BORNE ON THE GREAT WAVE
It chanced that in the chamber from which Werner von Orseln had come so
swiftly at the cry of the Wordless Man, Boris and Jorian, after sleeping
through the disturbances above them and the first burst of the storm,
were waked by the blowing open of the lattice as the wind reached its
height. Jorian lay still on his pallet and slily kicked Boris, hoping
that he would rise and take upon him the task of shutting it.
Then to Boris, struggling upward to the surface of the ocean of sleep,
came the same charitable thought with regard to Jorian. So, both kicking
out at the same time, their feet encountered with clash of iron
footgear, and then with surly snarls they hent them on their feet,
abusing each other in voices which could be heard above the humming of
the storm without.
It was tall Boris who, having cursed himself empty, first made his way
to the window. The lattice hung by one leathern thong. The other had
been torn away, and indeed it was a wonder that the whole framework had
not been blown bodily into the room. For the tempest pressed against it
straight from the north, and the sticky spray from the waves which broke
on the shingle drove stingingly into the eyes of the man-at-arms.
Nevertheless he thrust his head out, looked a moment through half-closed
eyelids, and then cried, "Jorian, we are surely lost! The sea is
breaking in upon us. It has passed the beach of shingle out there!"
And seizing Jorian by the arm Boris made his way to the door by which
they had entered, and, undoing the bolts, they reached the walled
courtyard, where, however, they found themselves in the open air, but
sheltered from the utmost violence of the tempest. There was a momentary
difficulty here, because neither could find the key of the heavy door in
the boundary wall. But Boris, ever fertile in expedient, discovered a
ladder under a kind of shed, and setting it against the northern wall he
climbed to the top. While he remained under the shelter of the wall his
body was comfortably warm; only an occasional veering flaw sent a purl
downwards of what he was to meet. But the instant his head was above the
copestone, and the ice-cold northerly blast met him like a wall, he
fairly gasped, for the furious onslaught of the storm seemed to blow
every particle of breath clean out of his body.
The spindrift flew smoking past, momentarily white in the constant
lightning flashes, and before him, and apparently almost at the foot of
the wall, Boris saw a wonderful sight. The sea appeared to be climbing,
climbing, climbing upwards over a narrow belt of sand and shingle which
separated the scarcely fretted Haff from the tumbling milk of the outer
Baltic.
In another moment Jorian was beside him, crouching on the top of the
wall to save himself from being carried away. And there, in the steamy
smother of the sea, backed by the blue electric flame of the lightning,
they saw the slant masts of a vessel labouring to beat against the wind.
"Poor souls, they are gone!" said Boris, trying to shield his eyes with
his palm, as the black hull disappeared bodily, and the masts seemed to
lurch forward into the milky turmoil. "We shall never see her again."
For one moment all was dark as pitch, and the next a dozen flashes of
lightning burst every way, as many appearing to rise upwards as could be
seen to fall downwards. A black speck poised itself on the crest of a
wave. "It is a boat! It can never live!" cried the two men together, and
dropping from the top of the wall they ran down to the shore, going as
near as they dared to the surf which arched and fell with ponderous roar
on the narrow strip of shingle.
Here Jorian and Boris ran this way and that, trying to pierce the
blackness of the sky with their spray-blinded eyes, but nothing more,
either of the ship or of the boat which had put out from it, did they
see. The mountainous roll and ceaseless iterance of the oncoming
breakers hid the surface of the sea from their sight, while the sky,
changing with each pulse of the lightning from densest black to green
shot with violet, told nothing of the men's lives which were being riven
from their bodies beneath it.
"Back, Boris, back!" cried Jorian suddenly, as after a succession of
smaller waves a gigantic and majestic roller arched along the whole
seaward front, stood for a moment black and imminent above them, and
then fell like a whole mountain-range in a snowy avalanche of troubled
water which rushed savagely up the beach. The two soldiers, who would
have faced unblanched any line of living enemies in the world, fled
terror-stricken at that clutching onrush of that sea of milk. The wet
sand seemed to catch and hold their feet as they ran, so that they felt
in their hearts the terrible sensation of one who flees in dreams from
some hideous imagined terror and who finds his powers fail him as his
pursuer approaches.
