He reached a point where she caught sight of his teeth; then his voice arrived, but coldly. ‘Are you afraid,’ he called, ‘Mrs Roxburgh?’
‘No,’ she lied, ‘why should I be?’ and laughed.
‘Of getting wet,’ it billowed back.
‘No, no, no!’ Against the wind, it sounded a pitiful chatter.
The captain had taken his passenger by an elbow, both to steady her, and to estimate the damage to her clothes. ‘You should wait for fair weather, you know.’
‘I am disappointed’, she screamed, ‘not to have watched the last of the Heads.’
But her words were lost in the mewing of the gulls, although she had delivered her reply with a raucousness she had judged would carry.
‘Your husband will be anxious.’
Perhaps she, too, failed to hear. Their difficulty in communicating caused them to smile at each other with exaggerated candour. Her face, she felt, must be the thinner for screaming, while his had grown more leathery from being subjected to the salt spray. Captain Purdew might have appeared a bleak man had it not been for the spirit of kindness his whiskers allowed to escape.
All around them was the sound of canvas creaking and straining. The sails which had sunk her in despair at Sydney for continuing so long furled and passive were almost frightening now that their bellies were filled and the dæmon of energy possessed them. Human life was made to appear an incidental hazard, especially since the harsh-voiced gulls, at first seemingly attuned to her own earthly experience, had been dismissed by herself and the motion of their wings to another, more sublime level.
Mrs Roxburgh was surprised when Captain Purdew brought his face so close to hers that she felt for an instant a distinct tingling of beard. ‘Were you born at sea, perhaps?’
‘No,’ she shouted manfully. ‘On a moor.’
‘More what?’
Had it not been for the mast and the captain’s ribs she would have been swept by the rolling in the direction of her ineffectual voice.
‘A Cornish heath,’ she tried afresh. ‘Within reach of the land’s end.’
Captain Purdew, had he been less kindly, might have felt irritated by what seemed like his female passenger’s desire to take part in an adventure. His own wife, during the several voyages they shared after marriage, had remained below, embroidering teacosies and hand-towels to give at Chistmas. When she ventured above, she no more than crossed the deck to interfere in the galley. Possibly Mrs Roxburgh was only trying to test her courage in a man’s world, though the captain suspected there was more to it than that. He would not have known how to express it, but in his still centre, round which many more considerable storms at sea had revolved, he sensed that his passenger had an instinct for mysteries which did not concern her.
So they continued smiling at each other, or she looked about her with an unnatural eagerness which would justify her being there. She looked at the land, still faintly visible to larboard, its grey mass founded in the predominating sea. She tried to visualize the interior, to which her presence might have lent reality, but which in her continued absence must remain an imagined country, a tangle of indeterminate scrub burning with the tongues of golden teasel.
Presently she realized Captain Purdew had begun to guide her by a forearm, and in the light refracted by a blow she received at the same moment from a sheet of canvas, she saw the image of her father, another grey, thickset man picking his way amongst rocks and hussocks at dusk to bring her back into the house, where, he said, she was needed by her mother.
It was herself increasingly who guided Pa as Pa took increasingly to spirits; his favourite, rum, announced itself without any telling.
She sometimes wondered whether she had loved Mamma and Pa. If she had in fact, memory had transformed love into pity. But yes, she must have loved them.
After her marriage, her mother-in-law had advised her to keep a journaclass="underline" it will teach you to express yourself, a journal forms character besides by developing the habit of self-examination. (Old Mrs Roxburgh was too polite ever to refer directly to shortcomings in those whose welfare she had at heart.) Ellen Roxburgh started a journal, but had not kept it day by day, or not above the first three weeks. The journal might have decided whether she had loved Mamma and Pa, had they not been gone before she married. Mamma went first. It was Pa’s death which decided her to accept what some considered Austin Roxburgh’s ‘extraordinarily injudicious’ proposal.
Alone on a derelict farm on the edge of a moor, she would have had to leave in any case, but where to go? Into service? Aunt Triphena would not have had her on account of Will and incestuous marriages between cousins, as Hepzie pointed out in a book. There was, moreover, a smell of poverty at Gluyas’s which appealed to Aunt Tite’s nostrils as little as the midden in the yard. It pained Ellen, who loved their farm after a fashion; it was all she knew. (Then she must surely have loved her parents who, with herself, were inseparable from it, the three of them living at such close quarters you could hear one another’s coughs, groans, dreams almost, anywhere inside the echoing house.)
Aunt Tite Tregaskis, married to substance and early widowed, mindful of herself and money (and of course her darling Will, not so much Hepzie because she was a girl) had despised her sister-in-law for years. The brother who shamed her, Triphena did not even despise. Dick the Hopeless and Clara the Helpless. (And Ellen—whatever will become of Her?) In time Triphena found she could enjoy the luxury of pitying her sister-in-law from another county, another country you might say (Kent, was it?) who followed Lady Ottering when it took her ladyship’s fancy to leave London for Glidgwith. Clara Hubbard was lady’s-maid, delicate-looking, of pale complexion, hands fine enough to fit into her ladyship’s gloves after the powder had been blown in. Clara Hubbard met her husband by accident while visiting a common acquaintance at Penzance.
After she began taking Mamma’s side, Aunt Tite used to say it was the worst accident ever befell anyone: that Miss Hubbard should have been sipping her madeira when Dick Gluyas looked in with an eye to a free glass, and that if Clara was laid in an early grave it would be on account of the pair of ‘roughskins’ she was saddled with.
Aunt Tite was that unjust. Ellen knew that her hands were chapped, but she wasn’t rough. Nobody was gentler with Mamma in what became her last illness. She would carry her down the narrow stair, and sit her by the window to take the sun and enjoy the fuchsias. As for chapped hands and red cheeks, Ellen tried rubbing in milk as soon as she learned she ought to be ashamed. She smeared them with the pulp from cucumbers according to the old receipt Hepzie found in The Lady’s Most Precious Possessions. Ellen’s cheeks stayed red until they toned down, seemingly of their own moving, to look by the best light what might have been considered a golden brown. (Not until herself became a lady was she properly blanched, by sitting in a drawing-room, and driving out in a closed carriage, and keeping such late hours the fits of yawning forced the blood out of her cheeks.)
Ellen Gluyas was a hoyden by some standards. Pa would have liked a boy, an industrious one, to help about the farm and make amends for his own poor husbandry. What he got was a strong girl he did not properly appreciate, who did such jobs as she was asked to perform, and drove him home from Penzance when drunk on market day.