“Thank you very much,” said Lady Ingleby. “And who was Davy Jones?”
Jim Airth’s face was streaming with perspiration. His mouth was full of sand. His heart was beating in his throat. But he loved to play the game, and he loved to see another do it. So he laughed as he put his arm around her, holding her tightly so that she should not realise how much she was trembling.
“Davy Jones,” he said, “is a gentleman who has a locker at the bottom of the sea, into which all drown’d things go. I am afraid your pretty parasol has gone there, and my boots and stockings. But we may well spare him those.... Oh, I say!.... Yes, do have a good cry. Don’t mind me. And don’t you think between us we could remember some sort of a prayer? For if ever two people faced death together, we have faced it; and, by God’s mercy, here we are—alive.”
CHAPTER XI
’TWIXT SEA AND SKY
Myra never forgot Jim Airth’s prayer. Instinctively she knew it to be the first time he had voiced his soul’s thanksgiving or petitions in the presence of another. Also she realised that, for the first time in her whole life, prayer became to her a reality. As she crouched on the ledge beside him, shaking uncontrollably, so that, but for his arm about her, she must have lost her balance and fallen; as she heard that strong soul expressing in simple unorthodox language its gratitude for life and safety, mingled with earnest petition for keeping through the night and complete deliverance in the morning; it seemed to Myra that the heavens opened, and the felt presence of God surrounded them in their strange isolation.
An immense peace filled her. By the time those disjointed halting sentences were finished, Myra had ceased trembling; and when Jim Airth, suddenly at a loss how else to wind up his prayer, commenced “Our Father, Who art in heaven,” Myra’s sweet voice united with his, full of an earnest fervour of petition.
At the final words, Jim Airth withdrew his arm, and a shy silence fell between them. The emotion of the mind had awakened an awkwardness of body. In that uniting “Our Father,” their souls had leapt on, beyond where their bodies were quite prepared to follow.