Hurricane Island by H. B. Marriott Watson (free novels to read .TXT) 📕

exhausted by the anxieties of the day, we gradually sank to sleep, and as I passed off Alix's hand lay in mine. She slept sweetly, for all the profound miseries of those past days.

I awoke to the sound of a bird that twittered in the bushes, and, emerging from the cavern, looked around. The sun was bright on the water, the foam sparkled, and the blue tossed and danced as if Nature were revisiting happily the scene of pleasant memories. It seemed as if those deeds of the previous night, that long fight against fate, those dismal forebodings, the tragedy of the Prince, were all separated from us by a gulf of years. It was almost impossible to conceive of them as belonging to our immediate precedent past and as colouring our present and our future. And as my gaze swept the horizon for the orient towards the west it landed upon nothing less than the _Sea Queen_!

I could have rubbed my eyes, and I started in amazement. My heart beat heavily. But it was true. There rode the yacht in the offing, idly swinging and plunging on the tide and clearly under no man's control. She must have drifted in upon Hurricane Island again through the stress of some backward tide, and here she bobbed on the broken water safe from the eyes of the mutineers. As soon as I had recovered from the shock of surprise, I reentered the cavern and woke Legrand, and in less than five minutes all of us were outside our shelter and gazing at the welcome sight.

"We have the boat hidden," said Legrand. "We must work our way back to it, and the sooner the better."

"Too much risk," said I. "I know a better way. At the tail of the island we may be seen and pursued. There are boats aboard, and she's not more than three hundred yards out."

"What, swim?" he asked, and looked rueful. He was one of the many sailors I have known who had not that useful art.

I nodded. "It won't take me long."

As I passed, Alix caught my hand. She said nothing, but her eyes devoured me and her bosom heaved. I smiled.

"My Princess!" I whispered, and her soul was in her look.

"I can't see a sign of any one on board," said Legrand, with his hand over his eyes.

"Mademoiselle would not be awake yet. It can't be later than five," said Lane, who was much better to-day.

"I make it 5:30," said Legrand. "We have some time to ourselves if we have luck. After last night those fiends will sleep well and with easy consciences." He spoke grimly.

"Have everything ready," I called as I left. "We must not lose a chance or hazard anything."

"What do _you_ think?" said Lane, in his old cheerful manner.

I quickly descended to the beach, threw off my coat, waistcoat, and boots, and tightened my belt. Then I waded into the sea. It was cold, and, when I first entered, struck a chill into me. But presently, as I walked out into the deepening waters, with the sparkling reflection of the sun in my eyes from a thousand facets of ripples, I began to grow warm. I reached water waist-high, and next moment I was swimming.

The tide sucked at me in a strong current, and soon, I perceived, would carry me across the _Sea Queen's_ bows unless I made a struggle. The water was racing under me, and I felt that my strength was as nothing compared with it. I was thrown this way and that as the flood moved. My passage had been taken incredibly quick, and now I was conscious that I was past the level of the yacht, and I turned and battled back. So far as I could see, I made no impression on the space that separated me from her, and I began to despair of reaching the yacht. In my mind I revolved the possibility of going with the flood and trusting to work ashore at the tail of the island. If that were not practicable, I was lost, for I should be blown out to the open sea.

Just as these desperate reflections crossed my mind, the _Sea Queen's_ stern, off which I was struggling, backed. She came round to the wind and jammed, so that the flutter of canvas which she still carried cracked above the voice of the seas. Then her nose swung right round upon me, with the bubble under her cutwater. It was almost as if she had sighted a doomed wretch and was come to his assistance. Her broadside now broke the tide for me, and I began to see that I was creeping up to her, and, thus encouraged, step by step made my way until at last I reached her, and by the aid of a trailing sheet got aboard. It had been half an hour since I left the island.

Once aboard, I waved across the intervening stretch of sea to my friends, and looked about me. There was no sign or sound of life anywhere on the yacht. She swung noisily, with creaks and groans, to the pulse of the tide, but there was no witness to human presence there. Mademoiselle immediately was in my thoughts, and I found my way to the state-rooms to reassure her, if she should be awake. They were as we had left them, save that every cabin had been ransacked and every box turned inside out. The cabins were empty, and so was the _boudoir_. Clearly, Mademoiselle Trebizond was not there. I went down into the saloon, but nothing rewarded me there; and afterwards I turned along the passage that led to the officers' quarters, and farther on, the steward's room. Here, too, was my own surgery, and instinctively I stopped when I reached it. The door stood ajar. No doubt, I thought, like every other place, it had suffered the ravages of the mutineers. I opened it wide, and started back, for there on the floor, a bottle in her hand, and her features still and tragic, lay Yvonne Trebizond!

