A whisper ran round the village that Joyce Maliphant was pining away her beauty for love of the gay young captain who had once courted her, and who was now going to wed with Miss Mary Thorne, the heiress. Deb told me of it, she had heard the rumor coming out of church; but I don't believe we, any of us, thought that it mattered much what Frank Forrester did. He could never have made Joyce happy, why should he not make Mary Thorne happy? There had been tears in her eyes when the news of his accident had come, there had been no tears in Joyce's.
No, what really mattered was that my sister's face was growing paler and thinner, and that at last the day came when they told us that unless we could make up our minds to part from Joyce for a while, we might have to part from her forever.
I hope I may never feel again the heart-sick pang that went through me as the doctor said those words. I had thought that no such pang could be worse than that I had felt when father had told me he was going to die; but this was worse, for Joyce was young, and had the right still to a long and happy life, and if she was deprived of it, it was I who had deprived her.
I went to work with an aching spirit to arrange how it should be that Joyce should leave us for warmer lands. Mother had a married brother living at Melbourne, and to him it was decided at last that Joyce should go for a couple of years. We found her an escort in some friends of the squire's, and the only little grain of comfort I had in the whole matter was that if Joyce was to leave us, it was to go to the same country whither Trayton Harrod had fled a year before. But Australia was a large field, and unless they were to meet by the purest accident, Trayton Harrod was not likely ever to seek Joyce out.
Was it some such faint and wild hope, I wonder, or merely the feeling that I could not part from that dear heart without making a clean breast of my sin to it, which made me say what I did when the last moment came? I don't know. I only know that as we stood there in the little waiting-room of the London Docks, while mother stooped from her usual shy dignity to beg the kindness and care of this unknown friend of the squire's for her suffering child, I felt suddenly that I could not let Joyce go from me with that lie weighing on my heart—I felt that I must have her forgiveness!
I cannot imagine how I had endured so long without it. I had hungered for his forgiveness, whom I had wronged less cruelly, because I owed him less devotion, and had been able to live side by side with her without asking for her pardon whose life I had so wrecked.
Many a time in those past months I had started to find the squire's perplexed eyes upon me, following mine that were fixed upon Joyce, and I had blushed with shame, knowing what it was that put that look in me which puzzled him; and many a time I had vowed that I would abase myself and tell her all, yet never had found the courage. But now, when the last chance was slipping from me, the courage came. It came, I think, because Joyce stood suddenly revealed before me in the grandeur of her simple goodness, her power of silent and loving sacrifice; it came because I had no fear, because I was ashamed of my very shame, because I was sure of her forgiveness.
She stood with her hand in mine, her figure very tall and slim in the straight black gown, her face very fair and fragile in the frame of the neat little close bonnet. She might have been a nun, so quiet and orderly her outward demeanor, so calm her beautiful face, and yet when I looked again I saw that there were tears in the blue eyes that looked away from me to the tangled mass of shipping in the dock, and to the confused net-work of masts and rigging that lay black against the leaden, wintry sky.
"O Joyce, darling," I cried, seizing her hand wildly, "don't cry! I can't bear it."
She did not answer, she was afraid of trusting herself to speak, but, true to her perfect unselfishness, she turned to me and smiled. "You'll get well, you know," I went on, with determined cheerfulness; "you'll get quite well and come back to us very soon."