An Ambitious Man Part 13

It was in thoughts like these that Joy relieved her heart of some of the bitterness and sorrow which weighed upon it. And day after day she bore about with her the dread of having the story of her mother's sin known in her new home.

As our fears, like our wishes, when strong and unremitting, prove to be magnets, the result of Joy's despondent fears came in the scandal which the Baroness had planted and left to flourish and grow in Beryngford after her departure. An hour before the services began, on the day of Preston Cheney's burial, Joy learned at whose rites she was to officiate as organist. A pang of mingled emotions shot through her heart at the sound of his name. She had seen this man but a few times, and spoken with him but once; yet he had left a strong impression upon her memory. She had felt drawn to him by his sympathetic face and atmosphere, the sorrow of his kind eyes, and the keen appreciation he had shown in her art; and just in the measure that she had been attracted by him, she had been repelled by the three women to whom she was presented at the same time. She saw them all again mentally, as she had seen them on that and many other days.

Mrs Cheney and Alice, with their fretful, plain, dissatisfied faces, and their over-burdened costumes, and the Baroness, with her cruel heart gazing through her worn mask of defaced beauty.

She had been conscious of a feeling of overwhelming pity for the kind, attractive man who made the fourth of that quartette. She knew that he had obtained honours and riches from life, but she pitied him for his home environment. She had felt so thankful for her own happy home life at the time; and she remembered, too, the sweet hope that lay like a closed-up bud in the bottom of her heart that day, as the quartette moved away and left her standing alone with Arthur Stuart.

It was only a few weeks later that the end came to all her dreams, through that terrible anonymous letter.

It was the Baroness who had sent it, she knew--the Baroness whose early hatred for her mother had descended to the child. "And now I must sit in the same house with her again," she said, "and perhaps meet her face to face; and she may tell the story here of my mother's shame, even as I have felt and feared it must yet be told. How strange that a 'love child' should inspire so much hatred!"

Joy had carefully refrained from reading New York papers ever since she left the city; and she had no correspondents. It was her wish and desire to utterly sink and forget the past life there. Therefore she knew nothing of Arthur Stuart's marriage to the daughter of Preston Cheney. She thought of the rector as dead to her. She believed he had given her up because of the stain upon her birth, and, bitter as the pain had been, she never blamed him. She had fought with her love for him and believed that it was buried in the grave of all other happy memories.

But as the earth is wrenched open by volcanic eruptions and long buried corpses are revealed again to the light of day, so the unexpected sight of Arthur Stuart, as he took his place beside Mabel and the Baroness during the funeral services, revealed all the pent- up pa.s.sion of her heart to her own frightened soul.

To strong natures, the greater the inward excitement the more quiet the exterior; and Jay pa.s.sed through the services, and performed her duties, without betraying to those about her the violent emotions under which she laboured.

The rector of Beryngford Church requested her to remain for a few moments, and consult with him on a matter concerning the next week's musical services. It was from him Joy learned the relation which Arthur Stuart bore to the dead man, and that Beryngford was the former home of the Baroness.

Her mother's ma.n.u.script had carefully avoided all mention of names of people or places. Yet Joy realised now that she must be living in the very scene of her mother's early life; she longed to make inquiries, but was prevented by the fear that she might hear her mother's name mentioned disrespectfully.

The days that followed were full of sharp agony for her. It was not until long afterward that she was able to write her "impressions" of that experience. In the extreme hour of joy or agony we formulate no impressions; we only feel. We neither a.n.a.lyse nor describe our friends or enemies when face to face with them, but after we leave their presence. When the day came that she could write, some of her reflections were thus epitomised:

Love which rises from the grave to comfort us, possesses more of the demons' than the angels' power. It terrifies us with its supernatural qualities and deprives us temporarily of our reason.

Suppressed steam and suppressed emotion are dangerous things to deal with.

The infant who wants its mother's breast, and the woman who wants her lover's arms, are poor subjects to reason with. Though you tell the former that fever has poisoned the mother's milk, or the latter that destruction lies in the lover's embrace, one heeds you no more than the other.

The acc.u.mulated knowledge of ages is sometimes revealed by a kiss.

Where wisdom is bliss, it is folly to be ignorant.

Some of us have to crucify our hearts before we find our souls.

A woman cannot fully know charity until she has met pa.s.sion; but too intimate an acquaintance with the latter destroys her appreciation of all the virtues.

To feel temptation and resist it, renders us liberal in our judgment of all our kind. To yield to it, fills us with suspicion of all.

There is an ecstatic note in pain which is never reached in happiness.

The death of a great pa.s.sion is a terrible thing, unless the dawn of a greater truth shines on the grave.

Love ought to have no past tense.

Love partakes of the feline nature. It has nine lives.

It seems to be difficult for some of us to distinguish between looseness of views, and charitable judgments. To be sorry for people's sins and follies and to refuse harsh criticism is right; to accept them as a matter of course is wrong.

