CHAPTER XIX
'I ALMOST DREADED THIS MAN ONCE'
The Indian Ocean lay beneath the purple-scarlet rays of the setting sun as calmly and as peacefully as though, across its treacherous bosom, nothing more violent than a cat's-paw had ever swept. Indeed, so calm and peaceful was the spaceless sheet of cobalt that, almost, one might have thought he gazed upon some quiet tarn, or inland lake, shut in and warded off from any breeze that might blow or any tempest that could ever roar. Only-he who should stand upon the pebbly beach of a little island upon whose white stones the surf hissed gently as it receded slowly and faintly-as though it were asleep and languid-would have known that, for thousands of miles ahead of him, there was nothing to oppose the tempests of the east and south, or prevent them from lashing that now calm and placid ocean into madness, or from exerting their powers of awful destruction.
A little island set in that glittering, sapphire sea, with, all around its circumference of five miles, a belt of white bleached stone and sand, and with, inland and running up from the belt, green grassy slopes, in which grew tall palm trees, vast bushes or tufts of bananas, orange and lemon trees, mangoes and yams. There, too, were grassy dells through which limpid streams of pure cool water ran until they mingled with the salt ocean; there the wild turtle-dove cooed from guava and tamarind tree, the quails and guinea-fowls ran about upon the white silvery sands; while, to complete all these natural advantages, neither mosquito nor sandfly existed.
A little island girt by coral reefs-the ocean's teeth, strong, fierce, and jagged; teeth that can rip the copper sheathing off a belated vessel as easily as a man can rip the skin from off the island's pink and golden bananas; teeth that can thrust themselves a dozen or twenty feet into the bowels of forlorn and castaway barks and tear them all to pieces as the tusk of the 'must' elephant tears the bowels of its victims. A little island, one of a thousand in that sometimes smiling, sometimes devilish, sea-such as are in the Chagos Archipelago, or the Seychelles, or the Cormoras, and, like so many of those islands, untrod, unvisited by man. Unvisited because, where all are equally and bounteously supplied by Nature, there is no need for any ship to draw near this solitary speck that is guarded from all approach by those belts of coral, and also because, to this small island, there is no natural harbour should rough winds blow.
Now-as still the setting sun went swiftly down amidst its regal panoply of purple and violet and crimson, while, above those hues, its rays shot forth great fleaks and flames of amber gold-it was not uninhabited, not desolate of all human life. Upon a grassy slope a man lay, his head bound up with linen bands; one of his hands being swathed, too, in similar wrappings. And his eyes were closed as though he were sleeping-or dead. To her who gazed on him it seemed almost as if it must be the latter-the greater, the more everlasting sleep, that had fallen on him.
For there were two in this island now; she who thus looked down on the prostrate man being a woman clad in a long dress, which once had been of a soft, delicate white fabric, but, now, was stained and smeared with many splashes and marks, and was rough and crumpled with hard usage and by the effects of seawater. Her hair, too, was all dishevelled, uncombed and unbrushed; tossed up in a great mass upon her head; bound with a piece of ordinary tape. And still she was as beautiful as she had ever been; beautiful in this negligence which was the result of shipwreck and of battling with tempest, of cruel buffetings from merciless waves and jagged rocks-beautiful, though on her face and in her eyes was now the sombre beauty of a despair and misery too deep for words. For he whom she loved, he whose wife she was to have been, was not upon that island with them, and had no more been heard of since, in the arms of Stephen Charke, she had been plunged into the sea and, in those arms, borne to safety and to life.
She gazed down on him now, in the last glimmering beams of the golden light that shot athwart the island, while regarding him with some expression in her glance which caused that glance to be not altogether a reflex of her own misery and despair. An expression that seemed to denote a supreme pity, an almost divine regret for him who lay before, and beneath, her, in pain and suffering.
'How brave-how strong he was!' she murmured inwardly, her lips not moving. 'How he fought with that storm-fought with Death to save me and himself! No!' she broke off, still uttering her meditations to her own heart alone-'why do him such injustice even in my thoughts? It was not to save us both, but me alone. There was but one desire in his soul-to save me!'
