For a few minutes, they stood looking blankly at one another in mute astonishment, turning over and comparing the two telegrams together with undecided minds; then at last Nora broke the silence. ‘I tell you what it is,’ she said, with an air of profound wisdom; ‘they must have got an epidemic of yellow fever over in Trinidad—they’re always having it, you know, and nobody minds it, unless of course they die of it, and even then I daresay they don’t think much about it. But papa and Mr Hawthorn must be afraid that if we come out now, fresh from England, we may all of us get it.’
Edward looked once more at the telegrams very dubiously. ‘I don’t think that’ll do, Miss Dupuy,’ he said, after re-reading them with a legal scrutiny. ‘You see, your father says: “On no account go on board the Severn.” Evidently, it’s this particular ship he has an objection to; and perhaps my father’s objection may be exactly the same. It’s very singular—very mysterious!’
‘Do you think,’ Marian suggested, ‘there can be anything wrong with the vessel or the machinery? You know, they do say, Edward, that some ship-owners send ships to sea that aren’t at all safe or seaworthy. I read such a dreadful article about it a little while ago in one of the papers. Perhaps they think the Severn may go to the bottom.’
‘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.’
Marian gently hinted at unseaworthiness; but at this the good captain laughed quite unceremoniously. ‘Go down!’ he cried—‘go down, indeed! I’d like to see the hurricane that’d send the Severn spinning to the bottom. No, no; we may get hurricanes, of course—though this isn’t the month for them. The rhyme says: “June—too soon; July—stand by; Au-gust—you must; September—remember; October—all over.” Still, in the course of nature we’re likely enough to have some ugly weather—a capful of wind or so, I mean—nothing to speak of, for a ship of her tonnage. But I’ll bet you a bottle of champagne the hurricane’s not alive that’ll ever send the Severn to the bottom, and I’ll pay it you (if I lose) at the first port the lifeboat puts into after the accident.—Dynamite! clockwork! that’s all gammon, my dear ma’am, that is! The ship’s as good a ship as ever sailed the Bay o’ Biscay, and there’s nothing aboard her more explosive than the bottle of champagne I hope you’ll drink this evening for dinner.’
‘Then we can’t be put out?’ Nora asked, with her most beseeching smile.
‘My dear lady, not if I knew you were the Queen of England. Once we’re off, we’re off in earnest, and nothing on earth can ever stop us till we get safely across to St Thomas—the hand of God, the perils of the sea, and the Queen’s enemies alone excepted,’ the captain added, quoting with a smile the stereotyped formula of the bills of lading.
‘What do you think the telegram means, then?’ Nora asked again, a little relieved by this confident assurance.
The captain once more hummed and hawed, and bit his nails, and looked very awkward. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, after a minute’s internal debate, ‘perhaps—perhaps the niggers over yonder may be getting troublesome, you know; and your family may think it an inopportune time for you or Mr and Mrs Hawthorn to visit the colony.—All right, Jones, I’m coming in a minute.—You must excuse me, ladies. In sight of land, a cap’n ought always to be at his post on the bridge. See you at dinner.—Good-morning, good-morning.’
‘It seems to me, Edward,’ Marian said, as he retreated opportunely, ‘the captain knows a good deal more about it than he wants to tell us. He was trying to hide something from us; I’m quite sure he was.—Aren’t you, Nora? I do hope there’s nothing wrong with the steamer or the machinery!’
‘I didn’t notice anything peculiar about him myself,’ Edward answered, with a little hesitation. ‘However, it’s certainly very singular. But as we’ve got to go on, we may as well go on as confidently as possible, and think as little as we can about it. The mystery will all be cleared up as soon as we get across to Trinidad.’
‘If we ever get there!’ Nora said, half-jesting, and half in earnest.
As she spoke, Dr Whitaker the mulatto passed close by, pacing up and down the quarter-deck for exercise, to get his sea-legs; and as he passed her, he turned his eyes once more mutely upon her with that rapid, timid, quickly shifting glance, the exact opposite of a stare, which yet speaks more certainly than anything else can do an instinctive admiration. Nora’s face flushed again, at least as much with annoyance as with self-consciousness. ‘That horrid man!’ she cried petulantly, with a little angry dash of her hand, almost before he was well out of earshot. ‘How on earth can he have the impertinence to go and look at me in that way, I wonder!’
‘Oh, don’t, dear!’ Marian whispered, genuinely alarmed lest the mulatto should overhear her. ‘You oughtn’t to speak like that, you know. Of course one feels at once a sort of natural shrinking from black people—one can’t help that, I know—it seems to be innate in one. But one oughtn’t to let them see it themselves at any rate. Respect their feelings, Nora, do, dear, for my sake, I beg of you.’
