Joan: a tale

CHAPTER I. “ And ye shall walk in silk attire

And siller hae to spare 1 ”

WoLFEESTAisr is liumming this very softly to himself, half under his breath, half over. A girl at the house he is staying at sang it last night, and it runs in his Jiead yet; a girl whose music-leaves he turned, whose music-stool he screwed up, and three of whose fingers he succeeded in squeezing when he gave her her candle at bedtime. Wolferstan has not got it on his conscience that he ever in all his life missed an opportunity of squeezing a woman’s hand.

“ And siller hae to spare ! ”

“Ah! that is just what I am afraid. she will not have, poor soul! ”

^It is not the girl whose fingers he squeezed of whom he is thinking, but another. It is Easter-day, in the afternoon. Wolferstan is sitting on an old tree-trunk that once was a stout oak-tree, but through whose dry old veins not even this strong young spring, vigorously awakening, can send the green sap-blood racing. Before Wolferstan’s eyes spread the ups and downs, the dead fern and live deer; the mighty single trees roomily stretching great arms on all sides of them into the free and wholesome air, and the bosky coppices of an English park. In his ears is the austere music of church-bells from different parishes, all seeming to tell with solemn mirth that “ Christ is risen.” Wolferstan is not going to church. He went this morning, and found her places in the hymn-book (out of which he afterward warbled with her) for the girl with the fingers. He is bound on a much disagreeabler errand now ; and so he thinks. He is going to pay a visit of condolence; yes — to condole with a young lady upon the loss of her grandfather.

The death of a grandfather is generally a very supportable affliction. But a small bottle would hold the tears that most people shed for their grandparents. Most of us can kiss that rod. But in the present case grandfather is a wide word. It means father, mother, brother, sister, home, standing, soft lying, high feeding, pretty nearly everything that makes life a morsel to be eaten with slow relish instead of a physic-draught to be quickly swallowed with wry faces. It is difflcult to offer comfort to a person who has lost all these at one sweep. So Wolferstan feels. Though he has been sitting on his tree-trunk for a good half-hour, cudgeling such brains as God has given him, nothing that sounds even to himself in the least degree consolatory occurs to him. The only thing that will persistently recur to him — often and angrily as he has driven it away as utterly inadmissible— is the old and homely saw that “it is no use crying over spilt milk.” He cannot get rid of it. It comes back like a gnat, and sticks like a bur. Its rude philosophy thrusts itself between him and all suitabler forms of speech.

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, In despair he jumps up at last, and r begins to walk through the quickening, freshening grass toward the great old Hall, with four cold, gray towers ivymuffled, that stands amid level velvet gardens fronting him. The hells are still ringing. The air is temperately cool; neither balmy nor yet sharp ; the sky looks high and chill and palely colored. Heaven seems far off, though it is Easter-day. Last time that he was here it was winter, and the hounds met here. A small, bright rime lay on the grass ; flashes of scarlet warmed up the cold and sunless colors of the weather-scarred, gray walls. The old squire was pottering about on his old horse. Well, the old squire is dead now ! dead suddenly. He was not among those who fumble and bungle long at the lock which shuts in the great secret. I think that more people than used to do so, go suddenly, nowadays. We have increased the speed of our traveling over this earth, why not also the quickness of our journey from this world into the next? Anyhow, he went quickly; not even in his own house or his own bed ! but in a public place, at a public meeting. With one stoop forward of .his gray head, with one groaning breath, he went and took the great and unavoidable stride without time for any pain or fear.

Poor old squire! Yes, and that same day on which the hounds met here, Joan stood on the top of the steps in a mousecolored velvet gown, shading with one hand the laughter of her eyes from the low, cool winter sun, which stared so hard at her. And the sun had good taste : she was worth staring at. He has reached the Hall-door by now ; mounted the steps, and rung the bell.

“Nothing is changed!” he says to himself with a sort of irrational surprise, looking back at the park across which he has come, and at a herd of stags that are trooping from one glade to another, with a tossing of great horns and whisking of tiny tails.

But, after all, why should the grass

I look withered, and the deer’s plump flanks fall in because an old man is dead ? It would be much odder if they did. At least the footman who opens the door is changed. He has moulted his gay blue-and-yellow plumage, and now the sable rook is not blacker than he.

As Wolferstan follows him through half a dozen rooms, big and little, ho looks round him affectionately. One always feels rather fondly toward a house where one has been happy, and Wolferstan has had many jovial moments in this one. Here stand the statues, just as they did on the night of the theatricals, when Joan made- such a sweet widow that he very nearly asked her to run the chance of being his. Here is Psyche, slenderly nude, with her butterfly on her finger. The little serpent is stinging Eurydice’s cold white heel, and Hadrian still stands stern in his panoply.

When at last they reach the sitting-room, toward which they finally tend, they find it empty. In it there is neither man nor mouse, nor woman either. The only live thing is a small faint fire that the sun is trying hard to kill, a little fire from whoso dull heart a red glow shines reflected in the old Dutch tiles, where Eve’s gluttony and Noah’s carouse are devoutly, yet grotesquely, wrought in blue and white. Near the hearth is drawn np an arm-chair, which, though it is pot at all rucked, up or disarranged, as it infallibly would have been had a man occupied it, yet has the indescribable air of having been lately sat in. A book, with its back still warm and warped from having been held over the fire, gapes half open on the table. There are flowers — flowers everywhere ! They seem to have walked in through the open door of the neighboring conservatory.

