CHAPTER V
THE tableaux had taken place to everybody’s satisfaction. There had been much applause, and Joyce had been called for to receive the thanks of the audience; but all muffled up in a dark cloak in which she had figured as one of Queen Margaret’s travelling retinue, she had not revealed anything to the amused look of the gentlemen and ladies who were spectators, except a dark and indistinct outline against the light. When the others, throwing off the veils and cloaks in which she had enveloped them, joined their friends in the drawing-room, which was to Joyce the emblem of everything that was most splendid and beautiful in the world, she stole away, getting her hat from Merritt’s room. Merritt would gladly have detained her for a gossip afterwards; but Joyce, though she told herself with an angry humility, which was more stinging than pride, that it was Merritt who was her equal and not Greta, would not stay. She went out into the silence of the night, hearing the voices of the company, with a keen desire to know what they were saying, and to share in the enjoyment which imagination represented to her as so much more delightful than any kind of social intercourse she had ever known. Joyce felt this with a sharp and keen sensation which she said to herself was not envy. Oh no, no! for envy is unkind, whereas she desired no harm, but only good and every pleasantness to the delightsome company where there were so many whom she was fond of; but only a forlorn consciousness of her own position as one who could not get access there, yet was at home nowhere else. No; all that youthful folly about Lady Joyce was nonsense, she knew. She would never be Lady Joyce, never find a place in the Queen’s Court, or among the people who are grand and great, and the flower of the land; but yet there was her place, and nowhere else was she at home.
She did not venture to say this to herself, yet the thought was in her mind as she stepped out with a sigh down the terrace steps, leaving the lights blazing, and the voices, so refined, as she thought, and delightful, rising in a soft tumult behind. She was tempted to steal along the terrace to an open window, to hear what they were saying, to peep in for a moment out of the gloom. But Joyce would not, could not do this thing. The temptation wounded her pride even while it moved her. What! she, Joyce, go and peep and listen, like a waiting-maid in a play! No, no; though they were so sweet, though they drew her as if with a magnet—no, no. She turned round resolutely away from this snare. On the other side the housekeeper’s room was shining too, and there was quite a fine company there—the ladies’-maids so fine, and gentlemen in evening clothes, quite equal to anything that was to be seen in the drawing-room. Joyce flung her head high—not there at least! though with a keen pang of self-humiliation she felt that there everybody would think was her appropriate place. But the fine ladies’-maids were too fine for her. There was something in that. It enabled her to feel a consolatory thrill of disdainful pride.
When she had gone on a little, and reached the beginning of the avenue, a shadow shaped itself out of the darkness of the night, and a shawl, unnecessary and undesired, was quickly put upon her shoulders. ‘I was told to bring you this—and I’ve been waiting half an hour. Oh, keep it on, the night is chilly—to please me, Joyce.’
‘Why should you make me do what I don’t wish, to please you?’
‘Well, if it is what you don’t wish; but consider that your health is of great consequence, and if you were to catch cold—or any unpleasant thing——’
‘There could not be a better time,’ said Joyce, ‘at the beginning of the holidays.’
‘Has something gone wrong with you to-night?—you are not as sweet as your ordinary—oh yes—sweet always, sweet ever to me. But something has come over you. You are so merry about them sometimes. You make me laugh, though I am not sure that it is right to laugh at the aristocracy—they have their difficulties, as we have ours.’
‘I wonder at you! Wherein are they different?—the same flesh and blood, I hope—no better education, often not so good. What then? Who was it they referred to for everything to-night?—to know all about the story and the history: the history of their own country, and we in sight of the very scene! Who did they come to ask from as if I were an oracle? and you say that knowledge is power——’
‘Yes, in a way, assuredly it is. There is a moral superiority; there is a sense of true nobility——’
‘Oh, stop, stop! In spite of all, if I had stayed there,’ cried Joyce, with an indignant sweeping motion of her arm towards the lighted windows, which now shone like faint stars in the distance, ‘should I have been like them? They would have talked and been kind; they would have asked me questions. What would you like, Joyce?—a cup of tea? Have you seen these pictures, Joyce? What can we show her to amuse her? And a gentleman would have come forward and said something, looking as if he were afraid I would curtsey when I spoke to him, like one of the children! and there would be little looks at me as if it were wonderful I could behave myself. And the lady herself, who is all goodness—yes, she is all goodness!—would give me a glance after a while, or perhaps a whisper, Now, Joyce, run away. Why—why should it be—so little difference, and yet so much? To feel nothing but scorn at the thought they are our betters, and yet never to feel at ease with them!’ Her foot gave an impatient mortified stamp on the ground, and her eyes, unseen, overflowed with hot and angry tears.
