CHAPTER XXIII
'THE TIGER DID THAT'
When the sun began to drop towards where Africa lay, afar off and invisible, and when (because of the dense foliage which crowned the slopes of the island that rose behind the beach) that portion where they sat was rapidly becoming shaded from its burning rays, Stephen Charke said that the time had come for him to think of making his tour of the place, or, at least, of accomplishing a part of it. The air, it is true, still resembled that which one feels when they have approached too near to a furnace, or, for a further simile, have descended into the engine-room of a steamer. Yet, now, there would be no danger of sunstroke, and the expedition, such as it was, might very well be undertaken.
'My idea is,' Charke said, 'to begin now, this afternoon, by starting to the left and going on along the shore until I am nearly opposite this place on the other side of the island; then I will come back here, crossing it, and to-morrow I will do the same thing with the other side. That way there cannot be much left unexplored by to-morrow evening. What do you think?'
'I think,' Bella answered, 'that you are the most unselfish, heroic man I ever knew. Ah, Mr. Charke,' she continued, 'I know very well why you are doing this, why you are going to make this journey round the island. It is to satisfy me, it is for my sake. If you were alone here you would never do it, but occupy yourself only on thoughts of how to get away, and-'
'No,' he said, 'no. Had I been the only person who got ashore from the wreck I should, as a sailor, as a comrade of the others, have deemed it my duty to make a thorough search through the island ere I took steps to quit it. I shall have, as the survivor of the Emperor of the Moon, to make a report-'
'I understand,' she said quietly. 'I understand. Nothing that you can say will make me feel my obligations to you any the less.'
For Bella Waldron knew as well as Stephen Charke himself knew, that what she had just said was the absolute fact; she knew that he was going to undertake this fresh toil-for toil it was, after all he had gone through, after his bruises and buffeting with the waves, and in this terrible torrid-zone heat-for her and on her account alone. He was going to undertake it with the desire of easing her heart and preventing her, in after-years, from being able to reproach herself with having left the spot while any chance remained of there being one of those who were dear to her upon it.
She was, too, perfectly aware that he did not for one moment believe-alas! how could he, a trained, intelligent seaman, believe? – that there was any other soul left alive out of all those who had been in the ill-fated vessel when she struck on the rock. And, being thus unable to believe, could she regard him as aught else than that which a moment before she had termed him, 'a most unselfish, heroic man'?
Before he left her he asked if she would not partake of some of the tinned meats, or sardines, which he had managed to obtain from the upturned hold, but as the girl replied that it was far too hot to eat anything but the wild fruit growing in such profusion all around, and also that she was not hungry, he decided that he would not open one of the tins for himself. He, too, could do very well on what there was to their hands for the trouble of picking, since, here, in this tropical, steaming atmosphere, eating scarcely seemed a necessity of life; while, if it were, then those glorious bananas whose golden and crimson hues merged so superbly into each other were amply sufficient. But, also, he had another reason for not opening the preserved meat. The odour of it would-might-arouse the cub's desires, and, once aroused, they would possibly stir the animal almost to frenzy if ungratified.
He rose now and prepared to set out, there being still two full hours of daylight left; two full hours ere the sun would be gone and the swift, dark night had fallen at once upon all around-the outcome of a dusky veil which the sun appears to fling behind it as it departs, and out of which emerges black obscurity, lit only by the burning, silvery constellations. But, ere he went, he asked if she feared to be left alone for so long.
'No,' she replied, 'no. Why should I? What is there to hurt me here?'
'There may be people on the island all the same,' he replied, 'even if they have not yet discovered our presence; although I do not think it likely.'
'Nor do I. If there were they would by now, in two days, have observed that,'-and she pointed towards the wreck-'and have come down to it. We are alone,' she concluded with a sigh. 'There is no one else here but you and I.' And still again she sighed.
'Yes,' he answered, understanding all that her words meant, all the heartbrokenness that they expressed. 'Yes, we are alone; there are no others.' After which he left her, saying that, by dark, or very shortly afterwards, he would be back again.
