Chapter XIII
There was no one who could detain her, for the agitated group in Mrs. Bellendean’s room were too much taken by surprise, in this curious development of affairs, to do anything but gaze astonished at Joyce’s unlooked-for passion. She went out of the room and out of the house, with old Janet, in her big shawl, following humbly, like a tall ship carrying out a humble little lugger in her train. Joyce seemed to have added to her stature in the intensity of her excitement. The nervous swiftness with which she moved, the air of passion in all her sails, to continue the metaphor, the unity of impassioned movement with which she swept forth--not looking back nor suffering any distracting influence to touch her--made the utmost impression upon the spectators who had been, to their own thinking, themselves chief actors in the scene, until this young creature’s surpassing emotion put them all into the position of audience while she herself filled the stage. Joyce would not see her father’s face, though it appealed to her with a keen touch of unaccustomed feeling which was like a stab--nor would she suffer herself to look at Mrs. Bellendean, whose faintest indication of a wish had hitherto been almost law to the enthusiast. The girl was possessed by a tempest of personal excitement which carried her far beyond all the habitual restraints and inducements of her life. Nothing weighed with her, nothing moved her, but that overwhelming tide which carried her forth, wounded, humiliated, indignant, angry, she could not tell why, in the desperation of this most bitter and entirely unreasonable disappointment which swept her soul. To think that it had come, the long-looked-for discovery--the revelation so often dreamt of--and that it should be this! Only a visionary, entirely abandoned to the devices of fancy by the bareness of all the facts that surrounded actual life in her experience, could have entertained such a vague grandeur of expectation, or could have fallen into such an abyss of disenchantment. It thrilled through and through her, giving a pride and loftiness indescribable to the carriage of her head, to the attitude of her person, to the swift and nervous splendour of her movements. Joyce, stung to the heart with her disappointment--with the bourdonnement in her ears and the jar in her nerves of a great downfall--was like a creature inspired. She swept out of the house, and crossed the open space of the drive, and disappeared in the shadows of the avenue, without a word, with scarcely a breath--carried along by that wind of passion, unconscious what she did.
Old Janet Matheson followed her child with feelings of almost equal intensity, but of a contradictoriness and mingled character which defies description. Her despair in the anticipation of losing Joyce was mingled with elation in the thought that Joyce was proved a lady beyond all possibility of doubt, fit to be received as an equal in the grand society at the House--which, however, in no way modified her profound and passionate sense of loss and anger against the fate which she declared to herself bitterly she had always foreseen. That she should not have felt a momentary joy in her child’s apparent rejection of the new life opening before her was impossible; but that too was mingled still more seriously by regret and alarm lest the girl should do anything to forfeit these advantages, and also by the dictates of honest judgment which showed her that resistance was impossible, and that it was foolish, and Joyce’s revolt a mere blaze of temporary impulse which could not, and must not, stand against the necessities of life. All these mixed and contradictory sentiments were in Janet’s mind as she hurried along, trying vainly to keep up with the swift, impassioned figure in front of her; trying, too, to reason with the unreasonable, and bring Joyce--strange travesty of all the usual circumstances of her life--to bring Joyce, the quick-witted, the all-understanding, to see what was right and wrong, what was practicable and impracticable. Her efforts in this respect were confined at present to a breathless interjection now and then-- ‘Oh, Joyce!’ ‘Oh, my dear!’ ‘Oh, my bonnie woman!’ in various tones of remonstrance and deprecation. But Joyce’s impulse of swift passion lasted long and carried her far, straight down the long avenue, and out into the village road beyond; and her mind was so preoccupied that she did not take into consideration the fatigue and trouble of her companion, as, under any other circumstances, Joyce would have been sure to do. It was only when the sight of the village houses, and the contact once more with other human creatures, and the necessary reticences of life suddenly checked Joyce in her career, that she slackened her pace, and, turning round to keep her face from the keen investigation of some neighbours grouped around a door, suddenly perceived a little behind her the flushed cheeks and labouring breath of Janet, who would not be separated from her side, and yet had found the effort of keeping up with her so difficult. Joyce turned back to her faithful old friend with a cry of self-reproach.
‘Oh, granny! and I’ve tired you struggling after me, and had not the sense to mind.’
‘Oh ay, you have the sense to mind. You have sense for most things in this world--- but no’ the day, Joyce, no’ the day; you havena shown your sense the day.’
‘Granny,’ said Joyce, with trembling lips, ‘there has been nothing in my life till now that you have not had all authority in: but you must say nothing about this. I must be the judge in this. It is my business, and only mine.’
‘There is nothing,’ said Janet, ‘that can be your business and no’ mine: until the time comes when you yoursel’ are none of my business--when you’re in your father’s hands.’
‘Oh no, no,’ said Joyce under her breath, clasping her hands,--‘oh no, no, no!’
‘What are you murmurin’ and saying ower as if it was a charm? No, you havena shown your sense. You think the like of that can be at your pleesure to tak’ it or to leave it? Na, na, my bonnie woman. I’m the one that will have the most to bear. Ye needna answer me, though I can see the words in your mouth. I’m the one, whatever happens, that will have the maist to put up with. But I say it’s no’ at your pleesure. What’s richt is richt, and what’s nature is nature, whatever ye may say. I tell ye, Joyce Matheson--but you’re no Joyce Matheson: eh! to think me, that never used it, that I should gie ye that name noo! Ye’re Joyce Matheson nae mair.
‘Granny, granny, don’t throw me off--don’t cast me away, for I’ve nobody but you,’ cried Joyce, with a voice full of tears.
‘Me cast ye off! but it’s true ye’ve nae richt to the name, and Peter and me, we’ve nae richt to you; and the moment’s come which I’ve aye foreseen: oh, I have foreseen it! I never deceivit mysel’ like him, or made up dreams and visions like you. And it’s no’ at your command to tak’ it or to leave it--na, na. I’m no’ one that can deceive mysel’,’ said Janet, mournfully shaking her head, and in the depth of her trouble finding a little sad satisfaction in her own clear-sightedness. ‘The rest o’ ye may think that heaven and earth will yield to ye, and that what ye want is the thing ye will get if ye stand to it; but no’ me--oh, no’ me! It’s little comfort to the flesh to see sae clear, but I canna help it, for it’s my nature. Na, na. We canna just go back to what we were before, as if nothing had happened. It’s no’ permitted. Ye may do a heap o’ things in this world, but ye canna go back. Na, na. Yesterday’s no dead, nor ye canna kill it, whatever ye may do. It’s mair certain than the day or the morn, and it binds ye whether ye like it or no,--oh, it binds ye, it binds ye! We canna go back.
These little sentences came from her at intervals with breaks and pauses between, as they went along towards the cottage, sometimes interrupted by an exclamation from Joyce, sometimes by the greeting of a neighbour, sometimes by Janet’s own breathlessness as she laboured along in the warm evening under the weight of her big shawl. Such monologues were not unusual to her, and Joyce had accompanied them by a commentary of half-regarded questions and exclamations, in all the mutual calm of family understanding on many a previous occasion. The girl had not lent a very steady ear to the grandmother’s wisdom, nor had the grandmother paused to answer the girl’s questions or remonstrances. Half heard, half noted, they had gone on serenely, the notes of age and experience mingling with the dreams and impulses of youth. But that soft concert and harmony in which the two voices had differed without any jar, supplementing and completing each other, was not like this. The old woman was flushed and tearful, and Joyce was pale, with excited eyes that looked twice as large as usual, and a trembling in the lips which were so apt to move with impatient intelligence, answering before the question was made. It was apparent even to the neighbours that something must have happened, and still more apparent to Peter, who stood at the open door of the cottage looking out for them with a look which varied from the broad smile of pleasure with which he had perceived their two familiar figures approaching, to a troubled perception of something amiss which he could not fathom. Peter’s mind was slow in operating; and as all previous information had been kept from him, he was without any clue to the origin of the trouble which he began to feel about him. To return and find the cottage closed, and neither wife nor child waiting for him, was in itself a prodigy; and though his astonishment had been partly calmed by the explanation of the neighbours who gave him the key of the door, and informed him that Joyce and her granny had been sent for to ‘the Hoose,’ it was roused into a kind of dull anxiety by the agitated air which he slowly recognised as he watched them approaching, convinced, against his will, that something ailed them,--that some new event had happened. Nevertheless, Peter, in the voiceless delicacy of his peasant soul, assumed the smile, trembling on the edge of a laugh, which was his usual aspect when addressing his womenfolk.
‘Weel,’ he said, ‘ye’re bonnie hoosekeepers for a man to come hame to, wanting his tea! ‘Deed, I might just whistle for my tea, and the twa of you stravaigin’ naebody kens where. Joyce, my bonny lass, ye should just think shame of yoursel’, leading your auld granny into ill ways.’ He ended with a long, low laugh, which was his expression of content and emotion and pleasure, and which turned the reproach into the tenderest family jest--and made way for them, but not till he had said out his say. ‘Come awa,’ noo ye’re here; come awa’ ben, and mask the tea: for I’m wanting something to sloken me,’ he said.
‘Oh, my poor man--oh, my poor auld man!’ said Janet. She had not ceased to shake her head at intervals while he was speaking, and she uttered a suppressed groan as she went into the cottage. So long as all was uncertain, Janet had carefully kept every intimation of possible calamity from Peter; but now that the truth must be known, she had a kind of tragic pleasure in exciting his alarm.
‘What ails the woman?’ he said, ‘girnin’ and groanin’ as if we were a’ under sentence. What ails your granny, Joyce?’
‘And so we are,’ said Janet, ‘a’ under sentence, as ye say, and our days numbered, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. But, eh, that’s no’ what we do--far, far from it. And when misfortin’ comes, that comes to a’, it’s rare, rare that it doesn’t come unexpected. We’re eatin’ and drinkin’ and makin’ merry--or else we’re fechtin’, beatin’ our fellow-servants, and a’ in a word that the Lord delayeth his comin’. And in a moment,’ said the old woman, with a sob, ‘our house is left unto us desolate. That’s just the common way.’
‘What is she meaning with the house left desolate?’ said Peter, the smile slowly disappearing from his face. ‘The woman’s daft! Joyce what is she meanin’? I’m no’ very gleg at the uptake,--no’ like you, my bonnie woman, that are just as keen as a needle. What’s she meanin’? Janet, woman, as lang as the lassie is weel and spared----’
‘The lassie, says he--naething but the lassie. And have I no’ foreseen it a’ the time? How often have I cried out to ye, Peter, to keep a loose grip! oh, to haud a loose grip! But ye never would listen to me. And now it’s just come to pass, and neither you nor me prepared.’
Peter’s face, gazing at her while she went on, was like a landscape in the uncertain shining of a Scotch summer. It lightened all over with a smile of good-humoured derision which brought out the shaggy eyebrows, the grizzled whiskers, the cavernous hollows round the eyes, like the inequalities of the mountainous land. And then the light fled instantaneously, and a pale blank of shadow succeeded, leaving all that surface grey, while finer lines of anxiety and chill alarm developed about the large mouth and in the puckers of those many-folded eyelids, like movements of the wind among the herbage and trees. He stood and gazed at her with his eyes widely open, his lips apart. But Janet did not meet that look. She went to the fire, which burned dully, ‘gathered,’ as she had left it in her careful way, to smoulder frugally in her absence, and poked it with violence, with sharp thrusts of the poker, standing with the back of her great shawl turned towards her companions, and her big bonnet still on her head. There was nothing said till with those sudden strokes and blows she had roused the dormant fire to flame, when she put on the kettle, and swept the hearth with vigorous, nervous movements, though always encumbered by the weight of the shawl. Then Janet made a sudden turn upon herself, and setting open the doors of the aumry, which made a sort of screen between her and the others, proceeded to take off and fold away that shawl of state. ‘I’ll maybe never put it on again,’ she said to herself, almost under her breath, ‘for whatfor should I deck mysel’ and fash my heid about my claes or what I put on? It was a’ to be respectable for her: wha’s heeding when there’s nane but me?’
‘There’s something happened,’ said Peter, in his low tremulous bass, like the rolling of distant thunder. ‘Am I the maister of this hoose, and left to find oot by her parables and her metaphors, and no’ a word of sense that a man can understand? What is’t, woman? Speak plain out, or as sure’s death I’ll----’ He clenched his large fist with a sudden silent rage, which could find no other expression than this seeming threat--though Peter would have died sooner than touch with a finger to harm her the old companion of his life.
‘Grandfather,’ said Joyce, ‘I will tell you what has happened. Granny takes a thing into her head, and then you know, whatever we say, you or me, she never heeds, but follows her own fancy.’ The girl spoke quickly, her words hurrying, her breath panting,--then came to a sudden pause, flushed crimson, her paleness changing to the red of passionate feeling, and added, as slowly as she had been hurried before, ‘Somebody has been here--that knows who my mother was: somebody that says--that says he is my father. And she thinks I am to rise up and follow him,’ cried Joyce, in another burst of sudden, swift, vehement words,--‘to rise up and follow him, like the woman in the Old Testament, away from my home and my own people, and all that I care for in the world! But I’ll not do it--I’ll not do it. I’ll call no strange man my father. I’ll bide in my own place where I’ve been all my days. What are their letters, and their old stories, and their secrets that they’ve found out, and their injuries that they’re sorry for--sorry for after costing a woman’s life! What’s all that to me? I’ll bide in my own place with them that have nourished me and cherished me, and made me happy all my days.’
‘Eh, lassie! eh, lassie!’ was all Peter could say. His large old limbs had got a trembling in them. He sat down in the big wooden arm-chair which stood against the wall, where it had been put away after dinner, and from that unaccustomed place, as if he too had been put away out of the common strain of life, gazed at the two alternately,--at his wife still folding, folding that shawl that would not lie straight, and at Joyce, in her flush of impassioned determination, standing up drawn to her full height, her head thrown back, her slim young figure inspired by the rush and torrent of emotion which she herself scarcely understood in its vehemence and force. The little quiet, humble cottage was in a moment filled as with rushing wings and flashing weapons, the dust and jar of spiritual conflict: but not one of the three visible actors in this little tragic drama had for the moment a word to say. When this silence of fate was broken, it was by Janet, who had at last shut up her shawl in the aumry, and, coming and going from the fire to the table, filling the intense blank of that pause with a curious interlude of hasty sound and movement, said at last, almost fiercely, ‘Come to your tea. You’ll do little good standing glowering at ane anither. Sit down and tak’ your tea.’
Chapter XIV
The first day of the holidays had also been a delight to Mr. Andrew Halliday’s virtuous soul. More systematic in all he did than Joyce’s irregular impulses permitted her to be, he had taken advantage of the leisure of the morning to enjoy to the utmost the quietness and freedom of a man who has no rule but his own pleasure for the government of his time. He got up a little later than usual, lingered over his breakfast, exhausted the newspaper over which, on ordinary occasions, he could cast only a hurried glance, and tasted the sweetness of that pause of occupation as no habitually unoccupied man could ever do. Then he sallied forth, not, as Joyce did, to dream and muse, but to enjoy the conscious pleasure of a walk, during which, indeed, he turned over many things in his mind which were not unallied to happy dreams. For Andrew had come to a determination which filled him at once with sweet and tender fancies, and with the careful calculations of a prudent man in face of a great change in life. He had made up his mind to insist upon a decision from Joyce, to have the time of their marriage settled. Of this she had never permitted him to speak. Their engagement had been altogether of a highly refined and visionary kind, a sort of bond of intellectual sympathy which pleased and flattered the consciousness of superiority in Halliday’s mind, but in other respects was sometimes a little chilly, and so wanting in all warmer demonstration as to carry with it a perpetual subdued disappointment and tremor of uncertainty. Had not the schoolmaster possessed a great deal of self-approval and conscious worth, he might have sometimes lost confidence altogether in Joyce’s affection; but though he was often uncomfortable with a sensation of having much kept from him which was his due, he had not as yet come so far as to be able to imagine that Joyce was indifferent to him. He could not have done her that wrong. She had met nobody, could have met nobody, who was his equal, and how was it possible then that she could be unfaithful? It seemed to Halliday a wrong to Joyce to suppose her capable of such a lamentable want of judgment.
But he was heartily in love with her at the same time, as well as so much with himself, and the régime under which she held him was cold. He had become impatient of it, and very anxious to bring it to an end: and there was no reason, except her fantastic unreadiness, for delay. He said to himself that he must put a stop to it,--that he must step forward in all the decision of his manhood, and impress this determination upon the weaker feminine nature which was made to yield to his superior force and impulse. There was no reason in the world for delay. He had attained all the promotion which was likely for a long time to be his; and the position of schoolmistress in his parish was likely to be soon vacant, which would afford to Joyce the possibility of carrying on her professional work, and adding to their joint means, as no doubt she would insist upon doing. This was not a thing which Halliday himself would have insisted upon. He felt profoundly that to be able to keep his wife at home, and retain her altogether like a garden enclosed for his private enjoyment, was a supreme luxury, and one which it was the privilege of the superior classes alone to prize at its proper value. He had been a prudent young man all his life, and had laid by a little money, and he felt with a proud and not ungenerous expansion of his bosom that he was able to afford himself that luxury; but he doubted greatly whether it would be possible to bring Joyce to perceive that this was the more excellent way, and that it would be meet for her to give up her work and devote herself entirely to her husband. He comprehended something of her pride, her high independence, and even indulgently allowed for the presence in her of a great deal of that ambition which is more appropriate to a man than a woman; therefore he was prepared to yield the question in respect to the work, and to find a new element of satisfaction in the thought of placing her by his own side in the little rostrum of the school as well as in the seclusion of the home. The Board would be too glad to secure the services of Miss Matheson, so well known for her admirable management at Bellendean, as the mistress at Comely Green. And thus every exigency would be satisfied.
He went over his little house carefully, room by room, when he came in from his walk, and considered what it would be necessary to add, and what to repair and refresh, for Joyce’s reception. His mind was a thoroughly frugal and prudent one, tempted by no vain desires, spoiled by no habits of extravagance. Amid all the fond visions which filled him, as he realised the new necessities of a double life, he yet calculated very closely what would be necessary, what they could do without, how many things were strictly needful, and how and at what price these additions could be procured. The calculations were full of enchantment, but they were not reckoned up less carefully. He returned to them after he had eaten his dinner, and they occupied the greater part of the afternoon, with many an excursion into the realms of fancy to sweeten them, although of themselves they were sweet. And it was with the result of his calculations carefully jotted down upon a piece of paper in his pocket-book, that he set out before tea-time for Bellendean, to make known to Joyce his desires and determination, and to sway her mind as the female mind ought to be swayed, half by sweet persuasion, half by the magnetism of his superior force of impulse, to adopt it as her own. The idea that she might insist, and decline to be influenced, was one which he would not allow himself to take into consideration, though it lay in the background in one of the chambers of his mind with a sort of chill sense of unpleasant possibility, which, so far as possible, he put out of sight.
It was a lovely afternoon, and the road from Comely Green to Bellendean lay partly by the highroad within sight of the Firth, and partly through the woods and park of Bellendean House. Everything was cheerful round him, the birds singing, the water reflecting the sunshine in jewelled lines of sparkle and light. Andrew could not think of any such black thing as refusal, or even reluctance, amid all the sweet harmony and consent to be happy, which was in the lovely summer day.
When he reached the cottage it gave him a little thrill of surprise to find the door shut which usually stood so frankly open, admitting the genial summer atmosphere and something of the sights and sounds outside. It was strange to find the door closed on a summer evening; and an idea that somebody must be ill, or that something must have happened, sprang into instant life in Andrew’s mind. His knock was not even answered by the invitation to come in, which would have been natural in other circumstances. He heard a little movement inside, but no cheerful sound of voices, and presently the door was opened by Janet, who, looking out upon him with a jealous glance through a very small opening, breathed forth an ‘Oh! it’s you, Andrew;’ and, letting the door swing fully open, bade him come in. Within he was bewildered to see old Peter and Joyce seated at the table, upon which the tea-things still stood. There they were all three, nobody ill, no visible cause for this extraordinary seclusion. Peter gave him a grim little nod without speaking, and Joyce put forth--it almost seemed unwillingly--her hand, but without moving otherwise. He took the chair from which Janet had risen, and gazed at them bewildered. ‘What is the matter? Has anything happened?’ he said.
There was a pause. Peter drummed upon the table with his fingers, with something almost derisive in the measured sound; and Joyce half turned to him as if about to speak, but said nothing. It was Janet who answered his question. There was a hot flush upon her cheeks--the flush of excitement and emotion. She answered him shaking her head.
‘Ay, Andrew, there’s something happened. We’re no’ like oursel’s, as ye can see. Ye wouldna have gotten in this nicht to this afflicted house if ye had not been airt and pairt in it as weel as Peter and me.’
‘What is the matter?’ he repeated, with increased alarm.
‘Ye better tell him, Joyce. Puir lad, he has a richt to hear. He’s maybe thought like me of sic a thing happening, without fear, as if it might be a kind of diversion. The Lord help us short-sighted folk.’
‘What is it?’ he said; ‘you are driving me distracted. What has happened?’
Upon this Peter gave a short, dry laugh, which it was alarming to hear. ‘He’ll never find out,’ said the old man, ‘if ye give him years to do it. It’s against reason--it’s against sense--a man to step in and take another man’s bairn away.’
Joyce was very pale. He observed this for the first time in the confusion and the trouble of this incomprehensible scene. She sat with her hands clasped, looking at no one--not even at himself, though she had given him her hand. It was rare, indeed, that Joyce should be the last to explain. Halliday drew his chair a little nearer, and put his hand timidly upon hers, which made her start. She made a quick movement, as if to draw it away, then visibly controlled herself and permitted that mute interrogation and caress.
