But presently, and all in a moment, the aspect of affairs changed for Joyce. It changed in a completely unreasonable, and, indeed, altogether inadequate way,—not by an introduction among the best people, the crowd whose appearance filled the clergyman and his wife, and all their retainers, with transports a trifle short of celestial; not in making acquaintance with Sir Sam Thompson, the soap-boiler, whose appearance was the climax of the triumph—a climax so complete that it turned the scale, and made the Sitwells’ hard-hearted partisan sorry for the Canon. None of these great things befell Joyce. All that happened was the appearance of a tall individual, separating himself from the crowd, and walking towards her from the lower level.
‘Here is a gentleman coming this way,’ said Miss Marsham. ‘I don’t think he is one of the school committee, or any one I know. But I am rather short-sighted, and I may be mistaking him for some one else, as I do so often. Dear Miss Hayward, I am sure you must have good eyes: will you look and tell me. Ah, I see you know him.’
‘It is Captain Bellendean,’ said Joyce. Her musing face had grown bright.
‘Who is Captain Bellendean? Does he take an interest in Sunday schools? Is he——’ Here Miss Marsham turned to look at her companion, and though she was short-sighted, she was not without certain insights which women seldom altogether lose. ‘Oh!’ she said, and, with a subdued smile and a sparkle out of her brown eyes, which for a moment made her middle-aged face both young and bright, returned to the children who were playing Hunt the Slipper, and though she had said she was too stiff for that game, was down among them in a moment as lively as any there.
It is to be doubted whether Joyce was conscious that her friend of ten minutes’ standing had left her, or how she left her. She stood looking down upon the same scene, her face still full of musing, but touched with light which changed and softened every line. ‘I have been looking for you everywhere,’ said Captain Bellendean; ‘when I got free of that rabble you were nowhere to be seen. I might have thought you would turn to the children, who have some nature about them. And so I had the sense to do at last.’
‘Do you call them rabble?’ said Joyce.
‘Not if it displeases you,’ he said. ‘But what are they after all? Society is always more or less a rabble, and here you get it naked, without the brilliancy and the glow which takes one in town.’
Perhaps Captain Bellendean had not found himself so much appreciated as he thought himself entitled to be in town, and thus produced these sentiments, which are so common, with a little air of conviction, as if they had never been heard before. And indeed, save in books, where she had often met them, Joyce had never heard them before.
‘And yet,’ said Joyce, ‘when educated people meet—people that have read and have seen the world—it must be more interesting to hear them talk than—than any other pleasure.’
‘May we sit down here? the grass is quite dry. Educated people? I am sure I don’t know, for I seldom meet them, and I’m very uninstructed myself. But I’ll tell you what, Miss Joyce, you are the only educated person I know. Talk to me, and I will listen, and I have no doubt it will be far more entertaining to me than any other diversion; but whether it may have the same effect on you——’ he said, looking up to her from the grass upon which he had thrown himself, with inquiring eyes.