The Stowaway Girl | Page 7

there is no reason why I should not go. I am on board the Andromeda,
and will probably be able to explain matters satisfactorily to Captain
Coke. The vessel is due back at the end of September, I believe, so Mr.
Bulmer will not have long to wait. It is more than likely that Captain
Coke will not know I am aboard until Thursday, and I have arranged
with a friend that this letter shall reach you about the same time. Please
convey my apologies to Mr. Bulmer, and accept my regret for any
anxiety you may have felt owing to my unaccountable absence.
"Your affectionate niece,
"IRIS YORKE."
David narrowly escaped an apoplectic seizure. When he recovered his
senses he looked ten years older. The instinct of self-preservation alone
saved him in his frenzy from blurting forth the tidings of the girl's flight.
Incoherent with fear and passion, he contrived to give orders for his
carriage, and was driven to his office. Thence he dispatched telegrams
to every signaling station in England, Ireland, and Spain, at which by
the remotest possibility the Andromeda might be intercepted. He cabled
to Madeira and Cape Verde, even to Fernando Noronha and
Pernambuco; he sent urgent instructions to the pilotage authorities of
the Bristol Channel, the southwest ports, and Lisbon; and the text of
every message was: "Andromeda must return to Liverpool instantly."
But the wretched man realized that he was doomed. Fate had struck at
him mercilessly. He could only wait in dumb despair, and mutter
prayers too long forgotten, and concoct bogus letters from a cousin's
address in the south of England for the benefit of Dickey Bulmer.

Never was ship more eagerly sought than the Andromeda, yet never
was ship more completely engulfed in the mysterious silence of the
great sea. The days passed, and the weeks, yet nothing was heard of her.
She figured in the "overdue" list at Lloyd's; sharp-eyed underwriters
did "specs" in her; woe-begone women began to haunt the Liverpool
office for news of husbands and sons; the love-lorn Dickey wore Verity
to a shadow of his former self by alternate pleadings and threats; but
the Andromeda remained mute, and the fanciful letters from Iris
became fewer and more fragmentary as David's imagination failed, and
his excuses grew thinner.
And the odd thing was that if David had only known it, he could have
saved himself all this heart-burning and misery by looking through the
dining-room window on that Sunday afternoon when his prospects
seemed to be so rosy. He never thought of that. He cursed every
circumstance and person impartially and fluently, but he omitted from
the Satanic litany the one girlish prank of tree-climbing that led Iris to
spring out of sight amid the sheltering arms of an elm when her uncle
and Captain Coke deemed the summer-house a suitable place for "a
plain talk as man to man."
So David learnt what it meant to wait, and listen, and start expectantly
when postman's knock or telegraph messenger's imperative summons
sounded on door of house or office.
But he waited long in vain. The Andromeda, like her namesake of old,
might have been chained to a rock on some mythical island guarded by
the father of all sea serpents. As for a new Perseus, well--David knew
him not.
CHAPTER II
WHEREIN THE "ANDROMEDA" BEGINS HER VOYAGE
The second officer of the Andromeda was pacing the bridge with the
slow alertness of responsibility. He would walk from port to starboard,
glance forrard and aft, peer at the wide crescent of the starlit sea, stroll
back to port, and again scan ship and horizon. Sometimes he halted in

front of the binnacle lamp to make certain that the man at the wheel
was keeping the course, South 15 West, set by Captain Coke shortly
before midnight. His ears listened mechanically to the steady
pulse-beats of the propeller; his eyes swept the vague plain of the ocean
for the sparkling white diamond that would betoken a mast-head light;
he was watchful and prepared for any unforeseen emergency that might
beset the vessel intrusted to his care. But his mind dwelt on something
far removed from his duties, though, to be sure, every poet who ever
scribbled four lines of verse has found rhyme and reason in comparing
women with stars, and ships, and the sea.
If Philip Hozier was no poet, he was a sailor, and sailors are
notoriously susceptible to the charms of the softer sex. But the only
woman he loved was his mother, the only bride he could look for
during many a year was a mermaid, though these sprites of the deep
waters seem to be frequenting undiscovered haunts since mariners
ceased to woo the wind. For all that, if perforce he was heart-whole,
there