"I must write a line to my father," he said. "I'm glad you've written to him. He doesn't suggest coming here, I suppose?"
"Well, yes, he does. We shall be pleased to see him—and her ladyship too, if she cares about it."
"Oh, save us from her ladyship!" said Bobby, unfilially. "She'd be hopeless in a sick-room; and this is a real keep-your-distance, Sundays-only sick-room, ain't it, Sarah Gamp?"
"Mr. Trench must be kept as quiet as possible," said the nurse; and the Squire, with an unintentionally obvious lift of spirits, said that he did not gather that Lady Sedbergh was anything but content to leave her son in present hands. "I've said we are looking after you as well as we can," he said. "You'll have plenty of company when you're well enough to receive it. Humphrey wants to have a look at you later on. If you hadn't been so sharp at the start, I expect he would have come in for what you got. He'd have been pretty well knocked out as it was, if it hadn't been for that young fellow, Gotch, and Dick. It's the first time anything of this sort has happened at Kencote since my grandfather's time. I don't say we haven't had to teach our local sportsmen a lesson or two occasionally, but these were regular professional ruffians from a distance—Ganton they come from—and that class of gentry sticks at nothing when he's interfered with. You see we've done very well with our young birds this year, and they must have got wind of the fact that we'd kept those coverts. That's why they turned their kind attentions on to us. They've been all round about, but mostly on more fully stocked places than mine generally is, and they've never been nabbed. Fortunately my keeper had an idea that they might pay us a visit, and had all his watchers out there. Otherwise you might have come upon them driving home, and then I don't know what would have happened. It's providential all round—the keepers being there, and you coming just in the nick of time to reinforce them. We're rid of a dangerous pest; and no particular harm is done—except to you, I'm afraid. I don't want to make light of that."
But if the Squire did not, Bobby Trench was not unwilling to do so, now that the worst was over. He saw himself an interesting, not to say petted, figure, with a perhaps undeserved but none the less convenient aura of heroism, and hoped accordingly.
"You must have got a bit of a shock when you first heard of it," he said. "I suppose that was when the ladies came in."
"I was waiting for them," said the Squire on a note of detailed reminiscence. "They had knocked me up and told me that the groom had come in for carriages, and I had had him in and learnt what he could tell me. I should have gone myself, but thought it better to stay and direct any preparations that had to be made. I didn't know but what there might have been serious accidents, and it turned out I was right. My wife had the idea too; but women are apt to lose their heads in these emergencies, so I stayed to see that everything was got ready. I went down into the cellar myself for a bottle of my oldest brandy. You want to keep a cool head on these occasions."
"The ladies were pretty much upset, eh?"
"Oh, I soon stopped their fuss. 'Look here,you'renot hurt,' I said. 'You'd better all swallow something hot, and then tuck yourselves up in your blankets.' I packed them all off, except Virginia and Miss Dexter—oh, and Susan, who wouldn't go till she'd seen Humphrey safe; and Nancy was helping her mother; she's turning into a useful girl, that—didn't turn a hair."
"Then Miss Joan was the only one who went up?"
"Yes, she was upset—hasn't quite the head that Nancy has. She's in bed now, but there's nothing really the matter with her. We're over it all very well, and ought to be thankful for it. Depend upon it, there's a Providence that looks after these things; and I say we're not doing our duty unless we recognise it, and show that we have some sense of gratitude. Sure you've got everything you want here?"
He looked round the large comfortable room with an air of complacent proprietorship. He kept habitually to half-a-dozen rooms of the big house, and had no such feeling for it and its hoarded contents as would impel some men and most women to occasional tours of inspection and appraisal. But it was all his, and it was all as it should be. He had not put foot inside this room perhaps for years, and took it in with a pleased feeling of proprietorship and recognition.
"Oh, every mortal thing, thanks," said Bobby. "It's a jolly room, this; cheery and peaceful at the same time. Just the room to be laid up in, if you've got to be laid up."
"My grandfather died in this room," said the Squire, by way of adding to its impression of cheerfulness. "Had it before his father died and never would shift downstairs. It was done up later, but I see there are one or two of his pictures still on the walls. This was his wardrobe, too. A good piece of mahogany; they don't make furniture so solid now-a-days."
He had got up to examine one or two of the old sporting prints on the walls, which he did with informative comment. "Most of the furniture is the same," he said, now looking round him from the vantage point of the hearthrug, where he seemed more spaciously at his ease than sitting in a chair by the bedside. "Yes, they only papered it, and put a new carpet and curtains. He wouldn't have curtains at all; liked to see the sun rise, and wasn't much behind it himself as a rule. He was a fine old fellow. Have you read his diaries?"
"Yes, I have," said Bobby, stretching the truth not unduly, for the two volumes of Colonel Clinton of Kencote's record of his lifelong pursuit of fur and feathers were in every adequately furnished country house library, and had been at least dipped into by countless sportsmen. "Jolly interesting! We don't take things so seriously now-a-days. Good thing if we did. A book like that shows you that half the things we do aren't nearly as amusing as sticking at home in the country and looking about you."
The Squire warmed to him. "That's a very sensible thing to say. The nonsense people talk about the country being dull! Dull! It's the people that say it who are dull. They've got no resources in themselves. Now my grandfather—you can see what he knew about nature by his diaries. But that wasn't his only interest by any means. He had an electrical apparatus, when they weren't nearly as common as they are now. He read books—stiff books, some of them. He was a man of brains as well as muscle, and in the life he chose to lead he had time and opportunity for exercising his brains. Oh, I say that the country life is the best life, undoubtedly. And I go further, and say that those who have a stake in the country—own land, and so forth—are doing a criminal thing if they don't spend a good part of their lives on their properties, instead of spending the money they get from them elsewhere."
"I quite agree with you," said Bobby Trench, anxious to fix the good impression he had made, and also to put a point to these observations. "Have your fling for a year or two when you're young, and then marry and settle down. You don't want to tie yourself by the leg, especially if you have a certain place in the world—House of Lords—Committees—all that sort of thing. But make yourhomein the country, I say. Bring up your children in pure air—fresh milk, and all that. You know, Mr. Clinton, a house like Kencote makes you think how jolly a simple country life may be made for everybody concerned. Early to bed, early to rise, church on Sundays, good food and drink, something to shoot, and all that sort of thing, and your family and relations coming down to liven you up—oh, it's life, that's what it is. All the rest is footle, compared with it."
A Daniel come to judgment! Saul among the prophets! Never had the shining example of Kencote, where wealth and ancestry adorned but did not overpower a God-fearing simplicity of life, received a more effective testimonial. Forgotten were Bobby Trench's offences against its ordered ways, withdrawn the Squire's strictures on his manners and character. He had found salvation. Kencote—and its owner—had triumphed exceedingly.
But Bobby Trench's speech, while offering most acceptable incense, had brought to mind the object with which he had installed himself at Kencote. This the Squire had, for the time, completely forgotten, and was not yet ready to exercise his mind upon it. So with a "Well, I mustn't make you talk too much," he took his leave, promising to come again shortly, and in the meantime to send other visitors.
