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Ebook has 1841 lines and 91323 words, and 37 pages

"Where? Where?" she interrupted him, with a tender eagerness. The launch was tossed high in the air, and the lights of Williamstown stretched across the darkness in front of them like a band of jewels.

"Oh, you can't distinguish it," said Guthrie, "but it's there--it's one of those lights; Mrs Hardacre said she was going to keep the blind up and the gas flaring, so that we might see it as we came over."

"That's what I shall do when you come back next time," said the girl, with a voice like a dove cooing. "Make a beacon to guide you home."

"No fear that I shall mistake the course, little woman."

He had an irresistible impulse to hug her with both arms again, and they happened to be on the verge of the river current. Hardacre and Finlayson both shouted, "Look out, sir!" but he was not looking out--his sailor eyes were otherwise occupied, and so he did not perceive the enemy of love making the spring to seize him. Just as he was folding his mate to his breast, he heard the warning cry for'ard, and it was then too late to avert the catastrophe. In the same instant a sudden wave struck the launch, and nearly turned her over, and the young wife and husband, holding to nothing but one another, and simply sitting upon an unprotected plank, were tipped out as easily as balls from a capsized basket.

"Oh, this is too absurd!"

That was Guthrie's mental ejaculation in the astonishing first moment. A deep-sea sailor, who had come through what he had come through, to let himself be caught unawares by such a paltry mischance as this! Then, what an unspeakable ass to have been so careless--to have shown himself incapable of protecting his wife, after all his boasts! Would he ever hear the last of it as long as he lived? Poor little woman! How cold the water felt when he thought of her tender skin. And her pretty dress, that she had set such store by, in which she had intended to go to church with him on Sunday--utterly destroyed, of course! Well, he must make shift to afford her another and smarter one, and get it made quickly. She should have her pick and choice. As the following wave soused his uprising head, slapping him full in the face, so as to confuse and blind him for a second or two, the fear that she might get "a dose of it" before they could pull her out made him sharply anxious. If she got a bad cold, a shock to her nerves, perhaps a serious illness, he would never forgive himself. And what a sell that would be--what waste of this precious holiday, this second honeymoon, so much sweeter than the first--after the weary waiting for it!

He cleared his eyes, and had a momentary view of the surroundings before another wave rushed upon him. Waves they were, by George! He would not have believed it possible that such a sea would be running right up here, in this little duck-pond of a bay. It had seemed rough on the boat, but viewed from the surface, it might have been the middle of Atlantic wastes. They were in the river channel--worse luck!--and the south wind was dead on to it, bringing up the swell from outside; and the swell, that had set that way for days, was so heavy as to drive him back faster than his powerful limbs could propel him in the other direction. At first the launch seemed to want to dance over him, but when he rose on a swirl of water to take his bearings after the first bewilderment, she was a couple of lengths away, cutting the most extraordinary capers in her efforts to put about. Her own lights, and those of the beacons at the river mouth, showed him all her stern grating and bright deck fittings as she heeled over, hanging to the side of one of those ridiculous ocean rollers out of bounds; and he thought it no wonder that he--even he--had been tossed off under the circumstances. The crew, who were not sitting on a skimming dish, as it were, had their work cut out to hold on. As he looked, he measured his drift with serious disquietude, although the preposterous idea of anybody being drowned had not as yet occurred to him. Drowned HERE! A good joke, indeed! Why, they were within hail of Sandridge, and half-a-dozen ships--or they would have been, but for the noise of wind and water, which smothered lesser sounds; and the lights of Williamstown--amongst them that of the little home awaiting him--studded the shore on the other hand, near and clear, like the eyes of a host of watching friends. And in Hobson's Bay, which could hardly cover the body of a sunk yacht; and right up by the river, which had to be dredged all the time to keep it open!

But where was Lily? It scared him to find himself out of arm's reach of her, forced back by the swell, and not to see her immediately when he was able to look. He saw the launch--which of course was entirely occupied in her rescue--and saw two white buoys floating, and saw a line thrown, but nothing else, except the wild water that buffeted him, and the moonless night overhead. And he remembered that the river channel--indeed, Hobson's Bay in any part--was just as dangerous as mid-Atlantic to one who could not swim. The thought clutched him like a hand at his throat.

