THE DOOR OF DISASTER
On the morning when we sighted land, I saw the big Fantee canoeman
standing in the waist and looking with eager eyes at the distant
shore. I suppose it was because I was still so weak that it did not
thrill me as my first glimpse of Africa had thrilled me. We had
known for some time that we were off the La Plata River by the
changed color of the water; but the shores that we now saw were mere
sandy beaches and low hills, which stretched, Captain North said,
from Cape St. Mary up the river itself; and I, having somehow got
the notion that I should see grand cliffs and mountains, was sadly
disappointed in them.
At about nine o'clock in the morning of that first day we passed an
island on which there were more seals than I had ever seen in any
one place; and at about eleven we came to a small town, whence with
light, fair winds we continued on our way up the river toward
Montevideo.
For our venture into unfamiliar waters we could not have desired
better weather than thus far prevailed; but about sunset the wind
rose and a dense fog blew in; whereupon Captain North decided to
haul off shore a few miles and anchor for the night, which we did
about fifteen miles below the city. The wind, meanwhile, was rising
to a gale. At eight o'clock, as it was still rapidly increasing, we
paid out a considerable length of cable, and the Adventure rode with
much less straining than before; but Captain North, I could see, was
by no means well pleased with our situation, and as we went below to
supper I overheard him say to Matterson, who continued to hold the
berth of chief mate, "Tend the cable with care, Mr. Matterson, and
keep a good lookout."
Whatever Matterson's reply, I lost it; but to this day I remember
his giant figure as he stood there on the quarter-deck, his jacket
buttoned tight up to his throat, his arms folded, with the wind
racing past his gray stubble of a beard. His strength was still
impaired by his wound, although at last it had healed clean; but
there was no sign of weakness in his bearing. In the dim light and
the rising gale he loomed up big, bold, and defiant.
Small wonder that I remember him as he looked then! It was almost
the last time I ever saw him.
We were five at the table that night,--Captain North, Gleazen,
Arnold, Faith, and I,--and Abe Guptil served us as steward.
With Mr. Severance in his own quarters asleep during his watch
below, and with the trader whom we had rescued sent unceremoniously
forward to keep company with the cook, we should have had a pleasant
time of it but for the presence of Gleazen, whose sullen scowl
dampened every word we spoke. Why the fellow ate with us instead of
waiting for Matterson, I am sure I do not know, unless it was sheer
perversity. Not one of us had a word to say to him, yet there he
sat, with his arm in a sling and the folds of bandages showing
through his waistcoat as broad ridges, now glaring at Arnold, now
eyeing Faith Parmenter; and his few words could have brought little
comfort even to him.
"How she pitches!" Arnold exclaimed, as wine from his glass fell in
a red blot on the cloth.
"This wind," said Gleazen gloomily, "puts me in mind of that little
yell Seth Upham gave when they got him." His voice sank almost to a
whisper.
Now, as the brig plunged, Abe Guptil stumbled while crossing the
cabin and fell to his knees, yet made out by a desperate effort both
to hold his tray upright and to keep the dishes from sliding off
against the bulkhead.
"Bravo!" cried Gideon North.
"Yes, sir," Abe replied, brightly, "that was a clever one and I'm
proud of it."
It had been impossible to teach him the manners of his new work, but
we cared little about that.
"Hark!" said Faith. "What was the noise?"
"Nothing, so far as I know," Captain North replied. "How she pitches
and jumps! Give me a ship under sail, steadied by the wind abeam."
"I've heard Bud O'Hara use them very words," said Gleazen.
Again silence followed the man's ill-chosen remark.
"When we have put our passengers ashore," Arnold began with a
significant glance at Gleazen, "shall we--"
"Captain North!"
Matterson's light voice calling down the companionway brought the
old mariner to his feet.
Gleazen, who had seemed to be on the point of making some
ill-tempered retort, slumped back in his chair as Captain North
rose.
"What will you have, Mr. Matterson?"
"I wish you'd come on deck, sir," came Matterson's reply. "I'm in
doubt whether or no we're drifting."
"Drifting?"
The old man went up with haste, and I followed close at his heels.
