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CHAPTER XXI
WASHED ASHORE

They had both slept again by the time that the morning broke with the suddenness of the tropics, while the coming of the sun was heralded by the pale primrose hue which all who have been between Capricorn and Cancer know so well; that hue being followed by the vermilion and golden shafts of light, and then by a deep blood-red tinge which suffused all the horizon. They had slept uneasily, each in their place; with-outside, near the opening of the little cave under the knoll-the tiger lying tranquilly as though keeping watch and ward over her whom, probably, it deemed its friend and mistress. Yet, ever and again, as she, while waking to regard it more than once-because of the fear which Stephen's words had engendered in her mind-saw very well, its yellow eyes peered out restlessly from their closed slits of eyelids, the pupil of each eye being itself a horizontal slit only. And she acknowledged that Charke had spoken aright, that the time had come for the creature to be either imprisoned or made away with. All its evil instincts were undoubtedly being developed with its growth; soon, they would have obtained their full force and be, perhaps, exerted. It was time.

But now the dawn was come, the blood-red of the Eastern sky was plainly visible, and the birds of the island were twittering to each other and pluming themselves; whereon the girl rose and left the cave, and passed quietly by the creature lying so close to her as though in fear of arousing it. In actual fear of it, indeed, since she did not know but that it might turn and rend her at any moment. For it was big enough and strong enough to do so now, its size being that of a large retriever, or a year-old mastiff; and she, or he, even-that stalwart muscular sailor-would probably have had little chance against it if it had set upon them, since both were unarmed and both were weakened and broken down by their struggles in the tempest-tossed waves.

Charke, seeing the girl rise from her recumbent position, rose also, quickly and quietly, and came towards her, while as he did so he said: 'Now, to-day is the time for me to make that search round the island which I promised you. We will but eat a little fruit, and then I will set out.'

'Shall I go with you?' she asked, as, taking up the cocoanut shell, she turned to go towards the rivulet that ran at her feet, 'or is it better for me to remain here? Perhaps, too, it may be more than I can do. Or, indeed,' she hastened to add, 'more than you can accomplish in one day, and in such heat as there will be. Oh, Mr. Charke,' she continued, 'you are not strong enough to undertake it yet!'

'I feel strong enough this morning,' he replied, 'and, if I cannot make the whole tour of the place in one day, I can at least do a considerable part of it. I will begin at once, before the sun becomes too fierce. But, as for you, perhaps it would be best if you stayed here. The outlook from this portion of the island is, I think, the one from which any ship that happened to pass would be most likely to be observed. You see, we look west from here, towards where Africa lies, and vessels use that track in preference to running more out into the open.'

'I will do anything you suggest,' she said. 'Anything you think will be for the best. But'-and again there came upon her face that stricken look which made his heart so sad for her, and which, whenever he observed it, caused him to bury every sorrow for himself in a more profound and unselfish one for her-'but-you know-I-I-at present-just at present-for a day or so-do not wish to see a ship come here to rescue us.'

'I know, I know,' he answered, not daring to keep his eyes fixed full upon that lovely but unhappy face. 'I know. Well, we will not look out for rescue yet. But, still, I think you had better stay here. We do not know for certain the size of this island; it is only guesswork on my part. It may be too far a walk, too much of an undertaking for you. You are not afraid-of that?' he continued, as he directed his eyes towards Bengalee, while seeing how, as he was speaking, she, too, had let her glance fall upon the cub, which was now pacing restlessly about at their feet.

'No,' she said, 'I am not. Yet what you said in the night was true. It is growing beyond control, and, of course, I know how treacherous and savage these animals are. It was a piece of girlish folly on my part to beg poor uncle to save it.'

'I scarcely know how we are to make away with it,' he replied. 'I have nothing but this,'-and he took from his pocket a little white-handled penknife, which he had probably bought for a shilling off a card exposed in a London shop window. 'I could hardly kill it with that. However, one thing is certain, it will die of starvation ere long on this island. It cannot live on fruit as we can, nor catch birds, and there are no signs of animals, not even rats or mice, as far as I can see.'

