Coventry crouched directly in the fork of the tree.
Grace looked bewildered from one to the other; but it was to Henry she spoke, and asked him in trembling tones what it "all meant?"
But, ere either could make a reply, a dire sound was heard of hissing thunder: so appalling that the three actors in this strange scene were all frozen and rooted where they stood.
Then came a fierce galloping, and Ransome, with his black hair and beard flying, and his face like a ghost, reined up, and shouted wildly, "Dam burst! Coming down here! Fly for your lives! Fly!"
He turned and galloped up the hill.
Cole and his mate emerged, and followed him, howling; but before the other poor creatures, half paralyzed, could do any thing, the hissing thunder was upon them. What seemed a mountain of snow came rolling, and burst on them with terrific violence, whirling great trees and fragments of houses past with incredible velocity.
At the first blow, the house that stood nearest to the flying lake was shattered and went to pieces soon after: all the houses quivered as the water rushed round them two stories high.
Little never expected to live another minute; yet, in that awful moment, his love stood firm. He screamed to Grace, "The houses must go!--the tree!--the tree!--get to the tree!"
But Grace, so weak at times, was more than mortal strong at that dread hour.
"What! live with him," she cried, "when I can die with you!"
She folded her arms, and her pale face was radiant, no hope, no fear.
Now came a higher wave, and the water reached above the window-sills of the bedroom floor and swept away the ladder; yet, driven forward like a cannon-bullet, did not yet pour into the bed-rooms from the main stream; but by degrees the furious flood broke, melted, and swept away the intervening houses, and then hacked off the gable-end of Grace"s house, as if Leviathan had bitten a piece out. Through that aperture the flood came straight in, leveled the part.i.tions at a blow, rushed into the upper rooms with fearful roar, and then, rushing out again to rejoin the greater body of water, blew the front wall clean away, and swept Grace out into the raging current.
The water pouring out of the house carried her, at first, toward the tree, and Little cried wildly to Coventry to save her. He awoke from his stupor of horror, and made an attempt to clutch her; but then the main force of the mighty water drove her away from him toward the house; her helpless body was whirled round and round three times, by the struggling eddies, and then hurried away like a feather by the overwhelming torrent.
CHAPTER XLV.
The mighty reflux, which, after a short struggle, overpowered the rush of water from the windows, and carried Grace Carden"s helpless body away from the tree, drove her of course back toward the houses, and she was whirled past Little"s window with fearful velocity, just as he was going to leap into the flood, and perish in an insane attempt to save her.
With a loud cry he seized her by her long floating hair, and tried to draw her in at the window; but the mighty water pulled her from him fiercely, and all but dragged him in after her; he was only saved by clutching the side of the wall with his left hand: the flood was like some vast solid body drawing against him; and terror began to seize on his heart. He ground his teeth; he set his knee against the horizontal projection of the window; and that freed his left hand; he suddenly seized her arm with it, and, clutching it violently, ground his teeth together, and, throwing himself backward with a jerk, tore her out of the water by an effort almost superhuman. Such was the force exerted by the torrent on one side, and the desperate lover on the other, that not her shoes only, but her stockings, though gartered, were torn off her in that fierce struggle.
He had her in his arms, and cried aloud, and sobbed over her, and kissed her wet cheeks, her lank hair, and her wet clothes, in a wild rapture.
He went on kissing her and sobbing over her so wildly and so long, that Coventry, who had at first exulted with him at her rescue, began to rage with jealousy.
"Please remember she is my wife," he shrieked: "don"t take advantage of her condition, villain!"
"Your wife, you scoundrel! You stole her from me once; now come and take her from me again. Why didn"t you save her? She was near to you. You let her die: she lives by me, and for me, and I for her." With this he kissed her again, and held her to his bosom. "D"ye see that?--liar!
coward! villain!"
Even across that tremendous body of rushing death, from which neither was really safe, both rivals" eyes gleamed hate at each other.
The wild beasts that a flood drives together on to some little eminence, lay down their natures, and the panther crouches and whimpers beside the antelope; but these were men, and could entertain the fiercest of human pa.s.sions in the very jaws of death.
