Chapter IX: Part 9

April had just become May when Ellen returned to Ansdore. It had been a rainy spring, and great pools were on the marshes, overflows from the dykes and channels, clear mirrors green from the grass beneath their shallows and the green rainy skies that hung above them. Here and there they reflected white clumps and walls of hawthorn, with the pale yellowish gleam of the buttercups in the pastures. The two sisters, driving back from Rye, looked round on the green twilight of the Marsh with indifferent eyes. Joanna had ceased to look for any beauty in her surroundings since Martin's days--the small gift of sight that he had given her had gone out with the light of his own eyes, and this evening all she saw was the flooded pastures, which meant poor grazing for her tegs due to come down from the Coast, and her lambs new-born on the Kent Innings. As for Ellen, the Marsh had always stood with her for unrelieved boredom. Its eternal flatness--the monotony of its roads winding through an unvarying landscape of reeds and dykes and grazings, past farms each of which was almost exactly like the one before it, with red walls and orange roofs and a bush of elms and oaks--the wearisome repetition of its seasons--the mists and floods of winter, the may and buttercups of spring, the hay and meadow-sweet and wild carrot of the summer months, the bleakness and winds of autumn--all this was typical of her life there, water-bound, cut off from all her heart's desire of variety and beauty and elegance, of the life to which she must now return because her attempt to live another had failed and left her stranded on a slag-heap of disillusion from which even Ansdore was a refuge.

Ellen sat very trim and erect beside Joanna in the trap. She wore a neat grey coat and skirt, obviously not of local, nor indeed of English, make, and a little toque of flowers. She had taken Joanna's breath away on Rye platform; it had been very much like old times when she came home for the holidays and checked the impulse of her sister's love by a baffling quality of self-containment. Joanna, basing her expectations on the Bible story of the Prodigal Son rather than on the experiences of the past winter, had looked for a subdued penitent, surfeited with husks, who, if not actually casting herself at her sister's feet and offering herself as her servant, would at least have a hang-dog air and express her gratitude for so much forgiveness. Instead of which Ellen had said--"Hullo, Jo--it's good to see you again," and offered her a cool, delicately powdered cheek, which Joanna's warm lips had kissed with a queer, sad sense of repulse and humiliation. Before they had been together long, it was she who wore the hang-dog air--for some unconscionable reason she felt in the wrong, and found herself asking her sister polite, nervous questions about the journey.

This attitude prevailed throughout the evening--on the drive home, and at the excellent supper they sat down to: a stuffed capon and a bottle of wine, truly a genteel feast of reconciliation--but Joanna had grown more aristocratic in her feeding since she bought Great Ansdore. Ellen spoke about her journey--she had had a smooth crossing, but had felt rather ill in the train. It was a long way from Venice--yes, you came through France, and Switzerland too ... the St. Gothard tunnel ... twenty minutes--well, I never?... Yes, a bit smoky--you had to keep the windows shut ... she preferred French to Italian cooking--she did not like all that oil ... oh yes, foreigners were very polite when they knew you, but not to strangers ... just the opposite from England, where people were polite to strangers and rude to their friends. Joanna had never spoken or heard so many generalities in her life.

At the end of supper she felt quite tired, what with saying one thing with her tongue and another in her heart. Sometimes she felt that she must say something to break down this unreality, which was between them like a wall of ice--at other times she felt angry, and it was Ellen she wanted to break down, to force out of her superior refuge, and show up to her own self as just a common sinner receiving common forgiveness. But there was something about Ellen which made this impossible--something about her manner, with its cold poise, something about her face, which had indefinitely changed--it looked paler, wider, and there were secrets at the corners of her mouth.

This was not the first time that Joanna had seen her sister calm and collected while she herself was flustered--but this evening a sense of her own awkwardness helped to put her at a still greater disadvantage. She found herself making inane remarks, hesitating and stuttering--she grew sulky and silent, and at last suggested that Ellen would like to go to bed.

Her sister seemed glad enough, and they went upstairs together. But even the sight of her old bedroom, where the last year of her maidenhood had been spent, even the sight of the new curtains chastening its exuberance with their dim austerity, did not dissolve Ellen's terrible, cold sparkle--her frozen fire.

"Good night," said Joanna.

"Good night," said Ellen, "may I have some hot water?"

"I'll tell the gal," said Joanna tamely, and went out.

§32

When she was alone in her own room, she seemed to come to herself. She felt ashamed of having been so baffled by Ellen, of having received her on those terms. She could not bear to think of Ellen living on in the house, so terribly at an advantage. If she let things stay as they were, she was tacitly acknowledging some indefinite superiority which her sister had won through sin. All the time she was saying nothing she felt that Ellen was saying in her heart--"I have been away to foreign parts, I have been loved by a man I don't belong to, I have Seen Life, I have stopped at hotels, I have met people of a kind you haven't even spoken to...." That was what Ellen was saying, instead of what Joanna thought she ought to say, which was--"I'm no better then a dairy girl in trouble, than Martha Tilden whom you sacked when I was a youngster, and it's unaccountable good of you to have me home."

Joanna was not the kind to waste her emotions in the sphere of thought. She burst out of the room, and nearly knocked over Mene Tekel, who was on her way to Ellen with a jug of hot water.

