CHAPTER XXI.

“ALONE ON A WIDE, WIDE SEA.”

“What fun this is!” exclaimed the pretty boy, Charlie Dacy.

He was convulsed with amusement, filled with unlawful delight. On each side of the companion was a small recess that commanded a view of the steps leading below. He had put Nina in one, and he stood in the other; and he was busily engaged in chaffing the various specimens of humanity who made their way up and down this particular opening to the deck.

Nina knew she ought not to stay, and at intervals made feeble efforts to escape him; but he was so amusing, and was so fond, or pretended to be so fond, of her society, that she could not get away.

“Here come the Hook and Eye,” he exclaimed, gleefully, “I hear them rattling down the passage!”

A lean, gaunt woman in a black bonnet and green veil came tugging up the stairway, a diminutive husband hanging loosely and helplessly on her arm.

The boy politely took off his cap when they came abreast of him. “Does your husband find himself in recovered health this afternoon, madam?”

“Hold your saucy tongue,” said the woman, abruptly and unexpectedly, as she passed him.

“Sharper than I thought,” he muttered, staggering back as if he had received a blow.

To atone for his misconduct, Nina followed the strange pair out on deck, and quite restored them to good humour by sending a steward to get a comfortable chair for the husband. Then she went back, resolving to exercise her powers of persuasion on Master Charles to get him to leave his present employment, and play shuffleboard with her.

He had both hands up to his mouth when she reached him. With red, inflated cheeks, and a seemingly prodigious exercise of strength, he was in a whisper proclaiming, “Ship ahoy!” He dared not say it aloud, for it was Captain Fordyce who was coming slowly up the stair, his head bent, his handkerchief twisted loosely in his fingers.

The instant his eyes were raised the boy dropped his hands, and stood before him sober and respectful.

Captain Fordyce looked at him, and as the handsome youth had become Nina’s almost inseparable companion, he asked, “Where is my wife, Dacy?”

“I think she must be hiding from you, sir. She was here until she saw you coming.”

“Here I am,” said Nina, coming forward.

“I have got a cinder in my eye, will you take it out?” inquired her husband, stepping out on deck and handing her his handkerchief.

Dacy had followed them, and looked on with interest as Nina warily chased a tiny piece of coal about her husband’s inflamed eyelid.

“You should have some flaxseed,” he said, critically; “that is the best way to get anything out of the eye. You put in one or two grains, and they swell and emit a sticky substance which covers your eyeball, and takes in the cinder or whatever has got in. Then you just wash the whole thing out, and you haven’t irritated your membrane.”

“A good scheme,” said Captain Fordyce, “but unfortunately there is no flaxseed here. Ah! there it is,” and he held up a jagged cinder.

“Whew! that’s a large one,” exclaimed the boy, pityingly; “why, sir, you’ve been carrying about a stoker in your eye.”

“‘A chief engineer,’ we call that size,” replied Captain Fordyce, dryly, pressing his handkerchief to his face, and looking as if he were about to go away.

“Can’t you stay for a little while?” asked Nina, balancing herself against a near boat, and glancing shyly up at him.

He smiled, turned his back to everything on the ship but her, and began to talk in a low tone. This was one of her elusive days. She had scarcely spoken a word to him since breakfast.

While he talked, Prince Charlie sat perched on the rail a little beyond him, in a lonely and disconsolate fashion. He knew that he was not wanted just now; and Nina smiled as she saw, over her husband’s shoulder, that he was making a pretence of throwing himself overboard.

Agile, sure-footed as a monkey, how did it happen that when she raised remonstrating eyes after a sentence that, coming from the sensible man before her, was nonsensical to the last degree, she saw that the boy’s play had turned to frightful earnest?

He had lost his balance. One glimpse she had of a pale, resolved face, two boyish, eager hands clutching wildly at the rail; then without a sound he dropped bravely into the ocean.

“Man overboard! Man overboard!” The piercing cry rang over the ship, and made her blood run cold in her veins. Then other voices took it up; and her husband, with his foolish sentence not yet cold on his lips, muttered a strangely mixed “Confound that boy!” and “God bless you, darling!” and was swinging himself over the side of the ship.

