“Whatever is Mr. Wyllard doing there?” she asked.
Mrs. Hastings, who was wrapped in furs, to protect her from the sting in the east wind, smiled at her.
“That,” she answered, “is more than I can tell you; but Harry Wyllard seems to find an interest in what other folks would consider most unpromising things, and, what is more to the purpose, he is rather addicted to taking a hand in them. It is a habit that costs him something now and then.”
Agatha asked nothing further. She was interested in Wyllard, but she was at the moment more interested in the faces of those who swarmed on board. She wondered what the emigrants had endured in the lands that had cast them out; and what they might still have to bear. It seemed to her that the murmur of their harsh voices went up in a great protest, an inarticulate cry of sorrow. While she looked on the doctor held back a long-haired man who, shuffling in broken boots, was following a haggard woman. The physician drew him aside, and after he had consulted with the other official, two seamen hustled the man towards a second gangway that led to the tug. The woman raised a wild, despairing cry. She blocked the passage, and a quarter-master drove her, expostulating in an agony of terror, forward among the rest. Nobody appeared concerned about this alien’s tragedy, except one man, and Agatha was not surprised when Wyllard rose and quietly laid his hand upon the official’s shoulder.
A parley appeared to follow, somebody gave an order, and when the alien was led back again the woman’s cries subsided. Agatha looked at Mrs. Hastings and once more a smile crept into the older woman’s eyes.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Hastings, “I guessed he would feel that he had to interfere. That is a man who can’t see any one in trouble.” She added, with a little whimsical sigh, “He had a bonanza harvest last fall, anyway.”
They moved aft soon afterwards, and the Scarrowmania was smoothly sliding seawards with the first of the ebb when Agatha met Wyllard. He glanced at the Lancashire sandhills, which were fading into a pale ocher gleam amid the haze over the starboard hand, and then at the long row of painted buoys that moved back to them.
“You’re off at last! The sad gray weather is dropping fast astern,” he said. “Out yonder, the skies are clear.”
“Thank you,” replied Agatha, “I’m to apply that as I like? As a matter of fact, however, our days weren’t always gray. But what was the trouble when those steerage people came on board?”
Wyllard’s manner, she noticed, was free alike from the complacent self-satisfaction which occasionally characterizes the philanthropist, and from any affectation of diffidence.