Joan Haste
Joan has almost made up her mind, with considerable perspicuity, that there was something of the sort in the air, when she remembered, with a sudden flush of pleasure, that Captain Graves had spoken of herself also yonder in the churchyard, and in singularly flattering terms, which seemed to negative the idea that the fact of a person speaking of another person, when under the influence of delirium, necessarily implied the existence of affection, or even of intimacy, between them. Still, thought Joan, it would not be wonderful if he did love Miss Levinger. Surely that sweet and spiritual face and those solemn grey eyes were such as any man might love.
But if Joan was impressed with Emma, Emma was equally impressed with Joan, for in that instant of the meeting of their gaze, the thought came to her that she had never before seen so physically perfect a specimen of womanhood. Although Emma could theorise against the material, and describe beauty as an accident, and therefore a thing to be despised, she was too honest not to confess to herself her admiration for such an example of it as Joan afforded. This was the girl whose bravery, so she was told, had saved Captain Graves from almost certain death; and, looking at her, Emma felt a pang of envy as she compared her health and shape with her own delicacy and slight proportions. Indeed, there was something more than envy in her mind – something that, if it was not jealousy, at least partook of it. Of late Emma’s thoughts had centred themselves a great deal round Captain Graves, and she was envious of this lovely village girl with whom, in some unknown way, he had become acquainted, and whose good fortune it had been to be able to protect him from the worst effects of his dreadful accident.
At that moment a warning voice seemed to speak in Emma’s heart, telling her that this woman would not readily let go the man whom fate had brought to her, that she would cling to him indeed as closely as though he were her life. It had nothing to do with her, at any rate as yet; still Emma grew terribly afraid as the thought went home, afraid with a strange, impalpable fear she knew not of what. At least she trembled, and her eyes swam, and she wished in her heart that she had never seen Joan Haste, that they might live henceforth at different ends of the world, that she might never see her again.
All this flashed through the minds of the two girls in one short second; the next Emma’s terror, for it may fitly be so called, had come and gone, and Lady Graves was speaking.
“Good day, Joan Haste,” she said kindly: “I understand that you were with my son at the time of this shocking accident. Will you tell us how it came about?”
“Oh, my Lady,” answered Joan with agitation, “it was all my fault – at least, in a way it was, though I am sure I never meant that he should be so foolish as to try and climb the tower.” And in a simple straightforward fashion she went on to relate what had occurred, saying as little as possible, however, about her own share in the adventure.
“Thank you,” said Lady Graves when Joan had finished. “You seem to have behaved very bravely, and I fear that you are a good deal hurt. I hope you will soon be well again. And now, Dr. Childs, do you think that I might see Henry for a little?”
“Well, perhaps for a minute or two, if you will keep as quiet as possible,” he answered, and led the way to the sick room.
By this time the effects of the sleeping draughts had passed off, and when his mother entered Henry was wide awake and talking to Mrs. Gillingwater. He knew her step at once, and addressed her in a cheery voice, trying to conceal the pain which racked him.
“How do you do, mother?” he said. “You find me in a queer way, but better off than ever I expected to be again when I was hanging against the face of that tower. It is very good of you to come to see me, and I hope that the news of my mishap has not upset my father.”
“My poor boy,” said Lady Graves, bending over him and kissing him, “I am afraid that you must suffer a great deal of pain.”
“Nothing to speak of,” he answered, “but I am pretty well smashed up, and expect that I shall be on my back here for some weeks. Queer old place, isn’t it? This good lady tells me that it is her niece’s room. It’s a very jolly one, anyhow. Just look at the oak panelling and that old mantelpiece. By the way, I hope that Miss Joan – I think that she said her name was Joan – is not much hurt. She is a brave girl, I can tell you, mother. Had it not been that she caught me when I fell, I must have gone face first on to that spiked tomb, and then – ”
“Had it not been for her you would never have climbed the tower,” answered Lady Graves with a shudder. “I can’t think what induced you to be so foolish, at your age, my dear boy.”
