"My boy!" she moaned. "My boy!"
Like quickly shifting pictures, there ran through Fenton's mind the images of Nino, of the boy whose life-preserver he had saved, and of his own son, asleep in safety in his nursery at home. With a quick revulsion of feeling came the desire to save Ninitta, and with instinctive quickness he hit upon a possible means of escape. As he came through the saloon he had seen a man, a dim shape in the fog, clambering through the shattered staterooms to climb over the broken bowsprit into the vessel that had run them down. Hastily drawing Ninitta along, he forced his way back into the saloon. The body of the man who had been hurt in the collision lay dead and deserted on the floor. He lifted his companion over it and made his way to the side of the steamer. Others had discovered this road to safety and he had to fight for his foothold amid the waves that now washed over his feet. The men on the stranger vessel were sawing off the broken spar which was entangled under the steamer's upper deck, lest their craft should be dragged down by the sinking boat. He urged Ninitta forward, swinging her by main force up into the tangled rigging.
"No, no," she cried, endeavoring to throw herself back. "I do not want to go. It will be better for Nino."
The sublimity of her self-sacrifice smote him like a lash. He could not stop to argue, but he forced her forward, and one of the men above, feeling himself in safety, caught her by the arm to drag her up. But at that instant the spar, cut nearly through, broke with a sharp crack like the sound of a gun. The end fell, and with it the wretched woman was carried down. She shrieked as she went, the water cutting short her cry of mortal anguish. Fenton saw her face an instant, and then in the fog and the darkness the lapping water closed over her.
An awful sickening shudder ran through him, a fear too great to be resisted. There rose from his heart a despairing prayer; and the unbeliever has sounded the depth of agony when he calls upon God.
At that instant a beam loosened from the upper deck, dragged downward by the ropes of the falling bowsprit, fell with a crash, dashing him downward into the gulf below. He felt the awful stinging pain of the blow, like the thrust of a spear; a mighty wave seemed to mount upward to meet and to engulf him. Then he lost all perception of what he was doing or of what happened to him; and it might to his consciousness have been either moments or hours before he found himself struggling in the icy water. He swam instinctively, and he even remembered to try to increase his distance from the steamer, that he might not be caught in the eddy when it went down. He heard still the cries and shrieks, but the noise of the sea at his ears was like a mighty uproar confusing all. He could not tell in which direction lay the vessel; a mighty pressure crushed his chest, and innumerable lights twinkling against a background of intensest black seemed to shine before his eyes. He was past thinking clearly. His memory was like a broken mirror whose shattered fragments reflected a thousand bits from his past life, confused, detached, and meaningless.
Then with a last supreme effort his strong will asserted itself in a command upon his consciousness. For one intense instant, briefer than the flash of the tiniest spark, he realized everything, save that the blow or the nearness of death seemed to have dulled all sense of fear. The most vivid thought of all was the reflection that he might have been saved but for his efforts to help Ninitta. The grim humor of the situation tickled his fancy, and in the very flood of death he faintly smiled at the irony of fate which thus balanced accounts. And this flash of cynical amusement was the last gleam of his earthly consciousness.
XXXVII
A SYMPATHY OF WOE.
Titus Andronicus; iii.—1.
Fortunately Ninitta had made no secret of her departure except to conceal it from her husband. She had been to see some Italian friends of former days to ask about people she had known in Italy, and from them her husband learned pretty nearly what her plans had been. Fenton might have spared himself his fears lest she be suspected of going with him. Such a thought did not for an instant enter into Herman's mind. The sculptor found himself appreciating better than ever before the strength of his wife's character. The knowledge of Ninitta's faults died with her, and her memory was transmitted to her son enriched with the halo of a martyr who has died in the path of supreme self-sacrifice. Nine's father understood fairly well the train of reasoning which had led his wife to the tragic resolve to leave their boy. Ignorant of her fault, he blamed himself for the reproach by which he feared he had forced her to believe that it were better for her son to be freed from her presence.