The Harris-Ingram Experiment Part 6

"No, no, madam," the stewardess replied, "I will return with beef tea, and you will soon feel better."

Lucille was helped to put on a dark wrapper; and after repeated efforts at a hasty toilet, she took the stewardess's arm and reached an easy chair in the library. Alfonso and Leo, who were both members of a yacht club in New York, came to the library from a short walk on the deck. It required much urging with Lucille before she would attempt an entrance into the dining-room. Several men and a few ladies were present.

"Good morning, Miss Harris, how brave you are," were words spoken so encouragingly by Captain Morgan that Lucille's face brightened and she responded as best she could.

"Thank you, captain, I believe I should much prefer to face a storm of bullets on the land than a storm at sea; you courageous sailors really deserve all the gold medals."

Leo, who was fond of the ocean, said to Alfonso, "Why can't we all be sailors? What say you to this? Let us test who of our party shall lose the fewest meals from New York to Queenstown. You and your mother or Lucille and I?"

"Agreed," responded Alfonso, thinking it would help to keep the ladies in good spirits.

"But what shall count for a meal?" inquired Alfonso.

"Not less than ten minutes at the table, and at dinner, soup at least."

Lucille thought Leo's idea a capital one. It was agreed that the contest should commence with the next lunch, and that Alfonso and Leo should act as captains for the two sides.

By this time Lucille had eaten a little toast and had sipped part of her chocolate. A tenderloin steak and sweet omelet with French fried potatoes were being served, when suddenly the color left her face. Another lurch of the steamer sent a gla.s.s of ice water up her loose sleeve, and, utterly discomfited, she begged to be excused and rushed from the table.

"Oh dear, mother, how terribly I feel; let me lie down. Oh dear! I wish I were home with father and Gertrude."

"If the colonel were only here to help," murmured Mrs. Harris.

"Stewardess, where are you? Why don't you hurry when I ring? Go for the doctor at once." It was now blowing a gale and the steamer was rolling badly.

It was a long half-hour before the doctor entered the stateroom of Mrs.

Harris. Dr. Argyle was perfect in physical development and a model of gentlemanly qualities. His education had been received in London and Vienna, and he had joined the service of the "Majestic" that he might enlarge his experiences as pract.i.tioner and man of the world. He had correctly divined that here he was sure to touch intimately the restless and wandering aristocracy of the globe.

While Dr. Argyle was ostensibly the ship's doctor, he was keenly alert for an opportunity that would help him on to fame and fortune. Of the two he preferred the latter, as he believed that humanity is just as lazy as it dares to be. Therefore stateroom No. ---- was entered both professionally and inquisitively. The doctor was half glad that the Harrises were ill, as he had seen the family at Captain Morgan's table and desired to meet them. Captain Morgan had incidentally mentioned to the doctor the great wealth of the Harris family, and this also had whetted his curiosity. Before him lay mother and daughter, helpless, both in utter misery and the picture of despair.

"Beg pardon, ladies," said the doctor as he entered, "you sent for me I believe?"

"Yes, yes," replied Mrs. Harris, "we thought you had forgotten us, as the half-hour's delay seemed a full week. My daughter, Lucille, and I are suffering terribly. How awful the storm! Last night, doctor, I thought I should die before morning, and now I greatly fear that the ship will go down."

"Do not fear, ladies," the doctor replied, "the wind is only brisk; most people suffer a little on the ocean, especially on the first voyage."

"What is the cause of this terrible seasickness, doctor, and what can you do for us?"

"Frankly, Mrs. Harris, no two physicians agree as to the cause. Usually people suffer most from seasickness who come aboard weary from over-work or nervous exhaustion. Most people waste vital forces by too much talking or by over-exertion. Americans, especially, overcheck their deposits of vitality, and as bankrupts they struggle to transact daily duties. Wise management of nerve forces would enable them to accomplish more and enjoy life better."

"I am a bankrupt then," said Mrs. Harris, "but how about my daughter Lucille?"

"Your child, I fear, is the daughter of bankrupts and doubtless inherits their qualities."

"But, doctor, can't you do something now for us?"

"Oh yes, madam, but first let me feel your pulse, please."

"Ninety-eight," he said to himself, but he added to Mrs. Harris, "you need the very rest this voyage affords and you must not worry the least about the storm or affairs at home. Our vessel is built of steel, and Captain Morgan always outrides the storms. Ladies, I want you to take this preparation of my own. It is a special remedy for seasickness, the result of the study and experience of the medical force of the White Star Line."

The faces of mother and daughter brightened. They had faith. This was noticed by Dr. Argyle. Faith was the restorative principle upon which the young doctor depended, and without it his medicine was worthless. The White Star panacea prescribed was harmless, as his powders merely inclined the patient to sleep and recovery followed, so faith or nature worked the cure. Soon after the door closed behind the doctor, Lucille was asleep, and Mrs. Harris pa.s.sed into dreamland.

The winds veered into the southwest, and, reinforced, were controlled by a violent hurricane that had rushed up the Atlantic coast from the West Indies. The novice aboard was elated, for he thought that the fiercer the wind blew behind the vessel, the faster the steamer would be driven forward. How little some of us really know! The cyclone at sea is a rotary storm, or hurricane, of extended circuit. Black clouds drive down upon the sea and ship with a tiger's fierceness as if to crush all life in their pathway.

