Colonel Hayward was in waiting on the platform at Edinburgh when the
morning express came in from the south. It was a lovely morning. The
unconventional freshness, as of a day still in its childhood and
doubting nothing, was in the air, even in the grimy precincts of the
railway station, where all was black below, yet all fresh above, the sun
shining, the air full of that keen sweetness which, even in a July
morning, breathes in the air of the north. The platform was already full
of people waiting for their friends; and when those friends arrived, and
came pouring from all the carriage doors, with the noise combined of a
crowd and a train, the Colonel was confused by the din and numbers.
Though he had the habit of command, and could have made his authority
felt in a moment had they been soldiers under him, he was pushed out of
his way by women and children and railway porters, without power of
asserting himself; and therefore it was not till most of the passengers
had poured out of the train, that he got to the particular object of his
search--a small, very bright-eyed woman, who stood in the door of the
carriage she had travelled in, looking out calmly upon the confused
scene. She was not grimy, as most of the passengers were, or untidy with
the night’s travelling, or hurried and flustered as everybody else was.
She stood calmly looking down from the height of the doorway, quite
patient and composed. She knew that the Colonel would come: she knew
that he was not very good at pushing his way: therefore she possessed
her soul in patience, making no fuss, showing no anxiety about her box,
calm, commanding the situation. ‘Ah, here you are,’ she said quietly, as
he came up to her, stepping lightly down.
‘Have you been waiting long, my dear?’
‘Oh no; it didn’t matter. I knew you would come. I have one box, and I
know exactly where it is. Don’t let us hurry. I don’t suppose there is
any hurry.’
‘No--perhaps not,--but something very serious, very serious, Elizabeth.’
‘I suppose so, or you would not have sent for me. Wait till we get out
of the noise. I could not hear you, so what would be the use? We are
going to a hotel, I suppose?’
‘We are going to Bellendean, where I am staying. Don’t be surprised.’
‘But I am surprised, Henry. To the great house you wrote to me about?
full of ladies? You forget----’
‘I--forget? No; I forget nothing--all you have done for me, your
kindness, your patience.’
The little lady took him by the arm, with a look of alarm in her face.
She had already sighted her box, and in the course of her dialogue with
her husband, had managed telegraphically to secure a porter and a cab.
Evidently she was of the order of women who take care of others, and do
not expect to be taken care of. She led him towards the cab, as if a
little afraid of his sanity. ‘Where is he to drive to? tell him,’ she
said, keeping a close hold to the Colonel’s arm. She held him fast
still, when they were seated together, until they had got clear of the
tumult of the railway station. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me. It must be
something very much out of the ordinary when you talk of my kindness,
Henry. My kindness!’ In this Mrs. Hayward resembled old Janet Matheson.
It was an offence to her to be praised in that way.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I am more perplexed than I can tell you. You will
say I have often been perplexed before, when you saw little cause for
it; and this is why I sent for you so suddenly; for if anybody can bring
light out of darkness, it is you.’
‘What is it? I am very willing to be sent for, Henry; the only
difficulty is going to this house, when you know my principle, and how
long I have kept out of all invitations and acquaintances.’
‘You that would shine anywhere!’ said the Colonel, with the water in his
eyes, ‘and all for my sake.’
She looked at him again for a moment with a sort of consternation.
‘There you are making a mistake, my dear--for my own. Because I did not
choose that there should ever be a remark.’
He put his hand upon her arm with a heavy pressure. ‘Elizabeth, I am
dreadfully perplexed; but I think, if I am not wrong, that I have come
upon the settlement of all that question; of everything--of what has
hung over us. I think, my dear, that all is right--that all has been
right from the very beginning.’ He stopped a little, and then added,
drawing a long breath, ‘I never had any doubt of it myself.’
A gleam, half of anger, half of fun, darted up into her bright eyes, and
flashed like an arrow of light at him, which the good man did not even
see, and which ended, on her part, with a quick laugh, in which there
was a little amusement, a little excitement, though not very much
expectation. ‘You never had any doubt!’ she said. Then she added, with a
half sigh of impatience-- ‘Tell me all about your new discovery, and
we’ll pull it to pieces and see if there’s anything in it. Have we a
long drive before us? Is there time to get it all out?’