When he had departed, after looking round once to wave his hand ere a bend of the shore hid him from her view (and she noticed that, true to his sailor's instincts, he went towards the boat and inspected it, and then drew it up a little more on to the white-pebbled beach and made the painter more secure), she went down to the rivulet and cooled her face and hands and feet in it, and made some attempt at arranging her hair, while using the stream as a mirror. Yet it was little enough that she could do in the way of a toilet, since she had nothing that would serve as a comb nor any soap or towel. After which, feeling refreshed, nevertheless, by this attempt, she returned to where she had been sitting and gazed out seaward, meditating deeply.
'What an end,' she murmured, as she did so, while from her eyes the tears flowed freely now-the more so because there was none to observe them-'what an end to all! Gilbert, who was to have been my husband, dead! Gilbert, whom I so loved with my whole heart and soul, dead! and lying beneath that ship. Oh, Gilbert, Gilbert, Gilbert, my love, come back to me. And my poor uncle and aunt, too. Oh, God, what a disaster! What a disaster!'
And now she wept piteously, so piteously that, if that other man, who had risked his own chances to save her as well as himself, could have seen her, the sight would have gone near to break his heart. That other man! At this moment her thoughts turned to him too. Almost unconsciously she found herself thinking of him, speculating on what his future would be. 'He will never marry,' she murmured. 'I know it. Feel sure of it. It would be the idlest affectation to ignore his sentiments for me. Yet-yet-how sad, how mournful a life must his be henceforth; no home to go to, no wife to welcome him, none to make him happy. Poor Mr. Charke. Poor Stephen. Our lots will be similar, we must be friends, always friends.'
Meanwhile, he was making his way along the beach, which was still shaded from the sun and becoming, indeed, more and more so as he progressed farther round the island, away from the west. And every step which he took served only to confirm him in what he had believed, known from the first-the unlikelihood of there being any other person saved from the wreck.
'Surely,' he muttered to himself, 'if he should have drifted ashore, it would have been here. The current sets this way, and also the monsoon blows towards this island. Living or dead, he would have come to this neighbourhood if he had come at all. The tiger did that, and, doubtless-'
He paused at those words. 'The tiger did that!' and for a moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still. 'The tiger did that!' Ay, but did it? Was he wrong in the surmise, wrong in his deduction? Did the cub land here or hereabouts? Reflecting, recalling the night before, the early dawn, when Bella shrieked to him and awoke him from a half-slumber into which he had fallen, he recollected that the beast had sprung forth from the copse of orange and lemon trees that was to the right of the little spot where he had waded ashore with the girl in his arms, and where, after carrying her up far above the waterline, he had dropped senseless. It had sprung at them from the right side, was coming from the right; and it was not to be believed, it was, indeed, beyond all belief, that it could previously have passed across where they were from the other side without having been noticed by one of them, especially by Bella, who was wide awake. It was coming from the right; it had, doubtless, therefore, got ashore, been cast ashore, to the right. And he was seeking for signs on-had set out to-the left! Had he, therefore, chosen the most unlikely place in which, if, by the most remote chance, any human being should have been washed ashore, to discover them?
'Shall I go back,' he mused, 'and begin again on the other side? Shall I?' Yet, as he meditated, he reflected that there would be little use in doing so; certainly little use in doing so to-day. An hour had now passed, or nearly so, since he quitted Bella; the sun, he knew, since he could no longer see it, was sinking fast-over the whole of the rich, luxurious vegetation that stretched inland there was now the golden hue, the amber light that, in the tropics, follows after the dazzling, blinding, molten brilliancy of the noontide, directly the sun is no longer vertically above the globe. And also, there was the odour of the coming night all about him, the odour of the declining day when, from every fruit and flower that has drooped through the hottest hours of the earlier portions of that day, there exudes the luscious, sickly scent that travellers know so well.
