CHAPTER VI
THE SECOND VISITOR
McKinnon was oppressed by the thought that the hour was late and his body bone-tired. But he did not close communication with the Royal Mail operator who had "picked him up" through the fog until he had been duly warned of heavy weather southeast of Hatteras. Through the night came also the news that one of the Royal Mail passengers, an American consul from Aregua, had broken his thigh-bone against a bulkhead, and the Laminian was asked to relay the news to New York. This meant a call for ambulance and doctors to be at the landing-wharf, together with an order to have a hospital-room made ready.
So the key was kept busy again while the beneficent resources of science were being marshalled so many miles away. The Laminian's operator had bidden his far-off fellow worker a sleepy "good-night," and was still stooping absently over his tuning-box—which had not adapted itself to the thick-weather work—when a knock sounded on his cabin door.
"Come in!" he said, lifting off his earphones with a little sigh of mingled weariness and resignation. He suspected that his undisclosed caller was a junior officer, much given to garrulity. He began to dread the thought of being kept out of bed for another hour or two.
The door opened slowly and the look of frank annoyance as slowly faded from the operator's face, for standing there, confronting him, blinking in the strong glare of his electrics, was a young woman.
Her skirts, gathered up in one hand, and held high from the wet deck, showed in a sweeping cascade of white against the gloom behind them. On her head was a blue seagoing cap, swathed in a long, cream-coloured motor-veil. Behind her stood a stewardess, fat and untidy, carrying a cloak, with the outward and studious solicitude of a servile nature exalted by the consciousness of having been overtipped. She would have made an ideal figure, the operator felt, for the nurse of the Capulets.
McKinnon put down his 'phone and rose from his seat, still peering at the figure nearer him, the woman in the doorway. He looked at her closely, perhaps too closely, for he had not imagined any such woman aboard the Laminian. He noticed that she was wearing a gown of dark-blue pilot-cloth, and that she was younger than he had at first supposed. One of her hands had been thrown out to the door-jamb to steady her against the roll and pitch of the deck. The clear oval of her face—and it seemed more the mature and thoughtful face of a woman than the timid and hesitating face of a girl—was shadowed and softened by a crowning mass of brown hair. Her teeth, as she ventured her sober yet oddly conciliating smile, impressed him as being very white and regular, vaguely hinting at a bodily strength which the softness of her eyes, at a first glance, seemed to contradict. Yet these deep-lashed eyes were alert and alive with the fires of intelligence, and set wide apart under the low and thoughtful brow. They carried an inalienable sense of wisdom in their almost austere steadiness of outlook, McKinnon felt, as the woman still stood in the doorway, puckering her face a little at the strong light. Yet what most impressed him was the sense of ebullient vigour, of intrepid and Aprilian vitality, which brooded about her. She was by no means Amazonian in stature—she was even smaller than he had at first suspected—but she gave him the impression of being youthfully and buoyantly full-blooded.
Then she stepped boldly in across the high door-sill and held out a tinted form-pad sheet to the operator. The solicitously purring stewardess, at a gesture from her benefactor, had already disappeared.
"You are still sending, are you not?" asked the young woman, stepping still nearer the operating-table.
Her voice betrayed no trace of foreign origin, as McKinnon had at first expected it might. The speech was that of a well-groomed New York girl, the type of girl that McKinnon had so often noted about the Fifth Avenue shops and the theatre lobbies. The voice was the New York voice, yet with a difference. It was the slightest and thinnest substratum of accent, of modulation, that made up this difference. Yet in doing so it imparted to her words a mild and bewitching gentleness of tone that seemed to hint at some indefinably exotic influence of education or environment. It seemed to impart to her the crisp piquancy of the Parisian, persistently yet mysteriously accounting for her birdlike alertness of poise and movement, for some continuous suggestion of schoolgirl youthfulness that belied her actual years. It seemed to convert what he had at first accepted as audacity into fortitude touched with discretion.
"Then you are sending," she said, as though in answer to her own question.
"I'm sorry," said McKinnon, backing away from the chair that she might take it if she chose. "I'm sorry, but I've just stopped for the night."
For the first time he was conscious of the fact that he had been at work in his shirt-sleeves, and that these sleeves were wofully soiled. He took down his coat and struggled into it. The young woman noticed the movement gratefully and sank into the chair he had abandoned for her.
