In this transient illumination the great dun-tinted forests that lined the banks showed dimly, as well as the vast river swirling intervenient, tawny, murky, but with sudden mad whorls of white foam where the current struck some obstruction flung into its course by the storm. The wreck of the Cherokee Rose was very melancholy as a spectacle since, but for the hurricane, she would have been floated in five minutes more of the deluge of rain. The yawl seemed a tiny thing, painfully inadequate, as it rocked with a long tilt on the swaying undulations of the current. The preparations for departure were going swiftly forward; another boat was in process of loading with material comforts, cots, bedding, all under tarpaulins, boxes and hampers of provisions, and the trunks and suit-cases of passengers. Since escape was now possible and at hand, one or two of the faint-hearted began to experience anew that reluctance to removal, that doubt of an untried change so common to the moment of decision. “It is a long way—ten miles in this wind,” said one, “how would it do for a few of us to try that swamper’s shack on the bank? The yawl is overloaded, anyhow.”
“Now, I can advise you,” said the Captain definitely. “It won’t do at all to trust river-side rats. You might be robbed and murdered for your watch or the change in your purse. I am not acquainted with that swamper,—I speak from precedent. And how can you judge if the shack is above water now,—or whether it has been blown by the hurricane down the river?”
“Still, the yawl is overloaded,” said Floyd-Rosney, with a trifle of malice. He was bent on exploiting the situation to his own commanding credit, and the proposition, reiterated anew, to withdraw for a different course, nettled his troublous and sensitive pride.
The next man who stepped into the yawl was the one who had advanced this divergent theory, and Floyd-Rosney flashed a glance of triumph at his wife, who still stood with the child in her arms at the warped rail of the promenade deck. She was pale, anxious, doubtful, in no frame of mind to furnish her wonted plaudits, the incense of wifely flatteries on which his vanity lived. These others had admired his initiative, had gladly adopted his plans, were looking to him with a unanimity of subservience that had quite restored the tone of his wonted arrogance. He could ill brook to see her with that discouraged questioning in her face, gazing forth over the forbidding gray water, letting first one, then another pass her to a place in the yawl. She should have been the first to board it,—to show her faith by her works.
He approached her with a rebuking question.
“Why do you lug that child around, Paula?” he demanded. “He will break your back.” He stepped forward, as if to lift the little fellow from her arms, but she precipitately moved a pace backward. Paula’s grisly thoughts were of the dungeon, the trap of the warped stateroom,—whence the boy was liberated by a stranger, while his father, unthinking and unnoting, was absorbed in his own complacence, in his busy and arrogant pose. No,—she would not let the child go again, she would hold him in her arms if his weight broke every bone in her body till they were all in safety.
“I don’t want to risk that yawl,” she said querulously. “I think the Captain knows best,—he has had such long experience. The yawl looks tricky, and the water is fearful. We ought to take to the yawl as a last resort, when the steamer can’t house us. That is always the custom. It is only in cases of absolute necessity that the yawl is used.”
It would be difficult to say whether he were more surprised or incensed, as for a moment, with short breaths and flashing eyes, he gazed at her. He was of an impetuous temper, yet not beyond schooling. He had had a lesson, he had felt the keen edge of her ridicule this morning, and he would not again lay himself liable to a public exhibition.
“Why, you must be a graduated pilot to know so much about the river,” he cried with a rallying laugh. “The kid and I are going in the yawl at all events. Unloose your hold,” he added in a furious undertone. “He is mine,—he is mine,—not yours.”
He had laid his hand on both hers as they clasped the child. Floyd-Rosney was still smiling and apparently gracious and good-humored, which might have seemed much, thus publicly withstood in this moment of excitement and stress. He was resolved that he would not lower his pride by an open and obvious struggle. He did not consider her pride. He forced her fingers apart, invisibly under the folds of the child’s cloak, by an old school-boy trick of suddenly striking the wrist a sharp blow. The muscles must needs relax in the pain, the hold give way, and, as the boy was about to slip from her clasp, his father called for the nurse, placed the child in the arms of the old servant and consigned them both to a stout roustabout who had them in the yawl in a trice. Without a word of apology, of justification, of soothing remonstrance, Floyd-Rosney turned away from his wife with brisk cheerfulness and once more addressed himself to the matter in hand.