'No,' he said to himself, 'no. It would be little use to turn back now or to begin again to-night! And-and,' he murmured, thinking deeply as he did so, 'even though he had been cast ashore, he could not now be alive. Blind-unable to see his way-to find any of all the fruit that grows here in such profusion, poor Bampfyld would succumb to starvation, even if the life had not been beaten out of him by the waves.'
It was of Gilbert Bampfyld alone that he thought, of him alone about whom he speculated, since, of all the others who had been in the Emperor of the Moon, he was the only one whose body could by any possibility have come ashore. They, those others, Pooley and his wife, were in the submerged cabin, no power on earth could have got them out of it; any men left in the galley and the forecastle were in as equally bad a plight. Nothing could have saved them, or have even released their bodies. But, as he thought of Gilbert Bampfyld, so he felt sure that he also must have perished, even though he was not thus below as those others had been. Still musing on all this, but with one other image ever present to his mind-the image of the woman he loved-dishevelled and storm-beaten, but always beautiful-the woman of whom, now, he began to dream once more, to dream of winning for his own in some distant day-he went on along the beach, his eyes glancing everywhere around and near him. Glancing into the wild, tangled vegetation, along the channels of the rivulet's courses, but sometimes with them fixed on the beach.
Suddenly he stopped, his heart quivering again, beating fast.
At his feet there lay a sailor's rough jacket, and, a little farther off, a cap-a common, blue-flannel thing, such as the mercantile sailor buys for a few pence at a Ratcliffe Highway slop-shop.
He stopped, regarding them-not with that agitation which the greatest romancer who ever lived has depicted as clutching at Crusoe's heart when he saw the footmarks, but, instead, with a feeling of astonishment; yet a feeling of astonishment which, he told himself, he, a sailor, ought not to experience.
'Do not all wrecks,' he muttered, 'send forth around them countless articles of débris, countless portions of the raffle that encumbers their decks? What more likely than that a sailor's jacket and a cap should have floated ashore?'
Then he stooped, and, feeling them, found that they were thoroughly dry, so that they must have been ashore for some hours at least, since even the fierce sun of the now declining day could not have dried them in less time, all soaked with water as they had been.
CHAPTER XXIV
BEATEN! DEFEATED!
'No,' he said to Bella some time later, and when he had returned to her, 'no other signs than these. Nothing,' while, as he spoke, he pointed to the jacket and cap at his feet. He had brought them with him after the discovery, thinking that perhaps they might be useful when the time came for them to set out in the quarter-boat, as he fully imagined they would have to do, thereby to reach some other island.
'Yet,' she whispered, 'if they, if this animal, too,' indicating Bengalee, who now, what with his being made prisoner by the rope and also by his long fasting, displayed a horrible state of nervous agitation, a state which frightened Bella and rendered even Charke very uneasy, 'if they could be thrown ashore, why not others? Mr. Charke, do you think there is any hope?'
'I cannot buoy you up by saying that I do think so,' he answered. 'Yet be assured of one thing-you will know soon now. To-morrow, at the first sign of dawn, I set out to accomplish the inspection of the other half of the island. It is smaller even than I thought; it will not take long.'
And at daybreak he roused himself to carry out his undertaking, though, even as he rose from the warm, soft sand on which he had lain, he knew, he felt sure, that he was going on a bootless task. Again and again he had told himself, through the night, that, even though Gilbert Bampfyld's body had reached the island, it had never done so with life in it. Yet he would make sure for her sake and for his.
'Heaven bless you,' she exclaimed from where she also rose as she saw him do so, and while going towards him. 'Heaven bless you. You spare yourself no trouble nor fatigue on my account.'
'It is best,' he answered, though he scarcely knew what reply to make. 'It is best that there should be no chance lost. If-if-' Then he held out his hand to her as he had not done before, and at once, after she had taken it, set out upon the remaining portion of his search. And, for some reason which he, perhaps, could not have explained to himself, he cast back no last look at her in the swift-coming daylight-nor gave any word of farewell as he had done on the previous afternoon.
