Stephen was not in the least grateful for this unsolicited championship. His dark, rather saturnine face took on such an expression of sardonic scorn that poor Joseph was momentarily abashed, and stood looking at him with an absurdly crestfallen air.
"Surprising weak intellects isn't a pastime of mine," said Stephen, not even troubling to remove his pipe from between his teeth.
Joseph smiled with a bravery which prompted Paula to take up the cudgels in his defence. But Stephen only gave a short bark of laughter, and buried himself in his book, and by the time Paula had told him, with modern frankness, what she thought of his manners, Joseph, whose invincible cheerfulness no brutality could long impair, had recovered from his hurt and archly ascribed Stephen's snap to a touch of liver.
Maud, who was laying out a complicated Double Patience, her plump countenance betraying nothing but a mild interest in the disposition of aces and kings, said in her toneless voice that salts before breakfast were good for sluggish livers.
"Oh, my God!" said Stephen, dragging his lanky limbs out of the deep chair. "To think that this house was once tolerable!"
There was no mistaking the implication of this savage remark, but as soon as Stephen had left the room, Joseph assured Paula that she need not worry on his account, since he knew Stephen too well to be hurt by the things he said. "I don't suppose poor old Stephen really grudges us Nat's hospitality," he said, with one of his whimsical smiles.
Joseph and Maud had not always been inmates of Lexham Manor. Joseph had been, in fact, until a couple of years previously, a rolling stone. In reviewing his past, he often referred to square pegs and wanderlust; and, that nothing should be wanting to exasperate Stephen, would recall past triumphs behind the footlights with a sigh, a smile, and a gently-spoken: "Eheu fugaces!"
For Joseph had been on the stage. Articled in youth to a solicitor, he had soon abandoned this occupation (the square peg) for the brighter prospects of coffee-growing (wanderlust) in East Africa. Since those early days he had flitted through every imaginable profession, from freelance prospecting for gold to acting. No one knew why he had left the stage - for since he had belonged to colonial and South American travelling companies it could scarcely be ascribed to the wanderlust that was responsible for his throwing up so many other jobs, for he seemed designed by nature to grace the boards. "The ideal Polonius!" Mathilda Clare once called him.
It was during this phase of his career that he had met and married Maud. Incomprehensible though it might appear to the young Herriards, knowing Maud only in her fifties, she had once held an honourable place in the second row of the chorus. She had grown plump with the years, and it was difficult to trace in her fat little face, with its tiny mouth embedded between deep creases of pink cheek, and its pale blue, slightly starting eyes, the signs of the pretty girl she must once have been. She rarely spoke of her youth, such remarks as she from time to time let fall being inconsequent, and holding little clue to what Paula chose to think mystery of her past.
The young Herriards, and Mathilda Clare, a distant cousin, knew Joseph and Maud only as legendary figures until the sea washed them up on the shores of England two years previously - at Liverpool. They had come from South America, solvent, but without prospects. They had gravitated to Lexham Manor, and there they had remained, not too proud, said Joseph, to be Nathaniel's pensioners.