The Honour of the Clintons Part 13

But I won't be any more."

There was a long silence. Then Joan said, "There is something else, Virginia. Why has Bobby Trench been asked to come here to-morrow?"

Virginia laughed, after a momentary pause. "I expect he asked himself," she said. "Hasn't he shown himself to be a great admirer of yours, Joan?"

"Oh!" said Joan without a smile. "I have never shown myself to be a great admirer of his. Virginia, I can't understand it. I know mother wrote to him. I asked her why, and she said Humphrey had wanted him asked, and father had said that he might be. She didn't seem to want to talk about him, and I could see that she didn't like him, and was sorry to have to ask him. It is father I don't understand. He has almost foamed at the mouth whenever Bobby Trench's name has been mentioned, and you know what a frightful fuss he made when I went to Brummels, and when Bobby Trench came here about that Amberley affair.

He said he shouldn't be let in if he came again."

"Well, my dear, you know what your father is. He could no more act inhospitably to anybody than----"

"Oh, Virginia, that's nonsense. He was quite rude to him when he came.

Besides, it's a different thing altogether, _asking_ him to come. He needn't have done that. Why did he do it?"

"Isn't Lord Sedbergh an old friend of his?"

"Virginia, I believe you are in the conspiracy against me. I _hate_ Bobby Trench, and when he comes here I won't have a thing to say to him. If father wants him here, he can look after him himself. I couldn't believe it when it first came into my head; but father said something to me, after he had looked at me once or twice in an odd sort of way, almost as if I were a person he didn't know."

"What did he say to you?"

"Oh, something about _him_, I forget what now. And when I said what an idiot I thought he was, he was quite annoyed, and said I ought not to talk about people in that way. How _can_ father be so changeable? He treats us as if n.o.body had any sense but himself, and lays down the law; and then, even in a question in which you agree with him, you find that all his sound and fury means nothing at all, and he has turned completely round."

"Well, my dear, we are not all the same. Your father speaks very strongly whatever is in his mind at the moment, and if he has cause to change his mind he is just as strong on the other side. It was so with me, you know well enough. He wouldn't hear a word in my favour; and now he likes me almost as much as d.i.c.k does. You have to dig down deeper than his speech to find what is fixed in him."

"I don't believe that anything is fixed. Anyone would have said that he had a _real_ dislike to Brummels, and all that goes with it. I am sure he made fuss enough when I went there, and has gone on making it ever since; and Bobby Trench summed it all up for him. He wouldn't have this and he wouldn't have that; and Kencote, and the way we live here, was the only sort of life that anybody ought to live. Oh, _you_ know it all by heart. And then, just as one is beginning to think there is something in it, and that we _have_ been very happy living quietly here, one finds that _he_, of all people, wants something else."

"What does he want?"

"What does he want for _me_? Does he want Bobby Trench, Virginia?

There! You don't say anything. You _are_ in the conspiracy. I _won't_. Nothing will make me."

"My dear child, there is no conspiracy. And if there were, I shouldn't be in it. _I_ don't want Bobby Trench for you; I want somebody much better. But I don't want anybody, yet awhile. I want to keep you."

"Doesn't mother want to keep me? Does _she_ want Bobby Trench for me?"

"No, I am quite sure she doesn't."

"Then what is it all about? Oh, I am very unhappy, Virginia. I want to talk it all over with Nancy; but I can't now. It is just as if everything were falling away from me. n.o.body cares. A little time ago I should have gone to mother if I had hurt my finger. I feel all alone. Why does father want to bring Bobby Trench worrying me, of all the people in the world?"

"Dearest Joan, you are making too much of it. You talk as if you were going to be forced into something you don't like."

"That is just what I feel is happening. It isn't like Kencote; not like anything I have known. Oh, I wish I were a little girl again."

"My dear, put it like this; somebody is bound to want you, sooner or later. I suppose somebody wants you now. He moves mountains to get at you, and find out whether you want _him_. You don't, and that is all there is to say about it."

"It might be," said Joan, "if it weren't that father is one of the mountains. He is one that is very easily shifted. Oh, I'm not a child any longer. I do know something about the world. I do know quite well that if he were not who he is, father would not have him near the place. Money and rank--those are what he really cares about, though he pretends to despise them--in anybody else. What is the good of belonging to an old and proud family, as we do, if you can't be just a little prouder than the rest?"

"Well, my dear, as a product of a country where those things don't count for much, I am bound to say that I think it isn't much good.

People are what their characters and surroundings make them."

"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.