That daylight brought a little breeze with it which was cool and soft as it came off the ocean that, for some hours, had been free from the burning rays of the sun; and Charke made his way along the beach while glancing everywhere, as he had done during his search of yesterday, – into every spot wherein, if any one, anything, had come ashore, they would probably have been cast. But as it had been when he proceeded towards the left or south, so it was now as he went towards the right or north end of the island. He found nothing; not even, this time, a rag of clothing or a spar from the ship. He observed, however, amongst other things of which his vigilant eyes took notice, that here the formation of the island was considerably different from what it had been on the southern side. There, as he made his way back inland to Bella, cutting across from the eastern to the western shore, he had found the glades and groves almost flat, except for small knolls and little eminences on which, as everywhere else, there grew the long, deep-green grass, the cocoa trees and tamarinds, and the flowering shrubs and bushes. But here, upon the side he was now following, all was very different. Inland, he could perceive that the surface rose until it developed into quite high hills, and that those hills, forming into spurs as they ran down to the water's edge, created a number of little bays or coves, some of them being scarcely more than fifty yards in breadth. Also he perceived that on high, where the crests or summits of these spurs were, their sides were abrupt declivities resembling often the sheer sides of cliffs instead of sloping gradually and being covered by the deep emerald-green, velvety grass. And they were white as English cliffs-as those of Dover! – and, sometimes, as precipitous. Huge masses, too, of fallen, crumbling rock lay tumbled together at their base and in the tiny valleys which they formed between them, and gave, thereby, signs of either a convulsion which had some time or another taken place, or of their lack of solidity and insecure composition. 'I shall have,' Charke thought, 'a mountainous, up-and-down kind of return journey if I go back to her inland. Yet it will cut off a good deal of the way and make it easier for me.'
He found as he progressed, however, that soon, if he wished to continue his inspection of the whole of the coast, he would, in any circumstances, have to continue his walk more or less inland, since now he could observe, by looking about, that the spurs ran quite out into the sea, so that they hid each little bay from its neighbour on either side of it. Consequently, if he wished to inspect the space between each, he would have to mount to their tops and thus peer down into the recesses that they formed. At present, however, there was no necessity for him to do this. Still looking, he saw that there were three more bays, or coves, which he could reach by walking between the feet of the spurs and the water, the spurs stopping some yards short of the gentle surf which the morning breeze was raising.
'Three,' he said, 'three. This one where I am now, the first; then two more. And, after that, I must ascend and gaze down. There will be no getting farther along the bank.'
So he entered the first cove, finding it as desolate and bare as the others into which he glanced in his journey; bare of everything, and with its white beach so void of all else but its own stones, that it might, that morning, have been swept clean and clear. The second was the same, except that here, upon its beach, there lay the long iron shank of an anchor with one arm and fluke upon it, but with the other gone. An anchor that, he knew at a glance, had never been made in recent days-that, by its quaint form, must be some centuries old. And, even as he continued his journey, he wondered how it had come there, and if, in long-forgotten and unnumbered years, some toilers of the sea had been flung ashore in this spot, and if this was all that had been left by time to hint at the story.
Then he entered the third, and last, bay or cove which remained passable by the shoreway-the last he would be able to inspect until he ascended to the cliffs above.
As he did so he started-knowing, feeling, that beneath his bronze and sunburn he had turned white-recognising that he was trembling with a faint, nervous tremor. For this cove to which he had penetrated was different from the previous ones; it ran back between the two spurs which formed its walls until it merged into the wooded, grassy declivity that sloped down from above, while, at the foot of that declivity, was more grass forming a little carpeted ravine and, growing on it, some of the island trees-orange trees, lemon trees, even bananas.
And on the grass there lay a man. Dead or asleep!
A man, fair-haired, clad in a white drill suit with brass buttons-they glistened now in the rays of the risen sun! – the white uniform of the Royal Navy. A man who was Gilbert Bampfyld.
