Great was the consternation in Bellendean over the unsatisfactory interview which it was so soon known had taken place between Joyce and her father. Colonel Hayward’s public intimation of the facts at luncheon had created, as might have been expected, the greatest commotion; and the ladies of the party assembled round Mrs. Bellendean with warm curiosity when the whisper ran through the house that Joyce had come—and had gone away again. Gone away! To explain it was very difficult, to understand it impossible. The schoolmistress, the village girl, to discover that she was Colonel Hayward’s daughter, and not to be elated, transported by the discovery! Why, it was a romance, it was like a fairy tale. Mrs. Bellendean’s suggestion that there was a second side to everything, though the fact was not generally recognised in fairy tales, contented no one; and a little mob of excited critics, all touched and interested by Colonel Hayward’s speech, turned upon the rustic heroine and denounced her pretensions. What did she expect, what had she looked for—to turn out a king’s daughter, or a duke’s? But it was generally agreed that few dukes were so delightful as Colonel Hayward, and that Joyce showed the worst of taste as well as the utmost ingratitude. Mrs. Bellendean was disappointed too; but she was partly comforted by the fact that Captain Bellendean, who was much bewildered by the girl’s caprice and folly, had fallen into a long and apparently interesting argument on the subject with Greta, her own special favourite and protégée. It is almost impossible for any natural woman to find a man in Norman’s position, well-looking, young, and rich, within her range, without forming matrimonial schemes for him of one kind or another; and Mrs. Bellendean had already made up her mind that the pang of leaving Bellendean would be much softened could she see her successor in Greta, the favourite of the house, a girl full of her own partialities and ways of thinking, and whom
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 she had influenced all her life. She forgot Joyce in seeing the animated discussion that rose between these two. It was disappointing, however, that when in the very midst of this discussion Captain Bellendean saw from the window at which he was standing his old Colonel walking to and fro on the terrace with heavy steps and bowed head, his point of interest changed at once. He looked no more at Greta, though she was a much prettier sight: evidently all his sympathy was for Colonel Hayward; and after the talk had gone on languishing for a few moments, he excused himself for leaving her. ‘Poor old chap! I must go and try if I can do anything to console him,’ he said.
Norman found Colonel Hayward very much cast down and melancholy. He was pacing up and down, up and down—sometimes pausing to throw a blank look over the landscape, sometimes mechanically gathering a faded leaf from one of the creepers on the wall. He endeavoured to pull himself up when Captain Bellendean joined him; but the old soldier had no skill in concealing his feelings, and he was too anxious to get support and sympathy to remain long silent. He announced, with all the solemnity becoming a strange event, that Mrs. Hayward was lying down a little. ‘She travelled all night, you know; and though she can sleep on the railway, it never does one much good that sort of sleep; and there has been a great deal going on all day—a great deal that has been very agitating for us both. I persuaded her to lie down,’ Colonel Hayward said, looking at his companion furtively, as if afraid that Norman might think Elizabeth was to blame.
‘It was the best thing she could do,’ said Captain Bellendean.
‘That is exactly what I told her—the very best thing she could do. It is seldom she leaves me when I have so much need of her; but I insisted upon it. And then I am in full possession of her sentiments,’ said the Colonel. ‘She told me exactly what she thought; and she advised me to take a walk by myself and think it all out.’
‘Perhaps, then, I ought to leave you alone, Colonel? but I saw you from the window, and thought you looked out of spirits.’
‘My dear boy, I am glad—too glad—to have you. Thinking a thing out is easy to say, but not so easy to do. And you had always a great deal of sense, Bellendean. When we had difficulties in the regiment, I well remember—— But that was easy in comparison with this. You know what has happened. We’ve found my daughter. For I was married long before I met with my wife. It was only for a little time; and then she disappeared,
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 poor girl, and I never could find out what became of her. It gave me a very great deal of trouble and distress—more than I could tell you; and now we have found out that she left a child. I told you all to-day at luncheon. Joyce, the girl they all talk about, is my daughter. Can you believe such a story?’
‘I had heard about it before; and then what you said to-day—it is very wonderful.’
‘Yes; but it’s quite true. And we told her—in Mrs. Bellendean’s room. And if you will believe it, she—— She as good as rejected me, Norman—refused to have me for her father. It has thrown me into a dreadful state of confusion. And Elizabeth can’t help me, it appears. She says I must work it out for myself. But it seems unnatural to work out a thing by myself; and especially a thing like this. Yes, the girl would have nothing to say to me, Bellendean. She says I must have ill-treated her mother—poor Joyce! the girl I told you that I had married. And I never did—indeed I never did!’
‘I am sure of that, sir. You never injured any one.’
