A Veldt Official: A Novel of Circumstance

“Gone! I only am left; and I am going to save you, if I can: if not, to die with you; and death will be sweet.”

Something of all that had been passing through his mind passed through Mona’s now. She pressed her lips to his, clasping him convulsively.

“You came back to die with me? Oh, my love! my love!”

She was quite calm as the whole truth struck upon her. Love seemed utterly to dispel all terrors of death. But Roden did not intend that it should come to that if he could help it. Keenly and carefully he had been looking around. Every life-buoy had disappeared, snatched off by the panic-stricken crowd. The deck cabins, though yawning and seamed, were so firmly stanchioned that he could not drag out so much as a plank. The skylights were unloosed. There was nothing. Again the deck beneath them gave that convulsive, shivering lurch.

“Mona, darling,” he whispered, “act now with that splendid courage you showed before. I will not leave go of you, but don’t clutch me or struggle. We shall go down, but we shall come up again. Now – come.”

But before he could gain the side of the ship with her there was an angry, seething swirl – and there leaped out of the gloom and mist in front huge wreaths, white and spectral, and hissing like snakes. Then with this appalling spectacle their footing gave way, and it seemed as if they were being whirled up into the very heavens. The after-part of the great hull reared itself aloft, and with a roaring, thunderous plunge, the Scythian disappeared from mortal sight for ever.

Down, down, into the farther depths – down, down, ever down, with a vibrating and jarring and crashing as of the destruction of ten million worlds. The weight of ten million worlds seemed upon these two, as, socked down in the vortex of the foundering ship, the swiftly flashing brain realised the terrific, the soul-curdling barrier that lay between them and the upper air. Down, down – ever down – down through those roaring, jarring realms of space and of darkness, of black and rayless night.

Never for the fraction of an instant did Roden relax his grasp; never in that swift, sickening engulfment, while dragged down and down to the black depths of creation; never, as the starry fires of suffocation dared and scintillated before his strained and bursting eyeballs. Never would he; for even the last awful struggle of dissolution should but rivet the embrace tighter. Then the engulfment, the suction, seemed to slacken. A vigorous effort, and he felt himself rising; yes, distinctly rising. Ha! air! light! yet not light. With a rush as of a bird through the air, he – they – soared up from that vast ocean depth, gaining the upper air once more.

Then in nameless fear he put his ear to her lips. Was she still living – or had she succumbed to that long suffocating immersion? A faint sigh escaped her breast; but that little sound caused his heart to leap with a wild and thrilling ecstasy. She lived – lived still. And then, drawing her closer to him as they floated, he kissed those lips, cold with semi-unconsciousness, wet with the salt brine of ocean; and it seemed to him that the kiss was returned. Did ever the world see stranger love passage, – these two alone, floating in the night mist; alone on the vast expanse of a silent ocean, nothing between them and death but the cork lifebelt of the one, and the far from inexhaustible swimming powers of the other?

Would any of the boats be hanging about the scene of the wreck? Not likely. Those which had escaped the havoc wrought by the first rush were crowded to the water’s edge. The panic-stricken castaways would sheer off as far as possible, eager to pat all the distance they could between themselves and the vortex of the foundering ship. Yet there was just the chance, and to this end, as soon as he had recovered breath Roden sent up a long, loud, penetrating call. His voice rang eerily out, rendering the slimy stillness more dead, more oppressive than before. But – no answer.

This he had expected. The hopelessness of their position was with him throughout. It was useless exhausting his forces in swimming hither or thither; wherefore he employed just enough movement to enable him to keep himself, and Mona, comfortably afloat. Again he raised his voice in a louder, clearer call.

Stay! What was that? Echo? Echo from the vastness of the liquid solitude? No. It was not an echo.

There floated out through the mist a fainter, shriller cry. Roden’s pulses beat like a hammer, and a rush of blood surged to his head. The boats had waited around, then? They would be picked up, saved – for the present. Again he shouted, long and loudly.

