OWEVER on the morrow they ran out of the dirty weather and by Tuesday morning were in the sunny Mediterranean. Most of the time Vi avoided the upper bridge during the second mate's watches. Every morning he saluted her politely but made no venture to enter into conversation.
Vi had decided that although she had perhaps exceeded the bounds of etiquette in broaching such a subject he had shown himself a “bit of a pig” in taking her up so curtly, and after all as it was no business of hers he should be allowed to go to the devil or elsewhere in his own way and gait. Yet sometimes watching him, his figure and profile against the sky as he “took the sun” on the upper bridge, a thought did occur that it was a pity to let such a nice boy ruin his career. And strangely enough she did not notice for some while after that the rawness of the eyelids had disappeared and that he did not lisp.
Of course as soon as the Hesperus ceased to plunge and roll Claude Selwyn appeared on deck again, wan and pale and rather subdued. Most of the time he lounged in a deck-chair in the lee of the chart-house, smoking cigarets and absorbing champagne at every meal and often between. Vi would lie beside him reading and sometimes chatting rather amused at the growing of the braggadocio in him as his health returned.
“Have some fizz, Miss Kelvett?” he would always say when Chi Loo appeared with the golden-necked bottle. “Rippin' stuff.”
Vi accepted until once as she was raising the glass to her lips she caught the eyes of the second mate, who was superintending some men working on an awning near by. Deliberately he smiled. Vi blushed and was furious. She put down the glass.
Afterward, to Selwyn's astonishment, she refused to drink. “ impertinence,” she called it, losing her sense of humor. On the first opportunity she very haughtily returned the usual morning courtesy. Fortunately, she thought, second mates did not have their meals with the captain.
Selwyn's swagger grew to normal. To the captain he was condescendingly familiar, but to the officers he seldom spoke and obviously resented the fact that he was compelled to sit at table with a mere ship's mate; but to Vi he was talkative and very attentive, which rather tempted her for fun to make him fetch and carry for her.
He had had a commission in a Welsh corps, but regarding his movements in France he was so reticent that Vi shrewdly suspected that the hand of influence had kept him nearer to Paris or Boulogne than to the Flanders mud. However, he knew Paris and London from a moneyed point of view and his flippant descriptions and remarks were amusing enough to pass the time under a sky of blue on a violet sea.
According to his own account he was a bit of a gallant, and of his prowess he was apt to boast to a point beyond the canons of good taste. But to Vi after her shoulder rubbing with the world in the past four years such a small matter seemed rather silly than otherwise. And to tell the truth a small incident led her out of idle mischievousness to rather encourage him, for one afternoon as Selwyn was stroking his tiny mustaches with much gallantry in the middle of an account of life in war-time Paris she chanced to look up and beheld the Second leaning over the upper bridge, where obviously he could not help but hear, with a portentous frown of genuine anger on his face.
“Of all the impertinence!” exclaimed Vi, and laughed loudly, a hilarity Selwyn naturally credited to her appreciation of his story.
O THEY chugged across the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal. The weather was as hot as the proverbial Red Sea. In the lightest of crash gowns, Vi gave up even reading in the heat. A light breeze was dead astern so that they were denied even the air made by the speed of the tramp.
Selwyn, cursing fluently because there was not an ample supply of ice, tried to bribe Chi Loo to steal some from the cabin ice-chest for his champagne, of which he guzzled exceedingly, ignoring the advice of the captain that wine merely made him feel the heat more than ever.
At dinner one night Selwyn implored the captain and Vi to join him in his cups. The heat certainly was trying. Although the captain refused Vi laughingly consented to have some. Selwyn became more than usually jubilant.
But the Old Man was right. In such a heat wine, particularly sparkling wine, does have an abnormal effect. The grizzled mate, as soon as he had finished his food, apologized and departed to the bridge to release the second. As he entered the saloon Vi was raising her glass to her lips.
“Oh, Mr. Carnell,” she cried, her eyes sparkling, taken by a mischievous idea, “have a glass of wine. It will do you good.”