‘It is just what I aye kent would happen,’ said Janet, unconscious or indifferent to her self-contradictions; ‘and many a time have I implored my man no’ to build upon her, though I wasna so wise as to tak’ my ain advice. And as for you, Andrew, though I took good care you should hear a’ the circumstances, maybe I should have warned you mair clearly that you should not lippen to her, and ware a’ your heart upon her, when at ainy moment--at ainy moment--’ Here the old woman’s voice failed her, and broke off in a momentary, much-resisted sob. Halliday’s astonishment and anxiety grew at every word. His hand pressed Joyce’s hand with the increasing fervour of an eager demand.
‘Joyce! Joyce! what do they mean? Have you nothing to say?’
Joyce turned upon him, with a sudden flush taking the place of her paleness. ‘Granny would make you think that I was not worthy to be trusted,’ she said; ‘that to ware your heart upon me, as she says, was to be cheated and betrayed.’
‘No, no,--I never could believe that!’ he cried, not unwilling to prove the superiority of his own trust to that of the old people, who, Halliday felt, it would not be a bad thing to be clear of, or as nearly clear of as circumstances might permit.
Joyce scarcely paused to hear his response, but, having found her voice, went on hurriedly. ‘People have come that say--that say---- They are just strangers--we never saw them before. They say that I--I--belong to them. Oh, I am not going to pretend,’ cried Joyce, ‘that I have not thought of that happening, many a day! It was like a poem all to myself. It went round and round in my head. It was a kind of dream. But I never thought--I never, never thought what would become of me if it came true. And how do I know that it is true? Grandfather, you and granny are my father and my mother. I never knew any other. You have brought me up and cared for me, and I am your child to the end of my life. I will never, never----’
‘Hold your peace!’ cried Janet. She put up her hard hand against Joyce’s soft young mouth. The little old woman grew majestic in her sense of justice and right. ‘Hold your peace!’ she cried. ‘Make no vows, lest you should be tempted to break them and sin against the Lord. Ye’ll do what it’s your duty to do. You’ll no’ tell me this and that--that you’ll take the law in your ain hands. Haud your tongue, Peter Matheson! You’re an auld fool, putting nonsense into the bairn’s head. What!’ cried Janet, ‘a bairn of MINE to say that she’ll act as she likes and please hersel’, and take her choice what she’ll do! and a’ the time her duty straight forenenst her, and nae mainner o’ doubt what it is. Dinna speak such stuff to me.’
In the pause of this conflict Andrew Halliday’s voice came in, astonished, yet composed, with curiosity in it and strong expectation--sentiments entirely different from those which swayed the others, and which silenced them and aroused their attention from the very force of contrast. ‘People who say--that you belong to them? Your own people--your own friends--Joyce! Tell me who they are,--tell me---- You take away my breath. To think that they should have found her after all!’
They all paused in the impassioned strain of their thoughts to look at him. This new note struck in the midst of them was startling and incomprehensible, yet checked the excitement and vehemence of their own feelings. ‘Ah, Andro,’ said old Peter, ‘ye’re a wise man. Ye would like to hear a’ about it, and wha they are, and if the new freends--the new freends’--the old man coughed over the words to get his voice--‘if they’re maybe grander folk and mair to your credit’--he broke off into his usual laugh, but a laugh harsh and broken. ‘Ye’re a wise lad, Andro, my man--ye’re a wise lad.’
‘It is very natural, I think,’ said Andrew, reddening, ‘that I should wish to know. We have spoken many a time of Joyce’s--friends. I wish to know about them, and what they are, naturally, as any one in my position would do.’
‘Joyce’s freends!--I thocht I kent weel what that meant,’ said Janet. ‘Eh! to hear him speak of Joyce’s freends. I thocht I kent weel what that meant,’ she repeated, with a smile of bitterness. Halliday had taken her seat at the table, and she went and seated herself by the wall at as great a distance from the group as the limits of space would permit. The old woman’s eyes were keen with grief and bitter pain, and that sense of being superseded which is so hard to bear. She thought that Joyce had put her chair a little closer to that of the schoolmaster, detaching herself from Peter, and that the young people already formed a little party by themselves. This was the form her jealous consciousness of Joyce’s superiority had always taken, even when everything went well. She burst forth again in indignant prophetic strains, taking a little comfort in this thought.
‘But dinna you think you’ll get her,’ she cried, ‘no more than Peter or me!--dinna you believe that they’ll think you good enough for her, Andrew Halliday. If it’s ended for us, it’s mair than ended for you. Do you think a grand sodger-officer, that was the Captain’s commander, and high, high up, nigh to the Queen herself,--do you think a man like that will give his dauchter--and such a dauchter, fit for the Queen’s Court if ever lady was--to a bit poor little parish schoolmaister like you?’
The comfort which Janet took from this prognostication was bitter, but it was great. A curious pride in the grandeur of the officer who was ‘the Captain’s’ commander made her bosom swell. At least there was satisfaction in that and in the sudden downfall, the unmitigated and prompt destruction of all hopes that might be entertained by that whippersnapper, who dared to demand explanations on the subject of Joyce’s ‘friends’--friends in Scotch peasant parlance meaning what ‘parents’ means in French, the family and nearest relatives. Janet had rightly divined that Halliday received the news not with sympathetic pain or alarm, but with suppressed delight, looking forward to the acquisition to himself, through his promised wife, of ‘friends’ who would at once elevate him to the rank of gentleman, after which he longed with a consciousness of having no internal right to it, which old Janet’s keen instincts had always comprehended--far, far different from Joyce, who wanted no elevation,--who was a lady born.
‘Granny,’ said Joyce, with a trembling voice, ‘you think very little, very, very little--I see it now for the first time--of me.’
‘Me think little of ye! that’s a bonnie story; but weel, weel I ken what will happen. We will pairt with sore hearts, but a firm meaning to be just the same to ane anither. I’ve seen a heap of things in my lifetime,’ said Janet, with mournful pride. ‘Sae has my man; but they havena time to think--they’re no’ aye turning things ower and ower like a woman at the fireside. I’ve seen mony changes and pairtings, and how it was aye said it should make no difference. Eh! I’ve seen that in the maist natural way. It’s no’ that you’ll mean ony unfaithfulness, my bonnie woman. Na, na. I ken ye to the bottom o’ your heart, and there’s nae unfaithfulness in you--no’ even to him,’ said Janet, indicating Halliday half contemptuously by a pointing finger, ‘much less to your grandfaither and me. I’m whiles in an ill key, and I’ve been sae, I dinna deny it, since ever I heard this awfu’ news: but now I am coming to mysel’. Ye’ll do your duty, Joyce. Ye’ll accept what canna be refused, and ye’ll gang away from us with a sair heart, and it will be a’ settled that you’re to come back, maybe twice a year, maybe ance a year, to Peter and me, and be our ain bairn again. They’re no’ ill folk,’ she went on, the tears dropping upon her apron, on which she was folding hem after hem--‘they’re good folk; they’re kind, awfu’ kind--they’ll never wish ye to be ungrateful,--that’s what they’ll say. They’ll no’ oppose it, they’ll settle it a’--maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe mair; they’ll be real weel-meaning, real kind. And Peter and me, we’ll live a’ the year thinking o’ that time; and ye’ll come back, my bonnie dear--oh, ye’ll come back! with your heart licht to think of the pleasure of the auld folk. But, eh Joyce! ye’ll no’ be in the house a moment till ye’ll see the difference; ye’ll no’ have graspit my hand or looked me in the face till ye see the difference. Ye’ll see the glaur on your grandfaither’s shoon when he comes in, and the sweat on his brow. No’ with ony unkind meaning. Oh, far frae that--far frae that! Do I no’ ken your heart? But ye’ll be used to other things--it’ll a’ have turned strange to ye then--and ye’ll see where we’re wanting. Oh, ye’ll see it! It will just be mair plain to ye than all the rest. The wee bit place, the common things, the neebors a’ keen to ken, but chief of us, Peter and me our ainsels, twa common puir folk.’
‘Granny!’ cried Joyce, flinging herself upon her, unable to bear this gradual working up.
Peter came in with a chorus with his big broken laugh-- ‘Ay, ay, just that, just that! an auld broken-down ploughman and his puir auld body of a wife. It’s just that, it’s just that!’
Chapter XV
Great was the consternation in Bellendean over the unsatisfactory interview which it was so soon known had taken place between Joyce and her father. Colonel Hayward’s public intimation of the facts at luncheon had created, as might have been expected, the greatest commotion; and the ladies of the party assembled round Mrs. Bellendean with warm curiosity when the whisper ran through the house that Joyce had come--and had gone away again. Gone away! To explain it was very difficult, to understand it impossible. The schoolmistress, the village girl, to discover that she was Colonel Hayward’s daughter, and not to be elated, transported by the discovery! Why, it was a romance, it was like a fairy tale. Mrs. Bellendean’s suggestion that there was a second side to everything, though the fact was not generally recognised in fairy tales, contented no one; and a little mob of excited critics, all touched and interested by Colonel Hayward’s speech, turned upon the rustic heroine and denounced her pretensions. What did she expect, what had she looked for--to turn out a king’s daughter, or a duke’s? But it was generally agreed that few dukes were so delightful as Colonel Hayward, and that Joyce showed the worst of taste as well as the utmost ingratitude. Mrs. Bellendean was disappointed too; but she was partly comforted by the fact that Captain Bellendean, who was much bewildered by the girl’s caprice and folly, had fallen into a long and apparently interesting argument on the subject with Greta, her own special favourite and protégée. It is almost impossible for any natural woman to find a man in Norman’s position, well-looking, young, and rich, within her range, without forming matrimonial schemes for him of one kind or another; and Mrs. Bellendean had already made up her mind that the pang of leaving Bellendean would be much softened could she see her successor in Greta, the favourite of the house, a girl full of her own partialities and ways of thinking, and whom she had influenced all her life. She forgot Joyce in seeing the animated discussion that rose between these two. It was disappointing, however, that when in the very midst of this discussion Captain Bellendean saw from the window at which he was standing his old Colonel walking to and fro on the terrace with heavy steps and bowed head, his point of interest changed at once. He looked no more at Greta, though she was a much prettier sight: evidently all his sympathy was for Colonel Hayward; and after the talk had gone on languishing for a few moments, he excused himself for leaving her. ‘Poor old chap! I must go and try if I can do anything to console him,’ he said.
Norman found Colonel Hayward very much cast down and melancholy. He was pacing up and down, up and down--sometimes pausing to throw a blank look over the landscape, sometimes mechanically gathering a faded leaf from one of the creepers on the wall. He endeavoured to pull himself up when Captain Bellendean joined him; but the old soldier had no skill in concealing his feelings, and he was too anxious to get support and sympathy to remain long silent. He announced, with all the solemnity becoming a strange event, that Mrs. Hayward was lying down a little. ‘She travelled all night, you know; and though she can sleep on the railway, it never does one much good that sort of sleep; and there has been a great deal going on all day--a great deal that has been very agitating for us both. I persuaded her to lie down,’ Colonel Hayward said, looking at his companion furtively, as if afraid that Norman might think Elizabeth was to blame.
‘It was the best thing she could do,’ said Captain Bellendean.
‘That is exactly what I told her--the very best thing she could do. It is seldom she leaves me when I have so much need of her; but I insisted upon it. And then I am in full possession of her sentiments,’ said the Colonel. ‘She told me exactly what she thought; and she advised me to take a walk by myself and think it all out.’
‘Perhaps, then, I ought to leave you alone, Colonel? but I saw you from the window, and thought you looked out of spirits.’
‘My dear boy, I am glad--too glad--to have you. Thinking a thing out is easy to say, but not so easy to do. And you had always a great deal of sense, Bellendean. When we had difficulties in the regiment, I well remember---- But that was easy in comparison with this. You know what has happened. We’ve found my daughter. For I was married long before I met with my wife. It was only for a little time; and then she disappeared, poor girl, and I never could find out what became of her. It gave me a very great deal of trouble and distress--more than I could tell you; and now we have found out that she left a child. I told you all to-day at luncheon. Joyce, the girl they all talk about, is my daughter. Can you believe such a story?’
‘I had heard about it before; and then what you said to-day--it is very wonderful.’
‘Yes; but it’s quite true. And we told her--in Mrs. Bellendean’s room. And if you will believe it, she---- She as good as rejected me, Norman--refused to have me for her father. It has thrown me into a dreadful state of confusion. And Elizabeth can’t help me, it appears. She says I must work it out for myself. But it seems unnatural to work out a thing by myself; and especially a thing like this. Yes, the girl would have nothing to say to me, Bellendean. She says I must have ill-treated her mother--poor Joyce! the girl I told you that I had married. And I never did--indeed I never did!’
‘I am sure of that, sir. You never injured any one.’
‘Ah, my dear fellow! you don’t know how things happen. It seems to be nobody’s fault, and yet there’s injury done. It’s very bewildering to me, at my age, to think of having a child living. I never--thought of anything of the kind. I may have wished that my wife--and then again it would seem almost better that it shouldn’t be so.’
Colonel Hayward put his arm within that of Norman; he quickened his pace as they went up and down the terrace, and then would stop suddenly to deliver an emphatic sentence. ‘She looked me in the face, as if she defied me,’ he said, ‘and then went away and left me--with that old woman. Did you ever hear of such a position, Bellendean? My daughter, you know, my own daughter--and she looks me in the face, and tells me I must have harmed her mother, and why did I leave her? and goes away! What am I to do? When you have made such a discovery, there it is; you can’t put it out of your mind, or go upon your way, as if you had never found it out. I can’t be as I was before. I have got a daughter. You may smile, Bellendean, and think it’s just the old fellow’s confused way.’
‘I don’t indeed, sir. I can quite understand the embarrassment----’
‘That’s it--the embarrassment. She belongs to me, and her future should be my dearest care--my dearest care--a daughter, you know, more even than a boy. Just what I have often thought would make life perfect--just a sort of a glory to us, Elizabeth and me; but when you think of it, quite a stranger, brought up so different! And Elizabeth opposed, a little opposed. I can’t help seeing it, though she tries to hide it, telling me that it’s my affair--that I must think it out myself. How can I think it out myself? and then my daughter herself turning upon me! What can I do? I don’t know what to do!’
‘Everybody,’ said Captain Bellendean--though a little against the grain, for he was himself very indignant with Joyce--‘speaks highly of her; there is but one voice--every one likes and admires her.’
The Colonel gave a little pressure to the young man’s arm, as if in thanks, and said with a sigh, ‘She is very like her mother. You would say, if you had known her, the very same--more than a likeness. Elizabeth has had a good deal to put up with on that account. You can’t wonder if she is a little--opposed. And everything is at a standstill. I have to take the next step; they will neither of them help me--and what am I to do? Children--seem to bring love with them when they are born in a house. But when a grown-up young woman appears that you never saw before, and you are told she is your daughter! It is a dreadful position to be in, Bellendean. I don’t know, no more than a baby, what to do.’
‘That is rather an alarming view to take,’ said Norman. ‘But when you know her better, most likely everything will come right. You have a very kind heart, sir, and the young lady is very pretty, and nice, and clever, and nature will speak.’
The Colonel shook his head. ‘I believed this morning in nature speaking--but I am sadly shaken, sadly shaken, Bellendean. Why did she turn against me? You would have thought that merely to say, I am your father--but she turned upon me as if I had been her enemy. And what can I do? We can’t go away to-morrow and leave her here. We must have her to live with us, and perhaps she won’t come, and most likely she’ll not like it if she does. I am dreadfully down about it all. Joyce’s girl whom I don’t know, and Elizabeth, who gives me up and goes to lie down because she’s tired--just when I need her most!’
‘But, Colonel, it is true that Mrs. Hayward must be very tired: and no doubt she feels that you and Miss Joyce will understand each other better if you meet by yourselves, when she is not there.’
‘Eh? Do you think that’s what she means, Bellendean? and do you think so too? But even then I am no further advanced than I was before; for my daughter, you know, she’s not here, and how do I know where to find her, even if I were prepared to meet her? and heaven knows I am less prepared than ever--and very nervous and anxious; and if she were standing before me at this moment I don’t know what I should say.’
‘I can show you where to find her,’ said Captain Bellendean. ‘Come and see her, sir; you don’t want to be prepared--you have only to show her that she may trust to your kind heart, and settle everything before Mrs. Hayward wakes up.’
‘My kind heart!’ said Colonel Hayward. ‘I’m not so sure that my heart is kind--not, it appears, to my own flesh and blood. I feel almost as if I should be glad never to hear of her again.’
‘That is only because you are out of sorts, and got no sleep last night.’
‘How do you know I got no sleep? It’s quite true. Elizabeth thinks I only fancy it, but the truth is that when my mind is disturbed I cannot sleep. I am dreadfully down about it all, Bellendean. No, I haven’t the courage, I haven’t the courage. If she were to tell me again that her mother had much to complain of, I couldn’t answer a word. And yet it’s not so. I declare to you, Bellendean, upon my honour, it was no fault of mine.’
‘I am sure of it, sir,’ said Bellendean. ‘Don’t think any more of that, but come with me and see Miss Joyce, and settle it all.’
The Colonel said little as he walked down to the village leaning on young Bellendean’s arm. He was alarmed and nervous; his throat was dry, his mind was confused. Norman’s society, the touch of his arm, the moral force of his companionship, kept Colonel Hayward up to the mark, or it is possible that he might have turned back and fled from those difficulties which he did not feel himself able to cope with, and the new relationship that had already produced such confusion in his life. But he was firmly held by Norman’s arm, and did not resist the impulse, though it was not his own. He did not know what he was going to say to Joyce, or how to meet this proud young creature, filled with a fanciful indignation for her mother’s wrongs. He had never wronged her mother. Pitiful as the story was, and tenderly as he had always regarded her memory, the Joyce of his youth had been the instrument of her own misery and of much trouble and anguish to him, though the gentle-hearted soldier had accepted it always as a sort of natural calamity for which nobody was responsible, and never blamed her. But even the gentlest-hearted will be moved when the judgment which they have refrained from making is turned against themselves. It was not his fault, and yet how could he say so? How could he explain it to this second hot-headed Joyce without blaming the first who had so suffered, and over whom death had laid a shadowy veil of tenderness, an oblivion of all mistakes and errors? Colonel Hayward did not articulately discuss this question with himself, but it was at the bottom of all the confusion in his troubled mind. He was afraid of her, shy of her presence, not knowing how to address or approach this stranger, who was his own child. He had looked with a tender envy at other people’s daughters before now, thinking if only Elizabeth---- But a daughter who was not Elizabeth’s, and to whom his wife was even, as he said to himself, a little--opposed, was something that had never entered into his thoughts. How easy it was in the story-books!--how parents and children long separated sprang into each other’s arms and hearts by instinct. But it was very different in real life, when the problem how to receive into the intimacy of so small a household a third person who was so near in blood, so absolutely unknown in all that constitutes human sympathy, had to be solved at a moment’s notice! He had been very much excited and disturbed the day before, but he had not doubted the power of Elizabeth to put everything right. Now, however, Elizabeth had not only for the first time failed, but was--opposed. She had not said it, but he had felt it. She had declared herself tired, and lain down, and told him to work it out himself. Such a state of affairs was one which Colonel Hayward had never contemplated, and everything accordingly was much worse than yesterday, when he had still been able to feel that if Elizabeth were only here all would go well.
The party in the cottage were in a very subdued and depressed condition when Captain Bellendean knocked at the door. The heat of resistance in Joyce’s mind had died down. Whether it was the strain of argument which Janet still carried on, though Joyce had not consciously listened to it, or whether the mere effect of the short lapse of time which quenches excitement had operated unawares upon her mind, it is certain that her vehemence of feeling and rebellion of heart had sunk into that despondent suspension of thought which exhaustion brings. Resistance dies out, and the chill compulsion of circumstance comes in, making itself felt above all flashes of indignation, all revolts of sentiment. Joyce knew now, though she had not acknowledged it in words, that her power over her own life was gone,--that there was no strength in her to resist the new laws and subordination under which she felt herself to have fallen. She had not even the consciousness which a girl in a higher class might have been supported by, that her father’s rights over her were not supreme. She believed that she had no power to resist his decrees as to what was to become of her; and accordingly, after the first outburst of contradictory feeling, the girl’s heart and courage had altogether succumbed. She had fallen upon the neck of her old guardian--the true mother of her life--with tears, which quenched out every spark of the passion which had inspired her.
Joyce felt herself to be within the grasp of fate. She was like one of the heroines of the poets in a different aspect from that in which she had identified herself with Rosalind or Miranda. What she was like now was Iphigenia or Antigone caught in the remorseless bonds of destiny. She did not even feel that forlorn satisfaction in it which she might have done had there been more time, or had she been less unhappy. The only feeling she was conscious of was misery, life running low in her, all the elements and powers against her, and the possibility even of resistance gone out of her. Old Janet had pressed her close, and then had repulsed her with the impatience of highly excited feeling; and Joyce stood before the window, with the light upon her pale face, quite subdued, unresistant, dejected to the bottom of her heart. The only one of the group who showed any energy or satisfaction was Andrew Halliday, who could not refrain a rising and exhilaration of heart at the thought of being son-in-law to a man who was the ‘Captain’s’ commanding officer, and consequently occupied a position among the great ones of the earth. Andrew’s imagination had already leaped at all the good things that might follow for himself. He thought of possible elevations in the way of head-masterships, scholastic dignities, and honours. ‘They’ would never leave Joyce’s husband a parish schoolmaster! He had not time to follow it out, but his thoughts had swayed swiftly upwards to promotions and honours undefined.
‘Wha’s that at the door?’ said Janet, among her tears.
‘It’s the Captain,’ said Joyce, in a voice so low that she was almost inaudible. Then she added, ‘It’s--it’s--my father.’
