Joyce stood like a figure turned to stone. She felt the world whirling round her as if she were coming down, down some wonderful fall, too giddy and sickening to estimate. The colour and the eagerness went out of her face. She took no notice of Mrs. Hayward, whose interference at this strange moment she did not seem to understand, although she understood clearly all that she said. Her eyes were fixed, staring at the man there against the window, who was her father. Her father! Her heart had been very soft to him this morning, when she believed he was her mother’s friend: but her father!—this was not how she had figured her father. He stood against the light, his outline all wavering and trembling, making a hesitating step towards her, then stopping again. Colonel Hayward was more agitated than words could say. Oh, if he had but taken her in his arms in the morning when his heart was full! He came forward slowly, faltering, not knowing what to say. When he had come close to her, he put out his hands. ‘Joyce!’ he said, ‘you are your mother’s living image: I saw it from the first; have you—have you nothing—to say to me?’
‘Sir,’ said Joyce, making no advance, ‘my mother—must have had much to complain of—from you.’
His hands, which he had held out, with a quiver in them, fell to his sides. ‘Much to complain of,’ he said, with a tremulous astonishment; ‘much—to complain of!’
A murmur of voices sounded in Joyce’s ears; they sounded like the hum of the bees, or anything else inarticulate, with mingled tones of remonstrance, anger, entreaty: even old Janet’s quavering voice joined in. To hear the girl defying a gentleman, the Captain’s colonel, a grand soldier officer, took away the old woman’s breath.
‘You left her to die,’ cried Joyce, her soft voice fierce in excitement, ‘all alone in a strange place. Why was she alone at such a time, when she had a husband to care for her? You left her to die—and never asked after her for twenty years: never asked—till her child was a grown-up woman with other—other parents, and another home—of her own.’
‘Oh, dinna speak to the gentleman like that!’ cried old Janet, getting up with difficulty from her easy-chair. ‘Oh, Joyce, Joyce!’ cried Mrs. Bellendean. Mrs. Hayward said nothing, but she came up to the indignant young figure in the centre of this group, and laid an imperative hand upon her arm. Joyce shook it off. She did not know what she was doing. An immense disappointment, horror, anger with fate and all about her, surged up in her heart, and gave force to the passion of indignant feeling of which, amid all her thinkings on the subject, she had never been conscious before. She turned away from the three women who surrounded her, each remonstrating in her way, and confronted once more the man—the father—whose great fault perhaps was that he was not the father whom the excited girl looked for, and that the disillusion was more than she could bear.
Colonel Hayward came to himself a little as he looked at her, and recovered some spirit. ‘I don’t blame you,’ he said, ‘for thinking so. No, Elizabeth, don’t blame her. I was in India. Short of deserting, I couldn’t get home.’
‘Why didn’t you desert, then,’ cried the girl in a flush of nervous passion, ‘rather than let her die?’ Then she turned round upon Janet, who stood behind, burdened with her great shawl, and threw herself upon the old woman’s shoulder. ‘Oh granny, granny, take me home, take me home again! for I have nothing to do here, nor among these strange folk,’ she cried.
CHAPTER XIII
There was no one who could detain her, for the agitated group in Mrs. Bellendean’s room were too much taken by surprise, in this curious development of affairs, to do anything but gaze astonished at Joyce’s unlooked-for passion. She went out of the room and out of the house, with old Janet, in her big shawl, following humbly, like a tall ship carrying out a humble little lugger in her train. Joyce seemed to have added to her stature in the intensity of her excitement. The nervous swiftness with which she moved, the air of passion in all her sails, to continue the metaphor, the unity of impassioned movement with which she swept forth—not looking back nor suffering any distracting influence to touch her—made the utmost impression upon the spectators who had been, to their own thinking, themselves chief actors in the scene, until this young creature’s surpassing emotion put them all into the position of audience while she herself filled the stage. Joyce would not see her father’s face, though it appealed to her with a keen touch of unaccustomed feeling which was like a stab—nor would she suffer herself to look at Mrs. Bellendean, whose faintest indication of a wish had hitherto been almost law to the enthusiast. The girl was possessed by a tempest of personal excitement which carried her far beyond all the habitual restraints and inducements of her life. Nothing weighed with her, nothing moved her, but that overwhelming tide which carried her forth, wounded, humiliated, indignant, angry, she could not tell why, in the desperation of this most bitter and entirely unreasonable disappointment which swept her soul. To think that it had come, the long-looked-for discovery—the revelation so often dreamt of—and that it should be this! Only a visionary, entirely abandoned to the devices of fancy by the bareness of all the facts that surrounded actual life in her experience, could have entertained such a vague grandeur of expectation, or could have fallen into such an abyss of disenchantment. It thrilled through and through her, giving a pride and loftiness indescribable to the carriage of her head, to the attitude of her person, to the swift and nervous splendour of her movements. Joyce, stung to the heart with her disappointment—with the bourdonnement in her ears and the jar in her nerves of a great downfall—was like a creature inspired. She swept out of the house, and crossed the open space of the drive, and disappeared in the shadows of the avenue, without a word, with scarcely a breath—carried along by that wind of passion, unconscious what she did.