They buried Noakes on the other side of thekopjebehind the house. He had lasted through the winter and early spring, but the season of the rains and heat, when the damp oozed through wooden walls and mud floor, and hung clammily upon sheets and pillows, gave the remnants of his lungs no breathing chance, and Noakes went uncomplainingly to his place.
Joyce laid “the dear lady’s” letter on his breast before nailing down the rough wooden coffin. It seemed as if most of his own heart too were enclosed with the letter, to be put away under the ground for ever and ever. Wilson the farmer, himself, and a Kaffir carried the coffin to the hole that had been dug beneath a blue gum-tree. There Wilson read the burial service of the Church of England.
He was a religious man, when he was not drunk, and set great store by a prayer-book that he had saved from the wreckage of churchgoing times. Over a fat, phlegmatic, brick-red face the sun had spread a glaze, as if to shield the colour from other counteracting climatic influences. His speech was thick and uneducated. At first Joyce had resented his intention as a mockery, and only to avoid unseemly wrangling did he stand there and listen, while the Kaffir squatted by, scratching his limbs in meditative wonder at the incantation. But very soon the solemn beauty of the service appealed to him. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He stooped and threw some handfuls of the red soil reverently into the grave. It seemed not unfitting that the rude voice should give the broken life this rude burial.
The service over, Wilson signed to the Kaffir to fill in the grave, and flicking the perspiration from his forehead, for the sun beat down fiercely, turned to Joyce.
“Come in now and have a drink.”
But Joyce refused and remained there alone, with his head sunk on his breast, watching the Kaffir. When the task was done, he set at the grave-head a great stone he had previously brought there, and slowly went away. His steps took him mechanically back over thekopje. But when he arrived at the prickly-pear hedge on top, the sight of the mean shanty and the Kaffir huts and the straggling fields high with corn and maize, jarred upon his mood. He turned, and descending, struck across the rank, sodden veldt, that stretched eastward in a terrible monotony to the sky-line. There, at any rate, he could be alone, away from the sights and sounds of his dreary toil. A broad gully, half filled with a red, swollen stream, stopped his progress. Half a mile farther up was a bridge. But he was tired and hot and sick at heart. A slab in the shade of an overhanging edge of the ravine met his eye. He clambered down and sat there, looking into the small swirling flood.
A centipede crawled close by. He drew his knife from his belt, cut the creature in two, and flicked the pieces into the water, which swept them instantaneously out of sight. He looked at his knife that had so speedily given death to the insect. Was he much better, more useful? One gash, a leap into the stream, and he would be carried away into eternity. Till yesterday his life had some meaning—the support of the poor forlorn man just buried. Now, what was the good of his living? There was no joy for himself, no service to one of God’s creatures. But after digging his knife idly into the crumbling slab, he returned it to his belt.
Yet what he had dreaded with almost morbid heart-sinking these latter months had come about. He was alone. Noakes had gone—passed away like a shadow, as the burial service hath it. The phrase brought back to his mind a tag from old days of scholarship—[Greek]—“man is the dream of a shadow.” He mused upon the saying. Time was, he remembered, when he had wondered at the strange Greek melancholy underlying even Pindar’s gladness in outward things, thews and sinews and supple forms. Now he understood. What sane man who had watched the world could escape it—this overwhelming sense of the futility of things? To what ends had Noakes’s life been lived? The ceaseless awful toil of grinding out despicable literature at sweated wages; the begetting of a child to an inheritance of misery in the world’s tragedy; the crowning futility of his senseless exile—what purpose had it all served? Save for the pity of it, could it be taken seriously? And he himself dangling his legs over this gully? Verily, the dream of a shadow.
The lines in which the passage occurred came into his head. He repeated them aloud. Such reminiscences of former culture occasionally visited him and smote him with their ironic incongruity. He broke into a mirthless laugh.
The westering sun had already touched the top of the far distant High Veldt when he turned his steps homeward.
Wilson was squirting tobacco juice over a gate and giving directions as to the repairing of one of the sluices, that drained the land into the gully, whence Joyce had come.
“This damn thing will all go to glory soon,” he said.
“We ought to get some pipes,” said Joyce.
“And lay on gas and hot-water,” returned Wilson, sarcastically. “Where’s the money to come from?”
Joyce shrugged his shoulders and continued his way to the house. He did not much care. Things were going badly. Well, things had gone badly with him since he stepped aside from the paths of honest living. He could expect nothing else.
The sight of the rough bed, tenantless now for the first time for many months, was inexpressibly cheerless. The indentations too of the coffin still remained upon it. He smoothed them out mechanically. Then reaching for a thick pile of foolscap that was on the shelf, he sat down with it upon the bed. It was the MS. of the novel which Noakes had copied from the yellow package-paper—all written in his beautiful round hand. He had been a writing master in his youth and retained a professional pride in penmanship. For months this copying had been all he could do.
Joyce read here and there, at last became interested. The work was good. And then for the first time he seriously contemplated mailing it to a publisher. When the Kaffir came in later to help him prepare supper, he had made up his mind.
It was a gloomy book, dealing with the abject side of colonial pioneer work—a tragedy of wasted lives and hopes foredoomed to disappointment. A picture of wrecks and derelicts; men of broken fortunes, breaking hearts, degraded lives; poor fools, penniless, craftless, who had come hither like Noakes, allured by vague visions of El Dorado, to find no place for them in this new rude land where unskilled labour belongs to the natives, who defy competition. He called it “The Wasters.” Almost unconsciously, his intellectual powers had returned to him whilst writing it. The English was pure, the style vigorous and scholarly. And the feeling—he had written it with his heart’s blood. Before he went to sleep that night, he appended to it an alternative title, “The Dream of a Shadow.”
In the course of time the manuscript was despatched and Joyce settled down to many months’ forgetfulness of it, and to humdrum loneliness and labour. Time went quickly, for he took no heed of its flight, having nothing to hope for. He tried to begin another book, but the stimulus of Noakes’s appreciation was gone and he sank again into intellectual apathy. In the long evenings he taught a Kaffir boy to read and write, while Wilson boozed away the profits of the farm. At the best of times there was little sympathy between the two men. Often mutual antipathy manifested itself actively under a thin disguise. The farmer despised Joyce for a broken-down gentleman unacquainted with any handicraft or the principles of farming, and Joyce considered his partner a dull sot, who was letting the farm go to rack and ruin. Still, a habit of life is a strange help in living. Often Joyce told himself that he must sell out and try his luck elsewhere. But there was no particular reason for bringing matters to a crisis on one day more than on another. So the months wore on.