"But can you not get somebody?" she asked. There was no note of pleading, in her voice, but the mute appeal of her eyes as they rested on his made him suddenly change his mind.
"I've been having trouble with that tuner of mine," he explained. "It's rather hard for us to pick up anything on a thick night like this, you know. But I'll try."
She bent a little to one side as he leaned over the table and threw down the switch-lever. They were side by side, almost touching each other.
"Why is it hard?" she asked.
"It's not easy to explain without being technical, but wireless works 'heavy' in damp weather. You may have noticed it with telephones, even, on rainy days."
"Yes, I have," she said with a preoccupied nod, turning her gaze from the switch-lever to McKinnon's face.
He caught the key in his fingers and the blue spark once more leaped and exploded across the spark-gap. The girl watched him with intent eyes and slightly parted lips as he fitted the "set" to his head and listened with the 'phones pressed against his ears.
McKinnon was keenly conscious of her presence there so close beside him. There was something perversely and insidiously exhilarating in it. It made him forget the hour and the fact that he was bone-tired. The orderlylike stewardess fluttering about, he supposed, somewhere beyond the closed door, alone took the romance out of a visit so deliberately secret. He turned to his key again, and again called through the night. Then he adjusted his phones and listened. He finally put down his "set," with a shake of the head.
"I'm afraid we'll have to wait until morning," he said.
"I'm sorry," she answered, with her studious eyes on the dancing-girl lithograph above the faded wall-map.
"If you'll leave the message, I'll file it," McKinnon explained, to hide his resentment at the half-derisive touch that had crept into her glance.
The woman handed him the message-form, with her intent eyes now on his.
"Must I pay now?" she asked.
"It will be charged against your stateroom; the purser will collect it before you land," explained the operator as he jabbed the message on his send-hook with a businesslike sweep of the hand.
"But you will see that it's sent?" she asked as she rose to her feet.
"It will be off before you're up," McKinnon answered, watching her as she drew the heavy folds of her veil close down over her face. She looked back, at the door, with a timidly audacious nod of the head. The next moment the door closed and she was gone.
McKinnon, still conscious of the subtle fragrance that filled the room, swung about to his table. He paused only a second to wonder a little at this faint but persistent perfume that seemed to have charged and changed the very atmosphere about him. Then he crossed the cabin and reached up and ripped a brightly coloured lithograph from the wall, bisecting the terpsichorean figure with one impatient tear of the paper.
He stood in the middle of the room for a moment or two without moving. Then he crossed to his table, reached out to the send-hook, and quickly unspeared the message.
He looked at it for several moments. Then he passed his hands over his tired eyes and reread the words. They were addressed to Enrique Luis Carbo, Locombian Consulate, New Orleans, and they said:
Am on board Laminian, bound from New York to Puerto Locombia. Advise necessary quarters. Alicia Boynton.
McKinnon was still peering down at the message in his hand when he was startled by the sound of someone at his door. Even before he could restore the message to the hook his door was opened and as quickly closed again.
It was the girl who had just left him. He noticed that she held one hand on her breast and that she was panting. She leaned against the jamb for a minute or two, as though weak from fright.
"What is it?" the operator asked.
"Oh, it's nothing," she faltered, struggling bravely enough to regain her composure. Her answer was not altogether convincing.
"What has happened?" persisted the startled operator.
She moved away from the door, in a listening attitude.
"It was a man," she tried to explain, inadequately. "He frightened me."
"But what man?"
"A stranger—somebody outside."
"You mean that he dared to speak to you?"
There was a moment's silence.
"No," she answered in her low voice. "But it was the shock of seeing him so so unexpectedly."
McKinnon stepped across the cabin and stood near her. His efforts to catch some clearer glimpse of the veiled face were fruitless. She reminded him of a ruffled bird.
"Won't you sit down until you feel better?"
"No, no! I must go! It's so late! I must go!"
But she still hesitated.
"Shall I take you to your cabin?" he ventured.
She showed actual alarm at this.
"Oh, no; that is out of the question. But if you will turn down your lights until I have slipped away"
He snapped out the electrics. He could hear her in the darkness quietly opening the door. She stood there looking out for several moments. "Good-night," she whispered gratefully as she slipped across the deck and was gone.
McKinnon stood looking after her, deep in thought