Mrs. Oliphant

“ Father’s a trial, but as long as we can we must just keep him to ourselves.”
“Ah, Joan,” said Mrs. Joscelyn, wringing her thin hands, “you can laugh, but I feel a great deal more like crying. I can think upon nothing but my poor boy.”
“Well, mother,” said Joan, “crying is not my line. I’ll not pretend to more; but it’s just as well there is one of us that can laugh, or what would become of us both I don’t know. Take your tea; it will be quite cold; and lie still and get a rest. ”

“ If Harry waited long enough he would get it; but in the meantime, a demand upon him was like a warning that he had lived long enough, and that his money was wanted for a new generation, which was as intolerable to Uncle Henry as young Harry’s troubles were to him. He would not take upon himself the burden of setting his grand-nephew up in life, but at the same time he felt it was a hardship that the young fellow should not have some one to set him up in life, and was conciliatory and soothing by a kind of generous instinct, an instinct not generous enough to go further. ”

“ Joscelyn said something unusually fine, a little snap of a cough came from Joan’s parted lips. She was astonished and she was delighted. “Who would have thought mother had so much in her?” she was saying all the time. She was not in the least handsome; but there was nothing in her that was unpleasant or objectionable; not a harsh line, or a sharp angle, or a twist of feature. Sometimes there is a curve at the corner of a mouth which will spoil the harmony of a face altogether; but Joan had no defect of this kind. She had a dimple in her smooth, round chin, and another in her cheek. ”

“ WHAT CAN’T BE CURED MUST BE ENDURED. ALL great evils are more intolerable, more terrible, before than after they come. It seems to us in advance as if the mind could never accustom itself to such a change, or life close over the wound. And yet, when but a very short time has elapsed, we find that obedient Nature has accepted and acknowledged the inevitable fact, and that use and wont, so rent asunder by the change, have begun to throw new fibres of their cobweb tissue over the chasm. There was a moment when poor Mrs. Joscelyn thought that she could not bear this rending asunder. ”

“ I am no slave to whisper and to conspire, whoever may be. What do you do for me that you should take all that upon you? I’m a servant without wages. I work as hard as any man about the place, and I neither get credit nor pay; and you think I’ll take all your insults to the boot as if I were a frightened little lass; but you’re mistaken. It isn’t for nothing you lock the door upon your family; and if you don’t keep a civil tongue in your head——”
“Joan, Joan!” came with a feeble cry from behind. Mrs. Joscelyn had risen up with her usual gesture, wringing her hands. ”

“ There were still several hours to wait before he could see Uncle Henry, and Harry lay down upon the bed where he had slept when he was a schoolboy, and returned to common life and respectable usages through the medium of a long sleep. It was a sort of moral bath to him, restoring him to creditable ways. To think that he should have feared John Armstrong’s lantern, and hid himself from the carter with his early vegetables! But all that, and a great deal more, went to his father’s account. His rage revived as the misery of the night ended. ”

“ Joan cried, turning her head in angry impatience. “Mother’s quite right, we’re used to all that.”
What could a man so assailed do? He could not get over his astonishment. He remained finally master of the field, in so far that they left him there volleying forth those thunders which they disdained, and saw to be nothing but words. Joscelyn recognized with the strangest humiliation that they were but words, when his women, his slaves, first ventured to let him know that they saw through him, and found them all to be froth and emptiness. ”

“ I am not setting up for more sense than other folk; the moment I heard Isaac’s voice asking for me I knew it in a moment, but not till then. Just see what fools we are, the wisest of us,” said Joan, reflectively. “I think I’ve got a little sense; but I have no more than other folk, till it’s put into my head. Well! it’s a comfort to know his address to write to, and that he’s gone to his work, and no harm done; for he has a queer temper, has Harry. He’s not just like the rest of us; he might have done a desperate thing, being the kind of lad he is. ”

“ It was in character with the wild immorality of an evening in the Red Lion that the young men should be playing for high stakes; and this idea made the others enjoy themselves still more. When they came out, the misty whiteness of the atmosphere had cleared off a little, and consolidated itself into dark shadows in all the corners, and a flood of faint moonlight dimly marking the gray fells and the dark treeless country, with its dim lines of dykes and square grey limestone houses. Harry Joscelyn was one of the last to leave ”

“ Perhaps the greater number do not reach it at all, but are content to deceive themselves and think all their offspring right and perfect. But Mrs. Joscelyn was not of this kind. She could not get over her sons’ indifference. “Another man going out to bring me news—taking all that trouble—a stranger that is nothing to us—and my own boys, my own boys caring nothing.” Over this again the poor soul, faithful in all the devices of self-torment, shed a few bitter tears.
“Now, mother, you are beginning to fuss again,” said Joan, in a vexed tone. ”

“ The packing up of the cheese and eggs, the bottle of cream (though that was allowed to be of very doubtful expediency) , the fine piece of honey-comb, the home-cured ham, all that was best in the house, threw, however, an air of stability and reality about Harry, and suppressed the first whispers against him. There could be nothing wrong about a young man for whom such a hamper was being prepared; neither a deadly quarrel with his family, nor any trouble at his office, nor roguery of any kind was compatible with that hamper. ”

“ And Harry was the one most like his mother; most likely to make a fuss and take such an accident in the worst way. Where had Harry gone? What was he doing? Where could he go in the middle of the night?
When she had come back to this subject, Joan felt almost too restless to stay in bed. If she had but thought of it at the time she would have gone after him; she would have prevented him from going away. To think she should have been so overcome by sleep as not to know when Harry had disappeared, or to be aware that he was gone! ”