His heart like ice within his breast-all was lost now, every hope gone that, of late, he had once again begun to cherish! – Stephen Charke advanced to where that man lay, and, approaching noiselessly, looked down on him. Looked down and recognised that here was no sign of death or coming death; that the man was sleeping peacefully and calmly; that he was rescued for the second time within the last month from a sudden doom.
He also saw something else-he observed that Bampfyld had recovered his sight. This he could not doubt. Near him was some fruit which he must have gathered recently. And he had pulled down some of the branches of the trees which grew close by, and had shed them of their leaves, upon which he was now lying, they making an easier pallet than the grass alone would have done, while Charke perceived, also, that he had been fashioning a sturdy branch of the tamarind into a stout stick. Doubtless, he had recovered his sight through the shock of his immersion, when the ship heeled over.
Strong, determined, masterful as Stephen Charke had been through all the disasters which had overwhelmed the Emperor of the Moon; brave and stalwart as he had shown himself when, with none other left to command the doomed ship but himself, he had helped to furl and unfurl sails, to steer like any ordinary seaman at the wheel, and to endeavour manfully to hold the vessel up and ward off instant destruction-he was beaten now. Beaten! defeated! And he felt suddenly feeble, so feeble that he was forced to sit down by the saved man's side, while doing it so quietly that the other did not awaken.
Beaten! defeated! Ay, and with nothing left of prospect in the future, nor ever any hope. Nothing! nothing! nothing! What had he hoped? he found himself asking: what, in these last few days? What dreamt of? A home, a wife; perhaps, in the future, children waiting for his return, running to meet him and to beg for stories of the sea, of tempests surmounted, of dangers passed. Now, there would never be any home, nor wife, nor children. Nothing! He had loved one woman fondly, madly; the one woman in all the world for him. Until ten minutes ago he had believed that, some day, he would win her. And, now, it was never to be. His home would be the desolate home which the sailor ashore inhabits; his existence a long series of toiling across the seas in any ship wherein he could find employment, first one, then the other, for poor wages and without one gleam of sunshine to cheer him. What a life! And-and it had seemed, only an hour ago, that all was likely to be so different. She, Bella Waldron-his love-no, not his! never his now-was being drawn towards him, she relied on him, trusted in him; but, henceforth, she would need him no more. This other had come back, would come back into her life again, and-he would go out of it for ever. God! it was bitter.
His hand, as he lifted it in his agony and let it fall again, struck against something hard in his pocket. Thrusting it into the pocket, he felt there the sailor's knife which he had found in the hold of the ship, and drew it forth, regarding it. It was a good knife, he found himself reflecting, a good knife. The man who owned it had kept it in excellent order, too; sharp and keen. How he must have railed at losing it. And he, Stephen, had found it! A good knife, long and stout-bladed, well pointed-a knife that would sever the stoutest cable or-! Men had been slain with worse weapons than this. A blow from it over the heart, under the left shoulder, and struck downwards-yes! such blows must be struck downwards, or otherwise they might fail-and a life could easily be taken. Easily-in a moment.
It was a good knife, he thought again. As he opened it and ran his finger along its tapering blade, and observed the thick, solid back which that blade possessed, he could not but acknowledge this. The man who had owned it and lost it had paid money for that knife. This was no slop-shop thing bought of a thievish Whitechapel or Houndsditch Jew who preyed on poor seamen. A good knife! He turned his head and looked at Gilbert Bampfyld lying there, still sleeping peacefully; looked at the man whom he had come out to seek, and-had found! Found as he had never expected to do, as he had never believed it possible he should do.
He looked at him, recognising all that his being there meant, all that this third human existence on the island, where formerly there had been but two persons, meant to him; the ruin that it cast upon his hopes. And again he regarded the knife, holding it by the tip, weighing it, balancing it. It was a good knife; one that would strike hard and sure.
And, as he so thought, he rose from his seat, went down to where the surf was beating violently now upon the beach, and flung the thing far off into the sea.
Then he returned to the sleeping man, and, kneeling by his side, shook his arm gently, saying:
'Come, Lieutenant Bampfyld. Come! Wake up, rouse yourself.'