Part 13 (2/2)
”Father wouldn't say that. He would say that blood counted for a lot.
I am quite sure he would say that people like us had a finer sense of honour than people who are n.o.bodies by birth. I don't think he comes out of the test very well. I think if anything were to happen to him where his birth and his position wouldn't help him, his honour wouldn't be finer than anybody else's. If he were to lose all his money, for instance--I think he would feel that more than anything in the world.
He would be stripped of almost everything. No-one would know him.”
”Oh, Joan darling, you mustn't say things like that. It isn't like you.”
Poor Joan, her mind at unrest, her first glimpse of the world outside the sheltered garden of her childhood showing her only the chill loneliness of its battling crowds, was not in a mood to insist upon her discoveries.
”It does make me feel rather bitter,” she said through her tears. ”But I don't want to be.”
As she and Nancy were dressing for dinner, she said lightly, but with a strained look in her eyes, ”The conquering Bobby Trench will be here by this time to-morrow. Nancy, you are not to go leaving me alone with him.”
Nancy looked up at her sharply, but her face was hidden, and she did not see the look in it, the look which hoped for a warm return to their old habit of discussing everything and everybody together.
”I suppose you would like me to take him off your hands so that you can devote yourself to John Spence?” she said.
If Joan was ready to mention names, she was ready too. Her meaning was not so unkind as her words; but how was Joan, ready to smart at a touch, to know that?
She could not speak for a moment. Then she said with a quiver, ”I don't want to devote myself to him. He likes you best.”
Nancy heard the quiver, and it moved her; but not enough to soothe the soreness she felt against Joan. Joan might be ready now, unwillingly, to accept the fact that John Spence liked Nancy best; but she had stood out against it for a long time, and had not taken the discovery in the way that Nancy was convinced she would have taken it herself, if Joan had been the preferred.
”If he does, it is your fault,” she said. ”I've not tried to make him.
I have only been just the same as I always was; and you have been quite different.”
There was nothing in this speech that would have struck Joan as unkind a few months before. But the tension was too great now to bear of the old outspokenness between them. How could Virginia say that Nancy wasn't hard? She only wanted to make friends, but Nancy wanted to quarrel. But she would not be hard in return.
”Perhaps I have been rather a pig,” she said. ”I haven't meant to be; and I shan't be any more.”
Nancy was conquered. The tears came into her own eyes. All that Virginia said of her was true. She had been aching for the old intimacy with Joan, more than ever now that such wonderful things were happening to her, and she had to keep them uncomfortably locked up in her own breast.
But Nancy would never cry if she could possibly stop herself. It was a point of honour with her, which Joan, with whom tears came more readily, had always understood. If they were to get back on to the old ground, signs of emotion on Joan's part would properly be met by a dry carelessness on hers.
”Well, you _have_ been rather a pig,” she said, ready to fall on Joan's neck, and give way to her own feelings without restraint, when the proprieties had once been observed. ”But if you're not going to be any more, I'll forgive you.”
Joan was too troubled to recognise this speech as a prelude to complete capitulation. She had gone as far as she could, and thought that Nancy was repulsing her. She now burst into open tears, into which wounded pride entered as much as wounded affection. ”You're a beast,” she cried, using the free language of their childhood. ”I don't want you to forgive me. I've done nothing to be forgiven for. I only thought you might want to be friends again. But if you don't, I don't either.
I shan't try again.”
Nancy wavered for a moment. Then the memory of her own grievances rushed back upon her, and she shrugged her shoulders. ”All right,” she said. ”If you're satisfied, I'm sure I am. I should have been quite ready to be friends, but it's impossible with you as you are now. I should leave off crying if I were you. You won't be fit to be seen.”
CHAPTER III
HUMPHREY AND SUSAN
Humphrey and Susan arrived at Kencote on a waft of good fortune. A widowed aunt of Susan's, a lady of unaccountable actions, from whom it had never been safe to expect anything, whether good or bad, had died and left her niece a ”little place.”
In the satisfaction induced by this acquisition, which seemed to endorse, almost supernaturally, his own oft-tendered advice, the Squire looked upon his daughter-in-law with new eyes. Her faults were forgotten; she was no longer, at best, a mere ornamental luxury of a wife, at worst a too expensive one; she had brought land into the family, or, at any rate--for there was very little land--property. She took her stand, in a small way, with those heiresses with whom the Clintons had from time to time allied themselves, not infrequently to the permanent enhancement of the rooted Kencote dignity, and occasionally to the swelling of one of the buds of the prolific Clinton tree into the proud state of a branch. This had happened, many generations before, in the case of the ancestor from whom Susan, a born Clinton, had herself sprung, and had helped to the nurture of that particular branch so effectively that its umbrage was more conspicuous than that of the parent stem itself.
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