--30

Towards the spring, Ellen wrote again, breaking the silence of several weeks. She wrote in a different tone--some change had pa.s.sed over her.

She no longer asked Arthur to divorce her--on the contrary she hinted her thanks for his magnanimity in not having done so. Evidently she no longer counted on marrying Sir Harry Trevor, perhaps, even, she did not wish to. But in one point she had not changed--she was not coming back to her husband.

"I couldn't bear to live that life again, especially after what's happened. It's not his fault--it's simply that I'm different. If he wants his freedom, I suggest that he should let me divorce him--it could easily be arranged. He should go and see a really good lawyer in London."

Yes--Ellen spoke truly when she said that she was "different." Her cavalier dealings with the situation, the glib way she spoke of divorce, the insult she flung at the respectable form of Huxtable, Vidler and Huxtable by suggesting that Arthur should consult "a really good lawyer in London," all showed how far she had travelled from the ways of Walland Marsh.

"What's she after now?" asked Joanna.

"Reckon they're getting tired of each other."

"She don't say so."

"No--she wants to find out which way the land lays first."

"I'll write and tell her she can come back and live along of me, if she won't go to you."

"Then I'll have to be leaving these parts--I couldn't be at Donkey Street and her at Ansdore."

"Reckon you could--she can go out of the way when you call."

"It wouldn't be seemly."

"Where ud you go?"

"I've no notion. But reckon all this ain't the question yet. Ellen won't come back to you no more than she'll come back to me."

"She'll just about have to come if she gets shut of the Old Squire, seeing as she's got no more than twelve pounds a year of her own. Reckon poor father was a wise man when he left Ansdore to me and not to both of us--you'd almost think he'd guessed what she was coming to."

Joanna wrote to Ellen and made her offer. Her sister wrote back at great length, and rather pathetically--"Harry" was going on to Venice, and she did not think she would go with him--"when one gets to know a person, Jo, one sometimes finds they are not quite what one thought them." She would like to be by herself for a bit, but she did not want to come back to Ansdore, even if Arthur went away--"it would be very awkward after what has happened." She begged Jo to be generous and make her some small allowance--"Harry would provide for me if he hadn't had such terrible bad luck--he never was very well off, you know, and he can't manage unless we keep together. I know you wouldn't like me to be tied to him just by money considerations."

Joanna was bewildered by the letter. She could have understood Ellen turning in horror and loathing from the partner of her guilt, but she could not understand this wary and matter-of-fact separation. What was her sister made of? "Harry would provide for me" ... would she really have accepted such a provision? Joanna's ears grew red. "I'll make her come home," she exclaimed savagely--"she'll have to come if she's got no money."

"Maybe she'll stop along of him," said Arthur.

"Then let her--I don't care. But she shan't have my money to live on by herself in foreign parts, taking up with any man that comes her way; for I don't trust her now--I reckon she's lost to shame."

She wrote Ellen to this effect, and, not surprisingly, received no answer. She felt hard and desperate--the thought that she was perhaps binding her sister to her misdoing gave her only occasional spasms of remorse. Sometimes she would feel as if all her being and all her history, Ansdore and her father's memory, disowned her sister, and that she could never take her back into her life again, however penitent--"She's mocked at our good ways--she's loose, she's low." At other times her heart melted towards Ellen in weakness, and she knew within herself that no matter what she did, she would always be her little sister, her child, her darling, whom all her life she had cherished and could never cast out.

She said nothing about these swaying feelings to Arthur--she had of late grown far more secretive about herself--as for him, he took things as they came. He found a wondrous quiet in this time, when he was allowed to serve Joanna as in days of old. He did not think of marrying her--he knew that even if it was true that the lawyers could set aside parson's word, Joanna would not take him now, any more than she would have taken him five or ten or fifteen years ago; she did not think about him in that way. On the other hand she appreciated his company and his services. He called at Ansdore two or three times a week, and ran her errands for her. It was almost like old times, and in his heart he knew and was ashamed to know that he hoped Ellen would never come back. If she came back either to him or to Joanna, these days of quiet happiness would end. Meantime, he would not think of it--he was Joanna's servant, and when she could not be in two places at once it was his joy and privilege to be in one of them. "I could live like this for ever, surely," he said to himself, as he sat stirring his solitary cup of tea at Donkey Street, knowing that he was to call at Ansdore the next morning. That was the morning he met Joanna in the drive, hatless, and holding a piece of paper in her hand.

