Joanna Godden Part 24

Martin's study, waiting to be sent for upstairs, but she'd only seen him once....

Then, when tongues at last were quiet in church, just before the second lesson, Mr. Pratt read out--

"I publish the banns of marriage between Martin Arbuthnot Trevor, bachelor, of this parish, and Joanna Mary G.o.dden, spinster, of the parish of Pedlinge. This is for the first time of asking. If any of you know any just cause or impediment why these persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony, ye are to declare it."

--23

Martin died early on Monday morning. Joanna was with him at the last, and to the last she did not believe that he would die--because he had given up worrying about himself, so she was sure he must feel better.

Three hours before he died he held both her hands and looked at her once more like a man out of his eyes ... "Lovely Jo," he said.

She had lain down in most of her clothes as usual, in the little spare room, and between two and three o'clock in the morning the nurse had roused her.

"You're wanted ... but I'm not sure if he'll know you."

He didn't. He knew none of them--his mind seemed to have gone away and left his body to fight its last fight alone.

"He doesn't feel anything," they said to her, when Martin gasped and struggled--"but don't stay if you'd rather not."

"I'd rather stay," said Joanna, "he may know me. Martin ..." she called to him. "Martin--I'm here--I'm Jo--" but it was like calling to someone who is already far away down a long road.

There was a faint sweet smell of oil in the room--Father Lawrence had administered the last rites of Holy Church. His romance and Martin's had met at his brother's death-bed ... "Go forth, Christian soul, from this world, in the Name of G.o.d--in the name of the Angels and Archangels--in the name of the Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Evangelists, Martyrs, Confessors, Virgins, and of all the Saints of G.o.d; let thine habitation to-day be in peace and thine abode in Holy Sion" ... "Martin, it's only me, it's only Jo" ... Thus the two voices mingled, and he heard neither.

The cold morning lit up the window square, and the window rattled with the breeze of Rye Bay. Joanna felt someone take her hand and lead her towards the door. "He's all right now," said Lawrence's voice--"it's over ..."

Somebody was giving her a gla.s.s of wine--she was sitting in the dining-room, staring unmoved at Nell Raddish's guilt revealed in a breakfast-table laid over night. Lawrence and Sir Harry were both with her, being kind to her, forgetting their own grief in trying to comfort her. But Joanna only wanted to go home. Suddenly she felt lonely and scared in this fine house, with its thick carpets and mahogany and silver--now that Martin was not here to befriend her in it. She did not belong--she was an outsider, she wanted to go away.

She asked for the trap, and they tried to persuade her to stay and have some breakfast, but she repeated doggedly, "I want to go." Lawrence went and fetched the trap round, for the men were not about yet. The morning had not really come--only the cold twilight, empty and howling with wind, with a great drifting sky of fading stars.

Lawrence went with her to the door, and kissed her--"Good-bye, dear Jo.

Father or I will come and see you soon." She was surprised at the kiss, for he had never kissed her before, though the Squire had taken full advantage of their relations.h.i.+p--she had supposed it wasn't right for Jesoots.

She did not know what she said to him--probably nothing. There was a terrible silence in her heart. She heard Smiler's hoofs upon the road--clop, clop, clop. But they did not break the silence within ...

oh, Martin, Martin, put your hand under my arm, against my heart--maybe that'll stop it aching.

Thoughts of Martin crowding upon her, filling her empty heart with memories.... Martin sitting on the tombstone outside Brodnyx church on Christmas day, Martin holding her in his arms on the threshold of Ansdore ... Martin kissing her in New Romney church, bending her back against the pillar stained with the old floods ... that drive through Broomhill--how he had teased her!--"we'll come here for our honeymoon"

... Dunge Ness, the moaning sea, the wind, her fear, his arms ... the warm kitchen of the Britannia, with the light of the wreckwood fire, the teacups on the table, "we shall want to see our children".... No, no, you mustn't say that--not _now_, not _now_.... Remember instead how we quarrelled, how he tried to get between me and Ansdore, so that I forgot Ansdore, and gave it up for his sake; but it's all I've got now. I gave up Ansdore to Martin, and now I've lost Martin and got Ansdore. I've got three hundred acres and four hundred sheep and three hundred pounds at interest in Lewes Old Bank. But I've lost Martin. I've done valiant for Ansdore, better'n ever I hoped--poor father ud be proud of me. But my heart's broken. I don't like remembering--it hurts--I must forget.

