A Veldt Official: A Novel of Circumstance

There floated what looked like a plank. No, stay! Was it a plank? It seemed more solid; it was oblong; and upon it, stretched out and clinging wildly to its sides, was the figure of a man. This, then, grotesquely exaggerated and distorted by the mist, was what had constituted the coffin apparition.

In the shock of this blank and bitter disappointment Mona had well-nigh lost consciousness. But upon her companion and protector the sight produced a strangely reinvigorating effect. A gleam as of a set, fell purpose shone from his eyes, as, beneath the sickly, moist light of the fog-veiled moon, he watched the plank and the clinging man draw nearer and nearer, while he guided himself and his charge silently, imperceptibly towards it; and the meaning of the lurid, predatory look was this: —

He meant to have that plank.

But the man who was already on it?

Well, he must get off it. Whatever the support was it certainly would not uphold two, let alone three. Mona must have it – must take the place of its present occupant. He himself could continue to swim, to float as he was doing, just aiding himself by the support of a hand upon its edge. The man who was on it now must yield it up.

Faint and shrill again came the cry which they had at first heard, and it had in it the quaver of exhaustion, of terror, of despair. This time no reply was made. But keeping behind and out of sight of the floating waif, Roden, with a few noiseless but vigorous strokes, brought his now unconscious charge and himself to within grasping distance of the concern. And as he did so he could hardly control his joy. The thing was a solid hatch, and was fitted with two strong ring-bolts, one at each diagonal corner.

Just then, alarmed by the faint splash, the man turned. His teeth were chattering with cold and fright, and his limbs shaking as he clung convulsively to his support. The moon, falling for an instant upon his anguished features, revealed the face of Lambert.

“What – who are you?” he quavered. “There’s no room – no room here. The thing won’t carry more than one. Oh – Musgrave, by God!”

“Yes. Musgrave, by God!” answered Roden, a kind of snarling triumph underlying his sneer. “You’re right. The thing won’t carry more than one, and that one is going to be Miss Ridsdale. So off you get, Lambert.”

“But I can’t swim another stroke. I’m done up,” stammered the other.

“Don’t care. You can go to the bottom then. Get off, will you?”

“No, I won’t,” yelled the unfortunate man in the fury of despair. “My life’s as good as other people’s. I’m here first, and here I mean to stick.”

“Oh, do you?” And dragging down the side of the impromptu raft which was nearest him Roden suddenly released it. Up it went with a jerk, flinging its occupant to the other side, where, losing his hold of the ring-bolt, he rolled off into the sea. By the time he could recover himself and think about striking out, the hatch was quite a number of yards away.

“Musgrave, Musgrave!” shrieked the despairing man, “for God’s sake don’t leave me! Let me just rest a hand on the thing to support myself; I won’t try and get on it. I swear I won’t.”

The only answer was a laugh – a blood-curdling laugh, a demoniacal laugh, sounding, as it did, from the very jaws of death upon that dark and horrible waste of waters.

“I wouldn’t believe the oath of such a crawling sneak as you, Lambert, if taken on your deathbed; and that’s about where it is taken now. Remember the valuable discovery you made at Doppersdorp. Well, you thought to ruin me, but you only twisted the rope to hang yourself with, for if your discovery hadn’t driven me from the country I shouldn’t be here to-day to take your last plank from you. Now we are quits; for I tell you, if this thing would carry fifty people, you shouldn’t get upon it.”

While Roden was thus speaking Lambert had been drawing gradually nearer. Now making a sudden last despairing effort, with a sort of spring out of the water, he succeeded in seizing the edge of the hatch, upon which Mona had already been lifted, and was lying unconscious. It began to slant perilously.

“Let go, will you!” spake Roden, between his teeth, in a voice like the growl of a wild beast. “What? You won’t!” And with all his force he struck out, aiming a blow between the other’s eyes. But Lambert saw it coming, and dodged it.

It was a strange and soul-curdling scene, that upon which the ghastly moon looked down, these two men, both within the very portals of death, striving, battling alone in the black oiliness of the midnight sea, fighting for that small slab of wood – fighting, the one for his life, the other for a life that was far more precious to him than his own. And of all the horrific and heart-sickening acts which that pale orb has witnessed, it can seldom have looked upon one more appalling.

Now Lambert made a frantic clutch at his adversary, hoping in his frenzy of despair to drag the latter down with him. But abandoning his hold of the raft for a moment Roden dived, then rising seized Lambert by the neck from behind, battering his head against the hard wood. The unfortunate surgeon, more than half stunned, relaxed his hold, and fell back into the sea.

