"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 your _home_ in 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 G.o.d-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 Forgotten were Bobby Trench's offences against its ordered ways, withdrawn the Squire's strictures on his manners and character.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 unembarra.s.sed 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.

CHAPTER VI

JOAN REBELLIOUS

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.

d.i.c.k 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 not _both_ going 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 rea.s.semble.

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 a.s.sume 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 rec.u.mbent 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 s.e.x.

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 att.i.tude 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 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!"