She shook her head at him with a wistful smile. ‘It was once thought a priest could do that,’ she said.
‘I am not a priest, but I am your father, Joyce. I set you free from it. It is in the Bible—you know your Bible better than I do. I set you free from it. You had no right to bind yourself.’
She shook her head still. ‘I cannot get any comfort out of that. I was a woman, well knowing what I was doing.’
‘My dear, you are not of age even now.’
‘Oh, father,’ she cried, ‘don’t say anything to me. I cannot go back from my word.’
‘Joyce, I hear my wife coming back. I am not clever, I know. Elizabeth is the one to tell us what to do. If she will only take it up—if you will let her take it up.’
Joyce rose quickly to her feet. ‘Not now—not now. I couldn’t speak to any one. Father, you must let me settle it by myself.’
‘Joyce! Oh, have confidence in us both, Joyce!’
Joyce escaped from his restraining hand and imploring look. She hastened out of one door while Mrs. Hayward entered by the other, and, with her limbs trembling under her, got to the refuge of her own room, where at least there was no one to question her, and tell her what she ought to do. She was not capable of any more. She threw herself down in a chair, and did not move for hours, turning it over and over—helplessly over and over in her mind. It was all she could do. The scene through which she had just passed repeated itself before her—every word that had been said, every look. When she was called to go downstairs for lunch, she made excuses for herself she knew not what, and sat there with a sort of helpless craving only to be alone—to be left to herself—through all the daylight hours. It seemed to Joyce that everything else had disappeared for ever, that every vision of her soul was gone,—that Andrew alone stood before her, the only stable and steadfast thing. She saw him before her eyes all the time, with all his imperfections. There had never been any glamour in her eyes to blind her to these. His familiar aspect, with which she had grown unfamiliar, came back to her with all the force at once of recollection and of new discovery. He had come to claim her, and he had a right to claim her; and how could she resist that claim? He had not hesitated, nor had he been cowed even by her dread of him, by her father’s vehemence. He had stood for his rights like a man. A respect for the man at whom she shuddered, whose approach was dreadful to her, had come into Joyce’s mind: even with strange inconsistency she was half proud of him in his immovableness—in the resolution and force he had shown. She tried to face it all calmly, to contemplate her fate,—to ask herself whether, perhaps, her old life, the duties to which she had been born, were not after all the best, the only existence for her? There would be plenty to do, there would not be much time to think. The clamour of the school, and all the old emulations, and the ambitions which at once seemed enough to fill any mind, would shut out all echoes and banish all ghosts. Only for a few months had she been absent—not enough to change her habits, to change the fashion of her mind. Why should she resist and strive against her fate?
She tried to soothe and put away other visions by that—the school, the children’s looks of interest, the clinging of the girls about her, the books in which she could always escape from all that troubled her. With her trembling hands clasped, with her eyes in an abstract gaze, she saw all these things again, and for a moment her heart beat calm. But then once more, with a sudden flash, with a start, with a cry of horror, she recognised in front of all, him—Andrew—as he had stood before her to-day, as she remembered him, as he was and had always been. Joyce sprang to her feet to escape that steady, calm, immovable image. She put her hands over her hot eyes, but could not shut it out. She paced about her room, but could not get beyond the place in which he stood. He filled all the sphere of her vision, as he would fill her whole life. Oh, how to escape—how to escape! Oh for the wings of a dove!—but where to fly? She flung herself down on her knees by the side of her bed. Sometimes in that attitude merely there is a relief. She was not praying, but laying her heart with all its confusions, its whirl of contradictory thoughts, its wild longings for escape, open where God could see it, calling wistfully His attention to it as human creatures will, in human forgetfulness that everywhere and in all attitudes He sees, and does not neglect.