in the perplexity of this extraordinary crisis they both went, without another word, ‘home’: though it was no more home than these wonderful new circumstances were the course of everyday. if we were to prophesy the conduct of human creatures in moments of great emotion by what would seem probable, or even natural, how far from the fact we should be! colonel hayward, a man of the tenderest heart and warmest affections, suddenly discovers that he has a child—a child by whose appearance, and everything about her, he has been pleased and attracted, the child of his first love, his young wife to whose cruel death he has contributed, though unwittingly, unintentionally, meaning no evil. would not all ordinary means of conveyance be too slow, all obstacles as nothing in his way, the very movement of the world arrested till he had taken this abandoned child into his arms, and assured her of his penitence, his joy, his love! but nothing could be further from his actual action. he went back to bellendean with a feeling that he would perhaps know better what to do were he within the four walls of a room where he could shut himself and be alone. it would be easier to think there than in the park, where everything was in perpetual motion, leaves rustling, branches waving, birds singing,—the whole world astir. ‘if we were only in our own room,’ he said to his wife, ‘we could think—what it was best to do.’
she said nothing, but she longed also for the quiet and shelter of that room. she recognised, as indeed she might have done from the first, that whatever had to be done, it was she that must do it. and mrs. hayward was entirely dépaysée, and did not know how to manage this business. janet matheson was a new species to a woman who had done a great deal of parish work, and was not unacquainted with the ordinary ways of managing ‘the poor.’ she did not understand how to deal with that proud old
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woman, to whom she could not offer any recompense, whom she would scarcely dare even to thank for her ‘kindness.’ janet had repudiated that injurious word, and mrs. hayward felt that it would be easier to offer money to mrs. bellendean than to this extraordinary cottager. to be sure, that was nothing—a trifle not worth consideration in face of the other question, of joyce herself, who would have to be adopted, removed from the cottage, taken home as miss hayward, a new, and perhaps soon the most important, member of the family. elizabeth’s heart beat as it had never done before, scarcely even when she married captain hayward, accepting all the risks, taking him and his incoherent story at a terrible venture. that was an undertaking grave enough, but this was more terrible still. she felt, too, that she would be thankful to get into the quiet of her own room to think it over, to decide what she should best do.
this, however, was more easily said than done. the anxious pair were met in the hall by mrs. bellendean with looks as anxious as their own. she was breathless with interest, expectation, and excitement: and came up to them in a fever of eagerness, which, to mrs. hayward at least, seemed quite unnecessary, holding out a hand to each. ‘well?’ she cried, as if their secrets were hers, and her interest as legitimate as their own. in short, the pair, who were very grave and preoccupied, having exhausted the first passion of the discovery, had much less appearance of excitement and expectation than this lady, who had nothing whatever to do with it. a shade of disappointment crossed her face when she saw their grave looks; but mrs. bellendean’s perceptions were lively, and she perceived at the same moment tokens of agitation in the old colonel’s face which reassured her. it would have been too much if, after all her highly-raised expectations, nothing had happened at all.
‘come into my room,’ she said quickly; ‘we have half an hour before luncheon, and there we shall be quite undisturbed.’ she led the way with a rapidity that made it impossible even to protest, and opening the door, swept them in before her, and drew an easy-chair forward for mrs. hayward. ‘now,’ she said, ‘tell me! you have found out something, i can see.’
they looked at each other,—mrs. hayward with the liveliest inclination to tell the lady, whom she scarcely knew, that their affairs were their own. it would have been a little relief to her feelings could she have done so; but this was just the moment, as she knew very well, in which the colonel was sure to come to the front.
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‘yes,’ he said, with a sigh, in which there was distinct relief. (he found it so easy to relieve himself in that way!) ‘we have found out—all we wanted, more than we expected. apart from all other circumstances, this is a memorable visit to me, mrs. bellendean. we have found—or rather elizabeth has found—— she is always my resource in everything——’
‘what?’ cried mrs. bellendean, clasping her hands. ‘please excuse me—i am so anxious. something about joyce?’
‘you must understand that i had no notion of it, no idea of it all the time. i was as ignorant—— there may have been things in which i was to blame—though never with any meaning: but of this i had no idea—none: she never gave me the slightest hint—never the least,’ said the colonel earnestly. ‘how could i imagine for a moment—when she never said a word?’
mrs. bellendean looked at mrs. hayward with an appeal for help, but she gave a smile and glance of sympathy to the colonel, who seemed to want them most. his wife sat very straight, with her shoulders square, and her feet just visible beneath her gown—very firm little feet, set down steadily, one of them beating a faint tattoo of impatience on the carpet. she was all resistance, intending, it was apparent, to reveal as little as possible; but the colonel, though his style was involved, was most willing to explain.
‘it is,’ he said, ‘my dear lady, i assure you, as much a wonder and revelation to me as to any one. i never thought of such a possibility—never. elizabeth knows that nothing was further from my mind.’