‘Her father!’ Peter rose up with a lowering brow. ‘My hoose is no’ a place for every fremd person to come oot and in at their pleasure. Let them be. I forbid ainy person to open that door.’
‘Oh, haud your tongue, man!’ cried Janet; ‘can ye keep them oot with a steekit door--them that has the law on their side, and nature too?’
The old man took his blue bonnet, which hung on the back of his chair. ‘Stand back, sir,’ he said sternly to Andrew, who had risen to go to the door; ‘if my hoose is mine nae mair, nor my bairn mine nae mair, it’s me, at least, that has the richt to open, and nae ither man.’ He put his bonnet on his head, pulling it down upon his brows. ‘My head’s white and my heart’s sair: if the laird thinks I’ve nae mainners, he maun just put up wi’t, I’m no’ lang for this life that I should care.’ He threw the door wide open as he spoke, meeting the look of the newcomers with his head down, and his shaggy eyebrows half covering his eyes. ‘Gang in, gang in, if ye’ve business,’ he said, and flung heavily past them, without further greeting. The sound of his heavy footstep, hastening away, filled all the silence which, for a moment, no one broke.
Norman made way, and almost pushed the Colonel in before him. ‘They expect you,’ he said. And Colonel Hayward stepped in. A more embarrassed man, or one more incapable of filling so difficult a position, could not be. How willingly would he have followed Peter! But duty and necessity and Norman Bellendean all kept him up to the mark. Joyce stood straight up before him in front of the window. She turned to him her pale face, her eyes heavy with tears. The good man was accustomed to be received with pleasure, to dispense kindness wherever he went: to appear thus, in the aspect of a destroyer of domestic happiness, was more painful and confusing than words can say.
‘Young lady,’ he began, and stopped, growing more confused than ever. Then, desperation giving him courage, ‘Joyce---- It cannot be stranger to you than it is to me, to see you standing here before me, my daughter, when I never knew I had a daughter. My dear, we ought to love one another,--but how can we, being such strangers? I have never been used to--anything of the kind. It’s a great shock to us both, finding this out. But if you’ll trust yourself to me, I’ll--I’ll do my best. A man cannot say more.’
‘Sir,’ said Joyce; her voice faltered and died away in her throat. She made an effort and began again, ‘Sir,’ then broke down altogether, and, making a step backwards, clutched at old Janet’s dress. ‘Oh, granny, he’s very kind--his face is very kind,’ she cried.
‘Ay,’ said the old woman, ‘ye say true; he has a real kind face. Sir, what she wants to tell ye is, that though a’s strange, and it’s hard, hard to ken what to say, she’ll be a good daughter to ye, and do her duty, though maybe there’s mony things that may gang wrang at first. Ye see she’s had naebody but Peter and me: and she’s real fond of the twa auld folk, and has been the best bairn’--Janet’s voice shook a little, but she controlled it. ‘Never, never in this world was there a better bairn--though she’s aye had the nature o’ a lady and the mainners o’ ane, and might have thought shame of us puir country bodies. Na, my bonnie woman, na,--I ken ye never did. But, sir, ye need never fear to haud up yer head when ye’ve HER by your side. She’s fit to stand before kings--ay, that she is,--before kings, and no before meaner men.’
The Colonel gazed curiously at the little old woman, who stood so firm in her self-abnegation that he, at least, never realised how sadly it went against the grain. ‘Madam,’ he said, in his old-fashioned way, ‘I believe you fully; but it must be all to your credit and the way you have brought her up, that I find her what she is.’ He took Janet’s hand and held it in his own,--a hard little hand, scored and bony with work, worn with age--not lovely in any way. The Colonel recovered himself and regained his composure, now that he had come to the point at which he could pay compliments and give pleasure. ‘I thank you, madam, from the bottom of my heart, for what you have done for her, and for what you are giving up to me,’ he said, bowing low. Janet had no understanding of what he meant; and when he bent his grizzled moustache to kiss her hand, she gave a little shriek of mingled consternation and pleasure. ‘Eh, Colonel!’ she exclaimed, her old cheeks tingling with a blush that would not have shamed a girl’s. Never in her life had lips of man touched Janet’s hand before. She drew it from him and fell back upon her chair and sobbed, looking at the knotted fingers and prominent veins in an ecstasy of wonder and admiration. ‘Did you see that, Joyce? he’s kissed my hand; did ever mortal see the like? Eh, Colonel! I just havena a word--no’ a word--to say.’
Joyce put out both her hands to her father, her eyes swimming in tears, her face lighted up with that sudden gleam of instantaneous perception which was one of the charms of her face. ‘Oh, sir!’ she said: the other word, father, fluttered on her lips. It was a gentleman who did that, one of the species which Joyce knew so little, but only that she belonged to it. In her quick imagination rehearsing every incident before it happened, that was what she would have had him do. The little act of personal homage was more than words, more than deeds, and changed the current of her feelings as by magic. And the Colonel now was in his element too. The tender flattery and sincere extravagance of all those delicate ways of giving pleasure were easy and natural to him, and he was restored to himself. He took Joyce’s hands in one of his, and drew her within his arm.
‘My dear,’ he said, with moisture in his eyes, ‘you are very like your mother. God forgive me if I ever frightened her or neglected her! I could not look you in the face if I had ever done her conscious wrong. Will you kiss me, my child, and forgive your father? She would bid you do so if she were here.’
It was very strange to Joyce. She grew crimson, as old Janet had done, under her father’s kiss. He was her father; her heart no longer made any objections; it beat high with a strange mixture of elation and pain. Her father--who had done her mother no conscious wrong, who had proved himself, in that high fantastical way which alone is satisfactory to the visionary soul, to be such a gentleman as she had always longed to meet with: yet one whom she would have to follow, far from all she knew, and, what was far worse, leaving desolate the old parents who depended upon her for all the brightness in their life. Her other sensations of pain fled away like clouds before the dawn, but this tragic strain remained. How would they do without her?--how could they bear the separation? The causeless resentment, the fanciful resistance which Joyce had felt against her father, vanished in a moment, having no cause; but the other burden remained.
Meanwhile there was another burden of which she had not thought. Andrew Halliday had discreetly withdrawn himself while the main action of the scene was going on. He stepped aside, and began to talk to Captain Bellendean. It was not undesirable in any circumstances to make friends with Captain Bellendean; and the schoolmaster had all his wits about him. He took up a position aside, where he could still command a perfect view of what was going on, and then he said, ‘We are having very good weather for this time of the year.’
‘Yes,’ Norman said, a little surprised, ‘I think so. It is not very warm, but it is always fine.’
‘Not warm! That will be your Indian experiences, Captain; for we all think here it is a very fine season--the best we have had for years. The corn is looking well, and the farmers are content, which is a thing that does not happen every year.’
‘No, indeed,’ said Norman. He was not very much interested in the farmers, who had not yet begun to be the troublesome members of society they now are; but he did not wish to have his attention distracted from the scene going on so near; and but for innate civility, he would willingly have snubbed the schoolmaster. Andrew, however, was not a person to be suppressed so.
‘You are more interested,’ he said confidentially, ‘in what’s going on here; and so am I, Captain Bellendean. I have reason to be very deeply interested. Everything that concerns my dear Joyce----’
‘Your dear--what?’ cried the Captain abruptly, turning quickly upon him with an indignant air. Then, however, Captain Bellendean recollected himself. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said quickly; ‘I believe I have heard--something.’
‘You will have heard,’ said Halliday, ‘that we’ve been engaged for some time back. We should have been married before now but for some difficulties about--about her parents and mine. Not that there was not perfect satisfaction with the connection,’ he added, with his air of importance, ‘on both sides of the house.’
‘Oh,’ said Norman. He felt himself grow red with annoyance at this intrusive fellow, whose affairs were nothing to him. He added with conscious sarcasm, ‘Let us hope it will always continue to be equally satisfactory.’
‘I hope so,’ said Halliday. ‘It could scarcely, indeed, be otherwise, seeing that Joyce was my choice in very humble circumstances, when I might well have found a partner in a different sphere. My mother’s first word was, “Andrew, you might have done better;” but Joyce’s own merits turned the scale. She is an excellent creature, Captain Bellendean, admirable in tuition. She raises an enthusiasm in the children, especially the bigger girls, which really requires quite a gift. I looked forward to the day when she should be transferred to my own parish, and work under me. Judicious guidance was all she required--just a hint here, a suggestion there--and there would not be a head-mistress in Scotland to equal her.’
‘I fear,’ said Norman, smoothing his annoyance into a laugh, ‘that Colonel Hayward will put a stop to schoolmistressing.’
‘Why, sir, why? it’s a noble office. There could not be a finer occupation, nor one in which you can serve your country better. Ladies, indeed, after marriage, when they get the cares of a family, sometimes begin to flag a little,’ said Halliday, giving a complacent look at Joyce. ‘Of course,’ he added, after a pause--and, though he did not know it, he had never been so near being kicked out of a house in his life--‘if Colonel Hayward should wish her to settle near him, there are many fine appointments to be had in England. I would not say that I should insist upon remaining here.’
‘That would be kind,’ said Captain Bellendean, with a sarcasm which was scarcely intentional. He was confounded by the composure and by the assurance of this fellow, who was so calmly persuaded of his own property in Joyce.
‘I would think it only duty,’ said Halliday; ‘but you’ll excuse me, Captain,--I think I am wanted.’ He turned with a smile towards Joyce, still awed and astonished by the sudden change in her own sentiments, who continued to stand shy and tremulous within her father’s encircling arm.
‘Joyce,’ said Andrew, ‘I am glad to see this happy conclusion; but you have not yet introduced me to the Cornel--and we can have no secrets from him now.’
The Colonel turned with astonishment and something as like hauteur as was possible to his gentle and courteous temper, to the new speaker. He looked him over from head to foot, with a dim recollection of having seen him before, and of having somehow resented his appearance even then. He resented it much more now, when this half-bred person, whose outside was not that of a gentleman, yet was not that of a labouring man, came forward claiming a place between his daughter and himself. He turned upon Andrew that mild lightning of indignant eyes which had proved so efficacious in the regiment. But Halliday was not to be intimidated by any man’s eyes. He drew still nearer with an ingratiating smile, and said again, ‘Introduce me to the Cornel, Joyce.’
Joyce had accepted Andrew Halliday’s love--as little of it as possible: because he had forced it upon her, because his talk and acquaintance with books had dazzled her, because she had found a certain protection in him from other rustic suitors. She had allowed it to be understood that some time or other she would marry him. He was the nearest to herself in position, in ambition, of any in the country-side. But she lifted her eyes to him now with a shrinking and horror which she herself could not understand. He stood between her and Captain Bellendean, contrasting himself without the smallest reluctance or sense of danger with the man whose outward semblance was more like that of a hero than any man Joyce had seen. She made in a moment the comparison which it had never occurred to Halliday to make. His under-size, his imperfect development, the absence of natural grace and refinement in him, made themselves apparent to her sharply, as if by the sting of a sudden blow. She gazed at him, the colour again flushing over her face, with a slight start of surprise and something like repugnance. He had got her promise that she would marry him, but she had never promised to present him to her unknown dream-father as his future son.
‘Who is it?’ said Colonel Hayward. He curved his eyebrows over his eyes to assist his vision, which gave him a look of displeasure; and he was displeased to see this man,--a man with whom he had some previous unpleasant association, he could not tell what,--thrusting himself in at such an inappropriate moment between his daughter and himself.
‘It is--Andrew Halliday,’ said Joyce, very low, turning her head away. Halliday held his ground very sturdily, and acknowledged this abrupt description with an ingratiating smile.
‘How do you do, Cornel?’ he said. ‘After all, she’s shy--she leaves me to introduce myself; which is not perhaps to be wondered at. We have been engaged for nearly a year. I came here to-day, knowing nothing, to try and persuade her to name the day, and put an end to a wretched bachelor’s life. But when I arrived I found everything turned upside down, and Joyce quite past giving any heed to me. I hope I may leave my cause in your hand, Cornel,’ said the schoolmaster, with the utmost absence of perception. He thought he had made a very agreeable impression, and that his affairs were, as he said, safe in the Cornel’s hands.
‘You are engaged to this--gentleman?’ Colonel Hayward said.
Joyce felt herself quail as she looked into her father’s face. She read all that was in his at a glance. Colonel Hayward was quite ignorant of Halliday, quite unaccustomed to the kind of man, unprepared for this new claim; and yet his eyes expressed the same thoughts which were in hers. A little shiver of keen sympathetic feeling ran through her. She felt herself unable to say anything. She assented with a look in which, with horror at herself, she felt the shrinking, the reluctance to acknowledge the truth, the disinclination which she had never allowed even to herself up to this time. The Colonel looked from Joyce, standing with downcast eyes and that half-visible shrinking in every line of her figure and attitude, to the commonplace man with the smirk on his countenance: and breathed once more the habitual aspiration of his life, ‘Oh that Elizabeth were here!’ But then he remembered that Elizabeth had sent him away to work it out for himself.
‘We always knew,’ said Halliday, ‘that this day would come some time, and that her real origin would be known. I have looked forward to it, Cornel. I have always done my best to help her to prepare--for any position. I am not rich,’ he added, with demonstrative frankness; ‘but among people of high tone that’s but a secondary matter, and I know you’ll find we are true partners and mates, Joyce and myself, in every other way.’
‘Sir, I am very much confused with one discovery,’ said the Colonel, hesitating and tremulous. ‘I--I--can scarcely realise yet about my daughter. Let the other stand over a little--let it wait a little--till I have got accustomed--till I know how things are--till I----’
He looked at Joyce anxiously to help him out. But for the first time in her life Joyce failed in this emergency. She stood with her eyes cast down, slightly drawn back, keeping herself isolated by an instinctive movement. She had never been in such a strait before.
‘Oh,’ said Halliday, ‘I understand. I can enter into your feelings, Cornel; and I am not afraid to wait.’ He took Joyce’s hand, which hung by her side, and clasped it close. ‘Joyce,’ he said, ‘will speak for me; Joyce will see that I am not put off too long.’
A sudden heat like a flame seemed to envelop Joyce. She withdrew her hand quickly, yet almost stealthily, and turned upon her father--her father whom she had known only for a few hours, whose claims she had at first rejected--an appealing look. Then Joyce, too, remembered herself. Truth and honour stood by Halliday’s side, though he was not of their noble strain. The flame grew hotter and hotter, enveloping her, scorching her, turning from red to the white flames of devouring fire. She turned back to her betrothed lover, scarcely seeing through eyes dazzled by that glare, and put out her hand to him as if forced by some invisible power.
Chapter XVI
The little family party left Bellendean two days after. It was not expedient, they all felt, to linger long over the inevitable separation. Even old Janet was of this mind. ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then it were well it were done quickly.’ The sentiment of these words was in the old woman’s mind, though possibly she did not know them. Joyce was finally taken from her foster-parents when she left them for Bellendean on the evening before, half heart-broken, yet half ecstatic, not knowing how to subdue the extraordinary emotion and excitement that tingled to her very finger-points. She was going to dine at the table which represented everything that was splendid and refined to the village schoolmistress, to be waited on by the servants who thought themselves much superior to old Peter and Janet, to hear the talk, to make acquaintance with the habits of those whom she had looked up to all her life. The Bellendean carriage came for her, to bring her away not only from the cottage, but from all her past existence--from everything she had known. By Janet’s advice, or rather commands, Joyce had put on her one white dress, the soft muslin gown which she had sometimes worn on a summer Sunday, and in which the old people had always thought she looked like a princess. Peter sat by the open door of the cottage while these last preparations were being made. The anger of great wretchedness was blazing in the old man’s eyes. ‘What are you doing with that white dud?’ he said, giving her a glance askance out of his red eyes. ‘I aye said it was not fit for a decent lass out of my house. Mak’ her pit on a goon that’s like her place, no like thae lightheaded limmers.’ He waved his hand towards the east end of the village, where there lived an ambitious family with fine daughters. ‘Dod! I would tear it off her back.’
‘Haud your tongue,’ said his wife; ‘what good will it do you to fecht and warstle with Providence? The time’s come when we maun just submit. Na, na, never heed him, Joyce. The white’s far the best. And just you step into your carriage, my bonnie lady: it’s the way I’ve aye seen you going aff in my dreams. Peter, dinna sit there like a sulky bear. Give her a kiss and your blessing, and let her go.’
A laugh of hoarse derision burst from Peter’s lips. ‘I’m a bonnie man to kiss a grand lady! I never was ane for thae showings-off. If she maun go, she will hae to go, and there is an end o’t. Farewell to ye, Joyce!’
He got up hastily from his seat at the door. The footman outside and the coachman on the box, keenly observant both, looked on--and Peter knew their fathers and mothers, and was aware that any word he said would be public property next day. He gave himself a shake, and pulled his bonnet over his eyes, but did not stride away as he had done before. He stood leaning his back against the wall, his face half buried in the old coat-collar which rose to his ears when he bent his head, and in the shadow of his bonnet and the forest of his beard. It was Janet, in her quavering voice, who gave the blessing, putting up two hard hands, and drawing them over Joyce’s brown satin hair and soft cheeks: ’"The Lord bless thee and keep thee: the Lord lift up the light o’ His countenance upon thee.” Gang away, gang away! It will maybe no’ be sae hard when you’re out o’ our sight.’
The horses seemed to make but one bound, the air to fill with the sound of hoofs and wheels, and Joyce found herself beginning again to perceive the daylight through her blinding tears. And her heart, too, gave a bound, involuntary, unwilling. It was not so hard when they were out of sight, and the new world so full of expectation, of curiosity, of the unknown, opened before her in a minute. Joyce in her white dress, in the Bellendean carriage driving up the avenue to dinner, with her father waiting at the other end to receive her, was and could be Joyce Matheson no more. All that she knew and was familiar with departed from her like the rolling up of a map, like the visions of a dream.
There was, however, so much consciousness, so much curiosity, so many comments made upon Joyce and her story, that the strange witching scene of the dinner-table--a thing of enchantment to the girl, with its wonderful flowers and fine company--was for the other guests somewhat embarrassing and uncomfortable. Strangely enough Joyce was almost the only one at table who was unaffected by this feeling. To her there was something symbolical in the novelty which fitted in with all her dreams and hopes. The flowers, the pretty dresses, the glitter and show of the white table with its silver and porcelain, the conversation, a dozen different threads going on at once, the aspect of the smiling faces as they turned to each other,--all carried out her expectations. It seemed to Joyce, sitting almost silent, full of the keenest observation, that the meal, the vulgar eating and drinking, was so small a part of it. She could not hear what everybody was saying, nor was she, in the excitement and confusion of her mind, very capable of understanding the rapid interchange of words, so many people talking together; but it represented to her the feast of reason and the flow of soul better than the most brilliant company in the world, more distinctly heard and understood, could have done. She was not disappointed. Joyce knew by the novels she had read that in such circumstances as hers the newcomer full of expectation generally was disappointed, and found that, seen close, the finest company was no better than the humblest. Her imagination had rebelled against that discomfiting discovery even when she read of it; and now it was with great elation that she felt she had been right all through and the novels wrong. She was not disappointed. The food and the eating were quite secondary, as they ought to be. When she looked along the table, it was to see smiling faces raised in pleasure at something that had been said, or saying something with the little triumphant air of successful argument or happy wit, or listening with grave attention, assenting, objecting, as the case might be. She did not know what they were saying, but she was convinced that it was all beautiful, clever, witty, true conversation, the food for which her spirit had hungered. She had no desire for the moment to enter into it herself. She was dazzled by all the prettiness and brightness, moved to the heart by that sensation of having found what she longed for, and at last obtained entrance into the world to which she truly belonged. She smiled when she met Mrs. Bellendean’s eye, and answered slightly at random when she was spoken to. She was by her father’s side, and he did not speak to her much. She was kindly left with her impressions, to accustom herself gradually to the new scene. And she was entirely satisfied, elated, afloat in an ethereal atmosphere of contentment and pleasure. Her dreams, she thought, were all realised.
But next morning the old life came back with more force than ever. Joyce went over and over the scene of the evening. ‘Gang away, gang away! It will maybe no’ be sae hard when you’re out o’ our sight.’ Her foster-parents had thrust her from them, not meaning to see her again; and though her heart was all aching and bleeding, she did not know what to do, whether to attempt a second parting, whether to be content that the worst was over. She made the compromise which tender-hearted people are so apt to do. She got up very early, following her old habit with a curious sense of its unusualness and unnecessariness--to use two awkward words--and ran down all the way to the village through the dewy grass. But early as she was, she was not early enough for Peter, whom she saw in the distance striding along with his long, heavy tread, his head bowed, his bonnet drawn over his brows, a something of dreary abandon about him which went to Joyce’s heart. He was going through a field of corn which was already high, and left his head and shoulders alone visible as he trudged away to his work--the sun beating upon the rugged head under its broad blue bonnet, the heavy old shoulders slouched, the long step undulating, making his figure fall and rise almost like a ship at sea. The corn was ‘in the flower,’ still green, and rustled in the morning air; a few red poppies blazed like a fringe among the sparse stalks near the pathway; the sky was very clear in the grey blue of northern skies under summer heat; but the old man, she was sure, saw nothing as he jogged onward heavy-hearted. Joyce dared not call to him, dared not follow him. With a natural pang she stood and watched the old father bereaved going out to his work. Perhaps it would console him a little: she for whom he sorrowed could do so no more.
But Joyce had not the same awe of Janet. Is it perhaps that there is even in the anguish of the affections a certain luxury for a woman which is not for the man? She ran along the vacant sunny village street, and pushed open the half-closed door, and flung herself upon the old woman’s neck, who received her with a shriek of joy. Perhaps it crossed Janet’s mind for a moment that her child had come back, that she had discovered already that all these fine folk were not to be lippened to; but the feeling, though ecstatic, was but momentary, and would indeed have been sternly opposed by her own better sense had it been true.
