Joanna Godden Part 36

"I've told 'em she's gone to stop with you."

"Well, I can't pretend she's here. You might have thought of something better, Arthur."

"I can't think of nothing else."

"You just about try. If only we can get her somewheres for a week, so as to have time to write and tell her as all will be forgiven and you'll take her back...."

Arthur looked mutinous.

"I don't know as I want her back."

"Arthur, you must. Otherways, everybody ull have to know what's happened."

"But she didn't like being with me, or she wouldn't have gone away."

"She liked it well enough, or she wouldn't have stayed with you two year. Arthur, you must have her back, you just about must. You send her a telegram saying as you'll have her back if only she'll come this once, before folks find out where she's gone."

Arthur's resistance gradually failed before Joanna's entreaties and persuasions. He could not withstand Jo when her blue eyes were all dull with tears, and her voice was hoa.r.s.e and frantic. For some months now his marriage had seemed to him a wrong and immoral thing, but he rather sorrowfully told himself that having made the first false step he could not now turn round and come back, even if Ellen herself had broken away.

He rode off to find out the Squire's address, and send his wife the summoning and forgiving telegram.

--28

It was not perhaps surprising that, in spite of a lavish and exceedingly expensive offer of forgiveness, Ellen did not come home. Over a week pa.s.sed without even an acknowledgment of the telegram, which she must have found reproachfully awaiting her arrival--the symbol of Walland Marsh pursuing her into the remoteness of a new life and a strange country.

As might have been expected Joanna felt this period of waiting and inactivity far more than she had felt the actual shock. She had all the weight on her shoulders of a sustained deception. She and Arthur had to dress up a story to deceive the neighbourhood, and they gave out that Ellen was in London, staying with Mrs. Williams--her husband had forbidden her to go, so she had run away, and now there would have to be some give and take on both sides before she could come back. Joanna had been inspired to circulate this legend by the discovery that Ellen actually had taken a ticket for London. She had probably guessed the sensation that her taking a ticket to Dover would arouse at the local station, so had gone first to London and travelled down by the boat express. It was all very cunning, and Joanna thought she saw the Old Squire's experienced hand in it. Of course it might be true that he had not persuaded Ellen to come out to him, but that she had gone to him on a sudden impulse.... But even Joanna's plunging instinct realized that her sister was not the sort to take desperate risks for love's sake, and the whole thing had about it a sly, concerted air, which made her think that Sir Harry was not only privy, but a prime mover.

After some ten days of anxiety, self-consciousness, shame and exasperation, these suspicions were confirmed by a letter from the Squire himself. He wrote from Oepedaletti, a small place near San Remo, and he wrote charmingly. No other adverb could qualify the peculiarly suave, tactful, humorous and gracious style in which not only he flung a mantle of romance over his and Ellen's behaviour (which till then, judged by the standards of Ansdore, had been just drably "wicked"), but by some mysterious means brought in Joanna as a third conspirator, linked by a broad and kindly intuition with himself and Ellen against a censorious world.

"You, who know Ellen so well, will realize that she has never till now had her birthright. You did your best for her, but both of you were bounded north, south, east and west by Walland Marsh. I wish you could see her now, beside me on the terrace--she is like a little finch in the suns.h.i.+ne of its first spring day. Her only trouble is her fear of you, her fear that you will not understand.

But I tell her I would trust you first of all the world to do that.

As a woman of the world, you must realize exactly what public opinion is worth--if you yourself had bowed down to it, where would you be now? Ellen is only doing now what you did for yourself eleven years ago."

Joanna's feelings were divided between gratification at the flattery she never could resist, and a fierce resentment at the insult offered her in supposing she could ever wink at such "goings on." The more indignant emotions predominated in the letter she wrote Sir Harry, for she knew well enough that the flattery was not sincere--he was merely out to propitiate.

Her feelings towards Ellen were exceedingly bitter, and the letter she wrote her was a rough one:--

"You're nothing but a baggage. It makes no difference that you wear fine clothes and shoes that he's bought you to your shame. You're just every bit as low as Martha Tilden whom I got shut of ten year ago for no worse than you've done."

Nevertheless, she insisted that Ellen should come home. She guaranteed Arthur's forgiveness, and--somewhat rashly--the neighbours' discretion.

"I've told them you're in London with Mrs. Williams. But that won't hold good much more than another week. So be quick and come home, before it's too late."

