CHAPTER XXVIII.
WAS A MIRACLE WROUGHT?
The sea was unusually calm and smooth that morning. A skillful swimmer could make good headway against the tide.
Laurier was an athlete, and swimming lightly and strongly after the vanishing lifeboat, he looked about anxiously for Lyndon, hoping to assist him.
To his surprise and dismay not a sign was to be seen of the fair head of the man in whom he took an almost painful interest for the sake of his daughter.
His straining gaze wandered here and there over the illuminated waters, but the glare of the burning ship pained his eyes, and nothing could be seen but floating débris, swirling black cinders, and the lifeboats vanishing in the gloom of the cold, gray dawn.
His heart sank with pain and sympathy thinking of the life gone down to the depths so suddenly, and the fair daughter left fatherless.
“Alone among those selfish wretches who received her so reluctantly that I feared to trust her to their care! What will become of her, poor girl?” he thought, and obeying a blind impulse he could not resist, swam after the boat that he now observed had slackened its speed as though too heavy freighted, being sunk to the water’s edge.
What he hoped or expected from following he did not know himself. The boat was so full they could not have made any room for him. He was all alone in the wide waste of waters with nothing but a spar between him and eternity, and the chances were all against his rescue. With his superb strength and skill he might keep afloat for hours—or, something might happen to end his life any moment, he could not tell.
He was near enough now to see that there was some commotion in the boat as though of men struggling together in fierce dispute, and the rowers had much ado to keep it from being overset.
In the next moment the struggle was ended by a horrible deed.
Several men lifted and cast out of the boat into the sea the white-robed form of a woman that immediately sank! Shrieks and cries as of horror echoed from the boat upon the morning air! Then the rowers bent to their oars, the boat shot away, and Laurier knew that his efforts to save Jessie Lyndon had all been in vain—the heartless fiends, fearful for their own safety, had overpowered the more merciful minority and cast the unwelcome passenger into the ocean.
Thrown into the boat in a fainting condition, Jessie was a most undesirable burden, and for the few that pitied her, there was a majority who scowled in anger, declaring that the additional weight would cause them all to lose their lives.
“Oh, no, no, no!—let us be glad we can save her beautiful life!” cried the only one other woman in the boat, and dipping her hand in the water, she tenderly laved the girl’s pale brow, trying to restore animation to the still form.
But it was a long, deep swoon, and no wonder—torn from her beloved father, leaving him to a most certain death, Jessie’s nerves had quite given way. She lay still and lifeless among them, heedless alike of bitter imprecations or exclamations of tender pity.
The most of these men were the offscourings of the passengers and crew—coarse, brutal men, selfish to the last extreme, ignorant of sympathy or pity. One of these men cried loudly:
“She is dead, and cannot be resuscitated. Let us cast her out!”
“Yes, let us do it! It is ill luck carrying a dead body!” cried a superstitious sailor.
Then the wrangle began, the woman and a few men declaring that the girl was yet alive and should be kept in the boat, others clamoring to get rid of the helpless burden. It ended in a struggle where the strong overpowered the weak, and amid the shrieks of the woman and the expostulations of the more merciful men, the unconscious form was torn from those who would have protected it, and thrown into the sea.
Then the rowers bent to the oars, and under their efforts the boat shot away, leaving Frank Laurier in the distance, a horrified spectator of one of the most dastardly deeds ever committed by fiends in the form of men.
Fate had indeed brought Jessie Lyndon and Frank Laurier together again under circumstances the most awful that could be imagined—both face to face with death, having scarcely one chance in a hundred of escape from their perilous strait.
As for Jessie, the only hope lay in Frank Laurier’s ability to reach and save her if she should rise to the surface again.
Ah, what deeds of valor Love can do! How it fires the heart, and nerves the arm to superhuman strength!
With a wild prayer to Heaven on his pallid lips, he swam quickly toward the spot where the white form had disappeared beneath the engulfing waves, but ere he reached it he saw to his joy that she had risen again and was floating on the surface, her skirts upheld by a piece of plank on which they had caught and become entangled.
His heart gave a wild, suffocating leap; his throat swelled; hot tears of joy sprang to his dark-blue eyes as he redoubled his efforts to reach her side.
Breathless, spent, exhausted with his wild struggle to overcome death, he reached the silent, floating form with its still, white face upturned to the sky, the golden locks streaming loose upon the water, and he clasped the beauteous form with the frenzy we feel when that which is dearest to us on earth seems slipping away from us forever.
“Jessie! Jessie!” he groaned, with a wild recollection of a face so like to this that he had seen once lying among funeral flowers in the ghastly shadow of the old family vault. “Jessie! Jessie!” But there came no movement of the white lips in answer to his wild appeal.
Yet even dead he would not cast her from him, but arranging her form carefully on the plank, and placing the spar beneath himself, they floated for an hour—the seeming dead and the anguished living side by side, away from the burning ship slowly settling beneath the waters, out on the trackless waste, while the gray light in the sky slowly brightened.
Laurier’s eyes gazed on the beautiful face in mute love and despair, while in his heart there echoed the sweet plaint she had sung but yesternight:
He had never spoken one word to her, never touched her hand, never looked into her soft, dark eyes, as he believed, yet while she had stood there singing in the moonlight, she had lured the heart from his breast because she brought back to him in fancy the dead girl he had loved too late.
He vowed to himself that he would never be parted from this dead love of his, so fair and still. They would float on together side by side until he knew there was no longer any hope of her recovery, then he would fold her in his arms and they would plunge down together to the depths of ocean.
A sudden cry—of commingled hope, surprise, and doubt—shrilled over his blanched lips:
“Ah, am I dreaming, or is this a blissful reality? Did her lips move, her eyelids flutter?”
But it was no dream as he feared, no fancy of an overwrought brain.
A faint tinge of color had crept into the waxen cheek, the eyelids fluttered nervously, the lips parted in a strangling gasp.
A cry of rapture escaped his lips, and at the sound so close to her ears Jessie opened wide her eyes with a dazed look straight upon his face.
There was no recognition at first. It was the startled wonder of a very young infant that looked out upon him—an infant just waking from sleep.
But little by little comprehension dawned on her mind. She recognized a familiar face presently, read passionate love in the blue eyes fixed upon her own, recalled his identity, and wondered why they were drifting thus with her head upon his arm, through sunlit seas together.