CHAPTER VIII
IN the meantime Colonel Hayward was walking up and down the village street, waiting for his wife. He passed and repassed the door two or three times. He was very nervous, hanging about, not knowing what to make of himself. The church stood at the end of the street, and a path led down by the side of the churchyard, in the direction of Bellendean. As he came to the end of this, he stopped in the abstraction of his mind to look down the line of shade which a high hedgerow opposite to the low mossy wall of the churchyard threw half-way across the path. Some one was coming along in this clear and soft shadow, which was so grateful in the midst of the sunshine. It startled him to see it was Joyce, in her dark dress, her face relieved against the broad brim of an untrimmed straw hat, which added in its tone of creamy white additional force to the very delicate tints of her face, so clear in the shadowy air, with an impression of coolness in the midst of great warmth. He cast an anxious look of suspense over his shoulder towards the house where his wife was; but as he did not see her, nor any sign of her coming, he turned down the path to meet Joyce. It was rather by way of diverting his own anxiety than from any eagerness to address her. He seemed to want somebody to whom he could talk to relieve his own mind; for up to this moment, except from curiosity and anxiety in respect to the past, and a certain admiration of herself and her demeanour, it had not been Joyce, upon her own account, who had interested the Colonel. He had not had leisure as yet to get so far as her—for herself. He went on to talk to her because she was in it, concerned like himself, though she might not be aware of the fact, in the matter which his wife at present was engaged in clearing up. It was as if the scene then going on at the cottage was a consultation of doctors upon the life or death of a beloved patient. Those who are waiting breathless for the opinion, which is at the same time a sentence, are glad to get together to ask each other what they think,—at least, to stand together and wait, feeling the support of company. This was Colonel Hayward’s feeling. He went towards the girl with a sense that she had more to do with it than any one else—but not with any perception of its immense importance to her.
Joyce had gone out in the freedom which comes to all the members of the scholastic profession, small and great, with the first morning of the holidays. To have no lessons to give, no claim of one kind or another, nothing but their own occupations, whatever they may be, gives to these happy people a sense of legitimate repose. For one thing, the members of almost every other profession have to go away to secure this much-desired leisure, but to the teacher it comes, without any effort, by appointment of nature, so to speak, by a beneficent arrangement which takes all selfishness out of the enjoyment, since it has been invented, not for the good primarily of himself, but of the flock who are so happily got rid of, to their own perfect satisfaction. The sweet consciousness that the happiness and freedom of so many sufferers have been consulted before one’s own, gives sweetness and grace to it. Joyce had risen this morning with that exquisite sense of freedom, and she had gone out with a book as soon as the household work she never neglected was over, to read and muse on a favourite spot, a point in the park at Bellendean out of reach of the house, where behind a great screen of trees the wayfarer came suddenly in sight of the Firth, the circle of low hills which protects the narrower sea at the Queen’s Ferry, and the sheltered basin of St. Margaret’s Hope. The sight of this wonderful combination of sea and sky and solid soil, the soft hills rising round, the mass of grey stones on the water’s edge, which marks a ruined castle, the island in the midst, the widening out beyond into the infinite, into the wider Firth and the stormy waters of the northern sea, affording an ever-open door for the fancy,—were delightful to this imaginative girl. She had taken her book, but she did not open it—for which she upbraided herself, confessing in the secret depths of her soul that Andrew would not have done so,—that he would have read and expounded and discussed and found a new beauty in every line, where she, so much his intellectual inferior, did nothing. She did not even think—if further avowal must be made, she did not even see the lovely landscape for the sake of which she had come here. It entered into her, reflecting itself in her dreamy eyes, and printing itself in her mind; but she did not look as Andrew would have done, finding out beautiful ‘lights,’ and commanding all the details of the scene. Joyce was a little short-sighted, and did not see the details. It was to her a large blurred celestial world of beauty and colour, and abundant delicious air and sunshine. Her thoughts went from her, where she sat in the heart of the morning, looking over the Firth, with all its breadth of melting light and reflection, to those low hills of the farther shore.
