In the simplicity of his heart, he saw nothing outrageous in her

demands. She was troubled and anxious about Ellen, and had a right to

expect him to help her solve this problem in the best way that had

occurred to her. As for Ellen herself, now his attention had been called

to the matter, he could see that she admired him and sought him out. Why

she should do so was as much a mystery as ever--he could not think why

so soft and dainty and beautiful a creature should want to marry a

homely chap like himself. But he did not doubt the facts, and when, at

the beginning of the second week, he proposed to her, he was much less

surprised at her acceptance than she was herself.

Ellen had never meant to accept him--all she had wanted had been the

mere proclaimable fact of his surrender; but during the last weeks the

focus of her plans had shifted--they had come to mean more than the

gratification of her vanity. The denial of what she sought, the dragging

of her schemes, the growing sense of hopelessness, had made her see just

exactly how much she wanted. She would really like to marry Alce--the

slight physical antipathy with which she had started had now

disappeared, and she felt that she would not object to him as a lover.

He was, moreover, an excellent match--better than any young Vines or

Southlands or Furneses; as his wife she would be important and

well-to-do, her triumph would be sealed, open and celebrated.... She

would moreover be free. That was the strong hidden growth that had

heaved up her flat little plans of a mere victory in tattle--if she

married she would be her own mistress, free for ever of Joanna's

tyranny. She could do what she liked with Alce--she would be able to go

where she liked, know whom she liked, wear what she liked; whereas with

Joanna all these things were ruthlessly decreed. Of course she was fond

of Jo, but she was tired of living with her--you couldn't call your soul

your own--she would never be happy till she had made herself independent

of Jo, and only marriage would do that. She was tired of sulking and

submitting--she could make a better life for herself over at Donkey

Street than she could at Ansdore. Of course if she waited she might get

somebody better, but she might have to wait a long time, and she did not

care for waiting. She was not old or patient or calculating enough to be

a really successful schemer; her plans carried her this time only as far

as a triumph over Joanna and an escape from Ansdore.

§15

Certainly her triumph was a great one. Brodnyx and Pedlinge had never

expected such a thing. Their attitude had hitherto been that of the man

at the fair, who would rather distrust appearances than believe Arthur

Alce could change from Joanna Godden to her sister Ellen. It would have

been as easy to think of the sunset changing from Rye to

Court-at-Street.

There was a general opinion that Joanna had been injured--though no one

really doubted her sincerity when she said that she would never have

taken Arthur. Her evident pleasure in the wedding was considered

magnanimous--it was also a little disappointing to Ellen. Not that she

wanted Joanna to be miserable, but she would have liked her to be rather

more sensible of her sister's triumph, to regret rather more the honour

that had been taken from her. The bear's hug with which her sister had

greeted her announcement, the eager way in which she had urged and

hustled preparations for the wedding, all seemed a little incongruous

and humiliating.... Joanna should at least have had some moments of

realizing her fallen state.

However, what she missed at home Ellen received abroad. Some neighbours

were evidently offended, especially those who had sons to mate. Mrs.

Vine had been very stiff when Ellen called with Alce.

"Well, Arthur"--ignoring the bride-to-be--"I always felt certain you

would marry Ansdore, but it was the head I thought you'd take and not

the tail."

"Oh, the tail's good enough for me," said Arthur, which Ellen thought

clumsy of him.

Having taken the step, Arthur was curiously satisfied. His obedience in

renouncing Joanna seemed to have brought him closer to her than all his

long wooing. Besides, he was growing very fond of little Ellen--her

soft, clinging ways and little sleek airs appealed to him as those of a

small following animal would, and he was proud of her cleverness, and of

her prettiness, which now he had come to see, though for a long time he

had not appreciated it, because it was so different from Joanna's

healthy red and brown.

He took her round the farms, not only in her own neighbourhood, but

those near Donkey Street, over on Romney Marsh, across the Rhee Wall. In

her honour he bought a new trap, and Ellen drove beside him in it,

sitting very demure and straight. People said--"There goes Ellen

Godden, who's marrying her sister's young man," and sometimes Ellen

heard them.

She inspected Donkey Street, which was a low, plain, oblong house,

covered with grey stucco, against which flamed the orange of its

lichened roof. It had been built in Queen Anne's time, and enlarged and

stuccoed over about fifty years ago. It was a good, solid house, less

rambling than Ansdore, but the kitchens were a little damp.

Alce bought new linen and new furniture. He had some nice pieces of old

furniture too, which Ellen was very proud of. She felt she could make

quite a pleasant country house of Donkey Street. In spite of Joanna's

protests, Alce let her have her own way about styles and colours, and

her parlour was quite unlike anything ever seen on the Marsh outside

North Farthing and Dungemarsh Court. There was no centre table and no

cabinet, but a deep, comfortable sofa, which Ellen called a

chesterfield, and a "cosy corner," and a Sheraton bureau, and a Sheraton

china-cupboard with glass doors. The carpet was purple, without any

pattern on it, and the cushions were purple and black. For several days

those black cushions were the talk of the Woolpack bar and every farm.

It reminded Joanna a little of the frenzy that had greeted the first

appearance of her yellow waggons, and for the first time she felt a

little jealous of Ellen.

She sometimes, too, had moments of depression at the thought of losing

her sister, of being once more alone at Ansdore, but having made up her

mind that Ellen was to marry Arthur Alce, she was anxious to carry

through the scheme as quickly and magnificently as possible. The wedding

was fixed for May, and was to be the most wonderful wedding in the

experience of the three marshes of Walland, Dunge and Romney. For a

month Joanna's trap spanked daily along the Straight Mile, taking her

and Ellen either into Rye to the confectioner's--for Joanna had too true

a local instinct to do as her sister wanted and order the cake from

London--or to the station for Folkestone where the clothes for both

sisters were being bought. They had many a squabble over the

clothes--Ellen pleaded passionately for the soft, silken undergarments

in the shop windows, for the little lace-trimmed drawers and chemises

... it was cruel and bigoted of Joanna to buy yards and yards of calico

for nightgowns and "petticoat bodies," with trimmings of untearable

embroidery. It was also painful to be obliged to wear a saxe-blue

going-away dress when she wanted an olive green, but Ellen reflected

that she was submitting for the last time, and anyhow she was spared the

worst by the fact that the wedding-gown must be white--not much scope

for Joanna there.

§16

The day before the wedding Joanna felt unusually nervous and restless.

The preparations had been carried through so vigorously that everything

was ready--there was nothing to do, no finishing touches, and into her

mind came a sudden blank and alarm. All that evening she was unable to

settle down either to work or rest. Ellen had gone to bed early,

convinced of the good effect of sleep on her complexion, and Joanna

prowled unhappily from room to room, glancing about mechanically for

dust which she knew could not be there ... the farm was just a

collection of gleaming surfaces and crackling chintzes and gay, dashing

colours. Everything was as she wished it, yet did not please her.

She went into her room. On the little spare bed which had once been

Ellen's lay a mass of tissue paper, veiling a marvellous gown of brown

and orange shot silk, the colour of the sunburn on her cheeks, which she

was to wear to-morrow when she gave the bride away. In vain had Ellen

protested and said it would look ridiculous if she came down the aisle

with her sister--Joanna had insisted on her prerogative. "It isn't as if

we had any he-cousins fit to look at--I'll cut a better figger than

either Tom or Pete Stansbury, and what right has either of them to give

you away, I'd like to know?" Ellen had miserably suggested Sam Huxtable,

but Joanna had fixed herself in her mind's eye, swaggering, rustling and

flaming up Pedlinge aisle, with the little drooping lily of the bride

upon her arm. "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?" Mr.

Pratt would say--"I do," Joanna would answer. Everyone would stare at

Joanna, and remember that Arthur Alce had loved her for years before he

loved her sister--she was certainly "giving" Ellen to him in a double

sense.

She would be just as grand and important at this wedding as she could

possibly have been at her own, yet to-night the prospect had ceased to

thrill her. Was it because in this her first idleness she realized she

was giving away something she wanted to keep? Or because she saw that,

after all, being grand and important at another person's wedding is not

as good a thing even as being humble at your own?

"Well, it might have been my own if I'd liked," she said to herself, but

even that consideration failed to cheer her.

She went over to the chest of drawers. On it stood Martin's photograph

in a black velvet frame adorned with a small metal shield on which were

engraved the words "Not lost but gone before." The photograph was a

little faded--Martin's eyes had lost some of their appealing darkness

and the curves of the mouth she had loved were dim.... She put her face

close to the faded face in the photograph, and looked at it. Gradually

it blurred in a mist of tears, and she could feel her heart beating very

slowly, as if each beat were an effort....

Then suddenly she found herself thinking about Ellen in a new way, with

a new, strange anxiety. Martin's fading face seemed to have taught her

about Ellen, about some preparation for the wedding which might have

been left out, in spite of all the care and order of the burnished

house. Did she really love Arthur Alce?--Did she really know what she

was doing--what love meant?

Joanna put down the photograph and straightened her back. She thought of

her sister alone for the last time in her big flowery bedroom, lying

down for the last time in the rose-curtained, mahogany bed, for her last

night's rest under Ansdore's roof. It was the night on which, if she had

not been motherless, her mother would have gone to her with love and

advice. Surely on this night of all nights it was not for Joanna to

shirk the mother's part.

Her heaviness had gone, for its secret cause had been displayed--no

doubt this anxiety and this question had lurked with her all the

evening, following her from room to room. She did not hesitate, but went

down the passage to Ellen's door, which she opened as usual without

knocking.

"Not in bed, yet, duckie?"

Ellen was sitting on the bolster, in her little old plain linen

nightdress buttoning to her neck, two long plaits hanging over her

shoulders. The light of the rose-shaded lamp streamed on the flowery

walls and floor of her compulsory bower, showing the curtains and

pictures and vases and father's Buffalo certificate--showing also her

packed and corded trunks, lying there like big, blobbed seals on her

articles of emancipation.

"Hullo," she said to Joanna, "I'm just going to get in." She did not

seem particularly pleased to see her.

"You pop under the clothes, and I'll tuck you up. There's something I

want to speak to you about if you ain't too sleepy."

"About what?"

"About this wedding of yours."

"You've spoken to me about nothing else for weeks and months."

"But I want to speak to you different and most particular. Duckie, are

you quite sure you love Arthur Alce?"

"Of course I'm sure, or I shouldn't be marrying him."

"There's an unaccountable lot of reasons why any gal ud snap at Arthur.

He's got a good name and a good establishment, and he's as mild-mannered

and obliging as a cow."

Ellen looked disconcerted at hearing her bridegroom thus defined.

"If that's all I saw in him I shouldn't have said 'yes.' I like

him--he's got a kind heart and good manners, and he won't interfere with

me--he'll let me do as I please."

"But that ain't enough--it ain't enough for you just to like him. Do you

love him?--It's struck me all of a sudden, Ellen, I've never made sure

of that, and it ud be a lamentable job if you was to get married to

Arthur without loving him."

"But I do love him--I've told you. And may I ask, Jo, what you'd have

done if I'd said I didn't? It's rather late for breaking off the match."

Joanna had never contemplated such a thing. It would be difficult to say

exactly how far her plans had stretched, probably no further than the

argument and moral suasion which would forcibly compel Ellen to love if

she did not love already.