Upward and still upward the wave swept with a soft universal hiss which
drowned and dominated the rataplan of the thunder-peals above and the
sonorous diapason of the surf around them. It rushed in a creaming
smother about their ankles, plucked at their knees, but could rise no
higher. Yet so fierce was the back draught, that when the water
retreated, dragging the pebbles with it down the shingly shore with the
rattle of a million castanets, the two stout captains of Plassenburg
were thrown on their faces and lay as dead on the wet and sticky stones,
each clutching a double handful of broken shells and oozy sand which
streamed through his numbed fingers.
Boris was the first to rise, and finding Jorian still on his face he
caught the collar of his doublet and pulled him with little ceremony up
the sloping bank out of tide-reach, throwing him down on the shingly
summit with as little tenderness or compunction as if he had been a bag
of wet salt.
By this time the morning was advancing and the storm growing somewhat
less continuous. Instead of the wind bearing a dead weight upon the
face, it came now in furious gusts. Instead of one grand roar,
multitudinous in voice yet uniform in tone, it hooted and piped overhead
as if a whole brood of evil spirits were riding headlong down the
tempest-track. Instead of coming on in one solid bank of blackness, the
clouds were broken into a wrack of wild and fantastic fragments, the
interspaces of which showed alternately paly green and pearly grey. The
thunder retreated growling behind the horizon. The violet lightning grew
less continuous, and only occasionally rose and fell in vague distant
flickerings towards the north, as if some one were lifting a lantern
almost to the sea-line and dropping it again before reaching it.
Looking back from the summit of the mound, Boris saw something dark
lying high up on the beach amid a wrack of seaweed and broken timber
which marked where the great wave had stopped. Something odd about the
shape took his eye.
A moment later he was leaping down again towards the shore, taking his
longest strides, and sending the pebbles spraying out in front and on
all sides of him. He stooped and found the body of a man, tall, well
formed, and of manly figure. He was bareheaded and stripped to his
breeches and underwear.
Boris stooped and laid his hand upon his heart. Yes, so much was
certain. He was not dead. Whereupon the ex-man-at-arms lifted him as
well as he could and dragged him by the elbows out of reach of the
waves. Then he went back to Jorian and kicked him in the ribs. The
rotund man sat up with an execration.
"Come!" cried Boris, "don't lie there like Reynard the Fox waiting for
Kayward the Hare. We want no malingering here. There's a man at death's
door down on the shingle. Come and help me to carry him to the house."
It was a heavy task, and Jorian's head spun with the shock of the wave
and the weight of their burden long before they reached the point where
the boundary wall approached nearest to the house.
"We can never hope to get him up that ladder and down the other side,"
said Boris, shaking his head.
"Even if we had the ladder!" answered Jorian, glad of a chance to
grumble; "but, thanks to your stupidity, it is on the other side of the
wall."
Without noticing his companion's words, Boris took a handful of small
pebbles and threw them up at a lighted window. The head of Werner von
Orseln immediately appeared, his grizzled hair blown out like a misty
aureole about his temples.
"Come down!" shouted Boris, making a trumpet of his hands to fight the
wind withal. "We have found a drowned man on the beach!"
And indeed it seemed literally so, as they carried their burden round
the walls to the wicket door and waited. It seemed an interminable time
before Werner von Orseln arrived with the dumb man's lantern in his
hand.
They carried the body into the great hall, where the Duchess and the old
servitor met them. There they laid him on a table. Joan herself lifted
the lantern and held it to his face. His fair hair clustered about his
head in wet knots and shining twists. The features of his face were
white as death and carven like those of a statue. But at the sight the
heart of the Duchess leaped wildly within her.
"Conrad!" she cried--that word and no more. And the lantern fell to the
floor from her nerveless hand.
There was no doubt in her mind. She could make no mistake. The regular
features, the pillar-like neck, the massive shoulders, the strong
clean-cut mouth, the broad white brow--and--yes, the slight tonsure of
the priest. It was the White Knight of the Courtland lists, the noble
Prince of the summer parlour, the red-robed prelate of her marriage-day,
Conrad of Courtland, Prince and Cardinal, but to her--"_he_"--the only
"he."