It had been thus that she had entered upon her holidays in the other days when life had no cares. The dreamings about Lady Joyce, and all the speculations as to her future, had come in other scenes, where there was a want of brightness and of a stronghold of her own to retire into. Here she had not needed that fanciful world of her own. But to-day Joyce was in a different mood. After a while she began to become insensible altogether to the scene, and resumed more personal musings instead. ‘Young lady, where did you get your name?’ It was not the first time she had been so questioned. Half the people she met asked her the same: but not as Colonel Hayward did. ‘I knew some one once’—what did he mean? why did he not come back and tell her? These thoughts became urgent after a while, so that she could not sit and dream, as was her wont in her favourite spot. She got up with a little impatience and vexation and disappointment to return home. But in the lane which led up to the village street, in the clear shadow of the tall hawthorn hedge, behold some one advancing to meet her, at sight of whom her heart began to beat—more loudly than it had ever beaten at the sight of Andrew Halliday; it sprang up thumping and resounding. ‘He knows who I am,’ she said to herself. ‘Perhaps he will tell me; perhaps he is looking for me to tell me. Perhaps he is something to me.’ Her veins seemed suddenly to fill with a rushing quick-flowing stream.
Colonel Hayward took off his hat as he came up. This was to him an everyday action, but to her an unusual grace, a homage which only lately had ever been given to her, and which she esteemed disproportionately as a sign of special chivalry. It brought the colour to her cheeks, which ebbed again the moment after in the fluctuations of her anxiety. The old Colonel looked very anxious too; his face was agitated, and paler than usual. When he came up to her he stopped. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that we were ever introduced to each other; but still—— You have been taking a walk this fine morning?’
‘The holidays have just begun, sir,’ said Joyce respectfully. ‘This is the first day: and though I am very fond of my work, freedom is sweet at first.’
‘Only at first?’
‘It is always sweet,’ she said, with a smile; ‘but never so delicious as the first day.’
Their hearts were not in this light talk, and here it came to an end. He had turned with her, and they were walking along side by side. Great anxiety—tremulous and breathless suspense—were in the minds of both on the same subject—and yet they regarded it in aspects so different! The soft transparent shadow of the hedge kept them from all the flicker of light and movement outside, giving a sort of recueillement, a calm of gravity and stillness, to the two figures. Had they been in a picture, there could have been no better title for it than ‘The Telling of the Secret.’ But yet there was no secret told. He was absorbed in his own thoughts, and unconscious of the wistful looks which she gave him timidly from time to time. At last he turned upon her, and asked the strangest question, with a tremor and quiver in all his big frame.
‘Do you remember your mother?’ he said.
‘My mother!’ The sudden shock brought a wave of colour over her. ‘Oh, sir,’ said Joyce, ‘how could I remember her? for she died when I was born.’
‘True, true—I had forgotten that,’ he said, with an air of confusion. Then added— ‘You must forgive me. My mind was full——’
Of what was his mind full? He fell silent after this, and for some time no more was said. But it gradually came to be impossible to Joyce to keep silence. She turned to him, scarcely seeing him in the rush of blood that went to her head.
‘Did you know my mother?’ she said. ‘Oh, sir, will you tell me? Do you know who she was?’
‘I can’t tell—I can’t tell,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It may be all a mistake. We must not make too sure.’
‘Then you think——’ she cried, and stopped, and looked at him, searching his face for his meaning—the anxious open face which was held before her like a book—though he did not look at her in return. She put her hand, with a light momentary touch, on his arm. ‘Perhaps you don’t know,’ she said hurriedly, ‘that I have things of hers—things she left—that would settle it—that would show you——’
He made a little gesture of assent, waving his hand. ‘My wife is there: that is what keeps me in this suspense.’
‘Where? Where?’
