From August to November the time had gone very slowly and very hardly
for Joyce.
After that glowing afternoon, when she had heard from Norman Bellendean
words which she could never forget, not another sign or token from him
had reached her. It is not an unprecedented thing that a gap like this
should happen in the midst of a love-tale. A declaration interrupted, a
question unanswered, may expose any pair of lovers to such a blank. The
man may be kept back by many reasons; the woman on her side cannot
gather up the broken threads. Joyce, above all, had no initiative to
take. He had said he would come back, but he had not come back; and thus
the story of her awakened heart had seemed to close, as it began, in
agitation and shame. It had been wrong to listen to him, wrong to allow
the thought of him to enter into her heart. She had not intended it, she
said to herself, as is always said. The strong new tide which she did
not understand, the character of which she had begun to suspect too
late, had carried her away. What defence could she have put up against
it when she never suspected it,--when it was to her a surprise most
painful, though so intoxicating? Who is there guilty of such infidelity,
forsaking an old love for a new, who cannot excuse herself in such
words? And of many such it is true, as with Joyce, that the first love
had been a mere name, a something not understood, an acquiescence--no
more. If she had sinned against Andrew in accepting the love which was
true enough on his side, without any real response, it had been done
without guile, with no knowledge of any harm. Joyce had been conscious
that it was not the love of which her beloved poets had sung; but how
could she tell? As there was no second Shakespeare, so perhaps that love
of the poets had died away into something calm and poor, like the dull
prose of to-day; and when the dulness about her had burst asunder like a
husk, and flowers had come forth, and a blossoming and brightness
indescribable, the girl, bewildered, had tried to attribute that
illumination to other causes, to give it other names.
The revelation, when it came, lasted but for a moment. Before she had
been able to realise the sunshine that suddenly blazed upon her life,
there had as suddenly followed a blank. The bewilderment and confusion
of all things, which had been great enough before, were by this brought
to a climax. Norman’s declaration or half-declaration completed the
cutting off of her heart and existence from every ancient tie. She dared
not seek light in the chaos of her mind from any one near her. She dared
not betray it to the tender ears of the old people who would not
understand, to whom she could not say all. To whom could she say
all?--to no one, no one on earth. She had to fall back upon herself, a
creature straying about in worlds not realised. Andrew appeared to her
through the mists like the vision of a nightmare, whose approach would
be death. Never, even when no distraction was in her mind, when he was
the most near and the most natural of all companions, had she been able
to tolerate the idea of a closer union. She had vaguely looked for
something to happen, to prevent any further _rapprochement_. She had
surrounded herself with reasons why no further step should be taken. But
she had never felt as now the horror of the bond which held her like
iron--which she had escaped from, yet from which she never could escape.
And, on the other hand, scarcely less terrible was the brighter vision
which had burst upon her in one dazzling, bewildering blaze--the
revelation which at first seemed to be that of Norman Bellendean’s love
for her, but which soon settled into a shameful, terrible consciousness
of her love for him. He had lighted up that blaze, and then he had
disappeared out of her life, leaving her to contend alone with this
discovery and consciousness. He had not asked for an answer from her--he
had only asked to come back. And he had not come back; he had
disappeared as if he had never existed, only leaving this revelation,
this overturn of everything--the glory, the horror, the shame.
Joyce, it is true, had been absent for a great part of this blank period
of darkness through which no word or sign of life had come. She had been
taken away into new scenes, into a new world, the novelty and delight of
which might have saved her had she ever remained long enough in one
place to realise and understand it. But it was only to her of all her
party that Switzerland was a novelty. Her father and his wife were
accustomed to travel. They moved from one tourist centre to another
carrying all their usual habits with them, possessing a terrible
monotony of acquaintance with everything there was to do and to see.
Mrs. Hayward took Mont Blanc as calmly as she did the river of which she
felt her own lawn and trees to be one of the great charms. The Colonel
thought more of the occasional old Indian comrade whom he would meet in
one of the big noisy hotels, than of all the mysteries of the Alps.