‘Oh, it’s all very well for you, Marian,’ Nora answered, quite aloud, and strumming on the deck with her parasol; ‘but for my part, you know, if there’s anything on earth that I can’t endure, it’s a brown man.’
All the way across to St Thomas, endless speculations as to the meaning of the two mysterious telegrams afforded the three passengers chiefly concerned an unusual fund of conversation and plot-interest for an entire voyage. Still, after a while the subject palled a little; and on the second evening out, in calm and beautiful summer twilight weather, they were all sitting in their own folding-chairs on the after-deck, positively free from any doubts or guesses upon the important question, and solely engaged in making the acquaintance of their fellow-passengers. By-and-by, as the shades began to close in, there was a little sound of persuasive language—as when one asks a young lady to sing—at the stern end of the swiftly moving vessel; and then, in a few minutes, somebody in the dusk took a small violin out of a wooden case and began to play a piece of Spohr’s. The ladies turned around their chairs to face the musician, and listened carelessly as he went through the preliminary scraping and twanging which seems to be inseparable from the very nature of the violin as an instrument. Presently, having tightened the pegs to his own perfect satisfaction, the player began to draw his bow rapidly and surely across the strings with the unerring confidence of a practised performer. In two minutes, the hum of conversation had ceased on deck, and all the little world of the Severn was bending forward its head eagerly to catch the liquid notes that floated with such delicious clearness upon the quiet breathless evening air. Instinctively everybody recognised at once the obvious fact that the man in the stern to whom they were all listening was an accomplished and admirable violin-player.
Just at first, the thing that Marian and Nora noticed most in the stranger’s playing was his extraordinary brilliancy and certainty of execution. He was a perfect master of the technique of his instrument, that was evident. But after a few minutes more, they began to perceive that he was something much more than merely that; he played not only with consummate skill, but also with infinite grace, insight, and tenderness. As they listened, they could feel the man outpouring his whole soul in the exquisite modulations of his passionate music: it was not any cold, well-drilled, mechanical accuracy of touch alone; it was the loving hand of a born musician, wholly in harmony with the master he interpreted, the work he realised, and the strings on which he gave it vocal utterance. As he finished the piece, Edward whispered in a hushed voice to Nora: ‘He plays beautifully.’ And Nora answered, with a sudden burst of womanly enthusiasm: ‘More than beautifully—exquisitely, divinely.’
‘You’ll sing us something, won’t you?’—‘Oh, do sing us something!’—‘Monsieur will not refuse us!’—‘Ah, señor, it is such a great pleasure.’ So a little babel of two or three languages urged at once upon the unknown figure silhouetted dark at the stern of the steamer against the paling sunset; and after a short pause, the unknown figure complied graciously, bowing its acknowledgments to the surrounding company, and burst out into a song in a glorious rich tenor voice, almost the finest Nora and Marian had ever listened to.
‘English!’ Nora whispered in a soft tone, as the first few words fell upon their ears distinctly, uttered without any mouthing in a plain unmistakable native tone. ‘I’m quite surprised at it! I made up my mind, from the intense sort of way he played the violin, that he must be a Spaniard or an Italian, or at least a South American. English people seldom play with all that depth and earnestness and fervour.’
‘Hush, hush!’ Marian answered under her breath. ‘Don’t talk while he’s singing, please, Nora—it’s too delicious.’
They listened till the song was quite finished, and the last echo of that magnificent voice had died away upon the surface of the still, moonlit waters; and then Nora said eagerly to Edward: ‘Oh, do find out who he is, Mr Hawthorn! Do go and get to know him! I want so to be introduced to him! What a glorious singer! and what a splendid violinist! I never in my life heard anything lovelier, even at the opera.’
Edward smiled, and dived at once into the little crowd at the end of the quarter-deck, in search of the unknown and nameless musician. Nora waited impatiently in her seat to see who the mysterious personage could be. In a few seconds, Edward came back again, bringing with him the admired performer. ‘Miss Dupuy was so very anxious to make your acquaintance,’ he said, as he drew the supposed stranger forward, ‘on the strength of your beautiful playing and singing.—You see, Miss Dupuy, it’s a fellow-passenger to whom we’ve already introduced ourselves—Dr Whitaker!’
