“Indeed I am a well-wisher,” he cried; “if I can do anything, I will do it with all my heart. If it’s about your brother Harry, I’ve heard something—” and he looked from Joan to Mrs. Joscelyn with eyes so full of sympathy that they felt the look as a sick man feels a cool hand laid upon his hot forehead.
They told him their story with anxious questions as to what he had heard. He had heard, of course, a great deal more than there was to hear, that Harry had come to blows with his father, that there had been a struggle and a fight, and that the young man had been kicked out of the house. Some added that he lay on the Fells all night, so much injured was he; and there were whispers of vice on Harry’s part as the cause of such a violent proceeding, which Selby was too wise to betray to the poor women. When they had told him all they knew, he sprang up to his feet and looked at his watch with an air of readiness and capability which at once gave them hope.
“It is quite clear what must be done,” he said; “you must send somebody to Liverpool at once, this very night. It’s too late for the mid-day train, but the night one will do.”
“Send somebody to Liverpool!” Joan’s countenance flushed again while her mother’s grew pale.
“Oh!” cried Mrs. Joscelyn, “but who can we get to go?” while Joan, who had never been beyond Carlisle in her life, stood up unconsciously with such a gasp as catches the breath after a sudden plunge into the sea. She knew nothing about the world, and she belonged to a generation which believed that a woman could do nothing out of her own home; but a rush of blood came to her face, and of tremendous energy to her heart. In the suggestion there seemed so much hope, although almost as much fear.
“Who will you get to go? Me if you like,” said Selby, with the benevolent glow of a man who feels himself a sort of good angel to women in trouble. “I have nothing very particular to do, and I have a pass on the railway, and I’m used to travelling. I will go to-night, and come back to-morrow night. You will hear sooner that way than any other way, and it is far easier to make inquiries personally than by letter—and far more satisfactory.”
The colour left Joan’s cheek; there was a little falling back of relief, yet half disappointment, from the sudden alarmed temerity of impulse that had come upon her. She looked at him with, in the midst of her trouble, a faint—the very faintest—touch of a smile at one corner of her mouth. “Aha, my lad! I know what that is for!” Joan said to herself, swift as lightning; but even the interested motive thus revealed was not displeasing to her, and the whole suggestion went through her mind like an arrow on the wind, showing only for a second against the dark atmosphere of anxiety within.
“Oh, Mr. Selby, how could I ask you to do that for me? How could I ever repay you for such kindness?” Mrs. Joscelyn cried, wringing her tremulous hands. There was no complication of ideas in her mind. She was bewildered by the suggestion, by the offer, by this unexampled effort of friendship. No one had ever offered her such a service before. To imagine that it was for the love of Joan that it was offered to her did not enter her mind. She knew no motive possible, and it filled her with astonishment—astonishment almost too great for hope. A journey was a thing which, in her experience, was only undertaken after great preparations and much thought. To go to-day and return to-morrow was a proceeding unknown to her. And then why should he, a stranger, not belonging to her, undertake such a journey for her? and how could she repay him? She had not even money to pay his expenses if she could have offered payment, and how was she to make it up to him? In this strait she turned her eyes anxiously upon Joan, who was standing by, silenced by an agitation such as had never been seen in her before.
“It is far, far too much trouble,” Joan faltered. “If I could go myself——”
“You!” cried the mother, upon whom the weakness of her sex and its incapacity had always been strongly impressed. “Oh, what could you do, Joan? what can a woman do? They will not even let a woman into these offices—or so I’ve heard. Oh no, no, not you—and it’s far too much, far too much, as you say, to ask—”