THE BITTERNESS OF DEATH.
As he staggered back after that revelation, St. Georges noticed that
the great chant sounded less strongly and more distantly in his ears,
and, seized with a sudden apprehension, he rushed to the cabin
porthole.
Then he knew that what he had dreaded, that the idea which had sprung
into his mind a second before, as the sturdy English voices became
more hushed and subdued, was indeed an absolute fact--the flotilla was
retiring. It had finished its work of destruction--it was returning to
the man-of-war.
And he was left behind!
Behind! to fall into the hands of the French, who, he knew very well,
would come forth from the fort and batteries directly the conquerors
had withdrawn. He was in a trap from which there was no escape. He
would be found there, and his doom be swift.
Yet, in a moment, even as he glanced down at his enemy at his feet and
noted the set features--handsome as in life--the white face, the blood
at either side of the mouth, looking as before like two small
down-turned horns, he asked himself if he was indeed doomed? Also, why
stay there to be taken like a rat in a trap? The sea was beneath him;
a mile off was the English fleet. If he could swim to that, even
halfway to it, he could make signs and, perhaps, be seen and rescued;
at the worst it would but be death. And a more fearful death than any
the sea could bring awaited him if he remained here.
He cast one more look at De Roquemaure lying with his head upon the
locker. At last he was done for! He would never cross his path again.
If he himself could live, if he could escape out of this burning
pandemonium, could again stand a free man on an English deck, he would
have to contend with him no more. There would be but one thing further
to do then--to stand face to face with Aurelie de Roquemaure, to ask
her if this charge against her was true--as St. Georges never
doubted!--to demand his child, and, if she would not restore it to
him, to--to--what? His mind was full of deeds of savagery now; the
last few days, filled with slaughter and spent amid the arousal of
men's fiercest passions, had made him fierce too. At this moment if
Aurelie could appear before him he knew that he should slay her--send
her to join her brother and all the other victims of his own aroused
passions. It would be dangerous for her if she were face to face with
him at this moment and refused to acknowledge where she had hidden
Dorine.
She was not there, however; at the present moment he had to take steps
to free himself, to escape from the burning transport. "'Twill be time
enough," he muttered, "to tax her with her perfidy when I stand once
more before her to punish her for it. And my own hour is too near, may
be too close at hand, for me to think of that. But when it comes,
then----"
He heard an explosion in another part of the vessel--he knew another
tier of guns had been reached by the flames; he was tarrying too long.
The magazine must be close to the cabin in which he was, might be,
indeed, beneath the cabin floor--at any moment he risked being blown
to atoms. He must lose no time. To be caught there was death, instant
and certain!
Lying at the door of the main cabin where he had been slain was one of
the officers of the transport; near him another man of lower rank, the
one shot through the back the other cut down by Rooke's sailors as he
fled into the cabin; and as his eye rested on them a thought struck
him. None of Bellefonds and James's forces on land could say who were
or were not officers of the transports--what was there to prevent him
from being one for the time being? All was fair in war!--and he was as
much French as any who might come out from the forts or batteries to
the sinking and exploding ships--if any dared to come at all. Once in
the garb of either of these lying here, officer or petty officer, and
he would be able to get safely ashore, and could avoid question by
disappearing a moment afterward, or as soon as might be.
And he would be in France--would be so much nearer to the reckoning
with Aurelie de Roquemaure!
He drew on the jacket of the officer as the thoughts of all this
chased one another through his mind, threw his own sword down and took
up that of the dead man, placed on his head the hat he had
worn--bearing in it a gold cockade on which a glittering sun was
stamped--and then, glancing through the square porthole that gave on
the shore, he looked to see if, yet, any of the French were coming out
to save some of their vessels from the conflagration. But the wind was
blowing off the sea to the land and carrying with it the smoke from
the burning ships; between those ships and the shore all was obscured.
And still, as he looked, the explosions--though fainter now--took
place at every moment; he could hear the crackling of the flames in
the vessel in which he was.
He knew that he must go--must not tarry another instant. Those flames
were gaining round him; they would reach the magazine before
long--and--then! He must go at once.
He cast one more hurried glance at De Roquemaure, who seemed quite
dead now. But, dead or alive, what mattered it? If dead, so much the
better; if alive, he would be blown to atoms in a few more moments--as
he would himself if he tarried longer. He must go at once.
"Farewell, dog!" he muttered, with one look downward at his enemy.
"Farewell. Your account is made!" And without wasting another
moment--for his fear of being hurled into eternity himself the next
moment had gained terrible hold on him--he rushed to the main cabin
door and seized the handle.
An awful sweat of fear--a cold, clammy sweat--broke out all over him
as he did so; he knew now how dear life was to him--dearer than he had
ever dreamed before that it would be; or was it rather the fear of an
awful death than death itself? Was it that which caused him to almost
faint with horror as he recognised that the door was either locked or
jammed, so that it would not open?
He was doomed--the fire was spreading--he heard one great gun explode
by itself--a gun on the lower deck near where the powder room must
be--_beneath_ him--he was doomed! In another few moments--perhaps not
more than four or five at most--the bulkheads would fly asunder, the
deck split like matchwood, he and the dead bodies of De Roquemaure and
the others be flung to the elements, be blown into portions of the
elements themselves.