‘Eh, and it’s you!’ she cried, seizing Joyce by the shoulders, gazing into her face.
‘It is me, granny. For all you said last night that I was better out of your sight, I could not. I could not go--without seeing you again.’
‘Did I say that?--the Lord forgive me! But it’s just true. I’ll be better when you’re clean gane; but eh! I am glad, glad. Joyce--my bonnie woman, did ye see him?’
‘Oh, granny, I saw him going across the big cornfield. Tell him I stood and watched him with his head down on his breast--but I daredna lift my voice. Tell him Joyce will never forget--the green corn and the hot sun, and him--alone.’
‘What would hinder him to be his lane at six o’clock in the morning?’ said Janet, with a tearful smile. ‘You never gaed wi’ him to his work, ye foolish bairn. If he had left ye sleeping sound in your wee garret, would he have been less his lane? Ay, ay, I ken weel what you mean; I ken what you mean. Well, it just had to be; we maunna complain. Run away, my dawtie: run away, my bonnie lady--ye’ll write when ye get there; but though it’s a hard thing to say, it’ll be the best thing for us a’ when you’re just clean gane.’
Two or three hours afterwards, Joyce found herself, all the little confusion of the start over, seated in the seclusion of the railway carriage, with the father and mother who were henceforward to dispose of her life.
She had seen very little of them up to this moment. Colonel Hayward, indeed, had kept by her during the evening, patting her softly on her arm from time to time, taking her hand, looking at her with very tender eyes, listening, when she opened her mouth at rare intervals, with the kind of pleased, half-alarmed look with which an anxious parent listens to the utterances of a child. He was very, very kind--more than kind. Joyce had become aware, she could scarcely tell how, that the other people sometimes smiled a little at the Colonel--a discovery which awoke the profoundest indignation in her mind; but she already began half to perceive his little uncertainties, his difficulty in forming his own opinion, the curious helplessness which made it apparent that this distinguished soldier required to be taken care of, and more or less guided in the way he had to go. But she had done nothing towards making acquaintance with Mrs. Hayward, whose relation to her was so much less distinct, and upon whom so much of her comfort must depend. This lady sat in the corner of the carriage next the window, with her back to the engine, very square and firm--a far more difficult study for her new companion than her husband was. She had not shown by look or word any hostility towards Joyce; but still a sentiment of antagonism had, in some subtle way, risen between them. With the exclusiveness common to English travellers, they had secured the compartment in which they sat for themselves alone; so that the three were here shut up for the day in the very closest contact, to shake together as they might. Joyce sat exactly opposite to her step-mother, whilst the Colonel, who had brought in with him a sheaf of newspapers, changed about from side to side as the view, or the locomotion, or his own restlessness required. He distributed his papers to all the party, thrusting a Graphic into Joyce’s hands, and heaping the remainder upon the seat. Mrs. Hayward took up the Scotsman which he had given her, and looked at it contemptuously. ‘What is it?’ she said, holding it between her finger and her thumb. ‘You know I don’t care for anything, Henry, but the Times or the Morning Post.’
‘You can have yesterday’s Times, my dear,’ said the Colonel; ‘but you know we are four hundred miles from London. We must be content with the papers of the place. There are all the telegrams just the same--and very clever articles, I hear.’
‘Oh, I don’t want to read Scotch articles,’ said Mrs. Hayward. She meant no harm. She was a little out of temper, out of heart. To say something sharp was a kind of relief to her; she did not think it would hurt any one, nor did she mean to do so. But Joyce grew red behind her Graphic. She looked at the pictures with eyes which were hot and dry with the great desire she had to shed the tears which seemed to be gathering in them. Now that Bellendean was left behind like a dream, now that the familiar fields were all out of sight, the village roofs disappeared for ever, and she, Joyce, not Joyce any longer, nor anything she knew, shut up here as in a strait little house with the people,--the people to whom she belonged,--a wild and secret anguish took possession of her. She sat quite still with the paper held before her face, trying to restrain and subdue herself. She felt that if the train would but stop, she would dart out and fly and lose herself in the crowd; and then she thought, with what seemed to her a new comprehension, of her mother who had done so--who had fled and been lost. Her poor young mother, a girl like herself! This thought, however, calmed Joyce; for if her mother had but been patient, the misery she was at present enduring need never have been. Had the first Joyce but subdued herself and restrained her hasty impulses, the second Joyce might have been a happy daughter, knowing her father and loving him, instead of the unhappy, uneasy creature she was, with her heart and her life torn in two. She paused with a kind of awe when that thought came into her mind. Her mother had entailed upon her the penalty of her hastiness, of her impatience and passion. She had paid the cost herself, but not all the cost--she had left the rest to be borne by her child. The costs of every foolish thing have to be borne, Joyce said to herself. Some one must drink out that cup to the dregs; it cannot pass away until it has been emptied by one or another. No; however tempting the crowd might be in which she could disappear, however many the stations at which she could escape, she would not take that step. She would not postpone the pang. She would bear it now, however it hurt her; for one time or another it would have to be borne.
The conversation went on all the same, as if none of these thoughts were passing through the troubled brain of Joyce,--and she was conscious of it, acutely yet dully, as if it had been written upon the paper which she held before her face.
‘You must not speak in that tone, my dear, of Scotch articles--before Joyce,’ the Colonel said. ‘I have never found that they liked it, however philosophical they might be----’
‘Does Joyce count herself Scotch?’ Mrs. Hayward asked, as if speaking from a distance.
‘Do you hear your mother, my dear, asking if you call yourself Scotch?’ he said.
Both Joyce and Mrs. Hayward winced at the name. There was nothing to call for its use, and neither of them intended to pick it up out of the oblivion of the past, or the still more effectual mystery of the might have been, to force it into their lives. But Joyce could not take notice of it: she could only reply to his question with a little exaggerated warmth-- ‘I have never been out of Scotland, and all I care for has been always there. How could I call myself anything else?’
It was not very long since Peter had accused her of ‘standing up for the English.’ That had been partially true, and so was this. She thought of it with almost a laugh of ridicule at herself. Now she felt Scotch to the tips of her fingers, resenting everything that was said or hinted against her foster-country.
‘I see I must mind my p’s and q’s,’ said Mrs. Hayward; ‘but, fortunately, there will be no means of getting the Scotsman in Richmond, so we shall be exempt from that.’
There was something in Mrs. Hayward’s tone which seemed to imply that other subjects of quarrel would not be wanting, and there was a little smile on her lips which gave further meaning to what she said, or seemed to do so; though, as a matter of fact, poor Mrs. Hayward had no meaning at all, but could not, though she tried, get rid of that little bit of temper which had sprung up all lively and keen at sight of the Colonel’s solicitude about his daughter and her ‘things’--a solicitude which was quite new and unaccustomed, for he was not in the habit of thinking of any one’s ‘things,’ but rather, whenever he could, of losing his own. Among Joyce’s small baggage there was one little shabby old-fashioned box--a box which Mrs. Hayward divined at the first glance must contain the little relics of the mother, of itself a pitiful little object enough. There had not been a word said on the subject, but the Colonel had been startled by the sight of it. He had recognised it, or imagined that he recognised it, she said to herself severely, and had himself seen it put in the van, with a care which he had never taken for anything of hers. It was only a trifle, but it touched one of those chords that are ready to jar in the wayward human instrument of which the best of men and women have so little control. She could not get that jarring chord to be still; it vibrated all through her, giving an acrid tone to her voice, and something disagreeable to the smile that came, she could not tell how, to her lip. All these vibrations were hateful to her, as well as to the hapless antagonist who noted and divined them with quick responding indignation. But Mrs. Hayward could not help it, any more than she could help Joyce perceiving it. The close vicinity into which this little prison of a railway carriage brought them, so that not a tone or a look could be missed, was intolerable to the elder woman too. But she knew very well that she could not run away.
Chapter XVII
Colonel Hayward’s house was at Richmond, in one of the most beautiful spots that could be imagined. It stood on the slope of the hill, and commanded a view of the winding of the river upward towards Twickenham: and the grounds about it were exquisite, stretching down to the Thames, with a long if somewhat narrow sweep of lawn descending to the very water’s edge. Nothing could be more warm and sheltered, more perfect in greenness and shade, nothing more bright and sunny than the combination of fine trees and blossoming undergrowth and elastic velvet turf, the turf of age, which had been dressed and tended like a child from before the memory of man, and never put to any rude use. The perfection of the place was in this lawn and the gardens and grounds, which were the Colonel’s hobby, and to which he gave all his attention. But the house was also a very pretty house.
It was not large, and it was rather low: a verandah, almost invisible under the weight of climbing roses, clematis, honeysuckle, and every kind of flowering thing, went round the front; and here, looking over the river, were the summer quarters of the family. Wicker-chairs, some of Indian origin, little tables of all convenient kinds, Indian rugs in all their subdued wealth of colour, like moss under the feet, made this open-air apartment delightful. It combined two kinds of luxury with the daintiest yet most simple success. If there was a drawback it was only in bad weather, when the pretty drawing-room behind was by reason of this verandah a little wanting in light; but no one could think of that in the June weather, when the sunshine touched everything with pleasantness.
Mrs. Hayward was as proud of the house as the Colonel was of the garden. After India it cannot be described how delightful it was to them, both very insular people, to get back to the greenness and comfort of this English home; and they both watched for the effect it would have upon Joyce, with highly raised expectations. To bring a girl out of a Scotch cottage to such a place as this, to open to her all at once, from Peter Matheson’s kitchen, in which the broth was made and the oatcakes baked, the glories of that drawing-room, which Mrs. Hayward could scarcely leave to be tended by a mere housemaid, which she herself pervaded every morning, giving loving touches everywhere, arranging draperies, altering the positions of the furniture, laying out those lovely pieces of oriental stuff and Indian embroideries which, always put carefully away at night, adorned the sofas and chairs. Though she did not love ‘the girl’ she yet looked forward to the moment when all this splendour should dawn upon Joyce, with a feeling half sympathetic, realising the awe and admiration with which for the first time her untutored eyes must contemplate the beautiful room, and all the luxury of the place, which to her must look like splendour. Mrs. Hayward did not pretend that it was splendid--‘our little place’ she called it, with proud humility; but she knew that it was more perfect than anything about, and in itself without comparison, a sight to see. That Joyce would be dazzled, almost overwhelmed, by her sudden introduction into such a home, she had no manner of doubt. And this anticipation softened her, and gave her a certain interest in Joyce. She talked to her husband at night, after their arrival, about his daughter in a more friendly tone than she had yet employed.
‘I thought of giving her the little west room for herself. She will want a place to herself to be untidy in--all girls do: a place where she can keep her work--if she works--or her books: or--whatever she is fond of.’ Mrs. Hayward had a distinct vision in her eye of a little old-fashioned box--the ark of the relics which the Colonel had recognised--and made up her mind that it should be at once endued with a chintz cover, so that it might be recognisable no more.
‘There is nobody like you, Elizabeth, for kind thoughts,’ he said gratefully. Then with the same expectation that had softened her, he went on-- ‘She has never been used to anything of the kind. I shouldn’t wonder if it was too much for her feelings--for she feels strongly, or else I am mistaken; and she is a girl who--if you once bind her to you by love and kindness----’ The Colonel’s own voice quivered a little. He was himself touched by that thought.
‘Don’t speak nonsense, Henry--we know nothing about the girl, neither you nor I. The thing in her favour is, that all those Scotch friends of yours thought very well of her: but then the Scotch stick to each other so----’ She has a spirit--and a temper too, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘No, my dear, it was only a flash, because she thought--because she was taken by surprise.’
‘I think none the worse of her for having a little temper; I have one myself,’ said Mrs. Hayward with candour. ‘People like that are far safer than the sweet yielding ones who show nothing. And another thing--we shall have to account for her. I don’t know if you have thought of that.’
‘Account for her?’
‘Yes, to be sure. People will be calling--and they will wonder how it was they never heard of your daughter before. One of the hardest things in life is, that whenever you are in any society you must explain. That was one advantage of being in none.’
‘I never liked it, Elizabeth. I always thought you were too particular--as the event has proved, my dear, as the event has proved!’
Mrs. Hayward withdrew a little from him and his congratulations. Now that her position was beyond question, she was unwilling in her impatient soul that any reference should be made to the doubt which had shadowed her life before. That was all over. She would have had it forgotten for ever, and in her heart resented his recollection of it. She resumed the previous subject without taking any notice of this.
‘Fortunately, we don’t know the people here so well that we need go into it from the beginning and tell everything. I have been thinking it over, and this is what I shall say--I shall say, Your daughter has been brought up by some old relations in Scotland, but that we both felt it was time she should come home. If they say, “O! we did not know Colonel Hayward had any family,” I shall answer, “Did I never tell you?” as if it had been quite an accidental oversight. Now don’t go and contradict me, Henry, and say more than there is any occasion for. Let us both be in one tale.’
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘to think that you should have settled all that while I was thinking about nothing; but why should we be in a tale at all? Why shouldn’t I just say simply----’
‘It is such a simple story, isn’t it?’ she cried, ‘that you should have had a child--an only child, as you said in Bellendean----’
There was a tone of exasperation in this which made Colonel Hayward look up. He said, ‘But it was quite true, Elizabeth. Providence has not thought meet to give us----’
‘As if I did not know that!’ cried the woman whom Providence--that synonym of all that goes against the wishes of humanity--had not permitted to be a mother. ‘But,’ she added quickly, taking up the thread again, ‘you will see, if you think of it, that we can’t go into all that story. There would be so much to explain. And besides, it’s nobody’s business.’
‘Then why say anything at all, my dear?’ the Colonel said.
‘Why know anybody at all, you mean? As if we could avoid explaining a thing which is a very strange thing, however you take it! Unless you have anything better to suggest, that is what I shall say. Brought up by some old relations in Scotland--you can say her mother’s relations if you please; but that we felt it was not right to leave her there any longer, now we are quite settled and she is grown up. Don’t contradict me just when I am in the middle of my story, Henry. Back me up about the relations--unless you have anything better to suggest.’
Colonel Hayward, however, had nothing to suggest, though he was much embarrassed by having a story to tell. ‘I’ll forget what it is you want me to say--or I’ll go too far--or I’ll--make a muddle of it one way or other,’ he said. ‘I shall feel as if there was something wrong about it, Elizabeth: and there is nothing wrong--nothing, nothing! all the time.’
‘Go to bed,’ said Mrs. Hayward; ‘you are too tired to begin to think at this hour. You know the railway always upsets you. Go to bed, my dear--go to bed.’
‘Well, perhaps it will be the best thing,’ the Colonel said.
They both got up next morning with one pleasant thought in their minds, that of dazzling Joyce. It took away the line even from Mrs. Hayward’s brow. It was pleasant to anticipate the astonishment, the admiration, the deep impression which all these unaccustomed splendours would make. Poor girl! it would be almost too much for her; and they both wondered what she would say--whether she would break down altogether in amazement and rapture--whether it would be by words or tears that she would show her sense of this wonderful change in her life.
Alas! Joyce had awoke with a pang of disappointment almost as keen as that which seized her when she was first told that Colonel Hayward was her father. She woke in a pretty room all dainty and fresh, with pretty paper, pretty furniture, everything that was most suitable and becoming for the character and dimensions of the place; and she hurried to the window and looked out eagerly upon the pretty English lawn so trim and well cared for, the trees that formed two long lines down to the river, shutting it out from other enclosures on either side, the brilliant flower-beds near the house, the clustering climbers that surrounded her window. And the cottage girl felt her high-vaulting thoughts go down, down, with a disappointment which made her giddy. Was ever anything so foolish, so wicked, so thankless? From the little garret in the cottage to this room filled with convenient and pretty things, of some of which she did not even understand the use--from the village street of Bellendean, seen through the open door or greenish bad glass of the cottage windows, to this warm luxurious landscape, and the silver Thames, and the noble trees! And yet Joyce was disappointed beyond what words could say.
She had no knowledge of this limited comfortable luxurious littleness; all that she knew was the cottage life--and Bellendean. There were, to be sure, the farmers’ houses, and the manse; but neither of these types resembled this, nor was either consistent with the image of Colonel Hayward, the Captain’s colonel, the ‘distinguished soldier’ with whose name Joyce had begun to flatter herself everybody was acquainted. She stood half dressed and gazed out upon the long but confined stretch of lawn, and the low gable which was within sight from the window, with dismay. A chill struck to her heart. She thought of Bellendean, not half so daintily cared for as this little demesne, with its groups of great trees, its wide stretches of park, its careless size and greatness. Poor Joyce! had she been the minister’s daughter at the manse, she might have been dazzled and delighted, as was expected from her. But she understood nothing of this. She knew the poor and their ways, and she knew the great people--the great houses and big parks, the cottages with a but and a ben and a little kailyard. The one was all-familiar to her--the other was her ideal, the natural alternative of poverty: but this she knew nothing about--nothing at all.
She did not understand it. The toil and care which made that lawn like velvet, perfect, without a weed, elastic, springing under the foot, soft as moss, and green as constant waterings and mowings could make it, was totally lost upon Joyce. She saw the two lines of trees and flowering shrubs, elaborately masking all more arbitrary lines of limitation on each side, shutting it off--and the sight of those green bonds made her heart turn back upon herself. Her father had recovered in her mind the greatness necessary for her ideal: he was a distinguished soldier--what could be better? He was finer in his fame (she said to herself) than if he had been a prince or a duke. But his house! She retired from her window and covered her face with her hands, and went back into the secret citadel of herself with a dismayed heart. She had never calculated upon this. To be just one among a crowd, to be nobody in particular, to have suffered this convulsion in her life and rending asunder of her being, for nothing--to be nobody. And all the time these two good people were forestalling each other in their anticipations, making pictures to themselves of Joyce’s transport and delight!
How she got through the ordeal will be best seen in the long letters which she wrote that evening to her old home.
* * * * *
‘My dearest old Granny, my own real true Mother--I wonder how you are, and how the day has passed, and how grandfather is, and even the cat, and everything at home. Oh what a thing it is to go away from your home, to be taken from the true place you belong to! You will never know how I felt when it all melted away into the sky, and Bellendean was a thing I could see no more. Oh my bonnie little Bellendean, where I’ve lived all my life, and the old ash-tree, and the rose-bushes, and my garret-window where I could see the Firth, and our kindly table where we ate our porridge and where I could see you! O Granny, my own Granny, that’s all gone away into the skies, and the place that has known me knows me no more: and here I am in a strange place, and I cannot tell whether I’m Joyce still, or if I’m like the woman in the old song, “and this is no’ me.”
‘Dear Granny, the journey was well enough: it was the best of all. I got a paper full of pictures (the Graphic, you know it), and they just talked their own talks, and did not ask me much: and then the country span along past the carriage-window, towns and castles, and rivers, and fields of corn, and all the people going about their business and knowing nothing at all of a poor lassie carried quick, quick away from her home. I pictured to myself that I might be going away for a governess to make some money for my grandfather and you--but that would not have been so bad, for I would have gone back again when I got the money: and then I tried to think I might be going to take care of somebody, perhaps a brother I might have had that was ill, and that you would be anxious at home--very anxious--but not like the present: for he would have begun to get better as soon as I was there to nurse him, and every day the time would have come nearer for taking him home. And I tried a great many other things, but none was bad enough--till I just came back to the truth, that here I was flying far away to a new life and a new name, and to try and be content and live with new people that I never saw, and leave all my own behind. Oh, Granny, I am ungrateful to say this, for they’re very good to me, and my father is kind and sweet and a real true gentleman: and would be that, as grandfather is, if he were a ploughman like grandfather: and what could you say more if you were Shakespeare’s self and had all the words in the world at your command?
‘We stopped in London, but I could not see at all what like it was, except just hundreds of railway lines all running into each other, and trains running this way and that way as if they were mad--but never any harm seemed to be done, so far as I could see: and then we took another train, and, after a little while, came here. To tell you about it is very difficult, for it is so different from anything that ever was before. Do you remember, Granny, the place where Argyle took Jeanie Deans after she had spoken to the Queen? where she said it would be fine feeding for the cows, and he just laughed--for it was the finest view and the most beautiful landscape, with the Thames running between green banks and big beautiful trees, and boats upon the river, and the woods all like billows of green leaves upon the brae? You will cry out when I tell you that this is here, and that the house is on that very brae, and that I’m looking out over the river, and see it running into the mist and the distance, going away north--or rather coming down from the north--where my heart can follow, but farther, farther away. And it is a very beautiful landscape: you never saw anything to compare to it; but oh, Granny, I never knew so well before what Sir Walter is and how he knew the hearts of men, for I’m always thinking what Jeanie said, “I like just as well to look at the craigs o’ Arthur Seat, and the sea coming in ayont them.” For me, I think of Bellendean and the Firth, and the hills drawing close round Queen Margaret’s Hope; but chiefly because you are there, Granny, and all I care for most.
‘I will tell you one thing: my father’s house is not, as we were fond to think, like Bellendean. The houses here are not great houses like that. I think they wonder I am not an enthusiast, as Mrs. Bellendean always said I was, for the things they have here. All the policy,[A] and everything in the house, is taken care of--as you used to take care of me. I can’t think of any other image. They are always at them. Mrs. Hayward puts on the things upon the chairs and the tables with her own hands. The things I mean are pieces of beautiful silk, sometimes woven in flowers like Mrs. Bellendean’s grandest gown, sometimes all worked with the needle as they do in India, fine, fine. I would like to copy some of them: but what would be the use? for they have them all from India itself, and what I did would be but an imitation. I am afraid to sit down upon the chairs for fear there should be some dust upon my gown, and I think I ought to take off my shoes before I go upon the carpet. You would like to go round and round as if you were in a collection, and look at everything. It will sometimes be ivory carving, and sometimes china that is very old and precious, and sometimes embroidery work, and sometimes silk with gold and silver woven in. And what you will laugh at, Granny, Mrs. Hayward has plates hung up instead of pictures--china plates like what you eat your dinner from, only painted in beautiful colours--and an ashet[B] she has which is blue, and very like what we have at home. All these things are very pretty--very pretty: but not to me like a room to live in. Of the three--this house, and Bellendean, and our own little housie at home--I would rather, of course, have Bellendean, I will not deny it, Granny; but next I would rather have our own little place, with my table at the back window, and you aye moving about whatever there was to do. They are more natural; but I try to look delighted with everything, for to Mrs. Hayward it is the apple of her eye.
