CHAPTER VIII
ALTHOUGH Vi was in her second medical year when the kaiser interrupted her studies, and the campaign had afforded her some further practical knowledge in gas, wound, and shell-shock cases, yet she was hardly qualified to make a diagnosis on a mystery that might well have puzzled a specialist; and moreover she had learned by precept and practise not to attempt such a hazardous performance.
“Can't make out what it could have been, uncle,” was her verdict. “Seems, as I said, to be a case of poison by some suffocating agent. But that bite puzzles me. I can't discover any similar abrasions on any of the other bodies.”
“Well, dear, perhaps we never will. The sea holds many mysteries that will never be solved by man. And anyway we've got to look after the living.”
“That's true, but it worries me. What's become of Mr. Selwyn?”
“Nobody appears to have seen him. Chi Loo says that he followed us down and that there was nobody there.”
“Seems queer,” commented Vi. “He can't have got drunk in such a short time even if he hadn't had his normal amount of food yesterday; and if he has, where could he have gone?”
On deck Carnell met them.
“The donkeyman seems to know enough to act as engineer, sir,” he reported, “so I've divided the other men into watches of six to act as stokers, and you and I, sir, I thought to take the wheel. We'll be able to keep one boiler going.”
“Very good, Mr. Carnell,” assented the captain.
“But, uncle,” exclaimed Vi, “I know enough to keep the ship on the point you tell me unless there's a storm or something, and that would free Mr. Carnell, wouldn't it?”
“Yes, dear, but”
“But nothing! I can do it easily.”
“Well,” demurred the captain, “perhaps you might, but anyway a ship may pick us up.”
“But you don't want one,” expostulated Vi, looking at Carnell and recollecting both their stories. “This ship's a valuable salvage, isn't she?”
“Oh, yes; she certainly is,” admitted Captain Kelvett. “But, Vi, we don't want a tow. We would merely borrow enough men to stoke her properly.”
“Oh, well, then I hope we do!” exclaimed Vi. “Now, Mr. Carnell, please sign me as an A.B. or whatever you call it.”
“I don't see why she shouldn't,” concurred the captain.
“Good !” exclaimed Vi exasperatedly. “Won't you permit a woman to have the intelligence of an ordinary sailor? Is it so terribly difficult to twiddle a wheel this way and that and see that the ship's bow keeps on the compass-point?”
“Miss Kelvett's perfectly right, sir,” said Carnell.
“H'm, I suppose so,” assented the conservative old man. “All right, Mr. Carnell. Get steam on as soon as we can—but we'd better do this disagreeable job first, I think. I'll try to find a prayer-book in the late captain's cabin. Oh, by the way, have you seen Mr. Selwyn?”
“Mr. Selwyn? He went below with you, sir, when we came on board.”
“Haven't seen him since?”
“No, sir.”
“ queer,” murmured Captain Kelvett.
“Perhaps he met Chips, sir, and has gone exploring the ship.”
“Mebbe. Mebbe.”
Chi Loo proved his Oriental appreciation of the vital truths of life by providing a most comfortable breakfast in the chartroom. For the men occupied in preparing the dead he also set out an ample meal from the stores of the Monsoon. Afterward the captain, standing bareheaded by the gangway platform, where a plank had been suitably-arranged, read the burial service and in solemn order the dead splashed into their ocean grave.
Then, each expressing a human emotion by a sigh of relief which even the war had not removed from the heart of man, the crew divided up and the first watch descended into the stoke-hole with the donkeyman to serve as amateur stokers. As the uncle and niece waited on the upper bridge for the first revolution of the propeller, scanning the tumbling infinity of water, the carpenter appeared to report.
“HAVE you got Mr. Selwyn with you, Chips?” inquired the captain.
“Mr. Selwyn, sir? No, sir. Ain't seen him.”
Uncle and niece looked at each other.
“Very queer,” commented the captain. “Well, go on, Chips.”
