But the best laid schemes of Yvonnes and men often come to nothing.
While she was devising, on her drive along the coast, a plan for
spending a quiet dangerless evening at the hotel, Mrs. Winstanley was
sitting in solitary dignity at the concert, nursing her wrath over
Professor Drummond’s “Natural Law in the Spiritual world,” a book which
she often perused when she wished to accentuate the rigorous attitude of
her mind.
Yvonne had reckoned without Mrs. Winstanley. Otherwise she would have
offered her a seat in the carriage. As it was, Mrs. Winstanley felt
more resentful than ever. Under the impression that the Canon was to
accompany her to the Kursaal, she had graciously dispensed with the
escort of the Wilmingtons, who had gone off to see bicycle races at the
Vélodrome. She was left in the lurch.
To dislike this is human. To wrap oneself up in one’s sore dignity is
more human still, and there was much humanity that lurked, unsuspected
by herself, in Mrs. Winstanley’s bosom. It asserted itself, further,
in certain curiosities. She had seen that morning what had escaped the
Canon’s notice--the stranger’s grasp on Yvonne’s arm and the insolent
admiration on his face. This fact, coupled with Yvonne’s agitation, had
put her upon the track of scandal. The result was, that at the concert
she made interesting discoveries, and, piecing things together in her
mind afterwards, bided her time to make use of them.
It would be for the Canon’s sake, naturally. A woman of Mrs.
Winstanley’s stamp is always the most disinterested of God’s creatures.
She never performed an action of which her conscience did not approve.
But she was such a superior woman that her conscience trembled a little
before her, like most of the other friends whom she patronised. She did
not have to wait long. The Canon called upon her soon after his return
to invite herself and the Wilmingtons to dinner. It was his last
evening at Ostend, and Yvonne was not feeling well enough to spend it,
as usual, at the Kursaal.
“Yvonne is still poorly, Everard?” she asked, with her air of
confidential responsibility.
“A little. She has been gadding about somewhat too much lately, and it
has knocked her up.”
“Has it not occurred to you that her encounter this morning may have had
something to do with it?”
“Of course not,” replied the Canon, sharply. “It would be ridiculous.”
“I have reasons for not thinking so, Everard. The man was singing at the
Kursaal this afternoon. Here is his name on the programme.” She
handed him the slip of paper. He read the name among the artistes. “M.
Bazouge.” He returned it to her.
“Well?”
“Does it not seem odd to you?”
“Not at all. A relation of her first husband’s, I suppose. In fact
Yvonne said as much.”
“I could not help being struck by the name, Everard. It is so peculiar.
I remembered it from the publication of the banns.”
“I compliment you on your memory, Emmeline,” said the Canon.
Mrs. Winstanley drew herself up, offended.
She walked from the window where they were standing to a table, and
fetched from it a newspaper.
“Do you remember the Christian name of Yvonne’s first husband?”
The Canon drew himself up too, and frowned.
“What is the meaning of all this, Emmeline? What are you trying to
insinuate?”
“If I thought you were going to adopt this tone, Everard, I should have
kept my suspicions to myself.”
“I certainly wish that you had,” said he, growing angry. “It is an
insult to Yvonne which I cannot permit. My wife is above suspicion.”
“Like Caesar’s,” said the lady with a curl of the lip. “Do you know that
we are beginning to quarrel, Everard? It is slightly vulgar. I am your
oldest friend, remember, and I am trying to acquit myself of a painful
duty to you.”
“Duty is one of the chief instruments of the devil, if you will excuse
my saying so,” replied the Canon.
“Oh, very well then, Everard,” she said hotly. “You can go on being
a fool as long as you like. I saw your wife struggling in this man’s
embrace, more or less, this morning. Two or three strange coincidences
have been forced upon my notice. For your sake I have been excessively
anxious. My conscience tells me I ought to take you into my confidence,
and I can do no more. You can see the Christian name of this Bazouge
in the Visitors’ List, and adopt what course of action you think fit.
I wash my hands of the whole matter. And I must say that from the very
beginning, two years ago, you have treated me all through with the
greatest want of consideration.”
The Canon did not heed the peroration. He stood with the flimsy sheet
clenched in his hand and regarded her sternly. She shrank a little, for
her soul seemed to be naked.
“You have tried to ferret this out through spite against Yvonne. Whether
the horrible thing you imply is true or not, I shall find it hard to
forgive you.”
Mrs. Winstanley shrugged her shoulders. “In either case, you will come
to your senses, I hope. Meanwhile, considering the present relations, it
might be pleasanter not to meet at dinner to-night.”
“I am sorry to have to agree with you, Emmeline,” said the Canon.
She made him a formal bow and was leaving the room; but his voice
stopped her.
“Your anxiety cannot be very great, or you would wait to learn whether
your suspicions are baseless or not.”
She paused, in a dignified attitude, with her hand on the back of a
chair, while he adjusted his gold pince-nez and ran through the list.
“You are right so far,” he said coldly. “The names are identical.”
They parted at the door. The Canon walked back to his hotel with anger
in his heart. In spite of cumulative evidence, the theory that his
cousin had insinuated was prima facie preposterous. It was important
enough, however, to need some investigation. But the feeling uppermost
in his mind was indignation with Mrs. Winstanley. He was too shrewd a
man not to have perceived long ago her jealousy of Yvonne; but beyond
keeping a watchful eye lest his wife should receive hurt, he had not
condescended to take it into serious consideration. Now, beneath her
impressive manner he clearly divined the desire to inflict on Yvonne
a deadly injury. To have leaped at such a conclusion, to have sought
subsequent proof from the Visitors’ List, argued malicious design. He
could never forgive her.
Still the matter had to be cleared up at once. On his arrival at the
Océan, he went forthwith to Yvonne’s room, and entered on receiving an
acknowledgment of his knock. She was standing in the light of the window
by the toilet table, doing her hair. The rest of the room was in the
shadow of the gathering evening.
“Well,” she said, without turning, “are they coming?”
The grace of her attitude, the intimacy of the scene, the pleasantness
of her greeting, made his task hateful.
“No,” he said, with an asperity directed towards the disinvited guest.
“We shall dine alone to-night.”
But his tone made Yvonne’s heart give a great throb, and she turned to
him quickly.
“Has anything happened?”
“A great deal,” said the Canon.
Where he stood in the dusk of the doorway, the shadow accentuated the
stern lines of his face and deepened the sombreness of his glance. His
brows were bent in perplexities of repugnance. It was horrible to demand
of her such explanations. To Yvonne’s scared fancy, his brows seemed
bent in accusation. That was the pity of it. For a few seconds they
looked at one another, the Canon severely, Yvonne in throbbing suspense.
“What?” she asked at length.
He paused for a moment, then threw his hat and the crumpled Visitors’
List on to the table and plunged into the heart of things--but not
before Yvonne had glanced at the paper with a sudden pang of intuition.
“Emmeline has discovered, Yvonne, that the man--”
He got no further. Yvonne rushed to him with a cry of pain, clung to his
arm, broke into wild words.
“Don’t say any more--don’t--don’t. Spare me--for pity’s sake. I did not
want you to know. I tried to keep it from you, Everard! Don’t look at me
like that?”
Her voice ended in a note of fright. For the Canon’s face had grown
ashen and wore an expression of incredulous horror. He shook her from
him.
“Do you mean that this is true? That you met your first husband this
morning?”
“Yes,” said she, with quivering lips. Question and answer were too
categorical for misunderstanding. For a moment he struggled against the
overwhelming.
“Are you in your right senses, Yvonne? Do you understand what I asked
you? Your first husband is still alive and you saw him to-day?”
“Yes,” said Yvonne again. “Didn’t you know when you came in?”
“I did n’t know,” he repeated almost mechanically.
The blow crushed him for a while. He stood quite rigid, drawing
quick breaths, with his eyes fixed upon her. And she remained still,
half-sitting on the edge of the bed, numb with a vague prescience of
catastrophe, and a dim, uncomprehended intuition of the earthquake and
wreck in the man’s soul. The silence grew appalling. She broke it with a
faltering whisper.
“Will you forgive me?”
The poor little commonplace fell in the midst of devastating
emotions--pathetically incongruous.
“Did you know that this man was alive when you married me?” he asked in
a hard voice.
“No,” cried Yvonne. “How could I have married you? I thought he had been
dead nearly three years.”
“What proofs did you have of his death?”
“A friend sent me a number of the Figaro, with the announcement.”
“Was that all?”
“Yes,” said Yvonne.
“Do you mean to tell me,” he insisted, “that you married a second time,
having no further proofs of your first husband’s death than a mere
newspaper report?”
“It never occurred to me to doubt it,” she replied, opening piteous,
innocent eyes.
The childlike irresponsibility was above his comprehension. Her apparent
insensibility to the most vital concerns of life was another shock to
him. It seemed criminal.
“God forgive you,” he said, “for the wrong you have done me.”
“But I did it unknowingly, Everard,” cried poor Yvonne. “If one has to
get greater proofs, why did you not ask for them, yourself?”
The Canon turned away and paced the room slowly, without replying. At
last he stood still before her.
“Among ordinary honourable people one takes such things for granted,” he
said.
“Forgive me,” she said again, humbly.
But he could find no pity for her in his heart. She had wronged him past
redemption.
“How much truth was there in the newspaper story?” he asked coldly.
She told him rapidly what Amédée Bazouge had said concerning his attack
in the hospital and his subsequent stroke.
“So the man is wilfully killing himself with absinthe?” he said.
“It appears so,” replied Yvonne with a shudder.
“Could you tell me what passed between you otherwise--in general terms?”
he asked, after a short silence. “You explained your position? Or did
you leave him in ignorance, as you were going to leave me?”
“I told him--of course. It was necessary. And he laughed--I thought to
spare you, Everard.”
“Spare me, Yvonne?”
“Yes,” she said, simply, “I could have borne all the pain and fright
of it alone--why should I have made you unhappy? And _he_ said he would
never interfere with me, and I can trust his word. Why should I have
told you, Everard?”
“Do you actually ask me such a question, honestly?”
“God knows I do,” she replied pitifully.
“And you would have gone on living with me--I not being your husband?”
“But you are my husband,” cried Yvonne, “nothing could ever alter that.”
“But good God! it does alter it,” cried the Canon in a voice of anguish,
breaking the iron bonds he had placed on his passion. “Neither in the
eyes of God nor of man are you my wife. You have no right to bear my
name. After this hour I have no right to enter this room. Every caress
I gave you would be sin. Don’t you understand it, child? Don’t you
understand that this has brought ruin into our lives, the horror of
loneliness and separation?”
“Separation?” said Yvonne.
She rose slowly from her seat on the bed and stared at him aghast.
The twilight in the room deepened; the shadow of a wall opposite the
window fell darker. Their faces and Yvonne’s bare neck and arms gleamed
white in the gloom. They had spoken with many silences; for how long
neither knew.
“Yes,” replied the Canon in his harder tones, recovering himself “It
means all that.”
“I am to go--not to live with you any more?”
“Could you imagine our past relations could continue?”
“I don’t understand,” she began feebly. And then the darkness fell upon
her, and her limbs relaxed. She swayed sideways and would have fallen,
but he caught her in his arms and laid her on the couch.
“Thank you,” she murmured faintly.
She hid her face in her hands and remained, crouched up, quite still, in
a stupor of misery. The Canon stood over her helplessly, unable to find
a word of comfort.
The sight of her prostration did not move him. He had been wounded to
the very depths of his being. His pride, his honour, his dignity were
lacerated in their vitals. He burned with the sense of unpardonable
wrong.
