J O Y C E

JOYCE

BY
MRS. OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF ‘THE SECOND SON,’ ‘A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN,’
‘THE WIZARD’S SON,’ ‘EFFIE OGILVIE,’ ETC.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1891
All rights reserved
First Edition (3 Vols. Crown 8vo), 1888
Second Edition (1 Vol. Crown 8vo), 1889
Reprinted 1891

CHAPTER I

It was a coming of age, and yet not a coming of age. The hero in honour of whom all these festivities were, was a bearded man, who had been absent in all sorts of dangerous places since the moment when he was supposed formally to have ended the state of pupilage. That had been later than common, since the will of his uncle, whom he had succeeded, had stipulated that he was to come of age at twenty-five. He was nearer thirty when he came home, bearded as has been said, bronzed, with decorations upon his breast, and a character quite unlike that of the young hero to whom such honours are usually paid. His position altogether was a peculiar one. The estates of the family were not entailed, and Mr. Bellendean of Bellendean, the uncle, had passed over his own brother, who was still living, and left everything to his nephew; so that Norman was in the peculiar position of being received by his father and mother in a house which was not theirs but his, and of standing in the place of the head of the family, while the natural head of his own branch of the family was put aside. The character of the people made this as little embarrassing as it was possible for such a false position to be, but still it was not easy; and as the young man was full of delicate feeling and susceptibility, notwithstanding an acquaintance with the world unusual in his circumstances, he had looked forward to it with some apprehension. Perhaps it would be wiser to say that he thought he was acquainted with the world. He had been ‘knocking about’ for the last ten years, seeing all the service that was to be seen, and making acquaintance with various quarters of the globe. He thought he knew men and life. In reality he knew a little of Scotland, a great deal of India, and had a trifling acquaintance with some of the colonies; but of London, Paris, all the capitals that count for anything, and all the life that counts for anything, he was as ignorant as a child.

This combination is one which was not at all unusual in Scotland a generation since, and produced a kind of character full of attraction, the most piquant mixture of experience and ignorance, of simplicity and knowledge, that can be conceived. A man who had an eye as keen as lightning for the wiles of an Eastern, were he prince or slave, but could be taken in with the most delightful ease by the first cab-driver in the streets; who could hold his own before a durbar of astute oriental politicians, but was at the mercy of the first flower-girl who offered him a rosebud for his buttonhole, or gamin who held his horse. He had the defects as well as the virtues common to a dominant race, and probably was imperious and exacting in the sphere which he knew best; but this tendency was completely neutralised by the confusion which arose in his mind from the fact of finding himself suddenly among a population entirely made up of this dominant race, to whom he could be nothing but polite, whatever their condition might be. He was very polite and friendly to the railway porters, to all the people he encountered on the journey home, and reluctant to give trouble to the pretty fair chambermaids at the hotels, or to pass, without inquiring into their story, the women who begged or sold trifles on the streets. ‘A respectable-looking woman, and English by her accent,’ he would say. ‘We must stop and inquire into it. There must be a reason, you know.’ ‘Oh yes; probably there’s a reason. Come along, or you’ll have all the vagrants at your heels,’ his more experienced companion would reply. They had thus a little difficulty in getting him safely through the streets at his first arrival. Home was strange to him; it was a place where all the men were honest and all the women true. He was ready to believe everything that was said to him in the new England which somehow was so unlike the old which he had seen only in passing so long ago.

The party he had brought with him consisted of two or three brother officers, unnecessary to dwell upon here; an older friend, Colonel Hayward, whom he had known very well and served under, and who had now retired from the service, who joined young Bellendean in Edinburgh, being already in the North; and a young man about town called Essex, who had made a tour in India a year before, and was very willing to repay the kindness shown him then by taking care of his military friend and steering him through the dangers of London. Essex, who had a mild handle to his name, and was Sir Harry, would have liked to prolong the period of his tutorship, and lead his young soldier about into pleasures and wonders unknown. But the claims of Bellendean and the great festivities concerted there were supreme. It was thus a party of four or five young men, chaperoned, if the word is applicable, by the vieux moustache, the steady old soldier, as ready for a frolic as any of them, who was yet, as he assured them, old enough to be their father, who arrived at the Bellendean station, where flags were flying, and the militia band blaring forth its welcome, and a body of mounted farmers waiting to escort their landlord to his paternal halls. For Bellendean it was a very fine reception indeed; and Norman himself, being of a simple mind, was much impressed. If the others laughed a little, that was partly, no doubt, because they were by no means the heroes of the day, and because, in the eagerness about ‘the Ca’aptain,’ the desire to identify him, and the disdainful indifference shown to everything that was not he, these gentlemen were thrown into the background, where they grinned and looked on. Colonel Hayward, however, was as much impressed and still more delighted than Norman. He would have liked to shake hands with all the tenantry as he did with Mr. Bellendean the father, and assure them all that ‘there could not be a finer fellow;’ and when they raised a cheer as the carriage drove off, joined in it lustily, with a sense of being at once a spectator yet an actor in the scene which it was delightful to see.

Bellendean was a handsome house, of no particular age or pretensions, not very far from Edinburgh. That beautiful town was indeed visible from various points in the park, which, on the other hand, commanded a view of the Firth and the low hills of Fife, at the point where the great estuary closes in, and with a peaceful little island in mid-stream, and a ruin or two on the margin of the water, forms that tranquil basin, in which, driven by storms of wind and storms of nations, the Athelings, pious folk, the Confessor’s kindred—not strong enough by themselves to hold head against fierce Normans and Saxons any more than against the wild tides of the Northern Ocean—once found a refuge. The rich and mellow landscape, brightened with vast rolling fields of corn and ripening orchards, startled the visitors from India, whose ideas of Scotland were all Highland; but increased their respect for their lucky comrade, of whom they had been accustomed to think that his estate was some little patrimony among the mountains, where there might indeed be grouse and perhaps deer to make poverty sweet, but nothing more profitable. The Lowland landscape lay under a flood of afternoon light. The roads were populous with passengers,—there were groups of ladies in front of the house, on the terrace to which the long windows opened: a beautiful park and fine trees, and all the evidences of that large life which a country potentate leads in what our fathers called his ‘seat.’ Everything was wealthy, almost splendid; Bellendean himself felt a certain awe as he looked upon all this which was his own. He remembered everything keenly, and yet it had not seemed to him so great, so imposing in his recollection as it was in reality. He had remembered his own favourite haunts, which were not the most important features in the scene. He turned to his father with a curious shyness and embarrassment. ‘I had forgotten what a fine place it was,’ he said; but his eyes said something else, which natural reserve and the presence of strangers kept from his lips. What his eyes said was—‘Pardon! that it should not be yours but mine.’

‘It is a fine place,’ said Mr. Bellendean. ‘The places we have known only in youth are apt to look diminished when we come back. I am glad it has not that effect on you. All the same, my dear boy, I am glad it is you and not I that have to live in it. Neither my wife nor I care much for Bellendean.’

At this Norman grasped his father’s hand, and said, ‘You are very good, sir,’ in a way which much perplexed the excellent Colonel, who did not understand wherein the virtue lay, and who was further stricken dumb by the next question. ‘In the confusion and excitement of seeing you again, I believe I have not asked for Mrs. Bellendean?’

The reader is too experienced not to perceive that this question, which bewildered Colonel Hayward, conveyed the not very extraordinary fact that Norman had a step-mother, which was one of the chief reasons of his long absence. Not that Mrs. Bellendean was a harsh or cruel step-mother, or one of those spoilers of domestic peace who flourish in literature under that title; but only that the young man remembered his mother, and could ill bear to see another in her place. She stood on the steps of the great door at this moment, awaiting the carriage—a woman not more than forty, tall and fair, dressed a little more soberly than her age required, but full of youth and animation in look and figure. A number of ladies stood behind her, some of them ’as pretty creatures as ever I saw,’ the Colonel said to himself—cousins of all degrees, old playfellows, old friends. The vieux moustache stood by while these pleasant spectators surged about young Bellendean. He stood aside and made his remarks. ‘I shouldn’t wonder now if he might marry any one of them,’ he said to himself. ‘Lucky fellow. I shouldn’t wonder now if they were all waiting till he throws the handkerchief. Talk about sultans! all those pretty English—no, they are Scotch—girls: and he could have any one of them!’ The Colonel sighed at the thought. He belonged himself to an age in which statistics had no place, before it was known that there was a million or so of superfluous women, and being a chivalrous soul he did not like it. He was much pleased to discover afterwards that several of the young ladies were married, and so out of the competition. But it was a pretty sight.

After this the days were tolerably well filled. There was a dinner to the neighbouring gentry, and a dinner to the tenantry. There was a ball. There was a great supper in tents to the labourers and cottagers on the estate; finally, there was a vast entertainment for the school children in the united parishes of Bellendean and Prince’s Ferry. The Colonel went through them all manfully. He carried out his original impulse, shook hands with everybody, and said, ‘I assure you he’s a capital fellow.’ ‘I had him under my command at So-and-so, and So-and-so, and I know what’s in him.’ In this way Colonel Hayward was himself a great success. The old county neighbours liked the assurance he gave them, and the farmers delighted in it. And when it came to the turn of the masses, and the old soldier went about among the tables at the labourers’ supper repeating his formula, the enthusiasm was immense. ‘Eh, Cornel, but that’s a real satisfaction,’ the old men said. ‘Sae lang as he’s done his duty, what can mortal man do mair?’ His own assurances and reassurances went to the good Colonel’s head. He felt like a trumpeter whose note was the word of command to everybody, and marched about with his head high. ‘I assure you he’s a capital fellow, a capital fell——’ He was in the very act of repeating them, when the words seemed to fail him all at once. He stopped in the middle with his mouth open, and gazed at some one who at that moment for the first time caught his eye.

Was it because her place did not seem to be there? A girl of twenty or so—tall, slight, her figure like a lily-stalk slightly swaying forward, her head raised, with a tremor of sympathy in every feature. Her face was like a lily too, pale, with large eyes, either brown or blue, he could not be sure which, and long eyelashes uplifted; and the most sensitive mouth, which smiled yet quivered, and made as though repeating the words, which the eyes seemed to divine before they were said. She was seated at the end of a table with two old people, too old to be her father and mother, looking as if she had strayed there by some strange chance, as if she had nothing to do with the vulgar features of the feast, like a young princess who had sat down among them to please them. The words were stopped upon the Colonel’s lips. He broke down in the middle, and stood staring at her, not knowing where he was. Good Lord! that face: and sitting there among the common people, among the labourers, the ploughmen! It did not seem to Colonel Hayward that anybody about was surprised at his stare. They, too, turned round and looked at her kindly, or—not kindly, as the case might be. But they were not surprised. They understood his wonder. ‘Ay, sir, she’s a very bonnie lass,’ said one old man. ‘A bonnie lass! a bonnie lass!’ the Colonel repeated; but not with the tone in which he had spoken about the capital fellow. It was as if some blow had been struck at him which took away his utterance. He hurried up to Mrs. Bellendean, who stood at the head of the tent looking on. ‘A young lady, my dear Colonel? there are no young ladies there.’ ‘You must know her if I could but point her out to you. She is like no one else about her. It is not curiosity. I have a particular reason for asking.’ ‘Tell me what she was like,’ the gracious lady said; but just then her husband came to consult her about something, and the opportunity was lost.