Colour had come into the dawn. The Marsh was slowly turning from a strange papery grey to green. The sky changed from white to blue, and suddenly became smeared with ruddy clouds. At once the watercourses lit up, streaking across the green in fiery slats--the shaking boughs of the willows became full of fire, and at the turn of the road the windows of Ansdore shone as if it were burning.

There it stood at the road's bend. Its roofs a fiery yellow with the swarming sea-lichen, its solid walls flushed faintly pink in the sunrise, its windows squares of amber and flame. It was as a house lit up and welcoming. It seemed to shout to Joanna as she came to it clop, clop along the road.

"Come back--come home to me--I'm glad to see you again. You forgot me for five days, but you won't forget me any more--for I'm all that you've got now."

_PART III_

THE LITTLE SISTER

--1

For many months Ansdore was a piece of wreckage to which a drowning woman clung. Joanna's s.h.i.+p had foundered--the high-castled, seaworthy s.h.i.+p of her life--and she drifted through the dark seas, clinging only to this which had once been so splendid in the midst of her decks, but was now mere wreckage, the least thing saved. If she let go she would drown. So she trailed after Ansdore, and at last it brought her a kind of anchorage, not in her native land, but at least in no unkind country of adoption. During the last weeks of Martin's wooing, she had withdrawn herself a little from the business of the farm into a kind of overlords.h.i.+p, from which she was far more free to detach herself than from personal service. Now she went back to work with her hands--she did not want free hours, either for his company or for her own dreams; she rose early, because she waked early and must rise when she waked, and she went round waking the girls, hustling the men, putting her own hand to the milking or the cooking, more sharp-tongued than ever, less tolerant, but more terribly alive, with a kind of burning, consuming life that vexed all those about her.

"She spicks short wud me," said old Stuppeny, "and I've toald her as she mun look around fur a new head man. This time I'm going."

"She's a scold," said Broadhurst, "and reckon the young chap saaved himself a tedious life by dying."

"Reckon her heart's broke," said Mrs. Tolhurst.

"Her temper's broke," said Milly Pump.

They were unsympathetic, because she expressed her grief in terms of fierce activity instead of in the lackadaisical ways of tradition. If Joanna had taken to her bed on her return from North Farthing House that early time, and had sent for the doctor, and shown all the credited symptoms of a broken heart, they would have pitied her and served her and borne with her. But, instead, she had come back hustling and scolding, and they could not see that she did so because not merely her heart but her whole self was broken, and that she was just flying and rattling about like a broken thing. So instead of pitying her, they grumbled and threatened to leave her service--in fact, Milly Pump actually did so, and was succeeded by Mene Tekel f.a.gge, the daughter of Bibliolatious parents at Northlade.

Ansdore throve on its mistress's frenzy. That autumn Joanna had four hundred pounds in Lewes Old Bank, the result of her splendid markets and of her new ploughs, which had borne eight bushels to the acre. She had triumphed gloriously over everyone who had foretold her ruin through breaking up pasture; strong-minded farmers could scarcely bear to drive along that lap of the Brodnyx road which ran through Joanna's wheat, springing slim and strong and heavy-eared as from Lothian soil--if there had been another way from Brodnyx to Rye market they would have taken it; indeed it was rumoured that on one occasion Vine had gone by train from Appledore because he couldn't abear the sight of Joanna G.o.dden's ploughs.

This rumour, when it reached her, brought her a faint thrill. It was the beginning of a slow process of reidentification of herself with her own activities, which till then had been as some furious raging outside the house. She began to picture new acts of discomfiting adventure, new roads which should be shut to Vine through envy. Ansdore was all she had, so she must make it much. When she had given it and herself to Martin she had had all the Marsh and all the world to plant with her love; but since he was gone and had left her gifts behind him, she had just a few acres to plant with wheat--and her harvest should be bread alone.

