Marcella found herself drifting like the rest. A letter to Dr. Angus she had begun to write the day after Naples asking him to explain the cause, treatment and cure of drunkenness, still awaited completion. She sat beside Louis's empty chair, physically too inert from want of strenuous exercise, and mentally too troubled to get a grip on anything. Naples had shown her that Louis had not come into her life merely as a shipboard acquaintance to be forgotten and dropped when they reached Sydney, as she would forget and drop Mrs. Hetherington, the schoolmaster and Biddy. His talk of the coincidence of his coming by the Oriana at all had made a deep dint on her Keltic imagination; his appeal to her for help had squared beautifully with her youthful dreams of Deliverance; the fact that he was the first young man who had ever talked to her probably had more than anything else to do with her preoccupation, though she did not realize it.
At Port Said she and Jimmy spent a stifling morning ashore amid the dust and smells of the native quarter. Turning a corner in the bazaar suddenly they heard Louis's voice joined with the red-haired man's in a futile song they sang night and day: it was a song about a man who went to mow a meadow; the second verse was about two men; the third about three and so on, as long as the singer's voice lasted out. It was the red-haired man's boast that he had once kept up to five hundred. As Marcella turned the corner she saw them sitting under some palm trees outside a little cafe, bottles and glasses before them. Louis, who looked dirty and unkempt, was facing her. He broke off and darted towards her.
"I wan' my money," he started.
"You're not going to have it—even if you try to get it with a sledge hammer, as you said you might," she said, white lipped.
"You—you—you're keeping it for yourself!"
"Don't be such a fool, Louis. You know why I'm keeping it. If only you'd stop drinking for a day or two your mind would come clear and you'd talk to me."
"Gi' m' my money, I tell you! Thas' why you hooked on to me, at first. You knew I was a gentleman! You guessed I'd plenty of money! Thas' what you want of me—you know the Pater's a well-known publisher, an' you think you'll do a good thing for yourself."
Marcella had a hard fight then; something told her that this was not Louis speaking. She remembered that he had told her that drinking was an illness. When Mrs. Mactavish had fever she remembered how the people in the village had talked of the cruel things she had said to Mr. Mactavish and her sister, and it came to Marcella that Louis was no more to be blamed than she. But her native temper made her quiver to take him and shake some sense in him, whether he were ill or not. It was in a strained, quiet voice that she said:
"I'm not going to talk any more about it. You'll get it when you say good-bye to me in Sydney," and so she turned away.
Just as the Oriana sailed, about six o'clock she saw him come aboard alone. His face was swollen, his eye blackened by a bruise; his collar was splashed with blood and his white drill suit very dirty and crumpled. She had seen Ole Fred carried on board some time ago by sympathetic, rather maudlin friends. She guessed that war had flamed up between the incongruous allies. Mrs. Hetherington, rather breathlessly, confirmed her suspicion.