Colonel Hayward retired from his trumpeting for that night. He let Norman’s reputation take its chance. He was very silent all the rest of the evening, not even repeating his question when he had an opportunity, but sitting by himself and thinking it over. It was a remarkable face: but no doubt the resemblance must be a chance resemblance. There are so many faces in the world, and some of them here and there must resemble each other. It must be something in his own mind, some recollection that had come to him unawares, an association from the Scotch voices he heard round him. That, when he came to think of it, must have been working in his mind all day; indeed, ever since he came. And this was the issue. Every mental process (people say) can be explained if you trace it out. And this one was not so difficult after all, not difficult at all, when you came to think of it, he said to himself, nodding his head; but all the same, he could not help wishing that Elizabeth had been here. And then he began to think again of that girl. She was not like a girl to be found sitting with the ploughmen’s families. He seemed to see her before him, especially when he shut his eyes and gave himself up to it, which he did in a retired corner on the terrace after everybody had gone away. Though it was late, there was still light in the skies, partly the lingering northern daylight, partly the moon, and he shut his eyes while he smoked his cigar and pondered. He could see her before him, that girl, in a dark dress made (he thought—but then he did not know much about it) like a lady’s—certainly with a face like a lady’s, or how could she have resembled——? Of course, it was only association, and the recollections that came back to him with those Lowland voices. The Highland ones had never affected him in the same way. The fact was, he said to himself, he was never half a man when Elizabeth was not with him. She would have understood the sequence of ideas at once. She would have found out in five minutes who the girl was and all about her, and set him at rest. He was interrupted in those thoughts by the sudden irruption of the band of young men with their cigars into the balmy quiet of the night. It was warm, and they had found the smoking-room hot. ‘And there is old Hayward gone to sleep in a corner,’ he heard one of them say.

‘He must not sleep,’ said Mr. Bellendean; ‘wake him up, Norman. The air here is too keen for that.’

‘I am no more asleep than any one of you young fellows,’ the Colonel said, jumping up. ‘But as old Hayward has more sense than a set of boys, he kept outside here in the cool while you were all heating yourselves in the smoking-room. I don’t think they’ve got the best of it this time, Mr. Bellendean, eh?’

‘They don’t half so often as they think,’ said the other old gentleman. They were neither of them very old, but they drew together with a natural sympathy amid that band of youth.

Next day was the concluding day of the Bellendean festivities, and it was chiefly to be devoted to the children. In the afternoon the park was turned into an immense playground. Every kind of game and entertainment that could be thought of was provided. There was a conjurer, there was Punch, there was a man with marionettes, and what the children liked still better, there were games of all kinds, in which they could themselves perform, which is always more agreeable than seeing other people do so. And finally, there was tea—a wonderful tea, in which mountains of cake and cookies innumerable disappeared like magic. The ladies were all there, serving actively the flushed and happy crowds of children, throwing themselves into it with much more sympathy than they had shown with the substantial feasts of the previous days. The young men were set free, they were not required to help in the entertainment of the boys and girls; and except Norman, who had bravely determined to do his duty to the end, the male portion of the company was represented only by Mr. Bellendean and the Colonel, who looked on from the terrace, and finally took a walk round the tent where the meal was going on, and partook, as the newspapers say, of a cup of tea at a little separate table in a corner, where Mrs. Bellendean was taking that refreshment. It was when the Colonel (who liked his tea) was standing with a cup in his hand, just outside the great tent, which was steaming with the entertainment, that he suddenly stopped once more in the midst of a little speech he was making about the pleasure of seeing children enjoy themselves. He stopped with a little start, and then he set down his cup and turned back to watch something. It was afternoon, but the sun was still high in the skies, and even under the tent there was full daylight, impaired by no shadows or uncertainty. The shade within gave a suppressed and yellow glow to everything, something like the air of a theatre: and in the midst there she stood once more, the girl of last night! The Colonel gazed at her with an absorption, an abstraction, which was extraordinary. He saw nothing but only her alone. She had been seated by the old ploughman on the previous night as if she belonged to him; but now she was moving about among the children as the young ladies were doing, serving and encouraging: her dress was very simple, but so was theirs, and there was not one of them more graceful, more at her ease. Everybody knew her. She seemed to be referred to on all hands; by the children, who came clinging about her—by the visitors, who seemed to consult her upon everything. Who could she be? The clergyman’s daughter perhaps; but then, how had she come to be seated last night between the old couple, who were clearly labouring people, at the cottagers’ supper? And how had she come by that face? Whoever she might be, gentlewoman or rustic maiden, how had she come by that face? There was the wonder.

The Colonel stood fascinated, immovable, at the tent-door, looking in, seeing all the moving crowd of faces only as a background to this one, which seemed, in his fancy, to reign over them all. Her face was not still and attentive, as on the previous night, but full of animation and life. He watched the children come round her as they finished their meal, which was pretty to see; he watched the ladies coming and going, always circling more or less about this one figure. He watched Norman going up to her, holding out his hand, which she took, showing for the first time a little rustic shyness, curtseying as if he had been a prince. Then he saw a quite different sort of man from Norman, one of the schoolmasters, go to her in his turn and say something in her ear, with an evident claim upon her attention and a lingering touch on her arm, which spoke much, which made the Colonel angry, as if the fellow had presumed. But the girl evidently did not think he presumed. A smile lighted up her face, which she turned to him looking up in his. Colonel Hayward felt a movement of impatience take possession of him: and then a still stronger feeling swept across his mind. As she turned her face with that look of tender attention to the man who addressed her, she turned it also to the spectator looking at her from the tent-door. The line of the uplifted head, the soft chin, the white throat, the eyes raised with their long eyelashes—‘Good God! who is she?’ he said aloud.

Mrs. Bellendean saw the absorbed expression in his face, and came and stood beside him to see what he was looking at. Her own face relaxed into smiles when she found out the object of his gaze. ‘Oh, I don’t wonder now at your interest, Colonel. I am sure she has had no tea; she would never think of looking after herself. Now, come, you shall see her nearer; she is worth looking at: Joyce!’ she cried.

‘Joyce! Good God!’

CHAPTER II

Colonel Hayward sank down upon a bench which stood close to the tent door. The light swam in his eyes. He saw only as through a mist the light figure advancing, standing docile and obedient by the side of the great lady. The name completed the extraordinary impression which the looks had made; he kept saying it over to himself under his breath in his bewilderment. ‘Joyce! Good Lord!’ But presently the urgency of the circumstances brought him to himself. He breathed in his soul a secret desire for Elizabeth: then manned himself to act on his own behalf, since no better could be.

‘This is the very best girl in the world, Colonel Hayward,’ said Mrs. Bellendean, with a hand upon Joyce’s shoulder. ‘I don’t wonder she interested you. She has taught herself every sort of thing—Latin and mathematics, and I don’t know all what. Our school is always at the head in all the examinations, and she really raises quite an enthusiasm among the children. I don’t know what we should do without her. Whenever we come here, Joyce is my right hand, and has been since she was quite a child.’

If it was condescension, it was of the most gracious kind. Mrs. Bellendean kept patting Joyce on the shoulder as she spoke, with a caressing touch: and her eyes and her voice were both soft. The girl responded with a look full of tenderness and pleasure. ‘Oh, mem, it is you who are always so good to me,’ she said.

The schoolmistress then! That was how the ploughman’s daughter had got her superior look. When he saw her closer, he thought he saw (enlightened by this knowledge) that it was only a superior look, not the aspect of a lady as he had supposed. Her dress had not the dainty perfection of the young ladies’ dresses; her hands were not delicate like theirs: and she said ‘mem’ to her patroness with an accent which—— Ah! but what did that accent remind him of? and the face? and, good heavens! the name? These criticisms passed like a cloud across his mind; the bewilderment and anxiety remained. He rose up from the bench, nobody having thought anything of his sudden subsidence, except that perhaps the old Colonel was tired with standing about. Oh that Elizabeth had been here! but in her absence he must do what he could for himself.

‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘would you tell me how you got your name? It is a very uncommon name: and your face is not a common face,’ he added, with nervous haste. ‘I knew some one once——’

His voice seemed to go away from him into his throat. It was curious to see him, at his age, so unsteady and agitated, swaying from one foot to another, stammering, flushing under the limpid modest eyes of this country girl, who, on her part, coloured suddenly, looked at him, and then at Mrs. Bellendean, with a faint cry, ‘Oh, sir!’

‘Where she got her name?’ said Mrs. Bellendean. ‘It is not so easily answered as perhaps you think. I will tell you afterwards. It is a very uncommon name. Joyce, my dear, what is the little secret you have been plotting, and when is it to be made known?’

The young woman stood for a moment without replying. ‘How can I help wondering?’ she said, with a long-drawn breath. ‘How can I think of common things? Nobody has ever asked me that question before.’ Then, with a sudden effort, she recovered her self-control. ‘It will be nothing,’ she said quickly, as if to herself; ‘it will be some fancy: I’ll go back to my work. It was no secret worth calling a secret, Mrs. Bellendean—only some poems they learned to please me—to say to you and the other ladies, if you will take your seats.’

‘Where would you like us to take our seats, Joyce?’

‘Yonder, under the big ash-tree. It’s very bonnie there. You can see the Firth, and the ships sailing, and St. Margaret’s Hope; and you will look like the Queen herself, with her ladies, under the green canopy. Will I put the chair for you?’ cried the girl, in a Scotch confusion of verbs. She gave the Colonel one glance, and then hurried off, as if determined to distract her own attention. There were a few garden-chairs already scattered about under a clump of trees, which crowned a little platform of green—a very slight eminence, just enough to serve as a dais. She drew them into place with a rapid and cunning hand, and caught quickly at a Turkish rug of brilliant colour, which lay beside the tea-table, placing it in front of the presiding chair. Her movements were very swift and certain, and full of the grace of activity and capacity. Meantime the Colonel stood by the side of Mrs. Bellendean, surveying all.

‘She is excited,’ said the lady. ‘She is a strange girl: your question—which I have no doubt is a very simple question—has set her imagination going. See what a picture she has made! and she could sketch it too, if there was time. She is a sort of universal genius. And now she is all on fire, hoping to find out something.’

‘Hoping to find out—what?’

‘Oh, my dear Colonel, it is a long story. I will tell you afterwards—not a word more now, please. I don’t want her to form expectations, poor girl—— Well Joyce—is that where I am to sit? I shall feel quite like the Queen——’

‘With the young ladies behind,’ said Joyce, breathless. Her eyes were full of impatient light, her sensitive lips quivering even while they smiled—a rapid coming and going of expression, of movement and colour, in her usually pale face. The Colonel stood gazing at her, his mouth slightly open, his eyes fixed. Oh, if Elizabeth were but here, who would know what to do!

The scene that followed was very pretty, if his mind had been sufficiently free to take it in. The little girls, in their bright summer frocks, subdued by the darker costumes of the boys, poured forth from their eclipse under the tent, and gathered in perpetually moving groups round the little slope. The ladies took their places, smiling and benignant—Mrs. Bellendean in the centre, two of the prettiest girls behind her chair, the others seated about. They all submitted to Joyce, asking, ‘Shall I sit here?’ ‘Shall I stand?’ ‘What am I to do?’ with gay docility. When it was all arranged to her liking, Joyce turned towards the children. She stood at one side, pointing towards the pretty group under the trees, holding her own fine head high, with a habit of public speaking, which the Colonel thought—and perhaps also Norman Bellendean, who was looking on—one of the prettiest sights he ever saw.

‘Children,’ said the young schoolmistress, lifting her arm, with simple natural eloquence, ‘this is a tableau—a beautiful tableau for you to see. If you ever read the word in a book, or in the papers, you will know what it means. It is a French word. It means a living group—that is like a picture. This is our Scots Queen Margaret—a far grander Queen than her they call the Queen of Scots in your history-books—Margaret that was the Atheling, that married Malcolm Canmore, that was the son of King Duncan, who was murdered by—who was murdered by—— Speak quick! What do you mean, you big girls? Why, it’s in Shakespeare!’ cried Joyce, with a ring of indignant wonder in her voice, as if the possibility of a mistake in such a case was beyond belief.

There was a movement among a group of girls, and some whispering and hasty consultation: then one put forth a nervous hand, and cried, but faltering, ‘Macbeth.’

‘I thought you would not put me to shame before all the ladies!’ cried Joyce, with a suffusion of sudden colour: for she had been pale with suspense. Then she added, in a business-like tone: ‘It is you, Jean, that are to say Portia. The Queen will hear you. Come well forward, and speak out.’