--2

Her black months had changed her--not outwardly very much, but leaving wounds in her heart. Martin had woken in her too many needs for her to be able to go back quietly into the old life of unfulfilled content. He had shown her a vision of herself as complete woman, mother and wife, of a Joanna G.o.dden bigger than Ansdore. She could no longer be the Joanna G.o.dden whose highest ambition was to be admitted member of the Farmers'

Club. He had also woken in her certain simple cravings--for a man's strong arm round her and his shoulder under her cheek. She had now to make the humiliating discovery that the husk of such a need can remain after the creating spirit had left it. In the course of the next year she had one or two small, rather undignified flirtations with neighbouring farmers--there was young Gain over at Botolph's Bridge, and Ernest Noakes of Belgar. They did not last long, and she finally abandoned both in disgust, but a side of her, always active unconsciously, was now disturbingly awake, requiring more concrete satisfactions than the veiled, self-deceiving episode of Socknersh.

She was ashamed of this. And it made her withdraw from comforts she might have had. She never went to North Farthing House, where she could have talked about Martin with the one person who--as it happened--would have understood her treacheries. Lawrence came to see her once at the end of September, but she was gruff and silent. She recoiled from his efforts to break the barriers between life and death; he wanted her to give Martin her thoughts and her prayers just as if he were alive. But she "didn't hold with praying for the dead"--the Lion and the Unicorn would certainly disapprove of such an act; and Martin was now robed in white, with a crown on his head and a harp in his hand and a new song in his mouth--he had no need of the prayers of Joanna G.o.dden's unfaithful lips. As for her thoughts, by the same token she could not think of him as he was now; that radiant being in glistening white was beyond the soft approaches of imagination--robed and crowned, he could scarcely be expected to remember himself in a tweed suit and muddy boots kissing a flushed and hot Joanna on the lonely innings by Beggar's Bush. No, Martin was gone--gone beyond thought and prayer--gone to sing hymns for ever and ever--he who could never abide them on earth--gone to forget Joanna in the company of angels--pictured uncomfortably by her as females, who would be sure to tell him that she had let Thomas Gain kiss her in the barn over at Botolph's Bridge....

She could not think of him as he was now, remote and white, and she could bear still less to think of him as he had been once, warm and loving, with his caressing hands and untidy hair, with his flushed cheek pressed against hers, and the good smell of his clothes--with his living mouth closing slowly down on hers ... no, earth was even sharper than heaven. All she had of him in which her memory and her love could find rest were those few common things they keep to remember their dead by on the Marsh--a memorial card, thickly edged with black, which she had had printed at her own expense, since apparently such things were no part of the mourning of North Farthing House; his photograph in a black frame; his grave in Brodnyx churchyard, in the shadow of the black, three-hooded tower, and not very far from the altar-tomb on which he had sat and waited for her that Christmas morning.

--3

In the fall of the next year, she found that once again she had something to engross her outside Ansdore. Ellen was to leave school that Christmas. The little sister was now seventeen, and endowed with all the grace; and learning that forty pounds a term can buy. During the last year she and Joanna had seen comparatively little of each other. She had received one or two invitations from her school friends to spend her holidays with them--a fine testimonial, thought Joanna, to her manners and accomplishments--and her sister had been only too glad that she should go, that she should be put out of the shadow of a grief which had grown too black even for her sentimental schoolgirl sympathy, so gus.h.i.+ng and caressing, in the first weeks of her poor Joanna's mourning.

But things were different now--Martin's memory was laid. She told herself that it was because she was too busy that she had not gone as usual to the Harvest Festival at New Romney, to sing hymns beside the pillar marked with the old floods. She was beginning to forget. She could think and she could love. She longed to have Ellen back again, to love and spoil and chasten. She was glad that she was leaving school, and would make no fugitive visit to Ansdore. Immediately her mind leapt to preparations--her sister was too big to sleep any more in the little bed at the foot of her own, she must have a new bed ... and suddenly Joanna thought of a new room, a project which would mop up all her overflowing energies for the next month.

It should be a surprise for Ellen. She sent for painters and paper-hangers, and chose a wonderful new wall-paper of climbing chrysanthemums, rose and blue in colour, and tied with large bows of gold ribbon--real, s.h.i.+ning gold. The paint she chose was a delicate fawn, picked out with rose and blue. She bought yards of flowered cretonne for the bed and window curtains, and had the mahogany furniture moved in from the spare bedroom. The carpet she bought brand new--it was a sea of stormy crimson, with fawn-coloured islands rioted over with roses and blue tulips. Joanna had never enjoyed herself so much since she lost Martin, as she did now, choosing all the rich colours, and splendid solid furniture. The room cost her nearly forty pounds, for she had to buy new furniture for the spare bedroom, having given Ellen the mahogany.