The work of the harvest knocked him up. He got ague and lay in bed for three weeks. Wilson cursed the day he ever took him into the place; and had it not been for the humaneness of their next neighbour, who farmed more healthy ground some forty miles away, towards the High Veldt, and carried Joyce off thither one day in an ox-waggon, he might have speedily followed Noakes. He returned to the farm cured but terribly gaunt. The lines had deepened in his face, over which the beard grew straggling, accentuating the hollows of his cheeks. His hands had whitened and thinned during his illness. Wilson sniffed contemptuously at them and looked at his own huge glazed and freckled paw.
Winter set in. There was plenty to do—ricks to thatch, buildings to repair, fields to irrigate. Joyce did not spare himself. Work, if joyless, was at least an anodyne. It brought on prostrating fatigue, which in its turn brought long heavy hours of sleep. In that way it was as good as adulterated whisky.
Some men thrive physically and morally in the wilds. The incessant conflict with the elemental forces of nature braces nerves and strengthens the will. And these are exclusive of such as find satisfaction of primitive instincts only in uncivilised lands—such as are a reversion to the savage type, and, in the forest or the desert, live a life truer to their natures than amid the decencies of civilisation. But the men who thrive are physically and morally adapted to the struggle—men of energy, ambition, daring, who see in it a means towards the yet ungained or forfeited place in civilisation. The pioneer work of new colonies is done by them, and they generally gain their reward. Joyce had found all the successful men in South Africa belonging to this type. He had looked at Noakes and himself and groaned inwardly. They were doomed to perish, it seemed, by natural selection. In the case of Noakes the foreboding had been fulfilled. Would it be so with himself? His unfitness for his environment weighed heavier day by day on his mind: all the more since the loss of the companionship that had cheered him in dark hours. A habit of brooding silence fell upon him. He spoke as little as in those awful years of prison. And as his life grew lonelier and more self-centred, softer memories faded, and those chiefly remained that had branded themselves in his brain. The gaol came back to his dreams. Once, in the shed where he had taken up his abode since the beginning of spring, he awoke in a sweating terror. The disposition of his bed as regards the window and the height of the latter from the ground corresponded with the arrangements of his cell. The nightmare held him paralysed. And this in some form or the other repeated itself at intervals, so that he was forced to rearrange his room.
He had shifted his quarters owing to the arrival of a fat Boer woman who claimed connubial relations with Wilson. The suggestion had proceeded from himself from motives of delicacy and good-nature. At first he had welcomed her in spite of unprepossessing manners and appearance, and tried to win her esteem by little acts of civility. But the lady drank; and one day Wilson, finding her alone in Joyce’s hut, whither she had come to steal whisky, grew unreasonably jealous and blacked both her eyes. After which occurrence Joyce and she let each other severely alone. He relapsed into his sombre apathy.
The life was killing him, brutalizing him. He lost even interest in the Kaffir boy’s education, which had not been without its light side of amusement. Hour after hour he would sit, on summer nights, on the doorstep of his shed, pipe in mouth, elbows on knees, thinking of nothing, his mind a dull blank. Now and then he thought of Yvonne, but only in a vague, far-off way. He never wrote or felt urged to write. What was the good? And he had received no letter from Yvonne since the one that had accompanied her line to Noakes. Once, several months afterwards, one of the ox-waggons from the town had been overturned in a swollen river, and many stores including the mail had been swept away. The driver told him there had been letters for him. Possibly one from Yvonne. At the time he regretted it, but his morbid indifferentism had already begun to darken his mind. He laid conjecture dully aside. The weeks and months passed and, with all his other longings for sweeter things, the desire for her letters died. And so the last strand wore through of the last thread that bound him to England.
As for the novel, he had long since ceased to concern himself about its fate. Probably it had been lost in transit, either going or returning. The yellow sheets on which he had written the first draft lay on the mud floor in the corner of his hut and rotted and grew mildewed with the damp.
At last, one day, like a bolt from the blue, came the publishers’ letter, offering alternative terms for the book, the usual royalty the firm paid to unknown authors, or eighty pounds down for the copyright, to be paid on publication. It aroused him, with a shock, from his torpor. That night he could not sleep. He got up and wandered about the veldt through the dewy grasses, under the bright African starlight, his veins alive with a new excitement. Perhaps he had found a vocation—one to bring him money, congenial work, the right at last to take his forfeited place in a civilised land. He returned to the house at daybreak, worn out with fatigue, but throbbing with wild schemes for the future. And the following evening, as soon as the toil of the day was over, he lit his small, smoking lamp, and sat down in feverish haste to begin a new story, the scheme of which he had half-heartedly worked out soon after Noakes’s death. The copyright of the other he sold for the eighty pounds.
And then gradually the longing for England grew more insistent, until at last it took the form of a settled determination. One day he saddled a rough farm-pony and rode to the good Samaritan who had taken him in during his illness. The farmer, a hard-headed Scotchman, shook his head dubiously when Joyce unfolded his plan.
“Stick to the farm and buy Wilson out. You ’ll mak’ more money, and then you can retire in a few years.”
“The profits are nearly swallowed up in improvements and transit,” said Joyce. “It is a bare subsistence.”
“That’s because you don’t go the right way to work. If I had the land, I’d make it pay soon enough.”
“You are a practical farmer, and I am not,” said Joyce. “Even if I desired to gain experience, it is precious little I could gain with Wilson—and I long for home again.”
“That’s all very well—but if you fail with your writing? I have heard it is a precarious trade.”
“I’m used to failure,” replied Joyce. “That’s what I came into the world for. You can’t say that I am a conspicuous success as a colonist.”
“Sell out from Wilson, and come here,” said the farmer, “on the metayer system. I will put you up to a few things.”
Joyce looked round him; they were sitting on the verandah of the nicely-built house. Everything had the trim appearance of scientific English farming—the outbuildings solid and clean, the fields high with grain, the dams in perfect repair, the yard spick and span. A flower garden lay beneath him. A well-trimmed vine covered the lattice-work of the verandah. All was a striking contrast to his own ramshackle, neglected surroundings. A month ago he would have leaped at the offer. But now he declined it. He distrusted himself, his power of content. If he once put his hand to the plough, he would not be able to draw back. And he held ploughs in cordial detestation. He rode back, having thanked his friend and obtained his consent to act as arbiter, if need were, between Wilson and himself.