Nina clung to his arm with all her strength. “His mother--I promised her to look after him,” he said, putting her aside as easily as if she were a baby; and she wrung her hands as he escaped from her grasp.

Some one had thrown a life-buoy. He struck out for it as he reached the water; then with swift, steady strokes swam toward the dash of gold on the blue waters astern, where poor Prince Charlie was making a gallant struggle for life.

The officer of the watch was shouting directions in a calm, stentorian voice: “Stop and reverse! Lower the lee quarter bo-o-at!”

Sailors came hurrying down the deck to fulfil his orders. Nina heard, but did not see them, for her tortured eyes were fixed on the jet-black spot growing fainter and fainter in the distance. Something that was not fear, that was rather exultant pride and agitation, swelled her heart almost to bursting. The tears streaming down her cheeks, she fell on her knees and sent to heaven a frantic, earnest prayer that the strength of his arm might not fail, that his heart might be strong.

But what was this? In one instant, as effectually as if giant hands from the sky had lowered and folded around them a heavy blanket, everything beyond the bulwarks of their ship was cut off from their vision, swallowed up in the fog.

“O God,” she muttered, “why must this one day be darkened?”

Then she rose from her knees, hard and unbelieving, now that her petition was about to be denied her. There was no hope now, and what would her life be? Through the sullen folds of the fog she saw stretching out before her a long, black, solitary road leading to an open grave. And she must walk that road alone.

She groped her way across the deck and struggled into her room. Broken-hearted and despairing, her whole soul rebelling with a dull, human protest against the fate that follows us, overshadows and dogs us to the tomb, she stood motionless till out of the terrible hush outside rose a shriek like that of a lost soul.

It was only the fog-horn; but it put into her head a new and ghastly thought. The other was terrible enough,--a vision of feeble, weakening hands, beating helplessly against the waves; but this,--the sickening thought drove her mad. That dear head in the maw of a monster of the deep,--a blessed oblivion came over her.

One quarter of an hour went by, then another, and at the end of the second Nina turned feebly and murmured, “What is it, Merdyce?”

Ever since the day that he repulsed her in her quest for her husband, the boy had been her faithful, devoted attendant, ready in every case to fulfil her wishes, sometimes even to anticipate them. He was gently shaking her arm now. Never on the face of the great deep would there be a more delighted face rising above a black jacket and brass buttons.

“Have I been asleep?” she whispered. “Why, the sun is shining; it must be morning. And have I been all night on the floor?”

Bit by bit the day came back to her, as he spluttered and gurgled confused sentences.

“They’ve come--’twas mortal hard work to find them--a powerful swim--the boy dead weight--had to swim with one hand--the master--”

“What!” shrieked Nina, springing to her feet, “my husband!”

With one bound she was outside. Hundreds of people were thronging the decks, swarming over the skylights, the cabins, the rigging, and from them all was going up a mighty shout. For the feet of the boat’s crew had just touched the deck.

No one noticed her. One brief, upward glance, a short, intense thanksgiving, and then, like a frightened bird kept from her nest, she was circling around the crowd of people, trying to reach the place where she saw standing a wet, capless, coatless, bedraggled figure.

He saw her coming, and opened a way for her. Her eyes were shining with the long-looked-for light, full into his. Below the words of congratulation and confused talk that surrounded him, her low-spoken words pierced his soul, “My darling!--I _do_ love you.” And he knew that the dream of years was realised at last. She was clinging to his hand, laying her cheek against it, with something new in the caress,--something that had never been there before.

Nor had she eyes for any other person; not even for Prince Charlie, who had come back from the jaws of death only a little sobered, and who was standing in a pool of water beside her, shivering and murmuring, waggishly, “Home they brought her warrior wet.”

It drew Captain Fordyce’s attention to him. “Dacy, go and put on some dry things,” he said, quickly. Then he turned his attention again to his wife.

She was murmuring fond, wild words to herself. He smiled, whispered a few words in her ear, then, putting her gently aside, went to exchange his brine-soaked garments for other more suitable ones. But he went in peace and in joy, knowing that he would shortly return to her to meet her long delayed but full surrender.