We were going full speed ahead for some while when next Black gave an order; and instantly upon his speaking the engines ceased to revolve and the ship did but glide through the water. I heard the clang of steel doors, then the hurrying footsteps of men upon the platform—but when I looked back there was no one there but Black and myself, and the doors of the conning-tower stood wide open. Motioning me to go down, the Captain entered the tower, and the steel plates closed behind us and shut us in beyond any hope if the ship were struck or sinking. But I thought little of that, for the spell of the descent and the place was upon me. We were going below the sea again; we were sinking down to the deep of the ocean to look upon a scene the eyes of man had never looked upon before. And the terror of it and the dread of it held me entranced; I forgot all else but the curtain of the waters and the world of the deep which lay behind them.
The ship sank slowly. It seemed an age before the seas closed over the cupola beneath which we sat; our eyes were down to the water-line, there was no longer anything to be seen but a waste of the swell and the frost of the spindrift upon the glasses—and now these vanished, and the waves surged round about until a man might have believed that they would run cold upon his face presently and draw him down to the embrace of death. This awful sensation followed me to the deep. I shuddered at the devouring waters, and could have put up my hand to keep them from my mouth. I closed my eyes that I might not see them break through the glass and envelop us. And then I heard the signal-bell again, and looking up, I saw that Black had seated himself before a round marble table beneath the centre of the periscope, and that the scene above was depicted there as clearly as though a camera had photographed it in colours.
This was something I had never dreamed of, though I came to know its meaning by and by. It seems that we had sunk but a little way below the water, and that the cap of the periscope still rested above the waves. Powerful lenses in this cap played the part of a camera obscura and cast the images of sea and sky and ship down upon the table, prepared to receive it and hid from the light.
Hereon I saw the Italian gunboat as clearly as ever I saw anything in my life. The ocean itself looked glorious in its freshness; the waves rolled in gentle sport; the sky was serenely blue. And this endured for many minutes until we appeared to come so close to the gunboat that she towered right above us—an optical illusion, for I learned from Osbart afterward that we were still the third of a mile from her. At last, however, the whole thing vanished in a flash; the glamour of the scene changed from sun and sea above to the sheen of the pellucid waters which had closed about us. I knew then that we had begun to sink below the gunboat, and the whole truth of it coming upon me in an instant, I turned and spoke to the Captain.
"Captain," I said, with what self-control I could, "you will let me speak—you heard me in the old days—for God's sake hear me now!"
He had been seated at the table and was still gazing upon the white marble as in the frenzy of a dream from which he would not awake. My words—and I would have spoken them if they had cost me my life—brought such a cry to his lips as I had never heard man utter before. All the passion, the madness, the agony of the dreadful years seemed to be expressed in it. For an instant he stood swaying as a man whose anger has blinded him utterly—I saw his hand go to the pistol in his pocket, and I wonder to this day that he did not blow out my brains. Another word of provocation and that would have been the end of it. But something, I may suppose, in my manner of speaking held him back. His hand fell impotently to his side; he looked me full in the face and answered me.
"So," he said, "you have known me, yet your lesson is not learned."
"It has been learned bitterly enough," I rejoined. "God knows I have paid the price. Has it given me no right to save you from yourself?"
I hoped to move him, but the words were ill-said. A passionate gust of anger swept upon him again; he smote the table with his clenched fist, his eyes blazed when he answered me:
"Have you paid the price of this man's life, then? Do your fine words make me forget that I took him from the gutter and made him as my own brother? There's the truth. I fed and clothed him and gave him money. He, who had been a beggar, became the first man in Spezzia. And what's his gratitude to me? Look at yon ship. Would I be safe if I stepped aboard her? By all that's holy, he'd shoot me like a dog. That's Giuseppe Riotti—that's the man who shall pay the last farthing if the sea runs blood; I swear it on the Book. There's no power in heaven or hell shall keep me from his throat to-day—to-day, when my work begins and they shall know that I live."
I saw that it would be stark madness to say another word. Once before, when the prisoners were killed at Ice Haven, had such awful fury of his madness come upon him; and then, as now, I had drawn back shuddering and helpless. An hour hence and he would awake to knowledge of his crime and its meaning; but what an hour must be lived before that! Already he had rung the signal-bell and begun to manipulate the brass keys upon the index before him. I felt the submarine rise and remain motionless beneath the water; the silence was profound when her engines had ceased to turn. We lay, it seemed, by the very keel of the Italian gunboat.
This was a wonderful moment, and I shall never forget it, though I was to live through many of the kind before my days upon the Zero were done with. Looking through the heavy glass of the tower, we could count every plate and bolt in the lower hull of the Vespa; or allowing her to pass us, we could see the whirl of the foam about her propellers, and say that she steamed straight ahead, unconscious of the danger. When she was lost to our view, the ebb of the foam gradually gave place to the green water again, and for all trace of her, the deep might have been void. So weird was the spectacle, so new, so unimaginable, that other thoughts were forgotten in its presence. I lived in a wonder world, profound in its suggestion of miracle. Nor did I remember until the bells rang out again and the Captain's face compelled me to listen.
Black had seated himself at the table once more, and appeared to listen as though for an answering signal. The massive brows, the deep-set eyes, reflected many emotions. Now the face would be wholly evil; then a little softened; then puckered up as though in agony. And through it all the man sat motionless; until, of a sudden, the vessel shot backward, as though a monster grappling had caught her and was dragging her upward. Then the whole water about the cupola began to surge and foam as if a tempest had struck the deeper sea; I heard a muffled roar as of some terrible explosion; we were lifted to the surface, and with a loud cry the Captain rolled the iron doors back, and the ocean gave up her secrets.
CHAPTER XII
THE "VESPA" IS FIRED
I had followed Black to the platform, and thither came the most part of the crew almost as soon as the bell had ceased to reverberate. Hot and stifling as was the air below, here it was gloriously fresh and cool; and for an instant the delight of breathing it forbade a thought of the hither sea and its story. But only for an instant. The submarine had hardly ceased to run when a shout of savage exultation spoke of our victory, and, looking over at the warship, I learned the truth at a glance.
She lay no more than a cable's length from us, the smoke pouring from her decks. It seemed to me that the Zero had fired her below the water-line, though how she had fired her, or by what devilish contrivance of a madman's brain, I could make no pretence to say. Evil enough to know that the work was done beyond any hope of salvation; and there the gunboat lay, sagging to the swell and already in the vortex of the flame. From her decks there went up such a wail of doomed humanity as I pray never to hear again. We could see her crew fleeing madly to the scanty rigging, fighting amidships, and even cutting one another down at the very davits. Such officers as remained upon the quarter-deck stood motionless, as though paralyzed by swift catastrophe. The smoke, drifting to starboard, revealed the tongues of flame which drove the seamen headlong and already