Joyce had therefore little aid in healing her wounds herself, as she
might have done, by that strong fascination of nature to which her
spirit was so open. The mountains were not still to her, nor was there
solitude to be found in the wildest ravine. She was taken there in the
midst of a party which discussed their usual concerns, and were intent
upon luncheon at the usual hour. The snowy peaks only formed a new
background for the prattle of common life, for talk about St. Augustine
and the new parsonage. The new world was to her like the old, only more
bewildering--a phantasmagoria in which the great and the petty were
jumbled together,--the great too cold and unfamiliar to reach her soul,
the petty like a babbling torrent carrying her away. Oh for the crags of
Arthur’s Seat and the sea coming in ayont them! Oh for the quiet where
thought is possible! But then with a shiver poor Joyce felt that there
was nothing for her but flight from the dear familiar scenes, and from
the very stillness for which her heart craved. For the one was full of
conflicting passions and the other of conflicting thoughts. Of all
places in the world, that place which, with the obstinacy of the heart,
she still called home was the most impossible to her. She dared not even
turn her face in that direction, lest the subdued struggle within her
might become a real conflict. For there was all that she dreaded as well
as all that she loved.
And even when the travelling was over things did not mend. Summer was
gone, and all its events. She came back to a blank, to the level of an
existence no longer new to her, but which she had never learned to love.
The sudden blaze of awakening, of enlightenment, of delight and misery,
had ceased as suddenly as it rose. She never now heard Norman
Bellendean’s name. He did not come, he gave no sign: he might be dead,
or gone back to India, or in the farthest part of the earth, for
anything she knew. He had disappeared as if he never had been, leaving
in her heart and mind only the miserable consciousness that she loved
him--oh, shame to think of! She so proud in her reserve and maidenly
withdrawal! she, affianced to another man! she, Joyce, who had been so
proud! She felt herself, she who had been a kind of princess in her own
thoughts, reduced to the humble state of the Eastern handmaiden, waiting
till perhaps some token of favour might be shown to her,--some word upon
which she could build her hopes. It is rare that any shame, real and
deserved, is felt with the same sting of suffering and self-horror as
attends the altogether fantastic shame of a sensitive girl, when she
finds that she has given her love unsought. It was torture and misery to
Joyce. To allow to herself that she was disappointed--that her ear was
always intent on every coming step, her heart ready to beat loudly for
every sudden call, filled her with a bitterness of humiliation such as
crime itself would scarcely bring. But nobody had any clue to these
thoughts. Her father saw nothing but that his daughter became every day
more delightful to him, more indispensable. Mrs. Hayward, with a faint
disdain which it pleased her to be able to entertain for her husband’s
daughter, concluded that Joyce, whom everybody thought so clever, was in
reality dull. She had not shown any appreciation of Switzerland. She was
a girl who might know books, perhaps, but nothing else. She had not
cared for the mountains. It was impossible not to allow that Mrs.
Hayward was rather satisfied on the whole that this should be. Perhaps
only old Janet, with a sore and sad heart, felt that something was
amiss. She did not know what it was that was wanting, but something was
wanting. The letters which Peter found an inexhaustible source of
happiness were to her dark. She could not see her child through them.
‘There is something the maitter,’ Janet said to herself. But nobody else
divined, and to no one did Joyce breathe a word.
It was in this condition that she had begun the sunshiny, hazy, November
day. It was Friday, the Friday of the winter Preachings, the Fast-day in
Bellendean. She had remembered this when she set out with Colonel
Hayward for their morning walk, with a tender thought of Janet in her
great shawl, and Peter in his Sunday clothes, sitting in the kirk in
rustic state and religious _recueillement_. And now the blank was
broken, the silence disturbed, but not as she thought.
‘My dear, don’t you be afraid--I am here to protect you, Joyce; your
father is surely good for that. This man can do nothing, nothing. Thank
God that you don’t love him--that there is not _that_ to struggle
against.’
‘Father, it is quite true. Oh, I have behaved badly--I am not fit to be
among honourable folk. I have not respected my word.’
‘Stuff and nonsense, my dear. What did a girl like you know? He took
advantage of your ignorance. You could never have--cared for that
fellow, Joyce.’ The Colonel himself blushed at the thought.
Joyce made no reply.
‘He took advantage of your inexperience--he never could have been a
match for you. I remember--he was there that afternoon in the cottage.
He tried to thrust his claims upon me, but Norman Bellendean took him
off me. Ah, Norman Bellendean!’
The Colonel broke off quickly. He was not clear about it at all, but he
remembered that Elizabeth--that there was something about Bellendean. He
stopped confused; and, with a sudden start, Joyce raised herself from
the sofa. He had brought her to life, though he did not know it, by that
violent stimulant. ‘I must not,’ she said, in a broken voice, ‘go back
from my word.’
‘I set you free from it,’ said the Colonel. ‘You were under age. You had
no right to bind yourself. I set you free from it.’
