‘I don’t know what can have become of Joyce,’ she said, after she had poured out tea for the gentlemen. ‘She is never out at this hour. It is getting dark, too late for her to be out.’
‘Are you anxious, my dear?’ cried the Colonel, rising. ‘Bless me! it is always you who think of everything. I’ll go at once and bring her home.’
‘Nonsense, Henry!—there is nothing to be anxious about. She has stayed somewhere for tea. Last time we saw you, Captain Bellendean, you expected to return to town—earlier than this. I suppose you had still a good deal to arrange before your father and Mrs. Bellendean left you to your own devices?’
‘I have been very busy,’ said Bellendean in a subdued tone, which the Colonel did not understand.
‘He has come up about business now,’ said Colonel Hayward; ‘and very dull you will find it, Bellendean, I don’t doubt, though I am told that more people come to London at this time of the year than used to do so. You must run down as often as you can and look us up—as you did in summer, you know——’
‘Summer and winter are two very different things,’ said Mrs. Hayward; ‘and Captain Bellendean feels that, Henry. In summer there’s the river, you know, and—other things.’
‘The other things,’ said Norman with an effort, ‘last all the year through; and they are more important even than the river.’
Captain Bellendean was very ill at ease. He had not thought of these surroundings at all, nor of any questions that might be put to him on the subject of his long delay, nor of anything indeed but Joyce. It had been comparatively easy in the outdoor summer life to secure an interview with her. Now as he looked round him, and saw Mrs. Hayward seat herself in her habitual chair by her habitual table, with that air of settled and permanent possession which the mistress of a house has in her own corner, and the Colonel thrown back in a larger chair on the other side, a sense of being surrounded and shut in came upon him. Joyce was not here, which took all the meaning out of his coming; but if she had been here between this pair to whom she belonged, what could he have said to her? Colonel Hayward’s daughter surrounded by all the fortifications of life was a different thing from Joyce,—the girl whom to love and seek was a sort of social crime. There was no question here of a tremendous social downfall, of the mésalliance and mistake against which he had been warned. He had fully understood that side of the question, and it had chilled him even in his heat of love. Now the tables were turned; it was he who was suspected and disapproved of, and from whom the parents were defending their daughter. This unexpected drawback chilled him still more.
Norman sat for a long time in that exceedingly comfortable, warm, beautifully furnished room, with his old Colonel, for whom he had the greatest respect, and the Colonel’s commander, the much-famed Elizabeth, over whose name he had jested, but of whose personality he had always been a little afraid. He sat and made conversation, or rather listened to that which went on across him, growing more and more embarrassed and uncomfortable. He seemed to hear doors opening and closing all over the house, but Joyce never appeared; and footsteps in the hall and on the stairs, but no sign of her coming. His head began to get confused with the contrariety and annoyance. Fate and Mrs. Hayward seemed to have joined the conspiracy against him, in which everybody was at Bellendean—and, as he now blushed to think, he had not expected any contrariety here. He had thought—coxcomb that he was!—that here he would be master of the situation. He had thought he knew that Joyce would not say him nay. The shy glance, the rising colour, even the startled opposition to his half-spoken love-making on their last interview, had given him an assurance that Joyce was not indifferent. But even this assurance came back upon him with a keen sense of shame and wounded vanity. He had been a fool. How could he tell what she would say to him, while here were the father and mother talking, perhaps keeping her out of sight, at least securing that even if she came nothing could be said? And she did not come—though it seemed to Captain Bellendean that hours had elapsed since he entered the drawing-room in the firelight, and imagined to himself the little comedy, the mother seeking the daughter, hurrying her downstairs and into the arms of the waiting lover. He realised with the most stinging shame that he had imagined that—though the reality was so different, so ludicrously different, he tried to say with a laugh at himself—so painfully different, as he felt in his heart.
After a long time he rose. ‘I am afraid it is getting late. I must not lose—the next train. I have—something to do in town,’ he said.