Part 15

Rockets were at once suggested, but Sir Anthony explained that the distance was too great for a rocket line to cover, and that the tides precluded the floating in of a buoy. Nothing could be done but wait and pray that the vessel might not break up during the next twelve hours.

Some one asked if she were likely to, and Sir Anthony admitted that she had signalled her fears of such an event.

"Couldn't some one swim to her?" said a voice from the taffrail.

Sir Anthony shook his head; to cross the ledge with the break of water on it at present would be to court almost certain death.

There was a pause; all eyes were turned towards the reef, where the vessel lay in the gay morning, like some masquerade of death, between the lovely colours of the sea and shore.

Caragh leant back in his chair with a yawn, and looked up at the sky.

"I'll take a line to her," he said placidly.

The backs of the heads between him and the ship's side became suddenly a ring of faces, and the first stupidity of surprise was expressed by the question, "Can you swim?"

Caragh looked at them with no expression of interest, and Sir Anthony shook his head.

"You couldn't do it, my dear fellow," he protested; "you couldn't do it!"

"Perhaps not," said Maurice; "but I can have a try." Sir Anthony's hands and head shook in voluble negation.

"The captain wouldn't permit it for a moment," he asserted.

"Well," said Caragh, "of course the captain can refuse me the use of a line, but he can't, without being very unpleasant, prevent my going overboard."

There was an instant's pause, and then the group about the chair burst into simultaneous suggestion and advice.

Caragh was slapped on the shoulder; his previous performances in the water were demanded; encouragement and remonstrance were alternately tendered, and everything obvious on the situation was said.

"I'm not a professional performer," he explained at last, "but I can keep afloat as long as most men, and if I'm ready to take the risks of a swim, I don't think it should be any one's business to stop me."

This met a varied response, and with a general acclamation for the captain the speakers were moving forward when that officer appeared, looking for Sir Anthony, who at once put the case to him.

The captain, with a glance at Caragh still seated in his chair, dismissed the matter with a shrug of his shoulders. But he had miscalculated the passiveness of the man before him.

Caragh got quietly upon his feet, looked across the water at the wreck, and then turned to the captain.

"If you can't spare me a line to take on board her, I'll have to bring you back one of hers," he said.

"I forbid you to leave the ship," replied the other briefly.

"Of course you can do that," said Caragh, looking again across the sea, "but it won't make a pretty story if those poor devils are drowned under our eyes."

At that moment a sailor brought the signalling slate aft to the captain, who looked glum and handed it to Sir Anthony.

"Tide's leaving her," he explained.

"Her back is breaking, is that it?" asked Sir Anthony.

The captain nodded.

"She won't hold together long after that?"

"Probably not," said the captain.

Caragh's offer found none but backers when the gravity of the signal was made known.

The captain still protested its insanity, but he was persuaded in the end to withdraw his prohibition and do what was possible to start the venture with the best chances of success.

The ship was to be taken a little nearer the southern shore to give the swimmer what help could be had from the tide, and the lightest line on board was prepared while Caragh went below to strip, accompanied by a couple of admirers, who insisted on the necessity of his being oiled before entering the water.

As he never expected to come out of it alive he had no wish for oil, but did desire urgently to be left alone for the next few moments.

He had made his offer from no surge of sympathy, no flush of valour. He was not braver probably than most of those on board, nor cared twopence more than they for the fate of the derelicts. His proposal was but the climax of his morning thoughts. He could endure himself no longer. The wretchedness of his passion would bear no further the thought of the girl he was on his way to meet. Every instant in the day-time, and night after night in his dreams, that splendid presence possessed him to which he had for ever said good-bye. And in the fever of that possession he could not think of a wife. Yet of what else could he think, as every hour brought her nearer, and made sharper for him the shame of her exultant face, and the reproach in her confiding arms. Never for an instant had his tenderness faltered. She was dearer to him than a sister; dearer by all she had given him, by all she was prepared to give; dearer above all by what she believed him to have given her.

And it was his tenderness that made unendurable the treachery of his faithfulness, the loyalty of the lie which was to make them one.

It was at the worst of such a reflection that death suddenly appeared to him as the escape, the release for them both; for the pledge which he had given and for her trust in his word.

Death, a high and honourable end, making a finish to his unprofitable life, leaving her with faith undimmed!

At that cold moment of his abasement there seemed nothing better. Given an hour to think it over and he would probably have recoiled from the sacrifice. There was even some measure of recoil in his mind as he went down the reeling ladder to his cabin, though there was no change in his determination. Death had ceased to look attractive; it was simply something for which, like a fool, he had let himself in. Yet under that was a dull indifference to what became of him.