"No, no--I'd never have you break it off--with the carriages and the

breakfast ordered, and my new gownd, and your troosoo and all.... But,

Ellen, if you _want_ to change your mind ... I mean, if you feel,

thinking honest, that you don't love Arthur ... for pity's sake say so

now before it's too late. I'll stand by you--I'll face the racket--I'd

sooner you did anything than--"

"Oh, don't be an ass, Jo. Of course I don't want to change my mind. I

know what I'm doing, and I'm very fond of Arthur--I love him, if you

want the word. I like being with him, and I even like it when he kisses

me. So you needn't worry."

"Marriage is more than just being kissed and having a man about the

house."

"I know it is."

Something in the way she said it made Joanna see she was abysmally

ignorant.

"Is there anything you'd like to ask me, dearie?"

"Nothing you could possibly know anything about."

Joanna turned on her.

"I'll learn you to sass me. You dare say such a thing!"

"Well, Jo--you're not married, and there _are_ some things you don't

know."

"That's right--call me an old maid! I tell you I could have made a

better marriage than you, my girl.... I could have made the very

marriage you're making, for the matter of that."

She stood up, preparing to go in anger. Then suddenly as she looked down

on Ellen, fragile and lily-white among the bed-clothes, her heart smote

her and she relented. This was Ellen's last night at home.

"Don't let's grumble at each other. I know you and I haven't quite hit

it off, my dear, and I'm sorry, as I counted a lot on us being at

Ansdore together. I thought maybe we'd be at Ansdore together all our

lives. Howsumever, I reckon things are better as they are--it was my own

fault, trying to make a lady of you, and I'm glad it's all well ended.

Only see as it's truly well ended, dear--for Arthur's sake as well as

yours. He's a good chap and deserves the best of you."

Ellen was still angry, but something about Joanna as she stooped over

the bed, her features obscure in the lamplight, her shadow dim and

monstrous on the ceiling, made a sudden, almost reproachful appeal. A

rush of genuine feeling made her stretch out her arms.

"Jo ..."

Joanna stooped and caught her to her heart, and for a moment, the last

moment, the big and the little sister were as in times of old.

§17

Ellen's wedding was the most wonderful that Brodnyx and Pedlinge had

seen for years. It was a pity that the law of the land required it to

take place in Pedlinge church, which was comparatively small and mean,

and which indeed Joanna could never feel was so Established as the

church at Brodnyx, because it had only the old harmonium, and queer

paintings of angels instead of the Lion and the Unicorn.

However, Mr. Elphick ground and sweated wonders out of "the old

harmonister" as it was affectionately called by the two parishes, and

everyone was too busy staring at the bride and the bride's sister to

notice whether angels or King George the Third presided over the altar.

Joanna had all the success that she had longed for and expected. She

walked down the aisle with Ellen white and drooping on her arm, like a

sunflower escorting a lily. When Mr. Pratt said "Who giveth this woman

to be married to this man?" she answered "I do" in a voice that rang

through the church. Afterwards, she took her handkerchief out of her

pocket and cried a little, as is seemly at weddings.

Turner of Northlade was Arthur Alce's best man, and there were four

bridesmaids dressed in pink--Maudie Vine, Gertrude Prickett, Maggie

Southland and Ivy Cobb. They carried bouquets of roses with lots of

spiræa, and wore golden hearts "the gift of the bridegroom." Altogether

the brilliance of the company made up for the deficiencies of its

barn-like setting and the ineffectiveness of Mr. Pratt, who, discomposed

by the enveloping presence of Joanna, blundered more helplessly than

ever, so that, as Joanna said afterwards, she was glad when it was all

finished without anyone getting married besides the bride and

bridegroom.

After the ceremony there was a breakfast at Ansdore, with a wedding-cake

and ices and champagne, and waiters hired from the George Hotel at Rye.

Ellen stood at the end of the room shaking hands with a long procession

of Pricketts, Vines, Furneses, Southlands, Bateses, Turners, Cobbs....

She looked a little tired and droopy, for she had had a trying day, with

Joanna fussing and fighting her ever since six in the morning; and now

she felt resentfully that her sister had snatched the splendours of the

occasion from her to herself--it did not seem right that Joanna should

be the most glowing, conspicuous, triumphant object in the room, and

Ellen, unable to protest, sulked languishingly.

However, if the bride did not seem as proud and happy as she might, the

bridegroom made up for it. There was something almost spiritual in the

look of Arthur Alce's eyes, as he stood beside Ellen, his arm held

stiffly for the repose of hers, his great choker collar scraping his

chin, lilies of the valley and camellias sprouting from his buttonhole,

a pair of lemon kid gloves--split at the first attempt, so he could only

hold them--clutched in his moist hand. He looked devout, exalted, as he

armed his little bride and watched her sister.

"Arthur Alce looks pleased enough," said Furnese to Mrs. Bates--"reckon

he sees he's got the best of the family."

"Maybe he's thankful now that Joanna wouldn't take him."

Neither of them noticed that the glow was in Alce's eyes chiefly when

they rested on Joanna.

He knew that to-day he had pleased her better than he had ever pleased

her in his life. To-day she had said to him "God bless you,

Arthur--you're the best friend I have, or am like to have, neither."

To-day he had made himself her kinsman, with a dozen new opportunities

of service. Chief among these was the dear little girl on his arm--how

pretty and sweet she was! How he would love her and cherish her as he

had promised Mr. Pratt! Well, thank God, he had done Joanna one good

turn, and himself not such a bad one, neither. How clever she had been

to think of his marrying Ellen! He would never have thought of it

himself; yet now he saw clearly that it was a wonderful notion--nothing

could be better. Joanna was valiant for notions.... Alce had had one

glass of champagne.

At about four o'clock, Joanna dashed into the circle round the bride,

and took Ellen away upstairs, to put on her travelling dress of

saxe-blue satin--the last humiliation she would have to endure from

Ansdore. The honeymoon was being spent at Canterbury, cautiously chosen

by Arthur as a place he'd been to once and so knew the lie of a bit.

Ellen had wanted to go to Wales, or to the Lakes, but Joanna had sternly

forbidden such outrageous pinings--"Arthur's got two cows calving next

week--what are you thinking of, Ellen Godden?"

The bridal couple drove away amidst much hilarity, inspired by the

unaccustomed champagne and expressed in rice and confetti. After they

had gone the guests still lingered, feasting at the littered tables or

re-inspecting and re-valuing the presents which had been laid out, after

the best style, in the dining-room. Sir Harry Trevor had sent Ellen a

little pearl pendant, though he had been unable to accept Joanna's

invitation and come to the wedding himself--he wrote from a London

address and hinted vaguely that he might never come back to North

Farthing House, which had been let furnished. His gift was the chief

centre of interest--when Mrs. Vine had done comparing her electro-plated

cruet most favourably with the one presented by Mrs. Furnese and the

ignoble china object that Mrs. Cobb had had the meanness to send, and

Mrs. Bates had recovered from the shock of finding that her tea-cosy was

the exact same shape and pattern as the one given by Mrs. Gain. People

thought it odd that the Old Squire should send pearls to Ellen

Godden--something for the table would have been much more seemly.

Joanna had grown weary--her shoulders drooped under her golden gown, she

tossed back her head and yawned against the back of her hand. She was

tired of it all, and wanted them to go. What were they staying for? They

must know the price of everything pretty well by this time and have

eaten enough to save their suppers. She was no polished hostess,

concealing her boredom, and the company began soon to melt away. Traps

lurched over the shingle of Ansdore's drive, the Pricketts walked off

across the innings to Great Ansdore, guests from Rye packed into two

hired wagonettes, and the cousins from the Isle of Wight drove back to

the George, where, as there were eight of them and they refused to be

separated, Joanna was munificently entertaining them instead of under

her own roof.

When the last was gone, she turned back into the house, where Mrs.

Tolhurst stood ready with her broom to begin an immediate sweep-up after

the waiters, whom she looked upon as the chief source of the disorder. A

queer feeling came over Joanna, a feeling of loneliness, of craving, and

she fell in all her glory of feathers and silk upon Mrs. Tolhurst's

alpaca bosom. Gone were those arbitrary and often doubtful distinctions

between them, and the mistress enjoyed the luxury of a good cry in her

servant's arms.

§18

Ellen's marriage broke into Joanna's life quite as devastatingly as

Martin's death. Though for more than three years her sister had been

away at school, with an ever-widening gulf of temperament between

herself and the farm, and though since her return she had been little

better at times than a rebellious and sulky stranger, nevertheless she

was a part of Ansdore, a part of Joanna's life there, and the elder

sister found it difficult to adjust things to her absence.

Of course Ellen had not gone very far--Donkey Street was not five miles

from Ansdore, though in a different parish and a different county. But

the chasm between them was enormous--it was queer to think that a mere

change of roof-tree could make such a difference. No doubt the reason

was that with Ellen it had involved an entire change of habit. While she

lived with Joanna she had been bound both by the peculiarities of her

sister's nature and her own to accept her way of living. She had

submitted, not because she was weak or gentle-minded but because

submission was an effective weapon of her welfare; now, having no

further use for it, she ruled instead and was another person. She was,

besides, a married woman, and the fact made all the difference to Ellen

herself. She felt herself immeasurably older and wiser than Joanna, her

teacher and tyrant. Her sister's life seemed to her puerile.... Ellen

had at last read the riddle of the universe and the secret of wisdom.

The sisters' relations were also a little strained over Arthur Alce.

Joanna resented the authority that Ellen assumed--it took some time to

show her that Arthur was no longer hers. She objected when Ellen made

him shave off his moustache and whiskers; he looked ten years younger

and a far handsomer man, but he was no longer the traditional Arthur

Alce of Joanna's history, and she resented it. Ellen on her part

resented the way Joanna still made use of him, sending him to run

errands and make inquiries for her just as she used in the old days

before his marriage. "Arthur, I hear there's some good pigs going at

Honeychild auction--I can't miss market at Lydd, but you might call

round and have a look for me." Or "Arthur, I've a looker's boy coming

from Abbot's Court--you might go there for his characters, I haven't

time, with the butter-making to-day and Mene Tekel such an owl."

Ellen rebelled at seeing her husband ordered about, and more than once

"told off" her sister, but Joanna had no intention of abandoning her

just claims in Arthur, and the man himself was pig-headed--"I mun do

what I can for her, just as I used." Ellen could make him shave off his

whiskers, she could even make him on occasion young and fond and

frolicsome, but she could not make him stop serving Joanna, or, had she

only known it, stop loving her. Arthur was perfectly happy as Ellen's

husband, and made her, as Joanna had foretold, an exemplary one, but

his love for Joanna seemed to grow rather than diminish as he cared for

and worked for and protected her sister. It seemed to feed and thrive on

his love for Ellen--it gave him a wonderful sense of action and

effectiveness, and people said what a lot of good marriage had done for

Arthur Alce, and that he was no longer the dull chap he used to be.

§19

It had done Ellen a lot of good too. During the next year she blossomed

and expanded. She lost some of her white looks. The state of marriage

suited her thoroughly well. Being her own mistress and at the same time

having a man to take care of her, having an important and comfortable

house of her own, ordering about her own servants and spending her

husband's money, such things made her life pleasant, and checked the

growth of peevishness that had budded at Ansdore.

