University of Virginia Library

3. III.

Ten years afterwards, Mrs. Lawrie went on board a
steamer at Southampton, bound for New York. She
was travelling alone, having been called suddenly from
Europe by the approaching death of her aged father.
For two or three days after sailing, the thick, rainy spring
weather kept all below, except a few hardy gentlemen who
crowded together on the lee of the smoke-stack, and kept
up a stubborn cheerfulness on a very small capital of comfort.
There were few cabin-passengers on board, but the
usual crowd of emigrants in the steerage.

Mrs. Lawrie's face had grown calmer and colder during
these years. There was yet no gray in her hair, no
wrinkles about her clear eyes; each feature appeared to
be the same, but the pale, monotonous color which had
replaced the warm bloom of her youth, gave them a different

character. The gracious dignity of her manner, the
mellow tones of her voice, still expressed her unchanging
goodness, yet those who met her were sure to feel, in some
inexplicable way, that to be good is not always to be happy.
Perhaps, indeed, her manner was older than her face
and form: she still attracted the interest of men, but with
a certain doubt and reserve.

Certain it is that when she made her appearance on
deck, glad of the blue sky and sunshine, and threw back
her hood to feel the freshness of the sea air, all eyes followed
her movements, except those of a forlorn individual,
who, muffled in his cloak and apparently sea-sick, lay
upon one of the benches. The captain presently joined
her, and the gentlemen saw that she was bright and perfectly
self-possessed in conversation: some of them immediately
resolved to achieve an acquaintance. The dull,
passive existence of the beginning of every voyage, seemed
to be now at an end. It was time for the little society of
the vessel to awake, stir itself, and organize a life of its
own, for the few remaining days.

That night, as Mrs. Lawrie was sleeping in her berth,
she suddenly awoke with a singular feeling of dread and
suspense. She listened silently, but for some time distinguished
none other than the small sounds of night on shipboard—the
indistinct orders, the dragging of ropes, the
creaking of timbers, the dull, regular jar of the engine, and
the shuffling noise of feet overhead. But, ere long, she
seemed to catch faint, distant sounds, that seemed like
cries; then came hurry and confusion on deck; then

voices in the cabin, one of which said: “they never can
get it under, at this rate!”

She rose, dressed herself hastily, and made her way
through pale and excited stewards, and the bewildered
passengers who were beginning to rush from their staterooms,
to the deck. In the wild tumult which prevailed,
she might have been thrown down and trampled under
foot, had not a strong arm seized her around the waist,
and borne her towards the stern, where there were but few
persons.

“Wait here!” said a voice, and her protector plunged
into the crowd.

She saw, instantly, the terrible fate which had fallen
upon the vessel. The bow was shrouded in whirls of
smoke, through which dull red flashes began to show
themselves; and all the length and breadth of the deck was
filled with a screaming, struggling, fighting mass of desperate
human beings. She saw the captain, officers, and
a few of the crew working in vain against the disorder:
she saw the boats filled before they were lowered, and
heard the shrieks as they were capsized; she saw spars and
planks and benches cast overboard, and maddened men
plunging after them; and then, like the sudden opening
of the mouth of Hell, the relentless, triumphant fire burst
through the forward deck and shot up to the foreyard.

She was leaning against the mizen shrouds, between
the coils of rope. Nobody appeared to notice her, although
the quarter-deck was fast filling with persons driven
back by the fire, yet still shrinking from the terror and

uncertainty of the sea. She thought: “It is but death
—why should I fear? The waves are at hand, to save me
from all suffering.” And the collective horror of hundreds
of beings did not so overwhelm her as she had both fancied
and feared; the tragedy of each individual life was lost
in the confusion, and was she not a sharer in their doom?

Suddenly, a man stood before her with a cork life-preserver
in his hands, and buckled it around her securely,
under the arms. He was panting and almost exhausted,
yet he strove to make his voice firm, and even cheerful, as
he said:

“We fought the cowardly devils as long as there was
any hope. Two boats are off, and two capsized; in ten
minutes more every soul must take to the water. Trust
to me, and I will save you or die with you!”

“What else can I do?” she answered.

With a few powerful strokes of an axe, he broke off
the top of the pilot-house, bound two or three planks to
it with ropes, and dragged the mass to the bulwarks.

“The minute this goes,” he then said to her, “you
go after it, and I follow. Keep still when you rise to the
surface.”

She left the shrouds, took hold of the planks at his
side, and they heaved the rude raft into the sea. In an
instant she was seized and whirled over the side; she
instinctively held her breath, felt a shock, felt herself
swallowed up in an awful, fathomless coldness, and then
found herself floating below the huge towering hull which
slowly drifted away.