He submitted to his oiling; then just as he was about to leave his cabin a remembrance came to him. He fumbled in his berth for the sovereign-case on his watch chain, opened it, slipped out a couple of gold pieces, took what looked like a wafer from beneath them, and put it into his mouth. The two men with him imagined the small gray disc to be some kind of sustaining lozenge. It was a tiny portrait of Laura Marton.

As he went shivering on deck Caragh made a wry mouth as his teeth met on the picture, and he imagined the suggestions its discovery would have offered to the woman he was to wed.

He had a hazy recollection afterwards of the close and eager crowd which surrounded him as he fitted the clammy belt of the lifeline about his body and climbed over the taffrail for a dive. It was a crowd warm with enthusiasm and admiration; with little to say, but with that in what it said which might have brought a blush to his whole body. But he heard nothing.

Then as the vessel lurched to starboard he let his body fall forward and shot down into the sea.

Before his head rose above the surface the cold water had changed his indifference to life into a disgust at his own temerity.

The ship heeled over as if about to impale him with her yards. Then he was lifted on the roller, and saw the wreck before him, looking much further off than it had from the deck. He laid his course on a cliff to the south which the captain had given him to steer by, and turned over on his side. His left arm swung high and white out of the blue water, regular and unhurried as though he were bathing, and his head dipped under and was driven clear of the surface with every stroke. With his face thrown back he could see the dark skirting of spectators along the ship's side swinging into and out of the sky.

They were admiring in speech and in silence his courage and cool indifference to the occasion, and the humour of their admiration moved him as he thought of it almost to a laugh.

That he, with his despairs, his self-contempt, his growing disgust at his foolhardiness, should appear to them as a heroic figure appealed to his keen sense of parody. What pretty reading in unconscious irony would the obituary paragraphs of his valour make for the gods of fate.

Yet valour of a sort he had, for it never once occurred to him to feign an inability to go further, though the line he carried was beginning to retard him at every stroke.

The ship he had left was now lost to him in each trough of the waves; he could hear the break of the rollers over the reef, and saw that the tide had already drifted him to windward of the wreck. The roar in front increased as he proceeded, and at last he could see, as he rose, the waves thirty yards beyond him suddenly flatten, flinging up a veil of spray into the air. For a moment he hung irresolute; there, if ever a man might see it, was death visible before him. Then, with a curious sense of obliteration, his mind cleared. It seemed empty of thought or fear as the open sky above him; not a shred even of anticipation floated anywhere within it. He trod water as he gathered a dozen loops of the lifeline in his hand, lest he should be hung up and dragged under by it when flung over the ledge. Then he went forward. A moment later, when the wave that had lifted him suddenly sank and smashed before him into a terrible welter of foam above the reef, his heart sank; but decision was past him. He knew that he was rising on the wave that followed, heard a strange crisp noise above him, and felt the crest dart forward like the head of a snake.

The next instant he was rolled up in the foam and flung onward like a whirling wheel. He lost his senses for a second from sheer giddiness, and found himself fighting for breath and the surface in almost quiet water, with the black sides of the wreck not fifty yards ahead.

The line was coiled about his body, but his limbs were free, and he seemed quite unhurt, and strangely unsurprised to be so, though but a moment back he had been prepared for destruction.

He was soon on the lee side of the wreck, and after some little difficulty was hauled on board, being too weak to lift himself from the water.

He fell when set down upon the deck, and only then discovered that two of the bones in his left foot were broken, and that blood was draining from a gash nine inches long in his thigh. He also became aware that, unlike the _Candia_, the wreck carried a mixed cargo of humanity, and was amused even in his unhappy plight to notice that its immense relief and gratitude quite overruled any considerations of sex.

There was no surgeon on board, the saloons were awash; but the women tore up their petticoats to bind his wound, and, rolled in blankets from the deck-house, he was made fast to the driest part of the poop.

There, drenched with spray and in a good deal of pain, he lay till evening, declining to use the means of safety he had provided till all but the captain and second mate had left the ship. The rigging up of a traveller had proved a difficult matter with the wreck heeling over as the tide left her, and the wind rising again after the ebb made all other means of communication impossible.

The captain was only got on board the _Candia_ as darkness was falling, and Caragh had some salve for his hurts in the knowledge that the wreck slid off the reef and sank at high water before the next dawn.

He drew near Ballindra with sentiments a good deal modified by his adventure.

Life had proved itself to be worth more to him than he had supposed, and sheer weakness from loss of blood as he lay bandaged on the sunny deck made the quiet certainty of a woman's love seem good in itself.

Sir Anthony had telegraphed a very picturesque account of the rescue, and owing to the _Candia_ having to put back to land her new passengers Lettice had read the story before Caragh arrived.

There is, perhaps, no happier moment possible to a woman than that in which she hears the world applauding the man she loves and is about to marry.

