‘Mrs. Bellendean, there is some mystery about this girl. Why should she wonder, why should she be disturbed? Me, yes. I am much disturbed. It is something—of which I have not spoken for years. Oh, if Elizabeth were only here!’
‘Then come with me to my room,’ Mrs. Bellendean said; ‘if we stay here we shall be interrupted every moment. I am beginning to get excited myself. Come this way. The window is always open, and nobody will know we are there.’
She turned for a moment and waved her hand to Joyce, who had just taken her place at the head of the band; then, turning up a side path, led Colonel Hayward round an angle of the house to the open window of a little morning-room. ‘Here,’ she said,—‘we can talk in quiet here.’
CHAPTER III
It was a little business-room, but the business in it was chiefly feminine. There were baskets of work, shelves full of books in homely covers, a parish or Sunday-school library, and all the paraphernalia of a country lady who ‘takes an interest’ in her poorer neighbours. It was the room in which Mrs. Bellendean interviewed those of her dependants or retainers who came to ask her advice, or whom she sent for to be reproved or counselled. Her own chair stood in front of a formidable-looking writing-table, and one other stood close by, awaiting the respondent or defendant, whoever he or she might be. The windows looked into a closely surrounding shrubbery, which shut out the view—as if landscapes and such vanities had nothing to do with the sternness of the business transacted here. Over the mantelpiece hung a large engraving of Dr. Chalmers—the presiding divinity. Colonel Hayward came in after her, somewhat tremulous, with a sense that some revelation was about to be made to him. The excitement which he had tried to put off, which he had tried to represent to himself as without foundation, as proceeding from merely accidental resemblances, had once more gained command of him, and with more power than ever. He felt certain now that some discovery deeply concerning him was about to be made.
‘Joyce,’ Mrs. Bellendean began, ‘is——’
‘I beg your pardon. Joyce what? Tell me her other name.’
‘My dear Colonel Hayward, if you will only listen to me! Joyce—has no other name. Oh yes, she takes the name of the good old people who have brought her up, who love her like their own child. She is a foundling, Colonel Hayward.’
‘A foundling!’ The word did not discompose him as she had expected, but evidently took him by surprise. A look of profound perplexity came upon his face. He shook his head slightly, and gazed at her, as if he did not know what to think.
‘The story has been told to me so often that I feel as if I had known all about it throughout, though this happened long before I came here. It is a little more than twenty years ago. A lady arrived one evening at the inn in the village. It is a very poor little place—the sort of place where people coming out from Edinburgh on Sundays——’