"Come, my darling, come!"
The girl fainted. He lifted her in his arms and threw one leg over the rail:
"Don't be afraid!" he said. "I will answer for your life!"
"I am not afraid," she said. "I am not afraid with you. . . ."
They leapt into the water.
CHAPTER III
GOOD-BYE, SIMON
Twenty minutes later, they were picked up by the Castor, the yacht which by this time had passed the Queen Mary. As for the Pays de Caux, the steamer sailing from Dieppe, subsequent enquiries proved that the passengers and the crew had compelled the captain to flee from the scene of the disaster. The sight of the huge waterspout, the spectacle of the ship lifting her stern out of the waves, rearing up bodily and falling back as though into the mouth of a funnel, the upheaval of the sea, which seemed to have given way beneath the assault of maniacal forces and which, within the circumference of the frenzied circle, revolved upon itself in a sort of madness: all this was so terrifying that women fainted and men threatened the captain with their levelled revolvers.
The Castor also had begun by fleeing the spot. But the Conte de Bauge, detecting through his field-glasses the handkerchief which Simon was waving, persuaded his sailors, despite the desperate opposition of his friends, to put about, while avoiding contact with the dangerous zone.
For that matter, the sea was subsiding. The eruption had lasted less than a minute; and it was as though the monster was now resting, sated, content with its meal, like a beast of prey after its kill. The squall had passed. The whirlpool broke up into warring currents which opposed and annulled one another. There were no more breakers, no more foam. Beneath the great undulating shroud which the little waves, tossing in harmless frolic, spread above the sunken vessel, the tragedy of five hundred death-struggles was consummated.