The Great Quest Part 51

I really did not understand the expression on Gleazen's face. I simply could not yet comprehend the terrible danger in which we were placed. To me, being no sailor, anything would have seemed possible at sea; but now, when we were so near port,--indeed, actually in sight of land,--it seemed utterly incredible that we could be in deadly peril. But it was a terrible lesson that put an end to my folly. A second blow followed the first shock of our striking, then a third still heavier, then a sea broke clean across our bows, carrying one poor wretch overboard and driving two more back to the quarter-deck. With a fearful, despairing yell the luckless fellow went past us and down, and as he did so I saw clinging to his shoulders a frightened animal and knew that we had seen the last of Pedro and his monkey.

The next sea broke over the whole weather side of the good Adventure, and only by clinging fast to the rigging did any one of us manage to retain his hold on the pounding wreck, which, desperate though her plight was, represented our one chance for life.

Now in a voice that rose above the roar of the tempest Gideon North thundered, "Cut away the masts! Cut away the masts!"

A lull followed, and for a moment we dared hope that, once the brig was freed of all weight aloft, she would right herself and go over the bar in such a way that we could let go our anchor on the farther side and so bring her up again into the wind. But the lull brought us only despair when the carpenter answered him by shrieking at the top of his voice, "The axe has gone overboard."

So swiftly and so mightily had the succession of seas burst over us that of all hands only ten or a dozen were left on board. I could see them in a line clinging precariously to the weather-rail. At first, in dazed horror, I thought Faith Parmenter was not there; then, seeing someone drag her back through the wash of the sea, I myself strove to reach her side. Another sea broke, and again she almost went overboard; then I saw that it was Abe Guptil who was holding her with the strength of two men. Then the great black figure of the Fantee canoeman worked along the rail ahead of me and took a place beside her, opposite to Abe, and helped to hold her in the brig.

It was plain to every one of us what the outcome would have been had not a cross-current now thrown the pounding hull at a new angle, so that for a breathing-s.p.a.ce those of us who were left alive had opportunity to take other measures for safety. But the very wave that did that also sent the masts by the board and, instead of lightening us, cluttered the decks with a hopeless snarl of ropes and canvas.

I was farther forward than the others, and so weak from my long illness that for a moment I could only strive to recover my strength and my breath. I saw them haul the filled boat up to the stern and, by sheer strength and audacity, raise her clear of the breakers, empty out half or two thirds of the water and let her go back again into the sea, where she rode sluggishly.

Into that rocking boat, first of all, sprang Matterson. Close after him scrambled the craven trader, and after him Neil Gleazen.

"Cast off!" I heard Matterson yell. "She'll founder with another soul aboard her."

And off they cast, those three men, abandoning every one of the rest of us to whatever end fate might hold in store.

That they should leave behind them those of us who had been from the first their enemies was not surprising; but that they should abandon thus, on a wreck that we all could see was doomed to break up in a few hours, if not literally in a few minutes, a girl who had done them no harm whatsoever, whose only fault lay in coming from quite another world than theirs, was contemptible beyond belief, if for no other reason than that she was but a young girl and they strong men.

I would not have believed it of even them. I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw them go. But as if to deal them a punishment more fitting than any that we could devise, while the brig was pounding in the breakers, a wave, sweeping clean over her, wrenched the trysail boom about and parted the sheet and flung the boom in a wide half-circle squarely on top of the boat, which it crushed to kindlings. Whether or not it hit any of the three cowardly knaves a direct blow, it left them struggling like so many rats in seas that speedily carried them out of our sight into the darkness.

No doubt we should have seen more of their fate had our own plight been less desperate; but the boom, as it swung down on the boat, raked across the taffrail, and those of us who had been clinging there in a long line, losing our hold on what up to that point had represented to us our only chance for safety, threw our arms round the boom and clung fast to that and with it were swept away from the wrecked brig, straight through the breakers that foamed between us and the sh.o.r.e. Holding the boom itself with one arm, I struggled to give Faith what help I could with the other; but we must both have been washed off the leaping spar, had not the big black Fantee canoeman, who all this time had been working closer and closer to his beloved mistress, plunged under the boom and, coming up on the farther side, seized both her and me with a grip like a gorilla's.

Meanwhile Abe Guptil, as strong as a bear, in a flash had seen how effective the Fantee's manoeuvre was, and had tried to duplicate it for himself, Arnold, and Gideon North, who had been washed to the farther end of the spar and nearly carried away from it. But he only partly succeeded, for to him the water was not nearly so natural an element as to the mungo, and he began his attempt later and completed it more slowly.

Coming up on the far side of the boom, gasping and choking from a wave that struck him squarely in the face, he clasped hands with Arnold and tried to do so with Gideon North; but as his outstretched arm groped for him, the sea tore the old sailor away and we five were left alone on the long spar, two of us on one side and three on the other, with arms and bodies locked around it.

