“You won’t mind waiting for me,” he said to Elsie.
“Don’t attempt to come alone. You are too exhausted.”
It was a fine thing to do, but she smiled at him to show that she could still repay his confidence.
“I shall wait,” she said simply.
So she was left there, all alone again, without even the dog to bear her company.
CHAPTER VI.
—BUT GOES ON AGAIN INTO THE UNKNOWN
This final waiting for the chance of succor seemed to be the hardest trial of all. The door had been hooked back to keep it wide open, so wind and sea invaded the trim privacy of the cabin. Spray leaped over the ship in such dense sheets that a considerable quantity of water quickly lodged on the port side where Courtenay’s bunk was fixed. There was no means of escape for it in that quarter, and the angle at which the Kansas lay would permit a depth of at least two feet to accumulate ere the water began to flow out through the door to the starboard.
At the great crises of existence the stream of thought is apt to form strange eddies. Courtenay, when the ship struck, and it was possible that each second might register his last conscious impression, found himself coolly reviewing various explanations of the existence of an uncharted shoal in a locality situate many miles from the known danger zone. Elsie, strung half-consciously to the highest tension by the affrighting probability of being set adrift in a small boat at the mercy of the sea roaring without—a sea which pounded the steel hull of the Kansas with such force that the great ship seemed to flinch from each blow like a creature in pain—Elsie, then, faced by such an intolerable prospect, was a prey to real anxiety because the wearing apparel scattered by Courtenay on the floor was becoming soaked in brine.
She actually stooped to rescue a coat which was not yet saturated beyond redemption. As she lifted the garment, a packet of letters, tied with a tape, fell from its folds. She placed the coat on the writing-table, and endeavored to stuff the letters into a pigeon-hole. They were too bulky, so she laid them on the coat. In doing this she could not avoid seeing the words, “Your loving sister, Madge,” written on the outer fold of the last letter in the bundle.
And that brought a memory of her previous visit to the captain’s stateroom; the contrast between the careless chatter of that glorious summer afternoon and the appalling midnight of this fourth day of the voyage was something quite immeasurable; it was marked by a void as that which separates life and death. She was incapable of reasoned reflection. A series of mental pictures, a startling jumble of ideas—trivial as the wish to save the clothes from a wetting, tremendous as the near prospect of eternity—danced through her brain with bewildering clearness. She felt that if she were fated to live to a ripe old age she would never forget a single detail of the furniture and decorations of the room. She would hear forever the dolorous howling of the gale, the thumping of the waves against the quivering plates, the rapid, methodic thud of the donkey-engine, which, long since deserted by its cowardly attendant, was faithfully doing its work and flooding the ship with electric light.