A day or two later, he took advantage of a sober and quasi-friendly moment, to announce his intention to Wilson, who listened to him stolidly.
“I hope my sudden withdrawal won’t cause you inconvenience,” said he, politely. “If it does—”
“My good friend,” replied Wilson, “I am only too damn glad to get rid of you.”
“Then if you ’ll give me a lump sum down for my share, and lend me a team, I ’ll leave the infernal place this afternoon,” said Joyce, nettled.
Wilson went into the house and came out with a roll of greasy notes.
“There,” he said, “will that satisfy you? I ’ve been wanting to part company for a long time, and I ’ve kept ’em by me.”
Joyce counted the notes, and to his surprise found the sum exceeded that which he himself calculated to be his due. After half an hour’s joint examination of their roughly-kept accounts, he found that Wilson was right.
“You are an honest man,” he said with a smile. “It is a pity you have so many other failings.”
“I can keep myself out of quod, at any rate,” replied Wilson, “which is more than some people can say.”
The retort was like a blow in the face. Joyce staggered under it.
“Another time don’t be so devilish smart with your tongue,” said Wilson. “I ain’t the one to cast a man’s misfortunes in his teeth, but, all the same, it’s best for a man like you to lie low.”
“What the devil are you talking of?” said Joyce, fiercely.
“What’s the good of bluff? You’ve given yourself away heaps of times.”
“I insist upon knowing what you mean,” said Joyce.
How could this man have learned his history? Noakes could not have betrayed him. For the honour of his dead comrade he could not let the matter drop. Wilson tilted back his chair and squirted a stream of tobacco-juice over the floor, which aroused the indignation of the Boer woman, who was sitting on some sacks near the door, peeling potatoes. Her lord was a beastly Englander, and a great many other undesirable things. Wilson, who had not yet laced his heavy boots, took one off to throw at her head, but Joyce caught his arm.
“What a brute you are!” he said angrily.
Wilson broke into a laugh.
“You’d better thank Mr. Joyce for saving your beauty from being damaged,” he said, pulling on the boot again.
“Now,” said Joyce, as soon as domestic peace was restored, “tell me what you meant just now.”
Wilson rose, went to the door and ostentatiously spat over the Boer woman’s head; then he turned round to Joyce:—
“Look here,” he said, “I have my hands full enough of quarrelling as it is. You ’d better trek off with that waggon and a couple of niggers. And I ’ll give you a piece of advice. When next you shake down alongside of a man to sleep, just keep from blabbing all your private affairs to him. And that’s why I wanted to be shut of you. We can do without your kind hereabouts. No wonder you were surprised to find me honest.”
“I suppose I must beg your pardon,” said Joyce humiliated. “I had no right to speak to you as I did.”
“If you had held your tongue, I should have held mine, as I have done for the last year and a half,” replied Wilson.
A few hours later Joyce stood up in the ox-waggon and looked back at the detested place that had so long been his home. It was just a speck in the midst of the cheerless plain under the irregular mound, thekopje, behind which poor Noakes lay buried. He drew an envelope from his pocket and looked at the blade of grass he had picked from the grave. Ashamed of his sentimentality, he twirled it between his fingers, undecided whether to throw it away or not He ended by replacing it in his pocket. After all, it symbolised a pure, tender feeling, and he was not carrying away with him too many.
He smoked in silence through the night, under the clear stars. He was sore at heart, deeply humiliated. The buoyancy of new hopes which his little literary success had occasioned during the last few weeks, had gone. The sense of the ineffaceable stain overpowered him. It was a fatality. Go where he would, he could not hide it from the knowledge of men. In his own land, accusing fingers pointed to it at street corners. In the uttermost ends of the earth he himself proclaimed it aloud.
To have lived for months and months under the silent contempt of this drunken woman-beating brute, to have been watched narrowly in all his business dealings—as he knew, from Wilson’s nature, must have been the case—to have been forced to stand helpless, degraded before this sot, while he vaunted his one virtue, honesty—it was gall and wormwood and all things bitter.
The Southern Cross flashed down from the myriad stars in its startling splendour. The moon shone bright over the vast silent plain, limitless, broken only by the undulating mounds and the infinitely stretching clumps of karroo bushes. The camp-fire, just replenished with damp twigs and shrubs, burned sulkily and the smoke ascended in spirals into the clear air. The hooded waggon depended helplessly on its shafts. The Kaffirs, wrapped in blankets, slept beneath. The oxen, outspanned some distance off, chewed the cud in sharp, rhythmic munches. The universe was still—awfully still. All gave the sense of the littleness of man and the immensity of space.
In a strange, imperious need of expansion, Joyce threw himself down on the wet earth and clutched the grasses and cried aloud:—
“Oh, God! I have suffered enough for my sin. Take this stain and degradation from my soul.”
After a while he arose, ashamed of his weakness, the futility of his appeal. Relighting his pipe, he clambered into the waggon, and sitting on the floor against the back, watched the portion of starry sky framed by the hood, until the first streaks of dawn announced the hour for inspanning the oxen again and continuing his journey.
For all the change about him and within him, the hand of time might have been put back four years, and the tender might have been nearing the outward bound ship, instead of the Southampton landing-stage. It was the same raw mizzling rain as when he had crossed the harbour four years before; the same wet, shivering crowd of second-class passengers, with the water streaming from waterproofs, umbrellas and hand luggage on to the sloppy deck. In his heart was the same mingling of anxiety and apathy, the same ineradicable sense of pariahdom. He had thought that the sight of England once more would have brought him a throb of gladness. It only intensified his depressing fears for the future.
The circumstances reproduced themselves with startling actuality. One of the men in charge of the tender had a great ugly seam across his face. Joyce remembered having seen him before, in just the same attitude, with a coil of rope in his hand. Had he not awakened from a minute’s dream that had covered an illusory four years of his life? He looked around, almost expecting to see Noakes, in his ridiculous curly silk hat and old frieze overcoat.
The tender came alongside the landing-stage, and he stepped ashore with the dripping crowd. The flurry of the Custom House and the transport of his meagre baggage to the railway station broke the illusion. He was in England at last, and it seemed a strange country. During the journey to London, he had the companionship of some of his fellow-travellers. At Waterloo they parted. Then he felt terribly lonely.