And now a strange, awesome, wonderful thing befell. Through the enshrouding mist there darted a nebulous expanding ray, as from the disc of some mighty lantern, and upon the curtain of vapour was silhouetted, black and gigantic, the horizontal form of a coffin; and rising from it and falling back again, the head and shoulders of a man, of huge proportions, black as night. Heavens! what appalling shade of darkness was this, haunting the drear, horrible, inky surface of that slimy sea?

The Thing bore down upon them, was almost over them. Roden, convinced that this new horror was a mere illusion begotten of the mist and his own exhausted state, closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again it had vanished.

But in its place was something else. Brighter and brighter shone the nebulous ray, and now, parting the mist folds a half-moon looked down; looked down on these two heads, mere tiny specks upon the vast ocean surface – down, too, upon that other thing. And seeing what it was, the revulsion of hope which shot through their two hearts was terrible.

There floated what looked like a plank. No, stay! Was it a plank? It seemed more solid; it was oblong; and upon it, stretched out and clinging wildly to its sides, was the figure of a man. This, then, grotesquely exaggerated and distorted by the mist, was what had constituted the coffin apparition.

In the shock of this blank and bitter disappointment Mona had well-nigh lost consciousness. But upon her companion and protector the sight produced a strangely reinvigorating effect. A gleam as of a set, fell purpose shone from his eyes, as, beneath the sickly, moist light of the fog-veiled moon, he watched the plank and the clinging man draw nearer and nearer, while he guided himself and his charge silently, imperceptibly towards it; and the meaning of the lurid, predatory look was this: —

He meant to have that plank.

But the man who was already on it?

Well, he must get off it. Whatever the support was it certainly would not uphold two, let alone three. Mona must have it – must take the place of its present occupant. He himself could continue to swim, to float as he was doing, just aiding himself by the support of a hand upon its edge. The man who was on it now must yield it up.

Faint and shrill again came the cry which they had at first heard, and it had in it the quaver of exhaustion, of terror, of despair. This time no reply was made. But keeping behind and out of sight of the floating waif, Roden, with a few noiseless but vigorous strokes, brought his now unconscious charge and himself to within grasping distance of the concern. And as he did so he could hardly control his joy. The thing was a solid hatch, and was fitted with two strong ring-bolts, one at each diagonal corner.

Just then, alarmed by the faint splash, the man turned. His teeth were chattering with cold and fright, and his limbs shaking as he clung convulsively to his support. The moon, falling for an instant upon his anguished features, revealed the face of Lambert.

“What – who are you?” he quavered. “There’s no room – no room here. The thing won’t carry more than one. Oh – Musgrave, by God!”

“Yes. Musgrave, by God!” answered Roden, a kind of snarling triumph underlying his sneer. “You’re right. The thing won’t carry more than one, and that one is going to be Miss Ridsdale. So off you get, Lambert.”

“But I can’t swim another stroke. I’m done up,” stammered the other.

“Don’t care. You can go to the bottom then. Get off, will you?”

“No, I won’t,” yelled the unfortunate man in the fury of despair. “My life’s as good as other people’s. I’m here first, and here I mean to stick.”

“Oh, do you?” And dragging down the side of the impromptu raft which was nearest him Roden suddenly released it. Up it went with a jerk, flinging its occupant to the other side, where, losing his hold of the ring-bolt, he rolled off into the sea. By the time he could recover himself and think about striking out, the hatch was quite a number of yards away.

“Musgrave, Musgrave!” shrieked the despairing man, “for God’s sake don’t leave me! Let me just rest a hand on the thing to support myself; I won’t try and get on it. I swear I won’t.”

The only answer was a laugh – a blood-curdling laugh, a demoniacal laugh, sounding, as it did, from the very jaws of death upon that dark and horrible waste of waters.

“I wouldn’t believe the oath of such a crawling sneak as you, Lambert, if taken on your deathbed; and that’s about where it is taken now. Remember the valuable discovery you made at Doppersdorp. Well, you thought to ruin me, but you only twisted the rope to hang yourself with, for if your discovery hadn’t driven me from the country I shouldn’t be here to-day to take your last plank from you. Now we are quits; for I tell you, if this thing would carry fifty people, you shouldn’t get upon it.”