It was not a masterpiece of elocution. The speaker blushed and fumbled, and clasped and unclasped her fingers in agonies of shyness—while Joyce stood by with her head on one side, prompting, encouraging, her lips forming the words, but only twenty times more quickly, as her pupil spoke them. The Colonel was so absorbed in this sight that he started when a voice spoke suddenly at his elbow, and recoiling a step or two instinctively, saw that it was the young man, evidently a schoolmaster, who had been with Joyce in the tent. He was looking at her with a mixture of tenderness and pride.

‘It is quite wonderful how she does it,’ he said. ‘I’ve no reason to think I’m unsuccessful myself with my big boys; but I have not got them under command like that. They will make very acute remarks, sir, that would surprise you, in the Shakespeare class—but answer like that, no. It is personal influence that does it—and I never saw anybody in that respect to equal Joyce.’

It gave the Colonel a sensation of anger to hear this fellow call her Joyce. He turned and looked at him again. But there was nothing to object to in him. He was not a gentleman; but he was what is called in his own class quite a gentleman—a young fellow of very tolerable appearance, whose clothes were of the most respectable description, and who wore them as if he were used to them. He had as good a necktie as Norman’s, and a flower in his coat. But when he stood by Norman it was apparent that there was a good deal wanting. He was in all probability much cleverer than Norman. He spoke of Shakespeare with an awe-striking familiarity as if he knew all about him—which was more than the Colonel did. All the same he felt a sensation of offence at the use by this man of the girl’s Christian name.

‘Miss Joyce—is evidently a young lady of unusual gifts,’ he said.

The face of the young man flushed with pleasure. ‘Sir,’ he cried, ‘you never said a truer word. She is just running over with capability. She can do anything she sets her hand to. I sometimes feel as if I grudged her to be in the line of public tuition all her life. But when there are two of us,’ he added proudly, ‘we will see what we can do.’

What did the fellow mean? two of them! and one this wonderful girl? the Colonel turned his back upon him in indignation, then turned again in curiosity. ‘Is it common,’ he said, ‘in Scotch parish schools to have a Shakespeare class?’

‘Our common people, sir,’ said the young man quietly, with a look of self-complacence which made the Colonel long to knock him down—‘our common people are far more educated as a rule than you find them in England. But no—I would not say it was common. There are many of my friends that have poetry classes, which are optional, you know, on a Saturday afternoon or other free moment. I’m not ashamed to say that it was from her I took the hint—though you will think it is seldom a woman takes the lead in such a matter. She started it, and several of us have followed her example. She is, as you say, a creature of most uncommon gifts.’

‘And yet a ploughman’s daughter in a Scotch village: with that face—and that name!’

The young schoolmaster gave a sort of doubtful cough, the meaning of which the Colonel could not divine. ‘That is how she has been brought up,’ he said; ‘but you are perhaps not aware, sir, that many a wonderful character has come from a Scotch ploughman’s house. Not to speak of Burns, there was——’

‘Oh, I am aware the Scotch are a most superior nation,’ cried the Colonel, with a laugh.

‘That is just the simple truth,’ the young man said.

Meanwhile the recitations were going on, which perhaps were not equal in quality to the rest of Joyce’s arrangements. She was in extreme earnest about it all, it was evident to see, and eager that everything should produce the best effect. A few mothers, who had known what was going to happen, had gathered about, listening with proud delight yet anxiety lest they should break down, each to her own child. Among them was a little old woman, sunburnt and rosy as a winter apple, with an old-fashioned black bonnet tied down over her ears, and a huge Paisley shawl almost covering her dark cotton gown. ‘You think but of your own bairns,’ she was saying, ‘but I think of them a’; for it’s a’ my J’yce’s doing, and she will just break her heart if there’s any failure.’

‘There will be nae failure; they’re owre weel trained for that.’

‘I’ve no a word to say against J’yce; but she’s awfu’ fond of making a show,’ another woman said.

‘If she’s fond of making a show, it’s never of hersel’,—it’s always your bairns she puts to the front; and if you dinna like it,’ cried the old woman, ‘what brings ye here?’

The Colonel, who had the best of manners, stepped forward and took off his hat. ‘I guess by what you say, ma’am, that you are Miss Joyce’s mother?’ he said.

The old woman was a little startled and fluttered by this unexpected address. She, too, hesitated, as they all seemed to do. ‘Weel,’ she said, ‘sir, I’m all the poor thing has had for one; but no so good as she deserved.’

‘Ma’am,’ said the Colonel, ‘the result of your training speaks for itself, and that is the best practical test. Will you let me ask you a question—and that is, whether the name Joyce is a family name?’

The old woman’s mouth and her eyes opened in astonishment. ‘Joyce,’ she said feebly, ‘a family name?’

‘I mean—does she take it from a relation, as I have always heard was the admirable Scotch way?’

‘Weel, sir,’ said the old lady, ‘if that is all, I have little doubt ye are quite right. She would get it, it’s mair than probable, from her mither.’

The Colonel gazed upon her with surprise. More than probable! what did she mean? ‘Then it is your name too,’ he said, with a little disappointment. There arose from the group a sudden burst of laughter and explanation and denials, of which he could not make out a word. ‘Na, na,’—that was all that reached him clearly. But what was meant by it—whether that it was not the old mother’s name, or what other negative—he could not make out: and just at this moment Mr. Bellendean and Norman came up to him and drew him away.

‘You have had enough of this, I am sure, Colonel. Come along, we are going down to the Ferry to see what Essex and the rest are after. It’s very good of you to give us your countenance to the last.’

‘My countenance! nothing of the sort, Norman. I’m very much interested.’

‘In the little girls and their “pieces?"’ said Mr. Bellendean.

‘In the young lady there who has taken so much trouble.’

‘What young lady?’ said the elder gentleman, looking about. Then he added, in a careless tone, ‘Oh, Joyce! Yes, she’s an interesting creature, isn’t she! It will please my wife if you admire Joyce.’

‘I think then, sir,’ said Norman, ‘I’ll please Mrs. Bellendean too.’

‘Oh, you! you’re a different matter. You had better keep to your own set, my boy,’ said the father. ‘If you are so absorbed, Colonel, we’ll leave you till you have had enough. You’ll find us at the Ferry. Come, Norman, and look after your friends.’

The two gentlemen went away, the Colonel stayed. He was becoming accustomed to the name and the face which had so much disturbed him. If indeed it was a family name—and likenesses, we know, are very fantastic—still for the sake of the name and face, he would like, he thought, to see something more of her; he would like to give her some token of his interest, if she would let him. He did not think that he had ever been so much interested in any one before. He thought he could never forget this little scene. Perhaps, on the whole, he was tired of the recitations. He took a little stroll about, but came back always to a point where he could see her. If Elizabeth were but here! She would have known in a moment what to do. She would have found out all about it; how the girl got that name at least, if not how she got that face. By and by the little performance came to an end, and Mrs. Bellendean made a gracious little speech praising every one, and got up from the place under the trees where she had been posing as Queen Margaret; and the children began to get into movement, to arrange themselves in their respective bands, and to prepare for going away.

‘How good of you to stay all the time, Colonel Hayward! They did their best, poor things; but even Joyce cannot create a soul in the Jeanies and Jennys. Now I think we had better go in; it is almost time to dress,’ Mrs. Bellendean said.

The Colonel could not but follow, but he cast wistful looks behind him. ‘I suppose it would only annoy her: but I should like to see more of her,’ he said.

‘Of Joyce? Colonel Hayward, I am afraid you are a dangerous person. I can’t have you turning the head of the best girl in the world.’

He looked round again, lingering, unable to quit the spot. The little procession was marshalled and ready to set out. But on the spot where she had stood prompting and directing her pupils the young schoolmistress was still standing, lingering like himself. She was looking after him with wistful eyes, with a look of wondering disappointment, as if she had expected something more. That look awakened all the old excitement, which had partially calmed down in the Colonel’s heart. The attitude, the raised head, the wistful look in the eyes, all moved him again as at the first, with an overpowering sense of likeness, almost identity. ‘What does it mean?’ he said; ‘I feel as if I could not tear myself away. Who is she? There must be something in a resemblance like that.’

‘Whom does she resemble, Colonel Hayward?’

The Colonel turned round again and gave his questioner a look. He looked at her as if he wanted to know how far he could trust her. And then his eyebrows and his mouth worked. ‘Of some one—a lady—who has been long dead,’ he replied, ‘and her name—her name!’

‘You are very serious, Colonel; it is not only a passing interest? It is really something—something! Oh, forgive me. I cannot have her disturbed. She is all quivering with imagination and wonder.’

‘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——’

He made her a little silent yet impatient sign of assent.

‘You understand? Yes, a little bit of a place, where they had a humble room or two sometimes to let in summer. She arrived there quite unexpectedly. She had been going by Queensferry to Fife and the North, and was too tired to go on. And they had no room for her at the Ferry hotel. She had no maid or any one with her, but she seemed a lady to the people here. They were all quite sure she was a lady—very like what Joyce is now, pale, with that little movement of her lips which I tell Joyce—— Colonel Hayward, you look as if you knew, as if you had known—— Oh, do you think you can throw any light——’

‘For God’s sake go on—go on!’

‘To spare you the details,’ said Mrs. Bellendean, ‘the poor thing was about to have a baby: but showed her condition very little—so little that there was no alarm, nor any idea of a—of a catastrophe. She walked about a little in the evening, and perhaps over-tired herself. Anyhow, in the middle of the night she was taken ill. The people made a great fuss when they knew what it was, and wanted her to tell them who her friends were, and her husband, and all that, which probably made everything worse, though they had no unkind meaning. And so when the child was born——’

The Colonel got up from his seat. He went to the window and looked out, turning his back upon her; then returned to his chair like a man distracted. Mrs. Bellendean paused in her narrative, startled by the sudden movement, and sat silent watching him. He said, in a sort of hoarse whisper, ‘She died?’

‘Not immediately. What happened was almost worse than dying; she went out of her mind. Women have many things to bear that nobody thinks of. They are subject to attacks of that kind at such times. The doctor thought she would get better of it; but she did not live to get better, poor thing! My sister-in-law, who was here then, heard of her, and was very much interested and did all she could. But the poor girl died in about three weeks, without ever being able to tell them where she came from or who she was. They made out that her name was Joyce, from her own wanderings and from the letters.’

Colonel Hayward said with his lips, ‘The letters?’ scarcely making any sound.

‘There was one letter, without any envelope or address, which appeared to be from her husband. And on the night she arrived, before she was taken ill, she had begun to write, to him apparently, about something that had come between them, something that had driven her nearly mad. Colonel Hayward! Yes, they were read by the people who took charge of the poor little baby and who managed everything. I understand what you mean; it was like prying into the secrets of the poor dead lady. But what could they do? What do you say? Name? No, there is no name. The husband’s letter is signed only H—— Ah! you know! I am sure you know!’

The Ah! which came from Mrs. Bellendean’s lips was very nearly a scream. The Colonel had risen to his feet, with a pallor upon his face and a gasp for breath which frightened her. He stood as if any touch would have knocked him down, as if scarcely conscious what he was about. His faculties seemed to fail him for the moment. He put up his hand with a sort of dumb appeal, as if to stop what she was saying. Then he himself with an effort broke the silence. She leaned forward with the greatest excitement and expectation. But all that was audible were the words that had been going through his mind all day, ‘Oh, if Elizabeth were only here!’

‘Elizabeth—who is Elizabeth?’ Mrs. Bellendean cried.

He did not make any reply, nor did he seem to hear, but began to walk up and down, passing and repassing between her and the window. He seemed to be arguing, talking to himself, comparing what he had heard with something else. ‘But I never suspected that—never. She said nothing. There might be another—another. It might be all the while, it might be all the while—some one else. How can I tell? Only a name, a name! and so long ago. Oh, if I only had Elizabeth here! Elizabeth would know.’

