Now Henry understood it all: Joan had accepted this man, and it was love for him that made her breast heave and her eyes shine like stars. He ought to have been delighted—the difficulty was done with, and no trouble could possibly ensue—and behold, instead he was furious. He ought to have congratulated her, to have said the right thing in the right way; but instead of congratulation the only words that passed his lips were such as might have been uttered by a madly jealous and would-be sarcastic boy.
“He proposed to you, did he, and in the rain? How charming! I suppose he kissed you too?”
“Yes,” replied Joan, “twice.” And slowly she raised her eyes and fixed them upon his face.
What Henry said immediately after that announcement he was never quite able to remember, but it was something strong and almost incoherent. Set on fire by his smouldering jealousy, suddenly his passion flamed up in the magnetised atmosphere of her presence, for on that night her every word and look seemed to be magnetic and to pierce him through and through. For a minute or more he denounced her, and all the while Joan stood silent, watching him with her wide eyes, the light shining on her face. At last he ceased and she spoke.
“I do not understand you,” she said. “Why are you angry with me? What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” he gasped. “I have no right to be angry. I think I must be mad, for I can’t even recollect what I have been saying. I suppose that I was astonished to hear that you were engaged to Mr. Rock, that’s all. Please forgive me and forget my words. And, if you don’t mind, perhaps you had better go away.”
“I don’t wish to forget them, although I dare say that they mean nothing; and I am not engaged to Mr. Rock—I hate him,” answered Joan in the same slow voice; adding, “If you have patience, will you listen to a story? I should like to tell it you before we part, for I think that we have been good friends, and friends should know each other, so that they may remember one another truly when their affection has become nothing but a memory.”
Henry nodded; and still very deliberately, as though she wished to avoid all appearance of haste or of excitement, Joan sat herself down upon a footstool in front of the dying fire and began to speak, always keeping her sad eyes fixed upon his face.
“It is not such a very long story,” she said, “and the only part of it that has any interest began on that day when we met. I suppose they have told you that I am nobody, and worse than nobody. I do not know who my father was, though I think”—and she smiled as though some coincidence had struck her—“that he was a gentleman whom my mother fell in love with. Mr. Levinger has to do with me in some way; I believe that he paid for my education when I went to school, but I am not sure even about this, and why he should have done so I can’t tell. Mr. Samuel Rock is a dissenter and a farmer; they say that he is the richest man in Bradmouth. I don’t know why it was no fault of mine, for I always disliked him very much but he took a fancy to me years ago, although he said nothing about it at the time. After I came back from school my aunt urged me continually to accept his attentions, but I kept out of his way until that afternoon when I met you. Then he found me sitting under the tower at Ramborough Abbey, where I had gone to be alone because I was cross and worried; and he proposed to me, and was so strange and violent in his manner that he frightened me. What I was most afraid of, however, was that he would tell my aunt that I had refused him for I did refuse him and that she would make my life more of a misery to me than it is already, for you see I have no friends here, where everybody looks down upon me, and nothing to do. So in the end I struck a bargain with him, that he should leave me alone for six months, and that then I would give him a final answer, provided that he promised to say nothing of what had happened to my aunt. He has not kept his promise, for to-day he waylaid me and was very insolent and brutal, so much so that at last he caught hold of me and kissed me against my will, tearing my dress half off me, and I pushed him away and told him what I thought of him. The end of it was that he swore that he would marry me yet, and left me. Then I came back home, and an hour ago I told my aunt what had happened, and there was a scene. She said that either I should marry Samuel Rock or be turned out of the house in a day or two, so I suppose that I must go. And that is all my story.”
“The brute!” muttered Henry. “I wish I had him on board a man-of-war: I’d teach him manners. And what are you going to do, Joan?”