He pointed vaguely in the direction of Joyce’s home. ‘She has gone—to see everything,’ he said.
For the moment a flash of sudden anger came to the eyes of Joyce. ‘They are all mine!’ she cried. ‘It was to me she ought to have come. I am the one chiefly concerned!’ Then the flash quenched itself, and her look grew soft and wistful once more. ‘Oh, sir,’ she said, ‘if it was the Joyce you thought—if it was her you supposed—who was she? To tell me that, even if it should turn out all different, would do no harm.’
‘It would do no good either,’ he said: then turned round to her, and took her hand between his two large brown hands, which were trembling. ‘You are very like her,’ he said—‘so like her that I am forced to believe. She looked just as you are doing when I saw her last. Some relationship there must be—there must be!’ Here he dropped her hand again, as if he had not known that he held it. ‘There was wrong done to her—the Joyce I mean. She was made very unhappy; but no wrong was meant on—on my—on—on his part. Would you really like to hear the story? But it may turn out to be nothing—to have nothing to do with you.’
‘Oh, tell me; it will fill up the time; it will ease the suspense.’
‘That is what I feel,’ he said; ‘and you will keep the secret—that is, there is no secret; it is only what happened to—— what happened long, long ago—to—to one of my friends: you understand,’ he said tremulously, but with an effort to be very firm, looking at her, ‘to—one of my friends.’
Joyce made a sign of assent, too much absorbed in what she was about to hear to think what this warmth of asseveration meant. It was a relief to him to speak. It was like going over all the changes of the illness when a beloved sufferer lies between life and death.
‘They met,’ he said, ‘abroad, at a foreign station. She was very young. She was with people that were not kind to her. They married in a great hurry, without proper precautions, without thinking that anything could be wrong. They came home soon after for her health, and I—I had to—I—I don’t quite remember——’ his voice seemed to die away in his throat; then with another effort he recovered it and went on— ‘Her husband had to leave her and go back—to his duty: and then she heard from some wicked person—oh, some wicked person!—God forgive her, for I can’t—that it was not a true marriage. It was, it was! I protest to you no thought of harm—good Lord! nothing but love, honest love—and it was all right, all right, as it turned out.’
‘But she thought—she had been deceived!’ Joyce listened with her head drooping, keeping down the climbing sorrow in her throat, hardly able to find her voice.
‘She was always hasty,’ he said. ‘I am not the one to blame her—oh no, no—it was not wonderful, perhaps, that she should believe. And letters to India were not then as now—they took so long a time; and something happened to delay the answer. It was what you call nobody’s fault—only an accident—an accident that cost——’
‘You are very, very kind—oh, you are kind; you speak as if you had felt for her with all your heart—as if she had been your very own.’
He gave her a startled look, and made a momentary pause: then he proceeded, ‘That’s all,—all that anybody has known. She disappeared. His letter came back to him. He could not get home to search for her. It had to be trusted to others. After years, when I came back, I—I—but nothing could ever be found.’
‘Sir,’ said Joyce, gasping a little to keep down her sobs, ‘I think that must have been my mother. I—think it must be. She begins in her letter to tell him—she calls him Henry—was that his name?’
The old Colonel made a noise in his throat which sounded like a sob too: he nodded his head in assent, as if he could not speak.
‘She begins to tell him—is he living still?’
This question had the strangest effect upon Colonel Hayward. He turned round upon her, steadying himself, looking her in the face, with momentary wonder and something like indignation: then the energy died out of him all at once, and he nodded his head again.
‘My father! then I have a father,’ said Joyce, with a voice as soft and tender as a dove’s. She was not now paying any attention to him or his looks, but was entirely absorbed in this new wonderful discovery of her own.
