"What else can it be? Salvage, in relation to a yacht pounded to pieces on an exposed reef two days ago! I don't think 'nonsense' too strong a term."
"It wouldn't be if every mortal thing had been bangin' on those rocks ever since. But the Stella was partin' amidships afore we were clear of her. She'd slip over into deep water within a few minutes, an' lie there quiet enough. Anyhow, them's my orders."
Raymond might be cantankerous because of his disablement; but Popple had suddenly remembered that Mrs. Carmac had resented the secretary's earlier interference. Raymond, however, helped to smooth over the difficulty.
"Of course I am only expressing an opinion," he said. "I admit it is not worth much. A little while ago I was speaking to Larraidou, the fisherman whom people here call Peridot, you know, and had I known then of your project I should have asked him what he thought of it."
"The sea is one big mystery, an' that's a fact," said Popple, refilling his pipe, and nodding his head to emphasize a bit of sententious philosophy born of experience. "It'll gobble up a ship, an' you'll never find a scrap of timber or a life belt to tell you what's become of her, an' in the next breath it'll show a thing as plain as though it was writ in a book. A friend of mine, skipper of a Hull trawler, missed a deckhand one day, and no one knew what had become of him. That night they shot the trawl in sixty fathom o' water, an' brought up the man's body. That's w'at the sea can do, Sir. Talk of women bein' fickle—they ain't in it with the most changeable thing on this earth."
Raymond poured out a second glass of brandy. "At any rate, you'll not recover a dead body from the Stella's wreckage," he said, with a ghastly grin.
"You never can tell," said Popple.
"But surely, Captain, you don't pretend that the finding of a drowned sailor in a trawl net was other than an accident?"
"That's as may be. S'pose some poor wastrel had been charged with knockin' a matey on the head an' chuckin' him overboard. The doctor's evidence would clear him. Then it 'ud ha been providential."
"I shall refuse to believe that you will retrieve any of the Stella's contents until I see them. Of course I know why Mrs. Carmac is so anxious that the effort should be made. There were thousands of pounds' worth of pearls and diamonds in her jewelcase. One pearl necklace alone cost ten thousand pounds many years ago, and would fetch far more today."