As It Was in the Beginning Part 2

She was dimly conscious of pain in her hands, where he crushed them in his ardor. But her shocked surprise was uppermost, as she faced him with blazing eyes.

"Mr. Grenville!" she said. "Mr. Grenville--you---- To say--to speak----"

"Elaine," he interrupted gayly, bright devils dancing in his boyish eyes, "it simply couldn't be helped. We were intended to meet--and were cut out for one another. So the hour must come when you'll pitch old Gerald's ring in the sea by order of the very Fates themselves!"

She s.n.a.t.c.hed away her hands in indignation.

"For shame!" she cried in rising anger, her whole womanly being aflame with resistance to all his growing madness. "You haven't the slightest right in the world----"

"Right?" he repeated. "Right? I love you, Elaine! I love you!

Haven't I said----"

"Oh, the treachery--the treachery to Gerald!" she cut in, with swiftly increasing emotion. "To say such things when your honor----"

"Wait!" he interrupted, eagerly. "I told him what he might expect from any such arrangement. I warned him precisely what might happen. He understood--accepted my conditions--made it a challenge--declared if I tried I couldn't win! And now----"

"You can't--you can't!--you can't!" she cried at him, angrily. "To think that Gerald--to think you'd dare----"

He suddenly caught her in his arms and crushed her against his breast.

He kissed her on the mouth, despite her struggles.

"Elaine," he said, "you are mine--all mine--my sweetheart--my comrade--my mate!"

She finally planted her fists against his throat and thrust him from her in fury.

"You brute!" she answered, sobbing in her anger. "I hate you--I loathe you--despise you utterly! I wish I might never see your face again!"

"I'll make you love me, Elaine," he answered, white at last with intensity and deep-going pa.s.sion. "I'll make you love me, as I love you--as madly--as wholly--as wondrously--before ever we two get home."

Already Elaine was retreating from the place.

"Never!" she answered, wildly. "Never, never, never!--do you hear?--not if it takes this boat a hundred years!" And gropingly, almost blinded by her sense of shame and rage, she fled from the deck and down the stairs, leaving him shaken where he stood.

CHAPTER III

A MIDNIGHT TRAGEDY

Not the slightest alarm had invaded the ship, when Grenville finally urged his senses back to the normal, notwithstanding the unaccustomed suddenness with which the aspect of the day had been reversed.

The storm broke at last, about one in the afternoon, with a deluge of rain and an onslaught of wind that seemed for a time refreshing. The huge steel leviathan appeared to elevate her nose, give her shoulders a shake that settled her firmly in the gray disorder of the elements, and then to accept the rude old contest with a certain indifference, born of well-established prowess.

By two o'clock there was nothing refreshing suggested. A dull, stubborn struggle was waging in the drab of a wild and narrow field of commotion. Chill, musty billows of air, made thick by something that was neither scud nor mist, pounced heavily upon the laboring "Inca" in a manner chaotic and irregular. The sea was rising sullenly, its waves, like tumultuous cohorts, with ragged white banners, ceaselessly advancing.

With an easy, monotonous a.s.surance the great device of steam and iron plugged steadily onward. It could ride out a sea of tremendously greater violence. It knew from long experience every crest and every abyss of these mountains of air and water. It met huge impacts majestically, with a prow that cleaved them through, while its huge, wet bulk plowed up its mileage with a barely diminished speed.

Few of the pa.s.sengers were actually alarmed. A storm evolved so suddenly, they were confidently informed, would expend itself in one brief spasm of impotent fury and subside almost as it had come. It was all some mere local disturbance that the spell of dry, calm weather had acc.u.mulated too swiftly for any save a violent discharge.

Discomfort increased to a certain pitch; locomotion about the saloon became impracticable. The crew alone remained upon their legs. It seemed like the climax to the storm. But another stage swiftly developed.

It might have been somewhat after three P.M. when a shroud of darkness settled from the heavens, its substance foreign both to cloud and sea.

It was thicker than before, and decidedly more musty. As black as night, but unrelated to all ordinary essences of darkness, it wrapped the stormy universe in Stygian folds with a suddenness strangely disquieting.

The cataclysm followed almost instantly, as if from behind a concealing curtain. It came in dimensions incredible, a prodigious wall of rumpled water, like a mobile mountain chain. It towered forbiddingly above the quivering vessel for one terrible moment of threat, then confusion, utter and seemingly eternal, plunged roaringly over and under the helpless ocean toy of steel, submerging the very sea itself in Niagaras of sound and weight and motion.