These did not, on the first day of Bobby Trench's convalescence, include any of the ladies of the house; but, on the day after, Mrs. Clinton, urged by the Squire, paid him a visit.
Bobby Trench could make no headway with her. She was solicitous as to his welfare, ready to talk in an unembarrassed and even friendly fashion; but kept him, beneath her ostensible approach, so at arm's length that when she left him he had not found it possible to ask, as he had meant to do, that Joan or Nancy—he was prepared to blunt the point of his request by including Nancy—might pay him a visit. And what Bobby Trench did not find it possible to ask of anybody was not likely to come about of itself. For further female society he had to be content with that of Susan Clinton, who, on already intimate terms with him, promised to do what she could to make things "easy all round."
This she essayed to do by hymning his courage at the call of danger, patience in affliction, and amiability under all weathers; but found none to take up her praises, except Humphrey, to a politic degree of indifference, and the Squire, who admitted that he had been mistaken in that young fellow, and had found him with a head on his shoulders, and a very proper idea as to what he should do with his place in the world when he should succeed to it.
This positive praise, after a long course of unmeasured abuse, only seemed to Joan, listening to it dispiritedly, a flick of the lash to start her on the road along which she conceived her father wishing to drive her, and caused her, if the ungallant simile may be carried out, to set her feet the more obstinately against it. It had much the same effect upon Mrs. Clinton, who foresaw herself plied with an enlargement on this theme, and forced either to obey, or else openly resist, directions founded upon it. Susan's intervention had only affected the already converted, except to insubordination, and would have been better omitted.
But what lover can eschew the use of weapons so ready to hand as the good nature of uninterested parties, or gauge their dangerous futility? Only in the case of the adored object being predisposed to adore is intentionally distilled praise treated without suspicion, and likely to achieve its object; which in that case is already achieved.
Joan, more or less recovered from her indisposition, still looked upon the world as a place from which all happiness had for ever fled. She mooned about the house doing nothing, and only felt that youth had not altogether departed from her when she was with her mother, who, in her calm stability, was a refuge from the buffetings of life, but seemed to be holding aloof from the troubles she must have known her girl to be undergoing.
Dick had gone up to Yorkshire to shoot with John Spence, and taken Virginia and Nancy with him. The invitation had been extended to Joan; but the Squire had said, with what she felt to be treacherous affection, "Surely, you're notbothgoing to desert your old father!" and she had refused; partly because she had dreaded lest acceptance should bring down upon her a direct prohibition, and the obliquity of a parent, whom she still wished to respect if she could, would stand revealed in all its nakedness; partly because Nancy had given her no encouragement, and as things were between them, it would be a relief to be apart for a time. Her mother had said nothing to influence her either way.
Walter had taken his wife and children back to London, leaving Bobby Trench in the care of the local surgeon. Frank had gone back to Greenwich, where he was taking a course. Humphrey and Susan were paying a flying visit to Hampshire, to arrange about the work to be done at Denny Croft. But there would be a mild recrudescence of Christmas gaieties in a week's time, when there was to be another ball, for which most of the party would reassemble.
Joan was sitting in the schoolroom, feeling very low and miserable, and wondering what was coming of it all, when she was surprised by the entrance of her father, who visited this quarter of the house at intervals so rare as to have permitted it to assume the character of a retreat.
"Well, my girl," he said paternally. "The house seems so empty that I thought I'd come up for a little chat."
It was the hour when Mrs. Clinton visited her recumbent guest, leaving the nurse free for an airing. Joan had occasionally accompanied her in her walks, but found them too apt to be filled with talk about her patient, couched in such laudatory language that Joan suspected the patient of having taken her into his confidence. In justice to him it must be said that the suspicion was unfounded, and in justice to the nurse that she had eyesight not less acute than the rest of her sex.
There were times when Joan felt drawn to put her head on her father's broad shoulder, and receive the protective petting which in his milder moods he was as capable of administering as the most consistently doting of parents. This would have been one of those times if it had been possible to regard him as the solace as well as the occasion of her trouble. But enough of the impulse remained to cause her to welcome him with a sense of forgiveness, and to make room for him by her side on the broad sofa.
He would have done well to respond to the movement, but, instead, he took up his attitude of harangue in front of her, with his back to the fire, and cleared his throat. She saw what was coming, and stiffened.
"Well, we shall have our invalid downstairs to-morrow," he made his clumsy opening. "Wonderful recovery! 'Pon my word I'm beginning to think that we shall see Walter a medical knight and I don't know what all, before we're much older."
"I dare say it wasn't so bad, after all, as it was thought to be," said Joan. "Men make such a fuss about a little pain. Women bear it much better."
This speech caused the Squire to bend his brows upon her, traversing as it did all the traditions in which she had been brought up as to the relative values of the sexes, and challenging that prompt verbal chastisement with which precocious rebellion must be dealt with, if those values were to be preserved in his own household. But Joan's eyes were downcast, and he took warning, without perceiving its source, from a certain angle between the lines of her neck and her back, not to pursue a by-path which would draw him—might indeed have been opened up to draw him—from the road he had sought her out to pursue.
"Well, that's as may be," he said, dismissing the offence; "but the pain has been borne well enough by this particular man; and if a charge of shot at such close quarters that it lays bare the bone and splinters it isn't pretty serious, I don't know what is. Walter told me that he would never be able to raise that arm above his shoulder again, however well it might heal."
Joan shuddered at the staring picture, and felt herself convicted of brutal callousness.
"However," proceeded her father, who might advantageously have left an interval for his words to make their effect, "the worst is over now, and we ought to do what we can to cheer him up and help him to forget it. It's been pretty dull for him, lying there, mostly alone. Your mother has seen fit to object for some reason or other to your paying him a visit in his room, though I think those ideas can be carried too far, and there couldn't be any harm in it, especially as he's now on the sofa."
Then her motherwason her side, although she had said nothing to her. Joan perceived quite plainly that her father had asked that she might be taken to see Bobby Trench, and her mother had refused, as she sometimes did refuse the requests of her lord and master, but only if she considered them quite beyond reason. Joan was drawn to one parent, and all the more set against the other.
"I don't like Mr. Trench," she said. "I shouldn't have gone to see him, even if mother had said I might; unless she had said that I must."
"Well, she wouldn't be likely to say that, if you didn't want to," said the Squire, determined to keep the interview on a note of mild reasonableness, in spite of provocation. "But now, I should like to know why you have taken a dislike to young Trench. I saw nothing of it when he was here before."
"You told me, after he had come here in the summer, that I had been making too free with him, and that you didn't want me to have anything to do with young cubs like that; and that if I wasn't careful how I behaved I should find myself back in the schoolroom with Miss Phipp."
The Squire had an uneasy feeling that he had given his younger daughters too much rope, and should have to bring them up with a round turn one of these days. But this was not the occasion.
"Well, I remember I did say something of the sort," he said. "I was upset by that Amberley business, and I've never gone back from the view I took then that if you had behaved sensibly you need never have been brought into it at all."
"How could I have helped it, father?"
