Drowned Gold/Chapter 26
CHAPTER XXVI
OUR meeting was unexpected, distressing, and to me almost tragic. For an instant it seemed like a cruel scene staged by Fate, in which I stood as the victim. Nor could such a master stage manager as Fate have well arranged a more curious setting—a ship resting quietly on waters as blue as seas of fable; in the distance, on the horizon, islands, purple, faint, and soft, like islands of enchantment; a sky unflecked by clouds; a brilliant morning sun; and on the deck of that ship, strangely weather-beaten men, some gnarled, bearded, and twisted, all roughly clad, and all falling back to either side as if to make way for a peerless woman whose presence suggested that she herself was the Queen of the Seas. And I, standing there at the head of the side ladder alone, was for the moment dumb. That she was as astonished as I did not mitigate our mutual embarrassment. I saw her eyes widen, then cloud over with a strange coldness. I saw the flush that sprang to her face and swept over it, even as a wind-blown cloud crosses the face of the moon, and in passing leaves it more cold and pure than ever it seemed before. I found myself leaning toward her, about to cry out involuntarily, as if we two had been alone. But suddenly the pendulum of my senses swung backward, and I brought myself to realities and courtesies. She, too, seemed to recover, and gravely advanced toward me with her hand outheld, as if appealing for at least a show of friendship if not of forgiveness. She was the first to speak.
"Captain Hale," she said, in that same old voice that had the strange quality of sea bells, "I had not expected to meet you here."
I accepted her hand and bent above it, but could not speak. Some great kindness, or perhaps pity, caused her to relent sufficiently to save me from the stare of curious eyes, and she said, quite calmly:
"Inasmuch as I seem to be hostess on this occasion, perhaps it is better that you come with me to my quarters." And again I bowed and followed her, aware, without seeing, that her crew, all hardened salvagers, immediately dismissed us from mind, and gathered at the rail of their ship, from which vantage-point they might look down upon the submarine. We mounted the bridge, and then went back to the superstructure that I had previously noted, and into something like a tiny little reception-room, made delicate by her touch and taste, as if wherever she went she surrounded herself with refinement. Again, as we seated ourselves, there was a distressing pause, in which I waited, knowing that the turn of conversation must be directed by her. I am certain that outwardly she was more calm than I.
I was relieved when, without reference to our past relations, she began in a most matter-of-fact way, "I presume that tug with the tow which is approaching, as well as the submarine on which you came, are yours?"
"Not mine, but under my command," I replied, mentally thanking God that my voice had resumed its normal, and that I was able to speak without emotion.
"And doubtless you, too, Captain Hale, have come with the intention of salvaging the wreck of the Esperanza, which you lost nearly, if not quite, on this spot?"
"Naturally," I said.
"Then I take it we are competitors; is that not so?"
"In a measure, yes," I replied.
For an instant her eyes swept out in an appraising glance through the cabin windows, to where the Sea-Gull, with her poor, battered, patched barge in tow, was coming to a halt, and a faint little smile crept incautiously to the corners of her lips, and I knew she wondered what chance I could have of being the first to grapple this prize of the seas in a contest against such might as hers; for here she was, aboard as powerful a salvaging boat as there was afloat, and manned by the most skillful veterans the Atlantic Ocean had ever known, those renowned men recruited from all corners of the globe by the Sterritt Wrecking Company, whose fame was world-wide. Here was everything, strength, equipment, and experience, such as no one might outdo. And then I recalled the capabilities of the Hector, and I could almost have pitied her for her supreme, unshaken confidence.
"Well," she said, again facing me, "there is one satisfaction, at least, in that it will be an honorable and fair fight, waged according to all decent rules of the seas."
"Must we fight it out, then?" I asked.
