperatures of August.
Luigi sighed contentedly and spoke.
"All is well, Signor. It remains to get our merchandise ashore."
Landon became aware of a blue speck of light in the darkness--a speck
which wavered, grew to a suddenly unexpected point of brightness and
disappeared. So quickly did it come and go, so evanescent was its
effect, that none but those who searched for it would have been likely
to give its appearance a second thought. It might have been caused by
the passing of a candle behind one of the many panes of frosted glass
which disfigure Italian villas in _villeggiatura_.
Luigi gave an order. The two deck hands clutched the halliards. The sail
was lowered. A moment later the anchor set the ripples herding towards
the shore as it plunged into the calm below the jetty. Landon and his
companion descended to the cabin.
Stretched on a bunk was Miller, sleeping the sleep of the justly tired.
He roused himself at their touch and sat up. He looked about him
meditatively.
"The wind has dropped, absolutely?" he said. "Since when?"
"Half an hour ago. We are in port," said Landon. "We are ready to land,
when you will."
The gray man smoothed the creases in his gray coat.
"When _I_ will?" he repeated. "I am a prisoner--the captive of your bow
and spear." He smiled with sombre sarcasm.
"That position is to be maintained?" asked Landon.
"Naturally. Your cousin may make my continued residence in Gibraltar
well-nigh impossible, otherwise."
"My cousin?" Landon repeated the words with a certain doubtfulness. "He
is my cousin," he said slowly, "and we sha'n't break one of his blood
except in one way. It's the girl, remember, that is our strong suit.
There's to be no bleating about that. To win, the trick has to be taken
with her alone."
Miller nodded woodenly.
"If I had the inclination to interfere, I have not the power," he said.
"Do you forget that I am a prisoner, like herself?"
"Yes," said Landon, and there was more than doubt in his expression
this time, there was suspicion. "I forget it all the time. I want your
assurance that _you_ won't!"
Miller made a gesture of assent.
"Let's get on," he said. "I understand that it's within a couple of
hours of dawn."
For an instant Landon hesitated. Then, with Luigi at his heels, he
entered the lazaret. Neither of them spoke. They bent and lifted Aylmer
methodically, holding him by his shoulders and his lashed ankles. They
bore him on deck. They gagged him with the cork float of a fishing-net
and left him, stark and motionless as a log. They turned back to the
cabin, and a minute later placed Claire Van Arlen beside him, as
helpless as himself.
The dingy--a new one, picked up in the island--was lowered. The
prisoners were thrust beneath the seats. A deck hand and Muhammed took
their places at the oars. Luigi steered; the child, half asleep and
wrapped in a blanket, drowsed at his feet. Miller and Landon sat on the
thwarts.
The two rowers dipped their oars without splashing in long, slow
strokes. The thole-pins were muffled with rags. The boat stole along in
the shadow of the jetty into the darkness which hid the port. It was
noiseless, ghost-like, this entry into the little haven. To the two dumb
prisoners who lay along the bottom of the boat it was ominous of hope
entirely lost.
They stifled under the cloaks which hid them; the perspiration dripped
from the rowers, despite the unhurried nature of their work. The weight
of a dozen atmospheres seemed to have replaced the exhilarating breath
which Sicily flings seaward from her sun-brimmed shores. Luigi, at the
helm, gasped and passed his hand across his eyes.
"Thunder in December! Not natural, Signor, but that is what we must
expect. I suffocate. _Per Dio!_ The bay is an oven."
He let the prow nose in towards the jetty. Moored boats began to appear
dimly, right and left of them. The lamplight from the Marina showed an
empty quay. Luigi steered for the shadow cast by a shed, and took the
ground silently on a strand of mud and garbage.
The deck hand drew in his oar and skipped nimbly ashore. Muhammed
followed him. They both laid their hands upon the painter. They bent
their backs to haul.
Two shadows appeared right and left of them, shadows which seemed to
have detached themselves from the framework of the shed. Something
clicked. A yellow beam flared out, full on Luigi's face.
He gasped, he yelled.
"God's Mother--the Carbineers!"
Landon leaped to his feet with a curse. He seized an oar; he thrust with
all his strength at the mud. And at the same moment the two on the
shore, struggling in their captor's hands, let fall the painter. The
boat shot out stern foremost into deep water.
From the shore came the sound of a struggle and then Muhammed's voice,
shrill in explanation.
"_Signori! Signori!_ I am not a contrabandist! I am a tourist; I can
prove it; I wish to offer no resistance; I place myself in your hands,
freely."
There was a grim laugh, and then the yellow beam of light which had been
withdrawn while the struggle proceeded, flung out its level rays again
and illuminated the boat.
"Surrender, Luigi!" shouted a stern voice. There was another click.
"Surrender, _stupido_! I have you covered; I give you five seconds
before I fire!"