But he started with a sudden cry— ‘Good God!’ as if something new—something too astounding to understand—had flashed upon him. Her father! why, so it was!—so he was—— He had thought of no subject but this for days, and yet this point of view had not opened upon him. They had reached the head of the lane, and were now in the village street, turned towards the cottage in which Joyce had lived all her life, and near enough to see the light little figure of Mrs. Hayward standing at the door. This caught his attention, but not hers. For Joyce had plunged suddenly with a new impulse back into the enchanted country of her dreams. A father—and one who had done no wrong—who was not to blame—a living father! It was only when she turned to Colonel Hayward, after the first bound of exhilaration and breathless pleasure, to ask him, clasping her hands unconsciously, ‘Who is my father?’ that she saw the extraordinary commotion in his face. He was looking at her, and yet his eyes made quick voyages to and from his wife. The lines of his face had all melted into what Joyce felt to be the ‘kindest’ look she had ever met. And yet there was alarm and boundless anxiety in it. He looked as if he did not hear her question, but suddenly laid his hand upon hers, and gave it a strong momentary pressure. ‘I must know first. I must speak to my wife,’ he said incoherently. ‘God bless you!—I must ask Elizabeth. You must wait: I must speak to Elizabeth. But God bless you, my dear!’
He was already gone, hastening with long steps up the street. The thought passed through Joyce’s mind that this must have been a dear friend,—some one, perhaps, who had loved her mother: and a man with the tenderest heart. There was something in his ‘God bless you’ which seemed to fall upon her like the dew—a true blessing; the blessing of one who had always been her friend, though she had never known him. She did not hurry to follow him to satisfy herself, but went on quietly at her usual pace, looking at the old gentleman’s long swift steps, and thinking of a camel going over the ground. He was from the East, too; and he devoured the way, hastening to the little figure which had perceived and which was waiting for him. Joyce had the faculty of youth to remark all this, yet keep up her own thoughts at the same time. She saw old Janet standing at the door looking out, with the hem of her apron in her hand, which was her gesture when her mind was much occupied or troubled: and the little lady in the street standing waiting, and then, her own old friend, the Colonel, hurrying up, putting his arm within the lady’s, leading her away with his head bent over her. There was a certain amusement in it all, which floated on the surface of the great excitement and wonder and delight of the discovery she had made. A father; and a dear old friend, the kindest, the most sympathetic, who blessed her, and who had a right to bless her, having loved (she could not doubt it) her mother before her.
Joyce did not know what the next disclosure might be,—did not think for the moment that, whatever it was, it must change the whole tenor of her life. Nor did she think that there was still a doubt in it,—that it might yet come to nothing, as he had said. Oh no, it could not come to nothing; everything pieced in to the story. The doubt with which Janet had always chilled her, that a young creature disappearing so utterly, with no one to care for her, no one to inquire after her, must have had a story in which shame was involved—how completely was it dissipated and explained by this real tale! Oh, no shame! she had felt sure there could not be shame—nothing but the cruel distance, the fatal accident that had delayed the letter, those strange elements of uncertainty which mix in every mortal story, which (Joyce remembered from that reading which had hitherto been her life) the ancients called fate. And what could they be called but fate? If it had come in time that letter! as letters which mean nothing, which are of no consequence, come every day—and yet he had said the delay was nobody’s fault. Was it less fatal, less fateful than those incidents that lead towards the end of a tragedy in the poets? and this was a tragedy. Oh, how sad, how pitiful, to the Joyce of twenty years ago! but not to our Joyce, who suddenly found this July morning her vague dreams of youth, her fancies that had no foundation, coming true.
‘You’ve been a long time away,’ said Janet from the door. She had watched Joyce’s approach until they were within a few steps of each other, when she had suddenly withdrawn her eyes, and taking to examining the hem of her apron, which she laid down and pinched between her fingers, as if preparing it to be hemmed over again. The corners of Janet’s mouth were drawn down, and a line or two marked in her forehead, as when she was angry and about to scold her nursling. ‘I could wuss,’ she said, ‘that ye wouldna stravaig away in the mornin’ without a piece or onything to sustain ye, and maybe getting your death o’ cauld, sittin’ on the grass.’
