University of Virginia Library

25. CHAPTER XXV.
A SALVATION FROM THE SEA.

THE love of life, that instinct which seems to strengthen just in proportion
as invading death cuts intelligence down to the bare root of sensation,
enabled and forced Nestoria to hold fast to the wreck of her shallop, and to
struggle to keep her head above the waters.

Whether dissolution were not more tolerable than existence, whether it
would not be well to drop out of a world which had suddenly been changed
for her into a place of torment, she did not for an instant consider. Amid
tossings, buffetings, whirlings, and suffocations, she labored with her whole
surviving strength to climb out of the abyss which howled and sucked beneath
her, slowly fighting her way to the uncertain asylum of the inverted hulk, and
clinging there with a sort of unintelligent tenacity, like a thing of inanimate
nature. The slit in the keel for the centre-board offered a hold to her fingers,
and by means of this she stayed herself against the pushings of the billows.
A long time she remained thus; far longer than she had thought possible.
After nature has done all it seemingly can, necessity endows it with force to
do more. The power of the dying to resist death exceeds every energy known
to ordinary life, and borders closely upon miracle.

Presently a light came over the sea; her first wild impression was that
help must be at hand; but it was only the distant, alien rising of the moon.
We can picture her now to our eyesight, as well as to our sensibilities. We
have a vision of one who, though beaten and worn and sorrowful and desperate,
was rarely and one might say shiningly beautiful. Her long golden
hair, flung loose by the wind and the waves, blew out in tremulous glistening
streamers, like quivering strands torn from the northern lights. Her face was
as white as marble, but its delicate finish of feature was all the more obvious
because of this Pentelican coloring, and its mute resignation was more touching
than the agitated despair of the daughters of Niobe. The moon took pity
on her, and lighted her up with exceeding tenderness, and showed her forth
as an unequalled sacrifice. In all the earth there was not perhaps at that moment
another victim of disaster so fair to look upon and so fashioned to command
compassion. Both in beauty and in pathos she may have been for a time
without a rival.

Her thoughts meanwhile were on far other things than her own merits and
admirableness. Half confounded as she was by the outrages of the sea and by
her weakness, she was striving to prepare herself for entrance into that other
world which seemed so near; she was groping in the dark gateway of illimitable
mysteries for unearthly hands which should guide her out of all tempests
into the great peace of eternal mercy. The past had fallen away from her;
even the calamity which had driven her out vagrant appeared unsubstantial
and long since bygone; she had almost forgotten that she had lived and loved
to her disappointment and her hurt. The future only was real and urgent to
her. Her lips moved, not in reminiscence nor in complaint, but in petition.
“O God of our salvation, who art the confidence of them that are upon the

sea, receive me!” she pleaded, as only the shipwrecked who are at their last
breath are gifted to plead. Other such words thronged mercifully to her;
they seemed to lift her like angels, in glorious, shining arms; they bore her
lovingly through the waters which run between two worlds. The faith of
her whole innocent life, the faith which had been taught her from infancy by
the lips of her father, was now a mighty reality to her, and the only reality.
All the rest of existence had become as a vision from which one awakens.

But mortality had not yet lost its hold upon this waif of disaster. We
have not ventured an absurdity in describing her as eye-witnesses, for human
vision did find her out and human help reached her. In her extremity, just
as her numbed fingers were losing their hold, and while the fantastic lights
and music and tintinnabulations of the strange city of the drowning were already
bewildering her senses, Nestoria became aware of the approach of
some dark rolling bulk, out of which presently issued voices and a plashing
of oars, all ending in rescue. She was lifted up the side of a vessel, and carried
into a dimly-lighted cabin, and wrapped closely in blankets, and laid away.
Next some stinging and heating liquid, the taste of which struck her as strange
and disagreeable, was given her to drink. After that she lay quiet, though
with a troublous sense of oscillation among billows, while her mind sank
through shoals of reveries which grew more and more like dreams, until presently
she was conscious of nothing.