'Oh, poor thing; what a dreadful death to die!' the girl exclaimed, her pity at once awakened for a creature which had been more or less her pet for some few weeks. Yet she hastened to ask if starvation did not make such animals even more fierce than usual, and if the risk to them both would not, thereby, be increased. Then, before he could reply, she suddenly exclaimed, as her glance fell on the sea, 'What is that out there? Surely-surely-it is not a drowned man? Oh, not that-not that!'

Following the direction of that glance, he saw something drifting about on the tranquil, almost rippleless, water over which by now the rays of the risen sun were gleaming horizontally. Something that, since it was end-on towards them and the island, was not easily to be distinguished, yet was, all the same, undoubtedly no drowned man nor human body, alive or dead. At first he thought it might be a dead shark-his knowledge of the sea telling him at once that it was not a living one, since they never expose aught but the dorsal fin when swimming-then, a second later, he recognised what the object was.

'No,' he exclaimed, anxious to appease her terrors at once-while knowing to whom, and, above all others, to whose dead body those terrors pointed-'No, that is no body, living or dead. Instead, it is one of our quarter-boats. Washed out of the chocks when the ship turned on her side, no doubt, and floating about ever since.'

'It is coming nearer,' Bella exclaimed, her eyes still on it and full of delight at hearing that in it there was, at least, no confirmation of one awful fear; 'do you not think so?'

'Undoubtedly it is coming nearer. It will strike the shore just there if the reef does not catch it'; and he pointed with sailor-like certainty to a spot close by. 'It will be a mercy if it does.'

'Why? We could not escape from this place in that, could we?'

'Hundreds of sailors have escaped death in smaller boats than that; ay, and lived for many days, too, on an open and rough sea in such boats. But it is not for that only. If it comes ashore I can make a visit to the poor old Emperor and find out something, if not all, that I-that we-want to know. While, though we need not put to sea in it, we may use it to get to some other island which is inhabited, by, perhaps, white men; but, anyhow, by some one. It will be of the greatest assistance, especially as, since it floats, it must be undamaged. I trust the oars, if not the sail, are in it.'

And now, listening to his words, Bella became as eager for the quarter-boat to come ashore as her companion was, and, together, they went down to the spot he had indicated as that which the boat was likely to arrive at-a spot about sixty yards from where they were.

As Bella walked by her preserver's side she was wondering many things, and especially if he would, indeed, be able now to discover what the fate of the others in the Emperor had been, and, above all, if, by the aid of this boat, he would be enabled to solve for her the question she hourly, momentarily, asked herself by day and night-the question whether there was any hope left of a life of happiness and bliss to be passed by her lover's side, or whether, for her, the future could bring nothing but a joyless, heartbroken existence henceforth. Also, she mused upon one other thing-namely, what Charke was thinking of while, with his eyes never off the incoming boat, he meditated deeply as, from his knit brows and fixed look, she felt sure he was doing. The thoughts, those that actually were in his mind, he would, undoubtedly, not have divulged, even though she had asked him to do so, since they were such as could only have caused grief unspeakable. For he was thinking that, since this quarter-boat had been washed out of the chocks and off the deck into the sea, and had then floated about for forty-eight hours in the neighbourhood previous to being directed by some subtle current to the island, so other things that were on deck would be subject to the same conditions. The bodies of drowned men; the body of her lover! He knew that the sea and its currents and tides work in calm weather with as much regularity as the sun and the moon work in their rising and setting, and, indeed, as the seasons themselves work; and he knew, also, that if Gilbert's body-which was close to where the quarter-boat rested when the ship struck-had been washed into the sea at the same time as it, then it was most probable, nay, almost certain, that it also would come ashore at the same spot and perhaps almost at the same time.

What horror, what fresh horror, would that be for this poor devoted girl to experience! For, in his own heart, he never doubted for one moment that somewhere close at hand the body of Gilbert Bampfyld was floating about.

