She had been playing for perhaps an hour, when a sudden exhaustion seized upon her, and her hands fell nerveless and inert upon her lap; she dropped her chin upon her breast and closed her eyes. She was drunken with her own music.
When she opened them again a few moments later, they fell upon the face of Arthur Stuart, who stood a few feet distant regarding her with haggard eyes. Unexpected and strange as his presence was, Joy felt neither surprise nor wonder. She had been thinking of him so intensely, he had been so interwoven with the music she had been playing, that his bodily presence appeared to her as a natural result. He was the first to speak; and when he spoke she noticed that his voice sounded hoa.r.s.e and broken, and that his face was drawn and pale.
"I came to Beryngford this morning expressly to see you, Joy," he said. "I have many things to say to you. I went to your residence and was told by the maid that I would find you here. I followed, as you see. We have had many meetings in church edifices, in organ lofts. It seems natural to find you in such a place, but I fear it will be unnatural and unfitting to say to you here, what I came to say. Shall we return to your home?"
His eyes shone strangely from dusky caverns, and there were deep lines about his mouth.
"He, too, has suffered," thought Joy; "I have not borne it all alone." Then she said aloud:
"We are quite undisturbed here; I know of nothing I could listen to in my room which I could not hear you say in this place. Go on."
He looked at her silently for a moment, his cheeks pale, his breast heaving. Before he came to Beryngford, he had fought his battle between religion and human pa.s.sion, and pa.s.sion had won. He had cast under his feet every principle and tradition in which he had been reared, and resolved to live alone henceforth for the love and companionship of one human being, could he obtain her consent to go with him.
Yet for the moment, he hesitated to speak the words he had resolved to utter, under the roof of a house of G.o.d, so strong were the influences of his early training and his habits of thought. But as his eyes feasted upon the face before him, his hesitation vanished, and he leaned toward her and spoke. "Joy," he said, "three years ago I went away and left you in sorrow, alone, because I was afraid to brave public opinion, afraid to displease my mother and ask you to be my wife. The story your mother told me of your birth, a story she left in ma.n.u.script for you to read, made a social coward of me. I was afraid to take a girl born out of wedlock to be my life companion, the mother of my children. Well, I married a girl born in wedlock; and where is my companion?" He paused and laughed recklessly. Then he went on hurriedly: "She is in an asylum for the insane. I am chained to a corpse for life. I had not enough moral courage three-years ago to make you my wife. But I have moral courage enough now to come here and ask you to go with me to Australia, and begin a new life together. My mother died a year ago.
I donned the surplice at her bidding. I will abandon it at the bidding of Love. I sinned against heaven in marrying a woman I did not love. I am willing to sin against the laws of man by living with the woman I do love; will you go with me, Joy?" There was silence save for the beating of the rain against the stained window, and the wailing of the wind.
Joy was in a peculiarly overwrought condition of mind and body. Her hours of extravagant weeping the previous night, followed by a day of fasting, left her nervous system in a state to be easily excited by the music she had been playing. She was virtually intoxicated with sorrow and harmony. She was incapable of reasoning, and conscious only of two things--that she must leave Beryngford, and that the man whom she had loved with her whole heart for five years, was asking her to go with him; to be no more homeless, unloved, and alone, but his companion while life should last.
"Answer me, Joy," he was pleading. "Answer me."
She moved toward the stairway that led down to the street door; and as she flitted by him, she said, looking him full in the eyes with a slow, grave smile, "Yes, Arthur, I will go with you."
He sprang toward her with a wild cry of joy, but she was already flying down the stairs and out upon the street.
When he joined her, they walked in silence through the rain to her door, neither speaking a word, until he would have followed her within. Then she laid her hand upon his shoulder and said gently but firmly: "Not now, Arthur; we must not see each other again until we go away. Write me where to meet you, and I will join you within twenty-four hours. Do not urge me--you must obey me this once-- afterward I will obey you. Good-night."
