A diminution in the floods of rain began to be perceptible, and the
extreme violence of the wind was abated. Now and then a gust in
paroxysmal fury came screaming down the river, battering tumultuously at
the shattered doors and windows of the wreck, setting all the loose
wires and chains to clattering, and showing its breadth and muscle by
tearing up some riverside tree and carrying it whirling as lightly as a
straw through the air above the tortured and lashed currents of the
stream. The clouds, dark and slate-tinted, showed occasionally a white
transparent scud driving swiftly athwart their expanse, which gave
obvious token of the velocity of the wind, for, although the hurricane
was spent, the menace of the stormy weather and the turbulent, maddened
waters was still to be reckoned with. It was scarcely beyond noon-day,
yet the aspect of the world was of a lowering and tempestuous darkness.
The alacrity of the Captain in getting them afloat argued that he now
accorded more approval to the plan than when it was first suggested, and
that, although he would not have assumed the responsibility of the
removal of the passengers at such imminent risk, he was glad to forward
it when it was of their own volition, indeed insistence. A fact that his
long riparian knowledge revealed to him was not immediately apparent to
the passengers until the yawl was about to be launched,--the sand-bar
was in process of submergence. The rise of the river was unprecedented
in so short an interval, due to the fall of the vast volume of rain.
During the last ten minutes the Captain began to realize that it was
beyond the power of prophecy to judge what proportion of the tow-head
would be above water within the hour. It was not difficult to launch the
yawl from the twisted timbers of the deck. It swung clear and slipped
down with a smart impact, rocking on the tumultuous current as if there
were twenty feet of water beneath it.
“Where the yawl is now was bare sand ten minutes ago,” commented
Floyd-Rosney.
This fact imparted courage to the weak-hearted who had held back at the
sight of the weltering expanse of the great river, the sound of the
blasts of the strong wind, and the overwhelming downpour of the rain.
They were disposed now to depend upon Mr. Floyd-Rosney, who was so
masterful and knowing, and who shared all their interest, rather than
the Captain, whose conservative idea seemed to be to stick to the boat
at all hazards, and to what might be left of the tow-head.
“This is the season of dead low water,” he argued. “This rain is
local,--the rise of the river is only temporary.”
But he had the less influence with them, because they felt that he was
complicated by his duty to the owners of the boat and the shippers of
freight, and also the traditions that forbid the Captain’s abandonment
of his deck till the last moment.
He did not resent the discarding of his opinion, but was quite genial
and hearty as he stood on the guards and himself directed the men who
were handling the yawl.
“It may be the best thing,--if she doesn’t capsize,” he
admitted,--“though I wouldn’t advise it.”
Whereupon the weak-hearted again began to demur.
“Don’t discourage us, Captain,” said Floyd Rosney, frowning heavily, “we
have no other resource.”
“I shall use my best judgment, Mr. Floyd-Rosney,” the Captain retorted.
“I am not here to encourage you in fool-hardy undertakings. We know
where we are now,--and we have the yawl and the other boats as a last
resource. The weather, too, may clear. It can’t rain and blow forever.”
“I shall show my opinion by taking to the boat and carrying my family
with me,” said Floyd-Rosney loftily. “Any one who wishes to go with us
will be very welcome at Duciehurst.”
He already had on his overcoat and hat and the other passengers, with
their suit-cases or such other possessions as could be handed out of
their almost inverted staterooms by the grinning roustabouts, began to
make their precarious descent to the lower deck on the reeking and
slippery stair, all awry and aslant.
“Take care of the Major,--oh, take care of the Major,” cried Hildegarde
Dean, almost hysterically, as the old man was lifted by his colored
servant, who had been with him as a “horse-boy” in the army, and who,
though grizzled, and time-worn, and wrinkled, was still brawny and
active. In fact, he had lived in great ease and competence owing to his
special fidelity and utility in the Major’s infirmities, since “Me an’
de Major fout through de War.” In fact, if old Tobe might be believed,
the majority of the deeds of valiance in that great struggle were
exploited by “Me an’ de Major.”
