CHAPTER II
JOAN AND NANCY
"My sweet old Joan, tell me all about it."
Joan buried her fair head in Virginia's skirts and burst into tears. She was sitting on the rug in front of the fire by Virginia's side, in the gloaming.
Virginia put her slim hand on to her shoulder, and caressed her lightly. "It's too bad," she said gently, with her soft, hardly distinguishable American intonation.
"I'm such a fool," said Joan. "I don't know what I want. I don't want anything."
She dried her eyes, but still kept her head on Virginia's knee, and put up her hand to give Virginia's a little squeeze. It was comforting to be with her, looking into the fire.
"It's about John Spence, isn't it, dear?" Virginia asked.
"I'm a fool," said Joan again. "I don't like him as much as I used to."
"Is that why you're a fool?" asked Virginia with a little laugh.
"No," said Joan seriously. "For caring about things changing, because one is grown up. I used to think it would be nothing but bliss to be grown up. Now I wish Nancy and I were little girls again. We used to be very happy together. We always talked about everything, it didn't matter what it was."
"And now you don't. You don't talk about John Spence."
Joan's tears flowed afresh. "I don't want to talk about it, Virginia," she said. "I am sure you would never understand what I feel. Whatever I said you would think I meant something else; and I don't a bit. I don't mind his liking Nancy best. I don't want him to like me more than he does."
"Oh, my darling girl! I think I understand it all better than you do yourself. You are unhappy, and you don't know why."
"Then tell me why."
"Well, to begin with, you are just a little jealous."
"Oh, Virginia! And you said you understood!"
"You are jealous, just as you would be if Dick were suddenly to show that he liked Nancy better than you."
"We used to have such fun together, all three of us. It never entered the heads of either of us to think which he liked the best. He liked us both just the same. Why couldn't it go on like that? I've done nothing. It was after I came back from that horrid Brummels. He didn't like my going there—not that it had anything to do with him. He was just like father about it, and tried to make out that it had altered me. It hadn't altered me at all. I was just the same as I had always been. It was he that had altered."
"Can't you see, little girl, that it couldn't always go on as it used to?"
"Why not?"
"How can a man fall in love with two girls at once? He must choose one of them, or neither."
"I didn't want him to fall in love with me," said Joan quickly. "I am not in love with him. That's why it's so difficult to say anything. If I'm unhappy, it looks as if I must be."
"Not to me, dearest Joan. But you can be jealous about people without being in love with them. You know, darling, I think John Spence was almost bound to fall in love with one of you almost directly you grew up. I should have been very much surprised if he hadn't. But I could never tell which it would be. It was just as it happened to turn out. He came here when you were away, and that just turned the scale. After that it couldn't possibly be as it had been before, when you were both children; not even if you had behaved well about it."
"What!" exclaimed Joan, sitting up sharply.
Virginia smiled, and drew her back to her. "You haven't been kind to Nancy, you know," she said.
Joan did not resist her, but said rather stiffly, "It's she who hasn't been kind to me."
"How?"
"She has said nothing to me. I don't know even what she thinks about it all. If you say I am jealous, that is what I am jealous about. I don't even know that he is in love with her; and if he is, whether she knows it. She acts exactly as we always used to with him, and as I did, until I saw he didn't want me to."
"And then you became offended, and rather ostentatiously left them together whenever he came on the scene."
"Well, if he wanted Nancy, and didn't want me, I wasn't going to push myself forward."
"Poor John Spence!" said Virginia. "He is very disturbed about you. I think he is very much in love with Nancy. It has become plain even to my obtuse old Dick now. But he might so easily have been very much in love with you, instead, that it troubles his dear simple candid old soul to think you have so changed. As far as he is concerned, he would like nothing better than to be on the old terms with you. He wouldn't like you any the less because he likes Nancy more."
"It is Nancy I am thinking of," said Joan after a pause. "She always has been just a little hard, and she is hard without a doubt now. Fancy, Virginia—somebody being in love with her, and showing it, and her never saying one single word to me about it! Talking about anything else, but never about the only thing that she must be thinking about!"
"Don't you think she may be thinking you just a little hard? Fancy—somebody being in love with her, and showing it, and Joan not saying a word to her about it! Talking about anything else, but never the one thing!"
Joan put her handkerchief to her eyes. "If it hadn't begun as it did I should have done everything I could to please her," she said. "I should have been just as interested and perhaps excited about it, for her sake, as she could have been herself. She could have told me everything she was feeling, and now she tells me nothing. I suppose when he has proposed to her, if he does, she will tell me, just as she might tell me if anybody had asked her the time; and then she will ask me what I am going to wear. Oh, everything ought to be different between us just now."
"Yes, it ought," said Virginia. "Dear Joan, you and Nancy mustn't go on like this. I don't think Nancy is hard; I am sure she isn't in this case. She must be feeling it—not to be able to talk to you."
"If I thought that!"
"Darling, you know her so well—almost as well as you know yourself. Can't you see that it must be so? Can't you make it easy for her to talk to you? It would do away with your own unhappiness. It is that that you are really unhappy about. Life is changing all about you. You are a child no longer, and you have nothing to put in the place of what you are losing. You are feeling lonely, and out of it all. Isn't that it?"
"Yes, I suppose that is it. It used to be so jolly only a very short time ago—when Frank was home in the summer. Now Kencote doesn't seem like the same place. I should like to go away."
"You wouldn't feel the change so much if you and Nancy were what you have always been to each other. Joan dear, it is for you to take the first step. Show Nancy that you, of all people, are the most pleased at the happiness that is coming to her. I am quite sure she will respond."
Joan's tears came again. "I don't think she wants me now," she said. "She has somebody else, and I have nobody. At least, I have you—and mother. But Nancy and I have been almost like one person."
"She does want you, Joan. She must want you, just as much as you want her. But she won't say so unless you give her the chance."
"Dear old Nancy!" said Joan softly. "I have been rather a pig to her. 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 nobody 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 Dick 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. Nobody 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 nobodies 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."