‘Or else that there’s dynamite on board,’ Nora put in; ‘or a clockwork thing like the one somebody was going to blow up that steamer with at Hamburg, once, you remember! Oh, my dear, the bare idea of it makes me quite shudder! Fancy being blown out of your berth, at dead of night, into the nasty cold stormy water, and having a shark bite you in two across the waist before you were really well awake, and had begun properly to realise the situation!’
‘Not very likely, either of them,’ Edward said. ‘This is a new ship, one of the very best on the line, and perfectly safe, except of course in a hurricane, when anything on earth is liable to go down; so that can’t possibly be Mr Dupuy’s objection to the Severn.—And as to the clockwork, you know, Nora, the people who put those things on board steamers, if there are any, don’t telegraph out to give warning beforehand to the friends of passengers on the other side of the Atlantic. No; for my part, I can’t at all understand it. It’s a perfect mystery to me, and I give it up entirely.’
‘Well, what do you mean to do, dear?’ Marian asked anxiously. ‘Go back at once, or go on in spite of it?’
‘I don’t think there’s any choice left us now, darling. The ship’s fairly under weigh, you see; and nothing on earth would induce them to stop her, once she’s started, till we get to Trinidad, or at least to St Thomas.’
‘You don’t mean to say, Mr Hawthorn,’ Nora cried piteously, ‘they’ll carry us on now to the end of the journey, whether we want to stop or whether we don’t?’
‘Yes, I do, Miss Dupuy. They will, most certainly. I suspect they’ve got no voice themselves in the matter. A mail-steamer is under contract to sail from a given port on a given day, and not to stop for anything on earth, except fire or stress of weather, till she lands the mails safely on the other side, according to agreement.’
‘Well, that’s a blessing anyhow!’ Nora said resignedly; ‘because, if so, it saves us the trouble of thinking anything more about the matter; and papa can’t be angry with me for having sailed, if the captain refuses to send us back, now we’ve once fairly started. Indeed, for my part, I’m very glad of it, to tell you the truth, because it would have been such a horrid nuisance to have to go on shore again and unpack all one’s things just for a fortnight, after all the fuss and hurry we’ve had already about getting them finished. What a pity the bothering old telegrams came at all to keep us in suspense the whole way over!’
‘But suppose there is some dynamite on board,’ Marian suggested timidly. ‘Don’t you think, Edward, you’d better go and ask the captain?’
‘I’ll go and ask the captain, by all means, if that’s any relief to you,’ Edward answered; ‘but I don’t think it likely he can throw any particular light of his own upon the reason of the telegrams.’
The captain, being shortly found on the bridge, came down at his leisure and inspected the messages; hummed and hawed a little dubiously; smiled to himself with much good-humour; said it was a confoundedly odd coincidence; and looked somehow as though he saw the meaning of the two telegrams at once, but wasn’t anxious to impart his knowledge to any inquiring third party. ‘Yellow fever!’ he said, shrugging his shoulders sailor-wise, when Edward mentioned Nora’s first suggestion. ‘No, no; don’t you believe it. ’Tain’t yellow fever. Why, nobody who lives in the West Indies ever thinks anything of that, bless you. Besides, you wouldn’t get it; don’t you trouble your head about it. You ain’t the sort or the build to get it. Men of your temperament never do ketch yellow fever—it don’t affect ’em. No, no; it ain’t that, you take my word for it.’