"Give that to me," she said, and went to her sister's door, at which she was still sufficiently demoralized to knock.

"Come in," said Ellen.

"I've brought you your hot water."

"Thank you very much--I hope it hasn't been a trouble."

Ellen was standing by the bed in a pretty lilac silk wrapper, her hair tucked away under a little lace cap. Joanna wore her dressing-gown of turkey-red flannel, and her hair hung down her back in two great rough plaits. For a moment she stared disapprovingly at her sister, whom she thought looked "French," then she suddenly felt ashamed of herself and her ugly, shapeless coverings. This made her angry, and she burst out--

"Ellen Alce, I want a word with you."

"Sit down, Jo," said Ellen sweetly.

Joanna flounced on to the rosy, slippery chintz of Ellen's sofa. Ellen sat down on the bed.

"What do you want to say to me?"

"An unaccountable lot of things."

"Must they all be said to-night? I'm very sleepy."

"Well, you must just about keep awake. I can't let it stay over any longer. Here you've been back five hour, and not a word passed between us."

"On the contrary, we have had some intelligent conversation for the first time in our lives."

"You call that rot about furriners 'intelligent conversation'? Well, all I can say is that it's like you--all pretence. One ud think you'd just come back from a pleasure-trip abroad instead of from a wicked life that you should ought to be ashamed of."

For the first time a flush darkened the heavy whiteness of Ellen's skin.

"So you want to rake up the past? It's exactly like you, Jo--'having things out,' I suppose you'd call it. How many times in our lives have you and I 'had things out'?--And what good has it ever done us?"

"I can't go on all pretending like this--I can't go on pretending I think you an honest woman when I don't--I can't go on saying 'It's a fine day' when I'm wondering how you'll fare in the Day of Judgment."

"Poor old Jo," said Ellen, "you'd have had an easier life if you hadn't lived, as they say, so close to nature. It's just what you call pretences and others call good manners that make life bearable for some people."

"Yes, for 'some people' I daresay--people whose characters won't stand any straight talking."

"Straight talking is always so rude--no one ever seems to require it on pleasant occasions."

"That's all nonsense. You always was a squeamish, obstropulous little thing, Ellen. It's only natural that having you back in my house--as I'm more than glad to do--I should want to know how you stand. What made you come to me sudden like that?"

"Can't you guess? It's rather unpleasant for me to have to tell you."

"Reckon it was that man"--somehow Sir Harry's name had become vaguely improper, Joanna felt unable to pronounce it--"then you've made up your mind not to marry him," she finished.

"How can I marry him, seeing I'm somebody else's wife?"

"I'm glad to hear you say such a proper thing. It ain't what you was saying at the start. Then you wanted a divorce and all sorts of foreign notions ... what's made you change round?"

"Well, Arthur wouldn't give me a divorce, for one thing. For another, as I told you in my letter, one often doesn't know people till one's lived with them--besides, he's too old for me."

"He'll never see sixty again."

"He will," said Ellen indignantly--"he was only fifty-five in March."

"That's thirty year more'n you."

"I've told you he's too old for me."

"You might have found out that at the start--he was only six months younger then."

"There's a great many things I might have done at the start," said Ellen bitterly--"but I tell you, Joanna, life isn't quite the simple thing you imagine. There was I, married to a man utterly uncongenial--"

"He wasn't! You're not to miscall Arthur--he's the best man alive."

"I don't deny it--perhaps that is why I found him uncongenial. Anyhow, we were quite unsuited to each other--we hadn't an idea in common."

"You liked him well enough when you married him."

"I've told you before that it's difficult to know anyone thoroughly till one's lived with them."

"Then at that rate, who's to get married--eh?"

"I don't know," said Ellen wearily, "all I know is that I've made two bad mistakes over two different men, and I think the least you can do is to let me forget it--as far as I'm able--and not come here baiting me when I'm dog tired, and absolutely down and out...."

She bowed her face into her hands, and burst into tears. Joanna flung her arms round her--

"Oh, don't you cry, duckie--don't--I didn't mean to bait you. Only I was getting so mortal vexed at you and me walking round each other like two cats and never getting a straight word."

"Jo," ... said Ellen.

Her face was hidden in her sister's shoulder, and her whole body had drooped against Joanna's side, utterly weary after three days of travel and disillusioned loneliness.

"Reckon I'm glad you've come back, dearie--and I won't ask you any more questions. I'm a cross-grained, cantankerous old thing, but you'll stop along of me a bit, won't you?"

"Yes," said Ellen, "you're all I've got in the world."

"Arthur ud take you back any day you ask it," said Joanna, thinking this a good time for mediation.

"No--no!" cried Ellen, beginning to cry again--"I won't stay if you try to make me go back to Arthur. If he had the slightest feeling for me he would let me divorce him."

"How could you?--seeing that he's been a pattern all his life."

"He needn't do anything wrong--he need only pretend to. The lawyers ud fix it up."

Ellen was getting French again. Joanna pushed her off her shoulder.

"Really, Ellen Alce, I'm ashamed of you--that you should speak such words! What upsets me most is that you don't seem to see how wrong you've done. Don't you never read your Bible any more?"

"No," sobbed Ellen.