She turned and went to a small heap of fruit that she had gathered earlier in the day, and selected one of the great pink bananas-pink with a lustrous beauty which those who only see them when they arrive in northern climes could never believe they have once possessed-then she took a scooped-out cocoanut shell, and, going to a little babbling rill that ran through the grassy defile, filled it with water. After which she returned to where the other lay, and, kneeling by his side, gazed on him again.
'My God!' she whispered. 'I almost dreaded him once. Feared him for I knew not what. Feared him! Him! And he has been my saviour.'
He seemed to know that she was by his side and near him; for, even as she murmured these words to herself, Stephen Charke opened his eyes-a faint smile appearing in them-and gazed into hers.
'You are better?' she asked, as she gave him the shell with the water in it, which he was not too weak to be able to take and raise to his lips, while she tore off the rind of the banana. 'Your forehead,' she went on, while putting her hand upon it calmly, as a sister might, 'is cooler. Are you still in pain?'
'No,' he answered. 'No-only very weak. Are-are-any more saved from that?' and he directed his glance to where, two hundred yards off from the island, lay something protruding above the water which looked like the rounded back of a whale, but was, in truth, the torn and lacerated keel of the Emperor of the Moon. In her last struggles-in her last convulsions as the gale had hurled her on to the coral reef-she had turned almost completely over.
'No,' she replied, her face an awful picture of despair and anguish. 'None are saved but you and I. Oh!' and she buried that face in her hands and wept aloud, piteously, heartbrokenly.
'God rest their souls,' he said solemnly. 'God pity them! Why I, too, should have been spared except to save you, I do not know. I might as well have gone down with them.'
'No! no!' she cried. 'No, Mr. Charke. You must be spared for better days, for greater things. Oh,' she exclaimed, 'how bravely you battled with it all! Uncle told us,' she went on through her tears, 'when we were below and before I became insensible, that your efforts were superhuman; that, if the ship could be saved, it would be by you alone. And,' she continued, 'how you saved me I do not know. Only-only-I wish I had gone with him, with Gilbert.'
'Nay,' he said-'nay. Do not say that. And-and-I ask you to believe that, had it been possible, I would have saved him too. But it was impossible. Impossible to so much as slip a life-buoy over his shoulders. The end was at hand, the ship broken in half. It was impossible,' he repeated earnestly.
'How,' she asked, as she sat by his side gazing out across the calm, waveless sea through the fast-coming tropic night, and watching the great stars-almost as big as northern moons-sparkling, incandescent like, in the blue heavens above-'how did you do it? I remember nothing till I found myself lying there,' and she pointed down to the white sand, from which there came, through the sultry night, the gentle hiss of the sea, 'and saw you lying near me, and dead, as I thought.'
'Nor do I remember, or only very little more than you can do. I dragged you from the saloon, and, after fixing a life-buoy on to each of us, leaped into the sea with you, striking out vigorously to avoid the ship. And I can recall my battlings with the waves for a few moments-only a few-then feeling my breath knocked out of me. And, then, nothing more until I came to and found you looking at me here. It was the life-buoys that saved us.'
'In God's mercy. Under His Providence. Yet-yet-if it were not wicked to say so-if it were not for my poor dear mother at home-I-should-'
'No, no!' he almost moaned. 'No, no! Not that!' Then, after a moment or so of silence, he said: 'Do you know how long we have been here? Can you guess?'
'This is the second night, I suppose,' she answered. 'When I came-to yesterday morning, I imagine it was the first one after the wreck.'
'Possibly. And have you seen nothing pass at sea, either near or far off?'
'Nothing. Yet I have gazed seaward all the time it has been light on each day. Where do you think we are?'
'If the island is uninhabited, I think it must be one of the Cormora group, since it can scarcely be part of the Chagos Archipelago-they are too far to the east. And all the others in the Indian Ocean-certainly in this part of it-are inhabited.'