“I think it was because she is so pretty, and I wanted to oblige her,” he answered, with the candour of a mind excited by suffering. “I say, I hope that somebody has written to the Levingers, or they will be wondering what on earth has become of me.”
“Yes, yes, dear; they are here, and everything has been explained to them.”
“Oh, indeed. Make them my excuses, will you? When I am a bit better I should like to see them, but I don’t feel quite up to it just now.”
Henry made this last remark in a weaker voice; and, taking the hint, Dr. Childs touched Lady Graves on the shoulder and nodded towards the door.
“Well, dear, I must be going,” said his mother; “but Ellen or I will come over to-morrow to see how you are getting on. By the way, should you like us to send for a trained nurse to look after you?”
“Most certainly not,” Henry answered, with vigour; “I hate the sight of hospital nurses – they always remind me of Haslar, where I was laid up with jaundice. There are two doctors, and this good lady taking care of me here, and if that isn’t enough for me, nothing will be.”
“Well, dear, we will see how you get on,” said his mother doubtfully. Then she kissed him and went; but the doctor stopped behind, and having taken his patient’s temperature, ordered him another sleeping draught.
So soon as Lady Graves had left the parlour, Joan followed her example, murmuring with truth that she felt a little faint.
“What a beautiful girl, father!” said Emma to Mr. Levinger. “Who is she? Somebody said the other day that there was a mystery about her.”
“How on earth should I know?” he answered. “She is Mrs. Gillingwater’s niece and I believe that her parents are dead; that is the only mystery I ever heard.”
“I think that there must be something odd, all the same,” said Emma. “If you notice, her manners are quite different from those of most village girls, and she speaks almost like a lady.”
“Been educated above her station in life, I fancy,” her father answered snappishly. “That is the way girls of this kind are ruined, and taught to believe that nothing in their own surroundings is good enough for them. Anyhow, she has led poor Graves into this mess, for which I shall not forgive her in a hurry.”
“At least she did her best to save him, and at great risk to herself,” said Emma gently. “I don’t see what more she could have done.”
“That’s woman’s logic all over,” replied the father. “First get a man who is worth two of you into some terrible scrape, physical or otherwise, and then do your ‘best to save him,’ and pose as a heroine. It would be kinder to leave him alone altogether in nine cases out of ten, only then it is impossible to play the guardian angel, as every woman loves to do. Just to gratify her whim – for that is the plain English of it – this girl sends poor Graves up that tower; and because, when he falls off it, she tries to throw her arms round him, everybody talks of her wonderful courage. Bother her and her courage! The net result is that he will never be the same man again.”
Her father spoke with so much suppressed energy that Emma looked at him in astonishment, for of late years, at any rate, he had been accustomed to act calmly and to speak temperately.
“Is Captain Graves’s case so serious?”
“From what young Salter tells me I gather that it is about as bad as it can be of its kind. He has fractured his leg in a very awkward place, there is some hæmorrhage, and he lay exposed for nearly five hours, and had to be carried several miles.”
“What will happen to him, then?” asked Emma in alarm. “I thought that the worst of it was over.”
“I can’t tell you. It depends on Providence and his constitution; but what seems likely is that they will be forced to amputate his leg and make him a hopeless cripple for life.”
“Oh!” said Emma, catching her breath like one in pain; “I had no idea that it was so bad. This is terrible.” And for a moment she leant on the back of a chair to support herself.
“Yes, it is black enough; but we cannot help by stopping here, so we may as well drive home. I will send to inquire for him this evening.”
So they went, and never had Emma a more unhappy drive. She was looking forward so much to Captain Graves’s visit, and now he lay wounded – dangerously ill. The thought wrung her heart, and she could almost find it in her gentle breast to detest the girl who, however innocently, had been the cause of all the trouble.
Chapter 10
Azrael’s Wing
For the next two days, notwithstanding the serious condition of his broken leg, Henry seemed to go on well, till even his mother and Emma Levinger, both of whom were kept accurately informed of his state, ceased to feel any particular alarm about him. On the second day Mrs. Gillingwater, being called away to attend to some other matter, sent for Joan – who, although her arm was still in a sling, had now almost recovered – to watch in the sick room during her absence. She came and took her seat by the bed, for at the time Henry was asleep. Shortly afterwards he awoke and saw her.
