Читать книгу The Jingo - George Randolph Chester - Страница 4

Table of Contents

"My ship!" wailed Bezzanna. "I said that the next one that came by was mine; and now it is all breaking up!"

"Where?" asked the king, gaining the top of the tower with the prince and clutching at the railing.

"Wait for the next lightning flash!" directed the girl excitedly. "Don't look straight out at the open space, but over between the tops of the two big trees on the cliff. Stand just here--at this corner."

Her soft warm hand clutched her brother's. Below them they could hear the thrashing of the trees in the park, and they held tightly to each other and to the rail to avoid being blown away by the fitful gusts of wind into darkness so dense that it seemed almost palpable. Suddenly the world opened with a great blue flare and closed again in inky blackness; and for minutes afterward they were looking, dazed, upon the vivid visual image which that flash had revealed. Even in the darkness they could still see the wildly tossing trees, with the white sides of their leaves flaunted uppermost; the long, winding stone steps which led up to the palace; the town; with its modest little terrace-topped houses, cut sharp and clean into the vision, as if they had been made from fresh white cardboard; the wind-swept river, with its tossing small craft and clumsy barges; the little bay hidden in its sheltering and concealing arms of solid rock; and, far to the right of that, the miles upon miles of seething frothing reefs, fretted and churned into boiling foam--always the same, yet always changing--and so incessant in that illusion that they dizzied the eye and made it sick.

Upon the outer reefs broke the big waves with the sharp crash of pealing thunder; and, at the mercy of these irresistible battering-rams, which had gathered their strength from the racing width of a wide sea, lay a long, low, black hull, with two smoke-stacks, which, in the lightning's glare, still sent forth thin streams of smoke, red-brown against the velvet of the sky.

Another flash, and in that instant the ship slowly turned on its side and crushed down in an awful silence upon the jagged points. Breathless, the four spectators upon the tower awaited the next blue-white cleavage of the heavens; but, before it came, a red glow appeared at the point on which their strained eyes were focused. It grew and spread until, suddenly bursting into vivid flame, it lighted its own scene of destruction. Dense clouds of smoke rolled up into the reddened sky, while, forming its own silhouette by his own flame, the ship stood out, distinct and clean-cut, with every rod and every rail like a tracery of jet upon cloth of gold; and as the foaming waves rushed in toward the shore, they were wreathed with crimson froth.

"It is wonderful!" gasped Bezzanna. "Wonderful and awful!"

That fierce far flame lighted dimly even the faces of the watchers on the tower, and Bezzanna, looking up at her older brother, saw tears in his eyes and pressed his arm closer.

"Men are dying out there!" he said simply.

There came another broad flash of lightning, one that raced its way in forking brilliance across the heavens, and seemed to come back again and again to perform the same mad journey; and, in the light of this parting struggle of the storm to retain its destructive clutch upon the universe, there was more opportunity to study detail.

"Oh, look!" suddenly cried Bezzanna. "Down there, just over Pointed Rock, something is coming ashore!"

The something which she indicated seemed to be a huge box, and, by an almost miraculous accident of passage between the haphazard openings in the successive reefs, it had worked its clumsy way far in to the less troubled and less violent waters.

"Perhaps it is your gift from the sea!" suggested the prince.

She unconsciously drew a little away from him. She had thought she had been holding the arm of Tedoyah on that side. She looked round for her younger brother. He was just starting to descend the inside stairway of the tower.

"Where are you going?" she called to him.

"Down the ravine to the foot of the cliff," he replied. "That thing is going to miss the opening into the bay."

"It's mine, whatever it is," she hastily warned him. "I discovered it!"

"Wait!" called the prince, and hurried after her, for she had already started down the steps. "Does that girl know there is such a thing as danger?" he demanded as they reached the splashing shelter of the stairway.

"Yes; for other people," laughed the king, and hurried, for he knew that the feet of the lively pair were winged.

Down the winding steps the youngsters dashed to the big main hall, where the flames still leaped and roared in happy comfort and cast their fitful reflections upon the great hewn logs in the beamed ceiling; then out upon the leaf-strewn terrace and down the wide stone steps into the park, where branches from the distressed trees lay thickly upon the paths. Through the flooded gardens they raced, and down through the winding, twisting, wet ravine, in the bed of which a miniature torrent of rainfall rushed to the sea.

There were slips and tumbles without number in that mad scramble, but the miracle that attends fleet youth happened for them at every footstep; for a loose stone upon which a careful adult might not place his foot with impunity, only stirred gently under their flying touch.

Above, through the interlacing leaves, the sky was pink, and they knew that the ship was still burning, a realization which, each time they looked upward, heightened the fever of their eagerness. A final turn and a steep descent brought them at last, by a ticklish path against the face of the bare cliff, to the rocky beach, which shelved sharply into the sea.

They stopped, backed against the towering wall, for a disappointed survey of the surf. Their prize was nowhere to be seen!

"All right; it's yours!" said Tedoyah. "I'll give you my share."

"That's because you think it's lost," charged Bezzanna; "but I want you to remember that you've let go all claims to it."

The boy laughed.

"I'll remember," he promised. "You'll never see it again, though."

"I will," she insisted. "It's round the point there, or it has come ashore among the rocks somewhere. I'll find it if I have to stay down here all night."

Tedoyah tried to restrain her, for the footing was insecure at its best and there were dangerous little pools, some of them quite deep; but, all wet as her garments were, she eluded his grasp like an eel and hurried on toward the point, beyond which was a tiny cove, invisible from any place on the beach and accessible only with the greatest difficulty, even in good weather.