It was not the insensibility of a swoon, but of hard, immovable, vice-like
sleep. She lay thus for hours, and when she awoke the sun was shining
through the stern windows of the cabin, showing that the horrible night, a
night which seemed years in duration, had at last ended. She was still wet,
but she had no feeling of chillness, for the blankets and the summer heat
made a warmth all about her, and slumber had revived the currents of youth
in her veins. Raising herself with difficulty on one elbow, she looked about
her with a dreamy, torpid gaze, like that of an awakening infant.

A short and squarely built negro, slouchingly clad in garments much too
big for him, and exhibiting that lowly and undeveloped physiognomy which
almost surely indicates a southern black, rolled out of some unperceived lair
and shambled toward her.

“How is you, miss?” he asked with a grin and chuckle which might have
been supposed to express unrestrainable hilarity, but which he simply meant
to be reassuring.

“I am well,” replied Nestoria, with that languor and vacancy which we
sometimes see in persons who have been very ill.

“Sorry we could'n keer fur you no better,” he continued, rolling his eyes
around the rudely furnished cabin in an apologetical way. “Ain't fixed up
for ladies. Did'n have no dry clos' fur you, 'cause the' ain't no women folks
aboard. Jes' done you up in them blankets, an' give you a horn o' whiskey,
an' sont you to sleep. Done the bes' we could fur you, miss.”

All this was said with such spasmodic wriggling and luminous grinning as
if the peril and escape had been the broadest joke possible.

“I am very much obliged to you,” murmured Nestoria.

“You's welkim, miss. Got blown off sho', did'n you? Was the res' of
'em drowned?”

The girl shook her head. She could not enter upon the story of the hideous
night. “Where are you taking me to?” she presently inquired, not without
a hope that it might be to distant eastern lands.

“To New Yawk,” said the negro. “We's done got thar now, I guess.
Don' ye hear 'em roundin' to? Capm is gwine ter drop you in New Yawk.
'cause this schooner is boun' souf, to—to some other place—don' know 'zactly
whar she's boun.”

“Can I—pay you for saving me?” Nestoria timidly queried.

The man hesitated; he quaked and wriggled from head to foot; in his physical
way he was resisting temptation.

“No, I reckon not,” he at last responded, chuckling with unusual vehemence.
“We may want savin' ourselves some stormy night. You keep your
money to git back whar you b'longs.”

“God reward you!” she whispered; and he reverently answered, “Amen!”

By this time the schooner had lain to; and in a few minutes more Nestoria
was placed in a small boat and landed on a gray, dingy, deserted dock; having
actually seen but the steward and three sailors of the somewhat mysterious
craft to which she owned her life. One is tempted to suppose a smuggler; and
indeed there was a story current about that time of casks of merchandise being
discovered in the Sound by traders who were singularly prepared for such
a speculation in salvage; but, remembering what a moderate and rational
tariff we are blessed with, the smuggling hypothesis is obviously untenable.
Let us abandon useless suppositions and return to Nestoria.

She remained for some minutes upon the dock, not knowing where in the
wide world to go. To her the great city which lay beside her was as
much a trackless wilderness as her native mountains of Kurdistan would have
been to a New Yorker. Upon only one thing had she come to a resolution,
and that was that she would never return to Sea Lodge. Sitting down where
the sun could shine upon her still damp clothing, she buried her face in her
hands, and pondered long upon her horrible past and perplexing future. It
was still very early; business had not awakened, and the wharves and streets
were silent; there was no one at hand to watch or disturb her.

