As It Was in the Beginning Part 4

"G.o.d help them!" he said, when the silence became once more insupportable. "He only knows where any of us are!"

"After all we'd been through!" she shivered in awe. "If only we two were really saved---- Oh, there must be land, somewhere about, if the Captain was trying to reach a port! But, of course, this isn't even a boat, and, perhaps, it will finally sink!"

He tried to summon an accent of hope to his voice.

"Oh, no; it will float indefinitely. It's sure to turn up somewhere in the end."

"We haven't food--or even water," she answered him, understandingly.

"What shall we do to-morrow?"

"We are drifting rapidly northward. We may arrive somewhere by to-morrow.... You'd better sit down. It taxes your strength to stand."

"G.o.d help us all!" she suddenly prayed in a broken voice, and, sinking lower where she sat, was shaken by one convulsion of sobbing, in pity for all she had seen. She had no thoughts left for their earlier, personal encounter.

For a time Grenville stood there, braced to take the motion of the raft. The wind continued brisk and undiminished. Aided by tides, which had turned an hour earlier, to flow in its general direction, it drove the raft steadily onward over miles of gray, unresting sea.

The water slopped up between the slats whereon Elaine was sitting. She was cold, despite the tropic lat.i.tude. She was hopeful, only because she wished to contribute no unnecessary worry to the man.

Grenville at length sat down at her side, but they made no effort to converse. Elaine was exhausted by the sickening strain and the shock of that tragic end. For an hour or more she sat there limply, being constantly wet by the waves. She attempted, finally, to curl herself down and make a pillow of her arm, and there she sank into something akin to sleep.

Gently Grenville thrust out his foot and lifted her head upon the cushion of flesh above his ankle. The night wore slowly on. Three o'clock came grayly over the world-edge, where the waves made a scalloped horizon.

Slowly the watery universe expanded, as the dawn-light palely increased. By four Grenville's gaze could search all the round of the ocean, but nothing broke either sky or sea.

Five o'clock developed merely color on the water, but no sign of a sail or a funnel. Elaine still slept, while Grenville, cramped almost beyond endurance, refused to move, and thereby disturb her slumber.

But at six, as he turned for the fiftieth time to scan the limited horizon, he started so unwittingly, at sight of a tree and headland, flatly erected, like a bit of sawed-out stage scenery, above the waste of billows, that Elaine sat up at once.

"It's land!" he said. "We're drifting to some sort of land!"

She was still too hazy in her mind, and puzzled by their surroundings, to grasp the situation promptly.

"Land?" she repeated. "Oh!" and a rush of hideous memories swept confusedly upon her till she shivered, gazing at the water.

Grenville had risen to his feet, and Elaine now rose beside him.

Somewhat more of the flat, wide protrusion from the sea became thus visible to both. It still appeared of insignificant extent, a blue and featureless patch against the sky, with one half-stripped tree upon its summit.

"I should say it's an island," Grenville added, quietly, restraining an exultation that might prove premature. "It is still some miles away."

"There must be someone there," Elaine replied, with an eagerness that betrayed her anxious state of mind. "Almost anyone would certainly help us a little."

What doubts he entertained of some of the island inhabitants in this particular section of the world, Sidney chose to keep to himself.

"It's land!" he said, as he had before. "That means everything!"

"Do you know of any island that ought to be in this locality?"

"I haven't the remotest notion where we are--except we are somewhere, broadly speaking, in the neighborhood of the Malay peninsula. The steamer must have drifted tremendously out of her course after we lost our rudder."

"Have you been awake for long?"

"I haven't slept."

"Have you seen or heard anything of any of the others?"

"Not a sign.... We may find some of them, landed on this island."

He had no such hope, and this she felt. She summoned a heart full of courage to meet the situation, however, and gazed off afar at the misty terra incognita enlarging imperceptibly as they drifted deliberately onward.

"It's fortunate," she said, "the steamers pa.s.s this way."

"Yes," he said, unwilling to shake this solitary hope that brightened her uncertain prospect, but he knew they were leagues from the nearest track that the ocean steamers plowed. "And I trust we'll find it entirely comfortable while we're waiting," he added. "We're sure to get dry and find something fit to eat."

She was silent for a moment. A sense of constraint was returning at last for their scene of the previous day. "It seems to be rather far away," was all she said.

"About another hour--if the breeze and tide continue favorable."

It was nearer an hour and a half, however, before they were finally abreast the headland with the tree, and swinging and turning slowly by the island's coast on the surface of a complicated tide.

The features of the land had developed practically everything usual to this lat.i.tude except habitations of men. That it was entirely surrounded by water was convincingly established. Indeed, it was not an extensive outcrop of some ocean-buried range, and, despite the luxuriance of its various patches of greenery and jungle, it was decidedly rugged in formation.

The edge past which the raft was leisurely floating was a broken and cavern-pitted wall of rock affording no promise of a landing. Above this loomed the solitary tree that Grenville had seen from a distance.

Nothing suggestive of hearth smoke arose against the sky from one end of the place to the other.

This one vital fact, in her excitement, Elaine entirely overlooked.

She likewise failed to note the look of concern that Grenville could not have banished from his eyes. The prospect of reaching a dry, firm soil outweighed her immediate worries.

"Couldn't we paddle in closer?" she said. "Where do you mean to land?"

"Where the Fates shall please," he answered, grimly. "Without even a line for me to take ash.o.r.e we must not be over fastidious."

"We could swim--if we have to," she told him, bravely. "We seem to be floating farther out."

They were, at that particular moment. The powerful current carried them swiftly seaward a considerable distance, till at length the raft was drawn to a species of whirlpool, some two hundred yards in diameter, the inner rim of which was depositing weed at the edge of something like an estuary, indenting the sh.o.r.e of the island.

On the huge circ.u.mference of this whirlpool they were finally rounding towards the one bit of beach that Grenville had been able to discover.

Yet when they approached within almost touching distance of this sunlit strand, the current failed, permitting the breeze to waft them again towards the center.

"Stand by to go ash.o.r.e," said Grenville, resolving suddenly on his course, and overboard he slipped, at the float's outer edge, and, using his legs like a powerful frog, he pushed at the raft with sufficient force to overcome the action of the wind.

For a moment his efforts seemed in vain--and then the clumsy affair nosed reluctantly sh.o.r.eward an inch, and was once more a.s.sisted by the tide. Ten feet out he found the water shallow and, planting his feet on the solid sand, drove the raft at once to the estuary's edge, where Elaine leaped lightly ash.o.r.e.

Some startled creature slipped abruptly into the pool that the tiny harbor formed. This escaped Elaine's attention. A moment later the raft rode sc.r.a.pingly over a bar that all but locked the inlet, and Grenville stood dripping on the sand.

"Welcome to our city," said he, an irrepressible emotion of joyousness and relief possessing him completely at the moment, and, going at once to the near-by growth, where a long stout limb had been broken from a tree, he dragged this severed member forth to the beach and across the estuary's mouth, where it effectually blocked the channel against the raft's escape. Then he folded a couple of large-sized leaves with his hands, secured each with a slender twig, and, giving one to Elaine for a cap, placed the other upon his head.

Elaine was no less relieved than he, so elastic and buoyant is youth.

"The villages must be on the farther side," she said. "What language do you suppose the natives speak?"