“Now, mother, listen to me for a moment. Don’t take it into your head that you are just to have a letter directly and all to go well. He may take some time to come round. I would not wonder if he was offended both with you and me. What for? oh, who can tell what for? Just for nonsense, and queer temper. Don’t you be disappointed if there’s no word.”
“I will be terribly disappointed, Joan,” said the poor mother. “I am going to write to him now. Why should he be offended with me? If he does not answer it will break my heart.”
“Your heart’s been broken a many times, mother,” Joan said, shaking her head. “Well, maybe there will be an answer, but it’s always best to be prepared for the worst.”
She shook her head again as she went away.
“I wonder,” she said to herself, with a half smile on her face, “how many pieces mother’s heart’s in? it’s taken a deal of breaking. We’ve all had a good pull at it in our day;” and then her face, with its half comic look of criticism, softened, and she added gently, “Poor dear!”
Then Joan went up to Harry’s room in all her self-possessed activity, and laid the clean white shirts carefully into the half-packed portmanteau, which stood like a kind of coffin half open in the deserted room. She looked through all the drawers, and put in everything he was likely to want. She had a very soft heart to her younger brother. There were only some five or six years between them, but a boy of four-and-twenty looks very young to a woman over thirty; she felt as if he might have been her son. Will and Tom were different. She had shared their games and such training as they had, and lived her hoyden days in their close company, with a careless comradeship, but no particular sentiment. Harry, however, had been the one who was away. When he came home at holiday times he was the stranger, the little brother, less robust than the others, a boy who had to be considered and cared for; even his mending and darning, in which she early had a share, had to be more carefully done than the others, for Mrs. Joscelyn had been jealous of any imperfection in her boy’s outfit falling under Uncle Henry’s, or still more Uncle Henry’s housekeeper’s eye. And so it had happened that a very special softness of regard for Harry had come into his elder sister’s mind. Nobody knew of it, but there it was. Perhaps the fact that he had “a deal of mother in him” had added to this partiality, notwithstanding that the mother’s peculiarities had often exasperated Joan in their original manifestation. Reflected in Harry they gave him a certain charm, the charm which a nature full of sudden impulses, swift to act and lively to feel has to a more substantial and matter-of-fact nature. She packed his clothes even with a tender touch, smoothing everything with the greatest neatness, arranging layer above layer in the most perfect order. “They’ll all be tossed into his drawers pell-mell,” she said, shaking her head over the linen as she laid it in, with a smile on her face. She disliked untidiness next to wickedness, but in Harry it was venial. Even Harry’s wrong-doings would have been no more hardly judged by Joan than with a shake of the head and a smile.
When she had finished her packing, she went downstairs on a still more congenial errand, and packed a hamper of home produce for her brother.
“Mr. Harry’s not coming back; he’s gone straight on to Liverpool; we’re to send his things after him,” she explained to the maids, who were full of curiosity, and vaguely certain that something was wrong. They were already beginning to have their doubts as to that first fine hypothesis about Joan’s lover, and to make out that Harry had more to do with the locking of the door than any “lad” who could be “courting” the daughter of the house; and they were all agog for information, as was natural. The packing up of the cheese and eggs, the bottle of cream (though that was allowed to be of very doubtful expediency), the fine piece of honey-comb, the home-cured ham, all that was best in the house, threw, however, an air of stability and reality about Harry, and suppressed the first whispers against him. There could be nothing wrong about a young man for whom such a hamper was being prepared; neither a deadly quarrel with his family, nor any trouble at his office, nor roguery of any kind was compatible with that hamper. It meant a well-doing respectable youth eating good breakfasts (always a sure sign of good morals) and coming in regularly to all his meals. The hamper eased the mind generally of the house. Joscelyn himself saw it as he passed, and, though he took no notice, was comforted too. His uneasiness had been angry rather than anxious; but then the anger had been partly against himself, and a consciousness that humbled him of having laid himself open to criticism and made a foolish exhibition of temper, had given it a double sting. It was one of the finest hams he ever had seen which he saw packed into the hamper, and he grudged it to Harry, but all the same it eased his mind. The fellow he said to himself, had taken no harm; he was all right. He asked no questions, but his mind was relieved. When they were all put into the cart in the evening, to be taken down to the nearest station, even Mrs. Joscelyn herself came out to the door to watch them go off. It was a soft evening, the warmest that had been that season; the wind had changed into the west, the sun was setting in a glow of crimson, the whole valley canopied over with clouds full of rosy reflection. In the distance one of these rose-clouds caught the mirror of the river, and glowed in that, repeating its warm and smiling tone of colour in the midst of the gray fields of the surrounding landscape and the gray houses of the village. At the back door, where the cart was standing, the servants were all congregated as if it wanted half-a-dozen people to put up two portmanteaus and a hamper. Joan gave a hand herself with that last precious burden.
“That’s the most worth of a’,” said the cook. “Ye may buy shirts and waistcoats, but you’ll no buy butter like ours, nor a ham to compare with that—and my griddle-cakes, I never made better.”
“It’s to be hoped,” said the dairy-maid, “they’ll not spoil.”