As she closed the door upon him, he said, "Oh, Joy, I have so much to tell you. I promised your father when he was dying that I would find you; I swore to myself that when I found you I would never leave you, save at your own command. I go now, only because you bid me go.
When we meet again, there must be no more parting; and you shall hear a story stranger than the wildest fiction--the story of your father"s life. Despite your mother"s secretiveness regarding this portion of her history, the knowledge has come to me in the most unexpected manner, from the lips of the man himself."
Joy listened dreamily to the words he was saying. Her father--she was to know who her father was? Well, it did not matter much to her now--father, mother, what were they, what was anything save the fact that he had come back to her and that he loved her?
She smiled silently into his eyes. Glance became entangled with glance, and would not be separated.
He pushed open the almost closed door and she felt herself enveloped with arms and lips.
A second later she stood alone, leaning dizzily against the door; heart, brain and blood in a mad riot of emotion.
Then she fell into a chair and covered her burning face with her hands as she whispered, "Mother, mother, forgive me--I understand--I understand."
CHAPTER XX
The first shock of the awakened emotions brings recklessness to some women, and to others fear.
The more frivolous plunge forward like the drunken man who leaps from the open window believing s.p.a.ce is water.
The more intense draw back, startled at the unknown world before them.
The woman who thinks love is all ideality is more liable to follow into undreamed-of chasms than she who, through the complexity of her own emotions, realises its grosser elements.
It was long after midnight when Joy fell into a heavy sleep, the night of Arthur Stuart"s visit. She heard the drip of the dreary November rain upon the roof, and all the light and warmth seemed stricken from the universe save the fierce fire in her own heart.
When she woke in the late morning, great splashes of sunlight were leaping and quivering like living things across the foot of her bed; she sprang up, dazed for a moment by the flood of light in the room, and went to the window and looked out upon a sun-kissed world smiling in the arms of a perfect Indian summer day.
A happy little sparrow chirped upon the window sill, and some children ran across the street bare-headed, exulting in the soft air.
All was innocence and sweetness. Mind and morals are greatly influenced by weather. Many things seem right in the fog and gloom, which we know to be wrong in the clear light of a sunny morning. The events of the previous day came back to Joy"s mind as she stood by the window, and stirred her with a sense of strangeness and terror.
The thought of the step she had resolved to take brought a sudden trembling to her limbs. It seemed to her the eyes of G.o.d were piercing into her heart, and she was afraid.
Joy had from her early girlhood been an earnest and sincere follower of the Christian religion. The embodiment of love and sympathy herself, it was natural for her to believe in the G.o.d of Love and to worship Him in outward forms, as well as in her secret soul. It was the deep and earnest fervour of religion in her heart, which rendered her music so unusual and so inspiring. There never was, is not and never can be greatness in any art where religious feeling is lacking.
There must be the consciousness of the Infinite, in the mind which produces infinite results.
Though the artist be gifted beyond all other men, though he toil unremittingly, so long as he says, "Behold what I, the gifted and tireless toiler, can achieve," he shall produce but mediocre and ephemeral results. It is when he says reverently, "Behold what powers greater than I shall achieve through me, the instrument," that he becomes great and men marvel at his power.
Joy"s religious nature found expression in her music, and so something more than a harmony of beautiful sounds impressed her hearers.
The first severe blow to her faith in the church as a divine inst.i.tution, was when her rector and her lover left her alone in the hour of her darkest trials, because he knew the story of her mother"s life. His hesitancy to make her his wife she understood, but his absolute desertion of her at such a time, seemed inconsistent with his calling as a disciple of the Christ.
The second blow came in her dismissal from the position of organist at the Beryngford Church, after the presence of the Baroness in the town.