“Cab, sir?” asked a porter.
He was standing over his luggage, somewhat lost amid the bustle and tumult of the station. It was the late afternoon, and the platforms were hurrying with suburban passengers. The incessant movement through the blue glare of the electric light dazed his unaccustomed eyes. He declined the porter’s offer. Cabs were a luxury he could ill afford. Besides, one meagre Gladstone bag contained his whole possessions, and he could easily carry it. Leaving the station, he took an omnibus for Victoria, with the idea of seeking his old Pimlico lodgings. If he could not be taken in there, it would not be difficult to find a room in the neighbourhood. Still confused by the sudden transition to the midst of the roar of London, he peered through the glass sides at the wet pavements glistening in the gaslight, the shop fronts, the eternal hurrying by of vague forms, and the dash past of vehicles. From Westminster Bridge the face of Big Ben greeted him. He stared at it stupidly as long as he could see it. The light on the Clock Tower announced that the House was sitting. It was all curiously familiar, and yet he felt like an alien. There was not a soul in London to welcome his home-coming. His heart sank with the sense of loneliness. He was as infinitesimal and as isolated a unit in this seething, swarming ant-hill of humanity as amid the starry solitudes of the African veldt.
As chance willed it, he found the house in Pimlico in the same hands as before, and his old room in the attics vacant. Nothing had altered, except that it looked smaller and four years shabbier. The same discoloured blind hung before the window, the same fly-blown texts adorned the walls. The same acrid smell of dust and ashes and earth and the unaired end of all human things met his nostrils. When he went to sleep that night, it seemed incredible that four years should have passed since he had last lain there.
In a day or two the strangeness wore off. London is in a Londoner’s blood. No matter how long his exile, life there comes to him as naturally as swimming does to a swimmer after years of non-practice. He remembered how he had yearned for its sights and sounds and stimulating movement. Now they were his again, and he took a measure of content. His first care was to provide himself with some clothes; his next, to visit the publishers. A cordial reception gratified him. The book was bound to have some success. The manuscript was in the printer’s hands. Publication was announced for the spring. Joyce went home lighter-hearted after the interview. It was delightful to be treated as an intellectual man once more. His prospects too were not so very gloomy. With the little capital he had brought back from South Africa and the £80 for his book, he saw himself saved from starvation for two years, if he lived very, very humbly on a little over a pound a week. Meanwhile he could earn something by occasional odds and ends of writing, and also complete his second novel. He arranged his scheme of life as he walked along. He would leave his lodging punctually at a certain hour after breakfast, walk to the British Museum, write all day in the Reading Room, dine, walk home, and write or read in the evenings until it was time for bed.
Thus, as ever, his sensitive nature reflected the little ray of hope. But, as usual, it was soon eclipsed by the darkening shadow in his soul, although he set to work with dogged determination. The prospect of life-long solitude appalled him. It was the terrible part of his never-ending punishment. To a nature like his, companionship and sympathy are essentials of development. Without them it withers like a parched plant And yet he dreaded making new acquaintances, on account of the shame that would inevitably follow if his identity and history leaked out He accepted loneliness as his portion. There were only two people in England whom, knowing his story, he could trust to shake him by the hand—Yvonne and the actor McKay. The latter was necessarily lost in the obscurities of his roving profession. Yvonne was married to his cousin, moving in the sphere to which beyond all others he was rigorously denied access. One day, however, when the memory of her sweet kind face came back to him, and he yearned for its bright sympathy, he wrote to her at Fulminster.
He felt somewhat cheered after he had despatched the letter. And as comfortings often come in pairs, he was further cheered by seeing in an evening paper which he bought from a stand near the pillar-box, a general article he had sent up two or three days before. It was an encouraging beginning. At any rate, London streets were more stimulating to his intellectual powers than the dull, deadening life of the African farm. He made many good resolutions during these first days in London. He would win back his lost scholarship, begin to form a humble library. On his way home he bought out of a fourpenny box an old copy of Plato’s “Republic.” He sat up half the night reading it.
To his surprise and disappointment, instead of a letter coming from Yvonne, his own was returned through the Dead Letter Office. “Left Fulminster two years ago—present address unknown.” He was puzzled. At the Museum he consulted the Clergy List for the year. According to it, Canon Chisely was still Rector of Fulminster. What had happened to Yvonne?
“It must be some silly mistake,” he said to himself. He wrote again; but with the same result. He thought of writing to Everard, but reflected that he too must be ignorant of Yvonne’s address; also that in any case, perhaps, he would disregard his letter. There was some mystery. Both his affection for Yvonne and the novelty of a curiosity outside himself spurred his interest. A day or two afterwards, he noticed on a hoarding an advertisement of cheap excursion trains to the great provincial town next to Fulminster. The journey would be very inexpensive. Why should he not go down and pick up what information he could? The idea of the little excitement pleased him.
He started the next morning at a very early hour, and arrived at Fulminster about noon. The place was well known to him. He had often visited his cousin in days gone by.
Many bitter-sweet associations crowded upon him as he walked up from the station through the streets.
He went on, without any definite idea as to his course of action. Almost mechanically he bent his steps toward the old abbey, whose spire rose above the housetops, at the end of the High Street. Soon the great mass towered above him. He stood for a while looking upwards at the wealth of tracery, and crocket, and pinnacle, feeling its beauty, and then wandered idly round. At last his eye fell upon a notice on the board by the vestry door. It was signed “J. Abdy, Rector”; other notices bore the same signature. This was a new surprise. Wondering what had occurred, he left the Abbey Close and proceeded round the familiar path to the front door of the Rectory. He would take the bull by the horns.
“Is the Rector in?” he asked the servant who opened to him.
“Yes, sir.”
“Could I see him for a moment?”
“What name, sir?”
“Chisely,” said Joyce, instinctively, then he coloured. It was odd that he should have been taken off his guard.
The servant showed him into the library. A glance proved that Everard no longer inhabited it. No trace of the dilettante was visible in its homely comfort. Presently the door opened, and the Rector, a kindly grey-bearded man, entered the room. Joyce made his apology for intrusion.
“I came down expecting to find Canon Chisely. I am a distant relation of his, not long come from abroad.”
“I fear you have come on a vain errand,” said the Rector with a smile. “He took over his diocese in New Zealand some months ago.”
