The Colonel took his wife’s arm, drawing her close to him, leaning over
her little figure: he could hold her closer in this way, and take her
strength more completely into his own than if she had taken his arm in
the ordinary fashion. But she gave him but an uncertain support for the
first time in their life. The group made up of those two figures linked
into one, making but one shadow, tottered as they set out. And she made
no reply to his look, to the urgent clasp of his arm on hers, until they
had passed out of the village street, and gained the quiet and stillness
of the avenue within the gates. Then Elizabeth--unprecedented
action!--detached herself almost with impatience. ‘You hurt me, Henry,’
she said quickly, with a sharp intolerance in her tone. This brought the
painful excitement of the morning to a climax; for when had she
complained before?
‘My dear!’ he cried, with a tone of compunction and horror, ‘I--hurt
you?’ as if he had been accused of high treason and brutal cruelty
combined.
This accent of amazed contrition brought Mrs. Hayward to herself. ‘Oh
no, Henry,’ she said, ‘you did not hurt me at all. I am not fit to speak
to any good Christian. I am a wretched creature, full of envy, and
malice, and all uncharitableness. Let me alone a little till I come to
myself.’
The Colonel gave her a piteous look. ‘As long as you please, my dear,’
he said; then added apologetically, ‘I can’t help feeling very anxious.
There is more in this than meets the eye--there is more in it than I
realised: there is--the--the young lady, Elizabeth.’
In spite of herself his wife looked at him with a momentary scorn which
was almost fierce. ‘Do you mean to say that this is the first time you
have thought of that?’
The Colonel was very apologetic. ‘I am afraid I am dense,’ he said;
‘but, my dear, I always like to wait till I know what you think--and as
yet you have said nothing. How was I to suppose----’ Here he broke off,
seeing in his wife’s eyes more than he could read all at once, and with
a tremulous movement laid his hand again upon her arm. ‘What is it?’ he
said.
She was tremulous too, but in a different fashion. She began to open out
a little parcel which she held in her hand quickly, almost with
indignation. ‘You will know what to think when you see you own hand and
name,’ she said. ‘There! that’s been laid up waiting for me--fancy! for
_me_ to find it--these twenty years.’
The Colonel looked at the yellow old letters with increasing agitation,
but no increase of understanding. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What does it
mean, Elizabeth? I did not go through all this, only to come to an old
letter of my own at the last.’
The little woman stamped her foot with a kind of fury. ‘I think you are
determined not to understand,’ she cried. ‘Look who that letter is
addressed to--look at this other along with it; for God’s sake, Henry,
don’t worry me any more! don’t ask what I think: look at them for
yourself.’
He did look, but with so bewildered an expression that compassion
overcame her. She took the papers over which he was puzzling, looking at
his own writing vaguely, with a quick impatient movement.
‘You have been right, quite right in your conjectures,’ she said; ‘the
poor girl that came here alone twenty years ago, and had her baby, and
went wrong in her head, and died, was your poor young wife, Joyce
Hayward, Henry. There is your letter to her--not the kind of letter I
should have thought you would have written; and there is hers to you, a
voice out of the grave. Don’t look at me in that pitiful way. I don’t
expect you to read it here. Go away to your own room or into the woods,
Henry, and read your wife’s letter. Go away! go away! and do this for
yourself without me. I am not the person,’ cried Mrs. Hayward, thrusting
them into his hands, and pushing him impatiently from her,-- ‘I am not
the person to read your wife’s letter. Go away! go away!’
‘My wife’s letter,’ he said, with a momentary look of awe and trouble.
Then suddenly he put one arm round her, and, half sobbing, said, ‘Twenty
years since! it has always been right, all the time, my darling, between
you and me.’
‘Oh, Henry!--is that all you think of at such a moment?’
He patted her shoulder with his large and unsteady hand, and held her
close. ‘If it is not all, it’s the first and foremost,’ he said; ‘you
will never again, Elizabeth, never any more----’
‘Oh, go away! go away!’ she cried, stamping her foot upon the path.
