CHAPTER XII.

LEFT TO HIS FATE.

And now let us see what in the meantime had become of Justin, left with his few unfortunate companions to perish on the deserted wreck.

After he had forcibly torn Britomarte from him and dropped her into the outstretched arms of Mike Mullony, and had heard her last despairing cry, and had waved his hand for the lifeboat to be pushed off—he abruptly turned away that he might not have his resolution shaken by the imploring words and gestures of her whom he loved more than life; for he did not know that with the cry still upon her lips she had swooned away in the arms that had received her.

He climbed with difficulty up the inclined plane of the half-submerged quarter-deck to the stern, which was lifted out of the water and wedged tightly in a cleft of the rock at an angle of about forty-five degrees, more or less.

There he turned and stood nearly waist-deep in water, holding onto the shrouds of the mizzen mast to keep from being carried off by the waves.

The sea that continued to break over the wreck with tremendous shocks, did not, however, rise far above the foot of the mizzen mast; though every wave that thundered over the quaking deck shook the wreck to its keel, and nearly swept the man from his holdings.

Yet there he stood, intently watching the receding lifeboat and silently praying for her safety, as she labored through the heavy sea.

And even when she was lost to sight, in the deep fog that enveloped the distant, unknown shore, he continued to gaze after her, until an enormous wave broke over the ship, burying him up to the neck in water and almost tearing him from the holdings where he clung with all his strength.

As the wave fell back a terrible cry arose from the sea.

Justin, clinging still to the shrouds, bent his head forward to see whence it came. And to his horror and grief, he saw a man’s hand and arm strike up for an instant through the foaming wave and then sink out of sight.

“Great Heaven! Who is it? Which of my friends has been swept off?” cried Justin, gazing in sorrow upon a calamity that he was powerless to prevent.

But the arm arose no more, and Justin turned his head to look over the portion of the deck that was still above water to see what had become of his companions.

There were but three of them—Mr. Ely and Mr. Breton, whom the sailors had refused to receive on the heavily-laden lifeboats, and Captain McKenzie, whom they would willingly have taken off, but that he regarded it as a point of honor to remain with the passengers whom he was unable to rescue.

Justin, looking all over the deck, saw nothing of these men. Until the moment he had heard the cry of the drowning man, he had been so much absorbed in watching the fate of the lifeboat which contained all that he loved most on earth, that he had quite forgotten his companions in misfortune. Now, however, he looked around for them with great anxiety. One of them was lost—carried off the deck by that last great wave—that was certain; but which one? Was it either of the two young missionaries who with himself had been abandoned to destruction, or was it the brave and loyal McKenzie, who voluntarily shared the fate of those whom he could not save?

It was impossible as yet to tell; for, look as he might, Justin could see neither of his companions.

He tried to think when and where he had seen them last, and he recollected that it was on the starboard gangway, where the three stood near together when the first lifeboat, containing, besides a portion of the crew, the two young missionary ladies, was preparing to leave the ship. He himself had turned away and followed Britomarte to the stern, and his whole attention had been given to her until he lowered her into the second lifeboat. And after that he had seen no more either of the missionaries or the captain.

Now what had become of them? One was drowned; but where were the others? Justin asked himself the question, and looked about for the answer in vain. They were nowhere in sight. They were not on deck, that also was certain. It was possible that the two survivors might be in the cabin, which from the position of the wreck was as yet a place of safety. He called aloud with all the strength of his sonorous voice, which rang out clearly above the thunder of the waves:

“Ely!—Breton!—McKenzie!”

“And but the sounding sea replied, And fast the waves rolled on.”

“McKenzie!—Breton!—Ely!” he called again; but called in vain.

“Oh, the roaring of the sea drowns my voice, I suppose, so that they cannot hear me; but as soon as it is safe to let go these shrouds, if the wreck holds together, I will go down into the cabin and look for them. Great Heavens! Now I think of it, it must have been McKenzie who was lost. He must have remained on deck. He never would have hidden himself in the cabin,” thought Justin, with an accession of sorrow, for he esteemed the brave and loyal captain far more than he did the well-meaning but rather weak-minded young missionaries.

In his eager look after his companions, he had ceased to watch the waves, and so he had not observed that the sea arose no higher; that the last great wave was the climax of its swell, and that now it seemed to be gradually subsiding.

His anxiety to search the cabin was now greater than ever; for he “hoped even against hope” to find the good and brave Captain McKenzie safe within its shelter. He waited and watched his opportunity to try to reach the cabin.

