Jared recalled, in his thoughts that night, the beginnings of things in his life. Joyce's mother, and the babies who had come and gone like little ghosts, each one taking more of the wife's and mother's beauty and power.
Then that flight to the St. Angé lumber camp—it was really that, nothing less—the attending discomfort and paralyzing reality of what lay before!
Joyce was born the year after the settlement in the rough forest home, and then poor Mrs. Birkdale gave up the struggle.
She told Isa Tate that had the baby been a boy she would not have felt the way she did, but to face the life of another woman in her own life was more than she could bear.
Isa had tried to hold her to her responsibility: Isa had more than her own share of trouble—but Jane Birkdale had slipped away in the middle of the severest winter St. Angé had known for many a year and Isa had been obliged to have "an eye" to the baby Joyce. The small girl responded in health and joyousness, and Jared, when he was himself, had had the grace to be grateful.
As the years slipped by the fire of Jared's own little private hell aroused him to a consciousness that he deserved anything but a happy future.
He hoped, in due season, that he would forget the wrongs he had done his wife, but they gathered strength with time. His sins walked with him through the sober lumber season; their memory drove him to the Black Cat; but his keener wit evolved a desire to "make good," as he termed it, in his relations with his daughter.
He would so conduct himself with her that she, at least, should have nothing against him; and when age, sickness or accident befell him, he might turn to her and find refuge. Jared had always had some kind of sanctuary to flee to when overtaken by the results of his own evil nature.
And now, by the impish words of Falstar's Billy, he was brought face to face with a possibility that staggered and unnerved him.
Joyce and Jude, or Joyce and Jock Filmer, had been possibilities in Jared's distant future. But Joyce, already a woman, and that silent man Gaston who had come from a Past that he rigidly reserved for his own contemplation—Gaston, who lived among them as a traveller who might depart with the day into a Future Birkdale instinctively knew would hold no possible connection with St. Angé—Joyce and Gaston! Here was a situation indeed.