"I don't like the feel of the lead," he remarked, when, after
gaining the deck, he laid hands on the lead-line. "But what with the
current of the river and our pitching, I can't be sure. Are those
breakers to leeward?"
"I think, sir," Matterson replied, "that they are only the white
tops of the waves."
Matterson showed more genuine deference now than I had ever seen in
him before, which in itself went far to convince me that affairs
were going badly.
"They may be," the old man replied, "but I'm inclined to doubt it."
And with that he went aft over the stern into the boat.
Evidently the nearer view convinced him that they were indeed
breakers, for he returned with surprising agility.
"Call 'em up, Joe," he hoarsely cried, "every living soul. We're in
a bad way. You, Mr. Matterson, get ready another anchor and send men
to clear the cable tier below. Quick now."
I heard those in the cabin start to their feet when I called, and a
moment later Gleazen burst out and up the ladder. Behind him came
Faith, whom he had passed in his rush to the deck; then, a moment
later, Arnold, who had stopped to shake Mr. Severance out of a sound
sleep.
The white crests were nearer now, and approaching at a startling
speed. The roar alone told us they were breakers. A wave curled
along the rail and a torrent of foam cascaded over the bulwark,
washed the length of the deck, and eddied for a moment above the
scuppers.
The breakers were upon us and all about us. Their deafening roar
drowned out every sound in the brig. Then we struck. The man at the
wheel was thrown to his knees, but held his place. One or two men
succeeded in clinging to the rigging. The rest of us went tumbling
up against the rail.
I really did not understand the expression on Gleazen's face. I
simply could not yet comprehend the terrible danger in which we were
placed. To me, being no sailor, anything would have seemed possible
at sea; but now, when we were so near port,--indeed, actually in
sight of land,--it seemed utterly incredible that we could be in
deadly peril. But it was a terrible lesson that put an end to my
folly. A second blow followed the first shock of our striking, then
a third still heavier, then a sea broke clean across our bows,
carrying one poor wretch overboard and driving two more back to the
quarter-deck. With a fearful, despairing yell the luckless fellow
went past us and down, and as he did so I saw clinging to his
shoulders a frightened animal and knew that we had seen the last of
Pedro and his monkey.
The next sea broke over the whole weather side of the good
Adventure, and only by clinging fast to the rigging did any one of
us manage to retain his hold on the pounding wreck, which, desperate
though her plight was, represented our one chance for life.
Now in a voice that rose above the roar of the tempest Gideon North
thundered, "Cut away the masts! Cut away the masts!"
A lull followed, and for a moment we dared hope that, once the brig
was freed of all weight aloft, she would right herself and go over
the bar in such a way that we could let go our anchor on the farther
side and so bring her up again into the wind. But the lull brought
us only despair when the carpenter answered him by shrieking at the
top of his voice, "The axe has gone overboard."
So swiftly and so mightily had the succession of seas burst over us
that of all hands only ten or a dozen were left on board. I could
see them in a line clinging precariously to the weather-rail. At
first, in dazed horror, I thought Faith Parmenter was not there;
then, seeing someone drag her back through the wash of the sea, I
myself strove to reach her side. Another sea broke, and again she
almost went overboard; then I saw that it was Abe Guptil who was
holding her with the strength of two men. Then the great black
figure of the Fantee canoeman worked along the rail ahead of me and
took a place beside her, opposite to Abe, and helped to hold her in
the brig.
It was plain to every one of us what the outcome would have been had
not a cross-current now thrown the pounding hull at a new angle, so
that for a breathing-space those of us who were left alive had
opportunity to take other measures for safety. But the very wave
that did that also sent the masts by the board and, instead of
lightening us, cluttered the decks with a hopeless snarl of ropes
and canvas.
I was farther forward than the others, and so weak from my long
illness that for a moment I could only strive to recover my strength
and my breath. I saw them haul the filled boat up to the stern and,
by sheer strength and audacity, raise her clear of the breakers,
empty out half or two thirds of the water and let her go back again
into the sea, where she rode sluggishly.
Into that rocking boat, first of all, sprang Matterson. Close after
him scrambled the craven trader, and after him Neil Gleazen.
