“I think him odious,” said Joan.
“Odious, my dear! What a strong term! Free and easy, if you like, but not odious. He is much better than most of them, I can tell you.”
“Then the rest must be very bad indeed,” said Joan, and continued on her way in silence.
CHAPTER XXV.
“I FORBID YOU.”
On the following Monday morning Joan began her career as a shop-girl, to describe which in detail would be too long, however instructive it might prove. Her actual work, especially at this, the dead season of the year, was not so hard as she had expected, nor was she long in mastering her duties; but, accustomed as she had been to a country life and the fresh air, she soon found confinement for so many hours a day in the close atmosphere of the shop exceedingly irksome. From Kent Street to Messrs. Black and Parker’s was but a quarter of an hour’s walk; and, as Joan discovered by experiment, without exposing herself to many annoyances it was impossible for her to wander about the streets after dark in search of exercise. As a last resource she was driven to rising at the peep of day and taking her walks abroad in the Park so soon as the gates were open—a daily constitutional which, if wholesome, was not exhilarating, and one that could only be practised in fine weather and while the days were long. This craving for air, however, was among the least of her troubles, for soon it became clear to her that she had no vocation for shop life; indeed, she learned to loathe it and its surroundings. At first the humours of the business amused her a little, but very shortly she discovered that even about these there was a terrible sameness, for one cannot be perpetually entertained by the folly of old ladies trying to make themselves look young, or by the vanity of the young ones neglected by nature and attempting to supply their deficiencies with costly garments.
What galled her chiefly, however, were the attentions with which she was honoured by the young men of the establishment. Worst of all, the oiled and curled Mr. Waters singled her out as the object of his especial admiration, till at length she lost her temper, and answered him in such a fashion as to check his advances once and for all. He left her muttering “You shall pay for that”; and he kept his word, for thenceforth her life was made a misery to her, and it seemed that she could do nothing right. As it chanced, he could not actually discharge her, for Joan had attracted the favourable notice of one of the owners of the business, who, when Mr. Waters made some trumped-up complaint against her, dismissed it with a hint that he had better be more careful as to his facts in future.
For the rest, she had no amusements and no friends, and during all the time she spent in London she never visited a theatre or other place of entertainment. Her only recreation was to read when she could get the books, or, failing this, to sit with little Mrs. Bird in the Kent Street parlour and perfect herself in the art of conversation with the deaf and dumb.
As may be imagined, such an existence did not tend to cause Joan to forget her past, or the man who was to her heart what the sun is to the world. She could renounce him, she could go away vowing that she would never see him more; but to live without him, and especially to live such a life as hers, ah! that was another matter.
Moreover, as time went on, a new terror took her, that, vague in the beginning, grew week by week more definite and more dreadful. At first she could scarcely believe it, for somehow such a thing had never entered into her calculations; but soon she was forced to acknowledge it as a fact, an appalling, unalterable fact, which, as yet secret to herself, must shortly become patent to the whole world. The night that the truth came home to her without the possibility of further doubt was perhaps the most terrible which she ever spent. For some hours she thought that she must go mad: she wept, she prayed, she called upon the name of her lover, who, although he was the author of her woe, in some mysterious fashion had now grown doubly dear to her, till at last sleep or insensibility brought her relief. But sleep passes with the darkness, and she awoke to find this new spectre standing by her bedside and to know that there it must always stand till the end came. All that day she went about her work dazed by her secret agony of mind, but in the evening her senses seemed to come back to her, bringing with them new and acuter suffering.
Where was she to go and what was she to do, she who had no friend in the wide world, or at least none in whom she could confide? Soon they would turn her out upon the streets; even the Bird family would shrink from her as though she had a leprosy. Would it not be better to end it at once, and herself with it? Abandoning her usual custom, Joan did not return home, but wandered about London heedless of the stares and insults of the passers-by, till at length she came to Westminster Bridge. She had not meant to come there—indeed, she did not know the way—but the river had drawn her to its brink, as it has drawn so many an unfortunate before her. There beneath those dim and swirling waters she could escape her shame and find peace, or at least take it to a region beyond all familiar things, whereof the miseries and unrest would not be those of the earth, even if they surpassed them. Twice she crossed the bridge; once she tore herself away, walking for a while along the Embankment; then she returned to it again, brought back by the irresistible attraction of the darkling river.