Pacing the deck in the tropical starlight he recapitulated to himself the whole situation. All had gone below now, but he remained, as his custom was; the swirl of the phosphorescent lines from the stem of the ship; the muffled clank of the engines; the weird, long-drawn cry of the lookout on the forecastle as the bells were struck every half hour—the sole accompaniment to his meditations. It all came back—the weeks of blank desolation following upon his father’s death, and how the voice of conscience, proving stronger than that of his advisers, had spurred him forth upon his fruitless quest. Well, it had proved fruitless, which seemed to point to the certainty that his advisers had been right.
It all came back. The wrench of that uprooting—of tearing himself away from Hilversea, and all it involved; the farewells, too, though he had avoided these as much as possible—in cowardly fashion he now told himself. Haldane’s hearty regrets and expectation to see him soon again; Yvonne’s blue eyes brimming with tears, which the affectionate child was at no pains to conceal; the genuine grief of his humbler friends; the last Mass in the chapel; and the final shutting out of everything behind him as the carriage whirled him off to Bassingham station in the murk of the winter day. Delia Calmour, too, whom he could not but think that he and his father and the indirect influences of their surroundings had been incidental, under Heaven, in guiding into the way of light. Poor child! He knew she would miss him, as he recalled the brave effort she had made to subdue all manifestation of the extent of her regret when he had bidden her good-bye; and he smiled to himself as he remembered certain arrangements which he had made with his solicitors providing that, in the event of anything happening to him, this girl whom he and his father had befriended should never be thrown upon the world to combat that uncompromising enemy with her own unaided resources.
Yes; Hilversea rose up before him now, fair, pleasant, restful in its sunshine as the very plains of heaven. Soon he would be within it again. He had trampled all considerations of self under foot and had followed the voice of conscience—and the result had been “As you were!” Surely he had done enough. Clearly his stewardship was his still, and, Heaven help him, he would endeavour to fulfil it to the utmost of his power, and would teach his son to do the same after him. Gerard? He must have grown quite tall, he reflected. What a splendid-looking fellow he would be.
Pacing up and down, hour after hour, Wagram’s thoughts ran too fast for his mind—and ever the silence, the swirl of the sea, and the streaking fall of a star in the murky tropical zenith. Then came a sudden jar, and a crash that shivered the ship from stem to stern. For a few moments this horrible jarring vibration continued, then the whole fabric gave a convulsive kind of heave, and the tremor ceased. All was still—but the thrash of the propeller was no longer felt, no longer heard. The throbbing of the engines had ceased—again.
Chapter Twenty Seven.
A Sacrifice in Vain.
The solitary watcher realised instinctively that this time something was wrong. So, too, did the residue of his fellow-passengers, for in an incredibly short space of time they came swarming up from below in various stages of dress and undress—mostly the latter—and many and eager were the inquiries heard on every side, and anxiety was depicted on every face; while on others there was a look which spelt downright scare—these, too, by no means exclusively the property of the ornamental sex.
There was some excuse for it; for to find oneself started out of one’s sleep by a jarring shock, to realise that the vessel is no longer moving, to rush up on deck only to find her lying helpless on the black midnight sea, the hurried gait and speech of officers and crew, to the accompaniment of the hoarse roaring of the steam pipes—all this is well calculated to try the nerves of the ordinary passenger; to conjure up visions of collision, or running on a rock, and the swift and sudden foundering with all hands.