As It Was in the Beginning. Philip Verrill Mighels
she had come to the place to find him, seek him out, a flood of tidal passion surged to his outermost veins.
It was just the one straw too much, this unforeseen encounter, with the smile upon her lips. His sturdy resolutions all went down in utter confusion before the wild gladness of his heart. Yet he made no outward sign for Elaine to read.
Calmly, to all appearances, he placed the letter in his pocket.
"I hope," said Elaine, "I haven't disrupted anything important."
He arose and gazed at her oddly.
"You have, Elaine," he answered, in a voice he strove hard to control. "You've not only disrupted everything heretofore moving along its accustomed path of order, law, and calm, but you've also upset all sorts of established institutions and raised some merry Hades."
A spirit of the lively old Nick was infusing with his youthful blood as he stood there gazing upon her. Elaine, however, either failed to detect its presence, or she failed to understand.
"I?" she said, "Mr. Grenville. I'm sorry. What have I done?"
He could not have done the conventional thing, the deliberate, calm, or expected thing, to save his immortal soul. His nature was far too honest, too unabashed. He came a step nearer—and then she knew, but she could not have moved at the moment had death been the oncoming penalty for remaining where she stood. She had never been so startled in her life.
They two were absolutely alone and unobserved. Of this the impulsive Grenville was aware—and the knowledge had fired a certain madness in his being he was powerless to quell.
"Elaine," he said, as he suddenly caught her unresisting hands, "you've put old Fenton entirely out of the game. You're going to marry me."
She was dimly conscious of pain in her hands, where he crushed them in his ardor. But her shocked surprise was uppermost, as she faced him with blazing eyes.
"Mr. Grenville!" she said. "Mr. Grenville—you—— To say—to speak——"
"Elaine," he interrupted gayly, bright devils dancing in his boyish eyes, "it simply couldn't be helped. We were intended to meet—and were cut out for one another. So the hour must come when you'll pitch old Gerald's ring in the sea by order of the very Fates themselves!"
She snatched away her hands in indignation.
"For shame!" she cried in rising anger, her whole womanly being aflame with resistance to all his growing madness. "You haven't the slightest right in the world——"
"Right?" he repeated. "Right? I love you, Elaine! I love you! Haven't I said——"
"Oh, the treachery—the treachery to Gerald!" she cut in, with swiftly increasing emotion. "To say such things when your honor——"
"Wait!" he interrupted, eagerly. "I told him what he might expect from any such arrangement. I warned him precisely what might happen. He understood—accepted my conditions—made it a challenge—declared if I tried I couldn't win! And now——"
"You can't—you can't!—you can't!" she cried at him, angrily. "To think that Gerald—to think you'd dare——"
He suddenly caught her in his arms and crushed her against his breast. He kissed her on the mouth, despite her struggles.
"Elaine," he said, "you are mine—all mine—my sweetheart—my comrade—my mate!"
She finally planted her fists against his throat and thrust him from her in fury.
"You brute!" she answered, sobbing in her anger. "I hate you—I loathe you—despise you utterly! I wish I might never see your face again!"
"I'll make you love me, Elaine," he answered, white at last with intensity and deep-going passion. "I'll make you love me, as I love you—as madly—as wholly—as wondrously—before ever we two get home."
Already Elaine was retreating from the place.
"Never!" she answered, wildly. "Never, never, never!—do you hear?—not if it takes this boat a hundred years!" And gropingly, almost blinded by her sense of shame and rage, she fled from the deck and down the stairs, leaving him shaken where he stood.
CHAPTER III
A MIDNIGHT TRAGEDY
Not the slightest alarm had invaded the ship, when Grenville finally urged his senses back to the normal, notwithstanding the unaccustomed suddenness with which the aspect of the day had been reversed.
The storm broke at last, about one in the afternoon, with a deluge of rain and an onslaught of wind that seemed for a time refreshing. The huge steel leviathan appeared to elevate her nose, give her shoulders a shake that settled her firmly in the gray disorder of the elements, and then to accept the rude old contest with a certain indifference, born of well-established prowess.
By two o'clock there was nothing refreshing suggested. A dull, stubborn struggle was waging in the drab of a wild and narrow field of commotion. Chill, musty billows of air, made thick by something that was neither scud nor mist, pounced heavily upon the laboring "Inca" in a manner chaotic and irregular. The sea was rising sullenly, its waves, like tumultuous cohorts, with ragged white banners, ceaselessly advancing.
With an easy, monotonous assurance the great device of steam and iron plugged steadily onward. It could ride out a sea of tremendously greater violence. It knew from long experience every crest and every abyss of these mountains of air and water. It met huge impacts majestically, with a prow that cleaved them through, while its huge, wet bulk plowed up its mileage with a barely diminished speed.
Few of the passengers were actually alarmed. A storm evolved so suddenly, they were confidently informed, would expend itself in one brief spasm of impotent fury and subside almost as it had come. It was all some mere local disturbance that the spell of dry, calm weather had accumulated too swiftly for any save a violent discharge.
Discomfort increased to a certain pitch; locomotion about the saloon became impracticable. The crew alone remained upon their legs. It seemed like the climax to the storm. But another stage swiftly developed.
It might have been somewhat after three P.M. when a shroud of darkness settled from the heavens, its substance foreign both to cloud and sea. It was thicker than before, and decidedly more musty. As black as night, but unrelated to all ordinary essences of darkness, it wrapped the stormy universe in Stygian folds with a suddenness strangely disquieting.
The cataclysm followed almost instantly, as if from behind a concealing curtain. It came in dimensions incredible, a prodigious wall of rumpled water, like a mobile mountain chain. It towered forbiddingly above the quivering vessel for one terrible moment of threat, then confusion, utter and seemingly eternal, plunged roaringly over and under the helpless ocean toy of steel, submerging the very sea itself in Niagaras of sound and weight and motion.
A hideous shudder quivered through the feeble plaything of the elements. Strange, muffled thunderings, sensations of oblivion sweeping miles deep across the ocean, and a horrible conviction of the ship's insignificance, impressed themselves pellmell upon the senses, while ebon blackness closed instantly down, like annihilation's swift accompaniment, and the hull seemed sinking countless fathoms.
Such a moment expands to an æon. Doom seemed an old acquaintance when a complex gyration, a sense of being flung through space, and a reassertion of the engine's throb preceded the struggle to the surface. Yet it seemed as if no miracle of buoyancy and might could survive till the great steel body rose once more to the air. Men held their breath as if they must drown if the top were not immediately achieved.
A stupendous lurch, an incredible list to starboard, another streaming by of immeasurable torrents, and the steamer wallowed pantingly out