Joan never knew how she got through the rest of that afternoon. She did not faint, but she was so utterly overcome and bewildered that she could do nothing right. Three times Mr. Waters spoke to her, with ever-increasing harshness, and on the third occasion she answered him saying,—
“I am very sorry, but it is not my fault. I feel ill: let me go home.”
“Yes, you’d better go, miss,” he said, “and so far as I am concerned you can stop there. I shall report your conduct to the proprietors, so you need not trouble to return unless you hear from me again.”
Joan went without a word; and so ended her life as a show-woman, for never again did she set eyes upon the establishment of Messrs. Black and Parker, or upon their estimable manager, Mr. Waters.
The raw damp of the October evening revived her somewhat, but before she reached Kent Street she knew that she had not exaggerated when she said that she was ill—very ill, in body as well as in mind. The long anxiety and mental torture, culminating in the scene of that afternoon, together with confinement in the close atmosphere of the shop and other exciting causes, had broken down her health at last. Sharp pains shot through her head and limbs; she felt fever burning in her blood, and at times she trembled so violently that she could scarcely keep her feet. Sally opened the door to her with an affectionate smile, for the dumb girl had learned to worship her; but Joan went straight to her room without noticing her, and threw herself upon the bed. Presently Mrs. Bird, learning from the girl that something was wrong, came upstairs bringing a cup of tea.
“What is the matter with you, my dear?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” answered Joan; “I feel very bad in my head and all over me.”
“Influenza, I expect,” said Mrs. Bird; “there is so much of it about now. Let me help you off with your cloak and things, then drink this tea and try to go to sleep. If you are not better to-morrow morning, we shall have to send for the doctor.”
Joan obeyed listlessly, swallowing the tea with an effort.
“Are you sure that you have nothing on your mind, my dear?” asked Mrs. Bird. “I have been watching you for a long while, and I find a great change in you. You never did seem happy from the hour that you came here, but of late you have been downright miserable.”
Joan laughed: the sound of that laugh gave Mrs. Bird “the creeps,” as she afterwards expressed it.
“Anything on my mind? Yes, I have everything on my mind, enough to drive me mad twice over. You’ve been very kind to me, Mrs. Bird, and I shall never forget your goodness; but I am going to leave you to-morrow they have dismissed me from the shop already so before I go I may as well tell you what I am. To begin with, I am a liar; and I’m more than that, I am Listen!” and she bent her head forward and whispered into the little woman’s ear. “Now,” she added, “I don’t know if you will let me stop the night in the house after that. If not, say so, and I’ll be off at once. I dare say that they would take me in at a hospital, or a home, or if not there is always the Thames. I nearly threw myself into it the other day, and this time I should not change my mind.” And again she laughed.
“My poor child! my poor, poor child!” said Mrs. Bird, wiping her eyes, “please don’t talk like that. Who am I, that I should judge you? though it is true that I do like young women to be respectable; and so they would be if it wasn’t for the men, the villains! I’d just like to tear the eyes out of this wicked one, I would, who first of all leads you into trouble and then deserts you.”
“Don’t speak of him like that,” said Joan: “he didn’t lead me,—if anything, I led him; and he didn’t desert me, I ran away from him. I think that he would have married me if I had asked him, but I will have nothing to do with him.”
“Why, the girl must be mad!” said Mrs. Bird blankly. “Is he a gentleman?”
“Yes, if ever there was one; and I’m not mad, only can’t you understand that one may love a man so much that one would die rather than bring him into difficulties! There, it’s a long story, but he would be ruined were he to marry me. There’s another girl whom he ought to marry a lady.”
“He would be ruined, indeed! And what will you be, pray?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care: dead, I hope, before long. Oh!” and she wrung her hands piteously, “I saw him in the shop this afternoon; he was quite close to me. Yes, he looked at a cloak that I was showing, and never knew me who wore it. That’s what has broken me down: so long as I did not see him I could bear it, but now my heart feels as though it would burst. To think that he should have been so close to me and not have known me, oh! it is cruel, cruel!”
“Dear, dear!” said Mrs. Bird, “really I feel quite upset: I am not accustomed to this sort of thing. If you will excuse me I will go and look for my salts. And now you get into bed like a good girl, and stop there.”
“Am I not to go away, then?” asked Joan.
“Certainly not—at any rate for the present. You are much too ill to go anywhere. And now there is just one thing that I should like to know, and you may as well tell it me as you have told me so much. What is this gentleman’s name?”
“I’ll not tell you,” answered Joan sullenly: “if I told you, you would be troubling him; besides, I have no right to give away his secrets, whatever I do with my own.”