She put out her foot to place it on the first of the series of irregular natural steps around the point, but, at the moment, the flames of the ship died suddenly down, leaving but an infinitesimal spark, which served only to accentuate the painful darkness. In that same instant here was a shriek from Bezzanna, and her brother heard a tumbling of rocks and a splash.

The agonized voices of the king and the prince from the lower reaches of the ravine called her name; but there was no answer.

Tedoyah had run to the point, but he stood there helpless in the darkness, calling to her and to the men who were coming; and with his eyes fixed on that flickering point of light on the ship, he prayed for it to flame up again. His prayer was answered in a different manner from that he had asked; for all at once a giant ring of fire shot straight up into the heavens, and then there was a mighty roar as if the earth and sea had split asunder--then darkness again!

The darkness was not for long, however; for, as if in answer to the tremendous explosion, or as if a direct result of it, the clouds near the horizon parted, and the round red moon shone through, casting its peaceful rays down on a sea that still sullenly tossed and tumbled, but upon which there was no vestige of a ship.

The prince and the king had gained the beach by now, just in time to see Tedoyah, stripped of his cap and cape and tunic, gripping his way round the point.

"Tedoyah!" called the king in fright.

Tedoyah paused, astride the very ridge of the point.

"If I don't find Bezzanna I won't come back," he declared, and edged round another step.

The king and the prince came plunging toward him, the king limping sorely--both with sublime disregard of their own safety.

"Is she lost?" demanded the king.

"I don't know!" cried the boy. "Bezzanna!"

"I'm here," called a cheerful voice, not twenty feet from him; and there, on the ledge of an opening in the cliff, sat Bezzanna, swinging her feet.

Tedoyah nearly fell off the ridge.

"You miserable wretch!" he gasped; and then to the men: "She's all right."

He had to say that over three times to make it distinguishable, and then he leaned his face against the rock and clasped the rugged granite with his arms to keep from falling off, and sobbed.

"Please don't!" wailed Bezzanna. "Don't you see I'm here?"

"Why didn't you answer us?" demanded the boy, now, furious.

"I just got my breath," she calmly explained. "I fell in the deep pool and had to dive under the arch and climb up here. Our old cave is still high and deep and warm and dry, Tedoyah; and my prize came ashore, just as I said! It's a beautiful big box and I get the first touch! It's mine, remember! I was just going down to look at it."

"There's something else with it, I think," hesitated her brother, examining the prize from his vantage-point at the side of it.

"That's mine, too!" she immediately reminded him.

"I wouldn't claim it," soberly advised Tedoyah, still with that curious hesitation; "for I think that the something else with it is a man--and he's dead!"

"Oh!" cried Bezzanna.

She had clambered half-way down the rock, but now she turned to it with her arms upstretched against it, as if for protection from the uncanniness which she had not yet seen. Tedoyah, on the contrary, hurried on round the point, closely followed by the prince, and leaped to the beach. As the king, with a badly hurt ankle, crept his more painful way round, the prince and Tedoyah bent down toward a sprawled something which lay against the side of the box next to the sea. The prince knelt to feel for a possible heart-beat that should distinguish the something as a man; but he rose, shaking his head.

Conquering her repugnance, Bezzanna clambered down again from her perch and approached timidly.

It was not much of a something to look at, but it had been once, when it was a man. It had been tall and muscular and well-formed, and the smoothly shaven face had been that of a young fellow not over thirty, whose countenance, now in repose, betrayed no telltale trace of bad living or evil thought. The full lips were firm and the broad jaws were tight, and his brow, upturned to the moonlight, was both high and white. His sinewy hands still gripped the rope with which the box was stoutly bound, and he was clad only in bathing trunks; but his poor body, buffeted and bruised from head to foot, was crossmarked with red cuts, flowing afresh since they had been bathed by the mocking sea.

Looking up from it with a shudder, Bezzanna's eyes met those of the prince fixed on her in hopeful speculation that perhaps this might, after all, end the restless dreaming.

"Out of the storm," he said softly and even pityingly.

A thrill of something antagonistic stirred in Bezzanna as she thought that she detected a faint note of triumph in Onalyon's voice.

"I don't believe he's dead!" she wilfully declared; and, stooping down, she laid her hand firmly and yet gently over the heart of the sprawling figure:

As if in answer to that touch, the man made a startling convulsive effort to rise upon his hands and knees, then moaned and fell back!

It was under Bezzanna's energetic direction that they removed the stranger to the cave, where she and the king bound up his wounds with strips of their clothing, while Tedoyah and the prince hurried to the palace and brought dry garments, and blankets and ointment and water, and hot broth and a pot of fire.

He was very good-looking, indeed, Bezzanna thought during the long time in which they worked so anxiously to resuscitate him, and she was bending over him when at last, after an hour of stupor, he slowly opened his eyes. They were blue!

For a moment he gazed, bewildered, into the sparkling and delighted brown orbs of Bezzanna; and then, in a language which no one in Isola could be expected to understand, because it was the choicest Broadway, he inquired:

"Where is the nearest cable office?"

The king and the prince bent over him immediately, and he repeated his question, with a shade of insistence. They did not understand; and, observing their beards, he tried them in Italian, French, Spanish and German--then scraped his memory for some fragments of Esperanto, all the time making motions with the fingers of his right hand like a telegraph key.

Finally, as the matter was urgent and he realized the necessity of finding an interpreter, he struggled painfully to his elbow and looked about him searchingly.

"Where are my pants?" he demanded.