Part 1 (1/2)
The Wings of the Morning.
by Louis Tracy.
CHAPTER I
THE WRECK OF THE _SIRDAR_
Lady Tozer adjusted her gold-rimmed eye-gla.s.ses with an air of dignified aggressiveness. She had lived too many years in the Far East.
In Hong Kong she was known as the ”Mandarin.” Her powers of merciless inquisition suggested torments long drawn out. The commander of the _Sirdar_, homeward bound from Shanghai, knew that he was about to be stretched on the rack when he took his seat at the saloon table.
”Is it true, captain, that we are running into a typhoon?” demanded her ladys.h.i.+p.
”From whom did you learn that, Lady Tozer?” Captain Ross was wary, though somewhat surprised.
”From Miss Deane. I understood her a moment ago to say that you had told her.”
”I?”
”Didn't you? Some one told me this morning. I couldn't have guessed it, could I?” Miss Iris Deane's large blue eyes surveyed him with innocent indifference to strict accuracy. Incidentally, she had obtained the information from her maid, a nose-tilted coquette who extracted s.h.i.+p's secrets from a youthful quartermaster.
”Well--er--I had forgotten,” explained the tactful sailor.
”Is it true?”
Lady Tozer _was_ unusually abrupt today. But she was annoyed by the a.s.sumption that the captain took a mere girl into his confidence and pa.s.sed over the wife of the ex-Chief Justice of Hong Kong.
”Yes, it is,” said Captain Ross, equally curt, and silently thanking the fates that her ladys.h.i.+p was going home for the last time.
”How horrible!” she gasped, in unaffected alarm. This return to femininity soothed the sailor's ruffled temper.
Sir John, her husband, frowned judicially. That frown const.i.tuted his legal stock-in-trade, yet it pa.s.sed current for wisdom with the Hong Kong bar.
”What evidence have you?” he asked.
”Do tell us,” chimed in Iris, delightfully unconscious of interrupting the court. ”Did you find out when you squinted at the sun?”
The captain smiled. ”You are nearer the mark than possibly you imagine, Miss Deane,” he said. ”When we took our observations yesterday there was a very weird-looking halo around the sun. This morning you may have noticed several light squalls and a smooth sea marked occasionally by strong ripples. The barometer is falling rapidly, and I expect that, as the day wears, we will encounter a heavy swell. If the sky looks wild tonight, and especially if we observe a heavy bank of cloud approaching from the north-west, you see the crockery dancing about the table at dinner. I am afraid you are not a good sailor, Lady Tozer. Are you, Miss Deane?”
”Capital! I should just love to see a real storm. Now promise me solemnly that you will take me up into the charthouse when this typhoon is simply tearing things to pieces.”
”Oh dear! I do hope it will not be very bad. Is there no way in which you can avoid it, captain? Will it last long?”
The politic skipper for once preferred to answer Lady Tozer. ”There is no cause for uneasiness,” he said. ”Of course, typhoons in the China Sea are nasty things while they last, but a s.h.i.+p like the _Sirdar_ is not troubled by them. She will drive through the worst gale she is likely to meet here in less than twelve hours. Besides, I alter the course somewhat as soon as I discover our position with regard to its center. You see, Miss Deane--”
And Captain Ross forthwith ill.u.s.trated on the back of a menu card the spiral shape and progress of a cyclone. He so thoroughly mystified the girl by his technical references to northern and southern hemispheres, polar directions, revolving air-currents, external circ.u.mferences, and diminished atmospheric pressures, that she was too bewildered to reiterate a desire to visit the bridge.
Then the commander hurriedly excused himself, and the pa.s.sengers saw no more of him that day.
But his short scientific lecture achieved a double result. It rescued him from a request which he could not possibly grant, and rea.s.sured Lady Tozer. To the non-nautical mind it is the unknown that is fearful.