‘She has never had any children.
‘My father is just as fond of his policy and his gardens--(but it’s too little for a policy, and it’s more than a garden). The gardeners are never done. They are mowing, or they are watering, or they are sweeping, or they are weeding, all the long day. And it’s all very bonnie--very bonnie--grass that is like velvet, and rose-bushes not like our roses at home, but upon a long stalk, what they call standards, and trees and flowers of kinds that I cannot name. I will find out about them and I will tell you after. But oh, Granny, the grand trees are like a hedge to a field; they are separating us from the garden next door. It is very, very strange--you could not think how strange--to be in a fine place that is not a place at all, but just a house with houses next door--not like Bellendean, oh, not like Bellendean--and not like any kind of dwelling I have seen, so pretty and so well kept, and yet neither one thing nor another, not poor like us--oh, far from that!--and yet not great. I am praising it all, and saying everything I can think--and indeed it’s very pretty, far finer than anything I ever saw: but I think she sees that I am not doing it from my heart. I wish I could; but oh, Granny dear, how can I think so much of any place that takes me away from my real home?
‘My dear, dear love to my grandfather, and tell him I never forget his bowed head going through the corn, as I saw him last when he did not see me. To think his good grey head should be bowed because of Joyce, that never got anything but good from him and you, all her life! Tell me what they are all saying, and who is to get the school, and if the minister was angry. What a good thing it was the vacation, and all the bairns away! You must not be unhappy about me, Granny, for I will do my best, and you can’t be very miserable when you do that; and perhaps I will get used to it in time.
‘Good night, and good night, and God be with us all, if not joy, as the song says.--Always your own and grandfather’s
‘JOYCE.’
She wrote at the same time her first letter to Halliday, lingering with the pen in her hand as if unwilling to begin. She was a little excited by what she had just written, her outpouring of her heart to her foster-mother. And this was different. But at last she made the plunge. She dried her eyes, and gave herself a little shake together, as if to dismiss the lingering emotion, and began, ‘Dear Andrew’; but then came to another pause. What was in Joyce’s thoughts? There was a spot of ink on the page, an innocent little blot. She removed the sheet hastily from the other paper, and thrust it below the leaves of her blotting-book. Then she took a steel pen, instead of the quill with which she had been hurrying along the other sheets--a good hard, unemotional piece of iron, which might make the clean and exact writing which the schoolmaster loved--and began again: and this time a little demure mischief was in Joyce’s eyes:--
‘DEAR ANDREW--We arrived here last night, tired but not worn out, and came home at once to my father’s house. The journey was very interesting--to see so many places I had heard of, even if they only flew past the carriage-windows. Of course it was the train that flew, and not Durham and Newcastle and all the rest. You have been to London yourself, so you will not require me to tell you all I saw, and I was thinking a great deal on what I left behind, so that I did not see them with an easy heart, so as to get the good of them, as you would do.
‘I wonder if you have ever seen Richmond--it is a beautiful place: the Thames a quiet river, not like any I know; but I have seen so little. It is like a picture more than a river, and the trees all in waves of green, one line above another, rich and quiet, with no wind to blow them about. I thought upon the poem, “As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean:” though there is neither ship nor ocean, but only the stream that scarcely seems to flow, and the little boats that scarcely seem to move--everything so warm and so still. My father’s house is called Rosebank, as you will see by the printing on the paper. It is rather a foolish name, but it was the name of the house before they came here. It is the most wonderful place I ever saw, so carefully kept and beautifully furnished. I never understood before what all the novels say now about furniture and the pretty things scattered about. There is a quantity of things in the drawing-room which I should have taken the children to an exhibition to see, and I should have had to read up a great deal to explain everything to them. But no one thinks of explaining: they are just lying about, and no one pays any attention to them here. My father takes a great interest in the gardens and the grounds, which are beautiful. And the best thing of all is the view of all the bits of the Thames, and the beautiful woods.
‘It is a great change, and it makes one feel very unsteady at first, and I scarcely realise what the life will be, but I must trust that everything will turn out well: and my father and Mrs. Hayward are very kind. I am to have a sitting-room to myself to do what I like in, and I am to be taken about to see everything. You will not expect me to tell you much more at present, for I don’t know much more, it being only the first day; but I thought you would like to hear at once. It is a great change. I wonder sometimes if I may not perhaps wake up to-morrow and find I am at home again and it is all a dream.
‘I hope you will go and see Granny, when you can, and cheer them a little. Grandfather is glad of a crack, you know. They will be lonely at first, being always used to me. I will be very thankful to you, dear Andrew, if you will see them when you can, and be very kind--but that, I am sure, you will be. When I think of them sitting alone, and nobody to come in and make them smile, it just breaks my heart.--Yours affectionately,
‘JOYCE HAYWARD.’
Joyce Hayward--it was the first time she had signed her name. Her eyes were too full thinking of the old people to see how it looked, but when that lump had melted a little in her throat, and she had dried her eyes, turning hastily aside that no drop might fall upon the fair page and blot the nice and careful writing, Joyce looked at it, and again there came upon her face a faint little smile. Joyce Hayward--it did not look amiss. And it was a beautifully written letter, not a t but was crossed, not an i but was dotted. She had resisted all temptations to abridge the ‘affectionately.’ There it stood, fully written out in all its long syllables. That would please Andrew. When she had put up her letters, she rose from her seat and looked out once more, softly pushing aside the carefully drawn curtains, upon the landscape sleeping in the soft summer haze of starlight and night. All so still--no whisper of the sea near, no thrill of the north wind--a serene motionless stretch of lawn and river and shadowy trees. It was a lovely scene, but it saddened Joyce, who felt the soft dusk fill her soul and fold over all her life. And thus ended her first day in her father’s house.
Chapter XVIII
Joyce was sadly uncertain what to do or how to behave herself in her new home. She took possession of the room which was given to her as a sitting-room, with a confused sense that she was meant to remain there, which was half a relief and half a trouble to her. To live there all alone except when she was called to meals was dreadfully dreary, although it felt almost a pleasure for the first moment to be alone. She brought out her writing things, which were of a very humble description, and better suited to the back window in the cottage than to the pretty writing-table upon which she now arranged them,--a large old blotting-book, distended with the many exercises and school-papers it had been accustomed to hold, and a shabby rosewood desk, which she had got several years ago as the prize of one of her examinations. How shabby they looked, quite out of place, unfit to be brought into this beautiful house! Joyce paused a moment to wonder whether she herself was as much out of place in her brown frock, which, though it was made like Greta’s, and so simple and quiet that it could not be vulgar, was yet a dress very suitable for the schoolmistress. She brought down her few books, some of which were prizes too, and still more deplorable in their cheap gilding than the simply shabby ones. Nobody could say that the bindings were not vulgar, although it was Milton, and Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and the Lay of the Last Minstrel that were within. She made a row of them in the pretty bookshelves, and they looked like common people intruding into a fine house, as she herself was doing. Common people! Milton and Wordsworth! That showed how little was told by the outside; and Joyce was not without a proud consciousness swelling in her breast that she, too, in her brown frock, and with her village schoolmistress’s traditions, was not common or unworthy.
Her father had met her coming downstairs with her arms full of the books, and had stopped to take them from her with a shocked look, and insisted on carrying them down for her. ‘But why didn’t you ring for somebody to do it, my dear?’ he said. ‘They are not heavy,’ said Joyce; ‘they are no trouble,--and I always do things for myself.’ ‘But you must not here,’ Colonel Hayward said, putting them down on the table, and pausing a moment to brush off with his handkerchief the little stains of dust which they had left on his irreproachable coat. Joyce felt that little movement with another keen sensation of inappropriateness. It was not right, because she was unaccustomed to being served by others, that Colonel Hayward, a distinguished soldier, should get specks of dust on his coat. A hot blush enveloped her like a flame, while she stood looking at him, not knowing whether to say anything, whether to try to express the distress and bewilderment that filled her being, or if it would be better to be silent and mutely avoid such an occurrence again.
He looked up at her when he had brushed away the last speck, and smiled. ‘Books will gather dust,’ he said. ‘Don’t look as if you were to blame, my dear. But you must remember, Joyce, you are the young lady of the house, and everything in it is at your command.’ He patted her shoulder, with a very kind encouraging look, as he went away. It was a large assurance to give, and probably Mrs. Hayward would not have said quite so much; but it left Joyce in a state of indescribable emotion, her heart deeply touched, but her mind distracted with the impossibilities of her new position. How was she to know what to do? To avoid giving trouble, to save herself, was not the rule she could abide by when it ended in specking with dust the Colonel’s coat, and bringing him out of his own occupations to help her. Joyce sat down when she had arranged her books, and tried to thread her way through all this maze which bewildered her. She had nothing to do, and she thought she was intended to spend her life here, to sit alone and occupy herself. It was very kindly meant, she was sure, so as to leave her at her ease; and she was glad to have this refuge, not to be always in Mrs. Hayward’s way, sitting stiffly in the drawing-room waiting to be spoken to. Oh yes; she was glad to be here: yet she looked about the room with eyes a little forlorn.
It was a nice little room, with a large window looking out upon the flower-garden, and it was, so far as Joyce knew, very prettily furnished, but without the luxuries and decorations of the other rooms. There were no pictures, but a little standing frame or two on the mantelpiece, no doubt intended for those endless photographs of friends which she had seen in Greta’s room at Bellendean, always the first things taken out of her boxes when her belongings were unpacked. But Joyce had few friends. She had a little rude picture on glass, shut up in a little case, of old Peter and Janet, the old woman in her big bonnet and shawl, her husband, all one broad smile, looking over her shoulder--very dear to Joyce, but not to be exposed on the mantelpiece for Mrs. Hayward’s quick look of criticism. Joyce felt that Greta in a moment would make that room her own. She would bring down her photographs; she would throw down her work, which never was done, with all the pretty silks about. She would spread out her paper and her pens, and the letters she had received and those she had begun to write, upon the table where Joyce’s big old blotting-book lay, and the rosewood desk, closed and looking like an ugly oblong box as it was--long, bare, and miserable; but none of all these things could Joyce do. She had no work, and no photographs of her friends, and no letters, and nothing to do--nothing to do! And was this how she was to spend her life?
She sat there until the bell rang for lunch, saying to herself that it was far better than being in the drawing-room in Mrs. Hayward’s way; and then she went timidly out into the hall, where her father was standing, just come in from some supervision in the garden. ‘I have had a busy morning,’ he said, beaming upon her, ‘and so I suppose have you, my dear; but we’ll soon settle down. Mrs. Hayward----’ here he paused with a little uneasiness, and after a moment resumed--‘your mother--has been very busy too. There is always a great deal to do after one has been away.’
‘Considering that I was only away four days,’ said Mrs. Hayward, coming in from the other side, and leading the way to the dining-room. Joyce could not help feeling stiff and awkward as she followed, and hastily got into her seat before the butler could come behind and push forward the chair. She was a little afraid of him hovering behind, and wondered if he knew.
‘I hope you like your room,’ Mrs. Hayward said. ‘It is small, but I think it is nice; and, Baker, remember to let down the sun-blinds before the afternoon sun gets in. Miss Hayward will not like to find it all in a blaze. That is the worst of a western aspect. Henry, some invitations have come----’
‘Ah!’ said the Colonel, ‘we have more to consider now than we used to have, Elizabeth. There is Joyce to be thought of----’
‘Oh,’ Joyce cried, growing very red, ‘I hope you will not think of me!’
‘For some things, of course, we must consider her, Henry,’ said Mrs. Hayward, taking no notice of Joyce’s hurried exclamation. ‘There are nothing but garden-parties all about, and she must go to some of them. It will be the best way of making her known.’
‘You always think of the right thing, my dear,’ the Colonel said.
‘But when it is for dinner, Henry, until people know her, Joyce will not mind, she will stay at home.’
‘I wish,’ said Joyce, with a horrified alarm--‘oh, I wish you would never think of me! I would not like--I could not think, I--I would be afraid to go to parties--I----’
‘My dear,’ said Colonel Hayward, ‘perhaps there may be--dressmakers to think of--or something of that sort.’
‘I think you may trust me to look after that,’ said Mrs. Hayward, with a glance at Baker, who was listening with benignant interest. Joyce had a keen enough feminine sense to know that Baker was not to be taken into the confidence of the family; and accordingly she made no further interruption, but allowed the conversation to go on without attempting to take any part in it. She heard them discuss names which were without any meaning to her, and kept shyly, and, as she felt, stiffly still, endeavouring with all her might to look as if she knew nothing at all about it, as if it did not at all refer to her--which went sadly against her with her step-mother, who was eagerly on the outlook for indications of character, and to whom Joyce’s apparent indifference was an offence--though she would probably have been equally offended had the girl shown too much interest. When Baker left the room, Mrs. Hayward turned to her again.
‘The Colonel was quite right,’ she said; ‘though I didn’t wish to discuss it before the servants. You must want some dresses. You are very nice as you are for indoors, but there is a great deal of dress now worn at garden-parties. And what is called a simple toilet is just the most troublesome of all. For it has to be so fresh and so perfect, not a crumpled ribbon, not a fold out of order. You must go with me to choose some patterns.’
Joyce coloured high again. She felt offended, proud--and yet knew she had no right to be either. ‘If I may speak,’ she said, ‘I never thought of parties. I would perhaps not know--how to behave. Oh, if you will be so kind as never to mind me! I will stay at home.’
Colonel Hayward put out his hand with his tender smile, and patted hers where it touched the table. ‘You will behave prettier--than any of them,’ the old soldier said.
‘Oh, don’t put nonsense in the girl’s head, Henry!’ cried his wife with impatience. ‘You may very likely be wanting a little, Joyce. You may feel awkward: it would be quite natural. The only thing is, you must begin some time--and the best way is to get your awkwardness over as soon as possible. Afternoon parties are more informal than dances, and so forth. They don’t demand so much, and you could pass in the crowd.’
Though Joyce had been frightened at the idea of parties, and though it was her own suggestion that she would not know how to behave, she did not like this. It sent the blood coursing through her veins. To pass in a crowd--to be tolerated where much was not demanded! How different was this from the old dreams in which Lady Joyce had been supreme! But these were but dreams, and she was ashamed to have ever been so vain. She stole away, while they stood in the hall discussing this question, with a sense of humiliation unspeakable, and retreated so quickly that her disappearance was not remarked, back to the west room once more. She shut the door upon herself, and said half aloud in the silence and solitude, how good a thing it was that they had given her this room of her own in which she could take shelter, and be in nobody’s way: and then for want of anything else to do, she fell suddenly, without warning, into a long fit of crying, tears irrestrainable, silent, overwhelming, that seemed as if they would carry her away.
Poor Joyce felt that her fate was harder than she could bear--to be carried away from her homely state, in which she had been accustomed to something of the ideal eminence of her dreams, into this, which was supposed by everybody to be social elevation, and was humiliation, downfall--a fall into depths which she had never realised, which had never seemed possible for her. She cried like a child, feeling no power, nor indeed any wish, to stop crying, in a hopeless self-abandonment. Altogether, she was like a child, feeling herself lost, undervalued, neglected, and as if all the rest of the world were happy and in their natural places, while she was left here in a little room by herself all alone. And to add to the humiliation, Baker came in, soft, stepping like a large noiseless black cat, to put down the blinds, as his mistress had told him, and found her in the midst of that speechless torrent of weeping, unable to stop herself or to keep up appearances in any way. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Hayward,’ Baker said, in subdued apology, shot with a glance of eager curiosity and inquisitiveness: for he wanted very much to know something about this daughter who had appeared so suddenly, and of whom no one had ever heard before. Joyce started up to her feet, and hurrying to the bookcase, took out all the books again in order to give herself a countenance. She turned her back upon him, but he could see very well the quivering of her shoulders, which all her pride and dismay at having betrayed herself could not stop.
This curious state of affairs continued for two or three days. Joyce withdrew to her room when the meals were over, at which she was nervously on the watch for anything that might be said concerning her and her mode of existence. It was the third or fourth day before anything was said. Then Mrs. Hayward stopped her as she was stealing away, and laid a hand upon her shoulder. ‘Joyce, wait for a moment; let me speak to you. I am not going to interfere with what you wish: but do you really like best to spend all your time alone?’
‘I thought,’ said Joyce, with a choking voice, for her heart had suddenly begun to thump so in her throat that she could scarcely hear,-- ‘I thought--that I was to stay there: that perhaps you thought it best.’
‘How could you think I was such a barbarous wretch! Joyce, if you mean to make life a fight----’
The girl opened her eyes wide with wonder and dismay.
‘That is not what you meant to say, Elizabeth,’ said the Colonel, coming up to them: his wife had thought he was out of the way, and made a little gesture of impatience on seeing him.
‘Don’t interfere, for heaven’s sake, Henry! unless you will manage affairs yourself, which would be much the best way. You make things much more difficult for me, as perhaps you are aware, Joyce.’
‘No; I did not know. I thought when you said I should have a room--for myself----’
‘That I meant you to live there like a prisoner in your father’s house? Are you aware that you are in your father’s house?’
Joyce turned her eyes from one to the other with a mute appeal. Then she said, ‘Yes,’ faintly, not with the vehemence of her former impulses. ‘If she had been patient and not run away,’ she added, with a little solemnity, after a pause, ‘it would not have been so unhappy for us all. I would at least have known--my father.’
‘You see that?’ cried Mrs. Hayward, though she did not understand why these words were said. ‘Then you have some common-sense after all, and surely you will get to understand.’
‘Why do you say that, Joyce--why do you say that?’ said the Colonel, laying his hand upon her arm. He was growing very pale and anxious, nervous and frightened, distinguished soldier as he was, by this sudden outburst of hostilities. To see two armies engaged is one thing, but it is quite another to see two women under your own roof----’ Joyce, you must not say that,’ he repeated, leaning his hand, which she could feel tremble, upon her arm; ‘you must listen to what Elizabeth--I mean, to what your mother says.’
‘Don’t call me her mother, Henry. She doesn’t like it, and I am not sure that I do either. But we might be friends for all that--so long as she has sense---- Don’t you see, child, that we can’t live if you go on in this way? It is getting on my nerves!’ cried Mrs. Hayward with excitement, ‘and upon his nerves, and affecting the whole house. Why should you like to shut yourself up as if we were your enemies, and upset everybody? I can’t settle to anything. I can’t sleep. I don’t know what I am doing. And how you can like----’
‘But I do not like it,’ said Joyce. ‘I did not think I could bear it any longer: everything is so strange to me. I used to think I would know by instinct; but it appears I was very silly all the time--for I don’t think I know how to behave.’
Joyce hated herself for feeling so near crying: why should a girl cry at everything when she does not wish to cry at all? The same thought was flying through Mrs. Hayward’s mind, who had actually dropped one hot and heavy tear, which she hoped no one saw. She put up her hand hastily to stop the Colonel, who was about to make one of those speeches which would have given the finishing touch.
‘Then,’ she said, ‘run and get your work, if you have any work, or your book, or whatever you are doing, and come to the drawing-room like a Christian: for we should all go out of our senses altogether if we went on much longer in this way.’
The Colonel patted his daughter’s arm and hastened to open the door for her like an old courtier. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘turning round to his wife, ‘that as soon as you spoke to her, Elizabeth, she would respond. You are a little hasty, my dear, though never with me. I knew that as soon as she saw what a heart you have----’
‘Oh, never mind my heart, Henry! Don’t talk to Joyce about my heart. I think she has a little common-sense. And if that’s so, we shall get on.’
And then Joyce began to spend all her time in the drawing-room, sadly ill at ease, not knowing what to do. She sat there sounding the depths of her own ignorance, often for hours together, as much alone as when in the west room, feeling herself to sit like a wooden figure in her chair, conscious to her finger-tips of awkwardness, foolishness, vacancy, which had never come into her life before. She had no needlework to give her a pretence of occupation: and as for books, those that were about on the tables were not intended to be read, except the novels from Mudie’s, which had this disadvantage, that when they were readable at all, Joyce got absorbed in them, and forgot herself, and would sometimes forget Mrs. Hayward too. She had a feeling that she should be at Mrs. Hayward’s disposal while they were together, so that this lapse occurring now and then, filled her with compunction and shame. But when visitors came, that was the worst of all.
Chapter XIX
On one of these mornings the Colonel came to her almost stealthily, with a very soft step, while she was in the drawing-room alone. Joyce had no book that morning, and was more in despair than ever for something to do. She was kneeling in front of one of the pretty pieces of Indian work, copying the pattern on a sheet of paper. When she heard her father’s step, she started as if found out in some act of guilt, grew very red, and dropped her pencil out of her trembling hand.
‘I beg your pardon,’ she said involuntarily. ‘I--had nothing to do. It is a wonderful pattern. I thought I should like to copy it----’
‘Surely, my dear--and very prettily you have done it too; but you must try to recollect that everything is yours, and that you have no need to ask pardon. I want you to come with me into my library. I believe you have never seen my library, Joyce.’
