“Man overboard! Man overboard!” The piercing cry rang over the ship, and made her blood run cold in her veins. Then other voices took it up; and her husband, with his foolish sentence not yet cold on his lips, muttered a strangely mixed “Confound that boy!” and “God bless you, darling!” and was swinging himself over the side of the ship.
Nina clung to his arm with all her strength. “His mother--I promised her to look after him,” he said, putting her aside as easily as if she were a baby; and she wrung her hands as he escaped from her grasp.
Some one had thrown a life-buoy. He struck out for it as he reached the water; then with swift, steady strokes swam toward the dash of gold on the blue waters astern, where poor Prince Charlie was making a gallant struggle for life.
The officer of the watch was shouting directions in a calm, stentorian voice: “Stop and reverse! Lower the lee quarter bo-o-at!”
Sailors came hurrying down the deck to fulfil his orders. Nina heard, but did not see them, for her tortured eyes were fixed on the jet-black spot growing fainter and fainter in the distance. Something that was not fear, that was rather exultant pride and agitation, swelled her heart almost to bursting. The tears streaming down her cheeks, she fell on her knees and sent to heaven a frantic, earnest prayer that the strength of his arm might not fail, that his heart might be strong.
But what was this? In one instant, as effectually as if giant hands from the sky had lowered and folded around them a heavy blanket, everything beyond the bulwarks of their ship was cut off from their vision, swallowed up in the fog.
“O God,” she muttered, “why must this one day be darkened?”
Then she rose from her knees, hard and unbelieving, now that her petition was about to be denied her. There was no hope now, and what would her life be? Through the sullen folds of the fog she saw stretching out before her a long, black, solitary road leading to an open grave. And she must walk that road alone.
She groped her way across the deck and struggled into her room. Broken-hearted and despairing, her whole soul rebelling with a dull, human protest against the fate that follows us, overshadows and dogs us to the tomb, she stood motionless till out of the terrible hush outside rose a shriek like that of a lost soul.