‘henry,’ said his wife suddenly, ‘you have been very much agitated this morning. all these old stories coming up again have given you a shake. go up, my dear, to your room, and i will tell mrs. bellendean all that she cares to hear.’
‘eh? do you think so, elizabeth? i have got a shake. it agitates a man very much to be carried back twenty years. perhaps you are right: you can explain everything—much better than i can—much better always; and if mrs. bellendean thinks i am to blame, she need not be embarrassed about it, as she might be before me. i think you are right, as you always are. and perhaps she will give you some good advice, my love, as to what we ought to do.’
‘i am sure i shall not think you to blame, colonel hayward,’ cried mrs. bellendean, with that impulse of general amiability which completed the exasperation with which elizabeth sat looking on.
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‘yes, no doubt, she will give me good advice,’ she said, with irrepressible irritation; ‘oh, no doubt, no doubt!—most people do. henry, take mine for the moment, and go upstairs and rest a little. remember you have to meet all the gentlemen at luncheon: and after that there will be a great deal to do.’
‘i think i will, my dear,’ colonel hayward said: but he paused again at the door with renewed apologies and doubts—‘if mrs. bellendean will not think it rude, and even cowardly, of me, elizabeth, to leave all the explanations to you.’
finally, when mrs. bellendean had assured him that she would not do so, he withdrew slowly, not half sure that, after all, he ought not to return and take the task of the explanation into his own hands. there was not a word said between the ladies until the sound of his steps, a little hesitating at first, as if he had half a mind to come back, had grown firmer, and at last died away. then mrs. hayward for the first time looked at the mistress of the house, who, half amused, half annoyed, and full of anxiety and expectation, had been looking at her, as keenly as politeness permitted, from every point of view.
‘my husband has been very much agitated—you will not wonder when i tell you all; and he is never very good at telling his own story. a man who can do—what he can do—may be excused if he is a little deficient in words.’
she spoke quickly, almost sharply, with a little air of defiance, yet with moisture in her eyes.
‘surely,’ said mrs. bellendean, ‘we know what colonel hayward is; but pardon me, it was a much less matter—it was about joyce i wanted to know.’
‘the one story cannot be told without the other. my husband,’ said mrs. hayward, with a long breath, ‘had been married before—before he married me. he had married very hurriedly a young lady who came out to some distant relations in india. they were at a small station out of the way. she was not happy, and he married her in a great hurry. afterwards, when she was in england by herself, having come home for her health, some wicked person put it into the poor thing’s head that her marriage was not a good one. she was fool enough to believe it, though she knew henry. forgive me if i speak a little hastily. she ought to have known better, knowing him; but some people never know you, though you live by their side a hundred years.’
she stopped to exhale another long breath of excitement and agitation. it was cruel to impute blame to the poor dead girl, and she felt this, but could not refrain.
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‘and suddenly, after one letter full of complaint and reproach, she wrote no more. he was in active service, and could not get home. it was not so easy then to come home on leave. he wrote again and again, and when he got no answer, employed people to find her out. i can’t tell you all the things that were done—everything, so far as he knew how to do it. i didn’t know him then. i daresay he wasted a great deal of money without getting hold of the right people. he never heard anything more of her, never a word, till the other day.’
‘then that poor young creature was—— and joyce—joyce!—who is joyce? mrs. hayward, do you mean really that joyce——’
‘joyce—was his first wife: and this girl—who has the same name,—i have not seen her, i don’t know her, i can express no feeling about her,—this young lady is my husband’s daughter, mrs. bellendean.’
‘colonel hayward’s daughter!’ mrs. bellendean sprang to her feet in her surprise and excitement. she threw up her hands in wonder and delight and sympathy, her eyes glittered and shone, a flush of feeling came over her. any spectator who had seen the two ladies at this moment would have concluded naturally that it was mrs. bellendean who was the person chiefly concerned, while the little woman seated opposite to her was a somewhat cynical looker-on, to whom it was apparent that the warmth of feeling thus displayed was not quite genuine. the colonel’s wife was moved by no enthusiasm. she sat rigid, motionless, except for that one foot, which continued to beat upon the carpet a little impatient measure of its own.
‘oh,’ cried mrs. bellendean, ‘i always knew it! one may deceive one’s self about many people, but there was no possibility with joyce. she was—she is—i never saw any one like her—quite, quite unprecedented in such a place as this: like nobody about her—a girl whom any one might be proud of—a girl who—oh yes, yes! you are right in calling her a young lady. she could be nothing less. i always knew it was so.’
‘she is my husband’s daughter,’ said mrs. hayward, without moving a muscle. she remained unaffected by her companion’s enthusiasm. she recognised it as part of the burden laid upon her that she should have to receive the outflowings of a rapture in which she had no share.
‘and what did joyce say?’ asked the lady of bellendean. ‘and poor old janet! oh, it will not be good news to her. but what did joyce say? i should like to have been there; and why, why
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did you not bring her up to the house with you? but i see,—oh yes, it was better, it was kinder to leave her a little with the old people. the poor old people, god help them! oh, mrs. hayward, there is no unmixed good in this world. it will kill old janet and her old husband. there’s no unmixed good.’
