--22

She was frightened, too--never in her life had she imagined that she could drift so far as she had drifted in those few seconds. She was still trembling as she led the way back to the church. She could hear him treading after her, and as she thought of him her heart smote her.

She felt as if she had hurt him--oh, what had she done to him? What had she denied him? What had she given him to think?

As they climbed into the trap she could tell that he was sulking. He looked at her half-defiantly from under his long lashes, and the corners of his mouth were turned down like a child's. The drive home was constrained and nearly silent. Joanna tried to talk about the grazings they had broken at Yokes Court, in imitation of her own successful grain-growing, about her Appeal to the High Court which was to be heard that summer, and the motor-car she would buy if it was successful--but it was obvious that they were both thinking of something else. For the last part of the drive, from Brodnyx to Ansdore, neither of them spoke a word.

The sunset was scattering the clouds ahead and filling the s.p.a.ces with lakes of gold. The d.y.k.es turned to gold, and a golden film lay over the pastures and the reeds. The sun wheeled slowly north, and a huge, shadowy horse and trap began to run beside them along the embankment of the White Kemp Sewer. They turned up Ansdore's drive, now neatly gravelled and gated, and a flood of light burst over the gables of the house, pouring on Joanna as she climbed down over the wheel. She required no help, and he knew it, but she felt his hands pressing her waist; she started away, and she saw him laugh--mocking her. She nearly cried.

The rest of that evening was awkward and unhappy. She had a vague feeling in her heart that she had treated Albert badly, and yet ... the strange thing was that she shrank from an explanation. It had always been her habit to "have things out" on all occasions, and many a misunderstanding had been strengthened thereby. But to-night she could not bear the thought of being left alone with Albert. For one thing, she was curiously vague as to the situation--was she to blame or was he? Had she gone too far or not far enough? What was the matter, after all?

There was nothing to lay hold of.... Joanna was unused to this nebulous state of mind; it made her head ache, and she was glad when the time came to go to bed.

With a blessed sense of relief she felt the whitewashed thickness of her bedroom walls between her and the rest of the house. She did not trouble to light her candle. Her room was in darkness, except for one splash of light reflected from her mirror which held the moon. She went over to the window and looked out. The marsh swam in a yellow, misty lake of moonlight. There was a strange air of unsubstantiality about it--the earth was not the solid earth, the watercourses were moonlight rather than water, the light was water rather than light, the trees were shadows....

"Ah-h-h," said Joanna G.o.dden.

She lifted her arms to her head with a gesture of weariness--as she took out the pins her hair fell on her shoulders in great hanks and ma.s.ses, golden and unsubstantial as the moon.

Slowly and draggingly she began to unfasten her clothes--they fell off her, and lay like a pool round her feet. She plunged into her stiff cotton nightgown, b.u.t.toning it at neck and wrists. Then she knelt by her bed and said her prayers--the same prayers that she had said ever since she was five.

The moonlight was coming straight into the room--showing its familiar corners. There was no trace of Ellen in this room--nothing that was "artistic" or "in good taste." A lively pattern covered everything that could be so covered, but Joanna's sentimental love of old a.s.sociations had spared the original furniture--the wide feather bed, the oaken chest of drawers, the wash-stand which was just a great chest covered with a towel. Over her bed hung Poor Father's Buffalo Certificate, the cherished symbol of all that was solid and prosperous and reputable in life.

She lay in bed. After she got in she realized that she had forgotten to plait her hair, but she felt too languid for the effort. Her hair spread round her on the pillow like a reproach. For some mysterious reason her tears began to fall. Her life seemed to reproach her. She saw all her life stretching behind her for a moment--the moment when she had stood before Socknersh her shepherd, seeing him dark against the sky, between the sun and moon. That was when Men, properly speaking, had begun for her--and it was fifteen years since then--and where was she now? Still at Ansdore, still without her man.

Albert had not asked her to marry him, nor, she felt desperately, did he mean to. If he did, he would surely have spoken to-day. And now besides, he was angry with her, disappointed, estranged. She had upset him by turning cold like that all of a sudden.... But what was she saying? Why, of course she had been quite right. She should ought to have been cold from the start. That was her mistake--letting the thing start when it could have no seemly ending ... a boy like that, nearly young enough to be her son ... and yet she had been unable to deny him, she had let him kiss her and court her--make love to her.... Worse than that, she had made love to him, thrown herself at him, pursued him with her love, refused to let him go ... and all the other things she had done--changing for his sake from her decent ways ... breaking the Sabbath, taking off her neck-band. She had been getting irreligious and immodest, and now she was unhappy, and it served her right.