While Roden was thus speaking Lambert had been drawing gradually nearer. Now making a sudden last despairing effort, with a sort of spring out of the water, he succeeded in seizing the edge of the hatch, upon which Mona had already been lifted, and was lying unconscious. It began to slant perilously.

“Let go, will you!” spake Roden, between his teeth, in a voice like the growl of a wild beast. “What? You won’t!” And with all his force he struck out, aiming a blow between the other’s eyes. But Lambert saw it coming, and dodged it.

It was a strange and soul-curdling scene, that upon which the ghastly moon looked down, these two men, both within the very portals of death, striving, battling alone in the black oiliness of the midnight sea, fighting for that small slab of wood – fighting, the one for his life, the other for a life that was far more precious to him than his own. And of all the horrific and heart-sickening acts which that pale orb has witnessed, it can seldom have looked upon one more appalling.

Now Lambert made a frantic clutch at his adversary, hoping in his frenzy of despair to drag the latter down with him. But abandoning his hold of the raft for a moment Roden dived, then rising seized Lambert by the neck from behind, battering his head against the hard wood. The unfortunate surgeon, more than half stunned, relaxed his hold, and fell back into the sea.

“Good-bye, Lambert,” cried the other, with a glee that was hellish in its ferocity. “Pity I haven’t got Sonnenberg here to send after you. Well, you and I are quits now, at any rate. Good-bye, Lambert!”

For reply came a frightful noise, a gurgling, gasping, inarticulate yell. Then the struggles of the despairing wretch ceased. A boil of bubbles came glittering up to the surface of the now moonlit water, then they too ceased. Roden Musgrave and his unconscious charge were alone together once more – alone on the dark, silent, midnight sea.

Chapter Thirty Four.

“Air, Light, and Wave Seemed Full of Burning Rest.”

Morning dawned. The sun shot up from his liquid bed, a ball of fiery splendour, purpling the vast immensity of a sailless ocean, shining down with rapidly increasing and merciless heat upon the speck formed by the impromptu raft amid the utter boundlessness of that blue-green, slimy, and now most horrible expanse. Not another object was visible far or near, not even so much as a stick of wreckage which might have come to the surface. Had they drifted with some current far from the scene of the night’s awful disaster?

Roden Musgrave, supporting himself by resting a light grasp upon the hatch, had been swimming mechanically all these hours, and well indeed was it that the water in those semi-tropical seas was more than ordinarily buoyant, for this and his coolness of brain had enabled him to spare all superfluous waste of energy. He had managed to secure his unconscious companion to the ring-bolts with a piece of cord which he had thrust into his pocket in view of some such emergency, and this timely precaution saved much expenditure of valuable strength in holding her in her otherwise precarious position. Yet now, upon himself, the night’s exhaustion and horror were beginning to tell; and he was, as we have said, swimming mechanically and as one half-asleep.

Now a hand stole forth and rested softly and caressingly upon his head.

“Love, why did you not leave me to my fate?” The voice, low and dreamy in its sweetness, resumed: “It would have been all over by now. Yet you threw away safety to come back and give your life for mine.”

The voice, the touch, awakened him, roused him to consciousness as wide as it ever had been.

“I would not be in such safety now if I had the opportunity,” came the reply, from the swimming head. “Our chances are desperate, yet I am happier at this moment than I have been at any time since – that day.”

“My darling, how selfish I am, resting at ease here while you have been struggling all these hours in the water,” she said. “Come up here and rest beside me, sweetheart. The thing will carry us both. Then we can talk nearer – closer to each other.”

“No. It will hardly carry you dry and comfortable. Besides, I might capsize it, and what then?”

For answer she began deliberately to untie the knots of the lashings that secured her.

“What – what are you doing?”

“I am going to take your place. Then you will be able to rest.”

“Mona! Mona I don’t be foolish. You can’t swim a stroke.”

“But the lifebelt will keep me up, and I can get the same amount of support you are having.”

“No, no, I tell you. Don’t loosen the knots. I might not be able to lash them again so easily. Stay. I will try if the thing will hold us both, if only for a little while.”