“It is self-evident,” he said at last, “that we must part. Our remaining
together would be a sin against God and an outrage upon Society.”
She rased herself wearily, with one hand on the couch, and shook her
head slowly.
“Such things are beyond me. No one will ever know.”
“There is One who will always know, Yvonne.”
She pondered over the saying, as far as her tired, bewildered brain
allowed. It conveyed very little meaning to her. Theology had not
altered her child-like conception of the benevolence of the Creator.
After a long time she was able to disentangle an idea from the
confusion.
“If it is a sin--don’t you love me enough to sin a little for my sake?”
“Not that sin,” he said.
Yvonne lifted her shoulders helplessly.
“I would commit any sin for your sake,” she said. “It would seem so
easy.”
Curiously assorted as they were, a poetic idealism on the one side and
grateful veneration on the other had hitherto bound them together. Now
they were sundered leagues apart; mutual understanding was hopeless.
Each was bewildered by the other’s moral attitude.
The logical consequences of the discovery, that appeared so luridly
devious to the Canon’s intellect, failed entirely to appeal to Yvonne.
She referred them entirely to his personal inclinations. On the other
hand, the Canon had a false insight into her soul that was a chilling
disillusion.
The beauty of her exquisite purity and innocence had always captivated
in him the finer man. It was a mirage. It was gone. Emptiness remained.
She was simply a graceful, non-moral being--a spiritual anomaly.
Yvonne shivered, and rising, walked unsteadily to the wardrobe, whence
she took a dressing-jacket. Putting it on, she returned to the couch. It
was almost dark. The Canon watched her dim, slight figure as it passed
him, with a strange feeling of remoteness. A hundred trivial instances
of her want of moral sense crowded into his mind to support his
view--her inability to see the wrong-doing of Stephen, her indefinite
notions in religious matters, her mental attitude toward the girl that
had gone astray, of whom she had been talking only the night before, her
expressed intention of hiding this terrible discovery from him. He had
been duped, not by her, but by his own romantic folly.
Yet what would his life be without her--or rather without his illusion?
An icy hand gripped his heart. He turned to the glimmering window and
stared at the blank wall.
Presently a moan struck upon his ear. He wheeled round sharply, and
distinguished her lying with helpless outspread arms on the couch. Mere
humanity brought him to her side.
“I am so tired,” she moaned.
“You must go to bed,” he replied in a gentler voice than hitherto. “We
had better part now. To-morrow, if you are well enough to travel, we
will leave for England.”
“Let me go alone,” she murmured, “and you go on to Switzerland. Why
should your holiday be spoiled?”
“It is my life that is spoiled,” he said ungenerously. “The holiday
matters very little. It is best to return to England as soon as
possible. Between now and to-morrow morning I shall have time to reflect
upon the situation.”
He struck a match and lit the candles and drew down the blind. The
light revealed her to him so wan and exhausted that he was moved with
compunction.
“Don’t think me hard, my child,” he said, bending over her. “It is the
bitterest day of our lives. We must pray to God for strength to bear it.
I shall leave you now. I shall see that you have all you want. Try to
sleep. Good-night.”
“Good-night,” she said miserably.
And so, without touch of hand, they parted.
The hours of the evening wore on, and night came. At last she cried
herself to sleep. It had been a day of tears.
They left Ostend quietly the following morning by the Dover boat. During
the whole journey the Canon treated Yvonne with the deferential courtesy
he could always assume to women, seeing to her comforts, anticipating
her wants, even exchanging now and then casual remarks on passing
objects of interest. But of the subject next his heart he said not a
word. The crossing was smooth. The sea air revived Yvonne’s strength.
His silence half comforted, half frightened her. Had he relented? She
glanced often at his impassive face, in cruel anxiety to pierce to the
thoughts that lay behind. Yet a little hope came to her; for fear of
losing it she dared not speak. To her simple mind it seemed impossible
that merely conscientious scruples could make him cast her off. If he
loved her, his love would triumph. If he persisted in his resolve, he
cared for her no longer. In this case her future was very simple. She
would go back to London and sing.
She seemed to have cried her feeling away during the night--such as he
had left unbruised and untorn. For the quivering flesh is only sensitive
up to a certain point of maceration. He had trodden upon her pitilessly;
but she felt no resentment. In fact, she would have been quite happy if
he had put his arms round her and said, “Let us forget, Yvonne.” By the
end of the journey she had cajoled herself into the idea that he would
do so.
A suite of rooms received them in the quiet West End hotel where the
Canon always stayed. They dined alone, the discreet butler waiting on
them, for the Canon was an honoured guest. When the cloth was removed,
the Canon said in his even voice:--
“Are you sufficiently recovered, Yvonne, to discuss this painful
subject?”
“I am quite ready, Everard.”
“We will make it as short as possible. What I said last night must
remain, whatever be the suffering. I have loved you deeply--like a young
man--in a way perhaps ill befitting my years. The memories, for they are
innocent, will always be there, Yvonne. If I did not seek strength from
Elsewhere, it might wreck my life to part from you.”
Her hope was dashed to the ground. She interrupted him with one more
appeal. “Why need we part, Everard?” she said, in a low voice. “I mean,
why cannot we live in the same house--before the world--?”
“It is impossible,” he replied. “You don’t know what you are asking.”
His voice grew husky. He paused a few seconds, then, recovering himself
continued in the same hard tones:--
“As we must live apart, it is my duty to make provision for you. I shall
alter my will, securing to you what would have come to you as my wife.
During my lifetime I shall make you an allowance in fair proportion to
my means. And it will be, of course, unconditional.”
Then, for the first time, her gentle nature rose up in revolt against
him.
“I could not accept it, Everard,” she cried with kindling cheeks. “If I
have no right to bear your name I have no right to your support. Don’t
ask me to take it, for I can’t.”
“Yvonne, listen to me--”
“No,” she went on passionately, “I am speaking as a woman now; the time
has come, and you were right in your prophecy--I would sooner die than
live away from you and be supported by you. You don’t understand--it is
as if I had done something shameful and you were putting me away from
you. Oh, don’t speak of it,--don’t speak of it. If I am not your wife
before God, I have no claims on you.”
“To hear you speak like that pains me intensely,” he said. “Do you think
I have lost all regard for you?”
“If you loved me, you would not wish to part from me,” said Yvonne with
her terrible logic.
They were on different planes of thought and feeling. The Canon argued,
insisted, but to no purpose. Yvonne was inconvincible.
The talk continued, drifted away for a time to arrangements for the
immediate future. A reply telegram came from Geraldine Vicary, to the
effect that she would be with Yvonne in the morning. It was settled that
Yvonne should stay with her provisionally, and that she, in order to
avoid painful meetings and communications, should be Yvonne’s agent in
the necessary settlement of affairs. Finally, the Canon returned to
the subject of the allowance. He would settle a certain sum upon her,
whether she would accept it or not. Yvonne flashed again into rebellion.
The idea was hateful to her. He had no right to make her lose her
self-respect.
“But it is my solemn duty that I must perform. Will nothing I can say
ever make you understand?” he exclaimed at last, in exasperation.
Yvonne rose and came to where he sat, and laid her hand upon his
shoulder with an action full of tenderness, and looked down upon him
with her wistful dark eyes, all the more wistful for the rings beneath
them.
“Don’t be angry with me--over last evening. It is good and generous of
you to wish to make provision for me. But I shall be much happier to
feel myself no burden upon you. And it will be so easy for me to earn my
living again. I shall be much happier, really.”
The little word, with which she so often confirmed her statements, the
familiar touch of her hand, the sense of her delicate, fragile figure so
near him caused a spasm of pain to pass through his heart; disillusion
had not touched his common, human want of her. He bowed his head in his
hands.
“Some day, Yvonne, it may be possible for me to ask you--to come back.
If I give in to your wishes now, will you give in to mine then?”
The emotion in his voice was too strong to escape her. It stirred
all the yielding sweetness and tender pity of Yvonne. She forgot the
reproaches, the pitilessness, the religious scruples comprehended only
as unloving. His broad shoulders shook beneath her touch.
“I will come whenever you want me,” she said.
“If I have been ungenerous in word or thought to you, Yvonne, forgive
me.”
Her hand strayed shyly to a lock of grizzling hair above his temples and
smoothed it back gently.
He raised his head, and looked at her for a second or two with an
expression of anguish.
Then he sprang to his feet, and before Yvonne, shrinking back, could
realise his intention, his arms were about her in a tight clasp, and
his kiss was on her face. “God help us. God help us both, my child.” He
released her and went hurriedly from the room.
And so they parted.
Part II
CHAPTER XIV--“IN A STRANGE LAND”
They buried Noakes on the other side of the _kopje_ behind the house.
He had lasted through the winter and early spring, but the season of the
rains and heat, when the damp oozed through wooden walls and mud floor,
and hung clammily upon sheets and pillows, gave the remnants of his
lungs no breathing chance, and Noakes went uncomplainingly to his place.
Joyce laid “the dear lady’s” letter on his breast before nailing down
the rough wooden coffin. It seemed as if most of his own heart too were
enclosed with the letter, to be put away under the ground for ever and
ever. Wilson the farmer, himself, and a Kaffir carried the coffin to the
hole that had been dug beneath a blue gum-tree. There Wilson read the
burial service of the Church of England.
He was a religious man, when he was not drunk, and set great store by
a prayer-book that he had saved from the wreckage of churchgoing times.
Over a fat, phlegmatic, brick-red face the sun had spread a glaze, as if
to shield the colour from other counteracting climatic influences.
His speech was thick and uneducated. At first Joyce had resented his
intention as a mockery, and only to avoid unseemly wrangling did he
stand there and listen, while the Kaffir squatted by, scratching his
limbs in meditative wonder at the incantation. But very soon the solemn
beauty of the service appealed to him. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.” He stooped and threw some handfuls of the red soil
reverently into the grave. It seemed not unfitting that the rude voice
should give the broken life this rude burial.
The service over, Wilson signed to the Kaffir to fill in the grave,
and flicking the perspiration from his forehead, for the sun beat down
fiercely, turned to Joyce.
“Come in now and have a drink.”
But Joyce refused and remained there alone, with his head sunk on his
breast, watching the Kaffir. When the task was done, he set at the
grave-head a great stone he had previously brought there, and slowly
went away. His steps took him mechanically back over the _kopje_. But
when he arrived at the prickly-pear hedge on top, the sight of the mean
shanty and the Kaffir huts and the straggling fields high with corn and
maize, jarred upon his mood. He turned, and descending, struck across
the rank, sodden veldt, that stretched eastward in a terrible monotony
to the sky-line. There, at any rate, he could be alone, away from the
sights and sounds of his dreary toil. A broad gully, half filled with a
red, swollen stream, stopped his progress. Half a mile farther up was a
bridge. But he was tired and hot and sick at heart. A slab in the shade
of an overhanging edge of the ravine met his eye. He clambered down and
sat there, looking into the small swirling flood.
A centipede crawled close by. He drew his knife from his belt, cut the
creature in two, and flicked the pieces into the water, which swept
them instantaneously out of sight. He looked at his knife that had so
speedily given death to the insect. Was he much better, more useful?
One gash, a leap into the stream, and he would be carried away into
eternity. Till yesterday his life had some meaning--the support of the
poor forlorn man just buried. Now, what was the good of his living?
There was no joy for himself, no service to one of God’s creatures. But
after digging his knife idly into the crumbling slab, he returned it to
his belt.
