Only a miracle could save Karen. He knew that as he stood there, silent, with death in his heart.
And the miracle happened. For, as he stood staring at the heavenward beam of the unseen cruiser's searchlight, all at once the ship herself became grotesquely visible, tilted up oddly out of the sea in the centre of a dull reddish glow. The next instant a deadened boom sounded across the night as though from infinite depths; a shaft of fire two hundred feet high streamed skyward.
"That ship has been torpedoed! Oh, my God!" said a voice.
"The Wyvern has hit a mine!" roared the Dutch captain. "I'm going to get out of this now!"
Jamison's youthful face was marble; he swayed slightly where he stood. The next instant he was over the side like a cat, and Guild heard him hailing his boat in an agonized voice which broke with a dry, boyish sob.
From everywhere out of the blackness searchlights stretched out tremulous phantom arms toward the Wyvern, and their slender white beams crossed and recrossed each other, focussing on the stricken warship, which was already down by the stern, her after deck awash, and that infernal red glow surrounding her like the glow of hell around a soul in torment.
Passengers, seamen, stewards crowded and crushed him to the rail, shouting, struggling, crying out in terror or in pity.
Guild caught an officer by his gold sleeve. "We ought to stand by her," he said mechanically. "Her magazine is afire!"
"There are boats a-plenty to look after her," returned the officer; "the British destroyers are all around her like chicks about a dying hen. She's their parent ship; and there go their boats, pulling hell for sweeps! God! If it was a mine, I wish we were at Amsterdam, I do!"
The steamer was already under way; electric signals sparkled from her; signals were sparkling everywhere in the darkness around them. And all the while the cruiser with her mortal wound, enveloped in her red aura, agonized there in the horrible sombre radiance of her own burning vitals.