“His diocese?” repeated Joyce.
“Dear me, have n’t you heard? Canon Chisely accepted the bishopric of Taroofa at the beginning of the year.”
“How very extraordinary!” said Joyce, nonplussed. But the other took his remark literally.
“Yes, it is singular. Most people think he has thrown himself away. A very able man, you know—quite young. He might have had an English bishopric if he had waited.”
“And Mrs. Chisely?” asked Joyce, interrogatively.
The Rector raised a deprecative hand.
“That’s where the whole trouble came in, apparently. It weighed on his mind—a very proud man. He took the first chance that offered.”
“Pardon my questioning you,” said Joyce, “but I am quite in the dark as to what you are referring to. The last letter, two years back, that I received from Mrs. Chisely was dated from here. She was happily married and all that. I am an old friend of hers. What has happened?”
“I can only repeat the gossip, Mr. Chisely. It seems that just about then some misfortune arose—a first husband of Mrs. Chisely’s, supposed dead, turned up, and so there was a separation.”
“And where is Mrs. Chisely now?”
“That’s more than I can say. A lady—a great friend of mine—also I believe a connexion of your own—”
“Mrs. Winstanley?”
“The same. I see you know her. She may be able to inform you. I believe she has said authoritatively that the late Mrs. Chisely went back to her former husband.”
“That I can’t believe,” said Joyce, indignantly.
“I can only give you what I hear,” said the Rector, placidly. “I know Bishop Chisely went to Paris, where they were supposed to be, before starting for New Zealand. But Mrs. Winstanley will tell you.”
“I think I know enough,” said Joyce, hurriedly, and rising from his chair. “I am greatly indebted to you for your kindness, Mr. Abdy.”
“Can I offer you some lunch? It will be on the table in a moment.”
Joyce declined, pleaded a train. He would have liked to sit with this kind gossipy old man, but he could not accept such hospitality under false pretences. Perhaps it was well that he acted thus, for later in the afternoon the Rector described his visitor to Mrs. Winstanley. She listened for some time, and at last broke out:—
“Why, my dear Mr. Abdy, it could have been no one else than the convict cousin! He must have come to get money out of Everard.”
“Dear me,” said Mr. Abdy, arresting his hand in a downward stroke of his beard. “Who would have thought it? He seemed such a gentlemanly fellow. And I asked him to lunch!”
“I ’ll write and put the dear Bishop on his guard,” said Mr. Winstanley, virtuously.
Meanwhile, Joyce went away full of wonder and pity. It was an amazing story. Poor Yvonne! He could not believe that she had returned to the scamp of a first husband. The thought was repulsive. At any rate communication between Everard and Yvonne seemed to have been cut off. He was not very sorry for Everard.
“A little trouble will do him good,” he muttered to himself. And he found a certain grim amusement in the contemplation of the chastened Bishop, his cousin. But he felt a great concern for poor fragile little Yvonne cast adrift again upon the world. “I will find out what has become of her, at any rate,” he said, digging his stick into the road.
The natural course was to write to Miss Geraldine Vicary, whose address he fortunately remembered. If she had lost count of Yvonne, he would set to work to find her some other way. He felt as eager now to recover Yvonne’s friendship as he had been apathetic before. To lose no time, while waiting for the early return excursion train, he went into a post-office and wrote and despatched his letter.
The following morning he resumed his newly schemed out life of literary work. Three days passed and no reply came from Miss Vicary. On the fourth morning he received a black-edged envelope bearing the Swansea postmark. He opened it and read:—
Dear Sir,—Your letter to Miss Geraldine Vicary was,according to instructions, forwarded to me. I regret toinform you that my poor sister died three weeks ago, ofdiphtheria. She caught the disease whilst nursing the ladyconcerning whom, I believe, you inquire. Madame Latour hadbeen living with her for the past two years. Shortly aftermy poor sister’s death, Madame Latour was removed to St.Mary’s Hospital, where, as far as I know, she still liesvery ill.Trusting this sad information may be of service to you,I am yours faithfully,Henrietta Dasent.
Joyce hurried through his dressing, bolted his breakfast, and rushed out into the street, with one idea in his head. Yvonne alone and uncared for, dying in a London hospital—it was incredible. The apparent heartlessness of the woman who wrote, her calm disclaimer of all interest in her dead sister’s dying friend, made his blood boil. A London hospital—an open common ward, with medical students chattering round—it was a cruel place for the sweet delicate woman he remembered as Yvonne. Where were all her friends?
In the dismay, excitement, and indignation of the moment, he forgot his poverty, and jumped into the first hansom-cab he saw.
“St. Mary’s Hospital, quick!”
And the cabman, thinking it a matter of life and death, went at a breakneck pace.
Seeing Yvonne at that time of the morning was out of the question. But he penetrated to the landing outside the ward and had a few words with the sister in charge. She was a fresh, pleasant-faced woman, who, having fallen in love with Yvonne, felt kindly disposed toward her friends.
Madame Latour was slowly recovering. One of the most lingering of the sequelae of diphtheria, diphtheritic paralysis, had set in. It was her larynx and left arm that were affected. At present she was suffering from general weakness. It would be some time yet before she could be moved.
“Do you think I could see her?” asked Joyce—“that is to say, if she would care about it.”
“Certainly,” replied the sister. “It would probably do her good. To-day is a visiting day—after two o’clock.”
“I wonder whether she would like it,” said Joyce, questioningly.
“I will take her a message,” said the sister.
He scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper and handed it to her. She retired and presently returned, smiling.
“She will be delighted. I have not seen her look like that since she has been here. ‘Tell him it will be a joy to see him.’ Those were her words.”
Joyce thanked her warmly, rased his hat, and departed. It was a fine crisp morning. The message seemed to bring a breath of something sweet into the air. He walked along almost buoyantly in spite of the sad plight of Yvonne. The appalling weight of loneliness was lifted from his shoulders. The sight of him would be a joy to one living creature. It was a new conception, and it winged his feet.
On the stroke of two the great doors of the ward opened, and he entered with a group of visitors, chiefly women of the poorer classes, some carrying babies. It was bewildering at first—the long double row of beds, each with its pale, wistful woman’s face. Some of the patients were sitting up, with shawls or wraps around them; the greater number lay back on their pillows, turning eyes of languid interest towards the visitors. Two beds curtained round broke the uniformity of the two white lines of bedsteads. At the end of the ward, a great open fireplace, with glowing blocks of coal, struck a note of cheerfulness in the grey November light, that streamed through the series of high windows. Joyce felt a man’s shyness in walking among these strange sick women, and looked helplessly down the ward from the doorway, to try to discover Yvonne. The sister came to his help from a neighbouring bedside.