Yet what he had dreaded with almost morbid heart-sinking these latter
months had come about. He was alone. Noakes had gone--passed away like
a shadow, as the burial service hath it. The phrase brought back to his
mind a tag from old days of scholarship--[Greek]--“man is the dream of
a shadow.” He mused upon the saying. Time was, he remembered, when he
had wondered at the strange Greek melancholy underlying even Pindar’s
gladness in outward things, thews and sinews and supple forms. Now
he understood. What sane man who had watched the world could escape
it--this overwhelming sense of the futility of things? To what ends
had Noakes’s life been lived? The ceaseless awful toil of grinding out
despicable literature at sweated wages; the begetting of a child to an
inheritance of misery in the world’s tragedy; the crowning futility of
his senseless exile--what purpose had it all served? Save for the pity
of it, could it be taken seriously? And he himself dangling his legs
over this gully? Verily, the dream of a shadow.
The lines in which the passage occurred came into his head. He repeated
them aloud. Such reminiscences of former culture occasionally visited
him and smote him with their ironic incongruity. He broke into a
mirthless laugh.
The westering sun had already touched the top of the far distant High
Veldt when he turned his steps homeward.
Wilson was squirting tobacco juice over a gate and giving directions as
to the repairing of one of the sluices, that drained the land into the
gully, whence Joyce had come.
“This damn thing will all go to glory soon,” he said.
“We ought to get some pipes,” said Joyce.
“And lay on gas and hot-water,” returned Wilson, sarcastically. “Where’s
the money to come from?”
Joyce shrugged his shoulders and continued his way to the house. He did
not much care. Things were going badly. Well, things had gone badly with
him since he stepped aside from the paths of honest living. He could
expect nothing else.
The sight of the rough bed, tenantless now for the first time for many
months, was inexpressibly cheerless. The indentations too of the coffin
still remained upon it. He smoothed them out mechanically. Then reaching
for a thick pile of foolscap that was on the shelf, he sat down with it
upon the bed. It was the MS. of the novel which Noakes had copied from
the yellow package-paper--all written in his beautiful round hand. He
had been a writing master in his youth and retained a professional pride
in penmanship. For months this copying had been all he could do.
Joyce read here and there, at last became interested. The work was good.
And then for the first time he seriously contemplated mailing it to a
publisher. When the Kaffir came in later to help him prepare supper, he
had made up his mind.
It was a gloomy book, dealing with the abject side of colonial pioneer
work--a tragedy of wasted lives and hopes foredoomed to disappointment.
A picture of wrecks and derelicts; men of broken fortunes, breaking
hearts, degraded lives; poor fools, penniless, craftless, who had come
hither like Noakes, allured by vague visions of El Dorado, to find no
place for them in this new rude land where unskilled labour belongs to
the natives, who defy competition. He called it “The Wasters.” Almost
unconsciously, his intellectual powers had returned to him whilst
writing it. The English was pure, the style vigorous and scholarly. And
the feeling--he had written it with his heart’s blood. Before he went to
sleep that night, he appended to it an alternative title, “The Dream of
a Shadow.”
In the course of time the manuscript was despatched and Joyce settled
down to many months’ forgetfulness of it, and to humdrum loneliness and
labour. Time went quickly, for he took no heed of its flight, having
nothing to hope for. He tried to begin another book, but the stimulus
of Noakes’s appreciation was gone and he sank again into intellectual
apathy. In the long evenings he taught a Kaffir boy to read and write,
while Wilson boozed away the profits of the farm. At the best of times
there was little sympathy between the two men. Often mutual antipathy
manifested itself actively under a thin disguise. The farmer despised
Joyce for a broken-down gentleman unacquainted with any handicraft or
the principles of farming, and Joyce considered his partner a dull sot,
who was letting the farm go to rack and ruin. Still, a habit of life is
a strange help in living. Often Joyce told himself that he must sell
out and try his luck elsewhere. But there was no particular reason for
bringing matters to a crisis on one day more than on another. So the
months wore on.
The work of the harvest knocked him up. He got ague and lay in bed for
three weeks. Wilson cursed the day he ever took him into the place; and
had it not been for the humaneness of their next neighbour, who farmed
more healthy ground some forty miles away, towards the High Veldt,
and carried Joyce off thither one day in an ox-waggon, he might have
speedily followed Noakes. He returned to the farm cured but terribly
gaunt. The lines had deepened in his face, over which the beard grew
straggling, accentuating the hollows of his cheeks. His hands had
whitened and thinned during his illness. Wilson sniffed contemptuously
at them and looked at his own huge glazed and freckled paw.
Winter set in. There was plenty to do--ricks to thatch, buildings
to repair, fields to irrigate. Joyce did not spare himself. Work, if
joyless, was at least an anodyne. It brought on prostrating fatigue,
which in its turn brought long heavy hours of sleep. In that way it was
as good as adulterated whisky.
Some men thrive physically and morally in the wilds. The incessant
conflict with the elemental forces of nature braces nerves and
strengthens the will. And these are exclusive of such as find
satisfaction of primitive instincts only in uncivilised lands--such as
are a reversion to the savage type, and, in the forest or the
desert, live a life truer to their natures than amid the decencies of
civilisation. But the men who thrive are physically and morally adapted
to the struggle--men of energy, ambition, daring, who see in it a means
towards the yet ungained or forfeited place in civilisation. The pioneer
work of new colonies is done by them, and they generally gain their
reward. Joyce had found all the successful men in South Africa belonging
to this type. He had looked at Noakes and himself and groaned inwardly.
They were doomed to perish, it seemed, by natural selection. In the
case of Noakes the foreboding had been fulfilled. Would it be so with
himself? His unfitness for his environment weighed heavier day by day
on his mind: all the more since the loss of the companionship that had
cheered him in dark hours. A habit of brooding silence fell upon him. He
spoke as little as in those awful years of prison. And as his life grew
lonelier and more self-centred, softer memories faded, and those chiefly
remained that had branded themselves in his brain. The gaol came back to
his dreams. Once, in the shed where he had taken up his abode since the
beginning of spring, he awoke in a sweating terror. The disposition
of his bed as regards the window and the height of the latter from the
ground corresponded with the arrangements of his cell. The nightmare
held him paralysed. And this in some form or the other repeated itself
at intervals, so that he was forced to rearrange his room.
He had shifted his quarters owing to the arrival of a fat Boer woman who
claimed connubial relations with Wilson. The suggestion had proceeded
from himself from motives of delicacy and good-nature. At first he had
welcomed her in spite of unprepossessing manners and appearance, and
tried to win her esteem by little acts of civility. But the lady drank;
and one day Wilson, finding her alone in Joyce’s hut, whither she had
come to steal whisky, grew unreasonably jealous and blacked both her
eyes. After which occurrence Joyce and she let each other severely
alone. He relapsed into his sombre apathy.
The life was killing him, brutalizing him. He lost even interest in the
Kaffir boy’s education, which had not been without its light side
of amusement. Hour after hour he would sit, on summer nights, on the
doorstep of his shed, pipe in mouth, elbows on knees, thinking of
nothing, his mind a dull blank. Now and then he thought of Yvonne, but
only in a vague, far-off way. He never wrote or felt urged to write.
What was the good? And he had received no letter from Yvonne since
the one that had accompanied her line to Noakes. Once, several months
afterwards, one of the ox-waggons from the town had been overturned in
a swollen river, and many stores including the mail had been swept away.
The driver told him there had been letters for him. Possibly one from
Yvonne. At the time he regretted it, but his morbid indifferentism had
already begun to darken his mind. He laid conjecture dully aside. The
weeks and months passed and, with all his other longings for sweeter
things, the desire for her letters died. And so the last strand wore
through of the last thread that bound him to England.
As for the novel, he had long since ceased to concern himself about its
fate. Probably it had been lost in transit, either going or returning.
The yellow sheets on which he had written the first draft lay on the
mud floor in the corner of his hut and rotted and grew mildewed with the
damp.
At last, one day, like a bolt from the blue, came the publishers’
letter, offering alternative terms for the book, the usual royalty the
firm paid to unknown authors, or eighty pounds down for the copyright,
to be paid on publication. It aroused him, with a shock, from his
torpor. That night he could not sleep. He got up and wandered about the
veldt through the dewy grasses, under the bright African starlight, his
veins alive with a new excitement. Perhaps he had found a vocation--one
to bring him money, congenial work, the right at last to take his
forfeited place in a civilised land. He returned to the house at
daybreak, worn out with fatigue, but throbbing with wild schemes for the
future. And the following evening, as soon as the toil of the day was
over, he lit his small, smoking lamp, and sat down in feverish haste to
begin a new story, the scheme of which he had half-heartedly worked out
soon after Noakes’s death. The copyright of the other he sold for the
eighty pounds.
And then gradually the longing for England grew more insistent, until at
last it took the form of a settled determination. One day he saddled
a rough farm-pony and rode to the good Samaritan who had taken him in
during his illness. The farmer, a hard-headed Scotchman, shook his head
dubiously when Joyce unfolded his plan.
“Stick to the farm and buy Wilson out. You ’ll mak’ more money, and then
you can retire in a few years.”
“The profits are nearly swallowed up in improvements and transit,” said
Joyce. “It is a bare subsistence.”
“That’s because you don’t go the right way to work. If I had the land,
I’d make it pay soon enough.”
“You are a practical farmer, and I am not,” said Joyce. “Even if I
desired to gain experience, it is precious little I could gain with
Wilson--and I long for home again.”
“That’s all very well--but if you fail with your writing? I have heard
it is a precarious trade.”
“I’m used to failure,” replied Joyce. “That’s what I came into the world
for. You can’t say that I am a conspicuous success as a colonist.”
“Sell out from Wilson, and come here,” said the farmer, “on the metayer
system. I will put you up to a few things.”
Joyce looked round him; they were sitting on the verandah of the
nicely-built house. Everything had the trim appearance of scientific
English farming--the outbuildings solid and clean, the fields high with
grain, the dams in perfect repair, the yard spick and span. A flower
garden lay beneath him. A well-trimmed vine covered the lattice-work
of the verandah. All was a striking contrast to his own ramshackle,
neglected surroundings. A month ago he would have leaped at the offer.
But now he declined it. He distrusted himself, his power of content. If
he once put his hand to the plough, he would not be able to draw back.
And he held ploughs in cordial detestation. He rode back, having thanked
his friend and obtained his consent to act as arbiter, if need were,
between Wilson and himself.
A day or two later, he took advantage of a sober and quasi-friendly
moment, to announce his intention to Wilson, who listened to him
stolidly.
“I hope my sudden withdrawal won’t cause you inconvenience,” said he,
politely. “If it does--”
“My good friend,” replied Wilson, “I am only too damn glad to get rid of
you.”
“Then if you ’ll give me a lump sum down for my share, and lend me
a team, I ’ll leave the infernal place this afternoon,” said Joyce,
nettled.
Wilson went into the house and came out with a roll of greasy notes.
“There,” he said, “will that satisfy you? I ’ve been wanting to part
company for a long time, and I ’ve kept ’em by me.”
Joyce counted the notes, and to his surprise found the sum exceeded that
which he himself calculated to be his due. After half an hour’s joint
examination of their roughly-kept accounts, he found that Wilson was
right.
“You are an honest man,” he said with a smile. “It is a pity you have so
many other failings.”
“I can keep myself out of quod, at any rate,” replied Wilson, “which is
more than some people can say.”
The retort was like a blow in the face. Joyce staggered under it.