“Nothing to report, sir. Everything seems O.K. Ain't a soul aboard her, sir, nor any more bodies. No. 4 boat has been swung out on the davits and abandoned. Seems like they changed their minds.”
“All right, Chips. Better get some food from the Chinaman.”
“Can't make out what on earth can have happened to Selwyn,” remarked the captain later as they waited. “He can't possibly have fallen overboard.”
“Surely he could look after himself,” suggested Vi.
“H'm. Awkward to explain if he doesn't turn up, dear.”
Vi glanced at her uncle.
“Owner's son, eh? What does that matter now? This boat ought to put you beyond the favors of Selwyn & Company, oughtn't it, uncle?”
“Eh? What's that? Well, yes; I suppose so. Underwriters'll be thundering glad to see her again, I'll warrant. Yes, that's right, Vi; but still—I lost the Hesperus. Pity.”
“But it was not your fault.”
She glanced at her uncle.
“Good Heavens, uncle! I'm far more practical than you are! Don't worry about Selwyn. He'll turn up. That sort always does.”
Although a gurgle was heard in the steering-gear pipe, fully two more hours passed before the one boiler raised sufficient power to move the propeller, which at last began with many grunts and sighs to revolve very slowly. When the Monsoon had got sufficient way upon her to answer the helm the captain put her on her course and gave Vi practical lessons in steering, which, as she had inferred, required very little natural intelligence—at any rate in comparatively calm weather.
After the usual little scrap between uncle and niece she had her way and he retired to the adjacent chartroom to pretend to take a nap, on the understanding that Vi gave up the wheel at eight bells in the evening, leaving the Old Man to take the wheel during the night.
So it was that from midday to evening the Monsoon lumped and waddled along complainingly—every revolution seemed the last—making possibly five knots per hour with the wind on her quarter. Although Vi used the binoculars frequently never a sign of a ship, nor even the smoke of a steamer, stained the clear horizon.
Several times to Vi's annoyance Carnell, black with dust and sweat, ran up to the bridge “to get some air,” he said; and once Chi Loo appeared bearing a cup of tea and without comment held out in the other yellow palm a small packet which caused Vi literally to yelp with delight.
“Oh, you darling!” she exclaimed, abandoning the wheel to tear open the cigarets. “Where on earth did you get 'em?”
“Plenty, plenty,” asserted Chi Loo reassuringly and departed.
So it was that when the captain came on the bridge at what should have been eight bells in the afternoon he found his woman officer calmly breaking all the rules of any ship by smoking on duty.
“Nothing to report, uncle. Had a good sleep?”
“Yes; very good nap,” replied the Old Man mendaciously. “But I'm very worried about Selwyn.”
“Yes; seems very queer,” Vi admitted, rather conscious of a sense of relief that he was not there to annoy her. “Perhaps he's shut himself up in some cabin with the champagne. You know what he is.”
“H'm. Don't think so.”
The captain paced several times up and down the bridge and after examining the horizon came back to the wheel-house.
“Vi, are you sure that those people were poisoned or killed—that they did not die of some disease? Tropical, you know?”
“Oh!”
“Couldn't have been beriberi, could it? I know that the symptoms didn't tally, but—might be something else,”
“I know very little about tropical medicine,” admitted Vi, “but even if it were I can't see how they would all have been struck at exactly the same moment. And besides they must have shown some symptoms. Why, obviously, had they been sick the wouldn't have been about to eat a hearty breakfast, would they?”
“Hardly. But what was the object of the murderers? Lascars they must have been, but what did they get off with?”
“She wouldn't have been bringing bullion from the East, would she? Or perhaps it's something to do with some jewels that one, or some, of the passengers had? Might be something to do with some sacred jewel, Hindu or something, mightn't it? Such things have happened.”
“H'm. In books, Vi. Never known such a romantic thing in my time.”
“Oh, that doesn't prove anything, uncle,” she said, and added politely, “except our want of imagination.”