A hideous shudder quivered through the feeble plaything of the elements. Strange, m.u.f.fled thunderings, sensations of oblivion sweeping miles deep across the ocean, and a horrible conviction of the ship's insignificance, impressed themselves pellmell upon the senses, while ebon blackness closed instantly down, like annihilation's swift accompaniment, and the hull seemed sinking countless fathoms.

Such a moment expands to an aeon. Doom seemed an old acquaintance when a complex gyration, a sense of being flung through s.p.a.ce, and a rea.s.sertion of the engine's throb preceded the struggle to the surface.

Yet it seemed as if no miracle of buoyancy and might could survive till the great steel body rose once more to the air. Men held their breath as if they must drown if the top were not immediately achieved.

A stupendous lurch, an incredible list to starboard, another streaming by of immeasurable torrents, and the steamer wallowed pantingly out into daylight once again, to flounder like a thing exhausted till she steadied once more to the roll and pitch of the former storm-driven sea.

There had been no time for any man to act till the monstrous thing had come and gone its way. As helplessly as all the others, Grenville had clutched at the table, there beside Elaine, while death pa.s.sed and roared in their faces. He had gone to her chiefly for appearances, yet quite as if nothing had happened, despite their scene above, while Elaine had issued from her stateroom in terror of the storm. It was not till new, sharp sounds of activity broke on his senses, from above, that Sid left her side and went to inquire concerning the sum of their damage.

His face had lost a shade only of its usual cheerfulness, when he finally returned. The ship was rolling heavily, fairly in the trough.

"Our rudder is gone, with six of the lifeboats and as many men," he told his charge, whose courage he had previously gauged. "The worst is undoubtedly over. We can steer with the screws, sufficiently to make the nearest port."

"Our rudder!--half a dozen men," Elaine faintly echoed, her brown eyes ablaze with dread and sympathy, as she steadied from the shock of Grenville's news. "What was it? How did it happen?"

"A tidal wave. There must have been a huge volcanic disturbance, doubtless under the sea. Or it may have been an earthquake, tremendously violent. Nothing else, according to the Captain, could account for a storm so sudden, or for all this strange thickness of the air. He is confident now of our safety. The storm may subside in an hour."

There was not the slightest cessation of the storm, however, till eight o'clock in the evening. Even then the night continued thick and wild.

Fortunately the sea was vast and deep. There was nothing known in two hundred miles on which the ship could blunder. Hour after hour the crippled "Inca" limped erratically onward, buffeted helplessly here and there, and scalloping angry abysses of darkness and water, as first one screw and then the other was driven full speed, or slowed to half, or reversed altogether, to hold her nose to the altered course that would finally fetch them to a port for highly essential repairs.

The rage of the elements, abating at last a trifle, had far exceeded the Captain's expectations. And when at length the center was pa.s.sed, and comparative ease had supervened, the wind was still a considerable gale, while the sea would run high till nearly morning.

The pa.s.sengers, however, were sufficiently a.s.sured to retire at a fairly early hour. Elaine had readily responded to Grenville's matter-of-fact instructions, and, long before midnight, was fitfully sleeping, although she had not undressed.

When eight bells struck from the bridge somewhere above him, Grenville still sat on the edge of his berth, rumpling his hair with one vigorous hand, while the other prisoned a book on his knee with a piece of white paper upon it. The paper was literally covered with mechanical designs and hieroglyphics, involved in his latest problem.

He arose at last, removed his coat, and began to fumble with his tie.

His eyes were fixed upon his paper. The problem's spell was cast again upon him. He sank, as before, to his inconvenient seat, and drew yet another design.

How long he remained there, tranced by the lines that represented levers, gears, and eccentrics, the man could never have stated. He was dimly subconscious it was time to go to bed, and from time to time one hand would return to his collar. As a matter of fact, the hour was past one of the morning.

Then, of a sudden, apparently beneath his very feet, the frightful _thing_ occurred.

It came all together--the grinding crunch, the colossal upheaval of the ship's great belly full of vitals, the scream of iron ripped from iron, the roar of steam from broken pipes, and the tremor of death-throes, shuddering thus promptly down to the canted bow and stern from the wedge-shaped split amidships.

They had struck on a rock, upheaved by the earthquake, where a hundred fathoms of crystal brine had existed the previous noon!

The hideous conviction of doom and horror sped as swiftly as the shiver of destruction to the farthest confines of the vessel. Screams far and near, hoa.r.s.e bellowing, a shrill, high paean of mortal fright, and sounds of disordered scurrying followed with a promptness fairly appalling.

Grenville waited for nothing. As well as the most experienced officer on board, he realized the significance of the impact, the ship's awful buckling, and the quiver stilling the creature's heart--the engines that had ceased at once to throb.