“Another time don’t be so devilish smart with your tongue,” said Wilson.
“I ain’t the one to cast a man’s misfortunes in his teeth, but, all the
same, it’s best for a man like you to lie low.”
“What the devil are you talking of?” said Joyce, fiercely.
“What’s the good of bluff? You’ve given yourself away heaps of times.”
“I insist upon knowing what you mean,” said Joyce.
How could this man have learned his history? Noakes could not have
betrayed him. For the honour of his dead comrade he could not let the
matter drop. Wilson tilted back his chair and squirted a stream of
tobacco-juice over the floor, which aroused the indignation of the Boer
woman, who was sitting on some sacks near the door, peeling potatoes.
Her lord was a beastly Englander, and a great many other undesirable
things. Wilson, who had not yet laced his heavy boots, took one off to
throw at her head, but Joyce caught his arm.
“What a brute you are!” he said angrily.
Wilson broke into a laugh.
“You’d better thank Mr. Joyce for saving your beauty from being
damaged,” he said, pulling on the boot again.
“Now,” said Joyce, as soon as domestic peace was restored, “tell me what
you meant just now.”
Wilson rose, went to the door and ostentatiously spat over the Boer
woman’s head; then he turned round to Joyce:--
“Look here,” he said, “I have my hands full enough of quarrelling as it
is. You ’d better trek off with that waggon and a couple of niggers.
And I ’ll give you a piece of advice. When next you shake down alongside
of a man to sleep, just keep from blabbing all your private affairs to
him. And that’s why I wanted to be shut of you. We can do without your
kind hereabouts. No wonder you were surprised to find me honest.”
“I suppose I must beg your pardon,” said Joyce humiliated. “I had no
right to speak to you as I did.”
“If you had held your tongue, I should have held mine, as I have done
for the last year and a half,” replied Wilson.
A few hours later Joyce stood up in the ox-waggon and looked back at the
detested place that had so long been his home. It was just a speck in
the midst of the cheerless plain under the irregular mound, the _kopje_,
behind which poor Noakes lay buried. He drew an envelope from his pocket
and looked at the blade of grass he had picked from the grave. Ashamed
of his sentimentality, he twirled it between his fingers, undecided
whether to throw it away or not. He ended by replacing it in his pocket.
After all, it symbolised a pure, tender feeling, and he was not carrying
away with him too many.
He smoked in silence through the night, under the clear stars. He was
sore at heart, deeply humiliated. The buoyancy of new hopes which his
little literary success had occasioned during the last few weeks, had
gone. The sense of the ineffaceable stain overpowered him. It was a
fatality. Go where he would, he could not hide it from the knowledge of
men. In his own land, accusing fingers pointed to it at street corners.
In the uttermost ends of the earth he himself proclaimed it aloud.
To have lived for months and months under the silent contempt of this
drunken woman-beating brute, to have been watched narrowly in all his
business dealings--as he knew, from Wilson’s nature, must have been the
case--to have been forced to stand helpless, degraded before this sot,
while he vaunted his one virtue, honesty--it was gall and wormwood and
all things bitter.
The Southern Cross flashed down from the myriad stars in its startling
splendour. The moon shone bright over the vast silent plain, limitless,
broken only by the undulating mounds and the infinitely stretching
clumps of karroo bushes. The camp-fire, just replenished with damp twigs
and shrubs, burned sulkily and the smoke ascended in spirals into the
clear air. The hooded waggon depended helplessly on its shafts. The
Kaffirs, wrapped in blankets, slept beneath. The oxen, outspanned some
distance off, chewed the cud in sharp, rhythmic munches. The universe
was still--awfully still. All gave the sense of the littleness of man
and the immensity of space.
In a strange, imperious need of expansion, Joyce threw himself down on
the wet earth and clutched the grasses and cried aloud:--
“Oh, God! I have suffered enough for my sin. Take this stain and
degradation from my soul.”
After a while he arose, ashamed of his weakness, the futility of his
appeal. Relighting his pipe, he clambered into the waggon, and sitting
on the floor against the back, watched the portion of starry sky framed
by the hood, until the first streaks of dawn announced the hour for
inspanning the oxen again and continuing his journey.
CHAPTER XV--KNIGHT-ERRANT
For all the change about him and within him, the hand of time might
have been put back four years, and the tender might have been nearing
the outward bound ship, instead of the Southampton landing-stage. It was
the same raw mizzling rain as when he had crossed the harbour four years
before; the same wet, shivering crowd of second-class passengers, with
the water streaming from waterproofs, umbrellas and hand luggage on
to the sloppy deck. In his heart was the same mingling of anxiety and
apathy, the same ineradicable sense of pariahdom. He had thought
that the sight of England once more would have brought him a throb of
gladness. It only intensified his depressing fears for the future.
The circumstances reproduced themselves with startling actuality. One of
the men in charge of the tender had a great ugly seam across his face.
Joyce remembered having seen him before, in just the same attitude, with
a coil of rope in his hand. Had he not awakened from a minute’s dream
that had covered an illusory four years of his life? He looked around,
almost expecting to see Noakes, in his ridiculous curly silk hat and old
frieze overcoat.
The tender came alongside the landing-stage, and he stepped ashore with
the dripping crowd. The flurry of the Custom House and the transport of
his meagre baggage to the railway station broke the illusion. He was in
England at last, and it seemed a strange country. During the journey to
London, he had the companionship of some of his fellow-travellers. At
Waterloo they parted. Then he felt terribly lonely.
“Cab, sir?” asked a porter.
He was standing over his luggage, somewhat lost amid the bustle and
tumult of the station. It was the late afternoon, and the platforms were
hurrying with suburban passengers. The incessant movement through
the blue glare of the electric light dazed his unaccustomed eyes. He
declined the porter’s offer. Cabs were a luxury he could ill afford.
Besides, one meagre Gladstone bag contained his whole possessions, and
he could easily carry it. Leaving the station, he took an omnibus for
Victoria, with the idea of seeking his old Pimlico lodgings. If he could
not be taken in there, it would not be difficult to find a room in the
neighbourhood. Still confused by the sudden transition to the midst
of the roar of London, he peered through the glass sides at the wet
pavements glistening in the gaslight, the shop fronts, the eternal
hurrying by of vague forms, and the dash past of vehicles. From
Westminster Bridge the face of Big Ben greeted him. He stared at it
stupidly as long as he could see it. The light on the Clock Tower
announced that the House was sitting. It was all curiously familiar, and
yet he felt like an alien. There was not a soul in London to welcome
his home-coming. His heart sank with the sense of loneliness. He was as
infinitesimal and as isolated a unit in this seething, swarming ant-hill
of humanity as amid the starry solitudes of the African veldt.
As chance willed it, he found the house in Pimlico in the same hands
as before, and his old room in the attics vacant. Nothing had altered,
except that it looked smaller and four years shabbier. The same
discoloured blind hung before the window, the same fly-blown texts
adorned the walls. The same acrid smell of dust and ashes and earth and
the unaired end of all human things met his nostrils. When he went
to sleep that night, it seemed incredible that four years should have
passed since he had last lain there.
In a day or two the strangeness wore off. London is in a Londoner’s
blood. No matter how long his exile, life there comes to him as
naturally as swimming does to a swimmer after years of non-practice. He
remembered how he had yearned for its sights and sounds and stimulating
movement. Now they were his again, and he took a measure of content. His
first care was to provide himself with some clothes; his next, to visit
the publishers. A cordial reception gratified him. The book was bound
to have some success. The manuscript was in the printer’s
hands. Publication was announced for the spring. Joyce went home
lighter-hearted after the interview. It was delightful to be treated
as an intellectual man once more. His prospects too were not so very
gloomy. With the little capital he had brought back from South Africa
and the £80 for his book, he saw himself saved from starvation for two
years, if he lived very, very humbly on a little over a pound a week.
Meanwhile he could earn something by occasional odds and ends of
writing, and also complete his second novel. He arranged his scheme
of life as he walked along. He would leave his lodging punctually at a
certain hour after breakfast, walk to the British Museum, write all day
in the Reading Room, dine, walk home, and write or read in the evenings
until it was time for bed.
Thus, as ever, his sensitive nature reflected the little ray of hope.
But, as usual, it was soon eclipsed by the darkening shadow in his
soul, although he set to work with dogged determination. The prospect of
life-long solitude appalled him. It was the terrible part of his
never-ending punishment. To a nature like his, companionship and
sympathy are essentials of development. Without them it withers like a
parched plant And yet he dreaded making new acquaintances, on account of
the shame that would inevitably follow if his identity and history
leaked out He accepted loneliness as his portion. There were only two
people in England whom, knowing his story, he could trust to shake him
by the hand--Yvonne and the actor McKay. The latter was necessarily lost
in the obscurities of his roving profession. Yvonne was married to his
cousin, moving in the sphere to which beyond all others he was
rigorously denied access. One day, however, when the memory of her sweet
kind face came back to him, and he yearned for its bright sympathy, he
wrote to her at Fulminster.
He felt somewhat cheered after he had despatched the letter. And as
comfortings often come in pairs, he was further cheered by seeing in
an evening paper which he bought from a stand near the pillar-box,
a general article he had sent up two or three days before. It was an
encouraging beginning. At any rate, London streets were more stimulating
to his intellectual powers than the dull, deadening life of the African
farm. He made many good resolutions during these first days in London.
He would win back his lost scholarship, begin to form a humble library.
On his way home he bought out of a fourpenny box an old copy of Plato’s
“Republic.” He sat up half the night reading it.
To his surprise and disappointment, instead of a letter coming from
Yvonne, his own was returned through the Dead Letter Office. “Left
Fulminster two years ago--present address unknown.” He was puzzled. At
the Museum he consulted the Clergy List for the year. According to
it, Canon Chisely was still Rector of Fulminster. What had happened to
Yvonne?
“It must be some silly mistake,” he said to himself. He wrote again; but
with the same result. He thought of writing to Everard, but reflected
that he too must be ignorant of Yvonne’s address; also that in any case,
perhaps, he would disregard his letter. There was some mystery. Both
his affection for Yvonne and the novelty of a curiosity outside himself
spurred his interest. A day or two afterwards, he noticed on a hoarding
an advertisement of cheap excursion trains to the great provincial town
next to Fulminster. The journey would be very inexpensive. Why should
he not go down and pick up what information he could? The idea of the
little excitement pleased him.
He started the next morning at a very early hour, and arrived at
Fulminster about noon. The place was well known to him. He had often
visited his cousin in days gone by.
Many bitter-sweet associations crowded upon him as he walked up from the
station through the streets.
He went on, without any definite idea as to his course of action. Almost
mechanically he bent his steps toward the old abbey, whose spire rose
above the housetops, at the end of the High Street. Soon the great mass
towered above him. He stood for a while looking upwards at the wealth
of tracery, and crocket, and pinnacle, feeling its beauty, and then
wandered idly round. At last his eye fell upon a notice on the board by
the vestry door. It was signed “J. Abdy, Rector”; other notices bore the
same signature. This was a new surprise. Wondering what had occurred, he
left the Abbey Close and proceeded round the familiar path to the front
door of the Rectory. He would take the bull by the horns.
“Is the Rector in?” he asked the servant who opened to him.
“Yes, sir.”
“Could I see him for a moment?”
“What name, sir?”
“Chisely,” said Joyce, instinctively, then he coloured. It was odd that
he should have been taken off his guard.