By the most careful and wary manoeuvring, and alert to lower himself if the hatch listed dangerously, he managed to worm himself upon it. Even then, lying beside her, the additional weight submerged the impromptu raft by nearly a foot. Still, by avoiding any violent or sudden movement, the position was comparatively a safe one. Then, for the first time for many hours, the first time since rising to the surface after being drawn down in the vortex of the foundering ship, they kissed, and there, crouching on their few feet of planking, it the only frail support between them and the vast green depths of that awful ocean abyss, themselves not even entirely above the surface, with all the terrors of their indescribably appalling position vividly brought home to them by the oozy, lifeless silence of the deserted sea, and the fierce, darting rays of the ascending sun, these two alone together were happy – strangely, mysteriously, awesomely, but most unequivocally, happy.

“We are not altogether without supplies,” said Roden, almost light-heartedly, as he produced the water-tight cartridge bag and began to extract some of its contents, using the utmost care lest a drop of sea water should by any chance be splashed upon the latter. “But we must be as sparing of them as we know how, for Heaven only can tell how long our cruise is likely to last. If any of the boats of the Scythian are picked up we shall be searched for.”

“And if not?”

“We must take our chance. We cannot be out of the track of the mail lines.”

His hopeful tone was full of comfort to Mona, who quite overlooked the vastness of ocean, and the comparatively small area commanded from the bridge of a mail steamer, also the well-nigh invisibility of so small an object as the hatch of a ship, which, presenting a flat surface, would hardly attract attention even at a very short distance. She ate a morsel of the biscuit and concentrated soup, and sipped a little of the weak spirit and water out of the pewter flask, then declared that she felt able to go for a long time without more.

“But what are you doing, dearest?” she cried, as having satisfied himself that she was in earnest, he had deliberately shut up and replaced the supplies. “No, no, I won’t allow that. You shall not starve yourself.”

“I don’t want anything; not yet, at any rate. The rest has set me up more than food would do.”

But to that sort of pleading Mona would not for a moment listen. Not another morsel would she touch until he had taken his share, she vowed. Besides, putting the matter on the very lowest and most selfish grounds, if he starved himself, how would he keep up his strength to watch over her?

This told. He yielded, or pretended to, at any rate, to the extent of a slight moisten from the flask.

“I don’t want any food; I couldn’t eat, even if we had enough to last us a year.”

This was simply the truth. The man’s high-strung nerves, with the excitement and peril, and consciousness of the success with which single-handed he had met and so far overcome the latter, had thrown him into a state of strange exaltation which lifted him above mere bodily cravings. There was something too of a sensuous witchery, a fascination, in floating there in the warm lapping heave of the tropical waters, rising all smoothly in imperceptible undulations. It was as though they two were in a kind of intermediate state, between earth and Heaven, the world far away, floating in a Nirvana dream of stirless and peaceful rest.

Not a word had escaped Mona as to that ghastly midnight struggle. The discovery of Lambert, and his fate seemed to leave not the faintest trace in her mind. If not wholly unconscious at the time, the incident must have seemed to her as nothing but an illusive dream. She did not even speculate as to how she had been placed upon this bit of wreckage which was supporting her, supporting them both, thus providentially.

So the day went by – the long, glaring, blinding day – and floating there these two waifs lay and talked – talked of strange things unseen, of the Present and of love; and in the midst of the vast immeasurable solitude heart opened to heart with well-nigh the unearthly voicing of the spirit-land. Again the sun dipped his red run to the lip of the liquid world, and plunged out of sight in a bathing flood of glory.

“I have never known what happiness meant until this day. I tell you, my Mona, although there is nothing but a plank or two between ourselves and death, speaking selfishly, I have no wish to be rescued, no wish for further life. I have done with life and its illusions. For your sake I trust that help may come, for my own it is the last thing I desire.”

“Darling, I don’t want to live without you. But think – think what life will mean to us together. Do not say, then, that you have no wish for rescue.”

“I have thought – and a presentiment has been upon me for some time. Hope and trust in me are dead. I said it was with life and its illusions I had done, for the two are convertible terms. I have had a strange foreshadowing of what has happened, and that it would be for the best. Love – my love – so strangely, so miraculously recovered, when I looked upon you for the last time on that day it was with the flash of a sure and certain conviction that I should behold you again – how and where I knew not; only that it would be at the hour of death, in some sort of magnetic extra-natural way as that in which I beheld you before in my dream, there in the burning house.”