“Sartainly,--sartainly,” his big voice boomed out on the air, responsive
to the caution, “Me an’ de Major have been through a heap worse
troublements dan dis yere.”
And, indeed, surely and safely he went down the stair, buffeted by the
wind and drenched by the rain and the spray leaping from its impact on
the surface of the water.
Hildegarde herself descended as easily as a fawn might bound down a
hill, to Colonel Kenwynton’s amazement, accustomed to lend the ladies of
his day a supporting arm. She sprang upon the gunwale of the yawl in so
lightsome a poise that it scarcely tipped beneath her weight before she
was seated beside the old blind soldier, joyous, reassuring and hopeful.
“It is hard to be in danger and unable to help others or even to see and
judge of the situation,” he said meekly, bending forward under the
down-pour, his face pallid and wrinkled, its expression of groping
wistfulness most appealing.
“Yes, indeed,” she assented, her voice sounding amidst the rain like the
song of a bird from out a summer shower. “But I think all this hubbub is
for nothing,--the sky is going to clear, I believe, toward the west.
Still, the next packet can take us off at Duciehurst as well as from the
_Cherokee Rose_.” “And, Major,” with a blithe rising inflection, “I can
see a veritable ante-bellum mansion, and you can go over it with me and
explain the life of the old times. You can refurnish it, Major! You can
tell me what ought to stand here and there, and what sort of upholstery
and curtains the ‘Has-Beens’ used to affect.”
His old face was suddenly relumed with this placid expectation; his
brain was once more thronged with reminiscences. He lifted his aged head
and gazed toward the clearing west and the radiant past, both beginning
to relent to a gentle suffusion of restored peace.
In this transient illumination the great dun-tinted forests that lined
the banks showed dimly, as well as the vast river swirling intervenient,
tawny, murky, but with sudden mad whorls of white foam where the current
struck some obstruction flung into its course by the storm. The wreck of
the _Cherokee Rose_ was very melancholy as a spectacle since, but for
the hurricane, she would have been floated in five minutes more of the
deluge of rain. The yawl seemed a tiny thing, painfully inadequate, as
it rocked with a long tilt on the swaying undulations of the current.
The preparations for departure were going swiftly forward; another boat
was in process of loading with material comforts, cots, bedding, all
under tarpaulins, boxes and hampers of provisions, and the trunks and
suit-cases of passengers. Since escape was now possible and at hand, one
or two of the faint-hearted began to experience anew that reluctance to
removal, that doubt of an untried change so common to the moment of
decision. “It is a long way--ten miles in this wind,” said one, “how
would it do for a few of us to try that swamper’s shack on the bank? The
yawl is overloaded, anyhow.”
“Now, I _can_ advise you,” said the Captain definitely. “It won’t do at
all to trust river-side rats. You might be robbed and murdered for your
watch or the change in your purse. I am not acquainted with that
swamper,--I speak from precedent. And how can you judge if the shack is
above water now,--or whether it has been blown by the hurricane down the
river?”
“Still, the yawl _is_ overloaded,” said Floyd-Rosney, with a trifle of
malice. He was bent on exploiting the situation to his own commanding
credit, and the proposition, reiterated anew, to withdraw for a
different course, nettled his troublous and sensitive pride.
The next man who stepped into the yawl was the one who had advanced this
divergent theory, and Floyd-Rosney flashed a glance of triumph at his
wife, who still stood with the child in her arms at the warped rail of
the promenade deck. She was pale, anxious, doubtful, in no frame of mind
to furnish her wonted plaudits, the incense of wifely flatteries on
which his vanity lived. These others had admired his initiative, had
gladly adopted his plans, were looking to him with a unanimity of
subservience that had quite restored the tone of his wonted arrogance.
He could ill brook to see her with that discouraged questioning in her
face, gazing forth over the forbidding gray water, letting first one,
then another pass her to a place in the yawl. She should have been the
first to board it,--to show her faith by her works.
He approached her with a rebuking question.