Would her situation overwhelm her, or would her character master the
situation? The result proved that she had individuality enough to order
events, instead of weakly submitting to them. She meditated with that seemingly
unnatural calmness and that lucidity which fundamentally strong spirits
discover in themselves under the pressure of disaster and despair. With an
ease which at any other time would have surprised and alarmed her, she disposed
of some mighty moral questions and decided upon her future course.
When she at last rose to her feet and set forward alone into the unfamiliar
mazes of New York, her steps might be uncertain, but not her mind. She had
resolved to find a hiding-place, and to remain concealed in it until she could
return to her father. She had said to herself that she would not bear witness
against Edward Wetherel; that it might be the duty of others so to do, but
that it could not be her duty; that she would never tell what she had seen,
never, never!

She wondered at herself for coming to such a determination, and once or
twice the thought struck her that she must be insane, but for all that she did
not waver. We will not pause to offer an apology for her which she did not
offer for herself, nor enter upon the difficult query as to whether her decision
were right or wrong. We propose simply to tell her story as it happened.
She could not bear witness against the man whom she had loved; she could
not aid in bringing him to death; she could not, and there was an end of it.
The resolution was little more than instinctive, or at the highest it sprang from

a root of pure emotion, but it was none the less inexorable. For once all her
education of conscience, all her innate and acquired sense of duty, fell prostrate
before a sentiment.

Her life henceforward was to be a woful and perhaps a criminal problem.
She did not think of that, but, drawing her thick green veil over her face,
walked on in a quiet, business-like way, looking on every side for her desired
hiding-place. It is stupefying to ponder upon such single-mindedness and simplicity.
It is much as if one were asked in good earnest to watch the adventures
of Jack the Giant Killer, or some other minute defier of monstrous potencies.
Here was a child of nineteen, ignorant of the world in almost every
manner of ignorance, and so topographically uninformed as to be at this very
moment losing her way in Fulton Market, who yet proposed to baffle the New
York police, the vast inquisition of public sentiment, and the Nemesis of ideal
justice. It would not be easy to imagine a greater disproportion in contending
forces. One is reminded of a water insect setting out to tread the rushings
of Niagara. And yet it may be that water insects do skip over the thunderous
cataract in safety.

Long before the girl found the asylum of which she was in search she became
languid with fatigue and hunger. She had no desire to eat, but she felt
that she must take some food or drop in the streets, and it seemed to her that
she could sip a cup of coffee. She looked timidly into the doors of various
eating shops, but the masculine stares which saluted her drove her onward.
Nowhere could she find a refectory frequented by her own sex; it was as if
the world had decided that women must not eat in public; as if even in America
the idea of the harem were dominant. The terrible isolation of the woman
who has no home attended her feet and oppressed her soul. Lonely, sad,
and weary, she wandered for two hours, slipping on the damp and foul pavements,
winding through masses of merchandise which lumbered the sidewalks,
and jostled by an ever-increasing crowd of hurrying men. All this time she
was endeavoring to get into some other quarter of the city. Wherever she
was, it appeared to her as if any place would be more friendly and more suitable
for her purposes than the one in which she happened to be.

At last she came to a great, rambling, sombre, sloppy market, encumbered
with a monstrous traffic in edibles, and overrunning with purchasers
and wayfarers. To her utter dismay she presently discovered that this was
the same market which had perplexed her footsteps in the very beginning of
her pilgrimage. For two hours she had feebly toiled away from it, and here
she was once more in its undesired medley and uproar. But at least it offered
her food; various stalls and shops sent forth an aroma of oysters and coffee; and
in some of them there were women satisfying their morning hunger. She
stole into one of these homely lairs, seated herself on a wooden stool without
a back, and leaned her aching head against the grimy wall.

“Stew?” asked a sweaty attendant in a foul apron and rumpled paper
cap.

Nestoria nodded, and added in a whisper, “Coffee.”

The food came, and she was making an attempt to eat, when a showy,
well-dressed young woman, bearing in her hand a copy of the “New York
Spasmodic,” entered with a peculiarly brisk and assured air, and seated herself
at the same table with the salutation, “I am so glad to see you here!”

Fancying that she was recognized, Nestoria stared in terror at the intruder,
ready to spring up and run away.