"Cast off!" I heard Matterson yell. "She'll founder with another
soul aboard her."
And off they cast, those three men, abandoning every one of the rest
of us to whatever end fate might hold in store.
That they should leave behind them those of us who had been from the
first their enemies was not surprising; but that they should abandon
thus, on a wreck that we all could see was doomed to break up in a
few hours, if not literally in a few minutes, a girl who had done
them no harm whatsoever, whose only fault lay in coming from quite
another world than theirs, was contemptible beyond belief, if for no
other reason than that she was but a young girl and they strong men.
I would not have believed it of even them. I could scarcely believe
my eyes when I saw them go. But as if to deal them a punishment more
fitting than any that we could devise, while the brig was pounding
in the breakers, a wave, sweeping clean over her, wrenched the
trysail boom about and parted the sheet and flung the boom in a wide
half-circle squarely on top of the boat, which it crushed to
kindlings. Whether or not it hit any of the three cowardly knaves a
direct blow, it left them struggling like so many rats in seas that
speedily carried them out of our sight into the darkness.
No doubt we should have seen more of their fate had our own plight
been less desperate; but the boom, as it swung down on the boat,
raked across the taffrail, and those of us who had been clinging
there in a long line, losing our hold on what up to that point had
represented to us our only chance for safety, threw our arms round
the boom and clung fast to that and with it were swept away from the
wrecked brig, straight through the breakers that foamed between us
and the shore. Holding the boom itself with one arm, I struggled to
give Faith what help I could with the other; but we must both have
been washed off the leaping spar, had not the big black Fantee
canoeman, who all this time had been working closer and closer to
his beloved mistress, plunged under the boom and, coming up on the
farther side, seized both her and me with a grip like a gorilla's.
Meanwhile Abe Guptil, as strong as a bear, in a flash had seen how
effective the Fantee's manoeuvre was, and had tried to duplicate it
for himself, Arnold, and Gideon North, who had been washed to the
farther end of the spar and nearly carried away from it. But he
only partly succeeded, for to him the water was not nearly so
natural an element as to the mungo, and he began his attempt later
and completed it more slowly.
Coming up on the far side of the boom, gasping and choking from a
wave that struck him squarely in the face, he clasped hands with
Arnold and tried to do so with Gideon North; but as his outstretched
arm groped for him, the sea tore the old sailor away and we five
were left alone on the long spar, two of us on one side and three on
the other, with arms and bodies locked around it.
Brave Gideon North! There was little time then to feel his loss; but
it was to grow upon us more and more and more in the weeks and
months to come. Stout-hearted, downright, thoughtful, kind--it is
very seldom that one gets or loses such a friend.
The spar rolled and turned as it swept toward the shore. Now we were
pounded and battered and almost drowned by the breakers; now we got
a chance to breathe and regain our strength as we came into deeper,
quieter water; now we were swept again through breakers that tossed
us, half drowned, into surging shallows. And so, holding fast to one
another, we were cast up on the shore in the darkness, where we
crawled away from the long waves that licked over the wet sand, and
sat down and watched and waited and watched.
Twice we heard someone calling aloud, and once I was sure that I saw
someone struggling toward us out of the surge. But though we
staggered down to the sea and shouted time and again, we got no
answer. Slowly the conviction forced itself upon us that we five and
some half a dozen sailors who had reached land before us were all
who were left alive of the passengers and crew of the brig
Adventure; that after all there was no hope whatever for Gideon
North, that bravest of master mariners.
To such an end had come Cornelius Gleazen's golden dreams! Through
suffering and disaster, they had led him to the ultimate wreck of
every hope; his own catastrophe had shattered the future of more
than one innocent man, and had caused directly the death of many
innocent men.
It was a wild dawn that broke upon us on that foreign shore. The
wind raged and the sea thundered, and black, low clouds raced over
our heads. To watch by daylight the terrible cauldron through which
we had come by dark was in itself a fearful thing; and beyond it,
barely visible through the surf, lay the broken hull of the
Adventure. So far as we could discover, there was no living creature
in all that waste of waters.
