In the meantime Colonel Hayward was walking up and down the village street, waiting for his wife. He passed and repassed the door two or three times. He was very nervous, hanging about, not knowing what to make of himself. The church stood at the end of the street, and a path led down by the side of the churchyard, in the direction of Bellendean. As he came to the end of this, he stopped in the abstraction of his mind to look down the line of shade which a high hedgerow opposite to the low mossy wall of the churchyard threw half-way across the path. Some one was coming along in this clear and soft shadow, which was so grateful in the midst of the sunshine. It startled him to see it was Joyce, in her dark dress, her face relieved against the broad brim of an untrimmed straw hat, which added in its tone of creamy white additional force to the very delicate tints of her face, so clear in the shadowy air, with an impression of coolness in the midst of great warmth. He cast an anxious look of suspense over his shoulder towards the house where his wife was; but as he did not see her, nor any sign of her coming, he turned down the path to meet Joyce. It was rather by way of diverting his own anxiety than from any eagerness to address her. He seemed to want somebody to whom he could talk to relieve his own mind; for up to this moment, except from curiosity and anxiety in respect to the past, and a certain admiration of herself and her demeanour, it had not been Joyce, upon her own account, who had interested the Colonel. He had not had leisure as yet to get so far as her—for herself. He went on to talk to her because she was in it, concerned like himself, though she might not be aware of the fact, in the matter which his wife at present was engaged in clearing up. It was as if the scene then going on at the cottage was a consultation of doctors upon the life or death of a beloved patient. Those who are waiting breathless for the opinion, which is at the same time a sentence, are glad to get together to ask
{62}
 each other what they think,—at least, to stand together and wait, feeling the support of company. This was Colonel Hayward’s feeling. He went towards the girl with a sense that she had more to do with it than any one else—but not with any perception of its immense importance to her.
Joyce had gone out in the freedom which comes to all the members of the scholastic profession, small and great, with the first morning of the holidays. To have no lessons to give, no claim of one kind or another, nothing but their own occupations, whatever they may be, gives to these happy people a sense of legitimate repose. For one thing, the members of almost every other profession have to go away to secure this much-desired leisure, but to the teacher it comes, without any effort, by appointment of nature, so to speak, by a beneficent arrangement which takes all selfishness out of the enjoyment, since it has been invented, not for the good primarily of himself, but of the flock who are so happily got rid of, to their own perfect satisfaction. The sweet consciousness that the happiness and freedom of so many sufferers have been consulted before one’s own, gives sweetness and grace to it. Joyce had risen this morning with that exquisite sense of freedom, and she had gone out with a book as soon as the household work she never neglected was over, to read and muse on a favourite spot, a point in the park at Bellendean out of reach of the house, where behind a great screen of trees the wayfarer came suddenly in sight of the Firth, the circle of low hills which protects the narrower sea at the Queen’s Ferry, and the sheltered basin of St. Margaret’s Hope. The sight of this wonderful combination of sea and sky and solid soil, the soft hills rising round, the mass of grey stones on the water’s edge, which marks a ruined castle, the island in the midst, the widening out beyond into the infinite, into the wider Firth and the stormy waters of the northern sea, affording an ever-open door for the fancy,—were delightful to this imaginative girl. She had taken her book, but she did not open it—for which she upbraided herself, confessing in the secret depths of her soul that Andrew would not have done so,—that he would have read and expounded and discussed and found a new beauty in every line, where she, so much his intellectual inferior, did nothing. She did not even think—if further avowal must be made, she did not even see the lovely landscape for the sake of which she had come here. It entered into her, reflecting itself in her dreamy eyes, and printing itself in her mind; but she did not look as Andrew would have done, finding out beautiful ‘lights,’ and commanding all the details
{63}
 of the scene. Joyce was a little short-sighted, and did not see the details. It was to her a large blurred celestial world of beauty and colour, and abundant delicious air and sunshine. Her thoughts went from her, where she sat in the heart of the morning, looking over the Firth, with all its breadth of melting light and reflection, to those low hills of the farther shore.
It had been thus that she had entered upon her holidays in the other days when life had no cares. The dreamings about Lady Joyce, and all the speculations as to her future, had come in other scenes, where there was a want of brightness and of a stronghold of her own to retire into. Here she had not needed that fanciful world of her own. But to-day Joyce was in a different mood. After a while she began to become insensible altogether to the scene, and resumed more personal musings instead. ‘Young lady, where did you get your name?’ It was not the first time she had been so questioned. Half the people she met asked her the same: but not as Colonel Hayward did. ‘I knew some one once’—what did he mean? why did he not come back and tell her? These thoughts became urgent after a while, so that she could not sit and dream, as was her wont in her favourite spot. She got up with a little impatience and vexation and disappointment to return home. But in the lane which led up to the village street, in the clear shadow of the tall hawthorn hedge, behold some one advancing to meet her, at sight of whom her heart began to beat—more loudly than it had ever beaten at the sight of Andrew Halliday; it sprang up thumping and resounding. ‘He knows who I am,’ she said to herself. ‘Perhaps he will tell me; perhaps he is looking for me to tell me. Perhaps he is something to me.’ Her veins seemed suddenly to fill with a rushing quick-flowing stream.