The servant showed him into the library. A glance proved that Everard
no longer inhabited it. No trace of the dilettante was visible in its
homely comfort. Presently the door opened, and the Rector, a kindly
grey-bearded man, entered the room. Joyce made his apology for
intrusion.
“I came down expecting to find Canon Chisely. I am a distant relation of
his, not long come from abroad.”
“I fear you have come on a vain errand,” said the Rector with a smile.
“He took over his diocese in New Zealand some months ago.”
“His diocese?” repeated Joyce.
“Dear me, have n’t you heard? Canon Chisely accepted the bishopric of
Taroofa at the beginning of the year.”
“How very extraordinary!” said Joyce, nonplussed. But the other took his
remark literally.
“Yes, it is singular. Most people think he has thrown himself away.
A very able man, you know--quite young. He might have had an English
bishopric if he had waited.”
“And Mrs. Chisely?” asked Joyce, interrogatively.
The Rector raised a deprecative hand.
“That’s where the whole trouble came in, apparently. It weighed on his
mind--a very proud man. He took the first chance that offered.”
“Pardon my questioning you,” said Joyce, “but I am quite in the dark as
to what you are referring to. The last letter, two years back, that I
received from Mrs. Chisely was dated from here. She was happily married
and all that. I am an old friend of hers. What has happened?”
“I can only repeat the gossip, Mr. Chisely. It seems that just about
then some misfortune arose--a first husband of Mrs. Chisely’s, supposed
dead, turned up, and so there was a separation.”
“And where is Mrs. Chisely now?”
“That’s more than I can say. A lady--a great friend of mine--also I
believe a connexion of your own--”
“Mrs. Winstanley?”
“The same. I see you know her. She may be able to inform you. I believe
she has said authoritatively that the late Mrs. Chisely went back to her
former husband.”
“That I can’t believe,” said Joyce, indignantly.
“I can only give you what I hear,” said the Rector, placidly. “I know
Bishop Chisely went to Paris, where they were supposed to be, before
starting for New Zealand. But Mrs. Winstanley will tell you.”
“I think I know enough,” said Joyce, hurriedly, and rising from his
chair. “I am greatly indebted to you for your kindness, Mr. Abdy.”
“Can I offer you some lunch? It will be on the table in a moment.”
Joyce declined, pleaded a train. He would have liked to sit with this
kind gossipy old man, but he could not accept such hospitality under
false pretences. Perhaps it was well that he acted thus, for later in
the afternoon the Rector described his visitor to Mrs. Winstanley. She
listened for some time, and at last broke out:--
“Why, my dear Mr. Abdy, it could have been no one else than the convict
cousin! He must have come to get money out of Everard.”
“Dear me,” said Mr. Abdy, arresting his hand in a downward stroke of his
beard. “Who would have thought it? He seemed such a gentlemanly fellow.
And I asked him to lunch!”
“I ’ll write and put the dear Bishop on his guard,” said Mr. Winstanley,
virtuously.
Meanwhile, Joyce went away full of wonder and pity. It was an amazing
story. Poor Yvonne! He could not believe that she had returned to
the scamp of a first husband. The thought was repulsive. At any rate
communication between Everard and Yvonne seemed to have been cut off. He
was not very sorry for Everard.
“A little trouble will do him good,” he muttered to himself. And he
found a certain grim amusement in the contemplation of the chastened
Bishop, his cousin. But he felt a great concern for poor fragile little
Yvonne cast adrift again upon the world. “I will find out what has
become of her, at any rate,” he said, digging his stick into the road.
The natural course was to write to Miss Geraldine Vicary, whose address
he fortunately remembered. If she had lost count of Yvonne, he would
set to work to find her some other way. He felt as eager now to recover
Yvonne’s friendship as he had been apathetic before. To lose no time,
while waiting for the early return excursion train, he went into a
post-office and wrote and despatched his letter.
The following morning he resumed his newly schemed out life of literary
work. Three days passed and no reply came from Miss Vicary. On the
fourth morning he received a black-edged envelope bearing the Swansea
postmark. He opened it and read:--
Dear Sir,--Your letter to Miss Geraldine Vicary was,
according to instructions, forwarded to me. I regret to
inform you that my poor sister died three weeks ago, of
diphtheria. She caught the disease whilst nursing the lady
concerning whom, I believe, you inquire. Madame Latour had
been living with her for the past two years. Shortly after
my poor sister’s death, Madame Latour was removed to St.
Mary’s Hospital, where, as far as I know, she still lies
very ill.
Trusting this sad information may be of service to you,
I am yours faithfully,
Henrietta Dasent.
Joyce hurried through his dressing, bolted his breakfast, and rushed
out into the street, with one idea in his head. Yvonne alone and
uncared for, dying in a London hospital--it was incredible. The apparent
heartlessness of the woman who wrote, her calm disclaimer of all
interest in her dead sister’s dying friend, made his blood boil. A
London hospital--an open common ward, with medical students chattering
round--it was a cruel place for the sweet delicate woman he remembered
as Yvonne. Where were all her friends?
In the dismay, excitement, and indignation of the moment, he forgot his
poverty, and jumped into the first hansom-cab he saw.
“St. Mary’s Hospital, quick!”
And the cabman, thinking it a matter of life and death, went at a
breakneck pace.
CHAPTER XVI--LA CIGALE
Seeing Yvonne at that time of the morning was out of the question. But
he penetrated to the landing outside the ward and had a few words with
the sister in charge. She was a fresh, pleasant-faced woman, who, having
fallen in love with Yvonne, felt kindly disposed toward her friends.
Madame Latour was slowly recovering. One of the most lingering of the
sequelae of diphtheria, diphtheritic paralysis, had set in. It was her
larynx and left arm that were affected. At present she was suffering
from general weakness. It would be some time yet before she could be
moved.
“Do you think I could see her?” asked Joyce--“that is to say, if she
would care about it.”
“Certainly,” replied the sister. “It would probably do her good. To-day
is a visiting day--after two o’clock.”
“I wonder whether she would like it,” said Joyce, questioningly.
“I will take her a message,” said the sister.
He scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper and handed it to her. She
retired and presently returned, smiling.
“She will be delighted. I have not seen her look like that since she
has been here. ‘Tell him it will be a joy to see him.’ Those were her
words.”
Joyce thanked her warmly, rased his hat, and departed. It was a fine
crisp morning. The message seemed to bring a breath of something sweet
into the air. He walked along almost buoyantly in spite of the sad
plight of Yvonne. The appalling weight of loneliness was lifted from his
shoulders. The sight of him would be a joy to one living creature. It
was a new conception, and it winged his feet.
*****
On the stroke of two the great doors of the ward opened, and he entered
with a group of visitors, chiefly women of the poorer classes, some
carrying babies. It was bewildering at first--the long double row of
beds, each with its pale, wistful woman’s face. Some of the patients
were sitting up, with shawls or wraps around them; the greater number
lay back on their pillows, turning eyes of languid interest towards the
visitors. Two beds curtained round broke the uniformity of the two white
lines of bedsteads. At the end of the ward, a great open fireplace,
with glowing blocks of coal, struck a note of cheerfulness in the grey
November light, that streamed through the series of high windows. Joyce
felt a man’s shyness in walking among these strange sick women, and
looked helplessly down the ward from the doorway, to try to discover
Yvonne. The sister came to his help from a neighbouring bedside.
“At the very end. The last bed on the left.”
Joyce walked down the druggetted aisle, and as soon as he saw her and
knew himself to be recognised, he quickened his pace.
There she was, half sitting in the bed, propped up by pillows, her wavy
dark hair like a nimbus around her pale face. In honour of the visit she
had done up her hair, with infinite difficulty, poor child, and put on
a pretty white dressing-jacket tied with knots of crimson ribbon. His
heart was smitten with pity. She was so changed, so wasted. Her delicate
features were pinched, her childlike lips blanched. Only the old
Yvonne’s eyes remained--the great, pathetic, winning dark eyes. They
gave him glad and grateful welcome.
“Yvonne.”
It was all he could find in his head to say as he pressed her little
thin hand.
“How good of you to come to see me,” she said.
Joyce was unprepared. It was not Yvonne’s voice--once as sweet in speech
as in singing; but a toneless, distressed sound devoid of quality, like
that of a cracked silver bell. He could not conceal the shadow of dismay
on his face. She was quick to note it.
“I am afraid I speak like a wicked old raven,” she said with a smile;
“but you mustn’t mind.”
“I can’t tell you how grieved I am to see you like this,” he said,
sitting down by the bedside. “You must have been very ill. Poor Yvonne.”
“Yes. Awfully ill. You would have been quite sorry to see how ill I was.
Do you mind moving your chair further down, so that I can look at you?
I can’t turn my head, you know. Is n’t it silly not to be able to turn
one’s head?”
“You must make haste and get well,” he said, after he had complied with
her request “I’m afraid I can’t,” she said, looking at him wistfully.
“They all say it’s going to be a long, long business. But I want to know
how you came here--to England, I mean,” she added more brightly, after
a pause. “It was such a startling surprise when Sister brought me your
note this morning. Why have you left Africa? I ’ve been dying to know all
day.”
Joyce sketched rapidly the events that had led him back--the death of
Noakes, the year of wretched apathy, the purchase of his book by the
publishers, the craving for civilisation.
“So I sold out and came home,” he concluded. “I have been back a
fortnight.”
“You must have been very sad at losing your friend,” said Yvonne. “Death
is an awful, awful thing. Have you ever thought of it? A person is
living and feeling, like you and me, to-day--and to-morrow--gone--out of
the world--for ever and ever.”
Her voice sank to a whisper and she looked at him out of great,
awe-stricken eyes.
“I have lost my dear friend too--just lately. Did you know?”
“Yes,” he replied gently. “I wrote to her for your address and her
sister answered the letter, telling me of her death.”
“Wasn’t it terrible? And she so bright and brave and strong. I never
loved anybody as I loved her. It was only after she was buried that I
knew--and then I wished I had died instead--I who am no good to any one
at all. And I am alive. Isn’t it an awful mystery?”
The man’s eyes fell for a moment beneath the intense, child-like
earnestness of hers. Silence fell upon them. He stretched out his arm
and took her hand that rested outside the coverlet. A man is often
instinctively driven to express his sympathy by touch, where a woman
would find words.
After a while she withdrew her hand gently, as if to break the current
of thoughts.
“I was wondering why you looked different,” she said. “You have grown a
beard.”
“Yes,” he said, with a sudden laugh--the transition was so abrupt. “I
was too slack to shave in South Africa. Don’t you like it?”
“Oh, not at all. It spoils you.”
“I will cut it off at once.”
“Not just to please me?”
“Just to please you. It will be a new sensation.”
“To have it off?”
“No--to please you, Yvonne.”
Her eyes smiled gratefully at him.
“Tell me when I must go,” he said, after a while. “I must n’t tire you.
And you may have other visitors.”
“Don’t go yet. No one else will come.”
“How do you know?”
“You are the only person who has been to see me since I was brought
here,” she replied sadly.
Joyce looked at her for a moment incredulously.
“Do you mean to say you have been quite alone here, among strangers, all
these weeks?”
“Yes,” she said. “But Sister is kind to me, and they allow me all sorts
of little indulgences.”
“But you should be among loving friends, Yvonne,” said Joyce.
“I have so few. And I have told no one that I am here. I couldn’t.
Besides, whom could I tell?”
Joyce could not understand. It was so strange for Yvonne to be
friendless. Delicacy forbade him to question further.
“I have had a lot of trouble, you know,” she said. “It has been nearly
all trouble for over two years. I wrote and told you what had happened.