"Got her?" he yelled, in a fury of terror. "Got her? See her?"

He strained to make himself heard by the men on the launch in a way to burst his heart. They shouted something that he could not understand, and a line came whizzing past him. He caught it as it dropped, and soon lessened the distance between them. Then he perceived a long boat-hook stretching out into the darkness; it went up and down with the toss of the boat like the fishing-rod of an impatient school-boy, and a few yards beyond its reach, where it touched water, there was a dim smudge. He knew it for the full cape of Lily's macintosh, outspread upon the waves. They alternately rumpled and smoothed it, flapping it into all shapes as they tossed and toyed with it; but, by the mercy of Heaven, it had held her up. In the middle of the mass he could see her dear little head hanging forward and downward, just under the surface, out of which a larger or smaller speck of her white fascinator rose and gleamed as each roll swung her up into the light of the boat's lamp turned upon the spot. This told him that she was already helpless and unconscious, although ten seconds had not elapsed since she went over. God send that she had not struck anything--that her heart was not weak--that she was not subject to any of the mysterious consequences of shock peculiar to the more than ordinarily complex women! At any rate, she had not had time to drown. He had seen a man recovered after being under for forty minutes, and in less than one they would be taking her full speed to Williamstown, signalling for the doctor as they went. What would the fellows ashore make of the three whistles--three times there before they got across? They would know the launch that blew them, and her present errand, and think, perhaps, that the crew were on the spree. But no, they would have more sense than that; they would look at the wild night, and conclude that something had happened. So would the doctor, who would hear the summons from his bed. What would they all say to him, Guthrie Carey, with his good seaman's record behind him, when he brought his wife home in such a state of dilapidation? However, all's well that ends well. Let him only have her safely there, and he would not mind what anybody said; and he'd take precious good care not to run any risks with her again.

Water-logged as he was, and cramped in his overcoat, he made a violent bound towards the floating cape, lunged twice, caught it at the second try, and pulled it eagerly--alas! too eagerly. He felt the tug of Lily's weight only just long enough to be sure that she was there, and then--the fastenings gave way, and she slipped through! The empty garment swam up to him on the edge of a new wave, which clapped it over his face like a gigantic plaster.

Oh, this was dreadful! She would be rescued eventually, of course--amongst them they would not let her drown, not if skill and courage had any show at all--but the fact that she was in danger could no longer be ignored. She was a little delicate thing, already overcome, and precious time was wasting, when every second was of the most stupendous consequence. With a frenzied gesture, Guthrie shook off the cloak, spluttered, spat, and made a dive to intercept her as she went down, wondering as he did so whether breath and strength would hold out if he missed her and had to follow her to the bottom. The swing of the swell was awful, and the darkness of the blind night too cruel for words.

"If only I had this cursed coat off!" he dumbly sobbed. "If only I could get rid of these damned laced boots!" Bad words would have been forgivable even had he not been a sailor.

He missed her, groped desperately, to the verge of suffocation, and came up to cough, and groan, and pump breath enough to take him down again. It would have cost five minutes to get his clothes off, and there was not a single second to spare--now.

"See her?" he shrieked.

"Ne'er a sign," Bill Hardacre shouted. "But we'll catch her when she rises. Take a turn o' the line round you, sir, so's we can haul you in--"

But there was not even time for that in the frightful race of these vital moments. She was gone, and she must be found, and there was but her husband to look for her. The two other men were few enough for the safety of the launch as she was then situated; and besides, Hardacre could be more useful to Lily above water than below. The neighbouring ships lay undisturbed, putting off no boats to help. In all that band of lights ringing the black welter of the bay, like stars out of the Infinite, shining calmly upon an abandoned world, not one was moving.

