Mother very rightly upbraided me for it, and in a way that showed me that she was more than ever determined that Joyce should not marry Captain Forrester if she could help it. She said that Joyce was beginning to forget this dandy love affair, and that it was all the more annoying of me to have gone putting my finger in the pie and stirring up old memories. I declared that Joyce was not forgetting Frank at all, and told mother I wondered at her for thinking a daughter of hers could be so fickle, and for supposing that her manner meant anything but the determination to keep to the unfair promise that had been extracted from her.
Ah, dear me, if I could have believed in that other string that mother had to her bow for Joyce! But although the squire came to the Grange just as often as ever, I could not deceive myself into thinking his coming or going made any difference to my sister, whatever might be his feelings towards her. If Joyce had not encouraged her lover, as I thought she ought to have done, that was not the reason. I told myself that the reason was in the different way in which we looked at such matters; but I was sorry I had brought Frank to the Grange.
With my arrogance of youth, I might have got over mother's scolding if I could have persuaded myself that I had done any good; but I could not but think that I seemed to have done nothing but harm. Joyce was almost distant to me in a way that had never happened before in our lives; and when I tried to upbraid her for her coldness, she choked me off in a quiet fashion that there was no withstanding and left me alone, sore and silent and angry. Oh, and there was a worse result of that unlucky visit than all this, although I would not even tell my own heart of it.
Joyce, as I have said, was moody and silent all the next day. To be sure, the weather had turned from that glorious heat to a dull gray, showery fit that was most depressing to everybody. It had most reason to be depressing to Trayton Harrod, who had his eye on the crops even more anxiously than father had himself. The rain had not as yet been heavy or continuous enough to do more than refresh the parched earth, but a little more might make a serious difference to the wheat and the hops, of which the one harvest was not yet all garnered, the second nearly ready for picking.
This, and the annoyance about the broken water-pipes—in which matter he had failed to discover the offenders—were quite enough, of course, to account for the cloud upon the bailiff's brow as I came across him that evening on the ridge of the downs by the new reservoir. I ought to have remembered this; I ought to have soothed the trouble; I should have done so a fortnight ago. But I was ruffed, unreasonable, unjust.
"Well, have you discovered anything more about that ridiculous affair?" I asked, nipping off the twig of a bush in the hedge pettishly as I spoke.
"What affair?" asked he, although I knew that he knew perfectly well what I meant.
"Well, about those water-pipes that you fancy the men have stamped upon to spite you," laughed I, ill-naturedly.
He pressed his lips together. "I think I guess pretty well who was at the bottom of it," he said. "But the work is finished now and in working order, so I shall say no more about it."
I knew very well that if he could have been certain of his facts he would have said a great deal more about it, and in my unreasonable ill-temper I wanted to make him feel this.