“Admittedly, the lady wanted to wed because I was about to disappear. I give her the credit of believing that she would never have gone through with the farce if she had the least reason to think that I would not be dead within the next half hour. But the fact remains that she was callous and calculating—whether to serve her own ends or some other person’s is immaterial.... No, Mr. Sturgess; when, if ever, I choose a wife, it is long odds against her name being Madeleine.”
Nina Forbes laughed, though her teeth chattered with the cold.
“The calm way in which men speak of ‘choosing’ a wife always amuses me,” she said. “If any man told me he had ‘chosen’ me I should feel inclined to box his ears.”
“It isn’t the best of words,” put in Sturgess promptly, “but it conveys a real compliment. A fellow meets a girl, the girl, and some electrical arrangement jangles at the back of his head. ‘This is it,’ says a voice. ‘Go to it, good and hard,’ and he goes. That’s the only sort of choice he’s given. The girl can always turn him down, you know. Still, she can’t help feeling flattered. She says to herself, ‘That poor fellow, Charles K. Sturgess, is only a mutt, but he did think me the best ever, so he had good taste.’ What do you think, Miss Madge?”
Then he and the others discovered that Madge was crying. The frivolous chatter intended to hide a dread reality had failed in its object. They were shivering with cold again, and ever more conscious of gnawing hunger. The prospect of escape was more than doubtful. Fate seemed to be playing a pitiless game with every soul on board the Southern Cross, having swept some to instant death, while retaining others for destruction by idle whim. The renewed darkness, the continuous uproar of the reef, had broken the girl’s nerve.
Maseden fancied that he had placed too great a strain on her by detailing with such precision the sequence of events during those crowded hours at Cartagena.
“I think,” he said gravely, “that we ought to lie down again, and await patiently the coming of daylight. The sun rises, no matter what else may happen, and dawn cannot be long delayed now.”
They obeyed him. They looked to him for guidance, but they were glad he did not call for any effort. Even the light-hearted, apparently irresponsible Sturgess, who, if he had to die, would depart this life with a jest on his lips, was stilled by the sheer hopelessness of their condition.
After one of those hours which seem to belong to eternity rather than to time, a quality of grayness made itself felt in the overwhelming gloom. Soon the serrated edge of the opposite wall of rock became a fixed and rigid thing against a background of cloud. In this new world of horror and suffering the break of day, to all appearances, came from the west!
This phenomenon was easily explained. Near by, on the east, rose the tremendous peaks of the Andes, so the plain of the sea on the western horizon caught the first shafts of light long before they filtered into the fiords and gorges of the coast-line tucked in at the base of those great hills.