At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly man entered the room, came forward and shook Helen’s hand with an emotional kind of heartiness, Willoughby himself, Rachel’s father, Helen’s brother-in-law. As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make a fat man of him, his frame being so large, he was not fat; his face was a large framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features and the glow in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand assaults of the weather than to express sentiments and emotions, or to respond to them in others.
“It is a great pleasure that you have come,” he said, “for both of us.”
Rachel murmured in obedience to her father’s glance.
“We’ll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think it an honour to have charge of him. Pepper’ll have some one to contradict him—which I daren’t do. You find this child grown, don’t you? A young woman, eh?”
Still holding Helen’s hand he drew his arm round Rachel’s shoulder, thus making them come uncomfortably close, but Helen forbore to look.
“You think she does us credit?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” said Helen.
“Because we expect great things of her,” he continued, squeezing his daughter’s arm and releasing her. “But about you now.” They sat down side by side on the little sofa. “Did you leave the children well? They’ll be ready for school, I suppose. Do they take after you or Ambrose? They’ve got good heads on their shoulders, I’ll be bound?”
At this Helen immediately brightened more than she had yet done, and explained that her son was six and her daughter ten. Everybody said that her boy was like her and her girl like Ridley. As for brains, they were quick brats, she thought, and modestly she ventured on a little story about her son,—how left alone for a minute he had taken the pat of butter in his fingers, run across the room with it, and put it on the fire—merely for the fun of the thing, a feeling which she could understand.
“And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks wouldn’t do, eh?”
“A child of six? I don’t think they matter.”
“I’m an old-fashioned father.”
“Nonsense, Willoughby; Rachel knows better.”
Much as Willoughby would doubtless have liked his daughter to praise him she did not; her eyes were unreflecting as water, her fingers still toying with the fossilised fish, her mind absent. The elder people went on to speak of arrangements that could be made for Ridley’s comfort—a table placed where he couldn’t help looking at the sea, far from boilers, at the same time sheltered from the view of people passing. Unless he made this a holiday, when his books were all packed, he would have no holiday whatever; for out at Santa Marina Helen knew, by experience, that he would work all day; his boxes, she said, were packed with books.
“Leave it to me—leave it to me!” said Willoughby, obviously intending to do much more than she asked of him. But Ridley and Mr. Pepper were heard fumbling at the door.
“How are you, Vinrace?” said Ridley, extending a limp hand as he came in, as though the meeting were melancholy to both, but on the whole more so to him.
Willoughby preserved his heartiness, tempered by respect. For the moment nothing was said.
“We looked in and saw you laughing,” Helen remarked. “Mr. Pepper had just told a very good story.”
“Pish. None of the stories were good,” said her husband peevishly.
“Still a severe judge, Ridley?” enquired Mr. Vinrace.
“We bored you so that you left,” said Ridley, speaking directly to his wife.
As this was quite true Helen did not attempt to deny it, and her next remark, “But didn’t they improve after we’d gone?” was unfortunate, for her husband answered with a droop of his shoulders, “If possible they got worse.”
The situation was now one of considerable discomfort for every one concerned, as was proved by a long interval of constraint and silence. Mr. Pepper, indeed, created a diversion of a kind by leaping on to his seat, both feet tucked under him, with the action of a spinster who detects a mouse, as the draught struck at his ankles. Drawn up there, sucking at his cigar, with his arms encircling his knees, he looked like the image of Buddha, and from this elevation began a discourse, addressed to nobody, for nobody had called for it, upon the unplumbed depths of ocean. He professed himself surprised to learn that although Mr. Vinrace possessed ten ships, regularly plying between London and Buenos Aires, not one of them was bidden to investigate the great white monsters of the lower waters.
“No, no,” laughed Willoughby, “the monsters of the earth are too many for me!”
Rachel was heard to sigh, “Poor little goats!”
“If it weren’t for the goats there’d be no music, my dear; music depends upon goats,” said her father rather sharply, and Mr. Pepper went on to describe the white, hairless, blind monsters lying curled on the ridges of sand at the bottom of the sea, which would explode if you brought them to the surface, their sides bursting asunder and scattering entrails to the winds when released from pressure, with considerable detail and with such show of knowledge, that Ridley was disgusted, and begged him to stop.
From all this Helen drew her own conclusions, which were gloomy enough. Pepper was a bore; Rachel was an unlicked girl, no doubt prolific of confidences, the very first of which would be: “You see, I don’t get on with my father.” Willoughby, as usual, loved his business and built his Empire, and between them all she would be considerably bored. Being a woman of action, however, she rose, and said that for her part she was going to bed. At the door she glanced back instinctively at Rachel, expecting that as two of the same sex they would leave the room together. Rachel rose, looked vaguely into Helen’s face, and remarked with her slight stammer, “I’m going out to t-t-triumph in the wind.”
Mrs. Ambrose’s worst suspicions were confirmed; she went down the passage lurching from side to side, and fending off the wall now with her right arm, now with her left; at each lurch she exclaimed emphatically, “Damn!”
CHAPTER II
Uncomfortable as the night, with its rocking movement, and salt smells, may have been, and in one case undoubtedly was, for Mr. Pepper had insufficient clothes upon his bed, the breakfast next morning wore a kind of beauty. The voyage had begun, and had begun happily with a soft blue sky, and a calm sea. The sense of untapped resources, things to say as yet unsaid, made the hour significant, so that in future years the entire journey perhaps would be represented by this one scene, with the sound of sirens hooting in the river the night before, somehow mixing in.
The table was cheerful with apples and bread and eggs. Helen handed Willoughby the butter, and as she did so cast her eye on him and reflected, “And she married you, and she was happy, I suppose.”
She went off on a familiar train of thought, leading on to all kinds of well-known reflections, from the old wonder, why Theresa had married Willoughby?
“Of course, one sees all that,” she thought, meaning that one sees that he is big and burly, and has a great booming voice, and a fist and a will of his own; “but—” here she slipped into a fine analysis of him which is best