She made no reply now-she did not say what almost every other woman in her position would undoubtedly have said-namely, that she hoped they would in some way be taken off the island. For, in absolute fact, she did not hope so. To be saved from this desolation, to be put on board some ship which might be going to any part of the world, even though that part should be England itself, meant leaving Gilbert behind-leaving him to his ocean grave. And she would not-certainly she would not yet-consent to believe that he had met with such a grave. The Emperor of the Moon was still there, a part of her above the water although she was almost turned upside down, or 'turned turtle,' as she knew the sailors called it, and-and-might not some of those who were in her when she struck be still sheltering, clinging to some portion of the wreck that happened to be above water? She did not know much about ships, this awful, fateful voyage being her only experience, wherefore she thought and hoped and prayed that such a chance as this which she imagined in her mind might be possible. While, too, she remembered that Gilbert and her uncle were both blind. Therefore, if they were still alive, they could not cast themselves into the sea to escape out of the vessel-they would not, indeed, know that there was an island close to them, and, probably, would imagine that the ship was wrecked upon some reef or rock, so that it would be doubly dangerous to venture to leave her. And, again, even if they could by any wild chance have guessed that there was an island near, how would they in their blindness have known which way to proceed to reach it?
Thus, by such arguments, she had endeavoured to solace her sad, aching heart, and now, as she rose to leave Stephen Charke for the night, she put into words the thoughts which had been present to her mind from almost the first moment she had discovered that they themselves were saved.
'Do you think,' she asked, standing there gazing down on him once more-'do you think any who were in the ship when we escaped can be still alive? Is there any hope of that?'
He looked up at her swiftly as she made the suggestion, then-because he felt that it was useless to encourage such vain longings-because, also, he knew that such a thing was impossible-absolutely, entirely impossible, he said: 'No, no! It cannot be. Those who were in the cabin would be submerged as the ship went over, and those who were on the deck would be thrown into the sea.'
She gave a bitter sigh as he answered her-and it went to his heart to hear that sigh, since now his pity for her was heroic, sublime, in its self-abnegation-as great as were also his love and adoration; then she asked:
'And where was Gilbert-Lieutenant Bampfyld?'
'He-he-was lying by the wheel. God pity him! He was a brave, noble officer. Even in his blindness he had crept up to help at the wheel, and was determined to do something towards saving the ship if possible. Then-then-he fell down from exhaustion. He-'
'-is dead!' she muttered, in a voice that sounded like a knell. 'Dead! oh, my God! he is dead. I wish I were dead, too!'
CHAPTER XX
'I DO BELIEVE YOU'
She moved away from him now that the night was at hand, intending to seek a little knoll that was hollowed out by Nature so that it presented the appearance of a small cave of about six feet in depth and the same in breadth. Above it there grew, tall, stately, and feathery, two cocoa trees close together; around it trailed tropical creepers and huge-leaved plants which bore upon them large white flowers. It was into this cave she had crept the night before and had slept, and to it she now intended to go again, it being, as she thought, better perhaps to pass the night there than in the open air. Yet, had she but known, it offered her no necessary shelter, since, in truth, none was required-especially at this season. Dews scarcely ever arose in the island, there being little, if any, of that dampness at night for which the poisonous deadly West Coast of Africa is so evilly renowned, and one might sleep in the open air as free from the dangers of exhalations as in any closed place that could be devised here.
But, not being aware of this-as how should she who, hitherto, had known so little of the world outside London-outside England? – she spoke to Stephen Charke ere she left him for the night, saying: 'I wish there was something to cover you with-something to protect you. Yet there is nothing-not a rag.'
'It is of no importance,' he said, looking up at her, and able to see her face, pale and ghostlike, by the light of the stars. 'Of none whatever. I shall be able to lie here and sleep very well. There is no fear of damp or fever in all this locality. I know it well. And, tomorrow, I hope to be able to get up and go about the island. Perhaps, beyond that mountain at the back, there may be some signs of human habitation-of human life. Do not think of me. Good-night. Sleep well. Try to sleep well.'
'Good-night,' she answered, 'Good-night'; and then she slowly withdrew to the cave in the little knoll, and so left him.
