Joyce answered him only with her eyes. They seemed to grow bigger and bigger in her pale face, telling him a hundred things; but she could not find her voice. She had meant to tell him as much at least as she had told Miss Marsham; but when she found herself before him, a man, with that confused story of hers which was not for a man’s ears, Joyce was struck dumb. She made an effort to say something, but failed again. He kept his hand on her shoulder patting it, encouraging her as if she had been a child, ‘Come, Joyce, tell me all about it. You are not afraid of me.’
Her voice burst forth suddenly, as if she had forced it, or rather as if it had forced an outlet for itself from some place where it had been pent up. ‘Oh, sir!’ Joyce cried, ‘I cannot speak; but tell me one thing,—if there are two and one must suffer, and you are one of them—must you never make a question, but consent and accept that it shall be you?’
The Canon was altogether taken by surprise. The burst of the voice, hoarse at first, afterwards clearing and quickening in its passionate strain, the question that had nothing to do with what he had expected to hear, but was an abstract question, startled him beyond expression. ‘Why, Joyce, Joyce—what is this?’ he said.
She turned to him, growing bolder. ‘If you are one of two, and one of them must break her heart—and you are the one that is used to that, and the other has known no trouble. Do not ask me what I mean,’ said Joyce, ‘but oh, you that are a minister, you that have to guide those that are wandering and lost, tell me! They say that it is like a, b, c, and every woman knows; but you are not a woman, you are a man. You will not be carried away by feeling as they are. You will be more just. You will know.’
‘My poor child,’ said the Canon. He too, like Miss Marsham, took her hand, in utter failure of any other way to help her, and held it, patting it softly between his. ‘Joyce,’ he said, ‘my dear you’re right. I am only a man, I can’t divine what you mean unless you tell me. As far as I can make out, somebody has been talking nonsense to you. What is this a, b, c, that every woman knows? If you’ll believe me, Joyce, a woman is just like a man so far as duty goes. There’s no law for one more than the other. Tell me what it is, seriously, Joyce.’
She looked up at him once more and opened her lips to speak; but again the impossibility of telling that tale to him closed her lips. Joyce was nearly in despair, and she had a clinging to him as to her friend, one who would help her if he could, one who knew many things and might understand. But when she looked up at the Canon’s middle-aged countenance and at his large prosperous person, and the capacious round of his black silk waistcoat, and the air about him of a man who had everything and abounded, her courage and confidence failed her. She was dumb. To tell her youthful trouble to him, all mixed up as it was with love and lovers and trifling things, though so great to her, a matter of life and death—to him, who would be moved by none of these matters—how could she do it? She drew a long breath, which ended in something like a sob— ‘It is—it is a case of conscience,’ she said, with her wistful eyes fixed upon him, making revelations which he could not understand.
‘A case of conscience!’ he said; ‘this is one of your evasions not to speak out. You’re like other women, Joyce, which is no shame to you; you would like me to be at all the expense of the talk, my dear, and give you my advice without any knowledge of the circumstances. Let us see what premisses we’ve got. If I were one of two and knew that one must suffer, would I take it upon me without question that the sufferer must be I—is that what you call the a, b, c, that every woman knows? A great many women are fools, my dear, but not such fools as that. No, Joyce! I should take up no such idea. I should say, let him suffer who deserved it, who had brought it on himself.’
‘No,’ said Joyce very low. ‘She has not done that: we are not ill-deserving—it’s no—no wrong—oh, neither her nor me!’
‘It is something between two women,’ said the clear-sighted Canon. ‘It is love then, and there is a man in the question too.’
She made him no reply; but she turned away her face from him, and the Canon saw the colour rise like a fire over her cheek from throat to brow.