There were tears in her eyes, half love and softness, half impatience
and fury. She pushed him away from her with all her strength, and
turning her back upon him, walked quickly through the trees and across
the park in the full sunshine. She was distracted with conflicting
sentiments, unwilling to be melted, yet touched to the heart; determined
that he should go back by himself into that distant past with which she
had nothing to do, yet scarcely able to resist the habit of doing
everything for him, of encountering even that for him. She hurried along
until she had got within the shade of a belt of wood, and out of sight
of the spot where she had left her husband. Here Mrs. Hayward suddenly
sat down upon the grass, and hid her face in her hands. Sometimes it
became necessary for her, even in the ordinary course of affairs, to
escape for a moment now and then from the Colonel’s constant demands.
But to-day it seemed to her that she must do this or die. The sudden
summons, the long journey, the agitating news, the commission so
suddenly put into her hands, the discovery she had made, all united had
overwhelmed her at last. She cried heartily, as she did everything, with
an abundant natural overthrow of feeling which relieved and exhausted
her, and a sensation underneath all which she could not define whether
it was happiness or pain.
This Joyce, who had been from the beginning the shadow upon her married
life, in despite of whose possible claims she had married, and whom she
had regarded all through with a mixture of pity and indignation and
fear, roused in her, dead, almost as strong feelings as if she had been
a living claimant to the name and place which were hers. The very fact
that the poor girl’s story was so pitiful, and that nothing could take
away the interest and compassion roused by the image of a young forsaken
creature dying so miserably with no one near who loved her, was to Mrs.
Hayward at this moment an additional aggravation, adding a pang to all
the rest. And yet there was in it an unspeakable relief; and the fact
that this, and not any revival of the romance of his youth, had been her
husband’s first thought, was exquisite to her, yet with a certain acrid
sweetness, not unmingled with pain and the contradictoriness of a highly
sensitive, impatient, and intolerant soul, sharply conscious of every
complication. For notwithstanding her strong personal share in the
matter, it was clear to Elizabeth that he ought to have thought of the
other, the poor girl in her youth and misery, first; and that the sight
of her letter, the words written in her anguish, coming to him as it
were from her grave, across the silence of twenty years, ought to have
transported the man to whom these words were addressed out of all
recollection of the present,--out of everything save that tragedy of
which, however innocently, he was the cause. She could not but feel it
sweet that it was herself and not the dead Joyce of whom in reality he
had thought: yet, in a manner, she resented it, and was wounded by it as
a thing against nature which ought not to have been. ‘That is all that a
man’s love is worth,’ she said to herself. ‘He cost her her life, and it
is me he thinks of, who am well and strong, and in no trouble.’ And yet
it went to her heart that he should have so thought.
In this keen complication of feeling, Mrs. Hayward, for the time, could
realise nothing else. It was not possible to think of the dead girl and
herself but as rivals: and this, too, gave her a pang. How mean, how
ungenerous, how miserable it was! Such a story in a book, much more in
real life, would have moved her to warm tears; but in this, which
touched herself so closely, she could feel no true pity. It was her
rival; it was one who had come before her, whose shadow had lain upon
her life and darkened it, who even now was bringing trouble into
it--trouble of which it was impossible to fathom the full extent. How
could there be tenderness where such sharp antagonism was? And yet, how
poor, how small, how petty, how unworthy was the feeling!