But, when she had gone, and had lain herself down upon the soft, dry sand within that cave, sleep refused to come to her. The night before she had slept long and soundly, perhaps because of all that she had gone through, and because also she was battered and bruised and weak after her immersion in the sea and the contact with the rocks. But to-night she could not do so-her mind was now triumphant over her body; the hour of that mind's agony was upon her. And she bent and swayed beneath this agony, and recognised, acknowledged, all the ruin that had fallen on her future life and hopes and dreams of happiness to come.
Her lover, her future husband, was gone-was dead! Her heart was broken; there was in actual fact no future before her. She had loved him madly, blindly, almost from the first time she had set eyes on him, and now-now he was dead. There was nothing more. She would never love any other man; none other could ever find his way into her heart as Gilbert Bampfyld had done, nor set every pulse and fibre in her body stirring, nor cause her to thank God when she awoke each morning that another day had dawned when, even though she might not see him, she could still pass many waking hours in thinking of him. No; no other man would ever have the power to cause all that. Henceforth, if she ever left this island alive, it would be to return to a joyless, hopeless life-a woman widowed ere she had become a wife.
Thus she thought and mused as she lay in the cave, her head supported on one hand while she looked out on all that devilish, cruel waste of waters which had hurled the ship to its destruction and slain almost every soul on board her, and which now-like some wanton trampling on the ruin and despair that she has caused-was smiling before her in the rays of a crescent moon that was just peeping above the eastern horizon. Indeed, the glimmer which this young moon sent shimmering along the tropical sea was not unlike the false sad smile that a wanton's lips might wear in the hour of her victim's ruin; the smile that bespeaks 'the painting of a sorrow, a face without a heart.'
A little breeze sprang up now, a ripple soft as a lover's kiss; balmy, too-as it played among all the rich tropical vegetation of the island-as a young girl's pure breath, and she saw that her fellow-castaway perceived it, since he turned himself so as to bring his face towards it-doubtless to cool his heated frame and to get relief from the warm, tepid air that hung all around-air that was like the atmosphere of a Turkish bath. And this led her thoughts away from her own sorrows into the direction of those griefs which must be his-towards this brave, valiant man, who had saved her life at, as she knew must be the case, the risk of his own. His lot was also sad, she recognised, sad because he loved her-as it would have been the merest affectation for her to pretend to doubt-and because she knew that never could this love obtain that which it hungered for. Yet, all the same, there had come into her heart a feeling of intense sorrow for him; sorrow and pity that had welled up into her bosom and was almost holy in its depth and purity.
'To love and lose, as I have done,' she murmured; 'to love and never win, as is the case with him. Oh, God! could there be aught to make our bitterness-our lot-more terrible?'
Suddenly, she started and raised herself higher with her elbow, her nerves quivering, her heart beating violently, her eyes staring intently into the shade beneath a copse, in which grew in wild profusion a tangled mass of cocoa trees and tamarinds, of orange bushes and lemon trees, and into which, now, the new moon's rays were glinting.
For she had seen something moving there-something creeping, crawling close to the ground-stealthily, secretly-as though desirous to approach the spot where they were both so near together, without being heard or seen.
What new horror was this that approached them in the night, that crept in ambush towards them as though intent on secret murder and attack? What! Some native of this horrid region lusting for the stranger's blood, or some wild beast as fierce!
Her; tongue cleaved to her mouth-she could feel that the roof of the latter was becoming dry-she tried to scream-and failed!
And, still, close to the earth, that thing crept-nearer-nearer-and once, as it either pushed some underbrush aside or came more into view, a ray of the moon glistened on a pair of eyes, illuminating the pupils for a moment. Then she found her voice and shrieked aloud:
'Mr. Charke! Mr. Charke! There is something creeping towards us. Save us! Save us!'
In a moment he was endeavouring to spring to his feet, but this he could not do owing to his soreness and contusions; yet, nevertheless, he staggered up a moment later and gazed around, wishing that he had some weapon to his hand.