Solemnly, unimpassionedly the words were uttered, and the voice was that of a man who has done with life, and is glad that it should be so. A sob shook Mona’s frame, and her tears rained down, mingling with the oily smoothness of the tropical sea. She clasped him wildly to her in a warm, passionate embrace, and their lips, wet with the salt brine, again met and clung.

“Love, love!” she whispered. “What a sweet word that is, since it can turn to sweetness and light such an awful position as that in which we now are. For I know the peril of our position – know it and realise it to the full. Coward that I was to let you go as I did. No wonder you turned from me with scorn and loathing, you who alone taught me what love really was. But I will not let you go again. We will live together or die together. We will not be separated again. We will not – we will not!”

In truth the scene was a passing strange one, a marvel. Her voice warmed and quivered with tenderness, and the smile which curved her lips and threw a melting lustre into her eyes was radiant, as though those words were uttered in peaceful security with a lifetime of happiness opening out before her – before them both. Yet, half submerged, upborne by the frailest of supports, they two were floating out upon the stupendous expanse of dusking waters – drear, solemn, silent – horrible in their awesome loneliness as in the far back ages of the world’s birth, while yet darkness brooded over the face of the deep.

Thus closed the first day.

Then, as the blackness of night fell, a faint breeze stirred the water, and there came a change, one of weird and unearthly splendour. In their countless myriads the stars sprang forth, and great constellations gushed redly through the spheres, throwing a revolving ray athwart the lesser luminaries in the transcendent brilliance and beauty of a tropical sky. Roseate meteors, too, falling in streaks, and lo, the whole surface of the sea blazed with phosphoric incandescence.

And the effect was wondrous, for bathed from head to foot in the phosphorescent flame, clothed, as it were, in shining clusters of stars, Mona’s splendid form was as that of some inexpressibly beautiful goddess of the sea; the oblong of the planking whereon it rested framing her as with a golden glory. And stirred by the cool night breeze, the gentle lapping of the ripples rose and fell in strange musical cadence as of the far-away sighings of a spirit world, varied ever and anon by the gasping snort of some mysterious monster of the deep.

Dawn rose at last – the dawn of the second day. Of how many more days would they behold the dawn, these two, cut off from the world, from all human help? How many more days before languor, weakness, exhaustion, should overtake them, before their scanty stock of provisions should fail? Yet no lingering, maddening agonies of hunger or thirst should attend their dissolution. Death would be easy and swift, and, above all, would involve no separation. Both spoke truly in denying the grim King his terrors.

The sun hung like a ball of fire in the unclouded blue of the heavens; the sea was of that translucent green so inseparable from the tropics. Mona, who had been intermittently sleeping, awoke to find herself alone. An affrighted cry escaped her; and but that she was secured to the ring-bolt she would have fallen into the sea.

“Love! love! where are you?”

“Here. Don’t be alarmed, my dearest,” was the soothing reply. “I have been swimming a little, as before. I thought you had been under water long enough.”

For the raft, relieved of his weight, was now floating level with the surface. The dews of the tropical night, as well as the soaking effect of her long immersion, had given way to the potent rays of the sun, and Mona felt quite warm and dry. Still, with it she felt a shivering feeling which was ominous, together with a languor and depression such as she had not hitherto shown. The lustre, too, had gone out of her eyes, leaving them dull and heavy. Was it the beginning of the end, of failing vitality, of final exhaustion?

Upon her companion and protector, too, the strain was beginning to tell, nay, as he recognised to himself, was much more than beginning. Pale, and hollow-eyed, he seemed to be putting forth a good deal of effort, swimming as before, with one hand upon the hatch. With the weakening of their bodily state a reaction had set in, dispelling the exaltation of the day before. Both seemed to recognise the imminence of a grim alternative – an early rescue, or a speedy end.

And now, as he swam thus, Roden’s glance lit upon an object the sight of which caused his blood to tingle in a curdling, creepy thrill, a small object, dark, wet and glistening; and a great horror came upon him, for he knew that object well. It was the triangular dorsal fin of a shark.