Part 17 (2/2)

”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 s.e.xes, and challenging that prompt verbal chastis.e.m.e.nt 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 mother _was_ on 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 G.o.d, 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, whatever _I_ may 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. _I_ think his way is a very silly way, and he is quite old enough to know better.”

It was a choice of repeating her words, ”_You_ think!” 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 circ.u.mstances 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!”

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