To be sure it was but for a moment; a new danger soon brought them both to their senses; an elm-tree whirling past grazed Coventry"s plane-tree; it was but a graze, yet it nearly shook him off into the flood, and he yelled with fear: almost at the same moment a higher wave swept into Little"s room, and the rising water set every thing awash, and burst over him as he kneeled with grace. He got up, drenched and half-blinded with the turbid water, and, taking Grace in his arms, waded waist-high to his bed, and laid her down on it.
It was a moment of despair. Death had entered that chamber in a new, unforeseen, and inevitable form. The ceiling was low, the water was rising steadily; the bedstead floated; his chest of drawers floated, though his rifle and pistols lay on it, and the top drawers were full of the tools he always had about him: in a few minutes the rising water must inevitably jam Grace and him against the ceiling, and drown them like rats in a hole.
Fearful as the situation was, a sickening horror was added to it by the horrible smell of the water; it had a foul and appalling odor, a compound of earthiness and putrescence; it smelt like a newly-opened grave; it paralyzed like a serpent"s breath.
Stout as young Little"s heart was, it fainted now when he saw his bedstead, and his drawers, and his chairs, all slowly rising toward the ceiling, lifted by that cold, putrescent, liquid death.
But all men, and even animals, possess greater powers of mind, as well as of body, than they ever exert, unless compelled by dire necessity: and it would have been strange indeed if a heart so stanch, and a brain so inventive, as Little"s, had let his darling die like a rat drowned in a hole, without some new and masterly attempt first made to save her.
To that moment of horror and paralysis succeeded an activity of mind and body almost incredible. He waded to the drawers, took his rifle and fired both barrels at one place in the ceiling bursting a hole, and cutting a narrow joist almost in two. Then he opened a drawer, got an ax and a saw out, and tried to wade to the bed; but the water now took him off his feet, and he had to swim to it instead; he got on it, and with his axe and his saw he contrived to paddle the floating bed under the hole in the ceiling, and then with a few swift and powerful blows of his ax soon enlarged that aperture sufficiently; but at that moment the water carried the bedstead away from the place.
He set to work with his saw and ax, and paddled back again.
Grace, by this time, was up on her knees, and in a voice, the sudden firmness of which surprised and delighted him, asked if she could help.
"Yes," said he, "you can. On with my coat."
It lay on the bed. She helped him on with it, and then he put his ax and saw into the pockets, and told her to take hold of his skirt.
He drew himself up through the aperture, and Grace, holding his skirts with her hands and the bed with her feet, climbed adroitly on to the head of the bed--a French bed made of mahogany--and Henry drew her through the aperture.
They were now on the false ceiling, and nearly jammed against the roof: Little soon hacked a great hole in that just above the parapet, and they crawled out upon the gutter.
They were now nearly as high as Coventry on his tree; but their house was rocking, and his tree was firm.
In the next house were heard the despairing shrieks of poor creatures who saw no way of evading their fate; yet the way was as open to them as to this brave pair.
"Oh, my angel," said Grace, "save them. Then, if you die, you go to G.o.d."
"All right," said Henry. "Come on."
They darted down the gutter to the next house. Little hacked a hole in the slates, and then in the wood-work, and was about to jump in, when the house he had just left tumbled all to pieces, like a house of sugar, and the debris went floating by, including the bedstead that had helped to save them.
"O G.o.d!" cried Little, "this house will go next; run on to the last one."
"No, Henry, I would rather die with you than live alone. Don"t be frightened for me, my angel. Save lives, and trust to Jesus."
"All right," said Little; but his voice trembled now.
He jumped in, hacked a hole in the ceiling, and yelled to the inmates to give him their hands.
There was a loud cry of male and female voices.
"My child first," cried a woman, and threw up an infant, which Little caught and handed to Grace. She held it, wailing to her breast.
Little dragged five more souls up. Grace helped them out, and they ran along the gutter to the last house without saying "Thank you."
The house was rocking. Little and Grace went on to the next, and he smashed the roof in, and then the ceiling, and Grace and he were getting the people out, when the house they had just left melted away, all but a chimney-stack, which adhered in jagged dilapidation to the house they were now upon.
They were now upon the last. Little hacked furiously through the roof and ceiling, and got the people out; and now twenty-seven souls crouched in the gutter, or hung about the roof of this one house; some praying, but most of them whining and wailing.
"What is the use of howling?" groaned Little.