During the first months of her marriage, Joanna went fairly often to see

her, one reason being the ache which Ellen's absence had left in her

heart--she wanted to see her sister, sit with her, hear her news.

Another reason was the feeling that Ellen, a beginner in the ways of

life and household management, still needed her help and guidance. Ellen

soon undeceived her on this point. "I really know how to manage my own

house, Joanna," she said once or twice when the other commented and

advised, and Joanna had been unable to enforce her ideas, owing to the

fact that she seldom saw Ellen above once or twice a week. Her sister

could do what she liked in her absence, and it was extraordinary how

definite and cocksure the girl was about things she should have

approached in the spirit of meekness and dependence on her elders.

"I count my linen after it is aired--it comes in at such an inconvenient

time that I can't attend to it then. The girls can easily hang it out on

the horse--really, Joanna, one must trust people to do something."

"Well, then, don't blame me when you're a pillowcase short."

"I certainly shan't blame you," said Ellen coolly.

Joanna felt put out and injured. It hurt her to see that Ellen did not

want her supervision--she had looked forward to managing Donkey Street

as well as Ansdore. She tried to get a hold on Ellen through Arthur

Alce.

"Arthur, it's your duty to see Ellen don't leave the bread-making to

that cook-gal of hers. I never heard of such a notion--her laying on the

sofa while the gal wastes coal and flour." ... "Arthur, Ellen needs a

new churn--let her get a Wallis. It's a shame for her to be buying new

cushions when her churn's an old butter-spoiler I wouldn't use if I was

dead--Arthur, you're there with her, and you can make her do what I

say."

But Arthur could not, any more than Joanna, make Ellen do what she did

not want. He had always been a mild-mannered man, and he found Ellen, in

her different way, quite as difficult to stand up to as her sister.

"I'm not going to have Jo meddling with my affairs," she would say with

a toss of her head.

§20

Another thing that worried Joanna was the fact that the passing year

brought no expectations to Donkey Street. One of her happiest

anticipations in connexion with Ellen's marriage was her having a dear

little baby whom Joanna could hug and spoil and teach. Perhaps it would

be a little girl, and she would feel like having Ellen over again.

She was bitterly disappointed when Ellen showed no signs of obliging her

quickly, and indeed quite shocked by her sister's expressed indifference

on the matter.

"I don't care about children, Jo, and I'm over young to have one of my

own."

"Young! You're rising twenty, and mother was but eighteen when I was

born."

"Well, anyhow, I don't see why I should have a child just because you

want one."

"I don't want one. For shame to say such things, Ellen Alce."

"You want me to have one, then, for your benefit."

"Don't you want one yourself?"

"No--not now. I've told you I don't care for children."

"Then you should ought to! Dear little mites! It's a shame to talk like

that. Oh, what wouldn't I give, Ellen, to have a child of yours in my

arms."

"Why don't you marry and have one of your own?"

Joanna coloured.

"I don't want to marry."

"But you ought to marry if that's how you feel. Why don't you take a

decent fellow like, say, Sam Turner, even if you don't love him, just so

that you may have a child of your own? You're getting on, you know,

Joanna--nearly thirty-four--you haven't much time to waste."

"Well it ain't my fault," said Joanna tearfully, "that I couldn't marry

the man I wanted to. I'd have been married more'n five year now if he

hadn't been took. And it's sorter spoiled the taste for me, as you might

say. I don't feel inclined to get married--it don't take my fancy, and I

don't see how I'm ever going to bring myself to do it. That's why it ud

be so fine for me if you had a little one, Ellen--as I could hold and

kiss and care for and feel just as if it was my own."

"Thanks," said Ellen.

§21

The winding up of her plans for her sister made it necessary that Joanna

should cast about for fresh schemes to absorb her energies. The farm

came to her rescue in this fresh, more subtle collapse, and she turned

to it as vigorously as she had turned after Martin's death, and with an

increase of that vague feeling of bitterness which had salted her

relations with it ever since.

A strong rumour was blowing on the Marsh that shortly Great Ansdore

would come into the market. Joanna's schemes at once were given their

focus. She would buy Great Ansdore if she had the chance. She had always

resented its presence, so inaptly named, on the fringe of Little

Ansdore's greatness. If she bought it, she would be adding more than

fifty acres to her own, but it was good land--Prickett was a fool not

to have made more of it--and the possession carried with it manorial

rights, including the presentation of the living of Brodnyx with

Pedlinge. When Joanna owned Great Ansdore in addition to her own

thriving and established patrimony, she would be a big personage on the

Three Marshes, almost "county." No tenant or yeoman from Dymchurch to

Winchelsea, from Romney to the coast, would dare withhold his

respect--she might even at last be admitted a member of the Farmers'

Club....

It was characteristic of her that, with this purchase in view, she made

no efforts to save money. She set out to make it instead, and her

money-making was all of the developing, adventurous kind--she ploughed

more grass, and decided to keep three times the number of cows and open

a milk-round.

As a general practice only a few cows were kept on the Marsh farms, for,

owing to the shallowness of the dykes, it was difficult to prevent their

straying. However, Joanna boldly decided to fence all the Further

Innings. She could spare that amount of grazing, and though she would

have to keep down the numbers of her sheep till after she had bought

Great Ansdore, she expected to make more money out of the milk and dairy

produce--she might even in time open a dairy business in Rye. This would

involve the engaging of an extra girl for the dairy and chickens, and an

extra man to help Broadhurst with the cows, but Joanna was undaunted.

She enjoyed a gamble, when it was not merely a question of luck, but

also in part a matter of resource and planning and hard driving pace.

"There's Joanna Godden saving her tin to buy Great Ansdore," said Bates

of Picknye Bush to Cobb of Slinches, as they watched her choosing her

shorthorns at Romney. She had Arthur Alce beside her, and he was, as in

the beginning, trying to persuade her to be a little smaller in her

ideas, but, as in the beginning, she would not listen.

"Setting up cow-keeping now, is she?--Will she make as much a valiant

wonder of that as she did with her sheep? Ha! ha!"

"Ha! ha!" The two men laughed and winked and rubbed their noses, for

they liked to remember the doleful tale of Joanna's first adventure at

Ansdore; it made them able to survey more equably her steady rise in

glory ever since.

It was obvious to Walland Marsh that, on the whole, her big ideas had

succeeded where the smaller, more cautious ones of her neighbours had

failed. Of course she had been lucky--luckier than she deserved--but she

was beginning to make men wonder if after all there wasn't policy in

paying a big price for a good thing, rather than in obeying the rules of

haggle which maintained on other farms. Ansdore certainly spent half as

much again as Birdskitchen or Beggar's Bush or Misleham or Yokes Court,

but then it had nearly twice as much to show for it. Joanna was not the

woman who would fail to keep pace with her own prosperity--her swelling

credit was not recorded merely in her pass-book; it was visible, indeed

dazzling, to every eye.

She had bought a new trap and mare--a very smart turn-out, with rubber

tires and chocolate-coloured upholstery, while the mare herself had

blood in her, and a bit of the devil too, and upset the sleepy,

chumbling rows of farmers' horses waiting for their owners in the

streets of Lydd or Rye. Old Stuppeny had died in the winter following

Ellen's marriage, and had been lavishly buried, with a tombstone, and an

obituary notice in the _Rye Observer_, at Joanna's expense. In his place

she had now one of those good-looking, rather saucy-eyed young men, whom

she liked to have about her in a menial capacity. He wore a

chocolate-coloured livery made by a tailor in Marlingate, and sat on the

seat behind Joanna with his arms folded across his chest, as she spanked

along the Straight Mile.

Joanna was now thirty-three years old, and in some ways looked older

than her age, in others younger. Her skin, richly weather-beaten into

reds and browns, and her strong, well-developed figure in its

old-fashioned stays, made her look older than her eyes, which had an

expectant, childish gravity in their brightness, and than her mouth,

which was still a young woman's mouth, large, eager, full-lipped, with

strong, little, white teeth. Her hair was beautiful--it had no

sleekness, but, even in its coils, looked rough and abundant, and it

had the same rich, apple-red colours in it as her skin.

She still had plenty of admirers, for the years had made her more rather

than less desirable in herself, and men had grown used to her

independence among them. Moreover, she was a "catch," a maid with money,

and this may have influenced the decorous, well-considered offers she

had about this time from farmers inland as well as on the Marsh. She

refused them decidedly--nevertheless, it was obvious that she was well

pleased to have been asked; these solid, estimable proposals testified

to a quality in her life which had not been there before.

Yes--she had done well for herself on the whole, she thought. Looking

back over her life, over the ten years she had ruled at Ansdore, she saw

success consistently rewarding hard work and high ambition. She saw,

too, strange gaps--parts of the road which had grown dim in her memory,

parts where probably there had been a turning, where she might have left

this well-laid, direct and beaten highway for more romantic field-paths.

It was queer, when she came to think of it, that nothing in her life had

been really successful except Ansdore, that directly she had turned off

her high-road she had become at once as it were bogged and lantern-led.

Socknersh ... Martin ... Ellen ... there had been by-ways, dim paths

leading into queer unknown fields, a strange beautiful land, which now

she would never know.

§22

Ellen watched her sister's thriving. "She's almost a lady," she said to

herself, "and it's wasted on her." She was inclined to be dissatisfied

with her own position in local society. When she had first married she

had not thought it would be difficult to get herself accepted as

"county" in the new neighbourhood, but she had soon discovered that she

had had far more consequence as Joanna Godden's sister than she would

ever have as Arthur Alce's wife. Even in those days Little Ansdore had

been a farm of the first importance, and Joanna was at least notorious

where she was not celebrated; but Donkey Street held comparatively

humble rank in a district overshadowed by Dungemarsh Court, and Arthur

was not the man to push himself into consideration, though Ellen had

agreed that half her marriage portion should be spent on the improvement

of his farm.

No one of any consequence had called upon her, though her drawing-room,

with its black cushions and Watts pictures, was more fit to receive the

well-born and well-bred than Joanna's disgraceful parlour of oleographs

and aspidistras and stuffed owls. The Parson had "visited" Mrs. Alce a

few weeks after her arrival, but a "visit" is not a call, and when at

the end of three months his wife still ignored her existence, Ellen made

Arthur come over with her to Brodnyx and Pedlinge on the Sundays she

felt inclined to go to church, saying that she did not care for their

ways at Romney, where they had a lot of ceremonial centering round the

alms-dish.

It was bitter for her to have to watch Joanna's steady rise in

importance--the only respect in which she felt bitter towards her

sister, since it was the only respect in which she felt inferior to her.

After a time, Joanna discovered this. At first she had enjoyed pouring

out her triumphs to Ellen on her visits to Donkey Street, or on the

rarer occasions when Ellen visited Ansdore.

"Yes, my dear, I've made up my mind. I'm going to give a dinner-party--a

late dinner-party. I shall ask the people to come at seven, and then not

have dinner till the quarter, so as there'll be no chance of the food

being kept waiting. I shall have soup and meat and a pudding, and wine

to drink."

"Who are you going to invite?" asked Ellen, with a curl of her lip.

