And Thus He Came: A Christmas Fantasy, Cyrus Townsend Brady [pdf e book reader .TXT] 📗

Absolvo te.

Of the five specters in the boat three were without life. Those whose faint breathing indicated that they had not yet reached the point of death were too weak and indifferent to rid the boat of the bodies of the others. Ever since the homeward-bound whaler had struck a derelict in a gale of wind north of the Falklands and foundered, this little boat, surviving the shipwreck as by a miracle, had drifted on.

For three weeks in vain they had scanned the horizon for a sail. Their scanty supply of bread and water had been consumed in ten days. Thereafter they had nothing. The baby had died first, next a man whose arm had been broken by a falling spar in the disaster, and then the ship's cabin boy. The survivors were a man and a woman. They were both far gone. The woman was plainly dying. The man kept himself up by sheer exercise of will.

Their drifting had been northward toward warmer seas. It was winter in their home land and, though they knew it not, Christmas day. There the tropic sun blazed overhead from an absolutely cloudless sky. There was no vestige of breeze to stir the canvas of the solitary sail or ripple the glassy surface of the smoothed out ocean. The boat lay still. Not even the iron man at the helm could have lifted an oar. It had been dead calm for days. Speech there was none except in the gravest necessity. To talk connectedly was impossible.

After scanning the horizon for the thousandth time the man's burning eyes sought those of the woman at his feet. He was astonished to find them open. Her mouth was working, her parched lips strove to form words. He dropped the tiller which his hand had grasped mechanically, and which was useless since there was no way on the boat, and bent his head lower. Some sudden recrudescence of strength which the dying sometimes receive came to the woman.

"Death," she whispered. "Glad." She turned her head slightly and saw the form of the child. "The Baby—and—I—together."

The man nodded. Tenderly he laid his hot wasted hand on the woman's fevered brow.

"A priest," she said, looking up at him uncomprehendingly.

She was evidently going fast yet she knew what she wanted although she was not conscious that she craved the impossible. It would appear that she had been a good churchwoman. The man could only stare. He was no priest, only a rough sailor.

"A priest," said the woman more clearly. "I want—a priest—the sacrament." By some nervous convulsive effort she lifted her arms up toward him beseeching, appealing. There was another kind of agony in her voice that had not been present when she had moaned for water in the days before.

"The sacrament," she insisted, "I die."

The man looked away. Hard by the boat where there had been but a waste of sea rose a green island. A stretch of pleasant meadow met his eyes. It was so close to him that if he had leaned over the gunwale of the boat he could have laid his hand on the lush grass. Dumbly he wondered where it had been before, how he had come upon it so suddenly, why he had not seen it hours ago.

In front of him were hundreds of people, men, women, and children, plain people in strange simple garb, the like of which he had never seen. In front of these people and with their backs toward him stood a little group of men, in the center a figure in white garments. A lad offered something in a basket.

The man watched, amazed, awe-stricken, yet with a strange peace in his soul. He made no movement to gain the shore. He only looked and looked. The white-robed figure bent over the basket. He lifted from it a crude rough loaf of bread. He raised his eyes to heaven, his lips moved. He broke the bread and gave it.

As the sailor watched the island disappeared as suddenly as it had come. The scene changed. Now he looked into a low room, dimly lighted with strange lamps. Through an open window he saw the stars. The few men that had stood about the man in the grassy meadow were alone with him in that upper chamber reclining about a table. The man lifted from the board a cup of silver. He blessed it and gave it. The fragrance of wine came to the watcher.

He rubbed his eyes and looked again and before him spread the smooth unbroken surface of the monotonous sea. The woman's voice smote his ear again, higher, shriller, with more painful entreaty.

"A priest—for the love of God—the sacrament," she whispered.

The man tore open the last canvas bread-bag. It was tough material but it yielded to his insistence. In the corner there was a single tiny crumb they had overlooked. He lifted it gently with his great hand. He held it up in the air a moment striving to think. He was an English sailor and in his boyhood had been a chorister in a great Cathedral. The mighty words came back to him. He bent over the woman.

The cry for bread.

"Bread," he whispered. "The body—"

He shattered the water breaker with his fist. There was a suggestion of moisture on the inside of the staves of the cask. He drew his finger across them and touched it to the woman's lips.

"Water," he said hoarsely. "The blood—"

The terror, the yearning, disappeared from the woman's eyes. She looked at the man sanely, gratefully.

"God bless—" she faltered and then her lips stiffened.

Some tag of quaint old Scripture that had impressed him when he first heard it because of its very strangeness, but of which he had never thought in all the years of his rough life since boyhood, came into the man's mind now. He lifted his head as if to see again that figure.

"A priest forever," he gasped, "after the order of Melchis—"

He did not finish the word. The woman was dead. He knew now for what he had been kept alive. His task had been performed. He bowed his head in his hands and entered into life eternal with the others.

Presently a little cloud flecked the sky. Out of the south the wind blew softly. The smooth sea rippled blue and white in the gentle breeze. The little boat, cradling its dead, rocked gently as it drifted on.

XI The Stiller of the Storm "BE OF GOOD CHEER; IT IS I; BE NOT AFRAID"

"It's Christmas eve at home," murmured the young lad after he had said his prayers and tumbled into his narrow berth on the great ship. "I suppose they're trimming the Christmas tree now and hanging up the stockings. I wish I were there."

He was very young to serve his country, but not too young according to the standards of mankind to be a midshipman on the great steel monster keeping the leaden deep. It was the first time he had ever been away from home on Christmas day, too. The youngsters had all laughed and joked about it in the steerage mess. They had promised themselves some kind of a celebration in the morning, but in his own cot with no one to see, a few tears which he fondly deemed unmanly would come. He had the midnight watch and he knew that he must get some sleep, but it was a long time before he closed his eyes and drifted off to dream of home and his mother.

Athwart that dream came a sudden, frightful, heart-stilling roar of destruction; a hideous crash followed, a terrible rending, breaking, smashing, concatenation of noises, succeeded by frightful detonations, as through the gaping hole torn in the great battleship by the deadly torpedo, the water rushed upon the heated boilers, the explosion of which in turn ignited the magazines. By that deadly underwater thrust of the enemy the battleship was reduced in a few moments to a disjointed, disorganized, sinking mass of shapeless, formless, splintered steel.

As the explosions ceased, from every point rose shrieks and groans and cries of men in the death-agony hurled into eternity and torn like the steel. And then the boy heard the surviving officers coolly, resolutely calling the men to their stations.

He had been thrown from his berth by the violence of the explosion. His face was cut and bleeding where he had struck a near-by stanchion. His left arm hung useless. He had lain dazed on the deck for a few moments until he heard the orders of his lieutenant. He was one of the signal midshipmen stationed on the signal bridge. Whatever happened that was the place to which to go; he still had a duty to perform.

Picking himself up as best he could, he hurried to report to the lieutenant. With such means as were available signals were made. Calls for help? Oh, never! Warnings that the enemy's submarines were in the near vicinity and that other ships should keep away.

The captain was on the half wrecked bridge above. The boy noticed how quiet he was, yet his voice rang over the tumult.

"Steady, men, steady. Keep your stations. Stand by. Be ready."

The old quartermaster whose business it was to tell the hours saluted the captain.

"Eight bells, sir," he said, "midnight. Christmas day," he added.

"Strike them," said the captain.

And, as clear as ever, the four couplets rang out over the chaos and the disaster.

"Christmas day," the boy murmured.

"She's going, men," said the captain, as the