"Well, there's lots in the Bible about people like you--you're called by your right name there, and it ain't a pretty one. Some are spoken uncommon hard of, and some were forgiven because they loved much. Seemingly you haven't loved much, so I don't see how you expect to be forgiven. And there's lots in the Prayer Book too ... the Bible and the Prayer Book both say you've done wrong, and you don't seem to mind--all you think of is how you can get out of your trouble. Reckon you're like a child that's done wrong and thinks of nothing but coaxing round so as not to be punished."

"I have been punished."

"Not half what you deserve."

"It's all very well for you to say that--you don't understand; and what's more, you never will. You're a hard woman, Jo--because you've never had the temptations that ordinary women have to fight against."

"How dare you say that?--Temptation!--Reckon I know ..." A sudden memory of those painful and humiliating moments when she had fought with those strange powers and discontents, made Joanna turn hot with shame. The realization that she had come very close to Ellen's sin in her heart did not make her more relenting towards the sinner--on the contrary, she hardened.

"Anyways, I've said enough to you for to-night."

"I hope you don't mean to say more to-morrow."

"No--I don't know that I do. Reckon you're right, and we don't get any good from 'having things out.' Seemingly we speak with different tongues, and think with different hearts."

She stood up, and her huge shadow sped over the ceiling, hanging over Ellen as she crouched on the bed. Then she stalked out of the room, almost majestic in her turkey-red dressing-gown.

§33

Ellen kept very close to the house during the next few days. Her face wore a demure, sullen expression--towards Joanna she was quiet and sweet, and evidently anxious that there should be no further opening of hearts between them. She was very polite to the maids--she won their good opinion by making her bed herself, so that they should not have any extra work on her account.

Perhaps it was this domestic good opinion which was at the bottom of the milder turn which the gossip about her took at this time. Naturally tongues had been busy ever since it became known that Joanna was expecting her back--Sir Harry Trevor had got shut of her for the baggage she was ... she had got shut of Sir Harry Trevor for the blackguard he was ... she had travelled back as somebody's maid, to pay her fare ... she had brought her own French maid as far as Calais ... she had walked from Dover ... she had brought four trunks full of French clothes. These conflicting rumours must have killed each other, for a few days after her return the Woolpack was saying that after all there might be something in Joanna's tale of a trip with Mrs. Williams--of course everyone knew that both Ellen and the Old Squire had been at San Remo, but now it was suddenly discovered that Mrs. Williams had been there too--anyway, there was no knowing that she hadn't, and Ellen Alce didn't look the sort that ud go to a furrin place alone with a man. Mrs. Vine had seen her through the parlour window, and her face was as white as chalk--not a scrap of paint on it. Mr. Southland had met her on the Brodnyx Road, and she had bowed to him polite and stately--no shrinking from an honest man's eye. According to the Woolpack, if you sinned as Ellen was reported to have sinned, you were either brazen or thoroughly ashamed of yourself, and Ellen, by being neither, did much to soften public opinion, and make it incline towards the official explanation of her absence.

This tendency increased when it became known that Arthur Alce was leaving Donkey Street. The Woolpack held that if Ellen had been guilty, Alce would not put himself in the wrong by going away. He would either have remained as the visible rebuke of her misconduct, or he would have bundled Ellen herself off to some distant part of the kingdom, such as the Isle of Wight, where the Goddens had cousins. By leaving the neighbourhood he gave colour to the mysteriously-started rumour that he was not so easy to get on with as you'd think ... after all, it's never a safe thing for a girl to marry her sister's sweetheart ... probably Alce had been hankering after his old love and Ellen resented it ... the Woolpack suddenly discovered that Alce was leaving not so much on Ellen's account as on Joanna's--he'd been unable to get off with the old love, even when he'd got on with the new, and now that the new was off too ... well, there was nothing for it but for Arthur Alce to be off. He was going to his brother, who had a big farm in the shires--a proper farm, with great fields each of which was nearly as big as a marsh farm, fifty, seventy, a hundred acres even.

§34

Joanna bitterly resented Arthur's going, but she could not prevent it, for if he stayed Ellen threatened to go herself.

"I'll get a post as lady's-maid sooner than stay on here with you and Arthur. Have you absolutely no delicacy, Jo?--Can't you see how awkward it'll be for me if everywhere I go I run the risk of meeting him? Besides, you'll be always plaguing me to go back to him, and I tell you I'll never do that--never."

Arthur, too, did not seem anxious to stay. He saw that if Ellen was at Ansdore he could not be continually running to and fro on his errands for Joanna. That tranquil life of service was gone, and he did not care for the thought of exile at Donkey Street, a shutting of himself into his parish of Old Romney, with the Kent Ditch between him and Joanna like a prison wall.

When Joanna told him what Ellen had said, he accepted it meekly--

"That's right, Joanna--I must go."

"But that ull be terrible hard for you, Arthur."

He looked at her.

"Reckon it will."

"Where ull you go?"

"Oh, I can go to Tom's."

"That's right away in the shires, ain't it?"

"Yes--beyond Leicester."

"Where they do the hunting."

"Surelye."

"What's the farm?"

"Grain mostly--and he's done well with his sheep. He'd be glad to have me for a bit."

"What'll you do with Donkey Street?"

