The Gentleman: A Romance of the Sea Part 24

The boats were drawing nearer again, wary as hunters drawing on a dying lion.

Old Ding-dong heard them, and smiled.

The little _Tremendous_ was a sheer hulk; her back was broken; her crew were dead--and still they feared her!

The old seaman's heart warmed within him. That one sweet moment paid him generously for fifty years of toil, of battle, of chagrin.

And as though thrilling to the emotion of the man who had loved her for so long, the little ship trembled as she settled deeper.

The old man patted the deck.

"There! it wonna urt you, my dear," he said soothingly. "Too suddint."

A tricorne rose over the bulwark.

An officer cast his eyes up and down the deck, swift and alert as a bird.

"Anybody alife on board?" he repeated, and in the vast silence his voice came small and very shrill.

He clambered over the bulwark, and came up the steep deck monkey-wise.

At the foot of the mizzen he paused.

Kit, crouching in a heap close by, noticed his boots, old, split across the toe, dingy white socks showing through. He found himself wondering whether the man had corns.

Clinging to the stump the Frenchman drew his sword, and looked up at the red-cross flag flapping sullen defiance overhead.

"Dans le nom de l'Empereur!" he cried pompously.

A whistle, swift as the arrow of death, pierced him to the heart.

CHAPTER XVII

THE GRAVE OF THE LITTLE _TREMENDOUS_

I

A roar drowned the boy's senses, sweeping his mind away on a mountainous billow of sound.

Earth and sea were a bubble beneath his feet, swelling and sailing; and he was walking on the bubble, and toppling backwards as he walked.

He felt himself smiling in a foolish way. There was no pain then about dying, he thought with a pleased and remote surprise--only this silly smiling content.

Things. .h.i.t him outside. He was aware of them; but they did not hurt.

His body was wood, dull to sensation. He himself was within somewhere, snug and safe. He had heard the parson at home talk about eternal life.

Now he knew what the man meant. To be alive yet above pain, to be dead yet dimly comfortable--that was the heavenly life. It was very curious, and not half bad.

And--he had been there before. When and where, he could not recollect.

But all was friendly, all familiar.

Suddenly there came a change, and for the worse. A great wet cloud swamped him. The light went out. All about him was cold, and dark, and clinging. Was this the grave and gate of Death?

He shuddered, and yet was not greatly afraid.

Everything was so far away, on the circ.u.mference of being, as it were; and he at the centre, safe and warm, was mildly interested--little more.

Somehow he knew he was in the sea, walking dream-waters; whether conscious, or unconscious, in the spirit or out of it, he knew not, and didn't greatly care.

Grotesque yet beautiful impressions of things familiar flitted across his mind. He saw his mother in a c.o.c.ked hat; Cuddie Collingwood, his pet canary, strutting the maindeck and picking his teeth; and Gwen with a tarred pigtail, her brawny bosom tattooed with dancing-girls.

She was making faces at him, the faces that none but Gwen could make; and he was about to shoot his tongue back brotherly, when there came another change, terrible this time.

There was a singing in his ears; a sense of suffocation and appalling impotence. He was rushing back to the world of sense and pain--in time, no doubt, to die, when he thought he was through that trouble. Just his luck!

He was throttled, battling, distraught. About him was the rush and smother of waters. A secret power clutched him about the waist and tugged him back. For the first time in his life he felt the aweful and inexorable grip of Necessity; and his heart screamed.

Then with a bob and a gasp, he was up; the water in his nostrils; and his hands clinging to a spar.

II

About him was a fog of smoke, and the throes of water in torment, sucking, spewing, pouncing.

Then a great swell, roaring into foam, lifted him. He was swung out of the stinging smother, away from the shock and battle of waters, out and out under the calm sky.

Beneath him a sheer white wall rose. There was no top to it, and no bottom. He could have screamed. It was so huge, so blank, so incomprehensible. It fell from heaven. Was it the skirt of G.o.d?

Then he saw the dark crest miles overhead, and knew it for a cliff.

He was right beneath it, and swinging towards it.

Suddenly he became aware of a badger-grey head bobbing beside him on the spar.

"Hullo, sir!" he gasped.

A voice spluttered,

"Pockets sprung a leak!--tailor! ruffian!"

A great following swell lifted them.

"Hold fast, sir!" called Kit. "This'll throw us up."