‘My kind heart!’ said Colonel Hayward. ‘I’m not so sure that my heart is kind—not, it appears, to my own flesh and blood. I feel almost as if I should be glad never to hear of her again.’
‘That is only because you are out of sorts, and got no sleep last night.’
‘How do you know I got no sleep? It’s quite true. Elizabeth thinks I only fancy it, but the truth is that when my mind is disturbed I cannot sleep. I am dreadfully down about it all, Bellendean. No, I haven’t the courage, I haven’t the courage. If she were to tell me again that her mother had much to complain of, I couldn’t answer a word. And yet it’s not so. I declare to you, Bellendean, upon my honour, it was no fault of mine.’
‘I am sure of it, sir,’ said Bellendean. ‘Don’t think any more of that, but come with me and see Miss Joyce, and settle it all.’
The Colonel said little as he walked down to the village leaning on young Bellendean’s arm. He was alarmed and nervous; his throat was dry, his mind was confused. Norman’s society, the touch of his arm, the moral force of his companionship, kept Colonel Hayward up to the mark, or it is possible that he might have turned back and fled from those difficulties which he did not feel himself able to cope with, and the new relationship that had already produced such confusion in his life. But he was firmly held by Norman’s arm, and did not resist the impulse, though it was not his own. He did not know what he was going to say to Joyce, or how to meet this proud young creature, filled with a fanciful indignation for her mother’s wrongs. He had never wronged her mother. Pitiful as the story was, and tenderly as he had always regarded her memory, the Joyce of his youth had been the instrument of her own misery and of much trouble and anguish to him, though the gentle-hearted soldier had accepted it always as a sort of natural calamity for which nobody was responsible, and never blamed her. But even the gentlest-hearted will be moved when the judgment which they have refrained from making is turned against themselves. It was not his fault, and yet how could he say so? How could he explain it to this second hot-headed Joyce without blaming the first who had so suffered, and over whom death had laid a shadowy veil of tenderness, an oblivion of all mistakes and errors? Colonel Hayward did not articulately discuss this question with himself, but it was at the bottom of all the confusion in his troubled mind. He was afraid of her, shy of her presence, not knowing how to address or approach this stranger, who was his own child. He had looked with a tender envy at other people’s daughters before now, thinking if only Elizabeth—— But a daughter who was not Elizabeth’s, and to whom his wife was even, as he said to himself, a little—opposed, was something that had never entered into his thoughts. How easy it was in the story-books!—how parents and children long separated sprang into each other’s arms and hearts by instinct. But it was very different in real life, when the problem how to receive into the intimacy of so small a household a third person who was so near in blood, so absolutely unknown in all that constitutes human sympathy, had to be solved at a moment’s notice! He had been very much excited and disturbed the day before, but he had not doubted the power of Elizabeth to put everything right. Now, however, Elizabeth had not only for the first time failed, but was—opposed. She had not said it, but he had felt it. She had declared herself tired, and lain down, and told him to work it out himself. Such a state of affairs was one which Colonel Hayward had never contemplated, and everything accordingly was much worse than yesterday, when he had still been able to feel that if Elizabeth were only here all would go well.
The party in the cottage were in a very subdued and depressed condition when Captain Bellendean knocked at the door. The heat of resistance in Joyce’s mind had died down. Whether it was the strain of argument which Janet still carried on, though Joyce had not consciously listened to it, or whether the mere effect of the short lapse of time which quenches excitement had operated unawares upon her mind, it is certain that her vehemence of feeling and rebellion of heart had sunk into that despondent suspension of thought which exhaustion brings. Resistance dies out, and the chill compulsion of circumstance comes in, making itself felt above all flashes of indignation, all revolts of sentiment. Joyce knew now, though she had not acknowledged it in words, that her power over her own life was gone,—that there was no strength in her to resist the new laws and subordination under which she felt herself to have fallen. She had not even the consciousness which a girl in a higher class might have been supported by, that her father’s rights over her were not supreme. She believed that she had no power to resist his decrees as to what was to become of her; and accordingly, after the first outburst of contradictory feeling, the girl’s heart and courage had altogether succumbed. She had fallen upon the neck of her old guardian—the true mother of her life—with tears, which quenched out every spark of the passion which had inspired her.
Joyce felt herself to be within the grasp of fate. She was like one of the heroines of the poets in a different aspect from that in which she had identified herself with Rosalind or Miranda. What she was like now was Iphigenia or Antigone caught in the remorseless bonds of destiny. She did not even feel that forlorn satisfaction in it which she might have done had there been more time, or had she been less unhappy. The only feeling she was conscious of was misery, life running low in her, all the elements and powers against her, and the possibility even of resistance gone out of her. Old Janet had pressed her close, and then had repulsed her with the impatience of highly excited feeling; and Joyce stood before the window, with the light upon her pale face, quite subdued, unresistant, dejected to the bottom of her heart. The only one of the group who showed any energy or satisfaction was Andrew Halliday, who could not refrain a rising and exhilaration of heart at the thought of being son-in-law to a man who was the ‘Captain’s’ commanding officer, and consequently occupied a position among the great ones of the earth. Andrew’s imagination had already leaped at all the good things that might follow for himself. He thought of possible elevations in the way of head-masterships, scholastic dignities, and honours. ‘They’ would never leave Joyce’s husband a parish schoolmaster! He had not time to follow it out, but his thoughts had swayed swiftly upwards to promotions and honours undefined.
‘Wha’s that at the door?’ said Janet, among her tears.
‘It’s the Captain,’ said Joyce, in a voice so low that she was almost inaudible. Then she added, ‘It’s—it’s—my father.’
‘Her father!’ Peter rose up with a lowering brow. ‘My hoose is no’ a place for every fremd person to come oot and in at their pleasure. Let them be. I forbid ainy person to open that door.’