Nora drew back almost imperceptibly at this sudden revelation. In the dusk and from a little distance, she had not recognised their acquaintance of yesterday. But it was indeed the mulatto doctor. However, now she was fairly trapped; and having thus let herself in for the young man’s society for that particular evening, she had good sense and good feeling enough not to let him see, at least too obtrusively, that she did not desire the pleasure of his further acquaintance. To be sure, she spoke as little and as coldly as she could to him, in such ordinary phrases of polite admiration as she felt were called for under these painful circumstances; but she tried to temper her enthusiasm down to the proper point of chilliness for a clever and well-taught mulatto fiddler.—He had been a ‘marvellous violinist’ in her own mind five minutes before; but as he turned out to be of brown blood, she felt now that ‘clever fiddler’ was quite good enough for the altered occasion.
Dr Whitaker, however, remained in happy unconsciousness of Nora’s sudden change of attitude. He drew over a camp-stool from near the gunwale and seated himself upon it just in front of the little group in their folding ship-chairs. ‘I’m so glad you liked my playing, Miss Dupuy,’ he said quietly, turning towards Nora. ‘Music always sounds at its best on the water in the evening. And that’s such a lovely piece—my pet piece—so much feeling and pathos and delicate melody in it. Not like most of Spohr: a very unusual work for him; he’s so often wanting, you know, in the sense of melody.’
‘You play charmingly,’ Nora answered, in a languid chilly voice. ‘Your song and your playing have given us a great treat, I’m sure, Dr Whitaker.’
‘Where have you studied?’ Marian asked hastily, feeling that Nora was not showing so deep an interest in the subject as was naturally expected of her. ‘Have you taken lessons in Germany or Italy?’
‘A few,’ the mulatto doctor replied with a little sigh, ‘though not so many as I could have wished. My great ambition would have been to study regularly at the Conservatoire. But I never could gratify my wish in that respect, and I learned most of my fiddling by myself at Edinburgh.’
‘You’re an Edinburgh University man, I suppose?’ Edward put in.
‘Yes, an Edinburgh University man. The medical course there, you know, attracts so many men who would like better, in other respects, to go to one of the English universities.—You’re Cambridge yourself, I think, Mr Hawthorn, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Cambridge.’
The mulatto sighed again. ‘A lovely place!’ he said—‘a most delicious place, Cambridge. I spent a charming week there once myself. The calm repose of those grand old avenues behind John’s and Trinity delighted me immensely.—A place to sit in and compose symphonies, Mrs Hawthorn. Nothing that I’ve seen in England so greatly impressed me with the idea of the grand antiquity of the country—the vast historical background of civilisation, century behind century, and generation behind generation—as that beautiful mingled picture of venerable elms, and mouldering architecture, and close-cropped greensward at the backs of the colleges. The very grass had a wonderful look of antique culture. I asked the gardener in one of the courts of Trinity how they ever got such velvety carpets for their smooth quadrangles, and the answer the fellow gave me was itself redolent of the traditions of the place. “We rolls ’em and mows ’em, sir,” he said, “and we mows ’em and rolls ’em, for a thousand years.”’
‘What a pity you couldn’t have stopped there and composed symphonies, as you liked it so much,’ Nora remarked, with hardly concealed sarcasm—‘only then, of course, we shouldn’t have had the pleasure of hearing you play your violin so beautifully on the Severn this evening.’
Dr Whitaker looked up at her quickly with a piercing look. ‘Yes,’ he replied; ‘it is a pity, for I should have dearly loved it. I’m bound up in music, almost; it’s one of my two great passions. But I had more than one reason for feeling that I ought, if possible, to go back to Trinidad. The first is, that I think every West Indian, and especially every man of my colour’—he said it out quite naturally, simply, and unaffectedly, without pausing or hesitating—‘who has been to Europe for his education, owes it to his country to come back again, and do his best in raising its social, intellectual, and artistic level.’
‘I’m very glad to hear you say so,’ Edward replied. ‘I think so myself too, and I’m pleased to find you agree with me in the matter.—And your second reason?’
‘Well, I thought my colour might stand in my way in practice in England—very naturally, I’m not surprised at it; while in Trinidad I might be able to do a great deal of good and find a great many patients amongst my own people.’
‘But I’m afraid they won’t be able to pay you, you know,’ Nora interposed. ‘The poor black people always expect to be doctored for nothing.’
Dr Whitaker turned upon her a puzzled pair of simple, honest, open eyes, whose curious glance of mute inquiry could be easily observed even in the dim moonlight. ‘I don’t think of practising for money,’ he said simply, as if it were the most ordinary statement in the world. ‘My father has happily means enough to enable me to live without the necessity for earning a livelihood. I want to be of some use in my generation, and to help my own people, if possible, to rise a little in the scale of humanity. I shall practise gratuitously among the poorest negroes, and do what I can to raise and better their unhappy condition.’