“Perhaps it is no such great secret after all, my dear. Say now, isn’t his name Henry Graves, and doesn’t he live at a place called Rosham?”
“Who told you that?” asked Joan, springing up and standing over her. Then she remembered herself, and sat down again upon the bed. “No, that’s not the name,” she said; “I never heard that name.”
“Nobody told me,” answered Mrs. Bird quietly, ignoring Joan’s denial. “I saw the name in those poetry books that you are so fond of, and which you lent me to read; and I saw one or two notes that you had made in them also, that’s all. I’ve had to watch deaf-and-dumb people for many years, my dear, and there’s nothing like it for sharpening the wits and teaching one how to put two and two together. Also you could never hear the name of Henry without staring round and blushing, though perhaps you didn’t know it yourself. Bless you, I guessed it all a month ago, though I didn’t think that it was so bad as this.”
“Oh! it’s mean of you to have spied on me like that, Mrs. Bird,” said Joan, giving in; “but it’s my fault, like everything else.”
“Don’t you fret about your faults, but just go to bed, there’s a good girl. I will come back in half an hour, and if I don’t find you fast asleep I shall be very angry.” And she put her arms about her and kissed her on the forehead, as a mother might kiss her child.
“You are too kind to me, a great deal too kind,” said Joan, with a sob. “Nobody ever was kind to me before, except him, and that’s why I feel it.”
When Mrs. Bird had gone, Joan undressed herself and put on a wrapper, but she did not get into bed. For a while she wandered aimlessly backwards and forwards through the doors between the two rooms, apparently without much knowledge of what she was doing. Some note-paper was lying on the table in the sitting-room, where the gas was burning, and it caught her eye.
“Why shouldn’t I write?” she said aloud: “not to him, no, but just to put down what I feel; it will be a comfort, to play at writing to him, and I can tear it up afterwards.”
The fancy seemed to please her excited brain; at any rate she sat down and began to write rapidly, never pausing for a thought or words. She wrote:—
“MY DARLING,—
“Of course I have no business to call you that, but then you see this is not a real letter, and you will never get it, for I shall post it presently in the fire; I am only playing at writing to you. Henry, my darling, my lover, my husband—you can see now that I am playing, or I shouldn’t call you that, should I?—I am very ill, I think that I am going to die, and I hope that I shall die quickly, quickly, and melt away into nothingness, to be blown about the world with the wind, or perhaps to bloom in a flower on my own grave, a flower for you to pick, my own. Henry, I saw you this afternoon; I wore that cloak your sister was choosing, and I think that I should have spoken to you, only she forbade me, and looked so fierce that she frightened me. Wasn’t it strange—it makes me laugh now, though I could have cried then to think of my standing there before you with that mantle on my shoulders, and of your looking at it, and taking no more notice of me than if I were a dressmaker’s shape? Perhaps that is what you took me for; and oh! I wish I was, for then I couldn’t feel. But I haven’t told you my secret yet, and perhaps you would like to know it. I am going to have a child, Henry—a child with big blue eyes, like yours. I was ashamed about it at first, and it frightened me. I used to dream at nights that everybody I knew was hunting me through the streets, pointing and gibbering at me, with my aunt, Mrs. Gillingwater, at the head of them. Now I’m not ashamed any more. I don’t care: why should I? Nobody will bother because a nameless girl has a nameless baby nobody except me; and I shall love it, and love it, and love it almost as much as I love you, my dear. But I forgot: I am going to die—kiss me when I am dead, Henry—pale lips for you to kiss, my own! so there will be no child after all, and that is a pity, for you won’t be able to see it. If it is born at all it will be born in heaven, or wherever poor girls who have gone wrong are sent to. I wonder what is the meaning of it, Henry; I wonder, not why I should love you, for I was bred to that, that was my birth-luck, but why I should suffer so because I love you? Is it my fault, or somebody else’s?—I don’t mean yours, dear, or is it simply a punishment because I am wicked?—because, if so, it seems curious. You see, if I had taken you at your word and married you, then I shouldn’t have been wicked—that is, in the eyes of others—and I shouldn’t have suffered. I should have been as good as all married women are, and oh! a great deal happier than most of them. But because I couldn’t think of marrying you, knowing that it would be your ruin, I am wicked and I suffer; at least I can guess no other reason. Well, Henry, I don’t mind suffering so long as you are happy, and I hope that you will always be happy. But I am selfish too: When I am dead, I hope that you will think of me at times —yes, and of the baby that wasn’t born—and if I can, I shall try to wander into your sleep now and again, and you will see me there white robed, and with my hair spread out—for you used to praise my hair holding the dream-baby in my arms. And at last you will die also and come to find me; not that you will need to seek, for though I am a sinner God will be good and pitiful to me because I have endured so much, and I shall be waiting at your bedside to draw your passing spirit to my breast. Oh! I have been lonely, so dreadfully lonely; I have felt as though I stood by myself in a world where nobody understood me and everybody scorned and hated me. But I know now that this was only because I could not see you. If only I could see you I should die happy. Oh! my darling, my darling, if only I could see you, and you were kind to me for one short hour, I would——”
Here Joan’s letter came to an abrupt termination, for the simple reason that the agony in her head grew so sharp that she fainted for a moment, then, recovering herself, staggered to her bed, forgetting all about the disjointed and half-crazy epistle which it had been her fancy to write.