"I've heard from Ellen--she's telegraphed from Venice--she's coming home."

--31

Now that she knew Ellen was coming, Joanna had nothing in her heart but joy and angry love. Ellen was coming back, at last, after many wanderings--and she saw now that these wanderings included the years of her life with Alce--she was coming back to Ansdore and the old home.

Joanna forgot how much she had hated it, would not think that this precious return was merely the action of a woman without resources. She gave herself up to the joy of preparing a welcome--as splendidly and elaborately as she had prepared for her sister's return from school.

This time, however, she went further, and actually made some concessions to Ellen's taste. She remembered that she liked dull die-away colours "like the mould on jam," so she took down the pink curtains and folded away the pink bedspread, and put in their places material that the shop at Rye a.s.sured her was "art green"--which, in combination with the crimson, flowery walls and floor contrived most effectually to suggest a sc.u.m of grey-green mould on a pot of especially vivid strawberry jam.

But she was angry too--her heart burned to think not only of Ellen's sin but of the casual way in which she treated it. "I won't have none of her loose notions here," said Joanna grimly. She made up her mind to give her sister a good talking to, to convince her of the way in which her "goings on" struck decent folk; but she would not do it at the start--"I'll give her time to settle down a bit first."

During the few days which elapsed between Ellen's telegram and her arrival, Joanna saw nothing of Alce. She had one letter from him, in which he told her that he had been over to Fairfield to look at the plough she was speaking of, but that it was old stuff and would be no use to her. He did not even mention Ellen's name. She wondered if he was making any plans for leaving Donkey Street--she hoped he would not be such a fool as to go. He and Ellen could easily keep out of each other's way. Still, if Ellen wouldn't stay unless he went, she would rather have Ellen than Alce.... He would have to sell Donkey Street, or perhaps he might let it off for a little time.

April had just become May when Ellen returned to Ansdore. It had been a rainy spring, and great pools were on the marshes, overflows from the d.y.k.es and channels, clear mirrors green from the gra.s.s beneath their shallows and the green rainy skies that hung above them. Here and there they reflected white clumps and walls of hawthorn, with the pale yellowish gleam of the b.u.t.tercups in the pastures. The two sisters, driving back from Rye, looked round on the green twilight of the Marsh with indifferent eyes. Joanna had ceased to look for any beauty in her surroundings since Martin's days--the small gift of sight that he had given her had gone out with the light of his own eyes, and this evening all she saw was the flooded pastures, which meant poor grazing for her tegs due to come down from the Coast, and her lambs new-born on the Kent Innings. As for Ellen, the Marsh had always stood with her for unrelieved boredom. Its eternal flatness--the monotony of its roads winding through an unvarying landscape of reeds and d.y.k.es and grazings, past farms each of which was almost exactly like the one before it, with red walls and orange roofs and a bush of elms and oaks--the wearisome repet.i.tion of its seasons--the mists and floods of winter, the may and b.u.t.tercups of spring, the hay and meadow-sweet and wild carrot of the summer months, the bleakness and winds of autumn--all this was typical of her life there, water-bound, cut off from all her heart's desire of variety and beauty and elegance, of the life to which she must now return because her attempt to live another had failed and left her stranded on a slag-heap of disillusion from which even Ansdore was a refuge.