“ Sometimes there is more pleasure to be got out of twenty pounds than out of a thousand. Uncle Henry meant it very kindly. The young man’s heart was a little softened and warmed, almost against his will, by the gift.
And when evening came, and with it the train which roars along between that deep cutting under the fells, between two high walls of living stone, to “the South” and the world, Harry, with a little portmanteau, in which Mrs. Eadie had packed the things she had bought for him, walked down to the station, boldly passing both lamps and policemen, and went away. ”

“ Suddenly the monotonous future in which she had foreseen no change opened before her, showing the pretty little property she had always admired, the place which had once belonged to the Joscelyns; the pasture which was the sweetest in the country-side; the nice house with its sunny aspect, so different from the White House; the best of beasts in the stables, and even the phaeton in the coach-house. It is the greatest wonder in the world that women are not demoralised altogether by the constant possibility of such sudden changes in their existence. From day to day it is always happening. ”

“ We must let him get over his pet.”
“Oh, Joan, do you think I would keep anybody anxious that was fond of me?” said Mrs. Joscelyn, “but,” she added, with a sigh, “nobody would care very much if it was only me. It is this that gives you all the pull over me, that I care, and you don’t.”
Joan could not contradict this; and there gleamed over her a momentary compassion for her mother, whose lot it seemed to be always to “care,” while nobody cared for her. “You must try and not care so much, mother. We’re none of us worth it,” she said, “but, as for Harry, he’s just in a pet. ”

“ Poor woman, she was always hopeful; every new child that came was, she thought, at last the one for whom she had been pining. Even now she had a lingering notion that Harry, her youngest boy, was that child—and far more than a notion, a hopeful certainty that little Liddy at school, the youngest of all, was exactly what she herself had been at the same age. These two, were in fact the least like Joscelyns of all her children. Harry was a broad-shouldered young fellow indeed, but he was less tall, and less powerful than his brothers ”

“ And again, Joscelyn laughed, with a shout that blew into Harry’s indignant face, and moved his hair.
This sensation half maddened the young man. He pushed away his chair, throwing it down with a clang that rang over all the house, and crying, “That’s settled, then!” darted out and flung himself forth, out of the flush and heat of the quarrel into the cool and wintry freshness of the night.
Other interviews before this had ended in the same way. It is the worst of domestic quarrels that they are endless and full of repetition. ”

“ To be sure, on the other hand, mother would make a fuss. She would not take anything easily. To see her excitement and anxiety over the smallest matters was enough to provoke even a patient temper. She could not take things as they came; that was a kind of excuse, perhaps, for father’s violence. Joan turned over all these things in her mind, as if her parents stood before the bar and it was her business to judge them. A woman of thirty cannot go on with those childish fictions of reverence which make criticism a sin. ”

“ What would be decisive between two friends is not decisive between two members of the same family, who are forced to meet again, and go over the same ground for scores of times. Harry{52} Joscelyn had felt the same tingle and thrill as of fire in his veins before now, the same determination to fling out of sight, out of recollection of this tyrant who was his father, and who became periodically insupportable to him. ”

“ And she knew, without any misplaced modesty on the subject, that she would make an excellent wife. But being thirty, and in her own opinion very homely in appearance, and evidently not appreciated in this way, Joan had, with a half-conscious contempt for the fool of a man, whoever he was, who had not “come forward,” and a secret laugh when she thought of it, even at this contempt—put that contingency out of her mind and taken it for granted that she was to be Joan Joscelyn till the end of her days, the manager and soul of the establishment at the White House. ”

“ We are all alone when the great problems of life come upon us. Joan, however, thought of this question very soberly, without once regarding it in the light of a great problem. It excited her a good deal privately within her own composed bosom; but, to tell the truth, its first effect was more mirthful than serious. In the seclusion of her own being she laughed, saying to herself that after all the maids had been right, that she had “got a lad” when she was least thinking of it. ”

“ Joan was a very homely woman, not much better educated than the dairy-maid, and accustomed to none of the softnesses of life, but yet she was Miss Joscelyn of the White House, and nothing could have obliterated from her mind the consciousness of this dignity which gave her nothing, and yet was everything to her. ”

“ You have a deal to be thankful for, mother. As for sons at home when the father is a hale man like father, they’re always quarrelling. What young fellows want is their own way. Father’s too young to manage Harry, he’s too strong and likely, just as good a man as any of them. That’s my opinion; so are you a deal too young. Bless me, you’re not a bit older than I am. If I wasn’t so steady I shouldn’t like it, I’d rather have an old wife that would give in to me and admire me, whatever I did—”
Joan continued the monologue with a little curve at one corner of her mouth which did duty for a smile. ”

“ A woman like that, Harry reflected, is almost as bad as if she were not a good woman. Oh, yes; she was a good woman! but what advantage was it to anyone? What did it matter being good if you were of no use to those belonging to you? Being good just for yourself, selfishly, that was a poor sort of business. For her children she was no good. What had she ever done for any of them? Made a fuss, as Joan said. ”

“ When, after a long career of violence and family domineering, and threats of all kinds, one of those who have hitherto only scolded back and kept up a war of words, is suddenly stung into action, and does something desperate instead of uttering the mere froth of passion, it is not unusual to see the domestic tyrant come to a sudden stand-still, more bewildered than anyone by the result.{212} Times without number he had threatened to turn every son he had out of the house: but the young man who turned himself out of the house gave him such a shock as he had never got before in his life. ”