A disgust for human laws, and a bitter resentment towards society took possession of her. When a gentle and loving nature is roused to anger and indignation, it is often capable of extremes of action; and Arthur Stuart had made his proposition of flight to Joy Irving in an hour when her high-wrought emotions and intensely strung nerves made any desperate act possible to her. The sight of his face, with its evidences of severe suffering, awoke all her smouldering pa.s.sion for the man; and the thought that he was ready to tread his creed under his feet and to defy society for her sake, stirred her with a wild joy. G.o.d had seemed very far away, and human love was very precious; too precious to be thrown away in obedience to any man-made law.
But somehow this morning G.o.d seemed nearer, and the consciousness of what she had promised to do terrified her. Disturbed by her thoughts, she turned towards her toilet-table and caught sight of the letter of dismissal from the church committee. It acted upon her like an electric shock. Resentment and indignation re-enthroned themselves in her bosom.
"Is it to cater to the opinions and prejudices of people like THESE that I hesitate to take the happiness offered me?" she cried, as she tore the letter in bits and cast it beneath her feet. Arthur Stuart appeared to her once more, in the light of a delivering angel. Yes, she would go with him to the ends of the earth. It was her inheritance to lead a lawless life. Nothing else was possible for her. G.o.d must see how she had been hemmed in by circ.u.mstances, how she had been goaded and driven from the paths of peace and purity where she had wished to dwell. G.o.d was not a man, and He would be merciful in judging her.
She sent her landlady two months" rent in advance, and notice of her departure, and set hurriedly about her preparations.
Twenty-five years before, when Berene Dumont disappeared from Beryngford, she had, quite unknown to herself, left one devoted though humble friend behind, who sincerely mourned her absence.
Mrs Connor liked to be spoken of as "the wash-lady at the Palace."
Yet proud as she was of this appellation, she was not satisfied with being an excellent laundress. She was a person of ambitions. To be the owner of a lodging-house, like the Baroness, was her leading ambition, and to possess a "peany" for her young daughter Kathleen was another.
She kept her mind fixed on these two achievements, and she worked always for those two results. And as mind rules matter, so the laundress became in time the landlady of a comfortable and respectable lodging-house, and in its parlour a piano was the chief object of furniture.
Kathleen Connor learned to play; and at last to the joy of the lodgers, she married and bore her "peany" away with her. During the time when Mrs Connor was the ambitious "wash-lady" at the Palace, Berene Dumont came to live there; and every morning when the young woman carried the tray down to the kitchen after having served the Baroness with her breakfast, she offered Mrs Connor a cup of coffee and a slice of toast.
This simple act of thoughtfulness from the young dependant touched the Irishwoman"s tender heart and awoke her lasting grat.i.tude. She had heard Berene"s story, and she had been prepared to mete out to her that disdainful dislike which Erin almost invariably feels towards France. Realising that the young widow was by birth and breeding above the station of housemaid, Mrs Connor and the servants had expected her to treat them with the same lofty airs which the Baroness made familiar to her servants. When, instead, Berene toasted the bread for Mrs Connor, and poured the coffee and placed it on the kitchen table with her own hands, the heart of the wash-lady melted in her ample breast. When the heart of the daughter of Erin melts, it permeates her whole being; and Mrs Connor became a secret devotee at the shrine of Miss Dumont.
She had never entertained cordial feelings toward the Baroness. When a society lady--especially a t.i.tled one--enters into compet.i.tion with working people, and yet refuses to a.s.sociate with them, it always incites their enmity. The working population of Beryngford, from the highest to the lowest grades, felt a sense of resentment toward the Baroness, who in her capacity of landlady still maintained the airs of a grand dame, and succeeded in keeping her footing with some of the most fashionable people in the town.
Added to these causes of dislike, the Baroness was, like many wealthier people, excessively close in her dealings with working folk, haggling over a few cents or a few moments of wasted time, while she was generosity itself in a.s.sociation with her equals.
Mrs Connor, therefore, felt both pity and sympathy for Miss Dumont, whose position in the Palace she knew to be a difficult one; and when Preston Cheney came upon the scene the romantic mind of the motherly Irishwoman fashioned a future for the young couple which would have done credit to the pen of a Mrs Southworth.