Fair play

by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

Then he returned to the cabin, and clearly saw its condition.

From the foot of the ladder, the floor inclined at an angle of about forty-five degrees. The highest part near the ladder was free from water, commenced around the pedestal of the center-table, and became deeper as the floor was lower, until at the partition wall it was two feet deep. The chairs and all the movable furniture had slidden down the sloping floor, and lay half submerged and piled against the wall. The doors of the staterooms were open, and the furniture within them was in the utmost confusion. And yet everything there—the women’s clothing, hanging on the pegs or dropped upon the berth; the little workbasket fallen upside down upon the floor; the scattered books, the flute—all was suggestive of life; but it was of desolate life, for all was chaos—still life, for not a living creature was to be seen.

A shock of alarm, almost of conviction, that his three companions had been lost, struck like an icebolt through his heart. He went into all the staterooms, one by one.

They all exhibited the wild disorder he had partly seen through the open doors; not only that of small sleeping apartments hastily evacuated, but that consequent upon the hurricane. The two staterooms to the right and left of the companion ladder, being in the highest part of the leaning cabin, were comparatively dry; the other two, lower down, were partly submerged.

No human being was to be found, either; but on the upper berth of the spare staterooms lay Judith Riordan’s cat, quietly and comfortably nursing her three kittens. On seeing Justin’s face leaning over, she began to purr with delight. What a contrast was this picture to all the desolation around?

But Justin turned away, sick at heart, to prosecute further what he felt would be a vain search for his missing friends.

The dining cabin was on the deck above, but it had been so continually swept through by the tremendous seas which had broken over the ship, that it seemed scarcely possible any living creature should have found refuge there; yet as a forlorn hope, he went thither to seek them.

And what a scene of destruction met him there!

The sea, that had fallen considerably, no longer swept through it, but everything was shaken together in the maddest medley. The table which had been laid for the supper which poor Mrs. Breton so greatly lamented the loss of, was standing in its place, for it was a fixture, and the glasses that were fitted in the swinging rack above the table were also safe, but everything else was thrown out of place and smashed to atoms, or piled up in the lowest part of the leaning floor. In the highest part of this cabin were two doors, leading into two large staterooms; the right-hand one as you stood facing them was the captain’s private room, the left-hand one was the doctor’s. Justin opened the door of the captain’s room, but found it unoccupied. A sound of pitiful whining and barking came from the doctor’s room. Justin opened the door, and found the doctor’s little dog, who leaped upon him with the wildest demonstrations of delight, but otherwise this room, like the captain’s, was unoccupied.

And now the anxious dread became a fatal certainty—his companions were all three lost!—swept from the deck by that last overwhelming wave! But yet, stay—one hope remained. They were not on the wreck, that was certain; but they might have been taken off at the last moment by the first lifeboat that had left the ship. They might have been so taken off without his knowledge, for he had left them standing on the starboard gangway, near the boat in which the two young wives were wildly pleading with the crew to save their husbands; the two young missionaries shaking with agitation in this crisis of their fate, and the captain pale with passion, and stern in his determination to share the fate of his abandoned ship and passengers. So he had left them to follow Britomarte and take her to the other boat, and he had not seen them since!