§ 8
It was in the nature of Mrs. Pybus to misconceive things. She never grasped the true relationship of Joan and Peter; Mr. Grimes had indeed been deliberately vague upon that point in the interests of the Sydenham family, the use of the Stubland surname for Joan had helped him; and so there dropped into Joan’s ears a suggestion that was at the time merely perplexing but which became gradually an established fact in her mind.
“Ow! don’t you know?” said Mrs. Pybus to her friend. “Ow, no! She’s——” (Her voice sank to a whisper.)
For a time what they said was so confidential as to convey nothing to Joan but a sense of mystery. “Ow ’is mother ever stood ’er in the ’ouse passes my belief,” said Mrs. Pybus, coming up to the audible again. “Why! I’d ’ave killed ’er. But ladies and gentlemen don’t seem to ’ave no natural affections—not wot I call affections. There she was brought into the ’ouse and treated just as if she was the little chap’s sister.”
“She’d be——?” said the friend, trying to grasp it.
“’Arf sister,” said Mrs. Pybus. “Of a sort. Neither ’ere nor there, so to speak. Not in the eyes of the law. And there they are—leastways they was until Lady Charlotte Sydenham interfered.”
The friend nodded her head rapidly to indicate intelligent appreciation.
“It isn’t like being reely brother and sister,” said Mrs. Pybus, contemplating possibilities. “It’s neither one thing nor another. And all wrop up in mystery as you might say. Why, oo knows? They might go falling in love with each other.”
“’Orrible!” said Mrs. Pybus’s friend.
“It ’ad to be put a stop to,” said Mrs. Pybus.
Confirmatory nodding, with a stern eye for the little figure that sat in a corner and pretended to be interested in the faded exploits of vanished royalties, recorded in that old volume of The Illustrated London News....
That conversation sank down into the deeps of Joan’s memory and remained there, obscured but exercising a dim influence upon her relations with Peter. One phrase sent up a bubble every now and then into her conscious thoughts: “half-sister.” It was years after that she began to piece together the hidden riddle of her birth. Mummy and Daddy were away; that had served as well for her as for Peter far beyond the Limpsfield days. It isn’t until children are in their teens that these things interest them keenly. It wasn’t a thing to talk about, she knew, but it was a thing to puzzle over. Who was really her father? Who was her mother? If she was Peter’s half-sister, then either his father was not hers or his mother....
When people are all manifestly in a plot to keep one in the dark one does not ask questions.