“Is that you, Miss Haste?” he said. “I did not know that you cared for nursing.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Joan. “My aunt was obliged to go out for a little while, and, as you are doing so nicely, she said that she thought I might be trusted to look after you till she came back.”
“It is very kind of you, I am sure,” said Henry. “Sick rooms are not pleasant places. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving me some of that horrid stuff – barley-water I think it is. I am thirsty.”
Joan handed him the glass and supported his head while he drank. When he had satisfied his thirst he said:
“I have never thanked you yet for your bravery. I do thank you sincerely, Miss Haste, for if I had fallen on to those spikes there would have been an end of me. I saw them as I was hanging, and thought that my hour had come.”
“And yet he told me to ‘stand clear’!” reflected Joan; but aloud she said:
“Oh! pray, pray don’t thank me, sir. It is all my fault that you have met with this dreadful accident, and it breaks my heart to think of it.” And as she spoke a great tear ran down her beautiful face.
“Come, please don’t cry: it upsets me; if the smash was anybody’s fault, it was my own. I ought to have known better.”
“I will try not, sir,” answered Joan, in a choking voice; “but aunt said that you weren’t to talk, and you are talking a great deal.”
“All right,” he replied: “you stop crying and I’ll stop talking.”
As may be guessed after this beginning, from that hour till the end of his long and dangerous illness, Joan was Henry’s most constant attendant. Her aunt did the rougher work of the sick room, indeed, but for everything else he depended upon her; clinging to her with a strange obstinacy that baffled all attempts to replace her by a more highly trained nurse. On one occasion, when an effort of the sort was made, the results upon the patient were so unfavourable that, to her secret satisfaction, Joan was at once reinstalled.
After some days Henry took a decided turn for the worse. His temperature rose alarmingly, and he became delirious, with short coherent intervals. Blood poisoning, which the doctors feared, declared itself, and in the upshot he fell a victim to a dreadful fever that nearly cost him his life. At one time the doctors were of opinion that his only chance lay in amputation of the fractured limb; but in the end they gave up this idea, being convinced that, in his present state, he would certainly die of the shock were they to attempt the operation.
Then followed three terrible days, while Henry lay between life and death. For the greater part of those days Lady Graves and Ellen sat in the bar- parlour, the former lost in stony silence, the latter pale and anxious enough, but still calm and collected. Even now Ellen did not lose her head, and this was well, for the others were almost distracted by anxiety and grief. Distrusting the capacities of Joan, a young person whom she regarded with disfavour as being the cause of her brother’s accident, it was Ellen who insisted upon the introduction of the trained nurses, with consequences that have been described. When the doctors hesitated as to the possibility of an operation, it was Ellen also who gave her voice against it, and persuaded her mother to do the same.
“I know nothing of surgery,” she said, with conviction, “and it seems probable that poor Henry will die; but I feel sure that if you try to cut off his leg he will certainly die.”
“I think that you are right, Miss Graves,” said the eminent surgeon who had been brought down in consultation, and with whom the final word lay. “My opinion is that the only course to follow with your brother is to leave him alone, in the hope that his constitution will pull him through.”
So it came about that Henry escaped the knife.
Emma Levinger and her father also haunted the inn, and it was during those dark days that the state of the former’s affections became clear both to herself and to every one about her. Before this she had never confessed even to her own heart that she was attached to Henry Graves; but now, in the agony of her suspense, this love of hers arose in strength, and she knew that, whether he stayed or was called away, it must always be the nearest and most constant companion of her life. Why she loved him Emma could not tell, nor even when she began to do so; and indeed these things are difficult to define. But the fact remained, hard, palpable, staring: a fact which she had no longer any care to conceal or ignore, seeing that the conditions of the case caused her to set aside those considerations of womanly reserve that doubtless would otherwise have induced her to veil the secret of her heart for ever, or until circumstances gave opportunity for its legitimate expression.
