Guided by a cabin-boy to Hugh's room, Ramsey found Julian confronting his father, "California," and the Gilmores. Hugh had led them there for privacy and stood close at one side. Julian seemed to be suffering a shock scarcely less than his brother's though it made a wholly different outward show. His face wore an appalled look, his voice was below its accustomed pitch, and his words, words which could not have been premeditated, seemed studiously fit and precise.
"Fortunately," he had been saying before Ramsey appeared, "he never"—meaning his brother—"goes into the country without his drugs and instruments—we have them with us yet—and he could tell me what to do and I did it, or he would have died right there in the swamp."
"But you don't say how the accursed thing happened," said Gideon as Ramsey entered hardly aware that she was pausing at Hugh's side. The brother turned and stared on the two.
"Come," said Gideon, "never mind that. How did it happen?"
"It happened, sir, through my own incredible carelessness and by my own hand. Don't say a word! I would to God I had been the victim and had fallen dead in my tracks. If I had killed him I would have put the other load into my brain."
"Oh, if!" solemnly sneered the incredulous father. While he did so Julian, the profoundness of whose mental torture his father poorly saw, received from Ramsey his brother's summons and with her was turning away. He stopped and flashed back a look of agonized resentment, but Gideon met it with a beetling frown and neither gaze fell until Ramsey stepped between, facing the giant, and she and the brother backed away and were gone.
They sought the passenger deck. Between anguish for Lucian's calamity and anguish for his father's contumely there poured from Julian's lips in hectoring questions to Ramsey a further anguish of chagrin for the seeming triumph of Hugh's love. Two or three challenges she parried and while in a single utterance he launched out as many more they encountered at a wheel-house stair their mother and old Joy. He cut short all inquiries with a proffer to return to them and Ramsey post-haste and give a full account of the disaster.
Meantime down in the sick-room Lucian said to Phyllis, when they had been a few minutes alone:
"And now give me my medicine."
"Yes, sir; where is it?"