‘Mrs. Bellendean,’ cried Elizabeth suddenly, ‘I am sure you are very kind. You would not have invited me here as you have done, without knowing anything of me, if you had not been kind. But perhaps you don’t quite put yourself in my place. I did not mean to say anything on that subject, but my heart is full, and I can’t help it. I married Colonel Hayward—he was only Captain Hayward then—knowing everything, and that it was possible, though not likely, that this wife of his might still be alive. It was a great venture to make. I have kept myself in the background always, not knowing—whether I had any real right to call myself Mrs. Hayward. Joyce has not been a name of good omen to me.’
‘Dear Mrs. Hayward!’ cried the impulsive woman before her, leaning over the table, holding out both her hands.
‘No, don’t praise me. I believe I ought to have been blamed instead; but, anyhow, I took the risk. And I have never repented it, though I did not know all that would be involved. And now, when we are growing old, and calm should succeed to all the storms, here is her daughter—with her name—not a child whom I could influence, who might get to be fond of me, but a woman, grown up, educated in her way, clever:—all that makes it so much the worse. No! don’t be sorry for me; I am a wicked woman, I ought not to feel so. Here I find her again, not a recollection, not an idea, but a grown-up girl, the same age as her mother. Joyce over again, always Joyce!’
Mrs. Bellendean did not know how to reply. She sat and gazed at the woman whom she wanted to console, who touched her, revolted her, horrified her all in one, and yet whose real emotion and pain she felt to the bottom of her sympathetic heart. Too much sympathy is perhaps as bad as too little. She was all excitement and delight for Joyce, and yet this other woman’s trouble was too genuine not to move her. It was very natural too, and yet dreadful,—a pain to think of. ‘I am sure,’ she said, faltering, ‘that when you know her better—when you begin to see what she is in herself: there is no one who does not like Joyce.’
Mrs. Hayward had got rid, in this interval, of a handful, so to speak, of hot sudden tears. She was ashamed of them, angry with herself for being thus overcome, and therefore could not be said to weep, or make any other affecting demonstration, but simply hurried off, threw from her angrily, these signs of a pang which she despised, which hurt her pride and her sense of what was seemly as much as it wrung her heart. She shook her head with a sudden angry laugh in the midst of her emotion. ‘Don’t you see! that is the worst of all,’ she cried.
But at this moment, in the midst of this climax of pain, exasperation, self-disapproval, there arose in soft billows of sound, rising one after the other into all the corners of the great house, the sound of the gong. It reached all the members of the household, along the long corridors and round the gallery, roused Colonel Hayward from the softened and satisfied pause of feeling which his withdrawal upstairs had brought him, and called Mrs. Bellendean back from the wonderful problem of mingled sentiments in which she was embroiling herself, taking both sides at once, into the more natural feelings of the mistress of the house, whose presence is indispensable elsewhere. But she could not break off all at once this interview, which was so very different from the ordinary talks between strangers. She hesitated even to rise up, conscious of the ludicrous anti-climax of this call to food addressed to people whose hearts were full of the most painful complications of life. At the same time, the sound of her guests trooping downstairs, and coming in from the grounds, with a murmur of voices, and footsteps in the hall, became every moment more and more clamant. She rose at last, and put her hand on Mrs. Hayward’s shoulder. ‘The gentlemen speak,’ she said, ‘of things that are solved walking. It will be so with you, dear Mrs. Hayward. It will clear up as you go on. Everything will become easier in the doing. Come now to luncheon.’
‘I—to luncheon!—it would choke me,’ cried Elizabeth, feeling in her impatience, and the universal contrariety of everything, as if this had been the last aggravation of all.
‘No,’ said Mrs. Bellendean, putting her arm through that of her guest; ‘it will do you good, on the contrary: and the Colonel will eat nothing if you are not there. You shall come in your bonnet as you are; and Colonel Hayward will make a good luncheon.’
‘I believe he is capable of it,’ Mrs. Hayward cried.