Читать книгу As It Was in the Beginning - Philip Verrill Mighels - Страница 10

With a rattle and scraping along the deck, the device with the two prone figures desperately clinging to its surface, was halted and tilted nearly level as it struck a spar and partially mounted upon it.

A sudden glare lit up the scene where the fire had burst through shattered windows. Screams yet more appalling than those already piercing the gale arose with the movement of the vessel. A picture grotesque and monstrous was for one awful moment presented. The huge iron entrails of the vessel heaved up into sight with her breaking. Her funnels, masts, and superstructure pointed outward, strangely horizontal. Innumerable loose things rattled down the decks. She belched forth flame and clouds of steam, against which one huge iron rib, rudely torn on its end to the semblance of a giant finger, seemed pointing the way to inscrutable eternity.

The lantern, up at the "Inca's" masthead, describing an arc as it swept across the heavens, was the last thing Grenville noted. He thought how insignificantly it would sizzle in the sea! Then he and Elaine, with raft and all, were flung far out, by the suddenly accelerated velocity of the doomed leviathan, turning keel upwards as it sank. When they struck, their puny float dived under like a crockery platter, shied from some Titanic hand.

With all his strength the man clung fast to Elaine and the lattice-like planking of their deck. It seemed to Grenville, still submerged, he could never resist the force of the waves to wash them backwards to death. It appeared, moreover, the raft would never return to the top. A million bubbles broke about his ears. He felt they were diving to deeps illimitable.

With a rush of waters drumming on their senses, it shot precipitately upward at last, till air and spray greeted them together. Then, sucked deep under, anew, and backward, by the gurgling vortex where the ship had gone, and swirling about, pivoting wildly, as the raft now threatened to plunge edge downward to the nethermost caverns of the hungry sea, they met a counter-violence that forced it once more towards the surface.

The boilers had burst in the steamer's hold, with confusion to all those tides of suction. Erratically diving here and there, a helpless prey to chaotic cross currents in all directions, the float swung giddily in the mid abyss, while the water walls baffled one another.

Elaine, even more than Grenville, was bursting with explosive breath when, at length, the raft came twisting once more to the chill, sweet region of the gale. And even then strong currents drew it fiercely in their wake before it rode freely on the waters.

Dripping and gasping, Grenville half rose to scan the troubled billows for companions in distress. Not a sound could he hear, save the swash of the waves. Not a light appeared in all that void, save the distant, indifferent stars.

Elaine, too, stirred, and raised herself up to a posture half sitting. She was hatless. Her hair was streaming down across her face and shoulders in strands too wet for the wind to ravel. Her eyes were blazing wildly.

"The ship?" she said. "What happened?"

"Sunk." He stood up. Their platform was steadying buoyantly as it drifted in the breeze. "I can't even see the spot," he added, presently. "We couldn't propel this raft to the place, no matter who might be floating."

"It's terrible!" she whispered, faintly, as one afraid to accuse the Fates aloud. "Couldn't we even—— You think they are all—all gone?"

"I'll shout," said Grenville, merely to humor the pity in her breast. His long, loud "Halloo" rolled weirdly out across the wolf-like pack of waves, three—four—a half dozen times.

There was not the feeblest murmur of response. Yet he felt that, perhaps, one boatload at least might have sped away in safety.

"God help them!" he said, when the silence became once more insupportable. "He only knows where any of us are!"

"After all we'd been through!" she shivered in awe. "If only we two were really saved—— Oh, there must be land, somewhere about, if the Captain was trying to reach a port! But, of course, this isn't even a boat, and, perhaps, it will finally sink!"

He tried to summon an accent of hope to his voice.

"Oh, no; it will float indefinitely. It's sure to turn up somewhere in the end."

"We haven't food—or even water," she answered him, understandingly. "What shall we do to-morrow?"

"We are drifting rapidly northward. We may arrive somewhere by to-morrow. … You'd better sit down. It taxes your strength to stand."

"God help us all!" she suddenly prayed in a broken voice, and, sinking lower where she sat, was shaken by one convulsion of sobbing, in pity for all she had seen. She had no thoughts left for their earlier, personal encounter.