Mrs. Bellendean here rose up too and touched him on the arm. She was trembling with the excitement of this encounter, which suddenly made the story of the poor young mother—a sort of tradition in the village—into something real. ‘Colonel,’ she said, ‘you know something; you can tell us something? For God’s sake, if there is any clue, don’t let it go. Tell me, for that poor girl’s sake.’

Her touch seemed to restore him to himself. He looked round vaguely, and seeing that she was standing, drew forward her chair with old-fashioned politeness. ‘A boorish fellow,’ he cried, ‘a boorish fellow you must think me, not to perceive that you were standing. How can I beg your pardon? The fact is, that without Elizabeth—without Elizabeth—there is no good to be got out of me.’

Mrs. Bellendean was a woman full of energy and promptitude. ‘If that be so, then let us send for her at once,’ she said.

The Colonel made a hasty movement of satisfaction. ‘But I am scarcely known to you myself,’ he cried. ‘How could I take such a liberty? Only your son’s old colonel; and he is not even your son.’

‘He is a great deal more—he is the master of this house. Who should be so welcome as his own friends? And if I count for anything, and any light can be thrown on this mystery—oh, Colonel!’

‘I don’t know,’ he said; ‘I don’t know. My mind is all in a whirl. There are some things that make me think—and then there are other things. It is more than I can make head or tail of—alone. And then it’s a serious thing—oh, a very serious thing. If I were to do anything hasty, and then it were to turn out a mistake——’

He said this with such an air of trouble, and at the same time of confidence, that his listener met his look with one of involuntary sympathy, and murmured an assent.

‘She will say I am hasty. I am always hasty; but then, in the circumstances—— And it is not a case for half measures. If this should be!’ A shiver of strong feeling seemed to pass over him. ‘It would make a revolution in our lives,’ he went on; ‘it would change everything. There must be no half measures. If ever there was a case in which she had a right to be consulted—— And then she’ll understand in a moment—she’ll see through it. If it’s credible: it sounds incredible; but on the other hand——’ He gave her once more that appealing look, as if the dilemma in which he found himself must be evident to her, then added hastily, ‘Will you really be so very good, notwithstanding the little you know of us? But I might go and get rooms at the Ferry, and not trouble you.’

‘You shall do nothing of the kind,’ she said peremptorily, with a decision that was balm to him. ‘Let us not lose a moment, Colonel Hayward. Here is a telegraph paper; will you write it yourself, or shall I?’

He took it from her, and lifted a pen from the table, but his hand shook. ‘I am very nervous,’ he said. ‘It is absurd, but I can’t help it. If you will write, “Come at once; I am in great need of you.” That will do.’

‘Come at once. I am in great need of you,’ repeated Mrs. Bellendean; ‘had not you better add that you will meet her by the early train? Will she be likely to travel by night?’

‘She will come by the first train, whenever that may be.’

‘That will be the night express. I shall add, “Will meet you at Edinburgh.” And now you must put the address.’

He paused a little without replying. ‘You would think that alarming, perhaps, if you got it all at once without any warning?’

‘Yes,’ she said, with a smile, ‘I fear I should; but then no one thinks my help so important as you evidently feel your—this lady’s to be.’

‘My wife,’ he said gravely; ‘my wife. Yes, she is very important. Perhaps you will put at the last, “Nothing that is alarming—rather good.” I think that will do. To Mrs. Hayward, Rosebank, Fairhill, Surrey. How can I ever thank you enough!’ He stooped over her hand, which held out the paper, and kissed it with old-fashioned gratitude—‘To let me send for her, when I am but a stranger myself.’

‘I hope she will be able to help you, Colonel Hayward; and I hope my poor Joyce will get the benefit.’

‘Ah!’ he cried. He had come to himself by means of the ready intervention of the practical in the person of Mrs. Bellendean, but faltered again at this as if she had struck him a blow.

‘Perhaps,’ she added hastily, ‘you would like to see—the letters, and the other relics? perhaps——’

He rose up from his seat. ‘I must go and send this,’ he said, and hurried from the room. He came back again, however, a moment after, looking in through the half-opened door. ‘When Elizabeth comes,’ he said, and disappeared again.

Mrs. Bellendean had been greatly excited by the idea of thus touching upon a real romance of life—a story such as comes to light rarely in the commonplace world. The old Colonel’s emotion, the excitement with which he had listened to the narrative, the evident stirring up of old recollections in his mind, and attempt to piece it out from his own knowledge of something which had passed long ago—had wound her up to a pitch of suspense and eagerness almost as great as his own. But a certain comic element came in with the sudden summons of Elizabeth, and the evident determination to put the whole matter, whatever it might be, on his wife’s shoulders, and to put off the inquiry until she should appear. Poor Elizabeth!—probably a comfortable mother, suddenly shaken out of domestic peace, and sent for in hot haste to unravel a mystery with which most likely she had nothing to do. Mrs. Bellendean laughed softly to herself: but then changed her expression, and sighed. She was herself of no such importance to any one. She reflected that, if any difficulty should happen in the life of her own husband, she would be the person from whom, above all others, it would be concealed. No one in the world would think of summoning her to aid him in a desperate crisis. She would be spared all unpleasant knowledge: what everybody would say would be—Don’t say anything to her; why should we disturb her? Perhaps the Elizabeth of Colonel Hayward’s thoughts would have been glad to be so exempted from the troubles of life. But Mrs. Bellendean was not glad. She envied the other woman, upon whom it appeared that, habitually, all that was troublesome was thrown. What kind of a woman must she be—an old campaigner, a strong-minded person—who kept the good old Colonel in subjection? That was the most probable explanation.

Mrs. Bellendean sat a little thinking this over, and then she went back to her duties, to see after her guests. The school treat had been happily the end of all the public performances; but with so many people in the house, every dinner was a dinner-party. When she went out again upon the terrace, the children were just disappearing in a many-coloured line through the avenue of limes, watched by the ladies who had been made to form Queen Margaret’s Court under the great ash-tree. The younger ladies of the party gathered about her as she reappeared. There was one of them who was her special favourite—the only daughter of one of her dearest friends, a distant relation—a little Margaret, to whom she had given her name, and in whom, accordingly, every element of preference centred. Mrs. Bellendean had said to herself that if Greta (which was her pet name, to distinguish her from Maggies and Margarets without number) and Norman should by any chance take to each other—why then! But it must be understood that no match-making was thought of, no scheme, no trap laid—only if they should happen to take to each other! Greta was one of the eager band who came forward to meet the lady of the house. She was a slim girl of nineteen, with silky brown hair and grey eyes—the slightest willowy figure, the most deprecating expression,—a fragile creature, who begged pardon for everything—though in looks, not in words—and yielded at a touch to the bolder spirits about. It was perhaps for this cause that Greta was always made the spokeswoman when anything was wanted in her family and connections; no one had the heart to refuse the pleading of her eyes.

‘Aunt Margaret, they want so much to have tableaux to-night, after dinner, before the gentlemen come in, just for ourselves.’

‘Oh, I don’t see that,’ said a voice out of the group behind her. ‘We may as well have an audience.’

‘And we want them to help. We must have an Edgar Atheling, and a Malcolm Canmore, and all the Court gentlemen.’

‘Oh no; dresses for the gentlemen are impossible,’ said another, more peremptory. ‘We can manage for ourselves, but how could we get things for them? Oh no, no!’

Greta stood looking round upon her somewhat rebellious following. ‘I wish,’ she said, with a slight vexation in her tone, ‘you would make up your mind what you do want, before you send me to ask. Aunt Margaret, may we get them up? and will you be Queen Margaret, as you were to-day! And will you let us ask Joyce?’

‘Oh, we must have Joyce!’ cried the chorus. ‘Joyce is indispensable. None of us know much about Queen Margaret. Please let us have Joyce.’

‘The tableaux as much as you like,’ said Mrs. Bellendean. ‘I have no objection; but Joyce—Joyce is quite another matter.’

‘How is Joyce another matter?’ cried the little surging crowd. ‘Joyce is the very first necessity of all. Oh, Aunt Margaret! Oh, Mrs. Bellendean! Oh, Queen, Queen! Why, she is the one that knows. She is the one——’

‘My dear girls, you don’t think. How do you suppose she can like it, to come and take her part with you, and be complimented by everybody, and then to go away to Peter Matheson’s cottage and boil the potatoes for supper? Besides, there are other circumstances——’

‘What other circumstances? Oh, tell us! Oh, I hope she is going to break it off with that Mr. Halliday. He is not half good enough for her. But why should that keep her from helping us?’

‘Don’t ask me fifty questions all in a moment. Hush! don’t say anything. Perhaps she may be going to find out about her mother.’

This was very indiscreet of Mrs. Bellendean: but she was so full of her new information that she could not restrain herself. And then there arose from all those soft throats a unanimous ‘Oh!’ which ran like a little breeze about the house, and disturbed the flowers in the big baskets. ‘Who is she? Is she a lady? I am sure she is a lady!’ the girls cried.

‘I can’t tell you any more. And you must none of you say a word, for she knows nothing; neither do I. I only know that I think—some one knows about her—some one who is here.’

Who could it be? the girls consulted each other with their eyes, and immediately ran over every name of all the dwellers in the house and all the guests, excepting only the old Colonel, of whom nobody thought.

‘If there is to be the least hint given, or so much as a look, or anything to awaken her attention—remember in that case she must not come. She must not come: I cannot have her excited and disturbed.’

There was a universal cry of indignant protestation. Tell her! oh no! No one would do such a thing. What did Mrs. Bellendean think of them? Were they such silly things, with so little feeling as that? Oh no, no! On the other hand, to be taken out of herself, to be made to forget it, would be such a good thing for Joyce. And how exciting and delightful for everybody! To think she might be a duke’s daughter perhaps, or a foreign princess, or, in any case, something altogether out of the common way!

‘Well, if it must be so,’ said Mrs. Bellendean. ‘Greta, I think I can trust you to take care of her. Not a word; not a hint. For after all, it is the very vaguest possibility, and it may come to nothing at all.’

‘In that case, don’t you think it was a pity to say anything about it?’ said the matter-of-fact, common-sense voice of Mr. Bellendean.

He was a man said to be full of common-sense. His wife considered him a wet blanket, always putting out her fires, and quenching all enthusiasm. He had a horrible way of being right which was doubly exasperating. And she had of course regretted that premature hint of hers the moment she had made it. When she turned round and found out that she had taken her husband and his son unwittingly into her confidence, she felt, to use her own words, ’as if she could have cried.’

‘Perhaps it was a pity,’ she said; ‘but one can’t always be prudent, and none of you will say a word.’

The young ladies redoubled their protestations, and hurried away to make up to Joyce before she reached the village with her charge. As for Mrs. Bellendean, to avoid further criticism, she turned quickly round upon Norman, who had said nothing, but whose eyes had followed the girls with pleased observation. It was natural, for they were a pretty group.

‘Are you very well acquainted with Colonel Hayward?’ she asked.

‘Acquainted? with old Hayward? Oh yes, I think so,’ he said, with a little surprise.

‘Then who is Elizabeth?’

The young man had been looking at her with some curiosity. His face suddenly changed now from grave to gay. His eyes lighted up with humour. ‘Elizabeth!’ he said, with a laugh, ‘have you found her out? She is Mrs. Hayward, I know; but I have never seen her. She is his other self—no, that’s not the right way of putting it. She is himself, and he is the other. Oh, everybody knows about Elizabeth.’

‘She is coming here to-morrow,’ said Mrs. Bellendean.

‘Coming here! none of us have ever seen her,’ he replied. ‘She was always at the hills, or home for her health, or something; though some people said she kept close in the bungalow like a native lady, and never would show——’

‘Good heavens! she is not a native, Norman, I hope? Don’t say that, please.’

‘One of your usual hasty proceedings, my dear; but it would be some fun to have a Begum in the house.’