She shook her head at him with a wistful smile. ‘It was once thought a
priest could do that,’ she said.
‘I am not a priest, but I am your father, Joyce. I set you free from it.
It is in the Bible--you know your Bible better than I do. I set you free
from it. You had no right to bind yourself.’
She shook her head still. ‘I cannot get any comfort out of that. I was a
woman, well knowing what I was doing.’
‘My dear, you are not of age even now.’
‘Oh, father,’ she cried, ‘don’t say anything to me. I cannot go back
from my word.’
‘Joyce, I hear my wife coming back. I am not clever, I know. Elizabeth
is the one to tell us what to do. If she will only take it up--if you
will let her take it up.’
Joyce rose quickly to her feet. ‘Not now--not now. I couldn’t speak to
any one. Father, you must let me settle it by myself.’
‘Joyce! Oh, have confidence in us both, Joyce!’
Joyce escaped from his restraining hand and imploring look. She hastened
out of one door while Mrs. Hayward entered by the other, and, with her
limbs trembling under her, got to the refuge of her own room, where at
least there was no one to question her, and tell her what she ought to
do. She was not capable of any more. She threw herself down in a chair,
and did not move for hours, turning it over and over--helplessly over
and over in her mind. It was all she could do. The scene through which
she had just passed repeated itself before her--every word that had
been said, every look. When she was called to go downstairs for lunch,
she made excuses for herself she knew not what, and sat there with a
sort of helpless craving only to be alone--to be left to
herself--through all the daylight hours. It seemed to Joyce that
everything else had disappeared for ever, that every vision of her soul
was gone,--that Andrew alone stood before her, the only stable and
steadfast thing. She saw him before her eyes all the time, with all his
imperfections. There had never been any glamour in her eyes to blind her
to these. His familiar aspect, with which she had grown unfamiliar, came
back to her with all the force at once of recollection and of new
discovery. He had come to claim her, and he had a right to claim her;
and how could she resist that claim? He had not hesitated, nor had he
been cowed even by her dread of him, by her father’s vehemence. He had
stood for his rights like a man. A respect for the man at whom she
shuddered, whose approach was dreadful to her, had come into Joyce’s
mind: even with strange inconsistency she was half proud of him in his
immovableness--in the resolution and force he had shown. She tried to
face it all calmly, to contemplate her fate,--to ask herself whether,
perhaps, her old life, the duties to which she had been born, were not
after all the best, the only existence for her? There would be plenty to
do, there would not be much time to think. The clamour of the school,
and all the old emulations, and the ambitions which at once seemed
enough to fill any mind, would shut out all echoes and banish all
ghosts. Only for a few months had she been absent--not enough to change
her habits, to change the fashion of her mind. Why should she resist and
strive against her fate?
She tried to soothe and put away other visions by that--the school, the
children’s looks of interest, the clinging of the girls about her, the
books in which she could always escape from all that troubled her. With
her trembling hands clasped, with her eyes in an abstract gaze, she saw
all these things again, and for a moment her heart beat calm. But then
once more, with a sudden flash, with a start, with a cry of horror, she
recognised in front of all, him--Andrew--as he had stood before her
to-day, as she remembered him, as he was and had always been. Joyce
sprang to her feet to escape that steady, calm, immovable image. She put
her hands over her hot eyes, but could not shut it out. She paced about
her room, but could not get beyond the place in which he stood. He
filled all the sphere of her vision, as he would fill her whole life.
Oh, how to escape--how to escape! Oh for the wings of a dove!--but
where to fly? She flung herself down on her knees by the side of her
bed. Sometimes in that attitude merely there is a relief. She was not
praying, but laying her heart with all its confusions, its whirl of
contradictory thoughts, its wild longings for escape, open where God
could see it, calling wistfully His attention to it as human creatures
will, in human forgetfulness that everywhere and in all attitudes He
sees, and does not neglect.