‘These are questions which are sometimes painful—but not necessarily so,’ said the young schoolmaster. ‘Take hold of my arm going down the avenue. Oh do! It is dark, and you might stumble, and the moon gives little light under the trees. And then, don’t you think I have a right to a little, just a little, kindness, more than everybody else? Well, then,’ he went on in a satisfied tone, as Joyce, moved by this argument, conceded the arm, though with some reluctance. ‘I will tell you all about it. It would be painful if it were not looked at from a high point of view. It is mortifying when there is no difference—when you are just as well instructed, perhaps better, and acquainted with all the rules of politeness, and even etiquette, and all the rest of it’—Joyce moved uneasily, impatiently, on his arm, and he had to hold her fast to retain it—‘to feel that there is a difference!’ he went on hastily; ‘and founded upon nothing reasonable, upon no solid ground. For to call them our betters is folly. Wherein are they our betters? not in acquaintance with everything that is best—with literature, with science, with what Tennyson calls the long results of time.’
‘If you think you are explaining, you are making a mistake,’ said Joyce,—‘you are only repeating what I said.’
The young schoolmaster laughed, but with confusion and a little resentment. ‘I am coming to the explanation,’ he said. ‘For one thing, it’s against our dignity, yours and mine, that are just as good as they are, to take offence. It’s a pitiful thing to take offence.’
He said ‘peetiful,’ and now and then made other betrayals in accent of his northern origin; but that was nothing, for some of the gentlemen did the same. This thought flew through Joyce’s mind with the rapidity of light, followed, like its attendant shadow, by another, a painful, hateful consciousness of this involuntary proof of the differences which they were discussing. The gentlemen! Why or how this distinction, which she herself made without knowing? In the darkness, unsuspected of her companion, who was going on quite easily, she blushed to her hair, to her heels, with a glow all over her.
‘But we must reflect,’ he said, ‘that in this world there must always be a certain sacrifice to appearances. And it’s more lovely and of good report to keep up different grades. Abstract justice is one thing, but fair-seeming also has to be considered. An aristocracy is a graceful thing. People like us, that consider these matters, may well consent to keep it up for the beauty of it. We cultivate flowers for the same end. It would be more profitable to fill all the garden beds with cabbages or gooseberries. We yield that for beauty, and we yield the other too. And then you and I, Joyce,’ he said, pressing her arm, ‘we have the advantage or the disadvantage, whichever you like to call it, of belonging to an exceptional class.’
Here again a murmur made itself heard in Joyce’s mind. Did he? For herself she made no question. She put him in her mind beside Captain Bellendean,—the Captain, as everybody called him—and her brain grew confused. But Halliday continued, with an equable sense of giving instruction, which confused her more and more.
‘We are, so to speak, everybody’s equal,’ he said. ‘We are probably superior to most of these people, but we are not going to compete with them in their way. There is no doubt that we are superior to the other classes, who cannot, in any manner, hold their own with us, except just by sheer force of money, or something of that measurable kind. We have therefore a rank—a rank, Joyce, that is by itself, that is becoming more and more acknowledged every day.’
He pressed her arm as he spoke, and she, wildly roving in her mind through every kind of bye-way of thought, did not like it, but made no sign, restraining herself, answering nothing, which was not Joyce’s way. She was thus caught and attached to reality, while her mind went wandering through space, in no way agreeing in the supposed triumphant argument of his—sometimes flashing a contradiction upon him which he could not see; chafing at the restraint; eager to throw him off, yet not doing so; held fast by circumstances and her fate.
‘When you and I set up together, Joyce,’ he said, clasping her arm closer, ‘which I hope will be soon, for I’m weary waiting—when you and I have our home together, we’ll have a home where any one may be proud to come to; where every meal will be a feast, and nothing spoken of or thought of that is not high—above the ideas of the common. We’ll have nothing common there. We’ll talk of the grandest things. We’ll be better than princes or kings; and by and by, when the world’s a little wiser—as we’re making it wiser every day—when a great statesman comes to Mid-Lothian, or a great scholar or a poet, it’s you and me he’ll come to. We’ll not have grand rooms to put him in, but it’s with us he’ll find the minds to understand him. Even now, if Tennyson were to be up yonder,’ he pointed back to the house—‘would he care for them, who could not quote a line he ever wrote, or us, who could say—what could we not say?—all his poems, I believe between you and me.’