A few minutes later Mrs. Bird entered the room accompanied by a doctor—not a “red lamp” doctor, but a very clever and rising man from the hospital, who made a rapid examination of the patient.
“Um!” he said, after taking her temperature, “looks very like the beginnings of what you would call ‘brain fever,’ though it may be only bad influenza; but I can’t tell you much about it at present. What do you know of the history of the case, Mrs. Bird?”
She told him, and even repeated the confession that Joan had made to her.
“When did she say all this?” he asked.
“About an hour and a half ago, sir.”
“Then you must not pay much attention to it. She is in a state of cerebral excitement with high fever, and was very likely wandering at the time. I have known people invent all sorts of strange stories under such conditions. However, it is clear that she is seriously ill, though a woman with such a splendid physique ought to pull through all right. Indeed, I do not feel anxious about her. What a beautiful girl she is, by the way! You’ll sit up with her to-night, I suppose? I’ll be round by eight o’clock to-morrow morning, and I will send you something in half an hour that I hope will keep her quiet till then.”
Mrs. Bird did not go to bed that night, the most of which she spent by Joan’s side, leaving her now and again to rest herself awhile upon the sofa in the sitting-room. As she was in the act of lying down upon this sofa for the first time, her eye fell upon the written sheets of Joan’s unfinished letter. She took them up and glanced at them, but seeing from its opening words that the letter was of a strictly confidential character, she put it down and tried to go to sleep. The attempt, however, was not successful, for whenever Mrs. Bird closed her eyes she saw those passionate words, and a great desire seized her to learn to whom they were addressed, and whether or no the document threw any light upon the story that Joan had told her. Now, if Mrs. Bird had a weak point it was curiosity; and after many struggles of conscience, the end of it was, that in this instance temptation got the better of her. From time to time glancing guiltily over her shoulder, as though she feared to see the indignant writer rise from the bed where she lay in semi-torpor, she perused the sheets from beginning to end.
“Well, I never did!” she said, as she finished them— “no, not in all my born days. To think of the poor girl being able to write like that: not but what it is mad enough, in all conscience, though there’s a kind of sense in the madness, and plenty of feeling too. I declare I could cry over it myself for sixpence, yes, that I could, with all this silly talk about a babe unborn. She seems to have thought that she is going to die, but I hope that isn’t true; it would be dreadful to have her die here, like the late accountant, let alone that we are all so fond of her. Well, I know her aunt’s name now, for it’s in the letter; and if things go bad I shall just take the liberty to write and tell her. Yes, and I’m by no means sure that I won’t write to this Mr. Graves too, just to harrow him up a bit and let him know what he has done. If he’s got the feelings of a man, he’ll marry her straight away after this—that is, if she’s left alive to marry him. Anyhow I’ll make bold to keep this for a while, until I know which way things are going.” And she placed the sheets in an envelope, which she hid in the bosom of her dress.
Next morning the doctor came, as he had promised, and announced that Joan was worse, though he still declined to express any positive opinion as to the nature of her illness. Within another twenty-four hours, however, his doubts had vanished, and he declared it to be a severe case of “brain fever.”
“I wish I had moved her to the hospital at once,” he said; “but it is too late for that now, so you will have to do the best you can with her here. A nurse must be got: she would soon wear you out; and what is more, I dare say she will take some holding before we have done with her.”
“A nurse!” said Mrs. Bird, throwing up her hands, “how am I to afford all that expense?”
“I don’t know; but can’t she afford it? Has she no friends?”
“She has friends, sir, of a sort, but she seems to have run away from them, though I think that I have the address of her aunt. She’s got money too, I believe; and there’s some one who gives her an allowance.”