"How could you have helped it? Why—— But I don't want to go into all that again. It's over and done with, thank God, and we can put it out of our minds."
"I'm sure I don't want to talk about it. But it's rather hard to know what to do, when you scold me for having anything to do with Mr. Trench one day, and want to know why I won't have anything to do with him the next."
It was probably at this moment that the Squire realised that his daughter was grown up. She spoke to him as his sons were accustomed to speak, with an offhand air of equality, to which, in them, he did not object. It was not, however, fitting in his eyes that he should be thus addressed by Joan, and he turned aside from his purpose to say, "I'm sure you don't mean to be impertinent, but that's not the way to speak to your father. Besides—one day and the next day! That's nonsense, you know. It must be over six months since I said whatever it was I did say, and you were a good deal younger then."
"I was six months younger—that's all."
"Well, six months is six months; and a good deal can happen in six months. I've nothing to regret in what I said six months ago, except that I may have said it rather more strongly than I need have done, annoyed as I was."
"Then you don't think that Mr. Trench was really a young cub, after all?"
"I wish you wouldn't keep on repeating those words. They are not words for you to say, whateverImay say. But if you ask me a plain question, and put it properly, I don't mind telling you that I was to a certain extent mistaken in young Trench. He has a way with him, on the surface, that I didn't care about, though I don't know that it means anything more than that he has naturally high spirits, which are not a bad thing to have when you are young."
"But he isn't so very young. He must be at least thirty-five.Ithink his way is a very silly way, and he is quite old enough to know better."
It was a choice of repeating her words, "Youthink!" and going on to explain with strong irritability that it didn't matter what she thought; or swallowing the offence. For he could not very well follow his inclination to upbraid, without seriously impairing his efficacy for reasoning with her. He chose the latter course.
"A man of thirty-five is a young man in these days, especially if he has led an active, temperate, open-air life, as young fellows in good circumstances do lead now-a-days."
"But I thought one of your objections to him was that he lived too much in London."
He waved the interruption aside. "Even people who live for the most part in London—work there, perhaps—well, like Walter does—have a taste for country life, and go in for sport and so forth whenever they have the opportunity. In the old days it wasn't so. There was a story of some big political wig—I forget who it was—Fox or Walpole or Pitt, or one of those fellows—who had the front of his country house paved with cobble stones, and made them drive carriages about half the night whenever he had to be there, so as to make him think he was in St. James's, with the hackney-coaches. Said he couldn't sleep otherwise. Ha, ha!"
"What a good idea!" said Joan, brightening to an opportunity of diverting the conversation. "I think stories about people in the eighteenth century are awfully interesting. Father, you have books of reminiscences about them in the library, haven't you?"
"Oh yes. Your great grandfather used to read them. He knew Fox; saw him come into the Cocoa-Tree one night and call for a bumper of—— However, that's not what we were talking about. But it's got this much to do with it, that men like Fox were looked upon as middle-aged men at five and thirty, and old men, by George, at fifty; but a man of thirty-five now is a young man, and it's all owing to the revival of country life and country sport, which, as I say, everybody who is anybody takes part in now-a-days, whether he's a Londoner or not."
"Yes, I see. But I like the people who live regularly in the country, like you, and Dick, and Jim. I think it's much the best life for a man, and a girl too. I should like to live it always, myself."
"Yes, well, I hope you will—for a good part of the year, at any rate. Of course, you can't expect to live at home—here at Kencote, I mean—all your life. You're grown up, now, and when young fledglings feel their wings, you know, the parent birds must make up their minds to lose them out of the nest."
"But they would like to keep them if they could. You don't want to lose me, father, do you?"
She looked up at him for the first time, and he was checked in the march of his desires. A doubt came to him whether he did want her to leave the nest just yet awhile. It was so very short a time since he had looked upon her and Nancy as still children, hardly longer, indeed, as it seemed, since they had made their somewhat disconcerting arrival, and from being a laughable addition to his family, of which he had been the least little bit ashamed, had found their way to his heart, and sensibly heightened the already strong attraction of his home. If Nancy was about to leave him, as to his great surprise he had recently heard was likely to happen, and to take just the kind of husband whom he had always desired for his daughters, could he not make up his mind to forego for a few years the advantages held out to Joan, who had always been a little closer to the centre of his heart? Was it so very important that she should marry a man of rank, if he took the form of Bobby Trench, when there were men like John Spence—good, honest, well-born, wealthy country gentlemen, men after his own heart—who were ready to come forward in due time?
These questions presented themselves to him in the form of an uneasy feeling that he might find himself obliged to change his course, if he should consider them carefully. He therefore shut his mind to them as quickly as possible; for there is nothing a hasty obstinate character dislikes more than to be compelled to prove himself in the wrong. When others try to prove him in the wrong, he can stand up to them.
"My dear child," he said, "of course I don't want to lose you. But when one is getting on in years, you know—not that I'm an old man—hope to have many years in front of me yet, please God—one doesn't live only in the present. You look forward into the future, and you like to see your children married and settled down before the time comes when you must get ready to go. And now we've got on to the subject of marrying and settling down, I just want to say a word to you which you mustn't misunderstand, or think I'm trying in any way to influence you, which is the very last thing I should wish to do—but as a father one is bound to put these matters in a light—not the most important light perhaps, but still one that a young girl can hardly be expected to take much into consideration herself—it wouldn't be advisable that she should. In short—well, now weareon the subject—this very young man—young Trench, whom we've been discussing, as it turns out—er—— This is what I want to say to you—that I've reason to believe that—er—there's a certain young lady—ha! ha! thathe'dlike to marry and settle down with, and—er——"
"But wasn't that exactly what you came upstairs to say to me, father?" asked Joan, with innocent open eyes, inwardly girding herself to contempt against this transparent duplicity, and hardening herself to make it as uncomfortable as possible for him to say what he had to say, even to the point of exhibiting herself as almost immodestly experienced.
He stared at her. "What!" he exclaimed. "You have had it in your mind all along?"
"You put it there, father," she retorted. "I'm grown up now. I've got eyes in my head. I knew there must besomereason for your making mother ask him here, when she dislikes him just as much as I do, and after you had always said thatyoudisliked him just as much, or more."
He gulped down oceans of displeasure and inclination to rebuke. "Now look here," he said. "Let's have no more harping on that string, and no more silly and undutiful speeches. You say you are grown-up. Very well, then, you can listen to sense; and you can talk sense if you wish it. I've already said that young Trench displeased me when he stayed here before; and, as you keep on reminding me, I said so at the time pretty plainly. It's my custom to speak plainly, and I've nothing to regret in that. If he acted in the same way now, I should object just as strongly. But the whole point is that he wouldnotact in the same way now. It is not I that have changed; it is he. Perhaps you're right, to a certain extent, in saying that he was old enough to know better. But a young fellow in his position is apt to keep on sowing his wild oats when others who have to begin to take a serious view of life more early have left off doing it. Anyhow, he has left off doing it now. He told me himself, and I was gratified to hear it, that seeing how life went in a house like this turned him round to see that he had been playing the fool. There's nothing wrong with him at bottom, any more than there is anything wrong with Humphrey, who played the fool in much the same way for years after he ought to have done, but has come to see you can't go on playing the fool all your life, and is now quite ready to settle down in a sensible way. You'll find when you come to talk to young Trench—when he comes down to-morrow—that——"
"I'm not going to talk to him," Joan interrupted. "I don't like him."