Guthrie Carey gave a last look round, identified the window of what was to have been his home, where the fire was burning brightly, the little supper spread, good Mrs Hardacre watching for them at the door--heard the landlady's cousin wailing, "Lil! Lil!"--and again plunged under, arms wide and eyes staring, and heart bursting with despair. Everything in him seemed bursting--an agonising sensation--as his overstrained lungs collapsed, and the power of his strong limbs failed him; then everything seemed to break away and let in the floods of Lethe with a rush--confusion and forgetfulness and a whirl of dreams, settling to a strange peace, an irresistible sleep, as if he had swallowed a magic opiate. The sea took him, as a nurse takes a helpless child, and floated him up from the place where he had been savagely groping; something met him half-way, floating down upon him, and his arms went round it of their own accord. But they were powerless to clasp or hold it. It passed him, sinking gently, and lay where it sank, under all the turmoil, as still as the rocking tide would let it.

The launch sounded her steam whistle furiously. From both sides of the bay it was heard, screeching through the windy night like a fiend possessed, and men got up hastily to ask what was the matter. Another launch put out from Williamstown, and a police boat from Sandridge, and the anchored ships awoke and hailed them. Soon half-a-dozen boats were tossing about the spot; they tossed for two hours, and Bill Hardacre dived seven times with a rope round his waist, while the widowed young husband lay on the cabin floor between two doctors, the baby and the landlady's cousin keening over him.

"Well," said Dugald Finlayson, as at last they headed for Williamstown through the now lessening storm, with a bundle in tarpaulin beside them, "it do seem as if the Powers above take a pleasure in tripping us up when we least expect it."

"Aye," said Bill Hardacre, sitting crying in his wet clothes, "he said as we were starting he'd got all he wanted now. I thinks to myself at the time, thinks I, 'That's an unlucky thing to say.'" But who is to judge luck in this world? Poor little Lily Harrison was a helpless creature, and had almost 'nothing in her' except vanity.

Sincerely he believed, when he was on his feet again, that his life was wrecked for ever. He did suffer from insomnia, even with his splendid sea-seasoned constitution, for months, which proved the poignant insistency of his grief, making thinking a disease instead of a healthy function. He performed his duties mechanically, rigidly, like an engine stoked from the outside. He no longer had pleasure or interest in them. The flavour was gone from life; it had become a necessary burden, to be borne as best he could. At one time he even questioned the right of the Moral Law to ask him to bear it, under the circumstances. He used to look at the blue water beneath him, and long to be beneath it, sharing the fate of his loved and lost. He did not want to live without her--he wanted to die. At twenty-one!

At twenty-three he was a man again, physically and mentally sound, doing all reverence to the memory of his dead wife--a flawless angel in the retrospect--while finding natural solace in the company of living women who were also young and fair. The living women were much in evidence from the first; nothing but the sea could keep them from trying to comfort him. A big fellow, with a square, hard face, and a fist to fell an ox--that was just the kind of man to call for coddling, apart from the fact that he was a widower--had been married for as long as five weeks altogether--with his heart in his wife's grave, and with that pathetic adjunct, a baby. When he would consent to recognise the world of affairs again, and the claims of youth and manhood against it, he found--but of course there is no need to specify all the things he found.

One was a batch of invitations awaiting each arrival of his ship in port--first two, then four, then half-a-dozen women's notes, begging him to come to as many hospitable houses for change and rest, and to "bring the baby". He could not bring the baby, for reasons which he did not honestly present, as a rule, but which he reluctantly disclosed to Alice Urquhart one night at Five Creeks. Alice had written one of the six notes , for she was the sister of Jim Urquhart, who was the friend of an ex-squatter down on his luck through droughts, and reduced to balancing ledgers in a Melbourne office, who was the friend of one of those doctors of Williamstown whose skill had brought Guthrie Carey to life after he had been drowned. Jim, having made the acquaintance of the latter, took his sister to inspect the ship, and to have tea in the mate's cabin; hence the return visit, which the captain, who loved his chief officer, stretched a point to sanction.

There were at Five Creeks station, besides Jim, a Mrs Urquhart and several children; but Alice, the eldest of the family, was the general manager of her household, ever struggling with her brother, who maintained it, to lift it and herself out of the ruts in which her father had left it stuck. She was close on thirty, sad to say, and there were three girls below her; and nothing happened from year to year, and she was weary of the monotony. "Do come and see us," she wrote to Guthrie Carey--one of the finest-looking men she had ever known, not excepting the splendid Claud Dalzell--"do come and see us, and bring the baby. Country air will do it good, and the house is full of nurses for it."