No, she had not been able to take the freedom either of a child of the house or of an ordinary visitor. She was afraid to go anywhere beyond the ordinary thoroughfare, from dining-room to drawing-room. ‘I saw an open door,’ she said, ‘and some books.’
‘But you did not come in? Come now. I have something to say to you.’ There was a look in the old soldier’s eye of unlawful pleasure, a gratification enhanced by the danger of being found out, and perhaps suffering for it. He led Joyce away with the glee of a truant schoolboy. ‘My wife is busy,’ he said, with an air of innocent hypocrisy. ‘She can’t want either of us for the moment. Come in, come in. And, my dear,’ he said, putting again his caressing hand upon his daughter’s shoulder, ‘remember, that when I am not in the garden, I’m here: and when you have anything to say to your father, I’m always ready--always ready. I hope you will learn--to take your father into your confidence, Joyce.’
She did not make any reply; her head drooped, and her voice was choked. He was so kind--and yet confidence was so hard a thing to give.
‘That reminds me,’ he said, still more gently, ‘that I don’t think you ever call me father, Joyce.’
‘Oh,’ she said, not daring to lift her eyes, ‘but I think it--in my heart.’
‘You must say it--with your lips, my dear; and you must not be afraid of the people who are nearest to you in the world. You must have confidence in us, Joyce. And now look here, my little girl; I have something to give you--not any pretty thing for a present,’ said the Colonel, sitting down before his desk and pulling out a drawer, ‘but something we can’t get on without. I got it for you in this form that you might use it as you please; remember it is not for clothes but only for your own pleasure, to do what you like with.’ He held out to her, with the most fatherly kind smile, four crisp and clean five-pound notes. Joyce looked at them bewildered, not knowing what they were, and then gave a choking cry, and drew back, covering her face with her hands.
‘Money!’ she cried, and a pang of mortification went through her like the sharp stab of a knife.
‘Well, my dear, you must have money, and who should give it you but your father? Joyce! why, this is worse and worse.’ The Colonel grew angry in his complete bewilderment, and the disagreeable sensation of kindness refused. ‘What can you mean?’ he cried; ‘am I to have nothing to do with you though you are my daughter?’ He got up from his chair impatiently. ‘I thought you would like it to be between ourselves. I made a little secret of it, thinking to please you. No; I confess that I don’t understand you, Joyce: if Elizabeth were here, I should tell her so.’ He flung down the notes upon his table, where they lay fluttering in the morning breeze that came in at the open window. ‘She must do what she can, for I don’t pretend to be able to do anything,’ the Colonel cried.
Joyce stood before him, collecting herself, calming down her own excitement as best she could. She said to herself that he was quite right--that it would have to be--that she had no independent life or plan of her own any more--that she must accept everything from her father’s hands. What right had she either to refuse or to resent? How foolish it was, how miserable, ungenerous of her, not to be able to take! Must it not sometimes be more gracious, more sweet to take, to receive, than to give? And yet to accept this from one who was almost a stranger though her father, seemed impossible, and made her whole being, body and soul, quiver with that sensation of the intolerable in which there is neither rhyme nor reason. Though she was so young, she had provided for her own necessities for years. They were very few, and her little salary was very small; but she had done it, giving rather than getting--for naturally there was nothing to spare from Peter Matheson’s ploughman’s wages. She stood shrinking a little from her father’s displeasure--so unused to anything of the kind!--but with all these thoughts sweeping through the mind, which was only a girl’s mind, in many ways wayward and fantastic, but yet at bottom a clear spirit, candid and reasonable. This would have to be. She must accept the money, she who had been so independent. She must learn how to live, that tremendous lesson, in the manner possible to her, not in her own way. Once more she thought of her mother obeying her foolish impulse, flying from her troubles--only to fall fatally under them, and to leave their heritage to her daughter. It did not require a moment to bring all these reflections in a flood through her mind, nor even to touch her with the thought of her father’s little tender artifice, and of how he had calculated no doubt that she would have presents to send, help to offer--or, at least, pleasure to bestow. Perhaps her imagination put thoughts even more delicate and kind into the Colonel’s mind than those which were there--which was saying much. She recovered her voice with a great effort.
‘Father----’ she said, then paused again, struggling with something in her throat,-- ‘I hope you will forgive me. I--never took money--from any one--before----’
‘You never had your father before to give it you, Joyce.’ A little word calmed down the Colonel’s superficial resentment. It did more, it went straight to his heart. He came up to her and put his arm round her. ‘My child,’ he said, in the words of the parable, ’"all that I have is thine.” You forget that.’
‘Father, if I could only feel that you were mine. It is all wrong--all wrong!’ cried Joyce. ‘It is like what the Bible says; I want to be born again.’
The Colonel did not know what to say to this, which seemed to him almost profane; but he did better than speaking--he held her close to him, and patted her shoulder softly with his large tender hand.
‘And I will, I will,’ said Joyce, with a Scotch confusion of tenses, ‘if you will have a little patience with me. It cannot come all in a moment; but I will, I will.’
‘We’ll all have patience,’ said the Colonel, stooping over her, feeling in his general weakness, and with even a passing sigh for Elizabeth going through his mind, that it was sweet to have the positions reversed sometimes, and to feel somebody depend upon him, and appeal to his superior wisdom.
At this moment Mrs. Hayward opened the door of her husband’s room quickly, coming in with natural freedom. She stopped ’as if she had been shot’ when she saw this group--Joyce sheltered in her father’s arm, leaning against him. She made a rapid exclamation, ‘Oh!’ and turning as quickly as she had come, closed the door after her with a quick clear sound which said more than words. She did not slam it--far from that. She would not have done such a thing, neither for her own sake, nor out of regard for what the servants would say: but she shut it sharply, distinctly, with a punctuation which was more emphatic than any full stop could be.
In the afternoon there were callers, and Joyce became aware, for the first time, of the social difficulties of her position. She heard the words, ‘brought up by relations in Scotland,’ as she went through the drawing-room to the verandah where the visitors were sitting with Mrs. Hayward. Joyce did not apply the words to herself, but she perceived a little stir of interest when she appeared timidly at the glass door. The lady was a little woman, precise and neat, with an indescribable air of modest importance, yet insignificance, which Joyce learned afterwards to understand, and the gentleman was in a long black coat, with a soft felt hat in his hands. Eyes more instructed would have divined the clergyman and clergywoman of the district, not rector and rectoress, but simple incumbents. They rose up to meet her, and shook hands in a marked way, as ‘taking an interest’ in a new member of their little cure; but Joyce, unaccustomed, did not understand the meaning of this warmth. It disconcerted her a little, and so did the conversation into which Mr. Sitwell at once began to draw her, while his wife conversed in a lower tone with the lady of the house. He talked to her of the river and boating, of which she knew nothing, and then of lawn-tennis, to which her response was not more warm. The good clergyman thought that perhaps the game had not penetrated to the wilds of Scotland, and changed the subject.
‘We are going to have our children’s treat next week,’ he said. ‘It would be very kind of you to come and help my wife, who has everything to manage. Our district is but a new one--we have not much aid as yet. Do you take any interest in schools, Miss Hayward?’
‘Oh yes, a great interest,’ cried Joyce, lighting up, ‘that is just my----’ she was going to say profession, having a high opinion of the dignity of her former office: but before the word was said she caught a warning glance from Mrs. Hayward--‘it is what I care most for in the world,’ she said, with a sudden blush of shame to feel herself stopped in that avowal of enthusiasm for the work itself.
‘Indeed!’ cried the clergyman. ‘Do you hear, Dora? here is a help for you. Miss Hayward says that schools are what she cares most for in the world.’
‘Joyce says a little more than she means,’ said Mrs. Hayward quickly. ‘Young ladies have a way of being enthusiastic.’
‘Don’t damp it, please!’ cried Mrs. Sitwell, clasping her hands; ‘enthusiasm is so beautiful in young people: and there is so little of it. Oh, how delighted I shall be to have your help! The district is so new--as my husband would tell you.’
‘Of course I have enlisted Miss Hayward at once,’ cried he. ‘She is going to help at the school feast.’
‘Oh, thank you, THANK you,’ cried the clergyman’s wife, with devotion, once more clasping her hands.
Mrs. Hayward’s voice was more dry than ever--there was a sharp ring in it, which Joyce had begun to know. ‘You must let her give you an answer later,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t know her engagements yet. We have several things to do. When must I send in the cakes, Mrs. Sitwell? We always calculate, you know, on helping in that way.’
‘You are always so kind, dear Mrs. Hayward, so kind! How can we ever thank you enough!’ said the clergywoman. ‘Always kind,’ her husband echoed, with an impressive shake of Mrs. Hayward’s hand, and afterwards of Joyce’s, who was confused by so much feeling. Her step-mother was drier still as they went away.
‘I must ask you, just at first, to make no engagements without consulting me,’ she said very rigidly. ‘You cannot know--at first--what it is best for your own interests to do.’
Should she say that she had made no engagements, and wished for none? It is hard not to defend one’s self when one is blamed. But Joyce took the wiser way, and assented without explanations. She had scarcely time to do more when other people came--people more important, as was at once evident--a large lady in black satin and lace, a younger, slimmer one in white. They filled the verandah, which was not very broad, with the sweep of their draperies. They both gave a little glance of surprise when Miss Hayward was presented to them, and the elder lady permitted herself an ‘Oh----!’ She retired to the end of the verandah, where Mrs. Hayward had installed herself. ‘I never knew before that you had a grown-up daughter. I always thought, indeed, that there were no----’
‘My husband’s daughter by his first marriage,’ said Mrs. Hayward. ‘She has never lived at home. In India, you know, children can never be kept with their parents.’
‘It is a dreadful drawback. I am so glad my girls will have nothing to say to Indian men.’
The lady in white had begun to talk to Joyce, but the girl’s ears were intent on the other conversation which she felt to concern herself. She made vague replies, not knowing what she said, the two voices in the distance drawing all her attention from the one more near.
‘So she had to be left with relations--quite old-fashioned people--and she is very simple, and knows very little of the world.’
‘The less the better,’ said the visitor, whose name Joyce had not caught; and then there was a pause, and the young lady’s voice became more audible, close to her ear.
‘Brought up in Scotland? Oh, I hope you are not one of the learned ladies. Don’t they go in tremendously for education in Scotland?’ her visitor said.
‘They say our Scotch schools are the best,’ said Joyce sedately, with a mixture of national and professional pride.
‘Oh yes, so everybody says; you are taught everything. I know Scotland a little: everybody goes there in the autumn, don’t you know? I wonder if I have been in your part of the country? Papa has a moor whenever he can afford it. And we have quantities of Scotch cousins all over the place.’
‘It was near Edinburgh,’ said Joyce, with a little hesitation.
‘Yes? I have been at several places near Edinburgh,’ said the young lady. ‘Craigmoor where the Sinclairs live, for one. They are relations of ours. And there is another house, a very nice house close by, Bellendean. I suppose you know the Bellendeans.’
The colour rushed over Joyce’s face. She remembered her difficulties no more. The very sound of the name filled her with pleasure and encouragement.
‘Bellendean!’ she said; ‘oh, indeed, I know Bellendean! I know it better than any place in the world. And I know the lady--oh, better than any one. And would it be Miss Greta that was your cousin----?’ Joyce’s countenance shone. She forgot all about those bewildering explanations which she had overheard: and about herself, whose presence had to be accounted for. For a moment her natural ease and unconsciousness came back, and she felt herself Joyce again.
Mrs. Hayward rose suddenly from her chair. She, too, had been listening, through her own conversation, to the other voices. She made a step forward-- ‘So you know the Bellendeans,’ she said, with an agitated smile. ‘We have just been staying there, and can give you the latest news of them. What a small world it is, as everybody says! I only heard of them for the first time when we went to fetch Joyce: and now I find my nearest neighbours know all about them! Joyce, will you ask if Baker is bringing tea?’
Lady St. Clair and her daughter gave each other a glance of mutual inquiry. And Joyce, as she obeyed, with a curious pang of wonder and pleasure and annoyance, heard the discussion begin, the interchange of questions mingled with remarks about her friends, the names so dear to her passing from mouth to mouth. She was sent away who knew all about them, while her stepmother, who knew so little, talked, adopting an air of familiarity. Why was she sent away? Then she remembered suddenly on what a humble footing she could alone claim knowledge of the Bellendeans, and divined with a shock of sudden pain that it was to stop any revelations on that subject that she had been despatched on this unnecessary errand. Joyce paused in the luxurious room, which seemed somehow to absorb all the air and leave none to breathe. Oh for the freedom of Bellendean, where everybody knew who she was and thought no harm! Oh for the little cottage, where there were no pretences! The great and the small were easy, they understood each other; but this middle country, all full of reserves and assumptions which lay between, how was an ignorant creature to learn how to live in it, to avoid the snares and keep clear of the pitfalls, not to contradict or expose the falsehoods, and yet to be herself true?
Mrs. Hayward, on her side, sitting painfully talking as if she knew all about these people, whom she thought she hated, so much were they involved with this painful episode of her life, was no more happy than Joyce. To think that her neighbours, the best people about, those whose friendship was most desirable, should be mixed up with the Bellendeans, who knew everything! So that now her skilful little romance must fall to the ground, and all the story be fully known.
Chapter XX
The discussions held upon this question in the Colonel’s room were many. Mrs. Hayward had kept herself for many years out of society, rejecting it all the more sternly because she loved it and held all its little punctilios dear. And now that all necessity for such self-denial was over, to have everything risked again was terrible to her. She who had so carefully kept her husband from annoyance, in this matter departed from all her traditions. The good Colonel himself was fond of society too. He liked to know people, to gather kindly faces about him, and to be surrounded by a cheerful stir of human interests; but to tell the truth, he did not care very much about Lady St. Clair and the best people in the neighbourhood. It was seldom--very seldom--that it occurred to him to criticise his Elizabeth; but on this point he thought her a little mistaken, and not so infallible as she usually was.
‘Have patience a little, my dear,’ he said, falling upon a simple philosophy, which, indeed, he was not at all disposed himself to put in practice, ‘and you’ll see all will come right.’
‘Nothing will come right,’ said Mrs. Hayward, ‘unless we can get your daughter properly introduced. It alters everything in our position, Henry. We were settling down to society such as suits you and me; but that will not do now. The moment there is a young lady in the house all is changed. She must be thought of. A different kind of entertainment is wanted for a girl. I ought to take her to balls, and to water-parties, and to all sorts of gaieties. You would not like her to be left out.’
‘Well, my dear,’ said the Colonel, more cheerfully, ‘I like young faces, and I don’t object to a little dance now and then. I always, indeed, encouraged the young fellows in the regiment----’
‘If it were giving a dance that was all!--you may be sure I shouldn’t come to you about that. There is a great deal involved that is of much more importance. If it all gets abroad about your daughter, everything will suffer--she in the first place. It will be like a governess--every one respects a governess----’
‘Surely, my dear. A good girl who perhaps does it to help her family, or support her old mother, or----’
‘Henry, my dear, you are very old-fashioned. But however good she may be, she is always at a disadvantage. It would be bad for us too. Colonel Hayward’s daughter a governess! They would say you were either less well off than you appeared, or that you had used her badly, or that I had used her badly--still more likely.’
‘But when we did not know of her very existence, Elizabeth!’
‘How are you to tell people that? The best thing is to keep quite quiet about it, if we only can. But now here is this new complication. These Bellendean people will talk it all over with the St. Clairs, and the St. Clairs will publish it everywhere. And people will be sorry for her, and pick her to pieces, and say it is easy to see she is unused to our world; they will be sorry for her for being with me, or else be sorry for me for being burdened with her.’
‘Elizabeth----’
‘And the worst is,’ she said vehemently, ‘that it will be quite true on both sides. She will be to be pitied, and I shall be to be pitied. If only these friends of hers could be kept quiet! If only she could be dressed properly, and taught to hold her tongue and say nothing about her past!’
The Colonel got up and began to walk about the room in great perturbation of spirit. He could not say, as he had been in the habit of saying, ‘If Elizabeth were but here!’ for it was Elizabeth herself--extraordinary fact!--who was the cause of the trouble. Social difficulties had not affected them till now; and what could he do or suggest in face of an emergency which was too much for Elizabeth? The poor gentleman was without resource, and he had a faint sense of injury, a feeling that he had never expected to be consulted or to have to advise in such a matter. All the difficulties in their way of a personal character had been Elizabeth’s business, not his. He walked about with a troubled brow, a face full of distress,--what could he do or say? It was almost cruel of her to consult him, to put matters which he had never pretended to be able to manage into his hands.
Mrs. Hayward, on her side, felt a faint gleam of alleviation in the midst of the gloom from the spectacle of the Colonel’s perturbation. It was his affair after all, and he had the best right to suffer; and though she expected no help from him, there was a certain satisfaction and almost diversion in the depth of his helpless distress. They were, however, brought to a sudden standstill, which was a relief to both, by a ring at the door-bell, a very unusual thing in the morning. The clouds dispersed from Mrs. Hayward’s brow. She put up her hand instinctively to her cap. Agitation of any kind, though it may seem a remarkable effect, does derange one’s cap, as everybody who wears such a head-dress knows. ‘It can’t be any one coming to call at this hour,’ she said. ‘It must be some of your men intending to stay for lunch.’
A weight was lifted off the Colonel’s mind by this resumption of ordinary tones and subjects. He was always glad to see one of ‘his men,’ as Mrs. Hayward called them, to lunch, being of the most hospitable disposition; and it was his experience that the presence of a stranger was always perfectly efficacious in blowing away clouds that might arise on the family firmament. Besides, in the strained condition of family affairs, a third, or rather fourth party, who knew nothing about the circumstances, could not but make that meal more cheerful. They stood and listened for a moment while some one was evidently admitted, with some surprise that Baker did not appear to announce the visitor. Presently, however, the door was opened with that mixture of swiftness and hesitation which was characteristic of Joyce, and she herself looked in, more awakened and with a brighter countenance than either of the pair had yet seen in her. Her shyness had disappeared in the excitement of a pleasant surprise; her cheeks had got a little colour; the eager air which had struck Colonel Hayward when he first saw her, but which of late had been so much subdued, had returned to her eyes and sensitive mouth. ‘Oh, it’s the Captain!’ she said, with a sense of the importance of the announcement, as if she had been presenting the Prince of Wales at least, which changed the entire sentiment of her face. Mrs. Hayward had never before seen the natural Joyce as she was in the humility of her early undisturbed state. She acknowledged the charm of the girl with a keen little sudden pang of that appreciation and comprehension of jealousy, which is more clear-sighted and certain than love.
‘The Captain!’ she said, not quite aware who was meant, yet putting on an air of more ignorance than was genuine.
‘Oh, Bellendean!’ cried the Colonel, going forward with cordiality. ‘My dear fellow, how glad I am to see you! You’ve got away, then, from all your anxious friends. Elizabeth, you remember Captain Bellendean?’
‘I am not likely to have forgotten him,’ Mrs. Hayward said graciously, yet with a meaning which perhaps was not so gracious as her speech. And there darted through her mind, as is so usual with women, a question, a calculation. Was it for Joyce? Men are so silly; who can tell how they may be influenced? There flashed through her a gleam of delight at the thought of thus getting rid of the interloper, and at the same time an angry grudge that this girl, who seemed to have all the luck, should come to such honour, and be thus set on high above so many who were her betters. All this in the twinkling of an eye. She stood for a minute or two and talked, asking the proper questions about his family, and when he came to town, and how long he meant to stay; then left the visitor with her husband, and hastened to say something about the luncheon to Baker, who on his part was lingering outside with a message from the cook. To those who feel an interest in such matters, we may say that Mrs. Hayward, when one of the Colonel’s men made his appearance unexpectedly for luncheon, generally added a dish of curry, for which her cook was noted (the men being almost all old Indians), to that meal.
When she returned to the drawing-room, Joyce was there, still with the same look of exhilaration and liveliness. She was even the first to speak--a singular circumstance. ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘I was not wrong in taking the Captain to the library. I thought, as you were not here, he would like that better than just talking to me.’
Was this false humility? or affectation? or what was it? ‘You were quite right, no doubt; for it must have been your father he came to see,’ said Mrs. Hayward, with a quick glance. She was prepared to see a conscious smile upon Joyce’s mouth, the little air of demure triumph with which a girl who knows herself the object of such a visit acquiesces in the fact that it is for her father. But no such consciousness was upon Joyce’s countenance. ‘You seem to be very much pleased to see him,’ she continued. ‘And why do you call him the Captain, as if there were not another in the world?’
Joyce paused a little before she answered. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that the people at Bellendean did think there was not another such Captain in the world.’
‘And you are glad to see him--because you know him so well? because he reminds you of your old life?’
Joyce grew red all at once with a blush, which surely meant something. Again she paused a little, with that sense of walking among snares and man-traps, which confuses the mind. ‘Oh no; I did not know him well. I have only spoken to him two or three times. It is so difficult to explain. You will perhaps not be pleased if I say it. To me that am not accustomed--the Captain’s coming seemed like a great honour.’ She stopped short, and the colour went out of her face as suddenly as it came.
‘A great honour!’ cried Mrs. Hayward with indignation,--‘to his commanding officer!’ It was all she could do to keep her temper. Her foot patted the carpet angrily, and she tore a band of calico off a piece upon her lap with vehemence, as if she were inflicting pain and liked to do so. ‘What an extraordinary notion!’ she cried. ‘Norman Bellendean, a little Scotch squire--that anybody should think his visit an honour to my husband!’ There was a sort of subdued fury in her laugh of scorn.
‘I can see,’ said Joyce, ‘it was very silly to say that; and it was only a sort of instinct. I forgot when I saw him--all that has happened--and that I was a--different creature.’