Well, really! Was it possible to talk sensibly to women at all? Would the clearest logic and reason weigh a grain against their obstinate likes and dislikes? Was it worth while going on?
"Are you going to listen to what I have to say, or not?" he asked impatiently. "Or do you want to be——"
"Sent to bed?" Joan took him up. "Yes, father, I think you had better send me to bed. I know I'm being a very naughty girl, but you won't make me like Mr. Trench, however long you talk."
"Youarenaughty. You are laying yourself out to annoy me. There is no question of mymakingyou like Mr. Trench, and you know that as well as I do. I am simply asking you to behave with ordinary courtesy to a visitor in my house, who has been seriously hurt in coming to the rescue of my own men—and in the pluckiest way too, and might very well have been killed. Is that too much to expect my own daughter to do, I should like to know, or——?"
"Oh no, father. Of course I shall be polite. I didn't know that was all you wanted."
"Yes, itisall I want. You are taking up a most extraordinary and unwarrantable position. Anyone would think, to hear you talk, that I had come up here to order you to marry young Trench out of hand. You see how outrageous it sounds when you put it plainly."
"Yes, I know it does; but I thought it was what you meant."
"Well, then, it isnotwhat I meant, or anything like it. I'm the last man in the world who would put any pressure on his daughters to marry anybody; and when no word of marriage has been mentioned it seems to me indelicate in the highest degree for a girl as young as you to be turning it over and discussing it in the open way you do. It's what comes of letting you gad about here and there and everywhere, amongst all sorts of people; and I tell you I won't have it."
Joan was enchanted. His leg was over the back of his favourite horse now, and she only had to give it a flick in the flank to set it galloping off with him.
"But, father dear, I haven't been gadding about. It is six months and more since I went to Brummels; and I'm sure I never want to go there again, after all you said about it, and the people I met there."
He reined in. The course was too difficult. "You're in a very tiresome and obstinate mood," he said, "and I don't like it. I come up here to spend a quiet half-hour with you, and you do nothing but set yourself to annoy me. But there's one thing I insist upon; I won't have you making yourself disagreeable to a guest in my house. When young Trench comes downstairs to-morrow, it's our common duty to cheer him up and try to make up to him for all he has gone through on our account. And you have got to do your share of it, and Nancy too, when she comes home. Now do you quite understand that?"
"Oh yes, father," said Joan. "I quite understand that."
"Very well, then. Mind you do it."
With which words the Squire left the room with an air of victory.
Joan was so far fortified by her conversation with her father that she was quite prepared to play her part in entertaining Bobby Trench when he exchanged the sofa in his bedroom for one in the morning-room.
She had proved to herself that there was little to fear. Her own weapons had been effective in turning aside any that had been brought, or could be brought, against her. Her mother, although she had not spoken, was on her side, her father had been routed and was sulking. No one else was likely to assail her, unless it was Bobby Trench himself; and him alone she had never feared.
She was even well-disposed towards him, and ready to amuse herself in the momentary dulness of the house, as well as him, by playing games, and forgetting, as far as was possible, in his spirited society, the troubles that beset her.
She was, to tell the truth, not unsympathetically shocked at his appearance when she first gave him greeting. Although his speech was as fluent and lively as ever, his face was pale and thin, and there was no ignoring the seriousness of his bound-up wound. But he took it all so lightly that some sense of the ready pluck he had shown came home to her, and abated her prejudice against him, which, indeed, had hardly existed until he had been presented to her mind as an encouraged wooer.
As for him, his enforced absence from her society, while yet he knew that she was under the same roof, had set him thinking about her with ever-increasing desire; and to find her, in her fresh young beauty, not holding him at arm's length, as she had done on the night of the ball, but smiling and friendly—this was to bind the cords of love till more tightly around him, and cause him most sweet discomfort in keeping them hidden.
And yet, by the time the house filled again, he could not congratulate himself on having made any progress with her. She would laugh with him and at him, and keep him agreeable company for an hour or two hours together, during which time their intimacy appeared to be founded on a complete and happy community of taste; but at a word or hint of love-making she would freeze, and if it was persisted in, she would leave him.
The poor man was in torments, underneath his gay exterior. If her behaviour had been designed to draw him on and enmesh him completely, it could not have been more effective. She was merry with him, because now she liked him, as a diversion from her lonely, sad-coloured thoughts. She could forget her estrangement from Nancy when she was playing with him, and the overcasting of her long-familiar life; and she felt so confident of being able to hold him in his place that the designs she knew him to be cherishing no longer troubled her at all.
But how was he to escape the perpetual hope that her obvious increase of liking for him was developing into something warmer than mere liking? And how was he to avoid now and then putting that hope to the test, seeing her so frank and so sweetly desirable? He was always cast down to the ground when he did so. Love had not blunted his native acuteness, and there was no mistaking the state of rising aversion in which she met and parried his tentative advances. In that only was she different from what she had been; for, before, she had parried them with a demure mischievousness, which had shown her taking enjoyment in the exercise of her wits. Now she used other weapons, and made it plain that her friendliness would not stand the strain, if she was to be put to those contests.
And yet liking and love cannot be kept in separate compartments in such circumstances as these. Liking, if it grows big enough, becomes love some day or other. He knew that, and she didn't; which was why he put very strong constraint on himself, made few mistakes in the way of premature soundings, and set himself diligently to be the indispensable companion of her days. The underlying contest, viewed from without, would have been seen to turn upon the question of his possessing qualities which would satisfy the deeper currents of her nature. Gaiety and courage he had, and self-control, if he cared to exercise it. Some amount of goodwill towards the world at large, also; but that was apt to hang upon the satisfaction or otherwise that he received from it. It was likely to come out at its strongest in his present condition of mind, and to throw into shadow his innate triviality.
It always seemed to Joan that he showed up least attractively in the presence of her mother, and this although he seemed more anxious to please her than he did to please Joan herself.
Bobby Trench could never have said that Mrs. Clinton was not giving him his chance. She never came into the room as if she wished to keep guard, nor turned a disapproving face upon the merriment that he made with Joan. She would respond to his sallies, and her smile was free, if it was aroused at all.
He thought that he had taken her measure. She was at heart a serious woman, and on that account she could not be expected to take very readily to him, for he hated seriousness, and it was out of his power to disguise it. But she was a nonentity in this house: he had heard her husband speak to her. The Squire was warmly in his favour, for reasons which were too obvious to need stating, and those reasons might be expected to appeal equally to Mrs. Clinton, who would also follow her husband's lead in everything. He did think that it was owing to her that Joan had been prevented from visiting him upstairs, for the Squire had given him that hint, without intending to do so. But he put that down to her old-fashioned prudery, and had forgiven her for it, since she now seemed quite willing to leave Joan alone with him. She might practically be disregarded as far as effective opposition was concerned; but it would be as well to keep on her right side, for Joan was evidently very fond of her, and by commending himself to her he would commend himself to Joan.