"Why, didn't I tell you? Sir Harry Trevor's coming back to North

Farthing next month. Mrs. Tolhurst got it from Peter Crouch, who had it

from the Woolpack yesterday. He's coming down with his married sister,

Mrs. Williams, and I'll ask Mr. Pratt, so as there'll be two gentlemen

and two ladies. I'd ask you, Ellen, only I know Arthur hasn't got an

evening suit."

"Thanks. I don't care about dinner-parties. Who's going to do your

waiting?"

"Mene Tekel. She's going to wear a cap, and stand in the room all the

time."

"I hope that you'll be able to hear yourselves talk through her

breathing."

It struck Joanna that Ellen was not very cordial.

"I believe you want to come," she said, "and I tell you, duckie, I'll

try and manage it. It doesn't matter about Arthur not having proper

clothes--I'll put 'evening dress optional' on the invitations."

"I shouldn't do that," said Ellen, and laughed in a way that made Joanna

feel uncomfortable. "I really don't want to come in the least--it would

be very dreary driving to and fro."

"Then what's the matter, dearie?"

"Matter? There's nothing the matter."

But Joanna knew that Ellen felt sore, and failing to discover the reason

herself at last applied to Arthur Alce.

"If you ask me," said Arthur, "it's because she's only a farmer's wife."

"Why should that upset her all of a sudden?"

"Well, folks don't give her the consequence she'd like; and now she sees

you having gentry at your table ..."

"I'd have had her at it too, only she didn't want to come, and you

haven't got the proper clothes. Arthur, if you take my advice, you'll go

into Lydd this very day and buy yourself an evening suit."

"Ellen won't let me. She says I'd look a clown in it."

"Ellen's getting very short. What's happened to her these days?"

"It's only that she likes gentlefolk and is fit to mix with them; and

after all, Jo, I'm nothing but a pore common man."

"I hope you don't complain of her, Arthur?"

"Oh, no--I've no complaints--don't you think it. And don't you go saying

anything to her, Jo."

"Then what am I to do about it? I won't have her troubling you, nor

herself, neither. I tell you what I'll do--look here!--I--I--" Joanna

gave a loud sacrificial gulp--"I'll make it middle-day dinner instead of

late, and then you won't have to wear evening dress, and Ellen can come

and meet the Old Squire. She should ought to, seeing as he gave her a

pearl locket when she was married. It won't be near so fine as having

it in the evening, but I don't want neither her nor you to be upset--and

I can always call it 'lunch' ..."

§23

As the result of Joanna's self-denial, Ellen and Arthur were able to

meet Sir Harry Trevor and his sister at luncheon at Ansdore. The

luncheon did not differ in any respect from the dinner as at first

proposed. There was soup--much to Ellen's annoyance, as Arthur had never

been able to master the etiquette of its consumption--and a leg of

mutton and roast fowls, and a large fig pudding, washed down with some

really good wine, for Joanna had asked the wine-merchant at Rye

uncompromisingly for his best--"I don't mind what I pay so long as it's

that"--and had been served accordingly. Mene Tekel waited, with creaking

stays and shoes, and loud breaths down the visitors' necks as she thrust

vegetable dishes and sauce-boats at perilous angles over their

shoulders.

Ellen provided a piquant contrast to her surroundings. As she sat there

in her soft grey dress, with her eyes cast down under her little town

hat, with her quiet voice, and languid, noiseless movements, anything

more unlike the average farmer's wife of the district was difficult to

imagine. Joanna felt annoyed with her for dressing up all quiet as a

water-hen, but she could see that, in spite of it, her sacrifice in

having her party transferred from the glamorous evening hour had been

justified. Both the Old Squire and his sister were obviously interested

in Ellen Alce--he in the naïve unguarded way of the male, she more

subtly and not without a dash of patronage.

Mrs. Williams always took an interest in any woman she thought

downtrodden, as her intuition told her Ellen was by that coarse, hairy

creature, Arthur Alce. She herself had disposed of an unsatisfactory

husband with great decision and resource, and, perhaps as a

thank-offering, had devoted the rest of her life to woman's

emancipation. She travelled about the country lecturing for a

well-known suffrage society, and was bitterly disappointed in Joanna

Godden because she expressed herself quite satisfied without the vote.

"But don't you feel it humiliating to see your carter and your cowman

and your shepherd boy all go up to Rye to vote on polling-day, while

you, who own this farm, and have such a stake in the country, aren't

allowed to do so?"

"It only means as I've got eight votes instead of one," said Joanna,

"and don't have the trouble of going to the poll, neither. Not one of my

men would dare vote but as I told him, so reckon I do better than most

at the elections."

Mrs. Williams told Joanna that it was such opinions which were keeping

back the country from some goal unspecified.

"Besides, you have to think of other women, Miss Godden--other women who

aren't so fortunate and independent as yourself."

She gave a long glance at Ellen, whose downcast eyelids flickered.

"I don't care about other women," said Joanna, "if they won't stand up

for themselves, I can't help them. It's easy enough to stand up to a

man. I don't think much of men, neither. I like 'em, but I can't think

any shakes of their doings. That's why I'd sooner they did their own

voting and mine too. Now, Mene Tekel, can't you see the Squire's ate all

his cabbage?--You hand him the dish again--not under his chin--he don't

want to eat out of it--but low down, so as he can get hold of the

spoon...."

Joanna looked upon her luncheon party as a great success, and her

pleasure was increased by the fact that soon after it Sir Harry Trevor

and his sister paid a ceremonial call on Ellen at Donkey Street.

"Now she'll be pleased," thought Joanna, "it's always what she's been

hankering after--having gentlefolk call on her and leave their cards. It

ain't my fault it hasn't happened earlier.... I'm unaccountable glad she

met them at my house. It'll learn her to think prouder of me."

§24

That spring and summer Sir Harry Trevor was a good deal at North

Farthing, and it was rumoured on the Marsh that he had run through the

money so magnanimously left him and had been driven home to economize.

Joanna did not see as much of him as in the old days--he had given up

his attempts at farming, and had let off all the North Farthing land

except the actual garden and paddock. He came to see her once or twice,

and she went about as rarely to see him. It struck her that he had

changed in many ways, and she wondered a little where he had been and

what he had done during the last four years. He did not look any older.

Some queer, rather unpleasant lines had traced themselves at the corners

of his mouth and eyes, but strangely enough, though they added to his

characteristic air of humorous sophistication, they also added to his

youth, for they were lines of desire, of feeling ... perhaps in his four

years of absence from the Marsh he had learned how to feel at last, and

had found youth instead of age in the commotions which feeling brings.

Though he must be fifty-five, he looked scarcely more than forty--and he

had a queer, weak, loose, emotional air about him that she found it hard

to account for.

In the circumstances she did not press invitations upon him, she had no

time to waste on men who did not appreciate her as a woman--which the

Squire, in spite of his susceptibility, obviously failed to do. From

June to August she met him only once, and that was at Ellen's. Neither

did she see very much of Ellen that summer--her life was too full of

hard work, as a substitute for economy.

Curiously enough next time she went to see her sister Sir Harry was

there again.

"Hullo! I always seem to be meeting you here," she said--"and nowhere

else--you never come to see me now."

Sir Harry grinned.

"You're always so mortal busy, Jo--I'd feel in your way. Now this little

woman never seems to have much to do. You're a lazy little thing,

Ellen--I don't believe you ever move off the sofa, except to the

piano."

Joanna was surprised to see him on such familiar terms with her

sister--"Ellen," indeed! He'd no right to call her that.

"Mrs. Alce hasn't nothing beyond her housework to do--and any woman

worth her keep 'ull get shut of that in the morning. Now I've got

everything on my hands--and I've no good, kind Arthur to look after me

neither," and Joanna beamed on Arthur Alce as he stirred his tea at the

end of the table.

"And jolly thankful you are that you haven't," said the Squire. "Own up,

Joanna, and say that the last thing you'd want in life would be someone

to look after you."

"Well, it strikes me," said Joanna, "as most of the people I meet want

looking after themselves, and it 'ud be just about waste for any of 'em

to start looking after me."

Arthur Alce unexpectedly murmured something that sounded like "Hear,

hear."

When Joanna left, he brought round her trap, as the saucy-eyed young

groom was having a day off in Rye.

"How've your turnips done?" he asked.

"Not so good as last year, but the wurzels are fine."

"Mine might be doing better"--he stood fumbling with a trace-buckle.

"Has that come loose?" asked Joanna.

"Nun-no. I hope your little lady liked her oats."

"She looks in good heart--watch her tugging. You've undone that buckle,

Arthur."

"So I have--I was just fidgeting."

He fastened the strap again, his fingers moving clumsily and slowly. It

struck her that he was trying to gain time, that he wanted to tell her

something.

"Anything the matter, Arthur?"

"Nothing--why?"

"Oh, it struck me you looked worried."

"What should I be worried about?"

"There's a lot of things you might be worried about. What did you tell

me about your wurzels?"

"They're not so bad."

"Then I can't see as there's any need for you to look glum."

"No more there ain't," said Arthur in the voice of a man making a

desperate decision.

§25

It was not till nearly a month later that Joanna heard that people were

"talking" about Ellen and Sir Harry. Gossip generally took some time to

reach her, owing to her sex, which was not privileged to frequent the

Woolpack bar, where rumours invariably had a large private circulation

before they were finally published at some auction or market. She

resented this disability, but in spite of the general daring of her

outlook and behaviour, nothing would have induced her to enter the

Woolpack save by the discreet door of the landlady's parlour, where she

occasionally sipped a glass of ale. However, she had means of acquiring

knowledge, though not so quickly as those women who were provided with

husbands and sons. On this occasion Mene Tekel Fagge brought the news,

through the looker at Slinches, with whom she was walking out.

"That'll do, Mene," said Joanna to her handmaiden, "you always was the

one to pick up idle tales, and Dansay should ought to be ashamed of

himself, drinking and talking the way he does. Now you go and tell Peter

Crouch to bring me round the trap."

She drove off to Donkey Street, carrying her scandal to its source. She

was extremely angry--not that for one moment she believed in the truth

of those accusations brought against her sister, but Ellen was just the

sort of girl, with her airs and notions, to get herself talked about at

the Woolpack, and it was disgraceful to have such things said about one,

even if they were not true. There was a prickly heat of shame in

Joanna's blood as she hustled the mare over the white loops of the

Romney road.

The encounter with Ellen made her angrier still.

"I don't care what they say," said her sister, "why should I mind what a

public-house bar says against me?"

"Well, you should ought to mind--it's shameful."

"They've said plenty against you."

"Not that sort of thing."

"I'd rather have that sort of thing said about me than some."

"Ellen!"

"Well, the Squire's isn't a bad name to have coupled with mine, if they

must couple somebody's."

"I wonder you ain't afraid of being struck dead, talking like that--you

with the most kind, good-tempered and lawful husband that ever was."

"Do you imagine that I'm disloyal to Arthur?"

"Howsumever could you think I'd dream of such a thing?"

"Well, it's the way you're talking."

"It ain't."

"Then why are you angry?"

"Because you shouldn't ought to get gossiped about like that."

"It isn't my fault."

"It is. You shouldn't ought to have Sir Harry about the place as much as

you do. The last two times I've been here, he's been too."

"I like him--he amuses me."

"I like him too, but he ain't worth nothing, and he's got a bad name.

