Now, sitting upright in the carriage, while the horses carried her forward at a spanking pace through the sea and moorland freshness and the delights of the spring sunshine, a new form of these fears tortured her. Adrian's love, constant association with him, participation in the varied interests and activities of his daily life and in that of the brilliant society in which he moved—this, and nothing less than this, in sum and in detail, constituted the lovely precious gift placed in her, till now, so sad and empty hands by a strange turn of Fortune's wheel. Were those poor hungry hands strong enough to close upon and hold it? Or would they, weakly faltering and failing, let it fall to the ground and be shattered? The shame of such prospective failure agonized her. To renounce a crown may be heroic, but to have it incontinently tumble off, when you are straining every nerve, exerting every faculty, to keep it safely balanced on your head, is feeble, as she felt, to the point of ignominy.
At last the schools, pensions, nursing-homes, and lodging-houses were left behind. The carriage reached the open common. Tracts of gorse, thick-set with apricot-yellow blossom, broke up the silvery brown expanse of heather. In sharply green, grass-grown hollows ancient hawthorns, their tops clipped by the sea wind into quaint shapes, compact and ruddy, were dusted over by opening leaf-buds. High in air screaming gulls circled. The shadows were long, for the sun drew down toward its setting. Then, as once before to-day, the happy appeal of outward things—in which, as in glass, man may, if he will, catch some faint reflection of God's glory—made its voice heard, awakening Joanna Smyrthwaite from the fever-dreams of her almost maniacal egoism.
Obeying a sudden impulse, she stopped the carriage, alighted, and walked out on to the little promontory the neck of which the road crosses. Here the sand cliffs, dyed all shades from deepest rusty orange to palest lemon-yellow and glistening white, descend, almost perpendicularly in narrow water-worn shelves and ledges to the beach nearly a hundred feet below. Looking eastward, up the wind, the sea horizon, Stourmouth, its many buildings and its pier, and all the curving coastline away to Stonehorse Head—the dark mass of which guards the entrance to Marychurch Haven—showed through a film of fine gray mist. Westward, the colors of both land and sea, though opaque, were warmer. Across the golden gorse of the common in the immediate foreground Joanna saw the great amphitheater of the Baughurst Park Woods extending far inland, the rich blue-purple of the pines and firs pierced here and there by the living sunlight of a larch plantation. Beyond Barryport Harbor, only the farthest coves and inlets of whose gleaming waters were visible, the quiet, rounded outlines of the Slepe Hills pushed seaward in blunt-nosed headland after headland, softening from heliotrope to ethereal lavender in the extreme distance, under a sky resembling the tint and texture of a pink pearl.
Joanna, her fur cloak gathered closely about her, stood a lonely black figure amid the splendor of the scented gorse. There is an exciting quality in the east wind. The harsh tang of it galvanized her into an unusual physical well-being, making her chest expand and her blood circulate more rapidly.
A new thought came to her. To doubt her power of meeting the demands of Adrian's affection and of rising to his level was really to doubt the vivifying power of that affection, to doubt his ability to raise her to his own level. Her doubt of her own worthiness was, in point of fact, an accusation against his intelligence and his judgment.
Joanna slipped one hand inside the velvet bag under her cloak and clasped the thin packet of letters. With the other she momentarily covered her eyes, as though in apology and penitence.
"Ah! how miserably faithless I am," she murmured in her flat, toneless voice. "How wickedly ungrateful it is not to trust him. As though he were not capable of supplying all that is wanting in me—as though he did not know so far, far best!"
CHAPTER IV
SOME PASSAGES FROM JOANNA SYMRTHWAITE'S LOCKED BOOK
That evening Joanna went to her room early. She permitted Mrs. Isherwood to help her off with her evening dress and on with a purple lamb's-wool kimono, the color and cut of which were singularly ill-suited to her pasty complexion and narrow-chested figure. She then rather summarily dismissed the good woman, who retired accompanied by black silk rustlings indicative of respectful displeasure and protest. These Joanna refused to let affect her. The experiences of the day had aroused an inherited, though until now latent, arrogance. She regarded herself as sealed to that altogether-otherwise-engaged young gentleman, Adrian Savage, and set apart. Yet ingrained habits of obedience and self-repression still stirred within her, making her timid in the presence of any sort of established authority, even in that of her old nurse. She needed solitude to enable her to enjoy the luxury of such "sealing" to the full. Therefore, when the door shut upon those remonstrant rustlings, she followed almost stealthily and locked it, stood for a moment listening to make sure of Isherwood's final departure, then extended both arms with a voiceless cry of satisfaction, crossed to her satinwood bureau, opened it and took the current volume of her diary from a pigeon-hole, fetched lighted candles and the silver-mounted bag containing Adrian's letters from off her dressing-table, and sat down to write.