‘I don’t think it is likely; but I don’t know. He was always wishing for her. We made rather a joke of it, I fear. I have heard him, when he was giving his orders—and he is a very smart soldier, dear old fellow, though perhaps you think him a—— I have heard him say between his teeth, “If Elizabeth were but here,” when most men were only too thankful their wives were out of the way.’

‘I like that,’ said Mrs. Bellendean, with a sigh. ‘I like it very much. Women would be a great deal happier if their husbands would always treat them so.’

‘What! take them out to face the enemy?’ her husband said. But he knew very well what she meant; and though he was a very well-bred man, and showed no sign of it, he resented both her little speech and her smaller sigh.

CHAPTER IV

It was not very far from the terrace at Bellendean to Peter Matheson’s cottage in the village, which was a cottage with a but and a ben—that is, an outer and an inner, two rooms downstairs, into one of which the door opened, and two others above. There was nothing in front but the village street, from which you could tap at the window of the kitchen in which the family lived; but behind there was a little garden, with some large lilac and rose bushes, and an ash-tree with a small plot of grass round its patriarchal feet. Joyce had come back tired from the dusty walk with the children just as her granny, as she called the old woman who had been her guardian all her life, had taken off the large Paisley shawl and the close black satin bonnet, which were her state costume out of doors. Mrs. Matheson—called Janet in the village, a freedom which Joyce resented—had folded up carefully her ‘grand shawl’ and laid her bonnet upon it, to be put away presently, and had seated herself in the high-backed wooden chair to rest. The kettle was beginning to boil on a fire kept as low as possible in compliment to the hot June day. Though she had shared in the refreshment under the tent, Janet was not contented to accept that in place of the much-prized cordial of her own brewing. ‘Na, na; what ye get out o’ an urn may be gran’ drinking,’ she said, ‘but it’s never like my tea.’ She was waiting till the kettle should boil to ‘mask the tea,’ which even Joyce did not do altogether to her liking. When the door opened and the girl came in, Janet was sitting, musing as she waited, near the fire, according to cottage custom. She was old, and it was not too warm for her, and she was tired and enjoying what it requires the long habit of toil to enjoy thoroughly, the entire quiescence of physical rest. To sit there, doing nothing, was sweet at her age. In former times she could remember being impatient for the boiling of the kettle. In these days she would have whipped up her bonnet and shawl and ran upstairs with them, thinking it an idle thing to leave them there even for a moment; and she would have set out the cups while she waited. But now she was not impatient. There was no hurry, and rest was sweet. She looked up when her child came in—who was her child certainly, though not her daughter—with a pride and admiration of her looks, and her dress, and everything about her, that never failed. Joyce wore a dark dress, which she had made herself, after the model of a dress of Greta’s. Her little collars and cuffs were like those the young ladies wore, without the slightest ornament. It vexed Janet a little that she would not wear a locket, as all the girls did in the village, and as the young ladies also did. It was as if they took her siller from her, or hoarded it up, or grudged her any bonnie thing she would wear. ‘Eh! if it was me,’ Janet said, ‘she would be just as fine as the best. There’s naething I would not ware upon her—a gold chain on her neck, and a gold watch at her side, and a ring upon her finger; but she will not be guided by me. And to see her looking like a young queen, and no a thing to show for it but just her ain bonnie looks; eh! I hope it’ll not be remembered against us if we’re awfu’ proud; for Peter is just as bad as me.’ But all this was said in the absence of Joyce, and to her face the old mother gave utterance to little phases of detraction, as it is the part of a mother to do.

‘You’re very soon back; you’re back maist as soon as me. I am just waiting for the water to come a-boil, and then I’ll mask the tea. You will be better, after a’ yon botheration, and the trouble you’ve been giving yoursel’, of a good cup of tea.’

‘I had some in the tent, granny,’ said Joyce, sitting down wearily near the door.

‘Oh ay! in the tent. If yon’s what pleases the leddies it doesna please me. What’s the matter with ye? You’ve just weariet yoursel’ with thae weans and their pieces, till ye canna tell whether you’re on your head or your heels. Na, na; sit still and rest. I’ve had naething to tire me. I’ll get out the cups mysel’, and we’ll keep the teapot warm at the side of the fire for Peter. He likes it a’ the better the mair it tastes o’ the pot.’

‘What did you think of it all, granny? Who did you like best? Did you like the tableau, with the Queen and the ladies? Wasn’t it like a picture? I wonder if the real Queen Margaret was as handsome as ours, and all her maidens as sweet.’

‘Your head is just turned with them, J’yce; and yon would be your doing, too? Putting up Mrs. Bellendean upon a throne, as if she was the duchess. I thought that bid to be one o’ your fancies; and they just do what ye tell them, it seems to me, young and auld, and the leddy hersel’. Your head would be just turned, if it werena for me, that never spoilt ye. Sit to the table like a reasonable creature, and take your tea.’

‘I don’t want any tea, granny. I am only tired. There was a gentleman there——’

‘And what’s that to you, if there were a hundred gentlemen?’ said her guardian quickly. ‘Na, na; there’s to be nae talk about gentlemen between you and me.’

‘It was an old gentleman, granny,’ said Joyce, with a smile curving slightly the grave lines of her mouth.

‘The auld anes are often waur than the young anes,’ the old woman said.

‘Oh, granny!’ cried Joyce, ‘what is that to me, if they are old or young? This one asked me—granny, listen! listen! for my heart is beating hard, and I must get some one to listen to me;—he asked me, where I had got my name,—who had given me my name? with a look—oh, if I could let you see his look! Not as some do, just staring, which means nothing but folly—but a look that made his eyes open wide, and the colour go out of his face.’

‘It was just very impident of any man to look at you like that.’

‘No, it was not impudent. He was an old man with a sweet face, as if he was somebody’s father—some girl’s father that is my age. And he asked me, “Young lady” (he did not know who I was)—“young lady, where did you get your name?"’

The terms of this address moved Janet much more than the meaning. ‘Well, I’ll not say that I’m surprised: for if ever there was a young lass that looked like a lady, no to flatter ye—for flattery’s no my way——’

‘Granny, granny, you don’t see what I mean. It was not me that he was thinking of. He was wondering to hear me called Joyce; and he knew somebody—he knew—some one that was like me—that had the same name.’

Old Janet paused in the act of pouring out the tea. ‘I mind now,’ she said. ‘There was somebody asking me where ye got it,—if it was a name in the family; but I took no thought. Bless me! can ye no be contented with them that have done their best for you all your life?’

‘I am very well contented,’ said Joyce; but the involuntary movement of her mouth contradicted her words. She added, after a little pause, ‘No one is so well off as I am. I have the kind of work I like, and my big girls that learn so well, and you, granny dear, that are always so kind.’

‘Kind!’ said the old woman, with quick offence; ‘if you think I’m wanting to be thought kind——’

‘But I should like,’ said Joyce, who in the meantime had been murmuring something to herself about the ‘Happy Warrior,’ and had not given much attention to this disclaimer—‘oh, I should like to hear who I am,—to hear something about her, to know——’ She paused, as if words were insufficient to express her thoughts, with a thrill of meaning more intense than anything she could say, quivering in her lips.

‘Oh ay,’ said Janet, ‘I ken what you mean; to hear that you were born a grand lady, though you’ve been bred up a cottage lass; that you’re Leddy Joyce or maybe Princess—how can I tell?—instead of just what you are, Joyce Matheson, that has made herself very weel respectit, and a’ her ain doing—which is a far greater credit than to be born a queen.’

‘Granny, you whip me, but it’s with roses—no, not roses, for there are thorns to them, but lily flowers. Oh no, not Lady Joyce, nor anything of the kind,’ she went on, with a tell-tale blush suddenly dyeing her pale face. ‘I might have thought that when I was young—but not now. It is only a kind of yearning to know—to know—I cannot tell what I want to know—about my mother,’ she added in a lower tone.

‘Bairn,’ said Janet, ‘let that be—let it be. Poor young thing, she’s been long long in her Maker’s hands, and a’ forgotten and forgiven.’

‘If there was anything to forget and forgive; you take that for granted, granny!’ cried the girl, with a sudden flush of indignation.

‘Onything to forgive? There’s aye plenty to forgive even to the best; but oh, J’yce, my poor lassie, take my advice and let it be. Many strange things happen in this world: but a poor thing that wanders into a strange place her lane with no a living creature to care if she lives or dies—oh, J’yce, my bonnie bairn, let it be!’

Joyce had risen, as if the remark was intolerable, and stood at the window looking out blankly. It was a discussion which had taken place often before, and always with the same result. Old Mrs. Matheson took, as was natural, the matter-of-fact view of the question, and felt a certainty that shame as well as sorrow must be involved in the secret of Joyce’s birth, and that to inquire into it was very undesirable. But, as was equally natural, Joyce, since she had been old enough to understand, had built a hundred castles in the air on the subject of her birth, and occupied many an hour with dreams of perhaps a father who should come and seek her, perhaps a mother’s mother, like an old queen—people who would be noble in look and thought—perhaps, who could tell, in birth too? The Lady Joyce, with which old Janet taunted her, had not been altogether a fiction. Who could say? Mysteries were more common among the great than among the small, the girl said to herself. And how many romances are there in which such a story appears? There was the ‘Gentle Shepherd,’ the one poem beside Burns and Blair’s ‘Grave,’ which was to be found in the cottage, and which she had known by heart almost before she could speak. Was not the shepherd Patie a gentleman all the time and Peggy a lady? and both of them in their first estate full of poetry, and distinguished among their seeming peers, as Joyce was well aware she had always been?

By some strange grace of nature Joyce had escaped the self-conceit which is so common to the self-taught, so usual, must we say it, in Scotland? Her consciousness of being able to do a great many things as other people could not do them, got vent in a little innocent astonishment at the other people, who either were dull beyond what is permitted, or would not ‘give their thoughts’ to the proper subjects. She grew impatient by times with their determined stupidity, but thought it their fault, and not any special gift of hers that made the difference. It was for this reason that she had very sedately accepted the addresses of Mr. Andrew Halliday, who was schoolmaster in the next parish. He was a young man who was full of intellectual ambitions. He could talk of books, and quote poetry as long and as much as any one could desire. Joyce had been moved by enthusiasm on their first acquaintance. She had felt herself altogether lifted out of the vulgarities of common life, when he talked about Shakespeare and Shelley, and Scott and Burns—and with a little smiling commendation, as from a superior altitude, even of the ‘Gentle Shepherd.’ It sobered her a little to find that, like the other ‘lads’ in the village, he was intent upon a ‘lass,’ and that she was the object of his choice. But she gave in to it with dignity, feeling that he was indeed the only person with whom she could mate; and looked forward to the career of the schoolmistress, the schoolmaster’s wife, with an adaptation to herself of the now so well-worn lines of the ‘Happy Warrior,’ which Joyce was not aware anybody had ever appropriated before. Yes; she would work out her life upon the plan which had pleased her childish thought. For it had been her ambition since ever she began to be able to do and learn so many things which the girls around her would not in their invincible ignorance be persuaded to attempt to do—to coax, or drag, or force them into better things. Who but a teacher who would never let them rest, who would give them no peace till they understood, could do that? And she was resolved to do it, with a hope that Providence might throw in the possibility of something heroical—the saving of somebody’s life, the redemption of some one who was going wrong—to make up. This was all laid out before her, the career which was to be hers.