‘Joyce,’ cried Mrs. Hayward quickly, ‘I warn you that unless you can get over this constant going back upon your old life, and try and adapt yourself to your present circumstances, it will be impossible for us--impossible for me--almost beyond any one’s powers----’
Joyce had become very pale. She did not make any reply, but waited with her lips moving in an eagerness so different from that joyous eagerness of her former aspect, for the next word that should be said. What was it that would be impossible? There is something in a threat which rouses the most placid blood. If it was impossible, what would happen? Joyce was in no way in fault; the circumstances which had changed her life, and transplanted her from her home, were not of her creating any more than they were of Mrs. Hayward’s. But Mrs. Hayward said nothing more. She went on tearing, wounding, cutting her calico with stabs and thrusts of the scissors that seemed as if they must draw blood. But she had gone as far as could be done unintentionally by sudden impulse--which, and no set purpose, was what had moved her. And she had come to herself by dint of that half-spoken threat. She had no desire to be cruel or even unkind; her desire, indeed, was quite different, if one could have come to the bottom of her heart. She would have given a great deal to have been upon comfortable terms with her step-daughter, and to have been able to quench the jealousy and the grudge with which, deeply ashamed of them all the time, she had taken in this third between the two who were so happy--this interloper, this supplanter, whom she had seen her husband embrace so tenderly, and heard saying with a voice full of emotion ‘father’--a word never to be addressed to him by child of her own.
Once more, however, this uncomfortable state of affairs was brought to a pause by the recurrence of the ordinary course of domestic events. The voices of the Colonel and Captain Bellendean became audible crossing the hall towards the drawing-room door. At the first sound of these voices, Mrs. Hayward threw her calico into the work-basket, and tore and stabbed at it no more. She relapsed suddenly into tranquil hemming, like a good child at school. Joyce had not the same cover for her agitation, but yet she collected herself as quickly as was possible, and made believe to be as quietly occupied and at her ease as her step-mother was.
‘I should have thought,’ said the Colonel, opening the door as he spoke, and bringing in this new subject with him, ‘that a pokey house in London, now that the season is more than half over, would be a bad change after your beautiful place; but that’s our mistake thinking of other people, as if they were just the same as we are--which nobody is, as a matter of fact.’
Mrs. Hayward thought her husband meant this for her, as a reproach in respect to Joyce--which he did not, being totally incapable of any such covert assault.
‘My father has always been fond of society,’ said Captain Bellendean. ‘I suspect my beautiful place, as you are kind enough to call it, was always a great bondage to him.’
‘Joyce, I want you to show Bellendean the garden and the river,’ said the Colonel; ‘I have a---- letter to finish. Take him down to the water, and show him the willows, and the poet’s villa, and all that. Have you got a hat handy, my dear, or a parasol, or something? for it’s very hot. You must take care not to get a sunstroke, or anything of that sort. This is the way, Bellendean. It’s only a little bit of a place, not like your castle; but we’re very much pleased with it for all that. The verandah is our own idea. It is the nicest possible place in the afternoon, when the sun is off this side of the house. My wife planned it all herself. Walk down under the shrubbery: you will have shade the whole way. The river’s sparkling like diamonds,’ he said, as he stood bareheaded in the moderate English sun, which he kept up a pretence of dreading as an old Indian ought, and watched the pair as they obeyed his directions somewhat shyly, not quite understanding why they were sent off together. Colonel Hayward came back to the drawing-room where his wife sat, rubbing his hands with satisfaction. ‘I have sent them off that they may have a quiet word, with nobody to interfere.’
‘Why should they want a quiet word? Was it her he came to see? Do you suppose he means anything?’ said Mrs. Hayward, in that unsympathetic tone.
‘They may not perhaps have anything particular to say; but they come from the same place, and they know the same people, and probably they would not like to talk their little talks about old friends with us listening to every word; so I said I had a letter to finish,’ said the Colonel, with a mild chuckle. ‘I must go and do it though, that they may not think it was a pretence.’
‘Do you know, Henry,’ said Mrs. Hayward, ‘that some people would say you were throwing your daughter at Captain Bellendean’s head.’
‘Bless me!’ said the Colonel, with a wondering look; ‘throwing my daughter at---- Elizabeth, these would surely be very unpleasant people, not the kind that ever had anything to do with you and me.’ He paused a moment, looking at her with an appeal which she did not lift her eyes to see. Then he repeated, ‘I must go, though, and finish my letter, or they will think it was only a pretence.’
Perhaps Captain Bellendean had some faint notion that it was, as he walked along under the shade of the shrubbery skirting the long but narrow lawn towards the river, which flowed shining and sparkling in the full sun--half amused to find himself walking by the side of the heroine of the curious story which had been worked out under his roof--the little schoolmistress turned into a young lady of leisure, transplanted out of her natural place. He was not without a little natural curiosity as to how such a strange travesty would succeed. There was nothing in her appearance to emphasise the change. She walked slowly, almost reluctantly, with that shyness which is not unbecoming to youth, as if she would have liked to fly and leave him unguided to his own devices. He gave her a good many glances under his eyebrows as they walked along very gravely together, scarcely speaking. Certainly if Colonel Hayward meant to throw his daughter at the Captain’s head, she had no intention that way.
‘The last time I saw you, Miss Joyce,’ he said, ‘was the evening before you left home. And you thought England and London would be a new world. What do you think of the new world, now that you have seen them near?’
‘Did I say they would be a new world?’ Joyce sighed a little, looking up to the Captain with a faint smile, which made, he thought, a charming combination. She added, ‘I have only seen London in passing; but I’m beginning to think there is no new world, but just what we make it--and the same in every place.’
‘One of the old classical fellows says that, doesn’t he?’ said the Captain. ‘I’ve forgotten all my Latin; but you’re up to everything of that sort----’
‘Oh no; I am not a scholar. I just know a little at the very beginning. But I understand what you mean. It is something about changing the skies but not the mind.’
‘I wonder if that is what Mrs. Bellendean will do?’
‘Mrs. Bellendean?’
‘Oh, I forgot; it was your father to whom I was speaking; but you will know better all that this means. My father and his wife have left Bellendean--for good, do you understand, not to come back.’
‘For good! but I should think that would rather be for ill,’ Joyce said.
‘Yes, I knew you would understand. I didn’t myself, however, till very lately. I had no conception what she had done for the place, nor how much it was to her. And now they have shaken the dust from off their feet, and left it--as if I could have wished that.’
‘They would think,’ said Joyce, with an explanatory instinct that belonged to her old position--‘the lady would think that perhaps you were likely----’
Here she looked up at him, and suddenly realising that she was not Joyce the schoolmistress, with a little privilege of place, making matters clear, but a young woman discoursing about his own affairs to a young man, stopped suddenly, blushed deeply, and murmured, ‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ with a horror of her own rashness which gave double meaning to all she said.
‘That perhaps I was likely----?’ said Norman. He found her very pleasant company, with her intelligent eager looks, her comprehension of what he meant before it was uttered. ‘Tell me what she would think likely. I know so little about--the lady, as you call her. She was only my step-mother, whom I didn’t much care for when I went away. It is a mistake to judge people before one knows them,’ he added reflectively; but this sentiment, so cognate to her own case, did not in the immediate urgency of the moment arrest Joyce’s attention, especially as he repeated with a smile, ‘what would she think me likely to do?’
‘I was going to speak like an old wife in a cottage--like my dear old granny.’
‘Do so, please,’ he said, with a laugh; and Joyce yielded to the unknown temptation, which had never come in her way before. The gentle malice of society, the undercurrent of meaning, the play with which youths and maidens amuse themselves in the beginning of an intercourse which may come to much more serious results, were quite out of her understanding and experience; but there are some things which are very quickly learnt.
‘She would think--the old wives would say--that now the Captain was come back, he would be bringing home a lady of his own.’
Joyce said this, not with the absolute calm of two minutes ago, but with a smile and blush which altogether changed the significance of the little speech. It had been an almost matter-of-fact explanation--it became now a little winged arrow of provocation, a sort of challenge. Captain Bellendean laughed.
‘I see,’ he said; ‘and you think that is a course open to me? But a lady of my own might not be so good as the lady--and then there are difficulties about time, for instance. I might not be able to bring her at once; and the one I wanted might not have me: and---- Miss Joyce, your attention flags--you are not interested in me.’
‘I was thinking,’ said Joyce, ‘that though you laugh, it would be no laughing for her to leave Bellendean.’
The Captain perceived that the joke was to go no further. ‘I do not believe it is her doing at all--it is my father’s doing. He prefers London--Half Moon Street, and rooms where you can scarcely turn round.’
‘Half Moon Street!’
‘Do you know it?’
‘No more than in books,’ said Joyce, with a smile; ‘there are so many places that seem kent places because they are in books.’
‘Italy, etc.,’ the Captain said, looking at her with a sympathetic glance.
‘Oh, but not etc.!’ cried Joyce. ‘Italy--is like nothing else in the world.’
‘Well,’ said Captain Bellendean, ‘when you are in the circumstances which you have just been suggesting to me, no doubt you will go to Italy; that is the right time and the right circumstances----’
Before he had half said these words, a sudden vision of Andrew Halliday flashed across his mind, and he stopped in sudden embarrassment. By this time they had reached the river’s side, and Joyce turned dutifully to point out to him the poet’s villa, as her father had bidden her; but there was something in her tone which betrayed to the sympathetic listener that the same image had suddenly overshadowed her imagination too. Captain Bellendean was very sympathetic--more so, perhaps, than he would have been had his companion been older or less pretty. He pretended to look with great interest at the willows sweeping into the water, and the lawn, with its little fringe of forget-me-nots reflected in the softly flowing stream. Joyce had lost the colour which was half excitement, and had kept coming and going like the shadows over the sky, while they walked together down the shady walk. It is very interesting to see a face change in this way, and to think that one’s own society, the quickening of the blood produced by one’s sudden advent, may have something to do with it. He had felt that it was very pleasant to watch these changes, and was conscious of a little agreeable thrill of responsive exhilaration in his own veins. But when this sudden shadow fell upon Joyce, his sympathy sprang into a warmer, energetic sentiment. Could that be the fate for which this girl was reserved? Surely some one must step in to save her from that fate!
Chapter XXI
It was some days before the new difficulties which possessed all Mrs. Hayward’s thoughts were fully revealed to Joyce. These early days were long, being full of so many confusing circumstances and new problems to be encountered, solved, or left aside for further trouble in their turn; and what she had heard her stepmother say about her bringing up had passed over Joyce’s mind with little effect. She had enough to do in other ways: to find out a mode of living which would be practicable, to subdue her own spirit, to reconcile herself with so many new necessities all rushing upon her at once. How to apportion her time was in itself a difficulty almost beyond her untried powers: to be long enough, yet not too long, with Mrs. Hayward--to find something to do during these hours which she had to pass in that drawing-room which was so pretty and comfortable, but so little homelike to the stranger. Joyce had abundant resources in herself. She was fully instructed in all kinds of work--a mistress of fine-sewing and mending, able to clothe her household with needlework, like the woman in the Proverbs; but there was no need for these qualifications here. And she had gone through all the studies which were open to her in design, besides having found out somehow, amid those gifts of nature which to all her early friends had seemed so lavish, a faculty for drawing, which had been of endless pleasure to her, and pride to her belongings in the old time. Music, indeed, was left out, except in so far as it belonged to her profession. She had learned the Hullah system, or something like it, and could read easily all the simple songs which were taught to the children; but a piano had never been within her reach, nor had she heard anything that a musician would think worth hearing. At home in Bellendean the old people thought that nobody could sing the ‘Flowers of the Forest’, or the ‘Banks of Doon,’ or the old Psalm tunes, which were still dearer, like, their Joyce. But these were not the sort of performances with which to please Mrs. Hayward.
Thus, though she was full of accomplishments in her way, none of Joyce’s acquirements stood her in much stead in her new circumstances. She had to contrive something for herself to do, which was far from being easy. She had to think of what she could talk about, to take her fit part in the household intercourse--not to sit like an uninterested spectator between these two strange people, who were her nearest relations. And this was almost the hardest of all; for Colonel Hayward and his wife were like so many people of their class--they had read little, they were puzzled by references to books, and did not understand that keen sense of association and fellowship with her favourite writers and their productions which made Joyce an inhabitant of a second world, to her consciousness almost more real than the external sphere. The Colonel said ‘Eh?’ as if he had become a little deaf, with a kind but bewildered smile, when she adduced the example--to Joyce more natural than the most familiar examples of every day--of somebody in Scott, or, as she loved to say, Sir Walter, to illustrate a position; while Mrs. Hayward was more apt to frown and to say impatiently that she thought it very wrong for young people to read so many novels. They did not even know what she meant by Sir Walter!--her father, with his puzzled look, suggesting, ‘Sir Walter--Gilbert, did you mean, my dear? Now, where can you have met Gilbert, Joyce? and what could he know about the oyster-dredging in the North?’ Thus it was against her that she knew more than they did, as well as that she knew less: in either case, she was left out of their circle, out of their world,--her very wealth futile, and more useless than had she been without endowment at all.
But in the preoccupation of so many matters, important beyond measure to her new existence, and much pondering of the way to make that existence possible, which seemed to her sometimes a problem almost beyond her powers of solving, Joyce was not at all quick to catch up the allusions of her stepmother, or to perceive what it was that filled Mrs. Hayward’s mind with new alarms. The possibility of there being something to be ashamed of in respect to herself--something to conceal or gloss over, in case it might revolt the visitors, of whom Joyce, hitherto measuring them by the standard of Bellendean, had not formed a very high idea--had never entered her mind; and she was startled beyond measure when Mrs. Hayward opened the subject directly in a moment of impatience, and notwithstanding her own excellent resolutions against doing so. Joyce had been betrayed into some reference to her old work, which she had instinctively felt to be distasteful and seldom alluded to, but which would crop up now and then. It was Mr. Sitwell, the clergyman, and his school feast, which was the original subject of the talk.
‘I think they are playing at school work,’ Joyce said. ‘I would like to see the mistress, and hear what she says.’
‘I beg you will do nothing of the kind,’ cried Mrs. Hayward. ‘I did not at all like your enthusiasm about the schools when the Sitwells were here. I think you said you were more interested in them than in anything else in the world. I am never fond of extravagance.’
‘But it was true,’ said Joyce, with a deprecating smile. ‘When you have been interested about one thing all your life, and always thinking which is the best way, what can you do but feel it the most important?’
‘It is time,’ said Mrs. Hayward, ‘that you should find another channel for your thoughts. I didn’t mean to say anything to vex you, Joyce. But you must know that your father’s daughter should have been brought up in a very different way; and, to tell the truth, I would much rather our friends here knew as little as possible--about your antecedents.’
Joyce looked up astonished, with a quick cry, ‘Antecedents!’ which was a word that seemed to imply something bad, like the reports in the newspapers. She was, to be sure, too well instructed to think that implication necessary; but there are prejudices of which even the best-informed persons cannot shake themselves free.
‘You know what I mean!--the teaching, and all that. That you should be fond of the schools, and interested in them, is all very well; but that you were a----’
A flush of deep colour had rushed over Joyce’s uplifted face. ‘A--schoolmistress,’ she said, with the quiver of a piteous little smile.
‘I can’t bear to hear you say it--your father’s daughter!--and of course it is impossible to enter into particulars, and explain everything to everybody. I think it better, far better, to draw a veil. You were brought up by relations in Scotland--that is what I mean to say.’
‘Relations!’ repeated Joyce softly; ‘thank you for saying that. Oh, and so they were!--the kindest relations that ever a poor little girl had.’
‘I am glad I have pleased you, so far as that goes,’ said Mrs. Hayward, in a tone of relief. ‘Well, then, I hope you will back me up, and show yourself grateful to your old friends. There are various other things I may mention as we are on this subject. For instance, when you were talking to Alice St. Clair you said Miss Greta. Now that young lady, if you were to renew your acquaintance with her, would certainly not allow you to call her Miss now.’
Joyce opened her eager lips to reply, but, struck by a sudden sense of the uselessness of any explanation, closed them again--a movement not unnoticed by her companion.
‘I notice also,’ said Mrs. Hayward, ‘that you have a way of calling Mrs. Bellendean the Lady. That’s all very well if it’s one of the fantastic names that girls are so fond of nowadays--I mean, if other young people use it as well as you; but if it’s one of your terms of respect---- Remember, Joyce, that to go on speaking in that way is a--is a kind of insult to your father and to your own family, which is quite as good as Mrs. Bellendean’s.’
As good as Mrs. Bellendean’s!--her heart revolted against this claim. The old homage which she had given with youthful enthusiasm was not to Mrs. Bellendean’s position or her family. But how was Joyce to explain this to her judge, who did not look upon her or her romances with a favourable eye? And yet she could not but say a word in self-defence. ‘It was for kindness,’ she said,--‘for,’ hesitating with her Scotch shyness, ‘for love!’
‘For love!’ Mrs. Hayward echoed the word with a tone of opposition, and almost offence. ‘She is one of the women who seem to have the gift of attracting girls. I don’t know how they do it, for girls have always seemed to me the most uncertain, unappreciative----’ She sighed impatiently, then added in a softened tone, ‘If it’s only a sort of pet name, that’s different. But you must see that it is your duty to avoid everything that could seem to--to discredit your father. And we can’t explain the circumstances to everybody, and prove that it was not his fault. For my part,’ she cried, with a flash of quick feeling in her clear eyes, ‘I’d say anything or do anything rather than let it be supposed for a moment that the Colonel--had anything to be ashamed of in the whole course of his existence. He has not, and never had, whatever you may think. That’s what I call love,’ she cried, vehemently, with a sudden tear or two taking her by surprise.
Joyce turned towards her step-mother with a quick responsive look; but Mrs. Hayward was ashamed of her own emotion, and had turned away to conceal it, thus missing the eager overture of sympathy. She went on in another moment with a little laugh: ‘It shows we never should be sure of anything. If there was one thing more unlikely than another, I should have said it was the gossip of a Scotch village getting abroad here. I should have thought that nobody here had ever heard the name of Bellendean--when lo! it turns out that we are in a perfect wasp’s nest of relations and connections. Your Miss Greta, as you call her, a cousin, and the St. Clairs themselves visitors of the Bellendeans. I suppose before another week is over all Richmond will know the story. It is very vexatious, when I had planned to take you about everywhere, and do all sorts of things!’
She was called out of the room at this moment by some domestic requirement, and did not hear Joyce’s troubled murmur. ‘Was there anything, then, to think shame of?’ Joyce had said, her voice trembling, with the Scotch idiom which Mrs. Hayward disliked. She added to herself, ‘in me,’ with a wondering pang. Perhaps the girl had too high a conception of herself, which it was well to bring down; but such an operation is always a painful one. Though she had been brought up in a ploughman’s cottage, and occupied the humblest position, yet nothing had ever happened in her life to humiliate Joyce. She had been admired and praised, and placed upon a little pedestal from her earliest consciousness: and that any one should be ashamed of her struck her as something so incredible and extraordinary, that it took away her breath,--‘anything to think shame of--in me.’ She had no defence against such a sudden dart: it went through and through her, cutting to her heart. She rose up quickly, with a sensation intolerable--a quick and passionate impulse. To do what? She could not tell. To have the wings of a dove and fly away--but where? She stopped herself, clasping her hands together, holding herself fast that she might not be so unreasonable as to do it. The mother had done it, and what had come of it? To herself madness and death, and to her poor child this,--that the people to whom she belonged were ashamed of her--ashamed of Joyce! It seemed a thing impossible, not to be realised. She said it over to herself incredulously, making an effort to smile. Ashamed!--but no, no! Whatever there was to bear, it must be borne, even though those wings for which so many have sighed should be given to her: she must not fly, she must stay.
But Joyce had in this particular still something more hard to bear. A few days after the visit of the captain, Mrs. Bellendean came to Richmond, bringing with her Greta. The two ladies came with a purpose. They had been warned by Captain Bellendean that there were difficulties in the Colonel’s household, and that Joyce’s position was not of the happiest. How he had divined that much it would be difficult to say, for divination was not Norman’s forte. But for once his sympathy or interest had given insight to his eyes.
‘You should go and let them see that the poor girl has friends,’ he said.
‘I shall go,’ said Mrs. Bellendean, who was very sure that she must know better than Norman, ‘and make myself very agreeable to the step-mother. She is not a bad sort of woman. She will be pleased if we go and call at once, and I confess I shall do everything I know to make her like me and trust me: that will be the best way of serving Joyce.’ With this intent the ladies arrived and played their part very prettily. They were delighted with the house, the drawing-room, the lovely things, Indian and otherwise, admiring them with a comprehension and knowledge which Joyce had not possessed, and making Mrs. Hayward glow with gratification and modest pride. Joyce followed her beloved lady with her looks,--her usual and faithful admiration of everything Mrs. Bellendean said and did very slightly modified by surprise at this new aspect of her. They had not failed in any mark of affection to herself--nay, had startled her by the warmth of their greetings. Mrs. Bellendean had met her with outstretched arms and a kiss which confused Joyce with pleasure, and afterwards with--something else, which was not so agreeable. Joyce, indeed, was the one silent in the midst of the effusive cordiality and pleasantness of this meeting. She did not know how to respond or what to say. It was the first time she had met her friends under this new aspect. The night she had spent at Bellendean before leaving had been different. She was then in all the excitement of the great revolution in her life, and nothing seemed too extraordinary for that crisis; but Joyce had calmed down, she had returned to life’s ordinary, though with so amazing a difference--and her lady’s kiss and Greta’s eager outstretched arms overwhelmed her with doubts and questions which half blotted out the pleasure.
