‘Do you know it?’
‘No more than in books,’ said Joyce, with a smile; ‘there are so many places that seem kent places because they are in books.’
‘Italy, etc.,’ the Captain said, looking at her with a sympathetic glance.
‘Oh, but not etc.!’ cried Joyce. ‘Italy—is like nothing else in the world.’
‘Well,’ said Captain Bellendean, ‘when you are in the circumstances which you have just been suggesting to me, no doubt you will go to Italy; that is the right time and the right circumstances——’
Before he had half said these words, a sudden vision of Andrew Halliday flashed across his mind, and he stopped in sudden embarrassment. By this time they had reached the river’s side, and Joyce turned dutifully to point out to him the poet’s villa, as her father had bidden her; but there was something in her tone which betrayed to the sympathetic listener that the same image had suddenly overshadowed her imagination too. Captain Bellendean was very sympathetic—more so, perhaps, than he would have been had his companion been older or less pretty. He pretended to look with great interest at the willows sweeping into the water, and the lawn, with its little fringe of forget-me-nots reflected in the softly flowing stream. Joyce had lost the colour which was half excitement, and had kept coming and going like the shadows over the sky, while they walked together down the shady walk. It is very interesting to see a face change in this way, and to think that one’s own society, the quickening of the blood produced by one’s sudden advent, may have something to do with it. He had felt that it was very pleasant to watch these changes, and was conscious of a little agreeable thrill of responsive exhilaration in his own veins. But when this sudden shadow fell upon Joyce, his sympathy sprang into a warmer, energetic sentiment. Could that be the fate for which this girl was reserved? Surely some one must step in to save her from that fate!
CHAPTER XXI
It was some days before the new difficulties which possessed all Mrs. Hayward’s thoughts were fully revealed to Joyce. These early days were long, being full of so many confusing circumstances and new problems to be encountered, solved, or left aside for further trouble in their turn; and what she had heard her stepmother say about her bringing up had passed over Joyce’s mind with little effect. She had enough to do in other ways: to find out a mode of living which would be practicable, to subdue her own spirit, to reconcile herself with so many new necessities all rushing upon her at once. How to apportion her time was in itself a difficulty almost beyond her untried powers: to be long enough, yet not too long, with Mrs. Hayward—to find something to do during these hours which she had to pass in that drawing-room which was so pretty and comfortable, but so little homelike to the stranger. Joyce had abundant resources in herself. She was fully instructed in all kinds of work—a mistress of fine-sewing and mending, able to clothe her household with needlework, like the woman in the Proverbs; but there was no need for these qualifications here. And she had gone through all the studies which were open to her in design, besides having found out somehow, amid those gifts of nature which to all her early friends had seemed so lavish, a faculty for drawing, which had been of endless pleasure to her, and pride to her belongings in the old time. Music, indeed, was left out, except in so far as it belonged to her profession. She had learned the Hullah system, or something like it, and could read easily all the simple songs which were taught to the children; but a piano had never been within her reach, nor had she heard anything that a musician would think worth hearing. At home in Bellendean the old people thought that nobody could sing the ‘Flowers of the Forest’, or the ‘Banks of Doon,’ or the old Psalm tunes, which were still dearer, like, their Joyce. But these were not the sort of performances with which to please Mrs. Hayward.
Thus, though she was full of accomplishments in her way, none of Joyce’s acquirements stood her in much stead in her new circumstances. She had to contrive something for herself to do, which was far from being easy. She had to think of what she could talk about, to take her fit part in the household intercourse—not to sit like an uninterested spectator between these two strange people, who were her nearest relations. And this was almost the hardest of all; for Colonel Hayward and his wife were like so many people of their class—they had read little, they were puzzled by references to books, and did not understand that keen sense of association and fellowship with her favourite writers and their productions which made Joyce an inhabitant of a second world, to her consciousness almost more real than the external sphere. The Colonel said ‘Eh?’ as if he had become a little deaf, with a kind but bewildered smile, when she adduced the example—to Joyce more natural than the most familiar examples of every day—of somebody in Scott, or, as she loved to say, Sir Walter, to illustrate a position; while Mrs. Hayward was more apt to frown and to say impatiently that she thought it very wrong for young people to read so many novels. They did not even know what she meant by Sir Walter!—her father, with his puzzled look, suggesting, ‘Sir Walter—Gilbert, did you mean, my dear? Now, where can you have met Gilbert, Joyce? and what could he know about the oyster-dredging in the North?’ Thus it was against her that she knew more than they did, as well as that she knew less: in either case, she was left out of their circle, out of their world,—her very wealth futile, and more useless than had she been without endowment at all.
But in the preoccupation of so many matters, important beyond measure to her new existence, and much pondering of the way to make that existence possible, which seemed to her sometimes a problem almost beyond her powers of solving, Joyce was not at all quick to catch up the allusions of her stepmother, or to perceive what it was that filled Mrs. Hayward’s mind with new alarms. The possibility of there being something to be ashamed of in respect to herself—something to conceal or gloss over, in case it might revolt the visitors, of whom Joyce, hitherto measuring them by the standard of Bellendean, had not formed a very high idea—had never entered her mind; and she was startled beyond measure when Mrs. Hayward opened the subject directly in a moment of impatience, and notwithstanding her own excellent resolutions against doing so. Joyce had been betrayed into some reference to her old work, which she had instinctively felt to be distasteful and seldom alluded to, but which would crop up now and then. It was Mr. Sitwell, the clergyman, and his school feast, which was the original subject of the talk.