The boat was coming very close into the shore now, so close that they could see that one oar was in it, but only one, and that there was nothing else, while they observed, too, that the rudder was not fixed in the braces. Yet that mattered little to Stephen Charke if he could only once get possession of the boat itself, since with one oar on such a glossy sheet of water as this ocean was now, he could propel and steer it easily enough.

'I am glad, thankful, it is coming ashore,' he said now. 'I had thought of swimming out to the ship, only I dreaded the sharks. Little use as one's life may be, one would scarcely care to lose it by the jaws of those brutes.'

And, though he did not see it, the girl by his side gave him a glance such as would, perhaps, have cheered his heart had he done so. 'Was not her own life, also, of little enough use,' she asked herself as he spoke, 'to make her sympathise with his remark? Would it not be a broken and dejected one, henceforth, if that which she dreaded, which she had almost forced herself to feel sure must be the case, should be proved to be so beyond all doubt before many more hours had passed?' For every hope with which she had buoyed herself was sinking in her breast, as moment after moment went by and the time grew longer and longer since the wreck had taken place.

The boat touched the white, pebbly beach now, grating on it with a gentle scrape, and Stephen, who had gone close to the water's edge to await its arrival, put out his hand, and, seizing first the stern and then the painter, drew it a foot or two farther on shore. Then he got into it, and, grasping the solitary oar which had remained in the boat simply because the loom, or handle, had got caught beneath the stern thwart, prepared to shove off in it.

'You will not mind,' he said, as he did so, 'being left alone for half an hour? This will not take me away from you for so long as when I go round the island.' While she, in answer, shook her head to indicate that she was not at all afraid of being left by herself.

CHAPTER XXII
A SAILOR'S KNIFE

'She is perfectly sound and watertight,' he called back to her as, with the hand which was uninjured, he threw the oar over the boat's stern, and worked her out from the shore. 'If we want her to help us off to another island she will do it, if I can only find another oar floating about somewhere.'

Then he propelled her as swiftly as he could to where the Emperor of the Moon lay outside the rock, her keel and copper bottom gleaming in the bright morning sun.

As he drew near to the ship he began to perceive how all hope of the likelihood that any one should still be alive and imprisoned in the ship must be abandoned. She had turned over even more than he had at first imagined when regarding her from the shore of the island, so that the keel was almost level in a manner exactly the opposite from what sailors mean when they talk about a 'level keel.' It stuck up now, so far as it was out of water, as some sharp mountain ridge seems to stick up when regarded from a valley, and showed an almost horizontal line; while, beneath the keel and above the water, for half the length of the vessel, there was visible a portion of the outside of the main hold, down to (or up from) her diagonal ribboned-lines. And, here, there was a great gaping wound, a hole smashed into her side large enough to have let the whole Indian Ocean pour into the devoted ship directly it was made, and (although there might well be others which were not visible) sufficient to have filled and sunk, forthwith, the largest vessel that was ever launched. The force of the impact was to be appreciated, too, by the manner in which her copper sheathing was driven into her and burst, so that, where the blow had been struck by the jagged tooth of the rock, the latter looked like a destroyed chevaux-de-frise, or, for a better comparison, a paper hoop through which an acrobat had passed. And, in this burst and broken protection, as in other and less terrible circumstances it might have been (though naturally it had proved useless here), the sheathing-nails stuck out like brilliant, gleaming yellow teeth, all broken and distorted.

Charke brought the quarter-boat alongside the upturned or leaning bottom, so that, by looking through this gaping wound, he could peer into the now reversed decks and see that there lay, on what had once been the roof of it but was now the floor, a mass of articles, such as is usually stowed away in a ship's lower decks. A mass, composed of cables and old and new sails, as well as some stores, consisting of dozens of tinned-meat cans unopened, boxes of sardines, and so forth, and several old sea chests and trunks-all lying, of course, helter-skelter, as they had been thrown together by the ship's reversal.

