“Good-bye, Lambert,” cried the other, with a glee that was hellish in its ferocity. “Pity I haven’t got Sonnenberg here to send after you. Well, you and I are quits now, at any rate. Good-bye, Lambert!”
For reply came a frightful noise, a gurgling, gasping, inarticulate yell. Then the struggles of the despairing wretch ceased. A boil of bubbles came glittering up to the surface of the now moonlit water, then they too ceased. Roden Musgrave and his unconscious charge were alone together once more—alone on the dark, silent, midnight sea.
Chapter Thirty Four.
“Air, Light, and Wave Seemed Full of Burning Rest.”
Morning dawned. The sun shot up from his liquid bed, a ball of fiery splendour, purpling the vast immensity of a sailless ocean, shining down with rapidly increasing and merciless heat upon the speck formed by the impromptu raft amid the utter boundlessness of that blue-green, slimy, and now most horrible expanse. Not another object was visible far or near, not even so much as a stick of wreckage which might have come to the surface. Had they drifted with some current far from the scene of the night’s awful disaster?
Roden Musgrave, supporting himself by resting a light grasp upon the hatch, had been swimming mechanically all these hours, and well indeed was it that the water in those semi-tropical seas was more than ordinarily buoyant, for this and his coolness of brain had enabled him to spare all superfluous waste of energy. He had managed to secure his unconscious companion to the ring-bolts with a piece of cord which he had thrust into his pocket in view of some such emergency, and this timely precaution saved much expenditure of valuable strength in holding her in her otherwise precarious position. Yet now, upon himself, the night’s exhaustion and horror were beginning to tell; and he was, as we have said, swimming mechanically and as one half-asleep.
Now a hand stole forth and rested softly and caressingly upon his head.
“Love, why did you not leave me to my fate?” The voice, low and dreamy in its sweetness, resumed: “It would have been all over by now. Yet you threw away safety to come back and give your life for mine.”