That cry of Bella's-it rang along the desolate beach as, may be, no woman's voice had ever rung there before! – brought matters to a crisis. There was a rush, a spring from the creature that had, by now, crawled so near to them; a spring which hurled Charke back reeling as the thing passed him and then brought it, itself, close to Bella, about and around whom it at once began to gambol, rudely and roughly, as some great watch-dog might do who had found its lost mistress.
The creature was Bengalee, the tiger-cub, and, in some way, it, if nothing else, was saved from the wreck of the Emperor of the Moon.
'Oh!' cried Bella, half fearfully at its furious bounds and leaps, which, even in her nervousness, she could not but construe into a wild, savage joy on its part at once more being in her presence, 'it is Bengalee. Oh, thank God!'
'Thank God?' Charke repeated, not understanding. 'Thank God for what?'
'It is a sign,' she said, 'a sign that we are not the only ones who have escaped. Think! think! If this creature could get ashore, so-so may others have done.'
For a moment he said nothing, contenting himself with watching the exultation of the creature and in reflecting that it was her shriek which had told it who those were to whom it had drawn so near-with, perhaps, if stung by hunger and privation, a vastly different intention from that of fondling either of them! And he did think of what she hinted in connection with its safety and its having reached the island alive, as well as of that safety pointing to the fact that others, that human beings, might also have done so. Only-he knew, and knowing, refrained from saying, that her deduction was by no means accurate. This animal had been on the deck when the ship heeled over on the reef; it was confined only in a locker from which it might easily have forced its way out in its terror, or, indeed, might have fallen out of it, but it was an animal, and its blindness had left it! Gilbert Bampfyld had also been on the deck, Charke remembered, but was still blind. There was no analogy between the tiger-cub and any human soul on board.
'You do not answer,' she said, as now Bengalee lay panting at her feet, its rough evidences of delight having ceased for a time; 'you do not speak. You think there is no likelihood of any others being saved from the wreck?'
'I cannot think so. Heaven knows that, if I could comfort you with such hopes, I would. But-'
And now he repeated aloud those silent thoughts and arguments of a moment ago; while, as he did so, he saw, in the moonlight, that she turned from him, and he heard her whisper low: 'Heaven help me!'
Then, because her misery and woe struck like a knife to his heart, he said:
'To-morrow, if I am strong enough, as I think I shall be, I will make a journey round the island and explore every spot upon it, where, if-if any one should have, by God's mercy, been fortunate enough to reach the land, I must light upon them. Believe me, nothing shall be left undone that I can do.'
'I do believe you,' she cried; 'I do, indeed. Ah, Mr. Charke,' she almost wailed, 'how good and noble you are! Oh that such goodness, such nobility must go for ever unrequited!'
'That,' he answered, and she, also, could see by the aid of the moon's rays that on his face there came a wan smile, a smile that had not even the ghost of happiness in it, 'that is not to be thought of-never. Let us put away for ever all thoughts of my desires; let us think only of what we have to do. To find, first, whether, in Providence, there should be any others who have escaped from the wreck, and, next, how we are to escape out of this. If there are other islands near here which are inhabited, no matter by whom or what, it may be easy.'
'And if not?'
'Then we must wait until, by some signal or other which I may devise, we can attract the attention of a passing vessel. Beyond this I can think of nothing.'
'Oh!' she exclaimed, 'much as I long to return home to England, to my mother-I think only of her now, I have none other of whom to think-yet-yet, ah, I could not go till I was sure, sure beyond all possibility of doubt, that Gilbert was not here or somewhere near. Think, if he should be still alive and blind and wounded! Here and unable to help himself. Oh, it would be almost worse than to know that he was dead.'
'I do think,' Charke answered; 'I understand. And until we are sure, one way or the other, we will not go: no, not even though rescue came to-morrow.'
Then, looking down at the tiger-cub which had now risen to its feet again, and was pacing restlessly about with the sinuous, lithe movements peculiar to its race, he said: 'But there is also one other thing that must be done. That creature is now beyond control, even by you; and these beasts are treacherous to the core. If it is to live, and we are to live also, it must be secured-made prisoner. Otherwise something terrible will happen. I know it; feel sure of it.'