Part 20 (1/2)
Cleo seemed relieved to find that Morgan hadn't been bored. Her mother, in whose strange, deep-cut features was suggested something of the spirit of Cleo's face, was a brisk-looking, homely matron of fifty.
”So Cleo is really married!” she repeated for the tenth time, her face aglow with satisfaction. And her eyes rested wonderingly on Morgan till he almost fancied he could hear her mental exclamation: ”A real live husband!”
Soon the other members of the family arrived, Mary and Alice and their brother Mark, a young man of thirty, who looked hard-working and reticent, and had large moustachios. They stopped almost on the threshold as they perceived there were strangers in the parlour, then they recognised their long-lost sister; but, embarra.s.sed by the presence of the strange gentleman, as well as by the startling fact of her presence, they stood hesitant and rather shame-faced. Cleo smiled at them encouragingly, whereupon her sisters came tripping over and smothered her with kisses. Their expressions of love were so loud and so flowery that Morgan began to recognise the family blood. When, a moment later, he was introduced to them as Cleo's husband, their faces became of a fiery red, as though there were something discreditable in the fact of matrimony, and they exhibited a stiff shyness that was almost stupid. The introduction completed, they stood looking at him, giggling and giggling. But Mark now came forward with outstretched hand, saying quietly: ”I am glad to know you, sir.”
”Let us go in to dinner, children,” said Mr. Kettering.
They dined in the back room on the same floor, for the ground floor and the bas.e.m.e.nt were devoted to the trade. It was a long, narrow room, lighted by one window at the end, and almost filled by the table. Morgan found himself between Alice and Mark, whilst Mary sat opposite him. Both the girls were young, Mary about twenty, whilst Alice did not seem more than seventeen. In appearance they struck him as inferior imitations of their sister. They were much shorter and far less well-proportioned than Cleo, their red hair was coa.r.s.er than hers, and their features were duller. Their voices, too, were reminiscent of hers. Altogether, though it was abundantly evident that they were Cleo's sisters, they were perfectly unarrestive. Nature had made a success of Cleo, but had egregiously failed to repeat the performance.
The one servant of the house waited at table, prim, sedate, formal. A corresponding air of restraint seemed to prevail during the whole meal. It was not till afterwards that he realised that they were somewhat in awe of him as being obviously a ”fine gentleman,” and that they were feeling they had to live up to him. Cleo showed no inclination to speak, and the other women would not venture to begin.
Mr. Kettering, on whom lay the onus of entertaining, at length strove to face his responsibilities, and, addressing himself to Morgan, discussed the comparative fineness of the weather at London and Dover.
Morgan, in return, asked questions about the town and the harbour and the boats, managing to keep up some sort of a conversation with him.
Eventually the situation began to depress him, so terribly stiff were they all in their attempt to be genteel. Besides, his appet.i.te was of the poorest, though he was somewhat astonished to find the fare so plentiful. Mrs. Kettering kept pressing him to eat more and more, and apparently found it hard to understand that his refusals were final.
”Are you sure?” she asked him each time; and once she plucked up courage to a.s.sure him he must not stand on ceremony with them, and that he need not hesitate to eat his fill. Morgan thought it extraordinary she should so persistently refuse to believe in the sincerity of his small consumption of food, but, attributing her solicitude to sheer good-nature, he was sorry to cause her such evident dissatisfaction.
He was glad when the meal was over, for he was beginning to feel stifled. The family did not disperse, coffee now being served, of so curious a flavour that Morgan could not get further than the first sip.
”Don't you like coffee, sir?” asked Mrs. Kettering.
He began to feel a little bit persecuted. He did not hesitate to reply in the negative, since the question was put from Mrs. Kettering's point of view and the answer had only to apply to her conception of the beverage.
At length Cleo said she was going to take him for a stroll, and he willingly fell in with the idea. But they did not go far, taking possession of a seat as soon as they arrived on the sea-front. They seemed to have nothing to say to each other. Cleo appeared lost in thought, and he, after gazing idly at the few promenaders and the children playing on the s.h.i.+ngle and at the white cliffs of France gleaming across the straits, relapsed into a half reverie. He had somewhat of a sense of physical relief at being able to breathe here at his ease; of temporary respite and security from being hunted by creditors. But he was intensely miserable all the same, the one immediate gleam of light being the hope of a letter from Helen.
As yet the Kettering family was a new experience to him, and though the stiff gentility and aggressive hospitality so far exhibited had made him somewhat uncomfortable, his judgment of these people was favourable enough. Still, he was possessed of the idea that he was not going to stay in that house more than a few days. Not that he had the least conception of what else he was going to do, but events had been following each other in such quick succession that he could not believe in a cessation of them. The last two days, in particular, had seemed very crowded. Yesterday all those dramatic events in the theatre--though not on its stage; to-day their departure from London and their incursion into the reality of that poetic nebulousness from which Cleo had originally emerged.