“Good-bye, Lambert,” cried the other, with a glee that was hellish in its ferocity. “Pity I haven’t got Sonnenberg here to send after you. Well, you and I are quits now, at any rate. Good-bye, Lambert!”

For reply came a frightful noise, a gurgling, gasping, inarticulate yell. Then the struggles of the despairing wretch ceased. A boil of bubbles came glittering up to the surface of the now moonlit water, then they too ceased. Roden Musgrave and his unconscious charge were alone together once more – alone on the dark, silent, midnight sea.

Chapter Thirty Four.
“Air, Light, and Wave Seemed Full of Burning Rest.”

Morning dawned. The sun shot up from his liquid bed, a ball of fiery splendour, purpling the vast immensity of a sailless ocean, shining down with rapidly increasing and merciless heat upon the speck formed by the impromptu raft amid the utter boundlessness of that blue-green, slimy, and now most horrible expanse. Not another object was visible far or near, not even so much as a stick of wreckage which might have come to the surface. Had they drifted with some current far from the scene of the night’s awful disaster?

Roden Musgrave, supporting himself by resting a light grasp upon the hatch, had been swimming mechanically all these hours, and well indeed was it that the water in those semi-tropical seas was more than ordinarily buoyant, for this and his coolness of brain had enabled him to spare all superfluous waste of energy. He had managed to secure his unconscious companion to the ring-bolts with a piece of cord which he had thrust into his pocket in view of some such emergency, and this timely precaution saved much expenditure of valuable strength in holding her in her otherwise precarious position. Yet now, upon himself, the night’s exhaustion and horror were beginning to tell; and he was, as we have said, swimming mechanically and as one half-asleep.

Now a hand stole forth and rested softly and caressingly upon his head.

“Love, why did you not leave me to my fate?” The voice, low and dreamy in its sweetness, resumed: “It would have been all over by now. Yet you threw away safety to come back and give your life for mine.”

The voice, the touch, awakened him, roused him to consciousness as wide as it ever had been.

“I would not be in such safety now if I had the opportunity,” came the reply, from the swimming head. “Our chances are desperate, yet I am happier at this moment than I have been at any time since – that day.”

“My darling, how selfish I am, resting at ease here while you have been struggling all these hours in the water,” she said. “Come up here and rest beside me, sweetheart. The thing will carry us both. Then we can talk nearer – closer to each other.”

“No. It will hardly carry you dry and comfortable. Besides, I might capsize it, and what then?”

For answer she began deliberately to untie the knots of the lashings that secured her.

“What – what are you doing?”

“I am going to take your place. Then you will be able to rest.”

“Mona! Mona I don’t be foolish. You can’t swim a stroke.”

“But the lifebelt will keep me up, and I can get the same amount of support you are having.”

“No, no, I tell you. Don’t loosen the knots. I might not be able to lash them again so easily. Stay. I will try if the thing will hold us both, if only for a little while.”

By the most careful and wary manoeuvring, and alert to lower himself if the hatch listed dangerously, he managed to worm himself upon it. Even then, lying beside her, the additional weight submerged the impromptu raft by nearly a foot. Still, by avoiding any violent or sudden movement, the position was comparatively a safe one. Then, for the first time for many hours, the first time since rising to the surface after being drawn down in the vortex of the foundering ship, they kissed, and there, crouching on their few feet of planking, it the only frail support between them and the vast green depths of that awful ocean abyss, themselves not even entirely above the surface, with all the terrors of their indescribably appalling position vividly brought home to them by the oozy, lifeless silence of the deserted sea, and the fierce, darting rays of the ascending sun, these two alone together were happy – strangely, mysteriously, awesomely, but most unequivocally, happy.

“We are not altogether without supplies,” said Roden, almost light-heartedly, as he produced the water-tight cartridge bag and began to extract some of its contents, using the utmost care lest a drop of sea water should by any chance be splashed upon the latter. “But we must be as sparing of them as we know how, for Heaven only can tell how long our cruise is likely to last. If any of the boats of the Scythian are picked up we shall be searched for.”

“And if not?”

“We must take our chance. We cannot be out of the track of the mail lines.”

His hopeful tone was full of comfort to Mona, who quite overlooked the vastness of ocean, and the comparatively small area commanded from the bridge of a mail steamer, also the well-nigh invisibility of so small an object as the hatch of a ship, which, presenting a flat surface, would hardly attract attention even at a very short distance. She ate a morsel of the biscuit and concentrated soup, and sipped a little of the weak spirit and water out of the pewter flask, then declared that she felt able to go for a long time without more.

“But what are you doing, dearest?” she cried, as having satisfied himself that she was in earnest, he had deliberately shut up and replaced the supplies. “No, no, I won’t allow that. You shall not starve yourself.”

