“If we’ve seen the last of him,” said the other, “we know where to lay the fault.”
There could not have been a more complete family unanimity on this point at least.
CHAPTER XV.
NO NEWS.
BUT neither Will nor Tom had any suggestion to make, or knew what to do in such an emergency. They thought it might be well to write to the office and ask what was known of him, or to his Liverpool lodgings; and for themselves, they were anxious to get back to their own homes, their wives, and their work. Even before the afternoon was out they had so far exhausted the subject of Harry that they were not unwilling to join their father in an examination of the Sister to Scythian, and “pass their opinion” on her, and the high hopes Joscelyn entertained of her. Joan looked on at this change of sentiment and subject with a half understanding and half bewilderment. In other family troubles before this she too had been glad to escape from the monotony of a painful subject with a half scorn and whole impatience of her mother’s persistence in it, exactly like the sentiment her brothers showed now. Only this time her own heart was profoundly engaged; she felt like her mother, and along with her comprehension of the feeling of “the boys,” had a perfectly new and bitter sense of their heartlessness, their stupid indifference, their desire to escape from this one thing which was more important than anything else in earth or heaven. What was the Sister to Scythian in comparison with Harry? And they had all allowed that Harry’s disappearance was a serious matter: they had not deceived themselves, or made it out to be some “nonsense of mother’s.” This time they had been obliged to confess there was grave cause for anxiety; and then they had gone to the stables with the father whom they had been unanimous in blaming, and had given all their minds to the points of the horse. Joan had never been given to investigating the feebleness of human character. She would scarcely have understood the words had they been suggested to her, or, at least, would have treated them as too high-flown for ordinary meaning; but for once in a way the wonder was brought home to her, and she saw and understood it. “The boys” were sorry about their brother, sorry that such a thing should have occurred; annoyed that their domestic affairs should thus be thrown open to the public, and more or less sympathetic with their mother, though not quite sure that it did not serve her right for making a favourite of her youngest son; but when they had expressed these feelings, what more were they to say? They could not go on talking about it for ever; they could not bring Harry back if they talked till doomsday; and besides, when once their opinion was expressed and their regrets said, Harry was not a subject of very great importance to them—whereas the Sister to Scythian might advance the interests of the family and make the Joscelyn stable celebrated. And Joan understood it all, she knew it by herself: yet was angry with a harsh and disappointed pain which all her reason could not subdue. Mrs. Joscelyn in the parlour, absorbed in that one passion of anxiety, did not even appreciate this failure of the interest of the others in what was so great a matter to herself so much as her daughter did.
“What do the boys say? What do they think we should do?” she asked Joan a hundred times. “What shall we do? Oh! Joan, what do they think we should do?”
“They are not thinking anything about it, mother,” Joan said. “They are off to the stables, looking at that beast. They are more taken up with her than with Harry. An ill-conditioned brute! I wish, for my part, she was at the bottom of the sea; but set a horse before the men, and they think of nothing else—if all the brothers in the world were perishing before their eyes.”
“Miss Joan,” said a voice behind her, “I am astonished to hear you say that; you whom I have always taken to be such an excellent judge of a horse yourself.”
The two women turned upon the new-comer with mingled feelings, half angry that he had intruded upon them, half excited by a sudden wild hope that a stranger might have some new light to throw upon a subject which they had exhausted, for they could not hide their trouble from him. Mrs. Joscelyn could not speak without an overflow of tears, and even Joan’s eyes were red, and there was that look of irritation and vexation and impatience in her face which comes so naturally to a capable person suddenly set down before a painful difficulty which she can see no way in her experience of coping with. Selby looked at her with anxious eyes. Was she angry with him? but, if so, there was a sudden gleam of expectation in her face too, suddenly looking up at him, as if she had said within herself, “If help is possible it is here—” which gave him courage; and he hastened to explain with that look and tone of sympathy in which strangers so often excel those who ought to be the natural consolers.
“I see I have come in at a wrong time,” he said. “I knocked, but I suppose you did not hear. I ought to go away, but I want to stay: for you are in trouble, and if I could be of any use to you——”
“Mr. Selby is—a true well-wisher,” said Joan, looking with almost timidity at her mother. She was not given to blushing, but she blushed now all over her face and her throat, and made such an appeal with her eyes as those eyes had never made before. “It will be best to tell him,” she said: “he, maybe, could think of something; and what is the use of trying to hide it? it will soon be all over the country-side.”