“Very likely, poor girl,” answered the doctor drily. “Well, I think that under the circumstances you had better examine her purse and see what she has to go on with, and then you must write to this aunt and let her know how things are. I dare say that you will not get any answer, but it’s worth a penny stamp on the chance. And now I’ll be witness while you count the money.”
Joan’s purse was easily found; indeed, it lay upon the table before them, for, notwithstanding Mr. Levinger’s admonitions, she was careless, like most of her sex, as to where she put her cash. On examination it was found to contain over fifteen pounds.
“Well, there’ plenty to go on with,” said the doctor; “and when that’s gone, if the relations won’t do anything I must get a sister to come in and nurse her. But I shouldn’t feel justified in recommending her case to them while she has so much money in her possession.”
Within three hours the nurse arrived—a capable and kindly woman of middle age who thoroughly understood her business. As may be imagined, Mrs. Bird was glad enough to see her; indeed, between the nursing of Joan, who by now was in a high fever and delirious, upstairs, and attending to her paralytic husband below, her strength was well-nigh spent, nor could she do a stitch of the work upon which her family depended for their livelihood. That afternoon she composed a letter to Mrs. Gillingwater. It ran as follows:—
“MADAM,—
“You may think it strange that I should write to you, seeing that you never heard of me, and that I do not know if there is such a person as yourself, though well enough acquainted with the name of Gillingwater down Yarmouth way in my youth; but I believe, whether I am right or wrong and if I am wrong this letter will come back to me through the Post Office—that you are the aunt of a girl called Joan Haste, and that you live at Bradmouth, which place I have found on the map. I write, then, to tell you that Joan Haste has been lodging with me for some months, keeping herself quiet and respectable, and working in a situation in Messrs. Black & Parker’s shop in Oxford Street, which doubtless is known to you if ever you come to London. Two nights ago she came back from her work ill, and now she lies in a high fever and quite off her head (so you see she can’t tell me if you are her aunt or not). Whether she lives or dies is in the hands of God, and under Him of the doctor; but he, the doctor I mean, thinks that I ought to let her relations, if she has any, know of her state, both because it is right that they should, and so that they may help her if they will. I have grown very fond of her myself, and will do all I can for her; but I am a poor woman with an invalid husband and child to look after, and must work to support the three of us, so that won’t be much. Joan has about fifteen pounds in her purse, which will of course pay for doctor, food and nursing for a few weeks; but her illness, if things go well with her, is likely to be a long one, and if they don’t, then there will be her funeral expenses to meet, for I suppose that you would wish to have her buried decent in a private grave. Joan told me that there was some one who is a kind of guardian to her and supplies her with money, so if you can do nothing yourself, perhaps you will send him this letter, as I can’t write to him not knowing his address. Madam, I do hope that even if you have quarrelled with Joan, or if she hasn’t behaved right to you, that you will not desert her now in her trouble, seeing that if you do and she dies, you may come to be sorry for it in after years. Trusting to hear from you,
“Believe me, Madam,
“Obediently yours,
JANE BIRD, Dressmaker.
“P. S. I enclose my card, and you will find my name in the London Directory.”
When she had finished this letter, and addressed it thus,
“Mrs. Gillingwater,
“Bradmouth,
“Please deliver at once,”
Mrs. Bird posted it with her own hands in the pillar-box at the corner of Kent Street.
Then she returned to the house and sat down to reflect as to whether or not she should write another letter—namely, to the Mr. Henry Graves of Rosham, who, according to Joan’s story, was the author of her trouble, enclosing in it the epistle which the girl had composed at the commencement of her delirium. Finally she decided not to do so at present, out of no consideration for the feelings of this wicked and perfidious man, but because she could not see that it would serve any useful purpose. If Joan’s relations did not come forward, then it would be time enough to appeal to him for the money to nurse or to bury her. Or even if they did come forward, then she might still appeal to him—that is, if Joan recovered—to save her from the results of his evil doings and her folly by making her his wife. Until these issues were decided one way or another, it seemed to Mrs. Bird, who did not lack shrewdness and a certain knowledge of the world, that it would be wisest to keep silent, more especially in view of the fact that, as the doctor had pointed out, the whole tale might be the imagining of a mind diseased.
And here it may be convenient to say that some weeks went by before it was known for certain whether Joan would die or live. Once or twice she was in considerable if not in imminent danger; moreover, after periods of distinct improvement, she twice suffered from relapses. But in the end her own splendid constitution and youth, aided by the care and skill with which she was nursed, pulled her through triumphantly. When her return to life and health was assured, Mrs. Bird again considered the question of the advisability of communicating with Henry in the interests of her patient.