"Oh, of that," she said with a little laugh, "there can be no doubt. I dislike it, because I believe that you are entitled to great consideration. She was your ship. Under other circumstances—"
Her eyes shifted from mine with a troubled look, and I saw her close her lips tightly, as if in self-annoyance for having said something, or thought something, which she had not wished to utter. I wondered what it could be, and in that moment of wonderment there came to me with amazing swiftness a flood of perplexing questions concerning the incongruities that presented themselves to my brain now that it had had time to recover from the shock of our meeting and resume full clarity of reasoning. In the first place, why was she here at all? If this craft was Sterritt's, why was not the master wrecker himself aboard and in command, and if it were not Sterritt's, to whom did it belong? What had taken place between her and her husband, Count von Vennemann, to make them rivals in the venture? It seemed impossible that this craft could have even the slightest connection with the Gretchen, which I had fought, disabled, and towed helpless into the shoals of those northward keys, in whose jaws I had left her securely locked. Bewildered by this rush of conflicting questions I blurted out, almost unthinkingly, "Is this a Sterritt outfit?"
A swift look of pain flashed through her eyes that I could not interpret, but she answered, unfalteringly, "Yes, it is, and the last of them."
"Last? Last of them? And your father—is your father aboard?"
"My father," she answered softly, "died more than two years ago."
Shock and pain must have expressed themselves on my face; and, as if she comprehended my thought and found a common ground of sympathy, she unbent.
"Ah! You, too, loved him!"
"Even as my father before me did," I answered quietly.
For a moment we forgot all the intervening years and were back on the Bay of Naples—three of us, all filled with hope. It was a merciful respite from the consideration of our present position. She forgot our estrangement, and spoke with almost the freedom she might have employed had our old relations remained intact.
"He made a brave fight to the very end. He never surrendered, though the physicians told him it was hopeless, he thought and spoke of you more than of any one else at the last. He had watched you so long, and for so long had followed and reported to your father of your career, that it was as if he had learned to love you—as if you were his own son. Toward the last he worried me by—by— Of course I evaded and misled him! I could not tell him that—our letters had ceased."
She stopped, and glancing up I saw that she was staring into space with eyes that were cold, and that her lips had hardened to firmness. Even the quality of her voice was suppressed as she brusquely swept everything aside and resumed before I might formulate a question.
"He died believing that you and I were still friends. He had no fears. He had no regrets. He told me to tell you of his love. He had but one request, at the last, that he be taken out and buried in the sea. He said that were he to be encased in a coffin and surrounded by earth, he should feel himself confined, and that he wished to rest as he had lived, quite free. A strange whimsy! But one that you and I can understand, because we are of the sea, as were those from which we sprang. I came home from Spezia, off whose shores I carried out his last wish, to find that my father had been betrayed. I was not rich, as we had believed. A man my father trusted had gambled. The company my father made was nearly bankrupt. I was well advised—and—I saved something—just a little. Enough to make my own fight. Friends of my father's and mine stood loyally behind me: those men you saw out there when you came aboard. It's hard for a woman to fight. Very hard! But they stood by, and I got this outfit together, and they came, most of them, as volunteers. They are men of the sort that my father employed, and seamen, all! One of them, the man you were talking to when I came down, could buy this boat, and for ten years has left the sea. But he came because he wished to have a part in the success of my father's only child. I've known them all—every man aboard this boat—since I was in pinafores and getting in the way when something was being done. They're not polite, these men, and would be bewildered and lost in places where you and I have been; but at heart they need feel no shame in the presence of the so-called great, who are, after all, less than they."
I started to speak; to tell her that I had nor challenged the worth of those under her command; that I understood; but she raised her hand in an appeal for continuation, as if she had set for herself the task of explanation that must be gone through with uninterrupted.
"And I chose this project as a final hope. I kept track of your career as best I could. You did not of mine, which doesn't matter now. The salvage of the Esperanza seemed the most promising opportunity of all. I took it. I put all I had left into the hazard."
There were questions rushing to my lips; but I waited for her to fill in the obvious gaps over which she had leapt. To a certain extent she hed been frank and outspoken, and it was no right of mine to ask for more than she chose to give, lest I intrude on her privacy. We were bound by the chains of a peculiar restraint, like a ship in irons. Anything I might ask concerning her relations with Count Waldo von Vennemann must be an impertinence, unwarranted the more because she had spoken frankly. It was her prerogative to give, not mine to ask. And, surmising that they two had come upon breakers and reefs that had wrecked them, I pitied them both at that moment, and for her happiness alone could have wished it otherwise. I had never been more ready and eager to lay my life at her feet than at that hour. I bled afresh from unhealed wounds. Whatever the rupture between them, the fault must have been his—the fault of the savage who threw away the jewel beyond all price. The silence between us became protracted beyond bearing, and she spoke again, with some strange impartation of gentleness, approaching the wistful.