Colonel Hayward took off his hat as he came up. This was to him an everyday action, but to her an unusual grace, a homage which only lately had ever been given to her, and which she esteemed disproportionately as a sign of special chivalry. It brought the colour to her cheeks, which ebbed again the moment after in the fluctuations of her anxiety. The old Colonel looked very anxious too; his face was agitated, and paler than usual. When he came up to her he stopped. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that we were ever introduced to each other; but still—— You have been taking a walk this fine morning?’
‘The holidays have just begun, sir,’ said Joyce respectfully. ‘This is the first day: and though I am very fond of my work, freedom is sweet at first.
{64}
’
‘Only at first?’
‘It is always sweet,’ she said, with a smile; ‘but never so delicious as the first day.’
Their hearts were not in this light talk, and here it came to an end. He had turned with her, and they were walking along side by side. Great anxiety—tremulous and breathless suspense—were in the minds of both on the same subject—and yet they regarded it in aspects so different! The soft transparent shadow of the hedge kept them from all the flicker of light and movement outside, giving a sort of recueillement, a calm of gravity and stillness, to the two figures. Had they been in a picture, there could have been no better title for it than ‘The Telling of the Secret.’ But yet there was no secret told. He was absorbed in his own thoughts, and unconscious of the wistful looks which she gave him timidly from time to time. At last he turned upon her, and asked the strangest question, with a tremor and quiver in all his big frame.
‘Do you remember your mother?’ he said.
‘My mother!’ The sudden shock brought a wave of colour over her. ‘Oh, sir,’ said Joyce, ‘how could I remember her? for she died when I was born.’
‘True, true—I had forgotten that,’ he said, with an air of confusion. Then added— ‘You must forgive me. My mind was full——’
Of what was his mind full? He fell silent after this, and for some time no more was said. But it gradually came to be impossible to Joyce to keep silence. She turned to him, scarcely seeing him in the rush of blood that went to her head.
‘Did you know my mother?’ she said. ‘Oh, sir, will you tell me? Do you know who she was?’
‘I can’t tell—I can’t tell,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It may be all a mistake. We must not make too sure.’
‘Then you think——’ she cried, and stopped, and looked at him, searching his face for his meaning—the anxious open face which was held before her like a book—though he did not look at her in return. She put her hand, with a light momentary touch, on his arm. ‘Perhaps you don’t know,’ she said hurriedly, ‘that I have things of hers—things she left—that would settle it—that would show you——’
He made a little gesture of assent, waving his hand. ‘My wife is there: that is what keeps me in this suspense.’
‘Where? Where?’
He pointed vaguely in the direction of Joyce’s home. ‘She has gone—to see everything,’ he said.
{65}
For the moment a flash of sudden anger came to the eyes of Joyce. ‘They are all mine!’ she cried. ‘It was to me she ought to have come. I am the one chiefly concerned!’ Then the flash quenched itself, and her look grew soft and wistful once more. ‘Oh, sir,’ she said, ‘if it was the Joyce you thought—if it was her you supposed—who was she? To tell me that, even if it should turn out all different, would do no harm.’
‘It would do no good either,’ he said: then turned round to her, and took her hand between his two large brown hands, which were trembling. ‘You are very like her,’ he said—‘so like her that I am forced to believe. She looked just as you are doing when I saw her last. Some relationship there must be—there must be!’ Here he dropped her hand again, as if he had not known that he held it. ‘There was wrong done to her—the Joyce I mean. She was made very unhappy; but no wrong was meant on—on my—on—on his part. Would you really like to hear the story? But it may turn out to be nothing—to have nothing to do with you.’
‘Oh, tell me; it will fill up the time; it will ease the suspense.’
‘That is what I feel,’ he said; ‘and you will keep the secret—that is, there is no secret; it is only what happened to—— what happened long, long ago—to—to one of my friends: you understand,’ he said tremulously, but with an effort to be very firm, looking at her, ‘to—one of my friends.’
Joyce made a sign of assent, too much absorbed in what she was about to hear to think what this warmth of asseveration meant. It was a relief to him to speak. It was like going over all the changes of the illness when a beloved sufferer lies between life and death.
‘They met,’ he said, ‘abroad, at a foreign station. She was very young. She was with people that were not kind to her. They married in a great hurry, without proper precautions, without thinking that anything could be wrong. They came home soon after for her health, and I—I had to—I—I don’t quite remember——’ his voice seemed to die away in his throat; then with another effort he recovered it ............