“At the very end. The last bed on the left.”
Joyce walked down the druggetted aisle, and as soon as he saw her and knew himself to be recognised, he quickened his pace.
There she was, half sitting in the bed, propped up by pillows, her wavy dark hair like a nimbus around her pale face. In honour of the visit she had done up her hair, with infinite difficulty, poor child, and put on a pretty white dressing-jacket tied with knots of crimson ribbon. His heart was smitten with pity. She was so changed, so wasted. Her delicate features were pinched, her childlike lips blanched. Only the old Yvonne’s eyes remained—the great, pathetic, winning dark eyes. They gave him glad and grateful welcome.
“Yvonne.”
It was all he could find in his head to say as he pressed her little thin hand.
“How good of you to come to see me,” she said.
Joyce was unprepared. It was not Yvonne’s voice—once as sweet in speech as in singing; but a toneless, distressed sound devoid of quality, like that of a cracked silver bell. He could not conceal the shadow of dismay on his face. She was quick to note it.
“I am afraid I speak like a wicked old raven,” she said with a smile; “but you mustn’t mind.”
“I can’t tell you how grieved I am to see you like this,” he said, sitting down by the bedside. “You must have been very ill. Poor Yvonne.”
“Yes. Awfully ill. You would have been quite sorry to see how ill I was. Do you mind moving your chair further down, so that I can look at you? I can’t turn my head, you know. Is n’t it silly not to be able to turn one’s head?”
“You must make haste and get well,” he said, after he had complied with her request “I’m afraid I can’t,” she said, looking at him wistfully. “They all say it’s going to be a long, long business. But I want to know how you came here—to England, I mean,” she added more brightly, after a pause. “It was such a startling surprise when Sister brought me your note this morning. Why have you left Africa? I ’ve been dying to know all day.”
Joyce sketched rapidly the events that had led him back—the death of Noakes, the year of wretched apathy, the purchase of his book by the publishers, the craving for civilisation.
“So I sold out and came home,” he concluded. “I have been back a fortnight.”
“You must have been very sad at losing your friend,” said Yvonne. “Death is an awful, awful thing. Have you ever thought of it? A person is living and feeling, like you and me, to-day—and to-morrow—gone—out of the world—for ever and ever.”
Her voice sank to a whisper and she looked at him out of great, awe-stricken eyes.
“I have lost my dear friend too—just lately. Did you know?”
“Yes,” he replied gently. “I wrote to her for your address and her sister answered the letter, telling me of her death.”
“Wasn’t it terrible? And she so bright and brave and strong. I never loved anybody as I loved her. It was only after she was buried that I knew—and then I wished I had died instead—I who am no good to any one at all. And I am alive. Isn’t it an awful mystery?”
The man’s eyes fell for a moment beneath the intense, child-like earnestness of hers. Silence fell upon them. He stretched out his arm and took her hand that rested outside the coverlet. A man is often instinctively driven to express his sympathy by touch, where a woman would find words.
After a while she withdrew her hand gently, as if to break the current of thoughts.
“I was wondering why you looked different,” she said. “You have grown a beard.”
“Yes,” he said, with a sudden laugh—the transition was so abrupt. “I was too slack to shave in South Africa. Don’t you like it?”
“Oh, not at all. It spoils you.”
“I will cut it off at once.”
“Not just to please me?”
“Just to please you. It will be a new sensation.”
“To have it off?”
“No—to please you, Yvonne.”
Her eyes smiled gratefully at him.
“Tell me when I must go,” he said, after a while. “I must n’t tire you. And you may have other visitors.”
“Don’t go yet. No one else will come.”
“How do you know?”
“You are the only person who has been to see me since I was brought here,” she replied sadly.
Joyce looked at her for a moment incredulously.
“Do you mean to say you have been quite alone here, among strangers, all these weeks?”
“Yes,” she said. “But Sister is kind to me, and they allow me all sorts of little indulgences.”
“But you should be among loving friends, Yvonne,” said Joyce.
“I have so few. And I have told no one that I am here. I couldn’t. Besides, whom could I tell?”
Joyce could not understand. It was so strange for Yvonne to be friendless. Delicacy forbade him to question further.
“I have had a lot of trouble, you know,” she said. “It has been nearly all trouble for over two years. I wrote and told you what had happened. Then I went to live with Geraldine Vicary, and began to sing again. But I was always being laid up with my throat and I never knew whether I could fulfil an engagement when I made it—so I didn’t get on as I used to. People won’t employ you if they fear you may have to throw them over at the last moment, will they? And Geraldine used to keep me in a great deal, for fear I should hurt my voice. But, you see, I had to make some money. So I went out and sang just before this illness, when I ought not, and my throat became inflamed and I caught another cold, and it got worse and worse until diphtheria came on. Then poor Dina caught it and there was no one to nurse me. You could n’t expect her sister, who did n’t know me, to do much, could you? And then Dina was just giving up her flat, and of course I couldn’t keep it on—so the doctor thought I had better come here. ‘J’y suis, j’y reste. It is not a gay little story, is it?”
“It is a heart-rending story altogether,” said Joyce, with a concerned puckering of the forehead. “I wish I could do something to brighten you, Yvonne.”
“You have done so,” she said with a smile, “by coming to see me. How good of you to remember—and, you know, by your not writing, I thought you had quite forgotten.”
“Forgive me, Yvonne—a kind of dull brutishness came over me—I couldn’t.”
“And I could n’t either, after the one I wrote—about my trouble—at Fulminster. You never answered it, and I thought—It was n’t because you despised me, was it?”
“I did n’t get the letter, Yvonne,” he said, unable to disregard this second reference as he had done the first. “It must have been the one I heard was lost. I will explain afterwards. I thought you were happy at Fulminster—so why should I inflict my eternal grumblings on you?”
“Then don’t you know what has happened?” asked Yvonne, with wider eyes and a little quiver of the lip.
“I learned it a few days ago. I went to Fulminster to find you, as my letters were returned to me through the Post Office. I was determined to discover you, but I never dreamed of finding you here. I came as soon I got the news this morning.”