‘no,’ said mrs. hayward quietly. she sat like a little figure of stone, nothing moving in her, not a finger, not an eyelash,—nothing but the foot, still beating now and then a sort of broken measure upon the floor.
mrs. bellendean sat down again when she had exhausted her first excitement. there is nothing that chills one’s warmest feelings like the presence of a spectator who does not share one’s satisfaction. mrs. hayward would have been that proverbial wet blanket, if there had not been in the very stiffness of her spectator-ship signs of another and still more potent excitement of her own. strong self-repression at the end comes to affect us more than any demonstration. mrs. bellendean was very quick, and perhaps felt it sooner than a less vivid intelligence might have done. she sat down, almost apologetically, and looked at her guest.
‘i am afraid,’ she said, faltering, ‘you are not so glad as i am. i hope it is not anything in joyce. i hope—she has not displeased you. if she has, i am sure, oh, i am very sure she did not mean it. it must have been—some mistake.’
‘mrs. bellendean,’ cried elizabeth suddenly, ‘i am sure you are very kind. you would not have invited me here as you have done, without knowing anything of me, if you had not been kind. but perhaps you don’t quite put yourself in my place. i did not mean to say anything on that subject, but my heart is full, and i can’t help it. i married colonel hayward—he was only captain hayward then—knowing everything, and that it was possible, though not likely, that this wife of his might still be alive. it was a great venture to make. i have kept myself in the background always, not knowing—whether i had any real right to call myself mrs. hayward. joyce has not been a name of good omen to me.’
‘dear mrs. hayward!’ cried the impulsive woman before her, leaning over the table, holding out both her hands.
‘no, don’t praise me. i believe i ought to have been blamed instead; but, anyhow, i took the risk. and i have never repented it, though i did not know all that would be involved. and now, when we are growing old, and calm should succeed to all the storms, here is her daughter—with her name—not a child whom i could influence, who might get to be fond of me, but a woman,
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grown up, educated in her way, clever:—all that makes it so much the worse. no! don’t be sorry for me; i am a wicked woman, i ought not to feel so. here i find her again, not a recollection, not an idea, but a grown-up girl, the same age as her mother. joyce over again, always joyce!’
mrs. bellendean did not know how to reply. she sat and gazed at the woman whom she wanted to console, who touched her, revolted her, horrified her all in one, and yet whose real emotion and pain she felt to the bottom of her sympathetic heart. too much sympathy is perhaps as bad as too little. she was all excitement and delight for joyce, and yet this other woman’s trouble was too genuine not to move her. it was very natural too, and yet dreadful,—a pain to think of. ‘i am sure,’ she said, faltering, ‘that when you know her better—when you begin to see what she is in herself: there is no one who does not like joyce.’
mrs. hayward had got rid, in this interval, of a handful, so to speak, of hot sudden tears. she was ashamed of them, angry with herself for being thus overcome, and therefore could not be said to weep, or make any other affecting demonstration, but simply hurried off, threw from her angrily, these signs of a pang which she despised, which hurt her pride and her sense of what was seemly as much as it wrung her heart. she shook her head with a sudden angry laugh in the midst of her emotion. ‘don’t you see! that is the worst of all,’ she cried.
but at this moment, in the midst of this climax of pain, exasperation, self-disapproval, there arose in soft billows of sound, rising one after the other into all the corners of the great house, the sound of the gong. it reached all the members of the household, along the long corridors and round the gallery, roused colonel hayward from the softened and satisfied pause of feeling which his withdrawal upstairs had brought him, and called mrs. bellendean back from the wonderful problem of mingled sentiments in which she was embroiling herself, taking both sides at once, into the more natural feelings of the mistress of the house, whose presence is indispensable elsewhere. but she could not break off all at once this interview, which was so very different from the ordinary talks between strangers. she hesitated even to rise up, conscious of the ludicrous anti-climax of this call to food addressed to people whose hearts were full of the most painful complications of life. at the same time, the sound of her guests trooping downstairs, and coming in from the grounds, with a murmur of voices, and footsteps in the hall, became every moment more and more
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clamant. she rose at last, and put her hand on mrs. hayward’s shoulder. ‘the gentlemen speak,’ she said, ‘of things that are solved walking. it will be so with you, dear mrs. hayward. it will clear up as you go on. everything will become easier in the doing. come now to luncheon.’
‘i—to luncheon!—it would choke me,’ cried elizabeth, feeling in her impatience, and the universal contrariety of everything, as if this had been the last aggravation of all.
‘no,’ said mrs. bellendean, putting her arm through that of her guest; ‘it will do you good, on the contrary: and the colonel will eat nothing if you are not there. you shall come in your bonnet as you are; and colonel hayward will make a good luncheon.’
‘i believe he is capable of it,’ mrs. hayward cried.