‘Plenty of time; and, oh, the comfort to know that you are here, and to
be able to tell you! I will do what you like best, Elizabeth. I will
tell you all the facts, and then you can judge for yourself. I came to
Bellendean, you know, nearly a week ago. There has been all sorts of
things going on. Great dinners, and all the fine people of the
county--and then the tenantry. It is a--a tidy estate--a number of
tenants--not small farms like what we are used to, but men, you know,
whom really I should have taken for country gentlemen--men paying big
rents, and able to make speeches--and--and that sort of thing.’
Mrs. Hayward kept her eyes upon her husband’s face. She was used, it was
evident, to long explanations, and expected them, and had learned that
patience which comes of necessity. He knew this fact, that she always
heard him out, and never interrupted him, as other people did. But what
he did not know, was that a thrill of natural impatience, never
altogether overcome, was in the veins of the little woman who sat by
him, keeping him to the point with her eyes, never interrupting him in
any other way. ‘Yes,’ she said, when he paused to take breath: but that
was all.
‘Yes; and then, last of all, there was a supper to the labourers and
cottagers. Well, no, not exactly last of all, for the last was the
children’s entertainment--the school-feast we should have called it, but
they don’t say school-feast here--a sort of gathering in the afternoon,
you know, with a band and games, and tea in a great tent, and--you
know?’
‘Yes, I know what a school-feast is.’
‘Well!’--he drew a long breath now, and settled himself down in a manner
which betokened, as his wife by long experience knew, that he was about
coming to the point; but she could scarcely believe it after so short a
preamble. ‘The first thing that happened was at the labourers’ supper:
we were all walking about, and I for my part said a word now and then,
while they were cheering Norman Bellendean--that he was a good fellow,
you know, and all that--the sort of thing one would say at an affair of
the kind, when you do think well of the fellow, you know, and get into
the swim----’
‘Yes?’ said Mrs. Hayward again.
‘Well then. I had the very words in my mouth, when at the end of one of
the tables, between an old man and an old woman, evidently cottagers, I
saw--I declare to you, Elizabeth, my heart leapt into my mouth--I was
choked, I could not say another syllable. I saw her as clear as I see
you.’
‘Whom did you see, Henry?’
‘Joyce!’ He got out the word with difficulty, and, taking out his
handkerchief, fanned himself, puffing forth a hot breath of excitement.
His bronzed face took a coppery tone in the heat of his reawakened
feelings; and this time Mrs. Hayward did not retain her usual calm. She
repeated the cry, ‘Joyce!’ with a tone of mingled astonishment and
dismay-- ‘Joyce!--then why in the name of heaven did you bring _me_
here?’
‘Stop a minute, stop a minute, Elizabeth: you have not heard all; and
how is it possible you could understand? I have described her to you
often. It was as if I saw her, exactly as I had seen her last--the same
looks, the same age.’
‘You must be dreaming,’ cried his wife, almost with anger. ‘If she is
living, according to all you have always said, she must be as old as I
am----’
Sudden indignation seemed to burst from her in these words. She grew
red, she grew pale. The impatience, so entirely concealed before, showed
now in every finger, in every limb, mingled with angry surprise. ‘If you
have sent for me, disturbed me, exposed me, only to tell me this at the
end--that you saw her--the same age as you saw her last! I hope she has
a good reason to give for all the misery she has caused--but the same
age!’ Mrs. Hayward gasped, and said no more.
‘Ah,’ said the Colonel, shaking his head, ‘you don’t see, you don’t see!
No more did I. I couldn’t say a word--I just stopped and stared--a young
lady, clearly a lady, between the two old cottagers--and that look.
Well! I came to myself, Elizabeth, and I thought it is just some chance
resemblance, and I left the place: but disturbed--disturbed beyond what
words could say. I got little sleep--you know how little sleep I get
when I am upset.’
‘I know you think so,’ said his wife, in an undertone.
‘But in the morning I felt calm. I said to myself that it must be some
chance---- Of course there are people who are like each other all over
the world. I knew myself, up in the Punjaub, a man--but that is neither
here nor there. However, next day I was quite easy. I thought nothing
more of it. And then there came the school-feast I told you of--well,
the thing that was the same as a school-feast, though they didn’t call
it a school-feast, you know. I was walking about, thinking of nothing in
particular, and of course it was daylight, and everything quite
clear--when I saw that girl again.’
‘Oh, you call her a girl now!’ Mrs. Hayward said, with that air of
resentment which he did not understand. He paused and looked at her with
sudden anxiety.
