Joan of the Island/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII
DELIRIUM
WITH eyes blazing, he strode toward the veranda, but at sight of the officers he pulled up sharply. If he were not careful he might give the impression that he suspected one of his guests. Keith, who was beginning to collapse under the effects of fever, had been urged by the doctor to take to his bed, and he met Chester at the doorway.
"I say, Keith—" the planter began; but the man from the Four Winds passed him with unseeing eyes. He was moving mechanically, knowing nothing but the fact that he must get under the blankets.
Chester caught him by the arm and helped him to undress.
"You'll stop there till I tell you to get up, this time, old man," the planter declared, "or else we shall be having a corpse on our hands."
Keith looked at his host curiously.
"How do you feel now?" Chester asked, when he had covered the sick man up.
"It's a lie!" said Keith in a strange voice. "Starboard a bit. Why, that must be Sandy Hook light! Didn't know we were so near. Starboard, I said, thick head! One of these days you'll get your block knocked off, like Murdock did. Stone dead he was. I hate killing men, Gibbs. They don't stop dead, damn them. Murdock was an obstinate pig when he was alive, and he's too obstinate to stay in his grave now. Eh? Oh, no. Of course. He was dumped overboard, as you say. Well, why in hell can't he stay there, instead of fooling around on Tao Tao? Think I must have got a touch of fever, Gibbs. Hold her on that course a while. I'm going below for a dose of quinine."
Chester listened, and frowned, perplexed. Then he stole out of the room and fetched the doctor.
"Can't do a thing till the sweat comes," declared Pills. "Keep him well covered up, though, and I expect he'll pull through all right. They generally do."
"Generally, eh? Do you think there's a doubt about it, doctor?"
"Not exactly. He's pretty bad, though. Guess I can persuade the Old Man to keep his hook down here till to-morrow. The ship's in no hurry. Probably your patient will be better by then."
"Joan," said her brother quietly, a few minutes later, "you'd better nurse Keith a while. I'll take it on as soon as these fellows go. He's pretty bad and—Joan—something else has happened—"
"What is it?" asked the girl, deeply concerned. It was only too clear to her that Chester had received a shock. He spoke in a quick, nervous manner, and in spite of the tan on his face he had paled a little.
"The pearls have vanished. But don't worry about it just now," Chester said kindly. "It's nothing desperate, at any rate."
"I'm sorry," the planter went on a moment later, addressing Steel, as he subsided into a chair by the visitor's side. "I can't lay my hands on those pearls for the minute."
"So!" replied Steel thoughtfully. There was a tinge of suspicion in the way he said it, and an indefinable change crept into his manner. It was on the strength of those pearls that were to have been produced, that he had made a tentative offer to enter into a partnership. Chester noticed the effect of his announcement, but he did not blame Steel.
"It's devilish awkward. Sounds like a variety of the confidence trick, doesn't it?" he said with a forced laugh, though a frown hung on his forehead.
"Why, no," replied Steel politely. "It just occurred to me that I'd be willing to make a speculation if you'd got decent samples to show, though, of course, if you haven't it isn't—er—it isn't so attractive, is it?"
"Naturally," agreed Chester. "It's a nuisance, though. I'd rather you didn't say anything about it, but the pearls have been stolen."
Steel flicked the ash from the end of his cigar, but otherwise he did not move for a moment.
"Indeed!" he said at last. "Since when?" He did not wish to appear discourteous to his host, but the story sounded a little fishy.
"Since this morning," Chester declared. "I know you think it queer, and I shouldn't have told you but for our previous conversation. Some of the niggers have got at the things, I expect, though how on earth they knew where to look for them is more than I can understand. I really was awfully glad at the idea of having you join me, but let's forget it," he added, as though determined to dismiss the subject from his mind.
Steel cast a searching glance at the other man. He was puzzled. From the first he had taken a liking to Chester. He was more than half inclined to believe him now, although pearls do not disappear, as a rule, in such places as Tao Tao. In the course of his wanderings through the South Seas he had met some queer customers, ready to play tricks of every imaginable kind. He decided, however, that Chester was no trickster. Steel was sympathetic, yet, in the circumstances, no business deal was possible.
"Look here," he said, "we've got a husky bunch of fellows ashore, all dying for a bit of excitement. I'm quite sure they'd do anything in their power to help you, and they'd enjoy doing it. Why not let us round up every nigger on the place and—"
"No, no, forget it. Thanks all the same. The pearls will be hidden by now. It's just the culminating point. Every single thing that could go wrong has gone wrong lately. There's a regular landslide comes in the affairs of all men sooner or later, Mr. Steel. Mine's under way. I shouldn't be in the least surprised to see the blooming roof fall in now. The only satisfaction I have about it all is that it's due to my own folly to a large extent—the landslide, I mean, not this latest phase of it. I ought to be kicked all the way from here to Hong Kong and then kicked back again. There's that about the atmosphere of the Pacific which demoralizes a fellow unless he's careful. There's an insidious something that comes over you without your knowing it."
"True enough," Steel agreed.
"True! Don't I know it? I was going hell-for-leather straight to the bow-wows a few months ago, and letting everything slide. God knows things were sliding fast enough on their own account, without me helping. Then this man Keith came here, and after a few days, when he got the hang of things, he read me a sort of curtain lecture—not too much, you know, but just sufficient to show me that I was ten different kinds of a fool. Pretty decent of him, too, because it wasn't any affair of his, and you're more likely to get kicked than thanked if you float around in these latitudes reading temperance lectures."
