Chapter XXI: The Cyclone

A shining-faced negro waiter came up in answer to the bell, and brought tumblers of tinkling ice and water. Both Onslow and Miss Kildare drank thirstily, and then lay back again in their cane chairs, panting. The close heat was something terrible. There was not a breath of either sea breeze or land breeze, and the electric fan which whirred on the table behind them did little more than send a blast of sickly warmth. Down the long line of the piazza were the rest of the people in the hotel, the men cursing and mopping their faces, the women with closed eyes fanning themselves languidly. And, overhead, the shingles of the roof crackled and rustled in the baking air as though they were alive.

Night came, and the bell clashed out its summons to dinner, but no one went in. The wooden sides of the hotel, baked through and through by a month of tropical sun, had made the rooms unendurable. So they stayed where they were, in the hot, oppressive dark, and blinked at the white summer lightning which splashed the violet heavens in front of them. In heavy panting beats the night seemed to close down upon them and pen them in, so that it was a labor to breathe.

“I can’t stand this,” said Miss Kildare at last.

“You’ve got to,” replied Onslow, wearily, “unless you choose to go down the beach and sit in the water with your clothes on.”

“That would be some relief, although the water is as hot as tea. But I shan’t do that. I shall walk out along the pier over the sea. One may faint half way, and tumble over and get drowned; but anyway that’s better than staying here and being cooked slowly.”

They got up together, and strolled wearily over the loose white sand, and then more crisply over the worn decking of the pier. Between the lightning flashes, the darkness above them was the darkness of a cave; but faint, phosphorescent fringes showed out amongst the piles beneath, and these guided them from walking over the edge of the planks.

“You shouldn’t stay down here this weather,” Onslow said, as they paced down the narrow platform, with fingers intertwined. “You’ll lose your color and your beauty if you do, and get thin and sallow like Mrs. Van Liew.”

No reply came, and Onslow said nothing more, but walked on thinking.

“You’ve been here now nine whole days, Pat,” the girl said, breaking silence for the second time, when they were half a mile from the shore.

“It can’t be. Yes, you’re right. Nine days! Time has gone quickly. What have we been doing all the time? Fishing once or twice, and a picnic to that Mound-Builder’s place down the canal; and I believe that’s all. We’ve just talked, and sometimes not even talked. You and I, little girl, know one another well enough to be companionable without always chatting. You see, we’ve always known one another. But still, nine solid days! I’d no idea till you spoke how long it was in actual point of time. It’s been very restful.”

“You seem to have found it so. You’ve stayed all the time close about here. Do you know you have not once gone so much as a dozen miles from Point Sebastian.”

Mrs. Duvernay’s place was fifteen miles away. Onslow saw the point.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t found time. You and I have had so much to tell one another, Elsie.”

“We always have been very good friends,” said the girl, and was going to add something else when her words were drowned by a furious crash of thunder.

There had been no working up to it. The summer lightning was noiseless, and there had not been so much as a mutter of thunder all the day. The great bellow of noise had come in an instant without a rustle of warning.

“That’s close overhead,” Onslow remarked, “and something else will follow. If it’s rain, we shall have a deluge falling in ropes, but I fancy we’re in for something different. We had better turn back, Elsie.”

“In view of this heat, a wetting would be a distinct luxury; but I think, as you say, there is something else coming besides. Oh, Pat, here it is. Run, or we shall be caught.”

The storm gave but one weird moan, a rustle and a shriek from over the treetops, and then was upon them. In a minute it was blowing with a hurricane force which no human being could stand against.

The wind plucked the feet from under them, and they fell to the decking of the pier, gripping with their fingers in the gaps between the planks. A storm of sand and leaves and twigs beat against their heads. The crazy tressle-work of the pier buckled and swung beneath their bodies.

“We must get shorewards,” Onslow yelled in his companion’s ear; “this jam-crack thing will go by the board directly.”