"And you? You have prospered, I hope."
"Prospered? Prospered!" I replied bitterly, thinking of the long fight that had culminated in this our meeting there in a southern sea. "No. I have but little. Nearly all that I have gained you can see out of the port window. Sometimes I think that half of me died that day I had a letter accepting my resignation from the service that I love. And—for God's sake—what had I to hope for or to gain? Money? It is nothing but a servant to our needs! It can't buy hope."
I checked myself, lest I say too much; lest I say something to give her a feeling of participation in my despair. I lifted sullen eyes to her face, and saw that she was strangely moved. To compassion—pity for the fallen—I attributed her state. It hurt and annoyed.
"No, I have accomplished but little," I continued, desperately intent on concealing all that I felt toward her. "They are all gone save me. My father—"
"I learned of his death and was grieved," she interjected.
"And after my mother left, and I found that I had but little, I went back to the sea," I said, condensing it all into a bald statement of facts. "I ran the blockade until I was worn to a wire edge, and then went South. There is no Esperanza Line now. I tried to keep it alive. I failed. I hoped for another. The hope was based upon the salvage of the ship I owned, the one that both of us seek."
I stopped and saw that she was grieved, and wished momentarily that I had left much unsaid; but reflection warned me that, however unpleasant truths might be, this was not the time to palter. Our understanding must be plain and complete. Yet I dreaded to bring into the conversation the name of the man who had played such a part in both our lives, and had mentally to lash myself to it.
"When I arrived here," I said bluntly, "I found another outfit on the ground before me. It belonged to, and was commanded by, Count Waldo von Vennemann in person."
"Vennemann! Here!" she exclaimed, in undisguised surprise, lifting her head and staring at me.
"Yes. And we came into conflict at once. He declared war on me, and—I fought him as best I could. It was several days prior to the big storm. I disabled his ship by stripping her propellers and towed him to the Petite Terre Keys, off Guadeloupe, where I beached him at high tide, and left him there, disabled."
I waited expectantly for her to express her opinion of my act; but by neither look nor word did she inform me of her attitude. She betrayed nothing more than a lively curiosity as to the means employed for such a bold performance.
"How on earth did you accomplish all that?" she asked, still regarding me with that curiously intent look.
"The submarine I command has modern appliances that enabled me to work on his screws, and has eighteen hundred horse power for a tow.
"Of course he fought back?" she asked.
"Yes, as best he could. Kept up a pretty hot rifle-fire; but it was harmless."
She appeared secretly amused, and shifted her gaze until she stared meditatively out over the sea. "Well, what then?" she asked after a time, but still without looking at me.
"I came back here towing a big working barge with pontoons, and began work. The storm caught us and swept away pontoons and barge. We lost all our cylinders but two, and the barge had to be patched up as best we could."
"Then," she said quietly, "you are not outfitted at this moment to accomplish much, even though you find the Esperanza?"
"No, we are not," I admitted with some reluctance. "But we have this advantage over any other comers—you, for instance. We have already located and inspected the wreck. By any other means than those at our disposal—that is, so far as I know of any other wrecking outfit than ours—the chances are all in our favor. The Esperanza lies in more than sixty fathoms of water!"
"Sixty fathoms! Sixty fathoms down, and you have inspected her?"
All the incredulity based on her great knowledge of the sea was voiced in her question.
"It is true," I asserted; "we have been to that depth, inspected her from all sides, and actually done some work on her hull."
"If any other man than you had told me that," she declared, "I should not believe it. You must have the most remarkable boat and appliances that ever put to sea."
"We have," I asserted confidently.
She moved restlessly, started from her seat, and for a moment stood frowning at the floor, perturbed. I felt sorry for her, knowing how great a blow had been given her own hopes and ventures. I saw the struggle for composure, and it was a brave fight against disappointment.
"Then," she said, suddenly confronting me with a white face, "the Esperanza is yours, not mine. Yours by the honorable old rule of the sea that grants the first comer who succeeds, all rights. I must look for other salvage."