The house was quite still; everyone had gone to bed, and the moon filled the middle of the window, splashing the bed, and Joanna in it, and the walls, and the sagging beams of the ceiling. She thought of getting up to pull down the blind, but had no more energy to do that than to bind her hair. She wanted desperately to go to sleep. She lay on her side, her head burrowed down into the pillow, her hands clenched under her chin. Her bed was next the door, and beyond the door, against the wall at right angles to it, was her chest of drawers, with Martin's photograph in its black frame, and the photograph of his tombstone in a frame with a lily worked on it. Her eyes strained towards them in the darkness ... oh, Martin--Martin, why did I ever forget you?... But I never forgot you ... Martin, I've never had my man.... I've got money, two farms, lovely clothes--I'm just as good as a lady ... but I've never had my man.... Seemingly I'll go down into the grave without him ...

but, oh, I do want ... the thing I was born for....

Sobs shook her broad shoulders as she lay there in the moonlight. But they did not relieve her--her sobs ploughed deep into her soul ... they turned strange furrows.... Oh, she was a bad woman, who deserved no happiness. She'd always known it.

She lifted her head, straining her eyes through the darkness and tears to gaze at Martin's photograph as if it were the Serpent in the Wilderness. Perhaps all this had come upon her because she had been untrue to his memory--and yet what had so appealed to her about Bertie was that he was like Martin, though Ellen said he wasn't--well, perhaps he wasn't.... But what was happening now? Something had come between her and the photograph on the chest of drawers. With a sudden chill at her heart, she realized that it was the door opening.

"Who's there?" she cried in a hoa.r.s.e angry whisper.

"Don't be frightened, dear--don't be frightened, my sweet Jo--" said Bertie Hill.

--23

She could not think--she could only feel. It was morning--that white light was morning, though it was like the moon. Under it the Marsh lay like a land under the sea--it must have looked like this when the keels of the French boats swam over it, high above Ansdore, and Brodnyx, and Pedlinge, lying like red apples far beneath, at the bottom of the sea.

That was nonsense ... but she could not think this morning, she could only feel.

He had not been gone an hour, but she must find him. She must be with him--just feel him near her. She must see his head against the window, hear the heavy, slow sounds of his moving. She slipped on her clothes and twisted up her hair, and went down into the empty, stir-less house.

No one was about--even her own people were in bed. The sun was not yet up, but the white dawn was pouring into the house, through the windows, through the c.h.i.n.ks. Joanna stood in the midst of it. Then she opened the door and went out into the yard, which was a pool of cold light, ringed round with barns and buildings and reed-thatched haystacks. It was queer how this cold, still, trembling dawn hurt her--seemed to flow into her, to be part of herself, and yet to wound.... She had never felt like this before--she could never have imagined that love would make her feel like this, would make her see beauty in her forsaken yard at dawn--not only see but feel that beauty, physically, as pain. Her heart wounded her--her knees were failing--she went back into the house.

A wooden chair stood in the pa.s.sage outside the kitchen door, and she sat down on it. She was still unable to think, and she knew now that she did not want to think--it might make her afraid. She wanted only to remember.... He had called her the loveliest, sweetest, most beautiful woman in the world.... She repeated his words over and over again, calling up the look with which he had said them ... oh, those eyes of his--slanty, saucy, secret, loving eyes....

She wondered why he did not come down. She could not imagine that he had turned into bed and gone to sleep--that he did not know she was sitting here waiting for him in the dawn. For a moment she thought of going up and knocking at his door--then she heard a thud of footsteps and creaking of boards, which announced that Mene Tekel and Nan Gregory of Windpumps were stirring in their bedroom. In an incredibly short time they were coming downstairs, tying ap.r.o.n-strings and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up hair as they went, and making a terrific stump past the door behind which they imagined their mistress was in bed. It was a great shock to them to find that she was downstairs before them--they weren't more than five minutes late.

"Hurry up, gals," said Joanna, "and get that kettle boiling for the men.

I hear Broadhurst about the yard. Mene Tekel, see as there's no clinkers left in the grate; Mrs. Alce never got her bath yesterday evening before dinner as she expects it. When did you do the flues last?"

She set her household about its business--her dreams could not live in the atmosphere of antagonistic suspicion in which she had always viewed the younger members of her own s.e.x. She was firmly convinced that neither Nan nor Mene would do a stroke of work if she was not "at them"; the same opinion applied in a lesser degree to the men in the yard. So till Ansdore's early breakfast appeared amid much hustling and scolding, Joanna had no time to think about her lover, or continue the dreams so strangely and gloriously begun in the sunless dawn.

Bertie was late for breakfast, and came down apologising for having overslept himself. But he had a warm, sleepy, rumpled look about him which made her forgive him. He was like a little boy--her little boy ...

she dropped her eyelids over her tears.

