"I ride to a tourney with sordid things,
They grant no quarter, but what care I?
* * * * *
I have bartered and begged, I have cheated and lied,
But now, however the battle betide,
Uncowed by the clamour, I ride ride, ride!"
VICTOR STARBUCK.
Joan did not see Aunt Janet again. Miss Abercrombie carried messages
backwards and forwards between the two, but even Miss Abercrombie's
level-headed arguments could not move Aunt Janet from the position she
had taken up. And Miss Abercrombie was quite able to realize how much
her old friend was suffering.
"I never knew a broken heart could bring so much pain," she told Joan;
"but every time I look at your aunt I realize that physical suffering is
as nothing compared to the torture of her thoughts."
"Why cannot she try to understand. Let me go to her," Joan pleaded. "If
only I can speak to her I shall make her understand."
But Miss Abercrombie shook her head. "No, child," she said, "it would be
quite useless and under the circumstances you must respect her wishes. I
am fearfully sorry for both of you; I know that it is hurting you, too,
but when you have wilfully or inadvertently killed a person's belief in
you the only thing you can do is to keep out of their way. Time is the
one healer for such wounds."
The tears smarted in Joan's eyes, yet up till now she had not cried
once. Hurt pride, hurt love, struggled for expression, but words seemed
so useless.
"I had better hurry up and get away," she said; "I suppose Aunt Janet
hates the thought of my being near her even."
Miss Abercrombie watched her with kindly eyes. The tragedy she had
suspected on the first night was worse even than she had imagined. It
stared at her out of the old, fierce face upstairs, it slipped into her
thoughts of what this girl's future was going to be.
"Have you made any plans?" she asked; "do you know at all where to go?"
"Does it matter very much?" Joan answered bitterly.
"My dear," Miss Abercrombie spoke gently, "I am making no attempt to
criticize, and I certainly have no right to judge, but you have a very
hard fight before you and you will not win through if you go into it in
that spirit. I do not want to ask questions, you would probably resent
them, but will you tell me one thing. Does the man know about what is
going to happen?"
"No," answered Joan. "It wouldn't make any difference if he did. It is
not even as if he had persuaded me to go and live with him; I want you
to understand that I went of my own free will because I thought it was
right."
"You will write and tell him," suggested Miss Abercrombie. "That is only
fair to him and yourself."
"No," Joan said again, "it was the one thing he was most afraid of; I
would not stoop to ask him to share it with me."
Miss Abercrombie put out a quick hand. "You are forgetting that now
there is someone else who is dependent on how you fight and whether you
win through. You may say, 'I stand alone in this,' yet there is someone
else who will have to share in paying the cost."
The colour swept from Joan's cheek; she choked back the hard lump in her
throat. "We will have to pay it together," she said. "I cannot ask
anyone else to help."
The tears, long held back, came then and she turned away quickly. Miss
Abercrombie watched her in silence for a minute or two. At last she
spoke. "You poor thing," she said slowly and quietly; "you poor, foolish
child."
Joan turned to her quickly. "You are thinking that I am a coward," she
said, "that I am making but a poor beginnings to my fight. But it isn't
that, not exactly. I shall have courage enough when it comes to the
time. But just now it is hurting me so to hurt Aunt Janet; I had not
reckoned on that, I did not know that you could kill love so quickly."
"You can't," Miss Abercrombie answered. "If her love were dead all this
would not be hurting her any more."
So Joan packed up her trunks again, fighting all the time against the
impulse which prompted her to do nothing but cry and cry and cry. The
chill of Aunt Janet's attitude seemed to have descended on the whole
household. They could have no idea of the real trouble, but they felt
the shadow and moved about limply, talking to each other in whispers.
Miss Janet was reputed to be ill, anyway, she was keeping her room, and
Miss Joan was packing up to go away; two facts which did not work in
well together. No wonder the servants were restless and unhappy.
Uncle John met Joan on her way upstairs late that evening. His usually
grave, uninterested face wore an expression of absolute amazement, it
almost amounted to fear.
"Will you come into my room for a minute," he said, holding the door
open for her to pass.
Once inside, he turned and stared at her; she had never imagined his
face could have worn such an expression. She saw him trying to speak,
groping for words, as it were, and she stayed tongue-tied before him.
Her day had been so tumultuous that now she was tired out, indifferent
as to what might happen next.
"Your aunt has told me," he said at last. "I find it almost impossible
to believe, and in a way I blame myself. We should never have allowed
you to go away as we did." He paused to breathe heavily. "I am an old
man, but not too old to make a fight for our honour. Will you give me
this man's name and address, Joan?"
She had not paused to think that they would look on it as their honour
which she had played with. His rather pitiful dignity hurt her more than
anything that had gone before.
"I cannot do that," she answered; "there is nothing exactly that you
could blame him for. I did what I did out of my own free will and
because I thought it was right."
He still stared at her. "Right," he repeated; "you use the word in a
strange sense, surely; and as for blaming him"--she saw how suddenly his
hands clenched, the knuckles standing out white--"if you will let me
know where to find him, I will settle that between us."
Joan moved towards the door. "I cannot," she said; "please, Uncle John,
don't ask me any more. I have hurt your honour; it must be me that you
punish. I am going away to-morrow, let me go out of your life
altogether. I shall not make any attempt to come back."