You get shut of him, Ellen--I know him, and I know a bit about him; he

ain't the sort of man to have coming to your house when folks are

talking."

"You have him to yours--whenever you can get him."

"But then I'm a single woman, and he being a single man there's no harm

in it."

"Do you think that a married woman should know no man but her husband?"

"What did she marry a husband for?"

"Really, Joanna ... however, there's no use arguing with you. I'm sorry

you're annoyed at the gossip, but to keep out of the gossip here one

would have to live like a cabbage. You haven't exactly kept out of it

yourself."

"Have done, do, with telling me that. They only talk about me because

I'm more go-ahead than any of 'em, and make more money. Anyone may talk

about you that way and I shan't mind. But to have it said at the

Woolpack as you, a married woman, lets a man like Sir Harry be for ever

hanging around your house ..."

"Are you jealous?" said Ellen softly. "Poor old Jo--I'm sorry if I've

taken _another_ of your men."

Joanna opened her mouth and stared at her. At first she hardly

understood, then, suddenly grasping what was in Ellen's mind, she took

in her breath for a torrential explanation of the whole matter. But the

next minute she realized that this was hardly the moment to say anything

which would prejudice her sister against Arthur Alce. If Ellen would

value him more as a robbery, then let her persist in her delusion. The

effort of silence was so great that Joanna became purple and

apoplectic--with a wild, grabbing gesture she turned away, and burst out

of the house into the drive, where her trap was waiting.

§26

The next morning Mene Tekel brought fresh news from the Woolpack, and

this time it was of a different quality, warranted to allay the seething

of Joanna's moral sense. Sir Harry Trevor had sold North Farthing to a

retired bootmaker. He was going to the South of France for the winter,

and was then coming back to his sister's flat in London, while she went

for a lecturing tour in the United States. The Woolpack was very

definitely and minutely informed as to his doings, and had built its

knowledge into the theory that he must have had some more money left

him.

Joanna was delighted--she forgave Sir Harry, and Ellen too, which was a

hard matter. None the less, as November approached through the showers

and floods, she felt a little anxious lest he should delay his going or

perhaps even revoke it. However, the first week of the month saw the

arrival of the bootmaker from Deal, with two van-loads of furniture, and

his wife and four grown-up daughters--all as ugly as roots, said the

Woolpack. The Squire's furniture was sold by auction at Dover, from

which port his sailing was in due course guaranteed by credible

eye-witnesses. Joanna once more breathed freely. No one could talk

about him and Ellen now--that disgraceful scandal, which seemed to lower

Ellen to the level of Marsh dairy-girls in trouble, and had about it too

that strange luciferian flavour of "the sins of Society," that scandal

had been killed, and its dead body taken away in the Dover mail.

Now that he was gone, and no longer a source of danger to her family's

reputation, she found herself liking Sir Harry again. He had always been

friendly, and though she fundamentally disapproved of his "ways," she

was woman enough to be thrilled by his lurid reputation. Moreover, he

provided a link, her last living link, with Martin's days--now that

strange women kept rabbits in the backyards of North Farthing and the

rooms were full of the Deal bootmaker's resplendent suites, that time of

dew and gold and dreams seemed to have faded still further off. For many

years it had lain far away on the horizon, but now it seemed to have

faded off the earth altogether, and to live only in the sunset sky or in

the dim moon-risings, which sometimes woke her out of her sleep with a

start, as if she slipped on the verge of some troubling memory.

This kindlier state of affairs lasted for about a month, during which

Joanna saw very little of Ellen. She was at rest about her sister, for

the fact that Ellen might be feeling lonely and unhappy at the departure

of her friend did not trouble her in the least; such emotions, so vile

in their source, could not call for any sympathy. Besides, she was busy,

hunting for a new cowman to work under Broadhurst, whose undertakings,

since the establishment of the milk-round, had almost come to equal

those of the looker in activity and importance.

She was just about to set out one morning for a farm near Brenzett, when

she saw Arthur Alce come up to the door on horseback.

"Hullo, Jo!" he called rather anxiously through the window. "Have you

got Ellen?"

"I?--No. Why should I have her, pray?"

"Because I ain't got her."

"What d'you mean? Get down, Arthur, and come and talk to me in here.

Don't let everyone hear you shouting like that."

Arthur hitched his horse to the paling and came in.

"I thought maybe I'd find her here," he said. "I ain't seen her since

breakfast."

"There's other places she could have gone besides here. Maybe she's gone

shopping in Romney and forgot to tell you."

"It's queer her starting off like that without a word--and she's took

her liddle bag and a few bits of things with her too."

"What things?--Arthur! Why couldn't you tell me that before?"

"I was going to.... I'm feeling a bit anxious, Jo.... I've a feeling

she's gone after that Old Squire."

"You dare say such a thing! Arthur, I'm ashamed of you, believing such a

thing of your wife and my sister."

"Well, she was unaccountable set on him."

"Nonsense! He just amused her. It's you whose wife she is."

"She's scarce given me a word more'n in the way of business, as you

might say, this last three month. And she won't let me touch her."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"I didn't want to trouble you, and I thought maybe it was a private

matter."

"You should have told me the drackly minute Ellen started not to treat

you proper. I'd have spoken to her.... Now we're in for a valiant

terrification."

"I'm unaccountable sorry, Jo."

"How long has she been gone?"

"Since around nine. I went out to see the tegs, counting them up to go

inland, and when I came in for dinner the gal told me as Ellen had gone

out soon after breakfast, and had told her to see as I got my dinner, as

she wouldn't be back."

"Why didn't you start after her at once?"

"Well, I made sure as she'd gone to you. Then I began to think over

things and put 'em together, and I found she'd taken her liddle bag, and

I got scared. I never liked her seeing such a lot of that man."

"Then why didn't you stop it?"

"How could I?"

"I could have--and the way people talked.... I'd have locked her up

sooner than ... well, it's too late now ... the boat went at twelve. Oh,

Arthur, why didn't you watch her properly? Why did you let her go like

that? Think of it! What's to become of her--away in foreign parts with a

man who ain't her husband ... my liddle Ellen ... oh, it's

turble--turble--"

Her speech suddenly roughened into the Doric of the Marsh, and she sat

down heavily, dropping her head to her knees.

"Joanna--don't, don't ... don't take on, Jo."

He had not seen her cry before, and now she frightened him. Her

shoulders heaved, and great panting sobs shook her broad back.

"My liddle Ellen ... my treasure, my duckie ... oh, why have you left

us?... You could have come back to me if you didn't like it.... Oh,

Ellen, where are you?... Come back ..."

Arthur stood motionless beside her, his frame rigid, his protuberant

blue eyes staring through the window at the horizon. He longed to take

Joanna in his arms, caress and comfort her, but he knew that he must

not.

"Cheer up," he said at last in a husky voice, "maybe it ain't so bad as

you think. Maybe I'll find her at home when I get back to Donkey

Street."

"Not if she took her bag. Oh, whatsumever shall we do?--whatsumever

shall we do?"

"We can but wait. If she don't come back, maybe she'll send me a

letter."

"It queers me how you can speak so light of it."

"I speak light?"

"Yes, you don't seem to tumble to it."

"Reckon I do tumble to it, but what can we do?"

"You shouldn't have left her alone all that time from breakfast till

dinner--if you'd gone after her at the start you could have brought her

back. You should ought to have kicked Sir Harry out of Donkey Street

before the start. I'd have done it surely. Reckon I love Ellen more'n

you."

"Reckon you do, Jo. I tell you, I ought never to have married her--since

it was you I cared for all along."

"Hold your tongue, Arthur. I'm ashamed of you to choose this time to

say such an immoral thing."

"It ain't immoral--it's the truth."

"Well, it shouldn't ought to be the truth. When you married Ellen you'd

no business to go on caring for me. I guess all this is a judgment on

you, caring for a woman when you'd married her sister."

"You ain't yourself, Jo," said Arthur sadly, "and there's no sense

arguing with you. I'll go away till you've got over it. Maybe I'll have

some news for you to-morrow morning."

§27

To-morrow morning he had a letter from Ellen herself. He brought it at

once to a strangely drooping and weary-eyed Joanna, and read it again

over her shoulder.

"DEAR ARTHUR," it ran--

"I'm afraid this will hurt you and Joanna terribly, but I expect

you have already guessed what has happened. I am on my way to San

Remo, to join Sir Harry Trevor, and I am never coming back, because

I know now that I ought not to have married you. I do not ask you

to forgive me, and I'm sure Joanna won't, but I had to think of my

own happiness, and I never was a good wife to you. Believe me, I

have done my best--I said 'Good-bye for ever' to Harry a month ago,

but ever since then my life has been one long misery; I cannot live

without him.

"ELLEN."

"Well, it's only told us what we knew already," said Joanna with a gulp,

"but now we're sure we can do better than just talk about it."

"What can we do?"

"We can get the Old Squire's address from somebody--Mrs. Williams or the

people at North Farthing House--and then send a telegram after her,

telling her to come back."

"That won't be much use."

"It'll be something, anyway. Maybe when she gets out there in foreign

parts she won't be so pleased--or maybe he never asked her to come, and

he'll have changed his mind about her. We must try and get her back.

Where have you told your folk she's gone to?"

"I've told 'em she's gone to stop with you."

"Well, I can't pretend she's here. You might have thought of something

better, Arthur."

"I can't think of nothing else."

"You just about try. If only we can get her somewheres for a week, so as

to have time to write and tell her as all will be forgiven and you'll

take her back...."

Arthur looked mutinous.

"I don't know as I want her back."

"Arthur, you must. Otherways, everybody ull have to know what's

happened."

"But she didn't like being with me, or she wouldn't have gone away."

"She liked it well enough, or she wouldn't have stayed with you two

year. Arthur, you must have her back, you just about must. You send her

a telegram saying as you'll have her back if only she'll come this once,

before folks find out where she's gone."

Arthur's resistance gradually failed before Joanna's entreaties and

persuasions. He could not withstand Jo when her blue eyes were all dull

with tears, and her voice was hoarse and frantic. For some months now

his marriage had seemed to him a wrong and immoral thing, but he rather

sorrowfully told himself that having made the first false step he could

not now turn round and come back, even if Ellen herself had broken away.

He rode off to find out the Squire's address, and send his wife the

summoning and forgiving telegram.

§28

It was not perhaps surprising that, in spite of a lavish and exceedingly

expensive offer of forgiveness, Ellen did not come home. Over a week

passed without even an acknowledgment of the telegram, which she must

have found reproachfully awaiting her arrival--the symbol of Walland

Marsh pursuing her into the remoteness of a new life and a strange

country.

As might have been expected Joanna felt this period of waiting and

inactivity far more than she had felt the actual shock. She had all the

weight on her shoulders of a sustained deception. She and Arthur had to

dress up a story to deceive the neighbourhood, and they gave out that

Ellen was in London, staying with Mrs. Williams--her husband had

forbidden her to go, so she had run away, and now there would have to be

some give and take on both sides before she could come back. Joanna had

been inspired to circulate this legend by the discovery that Ellen

actually had taken a ticket for London. She had probably guessed the

sensation that her taking a ticket to Dover would arouse at the local

station, so had gone first to London and travelled down by the boat

express. It was all very cunning, and Joanna thought she saw the Old

Squire's experienced hand in it. Of course it might be true that he had

not persuaded Ellen to come out to him, but that she had gone to him on

a sudden impulse.... But even Joanna's plunging instinct realized that

her sister was not the sort to take desperate risks for love's sake, and

the whole thing had about it a sly, concerted air, which made her think

that Sir Harry was not only privy, but a prime mover.