‘Ah, my dear fellow! you don’t know how things happen. It seems to be nobody’s fault, and yet there’s injury done. It’s very bewildering to me, at my age, to think of having a child living. I never—thought of anything of the kind. I may have wished that my wife—and then again it would seem almost better that it shouldn’t be so.’
Colonel Hayward put his arm within that of Norman; he quickened his pace as they went up and down the terrace, and then would stop suddenly to deliver an emphatic sentence. ‘She looked me in the face, as if she defied me,’ he said, ‘and then went away and left me—with that old woman. Did you ever hear of such a position, Bellendean? My daughter, you know, my own daughter—and she looks me in the face, and tells me I must have harmed her mother, and why did I leave her? and goes away! What am I to do? When you have made such a discovery, there it is; you can’t put it out of your mind, or go upon your way, as if you had never found it out. I can’t be as I was before. I have got a daughter. You may smile, Bellendean, and think it’s just the old fellow’s confused way.’
‘I don’t indeed, sir. I can quite understand the embarrassment——’
‘That’s it—the embarrassment. She belongs to me, and her future should be my dearest care—my dearest care—a daughter, you know, more even than a boy. Just what I have often thought would make life perfect—just a sort of a glory to us,
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 Elizabeth and me; but when you think of it, quite a stranger, brought up so different! And Elizabeth opposed, a little opposed. I can’t help seeing it, though she tries to hide it, telling me that it’s my affair—that I must think it out myself. How can I think it out myself? and then my daughter herself turning upon me! What can I do? I don’t know what to do!’
‘Everybody,’ said Captain Bellendean—though a little against the grain, for he was himself very indignant with Joyce—‘speaks highly of her; there is but one voice—every one likes and admires her.’
The Colonel gave a little pressure to the young man’s arm, as if in thanks, and said with a sigh, ‘She is very like her mother. You would say, if you had known her, the very same—more than a likeness. Elizabeth has had a good deal to put up with on that account. You can’t wonder if she is a little—opposed. And everything is at a standstill. I have to take the next step; they will neither of them help me—and what am I to do? Children—seem to bring love with them when they are born in a house. But when a grown-up young woman appears that you never saw before, and you are told she is your daughter! It is a dreadful position to be in, Bellendean. I don’t know, no more than a baby, what to do.’
‘That is rather an alarming view to take,’ said Norman. ‘But when you know her better, most likely everything will come right. You have a very kind heart, sir, and the young lady is very pretty, and nice, and clever, and nature will speak.’
The Colonel shook his head. ‘I believed this morning in nature speaking—but I am sadly shaken, sadly shaken, Bellendean. Why did she turn against me? You would have thought that merely to say, I am your father—but she turned upon me as if I had been her enemy. And what can I do? We can’t go away to-morrow and leave her here. We must have her to live with us, and perhaps she won’t come, and most likely she’ll not like it if she does. I am dreadfully down about it all. Joyce’s girl whom I don’t know, and Elizabeth, who gives me up and goes to lie down because she’s tired—just when I need her most!’
‘But, Colonel, it is true that Mrs. Hayward must be very tired: and no doubt she feels that you and Miss Joyce will understand each other better if you meet by yourselves, when she is not there.’
‘Eh? Do you think that’s what she means, Bellendean? and do you think so too? But even then I am no further advanced than I was before; for my daughter, you know, she’s not here,
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 and how do I know where to find her, even if I were prepared to meet her? and heaven knows I am less prepared than ever—and very nervous and anxious; and if she were standing before me at this moment I don’t know what I should say.’
‘I can show you where to find her,’ said Captain Bellendean. ‘Come and see her, sir; you don’t want to be prepared—you have only to show her that she may trust to your kind heart, and settle everything before Mrs. Hayward wakes up.’
‘My kind heart!’ said Colonel Hayward. ‘I’m not so sure that my heart is kind—not, it appears, to my own flesh and blood. I feel almost as if I should be glad never to hear of her again.’
‘That is only because you are out of sorts, and got no sleep last night.’
‘How do you know I got no sleep? It’s quite true. Elizabeth thinks I only fancy it, but the truth is that when my mind is disturbed I cannot sleep. I am dreadfully down about it all, Bellendean. No, I haven’t the courage, I haven’t the courage. If she were to tell me again that her mother had much to complain of, I couldn’t answer a word. And yet it’s not so. I declare to you, Bellendean, upon my honour, it was no fault of mine.’
‘I am sure of it, sir,’ said Bellendean. ‘Don’t think any more of that, but come with me and see Miss Joyce, and settle it all.’