None but a shallow brain could have judged of Mrs. Clinton as a nonentity, when opportunities for observing her were such as Bobby Trench enjoyed. The very fact that when she was present his humour seemed even to him to wear thin, and the conversation always followed the paths into which she directed it, might have warned him of that error. The paths she chose were not such as he could disport himself in to any advantage, although she trod them naturally enough, and Joan followed her as if she liked taking them.
Ideas make the best talk, someone has said, then things, then people. Bobby Trench could talk about people all day and all night if he were to be called upon; his experience had been wide, he had a fund of anecdote, and a quick eye for a point. To talk well about "things," you want reading and knowledge, of which he had little. To talk well about ideas, you want some of your own, and he had but few. He heard Joan, to his surprise, venturing herself with interest on subjects to which he had never given a moment's thought, and on which his readily produced speeches were like those of a child pushing into and spoiling the converse of its elders. Joan would sometimes look at him in surprise, as if he had said something particularly foolish, when he was not aware of having done so. He felt at a disadvantage.
He could not see that the question of woman's suffrage, which he started himself, was not satisfactorily covered by funny stories about the suffragettes, and thought Mrs. Clinton a bore for going on with it. She asked him about plays which he had seen and of which she had read, and he told her about actors and actresses. Of books he knew nothing. They were not much talked about at Kencote, but Mrs. Clinton read a good deal, and so did Joan and Nancy, and talked between themselves of what they read. It was impossible to keep allusion altogether out of their talk, although they spared him as much as possible, having been trained to do so in the similar case of the Squire, whose broad view of literature was that as nobody had written better than Shakespeare, it was waste of time to read anything else until you had thoroughly masteredhim, in which modest feat, however, he had not himself made any startling progress. But Bobby Trench, otherwise quite at ease as to his ignorance on such negligible matters, felt that it would have been to his benefit with Mrs. Clinton, and possibly with Joan, if he could have done with rather less explanation of points that were readily appreciated by either of them.
And yet no intellectual demands would have been made of a man like John Spence that would have shown him to disadvantage if he had not been able to meet them. His simple modesty would have fared better than Bobby Trench's superficial smartness, because he would never have tried to shine, and, failing, made a parade of his ignorance. He would have been tried by other tests, and come through them.
It was by these other tests that Bobby Trench stood or fell with Mrs. Clinton, not by his lack of intellectual interests.
What did he ask of life for himself?
A good time.
How did he stand with regard to the wealth and position which were the unacknowledged cause of his being where he was? Were they to be held as opportunities?
Yes, for giving him a good time.
What had he to bestow on others?
Luncheons, dinners, suppers, boxes at theatres, motor trips, yachting trips—all the material for a good time—on his equals; money tips, drinks, an occasional patronising cigar, on such of his inferiors as served or pleased him, so that he might imagine them also to be having a good time, according to their degree.
What did he demand from those of whom he made his friends?
Assistance in the great aim of having a good time, which cannot be enjoyed alone. Nothing beyond that; no steadfastness in friendship, no character; only the power to amuse or to share amusement.
That was Bobby Trench, as he revealed himself from day to day to the woman whom he treated with almost patronising attention, and considered a nonentity. Whether he so revealed himself to Joan there was nothing yet to show; but it was unlikely that she would have so clear a vision, or indeed that a good time, if he could persuade her that it was in his power to offer it, would not appeal to her, at her age, as of more importance than her mother could have desired.
Joan scanned Nancy's face on her return home for signs of relenting, and of a story completed. Neither appeared. Nancy kissed her lightly, and said, "We've had an awfully cold journey." Joan's heart sank again.
"How did you enjoy yourself?" she asked.
"Oh, awfully. It is a splendid great house, bigger than this, and much older. There were a lot of people staying there. We danced in the ball-room every night, and had great fun. Dick's leg is pretty well right now, though he had to shoot from a pony. How is Mr. Trench?"
The bald sentences marked the gulf that had opened between them. And there had not been a word of John Spence.
He dined at Kencote that night. Joan saw how much in love he was with Nancy; and indeed it was plain to everybody. The Squire was in the highest state of good humour. He had had no more trouble with Joan, and no longer sulked with her, having frequently made a third or fourth in the society of the morning-room, and judged everything to be going on there as he would have had it. And now there was this other affair, going also exactly as he would have it. He felt that Providence was busily at work on his behalf, and showed that it had the welfare of the landed interest, in a general sort of way, at heart.
The landed interest, though, had to keep a look-out on its own account, if those responsible were to be properly treated by the rank and file partly concerned in its continuance. There was a slight set-back the next morning, which the Squire took more to heart than seemed warranted.
The under-keeper, Gotch, who had come to Humphrey's rescue in the wood, and behaved well in the affair generally, had been thanked, and told that some substantial recognition of his merits would be considered, and in due course certainly made.
The Squire now had the satisfaction of being able to see his way to a more handsome reward than he had at first thought of, or than was, indeed, called for in the case of a man who had merely acted well in the course of his duty. But he prided himself on taking an interest in the welfare of all his servants; he was accustomed to say that he was not like those who treated them as machines; and he was genuinely pleased that circumstances brought it about that he could do Gotch a very good turn, also at the prospect of telling him so.
Gotch came to see him, on summons, in his business room. He was a fine specimen of country-bred manhood, about thirty years of age, upright and clean of limb, with a resourceful look on his open, weather-tanned face, and speech quiet, but readier and more direct than is usual with men of his class. He stood in his well-kept velveteens, cap in hand before his master, and looked him in the face when he addressed him.
"Well, Gotch," said the Squire, taking up his usual position in front of the fire. "I hear you've been making love, what?"
"Yes, sir," said Gotch, dropping his eyes for a moment.
"Clark, eh? Lady Susan Clinton's maid. Well, she seems a very respectable young woman, from what I've seen of her, and her ladyship tells me she's saved a bit of money, which is satisfactory, what? And I dare say you've saved a bit yourself."
"Yes, sir."
"When do you want to get married?"
The question was asked with business-like curtness, and was answered as shortly. "Soon as possible, sir."
"Yes. Well now, I've been turning things over in my mind, Gotch. I told you that I should do something for you, to mark my appreciation of the way you behaved in the affair with those scoundrels in Buckle Wood. In one way, you only did your duty, as anybody in my employ is expected to do it; but that's not the way I look at things. Those who do well by me—I like to do well by them; and there's not much doubt that if you hadn't—or somebody hadn't—hit that ruffian on the head—and just at the moment you did, too, by George—it might have gone very hard for Mr. Humphrey. I don't like to think of what would have happened."
"Thank you, sir," said Gotch, as there came a pause in the flow of eloquence.