For a time Grenville stood there, braced to take the motion of the raft. The wind continued brisk and undiminished. Aided by tides, which had turned an hour earlier, to flow in its general direction, it drove the raft steadily onward over miles of gray, unresting sea.

The water slopped up between the slats whereon Elaine was sitting. She was cold, despite the tropic latitude. She was hopeful, only because she wished to contribute no unnecessary worry to the man.

Grenville at length sat down at her side, but they made no effort to converse. Elaine was exhausted by the sickening strain and the shock of that tragic end. For an hour or more she sat there limply, being constantly wet by the waves. She attempted, finally, to curl herself down and make a pillow of her arm, and there she sank into something akin to sleep.

Gently Grenville thrust out his foot and lifted her head upon the cushion of flesh above his ankle. The night wore slowly on. Three o'clock came grayly over the world-edge, where the waves made a scalloped horizon.

Slowly the watery universe expanded, as the dawn-light palely increased. By four Grenville's gaze could search all the round of the ocean, but nothing broke either sky or sea.

Five o'clock developed merely color on the water, but no sign of a sail or a funnel. Elaine still slept, while Grenville, cramped almost beyond endurance, refused to move, and thereby disturb her slumber.

But at six, as he turned for the fiftieth time to scan the limited horizon, he started so unwittingly, at sight of a tree and headland, flatly erected, like a bit of sawed-out stage scenery, above the waste of billows, that Elaine sat up at once.

"It's land!" he said. "We're drifting to some sort of land!"

She was still too hazy in her mind, and puzzled by their surroundings, to grasp the situation promptly.

"Land?" she repeated. "Oh!" and a rush of hideous memories swept confusedly upon her till she shivered, gazing at the water.

Grenville had risen to his feet, and Elaine now rose beside him. Somewhat more of the flat, wide protrusion from the sea became thus visible to both. It still appeared of insignificant extent, a blue and featureless patch against the sky, with one half-stripped tree upon its summit.

"I should say it's an island," Grenville added, quietly, restraining an exultation that might prove premature. "It is still some miles away."

"There must be someone there," Elaine replied, with an eagerness that betrayed her anxious state of mind. "Almost anyone would certainly help us a little."

What doubts he entertained of some of the island inhabitants in this particular section of the world, Sidney chose to keep to himself.

"It's land!" he said, as he had before. "That means everything!"

"Do you know of any island that ought to be in this locality?"

"I haven't the remotest notion where we are—except we are somewhere, broadly speaking, in the neighborhood of the Malay peninsula. The steamer must have drifted tremendously out of her course after we lost our rudder."

"Have you been awake for long?"

"I haven't slept."

"Have you seen or heard anything of any of the others?"

"Not a sign. … We may find some of them, landed on this island."

He had no such hope, and this she felt. She summoned a heart full of courage to meet the situation, however, and gazed off afar at the misty terra incognita enlarging imperceptibly as they drifted deliberately onward.

"It's fortunate," she said, "the steamers pass this way."

"Yes," he said, unwilling to shake this solitary hope that brightened her uncertain prospect, but he knew they were leagues from the nearest track that the ocean steamers plowed. "And I trust we'll find it entirely comfortable while we're waiting," he added. "We're sure to get dry and find something fit to eat."

She was silent for a moment. A sense of constraint was returning at last for their scene of the previous day. "It seems to be rather far away," was all she said.

"About another hour—if the breeze and tide continue favorable."

It was nearer an hour and a half, however, before they were finally abreast the headland with the tree, and swinging and turning slowly by the island's coast on the surface of a complicated tide.

The features of the land had developed practically everything usual to this latitude except habitations of men. That it was entirely surrounded by water was convincingly established. Indeed, it was not an extensive outcrop of some ocean-buried range, and, despite the luxuriance of its various patches of greenery and jungle, it was decidedly rugged in formation.

