These rude fellow-creatures, little admirable as they might show themselves in happier hours, wore something very like dignity to-night. How still they were! It did not escape Hildegarde that all these many pairs of eyes were either lowered or fixed on space, as if each one forebore to read in his fellow’s face confirmation of his own grim knowledge. Each avoiding the other’s eyes, they stood there listening to those sounds the puny piano was ineffectual to drown—the crash of impact and the yet more horrible crunching, vicious and prolonged, as though man’s arch-enemy of the deep, after battering vainly for admission, would gnaw his admission to this strange concert on the ice-beleaguered bar. While the nerves of the people still vibrated under the bombardment, some one started “Nearer, my God, to Thee.” Strangest of all on that strange evening was the revelation that in this particular company hardly one but seemed to know the hymn, and few that were not singing it with abandon to the thunderous bass of the ice. Whatever your own thoughts might be, you read in more than one of these faces that of a certainty God was “nearer” this night than He had often been before. At the beginning of the last verse, the loudest crash of all, as if a hundred tons of iron had been hurled at the Los Angeles. The people, led by one unfaltering voice, kept on singing. Only Hildegarde’s flying fingers stumbled as the ship shrank and cowered under the blow. Had it ended like this for Galbraith, too? Would he and she meet down there in the kind sea caves?
Cheviot’s face looked in through the haze. Of course she had known he would come for her at the last. When those firm lips opened she would hear him saying: “Stop your playing. We’ve done what we could—you down here, I on deck. Let us go now and meet the end.” Oh, it was well that he was here! Through the haze his face swam nearer, and what he was really saying was: “Good girl! If only you can keep it up a little longer!” And with that the face grew dim.
“A little longer!” Faintness, like sleep, stole over the good girl. As a peculiar throbbing went through the ship, Hildegarde felt the hulk of the Los Angeles open, and knew vaguely that she was falling.
“Nearer, my God, to Thee”
When she opened her eyes Louis was lifting her up. She was not clinging to a berg, nor even sitting on a cake of ice. Still in the noisome little room, and still that throbbing was shaking the ship. The people who had been so quiet were pushing, jostling, shouting, frantic to get— Where? To the boats, of course! All except Louis and Mrs. Locke. Noble souls, they were ready to stay and die with Hildegarde Mar! She must exert herself.
“Now I can go.”
“There’s no hurry,” says Cheviot.
“Oh, yes, come. We must try—we, too.”
“Try what?”