"Let it off for a bit."

"Don't you sell!"

"Not I!"

"You'll be meaning to come back?"

"I'll be hoping."

Joanna gazed at him for a few moments in silence, and a change came into her voice--

"Arthur, you're doing all this because of me."

"I'm doing it for you, Joanna."

"Well--I don't feel I've any call--I haven't any right.... I mean, if Ellen don't like you here, she must go herself ... it ain't fair on you--you at Donkey Street for more'n twenty year ..."

"Don't you trouble about that. A change won't hurt me. Reckon either Ellen or me ull have to go and it ud break your heart if it was Ellen."

"Why can't you both stay? Ellen ull have to stay if I make her. I don't believe a word of what she says about going as lady's maid--she hasn't got the grit--nor the character neither, though she doesn't seem to think of that."

"It ud be unaccountable awkward, Jo--and it ud set Ellen against both of us, and bring you trouble. Maybe if I go she'll take a different view of things. I shan't let off the place for longer than three year ... it'll give her a chance to think different, and then maybe we can fix up something...."

Joanna fastened on to these words, both for her own comfort in Arthur's loss, and for the quieting of her conscience, which told her that it was preposterous that he should leave Donkey Street so that she could keep Ellen at Ansdore. Of course, if she did her duty she would pack Ellen off to the Isle of Wight, so that Arthur could stay. The fact was, however, that she wanted the guilty, ungracious Ellen more than she wanted the upright, devoted Arthur--she was glad to know of any terms on which her sister would consent to remain under her roof--it seemed almost too good to be true, to think that once more she had the little sister home....

So she signed the warrant for Arthur's exile, which was to do so much to spread the more favourable opinion of Ellen Alce that had mysteriously crept into being since her return. He let off Donkey Street on a three years' lease to young Jim Honisett, the greengrocer's son at Rye, who had recently married and whose wish to set up as farmer would naturally be to the advantage of his father's shop. He let his furniture with it too.... He himself would take nothing to his brother, who kept house in a very big way, the same as he farmed.... "Reckon I should ought to learn a thing or two about grain-growing that'll be useful to me when I come back," said Arthur stoutly.

He had come to say good-bye to Joanna on a June evening just before the quarter day. The hot scents of hay-making came in through the open parlour window, and they were free, for Ellen had gone with Mr. and Mrs. Southland to Rye for the afternoon--of late she had accepted one or two small invitations from the neighbours. Joanna poured Arthur out a cup of tea from the silver teapot he had given her as a wedding present six years ago.

"Well, Arthur--reckon it'll be a long time before you and me have tea again together."

"Reckon it will."

"Howsumever, I shall always think of you when I pour it out of your teapot--which will be every day that I don't have it in the kitchen."

"Thank you, Jo."

"And you'll write and tell me how you're getting on?"

"Reckon I will."

"Maybe you'll send me some samples of those oats your brother did so well with. I'm not over pleased with that Barbacklaw, and ud make a change if I could find better."

"I'll be sure and send."

Joanna told him of an inspiration she had had with regard to the poorer innings of Great Ansdore--she was going to put down fish-guts for manure--it had done wonders with some rough land over by Botolph's Bridge--"Reckon it'll half stink the tenants out, but they're at the beginning of a seven years lease, so they can't help themselves much." She held forth at great length, and Arthur listened, holding his cup and saucer carefully on his knee with his big freckled hands. His eyes were fixed on Joanna, on the strong-featured, high-coloured face he thought so much more beautiful than Ellen's with its delicate lines and pale, petal-like skin.... Yes, Joanna was the girl all along--the one for looks, the one for character--give him Joanna every time, with her red and brown face, and thick brown hair, and her high, deep bosom, and sturdy, comfortable waist ... why couldn't he have had Joanna, instead of what he'd got, which was nothing? For the first time in his life Arthur Alce came near to questioning the ways of Providence. Reckon it was the last thing he would ever do for her--this going away. He wasn't likely to come back, though he did talk of it, just to keep up their spirits. He would probably settle down in the shires--go into partnership with his brother--run a bigger place than Donkey Street, than Ansdore even.

"Well, I must be going now. There's still a great lot of things to be tidied up."

He rose, awkwardly setting down his cup. Joanna rose too. The sunset, rusty with the evening sea-mist, poured over her goodly form as she stood against the window, making its outlines dim and fiery and her hair like a burning crown.

"I shall miss you, Arthur."

He did not speak, and she held out her hand.

"Good-bye."

He could not say it--instead he pulled her towards him by the hand he held.

"Jo--I must."

"Arthur--no!"

But it was too late--he had kissed her.

"That's the first time you done it," she said reproachfully.

"Because it's the last. You aren't angry, are you?"

"I?--no. But, Arthur, you mustn't forget you're married to Ellen."

"Am I like to forget it?--And seeing all the dunnamany kisses she's given to another man, reckon she won't grudge me this one poor kiss I've given the woman I've loved without clasp or kiss for fifteen years."

For the first time she heard in his voice both bitterness and passion, and at that moment the man himself seemed curiously to come alive and to compel.... But Joanna was not going to dally with temptation in the unaccustomed shape of Arthur Alce. She pushed open the door.