“I have one friend left,” said Yvonne.
“And you shall always have him, if you will,” said Joyce. “You are the only one he has.”
“Poor fellow,” said Yvonne.
Though the sweet voice was broken and hard, there was the same tender pity in the words as when she had uttered them four years back, on their first re-meeting.
“We are two lonesome bodies, are n’t we?” she added.
“We ’ll do our best to comfort each other,” said Joyce.
The visiting hour was nearly at an end, and the ward was growing silent again. The sister came down the aisle and stood by Yvonne’s bed and smoothed her pillows.
“You have had quite enough talking for one day,” she said pleasantly. “It has given you quite a colour—but we mustn’t overdo it.”
Joyce rose to take his leave.
“I may come again, the next time?” he asked.
“Would you?” said Yvonne, with an eager look.
“I would come to-morrow—every day, if they would let me,” he said with conviction.
He shook hands with her and walked away. At the end of the ward he turned, looked back and saw the mass of black against the white pillow and the specks of crimson that showed Yvonne. He hated leaving her among strangers and the rough comforts of an open ward in a hospital. An odd feeling of personal responsibility was mingled with his resentment against the freaks of fortune—an irrational sense of mean-spiritedness in letting her lie there.
He went back to his work, cheered and strengthened within; but his outlook on life was darkened by one more shadow of the inexorable cruelty of fate. That he should have suffered—well and good. It was a penalty he was paying. But Yvonne, the sweetest, innocentest soul alive—why should her head be brought low? And thus the pages that he wrote grew darker by the shadow.
A fortnight passed, during which he saw her as often as the visiting hours allowed. He brought her whatever little trifles he could afford, and she accepted them with the eager gratification of a child. There was a secondhand bookshop he had come across during his late wanderings, in Upper Street, Islington, which had a speciality in cheap, tattered French novels. Thither he tramped one day in order to gratify a desire she had expressed, and spent an hour turning over the stock. It seemed hard not to be able to go into a West End shop and order the newest Paris fiction; but a poor devil must do as best he can and be cheerful. Yvonne’s delight repaid him for wounded pride. She dipped into them all, while he was there, turning to the last page to see how they ended. And then the rakish air their soiled yellow covers gave to the bed, as they sprawled upon it, amused them both.
They talked of many things. Yvonne interested herself in the patients and gossiped about their progress and their eccentricities. Often her artless candour and innate love of laughter gave him details unfit perhaps for ears masculine. Then she would catch herself up, while a faint tinge of colour came into her cheek, and with still smiling eyes, say:
“I always forget that you’re a man. You ought to remind me.”
Joyce, for his part, strove to amuse her with whatever gleams of brightness he could find in his colonial adventures. Noakes grew to be the hero of an Arthurian cycle. As for the fat Boer woman, he was surprised at the amount of grim humour he extracted from her doings.
“I hope you are going to put it in a book,” Yvonne would say, with her little air of wisdom. “You must n’t waste it all upon me.”
And Joyce, by thus disintegrating incidents from his confused mass of impressions, found the talks of material benefit as well as a delight. For a delight they were; the more so, because Yvonne’s gladness at his visits was so obviously genuine and spontaneous. She told him that she counted the hours between them. And Yvonne scarcely exaggerated. His visits were bright spots in a sorrowful, fear-haunted time. When he came, she summoned up all her strength and courage so as to make the hour pass pleasantly. Men do not like crying, complaining women, thought poor Yvonne. Unless she was bright for him, he might grow tired of coming, and then she would be lonelier than before. So Yvonne told him little of the anxieties that lay like a dead weight upon her poor little soul and kept her awake at nights, amid the moans of the sleeping women, that sounded faint and ghostly in the dim ward.
Her patient acceptance of her lot won Joyce’s admiration. But of her real position he had no idea. The gentleman in him that had survived his shame and degradation forbade him to pry into her private affairs. Besides, he took it for granted that when she recovered, she would live by herself again, in the old way, and that her drawing-room would be a haven of rest to him for indefinite years. The question of nursing alone, he thought, and her incomprehensible friendlessness, had brought her to the hospital. He longed for her to leave it.
One day, however, he found her lying down in bed, her hair in dark loose masses over the pillow, her face turned away towards the sister who was sitting by her side. The latter rose on seeing him, and hurried forward to meet him in the aisle.
“Be as kind as you can to her,” she said; “she is in great trouble to-day, poor little thing.”
“What is the matter?” asked Joyce, anxiously.
“Let her speak for herself. I was to send you away when you came. She was not fit to see you, she said. But I am sure it will comfort her to talk to a friend.”
The sister moved away, and Joyce approached Yvonne’s bedside with quick steps. Something serious must have happened.
Yvonne rased a wan, desolate face and eyes heavy with crying, and put out her hand timidly from beneath the bedclothes. He retained it, as he sat down upon the chair just vacated by the sister. The few little cakes he had brought her he placed on the stand near by. She looked too woe-begone for cakes.
“I have come in spite of your message,” he said. “Why did you want to send me away?”
“I am too miserable,” murmured Yvonne, in her broken voice.
“What has happened to make you miserable?” he asked very softly. “Tell me, if it is anything I can hear.”
“It’s my voice that has gone,” cried Yvonne in a sob. “They told me this morning—the doctor brought a throat specialist—I shall never be able to sing again—never.”
Before this sudden calamity the man was powerless for comfort.
“My poor little woman!” he said.
“It is worse than losing a limb,” moaned Yvonne. “I have been dreading it—hoping against hope all along. I wished I had died instead of Dina. I wish I could die now.” The tears came again. She drew away her hand and dabbed her eyes with a miserable little wet rag of a handkerchief.
“Don’t,” said Joyce, helplessly. “If you give way you will make yourself worse. They may be mistaken. Perhaps it will come again after a year or two.”
He strove to cheer her, brought forward all the arguments he could think of, all the tender phrases his unaccustomed mind could suggest. At last the tears ceased for a time.
“But it is my means of livelihood gone,” she said. “When I leave here I shall starve.”
“Not while I live,” said Joyce, impulsively. Then he reflected. Surely she could not be entirely without means. He coloured slightly at his remark, as at an impertinence.
“I shall never get any money any more as long as I live,” said Yvonne. “I can only go from this hospital into the workhouse. And I won’t go there. I will pray to die rather.”