"Where did he bob up from?" Steel asked.
"Floated ashore, like a merman, straight out of the sea."
"Floated? You mean in a boat?"
"Boat nothing. He swam here. Fell overboard somewhere off Tao Tao and the steamer didn't stop, so he had to swim or drown."
Steel nodded, but whatever thoughts he had he kept them to himself.
Before the little party returned to the warship Pills promised to take a run ashore next morning, to see his patient, and he turned up immediately after dawn in his pajamas and a dressing-gown, the "Old Man" having given him just twenty minutes grace, as he had decided to sail almost immediately. Pills brought a bundle of newspapers which were of comparatively recent date, having been passed on to the Petrel by a steamer not long out of Sydney.
Keith's fever was somewhat allayed.
"He may be all right now, if you look after him carefully," the doctor declared. "I've brought you a couple of bottles of medicine that should help him a bit. Good-bye. Awfully sorry I can't stop any longer, but if I don't scoot now there'll be a shindy."
A minute later he was flying down the path, with his dressing-gown blowing in the breeze. There came a farewell toot on the siren of the Petrel, and soon she was disappearing, away to the south, leaving only a long black trail of smoke behind.
But Keith's rally had only been temporary. Within a few hours his temperature was soaring. Death was knocking at his very door. Joan fought for his life as well as she could, but under such primitive conditions there was not much that she could do.
"Chester, have you—have you ever seen a man die of malaria?" she asked her brother tremulously, when Keith was worse than ever.
"Why, no—that is I've never seen a man die of fever," he replied, "though they do die sometimes, you know."
"I wish I had seen it," the girl declared. "Then I might know how much chance there is for—him."
Joan's delicate skin was ashen, and in her eyes there was a light which neither Chester nor any man had seen before. Chester stared at her, only half understanding. Something that he had never dreamed, never suspected, was beginning to dawn upon him.
Keith was lying still, moaning occasionally. His great frame seemed to have shrunk. His drawn face was a travesty of what it had been.
Chester looked down at the man and then at his sister.
"Are you scared—I mean are you really very much afraid that he might go?" he asked gently.
Joan did not answer in words, for words would not come to her just then. She shook her head, as though determined to oppose the very idea of Keith dying, but tears welled into her eyes.
Then Chester understood.
"He will take an awful lot of killing," he said, reassuringly. "A man with his constitution can look over the very brink and come back a dozen times. I wish now that I knew more about such things, but, honestly, sis, I believe you're more alarmed than is necessary."
Chester was not saying what he believed, but what he thought would comfort the girl.
Suddenly Keith, who had not spoken for hours, made a weak attempt to rise on to his elbow and fixed his burning eyes on an imaginary person in the room.
"Listen here," he said in hollow tones, moistening his parched lips with his tongue, "I tell you you're dead, Murdock. Can't you let a man alone for a while?"
Then he paused, as though listening to some reply.
"You belong in hell," he went on a few moments later. "Go back home, where I sent you. What's that, Gibbs? Yes, I know we shall make a bum trip. It's rotten coal we've got in the bunkers. Australian always is. I don't believe we're doing more than seven knots at this minute, and the Lord have mercy on our souls if a typhoon strikes us. When I see the skipper I'll tell him—oh, yes, I keep forgetting he's a dead 'un. There he is again, curse him! Murdock, for the love of Mike, leave me in peace—"
In a flash his manner changed. A look that might have been cunning came into his face.
"I suppose," he said slowly and with strange deliberation, "I suppose it's those two pearls you're after, eh, Murdock? I know. I can read your mind. Yes, if it gives you any satisfaction to hear it, I've got 'em, but they're not for you. A pretty pair, they are, too. It's no use looking like that. You don't want pearls in hell, Murdock. Get out of this, or—" his face lighted up with anger once more—"or I'll crack your skull again."
The paroxysm had burnt itself out. Keith sank back limp and shivering, with his eyes closed.
Chester, listening, had been biting his lips. He turned round slowly to his sister with raised eyebrows, but Joan's gaze remained on the patient.
Chester drummed the ends of his fingers on the edge of a table.
"That's—that's not what I should have expected of him," he said at last to his sister, in a low voice.
"Expected! What do you mean?" the girl asked.
Chester jerked his head in the direction of the patient.
"You heard what he said."
"But, Chester," the girl expostulated, "he is delirious. You don't mean that you suspect—"
"I hate to say it, my dear girl, especially when he's down and out, but it looks to me as though he'd let the cat out of the bag unconsciously."
"But think, Chester! You know him well enough to be sure he couldn't do a thing like that—"
"I know it isn't the sort of thing I should have expected of him," the planter said a trifle more bitterly, "but I know I didn't remove the pearls, and you didn't. There were three human beings on the face of the earth who knew where the cache was, and Keith was the third. Even supposing a nigger had known the pearls were in that room, the hole in the beam was covered so carefully that he might have hunted all day there without getting them. I didn't like to suspect Keith before, but now I have heard it from his own lips there's no alternative."
"I am sure—perfectly convinced—you are wrong," Joan declared obstinately. "At least you must remember that he was delirious when he said it, and no man should be held accountable for what he says at such times."
"I'm sorry," her brother said, "but under the circumstances I am bound to believe the evidence of my own eyes and ears."
Joan opened her lips to reply, but did not speak. It was obvious even to her that Chester's point of view was an eminently logical one, one which it was impossible for her to combat with mere words. And yet she felt certain there was some explanation that would be forthcoming.