"Have they brought round Ranger?--Hi! Peter Crouch!--Yes, there he is. You'll have a good ride home, Arthur."

"But there'll be rain to-morrow."

"I don't think it. The sky's all red at the rims."

"The wind's shifted."

Joanna moistened her finger and held it up--

"So it has. But the glass is high. Reckon it'll hold off till you're in the shires, and then our weather won't trouble you."

She watched him ride off, standing in the doorway till the loops of the Brodnyx road carried him into the rusty fog that was coming from the sea.

_PART IV_

LAST LOVE

§1

Time passed on, healing the wounds of the Marsh. At Donkey Street, the neighbours were beginning to get used to young Honisett and his bride, at Rye and Lydd and Romney the farmers had given up expecting Arthur Alce to come round the corner on his grey horse, with samples of wheat or prices of tegs. At Ansdore, too, the breach was healed. Joanna and Ellen lived quietly together, sharing their common life without explosions. Joanna had given up all idea of "having things out" with Ellen. There was always a bit of pathos about Joanna's surrenders, and in this case Ellen had certainly beaten her. It was rather difficult to say exactly to what the younger sister owed her victory, but undoubtedly she had won it, and their life was in a measure based upon it. Joanna accepted her sister--past and all; she accepted her little calm assumptions of respectability together with those more expected tendencies towards the "French." When Ellen had first come back, she had been surprised and resentful to see how much she took for granted in the way of acceptance, not only from Joanna but from the neighbours. According to her ideas, Ellen should have kept in shamed seclusion till public opinion called her out of it, and she had been alarmed at her assumptions, fearing rebuff, just as she had almost feared heaven's lightning stroke for that demure little figure in her pew on Sunday, murmuring "Lord have mercy" without tremor or blush.

But heaven had not smitten and the neighbours had not snubbed. In some mysterious way Ellen had won acceptance from the latter, whatever her secret relations with the former may have been. The stories about her grew ever more and more charitable. The Woolpack pronounced that Arthur Alce would not have gone away "if it had been all on her side," and it was now certainly known that Mrs. Williams had been at San Remo.... Ellen's manner was found pleasing--"quiet but affable." Indeed, in this respect she had much improved. The Southlands took her up, forgiving her treatment of their boy, now comfortably married to the daughter of a big Folkestone shopkeeper. They found her neither brazen nor shamefaced--and she'd been as shocked as any honest woman at Lady Mountain's trial in the Sunday papers ... if folk only knew her real story, they'd probably find....

In fact, Ellen was determined to get her character back.

She knew within herself that she owed a great deal to Joanna's protection--for Joanna was the chief power in the parishes of Brodnyx and Pedlinge, both personally and territorially. Ellen had been wise beyond the wisdom of despair when she came home. She was not unhappy in her life at Ansdore, for her escapade had given her a queer advantage over her sister, and she now found that she could to a certain extent, mould the household routine to her comfort. She was no longer entirely dominated, and only a small amount of independence was enough to satisfy her, a born submitter, to whom contrivance was more than rule. She wanted only freedom for her tastes and pleasures, and Joanna did not now strive to impose her own upon her. Occasionally the younger woman complained of her lot, bound to a man whom she no longer cared for, wearing only the fetters of her wifehood--she still hankered after a divorce, though Arthur must be respondent. This always woke Joanna to rage, but Ellen's feelings did not often rise to the surface, and on the whole the sisters were happy in their life together--more peaceful because they were more detached than in the old days. Ellen invariably wore black, hoping that strangers and newcomers would take her for a widow.

This she actually became towards the close of the year 1910. Arthur did a fair amount of hunting with his brother in the shires, and one day his horse came down at a fence, throwing him badly and fracturing his skull. He died the same night without regaining consciousness--death had treated him better on the whole than life, for he died without pain or indignity, riding to hounds like any squire. He left a comfortable little fortune, too--Donkey Street and its two hundred acres--and he left it all to Joanna.

Secretly he had made his will anew soon after going to the shires, and in it he had indulged himself, ignoring reality and perhaps duty. Evidently he had had no expectations of a return to married life with Ellen, and in this new testament he ignored her entirely, as if she had not been. Joanna was his wife, inheriting all that was his, of land and money and live and dead stock--"My true, trusty friend, Joanna Godden."

Ellen was furious, and Joanna herself was a little shocked. She understood Arthur's motives--she guessed that one of his reasons for passing over Ellen had been his anxiety to leave her sister dependent on her, knowing her fear that she would take flight. But this exaltation of her by his death to the place she had refused to occupy during his life, gave her a queer sense of smart and shame. For the first time it struck her that she might not have treated Arthur quite well....

However, she did not sympathize with Ellen's indignation--

"You shouldn't ought to have expected a penny, the way you treated him."

"I don't see why he shouldn't have left me at least some furniture, seeing there was about five hundred pounds of my money in that farm. He's done rather well out of me on the whole--making me no allowance whatever when he was alive."

"Because I wouldn't let him make it--I've got some pride if you haven't."

"Your pride doesn't stop you taking what ought to have been mine."

"'Ought to'.... I never heard such words. Not that I'm pleased he should make it all over to me, but it ain't my doing."

Ellen looked at her fixedly out of her eyes which were like the shallow floods.

