The Honour of the Clintons Part 18

"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 b.u.mper 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 d.i.c.k, 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 G.o.d--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 we _are_ on 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! that _he'd_ like 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 be _some_ reason for your making mother ask him here, when she dislikes him just as much as I do, and after you had always said that _you_ disliked 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 would _not_ act 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."

"You _are_ naughty. You are laying yourself out to annoy me. There is no question of my _making_ you 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, it _is_ all 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 is _not_ what 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.

CHAPTER VII

DISAPPOINTMENTS

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 a.s.sail 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 circ.u.mstances 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 nonent.i.ty 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 nonent.i.ty, 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 n.o.body had written better than Shakespeare, it was waste of time to read anything else until you had thoroughly mastered _him_, 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.