‘It is the first day of the holidays, granny,’ said Joyce. She came in smiling, and put down her book, and going up to her faithful guardian, put an arm round her, and laid her cheek against hers. Caresses are rare in a Scotch peasant’s house. Janet half turned away her own wrinkled cheek. The intensity of the love within her rose into a heat which simulated wrath.
‘I’m no a wean to be made o’. I like nane o’ your phrasin’s. I like when folk do as I bid them, and make nae steer.’
‘Oh, granny,’ said Joyce, ‘but my heart is so full, and I have so much to tell you.’
‘What can ye have to tell me? I have maybe mair to tell you than ever ye thought upon; and as for a full heart, how can the like of you, with a’ your life before ye, ken what that means?’
‘Granny, I have had a long talk with that gentleman—the gentleman that thought he knew my mother.’
‘And what had he to say to you? I’m thinking your mother has been just killed among them. That’s my opinion. A poor young solitary thing, that had naebody to stand up for her. And sae will ye be if ye lippen to them,’ cried Janet, suddenly sitting down and covering her face with her apron,—‘sae will ye be. Ye are weel off now, though maybe ye dinna think sae.’
‘Granny, have I ever given you any reason to say that?’
Janet withdrew her apron from her eyes. Her eyes were red with that burden of tears which age cannot shed like youth. The passion of love and grief which overflowed her being could only get vent in this irritation and querulous impatience. Her long upper lip quivered, a hot moisture glistened on the edges of her eyelids. She looked at the young creature, standing half on the defensive before this sudden attack, yet half disposed to meet it with tender laughter and jest. ‘Oh, ye can make licht o’t,’ she cried. ‘What is’t to you? just the life ye’ve aye been craving for,—aye craving for,—ye canna say nay. But to me what is it?’ said the old woman. ‘It’s just death. It’s waur than death; it’s just lingering and longin’ and frettin’ wi’ my Maker for what I canna have! When we took ye to our airms, a bit helpless bairn, maybe there was that in our hearts that said the Lord was our debtor to make it up to us. But them that think sae will find themselves sair mista’en; for He has just waited and waited till ye had come to your flower and were our pride! And now the fiat has gaen forth, no’ when ye were a little bairn; and I aye said, “Haud a loose grip!” But now that a’ the danger seemed overpast, now that—wheesht!’ cried Janet suddenly, coming to an abrupt pause. In the silence that followed they heard a slow and heavy foot, making long and measured steps, advancing gradually. They heard that among many others, for it was the time when the labourers were coming home to dinner; but to Janet and Joyce there was no mistaking the one tread among so many. Janet got up hurriedly from the chair. ‘Wheesht! no’ a word before him; it’s time enough when it comes,’ she said. Joyce had not waited even for this, but had begun to lay the table, so that Peter when he came in should find everything ready. He came in with his usual air of broadly smiling expectation, and took his bonnet from his grizzled red locks, which was the fashion Joyce had taught him, as he stepped across the threshold. ‘It’s awful warm the day,’ were his first words, as he went in, notwithstanding, and placed himself in the big chair near the fire. The fire was the household centre whether it was cold or warm. ‘So you’ve gotten the play?’ he added, beaming upon Joyce, awaiting something which should make him open his mouth in one of those big brief laughs that brought the water to his eyes. It was not necessary that it should be witty or clever. Joyce was wit and cleverness embodied to her foster-father. When she opened her lips his soul was satisfied.
And before Peter the cloud disappeared like magic. Janet was cheerful, and Joyce like everyday. They listened to his talk about the ripening corn, and where it was full in the ear, and where stubby, and about the Irish shearers that will be doun upon us like locusts afore we ken,—‘and a wheen Hieland cattle too,’ said Peter, who was not favourable to the Celts. Then the broth was put on the table and the blessing said, and the humble dinner eaten as it had been for years in the little family which held together by nature, and which, so far as had appeared, nothing could ever divide.