Part 14 (1/2)
Her throat swelled with a violent convulsion, and she could utter no more for a moment; and she put her white handkerchief to her lips, and drew it away discolored slightly with blood.
”Ah! you love me,” she cried; ”then know, for your comfort, that you have shortened my short life a day or two, by slandering him to my face, you monster. Look there at your love, and see what it has done for me.”
She put the handkerchief under his eyes, with hate gleaming in her own.
Mr. Hazel turned ashy pale, and glared at it with horror; he could have seen his own shed with stoical firmness; but a mortal sickness struck his heart at the sight of her blood. His hands rose and quivered in a peculiar way, his sight left him, and the strong man, but tender lover, staggered, and fell heavily on the deck, in a dead swoon, and lay at her feet pale and motionless.
She uttered a scream, and sailors came running.
They lifted him, with rough sympathy; and Helen Rolleston retired to her cabin, panting with agitation. But she had little or no pity for the slanderer. She read Arthur Wardlaw's letter again, kissed it, wept over it, reproached herself for not having loved the writer enough; and vowed to repair that fault. ”Poor slandered Arthur,” said she; ”from this hour I will love you as devotedly as you love me.”
CHAPTER IX.
AFTER this, Helen Rolleston and Mr. Hazel never spoke. She walked past him on the deck with cold and haughty contempt.
He quietly submitted to it; and never presumed to say one word to her again. Only, as his determination was equal to his delicacy, Miss Rolleston found, one day, a paper on her table, containing advice as to the treatment of disordered lungs, expressed with apparent coldness, and backed by a string of medical authorities, quoted _memoriter._
She sent this back directly, indorsed with a line, in pencil, that she would try hard to live, now she had a friend to protect from calumny; but should use her own judgment as to the means.
Yet women will be women. She had carefully taken a copy of his advice before she cast it out with scorn.
He replied, ”Live with whatever motive you please; only live.”
To this she vouchsafed no answer; nor did this unhappy man trouble her again, until an occasion of a very different kind arose.
One fine night he sat on the deck, with his back against the mainmast, in deep melancholy and listlessness, and fell, at last, into a doze, from which he was wakened by a peculiar sound below. It was a beautiful and stilly night; all sounds were magnified; and the father of all rats seemed to be gnawing the s.h.i.+p down below.
Hazel's curiosity was excited, and he went softly down the ladder to see what the sound really was. But that was not so easy, for it proved to be below decks; but he saw a light glimmering through a small scuttle abaft the mate's cabin, and the sounds were in the neighborhood of that light.
It now flashed upon Mr. Hazel that this was the very quarter where he had heard that mysterious knocking when the s.h.i.+p was lying to in the gale.
Upon this a certain degree of vague suspicion began to mingle with his curiosity.
He stood still a moment, listening acutely; then took off his shoes very quietly, and moved with noiseless foot toward the scuttle.
The gnawing still continued.
He put his head through the scuttle, and peered into a dark, dismal place, whose very existence was new to him. It was, in fact, a vacant s.p.a.ce between the cargo and the s.h.i.+p's run. This wooden cavern was very narrow, but not less than fifteen feet long. The candle was at the further end, and between it and Hazel a man was working, with his flank turned toward the spectator. This partly intercepted the light; but still it revealed in a fitful way the huge ribs of the s.h.i.+p, and her inner skin, that formed the right-hand part.i.tion, so to speak, of this black cavern; and close outside those gaunt timbers was heard the wash of the sea.
There was something solemn in the close proximity of that tremendous element and the narrowness of the wooden barrier.
The bare place, and the gentle, monotonous wash of the liquid monster, on that calm night, conveyed to Mr. Hazel's mind a thought akin to David's.
”As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, there is but a step between me and death.”
Judge whether that thought grew weaker or stronger, when, after straining his eyes for some time, to understand what was going on at that midnight hour, in that hidden place, he saw who was the workman and what was his occupation.
It was Joseph Wylie, the mate. His profile was illuminated by the candle, and looked ghastly. He had in his hands an auger of enormous size, and with this he was drilling a great hole through the s.h.i.+p's side, just below the water-mark; an act, the effect of which would be to let the sea bodily into the s.h.i.+p and sink her, with every soul on board, to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.