At length on a certain afternoon there came a crisis to which there was but one probable issue. The doctors and nurses were in Henry’s room doing their best to ward off the fate that seemed to be approaching, while Lady Graves, Mr. Levinger, Ellen and Emma sat in the parlour awaiting tidings, and striving to hope against hope. An hour passed, and Emma could bear the uncertainty no longer. Slipping out unobserved, she stole towards the sick room and listened at a little distance from it. Within she could hear the voice of a man raving in delirium, and the cautious tread of those who tended him. Presently the door opened and Joan appeared, walking towards her with ashen face and shaking limbs.
“How is he?” asked Emma in an intense whisper, catching at her dress as she passed.
Joan looked at her and shook her head: speak she could not. Emma watched her go with vacant eyes, and a jealousy smote her, which made itself felt even through the pain that tore her heart in two. Why should this woman be free to come and go about the bedside of the man who was everything to her – to hold his dying hand and to lift his dying head – while she was shut outside his door? Emma wondered bitterly. Surely that should be her place, not the village girl’s who had been the cause of all this sorrow. Then she turned, and, creeping back to the parlour, she flung herself into a chair and covered her face with her hands.
“Have you heard anything?” asked Lady Graves.
Emma made no reply but her despair broke from her in a low moaning that was very sad to hear.
“Do not grieve so, dear,” said Ellen kindly.
“Let me grieve,” she answered, lifting her white face; “let me grieve now and always. I know that Faith should give me comfort, but it fails me. I have a right to grieve,” she went on passionately, “for I love him. I do not care who knows it now: though I am nothing to him, I love him, and if he dies it will break my heart.”
So great was the tension of suspense that Emma’s announcement, startling as it was, excited no surprise. Perhaps they all knew how things were with her; at any rate Lady Graves answered only, “We all love him, dear,” and for a time no more was said.
Meanwhile, could she have seen into the little room behind her, Emma might have witnessed the throes of a grief as deep as her own, and even more abandoned; for there, face downwards on her bed, lay Joan Haste, the girl whom she had envied. Sharp sobs shook her frame, notwithstanding that she had thrust her handkerchief between her teeth to check them, and she clutched nervously at the bedclothes with her outstretched hands. Hitherto she had been calm and silent; now, at length, when she was of no more service, she broke down, and Nature took its way with her.
“O my God!” she muttered between her strangling sobs, “spare him and kill me, for it was my fault, and I am his murderess. O my God! my God! What have I done that I should suffer so? What makes me suffer so? Oh! spare him, spare him!”
* * *Another half-hour passed, and the twilight began to gather in the parlour.
“It is very long,” murmured Lady Graves.
“While they do not come to call us there is hope,” answered Ellen, striving to keep up a show of courage.
Once more there was silence, and the time went on and the darkness gathered.
At length a step was heard approaching, and they knew it for that of Dr. Childs. Instinctively they all rose, expecting the last dread summons. He was among them now, but they could not see his face because of the shadows.
“Is Lady Graves there?” he asked.
“Yes,” whispered the poor woman.
“Lady Graves, I have come to tell you that by the mercy of Heaven your son’s constitution has triumphed, and, so far as my skill and knowledge go, I believe that he will live.”
For a second the silence continued; then, with a short sharp cry, Emma Levinger went down upon the floor as suddenly as though she had been shot through the heart.
* * *Joan also had heard Dr. Child’s footsteps, and, rising swiftly from her bed, she followed him to the door of the parlour, where she stood listening to his fateful words – for her anxiety was so intense that the idea of intrusion did not even cross her mind.
Joan heard the words, and she believed that they were an answer to her prayer; for her suffering had been too fierce and personal to admit of her dissociating herself from the issue, at any rate at present. She forgot that she was not concerned alone in this matter of the life or death of Henry Graves – she who, although as yet she did not know it, was already wrapped with the wings and lost in the shadow of a great and tragic passion. She had prayed, and she had been answered. His life had been given back to her.