"Are you quite sure? Are you quite sure, Joanna, that you honestly played a sister's part by me while I was away?"

"What d'you mean?"

"I mean, Arthur seems to have got a lot fonder of you while I was away than he--er--seemed to be before."

Joanna gaped at her.

"Of course it was only natural," continued Ellen smoothly--"I know I treated him badly--but don't you think you needn't have taken advantage of that?"

"Well, I'm beat ... look here, Ellen ... that man was mine from the first, and I gave him over to you, and I never took him back nor wanted him, neither."

"How generous of you, Jo, to have 'given him over' to me."

A little maddening smile twisted the corners of her mouth, and Joanna remembered that now Arthur was dead and there was no hope of Ellen going back to him she need not spare her secret.

"Yes, I gave him to you," she said bluntly--"I saw you wanted him, and I didn't want him myself, so I said to him 'Arthur, look here, you take her'--and he said to me--'I'd sooner have you, Jo'--but I said 'you won't have me even if you wait till the moon's cheese, so there's no good hoping for that. You take the little sister and please me'--and he said 'I'll do it to please you, Jo.' That's the very thing that happened, and I'm sorry it happened now--and I never told you before, because I thought it ud put you against him, and I wanted you to go back to him, being his wife; but now he's dead, and you may as well know, seeing the upstart notions you've got."

She looked fiercely at Ellen, to watch the effect of the blow, but was disconcerted to see that the little maddening smile still lingered. There were dimples at the flexing corners of her sister's mouth, and now they were little wells of disbelieving laughter. Ellen did not believe her--she had told her long-guarded secret and her sister did not believe it. She thought it just something Joanna had made up to salve her pride--and nothing would ever make her believe it, for she was a woman who had been loved and knew that she was well worth loving.

§2

Both Ellen and Joanna were a little afraid that Arthur's treatment of his widow might disestablish her in public opinion. People would think that she must have behaved unaccountable badly to be served out like that. But the effects were not so disastrous as might have been expected. Ellen, poor and forlorn, in her graceful weeds, without complaining or resentful words, soon won the neighbours' compassion. It wasn't right of Alce to have treated her so--showed an unforgiving nature--if only the real story could be known, most likely folks would see.... There was also a mild scandal at his treatment of Joanna. "Well, even if he loved her all the time when he was married to her sister, he needn't have been so brazen about it.... Always cared for Joanna more'n he ought and showed it more'n he ought."

Joanna was not worried by these remarks--she brushed them aside. Her character was gossip-proof, whereas Ellen's was not, therefore it was best that the stones should be thrown at her rather than at her sister. She at once went practically to work with Donkey Street. She did not wish to keep it--it was too remote from Ansdore to be easily workable, and she was content with her own thriving estate. She sold Donkey Street with all its stock, and decided to lay out the money in improvements of her land. She would drain the waterlogged innings by the Kent Ditch, she would buy a steam plough and make the neighbourhood sit up--she would start cattle-breeding. She had no qualms in thus spending the money on the farm, instead of on Ellen. Her sister rather plaintively pointed out that the invested capital would have brought her in a comfortable small income--"and then I needn't be such a burden to you, Joanna, dear."

"You ain't a burden to me," said Joanna.

She could not bear to think of Ellen's becoming independent and leaving her. But Ellen was far better contented with her life at home than she wisely let it appear. Ansdore was a manor now--the largest estate not only in Brodnyx and Pedlinge, but on Walland Marsh; indeed the whole of the Three Marshes had little to beat it with. Moreover, Ellen was beginning to get her own way in the house--her bedroom was no longer a compulsory bower of roses, but softly cream-coloured and purple-hung. She had persuaded Joanna to have a bathroom fitted up, with hot and cold water and other glories, and though she had been unable to induce her to banish her father's Bible and the stuffed owls from the parlour, she had been allowed to supplement--and practically annihilate--them with the notorious black cushions from Donkey Street. Joanna was a little proud to have these famous decorations on the premises, to be indoors what her yellow waggons were outdoors, symbols of daring and progress.

On the whole, this substantial house, with its wide lands, respectable furniture and swarming servants, was one to be proud of. Ellen's position as Squire Joanna Godden's sister was much better than if she were living by herself in some small place on a small income. Her brief adventure into what she thought was a life of fashionable gaiety had discouraged and disillusioned her--she was slowly slipping back into the conventions of her class and surroundings. Ansdore was no longer either a prison or a refuge, it was beginning to be a home--not permanent, of course, for she was now a free woman and would marry again, but a good home to rest in and re-establish herself.

Thanks to Ellen's contrivance and to the progress of Joanna's own ambition--rising out of its fulfilment in the sphere of the material into the sphere of style and manners--the sisters now lived the lives of two well-to-do ladies. They had late dinner every night--only soup and meat and pudding, still definitely neither supper nor high tea. Joanna changed for it into smart, stiff silk blouses, with a great deal of lace and guipure about them, while Ellen wore a rest-gown of drifting black charmeuse. Mene Tekel was promoted from the dairy to be Ansdore's first parlourmaid, and wore a cap and apron, and waited at table. Ellen would have liked to keep Mene Tekel in her place and engage a smart town girl, whose hands were not the colour of beetroots and whose breathing could not be heard through a closed door; but Joanna stood firm--Mene had been her faithful servant for more than seven years, and it wasn't right that she should have a girl from the town promoted over her. Besides, Joanna did not like town girls--with town speech that rebuked her own, and white hands that made her want to put her own large brown ones under the table.

