Nobody spoke until Joyce said timidly, ‘They would be happier, and she would not scheme any more. The rain comes in upon the little children.’ She had half said ‘bairns,’ which was not at all Joyce’s way, and she changed the word, which would have been very effective if she had but known. ‘There is no room for the little children.’
‘People in such circumstances ’as no business with children. I always said so,’ said Sir Sam, with a wary eye upon his spiritual director, of whose opinion he stood much in awe.
Joyce was as innocent and ignorant as a girl should be. She lifted up her fair serene brow with no false shame upon it, knowing none. ‘How can they help that?’ she said. ‘It is God that sends the children, not the will of men.’
‘Oh, my pretty dear!’ cried Lady Thompson, who was so homely a woman, reaching across Mrs. Jenkinson’s prim lap to seize Joyce’s hand. ‘Oh, my dear!’—with tears in her homely eyes—‘however you knows it, that’s true.’
Mrs. Jenkinson did not say a word: emotion of this kind is contagious, and these two women, though without another feature in common, were both childless women, and felt it to the bottom of their hearts.
‘Canon,’ said Sir Sam, with a slight huskiness in his voice, ‘if you’re of that opinion I’ve got a cheque-book always ’andy. It was an understood thing, so far as I can remember. There was to be an ’ouse.’
‘Yes, there was to be an ’ouse,’ the Canon replied, without any intention of mimicry. At this moment of feeling he could not reprove the soap-boiler even by too marked an accentuation of the h which he had lost. He turned to his wife as he rose to accompany the soap-boiler, laying his hand upon Joyce’s shoulder. ‘This child has got very pretty turns of phraseology,’ he said. ‘Her Scotch is winning. You should have heard one or two things she said.’
‘Oh, go away, Canon!’ cried his wife. ‘She is just a pretty girl, and that is what you never could resist in your life.’
Thus Joyce’s first interference, and attempt to ascertain whether plain truth might not be more effectual than scheming, ended fortunately, as such attempts do not always do. It was her first appearance separately in the society of the new world she had been so strangely thrown into. But she had not time for much more, and perhaps it was as well. Such a success may happen once in a way, but it is seldom repeated. She was found sitting on that garden-seat with those two ladies a short time afterwards by her father, who had come late, and who brought with him Captain Bellendean.
Joyce had not seen Bellendean since that curious moment when she stood a spectator and watched him like a stranger, passing with his friends, steering the laden boat with all the ladies down the river. She was as much startled by his appearance now as if some strange embarrassing thing, requiring painful explanations, had passed since last they met.