When the sea had gone down a little, and the waves came with less force, but long before it was quite safe for him to leave his holding, he let go the shrouds, and began to climb the inclined deck, holding by anything that he could lay his hands on, until he reached the cabin door. It was a feat of gymnastics to get down the companion ladder, and when he had safely reached the bottom, he inadvertently lost his footing, and slid all the way down the leaning floor, until he was stopped by the opposite partition.

There he arose to his feet, stood ankle deep in water, and looked around. But he could see nothing; it was nearly dark in the cabin, the dead lights being up, as they had been put at the commencement of the storm. He listened; but he could hear nothing except the beating of the waves that still broke over the wreck, though with decreasing force. Again he called out:

“McKenzie! Breton! Ely! Where are you? For Heaven’s sake, answer!”

But there was no reply. His anxiety became intolerable.

He climbed the leaning floor again, and scaled the companion ladder, and with great difficulty succeeded in taking down the dead-lights and letting daylight into the cabin.

Then he returned to the cabin, and clearly saw its condition.

From the foot of the ladder, the floor inclined at an angle of about forty-five degrees. The highest part near the ladder was free from water, commenced around the pedestal of the center-table, and became deeper as the floor was lower, until at the partition wall it was two feet deep. The chairs and all the movable furniture had slidden down the sloping floor, and lay half submerged and piled against the wall. The doors of the staterooms were open, and the furniture within them was in the utmost confusion. And yet everything there—the women’s clothing, hanging on the pegs or dropped upon the berth; the little workbasket fallen upside down upon the floor; the scattered books, the flute—all was suggestive of life; but it was of desolate life, for all was chaos—still life, for not a living creature was to be seen.

A shock of alarm, almost of conviction, that his three companions had been lost, struck like an icebolt through his heart. He went into all the staterooms, one by one.

They all exhibited the wild disorder he had partly seen through the open doors; not only that of small sleeping apartments hastily evacuated, but that consequent upon the hurricane. The two staterooms to the right and left of the companion ladder, being in the highest part of the leaning cabin, were comparatively dry; the other two, lower down, were partly submerged.

No human being was to be found, either; but on the upper berth of the spare staterooms lay Judith Riordan’s cat, quietly and comfortably nursing her three kittens. On seeing Justin’s face leaning over, she began to purr with delight. What a contrast was this picture to all the desolation around?

But Justin turned away, sick at heart, to prosecute further what he felt would be a vain search for his missing friends.

The dining cabin was on the deck above, but it had been so continually swept through by the tremendous seas which had broken over the ship, that it seemed scarcely possible any living creature should have found refuge there; yet as a forlorn hope, he went thither to seek them.

And what a scene of destruction met him there!

The sea, that had fallen considerably, no longer swept through it, but everything was shaken together in the maddest medley. The table which had been laid for the supper which poor Mrs. Breton so greatly lamented the loss of, was standing in its place, for it was a fixture, and the glasses that were fitted in the swinging rack above the table were also safe, but everything else was thrown out of place and smashed to atoms, or piled up in the lowest part of the leaning floor. In the highest part of this cabin were two doors, leading into two large staterooms; the right-hand one as you stood facing them was the captain’s private room, the left-hand one was the doctor’s. Justin opened the door of the captain’s room, but found it unoccupied. A sound of pitiful whining and barking came from the doctor’s room. Justin opened the door, and found the doctor’s little dog, who leaped upon him with the wildest demonstrations of delight, but otherwise this room, like the captain’s, was unoccupied.

And now the anxious dread became a fatal certainty—his companions were all three lost!—swept from the deck by that last overwhelming wave! But yet, stay—one hope remained. They were not on the wreck, that was certain; but they might have been taken off at the last moment by the first lifeboat that had left the ship. They might have been so taken off without his knowledge, for he had left them standing on the starboard gangway, near the boat in which the two young wives were wildly pleading with the crew to save their husbands; the two young missionaries shaking with agitation in this crisis of their fate, and the captain pale with passion, and stern in his determination to share the fate of his abandoned ship and passengers. So he had left them to follow Britomarte and take her to the other boat, and he had not seen them since!

They might have been saved by the relenting boat’s crew, but, if so, who was the castaway that he had seen and heard in the uplifted arm and voice for one instant before he—the castaway—was whelmed in the sea?