Thus she thought for a moment; the next she heard Emma’s cry, and saw her fall, and was undeceived. Now she was assured of what before she had suspected, that this sweet and beautiful lady loved the man who lay yonder; and, in the assurance of that love, she learned her own. It became clear to her in an instant, as at night the sudden lightning makes clear the landscape to some lost wanderer among mountains. As in the darkness such a wanderer may believe that his feet are set upon a trodden road, and in that baleful glare discover himself to be surrounded by dangers, amid desolate wastes; so at this sight Joan understood whither her heart had strayed, and was affrighted, for truly the place seemed perilous and from it there was no retreat. Before her lay many a chasm and precipice, around her was darkness, and a blind mist blew upon her face, a mist wet as though with tears.
Somebody in the parlour called for a light, and the voice brought her back from her vision, her hopeless vision of what was, had been, and might be. What had chanced or could chance to her mattered little, she thought to herself, as she turned to seek the lamp. He would live, and that was what she had desired, what she had prayed for while as yet she did not know why she prayed it, offering her own life in payment. She understood now that her prayer had been answered more fully than she deemed; for she had given her life, her true life, for him and to him, though he might never learn the price that had been exacted of her. Well, he would live – to be happy with Miss Levinger – and though her heart must die because of him, Joan could be glad of it even in those miserable moments of revelation.
She returned with the lamp, and assisted in loosening the collar of Emma’s dress and in sprinkling her white face with water. Nobody took any notice of her. Why should they, who were overcome by the first joy of hope renewed, and moved with pity at the sight of the fainting girl? They even spoke openly before her, ignoring her presence.
“Do not be afraid,” said Dr. Childs: “I have never known happiness to kill people. But she must have suffered a great deal from suspense.”
“I did not know that it had gone so far with her,” said her father in a low voice to Lady Graves. “I believe that if the verdict had been the other way it would have killed her also.”
“She must be very fond of him,” answered Lady Graves; “and I am thankful for it, for now I have seen how sweet she is. Well, if it pleases God that Henry should recover, I hope that it will all come right in the end. Indeed, he will be a strange man if it does not.”
Just then Ellen, who was watching and listening, seemed to become aware of Joan’s presence.
“Thank you,” she said to her; “you can go now.”
So Joan went, humbly enough, suffering a sharper misery than she had dreamed that her heart could hold, and yet vaguely happy through her wretchedness. “At least,” she thought to herself, with a flash of defiant feeling, “I am his nurse, and they can’t send me away from him yet, because he won’t let them. It made him worse when they tried before. When he is well again Miss Levinger will take him, but till then he is mine – mine. Oh! I wish I had known that she was engaged to him from the beginning: no, it would have made no difference. It may be wicked, but I should have loved him anyhow. It is my doom that I should love him, and I would rather love him and be wretched, than not love him and be happy. I suppose that it began when I first saw him, though I did not understand it then – I only wondered why he seemed so different to any other man that I had seen. Well, it is done now, and there is no use crying over it, so I may as well laugh, if one can laugh with a heart like a lump of ice.”
* * *Once out of danger, Henry’s progress towards recovery was sure, if slow. Three weeks passed before he learned how near he had been to death. It was Joan who told him, for as yet he had been allowed only the briefest of interviews with his mother and Ellen, and on these occasions, by the doctor’s orders, their past anxieties were not even alluded to. Now, however, all danger was done with, and that afternoon Joan had been informed by Dr. Childs that she might read to her patient if he wished it, or talk to him upon any subject in which he seemed to take interest.
It was a lovely July day, and Joan was seated sewing in Henry’s, or rather in her own room, by the open window, through which floated the scent of flowers and a murmuring sound of the sea. Henry had been dozing, and she laid her work upon her knee and watched him while he slept. Presently she saw that his eyes were open and that he was looking at her.
“Do you want anything, sir?” she said, hastily resuming her sewing. “Are you comfortable?”
“Quite, thank you; and I want nothing except to go on looking at you. You make a very pretty picture in that old window place, I assure you.”
She coloured faintly and did not answer. Presently he spoke again.
“Joan,” he said – he always called her Joan now – ”was I very bad at any time?”
“Yes, sir; they almost gave you up three weeks ago – indeed, they said the chances were ten to one against your living.”