After some ten days of anxiety, self-consciousness, shame and

exasperation, these suspicions were confirmed by a letter from the

Squire himself. He wrote from Oepedaletti, a small place near San Remo,

and he wrote charmingly. No other adverb could qualify the peculiarly

suave, tactful, humorous and gracious style in which not only he flung a

mantle of romance over his and Ellen's behaviour (which till then,

judged by the standards of Ansdore, had been just drably "wicked"), but

by some mysterious means brought in Joanna as a third conspirator,

linked by a broad and kindly intuition with himself and Ellen against a

censorious world.

"You, who know Ellen so well, will realize that she has never till

now had her birthright. You did your best for her, but both of you

were bounded north, south, east and west by Walland Marsh. I wish

you could see her now, beside me on the terrace--she is like a

little finch in the sunshine of its first spring day. Her only

trouble is her fear of you, her fear that you will not understand.

But I tell her I would trust you first of all the world to do that.

As a woman of the world, you must realize exactly what public

opinion is worth--if you yourself had bowed down to it, where would

you be now? Ellen is only doing now what you did for yourself

eleven years ago."

Joanna's feelings were divided between gratification at the flattery she

never could resist, and a fierce resentment at the insult offered her in

supposing she could ever wink at such "goings on." The more indignant

emotions predominated in the letter she wrote Sir Harry, for she knew

well enough that the flattery was not sincere--he was merely out to

propitiate.

Her feelings towards Ellen were exceedingly bitter, and the letter she

wrote her was a rough one:--

"You're nothing but a baggage. It makes no difference that you wear

fine clothes and shoes that he's bought you to your shame. You're

just every bit as low as Martha Tilden whom I got shut of ten year

ago for no worse than you've done."

Nevertheless, she insisted that Ellen should come home. She guaranteed

Arthur's forgiveness, and--somewhat rashly--the neighbours' discretion.

"I've told them you're in London with Mrs. Williams. But that won't hold

good much more than another week. So be quick and come home, before it's

too late."

Unfortunately the facts of Ellen's absence were already beginning to

leak out. People did not believe in the London story. Had not the Old

Squire's visits to Donkey Street been the tattle of the Marsh for six

months? She was condemned not only at the Woolpack, but at the three

markets of Rye, Lydd and Romney. Joanna was furious.

"It's that Post Office," she exclaimed, and the remark was not quite

unjust. The contents of telegrams had always had an alarming way of

spreading themselves over the district, and Joanna felt sure that Miss

Godfrey would have both made and published her own conclusions on the

large amount of foreign correspondence now received at Ansdore.

Ellen herself was the next to write. She wrote impenitently and

decidedly. She would never come back, so there was no good either Joanna

or Arthur expecting it. She had left Donkey Street because she could not

endure its cramped ways any longer, and it was unreasonable to expect

her to return.

"If Arthur has any feeling for me left, he will divorce me. He can

easily do it, and then we shall both be free to re-marry."

"Reckon she thinks the old Squire ud like to marry her," said Alce, "I'd

be glad if I thought so well of him."

"He can't marry her, seeing as she's your wife."

"If we were divorced, she wouldn't be."

"She would. You were made man and wife in Pedlinge church, as I saw with

my own eyes, and I'll never believe as what was done then can be undone

just by having some stuff written in the papers."

"It's a lawyer's business," said Arthur.

"I can't see that," said Joanna--"a parson married you, so reckon a

parson must unmarry you."

"He wouldn't do it. It's a lawyer's job."

"I'd thank my looker if he went about undoing my carter's work. Those

lawyers want to put their heads in everywhere. And as for Ellen, all I

can say is, it's just like her wanting the Ten Commandments altered to

suit her convenience. Reckon they ain't refined and high-class enough

for her. But she may ask for a divorce till she's black in the face--she

shan't get it."

So Ellen had to remain--very much against the grain, for she was

fundamentally respectable--a breaker of the law. She wrote once or twice

more on the subject, appealing to Arthur, since Joanna's reply had shown

her exactly how much quarter she could expect. But Arthur was not to be

won, for apart from Joanna's domination, and his own unsophisticated

beliefs in the permanence of marriage, his suspicions were roused by the

Old Squire's silence on the matter. At no point did he join his appeals

and arguments with Ellen's, though he had been ready enough to write to

excuse and explain.... No, Arthur felt that love and wisdom lay not in

sanctifying Ellen in her new ways with the blessing of the law, but in

leaving the old open for her to come back to when the new should perhaps

grow hard. "That chap 'ull get shut of her--I don't trust him--and then

she'll want to come back to me or Jo."

So he wrote with boring reiteration of his willingness to receive her

home again as soon as she chose to return, and assured her that he and

Joanna had still managed to keep the secret of her departure, so that

she need not fear scornful tongues. They had given the Marsh to

understand that no settlement having been arrived at, Ellen had

accompanied Mrs. Williams to the South of France, hoping that things

would have improved on her return. This would account for the foreign

post-marks, and both he and Joanna were more proud of their cunning than

was quite warrantable from its results.

§29

That winter brought Great Ansdore at last into the market. It would have

come in before had not Joanna so rashly bragged of her intention to buy

it. As it was--"I guess I'll get a bit more out of the old gal by

holding on," said Prickett disrespectfully, and he held on till Joanna's

impatience about equalled his extremity; whereupon he sold it to her for

not over fifty per cent, more than he would have asked had he not known

of her ambition. She paid the price manfully, and Prickett went out with

his few sticks.

The Woolpack was inclined to be contemptuous.

"Five thousand pounds for Prickett's old shacks, and his mouldy pastures

that are all burdock and fluke. If Joanna Godden had had any know, she

could have beaten him down fifteen hundred--he was bound to sell, and

she was a fool not to make him sell at her price."

But when Joanna wanted a thing she did not mind paying for it, and she

had wanted Great Ansdore very much, though no one knew better than she

that it was shacky and mouldy. For long it had mocked with its proud

title the triumphs of Little Ansdore. Now the whole manor of Ansdore

was hers, Great and Little, and with it she held the living of Brodnyx

and Pedlinge--it was she, of her own might, who would appoint the next

Rector, and for some time she imagined that she had it in her power to

turn out Mr. Pratt.

She at once set to work, putting her new domain in order. Some of the

pasture she grubbed up for spring sowings, the rest she drained by

cutting a new channel from the Kent Ditch to the White Kemp Sewer. She

re-roofed the barns with slate, and painted and re-tiled the

dwelling-house. This last she decided to let to some family of

gentlepeople, while herself keeping on the farm and the barns. The

dwelling-house of Little Ansdore, though more flat and spreading, was in

every way superior to that of Great Ansdore, which was rather new and

inclined to gimcrackiness, having been built on the site of the first

dwelling, burnt down somewhere in the eighties. Besides, she loved

Little Ansdore for its associations--under its roof she had been born

and her father had been born, under its roof she had known love and

sorrow and denial and victory; she could not bear to think of leaving

it. The queer, low house, with its mixture of spaciousness and

crookedness, its huge, sag-ceilinged rooms and narrow, twisting

passages, was almost a personality to her now, one of the Godden family,

the last of kin that had remained kind.

Her activities were merciful in crowding what would otherwise have been

a sorrowful period of emptiness and anxiety. It is true that Ellen's

behaviour had done much to spoil her triumph, both in the neighbourhood

and in her own eyes, but she had not time to be thinking of it always.

Visits to Rye, either to her lawyers or to the decorators and

paper-hangers, the engaging of extra hands, both temporary and

permanent, for the extra work, the supervising of labourers and workmen

whom she never could trust to do their job without her ... all these

crowded her cares into a few hours of evening or an occasionally wakeful

night.

But every now and then she must suffer. Sometimes she would be

overwhelmed, in the midst of all her triumphant business, with a sense

of personal failure. She had succeeded where most women are hopeless

failures, but where so many women are successful and satisfied she had

failed and gone empty. She had no home, beyond what was involved in the

walls of this ancient dwelling, the womb and grave of her existence--she

had lost the man she loved, had been unable to settle herself

comfortably with another, and now she had lost Ellen, the little sister,

who had managed to hold at least a part of that over-running love, which

since Martin's death had had only broken cisterns to flow into.

The last catastrophe now loomed the largest. Joanna no longer shed tears

for Martin, but she shed many for Ellen, either into her own pillow, or

into the flowery quilt of the flowery room which inconsequently she held

sacred to the memory of the girl who had despised it. Her grief for

Ellen was mixed with anxiety and with shame. What would become of her?

Joanna could not, would not, believe that she would never come back. Yet

what if she came?... In Joanna's eyes, and in the eyes of all the

neighbourhood, Ellen had committed a crime which raised a barrier

between her and ordinary folk. Between Ellen and her sister now stood

the wall of strange, new conditions--conditions that could ignore the

sonorous Thou Shalt Not, which Joanna never saw apart from Mr. Pratt in

his surplice and hood, standing under the Lion and the Unicorn, while

all the farmers and householders of the Marsh murmured into their Prayer

Books--"Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this

law." She could not think of Ellen without this picture rising up

between them, and sometimes in church she would be overwhelmed with a

bitter shame, and in the lonely enclosure of her great cattle-box pew

would stuff her fingers into her ears, so that she should not hear the

dreadful words of her sister's condemnation.

She had moments, too, of an even bitterer shame--strange, terrible, and

mercifully rare times when her attitude towards Ellen was not of

judgment or of care or of longing, but of envy. Sometimes she would be

overwhelmed with a sense of Ellen's happiness in being loved, even if

the love was unlawful. She had never felt this during the years that her

sister had lived with Alce; the thought of his affection had brought her

nothing but happiness and content. Now, on sinister occasions, she

would find herself thinking of Ellen cherished and spoiled, protected

and caressed, living the life of love--and a desperate longing would

come to her to enjoy what her sister enjoyed, to be kissed and stroked

and made much of and taken care of, to see some man laying schemes and

taking risks for her ... sometimes she felt that she would like to see

all the fullness of her life at Ansdore, all her honour on the Three

Marshes, blown to the winds if only in their stead she could have just

ordinary human love, with or without the law.

Poor Joanna was overwhelmed with horror at herself--sometimes she

thought she must be possessed by a devil. She must be very wicked--in

her heart just as wicked as Ellen. What could she do to cast out this

dumb, tearing spirit?--should she marry one of her admirers on the

Marsh, and trust to his humdrum devotion to satisfy her devouring need?

Even in her despair and panic she knew that she could not do this. It

was love that she must have--the same sort of love that she had given

Martin; that alone could bring her the joys she now envied in her

sister. And love--how shall it be found?--Who shall go out to seek it?

§30

Towards the spring, Ellen wrote again, breaking the silence of several

weeks. She wrote in a different tone--some change had passed over her.

She no longer asked Arthur to divorce her--on the contrary she hinted

her thanks for his magnanimity in not having done so. Evidently she no

longer counted on marrying Sir Harry Trevor, perhaps, even, she did not

wish to. But in one point she had not changed--she was not coming back

to her husband.