“Right, oh,” came back the response cheerily enough, and together they began to warp themselves towards the beach and the wind, plank at a time. The girl was strong, and accustomed to using her muscles; but skirts are a poor rig to play caterpillar in, and her progress was slow even with Onslow’s help. When they had gained a score of yards, she bade him leave her to make the best of his own way. “I shall get along all right,” she cried. “Go and tell them I’m coming.”

“Naturally I should,” he shouted back with a laugh. “Here, let me link my arm inside yours. That’s right. Now we’ll ferry along at twice the pace.”

But they did not get much further. A minute afterwards, to the kick of a harder squall, the gray old pier tottered and clattered and crunched, and the wind was filled with flying boards, and Onslow found himself with one arm clutching the weed-clad stump of a pile, and the other wrapped round Elsie Kildare.

“Hurt?” he shouted anxiously.

“Not a bit. Sound as a bell. You?”

“All right.”

“But where’s the water? There should be six feet here, and I can feel none.”

“Blown away to sea. We may thank God the wind is not on-shore, or we’d have been drowned, as hundreds of other poor wretches are this moment. Ah! That’s a shave.”

A lightning flash showed them a huge tree plucked from its roots, and blowing past them, squirming and crashing about like a live mad thing. Then a heavy squared roof-beam hit their jagged pile, and missed Onslow’s arm by a nail’s breadth.

“The hotel’s going down,” he shouted. “The air will be full of this stuff in a minute, and if we try to move we shall be brained before we’ve got a yard. Crouch down, dear, at the bottom of the post.”

“You too?”

“No, there isn’t room.”

“Then I shall stand.”

She dragged at his sleeve and pulled him to her side. “Stay by me here, Pat. You might get swept away, and I couldn’t bear that.”

“Of course, I’ll stay by you, dear. I’ll never go till you turn me away.” He took new grip with his arms, pinning her between his breast and the weed-ragged leg of the pile. “Elsie, I want to tell you something. You know I’ve always liked you as a friend; but now it has come to more than that. Much more. Love, darling. Once my mind was full of another woman, and I thought I could never care for any one else as I cared for her. But that was years since—thousands of years it seems now—and, Elsie, I’ve—I’ve—forgotten her. She is only a name to me; and your sister. Dear, if we get away from this, do you think you could like me, too, a little more than an ordinary friend?”

She put her lips to his ear. “Do you think we shall come out of it alive, Pat? Tell me honestly.”

“I hope so.”

“Honestly, Pat.”

“I’m afraid, darling, it’s a poor chance.”

Her soft, wet cheek nestled against him, and strands of her hair intertwined themselves with his. “Pat,” she said, “you never knew, but I loved you all along from the first.”

* * * * *

Then, for the first time during many years, Patrick Onslow knew what it was to fear death. Before-time life had held many torments for him, and if lead or water or steel chose to show him the Great Secret, he did not very much care. Now it was all different. He lusted to live with a fierceness which almost drove him mad.

“You are trembling,” the girl said anxiously.

“I know I am. You have made me a rank coward, dear.”

She understood him, and kissed his mouth; but no other words passed between them.

The cyclone blew on, bellowing and tearing, and the fiends’ fingers of the wind did mischief beyond all reckoning. Timber which had stood hundreds of years, ceibas and cypresses, live oaks and pines, sprawled down amongst the tangled undergrowth, mere masses of splintered matchwood. The mangrove thickets were clogged with stones, with grasses, with gray tangles of Spanish moss. Lakes were licked from their beds and spirted far over the creaming waters of the Gulf. The land birds were driven like helpless spume-flakes far away to sea, and choked with the gale before they were flung breathless from its clutches. The palmetto-shucks of the humbler coast-dwellers vanished in dust. The frame houses of the better-to-do burst at all their angles, and spread like platforms upon the ground.