In another moment there was one at her side. “Lay
your hand on my shoulder,” he said; and when she did
so, swam for the raft, which they soon reached. While
she supported herself by one of the planks he so arranged
and bound together the pieces of timber that in a short
time they could climb upon them and rest, not much
washed by the waves. The ship drifted further and
further, casting a faint, though awful, glare over the sea,
until the light was suddenly extinguished, as the hull sank.

The dawn was in the sky by this time, and as it broadened
they could see faint specks here and there, where
others, like themselves, clung to drifting spars. Mrs. Lawrie
shuddered with cold and the reaction from an excitement
which had been far more powerful than she knew at the time.

Her preserver then took off his coat, wrapped it
around her, and produced a pocket-flask, saying; “this
will support us the longest; it is all I could find, or bring
with me.”

She sat, leaning against his shoulder, though partly
turned away from him: all she could say was: “you are
very good.”

After awhile he spoke, and his voice seemed changed
to her ears. “You must be thinking of Mr. Lawrie.
It will, indeed, be terrible for him to hear of the disaster,
before knowing that you are saved.”

“God has spared him that distress,” she answered.
“Mr. Lawrie died, a year ago.”

She felt a start in the strong frame upon which she
leaned. After a few minutes of silence, he slowly shifted

his position towards her, yet still without facing her, and
said, almost in a whisper:

“You have said that I am very good. Will you put
your hand in mine?”

She stretched hers eagerly and gratefully towards him.
What had happened? Through all the numbness of her
blood, there sprang a strange new warmth from his strong
palm, and a pulse, which she had almost forgotten as a
dream of the past, began to beat through her frame. She
turned around all a-tremble, and saw his face in the glow
of the coming day.

“Leonard Clare!” she cried.

“Then you have not forgotten me?”

“Could one forget, when the other remembers?”

The words came involuntarily from her lips. She
felt what they implied, the moment afterwards, and said
no more. But he kept her hand in his.

“Mrs. Lawrie,” he began, after another silence, “we
are hanging by a hair on the edge of life, but I shall gladly
let that hair break, since I may tell you now, purely
and in the hearing of God, how I have tried to rise to you
out of the low place in which you found me. At first
you seemed too far; but you yourself led me the first step
of the way, and I have steadily kept my eyes on you, and
followed it. When I had learned my trade, I came to
the city. No labor was too hard for me, no study too
difficult. I was becoming a new man, I saw all that was
still lacking, and how to reach it, and I watched you, unknown,
at a distance. Then I heard of your engagement:

you were lost, and something of which I had begun to
dream, became insanity. I determined to trample it out
of my life. The daughter of the master-builder, whose
first assistant I was, had always favored me in her society;
and I soon persuaded her to love me. I fancied, too,
that I loved her as most married men seemed to love their
wives; the union would advance me to a partnership in
her father's business, and my fortune would then be secured.
You know what happened; but you do not know
how the sight of your face planted the old madness again
in my life, and made me a miserable husband, a miserable
man of wealth, almost a scoffer at the knowledge I
had acquired for your sake.

“When my wife died, taking an only child with her,
there was nothing left to me except the mechanical ambition
to make myself, without you, what I imagined I
might have become, through you. I have studied and
travelled, lived alone and in society, until your world
seemed to be almost mine: but you were not there!”

The sun had risen, while they sat, rocking on their
frail support. Her hand still lay in his, and her head
rested on his shoulder. Every word he spoke sank into
her heart with a solemn sweetness, in which her whole
nature was silent and satisfied. Why should she speak?
He knew all.

Yes, it seemed that he knew. His arm stole around
her, and her head was drawn from his shoulder to the
warm breadth of his breast. Something hard pressed her
cheek, and she lifted her hand to move it aside. He

drew forth a flat medallion case; and to the unconscious
question in her face, such a sad, tender smile came to his
lips, that she could not repress a sudden pain. Was it
the miniature of his dead wife?

He opened the case, and showed her, under the glass,
a faded, pressed flower.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The Brandywine cowslip you dropped, when you
spoke to me in the lane. Then it was that you showed
me the first step of the way.”

She laid her head again upon his bosom. Hour after
hour they sat, and the light swells of the sea heaved them
aimlessly to and fro, and the sun burned them, and the
spray drenched their limbs. At last Leonard Clare
roused himself and looked around: he felt numb and
faint, and he saw, also, that her strength was rapidly
failing.

“We cannot live much longer, I fear,” he said, clasping
her closely in his arms. “Kiss me once, darling, and
then we will die.”

She clung to him and kissed him.

“There is life, not death, in your lips!” he cried.
“Oh, God, if we should live!”

He rose painfully to his feet, stood, tottering, on the
raft, and looked across the waves. Presently he began
to tremble, then to sob like a child, and at last spoke,
through his tears:

“A sail! a sail!—and heading towards us!”