"I couldn't bear to live that life again, especially after what's

happened. It's not his fault--it's simply that I'm different. If he

wants his freedom, I suggest that he should let me divorce him--it could

easily be arranged. He should go and see a really good lawyer in

London."

Yes--Ellen spoke truly when she said that she was "different." Her

cavalier dealings with the situation, the glib way she spoke of divorce,

the insult she flung at the respectable form of Huxtable, Vidler and

Huxtable by suggesting that Arthur should consult "a really good lawyer

in London," all showed how far she had travelled from the ways of

Walland Marsh.

"What's she after now?" asked Joanna.

"Reckon they're getting tired of each other."

"She don't say so."

"No--she wants to find out which way the land lays first."

"I'll write and tell her she can come back and live along of me, if she

won't go to you."

"Then I'll have to be leaving these parts--I couldn't be at Donkey

Street and her at Ansdore."

"Reckon you could--she can go out of the way when you call."

"It wouldn't be seemly."

"Where ud you go?"

"I've no notion. But reckon all this ain't the question yet. Ellen won't

come back to you no more than she'll come back to me."

"She'll just about have to come if she gets shut of the Old Squire,

seeing as she's got no more than twelve pounds a year of her own. Reckon

poor father was a wise man when he left Ansdore to me and not to both of

us--you'd almost think he'd guessed what she was coming to."

Joanna wrote to Ellen and made her offer. Her sister wrote back at great

length, and rather pathetically--"Harry" was going on to Venice, and she

did not think she would go with him--"when one gets to know a person,

Jo, one sometimes finds they are not quite what one thought them." She

would like to be by herself for a bit, but she did not want to come back

to Ansdore, even if Arthur went away--"it would be very awkward after

what has happened." She begged Jo to be generous and make her some small

allowance--"Harry would provide for me if he hadn't had such terrible

bad luck--he never was very well off, you know, and he can't manage

unless we keep together. I know you wouldn't like me to be tied to him

just by money considerations."

Joanna was bewildered by the letter. She could have understood Ellen

turning in horror and loathing from the partner of her guilt, but she

could not understand this wary and matter-of-fact separation. What was

her sister made of? "Harry would provide for me" ... would she really

have accepted such a provision? Joanna's ears grew red. "I'll make her

come home," she exclaimed savagely--"she'll have to come if she's got no

money."

"Maybe she'll stop along of him," said Arthur.

"Then let her--I don't care. But she shan't have my money to live on by

herself in foreign parts, taking up with any man that comes her way; for

I don't trust her now--I reckon she's lost to shame."

She wrote Ellen to this effect, and, not surprisingly, received no

answer. She felt hard and desperate--the thought that she was perhaps

binding her sister to her misdoing gave her only occasional spasms of

remorse. Sometimes she would feel as if all her being and all her

history, Ansdore and her father's memory, disowned her sister, and that

she could never take her back into her life again, however

penitent--"She's mocked at our good ways--she's loose, she's low." At

other times her heart melted towards Ellen in weakness, and she knew

within herself that no matter what she did, she would always be her

little sister, her child, her darling, whom all her life she had

cherished and could never cast out.

She said nothing about these swaying feelings to Arthur--she had of late

grown far more secretive about herself--as for him, he took things as

they came. He found a wondrous quiet in this time, when he was allowed

to serve Joanna as in days of old. He did not think of marrying her--he

knew that even if it was true that the lawyers could set aside parson's

word, Joanna would not take him now, any more than she would have taken

him five or ten or fifteen years ago; she did not think about him in

that way. On the other hand she appreciated his company and his

services. He called at Ansdore two or three times a week, and ran her

errands for her. It was almost like old times, and in his heart he knew

and was ashamed to know that he hoped Ellen would never come back. If

she came back either to him or to Joanna, these days of quiet happiness

would end. Meantime, he would not think of it--he was Joanna's servant,

and when she could not be in two places at once it was his joy and

privilege to be in one of them. "I could live like this for ever,

surely," he said to himself, as he sat stirring his solitary cup of tea

at Donkey Street, knowing that he was to call at Ansdore the next

morning. That was the morning he met Joanna in the drive, hatless, and

holding a piece of paper in her hand.

"I've heard from Ellen--she's telegraphed from Venice--she's coming

home."

§31

Now that she knew Ellen was coming, Joanna had nothing in her heart but

joy and angry love. Ellen was coming back, at last, after many

wanderings--and she saw now that these wanderings included the years of

her life with Alce--she was coming back to Ansdore and the old home.

Joanna forgot how much she had hated it, would not think that this

precious return was merely the action of a woman without resources. She

gave herself up to the joy of preparing a welcome--as splendidly and

elaborately as she had prepared for her sister's return from school.

This time, however, she went further, and actually made some concessions

to Ellen's taste. She remembered that she liked dull die-away colours

"like the mould on jam," so she took down the pink curtains and folded

away the pink bedspread, and put in their places material that the shop

at Rye assured her was "art green"--which, in combination with the

crimson, flowery walls and floor contrived most effectually to suggest a

scum of grey-green mould on a pot of especially vivid strawberry jam.

But she was angry too--her heart burned to think not only of Ellen's sin

but of the casual way in which she treated it. "I won't have none of her

loose notions here," said Joanna grimly. She made up her mind to give

her sister a good talking to, to convince her of the way in which her

"goings on" struck decent folk; but she would not do it at the

start--"I'll give her time to settle down a bit first."

During the few days which elapsed between Ellen's telegram and her

arrival, Joanna saw nothing of Alce. She had one letter from him, in

which he told her that he had been over to Fairfield to look at the

plough she was speaking of, but that it was old stuff and would be no

use to her. He did not even mention Ellen's name. She wondered if he was

making any plans for leaving Donkey Street--she hoped he would not be

such a fool as to go. He and Ellen could easily keep out of each other's

way. Still, if Ellen wouldn't stay unless he went, she would rather have

Ellen than Alce.... He would have to sell Donkey Street, or perhaps he

might let it off for a little time.

April had just become May when Ellen returned to Ansdore. It had been a

rainy spring, and great pools were on the marshes, overflows from the

dykes and channels, clear mirrors green from the grass beneath their

shallows and the green rainy skies that hung above them. Here and there

they reflected white clumps and walls of hawthorn, with the pale

yellowish gleam of the buttercups in the pastures. The two sisters,

driving back from Rye, looked round on the green twilight of the Marsh

with indifferent eyes. Joanna had ceased to look for any beauty in her

surroundings since Martin's days--the small gift of sight that he had

given her had gone out with the light of his own eyes, and this evening

all she saw was the flooded pastures, which meant poor grazing for her

tegs due to come down from the Coast, and her lambs new-born on the Kent

Innings. As for Ellen, the Marsh had always stood with her for

unrelieved boredom. Its eternal flatness--the monotony of its roads

winding through an unvarying landscape of reeds and dykes and grazings,

past farms each of which was almost exactly like the one before it, with

red walls and orange roofs and a bush of elms and oaks--the wearisome

repetition of its seasons--the mists and floods of winter, the may and

buttercups of spring, the hay and meadow-sweet and wild carrot of the

summer months, the bleakness and winds of autumn--all this was typical

of her life there, water-bound, cut off from all her heart's desire of

variety and beauty and elegance, of the life to which she must now

return because her attempt to live another had failed and left her

stranded on a slag-heap of disillusion from which even Ansdore was a

refuge.

Ellen sat very trim and erect beside Joanna in the trap. She wore a neat

grey coat and skirt, obviously not of local, nor indeed of English,

make, and a little toque of flowers. She had taken Joanna's breath away

on Rye platform; it had been very much like old times when she came home

for the holidays and checked the impulse of her sister's love by a

baffling quality of self-containment. Joanna, basing her expectations on

the Bible story of the Prodigal Son rather than on the experiences of

the past winter, had looked for a subdued penitent, surfeited with

husks, who, if not actually casting herself at her sister's feet and

offering herself as her servant, would at least have a hang-dog air and

express her gratitude for so much forgiveness. Instead of which Ellen

had said--"Hullo, Jo--it's good to see you again," and offered her a

cool, delicately powdered cheek, which Joanna's warm lips had kissed

with a queer, sad sense of repulse and humiliation. Before they had been

together long, it was she who wore the hang-dog air--for some

unconscionable reason she felt in the wrong, and found herself asking

her sister polite, nervous questions about the journey.

This attitude prevailed throughout the evening--on the drive home, and

at the excellent supper they sat down to: a stuffed capon and a bottle

of wine, truly a genteel feast of reconciliation--but Joanna had grown

more aristocratic in her feeding since she bought Great Ansdore. Ellen

spoke about her journey--she had had a smooth crossing, but had felt

rather ill in the train. It was a long way from Venice--yes, you came

through France, and Switzerland too ... the St. Gothard tunnel ...

twenty minutes--well, I never?... Yes, a bit smoky--you had to keep the

windows shut ... she preferred French to Italian cooking--she did not

like all that oil ... oh yes, foreigners were very polite when they knew

you, but not to strangers ... just the opposite from England, where

people were polite to strangers and rude to their friends. Joanna had

never spoken or heard so many generalities in her life.

At the end of supper she felt quite tired, what with saying one thing

with her tongue and another in her heart. Sometimes she felt that she

must say something to break down this unreality, which was between

them like a wall of ice--at other times she felt angry, and it was

Ellen she wanted to break down, to force out of her superior refuge,

and show up to her own self as just a common sinner receiving common

forgiveness. But there was something about Ellen which made this

impossible--something about her manner, with its cold poise, something

about her face, which had indefinitely changed--it looked paler,

wider, and there were secrets at the corners of her mouth.

This was not the first time that Joanna had seen her sister calm and

collected while she herself was flustered--but this evening a sense of

her own awkwardness helped to put her at a still greater disadvantage.

She found herself making inane remarks, hesitating and stuttering--she

grew sulky and silent, and at last suggested that Ellen would like to go

to bed.

Her sister seemed glad enough, and they went upstairs together. But even

the sight of her old bedroom, where the last year of her maidenhood had

been spent, even the sight of the new curtains chastening its exuberance

with their dim austerity, did not dissolve Ellen's terrible, cold

sparkle--her frozen fire.

"Good night," said Joanna.

"Good night," said Ellen, "may I have some hot water?"

"I'll tell the gal," said Joanna tamely, and went out.

§32

When she was alone in her own room, she seemed to come to herself. She

felt ashamed of having been so baffled by Ellen, of having received her

on those terms. She could not bear to think of Ellen living on in the

house, so terribly at an advantage. If she let things stay as they were,

she was tacitly acknowledging some indefinite superiority which her

sister had won through sin. All the time she was saying nothing she

felt that Ellen was saying in her heart--"I have been away to foreign

parts, I have been loved by a man I don't belong to, I have Seen Life, I

have stopped at hotels, I have met people of a kind you haven't even

spoken to...." That was what Ellen was saying, instead of what Joanna

thought she ought to say, which was--"I'm no better then a dairy girl in

trouble, than Martha Tilden whom you sacked when I was a youngster, and

it's unaccountable good of you to have me home."

Joanna was not the kind to waste her emotions in the sphere of thought.