"Very well, then. You want to get married. In the ordinary way you couldn't just yet, because there isn't a cottage. Now, Gotch, I'll build you a cottage. I've been talking it over with Captain Clinton, and we've decided to do that. There's a site in Buckle Wood about a hundred yards in from the gate on the Bathgate Road that'll be the very thing. I dare say you know the place I mean—that clearing hard by the brook. You shall have a good six-roomed house and a nice bit of garden and so forth, and everything that you can want for bringing up a family. Ha! ha! must look forward a bit, you know, in these matters. And there you'll be till the time comes when—well, I won't make any promises, and Rattray isn't an old man yet—but when he comes to the end of his time, if you go on as you've begun, you take his place as head-keeper. And let me tell you that head-keeper on a place like Kencote is about as good a job as any man has a right to look forward to. You'll follow some good men—men that have been written about in books, amongst them—and I believe you'll fill the place as well as any of them. You've got that to look forward to, Gotch, and in the meantime you'll be very nearly as well off as Rattray. In fact, your house will be a better house than his. We did think of moving him there and putting you into his cottage, but decided not. Now what have you got to say, Gotch? Will that meet your views?"
Gotch turned his cap in his hands. "Well, sir," he said. "I'm sure I'm very much obliged to you and Captain Clinton too. It's a handsome return for what I done, and kindly thought of."
"Well, we think kindly of you, Gotch," said the Squire. "I hope we think kindly of all the people on the place, and do what we can for their happiness. But we owe you something special, and it's right that we shoulddosomething special."
It was not, in fact, anything remarkably self-sacrificing that the Squire intended to do. There was a dearth of cottages at Kencote, as there is on so many otherwise well-managed country estates. Young people who wished to marry were sometimes prevented from doing so for years, and there were cases of overcrowding in existing cottages, which, while not amounting to a scandal, might possibly be worked up into one by hostile critics. A new medical officer of health, residing outside the sphere of the Squire's social influence, and more than suspected of Radical tendencies, had caused notices to be served during the past year; and, worse than that, a London journalist spending his holidays at a farmhouse just outside the manor of Kencote had poked his nose in where he had no business to take it, and written a very one-sided article on the depopulation of rural England, with Kencote and its owner as a text. The Squire had been greatly scandalised, and would have rushed instantly into print had not Dick's cooler head restrained him. Unfair and ill-informed as both of them judged the article to be, there was enough truth in it to give the enemy a handle. Therewasovercrowding, though not to any serious extent; and therewasa dearth of cottage accommodation.
"Much better build a few, and stop their mouths," said Dick.
"It doesn't pay to build cottages," said the Squire. "It can't pay, with these ridiculous bye-laws."
"Can't be helped," said Dick. "We can afford to make this property a model one up to a point, and we'd much better take the bone out of their mouths. It isn't a very big one. It will only cost us a few hundreds to satisfy everybody. And they'll like our doing it less than anything. Besides, we've got to do something. That fellow Moxon has a wife and five children sleeping in two rooms, and that sort of thing simply doesn't do now-a-days."
The Squire looked at him suspiciously. "I think Virginia has been putting some of her American notions into your head," he said. "It did well enough in my grandfather's time, and he was much ahead of his time in that sort of thing. He built model cottages before anybody, almost, and Kencote has always been considered——"
"Oh, well, we needn't go into all that," interrupted Dick. "Moxon has been served with a notice, and if we don't do something for him we shall lose him. Let's be ahead ofourtime. There hasn't been a brick laid on the place for fifty years or more, except at the home farm and the stables here. It won't do any harm to improve the property in that way, and we've got the money in hand. We might begin with another keeper's cottage. We ought to have somebody in Buckle Wood."
And that was how it all came to fit in so nicely with the reward due to Gotch, turning his cap round in his hands in front of his master.
"Well, sir," said Gotch, "if I was thinking of keeping to what I've been doing—and comfortable enough at it under you and Captain Clinton—for the rest of my life, nothing wouldn't have suited me better, and I take leave to thank you for it. But as you was so good as to say you was going to do something substantial for me, me and 'er talked it over, and we were going to ask you if you'd help us to get over to Canada, to start farming. She's got a brother there what's doing well, and I'd look to do as well as him if I could get a fair start."
The Squire heard him out, but his heavy brows came together, and by the end of the speech had met in a frown of displeasure. One of the points made by the London journalist had been that the best blood and muscle of the countryside was being drafted overseas, because by the selfishness of landowners there was no room for them in rural England; and here was a man for whom room was being made in the most generous manner, who wished to join in the altogether unnecessary stampede.
"Canada!" he echoed impatiently. "I think you fellows think that the soil is made of gold in Canada. What doyou, of all people, want to go dancing off to Canada for? You're not a practical farmer, and even if you were there'd be better chances for you in the old country than in all the Canadas in the world."
"Well, you know more about these things than I do, sir," said Gotch respectfully. "And I don't say as I should want to go if it was all in the air like. But there's 'er brother's offer open to me. He'll put me into the way of doing as well as he done himself, if I can take a bit of money out with me. He's a well-to-do man, and he wasn't no better than me when he went over there ten years ago."
"Well, and ain't I giving you the offer of being a well-to-do man, without pulling up stakes and starting again in a new country? What more can a man want than to have a good home and situation secured to him, on which he can marry and bring up a family, and work that he's fitted for and likes? You do like your work, don't you?"
"Yes, sir, I should like it better than anything, if——"
"If what?"
"Well, I hope you won't take it amiss what I says, sir; but every man what's worth anything likes to be his own master, sir. It don't mean that he's any complaint to make of them as he serves; and I haven't no complaint—far otherwise. I've done my best by you, sir, and knowed as I should get credit for it, and be well treated, as I 'ave been most handsome, by your kind offer. But it isn't just what I want, sir, and I make bold to say so, hoping not to be misunderstood."
"Oh, you're not misunderstood," said the Squire, unsoftened by this straightforward speech. "The fact is that you've got some pestilent socialistic notion in your head that I'm very sorry to see there. I didn't think it of you, Gotch, and I don't like it. I don't like it at all. It's ungrateful."
"I'm sure I shouldn't wish to be that, sir."
"But you are that. Don't you see that you are? A master has his duty towards those under him, and in my case I'm going out of my way to do more than my duty to you. But a man has his duty towards his master too. That's what seems to be forgotten now-a-days. It's all self. I'm offering you something that ninety-nine men out of a hundred would jump at in your position, and you throw it in my face. You won't be any happier as your own master, I can tell you that. You've learnt your Catechism, and you know what it says about doing your duty in the state of life to which you are called. You are called plainly to the state of life in which you can do your share in keeping up the institutions that have made this country what it is; and you won't be doing right if you try to go outside it."
"Well, you'll excuse me, sir, if I don't see things quite in the same light. As long as I'm in your service, sir, I'll do my duty as well as I know how. But every man has got a right to try and better himself, to my way of thinking, and I did hope as how you'd see that, and lend me a hand to do well for myself."
