I was awakened by Mrs. Ulswater's suddenly pulling my arm. It was near three o'clock in the morning.
“Listen!” she whispered. “Now, wait!” To my bewildered sense became now audible the sound of soft, regular steps in the outer cabin and on the cabin stairs leading to the deck. I arose softly.
I saw Susannah in her long night garment, of Mrs. Ulswater's making, stiffly mounting the stairs with a military step! and beyond her, on the moonlit deck, whom but Ram Nad, white-bearded, blue-turbaned, white-garmented, beckoning, retreating! I was about to advance, when at that moment Mrs. Ulswater shrieked loudly in my ear, and Ram Nad, running forward, sharply shut and bolted the cabin door. An instant's silence followed, then shouts and swift feet running aft. I rushed to the port-hole. Past it and past my face went a swiftly falling and fluttering body, which splashed in the sea. Was it Ram Nad? Was it Susannah? Mrs. Ulswater was beating the door with her hands and crying: “Catch that man, Captain Jansen! Catch that man!” Distressing moment! Norah came from her room and mingled her voice in the tumult. But there we were, locked in.
The cabin door was opened. Captain Jansen's comfortable bearded face appeared, “Yes, 'm. But he yump for das boat. He gone ofer.”
“Then catch the boat. Quick!”
“Yes'm. But I got das boat mit un grapple.”
We all emerged on the warm night, on the moonlit deck. The women had donned their shawls. This was the situation.
Ram Nad's misshaped and kilted canoe was held fast, and one end lifted from the water by a grappling-iron, at which a sailor was tugging with a rope over the rail. The two black heads of his rowers were just above the water at some distance, moving hastily shoreward, their wakes shining in the moonlight. Ram Nad was nowhere in sight. Susannah stood on deck, the watchman forward sat stiff and motionless—both of them rigid, frozen, mesmerised, wrapped up in his or her inner consciousness like a ball of yarn.
“There!” said Mrs. Ulswater. “He didn't get Susannah. Doctor, we must go away from this place. I don't like it.”
“We can weigh anchor,” I said, “surely, now as well as any time. But, my dear, as to these ossified unfortunates, I don't quite see. I'm no Ph. D. Mahatma, nor yet a brindle cat, hell-broth witch. It's mortifying, but that's my limit. I'm not on to Ram Nad's spoon motion, nor yet his lullaby. Hadn't we better wait and find another magician that knows how to untwist the charm? Because Ram Nad appears to be drowned, and these two, according to my notion, are, as you might say, tied up particularly tight.”