“Why do you lug that child around, Paula?” he demanded. “He will break
your back.” He stepped forward, as if to lift the little fellow from
her arms, but she precipitately moved a pace backward. Paula’s grisly
thoughts were of the dungeon, the trap of the warped stateroom,--whence
the boy was liberated by a stranger, while his father, unthinking and
unnoting, was absorbed in his own complacence, in his busy and arrogant
pose. No,--she would not let the child go again, she would hold him in
her arms if his weight broke every bone in her body till they were all
in safety.
“I don’t want to risk that yawl,” she said querulously. “I think the
Captain knows best,--he has had such long experience. The yawl looks
tricky, and the water is fearful. We ought to take to the yawl as a last
resort, when the steamer can’t house us. That is always the custom. It
is only in cases of absolute necessity that the yawl is used.”
It would be difficult to say whether he were more surprised or incensed,
as for a moment, with short breaths and flashing eyes, he gazed at her.
He was of an impetuous temper, yet not beyond schooling. He had had a
lesson, he had felt the keen edge of her ridicule this morning, and he
would not again lay himself liable to a public exhibition.
“Why, you must be a graduated pilot to know so much about the river,” he
cried with a rallying laugh. “The kid and I are going in the yawl at all
events. Unloose your hold,” he added in a furious undertone. “He is
mine,--he is mine,--not yours.”
He had laid his hand on both hers as they clasped the child.
Floyd-Rosney was still smiling and apparently gracious and good-humored,
which might have seemed much, thus publicly withstood in this moment of
excitement and stress. He was resolved that he would not lower his
pride by an open and obvious struggle. He did not consider her pride. He
forced her fingers apart, invisibly under the folds of the child’s
cloak, by an old school-boy trick of suddenly striking the wrist a sharp
blow. The muscles must needs relax in the pain, the hold give way, and,
as the boy was about to slip from her clasp, his father called for the
nurse, placed the child in the arms of the old servant and consigned
them both to a stout roustabout who had them in the yawl in a trice.
Without a word of apology, of justification, of soothing remonstrance,
Floyd-Rosney turned away from his wife with brisk cheerfulness and once
more addressed himself to the matter in hand.
Paula felt that if this had been her husband of yesterday it would have
broken her heart. But that identity was dead,--suddenly dead. Indeed,
had he ever lived? She wondered that the revulsion of feeling did not
overpower her. But she was consciously cool, composed, steady, without
the quiver of a muscle. She made no excuses to herself in her
introspection for her husband,--gave him no benefit of doubt,--urged no
palliation of his brutality. Yet these were not far to seek. The
hurricane had come at a crisis in his mental experience. He had been
publicly held up to ridicule, even to reprehension, by his own
subservient wife. He had been released from this pitiable attitude by
some unimaginable impulse in the brother of the man whom she had jilted
at the last moment, and thus confused, absorbed, scarcely himself at the
instant of the stupendous crash, he had lost sight of the fact, if he
had earlier noticed, that the child was not with her, and in the
saloon,--his latest glimpse of the boy was in her arms. It was natural
that he did not witness the rescue by Ducie, for he was planning an
escape for them all, and, surely, it was her place to defer to his
views, his seniority, his experience, and be guided by him rather than
take the helm herself. Naught of this had weight with her. She only
remembered the provocation that had elicited her fleer, his furious
whisper of objection, his censorious interference, the humiliation so
bitter that she could not lift her head while his rebukes hissed in her
ears before them all. Then, in that terrible moment of calamity, he had
not thought of her, of their son,--had not rushed to gather them in his
arms, that they might, at least, die together. Doubtless, he would have
said they could die together in due time,--it was not yet the moment for
dying--and he was preparing to postpone that finality as far as might
be.
And thus it was Adrian Ducie,--Randal’s brother--who had saved the
child, shut up in the overturned stateroom like a rat in a trap. She
knew, too, how lightly Floyd-Rosney would treat this if it were brought
to his knowledge--he would say that not a drop of water had touched the
child; he had sustained not an instant’s hurt. That he and his nurse had
for a few moments been unable to turn the bolt of a door was only a
slight inconvenience, as the result of a hurricane. One of the
passengers had a badly bruised arm, on which a chandelier had fallen,
another was somewhat severely cut about the head and face by the
shattering of a mirror. The baby was particularly safe in the restricted
little stateroom, where naught more deadly fell upon him than a pillow.