§3

Early the next year Mr. Pratt faded out. He could not be said to have done anything so dramatic as to die, though the green marsh-turf of Brodnyx churchyard was broken to make him a bed, and the little bell rocked in the bosom of the drunken Victorian widow who was Brodnyx church steeple, sending a forlorn note out over the Marsh. Various aunts in various stages of resigned poverty bore off his family to separate destinations, and the great Rectory house which had for so long mocked his two hundred a year, stood empty, waiting to swallow up its next victim.

Only in Joanna Godden's breast did any stir remain. For her at least the fading out of Mr. Pratt had been drama, the final scene of her importance; for it was now her task to appoint his successor in the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge. Ever since she had found out that she could not get rid of Mr. Pratt she had been in terror lest this crowning triumph might be denied her, and the largeness of her funeral wreath and the lavishness of her mourning--extinguishing all the relations in their dyed blacks--had testified to the warmth of her gratitude to the late rector for so considerately dying.

She felt exceedingly important, and the feeling was increased by the applications she received for the living. Clergymen wrote from different parts of the country; they told her that they were orthodox--as if she had imagined a clergyman could be otherwise--that they were acceptable preachers, that they were good with Boy Scouts. One or two she interviewed and disliked, because they had bad teeth or large families--one or two turned the tables on her and refused to have anything to do with a living encumbered by so large a rectory and so small an endowment. Joanna felt insulted, though she was not responsible for either. She resolved not to consider any applicants, but to make her own choice outside their ranks. This was a difficult matter, for her sphere was hardly clerical, and she knew no clergy except those on the Marsh. None of these she liked, because they were for the most part elderly and went about on bicycles--also she wanted to dazzle her society with a new importation.

The Archdeacon wrote to her, suggesting that she might be glad of some counsel in filling the vacancy, and giving her the names of two men whom he thought suitable. Joanna was furious--she would brook no interference from Archdeacons, and wrote the gentleman a letter which must have been unique in his archidiaconal experience. All the same she began to feel worried--she was beginning to doubt if she had the same qualifications for choosing a clergyman as she had for choosing a looker or a dairy-girl. She knew the sort of man she liked as a man, and more vaguely the sort of man she liked as a parson, she also was patriotically anxious to find somebody adequate to the honours and obligations of the living. Nobody she saw or heard of seemed to come up to her double standard of man and minister, and she was beginning to wonder to what extent she could compromise her pride by writing--not to the Archdeacon, but over his head to the Bishop--when she saw in the local paper that Father Lawrence, of the Society of Sacred Pity, was preaching a course of sermons in Marlingate.

Immediately memories came back to her, so far and pale that they were more like the memories of dreams than of anything which had actually happened. She saw a small dark figure standing with its back to the awakening light and bidding godspeed to all that was vital and beautiful and more-than-herself in her life.... "Go, Christian soul"--while she in the depths of her broken heart had cried "Stay, stay!" But he had obeyed the priest rather than the lover, he had gone and not stayed ... and afterwards the priest had tried to hold him for her in futurity--"think of Martin, pray for Martin," but the lover had let him slip, because she could not think and dared not pray, and he had fallen back from her into his silent home in the past.

The old wound could still hurt, for a moment it seemed as if her whole body was pain because of it. Successful, important, thriving Joanna Godden could still suffer because eight years ago she had not been allowed to make the sacrifice of all that she now held so triumphantly. This mere name of Martin's brother had pricked her heart, and she suddenly wanted to get closer to the past than she could get with her memorial-card and photograph and tombstone. Even Sir Harry Trevor, ironic link with faithful love, was gone now--there was only Lawrence. She would like to see him--not to talk to him of Martin, she couldn't bear that, and there would be something vaguely improper about it--but he was a clergyman, for all he disguised the fact by calling himself a priest, and she would offer him the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge and let the neighbourhood sit up as much as it liked.

§4

Father Lawrence came to see her one April day when the young lambs were bleating on the sheltered innings and making bright clean spots of white beside the ewes' fog-soiled fleeces, when the tegs had come down from their winter keep inland, and the sunset fell in long golden slats across the first water-green grass of spring. The years had aged him more than they had aged Joanna--the marks on her face were chiefly weather marks, tokens of her exposure to marsh suns and winds, and of her own ruthless applications of yellow soap. Behind them was a little of the hardness which comes when a woman has to fight many battles and has won her victories largely through the sacrifice of her resources. The lines on his face were mostly those of his own humour and other people's sorrows, he had exposed himself perhaps not enough to the weather and too much to the world, so that where she had fine lines and a fundamental hardness, he had heavy lines like the furrows of a ploughshare, and a softness beneath them like the fruitful soil that the share turns up.

Joanna received him in state, with Arthur Alce's teapot and her best pink silk blouse with the lace insertion. Ellen, for fairly obvious reasons, preferred not to be present. Joanna was terrified lest he should begin to talk of Martin, so after she had conformed to local etiquette by inquiring after his health and abusing the weather, she offered him the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge and a slice of cake almost in the same breath.