Then I went to live with Geraldine Vicary, and began to sing again. But
I was always being laid up with my throat and I never knew whether I
could fulfil an engagement when I made it--so I didn’t get on as I used
to. People won’t employ you if they fear you may have to throw them over
at the last moment, will they? And Geraldine used to keep me in a great
deal, for fear I should hurt my voice. But, you see, I had to make some
money. So I went out and sang just before this illness, when I ought
not, and my throat became inflamed and I caught another cold, and it got
worse and worse until diphtheria came on. Then poor Dina caught it and
there was no one to nurse me. You could n’t expect her sister, who did
n’t know me, to do much, could you? And then Dina was just giving up her
flat, and of course I couldn’t keep it on--so the doctor thought I had
better come here. ‘J’y suis, j’y reste. It is not a gay little story, is
it?”
“It is a heart-rending story altogether,” said Joyce, with a concerned
puckering of the forehead. “I wish I could do something to brighten you,
Yvonne.”
“You have done so,” she said with a smile, “by coming to see me. How
good of you to remember--and, you know, by your not writing, I thought
you had quite forgotten.”
“Forgive me, Yvonne--a kind of dull brutishness came over me--I
couldn’t.”
“And I could n’t either, after the one I wrote--about my trouble--at
Fulminster. You never answered it, and I thought--It was n’t because you
despised me, was it?”
“I did n’t get the letter, Yvonne,” he said, unable to disregard this
second reference as he had done the first. “It must have been the one I
heard was lost. I will explain afterwards. I thought you were happy at
Fulminster--so why should I inflict my eternal grumblings on you?”
“Then don’t you know what has happened?” asked Yvonne, with wider eyes
and a little quiver of the lip.
“I learned it a few days ago. I went to Fulminster to find you, as my
letters were returned to me through the Post Office. I was determined to
discover you, but I never dreamed of finding you here. I came as soon I
got the news this morning.”
“I have one friend left,” said Yvonne.
“And you shall always have him, if you will,” said Joyce. “You are the
only one he has.”
“Poor fellow,” said Yvonne.
Though the sweet voice was broken and hard, there was the same tender
pity in the words as when she had uttered them four years back, on their
first re-meeting.
“We are two lonesome bodies, are n’t we?” she added.
“We ’ll do our best to comfort each other,” said Joyce.
The visiting hour was nearly at an end, and the ward was growing silent
again. The sister came down the aisle and stood by Yvonne’s bed and
smoothed her pillows.
“You have had quite enough talking for one day,” she said pleasantly.
“It has given you quite a colour--but we mustn’t overdo it.”
Joyce rose to take his leave.
“I may come again, the next time?” he asked.
“Would you?” said Yvonne, with an eager look.
“I would come to-morrow--every day, if they would let me,” he said with
conviction.
He shook hands with her and walked away. At the end of the ward he
turned, looked back and saw the mass of black against the white pillow
and the specks of crimson that showed Yvonne. He hated leaving her among
strangers and the rough comforts of an open ward in a hospital. An
odd feeling of personal responsibility was mingled with his resentment
against the freaks of fortune--an irrational sense of mean-spiritedness
in letting her lie there.
He went back to his work, cheered and strengthened within; but his
outlook on life was darkened by one more shadow of the inexorable
cruelty of fate. That he should have suffered--well and good. It was
a penalty he was paying. But Yvonne, the sweetest, innocentest soul
alive--why should her head be brought low? And thus the pages that he
wrote grew darker by the shadow.
A fortnight passed, during which he saw her as often as the visiting
hours allowed. He brought her whatever little trifles he could afford,
and she accepted them with the eager gratification of a child. There was
a second-hand bookshop he had come across during his late wanderings,
in Upper Street, Islington, which had a speciality in cheap, tattered
French novels. Thither he tramped one day in order to gratify a desire
she had expressed, and spent an hour turning over the stock. It seemed
hard not to be able to go into a West End shop and order the newest
Paris fiction; but a poor devil must do as best he can and be cheerful.
Yvonne’s delight repaid him for wounded pride. She dipped into them all,
while he was there, turning to the last page to see how they ended. And
then the rakish air their soiled yellow covers gave to the bed, as they
sprawled upon it, amused them both.
They talked of many things. Yvonne interested herself in the patients
and gossiped about their progress and their eccentricities. Often her
artless candour and innate love of laughter gave him details unfit
perhaps for ears masculine. Then she would catch herself up, while a
faint tinge of colour came into her cheek, and with still smiling eyes,
say:
“I always forget that you’re a man. You ought to remind me.”
Joyce, for his part, strove to amuse her with whatever gleams of
brightness he could find in his colonial adventures. Noakes grew to
be the hero of an Arthurian cycle. As for the fat Boer woman, he was
surprised at the amount of grim humour he extracted from her doings.
“I hope you are going to put it in a book,” Yvonne would say, with her
little air of wisdom. “You must n’t waste it all upon me.”
And Joyce, by thus disintegrating incidents from his confused mass of
impressions, found the talks of material benefit as well as a delight.
For a delight they were; the more so, because Yvonne’s gladness at his
visits was so obviously genuine and spontaneous. She told him that she
counted the hours between them. And Yvonne scarcely exaggerated. His
visits were bright spots in a sorrowful, fear-haunted time. When he
came, she summoned up all her strength and courage so as to make the
hour pass pleasantly. Men do not like crying, complaining women, thought
poor Yvonne. Unless she was bright for him, he might grow tired of
coming, and then she would be lonelier than before. So Yvonne told him
little of the anxieties that lay like a dead weight upon her poor little
soul and kept her awake at nights, amid the moans of the sleeping women,
that sounded faint and ghostly in the dim ward.
Her patient acceptance of her lot won Joyce’s admiration. But of her
real position he had no idea. The gentleman in him that had survived
his shame and degradation forbade him to pry into her private affairs.
Besides, he took it for granted that when she recovered, she would live
by herself again, in the old way, and that her drawing-room would be
a haven of rest to him for indefinite years. The question of nursing
alone, he thought, and her incomprehensible friendlessness, had brought
her to the hospital. He longed for her to leave it.
One day, however, he found her lying down in bed, her hair in dark loose
masses over the pillow, her face turned away towards the sister who was
sitting by her side. The latter rose on seeing him, and hurried forward
to meet him in the aisle.
“Be as kind as you can to her,” she said; “she is in great trouble
to-day, poor little thing.”
“What is the matter?” asked Joyce, anxiously.
“Let her speak for herself. I was to send you away when you came. She
was not fit to see you, she said. But I am sure it will comfort her to
talk to a friend.”
The sister moved away, and Joyce approached Yvonne’s bedside with quick
steps. Something serious must have happened.
Yvonne rased a wan, desolate face and eyes heavy with crying, and put
out her hand timidly from beneath the bedclothes. He retained it, as he
sat down upon the chair just vacated by the sister. The few little
cakes he had brought her he placed on the stand near by. She looked too
woe-begone for cakes.
“I have come in spite of your message,” he said. “Why did you want to
send me away?”
“I am too miserable,” murmured Yvonne, in her broken voice.
“What has happened to make you miserable?” he asked very softly. “Tell
me, if it is anything I can hear.”
“It’s my voice that has gone,” cried Yvonne in a sob. “They told me this
morning--the doctor brought a throat specialist--I shall never be able
to sing again--never.”
Before this sudden calamity the man was powerless for comfort.
“My poor little woman!” he said.
“It is worse than losing a limb,” moaned Yvonne. “I have been dreading
it--hoping against hope all along. I wished I had died instead of Dina.
I wish I could die now.” The tears came again. She drew away her hand
and dabbed her eyes with a miserable little wet rag of a handkerchief.
“Don’t,” said Joyce, helplessly. “If you give way you will make yourself
worse. They may be mistaken. Perhaps it will come again after a year or
two.”
He strove to cheer her, brought forward all the arguments he could think
of, all the tender phrases his unaccustomed mind could suggest. At last
the tears ceased for a time.
“But it is my means of livelihood gone,” she said. “When I leave here I
shall starve.”
“Not while I live,” said Joyce, impulsively. Then he reflected. Surely
she could not be entirely without means. He coloured slightly at his
remark, as at an impertinence.
“I shall never get any money any more as long as I live,” said Yvonne.
“I can only go from this hospital into the workhouse. And I won’t go
there. I will pray to die rather.”
“But,” began Joyce, in an embarrassed way,
“I don’t understand. Forgive me for touching upon it--but has not
Everard--?”
“No, oh, no! I refused. I could n’t take his money, if I was not his
wife.”
“That’s absurd,” said Joyce. But his opinion did not alter the facts. He
remained for a moment in thought. “Don’t lose heart,” he said at length.
“Things are never as bad as they seem. I ’ve had awfully bad times and
yet I have pulled through, somehow. You can live quietly for a little on
what you have, and then--”
“But I have n’t a penny, Stephen,” she cried piteously. “Not a penny in
the world. I earned scarcely anything the last year. If it hadn’t been
for Dina, I don’t know what I should have done. I don’t own anything but
a few sticks of furniture and some clothes--”
“Where are they?”
“The porter’s wife at the mansions is keeping them for me, I believe.
They may be sold. I was too ill to trouble.”
“I ’ll see about them for you,” said Joyce. His heart was moved with
great pity for the sweet, helpless little soul. It seemed hard to
realise that, when they had met four years ago, he had looked upon her
as a Lady Bountiful, who had only to stretch out her kind arm to save
him from starvation. Oh, the whirligig of time! And yet the memory of
her help was very precious to him.
“You must let me act for you, Yvonne, will you?”
“You have your own troubles, poor fellow,” said Yvonne.
“Yours will drive mine away, so they will be a blessing in disguise. I
wonder if you could trust me?”
“I have always done so--and I do. Are n’t you the only friend I have?”
“That is what beats me entirely,” he said. “What are all your friends
doing?”
“They have all disappeared gradually,” said Yvonne. “My poor marriage
cut me adrift from my old circle. And at Fulminster--I did n’t make many
real friends.”
“There was a girl you wrote to me about once or twice.”
“Sophia Wilmington? She’s married and gone out to India. I should have
written to her if she had been in England, for she was fond of me.”
“I should have thought that the whole world was fond of you, Yvonne.”
“I don’t know,” she said wistfully. “It seems that I have always been
a kind of waif. I never had any solid kinds of friends, families and so
forth--except your dear mother. I once knew a lot of professionals--but
I saw men mostly--I could never tell why--and they don’t bother about
you much when they’ve lost sight of you, do they? I thought Vandeleur
might have wondered what had become of me.”
“Dear, dear!” said Joyce, reflectively. “I remember Vandeleur from the
long ago.”
“Yes, he’s an old friend. But, you see, it was through Dina. He behaved
badly to her and married Elsie Carnegie--and so they were cuts. I only
saw him once all last year. I heard she was awfully jealous. Is n’t it
silly of a woman? I think, if he knew I was here he’d come. But what
would be the use?”
“Not much, except to say a friendly word to you. But still--while you
were living with Miss Vicary, you must have made some acquaintances. It
seems so extraordinary.”
“We lived so very much alone,” explained Yvonne. “Poor Dina didn’t know
many people--no one liked her. With one exception--and he died long
ago--I think I am the only one in the world who ever loved Dina. No--I
am just a waif--that’s what I am.”