But it mattered not now to her what Floyd-Rosney said or thought. All
dwindled into insignificance, was nullified by the fact of the covert
blow, on the sly,--how she scorned him--that these men might not see and
despise him for it!--dealt in the folds of the child’s cloak, their
child, his and hers! She wondered that he dared, knowing how she had
surrendered him to scorn in their earlier difference. Perhaps he knew,
and, indeed, she was sure, instinctively, that none would believe; the
blow would be considered unintentional, the incident of the struggle to
wrest the child from her grasp.
If a moment ago she had seemed pale, haggard, a flaccid presentment of
an ordinary type, that aspect had fallen from her like a mask. Her
cheeks burned, and their intense carmine gave an emphasis to the luster
and tint of her redundant yellow hair. Her eyes were alert, brilliant,
not gray, nor brown, nor green, yet of a tint allied to each, and were
of such a clarity that one could say such eyes might well gaze unabashed
upon the sun. All her wonted distinction of manner had returned to her
unwittingly, with the resumption of her normal identity, the reassertion
of her courage. The necessity to endure had made her brave, quick to
respond to the exigencies of the moment.
As the child’s voice came to her through the torrents in a plaintive
bleat of reluctance and terror, full of the pain and fear of parting
from her, who was his little Providence, omnipotent, all-caring,
infinitely loving, she nerved herself to call out gaily to him and wave
her hand, and exhort him in the homely phrase familiar to all infancy,
“to be a good boy.” The tears started to her eyes as she noted his
sudden relapse into silence, and saw, through the rain, how humbly and
acquiescently he lent himself to the bestowal of his small anatomy in
the corner deemed fit by the imperious paternal authority.
Little Marjorie Ashley had been almost stunned into silence for a time.
The terrors of the experience, the exacerbation of nerves in the
tempestuous turmoils, the suspense, the agitation, the fear of injury or
even of death, all seemed nullified now in the expectation of rescue and
under the protective wing of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney. Her father, going within
to the office for some valuable which he had deposited in the safe of
the boat, had charged Marjorie to stand beside Mrs. Floyd-Rosney till
his return. The little girl utilized the interval more acceptably to
that lady than one might have deemed possible, by her extravagant
praises of baby Ned and her appreciative repetition of his bright
sayings.
Catching sight of him as he looked up from the yawl, she called out in
affected farewell,--“So long, partner!”--her high, reedy voice
penetrating the down-pour with its keenly sweet and piercing quality,
and she fell back against Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, laughing with delight and
gratified mirth, when the response came shrill, and infantile, and
jubilant,--“So long, Mar’jee! So long, Mar’jee!”
Floyd-Rosney’s look of inquiry as the business of embarkation brought
him near his wife was so marked as to be almost articulate. He could not
understand her changed aspect. He was prepared for tears, for
reproaches, even for an outbreak of indecorous rage. He had intended
that, in any event, she should feel his displeasure, his discipline,
and it was of a nature under which she must needs writhe. Anything that
affected the boy, however slightly, had power to move her out of all
proportion to its importance. In this signal instance of danger, almost
of despair, her conduct, her accession of beauty, seemed inexplicable.
Her manner of quiet composure, her look, the stately elegance so in
accord with her slender figure, her attitude, her gait, peculiarly
characteristic of her personality, seemed singularly marked now, and out
of keeping with the situation, challenging comment.
“Mrs. Floyd-Rosney has got the nerve!” said the Captain admiringly. “She
is fit for the bridge of a man-of-war. Are you going to stand by the
deck till the last passenger has taken to the boats, madam?”
For Floyd-Rosney, knowing full well that he was imposing on her no
danger that the others did not share, had made it a point to pass her by
in summoning the ladies to descend to the yawl. In fact, a number of men
were seated on the thwarts by his orders. He had only intended to
impress her with a sense of his indifference, his displeasure, his
power. But he had given her the opportunity to assert her independence,
and, incidentally, to levy tribute on the admiration of the whole boat’s
company.
