“You have word of that lad, I suppose?” Joscelyn said.
“He’s a young devil,” said his father, “he’s putting out his temper on you.”
“You’ve always set him a good example in that way,” said Joan, promptly; “maybe he is, and maybe not.”
“Hold your dashed tongue,” said Joscelyn; “what else could it be?”
“How am I to answer you if I hold my tongue? There’s a many reasons possible. He may have made up his mind to write no more to a house he was turned out of.”
“Stuff and nonsense! he was coming in at a disgraceful hour, and the door was locked, at a time when every honest door is locked.”
“I’m glad you can ease your conscience in that way,” said Joan; “it was at no disgraceful hour; all the boys have been out later, you’ve been out later, many’s the time, yourself. He may have made up his mind as I say,” she added, distinctly, “to disown the house as his home, at which I for one would not wonder: or he may,” and here her voice faltered, “he may--and that’s what I fear--have gone off as lads do----”
“Rubbish! blanked nonsense!” cried the father, but his ruddy countenance paled a little. “What do you mean by going off as lads do?”
“I cannot tell you,” said Joan, with sober disdain, “if you don’t know.”
“It’s just a dashed story you’ve got up,” her father said.
“It’s no story at all, for I hope it isn’t so, and I don’t know what it is--but to my mind that’s the most like. I wouldn’t put it into mother’s head for all the world, poor dear!”
“Dash you!” cried Joscelyn, “you are finely taken up with your mother. I never saw the like before; you have been easy enough about your mother and all her whining and complaining. What makes you set up this dashed nonsense, enough to make a man sick, now?”
“I never minded before,” said Joan, “maybe more shame to me. I’m very anxious about Harry myself, and that makes me understand the trouble mother’s in, poor dear!”
“Dash you and her too! It’s all the blanked nonsense he’s got from her, the young idiot!”
“That’s true: he has a deal of mother in him, poor lad!” Joan said, drying her eyes.
Joscelyn lifted his hand, and clenched his fist as if he would have given her a blow.
“You’re all a set of ---- ----s!” he cried, launching furiously forth into the kind of eloquence which was habitual to him; but furious as he was, and brutal, there was a keen arrow of pain in his heart too; he was angry with himself. He could have beaten himself with that big fist. What a fool he had been to expose himself, to put it in the power of any lad to expose him! There was nothing he could not have done to himself in the rage of self-reproach and shame which had come upon him. It was a little for Harry--he was not unnatural, and he had a feeling for his offspring--but it was much more that he had laid himself open to the remarks of the county, and every friend and every enemy who might like to gossip about him and say the worst that there was to say.