The shrill voice of the captured sailor reinforced the argument.
"It is over--finished," he shouted pessimistically. "It is _Pinale_;
there is nothing more to be done!"
Luigi groaned and then flung up his hands.
"I give in!" he cried, and burst into a storm of hysterical sobs. "It
means Procida--this," he wept. "It means years in chains; it means half
the rest of my life snatched from me." He turned and smote at Landon in
the darkness. "I owe it to you, tempter!" he yelled. "Accursed of God,
you led me into this!"
Landon stumbled in his surprise and then leaped at him like a cat. There
was a shrill scream from the child as the swaying pair rolled down upon
the stern sheets, gripping, each of them, for the other's throat. The
boat rocked violently.
Again the stern command from the shore rang into the night. They gave it
no heed. Animal rage possessed them; they were no longer men but beasts,
fighting with hand and foot and knee, clawing, tearing, even biting as
the chance of conflict brought Luigi's lips within reach of his
assailant's cheek. They were lost to all human warning or control.
It was no human interference which separated them.
Fate played her hand--played it irresistibly, crushingly, played it with
a vindictive completeness such as even she has never used since her grip
fell upon her plaything--that toy of hers among a million million toys,
and which we call our world.
A roar, terrific, growing, menacing, filling the echoes, brimming the
heavy air, rolling out across the still waters of the bay, thundered
into the silence of the shore. The dim lamps upon the Marina shook;
crash upon crash echoed from buildings which could not be seen, but
which terror could picture in all the crude pigments of imagination and
despair! Beside the boat a huge crack rent the jetty in twain. Stones,
dashed from the crumbling buildings in the darkness, flung huge gouts of
spray over the two who wrenched themselves apart in her stern, over
their prisoners, over the child, who cried aloud in all the agony of
childish fear.
And then human voices joined the chorus--voices which expressed every
intonation of panic, of the horror which is built upon amazement, of the
unleashed emotions of men awaking to meet blindly the common hazards of
life and confronting chaos, illimitable ruin, a sudden unbarring of the
gates of Hell.
The struggle in the boat ceased. Wild curses became, on Luigi's lips, a
string of piteous appeals to the very saints whose names he had used a
moment before to point his blasphemies. Miller and Landon grasped the
oars.
But even the terrors of earthquake do not wreck the discipline of
Italy's Carbineers. The sergeant's warning was repeated thunderously.
Miller screamed an assent, a surrender. Landon answered with an oath.
The one endeavored to propel the boat shorewards, the other towards the
sea. It spun between their efforts; they yelled and gesticulated madly.
And again the sergeant's voice was heard, with a hundred other voices,
appealing to a God whose mercy was surely turned away.
For a moaning sound _tingled_ along the strand, and then silently, but
with the speed of a cataract, the sea sank back from the shore.
It plucked half a hundred boats from their anchorages; it gripped them
down into its trough. For full thirty seconds they fled upon this
monstrous tide of a tideless sea, hull crashing against hull, mast
beating against mast, a wrecked wilderness of spars and rigging,
tangled, coiled, the froth, the scum, as it were, upon that mighty
crest. And behind them went the _Santa Margarita's_ dingy, with bound
and free in equal helplessness.
Then, as if the sluice of some Cyclopean lock had been shut, the mighty
mill-race halted and a mountain grew upon the face of the deep. Huge,
black, awesome, it swung itself up, swelled higher and higher, hung
through an aeon-long moment of horror, and then rolled back whence it had
come. And the menace of its coming left no tiniest coign of foothold for
hope in its path. Irresistible and relentless it moved along to destroy
every barrier of nature, every man-built obstacle with its might. Its
foam-plumed crest roared over the quayside and the Marina five fathoms
deep.
Like a chip upon the surface of a torrent which suddenly hastens to the
brink of the cascade, the boat and its burden of lives was snatched
along. The three who stood and gripped its gunwale saw the broad expanse
of the Marina before them, saw it seem to sink as they themselves rose
upon the flood, saw how they raced across it twenty feet above the level
of its flags. And they saw more--saw it with eyes which seemed to sear
their brains with anticipation, with despair.
This!
A long, irregular, deep-fronted row of dwellings, square to the sea,
square to the reeling ridge of ocean which was sweeping upon them as the
gust sweeps down upon the far-flung autumn leaves.
They called aloud in chorus; they challenged Fate with their despair.
And Fate replied.
The waters reached the walls; the huge sheet of spray shot high into the
night. But the dingy passed on uncrushed.
An alley opened before them--an alley through which they shot on the
roaring tide into the square beyond, sank down as the dwindling waters
sank and with their last effort of destruction reached, and were borne
into an arched opening girt about with trees. And then that, in its
turn, became a ruin of plaster and planks and stone. The wave completed
what the earthquake had all too thoroughly begun. The roof and walls
crashed down into a grim monument upon a living grave.