There it was again, that unconquerable fairness and bravery that lifted her above defeat to fresh endeavor, the same spirit that had imbued and upheld her sire through all vicissitudes to the very last. And yet I knew that I had dealt her something barely lighter than a death-blow, and that she saw her bright hope waning to blackness, her brave castle crumbling to ashes. It was more than I could endure thus to hurt the woman I loved. I sprang to my feet and held both hands toward her, calling, almost brokenly, "Marty! Marty! I—"
But her ears, more acute than mine, caught some sound without, and she flung up her hand in a gesture commanding restraint, and stood like one waiting an announcement. The wait was not long. A man came hurriedly to the door, tapped upon the lintel, and announced: "Another ship has come up astern, Miss Sterritt, and is putting off a boat. Looks like another wrecking outfit, and is called the Gretchen."
For an instant I stood bewildered by conflicting thoughts. Miss Sterritt! The Gretchen! And so she was not the Countess von Vennemann, and also I had not succeeded in eliminating the count from this royal game which had a fortune for a winner's prize! I ran out after the man, and looked from the bridge. Squat, ugly, and formidable, the Gretchen lay behind us, with smoke curling from her huge funnel. And, as the man had said, a boat had been lowered and was being pulled across the still sea by sturdy arms. In her stern sat the unmistakable man who had entered and conflicted with the greatest enterprises of my life, Vennemann. I whirled on my heels, and like one charging the capricious, vital obstacles of life, hastened back to the woman I had left in her cabin. She had not followed me. She stood almost as I had left her, staring about her like one whose back is against the wall for the last fight. Unuttered words died on my lips, and the open, outstretched hands with which I had entered fell, rebuffed, to my sides. Her voice fell upon my ears as clearly and coldly as Arctic waves breaking over a storm-tossed bow upon bent and stripped shoulders.
"We have come to an explanation," she said: "an explanation that I could never have made. Tom, the moorings are off! Wait!"
She commanded, not I. She seemed suddenly to dominate with an inflexible resolve that could be neither argued against nor thrust aside. She stood so still and motionless, this woman I loved, making her valiant fight, and lone, that I was subdued, waiting, and in awe, for what counted as a long and portentous time. All the little sounds without were magnified to the extreme—the trudge of boots upon the bridge, the languid comments of those who stood upon the decks, the slight, persistent slap of tiny waves against the steel hull, the voice of a boatswain admonishing some apprentice for a failure to coil a rope. The bumping of the visiting boat at the foot of the Storthing's ladder; the steps of Vennemann ascending; his abrupt demand to be conducted to the ship's master; the semi-defiant, half-contemptuous response of the man addressed—were all audible while we two waited. The tragedy of a deferred reckoning was thumping itself into my brain as I stood with my eyes fixed expectantly upon the sunlit door through which he must enter. He came unprepared, confident and arrogant. At sight of us together, he stopped like a man suddenly confronted by the harsh, punitive hands of a justice that he had long evaded and hoped always to avoid. In that curious, strained stillness, I heard his surprised intake of breath. Neither Marty nor I spoke. We stood watching him, with a mutual and fervid hostility. He was flustered. All the calmness and arrogance and self-assurance were stripped from him like a coat jerked from the shoulders of a pretender, and cast, contemptuously, upon turf. It was as if, in this climax, he had been bared. He halted as if held in a spell until he was precipitated to his fall by her voice.
"So, Count Waldo," she said, "we are all together again! We three. Almost as if some One Above had intervened and brought us to confession. You lied to me! You lied to others! Of that I am convinced."
He did not answer, but stood as if striving to find excuses. He tried to meet her eyes, failed, swept a glance that snarled toward me, then assumed as dull and vapid a blankness as ever was assumed by a German peasant before a Prussian drill-master.
"You told me, as a confidence—confidence filled with pretended regret!—that you had it from an indisputable source that Mr. Hale had certain heart entanglements at home; that his resignation had been demanded by his superior officers; and then denied that you had caused to be published an announcement that you and I were betrothed! And these were all lies, weren't they?"