“Mrs. Floyd-Rosney doesn’t care for a living thing but little Ned,”
cried the voluble Marjorie. “If little Ned is safe she had just as lief
the rest of us would go to the bottom as not.”
Mr. Floyd-Rosney took his wife by the elbow. “Come on,” he said, “why
are you lagging back here,--afraid to get in the yawl?” Then he added
in a lower voice, “Can you do nothing to stop that miserable girl’s
chatter?”
But the voice, even hissing between his set teeth, was not so low that
Marjorie, being near, did not hear it. At all events, _she_ had had no
schooling in self-repression, in the humiliation of a politic deference.
She flamed out with all the normal instincts of self-asserting and
wounded pride.
“No, there isn’t any way to stop my chatter,”--she exclaimed hotly, “for
I have as good a right to talk as you. I am _not_ a ‘miserable girl.’
But I don’t care what _you_ say. I don’t train with your gang, anyhow!”
“Why, Marjorie,” cried Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, and her husband had a moment’s
relief in the expectation that the indignity offered to him would be
summarily, yet tactfully rebuked. But his wife only said, “What slang!
Is that the kind of thing you learn at Madame Gerault’s?”
She passed her arm about the girl’s shoulder, but Marjorie had as yet
learned no self-control at Madame Gerault’s or elsewhere, and burst into
stormy tears. Even after she was seated in the yawl, beside Mrs.
Floyd-Rosney, she wept persistently, and sobbed aloud. The
grief-stricken spectacle greatly affected little Ned Floyd-Rosney at the
further end of the yawl. After staring, in grave and flushed dismay and
amaze for a few moments, he made one or two spasmodic efforts to cheer
his boon companion from the distance. Then he succumbed to sympathy and
wept dolorously and loudly in concert.
Mrs. Floyd-Rosney made no effort to reach him by word or look. Her
husband, whose nerves a crying child affected with such intense
aggravation that he was seldom subjected to this annoyance, was
compelled to set his teeth in helpless discomfort, and endure the
affliction, intensified by the difference in age, and the variance in
pitch and vocal volume of the two lachrymose performers.
Thus freighted, the yawl pushed off, at length, into the steely rain,
the white foam, and the surging, tawny currents of the river. All looked
back at the sand-bar, doubtless, with some apprehensive regret. The
sight of the stanch Captain on the deck waving his farewell was not
calculated to dispel anxiety. The sand-bar, too, was big,--on board they
had scarcely realized its extent. In comparison with the yawl it seemed
very solid, continental. They sheered off cautiously from it lest the
yawl, too, go aground on some submerged and unsuspected process of land
building. It was obviously safer in the middle of the river, despite the
menacing aspect of the swift tumultuous current, lashed into foaming
swirls by the blast. The tremendous impetus of the flow was demonstrated
by the speed of the yawl; in one moment the steamer had disappeared, its
great white bulk, lifted high on the sand-bar, showed like a mirage
through a sudden parting of the dashing torrents, then fell astern to be
glimpsed no more. When the yawl began to run precipitately toward the
bank there was a general outcry of fear, but the mate, who was
navigating the little craft, explained that it must needs go with the
sweep of the current, which now hugged the shore, for the strength of
his crew could not make headway against it, heavily laden as the yawl
was.
From this proximity to the land the voyagers could mark the evidences
of the fury of the hurricane. Its track through the woods was near a
hundred yards wide, in almost a perfectly straight line, and in this
avenue the trees were felled, the ground cleared, the levee laid flat.
It was impossible to say what dwellings or farm-buildings shared the
disaster, for no vestige was left to tell the tale. As the yawl fared
onward it encountered one of the great monarchs of the woods, tossed
into the river by the gusts that had uprooted it and now borne swiftly
on by the combined force of the wind and the current. It required all
the strength of the oarsmen to hold back and give precedence to this
gigantic flotsam, lest some uncovenanted swirl of the waters fling it
with all its towering intricacies of boughs upon the boat, and,
hopelessly entangling it, thrash out the life of every creature on
board. For the wind was rife in its branches and thus contorted its
course. It tossed them high; whistled and screamed madly among them, and
the yawl, following reluctantly in the rear, was witness of all the
fantastic freaks of these wild gambols of the gusts. This unlucky
blockade of their course gave rise to some discussion between the mate
and the passengers, and Floyd-Rosney would fain seek to pass the
obstruction by a spurt of rowing to one side.