“I don’t want anything; not yet, at any rate. The rest has set me up more than food would do.”

But to that sort of pleading Mona would not for a moment listen. Not another morsel would she touch until he had taken his share, she vowed. Besides, putting the matter on the very lowest and most selfish grounds, if he starved himself, how would he keep up his strength to watch over her?

This told. He yielded, or pretended to, at any rate, to the extent of a slight moisten from the flask.

“I don’t want any food; I couldn’t eat, even if we had enough to last us a year.”

This was simply the truth. The man’s high-strung nerves, with the excitement and peril, and consciousness of the success with which single-handed he had met and so far overcome the latter, had thrown him into a state of strange exaltation which lifted him above mere bodily cravings. There was something too of a sensuous witchery, a fascination, in floating there in the warm lapping heave of the tropical waters, rising all smoothly in imperceptible undulations. It was as though they two were in a kind of intermediate state, between earth and Heaven, the world far away, floating in a Nirvana dream of stirless and peaceful rest.

Not a word had escaped Mona as to that ghastly midnight struggle. The discovery of Lambert, and his fate seemed to leave not the faintest trace in her mind. If not wholly unconscious at the time, the incident must have seemed to her as nothing but an illusive dream. She did not even speculate as to how she had been placed upon this bit of wreckage which was supporting her, supporting them both, thus providentially.

So the day went by – the long, glaring, blinding day – and floating there these two waifs lay and talked – talked of strange things unseen, of the Present and of love; and in the midst of the vast immeasurable solitude heart opened to heart with well-nigh the unearthly voicing of the spirit-land. Again the sun dipped his red run to the lip of the liquid world, and plunged out of sight in a bathing flood of glory.

“I have never known what happiness meant until this day. I tell you, my Mona, although there is nothing but a plank or two between ourselves and death, speaking selfishly, I have no wish to be rescued, no wish for further life. I have done with life and its illusions. For your sake I trust that help may come, for my own it is the last thing I desire.”

“Darling, I don’t want to live without you. But think – think what life will mean to us together. Do not say, then, that you have no wish for rescue.”

“I have thought – and a presentiment has been upon me for some time. Hope and trust in me are dead. I said it was with life and its illusions I had done, for the two are convertible terms. I have had a strange foreshadowing of what has happened, and that it would be for the best. Love – my love – so strangely, so miraculously recovered, when I looked upon you for the last time on that day it was with the flash of a sure and certain conviction that I should behold you again – how and where I knew not; only that it would be at the hour of death, in some sort of magnetic extra-natural way as that in which I beheld you before in my dream, there in the burning house.”

Solemnly, unimpassionedly the words were uttered, and the voice was that of a man who has done with life, and is glad that it should be so. A sob shook Mona’s frame, and her tears rained down, mingling with the oily smoothness of the tropical sea. She clasped him wildly to her in a warm, passionate embrace, and their lips, wet with the salt brine, again met and clung.

“Love, love!” she whispered. “What a sweet word that is, since it can turn to sweetness and light such an awful position as that in which we now are. For I know the peril of our position – know it and realise it to the full. Coward that I was to let you go as I did. No wonder you turned from me with scorn and loathing, you who alone taught me what love really was. But I will not let you go again. We will live together or die together. We will not be separated again. We will not – we will not!”

In truth the scene was a passing strange one, a marvel. Her voice warmed and quivered with tenderness, and the smile which curved her lips and threw a melting lustre into her eyes was radiant, as though those words were uttered in peaceful security with a lifetime of happiness opening out before her – before them both. Yet, half submerged, upborne by the frailest of supports, they two were floating out upon the stupendous expanse of dusking waters – drear, solemn, silent – horrible in their awesome loneliness as in the far back ages of the world’s birth, while yet darkness brooded over the face of the deep.

Thus closed the first day.

Then, as the blackness of night fell, a faint breeze stirred the water, and there came a change, one of weird and unearthly splendour. In their countless myriads the stars sprang forth, and great constellations gushed redly through the spheres, throwing a revolving ray athwart the lesser luminaries in the transcendent brilliance and beauty of a tropical sky. Roseate meteors, too, falling in streaks, and lo, the whole surface of the sea blazed with phosphoric incandescence.

And the effect was wondrous, for bathed from head to foot in the phosphorescent flame, clothed, as it were, in shining clusters of stars, Mona’s splendid form was as that of some inexpressibly beautiful goddess of the sea; the oblong of the planking whereon it rested framing her as with a golden glory. And stirred by the cool night breeze, the gentle lapping of the ripples rose and fell in strange musical cadence as of the far-away sighings of a spirit world, varied ever and anon by the gasping snort of some mysterious monster of the deep.