Drenched with sweat, paralyzed with terror--it _was_ the terror of an
awful death and not of death itself; livid with horror--though he was
not aware such was the case; his lips parched and glued together; not
knowing whether his limbs were shaking beneath him or the deck of the
cabin quivering before its impending upheaval, his starting eyes
glared round the prison he was in. And as he so glared he saw--if God
gave him a moment more--his opportunity. The great square ports--an
invention of but the last few years and superseding the old small
round ones--furnished that opportunity.
With a gasp--nay, almost a cry--he clambered on the locker beneath the
nearest one--again it seemed as though the ship was quivering with the
impending explosion!--thrust his head and shoulders through, dragged
the sword by his side carefully after him, seized a top chain hanging
down into the water, and was himself in the water a moment later. Then
a nervous, hurried thrust of one foot against the hull, with an
impetus obtained thereby which propelled him a dozen feet from the
vessel, a few masterful strokes made boldly, all trembling with fear
and horror as he was, and he plunged into a puff of black smoke, the
cinders among which hissed on his face as he struck it, and he was
saved--saved from that most awful death, even though countless other
deaths surrounded and loomed up before him; saved, at least, from
being dismembered and flung piecemeal in a million atoms on the bosom
of the ocean.
The smoke drifting in his face recalled to him that he was swimming
toward the English fleet; the current still making toward the shore
told him that he could never reach that fleet. Even as he swam away
from the doomed transport he knew that the powerful tide beneath was
carrying him back; he must change his course, or another moment would
carry his body against the after part of the ship he had but now
escaped from, the ship which must now ere long be hurled out of the
sea! It was easy to do so, however; to turn himself away from her so
that, even though borne back to the coast of Cotentin, he would pass
far astern of her. He had enough strength for that, enough left to
haul himself far out from where she lay--but not much more. He was
sore spent now with all he had gone through, and was borne down also
with the double weight of clothes upon him; as he glided by, or was
carried back--though some forty yards adrift of the transport--he
could do nothing more than tread water and so manage to keep himself
afloat.
Borne through the murky grime, along that water there came now the
swish of oars and the voices of men speaking in French--French
strongly accentuated and in the Manche _patois_. What were they doing,
he wondered. Had they come out to save some of the burning transports
and boats, to endeavour to stop the flames and also the firing of the
guns by the heat--their own guns that, as they fired, hurled their
charges on their own shore? Were they going to meet their dooms
unknowingly by venturing on that very place of death which he had just
escaped from?
It might be--might well be so; and though he had fought against
them--though they were Frenchmen and his enemies, too, he must warn
them, save them, if he could: they were men, human beings; he could
not let them go unwittingly to such an awful end as this, could not
let them board that ship and meet the fate he had avoided. Therefore
he hailed them as loudly as he was able, screamed to them, besought
them to enter no vessel near; above all to avoid the burning
transport. But whether they understood him, even if they heard, he
could not guess; he caught still the beat of the oars upon the waves,
heard their chattering voices, even one or two of their expressions;
and then, as the tide took him nearer and nearer to the shore, he lost
sound of those voices altogether.
"Strange," he muttered, "strange she blows not up--many minutes have
elapsed since I quitted her--twenty at the least, and yet the
explosion has not come. They may have boarded her, those men, have
extinguished the flames: there may have been no powder left in the
mag--Ah!"
There came an awful roar as he so muttered, a roar such as he had
heard twenty times in as many hours; a hundred feet above and behind
him, as he turned swiftly in the water, he saw a fan-shaped mass of
flame ascending to the skies; he saw black objects amid that mass of
flame--what were they, beams, masts, or human bodies?--he saw the
smoke rent open, and great pieces of the transport floating or falling
on to the waters with terrific crashes. Then there rushed down on him
a fresh mountain of blood-coloured smoke, with blazing cinders and
pieces of burning wood, and smouldering sails all borne along in its
midst, and it enveloped him and choked him, while the burning matter
fell on him and hissed on his wet hair and skin, so that he was fain
to let himself sink below the waves for some few seconds to escape the
_debris_ and those suffocating fumes. And even as he did so, and when
he arose to the surface once more, cooled and refreshed by the
immersion of his face, his first thought was to utter a heartfelt
prayer for his escape from the awful fate that, but half an hour ago,
had threatened him and been so near.
Scarce had he done so than, as he swam a little now, being eased by
having floated and trod water for some time, he saw beneath the smoke,
which dispersed as it neared the shore and drifted inland, that he
himself was close in shore. He could perceive quite clearly the yellow
beach of Cotentin on which the incoming tide was rippling, and could
see also several bodies lying about on that beach--soldiers doubtless
killed by the fire from the English war vessels, or, perhaps, by the
discharge of the French guns when turned upon them by the parties
which had boarded their own ships. But that was all, except one or
two figures moving about and bending over them--no doubt the ghouls
who are to be found wherever a dead body is after a battle.
And as he glanced at these last relics of the great battle of La
Hogue, his foot touched the bottom; a moment later he was wading
ashore.
He stood once more in France, the land in which he would find his
child--if she was still alive.