The edge past which the raft was leisurely floating was a broken and cavern-pitted wall of rock affording no promise of a landing. Above this loomed the solitary tree that Grenville had seen from a distance. Nothing suggestive of hearth smoke arose against the sky from one end of the place to the other.

This one vital fact, in her excitement, Elaine entirely overlooked. She likewise failed to note the look of concern that Grenville could not have banished from his eyes. The prospect of reaching a dry, firm soil outweighed her immediate worries.

"Couldn't we paddle in closer?" she said. "Where do you mean to land?"

"Where the Fates shall please," he answered, grimly. "Without even a line for me to take ashore we must not be over fastidious."

"We could swim—if we have to," she told him, bravely. "We seem to be floating farther out."

They were, at that particular moment. The powerful current carried them swiftly seaward a considerable distance, till at length the raft was drawn to a species of whirlpool, some two hundred yards in diameter, the inner rim of which was depositing weed at the edge of something like an estuary, indenting the shore of the island.

On the huge circumference of this whirlpool they were finally rounding towards the one bit of beach that Grenville had been able to discover. Yet when they approached within almost touching distance of this sunlit strand, the current failed, permitting the breeze to waft them again towards the center.

"Stand by to go ashore," said Grenville, resolving suddenly on his course, and overboard he slipped, at the float's outer edge, and, using his legs like a powerful frog, he pushed at the raft with sufficient force to overcome the action of the wind.

For a moment his efforts seemed in vain—and then the clumsy affair nosed reluctantly shoreward an inch, and was once more assisted by the tide. Ten feet out he found the water shallow and, planting his feet on the solid sand, drove the raft at once to the estuary's edge, where Elaine leaped lightly ashore.

Some startled creature slipped abruptly into the pool that the tiny harbor formed. This escaped Elaine's attention. A moment later the raft rode scrapingly over a bar that all but locked the inlet, and Grenville stood dripping on the sand.

"Welcome to our city," said he, an irrepressible emotion of joyousness and relief possessing him completely at the moment, and, going at once to the near-by growth, where a long stout limb had been broken from a tree, he dragged this severed member forth to the beach and across the estuary's mouth, where it effectually blocked the channel against the raft's escape. Then he folded a couple of large-sized leaves with his hands, secured each with a slender twig, and, giving one to Elaine for a cap, placed the other upon his head.

Elaine was no less relieved than he, so elastic and buoyant is youth.

"The villages must be on the farther side," she said. "What language do you suppose the natives speak?"

"Well—doubtless some Simian, in any case," he answered, having fancied one movement half seen in the trees beyond was made by an ape or a monkey. "I'd suggest you recall your fondness for fruit for breakfast."

She comprehended his meaning with amazing promptness. Her face took on its serious expression.

"You don't believe we shall find the island inhabited? We shall have only fruit this morning?"

"I am sure we shall find some fruit," he said, "and we must certainly look for water."

A sense of helplessness and despair attacked Elaine momentarily. She began to wonder, with alarm, how long they might be stranded on the place—and what attitude Grenville might assume. She had thoroughly comprehended the passion of his nature in the outburst she had seen. A sense of distrust she dared not show came creeping to her mind.

"We must make the best of it, of course," she said, as calmly as possible. "We can't even light a fire, I suppose."

"I certainly have no matches," he answered, cheerfully. "All I had were in my coat. Suppose we explore the island first and leave despair till after breakfast."

She met his gaze with fearless eyes that set his heart to pounding.

"I shall never despair," she answered, more bravely than she felt—"at least, I shall try to do my part, till we are taken off."

He understood the challenge in her attitude.

"I felt that from the first," he answered, easily. "Perhaps we'd better begin by climbing up to the headland."

He caught up a short, heavy stick and turned about to force a way up through the rocks and tangled growth between the shore and summit.

And what a figure he presented—even to the frightened girl, whose anger still lingered in her veins—stripped, as he was, to his shirtsleeves, a powerful, active being, masterful and unafraid. With a strange, dreadful sense of isolation and the primitive, aye, even primal, conditions in which they had been cast, she followed helplessly at his heels for their first real look at the island.