In her simple way she had accounted to him accurately for her life since
her rupture with Everard. At first she had been too sore at heart to
go much into the world. Then Geraldine, whose influence with her
was paramount, continually discouraged her from renewing old
acquaintanceships. Her friends had literally melted away. Had she
so chosen, she might have interested in her misfortunes a score of
professional well-wishers. But Yvonne was proud in many unexpected ways,
and would have died rather than have the shame of sending the hat round
for relief. As for communicating with Fulminster, it was not to be
thought of.
“I don’t care,” she added, after a pause; “I have found you again.”
“Then dry your poor eyes,” he said comfortingly; “and don’t think any
more of the worries. Don’t you remember how happy you made me once, when
I was in desperate straits--when all the world cast me off but you? You
are still the only being who knows me and cares whether I live or die.
You are neither going to starve, Yvonne, nor die in a workhouse. As long
as I have a penny you shall have half of it. Don’t think of anything
more than the immediate future, little woman. We will manage that all
right. Be comforted.”
He spoke earnestly, leaning forward with his arm on the bed. The
precariousness of his own fortunes scarcely occurred to him. He was
deeply moved. At that moment he would have cut off his right hand for
her.
Yvonne thanked him with her eyes, which grew very soft and grateful. His
man’s strength brought her comfort. She trusted him implicitly, as she
had all her life trusted those who were kind to her. She closed her eyes
for a moment with a little sigh of relief. She was so content to yield
to the generous hand that was taking the terrible burden from her
shoulders, felt as if she could go to sleep like a tired child. When she
opened her eyes they were almost smiling.
“I ’ll try to be happy again, so as to thank you, Stephen,” she said.
“Well, here is something for you--what you like--eat one to show me you
are comforted.”
He put the paper bag into her hand, and, tilting back his chair, watched
her pleased expression as she peeped into the mouth and drew out one of
the cakes.
“Oh, how sweet of you!” she said, with a flash of her old sunlight.
Suddenly he rose, and stood, hands in pockets, by the window, frowning
absently at the gathering mist of evening outside. A conviction was
forcing itself on his mind--a cold douche for his quixotic impulses.
Obvious right and common-sense prevailed.
“Yvonne,” he said turning round. “You had no quarrel with Everard, had
you, at parting?”
“Oh, no,” she replied, looking up round-eyed from her paper-bag. “He was
very kind to me.”
“Have you written to him about this?”
“No. We arranged we should not correspond. He sent me word when he
was going out to New Zealand. But I couldn’t let him know--I should
be ashamed. Oh, no, Stephen, I could n’t write to him and say, ‘I am a
beggar now, please give me charity.’ Why should he support me?”
“I hate questioning you,” said Joyce in some embarrassment, “but--is it
repugnant to you to--to think of Everard?”
“Why, of course not, Stephen. It was a time of awful pain and
misery--but if he came to take me back as his wife, I would go to him.
If he ever can, I have promised that I will.”
With all his knowledge of her, Joyce was taken aback by her simple
candour.
“If that is so, why on earth shrink from reconsidering, now, his former
offer?” he asked, exceedingly puzzled at her point of view.
“You tell me what I ought to do, and I will do it,” said Yvonne.
“You must write to Everard.”
“Very well.”
“Then you need not have any fears at all for the future. It will be all
so simple.”
“How can I thank you?” said Yvonne. “Oh, if I could only sing for you!
But nothing will ever give me back my voice--I am a useless little
creature. And you have been so good to me to-day. I shall never forget
it all my life.”
But Joyce’s heart was at ebb-tide again. He rose soon, and took his hat
and stick.
“There is no reason to thank me, Yvonne,” he said, with bitterness.
“What I have done for you has cost me nothing--the cheapest of all
services; I have only given you advice.”
Yvonne looked at him wistfully.
“If you talk like that, you will make me cry again.”
“Forgive me,” said Joyce. “I am a beast.”
CHAPTER XVII--YVONNE PROPOSES
It was night. Yvonne lay wide awake. A suffused sound of breathing
filled the air. Now and then a moan or a smothered cry of pain broke
sharply upon the stillness. The woman in the adjacent bed began to
murmur broken words in her sleep: “For the children’s sake, Joe--my poor
little children--I wish we was all dead.” Some poor tragedy reenacting
itself in slumber. Yvonne listened pityingly. The woman had seemed as
broken down that day with misery as she herself. Then silence again, and
Yvonne fell back upon her own tragedy, which seemed to be working itself
out in the staring wakeful hours.
She had not written to Everard. Pen, ink, and paper had been brought.
The sister had propped her up with pillows in a posture especially
comfortable for writing. But her strength had failed her. To ask him for
money was more than her pride could do.
Instead, she had written a long outpouring to Joyce, which lay unposted
under her pillow.
This pride was a seam of flint in her soft nature. She would have
returned to Everard as his wife, willingly, gratefully, glad to lay her
tired head on his shoulder, and feel his strong protection around her
once more. But from any one rather than him would she accept charity.
Illogical, irrational, absurd--but a reality none the less in her heart.
Perhaps it was a protest of wounded sex. If Everard had treated her
differently on that disastrous day, the quivering feminine might have
gone unscathed. But in his anger, pain and disillusion he had driven her
wrongs towards him into her flesh, almost like infidelities. She was too
generous to feel resentful. An offer of remarriage would be a natural
acknowledgment of error. To accept his support, apart from him, stung
her to the soul with a sense of being cast off as faithless wife or
dishonest mistress, to whom, however, he was forgivingly and charitably
disposed. And yet what was she to do? Joyce would save her from
immediate want, but she could not look to him for anything but temporary
assistance. More was preposterous.
At last she gave up thinking. Joyce, with his cleverness, would see some
way out of her difficulties. Somewhat comforted, she fell asleep. The
next day was long and intensely dismal. The more clearly she saw that
Joyce’s counsel was the only course to follow, the more hateful it
seemed to her to write the letter. She put it off from hour to hour. And
then the terrible blow that had befallen her weighed upon her mind. She
strove to realise herself moving about the world without a voice. It was
as hard to grasp as the conception of herself as a bodiless shade on the
banks of Acheron. When the elusiveness ceased, and the reality loomed
upon her in all its grimness, she wept bitterly. The consequence was
that, in her still weak state, she broke down with the mental worry,
and, when Joyce next came, he found her in a far worse state than
before. She could scarcely move or speak. Letter-writing was out of the
question. By the merest chance he learned, during the five minutes the
sister allowed him to have with her, that she had not yet written to
Everard.
“But the mail goes to-morrow,” he said. “I have been making enquiries.
If we don’t write now, we shall lose a month. Shall I write to Everard,
seeing that your poor little self is incapable?”
She murmured assent, and sighed as if in grateful relief. Joyce
comforted her as best he could and left her reluctantly. When he
got home, he wrote the letter, a bald statement of facts to which he
appended his signature and the address of his lodgings. He sealed it,
directed it, in his nervous, characteristic handwriting and hurried
out to post it at once. It was a most disagreeable duty over, for to
communicate with his cousin went sorely against the grain. A pleasanter
duty awaited him, as soon as he could settle down to his evening’s work,
the correction of the first batch of proofs from the publishers.
In the course of time, Yvonne recovered her spirits and was on the mend
again. Signs of returning strength showed themselves in her left arm,
which, together with the throat on that side, had been affected by
the disease. Her speaking voice also began to regain some of its old
sweetness, though the surgeons confirmed their statement that the
singing voice was irrevocably gone.
“Do say they are wrong,” said Yvonne casting a pleading look at Joyce.
“Perhaps they are,” said he; “let us hope.”
“Then I may not need Everard’s money, after all.”
“You will for a couple of years, at least,” he said kindly. “But you may
be able to pay it back afterwards.”
This consoled her, and she began to build great schemes. On another
occasion she said to him irrelevantly:--
“Do you think I ought to write to Everard?” She had raised him by this
time to the position of father confessor. A certain feminine weakness in
Joyce’s nature, developing gradually, through his intercourse with
her, into a finer sensitiveness, made it easy for her to give him her
confidence, to speak with him much as she used to speak with Geraldine.
And yet, he being a man, his utterances on such questions, had for her
all their masculine weight.
“It is a matter entirely of your own inclination,” he replied
oracularly.
“But I don’t know what my inclination is,” said Yvonne. “Everard once
told me that it was a much harder thing to know what one’s duty was than
to do it when you know what it is.”
“He was plagiarising from George Eliot,” said Joyce, not ill-pleased at
a malicious hit at the Bishop. And then, teasingly to Yvonne: “And I’m
sure they both put it a little more grammatically.”
“I won’t talk grammar,” cried Yvonne. “I always hated it. It is silly
stuff. You understood perfectly what I meant, did n’t you?”
“Perfectly,” said Joyce.
“Then what’s the good of grammar?” cried Yvonne, triumphantly. “But you
make me forget what I was going to say. It was something quite clever.
Oh yes! Substitute ‘inclination’ for ‘duty,’ and you have my difficulty.
Now do tell me what I am to do.”
“Well, wait until you hear from Everard, and then write him a nice long
letter,” said Joyce.
“That’s just what I wanted to do,” said she; “you are so good to me.”
She was to leave the hospital in January. The time was rapidly
approaching. Much of their time together was spent in the discussion
of plans for the immediate future. Yvonne wanted to sell her furniture,
which Joyce had inspected and found in safe hands. He opposed the idea.
What was the use, when she would want it again, as soon as she was
comfortably situated? In three months she would be in receipt of funds.
Everard might cable her back a remittance long before. In the meantime,
he could advance her a lump sum out of his capital.
“Then you can take unfurnished rooms and put in your own things at once.
It will be much cheaper.”
“But suppose I don’t pay you back,” said Yvonne. “How can you make me?”
“I can suggest nothing but a bill of sale on the furniture,” he replied
laughingly.
“What is that?”
“Well, you sign a paper saying that if the debt is not paid in three
months, at the end of that time I can put in the brokers and sell your
furniture and take all the money.”
“Oh, that would be lovely!” cried Yvonne. “Do let me do it. I should
feel so businesslike. Draw it up now and I ’ll sign it.”
“It will have to be registered,” said Joyce.
“Well, register it then. What’s to prevent you?”
“I was only jesting,” said Joyce.
“But I’m quite serious. Don’t you see how serious I am? Come--to please
me.”
The idea caught her childish fancy, and she spoke quite in her old, gay
mood. She was sitting up now, partially dressed, and, being able to move
her limbs more freely, reached for writing materials that lay on the
little table by her bed.
“There, draw it up at once, as fearfully legally as you can, with all
kinds of ‘afore-saids’ in it.”
Joyce fell into her humour, and drew up the document in due form, read
it over to her solemnly, and called one of the nurses to witness the
signatures. Then he wrote out a cheque for the amount of the loan, which
she locked up in her despatch-box. He went away with the bill of sale
in his pocket. On his next visit he informed her that it had been
registered and that he would be a merciless creditor. The frivolity of
the proceedings cheered him.
Meanwhile, the real problem of Yvonne’s arrangements presented itself.
The idea of going at once into unfurnished rooms was abandoned. She was
far too weak and helpless as yet for the worries of housekeeping. He
suggested a boarding-house. But Yvonne shrank from the prospect of
living among strangers.
“Besides, you could n’t come and see me as often as I should like,” she
added, with a little air of worldly wisdom. “You haven’t an idea what
scandal is talked in those places.” So Joyce quickly acquiesced in her
taboo of boarding-houses, and found the choice of domicile narrowed down
to furnished apartments.