Brave Gideon North! There was little time then to feel his loss; but it was to grow upon us more and more and more in the weeks and months to come. Stout-hearted, downright, thoughtful, kind--it is very seldom that one gets or loses such a friend.

The spar rolled and turned as it swept toward the sh.o.r.e. Now we were pounded and battered and almost drowned by the breakers; now we got a chance to breathe and regain our strength as we came into deeper, quieter water; now we were swept again through breakers that tossed us, half drowned, into surging shallows. And so, holding fast to one another, we were cast up on the sh.o.r.e in the darkness, where we crawled away from the long waves that licked over the wet sand, and sat down and watched and waited and watched.

Twice we heard someone calling aloud, and once I was sure that I saw someone struggling toward us out of the surge. But though we staggered down to the sea and shouted time and again, we got no answer. Slowly the conviction forced itself upon us that we five and some half a dozen sailors who had reached land before us were all who were left alive of the pa.s.sengers and crew of the brig Adventure; that after all there was no hope whatever for Gideon North, that bravest of master mariners.

To such an end had come Cornelius Gleazen's golden dreams! Through suffering and disaster, they had led him to the ultimate wreck of every hope; his own catastrophe had shattered the future of more than one innocent man, and had caused directly the death of many innocent men.

It was a wild dawn that broke upon us on that foreign sh.o.r.e. The wind raged and the sea thundered, and black, low clouds raced over our heads. To watch by daylight the terrible cauldron through which we had come by dark was in itself a fearful thing; and beyond it, barely visible through the surf, lay the broken hull of the Adventure. So far as we could discover, there was no living creature in all that waste of waters.

My dream of being a prosperous ship-owner lay wrecked beside the shattered timbers of the Adventure; and knowing that, after all my youthful dreams of affluence, I now was a poor man with my way in the world to make, I felt that still another dream, a dearer, more ambitious dream, likewise was shattered.

If when I owned the brig and had good prospects Faith Parmenter had withdrawn behind a wall of reserve, if there had been someone else whom she held in greater favor,--of whom she thought more often,--what hope that I could win her now? Starting to walk away from the others, I saw that she was ahead of me, staring with dark, tearless eyes at the stormy sea. I stopped beside her.

"I suppose the time of our parting is near at hand," I began. "If I can in any way be of service to you--"

"You are going to leave me _now_? _Here?_"

There was something in her breathless, anxious voice that brought my heart up into my throat.

"Not leave you, but--"

"But the time of parting has come?" she said, with a rising inflection. "It has found us in a wild and desolate place,"--she smiled,--"more desolate and less wild than the place from which we sailed. You came to me strangely, sir; you go as strangely as you came."

"If I can be of any service to you," I blindly repeated, "I--"

Still smiling, she cut me short off. "I thank you, but I think I shall be able, after all, to make shift. If someone--Mr. Lamont, perhaps--will take me to some town where there is--an English church--"

She still was smiling, but her smile wavered.

Could she, I wondered with a sort of fierce eagerness, have told me _all_ her story? Was there, then, really nothing hidden?

"If you--" I began, "if I--"

Then she covered her face with her hands and sobbed, and for the first time I dared guess the truth.

At what I then said,--the words that opened the gate to the life we two have lived together,--she smiled so brightly through her tears, that for the moment I forgot the dark sh.o.r.e, the stormy seas, and the terrible, tragic night through which we had pa.s.sed.

There was a wealth of affection in Arnold's kind, thoughtful face when we joined the others, and Abe Guptil and the big Fantee, Paul, smiled at us--it was good to see their smiles after the sufferings and sorrow that we all had pa.s.sed through.

"If only Gideon North and Seth Upham were here now!" Abe cried.

"Poor Seth!" said Arnold. "What a price he has paid for one pa.s.sionate blow."

"What do you know?" I demanded.

Arnold gravely turned, "I _know_ little," he said. "But I have guessed much."

"What have you guessed?"

"They say in Topham that Neil Gleazen left town in the night and Eli Norton was found dead in the morning."

While he paused, we waited in silence.

"That, my friends, is why Gleazen for twenty years did not come back. But I once heard Gleazen say, when the mood was on him to torment Seth Upham, let people think what they would, that at least he--Gleazen--_knew_ who killed Eli Norton."

"And you think that Seth Upham--"

He interrupted me with a Latin phrase--"De mortuis nil nisi bonum."

My poor uncle!

"You four," said Arnold thoughtfully, "will need money before you once more reach Topham."

"But of course you are coming too," I cried.

"No, I fear that I should not be content to live always in Topham."

Taken aback by his words, I stared at him with an amazement that was utterly incredulous.

"You are not coming back with us?"