Officers and crew, in waterproof garments, become as restless as bunched cattle in a prairie blizzard. All eyes now roam from prow to stern, from deck to top mast. The lightning's blue flame plays with the steel masts, and overhead thunders drown the noise of engines and propellers. Thick black smoke and red-hot cinders shoot forth from the three black-throated smoke-stacks.

The huge steamer, no longer moving with the ease of the leviathan, seems a tiny craft and almost helpless in the chopped seas that give to the ship a complex motion so difficult, even for old sailors, to antic.i.p.ate.

Tidal wave follows tidal wave in rapid succession. Both trough and crest are whipped into whitecaps like tents afield, till sea and storm seem leagued to deluge the world again.

Captain Morgan, lashed to the bridge, has full confidence in himself, his doubled watch ahead, his compa.s.ses, and the throbbing engines below.

Dangers have now aroused the man and his courage grows apace. Moments supreme come to every captain at sea, the same as to captains who wage wars on the land.

The decks are drenched, great waves pound the forward deck and life-boats are broken from their moorings. Battened hatches imprison below a regiment of souls, some suffering the torments of stomachs in open rebellion, others of heads swollen, while others lose entire control of an army of nerves that center near and drive mad the brain.

To the uninitiated, words are powerless to reveal the torments of the imprisoned in a modern steel inquisition, rocking and pitching at the mercy of mighty torrents in a mid-ocean cyclone. Mephistopheles, seeking severest punishment for the d.a.m.ned, displayed tenderness in not adopting the super-heated and sooted pits where stokers in storms at sea are forced to labor and suffer.

All that terrible second day and night at sea, the Harrises and others tossed back and forth in their unstable berths, some suffering with chills and others with burning heat. Some, Mrs. Harris and daughter among them, lay for hours more dead than alive, their wills and muscles utterly powerless to reach needed and much coveted blankets.

The dining saloon was deserted except by a few old sea-travelers. Before dinner, Leo ventured above and for a moment put his head outside. The gale blowing a hundred miles an hour hit him with the force of a club.

When he went below to see Alfonso, his face was pale, and his voice trembled as he said, "Harris, before morning we shall all sink to the bottom of the Atlantic with the 'Majestic' for our tomb." Half undressed, Leo dropped again into his berth where he spent a miserable night.

CHAPTER VI

HALF-AWAKE, HALF-ASLEEP

Few persons find life enjoyable in a great storm at sea, for the discomfitures of mind and body are many. The ship's officers and crew are always concerned about the welfare of the pa.s.sengers and the safety of steamer and cargo.

True, Leo, with the instincts of an artist, had stood for hours on the deck, partially sheltered by a smoke-stack, to study wave motions and the ever-changing effects of the ocean. Never before had he known its sublimity. When the sea was wildest and the deck was wave-swept, he in his safe retreat made sketches of waves and their combinations which he hoped sometime to reproduce on canvas. At other times, conscious of storm dangers in mid-ocean, Leo's conscience troubled him. For a year he had been much in love with a pretty Italian girl, daughter of an official, long in the service of the Italian government at the port of New York.

Rosie Ricci was fifteen years old when she first met Leo. Dressed in white, she entered an exhibition of water colors on W. 10th street with her mother one May morning, as Leo had finished hanging a delicate marine view sketched down the Narrows.

Glances only between Leo and Rosie were exchanged, but each formed the resolution sometime, if possible, to know the other. Rosie's father had died when she was only fourteen years old, and existence for Mrs. Ricci and her little family had been a struggle. For the last year, a happy change had come in their condition. A letter had been received from a rich senator by Mrs. Ricci, which was couched in the tenderest language.

The senator explained in his letter that at a musicale, given on Fifth Avenue, he had heard a Rosie Ricci sing a simple song that revived memories of an early day. This fact, coupled with Rosie's charming simplicity and vivacity of manner, fixed her name in his mind; later he was reading the _New York Tribune_, and the name Ricci arrested his attention.

The item mentioned the death of Raphael Ricci, ex-consul, and the senator's object in writing was to inquire further as to the facts. Did he leave a competency? If not, would the family receive such a.s.sistance as would enable the daughter, if Rosie Ricci was her daughter, to obtain a further musical education?

The senator's letter dropped from the mother's hands; she was overcome with the good news. Rosie picked it up saying, "Mother dear, what is the matter? What terrible news does it contain?"

"Not bad news, child! possibly good news; a letter from a stranger who offers aid in our distress, a letter from one holding a high position.

I wonder what it all means? Has the senator been prompted by the spirit of your anxious father, or is there evil in the communication?"

"Tell me, mother, tell me all about it!" But before the mother could speak, Rosie was reading the letter aloud. She threw up her hands in delight and flew into her mother's arms. "How good the Lord is to us!"

Rosie exclaimed. She had been eager for a musical education and to win fame on the stage.

In June, by appointment, Mrs. Ricci and daughter met the Senator at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It was arranged that Rosie should have the best musical education obtainable in Boston, and further that the senator should pay her expenses in Boston and New York, and that the mother's rent should be included in his liberality. At times, the mother questioned the senator's motives, but he always seemed so kind and fatherly that she spurned the thought as coming from the Evil One.

The senator as he left, put several bills in Mrs. Ricci's hand, saying, "You and Rosie will find need of them for clothes for the daughter and for other expenses."