Yvonne was beginning to be a vital interest in his life. On the days
that the hospital was not open to him, he sent her little notes of his
doings and of such things as might amuse her. In her helpless dependence
she grew to be what Noakes had been to him in his latter days--with
the sweet and subtle difference made by her sex. He had moods almost
of happiness. Yet, like Noakes, Yvonne had not the power of freeing him
from himself, from the awful memories, from the taint that clung to
him. His crime and its punishment was his hair-shirt, for ever next
the sensitive skin, never for the shortest intervals forgotten. Small
incidents were never wanting to bring back the old burning anguish.
Already in the streets he had passed, unrecognised, two old
prison-associates. The sight of them was hateful. Once, in the Strand,
he came face to face with a man, his chief intimate in that fashionable
demi-reputable world which had drawn him to his precipice. The man cut
him dead. On another occasion he met a troop of his cousins from Holland
Park on the terrace of the British Museum. He noticed a girl recognize
him and turn round another way, with a start, as he sprang hurriedly by
through the folding doors. After such encounters, he cowered under the
sense of everlasting disgrace. The old longing that always had lain
dormant within him revived with intense poignancy; the longing to redeem
his self-respect by some wild heroic deed of atonement. Sometimes he
thought of realising all his capital, including the publisher’s eighty
pounds and giving it to Yvonne. But soon she would be beyond the need of
his help and his sacrifice would be merely silly. Common-sense leads us
generally to the most hopeless commonplace. Nor did patient bearing of
his lot appeal to his sensitive fancy as an expiation. The self-respect
that would enable him to free the world’s back with cheerful calm could
only be purchased by some great self-sacrifice. But what chances for
such were offered in his humdrum, poverty-stricken life?
The days passed uneventfully. He wrote from morning to night, either
in the Museum or in his attic, with a fierce determination to earn a
livelihood that braced his powers. His attempts at occasional journalism
were fairly encouraging. The new novel grew daily in gloomy bulk. Often,
on Yvonne-less days, he strolled up to the second-hand bookshop, where he
had bought the French novels, and chatted with the proprietor, with whom
he had struck up an acquaintance. He was a snuffy, rheumy-eyed old man,
Ebenezer Runcle by name, with chronic bronchitis and a deep disdain for
the remnant of the universe outside his bookshop. But for the lumbering,
chaotic, higgledy-piggledy world of volumes within its book-lined walls,
he had a passionate veneration. Joyce found him a mine of extraordinary
and useless information. To sit on a pile of books and listen
to unceasing gossip about Gregory Nazianzene, Sozomen, Evagrius,
Photius--about Aristotle, Averrhoes, Duns Scotus, and the
Schoolmen--about Hakluyt and Purchas--about forgotten historians,
churchmen, poets, dramatists, of all countries in Europe; to turn
over musty old editions of famous printers, the Aldi, Junta, Elzevirs,
Stephani, Allobrandi, Jehans, which the old man shuffled off to procure
from dim recesses of the shelves, was a new intellectual delight. It was
a renewal of the keen book-interest of his Oxford days, and a mental
stimulus such as he had not received for many weary years. Gradually it
appeared that Mr. Runcle looked forward to his visits; and Joyce, who had
been shy at first of trespassing upon his time, gladly took advantage
of his welcome. Sometimes he helped the old man in the constant work
of rearranging and cataloguing the stock. One afternoon, he found him
wheezing so painfully with his complaint, that he persuaded him to
sit in the little back parlour, while he himself took charge of the
establishment and served customers till closing time. After that he
dropped into the habit of playing salesman. The old man seemed a lonely,
pathetic figure. Joyce’s heart instinctively warmed toward him.
One afternoon, toward the middle of January, he visited Yvonne for the
last time in the hospital. She received him, as on the last two or three
occasions, in the sister’s little sitting-room just outside the ward.
For the first time, however, she was completely dressed, and only
now did Joyce realise how thin and fragile she had become. She looked
absurdly small in the great cane armchair before the fire.
“So I am to call for you on Thursday at twelve and carry you off to your
new abode,” he said.
“Have you settled yet?” asked Yvonne.
“No, not yet. If I can get the place in Elm Park, I shall give up the
other. I shall hear to-morrow.”
Yvonne looked wistfully into the fire, and sighed.
“I shall feel awfully lonesome there, by myself. I am beginning to dread
it. You won’t think me silly, will you? I used not to mind living alone.
But then it was different. You ’ll come and see me very, very often.
Bring your writing, and I ’ll be as quiet as a mouse and won’t disturb
you. You don’t know how frightened and nervous I am. I suppose it’s
because I have been so ill.”
“You poor little thing,” said Joyce, looking down upon her, as he stood
on the hearthrug, “I wish I knew some motherly soul to take care of
you--or that I could take care of you myself,” he added, with a smile.
“Oh, I wish you could,” cried Yvonne, piteously, with an appealing
glance. “Oh, Stephen--could n’t you? I would n’t give you much trouble.”
“Do you mean, Yvonne, that you would like me to get lodgings in the same
house as you?” asked Joyce, with a sudden flash in his eyes.
“Yes,” said Yvonne. “Just at first. Until I feel stronger. I have
been longing to ask you, but I didn’t dare. Don’t think me selfish and
horrid.”
The notion dawned upon him like an inspiration. Why had he not thought
of it before? Why should he not find a garret above her rooms whence he
could look protectingly down upon her, in brotherly affection, instead
of leaving her ill and alone to the dubious mercy of landladies and
lodging-house servants? He was quite bewildered by the charm of her
proposal.
“But, Yvonne, do you know what undreamed of happiness you are offering
me?” he said.
“Then you would like it?” she cried gladly.
“Why, my dear child!” said Joyce; and he walked about the room to
express his feelings.
“I have thought it all out,” said Yvonne, sagely. “We can go to much
cheaper rooms than you intended me to have, so that you can pay the
same for your own lodgings as you pay now. I would n’t lead you into
extravagances for anything in the world.”
“If it comes to that,” said Joyce, “the second floor is vacant where I
lodge now.”
“But that is delightful!” cried Yvonne. “The fates have arranged it
on purpose for us.” They talked for a while over the new plan. Joyce’s
acquiescence, relieving her of much nervous dread of loneliness, raised
her spirits wonderfully.
“You won’t tyrannise over me too much, will you? If I am going out with
tan shoes, you won’t send me indoors to put on black ones? Promise me.”
He laughed. The idea of such an attitude towards her seemed to belong
more to comic opera than to real life. And yet he felt his authority.
She regarded him with the implicit trust of a stray child.
The sister came in and stayed whilst afternoon tea was in progress. She
had built up a lone woman’s romance for these two, and had taken them
both into her friendship. Hence the use of the sitting-room, the tea
and her wise counsels to Joyce as to the proper care of Yvonne. When she
left them alone again, a silence fell upon them, and with it the gloomy
cloud upon Joyce, that no sunshine could dispel for long. He looked
broodingly into the fire, the lines deepening on his face, the old pain
in his eyes.
Was it a right thing that he was about to do--to associate his tarnished
name with hers? It was all very well to dream of the sweetness and light
that daily companionship with her would bring into his life--but was
he fit, socially, morally, spiritually, to live with her? It was taking
advantage of her innocence. His sensitiveness shrank, as if from the
suggestion of a baser disloyalty to her trustingness.
Yvonne, leaning back in her long chair, kept her dark eyes fixed
upon him. At first she wondered at his sudden gloom, and fancied
distressedly that it proceeded from her proposal. But suddenly an
illumination, such as she had never in her life experienced, lit up
her mind, and caused her a strange little thrill. She called his name
softly. He started, turned, rose at her sign and bent low over her
chair.
“I want to come and live with you more than ever now, Stephen,” she
said; and as she spoke her voice seemed to have regained its musical
softness. “I mean to try and drive away the sad thoughts from you.
Perhaps, after all, though I can’t sing, I may do a little good in the
world.”
Her tenderness touched him. He wished she was a child that he might kiss
her. The temptation to receive this boon the gods were giving him was
too strong. He yielded entirely. And from that hour began Yvonne’s
conscious battle with the powers of darkness in the desolate depths of a
man’s heart.
CHAPTER XVIII--DRIFTWOOD
They lived together four months, Yvonne in her comfortable rooms, Joyce
in his attic overhead. At first she had been helpless, requiring much
aid both from Joyce and from the landlady, over whom she had cast her
accustomed charm; but with the early spring weather she recovered full
use of her limbs, and strength enough to fight her small battles for
herself. To Joyce it had been a time of consolation in many black moods.
He dreaded the arrival of the New Zealand mail, which he calculated
would bring Yvonne her freedom. It was almost a relief when he assured
himself by enquiries that no news had come from the Bishop. He had
another month of Yvonne’s companionship to look forward to. When
that passed, however, and the second mail from New Zealand proved as
fruitless as the first, he was forced to look at matters from a
practical point of view. He had already far exceeded the original
advance he had made to Yvonne. Under the assurance that he would be
reimbursed, he had not scrupled to spend money freely on little luxuries
and comforts. At the present rate of living, therefore, another two
months would see him at the end of his resources, which included money
that he had received in advance for the copyright of his book. His
current income from occasional journalism was ridiculously small. The
new novel was only half-way towards completion. Poverty stared him in
the face.
As a last resource he went to Everard’s bankers, but only to learn that
his cousin had withdrawn his account. He found Yvonne anxiously
awaiting the result of this errand. As he entered, she rose impulsively,
scattering scissors and spool of cotton from her lap. She read his
failure in his face.
“What is to be done?” she asked, when he had finished his report.
“I don’t know,” replied Joyce, truthfully.
He looked at her, puzzled and distressed.
“You must pay yourself out of the furniture and let me go,” said Yvonne.
“Where would you go to?”
“I don’t know,” said Yvonne in her turn.
At the picture of helpless dismay Joyce broke into a laugh.
“Oh, how _can_ you laugh, when I owe you all this money?” she said, with
a choke in her voice.
“Because I am glad, Yvonne, that fate seems to compel me to go on
looking after you.”
“But how can you go on? How can I burden you any further?”
“Don’t talk about burdens,” he said gently. “You repay me twice over for
what little I have given you.”
“But the furniture is not worth all that,” said Yvonne.
“What has the furniture to do with it?”
“Why it is yours, is n’t it?”
“How, mine?”
“The bill of sale,” replied Yvonne seriously.
“Oh, you dear little goose,” cried Joyce, “you don’t suppose I am going
to sell you up!”
“Why not--if you need the money? The furniture is all your own.”
“How can it be when I don’t claim it?”
Yvonne shook her head. Ordinarily the most easily swayed of women, now
and then she was inconvincible. She had got it into her head that the
furniture had lapsed by sheer law of England into his possession, and no
argument could move her. He explained that he could renew the bill. She
dismissed the explanation with a little foreign gesture.
“I own nothing in the world but what I stand up in,” she persisted.
“Then you’re worse off than ever,” said Joyce.
“I am,” she said despondently. “Is n’t it strange to want money! I never
knew what it was before.”
There was an odd pathos in her face that touched him.
“Cheer up, little woman. Nothing is ever so bad as it looks.”
Comforting words were nice, but they did not change the position. Money
had to be obtained. Where was it to come from?
“I suppose I must write to Everard, since your letter has miscarried.”
“Letters don’t miscarry nowadays,” said Joyce. “They don’t even do so in
novels. Still, you had better write. I wish you felt you need n’t.”
“So do I.”
“We shall have to part as soon as he cables a remittance.”
“Oh, I wish we could get along as we are,” said Yvonne. “I have been so
happy here with you.”