The Squire straightened himself. "I see it's no use talking sensibly to you, Gotch," he said. "You simply repeat the same things over and over again. If you want me to promise you money to take you out of the country when I think it's plainly pointed out by Providence that you should stay in it, I'm sorry I don't see my way to oblige you. In the meantime you may consider the offer I made to you open for the present. It's a very good one, and you'll be a fool if you don't take it. And I shan't keep it open indefinitely. I shouldn't keep it open at all, after the way you have spoken, if it hadn't been for what you did a fortnight ago. And it's that or nothing."
He turned towards his writing table. Gotch, after a pause as if he were going to say something more, glanced at the profile presented to him, said, "Thank you, sir," and went out.
"Well, my dear, everybody seems to be busily employed except you and me. It's a fine morning. Supposing we go for a walk together!"
Lord Sedbergh beamed upon Joan affectionately. He was a stoutish, elderly man, with a large, clean-shaven face, not unhandsome, and noticeably kind, and a bald head fringed with grey-white hair. He had arrived at Kencote the afternoon before, to find his son recovering as fast as could be hoped for, and to make a pleasant impression on the company there assembled by his readiness to make friends all round. He and the Squire were cronies already, and took delight in reminiscences of their bright youth, which seemed to come nearer to them at every story told.
The sky was clear and frosty, the sun bestowed mild brilliance on the browns and purples and greens of the winter landscape, the roads were hard and clean under foot. It was the right morning for a long walk, that form of recreation so seldom enjoyed for its own sake by the Squire of Kencote and his likes. He came to the door as Joan and Lord Sedbergh were setting out together, and expressed a hope that Joan was not boring her companion. "I've got things that Imustdo for another hour or so," he said; "but we could go up to the home farm at eleven o'clock if that suited you; and the papers will be here in half-an-hour."
"My dear Edward," said Lord Sedbergh, "I wouldn't lose my walk with my friend Joan for all the home farms in the world, or all the papers that were ever written. And as for her boring me, she couldn't do it if she tried. Come along, Joan."
Lord Sedbergh had a trace of the garrulity that distinguished the conversation of his son, but it was a ripe garrulity, founded on wide experience of the world, and great good will towards mankind. And he had gifts of taste and knowledge besides, although his indolence had prevented him making any significant use of them. Joan found him the most agreeable company, almost as diverting as her uncle, Sir Herbert Birkett, and just as informative as an elderly man has a right to be with an intelligent young girl for her entertainment, and no more.
He told her about his early life in foreign cities, and amused her with his stories. An easy strain of past intimacy with notable people and events ran through his talk.
"Life was very interesting in those days," he said. "I often wish I had stuck to diplomacy. I might have been an ambassador by this time—probably should have been."
"Why did you give it up?" asked Joan.
"Well, to tell you the truth, my dear, if I hadn't given it up when I did I should have been appointed to the Embassy at Washington; and don't breathe a word of it to your charming sister-in-law, but I have no particular use for America. There it is, you see—probably, after all, I should not have been made an ambassador. It wasn't the diplomatic game I so much cared about, or Washington would have done as well as any other place to play it in. No, it was the life of foreign cities I liked as a young man. I like it still. I go abroad a great deal, and wander all over the place. I like pictures and churches now, though I can't say I paid much attention to that sort of thing in the old days. Yes, it is one of my chief pleasures now, to go abroad. I have been all over Europe."
"I should love to go abroad," said Joan. "I have never been out of England, and very seldom away from Kencote."
He looked at her affectionately. "You have a great deal of pleasure to come," he said, "and I am very much hoping that it may come to me to give you some of it. Tell me, my little Joan, are you going to give that boy of mine what he wants?"
The abrupt transition threw her into confusion. She put her muff to her mouth, and took it away again to stammer, "I don't know. I mean I haven't thought of it—of anything."
He withdrew his eyes from her face. "Well, I suppose it is rather impertinent of me to ask such a question," he said, "before he has asked it himself. But I think it is plain enough that he wants to ask it, if you will let him; and you see I'm so interested in the answer you are going to give him, on my own account, that I find it difficult to keep away from it. You must put it down to the impatience of old age, Joan. The things old people want they want quickly."
"You are not old," said Joan in a turmoil.
"Not so old, my dear, but what we shall have many good times together, if you come to us, as I hope you will. I shouldn't allow Bobby to monopolise you, you know. When he did his bit of soldiering in the summer you and I would go off on a trip together. And we'd drag him away from his hunting sometimes, and go off in search of sunshine—Egypt, Algiers, all sorts of places—make up a little party. And you and I would get together at Brummels occasionally, and amuse ourselves quietly while the rest of them were making a noise, as we did before. Oh, I tell you, I've got very selfish designs on you, my dear; but I shouldn't be in the way, you know; I should never be in the way. I shouldn't want to make Bobby jealous."
It crossed Joan's mind that if he were to be always in the way, and Bobby out of it, the proposal would be more attractive than it was at present. But so many thoughts crossed her mind while he was speaking, and she could not give expression to any one of them.
He looked at her with kind eyes. "You do like him, little Joan, don't you?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, "but—oh, not in that way." Again her muff went to her face.
A shade of disappointment crossed his. "Then I mustn't press you," he said. "But you are very young, my dear. Perhaps some day——! And I shall be a very pleased old man if I can one day have you for a daughter. There would be a house ready for you, and all—a charming house—you saw it—the Lodge, you know. I lived there when I was first married. I should like to seeyouthere. I'd do it up for you from top to toe, exactly as you liked it. And I'd give you a motorcar of your own to get about in and pay your visits; and there are good stables if you want to ride. I hope you would live there a good part of the year, and there would be plenty of room for your friends and relations. You would come to us, I hope, in London. Your own rooms would be kept for you in my house, and you could have them as you wanted them. There would be Scotland in the Autumn. You've never seen Glenmuick. We're out all day there, and I don't know that it isn't even better than going abroad. Bobby doesn't care about fishing, but I think you would. We'd leave him to his stalking, and go off and spend long days on the loch and by the river. You'd never get tired of that. Then there's the yacht. You'd get lots of fun out of the yacht, if you like that sort of thing. We generally go to Cowes, and have a little cruise afterwards, just to blow away the cobwebs we get from amusing ourselves too hard in London. You'd get lots of change, and your pretty house as a background to it all, where you'd be queen of your own kingdom, my little Joan. There now, it looks as if I were trying to tempt you, with all sorts of things that wouldn't really matter, unless you—— Well, of course, they do matter. Love in a cottage is all very well, but I think young people are likely to get on better together if they've both got something to do. And you'd have plenty to do. I don't think you would ever feel dull."
If Mrs. Clinton had heard this speech she might not have felt so confident of its failing of its purpose as she did when Bobby Trench disclosed his views on life at its most attractive. It amounted to the same exaltation of "a good time," but it sounded different from Lord Sedbergh's lips—fresher, opening up vistas, to a country-bred girl, who had only just sipped at the delights of change, and was in the first flush of adventurous youth. The inherent tendency of such a life as he had set forth to lose its salience, to satisfy no more than the stay-at-home life, which Joan was beginning to find so dull, could hardly be known to her at her age. It held of itself glamorous possibilities, of which not the least was the astonishing change viewed in herself. The girl who was liable to be told at any moment that if she did not behave herself she should be sent to bed, by her father, was the same girl that her father's friend thought of as the honoured mistress of a household, one on whom gifts were to be showered, whose society was to be courted, whose every wish was to be considered.