Ellen sat very trim and erect beside Joanna in the trap. She wore a neat grey coat and skirt, obviously not of local, nor indeed of English, make, and a little toque of flowers. She had taken Joanna's breath away on Rye platform; it had been very much like old times when she came home for the holidays and checked the impulse of her sister's love by a baffling quality of self-containment. Joanna, basing her expectations on the Bible story of the Prodigal Son rather than on the experiences of the past winter, had looked for a subdued penitent, surfeited with husks, who, if not actually casting herself at her sister's feet and offering herself as her servant, would at least have a hang-dog air and express her grat.i.tude for so much forgiveness. Instead of which Ellen had said--"Hullo, Jo--it's good to see you again," and offered her a cool, delicately powdered cheek, which Joanna's warm lips had kissed with a queer, sad sense of repulse and humiliation. Before they had been together long, it was she who wore the hang-dog air--for some unconscionable reason she felt in the wrong, and found herself asking her sister polite, nervous questions about the journey.

This att.i.tude prevailed throughout the evening--on the drive home, and at the excellent supper they sat down to: a stuffed capon and a bottle of wine, truly a genteel feast of reconciliation--but Joanna had grown more aristocratic in her feeding since she bought Great Ansdore. Ellen spoke about her journey--she had had a smooth crossing, but had felt rather ill in the train. It was a long way from Venice--yes, you came through France, and Switzerland too ... the St. Gothard tunnel ...

twenty minutes--well, I never?... Yes, a bit smoky--you had to keep the windows shut ... she preferred French to Italian cooking--she did not like all that oil ... oh yes, foreigners were very polite when they knew you, but not to strangers ... just the opposite from England, where people were polite to strangers and rude to their friends. Joanna had never spoken or heard so many generalities in her life.

At the end of supper she felt quite tired, what with saying one thing with her tongue and another in her heart. Sometimes she felt that she must say something to break down this unreality, which was between them like a wall of ice--at other times she felt angry, and it was Ellen she wanted to break down, to force out of her superior refuge, and show up to her own self as just a common sinner receiving common forgiveness. But there was something about Ellen which made this impossible--something about her manner, with its cold poise, something about her face, which had indefinitely changed--it looked paler, wider, and there were secrets at the corners of her mouth.

This was not the first time that Joanna had seen her sister calm and collected while she herself was fl.u.s.tered--but this evening a sense of her own awkwardness helped to put her at a still greater disadvantage.

She found herself making inane remarks, hesitating and stuttering--she grew sulky and silent, and at last suggested that Ellen would like to go to bed.

Her sister seemed glad enough, and they went upstairs together. But even the sight of her old bedroom, where the last year of her maidenhood had been spent, even the sight of the new curtains chastening its exuberance with their dim austerity, did not dissolve Ellen's terrible, cold sparkle--her frozen fire.

"Good night," said Joanna.

"Good night," said Ellen, "may I have some hot water?"

"I'll tell the gal," said Joanna tamely, and went out.

--32

When she was alone in her own room, she seemed to come to herself. She felt ashamed of having been so baffled by Ellen, of having received her on those terms. She could not bear to think of Ellen living on in the house, so terribly at an advantage. If she let things stay as they were, she was tacitly acknowledging some indefinite superiority which her sister had won through sin. All the time she was saying nothing she felt that Ellen was saying in her heart--"I have been away to foreign parts, I have been loved by a man I don't belong to, I have Seen Life, I have stopped at hotels, I have met people of a kind you haven't even spoken to...." That was what Ellen was saying, instead of what Joanna thought she ought to say, which was--"I'm no better then a dairy girl in trouble, than Martha Tilden whom you sacked when I was a youngster, and it's unaccountable good of you to have me home."

Joanna was not the kind to waste her emotions in the sphere of thought.

She burst out of the room, and nearly knocked over Mene Tekel, who was on her way to Ellen with a jug of hot water.

"Give that to me," she said, and went to her sister's door, at which she was still sufficiently demoralized to knock.

"Come in," said Ellen.

"I've brought you your hot water."

"Thank you very much--I hope it hasn't been a trouble."