when dorothy fairfax came on deck again the sun was dropping fast toward the horizon. a gusty breeze was blowing and the steamer was pitching slightly in the short, choppy seas that characterize west indian waters. movement had become unpleasant to those inclined to seasickness and this, combined with the comparative lightness of the passenger list, caused the deck of the queen to be nearly deserted.
dorothy was glad of it. she wanted solitude in order to think in peace, and there was seldom solitude for her when young men—or old men, for that matter—were near. they seemed to gravitate naturally to her side.
mrs. renfrew’s words, and especially the paragraph in the new york paper, were troubling her. she could see the[16] words now, published under a san juan date-line:
“miss dorothy fairfax, daughter of the multimillionaire railroader, john fairfax, will sail next week for new york to order her trousseau for her coming marriage with lieutenant loving, u. s. n. mr. fairfax, who is financing the railroad here, will follow in about three weeks.”
that was all; the whole thing taken for granted! evidently the writer had supposed that the engagement had been already announced, or he would either have made some inquiry or—supposing that he was determined to publish—would have “spread” himself on the subject. miss fairfax had been written up enough to know that her engagement would be worth at least a column to the society editors of the new york papers. yes, she concluded, the item must have emanated from some chance correspondent who had picked up a stray bit of gossip.
she had known mr. loving for two years or more, and had liked him. three[17] months before, at the close of the howard trial, she had become convinced that he intended to ask her to marry him, and she had slipped away to join her father in porto rico in order to gain time to think before deciding on her answer. and here she was, returning home, no more resolved than when she had left.
it was odd that her ship should also bear lieutenant howard, of whom mr. loving had been so fond, standing by him all through his trial when everybody else fell away. she had had a glimpse of mr. howard once, and vaguely recalled him, wondering what combination of desperate circumstances could have brought a man like him to the commission of such a crime.
the judge, she remembered, in sentencing him to death had declared that no mercy should be shown to one who, with everything to keep him in the straight path, had deliberately gone wrong.
the soft pad of footsteps on the deck[18] roused her from her musings, and she turned to see the purser drawing near.
“ah! good evening, miss fairfax!” he ventured. “we missed you at tea. feeling the motion a bit? it is a little rough, ain’t it?”
miss fairfax did not like the purser, but she found it difficult to snub any one. therefore she answered the man pleasantly, though not with any especial enthusiasm.
“why! no, mr. sprigg. i don’t consider this rough; i’m rather a good sailor, you know. i simply wasn’t hungry at tea-time.”
mr. sprigg came closer.
“by the way, miss fairfax,” he insinuated. “you know lieutenant howard is on board. if you’d like to have a peep at him, just say the word and i’ll manage. oh!” he added, hastily, as a slight frown marred miss fairfax’s pretty brows, “i know you must be interested in his case. he’s a friend of[19] lieutenant loving, and i read the notice in the paper to-day, you know.”
the look the girl gave him drove the smirk in haste from his face.
“the notice in the paper was entirely without foundation, mr. sprigg,” she declared, coldly. “as for seeing mr. howard, i’m afraid my tastes do not run in that direction. besides, he probably would not like to be stared at. he was a gentleman once, you know.”
she turned impatiently away and looked eastward. then she uttered an exclamation.
“why! whatever’s happened to the water?” she cried.
the question was not surprising. in the last hour the sea had changed. from a smiling playfellow, lightly buffeting the ship, it had grown cold and sullen. the sparkles had died from the waves, giving place to a metallic lustre. long, slow undulations swelled out of the southeast, chasing each other sluggishly up in the wake of the ship.
[20]it did not need a sailor’s eye to tell that something was brewing. miss fairfax shivered slightly and drew her light wrap closer around her.
“makes you feel cold, don’t it?” asked mr. sprigg cheerfully. “lord bless you, that’s nothing to the way you’ll feel before it’s over. funny the weather bureau didn’t give us any storm warnings before we sailed.”
the weather bureau had, but the warnings had been thrown away, unposted, by a sapient native official of san juan, who considered the efforts of the americans to foretell the weather to be immoral.
“will there be any danger?”
“danger? naw! not a bit of it. if you stay below, you won’t even know that there’s been anything doing. even if we run into a hurricane, which ain’t likely, we’ll be just as safe as if we were ashore. the queen don’t need to worry about anything short of an island or a derelict.”
“a derelict?”
[21]“sure. a ship that has been abandoned at sea for some reason or other, but that ain’t been broken up or sunk. derelicts are real terrors, all right.”
“some of ’em float high; they ain’t so bad, because you can usually see ’em in time to dodge, and because they ain’t likely to be solid enough to do you much damage even if you do run into them. but some of ’em float low—just awash—and they’re just— well, they’re mighty bad. they ain’t really ships any more; they’re solid bulks of wood.”
“i suppose they are all destroyed sooner or later?”
the little purser unconsciously struck an attitude. “a good deal later, sometimes,” he qualified. “derelicts have been known to float for three years in the atlantic, and to travel for thousands of miles. generally, however, in the north atlantic, they either break up in a storm within a few months, or else they drift into the sargasso sea and stay there till they sink.”
[22]“the sargasso sea? where is that? i suppose i used to know when i went to school, but i’ve forgotten.”
mr. sprigg waved his hand toward the east and north. “yonder,” he generalized vaguely. “we are on the western edge of it now. see the weed floating in the water there? farther north and east it gets thicker until it collects into a solid mass that stretches five hundred miles in every direction.
“nobody knows just what it looks like in the middle, for nobody has ever been there; or, rather, nobody has ever been there and come back to tell about it. old sailors say that there’s thousands of derelicts collected there.”
“the gulf stream encircles the whole ocean in a mighty whirlpool, you know, and sooner or later everything floating in the north atlantic is caught in it. they may be carried away up to the north pole, but they’re bound to come south again with the icebergs and back into the[23] main stream, and some day they get into the west-wind drift and are carried down the canary current, until the north equatorial current catches them, and sweeps them into the sea over yonder.”
“for four hundred years and more—ever since columbus—derelicts must have been gathering there. millions of them must have sunk, but thousands must have been washed into the center. once there, they must float for a long time. there are storms there, of course, but they’re only wind-storms—there can’t be any waves; the weed is too thick.”
“i guess there are ships still afloat there that were built hundreds of years ago. maybe columbus’s lost caravels are there; maybe people are imprisoned there! gee! but it’s fascinating.”
miss fairfax stared at the little man in amazement. he was the last person she would ever have suspected of imagination or romance; and here he was, with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, declaiming[24] away like one inspired. most men can talk well on some one subject, and this subject was mr. sprigg’s own. for years he had been reading and talking and thinking about it.
miss fairfax rose from her steamer-chair and looked around her, then paused, awestruck. down in the southeast a mass of black clouds darkened the day as they spread. puffs of wind ran before them, each carrying sheets of spray torn from the tops of the waves; one stronger than the rest dashed its burden into miss fairfax’s face with little stinging cuts. the cry of the stewards, “all passengers below!” was not needed to tell her that the deck was rapidly becoming no place for women.