She has not come yet: perhaps she does not mean to come at all. He walks about nervously, saying over to himself his prepared speech, and trying to keep the spilt milk out of it. He strolls into the conservatory, and looks at the great and

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fragrant array of flourishing blooms; a regiment of cyclamens, each with its sweet white ears laid hack; tulips, the vividness of whose varnished coats makes* one wink ; an army of cinerarias, each blossom a little scentless sun-disk of blazing color ; heavy, bashful roses that set one dreaming of June. Poor, poor Joan! What will she do without her flowers? Poor little Joan!

As he thus kindly and pitifully addresses her, in his own soul, and mentally strokes her, she enters. The tall old door opens, and she comes in with a soft and dragging step. For so slender a thing she treads heavily, does not she ? but sorrow puts leaden weights in one’s feet. Wolferstan has hardly ever before seen her, that she has not been either quite laughing, or else with unborn or half-born laughter hovering in the corners of her happy eyes. It is not that she has pulled a long face, even now, or is dressed in the mourner’s airs, that some people, although truly sorrowing, think it right in such cases to wear.

She comes to meet him with a smile, but alas! it has so clearly been put on only just outside the door, and is kept with such difficulty from brinily drowning itself. She looks half the size that he remembers her when last they parted, not that she ever was of the buxom sort. Ilers was never one of your great, luscious Bubens bodies, in whose depths of creamy flesh the poor little soul is oftenest lost and smothered. But now you can almost, as they say, see through her. One is always tenderly disposed toward thin people, though, in reality, they are not nearly such objects of compassion as the preposterously fat, toward whom no one’s heart yearns.

Before he in the least knows what he is meaning to do (Wolferstan’s actions mostly get ahead of his intentions), he is standing before her, holding both her hands ; though the amount of their hitherto acquaintance would not justify more than the moderate shaking of one.

The trite and unconsoling consolations over which he labored so heavily on his tree-trunk depart to the limbo appointed for all abortions, and he finds himself saying hurriedly :

“Do you mind my coming? do I bother you? shall I go? ”

“ Ho, don’t! ” she answers, with a sort of eagerness, giving his hands a little unintentional squeeze of detention; “it is good to see some one! *I was so glad when they came and told me ; I thought I never was going to see any one again, and I have been alone — alone — such a long time ! ” Her very voice is changed ; it sounds faint, and yet hoarse, as if all its substance and sweetness had been soaked away in tears. “This is a bad house to be alone in, I can tell you,” she goes on in the same weak, spent kind of tone, lifting her eyes with a sort of relief to the pity of his face ; “ you do not know how ghostly the statues look at night; you have only seen the gallery when it has been well lit up ; and the suits of armor are worse — oh! far wope! last night I stared at them — I could not help it — until I could have sworn that there was a skeleton head under each visor ! ”

She speaks the last words so low and so quickly that he finds it hard to hear them.

“Poor soul!” he says, taking both the chill little hands, which are gradually growing warmer in his close clasp, into one of his, in which they lie quite comfortably, and stroking their smooth backs with his freed one ; why did not you send for me? ”

“That would have been so likely!” she says, with a little flash of maiden mirth struggling into her drowned eyes ; “ if I had, you would have thought that grief had unsettled my wits ! And not a soul has been near me,” she continues presently, raising her voice a little, and speaking with slow emphasis, while her eyes stiU rest on his full and solemn, and with no more apparent consciousness in them of his being man, and herself woman, than

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if he had been the grandfather she deplores. “Not a soul! except the doctor twice; he said both times that I was to keep up, and take a fizzing draught, and not think of anything disagreeable, and remember that everybody died, ha ! ha ! — and the lawyer once — ”

“ Yes ; and what did he say to you ? ” interrupts "Wolferstan, eagerly.

“ He said — but why do you make me tell you? I see by your face that you know ! there is not a hedger and ditcher about that does not know — he said : ‘ My dear young friend’ (I never used to be his ‘ dear young friend ! ’ I used to be ‘ Miss Dering,’ ” drawing up her little milk-white throat) — “‘my dear young friend, I am sorry that it has devolved upon me to be the bearer of ill-tidings to you, but — ’ ” (turning her head restlessly about like some poor dumb beast in physical pain), “ ‘ that I was a beggar in short,’ those were not his words, of course ; he said it much more lengthily and roundaboutly. I think he kept me on the rack for ten good minutes, but that was what it came to ! ”

“ And was that all ? did he tell you — did he say nothing else ? ” asks the young ^fellow with quick anxiety.

“ Was that all f ” she repeats with an almost angry emphasis, opening her eyes as widely as they will go ; “ was not that enough? Good Heavens I what else would you have had him say? what could be worse ? ”

Wolferstan does not answer aloud, but to his own heart he says, “ Thank God ! ”

“ When he first told me,” she goes on, as if speech were a relief, “I said I did not care a straw. I did not then ; he thought it was bravado, but it was not ; now I am beginning to care, dreadfully ! it is enough to make any one care, is not it?”

“ Merciful God ! I should think it was ! ”

For a moment or two they stand silent, their position unaltered. It does not occur to them to sit down or to loose each other’s hands. Sometimes, in trouble, the contact of warm human fiesh is more comforting than any spoken words. And the •sun comes in merrily, through the open window, and kisses them both, as not knowing which he likes best, and gives one stab more to the sick fire.