Page:Robins - The Messenger.djvu/405

Rh Napier leaned more heavily on his servant.

"We must get out of this," he said. But they could n't. People who had n't found their friends were not to be convinced they were n't on board. Again and again denied access to the ship, they pressed through the crowd with cries and questions. They could n't see the crutch. Napier was knocked and jostled. The old gas-sickness was heavy on him. He took refuge on a sea-chest behind a pile of luggage, and sent Day to keep places in the train. When he lifted his swimming head, struggling still against that tide of nausea rising to choke him, Napier saw that the crowd had thinned now to a few groups of last, despairing lingerers. Even the cries for Jimmy O'Brian had sunk into the same stillness that wrapped the sailor at the bottom of the sea. A little old man in a threadbare coat closely but toned round a meager body went up to the guard at the foot of the gangway.

"You are quite sure? The passengers are all off?"

"Have n't I told you no end o' times? They 're gone, every man Jack of 'em, and we 're hoistin' the gangway."

The old man walked forlornly away, his threadbare ulster flapping against his shins.

"Any idea when the other lady will be coming off?" a foreign-sounding voice asked on the other side of the luggage.

Other lady'! What other lady?"

Napier, leaning over, saw something shoved into a grimy fist. The Clonmel deck-hand had no need to look at the aid to memory. The faculty of touch had applied the stimulus. "There was another lady," he said; "but she ain't comin' ashore here. Goin' back with us to Ireland."