She burst out of the room, and nearly knocked over Mene Tekel, who was

on her way to Ellen with a jug of hot water.

"Give that to me," she said, and went to her sister's door, at which she

was still sufficiently demoralized to knock.

"Come in," said Ellen.

"I've brought you your hot water."

"Thank you very much--I hope it hasn't been a trouble."

Ellen was standing by the bed in a pretty lilac silk wrapper, her hair

tucked away under a little lace cap. Joanna wore her dressing-gown of

turkey-red flannel, and her hair hung down her back in two great rough

plaits. For a moment she stared disapprovingly at her sister, whom she

thought looked "French," then she suddenly felt ashamed of herself and

her ugly, shapeless coverings. This made her angry, and she burst out--

"Ellen Alce, I want a word with you."

"Sit down, Jo," said Ellen sweetly.

Joanna flounced on to the rosy, slippery chintz of Ellen's sofa. Ellen

sat down on the bed.

"What do you want to say to me?"

"An unaccountable lot of things."

"Must they all be said to-night? I'm very sleepy."

"Well, you must just about keep awake. I can't let it stay over any

longer. Here you've been back five hour, and not a word passed between

us."

"On the contrary, we have had some intelligent conversation for the

first time in our lives."

"You call that rot about furriners 'intelligent conversation'? Well,

all I can say is that it's like you--all pretence. One ud think you'd

just come back from a pleasure-trip abroad instead of from a wicked life

that you should ought to be ashamed of."

For the first time a flush darkened the heavy whiteness of Ellen's skin.

"So you want to rake up the past? It's exactly like you, Jo--'having

things out,' I suppose you'd call it. How many times in our lives have

you and I 'had things out'?--And what good has it ever done us?"

"I can't go on all pretending like this--I can't go on pretending I

think you an honest woman when I don't--I can't go on saying 'It's a

fine day' when I'm wondering how you'll fare in the Day of Judgment."

"Poor old Jo," said Ellen, "you'd have had an easier life if you hadn't

lived, as they say, so close to nature. It's just what you call

pretences and others call good manners that make life bearable for some

people."

"Yes, for 'some people' I daresay--people whose characters won't stand

any straight talking."

"Straight talking is always so rude--no one ever seems to require it on

pleasant occasions."

"That's all nonsense. You always was a squeamish, obstropulous little

thing, Ellen. It's only natural that having you back in my house--as I'm

more than glad to do--I should want to know how you stand. What made you

come to me sudden like that?"

"Can't you guess? It's rather unpleasant for me to have to tell you."

"Reckon it was that man"--somehow Sir Harry's name had become vaguely

improper, Joanna felt unable to pronounce it--"then you've made up your

mind not to marry him," she finished.

"How can I marry him, seeing I'm somebody else's wife?"

"I'm glad to hear you say such a proper thing. It ain't what you was

saying at the start. Then you wanted a divorce and all sorts of foreign

notions ... what's made you change round?"

"Well, Arthur wouldn't give me a divorce, for one thing. For another, as

I told you in my letter, one often doesn't know people till one's lived

with them--besides, he's too old for me."

"He'll never see sixty again."

"He will," said Ellen indignantly--"he was only fifty-five in March."

"That's thirty year more'n you."

"I've told you he's too old for me."

"You might have found out that at the start--he was only six months

younger then."

"There's a great many things I might have done at the start," said Ellen

bitterly--"but I tell you, Joanna, life isn't quite the simple thing you

imagine. There was I, married to a man utterly uncongenial--"

"He wasn't! You're not to miscall Arthur--he's the best man alive."

"I don't deny it--perhaps that is why I found him uncongenial. Anyhow,

we were quite unsuited to each other--we hadn't an idea in common."

"You liked him well enough when you married him."

"I've told you before that it's difficult to know anyone thoroughly till

one's lived with them."

"Then at that rate, who's to get married--eh?"

"I don't know," said Ellen wearily, "all I know is that I've made two

bad mistakes over two different men, and I think the least you can do is

to let me forget it--as far as I'm able--and not come here baiting me

when I'm dog tired, and absolutely down and out...."

She bowed her face into her hands, and burst into tears. Joanna flung

her arms round her--

"Oh, don't you cry, duckie--don't--I didn't mean to bait you. Only I was

getting so mortal vexed at you and me walking round each other like two

cats and never getting a straight word."

"Jo," ... said Ellen.

Her face was hidden in her sister's shoulder, and her whole body had

drooped against Joanna's side, utterly weary after three days of travel

and disillusioned loneliness.

"Reckon I'm glad you've come back, dearie--and I won't ask you any more

questions. I'm a cross-grained, cantankerous old thing, but you'll stop

along of me a bit, won't you?"

"Yes," said Ellen, "you're all I've got in the world."

"Arthur ud take you back any day you ask it," said Joanna, thinking this

a good time for mediation.

"No--no!" cried Ellen, beginning to cry again--"I won't stay if you try

to make me go back to Arthur. If he had the slightest feeling for me he

would let me divorce him."

"How could you?--seeing that he's been a pattern all his life."

"He needn't do anything wrong--he need only pretend to. The lawyers ud

fix it up."

Ellen was getting French again. Joanna pushed her off her shoulder.

"Really, Ellen Alce, I'm ashamed of you--that you should speak such

words! What upsets me most is that you don't seem to see how wrong

you've done. Don't you never read your Bible any more?"

"No," sobbed Ellen.

"Well, there's lots in the Bible about people like you--you're called by

your right name there, and it ain't a pretty one. Some are spoken

uncommon hard of, and some were forgiven because they loved much.

Seemingly you haven't loved much, so I don't see how you expect to be

forgiven. And there's lots in the Prayer Book too ... the Bible and the

Prayer Book both say you've done wrong, and you don't seem to mind--all

you think of is how you can get out of your trouble. Reckon you're like

a child that's done wrong and thinks of nothing but coaxing round so as

not to be punished."

"I have been punished."

"Not half what you deserve."

"It's all very well for you to say that--you don't understand; and

what's more, you never will. You're a hard woman, Jo--because you've

never had the temptations that ordinary women have to fight against."

"How dare you say that?--Temptation!--Reckon I know ..." A sudden memory

of those painful and humiliating moments when she had fought with those

strange powers and discontents, made Joanna turn hot with shame. The

realization that she had come very close to Ellen's sin in her heart did

not make her more relenting towards the sinner--on the contrary, she

hardened.

"Anyways, I've said enough to you for to-night."

"I hope you don't mean to say more to-morrow."

"No--I don't know that I do. Reckon you're right, and we don't get any

good from 'having things out.' Seemingly we speak with different

tongues, and think with different hearts."

She stood up, and her huge shadow sped over the ceiling, hanging over

Ellen as she crouched on the bed. Then she stalked out of the room,

almost majestic in her turkey-red dressing-gown.

§33

Ellen kept very close to the house during the next few days. Her face

wore a demure, sullen expression--towards Joanna she was quiet and

sweet, and evidently anxious that there should be no further opening of

hearts between them. She was very polite to the maids--she won their

good opinion by making her bed herself, so that they should not have any

extra work on her account.

Perhaps it was this domestic good opinion which was at the bottom of the

milder turn which the gossip about her took at this time. Naturally

tongues had been busy ever since it became known that Joanna was

expecting her back--Sir Harry Trevor had got shut of her for the baggage

she was ... she had got shut of Sir Harry Trevor for the blackguard he

was ... she had travelled back as somebody's maid, to pay her fare ...

she had brought her own French maid as far as Calais ... she had walked

from Dover ... she had brought four trunks full of French clothes. These

conflicting rumours must have killed each other, for a few days after

her return the Woolpack was saying that after all there might be

something in Joanna's tale of a trip with Mrs. Williams--of course

everyone knew that both Ellen and the Old Squire had been at San Remo,

but now it was suddenly discovered that Mrs. Williams had been there

too--anyway, there was no knowing that she hadn't, and Ellen Alce didn't

look the sort that ud go to a furrin place alone with a man. Mrs. Vine

had seen her through the parlour window, and her face was as white as

chalk--not a scrap of paint on it. Mr. Southland had met her on the

Brodnyx Road, and she had bowed to him polite and stately--no shrinking

from an honest man's eye. According to the Woolpack, if you sinned as

Ellen was reported to have sinned, you were either brazen or thoroughly

ashamed of yourself, and Ellen, by being neither, did much to soften

public opinion, and make it incline towards the official explanation of

her absence.

This tendency increased when it became known that Arthur Alce was

leaving Donkey Street. The Woolpack held that if Ellen had been guilty,

Alce would not put himself in the wrong by going away. He would either

have remained as the visible rebuke of her misconduct, or he would have

bundled Ellen herself off to some distant part of the kingdom, such as

the Isle of Wight, where the Goddens had cousins. By leaving the

neighbourhood he gave colour to the mysteriously-started rumour that he

was not so easy to get on with as you'd think ... after all, it's never

a safe thing for a girl to marry her sister's sweetheart ... probably

Alce had been hankering after his old love and Ellen resented it ... the

Woolpack suddenly discovered that Alce was leaving not so much on

Ellen's account as on Joanna's--he'd been unable to get off with the old

love, even when he'd got on with the new, and now that the new was off

too ... well, there was nothing for it but for Arthur Alce to be off. He

was going to his brother, who had a big farm in the shires--a proper

farm, with great fields each of which was nearly as big as a marsh farm,

fifty, seventy, a hundred acres even.

§34

Joanna bitterly resented Arthur's going, but she could not prevent it,

for if he stayed Ellen threatened to go herself.

"I'll get a post as lady's-maid sooner than stay on here with you and

Arthur. Have you absolutely no delicacy, Jo?--Can't you see how awkward

it'll be for me if everywhere I go I run the risk of meeting him?

Besides, you'll be always plaguing me to go back to him, and I tell you

I'll never do that--never."

Arthur, too, did not seem anxious to stay. He saw that if Ellen was at

Ansdore he could not be continually running to and fro on his errands

for Joanna. That tranquil life of service was gone, and he did not care

for the thought of exile at Donkey Street, a shutting of himself into

his parish of Old Romney, with the Kent Ditch between him and Joanna

like a prison wall.

When Joanna told him what Ellen had said, he accepted it meekly--

"That's right, Joanna--I must go."

"But that ull be terrible hard for you, Arthur."

He looked at her.

"Reckon it will."

"Where ull you go?"

"Oh, I can go to Tom's."

"That's right away in the shires, ain't it?"

"Yes--beyond Leicester."

"Where they do the hunting."

"Surelye."

"What's the farm?"

"Grain mostly--and he's done well with his sheep. He'd be glad to have

me for a bit."

"What'll you do with Donkey Street?"

"Let it off for a bit."

"Don't you sell!"

"Not I!"

"You'll be meaning to come back?"

"I'll be hoping."

Joanna gazed at him for a few moments in silence, and a change came into

her voice--

"Arthur, you're doing all this because of me."

"I'm doing it for you, Joanna."

"Well--I don't feel I've any call--I haven't any right.... I mean, if

Ellen don't like you here, she must go herself ... it ain't fair on

you--you at Donkey Street for more'n twenty year ..."

"Don't you trouble about that. A change won't hurt me. Reckon either

Ellen or me ull have to go and it ud break your heart if it was Ellen."