CHAPTER XXVIII
Napier was not yet out of the hospital when the cable came, telling the date of Julian's sailing from New York and that Nan was returning by the same ship.
Nine days after, Napier sat in his sister's London house, raging feverishly at his slow convalescence, which wasn't in reality slow at all. To him, there, caught, as he said, "by the foot, like a rabbit in a trap," came the awful news—they still cried these things in streets—of the torpedoing of the Leyden.
He sent his man Day to Liverpool that evening to give help or, at the worst, to send back instant news. The knowledge that Sir James and Lady Grant had taken the first train on the same errand was a thought to lean on.
Yet those next days of waiting! They were followed by the news, wirelessed from the SS. Clonmel, which told of falling in with a handful of Leyden survivors among a boatful of dead. "Identities not established," it announced. That meant people too injured or too delirious to tell their names; people rescued too late, people dying.
Who could sit and wait in London? Not Napier. Within two hours of a stormy interview with his surgeon Napier was on his way.
Leaning on his crutches, he stood in the crowd on the Liverpool wharf. Among the faces all about him, fear-darkened, hope-lit, tear-stained, or merely curious, one of them caught Napier's eye for its look of detachment. Or was it for something familiar? The blue eyes crossed his with no flicker of recognition. But when Napier looked round again, the man was withdrawing from the line of vision, and to do that was no easy matter in the crush. Was it Ernst Pforzheim, with his mustache shaved off? Napier had decided against so far-fetched an assumption before the incident was forgotten in the wild cheering that broke from the crowd, and which rose again and again, as the Clonmel steamed up the Mersey with its tragic remnant.
There was no glimpse of Julian among those ravaged faces, and no use, Napier told himself, no earthly use, to look for that other. Yet all the forces of body and of soul met in the concentration of his scrutiny from end to end of the slowing ship.
No, she wasn't there. Napier's right hand tightened on the bar of his crutch. He leaned an instant against the shoulder of his servant, feeling the dreaded onset of that dizzy sickness which comes back upon men who have had a touch of gas. Still, he was master enough of himself to notice that the captain moved a little as he put up his hand in recognition of some one on the wharf. Then Napier saw her—or was it Nan?