THE fearful, the sickening truth burst on him in all its awful significance.
Some miscreant or madman had locked the door, and so fastened him to the sinking ship, at a time when, in the bustle, the alarm, the selfishness, all would be apt to forget him and leave him to his death.
He tried the door in every way, he hammered at it; he shouted, he raged, he screamed. In vain. Unfortunately the door of this cabin was of very unusual strength and thickness.
Then he took up one of those great augers he had found in the mate's cabin, and bored a hole in the door; through this hole he fired his pistol, and then screamed for help. "I am shut up in the cabin. I shall be drowned. Oh, for Christ's sake, save me! save me!" and a cold sweat of terror poured down his whole body.
What is that?
The soft rustle of a woman's dress.
Oh, how he thanked God for that music, and the hope it gave him!
It comes toward him; it stops, the key is turned, the dress rustles away, swift as a winged bird; he dashes at the door; it flies open.
Nobody was near. He recovered his courage in part, fetched out his bag and his tools, and ran across to the starboard side. There he found the captain lowering Miss Rolleston, with due care, into the cutter, and the young lady crying; not at being shipwrecked, if you please, but at being deserted by her maid. Jane Holt, at this trying moment, had deserted her mistress for her husband. This was natural; but, as is the rule with persons of that class, she had done this in the silliest and cruelest way. Had she given half an hour's notice of her intention, Donovan might have been on board the cutter with her and her mistress. But no; being a liar and a fool, she must hide her husband to the last moment, and then desert her mistress. The captain, then, was comforting Miss Rolleston, and telling her she should have her maid with her eventually, when Hazel came. He handed down his own bag, and threw the blankets into the stern-sheets. Then went down himself, and sat on the midship thwart.
"Shove off," said the captain; and they fell astern.
But Cooper, with a boat-hook, hooked on to the long-boat; and the dying ship towed them both.
Five minutes more elapsed, and the captain did not come down, so Wylie hailed him.
There was no answer. Hudson had gone into the mate's cabin. Wylie waited a minute, then hailed again. "Hy! on deck there!"
"Hullo!" cried the captain, at last.
"Why didn't you come in the cutter?"
The captain crossed his arms and leaned over the stern.
"Don't you know that Hiram Hudson is always the last to leave a sinking ship?"
"Well, you _are_ the last," said Wylie. "So now come on board the long-boat at once. I dare not tow in her wake much longer, to be sucked in when she goes down."
"Come on board your craft and desert my own?" said Hudson, disdainfully.
"Know my duty to m' employers better."
These words alarmed the mate. "Curse it all!" he cried; "the fool has been and got some more rum. Fifty guineas to the man that will shin up the tow-rope and throw that madman into the sea; then we can pick him up.
He swims like a cork."
A sailor instantly darted forward to the rope. But, unfortunately, Hudson heard this proposal, and it enraged him. He got to his cutlass. The sailor drew the boat under the ship's stern, but the drunken skipper flourished his cutlass furiously over his head. "Board me! ye pirates! the first that lays a finger on my bulwarks, off goes his hand at the wrist." Suiting the action to the word, he hacked at the tow-rope so vigorously that it gave way, and the boats fell astern.
Helen Rolleston uttered a shriek of dismay and pity. "Oh, save him!" she cried.
"Make sail!" cried Cooper; and, in a few seconds, they got all her canvas set upon the cutter.
It seemed a hopeless chase for these shells to sail after that dying monster with her cloud of canvas all drawing, alow and aloft.
But it did not prove so. The gentle breeze was an advantage to light craft, and the dying _Proserpine_ was full of water, and could only crawl.
After a few moments of great anxiety the boats crept up, the cutter on her port and the long-boat on her starboard quarter.
Wylie ran forward, and, hailing Hudson, implored him, in the friendliest tones, to give himself a chance. Then tried him by his vanity, "Come, and command the boats, old fellow. How can we navigate them on the Pacific without _you?"_
Hudson was now leaning over the taffrail utterly drunk. He made no reply to the mate, but merely waved his cutlass feebly in one hand, and his bottle in the other, and gurgled out, "Duty to m' employers."
Then Cooper, without a word, double reefed the cutter's mainsail and told Welch to keep as close to the ship's quarter as he dare. Wylie instinctively did the same, and the three craft crawled on in solemn and deadly silence, for nearly twenty minutes.
The wounded ship seemed to receive a death-blow. She stopped dead, and shook.
The next moment she pitched gently forward, and her bows went under the water, while her after-part rose into the air, and revealed to those in the cutter two splintered holes in her run, just below the water-line.
The next moment her stern settled down; the sea yawned horribly, the great waves of her own making rushed over her upper deck, and the lofty masts and sails, remaining erect, went down with sad majesty into the deep. And nothing remained but the bubbling and foaming of the voracious water, that had swallowed up the good ship, and her cargo, and her drunken master.
All stood up in the boats, ready to save him. But either his cutlass sunk him, or the suction of so great a body drew him down. He was seen no more in this world.
A loud sigh broke from every living bosom that witnessed that terrible catastrophe.
It was beyond words; and none were uttered, except by Cooper, who spoke so seldom; yet now three words of terrible import burst from him, and, uttered in his loud, deep voice, rang like the sunk ship's knell over the still bubbling water.
"SCUTTLED--BY GOD!"