Later in the afternoon Joyce stole out to seek counsel from the evening
breeze and the cold flow of the river. She was afraid to go beyond the
limits of the garden and grounds lest she should meet him alone, and
forestall the decision of her fate. The November evening was chill with
cold dews falling, the grass penetrated with wet, the half-naked trees
all heavy with moisture, sprinkling cold showers over her when the
breeze moved them. She went down to the river-edge, and looked out upon
it in the grey of the twilight, flowing, glistening, giving back the
little light there was. A boat was drawn up here and there on the bank,
but there was none on the stream, which, swollen with early rains, and
bearing on its dark clear surface specks of the leaves that every air
swept off the overhanging trees, flowed on through the darkness, a
ceaseless wayfarer. The willows, still in ragged robes of pale yellow,
gave a faint light to the darkling scene. Joyce leant over, almost
feeling the sweep of the stream, and there came upon her a strong
temptation to detach the boat that lay within her reach, and trust
herself to the flowing water and the night. The possibilities of that
flight came before her instantaneously like a picture. The stream itself
would carry her along; the movement itself would soothe her troubled
spirit. She seemed to feel the rush of the water under the bridge, to
see the lights of the town twinkling reflected on the water, the opening
of the dim evening skies beyond, the dark shadows of barges and ships as
the widening stream flowed on. She saw in a moment all the dark panorama
float past her, the increasing rush of the Thames, the sound of its
gurgle in her ears, the growing dangers of the darkness, and the crowded
ways. The little boat might go down under the bows of some monster in
the dark, and no one ever know what young despairing heart was in it.
She saw, too, the dark mass heaving up high above, the frail little
vessel turning over, the choking inky stream, and drew back with a low
cry of terror. It was indeed a kind of despair which was closing round
her, but she wanted to escape and not to die--not yet to die.
The shuddering of that sensation brought her back slowly away from the
dark fascination of the flowing water. She came back picking her steps
across the wet grass, chilled by the damp and the dark, the cold
raindrops suspended on the branches coming down upon her in an icy
shower as she passed under the trees. The lights in the windows, the
warmth of the house, shone through the twilight, attracting her, putting
forth a strong appeal. But what was warmth and shelter to freedom, if
she could but get her freedom and escape from it all? Joyce had got
beyond all power of thinking. Her mind saw pictures, visions of what
might be, as more reasonable people see the motives and arguments which
tell for or against every course of action. As she turned her face from
the river and reached the gravel path, there suddenly came before her a
vision of a still and quiet country road, such as she had seen in her
walks, leading far away into far level distances, the long perspective
of the low-lying country. She bethought herself of a dozen turns and
byways, all leading into the unknown. She saw them stretching for miles
and miles, leading the wayfarer far out of sight of every one who knew
her, and the dark line of the hedgerows that would keep her from
straying, and the sleeping villages she would pass through. There would
be no dangers in a country road, and she was strong: she could go a long
way without requiring to pause. There would be ten hours of darkness in
which she could walk on. She was not afraid of her strength failing. And
at the end surely there would be some quiet place where nobody would
ever think of finding a strayed creature. It would be like falling and
disappearing through Mirza’s bridge. Joyce stood still for a moment,
moved by a wild prick of that unreasoning impulse which was in her
blood. By the side of the house was a dim opening which admitted to that
world, strange, dark, and cold, in which a poor girl could lose herself
who had no true place, no natural nest in the other. She paused for a
moment, clasping her hands, appealing to she knew not what--not God this
time: there are moments when the bewildered soul becomes pagan in its
broken faith--to something, she knew not what, above, around.
The lamp had been lighted in the drawing-room, but no curtains drawn or
shutters closed. Another picture, a real one, caught her eyes there as
she hesitated, standing on the edge. She was close to the verandah upon
which the window opened, and she heard the sound of the voices within,
now raised, now sinking low. The sudden spell of a stronger interest
seized upon Joyce. She came forward a few steps at a time, unwilling and
yet eager, until she commanded a full view of the party within. Her
father stood facing the window. He was talking with much vehemence,
referring occasionally to his wife, who sat in her usual place, a very
watchful spectator--now and then breaking off with a flourish of his
hand, as a man does when he has said something unanswerable. With his
back towards the window, Andrew sat squarely on a chair, his hat at his
feet. There came upon Joyce an impulse of painful laughter in the midst
of her misery. It was a look, an attitude she knew so well--ludicrously,
horribly familiar in this crisis of her fate,--for it was her fate, her
life or death, they were deciding, while he sat there like a rock,
unconvincible, immovable, as he had sat through many a discussion that
mattered nothing. For who could ever convince Andrew? She drew closer in
the sudden smart of the recollection, the keen sense of incongruity, the
reality of this scene dispersing every vision. The living drama, in
which she was herself the chief figure, had a stronger force than any
imagination. She went into the verandah, to the window against which, on
the other side, she had leant in the morning. It was not fastened, and
yielded to her touch. They all turned upon her at the sound of the faint
cry she gave.