He was glad that Kettering had not addressed to him any personal questions, for he wished to tell neither truth nor falsehood about himself. The antic.i.p.ation of the topic arising was not an agreeable one, and it was likewise unpleasant to dwell upon the possibility of embarra.s.sment arising from Cleo's habit of embellishment. He wondered what her schemes were, though he could not take them seriously. And this train of thought ultimately brought back to him the fear that perhaps after all pressure might be brought to bear on him to make him avail himself of his father's purse. The thought of his father gave him now--as it had given him throughout all this time of trial--an uncontrollable emotion, but he would not let his mind speculate about the grief and att.i.tude of his family, forcibly interposing a veil between himself and them. Tired out at length, he let his reverie merge into mere uncritical perception. He was conscious of afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, of a great stretch of sky, with a continent of white cloud containing big blue lakes; his eye took in the expanse of sea, glistening, streaked, patched, lined, and shaded, with the pier in his centre of vision, a ma.s.s of kiosks, pole-lamps, and conventional iron-work. And in the foreground parasols dotted here and there made spots of black, brown, green, and red against the yellowish s.h.i.+ngle.
Commonplace as the scene was, he found it restful to dwell upon in a lazy fas.h.i.+on. He forgot for a while that Cleo was by his side, and when he awoke again to the consciousness of her presence he found she had been engaged in reading again the two favourable notices of her performance, which she had carefully carried about with her.
Soon Alice and Mary appeared, and all four went home together. Tea was laid in the same room, the table being set out as for a heavy meal.
”Did you enjoy your walk, sir?” asked Mr. Kettering, while the trim servant, waiting at table with the same solemn gravity as before, put before him a huge cup of very strong tea, of which no milk or sugar could alleviate the astringency. He now found he was expected to eat large quant.i.ties of boiled fish, plum-cake and sweets; and Mrs.
Kettering, perceiving that he didn't do justice to the fare, enumerated to him other things that were in the larder, with the suggestion that he might perhaps prefer a choice of them. Some of the stiffness that had characterised the former meal had vanished--Morgan could see now that had been due to shyness at his presence--and, though Mark still showed little willingness to converse, the girls were evidently beginning to find themselves again, occasional gigglings heralding their return to normality. But the concentration of the united attention of the family for Morgan's benefit was somewhat disconcerting. The girls vied with each other in pressing plum-cake upon him, and seemed to view his refusal as a personal rebuff. He did not understand just then that each considered a bit of her own niceness went into the cake when held towards him with her own hand, and that it was this niceness he was rejecting. As for the cake, they took it for granted that there could be no difficulty about disposing of that. Before the end, Morgan got the sensation of having the food rammed down his throat with a pole.
They tried to flirt with him, too, but here again he unconsciously annoyed them by his unresponsiveness. In fact, being entirely unacquainted with the game as they were in the habit of playing it, he set down the strange attempts of Cleo's sisters to provoke him to banter as rather silly. He did not know that they had thrown off their first unquestioning acceptance of his impressiveness and were now subjecting him to sharp criticism. They had their own notion--and a very definite one it was--of what a perfect gentleman should be, and they were not disposed lightly to accept a subst.i.tute. What, however, struck him particularly was their unbounded affection for their father and mother, for Cleo and Mark, and last, though not least, for each other.
During the evening Mary grew so bold as to offer to show him the harbour by night, and he welcomed the suggestion as likely to afford him a little quiet distraction. He had sat amid the family for several hours, and it had not occurred to anybody he might like to be just alone. The day had seemed interminable, and as they had been behaving more freely among themselves, once the restraint had worn off, he had begun to get a somewhat revised perception of them. Their peculiar atmosphere was beginning to enter into his being, and his vision of them, therefore, to lose its first impersonality.
Though the sky was clear, there was no moon that evening, which elicited the remark from Mary that it was a pity. Morgan presumed that moonlight made the harbour look much more poetic, whereupon Mary admitted that she wasn't thinking of the harbour, but of the fact that it made walking with a girl much more poetic. She wanted him to say that walking with her was so heavenly, absence of moonlight notwithstanding, that he couldn't possibly imagine any improvement.
But he didn't say it. He only just gave the faintest indication of a laugh.
When he happened to admire the far-stretching, soft shadow of the sea, with its gentle, irregular line of white where it met the sh.o.r.e, she asked him if he wouldn't like to be rowing just then with a girl on a lovely lake. She wanted him to say--yes, if the girl were she. But he did not say it, and he had no idea that she was getting angry.