“I am so cold,” she said, with a nervous shiver.
“That’s because you will fret so, mother, and make such a deal of everything,” Joan said.
Mrs. Joscelyn made no answer to this reproach.
“My feet are like lumps of lead,” she said. “It’s more like December than April. I think I will never be warm again.”
A little sympathetic moisture softened Joan’s steady eyes. She felt towards her mother as she might have felt to a tiresome but amiable child, impatient of her vagaries, yet sorry for the useless trouble and pain the poor thing gave herself.
“It’s all the fretting,” she said, “it’s not the weather. Sit down here by the fire and I’ll get you a shawl. Bless me! there’s father coming in.”
Mrs. Joscelvn retreated hastily from the fireside, and sat down by the table, where the candles were shining steadily upon a heap of linen to mend. She took up something hurriedly without appearing to notice what it was, and began to work, or to put on an appearance of working. It seemed at first a false alarm, but, after a minute or two of uncertain movement outside, the door opened and a tall and strong man came in. There was a great arm-chair standing by the side of the fire, which evidently, as soon as he appeared, proclaimed itself to be waiting for him, his harsh and big domestic throne; a hard, broad, uncompromising piece of furniture, with its two great wooden elbows thrust out. He stood for a moment at the door, looking round the room—perhaps to see whether his son had taken refuge there, perhaps only to find out any lurking offence. Ralph Joscelyn was a man whose habit it was to look out for offence meant or possible. He inspected the downcast faces of the women, for even Joan now, after one momentary glance at him, turned her eyes upon her knitting—and the bright space before the fire, and all the darker corners round. Then his keen eye caught the ruffled curtain, and the slight whiteness behind of the moonlight showing through the shutter, which his wife had left half open. She had meant to go back when the rest of the house was quiet, and watch noiseless at that window till her son came back, and probably her husband divined this. He walked straight to the window, pushing the curtains aside, and with much demonstration closed the shutters, and with a heavy tug brought the curtains together again.
“There’s no order in this house, nor ever was,” he said, in a strong North country accent. Then he crossed the room again and threw himself into the big chair. The house was solidly built, and the parlour was on the ground floor; nevertheless, his step made the floor jar and creak as if it had found loose boards under the carpet, and shook the room as though it had been in a slim villa. The big chair creaked too as he threw himself into it. All other sounds had ceased as by magic, even the click of Joan’s needles, which only occurred at long intervals, though she worked on with more devotion than ever. Even the coals made no further explosions, sent out no little gay jets of gas, but burned soberly, stolidly under the master’s eye. Mrs. Joscelyn, in her agitation, was less silent. Her elbow knocked against the table, her needle stumbled and broke in her work, her reels of thread fell down and rolled about the carpet. All this the master contemplated with his keen spectator-eyes. He had altogether changed the character of the scene. The two very distinctly marked individuals, so unlike in nature, though so closely bound together, who had put forth unawares each her own phase of life in the household quiet, were now cowed into a sort of composed and alarmed opposition, dumbly resistant, making common cause together; typical women merely, not individuals at all. The typical domestic tyrant who had worked this change looked round him with a glance in which contempt for them and a kind of pleasure in their subjugation were mingled with resentment against them for the distrust and sudden silence which he knew his appearance had produced. He crossed his long legs half way across the hearth, thrusting up his heavy boot almost in his daughter’s face. Many men do this who mean no particular harm, but Joscelyn did mean harm, and did not care who knew it. In a moment the room had become full of him, and of his oppressive shadow. He took away and devoured, drawing into his capacious gullet, the very air they breathed.
“You are a nice cheerful lot for a man to come in to,” he said; “a nice pleasant home you make for me, with that click-clack. I don’t wonder, not I, that men turn out to the ale-house, though I’ve got to punish ’em for it now and again. No, I don’t wonder, not a bit. A couple of white-faced women filling up his rooms, taking the heat out of his fire and the light out of his lamp for their confounded stockings and rubbish—when there isn’t an old woman in the dale but could do them a sight better and save all that pretence.”
Joan upon this raised her eyes. She was not timid, though she avoided strife.