The Colonel said little as he walked down to the village leaning on young Bellendean’s arm. He was alarmed and nervous; his throat was dry, his mind was confused. Norman’s society, the touch of his arm, the moral force of his companionship, kept Colonel Hayward up to the mark, or it is possible that he might have turned back and fled from those difficulties which he did not feel himself able to cope with, and the new relationship that had already produced such confusion in his life. But he was firmly held by Norman’s arm, and did not resist the impulse, though it was not his own. He did not know what he was going to say to Joyce, or how to meet this proud young creature, filled with a fanciful indignation for her mother’s wrongs. He had never wronged her mother. Pitiful as the story was, and tenderly as he had always regarded her memory, the Joyce of his youth had been the instrument of her own misery and of much trouble and anguish to him, though the gentle-hearted soldier had accepted it always as a sort of natural calamity for which nobody was responsible, and never blamed her. But even the gentlest-hearted will be moved when the judgment which they have refrained from making is turned against
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 themselves. It was not his fault, and yet how could he say so? How could he explain it to this second hot-headed Joyce without blaming the first who had so suffered, and over whom death had laid a shadowy veil of tenderness, an oblivion of all mistakes and errors? Colonel Hayward did not articulately discuss this question with himself, but it was at the bottom of all the confusion in his troubled mind. He was afraid of her, shy of her presence, not knowing how to address or approach this stranger, who was his own child. He had looked with a tender envy at other people’s daughters before now, thinking if only Elizabeth—— But a daughter who was not Elizabeth’s, and to whom his wife was even, as he said to himself, a little—opposed, was something that had never entered into his thoughts. How easy it was in the story-books!—how parents and children long separated sprang into each other’s arms and hearts by instinct. But it was very different in real life, when the problem how to receive into the intimacy of so small a household a third person who was so near in blood, so absolutely unknown in all that constitutes human sympathy, had to be solved at a moment’s notice! He had been very much excited and disturbed the day before, but he had not doubted the power of Elizabeth to put everything right. Now, however, Elizabeth had not only for the first time failed, but was—opposed. She had not said it, but he had felt it. She had declared herself tired, and lain down, and told him to work it out himself. Such a state of affairs was one which Colonel Hayward had never contemplated, and everything accordingly was much worse than yesterday, when he had still been able to feel that if Elizabeth were only here all would go well.
The party in the cottage were in a very subdued and depressed condition when Captain Bellendean knocked at the door. The heat of resistance in Joyce’s mind had died down. Whether it was the strain of argument which Janet still carried on, though Joyce had not consciously listened to it, or whether the mere effect of the short lapse of time which quenches excitement had operated unawares upon her mind, it is certain that her vehemence of feeling and rebellion of heart had sunk into that despondent suspension of thought which exhaustion brings. Resistance dies out, and the chill compulsion of circumstance comes in, making itself felt above all flashes of indignation, all revolts of sentiment. Joyce knew now, though she had not acknowledged it in words, that her power over her own life was gone,—that there was no strength in her to resist the new laws and subordination under which she felt herself to have fallen. She had not even the con
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sciousness which a girl in a higher class might have been supported by, that her father’s rights over her were not supreme. She believed that she had no power to resist his decrees as to what was to become of her; and accordingly, after the first outburst of contradictory feeling, the girl’s heart and courage had altogether succumbed. She had fallen upon the neck of her old guardian—the true mother of her life—with tears, which quenched out every spark of the passion which had inspired her.
Joyce felt herself to be within the grasp of fate. She was like one of the heroines of the poets in a different aspect from that in which she had identified herself with Rosalind or Miranda. What she was like now was Iphigenia or Antigone caught in the remorseless bonds of destiny. She did not even feel that forlorn satisfaction in it which she might have done had there been more time, or had she been less unhappy. The only feeling she was conscious of was misery, life running low in her, all the elements and powers against her, and the possibility even of resistance gone out of her. Old Janet had pressed her close, and then had repulsed her with the impatience of highly excited feeling; and Joyce stood before the window, with the light upon her pale face, quite subdued, unresistant, dejected to the bottom of her heart. The only one of the group who showed any energy or satisfaction was Andrew Halliday, who could not refrain a rising and exhilaration of heart at the thought of being son-in-law to a man who was the ‘Captain’s’ commanding officer, and consequently occupied a position among the great ones of the earth. Andrew’s imagination had already leaped at all the good things that might follow for himself. He thought of possible elevations in the way of head-masterships, scholastic dignities, and honours. ‘They’ would never leave Joyce’s husband a parish schoolmaster! He had not time to follow it out, but his thoughts had swayed swiftly upwards to promotions and honours undefined.
‘Wha’s that at the door?’ said Janet, among her tears.
‘It’s the Captain,’ said Joyce, in a voice so low that she was almost inaudible. Then she added, ‘It’s—it’s—my father.’
‘Her father!’ Peter rose up with a lowering brow. ‘My hoose is no’ a place for every fremd person to come oot and in at their pleasure. Let them be. I forbid ainy person to open that door.’
‘Oh, haud your tongue, man!’ cried Janet; ‘can ye keep them oot with a steekit door—them that has the law on their side, and na............