Finally, they strayed out upon the lawn, and down the shaded walk towards the river, as all visitors did. Joyce had made that little pilgrimage only in company with Captain Bellendean as yet; and there did not fail to pass through her mind a comparison which affected her in a way she did not understand. She knew him so much less than Greta, cared for him much less--and yet---- Joyce fled from the faint rising of an uncomprehended thought with a thrill of strange alarm, and turned to her friend, who was so sweet, the admired of all her youthful thoughts, her little paragon of prettiness and sweetness. Greta had twined her arm within her companion’s, and was looking tenderly into her face.
‘And are you happy?’ Greta said. ‘Oh, Joyce! I remember how you used to fancy all manner of things. You would not have been surprised if you had turned out to be a princess--like Queen Mary’s daughter, who was “unknown to history."’
‘If there ever was such a person,’ said schoolmistress Joyce. ‘Yes, I think I was quite prepared to be a princess.’
‘It would have been much more troublesome than this, and not half so nice, I think. To have had that horrible Bothwell for a father, or some one else as dreadful, instead of delightful Colonel Hayward.’
‘My father,’ said Joyce, with a little flush and stir of feeling which was always called forth by his name, ‘is better--than anything I ever could have dreamed.’
‘Then why are you not happy?’ cried Greta, going direct to the heart of the matter, as children do.
‘But perhaps I am happy,’ said Joyce, with a little sigh, followed by a smile. ‘To be happy is a strange thing: it is not at your own will, nor because you are well off, and have everything you can want. It is just for nothing, and comes when it pleases. And life is very confusing. There are so many things to think of that I never thought of before. How to please them--and I always used to please, just because it was me. And sometimes I think they are ashamed.’
‘Ashamed, Joyce!’
‘No,’ she said, ‘not of me, as me: but because of what I was. You used all to say pretty things to me, Miss Greta, about the fine work I was doing,--about the use I was to the children--even to the country,’ Joyce added, with a light in her eyes.
‘Miss Greta, Joyce! is that like the friends we are? I shall call you Miss Hayward if you say that again.’
Joyce turned upon her with a sudden flash, raising her head with an involuntary movement that looked like disdain. ‘See now,’ she said, ‘you yourself! You never said that when I was Joyce Matheson, the schoolmistress at Bellendean. And yet you all praised me, and said I was doing a good work. I am doing no work nor anything here. I am just a cumberer of the ground. They don’t know what to do with me, though they want to be very kind. And I don’t know what to do with myself. But you never said that to me in the old time.’
‘Oh, Joyce!’ cried Greta, with conviction and shame. She added, holding her companion’s arm close, ‘Not that I didn’t want to say it--many and many a time! You were always much better, much higher than I.’
Joyce put her hand upon her friend’s, but shook her head, her cheeks flushed with a transient glow of feeling, her eyes troubled and unconvinced. ‘We’ll say nothing about that. It was all as it ought to be, and natural: anything else would have been out of place both for you and me. But you did not then; and now you would have me in a moment change, and say Miss Greta no more, because I am no longer the schoolmistress, but Colonel Hayward’s daughter. But how can I do that? that would mean a change in me. And there is no change in me.’
Greta did not understand what was in her friend’s face. Joyce no longer looked at her, but away into the blue distance over the river among the tufts and clusters of the soft English trees--looking but seeing not; perceiving only the mists and confusion of a change with which her own will and thoughts had nothing to do, against which she could not help rebelling, though she was compelled to acknowledge that it was all natural, inevitable, not to be resisted. It wounded her native sense of dignity to be thus elevated, to have a position given to her, even in the hearts of her friends, which had not been hers before. Mrs. Bellendean’s kiss, and Greta’s eager affection, what were they to the real Joyce, to whom both had been so kind, so friendly, even tender, but never with this demonstration of equality? If Joyce had been embittered, she would have considered them insults to her old and true self; but she was not bitter. She was only humiliated, strangely wounded, and astray, seeing the necessity of it, and the hardness of it, and only feeling in her heart the absence of any place for her, herself, the true Joyce, who had never changed amid all these strange alterations. She put her hand upon that which was trembling yet clinging fast to her arm, and softly patted it, with something of the feeling of the elder to the younger, the superior to the inferior--which was a change too, though Joyce was scarcely cognisant of it; for in her unawakened days she had looked up with genuine faith to Miss Greta, making a little ideal of her. Now, though Joyce did not know it, that balance had turned too, and she was keenly perceiving, pardoning, excusing that in which her ideal had failed. ‘I could have wished,’ she said, ‘you had not done it. I could have wished that we should bide--as we always were--just you, and me.’
‘Oh, Joyce!’ faltered Greta, clinging more and more. ‘I have been so glad that you and I could be like sisters--as I have always felt.’
‘You and--Colonel’s Hayward’s daughter, Miss Greta,’ she said.
By this time the two elder ladies had followed to the water’s edge, and stood looking up the Thames at the sweeping willows, and the spot, which none of them cared the least about, where the poet’s villa had been planted. Mrs. Bellendean, who was very quick in observation, saw that Greta was disturbed, and came up, laying her hand on Joyce’s shoulder. ‘Let me have her a little now,’ she said. ‘Norman told us about your river-side, Joyce, and how you had showed him everything. He could talk of nothing else when he came back.’
‘It was a beautiful day--which was all that is wanted; for you see yourself there is not much to show.’
‘And you,’ said Mrs. Bellendean, ‘who were the first thing to be taken into consideration, perhaps. Joyce, I want to speak to you, my dear. Your--yes, I know, she is not your mother; but she wants to be as kind as you will let her. She is troubled about all this story being known.’
‘All what story?’ said Joyce, with a catching of her breath.
‘Oh, my dear, you know. And I don’t wonder at it. You were a miracle in your own--I mean in that position. But now it is very natural your parents should wish--no more to be said about it than is necessary. Mrs. Hayward says very truly that it is better a girl shouldn’t be talked about, even when it is all to her credit. She wanted to warn me,’ Mrs. Bellendean said, with a smile at the ignorance thus manifested. She had put her arm into that of Joyce, and led her along the velvet turf, as far as the lawn extended, leaving Greta with Mrs. Hayward. ‘As if I were likely to betray you! But I want you to promise, Joyce, that you won’t--betray yourself, which is far more likely.’
‘Betray!’ cried Joyce. She had been humiliated by Greta; she was indignant now. ‘What have I to betray?’ she cried; ‘that I am a waif, and a foundling, and an abandoned creature that belongs to nobody? or that I am a trouble and a charge to everybody that has to do with me, breaking my poor Granny’s heart because she wants me, and a shame to the others that don’t want me? Myself! what is it to betray myself? Oh, you are kind; you are very kind. You were my dear lady that I honoured above everything. But you kiss me to-day because I’m--not Joyce, but Colonel Hayward’s daughter; and you bid me not to betray myself. To betray that I am myself--is that what you mean?’
‘Joyce! Joyce!’ cried Mrs. Bellendean.
Joyce paused for a moment to dry the sudden tears which had betrayed her, coming with a rush to her eyes--girls being such poor creatures, that cannot do anything or feel anything without crying! She had drawn her arm out of her friend’s arm, and her eyes were shining, and a swift nervous movement, scarcely restrainable, thrilling through her. That impulse, as of a hunted deer, to give one momentary glance round, and then turn and fly--the impulse of her mother, which was in all Joyce’s veins, though nothing had occurred till now to bring it out,--took hold upon her, and shook her like a sudden wind. She knew what it was, though no one else had any warning of it; and it frightened her to the depths of her soul.
Chapter XXII
Notwithstanding this sense of outrage and injury, time and the hour had their usual effect upon Joyce. There are few things that the common strain of everyday does not subdue in time--few things, that is, that are of the nature of sentiment, not actual evil or wrong. She reconciled herself to the affectionate demonstrations of her old friends, which were such as they had not made in the old times, without at least saying again that these were for Colonel Hayward’s daughter, and not for Joyce; and she learnt to make new ones, or at least to receive shyly and respond as much as her nature permitted to the overtures of acquaintanceship made to her by the society among which she lived. The sense of strangeness faded away; she became familiar with her surroundings, and with the things which were required of her. She acquired, to her astonishment and amusement, and pleasure too, when she had become a little accustomed to her own appearance in them, a number of new dresses and ornaments, the latter chiefly presents from her father, who found it the most delightful amusement to make a little expedition into town--a thing which was at all times a pleasant diversion to him--to go to Hancock’s, or some other costly place, before or after he went to his club, and bring Joyce a bracelet or a ring. These expeditions were not always agreeable to Mrs. Hayward. She said, ‘If you would tell me what you wanted, Henry, I could get it a great deal cheaper for you at the Stores--half the price: these Hancock people are ruinous.’
‘But, my dear, I bought it only because it chanced to take my fancy--in the shop-window,’ said the scheming Colonel, with wiles which he had learned of recent days. His wife knew as well as he did that this little fable was of doubtful credence, but she said no more. After all, if he could not give his child a bracelet or two, it would be a strange thing, Mrs. Hayward said to herself with a little heat. She was determined to be reasonable, but she could not help being slightly suspicious of his meaning, when he announced his intention at the breakfast-table of taking a little run up to town, and seeing how those fellows were getting on. He meant his old cronies at the club, whom he was always pleased to see; but it always turned out that there were other little things to be done as well.
And Joyce was far from being without pleasure in these pretty presents, and in the tenderness which beamed from the Colonel’s face when he stole his little packet out of his pocket with the air of a schoolboy bringing home a bird’s nest. ‘My dear, I happened to see this as I passed, and I thought you would like it.’ She did not know much about the value of these gifts, overestimating it at first, underrating it afterwards--and cared very little, to tell the truth, after the first sensation of awe with which she had regarded the gold and precious stones, when she found such unexpected treasures in her own possession. But what was of far greater importance was the tender bond which, by means of all the kind thoughts which resulted in these gifts, and the grateful and pleased sentiment which these kind thoughts called forth, grew up between the Colonel and his daughter. She became the companion of a morning walk which up to this time he had been in the habit of taking alone--Mrs. Hayward considering it necessary to be ‘on the spot,’ as she said, and looking after her household. The Colonel, who never liked to be alone, took advantage one lovely morning of a chance meeting with Joyce, who was straying somewhat listlessly along the shrubbery walk, thinking of many things. ‘I am going for my walk,’ he said--his walk being a habit as regular as the nursery performance of the same kind. ‘If you have nothing to do, get your hat and come with me, my dear.’ And this walk came to be delightful to both, Joyce making acquaintance thereby with those genuine reflections of a mind uninstructed save by life, which are so often full of insight and interest; while the Colonel on his side listened with delighted admiration to Joyce’s information on all kinds of subjects, which was drawn entirely from books. He talked to her about India and his old friends there and all their histories, enchanted to rouse her interest and to have to stir up his memory in order to satisfy her as to how an incident ended, or what became of a man.
‘What happened after? My dear, I believe he was killed at Delhi, poor fellow!--after all they had gone through. Yes, it was hard: but that’s a soldier’s life, you know; he never knows where he may have to leave his bones. The poor little woman had to be sent home. We got up some money for her, and I believe she had friends to whom she went with her baby. That’s all I know about them. As for Brown, he got on very well--retired now with the rank of a general, and lives at Cheltenham. The last time I saw him, he was at Woolwich with his third boy for an exam. It is either the one thing or the other, Joyce--either they get killed young, or they live through everything and come home, regular old vieux moustaches, as the French say, with immense families to set out in the world. The number of fine fellows I’ve seen drop! and then the number of others who survive everything, and are not so much the better for it after all.’
‘When I read the vision of Mirza to my old granny at home---- at Bellendean--she said life was like that,’ said Joyce gravely,--‘some dropping suddenly in a moment, so that you only saw that they had disappeared.’
‘The vision of---- what, my dear? It has an Eastern sound, but I don’t think it’s in the Bible. Very likely I’ve heard it somewhere: but my memory is rather bad’--(he had been giving her a hundred personal details of all kinds of people, in the range of some thirty or forty years)--‘especially for books.’ Colonel Hayward added, ‘More shame to me,’ with a shake of his grey head.
And then she told him Mirza’s vision, with the warm natural eloquence of her inexperience and profound conviction that literature was the one deathless and universal influence. The Colonel was greatly pleased with it, and received it as the most original of allegories. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he said, ‘what imagination these Eastern chaps have, Joyce. They carry it too far, you know, calling you the emperor’s brother, the flower of all the warriors of the West, and that sort of thing, which is nonsense, and never after the first time takes in the veriest Johnny Raw of a young ensign. Well, but your old woman was very right, my dear. If I were to tell you about all the fellows that started in life with me--such a lot of them, Joyce; as cheery a set--not so clever, perhaps, as the new men nowadays, but up to anything--it’s very like that old humbug’s bridge, which, between you and me, never existed, you know--you may be quite sure of that.’
Joyce held her breath when she heard the beloved Addison called an old humbug, but reflected that the Colonel did not mean it, and made no remark.
‘It is very like that,’ he continued musingly. ‘One doesn’t even notice at the time--but when you look back. There was Jack Hunter went almost as soon as we landed: such a nice fellow--I seem to hear his laugh now, though I haven’t so much as thought upon him for forty years,--dropped, you know, without ever hearing a shot fired, with the laugh in his mouth, so to speak. And Jim Jenkinson, the first time we were under fire, in a bit of a skirmish for no use. His brother, though--by George! he hasn’t dropped at all; for here he comes, as tough an old parson as ever lived, Joyce. Excuse the exclamation, my dear. It slips out, though I hate swearing as much as you can do. We’ll have to stop and speak to Canon Jenkinson. I think, on the whole, rather than grow into such a pursy parson, I’d rather have dropped like poor Jim.’
Colonel Hayward directed his daughter’s attention to a large clergyman, who was walking along on the other side of the road. The Colonel had the contempt of all slim men for all fat ones; and Joyce, too, being imaginative and young, looked with sympathetic disapproval at the rotundity which was approaching. Canon Jenkinson was more than a fat man--he was a fat clergyman. His black waistcoat was tightly, but with many wrinkles, strained across a protuberance which is often anything but amusing to the unfortunate individual who has to carry it, but which invariably arouses the smiles of unfeeling spectators; the long lapels of his black coat swung on either side as he moved quickly with a step very light for such a weight--swinging, too, a neatly rolled umbrella, which he carried horizontally like a balance to keep his arm extended to its full length. When he saw Colonel Hayward he crossed the road towards him, with a larger swing still of his great person altogether. ‘Halloa, Hayward!’ he said, in a big, rolling, bass voice.
‘Well, Canon; I am glad to see you have come back.’
‘And what is this you have been about in my absence, my good fellow,--increasing and multiplying at a time of life when I should have thought you beyond all such vanities? Is this the young lady? As a very old friend of your father’s, Miss Hayward, and as he doesn’t say a word to help us, I must introduce myself.’
He held out a large hand in which Joyce’s timid one was for a moment buried, and then he said, ‘You’ve hidden her away a long time, Hayward, and kept her dark; but I’ve always remarked of you that when you did produce a thing at the last, it was worth the trouble. My wife told me you had sprung a family upon us. No story was ever diminished by being retold.’
‘No, no, my daughter only--Joyce, who has been brought up by--her mother’s relations--in Scotland.’ The Colonel had learned his lesson, but he said it with a little hesitation and faltering.
‘Oh!’ said the clergyman, and then he added in an undertone, ‘Your first poor wife, I suppose?’
The Colonel replied only by a nod, while Joyce stood embarrassed and half indignant. She was deeply vexed by the interrogatory of which she was the subject, and still more by her father’s look and tone. For the poor Colonel was the last person in the world to be trusted with the utterance of a fiction, and his looks contradicted the words which he managed to say.
‘Ah!’ said Canon Jenkinson: and then he turned suddenly upon Joyce. ‘Are you a good Churchwoman, or are you a little Presbyterian?’ he said. ‘I must have that out with you before we are much older. And I hear you are going to range yourself on the side of Sitwell, and help him to defy me. His school feast, par exemple, when I am having the whole parish three or four days after! You know a good deal of the insubordination of subalterns, Hayward, but you don’t know what the incumbent of a district can do when he tries. He is not your curate, so you can’t squash him. Miss Hayward, I take it amiss of you that you should have gone over to Sitwell’s side.’
‘I don’t know even the gentleman’s name,’ said Joyce. ‘There was somebody spoke of his schools--and I am very fond of schools.’
‘His schools! You shall come and see the parish schools, and tell me what you think of them. Don’t take a wretched little district as an example. I’ll tell you what, Hayward,--she shall come with me at once and see what we can do. I don’t go touting round for unpaid curates, as Sitwell does. But I do think a nice woman’s the best of school inspectors--in an unofficial way, bien entendu. I don’t mean to propose you to the Government, Miss Hayward, to get an appointment, when there are so much too few for the men.’
He spoke with a swing, too, of such fluent talk, rolling out in the deep, round, agreeable bass which was so well known in the neighbourhood, that the two helpless persons thus caught were almost carried away by the stream.
‘I don’t think she can go now, Jenkinson. Elizabeth will be wondering already what has become of us.’
‘Is that so?’ said the Canon, with a laugh. ‘We all know there’s no going against the commanding officer. Another time, then--another time. But, Miss Hayward, you must give me your promise not to let yourself be prejudiced; and, above all, don’t go over to Sitwell’s side.’
He pressed her hand in his, gave her a beaming smile, waved his hand to the Colonel, and swung along upon his way, exchanging greetings with everybody he encountered.
‘My dear,’ said Colonel Hayward, ‘there is no telling what that man might have plunged you into if I had not been here to defend you. Let us go home lest something worse befall us. I think I see the Sitwells coming up Grove Road. If you should fall into their hands, I know not what would happen. Walk quickly, and perhaps they will not see us. Elizabeth will say I am not fit to be trusted with you if I let you be torn to pieces by the clergy. The Canon, you see, Joyce, was the means of having this new district church set up. And Sitwell has not behaved prudently--not at all prudently. He has played his cards badly. He has taken up the opposition party--those that were always against the Canon, whatever he might do. They are good people, and mean well, but---- Oh, Mrs. Sitwell! I am sure I beg your pardon. I never imagined it was you.’
There had been a quick little pattering of feet behind them, and Mrs. Sitwell, out of breath, panting out inquiries after their health and the health of dear Mrs. Hayward, captured the reluctant pair. She was a small woman, as light as a feather, and full of energy. She took Joyce by both her hands. ‘Oh, dear Miss Hayward!’ she cried, breathless, ‘I ran after you to tell you about the school feast. I hope you don’t forget your promise. Austin’s coming after me--he’ll be here directly, but I ran to tell you. To-morrow afternoon in Wombwell’s field. Colonel Hayward, you’ll bring her, won’t you? I know you like to see the poor little children enjoying themselves.’
‘My dear lady,’ said the Colonel, ‘I am distressed to see you so out of breath.’
‘Oh, that’s nothing. There’s no harm done,’ said Mrs. Sitwell. ‘I am always running about. Here is Austin to back me up. He will tell you how I have been calculating upon you, Miss Hayward. Dear, don’t pant, but tell her. I have told every one you were coming. Oh, don’t disappoint me--don’t, don’t!’
‘I can’t help panting,’ said the clergyman; ‘it is my usual state. I am always running after my wife. But, Miss Hayward, it is quite true. We want you very much, and she has quite set her heart upon it. I do hope you will come--as I think you said.’
Mrs. Sitwell left Joyce no time to reply. ‘You must, you must, indeed,’ she said. ‘Ah, Colonel Hayward, I saw what you did. You brought down the Great Gun upon her. Was that fair? when we had been so fortunate as to see her first, and when she had begun to take to us. And whatever he may say, you are in our district. Of course the parish includes everything. I think that man would like to have all England in his parish--all the best people. He would not mind leaving us the poor.’
‘Hush, Dora,’ said her husband. ‘I don’t wonder you should form a strong opinion: but we must not say what is against Christian charity.’
‘Oh, charity!’ cried the clergyman’s wife; ‘I think he should begin. I am sure he told Miss Hayward that she was to have nothing to do with us. Now, didn’t he? I can read it in your face. Austin himself, though he pretends to be so charitable, said to me when we saw him talking, “Now you may give up all hopes;” but I said, No; I had more opinion of your face than that. I knew you would stick to your first friends and hold by your word.’
‘You ought to be warned, Miss Hayward,’ said the Rev. Austin Sitwell; ‘my wife’s quite a dangerous person. She professes to know all about you if she only sees your photograph--much more when she has the chance of reading your face.’
‘Don’t betray me, you horrid tell-tale,’ said his wife, threatening him with a little finger. There was a hole in the glove which covered this small member, which Joyce could not but notice as it was held up; and this curious colloquy held across her bewildered her so much, that she had scarcely time to be amused by it. For one thing, there was no need for her to reply. ‘But I do know the language of the face,’ said Mrs. Sitwell. ‘I don’t know how I do it, it is just a gift. And I know Miss Hayward is true. Wombwell’s field at three o’clock to-morrow afternoon. You won’t fail me! Colonel Hayward, you’ll bring her, now won’t you? or it will quite break my heart.’
‘Sooner than do that, my dear lady,’ said the Colonel, with his hat in his hand----
‘Ah, you laugh--you all laugh; you don’t think what it is to a poor little woman trying to do her best. Good-bye, then, good-bye till to-morrow--Wombwell’s field. I shall quite calculate on seeing you. My love to dear Mrs. Hayward. Tell her we got the cakes this morning--such lovely cakes. I shall keep a piece for my own chicks. Good-bye, good-bye.’
‘Thank heaven, Joyce, my dear,’ said the Colonel piously, ‘we have got away without any pledge. If Elizabeth had only been there! but I don’t think she is very sure herself which side she is on. The Canon is the head of the parish, to be sure, and a sort of an old friend besides; but these young people take a great deal of trouble. And we were all instrumental in getting this new church built, so I think we ought to stand by them. But, thank goodness, we neither said one thing nor another. So we can’t be blamed, my dear, neither you nor I.’