If only Bobby Trench were not included in the bright picture! And yet she liked him now, and his society was never irksome.
"You are awfully kind to me," she fluttered. "But——"
"Oh, I know, my dear," he soothed her. "You couldn't possibly give me any answer that I should like to have now. Only, I hope—— Well, I do want you for Bobby, my little Joan. And he's very fond of you, you know. It has made a different man of him—er—wanting you as he does. That's the effect that the right sort of girl ought to have on a man. Bobby will make a good husband, if he does get the right sort of girl; I'm quite sure of that. She would be able to do anything with him that she liked; make anything of him."
This was flattery of a searching kind, and it did seem to Joan that she would be able to do anything she liked with Bobby Trench. As for Bobby Trench's father, she would have liked to go home and tell Nancy that he was the sweetest old lamb in the world. He had healed to some extent the wound caused by her sad discovery that nobody wanted her, caused in its turn—although she did not know it—by the discovery that John Spence didn't want her. The fact that Bobby Trench wanted her didn't count; that Lord Sedbergh wanted her, did. Wonderful things were happening to her as well as to Nancy, and if Nancy had a secret to hug, so had she.
But her secret did not support her long; she was made of stuff too tender. A few hours after her exaltation at the hands of Lord Sedbergh she was shedding lonely tears because Nancy had been so unkind to her, having coldly repulsed an effort to draw out of her some admission as to how she stood with regard to her own now plainly confessed lover.
"I don't want to talk about that—to you," she said. "You seem to have affairs of your own to attend to, and you can leave mine alone."
Lord Sedbergh took his departure, and with him went much of the glamour that he had thrown over the proposal which Joan now knew must come. Bobby Trench, undiluted, pleased her less than before, and in a house full of people, with most of whom he had been wont to make common merriment, it vexed her to be constantly left with him in a solitude of two.
There was an air of expectancy about the house. It hovered with amused gratification over John Spence and Nancy, but blew more coldly watchful upon herself and Bobby Trench. It seemed that if she did what she bitterly told herself was expected of her, she would not please anybody particularly, except Bobby Trench himself. Even her father seemed to watch her suspiciously, but that she supposed was because he was doubtful whether naughtiness would not prevail in her after all. As for her mother, she invited no confidences. Joan felt more and more alone, and more and more dissatisfied with herself and everybody about her. Her intercourse with Bobby Trench was less evenly amicable than it had been, for she felt her power to make him suffer for some of her moods. But he did, sometimes, with his unfailing cheerfulness lift her out of them, and she wavered between resentment against him for being the past cause of her present troubles, and remorseful gratitude for his unconquerable fidelity.
She had been unusually fractious with him on the afternoon preceding the ball. Perhaps it was because she could not go to it herself, being out of sorts, and confined to the house by doctor's orders. The house-party was on the ice on the lake, enjoying itself exceedingly. She and Bobby were sitting in front of the fire in the morning-room.
"I say, you seem to have got out of bed the wrong side this morning," he said with a conciliatory grin. "What have you got the hump about?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Joan. "Everything is so dull, and everybody is so horrid."
"You're not such good pals with Nancy as you used to be, are you?" he asked after a pause.
"That has nothing to do with you," she said, following her mood of snappish domination over him.
His reply startled her. "Look here," he said, "I'm getting fed up with this. I seem to be about the only person in the house who takes any trouble to make themselves agreeable to you, and I'm the only person you can't treat with ordinary politeness. What's the matter? What have I done?"
He spoke sharply, as he had not spoken before, and his words brought home to her the sad state of isolation in which she imagined herself to be living.
"I know perfectly well how things are going," he went on, as she did not reply. "There's going to be an engagement in this house in about five minutes, and a general flare up of congratulations and excitement all round; and you're feeling out of it. I can understand that; but why you should turn round upon me, when I've laid myself out to be agreeable to you—and haven't worried you either—Idon'tunderstand. I call it devilish unfair."
Joan felt that itwasunfair. It was true that he had often caused her to forget her troubles; and it was true that he had not "worried" her for days.
"I am rather unhappy, sometimes, about things I don't want to talk about," she said; "but I'm sorry if I've been disagreeable. I won't be any more. Shall we play bezique?"
"No, we won't play bezique. We'll talk. Look here, you know quite well what I want of you. I've been——"
"I don't want to talk about that."
"Well, I do, and you've got to listen this time. I've been playing the game exactly as you wanted it so far, and you can't refuse to give me my innings."
This also was fair; and as love-making was apparently not to be introduced into the game, Joan sat silent, looking into the fire, her chin on her hand, and a flush on her cheeks.
"It's pretty plain," he went on, "that I haven't got much farther with you in the way I should like to have done. You've always shown you didn't want me to make love to you, and I haven't bothered you much in that way; now have I?"
"No," said Joan. "And I shan't listen to you if you do."
"All right. I'm not going to. But there's another way of looking at things. We do get on well together, and you do like me a bit better than you used to, don't you? Now answer straight."
"I don't like you any better in the way I suppose you want me to, if that's what you mean."
"No, it isn't what I mean. I've said that. I mean, wearefriends, aren't we? If I were to go away to-morrow, and you were never to see anything more of me, you would remember me as a friend, wouldn't you?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Well, then, look here! Can't we fix it up together? No, don't say anything yet; I want to put it to you. You're having a pretty dull time here, and you'll have a jolly sight duller time when your sister gets married and goes away. But we'll give you the time of your life. My old governor is almost as much in love with you as I am, and that's saying a good deal, though you won't let me say it. He's longing to have you, and there's nothing he won't do for us in the way of setting us up. Look here, Joan, I'll do every mortal thing I can to make you happy; and so will all of us. You'll be the chief performer inourlittle circus; and it won't be such a little one, either. We can give you anything, pretty well, that anybody could want, and will lay ourselves out to do it. You won't find me such a bad fellow to live with, Joan. Wearepals, you know, already; you've said so. Can't you give it a chance?"
Dispossessed of its emotional constituents, the proposal was not without its allure; and, so dispossessed, could be faced, or at least glanced at, without undue confusion of face.
Joan glanced at it, and said, "Lord Sedbergh is very sweet to me."
"Well, he's sweetonyou, you know," said Bobby with a grin. "Do say yes, Joan. It'll make him the happiest man in the world—except me. Iknowyou won't regret it. I shan't let you. I shall lay myself out to do exactly what you want; and there's such a lot I can do, if you'll only let me. For one thing, you'd be taken out of everything that's bothering you now, at a stroke. You'll have such a lot of attention paid to you that you'll be likely to get your head turned; but I shan't mind that, if it's turned the right way. Joan, let my old Governor and me show what we can do to look after you and give you a good time."
She twisted her handkerchief in her hands. "Oh, it's awfully good of you both to want me so much," she said; and his eyes brightened, because hitherto she had shown that she thought it anything but good of him to want her so much. "But how can I? I don't love you, Bobby."