But nevertheless (though she had abandoned all that folly about the Lady Joyce), when her mind was free, and nothing before her that compelled her attention, the romance of her unknown origin would come in, with a hundred vague attractions; and Colonel Hayward’s question was more than enough to call everything back. ‘Young lady, where did you get your name?’ and then his look! She had caught that look again, constantly coming back to her. Joyce was well enough aware what looks of admiration are like. She had met them of every kind—the innocent, the modest, the bold—but this was not one of them; not even the fatherly kind, of which she had been conscious too. This look was very different: it was the look of a man so startled, so absorbed, that he could think of nothing else; and then he had said, ‘I once knew—some one’—Joyce stood and listened, yet did not listen to what old Janet went on saying behind. The old woman was launched on a subject which filled her with eloquence. She was jealous of the poor little mother who had died—jealous at least of the idea that somebody might arrive some fine morning who would turn out to have a better claim than herself upon her nursling. In her heart Janet had always been certain that this was what would happen some day. She had spoken of it freely when the child was young, bidding Peter, her husband, to ‘haud a loose grip.’ ‘We maunna think too much of her,’ she had said; ‘for just when we’re bound up in her, and canna do without her, her ain kith and kin will come and carry her away.’ She had gone on saying this until the slumbering light in Joyce’s eyes had leaped out, and her quick intelligence had seized upon the expectation; after which Janet had changed her tone. She went on now in a very different strain, while Joyce stood at the window turning her back. ‘If I were in your place,’ she was saying, ‘I wouldna hear a word—no a word—that would maybe make me think shame o’ my mother. Oh, I wouldna listen—no, if it was the Queen hersel’!’ Joyce made no reply to these exhortations, but her heart burned. Her imagination rejected the idea with a fervour of suppressed indignation and resentment, which it needed all her gratitude and affection to keep in check. She stood and looked out, her foot tapping impatiently on the floor, her hand on the window. It was hard, very hard, to keep silent, though it was her duty so to do.

‘Granny,’ she said at last, ‘say no more, please. For one thing, I cannot bear it—and for another, here is Miss Greta, and I think she is coming to our door.’

‘Miss Greta! They might have kept her to her ain right name, which is a hantle bonnier than ony of your outlandish names; but she’s very free to come and very welcome, and grand company for you—I’m aye glad to see her coming here: is that her at the door? Come in, come in, my bonnie leddy. Joyce was just telling me—and we’re just awfu’ fain to see you, both her and me.’

‘Oh, thank you, Mrs. Matheson. Joyce! you are to come up to the house to-night,’ said the young lady, coming in, in the gaiety of her pretty summer dress, like a sunbeam. ‘Aunt Margaret has sent me to tell you: and I’ve run half the way, but I could not catch you up; you are to come to-night.’

Once more Joyce became crimson with expectation and excitement. Her eyes seemed to send out eager questions, and her lips to repeat the answer before the question was made. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Has the gentleman——’ and then stopped short, devouring the young visitor with eager eyes.

‘We want to have tableaux,’ cried the girl; ‘it was you yourself that put it into our heads: and you must come and help us—we could do nothing without you. Joyce, we want to do Queen Margaret—the same scene we had on the lawn for one. Captain Bellendean said it was beautiful: and then—something else. You are the one that knows all about Queen Margaret, Joyce.’

While Greta made her little speech, with a wondering sense after a word or two that she had stumbled into the midst of some dramatic scene which she did not understand, the face of Joyce was like a changing sky, save that the changes upon it were of swifter operation than those which alter the face of the heavens. It was full of a brilliant glow and flush of expectation at first: then the clouds suddenly swept over it, extinguishing all the higher lights: and then the shadows in their turn wavered and broke, and a chill clearness of self-repression came in their place, a calm which was like the usual calm of the countenance in repose, but intensified by the fact that this repose was not that of nature but of a violent effort, and had in it the gleam of self-scorn which answered in a certain vivid paleness to the effect of the light. A few instants were enough to work out all this drama, which was the truest reflection of Joyce’s mind. For one wild moment of hope, she had thought with a kind of certainty that her patroness, ‘the lady,’ the source of so many pleasures in Joyce’s life, was sending for her to tell her that her anticipations were realised, that her birth and kindred were discovered, and that she was to be told who she was. So swift are the operations of the mind that in her instantaneous conception of this, Joyce had time to make sure that there was no shame but only happiness in the revelation about to be made, or Mrs. Bellendean, always kind, would not have sent for her in this marked way. The thought sent the blood dancing through her veins, and though, perhaps, she did not picture herself as Lady Joyce, her mind yet rushed towards unknown glories in which insignificance at least had no place. And then there came a sense of absolute and sickening disappointment, such as seems to check the very fountains of life—disappointment so overwhelming that she felt herself stand up merely like a piece of mechanism by no strength or will of her own—a state of mental collapse from which she awoke to such scorn of herself for her former incoherent hopes as brought the blood to her cheeks again.

It takes longer time to describe these varying moods than it did to go through them, one sensation sweeping through her mind after the other. She had come to herself again after mounting to those heights and descending to those depths, when she replied, rather coldly, vaguely, to Greta’s petition, ‘If I can get away—if I can be spared from home.’

‘Spared from home! oh ay, she can be spared, Miss Greta, weel spared. She is aye so busy and taken up with thae bairns that a little pleasure will just do her a great deal of good.’

‘Pleasure!’ said Joyce, echoing the word. ‘I will come if the lady wants me; but there is a good deal to do—things to prepare. And then—and then——’ She paused with a conscious effort, making the most of her hindrances— ‘I am expecting a friend to-night.’

‘A friend?—that will be Andrew Halliday,’ said the old woman, again interposing anxiously; ‘you can see him ony day of the week; he’s no that far away nor sweared to come. Where are your manners, Joyce? to keep Miss Greta standing, and hum and ha, as if ye werena aye ready to do what will pleasure the lady—aye ready, night or day.’

‘If Joyce is tired, Mrs. Matheson,’ said Greta, ‘I will not have her troubled. But are you really so tired, Joyce? We cannot do anything without you. And it was all my idea, for there is no party or anything: but I thought it would please—all of them. Only I could do nothing without you.’

‘Yes, yes, I am coming,’ cried Joyce suddenly; ‘I was only what granny calls cankered and out of heart.’

‘Why should you be out of heart,’ said the other girl, ‘when everything went so well and everybody was so pleased? It is perhaps because you will miss Mr. Halliday? But then he can come up for you, and it’s moonlight, and that will be better than sitting in the house. Don’t you think so, Joyce?’

‘The moonlight is fine coming down the avenue,’ Joyce said vaguely. And then she asked, ‘Will the old Colonel—the old gentleman—will he be there?’

‘Oh, did you take a fancy to him, Joyce? So have I. Yes, he will be there—they will all be there. We are to have it in the great drawing-room—and leave to rummage in all the presses in the red room, you know, where the old Lady’s dresses are kept, and to take what we like.’

‘That would be fine,’ said Joyce, ‘if it was for last century; but if Queen Margaret is what you are wanting, that’s far, far back, and the old Lady’s dresses will do little good. There will be nothing half so old as Queen Margaret——’

‘Oh,’ cried Greta, her countenance falling, ‘I never thought of that.’

Joyce hesitated a moment, and the light returned to her eyes. ‘I will go up with you to the house now, if granny can spare me, and I will speak to Merritt, and we will think, she and I; and when you come out from your dinner we will have settled something. Oh, never fear but we will find something. It is just what I like,’ said Joyce, restored to full energy—‘to make out what’s impossible. That’s real pleasure!’ she cried, with sparkling eyes.

‘Did ever ony mortal see the like,’ said Janet to herself as she stood at the door watching the two girls go down the village street. ‘What’s impossible! that’s just what she likes, that wonderful bairn. And if onybody was to ask which was the leddy, it’s our Joyce and not Miss Greta that ilka ane would say. But, eh me! though I am so fain to get her a bit pleasure, what’s to come o’ a’ that if she is just to settle doon and marry Andrew Halliday? That’s what is impossible, and nae pleasure in it so far as I can see!’

CHAPTER V

The tableaux had taken place to everybody’s satisfaction. There had been much applause, and Joyce had been called for to receive the thanks of the audience; but all muffled up in a dark cloak in which she had figured as one of Queen Margaret’s travelling retinue, she had not revealed anything to the amused look of the gentlemen and ladies who were spectators, except a dark and indistinct outline against the light. When the others, throwing off the veils and cloaks in which she had enveloped them, joined their friends in the drawing-room, which was to Joyce the emblem of everything that was most splendid and beautiful in the world, she stole away, getting her hat from Merritt’s room. Merritt would gladly have detained her for a gossip afterwards; but Joyce, though she told herself with an angry humility, which was more stinging than pride, that it was Merritt who was her equal and not Greta, would not stay. She went out into the silence of the night, hearing the voices of the company, with a keen desire to know what they were saying, and to share in the enjoyment which imagination represented to her as so much more delightful than any kind of social intercourse she had ever known. Joyce felt this with a sharp and keen sensation which she said to herself was not envy. Oh no, no! for envy is unkind, whereas she desired no harm, but only good and every pleasantness to the delightsome company where there were so many whom she was fond of; but only a forlorn consciousness of her own position as one who could not get access there, yet was at home nowhere else. No; all that youthful folly about Lady Joyce was nonsense, she knew. She would never be Lady Joyce, never find a place in the Queen’s Court, or among the people who are grand and great, and the flower of the land; but yet there was her place, and nowhere else was she at home.

She did not venture to say this to herself, yet the thought was in her mind as she stepped out with a sigh down the terrace steps, leaving the lights blazing, and the voices, so refined, as she thought, and delightful, rising in a soft tumult behind. She was tempted to steal along the terrace to an open window, to hear what they were saying, to peep in for a moment out of the gloom. But Joyce would not, could not do this thing. The temptation wounded her pride even while it moved her. What! she, Joyce, go and peep and listen, like a waiting-maid in a play! No, no; though they were so sweet, though they drew her as if with a magnet—no, no. She turned round resolutely away from this snare. On the other side the housekeeper’s room was shining too, and there was quite a fine company there—the ladies’-maids so fine, and gentlemen in evening clothes, quite equal to anything that was to be seen in the drawing-room. Joyce flung her head high—not there at least! though with a keen pang of self-humiliation she felt that there everybody would think was her appropriate place. But the fine ladies’-maids were too fine for her. There was something in that. It enabled her to feel a consolatory thrill of disdainful pride.

When she had gone on a little, and reached the beginning of the avenue, a shadow shaped itself out of the darkness of the night, and a shawl, unnecessary and undesired, was quickly put upon her shoulders. ‘I was told to bring you this—and I’ve been waiting half an hour. Oh, keep it on, the night is chilly—to please me, Joyce.’

‘Why should you make me do what I don’t wish, to please you?’

‘Well, if it is what you don’t wish; but consider that your health is of great consequence, and if you were to catch cold—or any unpleasant thing——’

‘There could not be a better time,’ said Joyce, ‘at the beginning of the holidays.’

‘Has something gone wrong with you to-night?—you are not as sweet as your ordinary—oh yes—sweet always, sweet ever to me. But something has come over you. You are so merry about them sometimes. You make me laugh, though I am not sure that it is right to laugh at the aristocracy—they have their difficulties, as we have ours.’

‘I wonder at you! Wherein are they different?—the same flesh and blood, I hope—no better education, often not so good. What then? Who was it they referred to for everything to-night?—to know all about the story and the history: the history of their own country, and we in sight of the very scene! Who did they come to ask from as if I were an oracle? and you say that knowledge is power——’

‘Yes, in a way, assuredly it is. There is a moral superiority; there is a sense of true nobility——’

‘Oh, stop, stop! In spite of all, if I had stayed there,’ cried Joyce, with an indignant sweeping motion of her arm towards the lighted windows, which now shone like faint stars in the distance, ‘should I have been like them? They would have talked and been kind; they would have asked me questions. What would you like, Joyce?—a cup of tea? Have you seen these pictures, Joyce? What can we show her to amuse her? And a gentleman would have come forward and said something, looking as if he were afraid I would curtsey when I spoke to him, like one of the children! and there would be little looks at me as if it were wonderful I could behave myself. And the lady herself, who is all goodness—yes, she is all goodness!—would give me a glance after a while, or perhaps a whisper, Now, Joyce, run away. Why—why should it be—so little difference, and yet so much? To feel nothing but scorn at the thought they are our betters, and yet never to feel at ease with them!’ Her foot gave an impatient mortified stamp on the ground, and her eyes, unseen, overflowed with hot and angry tears.

