The ship shivered and rolled. A whirlpool of waters raced about the glasses of the conning-tower and foamed as though a mighty wave had broken upon us. There was light no longer from the projectors, but black darkness everywhere, the bellowing of men's voices and the roar of our engines. An eternity seemed to pass before I heard a signal-bell ring out and knew that one of those with me in the tower was still alive. To this there succeeded the idea that a man was laughing in my ears, laughing horribly; and then fearful sounds recurred and recurred until they were as the ravings of a madman in his death agony. When they ceased, it was because I myself had lost all sense of time and place. Stupor fell upon me, to give place to that dim idea of environment and of action which attends awakening. I heard, as a man may hear in his day sleep, the clash of steel doors and the trampling of feet. A bright light flashed in my eyes; I knew that some one lifted me in his arms; the cool air of the night was breathed upon my face. Then I staggered to my feet to find myself upon the platform of the Zero with Black by my side.
"Good God, what has happened—where are we?" I asked him wildly.
But he pointed to the waters void of ships, and with a devil's laugh he cried:
"Ask the sea, lad, ask the sea!"
There was no other answer. Far away I beheld the light of Cape Grisnez flashing its mighty beams over the waters of the Channel.
But of our enemies there was no sign whatever, and I knew that the victory was won and that nothing lay between us and the great Atlantic which the pirate had ruled and would rule again.
CHAPTER XV
THE DEATH BEACON
I was three days in my cabin after this dread affair. During that time I saw nothing of the Captain, but much of Osbart, who was often at my bed-side, and as full of devil-may-care confidence as I had known him since the beginning.
Our voyage, I learned, was now to carry us to the shores of Spain, where, in a haven which was not named, the men would get some recompense for the hardships they had endured since we quitted Ice Haven. Black, meanwhile, proposed to visit Paris, a city after his own heart. Osbart told me, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, that Black had set his mind upon buying certain pieces of old Chinese porcelain, come recently to Paris via St. Petersburg. "And," said he, "when Black has a mind to do that, there isn't a Government in Europe which will stop him."
To this I made a commonplace answer. My own hopes that the mad venture would end as it had begun, and that a swift cataclysm would overtake it, were now giving place to the belief that the man who had ruled the seas as never they were ruled before, would be as surely their master in the Zero as ever he had been on the Nameless Ship. And with this belief there came a foreboding gloomy beyond words.
What must my own lot be if Black kept his word and defied the nations? Could I hope that an accident would again be his undoing, as it had undone him once upon the high seas? That was a counsel of despair and not to be thought of. I saw myself, when I thought of it in the silent hours, doomed to this floating prison until the end; cut off from home and friends; lost to the world I had known; the companion of outcasts guilty of nameless infamies. And from this fate Almighty God alone could deliver me.
We were off Ushant on the morning of the third day, and I went up, despite the Doctor's order, to breathe a little of God's fresh air upon the platform. It was a pleasant morning, with a fleck of cloud and a gentle breeze from west by south. I could make out the coast of France upon our port quarter, and a tramp steamer wafting her black smoke toward us as she headed for the English shore. Ahead of us the great waves of the Atlantic rolled majestically through their infinite solitudes; and all the desolation and the beauty of the ocean enchanted my eyes, long accustomed to the gloom of the cabin.
This wonderful scene turned my thoughts naturally to the object of our voyage and the haven at which Osbart had hinted. Many speculations occupied my mind, but none which encouraged me to believe that 1 had solved the riddle of Black's purpose. That Spain could harbour him, I did not believe;and I had begun to tell myself that the story of Spain must be a fable, when I heard a step behind me, and, turning, I found myself face to face with the great Captain himself.
"Well, my lad," he said, taking my arm quite in the old kindly way, "so you, too, have learned the glory of the sea. I've been watching you this ten minutes or more. You are trying to reed the secrets, eh? and they are battling you? Why, my boy, they've baffled me for forty years; and here I am, every morning, trying to read them anew."
We paced the deck a little while in silence, and then, as though the same thought still dwelt in his mind, he exclaimed very earnestly:
“There's not a man alive who knows the truth about yonder ocean. She lives, I tell you as surely as you and I. She’s a heart and a mind to play with men. The shore's her enemy, and there she fights her battles. Study her a thousand years, and she's not a day older. Say that you have mastered her, and she'll beat the life out of you, because she owns no master. Aye, the sea’s the glory of the world, and there's none like to her. If you kneel before the Unseen Powers, lift your hands first to the sea. I tell you, land can show no such picture to the eyes of mankind. She is mightier than the mountains and deeper than the valleys. All the jewels dug from the bowels of the earth cannot match the gems she catches from the sun. There is no emerald as green as the heart of yon wave; no diamond to match the spindrift she shakes from her crown when the winds call to her and she answers. Aye, love the sea, my lad, and make her your divinity."
I had known him in such a mood before, and it was a delight to listen to him. Sometimes I thought that this was his secret, and that all he had done and all he had planned to do were the fruits of his homage to the mistress he served so faithfully. He flung the gauntlet to man in the name of the sea. No power on earth could keep him from that kingdom to which the ocean had called him.
"Captain," said I, answering him upon a mood of curiosity, "if you love the sea so well, is there no other way of serving her than upon such a ship as this?"
He did not reply to me angrily, as I feared he would, hut, still holding my arm, he declared his pride in the Zero and her achievement. At the same time he confessed some of those secret thoughts which would have been a revelation to the world if they had been wholly known.
"The Zero is my kingdom," he said quietly. "Men fight and sweat to be masters ashore, but I am master here, as surely as king or emperor. That's Guichard's doing, and the world should know of it. I thought that I must become as other men when the great ship went down—but, lad, it's not to be. Guichard has built me a fortress which no navy that swims is going to break. Give me the wide sea for my horizon, and I care no more for your battleships than for any bird which plays upon the breakers. They shut the gates to me, but I go in and out when I please. The ocean is my empire, and my will shall rule it. Remember it when men speak of Black and his crimes. Tell them that it's born in me to be master upon the sea, and that no law can write it otherwise."
"Then," said I, eager to question him, "you believe that the Zero is impregnable?"
"I believe it," he rejoined. "If I had not faith, why should these men follow me? Heaven or hell is nothing to me while I walk these decks and know that I am the master. Day and night are of less account than the waters about me and the wild sea's face. Aye, lad, I have begun to live again since the Zero sailed from Brest. It's Guichard's doing—and I will make him the greatest man alive as surely as there is a sky above us."
I forebore to ask him how he hoped to do this when every port was shut against him, and there was not a seaman afloat who would not try to take him, alive or dead. That the Frenchman had built him a submarine twenty years ahead of her time, I never doubted; but other considerations crowded upon my mind, and chiefly those of the support he must find if he would continue to hold the seas. What if he missed his consorts? How if he were isolated at the heart of