The days that followed were full of sharp agony for her. It was not until long afterward that she was able to write her “impressions” of that experience. In the extreme hour of joy or agony we formulate no impressions; we only feel. We neither analyse nor describe our friends or enemies when face to face with them, but after we leave their presence. When the day came that she could write, some of her reflections were thus epitomised:
Love which rises from the grave to comfort us, possesses more of the demons’ than the angels’ power. It terrifies us with its supernatural qualities and deprives us temporarily of our reason.
Suppressed steam and suppressed emotion are dangerous things to deal with.
The infant who wants its mother’s breast, and the woman who wants her lover’s arms, are poor subjects to reason with. Though you tell the former that fever has poisoned the mother’s milk, or the latter that destruction lies in the lover’s embrace, one heeds you no more than the other.
The accumulated knowledge of ages is sometimes revealed by a kiss. Where wisdom is bliss, it is folly to be ignorant.
Some of us have to crucify our hearts before we find our souls.
A woman cannot fully know charity until she has met passion; but too intimate an acquaintance with the latter destroys her appreciation of all the virtues.
To feel temptation and resist it, renders us liberal in our judgment of all our kind. To yield to it, fills us with suspicion of all.
There is an ecstatic note in pain which is never reached in happiness.
The death of a great passion is a terrible thing, unless the dawn of a greater truth shines on the grave.
Love ought to have no past tense.
Love partakes of the feline nature. It has nine lives.
It seems to be difficult for some of us to distinguish between looseness of views, and charitable judgments. To be sorry for people’s sins and follies and to refuse harsh criticism is right; to accept them as a matter of course is wrong.
Love and sorrow are twins, and knowledge is their nurse.
The pathway of the soul is not a steady ascent, but hilly and broken. We must sometimes go lower, in order to get higher.
That which is to-day, and will be to-morrow, must have been yesterday. I know that I live, I believe that I shall live again, and have lived before.
Earth life is the middle rung of a long ladder which we climb in the dark. Though we cannot see the steps below, or above, they exist all the same.
The materialist denying spirit is like the burr of the chestnut denying the meat within.
The inevitable is always right.
Prayer is a skeleton key that opens unexpected doors. We may not find the things we came to seek, but we find other treasures.
The pessimist belongs to God’s misfit counter.
Art, when divorced from Religion, always becomes a wanton.
To forget benefits we have received is a crime. To remember benefits we have bestowed is a greater one.
To some men a woman is a valuable book, carefully studied and choicely guarded behind glass doors. To others, she is a daily paper, idly scanned and tossed aside.
CHAPTER XIX
While Joy battled with her sorrow during the days following Preston Cheney’s burial, she woke to the consciousness that her history was known in Beryngford. The indescribable change in the manner of her acquaintances, the curiosity in the eyes of some, the insolence or familiarity of others, all told her that her fears were realised; and then there came a letter from the church authorities requesting her to resign her position as organist.
This letter came to the young girl on one of those dreary autumn nights when all the desolation of the dying summer, and none of the exhilaration of the approaching winter, is in the air. She had been labouring all day under a cloud of depression which hovered over her heart and brain and threatened to wholly envelop her; and the letter from the church committee cut her heart like a poniard stroke. Sometimes we are able to bear a series of great disasters with courage and equanimity, while we utterly collapse under some slight misfortune. Joy had been a heroine in her great sorrows, but now in the undeserved loss of her position as church organist, she felt herself unable longer to cope with Fate.
“There’s no place for me anywhere,” she said to herself. Had she known the truth, that the Baroness had represented her to the committee as a fallen woman of the metropolis, who had left the city for the city’s good, the letter would not have seemed to her so cruelly unjust and unjustifiable.
Bitter as had been her suffering at the loss of Arthur Stuart from her life, she had found it possible to understand his hesitation to make her his wife. With his fine sense of family pride, and his reverence for the estate of matrimony, his belief in heredity, it seemed quite natural to her that he should be shocked at the knowledge of the conditions under which she was born; and the thought that her disappearance from his life was helping him to solve a painful problem, had at times, before this unexpected sight of him, rendered her almost happy in her lonely exile. She had grown strangely fond of Beryngford—of the old streets and homes which she knew must have been familiar to her mother’s eyes, of the new church whose glorious voiced organ gave her so many hours of comfort and relief of soul, of the tiny apartment where she and her heart communed together. She was catlike in her love of places, and now she must tear herself away from all these surroundings and seek some new spot wherein to hide herself and her sorrows.
It was like tearing up a half-rooted flower, already drooping from one transplanting. She said to herself that she could never survive another change. She read the letter over which lay in her hand, and tears began to slowly well from her eyes. Joy seldom wept; but now it seemed to her she was some other person, who stood apart and wept tears of sympathy for this poor girl, Joy Irving, whose life was so hemmed about with troubles, none of which were of her own making; and then, like a dam which suddenly gives way and allows a river to overflow, a great storm of sobs shook her frame, and she wept as she had never wept before; and with her tears there came rushing back to her heart all the old love and sorrow for the dead mother which had so long been hidden under her burden of shame; and all the old passion and longing for the man whose insane wife she knew to be a more hopeless obstacle between them than this mother’s history had proven.
“Mother, Arthur, pity me, pity me!” she cried. “I am all alone, and the strife is so terrible. I have never meant to harm any living thing! Mother Arthur, God, how can you all desert me so?”
At last, exhausted, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.