LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

gently and trustfully.

      Then, she became aware that a weight was upon her limbs and she looked down. A man's head lay in her lap just free of the foaming wash in the boat's bottom. It was the hand of this man that she clasped and that was clasping hers tightly. She bent closer, with a new fear starting in her heart for the face was very white. A stronger volume of light shot into the heavens. It was the man Whitridge—Lavelle!

      The boat plunged from the crest of a gray-backed comber and ended its descent with a racking jerk. Emily Granville was thrown across Lavelle, her face pressed against his spray-wet lips. She struggled to draw away, but the sea, as if in mockery, held her close to this man and weltered them in its spume.

      When the boat rose again she straightened with a shudder. A wave of horror mixed with hateful revulsion swept over her. She tried to pull herself away from him, but the weight of his head and shoulders and a woman cowering at her side pinned her down. She freed one of her hands, but Lavelle's held the other in a grip which her strength could not break.

      Then, gradually, her natural spirit of justice and humanity assumed rule, overcoming even what had been almost an obsession since childhood—her repugnance of physical contact. The water in the boat was so deep that she realized that if she put this man's head away from her lap it must sink. Perhaps he was dying—perhaps death had already claimed him and as this thought came to her she saw the open wound in his brow just back of another jagged scar.

      The humility of shame bowed her head and her eyes filled with tears. This man had suffered this wound for her sake; he had come to her in the night when all hope had gone; he had snatched her from the clutches of wild beasts, who had shot him down even as he laid her in this boat. It was because of him that she lived.

      She felt a tremor pass from Lavelle's body into hers. His lips parted with a sigh and he murmured something wearily. Then, his eyes opened for a second. He looked up into her face with the glance of a tired child, yet without recognition, and her heart gave a sudden fearful throb. She thought it was pity and knew it not for the stirring of the eternal motherhood that is in all women.

      A gust of wind swept Emily's thick plaits of golden hair across his face and his eyes closed again, the while a faint smile flickered across his lips like one returning to a pleasant dream. He snuggled his head closer against the thigh which was numb from pillowing it and the woman did not move.

      Chang, looking down from where he stood over them in the stern, like a giant in bronze, nursing the boat up to a sea anchor, alone had glimpsed what had happened. He shouted something which Emily could not understand. Stooping quickly he slipped a hand through Lavelle's tattered shirt.

      "More better," he said. "Him heart move. Him live—you live. Sab-bee?"

      The Chinaman's glance and the forceful nod of his head conveyed a meaning greater than his words. They implied a task for her performance—the doing of what was in her power to do for this man.

      A horrifying cry from forward straightened the giant in a flash. One glance ahead and he gave the big steering oar a mighty sweep. He seemed to lift the boat bodily out of the water. A stream of orders poured from his lips and electrified every bit of life in the cockleshell, save that in Lavelle.

      It took but a glimpse overside to transport these sea waifs from their horror of the night into a terror of the day. Elsie of Shanghai started from Emily's side into a sitting posture only to hide her head again. A man with a pointed black beard rose to his knees between the second and third thwarts and gazed round him in terror. Two of the three Chinese in the bows seized oars and stood like warders at a gate.

      The boat was riding in a mass of planks and railroad ties—the deckload of the stranger which had sent the Cambodia to the bottom. Every sea was armed and eager with death. Some carried their bludgeons and clubs openly; others hid them under their white-crested capes, flashing them out treacherously and suddenly as the boat rode wildly to the assault. The sides and bottom of the boat would have been no more than paper under the slightest blow from a piece of this wreckage: a touch and every life in it would have been flotsam. Hunger, thirst, and the terrors of the night were forgotten in the menace of the battle which the yellow giant at the steering oar captained with a master hand.

      The white man, kneeling between the thwarts, began shouting orders and warnings. Chang, his thick cue streaming in the wind, his jaw set, his face as expressionless as a piece of parchment, seemed oblivious of what this white man did until he saw him start to heave his big form to a standing position. Then he hurled a curse at him that was like a blow—a curse learned of the sea and white men's lips.

      But to the women the giant kept calling, "Bimeby him all go way!" and there was faith in his voice and it passed into their hearts. As often as the boat shuddered from an assault cheated of its death strength he abjured them to be unafraid. No white man could have been more gentle or thoughtful.

      Through it all Emily Granville clung to Lavelle's hand as she had in the night. What the Chinaman had said kept forcing itself uppermost in her mind—if the man who lay across her lived, all would live.

      Even as Chang had promised the boat passed out of the wreckage. The wind dropped suddenly and peace began its entrance into the sea's worried blue bosom. The sun, leaping to its day's work overhead, touched the boat with its warmth. Emily, following Chang's glance round the horizon, saw a speck away to leeward. It might be another boat he told her.

      "Hi!" cried one of the coolies forward, pointing up to windward where the broken half of a boat went by.

      "No good look him that way!" shouted Chang, but too late. Emily and Shanghai Elsie saw the grim sea grist and the body of a little boy in pajamas tangled in it. Their eyes met—the Magdalen's and hers of the sheltered life—and they wept together, cheek against cheek, in an understanding of woman's heritage of potential motherhood.

      In the midst of Chang's tongue-lashing of the coolie who had discovered the wrecked boat, Lavelle stirred into consciousness. Elsie was the first to see his eyes open and stare upward blankly.

      "Thank God he is living," she murmured. "Thank God!" and as she spoke he sat up with a start, tearing his hand from Emily's. He gazed round him wildly for a moment, his eyes finally settling on Emily with a gleam of recognition.

      "You," he murmured in a tone of awe. Chang's chattering went unheeded. He passed a hand across his brow and at the touch the bullet wound over his temple began to bleed afresh. His head rocked with pain and he pressed it in both hands until it seemed that he must crush the skull.

      "Don't, don't," Emily protested, but he did not hear her. "You would better——You are ill. Lie down again, please."

      "Somebody struck me——Oh, yes—they shot me. I don't know—I don't know why," and a low moan escaped from him.

      The Shanghai woman begged him to lie down again, but he shook his head. He looked at his hands. They were wet with blood. Then he began to examine his shirt for something with which to bind his brow. It was sleeveless; the arms had been ripped out of the pits; the body of it was in ribbands.

      "If I had something—to tie——" Lavelle began, and then called Chang.

      "I have nothing" said Elsie, conscious for the first time that she had escaped from the Cambodia in only a black satin kimono and the flimsy silken nightdress which it covered. Even as she spoke Emily struggled up from the bottom of the boat to the fore-and-aft seat against which her head had been resting. With a splendid unconsciousness of self she opened the long tan coat—the one in which Lavelle had first beheld her—raised an outer black skirt and with a swift movement ripped off the deep hem of the night robe which it hid.

      Lavelle was facing away from her, but he opened his eyes at that moment to see the strange man seated in front of him start up, with a smile of strange curiousness in his dark face. Emily saw this smile, too, with disgust, and hesitated in her purpose. Then she leaned toward Lavelle and said quickly:

      "If you will bend back your head—a little."

      He leaned toward her obediently and she bandaged the wound with an

Скачать книгу