‘You are really incorrigible, Dora,’ he said, turning back to his sermon with a mind amused. But he did not know altogether how incorrigible she was, and that he himself, all innocent and unsuspecting, had been a victim too.
‘And I’ll go and see whether I can’t get Joyce to make her father do something,’ cried the parson’s wife.
Joyce had been plunged in spite of herself into this new and strange current of life. The Miss St. Clairs, notwithstanding the momentary intimacy of the boating party, made few advances towards friendship; but Mrs. Sitwell was very eager to secure her society, and also her help in the many activities which absorbed the clergywoman’s busy life. And there could be no doubt that it was very convenient to Mrs. Hayward that her step-daughter should have a friend who would relieve herself from the duty of tolerating Joyce’s constant companionship, and providing for her entertainment. Joyce, with a singular impartiality and fairness of mind, herself perceived the advantages of this, and what it must be to her father’s wife to be now and then free of her presence, and able to act as if no grown-up daughter, no unexpected much-claiming personage had ever been in existence. She had a certain sympathy even with Mrs. Hayward—and she allowed herself to be drawn into the other current, with wistful yet genuine understanding of its expediency. Indeed, Joyce went on day by day making discoveries, learning fully only now when she seemed to have settled into her place in her father’s house, all the difficulties, the almost impossibilities of it. She felt her disjunction from her past growing day by day, and that was perhaps the worst of all.
The very climax of disquietude and distress came upon her suddenly one day when she was sitting in her room writing her usual letter to Janet, the long journal-letter which had been her safety-valve in her early troubles. In the midst of her writing, while she was giving that minute account of herself and of all her actions, which was everything to her old grandmother, Joyce suddenly awoke as from a dream, with a burning blush, and threw away her pen out of her hand, as if it had been that that was in the wrong. That little implement, which, one way or other, does so much for us, betraying us, expounding us even to ourselves, seemed to her for the moment like a tricksy demon drawing out of her things which it was against her honour to say. She got up suddenly, pushing away the table and the letter—things that were in the conspiracy! and with a great deal of agitation walked about the room to subdue the beating in her heart. How was it she had never felt, never recognised till now, the difference? Not Janet’s child, free to secure in everything the sympathy of those old people who belonged to her, but Joyce Hayward, her father’s daughter, bound by a hundred ties, bound above all to betray his household to no one, not to those who were dearest to her. Joyce was very miserable for a time over this discovery. It stopped not only her letter but the whole course of her thoughts. When she resumed her writing, it was with a poignant sense of unreality, a feeling that her letter was fictitious, written not to reveal but to conceal, which took all the comfort and pleasure out of it. She felt that Janet would read between the lines that it was no longer her Joyce that was writing, but Colonel Hayward’s daughter. Their relationship seemed to change in a moment, to become a thing unreal, no longer full of solace and confidence, but fictitious, strained, and untrue.
For a time she no longer cared to write at all, making excuses, finding that she had not time—that to put off till to-morrow was a relief. The change made her heart sick. She felt as if she had been over again cut adrift from what she loved best. And yet it had to be. Hers was not the hand to lift any veil from the doorways of her father’s house, or hand over its household manners to remark, or take refuge from it in another. She wrote a longer letter than usual to Janet after that abrupt awakening, and kissed and cried over it when she sent it away, redoubling the tender words in which she was usually shy of indulging, and writing protestations of affection which had been unnecessary, and which she felt to ring untrue. But how could she better it? It was her first false letter, yet so loyal—the first little rift within the lute, and the music was mute already. She accompanied it with many an anxious, wondering thought, but never knew what Janet thought of it, if Janet had perceived. If Janet did perceive, she never let her nursling suspect it. And not a word was said between them; but it is scarcely to be believed that the acute and keen intellect of the old woman, and her tremulous sympathy with every movement in the mind of her child, could pass over that change which to Joyce’s consciousness was so complete.
To say that the letters to Andrew Halliday grew few and rare would be to say little. Joyce began to feel the writing of them as the greatest burden of her life. She did not know what to say to him—how to address him. His very name made her tremble. Her heart, which had never beaten two beats quicker for his presence, sank now into depths unknown at the thought of him. What if he were to come to claim her! That he would do so one day, Joyce felt a terrifying, awful conviction. And would she be bound to arise and go with him—to leave everything that she was beginning to love? Joyce knew nothing else that could be done. She had pledged him her word. To withdraw from it because—because, as she had said, she was Colonel Hayward’s daughter—how should she do that? He was the inevitable, standing at the end of all things—a sort of visible fate.
Joyce shuddered and turned away from this thought. To escape from it, to hide her face and not see that image in her pathway, became more and more a necessity as the days went on. And this was another reason for finding refuge in the society which was close to her, though it was so perplexing and unfamiliar. Anyhow, it was more comprehensible than garden-parties and lawn-tennis, which, to the spirit of the Scotch peasant which was in her, were inscrutable pleasures regarded with awe. Joyce did not understand these rites. She understood Mrs. Sitwell’s schemes a little better, though still with wonderment and many failures in comprehension. And it took her a long time to find out that the parson’s wife intended to employ her for the furtherance of her own purposes, and that it was the novelty of her and her unlikeness to other people which made her attractive to her new friend. Mrs. Sitwell wooed Joyce with flattering pertinacity. She showered invitations upon her. She took the girl into her confidence, telling her how much she wanted, how little she had, and unbosoming herself about her pecuniary concerns in a way which horrified her listener. For Joyce had the strong Scotch prejudice against any confession of poverty or appeal for help. She had been trained in the stern doctrine that to starve or die was possible, but not to beg or expose your sorrows to the vulgar eye. When the parson’s wife told of her poverty, which she was quite willing to do, to the first comer, Joyce listened with a painful blush, with a sense of shame. She was very sorry—but horrified to see behind the scenes, to be admitted thus, as she felt, to the sanctuary which ought to be kept sacred. But for the woman who had bestowed upon her this painful confidence, Joyce felt that she must be ready to do everything. It could not be for nothing that such a confidence was bestowed.
Mrs. Sitwell, for her part, did not care at all for what poor Joyce considered this exposure of her circumstances. She told her tale with a light heart. She was not ashamed of being poor. ‘It’s very nice of you to be so sorry,’ she said. ‘And, my dear, if you would just say a word to the Colonel, and get him to set things agoing. He could do it quite, quite easily. If you were to take an opportunity when you are walking with him, or when you have him alone. But I don’t doubt you would have done that, you kind thing, without being asked——’
‘Oh no,’ said Joyce; ‘I would not have betrayed your confidence, nor said a word——’
‘Oh, my confidence! It is only rich people that can hope to keep their affairs to themselves. I didn’t want you to make any secret of it. Just say to your father, who is so kind—whatever you please, my dear. I can trust you. Say, “Dear daddy, those Sitwells are so poor! don’t you think you could do something for them?” or any other thing that will please him and make him think well of us.’