At this Joyce laughed aloud with a sudden burst of ridicule. ‘Do you think he would care to hear his own poems? I think he would rather go up to the house, where nobody would be afraid of him.’
‘Afraid of him! why should we be afraid? I hope our manners are good enough for—as good as——’
‘Oh, what do you mean about manners? doesn’t that just prove what I say?—we should be afraid of him. We could quote all his poems one after another. What would he care for that? Miss Greta, that knows none of them, except perhaps the Queen of the May, would please him better. Why? Oh, how can I tell you? but I know it! She would know the people he knows; and, don’t you see, when you speak about manners, that alone shows—— Oh yes, we are different, and that is the truth. We may know more—and we might know double again, and it would not make any difference. There is more in it than that.’
‘Yes, there is money in it, if that is what you mean,’ said the schoolmaster scornfully.
‘That is not what I mean; but it’s true—there is money in it—and beautiful rooms, and people that have lived in them all their life, and their fathers before them, and that are used to be the best wherever they go. We say we’re the best, but we’re not used to it. It is in our thoughts, but not in other people’s. Oh, there is a difference! I feel I don’t belong to the cotters’ houses, but I am at ease in them: and in the farmers’ I feel—oh, a little queerish, as if I were smiling at their money and their notion that they were better than me—superior as you say. But in Bellendean I would be awkward and blush. I would say, Thank you, mem, or sir. Perhaps I could talk better than the rest if I were to try——’
‘You could—you could.’
‘What would that matter?’ cried this stern philosopher. ‘I would be just Joyce Matheson among them all. But here I’m not Joyce Matheson, I’m—anything. I’m Desdemona or even Rosalind. I’m Lady Joyce, as granny says. I’m no match for any but a prince—oh, Andrew!—what I meant to say was that in my thoughts I’m a grand lady, but in Bellendean, nobody—nobody! a little schoolmistress, a little country girl.’
‘I know what you mean,’ he said, recovering the hand she had drawn from his arm. ‘But if you love me, Joyce, I’m prince enough for anything,’ he said in a lower tone.
This touch of feeling suddenly coming in silenced Joyce. She made no reply. Love had been little talked of between them. They had thought more of Shakespeare and the poets generally, and of that culture which levels all distinctions, and makes of those who are engaged ‘in tuition’ the superiors of the world. There was always this strange question, too, so little explicable, of class distinctions, which contradicted all theories, and set culture aside as if it meant nothing. They were both aristocrats by birth, holding fondly to the doctrine of a superior race, but feeling also a wistful, nay, sometimes angry, wonder why their own special affinities for that race were not more justly recognised.
‘After all, the class that we belong to is the greatest of all,’ said Halliday. ‘The greatest men have come out of it. The peasant is a kind of king. He has nothing to do with money-making, and poor sordid trades. He digs his bread out of the soil. However we may get up and up, we have no reason to be ashamed of him. In the cottages you are at your ease, you said——’
‘But not because I belong to them,’ cried Joyce, with a flash of her eyes. ‘If I did, I would not say so; it would be natural. But I don’t: I belong to nobody: if I were a peasant, I would be a peasant and nothing more; but I am nobody, and I think and think—and sometimes I have silly dreams.’
He tried again to take her hand. ‘Not silly, perhaps,’ he said; ‘the world is before us. I see nothing that we might not do—you and me together, Joyce.’
You and me together! This was not what she was thinking of. The vague exaltation and vaguer hope which sometimes swept her up to heights unknown had nothing to do, it must be confessed, with Andrew Halliday. She drew herself apart from him, on the evident ground that they were emerging from the darkness of the avenue into the bright moonlight at the park gates. The village street opened beyond, with various groups about enjoying the freshness of the night. The women were out at their doors; a knot of men smoking their pipes and talking in their slow rustic way, stood together at a corner. Without a doubt, there were two or three pairs, not so bashful as Joyce, taking advantage of the moonlight. But it was in conformity with Halliday’s principles as well as her own to maintain the loftiest decorum. They walked down side by side, with quiet gravity and propriety, talking of what Mr. Halliday called ‘the topics of the day’: the success of all the festivities in honour of the Captain’s return, the Captain himself and his character, and other cognate subjects,—a kind of conversation which anybody might have listened to with edification. Indeed, even in the avenue, where it was dark, and Joyce’s arm was in that of her lover, the talk had not been any drivel of love-making, as the reader knows. But Joyce had not said a word to him of the excitement which lay deep at the bottom of her heart. She had never said a word to Halliday of the commotions which the thought of her possible origin awoke; and of Colonel Hayward and his strange questions and looks she had said nothing. All this was kept a secret from her lover; she kept it jealously, but she could scarcely have told why.
