‘It will be the wreckage that drownded most of them and that hurt them that’s come off with their lives,’ exclaimed Finn. ‘It was like being thrown into whirling machinery. How many shall we be able to muster? I fear they’re but bodies, sir,’ indicating the figures over which Cutbill was stooping.
All this while Laura and her sister were standing and conversing. I was starting to walk to the wreckage that stood at the foreshore, when Laura slightly motioned to me to approach her. I at once went to her, watching every foot of ground I measured, for the island was just a surface of pitfalls, and one could not imagine how deep the larger among them might prove. Lady Monson bowed to me with as much dignity as if she were receiving me in a ball-room. Her face looked like a dead woman’s vitalised by some necromantic agency, so preternatural was the ghastly air produced by the contrast between the tomb-like tincture of the flesh and the raven blackness of her mass of flowing hair, and the feverish glow in her large dark eyes. I returned her salutation, and she extended a lifeless, ice-cold hand.
‘I am asking Laura what is to become of us,’ she exclaimed with a distinct hint of her imperious nature in her voice, and fastening her eyes upon me as from a habit of commanding with them.
‘I cannot tell,’ I answered; ‘our business is to do the best we can for ourselves.’
‘How many are living?’ she asked.
‘We do not as yet know, but I fear no more than you see alive. My cousin is drowned, I fear.’
Her eyes fell, she drew a deep breath and continued looking down; then her gaze, full of a sudden fire, flashed to my face again.
‘I am not accountable for his death, Mr. Monson. Why do you speak significantly of this dreadful thing? I did not desire his death. I would have saved his life had the power to do so been given to me. Oh God!’ she cried, ‘it is cruel to talk or to look so as to make me feel as if the responsibility of all this were mine!’
She clasped one hand over another upon her heart, drawing erect her fine figure into a posture full of indignant reproach and passionate deprecation. Indeed, had I never met her before and not known better, I should have taken her to be some fine tragedy actress who could not perform in the humblest article of an everyday commonplace part without dressing her behaviour with the airs of the stage.
‘Pardon me,’ I exclaimed, ‘you mistake. I meant nothing significant. I thought you would wish to know if your husband had been spared. This is no moment for discussing any other question in the world but how we are to deliver ourselves from this terrible situation.’