Love and sorrow are twins, and knowledge is their nurse.

The pathway of the soul is not a steady ascent, but hilly and broken.

We must sometimes go lower, in order to get higher.

That which is to-day, and will be to-morrow, must have been yesterday. I know that I live, I believe that I shall live again, and have lived before.

Earth life is the middle rung of a long ladder which we climb in the dark. Though we cannot see the steps below, or above, they exist all the same.

The materialist denying spirit is like the burr of the chestnut denying the meat within.

The inevitable is always right.

Prayer is a skeleton key that opens unexpected doors. We may not find the things we came to seek, but we find other treasures.

The pessimist belongs to G.o.d's misfit counter.

Art, when divorced from Religion, always becomes a wanton.

To forget benefits we have received is a crime. To remember benefits we have bestowed is a greater one.

To some men a woman is a valuable book, carefully studied and choicely guarded behind gla.s.s doors. To others, she is a daily paper, idly scanned and tossed aside.

CHAPTER XIX

While Joy battled with her sorrow during the days following Preston Cheney's burial, she woke to the consciousness that her history was known in Beryngford. The indescribable change in the manner of her acquaintances, the curiosity in the eyes of some, the insolence or familiarity of others, all told her that her fears were realised; and then there came a letter from the church authorities requesting her to resign her position as organist.

This letter came to the young girl on one of those dreary autumn nights when all the desolation of the dying summer, and none of the exhilaration of the approaching winter, is in the air. She had been labouring all day under a cloud of depression which hovered over her heart and brain and threatened to wholly envelop her; and the letter from the church committee cut her heart like a poniard stroke.

Sometimes we are able to bear a series of great disasters with courage and equanimity, while we utterly collapse under some slight misfortune. Joy had been a heroine in her great sorrows, but now in the undeserved loss of her position as church organist, she felt herself unable longer to cope with Fate.

"There's no place for me anywhere," she said to herself. Had she known the truth, that the Baroness had represented her to the committee as a fallen woman of the metropolis, who had left the city for the city's good, the letter would not have seemed to her so cruelly unjust and unjustifiable.

Bitter as had been her suffering at the loss of Arthur Stuart from her life, she had found it possible to understand his hesitation to make her his wife. With his fine sense of family pride, and his reverence for the estate of matrimony, his belief in heredity, it seemed quite natural to her that he should be shocked at the knowledge of the conditions under which she was born; and the thought that her disappearance from his life was helping him to solve a painful problem, had at times, before this unexpected sight of him, rendered her almost happy in her lonely exile. She had grown strangely fond of Beryngford--of the old streets and homes which she knew must have been familiar to her mother's eyes, of the new church whose glorious voiced organ gave her so many hours of comfort and relief of soul, of the tiny apartment where she and her heart communed together. She was catlike in her love of places, and now she must tear herself away from all these surroundings and seek some new spot wherein to hide herself and her sorrows.

It was like tearing up a half-rooted flower, already drooping from one transplanting. She said to herself that she could never survive another change. She read the letter over which lay in her hand, and tears began to slowly well from her eyes. Joy seldom wept; but now it seemed to her she was some other person, who stood apart and wept tears of sympathy for this poor girl, Joy Irving, whose life was so hemmed about with troubles, none of which were of her own making; and then, like a dam which suddenly gives way and allows a river to overflow, a great storm of sobs shook her frame, and she wept as she had never wept before; and with her tears there came rushing back to her heart all the old love and sorrow for the dead mother which had so long been hidden under her burden of shame; and all the old pa.s.sion and longing for the man whose insane wife she knew to be a more hopeless obstacle between them than this mother's history had proven.

"Mother, Arthur, pity me, pity me!" she cried. "I am all alone, and the strife is so terrible. I have never meant to harm any living thing! Mother Arthur, G.o.d, how can you all desert me so?"

At last, exhausted, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

She awoke the following morning with an aching head, and a heart wherein all emotions seemed dead save a dull despair. She was conscious of only one wish, one desire--a longing to sit again in the organ loft, and pour forth her soul in one last farewell to that instrument which had grown to seem her friend, confidant and lover.

She battled with her impulse as unreasonable and unwise, till the day was well advanced. But it grew stronger with each hour; and at last she set forth under a leaden sky and through a dreary November rain to the church.

Her head throbbed with pain, and her hands were hot and feverish, as she seated herself before the organ and began to play. But with the first sounds responding to her touch, she ceased to think of bodily discomfort.

The music was the voice of her own soul, uttering to G.o.d all its desolation, its anguish and its despair. Then suddenly, with no seeming volition of her own, it changed to a pa.s.sion of human love, human desire; the sorrow of separation, the strife with the emotions, the agony of renunciation were all there; and the November rain, beating in wild gusts against the window-panes behind the musician, lent a fitting accompaniment to the strains.