She felt sick with horror as the man glided away, for the tones of his voice seemed familiar, and her very first impulse was to call her husband; but the mulatto’s words had such an effect upon her, weakened as she was with long illness, that she dared not speak even to Bessy, to whose side she crept as an eager buzz of conversation went on.
For, after sitting thoughtfully in the boat for a few minutes, Dutch had leaned over the side once more, placing his face in the water, and gazed down at the beautiful submarine grove, when he saw a long, grey body pass slowly out from amongst the weeds, and woke to the fact that there were sharks in those waters, this creature being fourteen or fifteen feet long.
He shuddered at the sight, and thought of the helplessness of any diver if one of these monsters attacked him. He raised his face to breathe, and then looked down again, to see the monster part a bed of seaweed, and as it did so his past troubles were forgotten in the thrill of delight he felt: for Oakum was certainly right as to the wreck. As the shark glided slowly on, it parted the weeds more and more, leaving bare, plainly to be seen, what looked like a stump standing out of the sand, but which his experienced eye knew at once to be one of the ribs of a ship, black with age where it was not grey with barnacles and other shells.
He rose from the water again, with his face dripping, inhaled a long breath, and once more softly stooped and peered down into the clear, ambient depths, where the waving seaweed and multitudinous growths seemed ever changing their colours as they waved gently in the current.
The weed parted by the shark had closed up together once more, and not a vestige seemed left of the piece of wreck wood; in fact, it might have been a dream, only that close by where he had seen it before, half-hidden in the weed, lay the shark, its long, unequal-lobed tail waving slightly to and fro a few moments, and then the monster was perfectly still—so quiet that the sharpest eye would have passed it unnoticed, so exactly was its back in hue like the sand upon which it lay.
But Dutch knew, dreamer as he had been, that this was no piece of imagination; and taking the tube once more, and recalling the peculiar bend of the piece of timber, he began again to examine the bottom, especially the portion that lay in the shadow cast by the schooner’s hull. According to the bend of the timber, he knew that the wreck, if wreck it belonged to, must be lying in the opposite direction to the schooner; and, tracing its imaginary shape, he concluded that there must be a succession of ribs embedded in the sand, though not visible in the lines he marked out with his eye.
And so it seemed, for as he looked he could make out that the weeds lay in thick clusters in the position they should occupy if they were attached to the timbers of an old ship. Huge corals were there as well, forming quite a submarine forest, but evidently they took the form of a ship where they were most dense; and, to Dutch’s great surprise, the vessel must have been one of nearly double the size of the schooner.
“See anything?” said Mr Parkley, as the young man rose for a few minutes and wiped his brow.
“Yes,” said Dutch, bluntly. “Shark!”
“Ah, there are plenty, no doubt,” said Mr Parkley.