I stooped to her, but I knew it was useless even without glancing at the bottle she held. She had sought death in the despair of her loneliness. The _Sea Queen_ had carried out upon the face of the dark waters the previous evening an unhappy woman to a fate which she could not face. She had chosen Death to that terrible solitude on the wilderness of the ocean. I lifted her gently, and carried her to one of the cabins, disposing the body on a bunk. Then I returned to the deck, for I had work to do that pressed. I experienced no difficulty in loosing one of the remaining boats, and, dropping into her, I began to row towards the island.

Legrand had the party at the water's edge, and they were in the boat in a very brief space of time. We shoved off, and now Legrand and Ellison had oars in addition to myself, so that, what with that and the tide, we made good progress. We had not, however, got more than halfway to the yacht when Legrand paused on his oars and I saw his face directed along the beach. I followed his glance, and saw, to my astonishment, a boat bobbing off the spit of the island.

"It's our boat!" said I.

"Yes," he said, "the ruffians are up and about. Give way, give way!"

We bent to the oars, but as we did so a number of figures appeared round the bend of the land where we had passed our first night. Shouts reached us. The figure in the boat was working his oars with frantic haste, and now Legrand called out suddenly,

"Pye!"

Pye it was, and it was also apparent now that he was aiming for us, and that he was striving to get away from the mutineers. He stood out to sea, and pulled obliquely towards the yacht. Obviously, he was better content to trust himself to our mercies than to the ruffians with whom he had consorted. He was a coward, I knew, and I remembered then his white face and his terror at the time of the first onslaught. I remembered, too, how vaguely, how timidly and how ineffectually he had endeavoured to warn me of the coming massacre. He was a miserable cur; he had been largely responsible for the bloody voyage; but I could not help feeling some pity for him. I hung on my oars.

"Shall we pick him up?" I asked.

Legrand's only answer was an oath. He had forgotten the presence of Alix, I think. His eyes blazed above his red cheeks.

"Let him drown," he said.

By the time we reached the _Sea Queen_, some of the mutineers, who had started running when they saw us, had got to the water's edge opposite to us, and one or two of them plunged in. In the distance, the others were pursuing Pye and his boat.

Legrand, meanwhile, had taken the wheel, and Ellison set about the sails. I did what I could to help, and it was not many minutes ere we had the topsails going. Under that pressure the yacht began to walk slowly. Seeing this, the mutineers on the shore raised a howl, and two more jumped in to join the swimmers, who were now halfway to us. Legrand cried out an order, and Ellison had the jib-sail set, and the _Sea Queen_ quickened her pace under the brisk breeze. The swimming mutineers dropped behind. There must have been half a dozen of them in the water, and now we saw that they had given up the attempt to reach us in that way and had fallen back on a new idea. They turned aside to intercept Pye.

The little lawyer's clerk was paddling for life, and knew it, but he made no way. The yacht moved faster, and he sent up to heaven a dreadful scream that tingled in my ears. I made a step towards Legrand, but he merely gave one glance backward towards the boat and then fixed his gaze on the wide horizon of interminable sea, as though he thus turned his back forever on Hurricane Island and all there. He pulled the spokes of the wheel, and the _Sea Queen_, breasting the foam-heads, began to leap. We were moving at a brisk pace.

I looked back to the unhappy man. He had fallen away now, but still laboured at his oars. The swimmers could not have been more than twenty yards from him. Just then Alix's voice was low with agitation in my ears.

"Yvonne? Where is Yvonne?"

I turned to her and took her hand. "She will need no further care of yours, sweetheart," I said. "She has played her last tragedy--a tragedy she thought destined for a comedy."

Alix, looking at me, sighed, and ere she could say more Lane intervened in huge excitement.

"Good heavens, Phillimore! the treasure's all in my safes again. By crikey, is it all a dream?"

"Yes," I answered, looking at Alix, "all a bad nightmare."

I looked away across the sea, for somehow I could not help it.

"What are you looking at?" she asked. "They cannot catch us, can they?"

The foremost mutineers had reached the boat and were climbing aboard. The little clerk, white and gasping, raised his oar and struck at them with screams of terror, striking and screaming again.

"Hush! don't look, darling," said I, and I put my hands before her eyes. "It is the judgment of God."