I stood amazed by these revelations, not one of which I had ever surmised. I could not summarize their portent and the influence they had exerted upon my life. A dull anger began to pervade me, arising with swift ascent to murderous intent, when her voice again swept scornfully through the waiting silence.
"You dare not answer! Why? Because you fear that I know the truth, and I do. I learned, when it was too late, that all you had said was untrue! You, a man of honor? Better that the very names of honor and truth be cast from our tongue than that such as you should use them! Better that women such as I had never been born than to be influenced to their unhappiness by such as you, when—"
She had not time to concede the pulsating, unleashed arraignment of her scorn. The quiet cabin became attenuated to the reach of my anger. A flash told me the whole sum of his perfidy. I have no recollections of what he said, beyond his attempted admission and apology, before I had swept a chair aside and had clutched my fingers in his throat. I recall no desire nor hope so great as when, in that moment, I sought to kill him, fervently, avidly, trusting that his sufferings might be prolonged. He struck blindly, his clenched fists falling unheeded on my face, as I lifted him upward, and with the frenzied, multiplied strength of rage, thrust him back against the cabin wall and pinned him against it, hoping that he might endure the agonies of a thousand deaths. The very existence of my being was absorbed in a chaotic tempest unleashed, in which I clung to him, feeling his struggles grow weaker, hearing the beating of my heart, the rush of my own blood, intermingled with his gurgling cries and the appeals of the woman I loved, and from whom I had been separated by his machinations. Her hands were clasped about mine, tugging to break them from their strangling hold. The world flamed red. All that I had ever been and ever might be were absorbed in the one mad yearning to finish that which I had begun, the termination of his life. No maniac could have been more desperately intent on his sole object than I, who was killing the man beneath my hands. I was aware that other hands, rough and vigorous, had intruded themselves, and were dragging me back from my prey. The men from the bridge, alarmed by the tumult, had responded to her appeals for aid and overpowered me. They clung to me tenaciously after they had dragged me away by dominating strength, and I awoke from my murderous nightmare to see that Count von Vennemann had fallen to the floor, that Marty was assisting him to arise, that the chair I had thrown aside in my fury was lying a crumpled mass of twisted wood, and that through the windows streamed the white light of the sun and the blue, glancing reflections cast upward from the waves of the tropical sea. Panting and subdued, I shook an arm free, and ran my hand across my eyes like one awakening from a horrible spell.
"Let him go. He's all right now," a voice behind me ordered, and I found myself released. I looked around to face one of the twisted old men of her crew.
"Young Tom Hale," he said, with a wry grin, as he massaged a swollen spot on his face, "your dad was a bad man to handle when he was riled, but he had nothing on you!"
Vennemann was now on his feet, upheld by a man from the bridge. He rubbed his throat with his fingers and glared sullenly at me. He straightened his disordered cravat, pulled down the ends of his collar, that I had torn loose in my first rush, and muttered, "Ach! Was ein verrückt Mann!"
"Madman or not," I retorted, "you're lucky to be alive. One word more and I'll finish what I began."
I give him credit for bravery; for he stared at me defiantly and did not shrink from an issue that meant death to him.
"Brute strength has its values," he said significantly, with a shrug of his shoulders.
"And stupidity of intellect its shortcomings," I added.
I fought an impulse to attack him again, and knew that he knew what those impulses were; for he quailed and was relieved by the voice of the woman who stood between us, and commanded, with cool emphasis, her wishes.
"We shall put an end to this. My cabin is not a place for a brawl."
Humiliated, both Vennemann and I bowed our apologies, and she told her men to withdraw. They did so, after exchanging wise glances, as if aware that there was an undercurrent of which they had not been apprised. We waited until they had gone from sight and sound, the count still by the partition, I on the opposite side of the cabin, and Marty in the center, where the sea reflections, glancing upward through the cabin window, flashed through her splendid hair, across her firmly moulded face, and into her wonderful eyes. They were filled with an infinite scorn when again she addressed the count.
"I had hoped never to see you again," she declared coldly. "But now I am glad that it was to be so, that I may tell you to your face, in the presence of the man about whom you lied, all that I found out. To me it is a great privilege. To you it is an opportunity to defend yourself, if you can conceive of anything to say."