And meanwhile the great straggling, wooden hotel on Point Sebastian dissolved away like a sandbank in a flooded estuary. First the heat-twisted shingles had been stripped off, flying away into the wind like some strange dark fowl sent as _avant-couriers_ of more fearsome things to come. Then weather-boards followed, singly and in coveys; then gable-ends and joists and rafters; all floating and pitching in the air as though the wind had the density of a tossing ocean stream. Chairs and wooden bedsteads, clothes blown out into grotesque shapes, as though the freakish spirits of the storm had donned them, the scantling of the long piazzas, and still more boards, whirred out into the night and vanished for ever down the track of the cyclone. And in the thick of this devil’s bombardment crouched men and women, and other things, shapeless and horrible, which had been men and women once. The tale of the dead grew with awful pace that night.

Once there was a slight lull in the blast of the gale, and the driven-out waters of the shore began to return, and swirled knee-high about the two who were taking refuge at the foot of the pile.

“Come,” said Onslow, taking the girl by the hand, “we must run for it.” And he led the way beachwards, blundering through piled up mounds of wreckage, whilst the stinging spindrift swirled around their heads and bit them upon the face like whips. But a flying missile from out of the inky blackness struck him on the curve of the temple before he had gone with her twenty yards, and the grip of his fingers loosened, and he swayed and fell without a word. The girl threw herself on his body, wailing that he was killed and that she too would stay there and die; but a wild hope seized her that he might be only stunned, and she took his body in her arms, and half dragging, half carrying, began to go with him once more by tedious inches towards the beach.

Then the cyclone burst out afresh with all the torrent of its fury, and to move or even stand against the wind was a thing impossible. The girl and her burden were flung heavily to the ground, and a mass of driving wreckage slid above them and pressed them down. “Oh, Pat, Pat,” she cried, “I did so want to live with you, and now we must both die here.”

Three terrible hours more they spent there, the girl expecting violent death to fall on her every next second, the man in her arms gradually returning to consciousness. And then, like an organ whose wind-chamber has emptied itself, the cyclone suddenly dropped its voice. It had arisen in a minute to the full of its strength, and in a single minute it lulled to a breathless calm, leaving the air scoured and sweet, and the land a tangled desert. The sea alone remembered its lashing actively, and fumed in a swell of sullen majesty in its deeper parts, and sent its angry waters back in rippling surf on to those shallow western beaches from which it had been so ruthlessly evicted.

It was from this last returning tidal wave that the final danger came, but the two under that pile of wreckage managed to slip from beneath the wood when the waters loosened it, and run in the breaking dawn to the higher ground beyond. They were bruised, both of them, and Onslow was bleeding from a jagged cut on the head; but after all, their hurts were trifling compared with what they might have been. Three thousand people died in that night’s work amongst the Southern States; and the air was torn with the moan of those who were left, lamenting as they sought their dead.

That day all who could lift a pair of hands had work to do, and the next, and the next; but on the fourth day from the cyclone, when the fallen had been buried and the quick housed, Onslow managed for the first time to get a word _en tête-à-tête_ with this woman who had said she loved him and had promised to be his wife. He had conned the matter over in his mind, and after heavy argument had decided not to hold any of his affairs secret from her; this of course having particular reference to the one affair by which he hoped to make a competence. He had visions of difficulties with her over it, but he began his confidence artfully.

“Elsie,” he said, “I came here to Florida on business.”

“Then,” replied Miss Kildare, “I’d like to give business a knob of sugar to eat and flowers to wear on his headstall. What color was business? White?”

“Black, distinctly black, but valuable. In figures, slightly more than a quarter of a million in English money ought to come to me for my share out of him; or rather, as it now is, our share; yours and mine, dear.”

“Oh, you duck, Pat! You don’t mean to say I’m to marry a rich man? Wherever did you steal the money from? Speculation?”

“Speculation of sorts, though steal describes it better. It’s there, and that’s the main thing.”

“Money in the pocket is better than ten plans to get it there any day. Pat, we’ll have a big steam yacht, and when we get sick of London we’ll go and see all the rest of the world. But you of all people to become a successful speculator! Tell me, what have you been making your corner in? Nothing unclean I hope, like short ribs of pork?”

“Gold, if that will suit your ladyship.”

