‘Oh Joyce! my darling Joyce! I don’t know that I quite understand you, dear. It is all so mixed up. Things that I have heard and that you tell me are so different. I don’t know what to think—but if it’s a question between you and another, which is to take the happiness and let the other suffer—oh, my child, my dear! do I need to say it to you—do I need to tell you? Joyce, your heart tells you—it’s like a, b, c, to a woman. You know——’
‘I thought,’ said Joyce, with that sob in her throat, following with intent eyes every little movement of her agitated instructor— ‘I thought that was what you would say.’
‘Yes,’ said the vestal, the priestess of this new Dodona, ‘it is not in our will to choose or to change. You can’t leave the heartbreak to another. You have to take it, though your spirit may cry out and refuse. I am not wise to give you advice, oh my darling! but I know this, and every woman knows it. Oh, it isn’t all that do it, I know, for it’s not an easy thing. But when you have strength from above, you can do it. And what is more, it is not in your nature to do anything else. So don’t ask me what I would do. You could not—do—any other thing: being you and nobody else: Joyce that I know.’
‘No,’ said Joyce, stumbling, rising to her feet, meeting with a solemn look the wet and weeping eyes of her oracle, ‘no, not any other thing.’
‘Not any other thing.’ Miss Marsham would have kept her in her arms, would have wooed her to further speech, would have wept over her and caressed her, and expended all the treasures of her heart in soothing the martyr whom she had thus consecrated. But of this Joyce was not capable. She had got her oracle, and it was clear. It was what she had wanted, not advice, but that divine and vague enigma which corresponded with the enigma of her confession. She resisted gently the softness of her friend’s clinging embrace. Her eyes were full of the awe of the victim who consents and accepts, and is restrained by every solemnity of her religion from any struggle—but who already feels herself to be outside this world of secondary consolations, face to face with the awful realities of the sacrifice. ‘Don’t keep me,’ she said faintly, putting away the thin kind hands that would have held her, ‘I must go—I must go.’
‘Oh Joyce,’ cried Miss Marsham, stricken with a secret terror, ‘I hope I have said right!’
‘I am sure you have said right; it is what I knew. I could not—do—any other thing. Let me go, Miss Marsham, let me go, for more I cannot bear.’
‘Oh, my dearest, I hope I have done right! Oh, stay a little and tell me more! Oh Joyce, God bless you, God bless you, my dear, if you must go!’
She followed the girl to the little door, so flowery and embowered in summer, now overshadowed by those straggling bare branches of the rose-tree, which were good for nothing but to make, had that been wanted, a sharp garland of thorns. Joyce scarcely turned to answer her blessings and good-byes, but went on straight from the door as if hurrying to the place of sacrifice. The thought was folly, Miss Marsham said to herself, and yet it went with a chill to her heart and would not be chased away.