Dawn rose at last – the dawn of the second day. Of how many more days would they behold the dawn, these two, cut off from the world, from all human help? How many more days before languor, weakness, exhaustion, should overtake them, before their scanty stock of provisions should fail? Yet no lingering, maddening agonies of hunger or thirst should attend their dissolution. Death would be easy and swift, and, above all, would involve no separation. Both spoke truly in denying the grim King his terrors.

The sun hung like a ball of fire in the unclouded blue of the heavens; the sea was of that translucent green so inseparable from the tropics. Mona, who had been intermittently sleeping, awoke to find herself alone. An affrighted cry escaped her; and but that she was secured to the ring-bolt she would have fallen into the sea.

“Love! love! where are you?”

“Here. Don’t be alarmed, my dearest,” was the soothing reply. “I have been swimming a little, as before. I thought you had been under water long enough.”

For the raft, relieved of his weight, was now floating level with the surface. The dews of the tropical night, as well as the soaking effect of her long immersion, had given way to the potent rays of the sun, and Mona felt quite warm and dry. Still, with it she felt a shivering feeling which was ominous, together with a languor and depression such as she had not hitherto shown. The lustre, too, had gone out of her eyes, leaving them dull and heavy. Was it the beginning of the end, of failing vitality, of final exhaustion?

Upon her companion and protector, too, the strain was beginning to tell, nay, as he recognised to himself, was much more than beginning. Pale, and hollow-eyed, he seemed to be putting forth a good deal of effort, swimming as before, with one hand upon the hatch. With the weakening of their bodily state a reaction had set in, dispelling the exaltation of the day before. Both seemed to recognise the imminence of a grim alternative – an early rescue, or a speedy end.

And now, as he swam thus, Roden’s glance lit upon an object the sight of which caused his blood to tingle in a curdling, creepy thrill, a small object, dark, wet and glistening; and a great horror came upon him, for he knew that object well. It was the triangular dorsal fin of a shark.

Here was a new and truly appalling peril. Strange that up till then this form of it had hardly occurred to him. Infested as the tropical seas are with these horrible creatures, yet from the swiftly moving steamer none had hitherto been sighted. In all the excitement of getting clear of the sinking ship, in the hour of effort and of action, his whole mind had been centred on the means of keeping themselves afloat, and once afloat, of the wherewithal to sustain life as long as possible. Now the imminence of this hideous peril was forcibly thrust upon him. He momentarily expected to feel the sudden crunch of one of these voracious monsters “rising” him from the depths beneath.

He looked at the wet, gliding fin. It was moving away from their frail floating refuge, increasing the space between. This conveyed but small comfort. He had known sharks swim round and round a ship for hours, ever keeping at a respectful distance, ever appearing to be moving in the contrary direction; yet somehow there they were ever about the same distance ahead. This one was not going to leave them: no such luck. Besides, where there was one there were more.

“Mona, dear. I think I will get up on the hatch again, and rest a little,” he said, wishing to spare her the alarm, the consternation, of his terrible discovery.

She reached out a hand to him with a murmur of welcome. He climbed to his former position, for he, too, was growing very weak, and he wanted to rest and think. And as he did so, his eyes fell upon another glistening fin, seeming to appear on the very spot where he had seen the first. Great Heaven! there were two of them.

And the result of his thinking was that Roden Musgrave, himself no stranger to peril, came to the conclusion that if ever living mortal had found himself in a situation of more unique and ghastly horror, why, then he had never heard of it. The raft, submerged by their double weight, might afford a sufficient depth of water for the sharks, growing bold, to snatch them from it, or possibly to capsize it. On the other hand, were he to resume his swimming he might be seized at any moment, and certainly would be sooner or later.

Suddenly he became conscious of a shock, a slight momentary jarring, as though their precarious support had bumped, had touched a sunken reef; yet not, for there was a most distinct feeling that the impact was that of something living. Quickly, but carefully he looked forth, just in time to catch a glimpse of a long, hideous, ill-defined shape changing from white to dull ugly green, as it turned over with serpentine writhe and sank out of sight in the opal depths.

Mona saw it too, and a low cry of horror escaped her. She started up, shivering with fear, her eyes wild and dilated. The hatch listed dangerously on its balance. Then in a tone of unutterable terror which curdled her listener’s blood, she cried,

“Look! look! It is coming again!”