'There are some things of use here,' Charke thought, 'and worth taking away,' whereupon he ran the painter through a small hole in the sheathing and tied it tightly, and then scrambled up the vessel's inverted side until he was able to drop himself through the opening into the deck, taking care that he tore neither his flesh nor his clothes in doing so. Being there, he selected a small sail which he found; it was indeed, a boat sail, and had its gear of mast and tackle attached, while, passing it through the orifice, he dropped it carefully into the boat, and then he took next a few of the tins of provisions, and dropped them into her, too. And, also, he found something which would be to him, in the utterly unprovided condition in which Bella and he had escaped to the island, of the greatest service. This was a long, sharp knife in its leather sheath, such as sailors strap to their sides, and was new and in good condition, so that he did not doubt that the last seaman who had been sent below to this deck had dropped it there, and he was able to picture to himself the man's annoyance, probably expressed aloud and with a good deal of vehemence and strong language, over his loss. This done-and the doing of it had not taken long-he prepared to leave the disordered hold, when he remembered that there was one thing he wanted, namely, some cable. 'That tiger has to die at once,' he muttered to himself. 'With a piece of stout rope and this knife-which would slay anything, from a horse downwards-its death should not be difficult of accomplishment.'

Then, having selected two or three pieces of cable of different strands, he got out through the hole again and into the boat.

It is almost needless to write down that he found no sign of human life as he rowed about and round the wrecked Emperor of the Moon for some moments afterwards. Needless, too, perhaps, to add that he had never expected to find any. He was a sailor, accustomed to disaster at sea and full also of much acquired knowledge pertaining to many of the calamities which it had never been his lot to experience heretofore; and he knew-he felt sure, and would have staked his life upon the certainty of his convictions-that of all who had been in that doomed ship an hour before she struck, none except Bella Waldron and himself were now alive. Those who had been below in the cabins or saloon, those also who were in forecastle or galley, had met, must have met, not only with their deaths but their graves at one and the same time; while as for the unhappy and blind young officer who had caused him so much heartache by winning the woman whom he loved so fondly, and whom he had once hoped to win-why, it was impossible that he should still be alive. If he had been washed ashore, it could be only as a corpse, and it was most improbable that even that should have happened. In truth, he believed that, with all the others, he had been carried below by the overturning of the ship and then pinned down, buried, beneath the mass of the fabric. Otherwise, since the boat had floated ashore, so, too, would he have done by now.

'The woman he had hoped to win,' he repeated softly to himself, as still he sculled the quarter-boat round and round while peering down into the dark blue depths as far as he could penetrate; and while endeavouring also to perceive some sign or memorial-even so much as a cap or straw hat-of one of those poor drowned sailors imprisoned below-'the woman he had hoped to win!' And as the phrase rose to his mind, though not to his lips, he recalled as well how he had cherished the thought of the length of voyage that had lain before her ere she could join her lover in India; how, too, he had pondered on half a hundred things which might happen ere the old Emperor should be anchored in Bombay harbour. Almost, now, those meditations seemed to have been prophetic-for what had not happened! The girl's lover was gone, removed by death, and she had none other in the world on whom to lean but himself. And what was more, she spoke kindly to him; she pitied him, he could well perceive; there was something between them now, a deep sympathy, a reliance on each other in their misfortunes, which had never existed before.

'The woman he had hoped to win?' Well! – he scarce dared whisper the thought to his longing heart, yet it was there! – the thought, the hope that in days to come, in after-months, perhaps years, when her grief for Gilbert Bampfyld was mellowed and softened by time, when she knew him better and should fully recognise how profound his adoration for her was, he might still win her! She could not, young as she was, and with all the years of a long life before her, sorrow for ever-sorrow for a memory that would at last be nothing but a shadow.

'He would win her!' he said aloud to himself now, as he worked the boat ashore, 'he was resolved he would.' The one obstacle in his path was removed, the brave, gallant young officer was gone, brushed aside by Fate. He would win her yet!

He stepped ashore now to where she was standing watching him, and it seemed almost-if his recent thoughts had not tinged his present fancies with a roseate hue-that there was a look of greeting and welcome to him in her eyes, even as she saw that he had come back-even at the ending of so short an absence as his had been! Was she beginning now-now that she had none other in the world to watch for-to desire to have him always near her? Ah, if that were indeed so! Then-then he might win her at last.

