She had gone out obediently to him, as she had been told. ‘Do as you’re told,’ her father and mother had taught her, ‘and not much can go wrong with you.’ Innocent Pinners. Inadequate teaching. It was to lead her, before she had done, into many difficulties.
She went, then, as she had been told, over to where she saw Jocelyn, and sat down beside him beneath the cedar.
He didn’t move, and didn’t look up, and she sat for a long while not daring to speak, because of the expression on his face.
Naturally she thought it was his stomach again, for what else could it be? Last time she had seen him he was smiling as happy as happy, and kissing his mother’s hand. Clear to Sally as daylight was it that he was having another of those attacks to which her father had been such a martyr, and which were familiar to the Pinners under the name of the Dry Heaves. So too had her father sat when they came on, frowning hard at nothing, and looking just like ink. The only difference was that Jocelyn, she supposed because of being a gentleman, held his head in his hands, and her father held the real place the heaves were in. But presently, when the simple remedy he took on these occasions had begun to work, he was better; and it seemed to Sally a great pity that she should be too much afraid of Usband to tell him about it,—a great pity, and wrong as well. Hadn’t she promised God in church the day she was married to look after him in sickness and in health? And here he was sick, plain as a pikestaff.
So at last she pulled her courage together, and did tell him.
‘Father’s stomach,’ she began timidly, ‘was just like that.’
‘What?’ said Jocelyn, roused from his black thoughts by this surprising remark, and turning his head and looking at her.
‘You got the same stomachs,’ said Sally, shrinking under his look but continuing to hold on to her courage, ‘you and Father ’as. Like as two peas.’
Jocelyn stared at her. What, in the name of all that was fantastic, had Pinner’s stomach to do with him?
‘Sit just like that, ’e would, when they come on,’ continued Sally, lashing herself forward.