“I am not well acquainted with the current just along here,” said the
mate, “but if it should make in toward the land with us between it and
the bank we would be flailed alive and drowned besides.”
There was a general consensus of opinion with the mate’s position, and
one of the elderly ladies openly remonstrated against Floyd-Rosney’s
risky proposition, but his wife said never a word.
Suddenly the mate called out in a startled voice: “Back
oars,--back,--back,” and every roustabout put his full force against the
current, but their utmost strength only sufficed to retard the progress
of the boat. The tree had been struck by a flaw of wind which almost
turned it over on the surface of the water, and then went skirling and
eddying down the river. The whirling foliage gave an effect as of a
flash of iridescent light through the sad-hued landscape; the leaves all
green and yellow, as in a blend of some gorgeous emblazonry, showed now
against the white foam and now against the slate-tinted sky. The myriad
wild waves, surging to and fro in the commotion, leaped in long, elastic
bounds, and shook their tawny manes. In the tumultuous undulations of
the waters it required all the skill of the experienced boat-hands to
keep the yawl afloat.
“Give it up,” said Floyd-Rosney, at length. “We must go back to the
_Cherokee Rose_.”
“Impossible,--against the current with this load,” said the mate.
“We can try, at least,” urged Floyd-Rosney. “If we don’t turn back the
current will carry us down into the midst of that cursed tree in case we
have another gust.”
“Isn’t there a bayou about half a mile further?” suggested Adrian Ducie.
“Does the current make in?”
“I am not sure whether it’s a creek or a bayou,” said the mate, “but the
current does make in along there.”
“As if it matters a _sou marqué_ whether it is a creek or a bayou,”
fleered Floyd-Rosney contemptuously.
“It makes all the difference in the world,” retorted Ducie. “If it is a
creek it flows into the Mississippi,--a tributary. If it is a bayou the
Mississippi flows into it, for it is an outlet. If the current sets that
way it may carry the tree into the bayou, provided it is wide enough,
and, if it is narrow, the boughs may be entangled there.”
It was one of the misfortunes under which the voyagers labored that
these consultations of the leaders must needs be made in the hearing of
the others, owing to the restricted space which they occupied. Several
had begun to grow panicky with the suggestion that progress was so
environed with danger, and yet that return was impossible. Perhaps the
mate was skilled in weather-signs not altogether of the atmosphere when
he said, casually,
“You seem to be well acquainted with the river hereabouts, Mr. Ducie.”
“Not the river itself, but I have made a study of a plot of survey of
the Duciehurst lands. Bayou Benoit touches the northwestern
quarter-section just where it leaves the river. We cannot be far now.”
And, indeed, a sudden rift in the sullen cypress woods on the eastern
shore revealed, presently, a stream not sluggish as was its wont, when
one might scarce have discerned the course of the water, whether an
inlet or an outlet of the river. Now it was flowing with great speed and
volume obviously directly from the Mississippi. As the mate had said,
the current hugged the shore. The oarsmen made as scant speed as might
be while the great tree, in its rich emblazonment of green and gold,
went teetering fantastically on the force of the river. Its course grew
swifter and swifter with the momentum of the waters, seeking liberation,
until, all at once, it became stationary. As Ducie had thought probable,
its boughs had entangled themselves with the growths on one side of the
narrow bayou. It was effectually checked for the nonce, although, at any
moment, the force of the stream might break off considerable fragments
of the branches and thus compass its dislodgment.
“Give way, boys,” cried the mate in a stentorian voice. “Give way.” The
crew stretched every muscle, and the yawl skimmed swiftly past the
great, flaring obstruction, swinging and swaying as if at anchor in the
mouth of the bayou. Now and again anxious, frightened glances were cast
astern. But a pursuit by the woodland monster did not materialize.