Lost for a moment in the eagerness of his search, the bark had drifted down upon them until a stroke would have brought them together. The sensation of being drawn down made him aware of it. It shocked him into action. Dragging Emily with him, Paul plunged away just in time to escape a terrific suction produced by the vessel's laboring.
Hardly were they clear of this new peril, which he instantly realized must be taken into account, when something wound itself around Paul's legs with a jerk. It clung like the tentacle of a monster. It snatched him toward the vessel. The bark was lifting at the moment. He and Emily were falling away in a valley of beryl. Instinctively he threw himself on his back, kicking as best he could to free his prisoned limbs. A glance, as his feet came clear of the water, transported him from the depths of fear and hopelessness to the heights of hope. He was entangled in a rope's end which was attached to the bark. He caught it just as it was slipping away from him. Overhauling it with one hand he found it to be a gauntline which trailed away from a block at the end of the lee main yardarm. To his sailor mind it told how the vessel's small boats had been hoisted out of her.
It was with misgiving that he drew the line toward him. It came so freely that he was certain that it was but another mockery. At each pull he expected to see its length come darting through the block. Presently it held; it sustained his weight. It was fast aboard the vessel. His heart bounded at the discovery. He passed a bight round Emily's waist and darted from her side forward. Hurling himself into the smothering suction under the bows, he clutched the bobstay as it buried itself. Down he went with it, dragged further and further until it seemed that he must let the sea have him. A monster with an hundred beaks tore at his lungs. Another clawed at his eyes. Still another gnashed at his heart. A bare glimmer of consciousness marked the end of the downward pitch. As the bark rose he continued to climb. At the end of the rise he was clear of the sea and halfway to the cap of the bowsprit. The fangs which reached for him did not get him again.
Half an hour afterward Paul Lavelle found himself lying on a deck with water hissing over him and round him. It gurgled in his ears and foamed across his throat. It was being spat at him out of three or four scuppers and a bulwark port on his right. He was in the waist of a vessel. This was a hatch coaming against which his left side was pressed—the coaming of the vessel's main hatch. He sat up and saw Emily lying across the hatch unconscious. The bight of the gauntline was still around her. As he struggled to arise, only to fall back again, his cheek swept one of her feet which dangled over the edge of the coaming. Yes, he had torn that woman out of the sea's arms. There she was in evidence of that, but where he had found the strength, how he had done it or when he had done it, he had no idea.
The names Emily and Daphne were mixed in his thoughts. It took a severe mental struggle to identify his own name. He repeated it two or three times before he recognized it. Emily was the name of the woman on the hatch. But Daphne? This name puzzled him until his wandering gaze found a row of deck buckets in a rack on the edge of the forward house. Daphne was painted on each bucket. Then slowly it came to him that he had seen it on the bows of a vessel aboard which he had climbed a long time before.
His senses were bogged in the reaction of the despair of exhaustion—that hopeless dejection which follows a supreme mental or physical exertion and whose poignancy is the greater according to the successful degree of the effort. He slipped back to his full length in the water and lay staring up at the sky.
"Paul! Paul!"
His name called in a plaintive tone over his head was what finally aroused him to a realization of his situation. The voice touched a chord in his being that impelled him to action. It sent a wave of emotion through him. He rose to a sitting posture. Again his cheek brushed the gold woman's feet, and at the touch he bent his head quickly and kissed them. It was not the first time he had done this, but it startled him now, for he sensed that she was conscious of what he did. Yet thus on the island he had kissed her reverently and sacredly when he had bound her burns.
As he struggled to his feet Emily sat up. Her hair fell across her shoulders and bosom and across her limbs in a golden shower.
"Oh, woman of all the world," he murmured, "we still live!"