‘These are questions which are sometimes painful—but not necessarily so,’ said the young schoolmaster. ‘Take hold of my arm going down the avenue. Oh do! It is dark, and you might stumble, and the moon gives little light under the trees. And then, don’t you think I have a right to a little, just a little, kindness, more than everybody else? Well, then,’ he went on in a satisfied tone, as Joyce, moved by this argument, conceded the arm, though with some reluctance. ‘I will tell you all about it. It would be painful if it were not looked at from a high point of view. It is mortifying when there is no difference—when you are just as well instructed, perhaps better, and acquainted with all the rules of politeness, and even etiquette, and all the rest of it’—Joyce moved uneasily, impatiently, on his arm, and he had to hold her fast to retain it—‘to feel that there is a difference!’ he went on hastily; ‘and founded upon nothing reasonable, upon no solid ground. For to call them our betters is folly. Wherein are they our betters? not in acquaintance with everything that is best—with literature, with science, with what Tennyson calls the long results of time.’

‘If you think you are explaining, you are making a mistake,’ said Joyce,—‘you are only repeating what I said.’

The young schoolmaster laughed, but with confusion and a little resentment. ‘I am coming to the explanation,’ he said. ‘For one thing, it’s against our dignity, yours and mine, that are just as good as they are, to take offence. It’s a pitiful thing to take offence.’

He said ‘peetiful,’ and now and then made other betrayals in accent of his northern origin; but that was nothing, for some of the gentlemen did the same. This thought flew through Joyce’s mind with the rapidity of light, followed, like its attendant shadow, by another, a painful, hateful consciousness of this involuntary proof of the differences which they were discussing. The gentlemen! Why or how this distinction, which she herself made without knowing? In the darkness, unsuspected of her companion, who was going on quite easily, she blushed to her hair, to her heels, with a glow all over her.

‘But we must reflect,’ he said, ‘that in this world there must always be a certain sacrifice to appearances. And it’s more lovely and of good report to keep up different grades. Abstract justice is one thing, but fair-seeming also has to be considered. An aristocracy is a graceful thing. People like us, that consider these matters, may well consent to keep it up for the beauty of it. We cultivate flowers for the same end. It would be more profitable to fill all the garden beds with cabbages or gooseberries. We yield that for beauty, and we yield the other too. And then you and I, Joyce,’ he said, pressing her arm, ‘we have the advantage or the disadvantage, whichever you like to call it, of belonging to an exceptional class.’

Here again a murmur made itself heard in Joyce’s mind. Did he? For herself she made no question. She put him in her mind beside Captain Bellendean,—the Captain, as everybody called him—and her brain grew confused. But Halliday continued, with an equable sense of giving instruction, which confused her more and more.

‘We are, so to speak, everybody’s equal,’ he said. ‘We are probably superior to most of these people, but we are not going to compete with them in their way. There is no doubt that we are superior to the other classes, who cannot, in any manner, hold their own with us, except just by sheer force of money, or something of that measurable kind. We have therefore a rank—a rank, Joyce, that is by itself, that is becoming more and more acknowledged every day.’

He pressed her arm as he spoke, and she, wildly roving in her mind through every kind of bye-way of thought, did not like it, but made no sign, restraining herself, answering nothing, which was not Joyce’s way. She was thus caught and attached to reality, while her mind went wandering through space, in no way agreeing in the supposed triumphant argument of his—sometimes flashing a contradiction upon him which he could not see; chafing at the restraint; eager to throw him off, yet not doing so; held fast by circumstances and her fate.

‘When you and I set up together, Joyce,’ he said, clasping her arm closer, ‘which I hope will be soon, for I’m weary waiting—when you and I have our home together, we’ll have a home where any one may be proud to come to; where every meal will be a feast, and nothing spoken of or thought of that is not high—above the ideas of the common. We’ll have nothing common there. We’ll talk of the grandest things. We’ll be better than princes or kings; and by and by, when the world’s a little wiser—as we’re making it wiser every day—when a great statesman comes to Mid-Lothian, or a great scholar or a poet, it’s you and me he’ll come to. We’ll not have grand rooms to put him in, but it’s with us he’ll find the minds to understand him. Even now, if Tennyson were to be up yonder,’ he pointed back to the house—‘would he care for them, who could not quote a line he ever wrote, or us, who could say—what could we not say?—all his poems, I believe between you and me.’

At this Joyce laughed aloud with a sudden burst of ridicule. ‘Do you think he would care to hear his own poems? I think he would rather go up to the house, where nobody would be afraid of him.’

‘Afraid of him! why should we be afraid? I hope our manners are good enough for—as good as——’

‘Oh, what do you mean about manners? doesn’t that just prove what I say?—we should be afraid of him. We could quote all his poems one after another. What would he care for that? Miss Greta, that knows none of them, except perhaps the Queen of the May, would please him better. Why? Oh, how can I tell you? but I know it! She would know the people he knows; and, don’t you see, when you speak about manners, that alone shows—— Oh yes, we are different, and that is the truth. We may know more—and we might know double again, and it would not make any difference. There is more in it than that.’

‘Yes, there is money in it, if that is what you mean,’ said the schoolmaster scornfully.

‘That is not what I mean; but it’s true—there is money in it—and beautiful rooms, and people that have lived in them all their life, and their fathers before them, and that are used to be the best wherever they go. We say we’re the best, but we’re not used to it. It is in our thoughts, but not in other people’s. Oh, there is a difference! I feel I don’t belong to the cotters’ houses, but I am at ease in them: and in the farmers’ I feel—oh, a little queerish, as if I were smiling at their money and their notion that they were better than me—superior as you say. But in Bellendean I would be awkward and blush. I would say, Thank you, mem, or sir. Perhaps I could talk better than the rest if I were to try——’

‘You could—you could.’

‘What would that matter?’ cried this stern philosopher. ‘I would be just Joyce Matheson among them all. But here I’m not Joyce Matheson, I’m—anything. I’m Desdemona or even Rosalind. I’m Lady Joyce, as granny says. I’m no match for any but a prince—oh, Andrew!—what I meant to say was that in my thoughts I’m a grand lady, but in Bellendean, nobody—nobody! a little schoolmistress, a little country girl.’

‘I know what you mean,’ he said, recovering the hand she had drawn from his arm. ‘But if you love me, Joyce, I’m prince enough for anything,’ he said in a lower tone.

This touch of feeling suddenly coming in silenced Joyce. She made no reply. Love had been little talked of between them. They had thought more of Shakespeare and the poets generally, and of that culture which levels all distinctions, and makes of those who are engaged ‘in tuition’ the superiors of the world. There was always this strange question, too, so little explicable, of class distinctions, which contradicted all theories, and set culture aside as if it meant nothing. They were both aristocrats by birth, holding fondly to the doctrine of a superior race, but feeling also a wistful, nay, sometimes angry, wonder why their own special affinities for that race were not more justly recognised.

‘After all, the class that we belong to is the greatest of all,’ said Halliday. ‘The greatest men have come out of it. The peasant is a kind of king. He has nothing to do with money-making, and poor sordid trades. He digs his bread out of the soil. However we may get up and up, we have no reason to be ashamed of him. In the cottages you are at your ease, you said——’

‘But not because I belong to them,’ cried Joyce, with a flash of her eyes. ‘If I did, I would not say so; it would be natural. But I don’t: I belong to nobody: if I were a peasant, I would be a peasant and nothing more; but I am nobody, and I think and think—and sometimes I have silly dreams.’

He tried again to take her hand. ‘Not silly, perhaps,’ he said; ‘the world is before us. I see nothing that we might not do—you and me together, Joyce.’

You and me together! This was not what she was thinking of. The vague exaltation and vaguer hope which sometimes swept her up to heights unknown had nothing to do, it must be confessed, with Andrew Halliday. She drew herself apart from him, on the evident ground that they were emerging from the darkness of the avenue into the bright moonlight at the park gates. The village street opened beyond, with various groups about enjoying the freshness of the night. The women were out at their doors; a knot of men smoking their pipes and talking in their slow rustic way, stood together at a corner. Without a doubt, there were two or three pairs, not so bashful as Joyce, taking advantage of the moonlight. But it was in conformity with Halliday’s principles as well as her own to maintain the loftiest decorum. They walked down side by side, with quiet gravity and propriety, talking of what Mr. Halliday called ‘the topics of the day’: the success of all the festivities in honour of the Captain’s return, the Captain himself and his character, and other cognate subjects,—a kind of conversation which anybody might have listened to with edification. Indeed, even in the avenue, where it was dark, and Joyce’s arm was in that of her lover, the talk had not been any drivel of love-making, as the reader knows. But Joyce had not said a word to him of the excitement which lay deep at the bottom of her heart. She had never said a word to Halliday of the commotions which the thought of her possible origin awoke; and of Colonel Hayward and his strange questions and looks she had said nothing. All this was kept a secret from her lover; she kept it jealously, but she could scarcely have told why.

Old Peter Matheson stood at his door, in the full light of the moon, which threw all the roughnesses upon his surface into shadow, as if he had been a mountain. He was a mountain in his way, or rather an angular tall old crag, his face seamed as with torrents. The moon subdued the high colour, the deep frosty-red and russet-brown of his weather-beaten countenance, and made his scanty circle of white locks like a silver crown. He was standing in the middle filling up the doorway, with a lordly indifference to his wife, who stood spying at the moonlight from under his arm.

‘Yon’ll be them,’ Janet had said, as the two slim figures suddenly rose out of the white distance.

‘How can ye tell it’s them? It might be onybody,’ said Peter, in his deep voice.

‘Wha would it be but them? It’s no the Captain and some young lady—therefore,’ said Janet, ‘it’s bound to be our twa. There’s nae ither twa like them. And I would ken our Joyce at ten mile.’

Peter grumbled something about the impossibility of seeing anything except the hills or the sea at ten miles, and about the nonsensical character of her remarks generally. But with a swelling at his old heart which almost brought the water to his eyes (not hard to do), decided that she was right, and that Joyce could be distinguished as far as mortal vision would carry. The way she stepped, and the carriage of her—like a lady! she was just like the Queen!

‘Sae it’s you after a’. I was thinking nae ither pair would move along like twa steeples, nae nearer. Come away. It’s a bonnie night, but I’m wantin’ my supper. I canna fill my wame with the moonlicht, like you twa.’

‘Is it late, grandfather? I might have known it was late, as it’s so dark, or would be but for the moon.’

‘Na, na,’ said the old man, with a laugh as deep and bass as his voice; ‘it wasna to be expected you should mind. We’re no lookin’ for impossibilities. But there is a fine smell of stoved ta’aties. Your granny is a woman that loses no time.’

‘Now that they are come,’ said Janet from within, ‘come in, come in to your supper. Dinna stand and chatter there.’

The supper was simple enough. There were oatcakes and cheese on the table, a large dish of stoved potatoes, steaming and savoury, and a jug of milk. The potatoes were a feast for a king; the steam of them rose like domestic incense to the dim roof. The table was set as far from the fire as possible, the door left open, the moonlight, silver to the threshold, stopped about a yard within, drawing a clear line of separation between its intense ethereal whiteness and the ruddy light of the little lamp. Joyce sat facing the moonlight, looking out across the homely table into that mystic world outside: conscious of the contrast between the little human group, so well defined and distinct, the smoky lamplight on their faces, and the great universe beyond, all filled with spiritual light, with moving shadows and subdued voices—mystic, mysterious. Now and then a step passed, the line of some flitting figure crossed the doorway, and sometimes a cheerful voice called ‘Good-night’ at them in passing, while the talk went on within.

‘Weel, and did a’ yon nonsense come to pass, and were ye satisfied?’ Janet asked.

‘Yes, granny; pretty well. Everybody was pleased.’

‘Except yoursel’, ye exacting thing! They wouldna do just a’ ye told them, that would be the cause.’