It was. Emboldened by their apparent helplessness, the tiger of the sea was bent upon making another attempt to obtain his prey. The grisly snout, the cruel eye, the white belly, the long glutinous tail, every detail of the sea-demon stood clear, as it rushed straight through the water with an unswerving velocity, which should throw it right upon the hatch. But, with lightning swiftness, it sank, and, as it passed underneath, again that shock was felt, this time with increased violence. Then, as they looked forth, behold several of those gliding, glistening, triangular fins, cleaving without effort in their stealthy, creeping way through the mirror-like surface. Here, indeed, with only a few square feet of submerged planking between them and destruction in the most hideous and horrible of forms, they realised their utter helplessness. The ravening monsters closed in nearer and nearer.

And now as the very lowest depths of despair seemed reached, hope dawned once more, faintly enkindled, but still, hope. Low down upon the far horizon hung a dark vaporous cloud. It grew, waxing larger and larger. The smoke of a steamship.

Both had seen it, both with their heads on a level with the surface of the sea. Then came another jarring shock, followed immediately by another, and a rushing swirl as the tigers of the deep, now growing bold in their impatience, as though divining that their prey would soon be snatched from them, darted to and fro, striving to capsize the cranky support.

“We are saved! But – will they see us? Will they see us?” gasped Mona, in agony, straining her eyes upon the now rapidly advancing object. The latter became plainer and plainer every moment, and resolved itself into the masts and yards, then the funnel and hull, of a large steamship. And the course she was steering could not fail to bring her very near.

But the heads of two people do not constitute a very prominent object of attention on the surface of the wide sea, even at a short distance. The vessel drew nearer and nearer, till she was almost abeam. But not nearly so close as they had at first expected.

By now they were in the midst of a perfect shoal of the ravenous monsters; black fins glistening above the surface; dull, tumbling, snaky shapes, writhing, turning over beneath it; the glint of a ravening eye; the gap of a frightful month, armed with its bristling rows of pointed teeth. The sea boiled and babbled with the rush of the hideous beasts. Scarcely a minute went by without bringing with it the shock of their onslaught. And the ship was passing – passing.

Then both these castaways, lifting up their voices, sent up a long, loud ringing shout. But what avail was that in the great immensity of space? Why, the clanging of the engines, even the chatter of the passengers on board the passing vessel, would be enough to drown it.

But the cry on Mona’s part ended in a wild, quavering shriek of terror. There was a shock greater than any that had hitherto occurred, and a most horrible crunch of something. The hatch rocked terribly, trembling upon the very verge of capsizal. A huge shark had risen, and turning over had seized a portion of Mona’s robe which trailed out beyond the edge, at the same time crunching splinters out of the hard wood; and it was the lash of his tail as he discovered the empty nature of his find, and sounded again into the depths, which had come so near capsizing the hatch. Well indeed might Mona scream and nearly lose her mind with horror, as she realised what would have happened but for her being secured to the ring-bolt. Nature would bear no more. She was half fainting.

Her companion saw it all too; realised what had happened as thoroughly as she did; more, he realised what would happen, failing one alternative. With the rapidity of mind which was characteristic of him, that alternative had already presented itself, and it was a ghastly one. This was it. One of they two must abandon the hatch, abandon it altogether.

The quiet, easy death of the deep waters, the death by drowning, he would have welcomed, did they but share it together. But now? The picture of her, rent limb from limb by these tigers of the sea! Horror! That put another face on the affair. The ship was already passing. With two on the hatch, the latter was submerged, and their heads presented no point of attraction. But with only one upon it, it would float flush with the surface, and its dark, oblong shape would stand a far greater chance of being sighted from the passing steamer. Further, it would be almost secure from capsizing.

“Kiss me, Mona! Mine in death!”

They lay close together on the hatch. Shuddering, shrinking still with the horror of that last terrible fright, she clung to him, and thus – their lips washed by the phosphorescent brine of the tropical ocean, in the extreme moment of their peril – they kissed. Gently, but forcibly, parting her grasp, Roden raised his head, and sent forth over the waste of waters a long, piercing, pealing shout. Then, sliding from the raft, he sank.

The hatch, relieved of his weight, rose immediately, floating square upon the surface, the dark wood framing its white burden in its midst. But the moments vent by, and still no hideous stain rose to empurple the green translucent plain of liquid light. Had the dauntless resolution of his sacrifice carried him down into immeasurable depths, whither even the ravening sea-tigers did not penetrate? It seemed so. “Love! love! where are you?” whispered Mona, her exhausted voice wild with alarm. And then such a curdling, piercing shriek rang out over the immensity of space as even to surpass that call for help uttered with the last breath of a dying man. “Love! love! you have given your life for mine! O God! O God! take mine, for it is worthless to me now!”