“Put Mrs. Hardenworth in your boat, so she and Lenore can be together,” she told Captain Knutsen. “I’ll get in the other.”
The captain did not seem to hear. He continued to shout his orders. In the work of lowering the lifeboat he had cause to lift his lantern high, and for a moment its yellow gleam was bright upon Bess’s drawn, haggard face. Farther off it revealed Ned, white-faced but erect in the beat of the storm.
In one instant’s insight, a single glimpse between the storm and the sea, he understood that she was taking him at his word. For some reason beyond his ken—likely beyond hers, too—she had asked to be put in McNab’s boat so that his wish he had spoken in anger at the door of her stateroom might come true. How silly, how trivial he had been! Those angry words had not come from his heart: only from some false, superficial side of him that was dying in the storm. He had never dreamed that she would take them seriously. They were the mere spume of a child that had not yet learned to be a man.
“Get in with us,” he said shortly. “Don’t be silly—as I was.” Then, lest she should mistake his sentiment: “Mrs. Hardenworth is twice your weight, and this boat will be overloaded as it is.”
The girl looked at him quietly, nodding her head. If he had expected gratitude he was disappointed, for she received the invitation as merely an actuality of her own, immutable destiny. Indeed the wings of destiny were sweeping her forward, her life still intertwined with his, both pawns in the vast, inscrutable movement of events.
He helped her into the dory. Julius, who at the captain’s orders had been rifling the cabins, threw blankets to her. Then tenderly, lending her his strength, Ned helped Lenore over the wind-swept deck into the bow seat of the lifeboat, nearest to the seat he would take himself. “Buck up, my girl,” he told her, a deep, throbbing note in his voice. “I’ll look after you.”
Already the deck was deserted. The dim light showed that the larger dory, containing McNab, Forest, Julius, and Mrs. Hardenworth, had already been launched. There was no sign of them now. The darkness and the storm had already dropped between. They could not hear a shout of directions between the three men, not a scream of fear from the terrified woman who was their charge.
It was as if they had never been. Only the Charon was left—her decks awash and soon to dive and vanish beneath the waves—and their little group in the dim gleam of the lantern. Knutsen and Ned took their places at the oarlocks, Ned nearer the bow, Knutsen just behind. A great wave seemed to catch them and hurl them away.
Could they live in this little boat on these tumultuous seas? Of course the storm was nothing compared to the tempests weathered successfully by larger lifeboats, but it held the utmost peril here. Any moment might see them overwhelmed. The least of those great waves, catching them just right, might overturn them in an instant.
Already the Charon was lost in the darkness, just as the other lifeboat had been lost an instant before. Not even Knutsen could tell in what direction she lay. Still the waves hurried them along. The chill wind shrieked over them, raging that they should have dared to venture into its desolate domains.