“A destroyer’s come in sight,” he said. “It’s fighting one of the Huns. Listen!” He halted for an instant to let her hear the distant sound of guns.
“I hear it,” she said.
“We hit that U-boat, we think, so that it can’t submerge and has to keep fighting on the surface. The other’s submerged.”
He brought her down a stairway into some large compartment, evidently below the water line; it seemed to have been a dining saloon for the steerage when the Ribot had been regularly in the passenger trade; or perhaps it had been crews’ quarters. Now it was a hospital; cots had been laid out and those who had been injured by the shell fire had been brought there. They were a great many, it seemed to Ruth—thirty or forty. She had never seen so many suffering people, so many bandages, so much blood before. The ship’s surgeon was moving among them; women were there—quiet, calm, competent women. One had direction of the others and Ruth gazed at her for moments before she recognized Agnes Ertyle with her beautiful, sweet eyes become maturely stern and, at the same time, marvelously compassionate. If Ruth were a man, she must love that girl, she thought; love her now as never before. Ruth looked up to Gerry Hull to see his face when he spoke to Lady Agnes; he evidently witnessed no new marvel in her. He had seen her like this before, undoubtedly; that was why he loved her.
“I’m not hurt,” Ruth said, ashamed of herself for having been brought to this place among so many who had been terribly wounded. “I’ve just been in the water; I’m wet, that’s all.” She moved to release herself from Gerry’s hold.
“She went into the sea to save a man,” Gerry told Agnes Ertyle.
“Let me go to the cabin,” Ruth said, as she stood a little dizzily.
Lady Agnes grasped her hand. “If your cabin’s been wrecked, go to mine—number twenty-six—and take any of my things,” she invited. “Get dry and warm at once.”
She motioned to someone who gave Ruth hot, strong tea to drink. Gerry turned with Ruth and led her up the stairs down which he had just carried her; he saw her to the door of her cabin, which had not been wrecked; he saw that a stewardess was there to aid her. Then he went.
The stewardess helped Ruth undress and rubbed her and put on warm and heavy things. Milicent Wetherell came to the cabin; she had escaped uninjured, and she aided also.