Unfortunately the facts of Ellen's absence were already beginning to leak out. People did not believe in the London story. Had not the Old Squire's visits to Donkey Street been the tattle of the Marsh for six months? She was condemned not only at the Woolpack, but at the three markets of Rye, Lydd and Romney. Joanna was furious.

"It's that Post Office," she exclaimed, and the remark was not quite unjust. The contents of telegrams had always had an alarming way of spreading themselves over the district, and Joanna felt sure that Miss G.o.dfrey would have both made and published her own conclusions on the large amount of foreign correspondence now received at Ansdore.

Ellen herself was the next to write. She wrote impenitently and decidedly. She would never come back, so there was no good either Joanna or Arthur expecting it. She had left Donkey Street because she could not endure its cramped ways any longer, and it was unreasonable to expect her to return.

"If Arthur has any feeling for me left, he will divorce me. He can easily do it, and then we shall both be free to re-marry."

"Reckon she thinks the old Squire ud like to marry her," said Alce, "I'd be glad if I thought so well of him."

"He can't marry her, seeing as she's your wife."

"If we were divorced, she wouldn't be."

"She would. You were made man and wife in Pedlinge church, as I saw with my own eyes, and I'll never believe as what was done then can be undone just by having some stuff written in the papers."

"It's a lawyer's business," said Arthur.

"I can't see that," said Joanna--"a parson married you, so reckon a parson must unmarry you."

"He wouldn't do it. It's a lawyer's job."

"I'd thank my looker if he went about undoing my carter's work. Those lawyers want to put their heads in everywhere. And as for Ellen, all I can say is, it's just like her wanting the Ten Commandments altered to suit her convenience. Reckon they ain't refined and high-cla.s.s enough for her. But she may ask for a divorce till she's black in the face--she shan't get it."

So Ellen had to remain--very much against the grain, for she was fundamentally respectable--a breaker of the law. She wrote once or twice more on the subject, appealing to Arthur, since Joanna's reply had shown her exactly how much quarter she could expect. But Arthur was not to be won, for apart from Joanna's domination, and his own unsophisticated beliefs in the permanence of marriage, his suspicions were roused by the Old Squire's silence on the matter. At no point did he join his appeals and arguments with Ellen's, though he had been ready enough to write to excuse and explain.... No, Arthur felt that love and wisdom lay not in sanctifying Ellen in her new ways with the blessing of the law, but in leaving the old open for her to come back to when the new should perhaps grow hard. "That chap 'ull get shut of her--I don't trust him--and then she'll want to come back to me or Jo."

So he wrote with boring reiteration of his willingness to receive her home again as soon as she chose to return, and a.s.sured her that he and Joanna had still managed to keep the secret of her departure, so that she need not fear scornful tongues. They had given the Marsh to understand that no settlement having been arrived at, Ellen had accompanied Mrs. Williams to the South of France, hoping that things would have improved on her return. This would account for the foreign post-marks, and both he and Joanna were more proud of their cunning than was quite warrantable from its results.

--29

That winter brought Great Ansdore at last into the market. It would have come in before had not Joanna so rashly bragged of her intention to buy it. As it was--"I guess I'll get a bit more out of the old gal by holding on," said p.r.i.c.kett disrespectfully, and he held on till Joanna's impatience about equalled his extremity; whereupon he sold it to her for not over fifty per cent, more than he would have asked had he not known of her ambition. She paid the price manfully, and p.r.i.c.kett went out with his few sticks.

The Woolpack was inclined to be contemptuous.

"Five thousand pounds for p.r.i.c.kett's old shacks, and his mouldy pastures that are all burdock and fluke. If Joanna G.o.dden had had any know, she could have beaten him down fifteen hundred--he was bound to sell, and she was a fool not to make him sell at her price."

But when Joanna wanted a thing she did not mind paying for it, and she had wanted Great Ansdore very much, though no one knew better than she that it was shacky and mouldy. For long it had mocked with its proud t.i.tle the triumphs of Little Ansdore. Now the whole manor of Ansdore was hers, Great and Little, and with it she held the living of Brodnyx and Pedlinge--it was she, of her own might, who would appoint the next Rector, and for some time she imagined that she had it in her power to turn out Mr. Pratt.