"You are going to him?" he questioned. "Before God, if you do that I
will find you out and----"
"No," she interrupted, "you need not be afraid; I am not going back to
him."
With her hand on the door she heard him order her to come back as he had
not finished what he had to say, and she stayed where she was, not
turning again to look at him.
"You are being stubborn in your sin." How strange the words sounded from
Uncle John, who had never said a cross word to her in his life. "Very
well, then, there is nothing for us to do except, as you say, to try and
forget that we have ever loved you. When you go out of our house
to-morrow it shall be the end. Your aunt is with me in this. But you
shall have money; it shall be paid to you regularly through my
solicitor, and to-night I am writing to him to tell him to render you
every assistance he can. You can go there whenever you are in need of
help. Miss Abercrombie has also promised your aunt, I believe, to do
what she can for you."
"I would rather not take any money from you," whispered Joan; "I will be
able to earn enough to keep myself."
"When you are doing that," he answered grimly, "you may communicate with
the solicitor and he will put the money aside for such time as you may
need it. But until then you owe it to us to use our money in preference
to what could only be given to you in charity or disgrace."
She waited in silence for some minutes after his last words. If she
could have run to him then and cried out her fear and dismay and regret,
perhaps some peace might have been achieved between them which would
have helped to smooth out the tangle of their lives. But Joan was
hopelessly dumb. She had gone into her escapade with light laughter on
her lips, now she was paying the cost. One cannot take the world and
readjust it to one's own beliefs. That was the lesson she was to learn
through loneliness and tears. This breaking of home ties was only the
first step in the lesson.
She stole out of his presence at last and up to her own room. Her
packing was all finished, she had dismantled the walls of her pictures,
the tables of her books. Everything she possessed had been given to her
by either Uncle John or Aunt Janet. Christmas presents, Easter presents,
birthday presents, presents for no particular excuse except that she was
their little girl and they loved her. It seemed to Joan as if into the
black box which contained all these treasures she had laid away also
their love for her. It took on almost the appearance of a coffin and
she hated it.
Miss Abercrombie saw her off at the station next morning. She had given
Joan several addresses where she could look for rooms and was coming up
to London in about a month herself, and would take Joan back with her
into the country. "I want you to remember, though," she added, "that you
can always come to me any time before that if you feel inclined. You
need not even write; just turn up; you have my address; I shall always
be glad to have you. I want to help you through what I know is going to
be a very bitter time."
"Thank you," Joan answered; but even at the time she had a ridiculous
feeling that Miss Abercrombie was very glad to be seeing the last of
her.
After the train had slid out of the station and the small, purposeful
figure had vanished from sight she sat back and tried to collect her
thoughts to review the situation. She was feeling tired and desperately
unhappy. They had let her see, even these dear people whom of all others
in the world she loved, that she had gone outside their pale. She was in
their eyes an outcast, a leper. She was afraid to see in other people's
eyes the look of horror and agony which she had read in Aunt Janet's. Of
what use was her book-learned wisdom in the face of this, it vanished
into thin air. Hopeless, ashamed, yet a little defiant, Joan sat and
stared at the opposite wall of the railway carriage.
At Victoria Station she put her luggage into the cloak-room, deciding to
see what could be done in the way of rooms, without the expense of going
from place to place in a cab. The places Miss Abercrombie had
recommended her to struck her as being expensive, and it seemed to her
tortured nerves as if the landladies viewed her with distrustful eyes.
She finally decided to take a bus down to Chelsea; she remembered having
heard from someone that Chelsea was a cheap and frankly Bohemian place
to live in.
London was not looking its very best on this particular morning. A
green-grey fog enshrouded shops and houses, the Park was an invisible
blur and the atmosphere smarted in people's eyes and irritated their
throats. Despite the contrariness of the weather, Joan clambered on to
the top of the bus, she felt she could not face the inside stuffiness.
She was tired and, had she but owned to it, hungry. It was already late
afternoon and she had only had a cup of coffee and a bun since her
arrival.
As the bus jolted and bumped down Park Lane and then along
Knightsbridge, she sat huddled up and miserable on the back seat, the
day being well in accord with her mood. She was only dimly aware that
they were passing the flat where she and Gilbert had lived, she was more
acutely conscious of the couple who sat just in front of her--the man's
arm flung round the girl's shoulders, her head very close to his.
Waves of misery closed round Joan. A memory, which had not troubled her
for some time, of Gilbert's hands about her and the scent of heliotrope,
stirred across her mind. She could feel the hot tears splashing on her
ungloved hands, a fit of sobbing gulped at her throat. Lest she should
altogether lose control of herself she rose quickly and fumbled her way
down the steps. The bus had just reached the corner of Sloane Street.
She would go across the Park, she decided, and have her cry out. It was
no use going to look for rooms in her present state, no landlady would
dream of having her.
Half blinded by her tears and the fog combined, she turned and started
to cross the road. Voices yelled at her from either side, a motor car
with enormous headlights came straight at her out of the fog. Joan
hesitated, if she had stayed quite still the danger would have flashed
past her, but she was already too unnerved to judge of what her action
should be. As if fascinated by the lights she shut her eyes and moved
blindly towards them.
There were more sharp shouts, a great grinding noise of brakes and
rushing wheels brought to a sudden pause, then the darkness of black,
absolute night surged over and beyond the pain which for a moment had
held Joan. She floated out, so it seemed, on to a sea of nothingness,
and a great peace settled about her heart.