“Well, whatever it was,” commented her uncle uneasily, “that doesn't explain what has become of Selwyn.”
EVENING closed down swiftly in a glory of misty colors. Carnell insisted upon taking the wheel while uncle and niece dined. Afterward the captain, to please Vi, let her have the wheel until four bells, pretending to take another rest. When she retired to the chartroom, which was provided with a spare bunk, she found that the inimitable Chi Loo had provided a gorgeous silk dressing-gown which evidently he had found in one of the cabins.
“He's a perfect darling, that Chinaman!” murmured Vi; and then the recollection that the owner had passed out brought a momentary thrill, which was however as swiftly erased by experience. Yet as soon as she had placed the wrap around her shoulders the suggestion made by her uncle that the deaths possibly resulted from a tropical disease caused her hastily to throw it off.
“One never knows,” she muttered. “Killing and death I can stand the thought of, but disease—ugh! Queer; disease always seems more terrible than just death.”
She blew out the candle, which she was compelled to use—for naturally they could not spare any of the precious steam for the dynamo—and turned in. But the reaction from the excitement in the small boat and the tragedy on the steamer made her sleepless. She listened to the steady sigh of the breeze and the sea, which emphasized the unrhythmic thump and pause of the engines struggling gamely at each revolution; listened also to the occasional mutter of the steam steering-gear above her, and she found leisure to remark the unreality of things. The days upon the Hesperus—monotonous days which she had resented because she had been persecuted by the missing Selwyn. and the “sentimental” Carnell, as she had dubbed him—seemed to belong to another existence.
Then had come the loss of the Hesperus. The awful possibility of days in an open boat with little food and perhaps no water had completely obliterated the dislike for, and irritation caused by, Selwyn, even so much that she had not even resented the fact that he had held her while she slept.
Yet now, once comparative safety seemed assured, the old feelings of exasperation had revived; and toward Carnell also had returned the sense of embarrassment and resentment for spoiling the use, as it were, of her only possible companion.
After all, she mused, the chance of the accident seemed to carry with it a silver if not golden future for both her uncle, who certainly should be able to retire or purchase a shore job, and for Carnell to buy a command.
“Dear soul!” She pondered amusedly. “Perfectly sweet of him to give up drink for my sake! But why on earth must he make a nuisance of himself at the same time? In future,” she decided, staring at the circle of misty stars through the open port, “I'll have to suppress that infernal maternal instinct—at all events with nice men. He is rather nice but— O-oh!”
Against her will a muffled scream was squeezed from her lips and her heart seemed to cease to beat as she stared in a paralyzed fashion at some mass which had blocked out the stars. The next instant Vi had gained some control over herself, but as she leaped for the deck the thing disappeared.
“That fool Selwyn,” she thought as she made for the door, “trying to be funny!”
But neither on the deck nor behind the chartroom was there any living creature. The shoulders of her uncle on the upper bridge were silhouetted round the corner of the wheel-house against the sky. For a moment she stopped to listen. Came only the heave and the thump of the sick engines and the sough of the wind and sea.
That she had seen something she was positive. She had not been asleep. Controlling the panic that arose within her, she searched swiftly and methodically all over the deck, even examining the fastening of the canvas cover on the one boat which remained on the bridge-deck. No sign of any movement or of any being could she discover. She mounted the bridge and asked her uncle whether he had seen anybody.
“Seen what? Where? Why, no. Did you mean Mr. Carnell?”
Vi related what she was positive she had seen.
“You must have dozed. and been dreaming, dear,” said he. “Or perhaps one of the men came up to shift a ventilator and looked in the chartroom, although I can't imagine what he— My God! What's that?”
Muffled yet distinct, floated a sound which surely developed into a voice singing, even the words of which were distinct:
““… The winds and the waves of the turbulent se-ea!
Or demons or devils or whatever they be-e-e-!
They al-l shall sweetly obey my will!
Peace, be still! Peace, be still!”
“It's—it's a Moody and Sankey hymn!” snickered Vi.