'You found,' she asked, speaking low, and in those sad tones which had come into her voice of late, and since disaster had fallen heavily on them, 'you found no sign of any others having been saved?'

'No,' he said, also softly. 'No, there are no signs of that. Miss Waldron-I am neither cruel nor hard of heart, but-oh, how can I say it! – it is useless to hope.'

'Useless! Ah, well, I suppose it is-it must be! And, God help me, it must also be borne.' Then she turned away from him with the desire to prevent the tears which had risen to her eyes from being seen by him, and went back to the shade of the trees under which she had been sitting until she saw the quarter-boat returning with him in it. And he followed her, carrying the cable which he brought away from the ship; the knife which he had found being in his pocket and the sail with its gear left in the boat. The sun was terribly fierce now, so fierce that to be beneath its rays for only a few moments was to risk sunstroke or to be burnt more red than he had long since been, or she since her exposure on the island; and, of course, he could not attempt the projected tour of the place until that sun once more sank low in the west. There was, therefore, nothing now to do but to sit idly gazing out to sea and watch for signs of any ship which might pass near enough to perceive them, when they should have erected signals.

'After the tour round the island,' he said to her, as he sat by her side beneath the palm trees and occupied his time in plaiting some of the long, thick grass which grew at their feet into something that should serve for hats, or, at least, coverings for their heads, 'after the tour, when we have had the last sad satisfaction of knowing that there can be none who have escaped, you will not object to my endeavouring to arrange for our being taken off? The Mozambique Channel is full of ships on their way to India during the time of the southwest monsoon-you will let me make signals, will you not?'

'I am in your hands,' she replied, her eyes on him. 'You must do all that you think best. Ah, Mr. Charke, you do not know how grateful I feel to you!'

'Never say that. Not a word. I knew, I thought, I could save one besides myself, and, naturally,' he went on simply, 'I saved you.'

Then both sat on musing and meditating in silence.

'Here comes the tiger,' he said now, seeing the creature stalking towards them in the lithe, treacherous manner peculiar to its race. 'I imagine it has been endeavouring to find food. I brought off some tinned things from the ship; yet, cruel as it seems to be, it is not advisable, I think, to give it anything in the shape of flesh. Meanwhile, if it will only go to sleep we ought to secure it,' and, as he spoke, he took up one of the pieces of cable and commenced tying what is known to sailors as a double-diamond knot. But, previously, he had fastened the other end securely round one of the palm trees that grew close by him.

'There will be one advantage in this,' he said, 'namely, that the more it pulls against it the tighter will come the loop, so that its intelligence will prevent it from straining at the rope and strangling itself.'

'Poor wretch,' Bella exclaimed, 'how gaunt and lean it is growing! I recognise that it cannot be kept alive or even taken off with us when we are found here; yet-yet I am sorry for it.'

'Yes,' he answered, 'I understand that, but it has to be done-must be done-it is imperative. In the state it is now in from hunger, and also owing to its increasing strength, our lives are no longer safe with it, and certainly not with it at large; while, if one of us were to scratch our hands, or even get the slightest wound, and the creature smelt the blood, which it would undoubtedly do-well, the result might be terrible. Now, see, it's going to sleep; it appears exhausted. I must drop the loop over its head.'

'No,' she answered, 'let me do that. It is still very docile with me,' and, as she spoke, she took the loop from his hand and, while patting the creature's head-whereon it raised it as a dog will raise its head when stroked by a loved hand-she dropped that hand down until the rope was round its neck, though not without muttering some words of regret as to what she deemed her treachery.

'It is no treachery,' he said, 'no more treachery, indeed, than to tie up a mastiff in its kennel. And, even though it were, it would not matter. These creatures are themselves the incarnation of treachery. However, the main point is that it is now secure. It is not yet strong enough to burst this rope.'

Such was the case, yet it was strange that to so acute a mind as Charke's there had not occurred the idea that it would not take a tiger very long to gnaw a ship's rope through if it desired its release.