“Come,” he said. “No—just as you are!” noting a movement to turn back. “We have not a moment to lose. Quick—trust yourself to me.”
As they passed through the saloon, she with his arm around her, still drowsy and half stupefied, which perhaps was the best state she could have been in in such an appalling emergency, the quivering tremor of the deck had increased, and louder sounded the hollow booming of the water. There was a list which nearly threw them off their feet. A wash of water swept the scuttles, then the ship lurched slowly over to starboard, and again the scuttles were under the brine. Surely they were going—going. It would be awful, shut up there to drown like rats in a hole, awful—awful; the same death up on deck in the free open air seemed easy, pleasant, by comparison. Yet as he held her closely to him, supporting her with his right arm while with his left he groped and steadied his way—both their ways—ascending the companion stairs, Roden Musgrave was conscious that even death in this fashion held no bitterness for him. No, there was a strange, fierce, delirious sweetness in the situation, which he would not have exchanged at that moment for life and safety. When her absence was overlooked, when she had been left to die, he alone had thrown away safety, life; he alone had returned to die with her. And he had his reward. Were they entering paradise together? It seemed like it at that moment, when they were about to die together, she in his arms. In such lightning flashes of thought did his mind whirl in the brief minute which had elapsed since the opening of her cabin door.
In close, dank, airless folds, the heavy mist still lay around—dark, impenetrable as a curtain. The night air, however, and the weird eloquence of the utter solitude, the disordered deck, the great towering funnel, the ruined deckhouses, the serpentine lapping of the water, roused Mona from her semi-lethargy.
“Where are they all?” she said, a start of terror shaking her frame as she looked around and began to realise her position.
“Gone! I only am left; and I am going to save you, if I can: if not, to die with you; and death will be sweet.”
Something of all that had been passing through his mind passed through Mona’s now. She pressed her lips to his, clasping him convulsively.
“You came back to die with me? Oh, my love! my love!”
She was quite calm as the whole truth struck upon her. Love seemed utterly to dispel all terrors of death. But Roden did not intend that it should come to that if he could help it. Keenly and carefully he had been looking around. Every life-buoy had disappeared, snatched off by the panic-stricken crowd. The deck cabins, though yawning and seamed, were so firmly stanchioned that he could not drag out so much as a plank. The skylights were unloosed. There was nothing. Again the deck beneath them gave that convulsive, shivering lurch.
“Mona, darling,” he whispered, “act now with that splendid courage you showed before. I will not leave go of you, but don’t clutch me or struggle. We shall go down, but we shall come up again. Now—come.”
But before he could gain the side of the ship with her there was an angry, seething swirl—and there leaped out of the gloom and mist in front huge wreaths, white and spectral, and hissing like snakes. Then with this appalling spectacle their footing gave way, and it seemed as if they were being whirled up into the very heavens. The after-part of the great hull reared itself aloft, and with a roaring, thunderous plunge, the Scythian disappeared from mortal sight for ever.