In these contrarieties her mind was caught, and thrilled with sharp
vexation, shame, scorn of herself, and sense of that profound vanity of
human things which makes the present in its pettiness so much greater
than the past, and dims and obliterates everything that is over. To
think that such a tragedy had been, and that those who were most
concerned thought of their poor share in it first, and not of her who
was the victim! That contradiction of all that was most true and just,
that infidelity which is in every human thing, the callousness and
egotism which ran through the best, jarred her with a discord which was
in herself as well as in all the rest. But when she had cried her heart
out, Mrs. Hayward, as was natural, exhausted that first poignant
sensation, and came to contemplate, apart from all that was past, the
present condition of affairs, which was not more consolatory. Indeed,
when, putting the tragedy of the poor Joyce who was dead out of her
mind, she returned to the present, the figure of the living Joyce
suddenly rose before her with a sharp distinctness that made her spring
to her feet as a soldier springs to his weapon when suddenly confronted
by an enemy. Mrs. Hayward had never seen Joyce, so that this figure was
purely imaginary which rose before her, with a stinging touch, reminding
her that here was something which was not past but present, a
reality,--no affair of memory or sentiment, but a difficulty real and
tangible, standing straight before her, not to be passed by or
forgotten. She sprang up as if to arms, to meet the new antagonist who
thus presented herself, and must be met, but not with arms in hand, nor
as an antagonist at all. Joyce herself would scarcely have been so
terrible to encounter as Joyce’s child thus coming between her husband
and herself, taking possession of the foreground of their existence
whether they would or not. What Mrs. Hayward would be called upon to do
would be--not to retire before this new actor in her existence, not to
withdraw and leave the field as she had always felt it possible she
might have to do, but to receive, to live with,--good heavens! perhaps
to love her! Yes! no doubt this was what the Colonel would want; he
would require her to love this girl who was his child. He would take it
for granted that she must do so; he would innocently lay all the burden
upon her, and force her into a maternity which nature had not required
of her. A mother! ah yes, she could have been a mother indeed had God
willed it so; but to produce that undeveloped side of her, that capacity
which she had been so often tempted to think Providence had wronged her
by leaving in abeyance, for the benefit of this country girl, this
Scotch peasant, with all her crude education, her conceit (no doubt) of
superiority, her odious schoolmistress’s training!
Mrs. Hayward could not sit still and look calmly at what was before her.
There was something intolerable in it, which stung her into energy,
which made her feel the necessity of being up and doing, of making a
stand against misfortune. However much she might resent and resist in
her private soul, she would have to do this thing, and put on a
semblance of doing it with, not against, her own will and liking. Talk
of the contradictions of fate! they seemed to be all grouped together in
this problem which she had to work out. If the child had been a boy, the
Colonel would have been compelled more or less to take the charge upon
himself. There would have been school or college, or the necessities of
a profession, to occupy the newcomer; but that it should be a girl--a
girl, a young woman, a creature entirely within the sphere of Colonel
Hayward’s wife, whose business it would be not only to be a mother to
her, but to receive her as a companion, to amend her manners, to watch
over all her proceedings, to take the responsibility night and day!
Mrs. Hayward felt that she could have put up with a boy. He would not
have been her business so much as his father’s, and he would not for
ever and ever have recalled his mother, and put her in mind of all that
had been, and of all she herself had already borne. For though she had
accepted the position knowing all that was involved, and though it was,
so to speak, her own fault that she had encountered these difficulties,
still there could be no doubt that she had for years had much to bear;
and now what a climax, what a crown to everything! A second Joyce, no
doubt, with all the headstrong qualities which had made the first Joyce
spoil her own life and the lives of others, with all the disadvantages
of her peasant training, of her education even, which would be rather
worse than ignorance. Mrs. Hayward conjured up before her the image of a
pupil-teacher, a good girl striving for examinations, immaculate in
spelling, thinking of everything as the subject of a lesson: looking up
with awe to the inspector, with reverence to some little prig of a
schoolmaster, a girl with neat collars and cuffs, knowing her own
condition in life, and very respectful to her superiors: or else
bumptious, and standing upon her dignity as an educated person, which
Mrs. Hayward had heard was more the way of the Scotch. In either point
of view, what a prospect, what a companion!
And the Colonel’s wife knew how that good man would conduct himself. He
would remonstrate with her if the girl were _gauche_, or if she were
disagreeable and presuming. He would say, ‘You must tell her’--‘you must
make her do so-and-so.’ If his taste was shocked, if the girl turned out
to be very dreadful, he himself, who ought to know so much better, would
throw all the blame upon her. Or perhaps, which would be still more
intolerable, his eyes would be blinded, and he would see nothing that
was not beautiful and amiable in his child. With a sudden flush of
irritation, Mrs. Hayward felt that this would be more unbearable still.