Old Peter Matheson stood at his door, in the full light of the moon, which threw all the roughnesses upon his surface into shadow, as if he had been a mountain. He was a mountain in his way, or rather an angular tall old crag, his face seamed as with torrents. The moon subdued the high colour, the deep frosty-red and russet-brown of his weather-beaten countenance, and made his scanty circle of white locks like a silver crown. He was standing in the middle filling up the doorway, with a lordly indifference to his wife, who stood spying at the moonlight from under his arm.
‘Yon’ll be them,’ Janet had said, as the two slim figures suddenly rose out of the white distance.
‘How can ye tell it’s them? It might be onybody,’ said Peter, in his deep voice.
‘Wha would it be but them? It’s no the Captain and some young lady—therefore,’ said Janet, ‘it’s bound to be our twa. There’s nae ither twa like them. And I would ken our Joyce at ten mile.’
Peter grumbled something about the impossibility of seeing anything except the hills or the sea at ten miles, and about the nonsensical character of her remarks generally. But with a swelling at his old heart which almost brought the water to his eyes (not hard to do), decided that she was right, and that Joyce could be distinguished as far as mortal vision would carry. The way she stepped, and the carriage of her—like a lady! she was just like the Queen!
‘Sae it’s you after a’. I was thinking nae ither pair would move along like twa steeples, nae nearer. Come away. It’s a bonnie night, but I’m wantin’ my supper. I canna fill my wame with the moonlicht, like you twa.’
‘Is it late, grandfather? I might have known it was late, as it’s so dark, or would be but for the moon.’
‘Na, na,’ said the old man, with a laugh as deep and bass as his voice; ‘it wasna to be expected you should mind. We’re no lookin’ for impossibilities. But there is a fine smell of stoved ta’aties. Your granny is a woman that loses no time.’
‘Now that they are come,’ said Janet from within, ‘come in, come in to your supper. Dinna stand and chatter there.’
The supper was simple enough. There were oatcakes and cheese on the table, a large dish of stoved potatoes, steaming and savoury, and a jug of milk. The potatoes were a feast for a king; the steam of them rose like domestic incense to the dim roof. The table was set as far from the fire as possible, the door left open, the moonlight, silver to the threshold, stopped about a yard within, drawing a clear line of separation between its intense ethereal whiteness and the ruddy light of the little lamp. Joyce sat facing the moonlight, looking out across the homely table into that mystic world outside: conscious of the contrast between the little human group, so well defined and distinct, the smoky lamplight on their faces, and the great universe beyond, all filled with spiritual light, with moving shadows and subdued voices—mystic, mysterious. Now and then a step passed, the line of some flitting figure crossed the doorway, and sometimes a cheerful voice called ‘Good-night’ at them in passing, while the talk went on within.
‘Weel, and did a’ yon nonsense come to pass, and were ye satisfied?’ Janet asked.
‘Yes, granny; pretty well. Everybody was pleased.’
‘Except yoursel’, ye exacting thing! They wouldna do just a’ ye told them, that would be the cause.’
‘J’yce is a lass that likes her ain gait. Ye manna gang into it wi’ your eyes blindfold, Andrew, my man.’
‘Yes, they did what I told them, granny. But the Scots maidens could hardly be distinguished from the Saxon maidens, which was a mistake; and we could not get anything like right costume, there was so little time. But they knew no better,’ said Joyce, with a slight inflection of contempt; ‘they were quite pleased.’
‘And that is a very difficult question,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘Do you think there would be much difference at that early period?’
‘What!’ cried Joyce, lighting up, ‘between the Saxon ladies that were with the Athelings, that had been in a Court, and the wives of the wild Picts, or whatever they were—for history knows little of them—on the other side!’
‘And what were you?’ said Janet, while Peter burst into one of his long, derisive, admiring laughs, with a ‘Hearken to her!’ which brought the water to his eyes.
‘I was nobody. I was a tirewoman. I was not thinking of me. I was in the lady’s train in her journey, with a big cloak of the Captain’s,’ said Joyce, permitting herself to laugh.
‘And wherefore no’ a Scots lady, to wait upon her in her kingdom,’ said Janet, half offended. ‘You have aye an awfu’ troke with thae English, as if you liked them the best.’
‘How can she do that when she never kent ane?’ said Peter, in his innocence.