“Never mind me, child. You forget that I can swim. If we manage to stick together, this belt will be a great help to me, as you will see. And now, Léonie, we can do nothing but cling to these rails and trust in God. Keep a good look out for the waves. When you see one rushing this way don’t try and stand up against it, it will only knock you backwards, but bend yourself, hold your breath, and put your head through it. Quick, have a care, child!” She utters these last words in a sharp warning tone as she tightens her grasp on Léonie’s hand. A dense dark wall seems to tower above them, a swirl and a rush is all she hears as a monster wave envelops her and Léonie in its folds. It tears the rail, to which her left hand clings, from her grasp. She feels herself lifted up like a straw, and borne forward by the resistless rush and volume of water. With the desperation of death in her clutch, her right hand still grips the still, cold fingers of her young companion, whose grasp has slackened altogether. A floating spar strikes her with some force. She clutches at it, but it sweeps past her, and is gone as the wave carries her ever onwards.
A sudden ebb in the resistless current as if by magic arrests her course. She feels herself dragged back along the line she has come. Then the volume of water abruptly leaves her, and her feet touch the deck again.
Gloria is up in a moment; she knows there is not a minute to spare. In her present position another such a billow would sweep her clear of the smack altogether into the raging sea.
“Jump up, Léonie!” she shouts, but Léonie never stirs. As Gloria tugs at her arm to try and arouse her, she knows by the dead weight of the girl’s body that Léonie is either dead or insensible.
With a supreme effort she raises the now helpless girl in her arms, and staggers forward to the cabin with her burden. A wave strikes her as she reaches it, and dashes her once more to the ground. For a second time she is swept like a straw along the deck, and for the second time the ebb arrests her progress, and leaves her in the same position as before.
“Oh God!” she gasps, “how long? This is indeed a living death.”
She still grasps the stiff, clammy fingers of the helpless girl, but hope has left her. She only now wishes that death may come, and come quickly.
There is a wild shriek ahead. It rises high above the wind’s roar. Then a ghastly, unearthly sound comes out of the blackness of night. Even on death’s threshold it awakes to attention the senses of Gloria de Lara. Through the blinding spray she strains the last glance on life which she feels is left to her. High above, like a huge black mountain rising suddenly out of the sea, looms a gigantic apparition. It towers above her like some fearful, unknown spectre. There is a flash of light in the air, a loud shout, a grating sound. Loud o’er all shrieks the tempest whistle, she feels the smack part from her, a mighty current sucks her beneath the waves; down, down it drags her into the bottomless abyss of the ocean’s awful crater, as the great ship sweeps forward on its course. Even in this moment of death’s agony Gloria’s brain is clear. She relaxes her grasp of Léonie, who, with the life-belt around her, has that one straw of hope to cling to. As the waters of the surging Atlantic sweep over her her last cry is to God; her last vision of the life which she is quitting, is the face of Evie Ravensdale.