‘J’yce is a lass that likes her ain gait. Ye manna gang into it wi’ your eyes blindfold, Andrew, my man.’

‘Yes, they did what I told them, granny. But the Scots maidens could hardly be distinguished from the Saxon maidens, which was a mistake; and we could not get anything like right costume, there was so little time. But they knew no better,’ said Joyce, with a slight inflection of contempt; ‘they were quite pleased.’

‘And that is a very difficult question,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘Do you think there would be much difference at that early period?’

‘What!’ cried Joyce, lighting up, ‘between the Saxon ladies that were with the Athelings, that had been in a Court, and the wives of the wild Picts, or whatever they were—for history knows little of them—on the other side!’

‘And what were you?’ said Janet, while Peter burst into one of his long, derisive, admiring laughs, with a ‘Hearken to her!’ which brought the water to his eyes.

‘I was nobody. I was a tirewoman. I was not thinking of me. I was in the lady’s train in her journey, with a big cloak of the Captain’s,’ said Joyce, permitting herself to laugh.

‘And wherefore no’ a Scots lady, to wait upon her in her kingdom,’ said Janet, half offended. ‘You have aye an awfu’ troke with thae English, as if you liked them the best.’

‘How can she do that when she never kent ane?’ said Peter, in his innocence.

But Joyce made no reply.

CHAPTER VI

Colonel Hayward was in waiting on the platform at Edinburgh when the morning express came in from the south. It was a lovely morning. The unconventional freshness, as of a day still in its childhood and doubting nothing, was in the air, even in the grimy precincts of the railway station, where all was black below, yet all fresh above, the sun shining, the air full of that keen sweetness which, even in a July morning, breathes in the air of the north. The platform was already full of people waiting for their friends; and when those friends arrived, and came pouring from all the carriage doors, with the noise combined of a crowd and a train, the Colonel was confused by the din and numbers. Though he had the habit of command, and could have made his authority felt in a moment had they been soldiers under him, he was pushed out of his way by women and children and railway porters, without power of asserting himself; and therefore it was not till most of the passengers had poured out of the train, that he got to the particular object of his search—a small, very bright-eyed woman, who stood in the door of the carriage she had travelled in, looking out calmly upon the confused scene. She was not grimy, as most of the passengers were, or untidy with the night’s travelling, or hurried and flustered as everybody else was. She stood calmly looking down from the height of the doorway, quite patient and composed. She knew that the Colonel would come: she knew that he was not very good at pushing his way: therefore she possessed her soul in patience, making no fuss, showing no anxiety about her box, calm, commanding the situation. ‘Ah, here you are,’ she said quietly, as he came up to her, stepping lightly down.

‘Have you been waiting long, my dear?’

‘Oh no; it didn’t matter. I knew you would come. I have one box, and I know exactly where it is. Don’t let us hurry. I don’t suppose there is any hurry.’

‘No—perhaps not,—but something very serious, very serious, Elizabeth.’

‘I suppose so, or you would not have sent for me. Wait till we get out of the noise. I could not hear you, so what would be the use? We are going to a hotel, I suppose?’

‘We are going to Bellendean, where I am staying. Don’t be surprised.’

‘But I am surprised, Henry. To the great house you wrote to me about? full of ladies? You forget——’

‘I—forget? No; I forget nothing—all you have done for me, your kindness, your patience.’

The little lady took him by the arm, with a look of alarm in her face. She had already sighted her box, and in the course of her dialogue with her husband, had managed telegraphically to secure a porter and a cab. Evidently she was of the order of women who take care of others, and do not expect to be taken care of. She led him towards the cab, as if a little afraid of his sanity. ‘Where is he to drive to? tell him,’ she said, keeping a close hold to the Colonel’s arm. She held him fast still, when they were seated together, until they had got clear of the tumult of the railway station. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me. It must be something very much out of the ordinary when you talk of my kindness, Henry. My kindness!’ In this Mrs. Hayward resembled old Janet Matheson. It was an offence to her to be praised in that way.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I am more perplexed than I can tell you. You will say I have often been perplexed before, when you saw little cause for it; and this is why I sent for you so suddenly; for if anybody can bring light out of darkness, it is you.’

‘What is it? I am very willing to be sent for, Henry; the only difficulty is going to this house, when you know my principle, and how long I have kept out of all invitations and acquaintances.’

‘You that would shine anywhere!’ said the Colonel, with the water in his eyes, ‘and all for my sake.’

She looked at him again for a moment with a sort of consternation. ‘There you are making a mistake, my dear—for my own. Because I did not choose that there should ever be a remark.’

He put his hand upon her arm with a heavy pressure. ‘Elizabeth, I am dreadfully perplexed; but I think, if I am not wrong, that I have come upon the settlement of all that question; of everything—of what has hung over us. I think, my dear, that all is right—that all has been right from the very beginning.’ He stopped a little, and then added, drawing a long breath, ‘I never had any doubt of it myself.’

A gleam, half of anger, half of fun, darted up into her bright eyes, and flashed like an arrow of light at him, which the good man did not even see, and which ended, on her part, with a quick laugh, in which there was a little amusement, a little excitement, though not very much expectation. ‘You never had any doubt!’ she said. Then she added, with a half sigh of impatience— ‘Tell me all about your new discovery, and we’ll pull it to pieces and see if there’s anything in it. Have we a long drive before us? Is there time to get it all out?’

‘Plenty of time; and, oh, the comfort to know that you are here, and to be able to tell you! I will do what you like best, Elizabeth. I will tell you all the facts, and then you can judge for yourself. I came to Bellendean, you know, nearly a week ago. There has been all sorts of things going on. Great dinners, and all the fine people of the county—and then the tenantry. It is a—a tidy estate—a number of tenants—not small farms like what we are used to, but men, you know, whom really I should have taken for country gentlemen—men paying big rents, and able to make speeches—and—and that sort of thing.’

Mrs. Hayward kept her eyes upon her husband’s face. She was used, it was evident, to long explanations, and expected them, and had learned that patience which comes of necessity. He knew this fact, that she always heard him out, and never interrupted him, as other people did. But what he did not know, was that a thrill of natural impatience, never altogether overcome, was in the veins of the little woman who sat by him, keeping him to the point with her eyes, never interrupting him in any other way. ‘Yes,’ she said, when he paused to take breath: but that was all.

‘Yes; and then, last of all, there was a supper to the labourers and cottagers. Well, no, not exactly last of all, for the last was the children’s entertainment—the school-feast we should have called it, but they don’t say school-feast here—a sort of gathering in the afternoon, you know, with a band and games, and tea in a great tent, and—you know?’

‘Yes, I know what a school-feast is.’

‘Well!’—he drew a long breath now, and settled himself down in a manner which betokened, as his wife by long experience knew, that he was about coming to the point; but she could scarcely believe it after so short a preamble. ‘The first thing that happened was at the labourers’ supper: we were all walking about, and I for my part said a word now and then, while they were cheering Norman Bellendean—that he was a good fellow, you know, and all that—the sort of thing one would say at an affair of the kind, when you do think well of the fellow, you know, and get into the swim——’

‘Yes?’ said Mrs. Hayward again.

‘Well then. I had the very words in my mouth, when at the end of one of the tables, between an old man and an old woman, evidently cottagers, I saw—I declare to you, Elizabeth, my heart leapt into my mouth—I was choked, I could not say another syllable. I saw her as clear as I see you.’

‘Whom did you see, Henry?’

‘Joyce!’ He got out the word with difficulty, and, taking out his handkerchief, fanned himself, puffing forth a hot breath of excitement. His bronzed face took a coppery tone in the heat of his reawakened feelings; and this time Mrs. Hayward did not retain her usual calm. She repeated the cry, ‘Joyce!’ with a tone of mingled astonishment and dismay— ‘Joyce!—then why in the name of heaven did you bring me here?’

‘Stop a minute, stop a minute, Elizabeth: you have not heard all; and how is it possible you could understand? I have described her to you often. It was as if I saw her, exactly as I had seen her last—the same looks, the same age.’

‘You must be dreaming,’ cried his wife, almost with anger. ‘If she is living, according to all you have always said, she must be as old as I am——’

Sudden indignation seemed to burst from her in these words. She grew red, she grew pale. The impatience, so entirely concealed before, showed now in every finger, in every limb, mingled with angry surprise. ‘If you have sent for me, disturbed me, exposed me, only to tell me this at the end—that you saw her—the same age as you saw her last! I hope she has a good reason to give for all the misery she has caused—but the same age!’ Mrs. Hayward gasped, and said no more.

‘Ah,’ said the Colonel, shaking his head, ‘you don’t see, you don’t see! No more did I. I couldn’t say a word—I just stopped and stared—a young lady, clearly a lady, between the two old cottagers—and that look. Well! I came to myself, Elizabeth, and I thought it is just some chance resemblance, and I left the place: but disturbed—disturbed beyond what words could say. I got little sleep—you know how little sleep I get when I am upset.’

‘I know you think so,’ said his wife, in an undertone.

‘But in the morning I felt calm. I said to myself that it must be some chance—— Of course there are people who are like each other all over the world. I knew myself, up in the Punjaub, a man—but that is neither here nor there. However, next day I was quite easy. I thought nothing more of it. And then there came the school-feast I told you of—well, the thing that was the same as a school-feast, though they didn’t call it a school-feast, you know. I was walking about, thinking of nothing in particular, and of course it was daylight, and everything quite clear—when I saw that girl again.’

‘Oh, you call her a girl now!’ Mrs. Hayward said, with that air of resentment which he did not understand. He paused and looked at her with sudden anxiety.

‘You are not feeling poorly, Elizabeth? You are not over-tired? You are not——?’ He could not say angry, it seemed ridiculous; but his attention was roused, and nothing but her health could be the cause, he thought, of her change of tone.

‘Go on,’ she said, ‘go on. I am not feeling anything—but a wish to know what you mean.’

There was a difference in her for all that. And if Elizabeth was going to fail him, what would become of him? He gave her a serious, anxious, inquiring look. Then, in reply to an impatient movement on her part, continued—

‘That’s not all. I went and asked Mrs. Bellendean who she was—though I had scarcely breath to ask. Elizabeth—conceive what I felt when she turned round and called Joyce!’

‘Joyce!—well I suppose you did not expect she had changed her name?’ She said this sharply; then added, with an evident effort, ‘My dear, I beg your pardon. I don’t wonder you were upset. Joyce—and it is a name one never hears. Did she—know you?’

‘Know me? She had never seen me, nor heard of me—how should she know me? And I was left for a long time in a state I can’t describe—wondering whether it could be a relation—God knows what I didn’t think! Everybody knew the girl. She was the schoolmistress, as it turned out, but a lady every inch of her. Everybody liked her, consulted her, clustered about her. I heard nothing but Joyce, Joyce, wherever I turned.’

Mrs. Hayward’s impatience seemed to have died away. She patted his arm with her small hand, saying, ‘Poor Henry!’ with a tone of compunction in her pity. She had done him wrong, or else she had done wrong to Joyce. To Joyce—the very name, though she had heard it so often, was like an arrow quivering in her heart.

‘Elizabeth, all that is as nothing to what I am going to tell you now. I want all your attention. I have waited till you came: I haven’t even tried to think: I have said to myself, Elizabeth will know. Now you must give your mind to it, and tell me what to do. Elizabeth, this is the story I heard. Twenty years ago, just the date I’ve often told you—the date I remember so well—you know, my dear, you know——’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Well!—Just then this girl’s mother came to Bellendean—all by herself, going north, it was thought. She was going to have a baby——’ The old Colonel here fell a trembling, and his wife took his hands and held them in her own, caressing them—two large brown tremulous hands—between her small white nervous ones. He leant back on her shoulder too, which was not half broad enough to support him. ‘The short and the long is this: she had her baby, and she died. And the baby is Joyce—named after her mother; and there are clothes and letters to prove who she was——’

‘My poor Henry! God help you, my dear! You have seen them? it was—she?’