“Oh, this is delightful. You’ve been trading on American necessities. Tell me all about it. I think I can follow. One hears so much about the silver question, that one can’t help understanding it a little.”

So, with a pardonable _couleur de rose_, wherever tinting was available, Onslow told the story of his finding the channel into the Everglades, his compact with Shelf, the hazardous voyage of the S. S. _Port Edes_, and the subsequent disposal of the specie. The girl listened to the tale with close attention and unmoved face. Even the account of the mutiny and the gruesome encounter between Nutt and his friend failed to call up comment, because in domestic Florida a little dashing homicide is such a very common occurrence. But when Patrick Onslow had finished his say and looked to her for approval, he only got a grave and decisive shake of the auburn head.

“Well, dear,” he asked at last, made very anxious by her silence.

“No, Pat,” she said quietly, “I can’t share in a fortune which has been laid up that way. Heaven knows, I’m not squeamish. Hearing what I do out here about Trusts and Corners and Syndicates, and seeing what I can’t help seeing of the way the people around make their living, and still evade the law and retain respect, my notions of morality are very easy and slack. But——”

“But I have gone too far?”

She bowed her face gravely.

“And so,” he said bitterly, “after all that I have gone through, and all I’ve done, you want me to give this fortune up. My God, Elsie, you know what a hateful thing poverty is as well as I do. Think what this money would buy. Love for one another we have already, and we can get besides every pleasure the heart can wish for. I know as well as you do that it was dirtily earned, and I hated the work of getting it, and I’ll never dabble in anything so foul again. My instincts bid me live as an upright gentleman, and with the proper income I could do that, and forget I was ever anything else. When I cease to be poor, I cease to be in the way of temptation. Don’t you see? And, besides, there is no chance of being found out. The money is supposed to be blotted out of existence, and it’s there now in the ’Glades as a private mine to dig at as we choose. Besides, I’m bound in honor to go on after getting thus far. It isn’t as if I were working for my own hand alone. Shelf’s my partner, and I can’t neglect Shelf’s interests for a sentiment.”

“Mr. Shelf may do as he chooses, Pat; you yourself may do as you choose, dear; but I can’t alter what I’ve said. I love money, Heaven knows, but I couldn’t use money of that sort. You might forget how it came: I couldn’t. I can’t forget some things. I’ve a terrible memory when I don’t want it to act. I tried to forget you, Pat, ever since you left us in England till the day I saw you here, but I couldn’t. I used to pray for forgetfulness all those years, and it wouldn’t come; and if I were to marry you now, dear, with that money, I should always remember, just in the same way.”

“What is the use of carrying thumbscrews in your pocket?” he asked half angrily.

She smiled a little pained smile. “Can’t help it, Pat. I suppose it’s the way I’m built. But I’m only telling you facts.”

“I thought,” he said brusquely, “you wanted to go back into society, and have a steam yacht; and do things comfortably. Now, without this quarter of a million which is lying ready to be picked up, you have two hundred a year, and I have three, which make five hundred pounds in all. I might point out to you that one can’t do much continuous splashing amongst smart people on that, in London or anywhere else. Unless, of course, you married some one else.”

She flushed painfully. “Oh, Pat,” she said, “I don’t think I deserved that from you.”

He dropped his arms round her and drew her to him tenderly. “No, dear, you didn’t. I was a brute. But it’s hard for a man to speak soberly when he’s just had all his plans smashed to the smallest kind of fragments, and stamped upon by the only person in the world whose opinion he cares a rap about. Of course I know all this business was a theft, a piece of piracy pure and simple. But circumstances elbowed one into it, and I bowed my head to them. Circumstances—you, that is, and you entirely—now drag me out of it, and I’m going to bow again, and say ‘Kismet.’ Only I wonder what will become of the money. I swear Shelf shan’t have the whole half million and the steamer too. But I don’t see how we are to give my share back to the rightful owners. One can’t very well draw a cheque on the Everglades, and send it to them anonymously by post.”