She was surprised and a little hurt when he refused the former. As a member of a religious community he could not hold preferment, and he had no vocation to settled Christianity.

"I shouldn't be at all good as a country clergyman. Besides, Jo"--he had at once slipped into the brotherliness of their old relations--"I know you; you wouldn't like my ways. You'd always be up at me, teaching me better, and then I should be up at you, and possibly we shouldn't stay quite such good friends as we are now."

"I shouldn't mind your ways. Reckon it might do the folks round here a proper lot of good to be prayed over same as you--I mean I'd like to see a few of 'em prayed over when they were dying and couldn't help themselves. Serve them right, I say, for not praying when they're alive, and some who won't put their noses in church except for a harvest thanksgiving. No, if you'll only come here, Lawrence, you may do what you like in the way of prayers and such. I shan't interfere as long as you don't trouble us with the Pope, whom I never could abide after all I've heard of him, wanting to blow up the Established Church in London, and making people kiss his toe, which I'd never do, not if he was to burn me alive."

"Well, if that's the only limit to your toleration I think I could help you, even though I can't come myself. I know one or two excellent priests who would do endless good in a place like this."

Joanna suddenly felt her imagination gloat and kindle at the thought of Brodnyx and Pedlinge compelled to holiness--all those wicked old men who wouldn't go to church, but expected their Christmas puddings just the same, those hobbledehoys who loafed against gate-posts the whole of Sunday, those vain hussies who giggled behind their handkerchiefs all the service through--it would be fine to see them hustled about and taught their manners ... it would be valiant sport to see them made to behave, as Mr. Pratt had never been able to make them. She with her half-crown in the plate and her quarterly communion need have no qualms, and she would enjoy seeing the fear of God put into other folk.

So Lawrence's visit was fruitful after all--a friend of his had been ordered to give up his hard work in a slum parish and find a country vocation. He promised that this friend should write to Joanna.

"But I must see him, too," she said.

They were standing at the open door, and the religious in his black habit was like a cut paper silhouette against the long streaks of fading purple cloud.

"I remember," he said, "that you always were particular about a man's looks. How Martin's must have delighted you!"

His tongue did not falter over the loved, forbidden name--he spoke it quite naturally and conversationally, as if glad that he could introduce it at last into their business.

Joanna's body stiffened, but he did not see it, for he was gazing at the young creeper's budding trail over the door.

"I hope you have a good photograph of him," he continued--"I know that a very good photograph was taken of him a year before he died--much better than any of the earlier ones. I hope you have one of those."

"Yes, I have," said Joanna gruffly. From shock she had passed into a thrilling anger. How calmly he had spoken the dear name, how unblushingly he had said the outrageous word "died!" How brazen, thoughtless, cruel he was about it all!--tearing the veil from her sorrow, talking as if her dead lived ... she felt exposed, indecent, and she hated him, all the more because mixed with her hatred was a kind of disapproving envy, a resentment that he should be free to remember where she was bound to forget....

He saw her hand clench slowly at her side, and for the first time became aware of her state of mind.

"Good-bye, Jo," he said kindly--"I'll tell Father Palmer to write to you."

"Thanks, but I don't promise to take him," was her ungracious fling.

"No--why should you? And of course he may have already made his plans. Good-bye, and thank you for your great kindness in offering the living to me--it was very noble of you, considering what your family has suffered from mine."

He had carefully avoided all reference to his father, but he now realized that he had kept the wrong silence. It was the man who had brought her happiness, not the man who had brought her shame, that she was unable to speak of.

"Oh, don't you think of that--it wasn't your doing"--she melted towards him now she had a genuine cause for indignation--"and we've come through it better than we hoped, and some of us deserved."

Lawrence gave her an odd smile, which made his face with its innumerable lines and pouches look rather like a gargoyle's. Then he walked off bare-headed into the twilight.

§5

Ellen was intensely relieved when she heard that he had refused the living, and a little indignant with Joanna for having offered it to him.

"You don't seem to realize how very awkward it would have been for me--I don't want to have anything more to do with that family."

"I daresay not," said Joanna grimly, "but that ain't no reason why this parish shouldn't have a good parson. Lawrence ud have made the people properly mind their ways. And it ain't becoming in you, Ellen Alce, to let your own misdoings stand between folk and what's good for 'em."

Ellen accepted the rebuke good-humouredly. She had grown more mellow of late, and was settling into her life at Ansdore as she had never settled since she went to school. She relished her widowed state, for it involved the delectable business of looking about for a second husband. She was resolved to act with great deliberation. This time there should be no hustling into matrimony. It seemed to her now as if that precipitate taking of Arthur Alce had been at the bottom of all her troubles; she had been only a poor little schoolgirl, a raw contriver, hurling herself out of the frying-pan of Ansdore's tyranny into the fire of Donkey Street's dullness. She knew better now--besides, the increased freedom and comfort of her conditions did not involve the same urgency of escape.

She made up her mind that she would not take anyone of the farming classes; this time she would marry a gentleman--but a decent sort. She did not enjoy all her memories of Sir Harry Trevor. She would not take up with that kind of man again, any more than with a dull fellow like poor Arthur.