He went himself, out of friendship for Jim, and after dinner sat in the verandah with Alice, and explained why he had not brought the baby. Jim had then gone off to doctor a sick horse, and Mrs Urquhart was putting children to bed.

"I believe," Alice rallied him, "that you thought it INFRA DIG."

He protested earnestly that she was wrong. No, it was not that--not THAT.

Ignorant of the details of the tragedy of his life, she scented a mystery about the child. Was it, perhaps, not right in its head, she wondered--or afflicted with a hare lip?

"Son or daughter?" she ventured cautiously. "A boy," said Guthrie Carey, still with that unfatherly air of discontent. "Sometimes I wish it was a girl. She could look after me by-and-by; I could have her trained to be my housekeeper, and sew my buttons on--that sort of thing, you know."

"You would have to wait a long time," said Alice, turning admiring eyes upon his comely person, noting with regret that he could not be within several years of her own age. "It is quite a young infant, isn't it?"

"Yes; that is--let me see--fifteen months and a little over. Yes, it will be fifteen months on Thursday since he lost his mother." Time had done so much for him that he could now speak of her to a stranger. "And he was then only a few weeks old."

"Poor, poor little thing!" sighed Alice Urquhart.

It was, by the way, a particularly sympathetic night--soft, still, solitary, with a full moon. They both felt it. Besides, he had had an excellent dinner. Five Creeks was poor, but it lived well.

"Oh," laughed the guest, without merriment in his laugh, "you needn't waste pity on HIM, Miss Urquhart; he's all right. Rolls in fat--never ailed a thing in his life--might take the prize at a baby show. So they tell me. I have not seen him myself for a good while."

"What! Why, he's in Melbourne, isn't he?"

"Not far out."

"And you haven't been home to see him?"

"I haven't got a home. I gave it up when--you know. I knew I should never be there, and you can't leave a house and a young child to servants. The little time that I did try to carry on by myself, I made a dismal mess of it. The woman I trusted to'--he meant Mrs Hardacre--'started feeding it with thick arrowroot. She'd have killed it to a certainty."

"Indeed, yes. The idea! But it is incredible what some fools of women can do in the way of mismanaging a baby." The remark implied expert knowledge on the speaker's part.

"A mother of children herself, too," said Guthrie reflectively, "and looking it, if ever a woman did. While a girl, who'd never had any, took to the job like a duck to water--knew just what to do and how to do it. I will say that for her." "Instinct," Miss Urquhart remarked to the man in the moon, who seemed to survey the couple with his tongue in his cheek. "I'm sure, though I say it, that I could give many a mother points myself."

"I've no doubt you could. I heard somebody say, the other day, that mothers are born, not made. Very true, too. You see it in the little girls nursing their dolls. I don't think anything of a she-child that doesn't want a doll as soon as it can speak." "I always loved them," declared Alice casually.

He leaned forward to look at a spider's web that the silver light had just touched, making it shine out from its background of dark leaves and verandah post; and there was danger of rupture to the delicate thread of the topic that was weaving so charming a conversation. Wherefore the young lady hastened to inquire what had become of his little son.

"I suppose," she said, "he is with his mother's people?"

Slowly resuming his attitude of repose, the guest considered the question.

"No-o--not exactly. With a friend of his mother's, not her family. Unfortunately, she had no family to speak of--and mine is in England. Neither of us had a soul here who really belonged to us. That was just the difficulty."

"It must have been a great difficulty," murmured Alice, in a feeling tone.

"I believe you," assented Guthrie, with emphasis. "In fact, it put me into the most ridiculous hole, the most confounded fix--one that I can't for the life of me see my way out of; one that--However, I mustn't talk about it to you. It's not a thing that one ought to talk about to anybody."

And yet he yearned to talk about it, and now, and to this particularly sympathetic woman, who was not young and giddy, but, like himself, experienced in the troubles of life, such as weighed him down. There was "something about her" that irresistibly appealed to him, and he did not know what; but an author, who knows everything, knows exactly what it was. It was the moonlight night.

A few words from her, backed by the nameless influences of the hour, unloosed his tongue.

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