‘You are not feeling poorly, Elizabeth? You are not over-tired? You are
not----?’ He could not say angry, it seemed ridiculous; but his
attention was roused, and nothing but her health could be the cause, he
thought, of her change of tone.
‘Go on,’ she said, ‘go on. I am not feeling anything--but a wish to know
what you mean.’
There was a difference in her for all that. And if Elizabeth was going
to fail him, what would become of him? He gave her a serious, anxious,
inquiring look. Then, in reply to an impatient movement on her part,
continued--
‘That’s not all. I went and asked Mrs. Bellendean who she was--though I
had scarcely breath to ask. Elizabeth--conceive what I felt when she
turned round and called Joyce!’
‘Joyce!--well I suppose you did not expect she had changed her name?’
She said this sharply; then added, with an evident effort, ‘My dear, I
beg your pardon. I don’t wonder you were upset. Joyce--and it is a name
one never hears. Did she--know you?’
‘Know me? She had never seen me, nor heard of me--how should she know
me? And I was left for a long time in a state I can’t
describe--wondering whether it could be a relation--God knows what I
didn’t think! Everybody knew the girl. She was the schoolmistress, as it
turned out, but a lady every inch of her. Everybody liked her, consulted
her, clustered about her. I heard nothing but Joyce, Joyce, wherever I
turned.’
Mrs. Hayward’s impatience seemed to have died away. She patted his arm
with her small hand, saying, ‘Poor Henry!’ with a tone of compunction in
her pity. She had done him wrong, or else she had done wrong to Joyce.
To Joyce--the very name, though she had heard it so often, was like an
arrow quivering in her heart.
‘Elizabeth, all that is as nothing to what I am going to tell you now. I
want all your attention. I have waited till you came: I haven’t even
tried to think: I have said to myself, Elizabeth will know. Now you must
give your mind to it, and tell me what to do. Elizabeth, this is the
story I heard. Twenty years ago, just the date I’ve often told you--the
date I remember so well--you know, my dear, you know----’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Well!--Just then this girl’s mother came to Bellendean--all by herself,
going north, it was thought. She was going to have a baby----’ The old
Colonel here fell a trembling, and his wife took his hands and held them
in her own, caressing them--two large brown tremulous hands--between her
small white nervous ones. He leant back on her shoulder too, which was
not half broad enough to support him. ‘The short and the long is this:
she had her baby, and she died. And the baby is Joyce--named after her
mother; and there are clothes and letters to prove who she was----’
‘My poor Henry! God help you, my dear! You have seen them? it was--she?’
‘No--I haven’t seen them. I hadn’t the courage. I could think of nothing
but you. You’ll do it for me, Elizabeth? you’ll see what you think. I--I
couldn’t look up the old things. I--couldn’t--decide--I couldn’t----’
He could do nothing but tremble, it seemed, and falter out these broken
words, and lean back upon her, the colour going out of his face. She
thought he was about to faint.
‘Come, Henry, this will never do,’ she said quickly. ‘Rouse yourself, my
dear fellow--rouse yourself up. We will bear it together, whatever it
may be. And it doesn’t seem, so far as I can see, as if there would be
anything new to bear.’
‘If it was so. She never told me, Elizabeth--that anything like that
could happen.’
‘Perhaps she did not know. You have always said she was young and
inexperienced. Oh, poor thing! poor thing!’
He loosed his hands from hers, and suddenly threw his arms round her,
enfolding her, with something like a sound of sobbing. ‘If it was fault
of mine, God forgive me! God forgive me! But, Elizabeth, my dear! it has
always been all right between you and me--as I felt sure all along.’
Her bright eyes were for a moment dimmed too. She gave him a sudden
light kiss upon his old cheek, and then softly detached herself. ‘We
will say no more about that just now. If all this is as you think,
Henry, there is something more important even than you and me--the
girl.’
‘Ah, the girl!’ He spoke vaguely, as if his attention had been
distracted from that part of the subject. ‘You will see her,’ he said,
‘the very living image--and then the name--just as she was the last time
I ever saw her. Elizabeth: you will understand the kind of creature she
was--the--the impetuosity--the----’
‘Don’t dwell on all that, or you will upset yourself again. See her! of
course I shall see her. You don’t seem to realise what a wonderful
change for her--and us too. But don’t you think it is you who ought to
see her first and tell her--you who are, after all, the chief person----’
‘I!’ he cried with dismay, interrupting her. ‘Why the chief person? Did
I ever set myself up as the chief person? We have gone along with each
other, Elizabeth, in everything that has been done.’
