“Well, you’re a bold man to be partial to a woman when she’s scolding,” said Joan, a little mollified; “but I don’t know much about you, Mr. Selby, and I can’t say I’m partial to you.”
“That’s because you don’t know me,” he said promptly; “make as many inquiries as you like, I am not afraid of them. You’ll find I have a good character wherever I’ve been. I don’t see why I shouldn’t make you happy as well as another. I’ve nothing behind me that I’m ashamed of. You and I at Heatonshaw, with plenty of beasts in the stables, and the house furnished to please you, and a bit of a phaeton in the coach-house: I don’t see why we mightn’t be very snug together,” he said, and as he spoke he took Joan’s hand, which, though a little red in the fingers and brown on the back, was a shapely hand notwithstanding all her work. Then she was seized all at once, and without warning, with that fou rire.
“If you mean courting, Mr. Selby, it’s a bit public here,” she said, discharging a load from her breast in that peal of laughter. He was a little offended for the moment; but then he comforted himself that laughing was near to crying, and that crying would have been a very good sign indeed. At his age he had a little experience more than falls to the lot of a youth at the ordinary love-making age.
“I hope you’re not just laughing at me, Joan.”
“I’m laughing at myself as well—and at you too. I’m old to have a lad, and I never looked for such a thing—and you’re old,” Joan added. “I think you’re too old for me.”
“I am forty-one; which is not a bad age. Just suitable, I think,” he said.
Then she looked at him again with the laughter in her eyes. He was a very “wiselike” man—nothing to be ashamed at, whoever saw him—very good-looking indeed; more satisfactory in that way than Joan felt herself to be. And Heatonshaw was a pretty place; and a house all of her own was better than a house in which her father might interfere arbitrarily every day, or even her mother change all the arrangements some fine morning in a fit of absence or compunction. She turned round and began to walk towards the house, suddenly becoming serious. Selby turned too and walked with her. He did not say a word as they went over the fields and through the garden of the White House, but waited her pleasure in a deferential way which went to Joan’s heart. But she was not “partial” to him. “We can talk of this some other time” was all that she said.
CHAPTER XIV.
JOAN AND HER LOVER.
JOAN said nothing to anyone about Philip Selby’s proposal. She had, indeed, no one to consult on such a subject. She had grown up in the habit of indifference to her mother’s opinions, which originated partly in the difference of their dispositions and the superiority a calm temperament has over a nervous and anxious one, and partly in her father’s contempt of his wife, which her children resented, yet were influenced by. Seeing the number of times when Mrs. Joscelyn was unhappy, and excited as Joan thought about nothing, it was almost impossible for the strong-natured and composed young woman not to feel a certain affectionate and sometimes indignant contempt for the excess of feeling which gave so much trouble, yet never had any result; while, on the other hand, it is almost impossible for a man to treat his wife with systematic scorn without weakening the respect of her children for her, even when, as we have said, they resent his conduct and are more or less her partizans. At the best she was “poor mother,” a person to be defended and accounted for, not looked up to and trusted in. From her early youth Joan had been her own guide and governor. She had none of her mother’s sentiment; her mother’s standard was too high for her; her mother’s feelings overstrained and exaggerated. Among the multitude of “fusses” she was partly disgusted, partly amused, ready to take mother’s part, as has been seen, but always with a protest against the weaknesses which she could apologise for, but not understand. In the matter of Harry, as she shared in some measure the anxiety, she had in some measure understood the sentiment; but her attitude towards her mother was more that of a senior towards a junior, the stronger to the weaker, than the natural subordination which would have become their relationship. Joan knew that, had she consulted her mother about Mr. Selby, Mrs. Joscelyn would have been greatly excited. She would have questioned her daughter as to her love for her suitor, and his love for her, and all the sentimental questions, which Joan felt were well enough in books, but as far as regarded Philip Selby and herself were altogether out of the question. And as for mentioning such a subject to her father, nothing could have been more impossible. She was thus alone in her moderate and sober soul, as Mrs. Joscelyn was in her tender and somewhat excitable being. She could not tell her story to anyone with the hope of aid and guidance—who can? We are all alone when the great problems of life come upon us. Joan, however, thought of this question very soberly, without once regarding it in the light of a great problem. It excited her a good deal privately within her own composed bosom; but, to tell the truth, its first effect was more mirthful than serious. In the seclusion of her own being she laughed, saying to herself that after all the maids had been right, that she had “got a lad” when she was least thinking of it. The laugh was not without a touch of gratification in it, for it is true that a young woman, even when she reaches the mature age of thirty and gives herself out as beyond such vanities, still likes to have “a lad,” and to feel that she is like the others—“respectit like the lave,” not left out in this important particular of life. Joan was pleased with Mr. Selby that he had appreciated her. She thought the more of him for it, as has perhaps been already perceived. She had an honest consciousness of her own value. She knew what she could do, and what her services were worth in the not very satisfactory position she held in her father’s house, where she had the responsibility of everything without either the approbation or the reward to which such work as hers was entitled. And she knew, without any misplaced modesty on the subject, that she would make an excellent wife. But being thirty, and in her own opinion very homely in appearance, and evidently not appreciated in this way, Joan had, with a half-conscious contempt for the fool of a man, whoever he was, who had not “come forward,” and a secret laugh when she thought of it, even at this contempt—put that contingency out of her mind and taken it for granted that she was to be Joan Joscelyn till the end of her days, the manager and soul of the establishment at the White House. If it occurred to her sometimes—as of course it must have done—that the White House could not continue for ever under its present régime, and that the day would come when Will’s wife (and a bonnie hand she would make of it!) must reign in her stead, the idea in no way troubled her; for she knew that no circumstances could arise in which she, Joan Joscelyn, would not be well worth her salt. But now, when she had no thought of any such want, when she had put it entirely out of her mind, here had happened the thing that she thought would never happen! She had got “a lad.” Suddenly the monotonous future in which she had foreseen no change opened before her, showing the pretty little property she had always admired, the place which had once belonged to the Joscelyns; the pasture which was the sweetest in the country-side; the nice house with its sunny aspect, so different from the White House; the best of beasts in the stables, and even the phaeton in the coach-house. It is the greatest wonder in the world that women are not demoralised altogether by the constant possibility of such sudden changes in their existence. From day to day it is always happening. A poor girl, who has been trained to all the pinchings and scrapings of genteel poverty, will suddenly see wealth before her, and consideration, and importance, all in a moment, offered to her acceptance without any virtue of hers. We ask a great deal in asking young women to be wholly insensible to this chance which may happen at any moment to any one of them, and of which everyone knows instances. It was not anything so magnificent which had suddenly fallen in Joan’s way; but it was a great change, an offer as important as if it had come from King Cophetua; far more important indeed, for sensible Joan would have made short work with his majesty. This, however, was the most sensible, the most suitable of arrangements. It was exactly what she would have liked had she exercised the widest choice. The perfect appropriateness of it even subdued the inward mirth with which the idea, when it first presented itself to her mind, had been received. Though she still had a laugh now and then, it was gradually hushed by this conviction. “I thought I might had a waur offer,” she would say to herself now and then. She was like the heroine of that song. Her “braw wooer” was not without a touch of the ridiculous about him. She was disposed to jibe at his good looks, and his politeness, and his fine talk; but notwithstanding:—
“I never let on that I kent or I cared,
But I thought I might had a waur offer, waur offer,
I thought I might had a waur offer.”