“But,” began Joyce, in an embarrassed way,
“I don’t understand. Forgive me for touching upon it—but has not Everard—?”
“No, oh, no! I refused. I could n’t take his money, if I was not his wife.”
“That’s absurd,” said Joyce. But his opinion did not alter the facts. He remained for a moment in thought. “Don’t lose heart,” he said at length. “Things are never as bad as they seem. I ’ve had awfully bad times and yet I have pulled through, somehow. You can live quietly for a little on what you have, and then—”
“But I have n’t a penny, Stephen,” she cried piteously. “Not a penny in the world. I earned scarcely anything the last year. If it hadn’t been for Dina, I don’t know what I should have done. I don’t own anything but a few sticks of furniture and some clothes—”
“Where are they?”
“The porter’s wife at the mansions is keeping them for me, I believe. They may be sold. I was too ill to trouble.”
“I ’ll see about them for you,” said Joyce. His heart was moved with great pity for the sweet, helpless little soul. It seemed hard to realise that, when they had met four years ago, he had looked upon her as a Lady Bountiful, who had only to stretch out her kind arm to save him from starvation. Oh, the whirligig of time! And yet the memory of her help was very precious to him.
“You must let me act for you, Yvonne, will you?”
“You have your own troubles, poor fellow,” said Yvonne.
“Yours will drive mine away, so they will be a blessing in disguise. I wonder if you could trust me?”
“I have always done so—and I do. Are n’t you the only friend I have?”
“That is what beats me entirely,” he said. “What are all your friends doing?”
“They have all disappeared gradually,” said Yvonne. “My poor marriage cut me adrift from my old circle. And at Fulminster—I did n’t make many real friends.”
“There was a girl you wrote to me about once or twice.”
“Sophia Wilmington? She’s married and gone out to India. I should have written to her if she had been in England, for she was fond of me.”
“I should have thought that the whole world was fond of you, Yvonne.”
“I don’t know,” she said wistfully. “It seems that I have always been a kind of waif. I never had any solid kinds of friends, families and so forth—except your dear mother. I once knew a lot of professionals—but I saw men mostly—I could never tell why—and they don’t bother about you much when they’ve lost sight of you, do they? I thought Vandeleur might have wondered what had become of me.”
“Dear, dear!” said Joyce, reflectively. “I remember Vandeleur from the long ago.”
“Yes, he’s an old friend. But, you see, it was through Dina. He behaved badly to her and married Elsie Carnegie—and so they were cuts. I only saw him once all last year. I heard she was awfully jealous. Is n’t it silly of a woman? I think, if he knew I was here he’d come. But what would be the use?”
“Not much, except to say a friendly word to you. But still—while you were living with Miss Vicary, you must have made some acquaintances. It seems so extraordinary.”
“We lived so very much alone,” explained Yvonne. “Poor Dina didn’t know many people—no one liked her. With one exception—and he died long ago—I think I am the only one in the world who ever loved Dina. No—I am just a waif—that’s what I am.”
In her simple way she had accounted to him accurately for her life since her rupture with Everard. At first she had been too sore at heart to go much into the world. Then Geraldine, whose influence with her was paramount, continually discouraged her from renewing old acquaintanceships. Her friends had literally melted away. Had she so chosen, she might have interested in her misfortunes a score of professional well-wishers. But Yvonne was proud in many unexpected ways, and would have died rather than have the shame of sending the hat round for relief. As for communicating with Fulminster, it was not to be thought of.
“I don’t care,” she added, after a pause; “I have found you again.”
“Then dry your poor eyes,” he said comfortingly; “and don’t think any more of the worries. Don’t you remember how happy you made me once, when I was in desperate straits—when all the world cast me off but you? You are still the only being who knows me and cares whether I live or die. You are neither going to starve, Yvonne, nor die in a workhouse. As long as I have a penny you shall have half of it. Don’t think of anything more than the immediate future, little woman. We will manage that all right. Be comforted.”
He spoke earnestly, leaning forward with his arm on the bed. The precariousness of his own fortunes scarcely occurred to him. He was deeply moved. At that moment he would have cut off his right hand for her.
Yvonne thanked him with her eyes, which grew very soft and grateful. His man’s strength brought her comfort. She trusted him implicitly, as she had all her life trusted those who were kind to her. She closed her eyes for a moment with a little sigh of relief. She was so content to yield to the generous hand that was taking the terrible burden from her shoulders, felt as if she could go to sleep like a tired child. When she opened her eyes they were almost smiling.
“I ’ll try to be happy again, so as to thank you, Stephen,” she said.
“Well, here is something for you—what you like—eat one to show me you are comforted.”
He put the paper bag into her hand, and, tilting back his chair, watched her pleased expression as she peeped into the mouth and drew out one of the cakes.
“Oh, how sweet of you!” she said, with a flash of her old sunlight.
Suddenly he rose, and stood, hands in pockets, by the window, frowning absently at the gathering mist of evening outside. A conviction was forcing itself on his mind—a cold douche for his quixotic impulses. Obvious right and common-sense prevailed.
“Yvonne,” he said turning round. “You had no quarrel with Everard, had you, at parting?”
“Oh, no,” she replied, looking up round-eyed from her paper-bag. “He was very kind to me.”
“Have you written to him about this?”
“No. We arranged we should not correspond. He sent me word when he was going out to New Zealand. But I couldn’t let him know—I should be ashamed. Oh, no, Stephen, I could n’t write to him and say, ‘I am a beggar now, please give me charity.’ Why should he support me?”
“I hate questioning you,” said Joyce in some embarrassment, “but—is it repugnant to you to—to think of Everard?”
“Why, of course not, Stephen. It was a time of awful pain and misery—but if he came to take me back as his wife, I would go to him. If he ever can, I have promised that I will.”
With all his knowledge of her, Joyce was taken aback by her simple candour.
“If that is so, why on earth shrink from reconsidering, now, his former offer?” he asked, exceedingly puzzled at her point of view.
“You tell me what I ought to do, and I will do it,” said Yvonne.
“You must write to Everard.”
“Very well.”
“Then you need not have any fears at all for the future. It will be all so simple.”
“How can I thank you?” said Yvonne. “Oh, if I could only sing for you! But nothing will ever give me back my voice—I am a useless little creature. And you have been so good to me to-day. I shall never forget it all my life.”
But Joyce’s heart was at ebb-tide again. He rose soon, and took his hat and stick.