My dream of being a prosperous ship-owner lay wrecked beside the
shattered timbers of the Adventure; and knowing that, after all my
youthful dreams of affluence, I now was a poor man with my way in
the world to make, I felt that still another dream, a dearer, more
ambitious dream, likewise was shattered.
If when I owned the brig and had good prospects Faith Parmenter had
withdrawn behind a wall of reserve, if there had been someone else
whom she held in greater favor,--of whom she thought more
often,--what hope that I could win her now? Starting to walk away
from the others, I saw that she was ahead of me, staring with dark,
tearless eyes at the stormy sea. I stopped beside her.
"I suppose the time of our parting is near at hand," I began. "If I
can in any way be of service to you--"
"You are going to leave me _now_? _Here?_"
There was something in her breathless, anxious voice that brought my
heart up into my throat.
"Not leave you, but--"
"But the time of parting has come?" she said, with a rising
inflection. "It has found us in a wild and desolate place,"--she
smiled,--"more desolate and less wild than the place from which we
sailed. You came to me strangely, sir; you go as strangely as you
came."
"If I can be of any service to you," I blindly repeated, "I--"
Still smiling, she cut me short off. "I thank you, but I think I
shall be able, after all, to make shift. If someone--Mr. Lamont,
perhaps--will take me to some town where there is--an English
church--"
She still was smiling, but her smile wavered.
Could she, I wondered with a sort of fierce eagerness, have told me
_all_ her story? Was there, then, really nothing hidden?
"If you--" I began, "if I--"
Then she covered her face with her hands and sobbed, and for the
first time I dared guess the truth.
At what I then said,--the words that opened the gate to the life we
two have lived together,--she smiled so brightly through her tears,
that for the moment I forgot the dark shore, the stormy seas, and
the terrible, tragic night through which we had passed.
There was a wealth of affection in Arnold's kind, thoughtful face
when we joined the others, and Abe Guptil and the big Fantee, Paul,
smiled at us--it was good to see their smiles after the sufferings
and sorrow that we all had passed through.
"If only Gideon North and Seth Upham were here now!" Abe cried.
"Poor Seth!" said Arnold. "What a price he has paid for one
passionate blow."
"What do you know?" I demanded.
Arnold gravely turned, "I _know_ little," he said. "But I have
guessed much."
"What have you guessed?"
"They say in Topham that Neil Gleazen left town in the night and Eli
Norton was found dead in the morning."
While he paused, we waited in silence.
"That, my friends, is why Gleazen for twenty years did not come
back. But I once heard Gleazen say, when the mood was on him to
torment Seth Upham, let people think what they would, that at least
he--Gleazen--_knew_ who killed Eli Norton."
"And you think that Seth Upham--"
He interrupted me with a Latin phrase--"De mortuis nil nisi bonum."
My poor uncle!
"You four," said Arnold thoughtfully, "will need money before you
once more reach Topham."
"But of course you are coming too," I cried.
"No, I fear that I should not be content to live always in Topham."
Taken aback by his words, I stared at him with an amazement that was
utterly incredulous.
"You are not coming back with us?"
"No." Arnold smiled kindly and perhaps a little sadly.
Unbuckling a belt that he had worn since I first knew him, he drew
it off and opened it, and I saw to my further amazement that it was
full of gold coins. "This," said he, "will go far to pay your
expenses."
"I cannot take gold from you," I cried.
"Do not be foolish, Joe. We are old friends, you and I, and this by
rights is as much yours as mine."
He thrust the belt into my hands. "It is all for you, but there is
enough for our good friend Abe, in case he parts from you before
reaching Topham."
"But you--"
"I have more. I am not, Joe, only that which I have pretended to be
in your uncle's store in Topham, where you and I have had happy days
together."
At my bewildered face, he smiled again.
"My real name, Joe, is old and not obscure. I am one of the least
illustrious sons of my house; but I myself have served on the staff
of the great Bonaparte.
"And that--" I could scarcely believe that honest Arnold Lamont was
saying these astounding things.
"That is why it has been necessary--at least advisable--for me to
conceal for so many years my identity. A man, Joe, does not tell all
he knows."