Joyce Morrell's Harvest / The Annals of Selwick Hall

by Emily Sarah Holt

The name was so long a-coming that I marvelled if she meant to tell us.

“I do not desire to make my tale longer than need is, dear hearts,” pursueth she, “and therefore I will but tell you that in course of time, with assent of my father and his mother, my cousin Leonard and I were troth-plight. I loved him, methinks, as well as it was in woman to love man: and—I thought he loved me. I never knew a man who had such a tongue to cajole a woman’s heart. He could talk in such a fashion that thou shouldst feel perfectly assured that he loved thee with all his heart, and none but thee: and ere the sun had set, he should have given the very same certainty to Nan at the farm, and to Mall down in the glen. I believe he did rarely make love to so little as one woman at once. He liked—he once told your father so much—a choice of strings for his bow. But of all this, at first, lost in my happy love, I knew nothing. My love to him was so true and perfect, that the very notion that his could be lesser than so never entered mine head. It was Anstace who saw the clouds gathering before any other—Anstace, to whom, in her helpless suffering, God gave a strange power of reading hearts. There came a strange maiden on the scene—a beautiful maiden, with fair eyes and gleaming hair—and Leonard’s heart was gone from me for ever. Gone!—had it ever come? I cannot tell. May-be some little corner of his heart was mine, once on a time—I doubt if I had more. He had every corner and every throb of mine. Howbeit, when this maid—”

“How was she called, Aunt Joyce?” saith Milly, in rather an hard voice.

Aunt Joyce did not make answer for a moment: and, looking up on her, I saw drawn brows and flushed cheeks.

“Never mind that, Milly. I shall call her Mary. It was not her name. Well, when this maid first came to visit us, and I brought her above to my sister, that as ye know might never arise from the couch whereon she lay—I something marvelled to see how quick from her face to mine went Anstace’ eyes, and back again to her. I knew, long after, what had been her thought. She had no faith in Leonard, and she guessed quick enough that this face should draw him away from me. She tried to prepare me as she saw it coming. But I was blind and deaf. I shut mine eyes tight, and put my fingers in mine ears. I would not face the cruel truth. For Mary herself, I am well assured she meant me no ill, nor did she see that any ill was wrought till all were o’er. She did but divert her with Leonard’s words, caring less for him than for them. She was vain, and loved flatteries, and he saw it, and gave her them by the bushel. She was a child laking with a firebrand, and never knew what it were until she burnt her fingers. And at last, maids, mine eyes were forced open. Leonard himself told me, and in so many words, what I had refused to hear from others,—that he loved well enough the gold that was like to be mine, but he did not love me. There were bitter words on both sides, but mine were bitterest. And so, at last, we parted. I could show you the flag on which he stood when I saw his face for the last time—the last, until I saw it yester-morrow. Others had seen him, and knew him not, through the changes of years. Even your father did not know him, though they had been bred up well-nigh as brothers. But mine eyes were sharper. I had not borne that face in mine heart, and seen it in my dreams, for all these years, that I should look on him and not know it. I knew the look in his eyes, the poise of his head, the smile on his lips, too well—too well! I reckon that between that day and this, a thousand women may have had that smile upon them. But I thought of the day when I had it—when it was the one light of life to me—for I had not then beheld the Light of the World. Milly, didst thou think me cruel yester-morrow?—cold, and hard, and stern? Ah, men do think a woman so,—and women at times likewise—think her words hard, when she has to crush her heart down ere she can speak any word at all—think her eyes icy cold, when behind them are a storm of passionate tears that must not be shed then, and she has to keep the key hard turned lest they burst the door open. Ah, young maids, you look upon me as who should say, that I am an old woman from whom such words are strange to you. They be fit only for a young lass’s lips, forsooth? Childre, you wis not yet that the hot love of youth is nought to be compared to the yearning love of age,—that the maid that loveth a man whom she first met a month since cannot bear the rushlight unto her that has shrined him in her heart for thirty years.”

Aunt Joyce tarried a moment, and drew a long breath. Then she saith in a voice that was calmer and lower—

“Anstace told me I loved not the Leonard that was, but only he that should have been. But I have prayed God day and night, and I will go on yet praying, that the man of my love may be the Leonard that yet shall be,—that some day he may turn back to God and me, and remember the true heart that poured all that love upon him. If it be so, let the Lord order how, and where, and when. For if I may know that it is, when I come into His presence above, I can finish my journey here without the knowledge.”

“But it were better to know it, Aunt Joyce?” saith Helen tenderly. Methinks the tale had stirred her heart very much.

“It were happier, Nelly,” quoth Aunt Joyce softly. “God knoweth whether it were best. If it be so, He will give it me.—And now is the hardest part of my tale to tell. For after a while, Milly, this—Mary—came to see what Leonard meant, and methinks she came about the same time to the certainty that she loved one who was not Leonard. When he had parted from me he sought her, and there was much bitterness betwixt them. At the last she utterly denied him, and shut the door betwixt him and her: for the which he never forgave her, but at a later time, when in the persecutions under King Henry she came into his power, he used her as cruelly as he might then dare to go. I reckon, had it been under Queen Mary, he should have been content with nought less than her blood. But it pleased the good Lord to deliver her, he getting him entangled in some briars of politics that you should little care to hear: and so when she was freed forth of prison, he was shut up therein.”

“Then, Aunt Joyce, is he a Papist?” saith Helen, of a startled fashion.