We bore them into the cabin, and poured cordials between their white lips. We chafed their frozen hands and fetched hot bricks from the engine-room to place beneath their feet. We tore off their outer garments—for ceremony flies through the porthole when death is knocking at the door and wrapped blankets round them and rubbed their limbs furiously. We did everything that men can do, of a good purpose but unhandily, to bring them back from the edge of the eternal sleep whereon they hovered, and soon—in the younger women’s case at least—with success. Then as their eyes opened, and the color began to creep back languidly into their cheeks, and they sat up in utter wonder at their surroundings, we left them, with every appliance we could furnish forth, to revive in her turn their mother, giving them but little explanation of their whereabouts, and being eyed by them with a surprise that we could but hope had pleasure at its back. But this was no time for sentimental musings, and we hurried on deck to see what had betided to the others.
Eight men had been hauled by main force from the tumbling boat, which had reeled more and more tempestuously as her living ballast lightened, and the last poor fellow, with no restraining hand on the far end of the line, had been bumped fearfully against the bulge of the hull as we rolled back. But bruises were the worst that any man had received, and we hustled them into the smoke-room unceremoniously.
Janson was still flinging the searchlight rays across the tumbling waste of water, but a word from one of the half-drowned mariners made us stay him.
“Not another two spars are afloat together of the other boats,” he gasped, as the blood began to flow again in his frozen veins. “Every one was matchwooded against the side as they left. Ours was carried off, half full by a wave that broke the painter, or I shouldn’t be here, and thank God for it.”
“How many aboard you?” I asked, shuddering to think what a toll the night had taken; “you’re the Madagascar, aren’t you?”
“Yes, we’re the Madagascar,” he answered slowly and with surprise, “though I don’t know how you know it, seeing you’ve let the boat drift. An hour ago she was the finest pleasure craft afloat, with a hundred and twenty passengers and fifty crew as jolly as could be. And now there’s us,” and he flung his hands out towards his fellows with a gesture of weak despair.
“An hour ago!” I demurred, “more than that, my man, surely. She could never have blazed up to a bon-fire like that in the time.”
“I tell you, sir,” he answered obstinately, “that less than an hour ago six score of happy men and women were feeding theirselves as contented as could be in her saloon. And now,” he added grimly, “they’re feeding the fishes. And in that boat for three-quarters of an hour we’ve been tossing over their dead, drowned carcasses, reckoning that every minute would see us join them. And Captain—my captain, what I’ve sailed with this ten years past—he’s down there among them, and I’m here, and ought to be thankin’ God, and I keep cursin’ every time I give myself leave to think. And that’s what comes of followin’ the sea, sir,” and he laid his rough, damp, grizzled head upon the table, and burst into a storm of hysterical tears.
The others were coming back to consciousness one by one. Baines touched me on the shoulder.
“There’s one here that won’t last long, my lord, I fear,” he said, leading me towards the other end of the saloon, where another limp body was stretched across the table. “We can’t bring him round at all.”