Again came the overpowering conviction—it was the brave McKenzie who was lost. The young missionaries had probably been taken off at the prayers of their wives; for sailors have a soft place in their hearts, or heads, for the woes of women, and will risk much to alleviate them; and so they had probably consented to risk the swamping of their heavily-laden boat by the additional weight of the two young husbands rather than listen to the sobs and cries of the two heartbroken young wives. But Captain McKenzie had chosen to remain on the wreck with his one abandoned passenger—Justin Rosenthal; and he—the gallant McKenzie—had been swept off the deck and was lost!

Such was the conclusion that Justin came to. And at the thought he sat down and dropped his head upon his hands and sobbed aloud; for, you see, as I have often said before, the bravest are always the tenderest.

The doctor’s little dog, unable to endure such an appalling sight, to him, as a man’s distress, jumped and whined around him in sympathetic grief and terror.

At length Justin lifted up his bowed head and tried to bring reason and religion to the relief of his great regret. He reflected that the death of so good a man could but have been a quick passage to eternal bliss—a blessed fate compared to that which awaited himself, left to perish slowly on the abandoned wreck, or that which attended the fugitives in the boats, exposed to battle with the elements, and perhaps with hunger and thirst for days, upon the bare chance of saving their lives.

Somewhat strengthened by the first clause of his reflections upon the eternal destiny of the brave and good captain, and very much distracted by the counter-irritant of his anxiety for the fate of the lifeboats, Justin Rosenthal arose to leave the dining cabin, the little dog jumping and barking around him.

Just as he went out on deck, the sun broke through a mass of black clouds, and striking upon the brasses of the stern, lighted up the whole wreck in a perfect blaze of glory.

It was the same “star of hope” that had been seen by Britomarte, from the lifeboats, just before the wreck disappeared from her view in the distance. For it must be remembered that the wreck, being much the larger object of the two, and being hoisted high upon the rocks, was visible to the boat’s crew long after the boat was lost to Justin’s sight.

By noon the sea had fallen so much that the whole length of the deck from stem to stern was above the water; and Justin was enabled to take note of the actual condition of the ship.

She remained in the same position, her stern lifted high and wedged tight in the crevice of the rocks, and her deck inclined at a great angle. Her bows were very much broken and her keel was gored by the sharp points of the rocks upon which she had struck and where she was fast fixed. Her hold must have been full of water, which would have sunk her but for the fact that she was high and fast upon the rocks; that with the rise and fall of the waves the large leaks let out the water as easily as they let it in.

Justin went down to the lower deck and examined the forecastle, which he found in an even greater state of chaos than the cabin and the saloon had been. Everything was saturated with sea water.

From there he went into the storeroom, which he found in the same condition. All the provisions that could be hurt by salt water were totally ruined—except a few articles that, being in water-tight receptacles, remained uninjured.

Feeling faint from long fasting, Justin broke open a tin canister of biscuits and sat down to satisfy his hunger upon that dry fare. The little dog that had trotted after him wherever he went, as if afraid of being left behind, now stopped and stood on his hind legs and began to beg as his poor master, a little Dutch doctor, had taught him to do. Then, perceiving that his new master did not notice him, he began to expostulate in short, impatient barks.

Justin threw him some biscuits, and, leaving him to nibble them, went to the upper deck.

How rapidly the sea had fallen! The jagged rocks upon which the bows of the ship rested were laid bare. The wind had changed, and blew directly off that distant, unknown shore, rolling the fogs out to sea and towards the wreck. While Justin strained his eyes to make out, if he could, what sort of shore it was, he felt something rub against his ankles and heard a mew.

He glanced down and saw the poor cat, who was rubbing her furry sides against his limbs, and mewing piteously, and gazing up into his face with that helpless, appealing look with which the brute creation in their need seem to pray to the human for relief.

“Poor little animal!” said Justin, stooping, and gently stroking her fur. “Poor little companion in wretchedness! You look up in my face with your perplexed eyes, as if you think I have the power, and ought to have the will, to help you. But you are half famished, and I have nothing but a biscuit to give you. And, as you are not granivorous, it is not your natural food.”

And he broke up the biscuit and scattered the pieces on the deck.

And pussy, granivorous though she was not, pounced upon the fragments as if they had been so many young mice, and devoured them all before she returned to her kittens.

Then Justin found his way to the cabin, and threw himself upon one of the berths in Britomarte’s abandoned stateroom.

For some hours he lay, not sleeping, but thinking of her, and praying for her safety. Then, as even convicts sometimes sleep the night before their execution, he, Justin, notwithstanding his own great personal peril, and his excessive anxiety for Britomarte’s fate, fell asleep, and slept long and well.