To Lettice, so new to love and to a near interest in any of the world's noises, the moment was almost overwhelming. It was a pain of happiness, a tense fear that such glad fortune could not endure. Caragh had sent her a wire, more kind than true, to say that he was mending splendidly, but she tortured herself with every sort of deplorable anticipation, till she came to expect little from the _Candia's_ arrival but her lover's body.

But she woke one morning to see the big liner, gay with flags, lying before her windows at the mouth of the river.

She dressed at a pace that left her maid staring, and took the steepest of short cuts to the slip. There, at that hour of the morning, not a soul was to be seen, so she hauled in the lightest of the moored boats and sculled herself down the river against the tide.

On the way the maiden modesty, which had so far been as breathless as every other part of her, found a word to say.

For a moment the sculls stopped, and then dipped slowly to hold her against the tide.

Then the boat went ahead again, but more deliberately. While she was dressing Lettice had forgotten every one in the world but herself and Maurice. Now, with the big ship before her, she remembered the others.

As she ran down to the slip she had thought of nothing but to get to him as soon as possible. Now there seemed a dozen things besides, all very important for a young lady.

But her doubts and fears were set at rest by a shout from the ship, and she looked over her shoulder to see Caragh standing by the flag pole waving his hat.

He was at the head of the gangway as she came up it, on a pair of improvised crutches, looking very white, but with nothing left her to wish for in the welcome of his eyes.

Sir Anthony, who was at his elbow, as radiant as herself, protested fussily at his imprudence, and walked them both over to the chart-house, which had been arranged for Caragh's use, where he left them to order breakfast.

Lettice, fastened to her seat by the windows round her, and dumb with happiness, could only gaze into Caragh's face. He looked back at her with a smile, which broke at last in laughter.

"You've heard all about it?" he asked.

"Oh, I should think I had!" she breathed.

"Comic, wasn't it?"

"Comic!" she repudiated indignantly; "how _can_ you?"

"I can't," he replied ruefully; "it's comic only for me, and no one else will ever see it. Ah, but if you knew!"

"I _do_ know," she exclaimed imposingly, "and every one else knows that you were a hero."

"On Monday?" he queried.

"Yes," she said proudly, "on Monday."

"Heroes were cheap on Monday," he explained with a whimsical sigh, "but I've been a hero when heroes were very, very dear."

She looked at him with the wistful misgiving which was always stirred by his half-serious banter. "I know a hero," she said, "who is very, very dear to-day."

He met the love in her eyes with such a tender appreciation that, disregarding the windows, she had half risen to kiss him, when the head steward entering, wrinkled with smiles and suffusing the joyousness of the occasion, set a breakfast tray between them.

He greeted Lettice with the custom of an old retainer, and commented on Caragh's health as though personally responsible for its condition.

"We're all that proud of him, miss, I can tell you," he said as he withdrew with the covers.

But his flattery was spoilt for Lettice by the appearance of a meal which declared the newness of the morning with such emphasis.

"Was it awful, coming at such an hour?" she begged of Caragh.

"Shocking," he said unmoved; "five minutes earlier and you'd have found me in my bath."

"Oh!" she groaned; "I wish I'd waited for you on shore."

"In that case," he said, "I should probably have never landed."

"Never landed!"

"No," he went on; "I should have taken your absence for a sign that you couldn't goad yourself to meet me; that you were cowering at home, dreading my arrival, and with your heart lost to a much lovelier young man."

"Oh, Maurice!"

"Yes," he continued; "I have never been able to believe that any woman's flighty little soul could be worthy of my own virgin and unchangeable affection."

"Maurice," she pleaded, "don't say things like that to-day; I want you to be quite serious and quite yourself."

"Heaven forbid!" he protested as he took her hand.

The chief engineer had devised a sling to lower Caragh into the boat; the purser had illuminated an inscription to him, signed by every one on board; there seemed to be innumerable hands to shake and good wishes to respond to before the boat was clear of the ship's side.

And then he had to wave his hat again and again to the cheers and shouts of farewell, Lettice sitting beside him burning like a rose.

But her hour came when she had him laid at last upon a sofa by his favourite window, and was kneeling on the floor beside him. Her mouth had been thirsting all day to kiss him, and when he leaned his head back and smiled at her she set her lips on his as though to drink from them.

"Oh, my darling," she murmured, lifting her face to look once more into his eyes, "you can't think what these last few days have been. It didn't seem possible that you could live and come back to me after doing all those splendid things. It was too much happiness for any one. And I was horrid and faithless, and felt sure you'd die. I ought to have known that God would take care of us, because you'd been so brave and loved me so."

Despite himself there was a tinge of pain and shame that showed on Caragh's face, and Lettice lifted her arm that had rested, ever so lightly, across his body.

"Did I hurt you, dear?" she questioned anxiously.

"Oh, it's only just at first," was his ambiguous answer. But he drew her face towards him and kissed it again.

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End of Project Gutenberg's The Plague of the Heart, by Francis Prevost