He seemed to have forgotten my presence as he fixed his look upon her, and there were misery, shame, and yearning all portrayed. In a less profound silence his voice would have been inaudible; but now it carried with it a note of despair and appeal.
"I can say nothing, save that I loved you; that I wanted you more than anything in the world; and that when one is hopeless and desperate enough, he will stop at no means. You loved Tom Hale, and—"
"Stop!" she exclaimed; but I, with a leaping heart, saw the flush of color that passed over the side of her face before she could turn her head away from me, and knew that for once he had uttered a truth. I could not bear that anything of such glorious refinement and sacred worth as the inner shrine of her heart should be bared to and discussed by such a man. That would have been a sacrilege. I forced myself forward to spare her such ignominy.
"Does it not seem," I asked quietly, "that this has gone far enough? Can any of us gain anything by further words, or undo all that has been done? Then let us have it over with!"
I sensed her gratitude, although she did not face me.
"Vennemann," I said, eying him, "you have done harm enough to satisfy any one. It's a fairly big world; but so far as you and I are concerned, and although I am canceling everything behind, it will prove too small for both of us if ever you intrude yourself in my affairs again. I trust you understand my meaning?"
For a long time he did not answer, save by a steady, ugly stare, and then, reading a relentless determination in my look, wavered, and as if resolved to pretend an unbroken front, shrugged his shoulders impatiently, made a slight gesture with his hands, and said: "We shall not be too far apart to suit me; but of this you can be sure, Hale, that if I had it to do over again you would not be here and alive! It was in that that I was a fool!"
He seemed, through his own words, to lose control of himself again, and, raising his voice, vented his anger:
"If I had to do it over again, my Government could have gone to hell for the plans I was ordered to get from a man aboard your ship, and I'd have given all I had, and all I ever hoped to have, for the opportunity of putting you where I put the Esperanza! You got the best of it when you disabled the Gretchen; but it didn't last, because you were too soft! You thought you had us fast when you left us in those cursed keys; but you hadn't! The storm lifted us off, and we got a tow and were repaired in the nearest port. I came back here, hoping to find you and your rotten little outfit. Do you know why? Because I wanted to sink you, and drown the lot of you, more than I ever wished to do anything in my life. I'd have shown you what a fight means, you big, ugly—"
"Marty!" I exclaimed, appealing to her. "Do I have to stand here aboard your ship and listen to this abuse?"
As if terrified by what might doubtless become a tragedy, she swung toward me, crying: "Tom! Tom! Don't! Pay no attention to him! He's not worth it!"
I drew back and felt my flexed muscles relax.
"Mr. Vennemann," she said, turning toward him, "you are no longer welcome aboard the Storthing. Please go now. And perhaps it would be as well for me to warn you of this: that if you attempt to interfere with Mr. Hale's work, you will have not only, him but the men of the Storthing also to fight. Common sense will warn you that you can hope for nothing but defeat. If you have any knowledge of decency left, you will go immediately from a place where you are not welcome, and—I hope to forget you!"
She stepped swiftly to the door and called, "Mr. Marvin," will you see Captain Vennemann to his boat?"
A man's voice, heavy and deep from long sea command, responded, "Aye! Aye! Miss Sterritt." And before the echoes had dwindled away one of the men I had seen on the bridge loomed hugely in the door.
Vennemann bowed deeply before the woman who had given him his congé, but she neither acknowledged his parting salute nor favored him with a look. He bestowed on me a final scowl, that I fancy I returned with compound interest, and was gone.
Marty and I heard the sounds of his departure. They died away and normal tones resumed from without: the same languid slapping of the sea; the same subdued but animated conversation; the very words of the men of the Storthing calling questions to those aboard the Hector, and the faint replies. Suddenly I was aware that she had not faced me for a long time, and stood poised upon her feet as though all bravery had left her, and that she might at any moment rush away from this portentous page of our lives, and from me. In a panic of apprehension lest I lose again this precarious footing, this coveted ambition of love and life, I sprang toward her, crying aloud her name. Aye! Crying it aloud as a drowning, dying man, spent and feeling his bleeding fingers slipping from the last rock of hope, cries for succor. I could say no more. I had not the need; for swiftly she turned toward me with compassion and relinquishment in her eyes, and was in my arms.