Joyce had been the bugbear of his life in the past; what if Joyce were
to be the model, the example of every good quality, the admiration and
delight of his life to come: and she herself, the step-mother, the
half-rival, half-tyrant, the one who would not appreciate the new
heroine! No one was so ready as Elizabeth to perceive all her husband’s
excellent qualities. He was good as an angel or a child--there was no
soil in him. His kindness, his tenderness, his generous heart, his
innocent life, were her pride and delight. And the perpetual appeal
which he made to her, the helplessness with which he flung himself upon
her for inspiration and counsel, made him dearer still. She herself
laughed and sometimes frowned at the devout aspiration, ‘If only
Elizabeth were here!’ for which all his friends smiled at the Colonel;
but at the same time it warmed her heart. And yet there was no one in
the world so feelingly alive to the irritations and vexations which were
involved in this supreme helplessness and trust. There were moments when
he worried her almost beyond endurance. She had to be perpetually on the
watch. She had to subdue herself and forget herself, and make a thousand
daily sacrifices to the man whom she ruled absolutely, and who was ready
at her fiat almost to live or die. But of all intolerable things, that
which was most intolerable was the suggestion that he might in this
matter judge for himself without her aid,--that he might admit this
strange girl into his heart, and place her on the pinnacle which had
hitherto been sacred to Elizabeth alone.
She had seated herself on a grassy bank under the shade of the trees
which skirted one side of the park of Bellendean. Instinctively she had
chosen a spot where there was ‘a view.’ How many such spots are there to
which preoccupied people, with something to think out, resort half
unawares, and all-unconscious of the landscape spread before them!
Edinburgh, gray in the distance, with her crags and towers, shone
through the opening carefully cut in the trees, the angle of the castled
rock standing forth boldly against the dimness of the smoke behind; and
the air was so clear, and the atmosphere so still, that while Mrs.
Hayward sat there the sound of the gun which regulates the time for all
Edinburgh--the gun fired from the Castle at one o’clock--boomed through
the distance with a sudden shock which made her start. She was not a
fanciful woman, nor given to metaphors. But there was something in the
peace of the landscape, the summer quiet, broken only by the hum of
insects and rustle of the waving boughs, the distant town too far off to
add a note to that soft breathing of nature, which made a centre to the
picture and no more--when the air was suddenly rent by the harsh and
fatal sound of the gun, making the spectator start--which was to her
like an emblematic representation of what had happened to herself. To be
sure, if she had but thought of it, that voice of war had been tamed
into a service of domestic peace, a sound as innocent as chanticleer;
but Mrs. Hayward was a stranger, and was unaware of this. As she rose up
hurriedly, startled by the shock in the air, she saw her husband coming
towards her across the sunshine. He was moving like a man in a dream,
moving instinctively towards where she was, but otherwise unconscious
where he was going, unaware of the little heights and hollows, stumbling
over the stump of a tree that came in his way. The sight of his
abstraction brought her back to herself. He came up to her, and held out
the little packet in his hand.
‘Put them away,’ he said hoarsely; ‘lock them up in some sure place,
Elizabeth. To think all that should have been going on, and I
ignorant--oh, as ignorant as the babe unborn!’
‘How could you know when she never told you?’ Mrs. Hayward cried
quickly, instinctively taking his part, even against himself. He put his
large hand upon her small shoulder, and patted her with a deprecating,
soothing touch, as if the wrong and the sorrow were not his but hers.
‘But she meant us to know--that letter, if I had ever got it! She was
young and foolish, young and foolish. Put it away, my dear; don’t
destroy it, but lock it away safe, and let us think of it no more.’
‘That is impossible, Henry. You must think of it, in justice to
her--poor thing;’ this Mrs. Hayward said unwillingly, from a sense of
what was right and fitting, and with a compunction in her heart,--‘and
for the sake,’ she added firmly, after a moment, ‘of your child.’
‘The girl,’ he said vaguely. Then he came closer to her, and put his arm
within hers. ‘You will see to all that, Elizabeth. You understand these
sort of things better than I do. It would be very awkward for me, you
know, a man.’ To describe the persuasive tone, the ingratiating gesture
with which, in his simplicity, he put this burden upon her, would be
impossible. Even she, well as she knew him, was struck with surprise--a
surprise which was half happiness and half indignation.
‘Henry!’ she cried, resisting the appealing touch, ‘have you no heart
for your own child?’
He leant upon her for a moment, drawing as it seemed her whole little
person, and all her energy and strength, into himself. ‘I’m all upset,
Elizabeth. I don’t know what I have, whether heart or anything
else--except you, my dear, except you. Everything will go right as long
as I have you.’