CHAPTER VIII.
For a few minutes, they stood looking blankly at one another in mute astonishment, turning over and comparing the two telegrams together with undecided minds; then at last Nora broke the silence. ‘I tell you what it is,’ she said, with an air of profound wisdom; ‘they must have got an epidemic of yellow fever over in Trinidad—they’re always having it, you know, and nobody minds it, unless of course they die of it, and even then I daresay they don’t think much about it. But papa and Mr Hawthorn must be afraid that if we come out now, fresh from England, we may all of us get it.’
Edward looked once more at the telegrams very dubiously. ‘I don’t think that’ll do, Miss Dupuy,’ he said, after re-reading them with a legal scrutiny. ‘You see, your father says: “On no account go on board the Severn.” Evidently, it’s this particular ship he has an objection to; and perhaps my father’s objection may be exactly the same. It’s very singular—very mysterious!’
‘Do you think,’ Marian suggested, ‘there can be anything wrong with the vessel or the machinery? You know, they do say, Edward, that some ship-owners send ships to sea that aren’t at all safe or seaworthy. I read such a dreadful article about it a little while ago in one of the papers. Perhaps they think the Severn may go to the bottom.’
‘Or else that there’s dynamite on board,’ Nora put in; ‘or a clockwork thing like the one somebody was going to blow up that steamer with at Hamburg, once, you remember! Oh, my dear, the bare idea of it makes me quite shudder! Fancy being blown out of your berth, at dead of night, into the nasty cold stormy water, and having a shark bite you in two across the waist before you were really well awake, and had begun properly to realise the situation!’
‘Not very likely, either of them,’ Edward said. ‘This is a new ship, one of the very best on the line, and perfectly safe, except of course in a hurricane, when anything on earth is liable to go down; so that can’t possibly be Mr Dupuy’s objection to the Severn.—And as to the clockwork, you know, Nora, the people who put those things on board steamers, if there are any, don’t telegraph out to give warning beforehand to the friends of passengers on the other side of the Atlantic. No; for my part, I can’t at all understand it. It’s a perfect mystery to me, and I give it up entirely.’
‘Well, what do you mean to do, dear?’ Marian asked anxiously. ‘Go back at once, or go on in spite of it?’
‘I don’t think there’s any choice left us now, darling. The ship’s fairly under weigh, you see; and nothing on earth would induce them to stop her, once she’s started, till we get to Trinidad, or at least to St Thomas.’
‘You don’t mean to say, Mr Hawthorn,’ Nora cried piteously, ‘they’ll carry us on now to the end of the journey, whether we want to stop or whether we don’t?’
‘Yes, I do, Miss Dupuy. They will, most certainly. I suspect they’ve got no voice themselves in the matter. A mail-steamer is under contract to sail from a given port on a given day, and not to stop for anything on earth, except fire or stress of weather, till she lands the mails safely on the other side, according to agreement.’
‘Well, that’s a blessing anyhow!’ Nora said resignedly; ‘because, if so, it saves us the trouble of thinking anything more about the matter; and papa can’t be angry with me for having sailed, if the captain refuses to send us back, now we’ve once fairly started. Indeed, for my part, I’m very glad of it, to tell you the truth, because it would have been such a horrid nuisance to have to go on shore again and unpack all one’s things just for a fortnight, after all the fuss and hurry we’ve had already about getting them finished. What a pity the bothering old telegrams came at all to keep us in suspense the whole way over!’
‘But suppose there is some dynamite on board,’ Marian suggested timidly. ‘Don’t you think, Edward, you’d better go and ask the captain?’
‘I’ll go and ask the captain, by all means, if that’s any relief to you,’ Edward answered; ‘but I don’t think it likely he can throw any particular light of his own upon the reason of the telegrams.’
The captain, being shortly found on the bridge, came down at his leisure and inspected the messages; hummed and hawed a little dubiously; smiled to himself with much good-humour; said it was a confoundedly odd coincidence; and looked somehow as though he saw the meaning of the two telegrams at once, but wasn’t anxious to impart his knowledge to any inquiring third party. ‘Yellow fever!’ he said, shrugging his shoulders sailor-wise, when Edward mentioned Nora’s first suggestion. ‘No, no; don’t you believe it. ’Tain’t yellow fever. Why, nobody who lives in the West Indies ever thinks anything of that, bless you. Besides, you wouldn’t get it; don’t you trouble your head about it. You ain’t the sort or the build to get it. Men of your temperament never do ketch yellow fever—it don’t affect ’em. No, no; it ain’t that, you take my word for it.’