After breakfast, as soon as they were alone, she stole into his arms and held close to him, without embrace, her hands just clasped over her breast on which her chin had fallen. He tried to raise her burning, blushing face, but she turned it to his shoulder.

--24

Albert Hill went back to London on Tuesday, but he came down again the following week-end, and the next, and the next, and then his engagement to Joanna was made public.

In this respect the trick was hers. The affair had ended in a committal which he had not expected, but his own victory was too substantial for him to regret any development of it to her advantage. Besides, he had seen the impossibility of conducting the affair on any other lines, both on account of the circ.u.mstances in which she lived and of her pa.s.sionate distress when she realized that he did not consider marriage an inevitable consequence of their relation. It was his only way of keeping her--and he could not let her go. She was adorable, and the years between them meant nothing--her beauty had wiped them out. He could think of her only as the ageless woman he loved, who shared the pa.s.sion of his own youth and in it was for ever young.

On the practical side, too, he was better reconciled. He felt a pang of regret when he thought of London and its work and pleasures, of his chances of a "rise"--which his superiors had hinted was now imminent--of a head clerkship, perhaps eventually of a partnership and a tight marriage into the business--since his Whitsuntide visit to Ansdore he had met the junior partner's daughter and found her as susceptible to his charms as most young women. But after all, his position as Joanna G.o.dden's husband would be better even than that of a partner in the firm of Sherwood and Son. What was Sherwood's but a firm of carpet-makers?--a small firm of carpet-makers. As Joanna's husband he would be a Country Gentleman, perhaps even a County Gentleman. He saw himself going out with his gun ... following the hounds in a pink coat.... He forgot that he could neither shoot nor ride.

Meantime his position as Joanna's lover was not an unenviable one. She adored him and spoiled him like a child. She poured gifts upon him--a gold wrist-watch, a real panama hat, silk socks in gorgeous colours, boxes and boxes of the best Turkish and Egyptian cigarettes--she could not give him enough to show her love and delight in him.

At first he had been a little embarra.s.sed by this outpouring, but he was used to receiving presents from women, and he knew that Joanna had plenty of money to spend and really got as much pleasure out of her gifts as he did. They atoned for the poverty of her letters. She was no letter-writer. Her feelings were as cramped as her handwriting by the time she had got them down on paper; indeed, Joanna herself was wondrously expressed in that big, unformed, constricted handwriting, black yet uncertain, sprawling yet constrained, in which she recorded such facts as "Dot has calved at last," or "Broadhurst will be 61 come Monday," or--as an utmost concession--"I love you, dear."

However, too great a strain was not put on this frail link, for he came down to Ansdore almost every week-end, from Sat.u.r.day afternoon to early Monday morning. He tried to persuade her to come up to London and stay at his mother's house--he had vague hopes that perhaps an experience of London might persuade her to settle there (she could afford a fine house over at Blackheath, or even in town itself, if she chose). But Joanna had a solid prejudice against London--the utmost she would consent to was a promise to come up and stay with Albert's mother when her appeal was heard at the High Court at the beginning of August. Edward Huxtable had done his best to convince her that her presence was unnecessary, but she did not trust either him or the excellent counsel he had engaged.

She had made up her mind to attend in person, and look after him properly.

--25

The att.i.tude of Brodnyx and Pedlinge towards this new crisis in Joanna G.o.dden's life was at first uncertain. The first impression was that she had suddenly taken fright at the prospect of old-maidenhood, and had grabbed the first man she could get, even though he was young enough to be her son.

"He ain't twenty-one till Michaelmas," said Vine at the Woolpack.

"She's always liked 'em young," said Furnese.

"Well, if she'd married Arthur Alce when she fust had the chance, instead of hanging around and wasting time the way she's done, by now she could have had a man of her intended's age for a son instead of a husband."

"Reckon it wouldn't have been the same thing."

"No--it would have been a better thing," said Vine.

When it became known that Joanna's motive was not despair but love, public opinion turned against her, Albert's manner among the Marsh people was unfortunate. In his mind he had always stressed his bride's connexions through Ellen--the Ernleys, a fine old county family; he found it very satisfying to slap Tip Ernley on the back and call him "Ole man." He had deliberately shut his eyes to the other side of her acquaintance, those Marsh families, the Southlands, Furneses, Vines, Cobbs and Bateses, to whom she was bound by far stronger, older ties than any which held her to Great Ansdore. He treated these people as her and his inferiors--unlike Martin Trevor, he would not submit to being driven round and shown off to Misleham, Picknye Bush, or Slinches.... It was small wonder that respectable families became indignant at such airs.