‘Yes, but in the case of--Joyce.’ She made a little pause before she
said the name. ‘Henry, Joyce, whether living or dead, must be
yours--yours alone. She would have a right to complain if you left her
to me.’
He caught her again, with an alarmed look, by her arm. ‘Is there
anything mine that is not yours too? Has there ever been anything of
mine that was not yours? Don’t go and make a separation just when--just
when----’
‘Separation! it is likely that I should make a separation,’ she cried,
with a laugh in which there was, though he was unconscious of it, a
great deal of nervous excitement. Then she looked out of the carriage
with a little cry of admiration: ‘What is this? Have we got to
Bellendean already? What beautiful trees! I did not know there were such
fine trees in the north. And now I must think of meeting Mrs.
Bellendean. Isn’t it rather bold of you to bring me here?’
‘Not bold at all. The invitation was from her. I did not ask for it. It
was she herself--entirely she----’
‘I know what you did,’ said Mrs. Hayward, with a smile. ‘You said, I
wish Elizabeth were here. And she heard it, and suggested that you send
for me. Most likely she was a little amused about Elizabeth. I know your
way, and what the young fellows say, that you always want Elizabeth,
whatever happens.’
‘So I do--so I do; though I can’t tell how they know, the jackanapes.
Here we are at the door.’
‘You must smuggle me upstairs before anybody sees me, for I’m very
untidy; and I know how fresh they will all look in their morning
things,’ cried Mrs. Hayward, with a shade of disquietude in her eyes.
‘Oh yes, you shall be smuggled upstairs,’ cried the Colonel, confident
in the security of the early hour. And presently the pair found
themselves in the cheerful room prepared for the newcomer, with tea set
out upon a table. Elizabeth took at once the command of the position.
She gave him some tea, then dismissed him to an easy chair in his own
room, which communicated with hers, where, as he began to doze, he could
see her little figure moving about, appearing and disappearing, as she
unpacked her things and made herself comfortable. She looked, he
thought, as if she had been there all her life. It was a faculty
peculiar to her. She made the barest barrack-room look like herself
somehow, before she had been half an hour in it. Wherever she was, the
place began to appear like home directly. He had the immense sense of
relief which a man in charge of a difficult post feels on the arrival of
his commanding officer who takes over the responsibility, and that
delightful loosening of moral tension filled him with pleasant
drowsiness. His eyes, half shut, half open, were conscious of her, and
that everything was being looked after; and, as a matter of fact, he had
not slept well for two or three nights, though Elizabeth had scoffed at
this. He had a most refreshing doze while she dressed and made herself
look as fresh as the morning. As for her having been untidy, even after
the night-journey, that was a thing impossible to Elizabeth. But he knew
that she would come out looking fresher than the day.
She was a little woman of about forty-five, with the complexion of a
girl, and eyes that were as blue as an infant’s, but with the quality of
brightness which belongs more frequently to a darker hue. Not soft and
dreamy as blue eyes should be, but keen and clear, dancing with
light--eyes which saw behind as well as before, and which nothing could
elude. There was no sleep or weariness in them, but there was, visible
to her own perception as she looked at herself in the glass, a keener
glitter of uneasiness, a little curve of anxiety in the lids. He seemed
to think only of this possible revelation of the past--which, no doubt,
was important, very important; but of the future, which she saw so
distinctly opening upon them, a future entirely new, distracting, for
which neither she nor he had any preparation, he seemed to take no
thought. That was Henry’s way, she said to herself, to be overwhelmed by
one view of a question, which had half a dozen other aspects more
important, and to make himself quite comfortable about it when the
first shock was over, without an idea of what the consequences might be:
dear old stupid that he was! She, too, glanced at him as she passed and
repassed the doorway, with a tenderness in which there was a mixture of
amusement and partial irritation and fun and sympathy, all mingled
together. His goodness, his strength, his helplessness and confusion of
mind, his high courage and authority and judgment, and his complete
dependence and docility, were all so evident to those keen eyes of hers,
which adored him, laughed at him, smote him with keen shafts of
criticism, made haloes of glory about him all at one and the same
moment. He had brought her many a ravelled skein to disentangle, but
never any so serious as this. Joyce dead had been a shadow often
discouraging upon her life, but Joyce living filled her lively soul with
a shrinking of dismay. And of this he did not seem to have a thought.