She at once set to work, putting her new domain in order. Some of the pasture she grubbed up for spring sowings, the rest she drained by cutting a new channel from the Kent Ditch to the White Kemp Sewer. She re-roofed the barns with slate, and painted and re-tiled the dwelling-house. This last she decided to let to some family of gentlepeople, while herself keeping on the farm and the barns. The dwelling-house of Little Ansdore, though more flat and spreading, was in every way superior to that of Great Ansdore, which was rather new and inclined to gimcrackiness, having been built on the site of the first dwelling, burnt down somewhere in the eighties. Besides, she loved Little Ansdore for its a.s.sociations--under its roof she had been born and her father had been born, under its roof she had known love and sorrow and denial and victory; she could not bear to think of leaving it. The queer, low house, with its mixture of s.p.a.ciousness and crookedness, its huge, sag-ceilinged rooms and narrow, twisting pa.s.sages, was almost a personality to her now, one of the G.o.dden family, the last of kin that had remained kind.

Her activities were merciful in crowding what would otherwise have been a sorrowful period of emptiness and anxiety. It is true that Ellen's behaviour had done much to spoil her triumph, both in the neighbourhood and in her own eyes, but she had not time to be thinking of it always.

Visits to Rye, either to her lawyers or to the decorators and paper-hangers, the engaging of extra hands, both temporary and permanent, for the extra work, the supervising of labourers and workmen whom she never could trust to do their job without her ... all these crowded her cares into a few hours of evening or an occasionally wakeful night.

But every now and then she must suffer. Sometimes she would be overwhelmed, in the midst of all her triumphant business, with a sense of personal failure. She had succeeded where most women are hopeless failures, but where so many women are successful and satisfied she had failed and gone empty. She had no home, beyond what was involved in the walls of this ancient dwelling, the womb and grave of her existence--she had lost the man she loved, had been unable to settle herself comfortably with another, and now she had lost Ellen, the little sister, who had managed to hold at least a part of that over-running love, which since Martin's death had had only broken cisterns to flow into.

The last catastrophe now loomed the largest. Joanna no longer shed tears for Martin, but she shed many for Ellen, either into her own pillow, or into the flowery quilt of the flowery room which inconsequently she held sacred to the memory of the girl who had despised it. Her grief for Ellen was mixed with anxiety and with shame. What would become of her?

Joanna could not, would not, believe that she would never come back. Yet what if she came?... In Joanna's eyes, and in the eyes of all the neighbourhood, Ellen had committed a crime which raised a barrier between her and ordinary folk. Between Ellen and her sister now stood the wall of strange, new conditions--conditions that could ignore the sonorous Thou Shalt Not, which Joanna never saw apart from Mr. Pratt in his surplice and hood, standing under the Lion and the Unicorn, while all the farmers and householders of the Marsh murmured into their Prayer Books--"Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law." She could not think of Ellen without this picture rising up between them, and sometimes in church she would be overwhelmed with a bitter shame, and in the lonely enclosure of her great cattle-box pew would stuff her fingers into her ears, so that she should not hear the dreadful words of her sister's condemnation.

She had moments, too, of an even bitterer shame--strange, terrible, and mercifully rare times when her att.i.tude towards Ellen was not of judgment or of care or of longing, but of envy. Sometimes she would be overwhelmed with a sense of Ellen's happiness in being loved, even if the love was unlawful. She had never felt this during the years that her sister had lived with Alce; the thought of his affection had brought her nothing but happiness and content. Now, on sinister occasions, she would find herself thinking of Ellen cherished and spoiled, protected and caressed, living the life of love--and a desperate longing would come to her to enjoy what her sister enjoyed, to be kissed and stroked and made much of and taken care of, to see some man laying schemes and taking risks for her ... sometimes she felt that she would like to see all the fullness of her life at Ansdore, all her honour on the Three Marshes, blown to the winds if only in their stead she could have just ordinary human love, with or without the law.

Poor Joanna was overwhelmed with horror at herself--sometimes she thought she must be possessed by a devil. She must be very wicked--in her heart just as wicked as Ellen. What could she do to cast out this dumb, tearing spirit?--should she marry one of her admirers on the Marsh, and trust to his humdrum devotion to satisfy her devouring need?

Even in her despair and panic she knew that she could not do this. It was love that she must have--the same sort of love that she had given Martin; that alone could bring her the joys she now envied in her sister. And love--how shall it be found?--Who shall go out to seek it?