Marian gently hinted at unseaworthiness; but at this the good captain laughed quite unceremoniously. ‘Go down!’ he cried—‘go down, indeed! I’d like to see the hurricane that’d send the Severn spinning to the bottom. No, no; we may get hurricanes, of course—though this isn’t the month for them. The rhyme says: “June—too soon; July—stand by; Au-gust—you must; September—remember; October—all over.” Still, in the course of nature we’re likely enough to have some ugly weather—a capful of wind or so, I mean—nothing to speak of, for a ship of her tonnage. But I’ll bet you a bottle of champagne the hurricane’s not alive that’ll ever send the Severn to the bottom, and I’ll pay it you (if I lose) at the first port the lifeboat puts into after the accident.—Dynamite! clockwork! that’s all gammon, my dear ma’am, that is! The ship’s as good a ship as ever sailed the Bay o’ Biscay, and there’s nothing aboard her more explosive than the bottle of champagne I hope you’ll drink this evening for dinner.’
‘Then we can’t be put out?’ Nora asked, with her most beseeching smile.
‘My dear lady, not if I knew you were the Queen of England. Once we’re off, we’re off in earnest, and nothing on earth can ever stop us till we get safely across to St Thomas—the hand of God, the perils of the sea, and the Queen’s enemies alone excepted,’ the captain added, quoting with a smile the stereotyped formula of the bills of lading.
‘What do you think the telegram means, then?’ Nora asked again, a little relieved by this confident assurance.
The captain once more hummed and hawed, and bit his nails, and looked very awkward. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, after a minute’s internal debate, ‘perhaps—perhaps the niggers over yonder may be getting troublesome, you know; and your family may think it an inopportune time for you or Mr and Mrs Hawthorn to visit the colony.—All right, Jones, I’m coming in a minute.—You must excuse me, ladies. In sight of land, a cap’n ought always to be at his post on the bridge. See you at dinner.—Good-morning, good-morning.’
‘It seems to me, Edward,’ Marian said, as he retreated opportunely, ‘the captain knows a good deal more about it than he wants to tell us. He was trying to hide something from us; I’m quite sure he was.—Aren’t you, Nora? I do hope there’s nothing wrong with the steamer or the machinery!’
‘I didn’t notice anything peculiar about him myself,’ Edward answered, with a little hesitation. ‘However, it’s certainly very singular. But as we’ve got to go on, we may as well go on as confidently as possible, and think as little as we can about it. The mystery will all be cleared up as soon as we get across to Trinidad.’
‘If we ever get there!’ Nora said, half-jesting, and half in earnest.
As she spoke, Dr Whitaker the mulatto passed close by, pacing up and down the quarter-deck for exercise, to get his sea-legs; and as he passed her, he turned his eyes once more mutely upon her with that rapid, timid, quickly shifting glance, the exact opposite of a stare, which yet speaks more certainly than anything else can do an instinctive admiration. Nora’s face flushed again, at least as much with annoyance as with self-consciousness. ‘That horrid man!’ she cried petulantly, with a little angry dash of her hand, almost before he was well out of earshot. ‘How on earth can he have the impertinence to go and look at me in that way, I wonder!’
‘Oh, don’t, dear!’ Marian whispered, genuinely alarmed lest the mulatto should overhear her. ‘You oughtn’t to speak like that, you know. Of course one feels at once a sort of natural shrinking from black people—one can’t help that, I know—it seems to be innate in one. But one oughtn’t to let them see it themselves at any rate. Respect their feelings, Nora, do, dear, for my sake, I beg of you.’
‘Oh, it’s all very well for you, Marian,’ Nora answered, quite aloud, and strumming on the deck with her parasol; ‘but for my part, you know, if there’s anything on earth that I can’t endure, it’s a brown man.’