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It was not very far from the terrace at Bellendean to Peter Matheson’s cottage in the village, which was a cottage with a but and a ben—that is, an outer and an inner, two rooms downstairs, into one of which the door opened, and two others above. There was nothing in front but the village street, from which you could tap at the window of the kitchen in which the family lived; but behind there was a little garden, with some large lilac and rose bushes, and an ash-tree with a small plot of grass round its patriarchal feet. Joyce had come back tired from the dusty walk with the children just as her granny, as she called the old woman who had been her guardian all her life, had taken off the large Paisley shawl and the close black satin bonnet, which were her state costume out of doors. Mrs. Matheson—called Janet in the village, a freedom which Joyce resented—had folded up carefully her ‘grand shawl’ and laid her bonnet upon it, to be put away presently, and had seated herself in the high-backed wooden chair to rest. The kettle was beginning to boil on a fire kept as low as possible in compliment to the hot June day. Though she had shared in the refreshment under the tent, Janet was not contented to accept that in place of the much-prized cordial of her own brewing. ‘Na, na; what ye get out o’ an urn may be gran’ drinking,’ she said, ‘but it’s never like my tea.’ She was waiting till the kettle should boil to ‘mask the tea,’ which even Joyce did not do altogether to her liking. When the door opened and the girl came in, Janet was sitting, musing as she waited, near the fire, according to cottage custom. She was old, and it was not too warm for her, and she was tired and enjoying what it requires the long habit of toil to enjoy thoroughly, the entire quiescence of physical rest. To sit there, doing nothing, was sweet at her age. In former times she could remember being impatient for the boiling of the kettle. In these days she would have whipped up her bonnet and shawl and ran upstairs with them, thinking it an idle thing to leave them there even for a moment; and she would have set out the cups while she waited. But now she was not impatient. There was no hurry, and rest was sweet. She looked up when her child came in—who was her child certainly, though not her daughter—with a pride and admiration of her looks, and her dress, and everything about her, that never failed. Joyce wore a dark dress, which she had made herself, after the model of a dress of Greta’s. Her little collars and cuffs were like those the young ladies wore, without the slightest ornament. It vexed Janet a little that she would not wear a locket, as all the girls did in the village, and as the young ladies also did. It was as if they took her siller from her, or hoarded it up, or grudged her any bonnie thing she would wear. ‘Eh! if it was me,’ Janet said, ‘she would be just as fine as the best. There’s naething I would not ware upon her—a gold chain on her neck, and a gold watch at her side, and a ring upon her finger; but she will not be guided by me. And to see her looking like a young queen, and no a thing to show for it but just her ain bonnie looks; eh! I hope it’ll not be remembered against us if we’re awfu’ proud; for Peter is just as bad as me.’ But all this was said in the absence of Joyce, and to her face the old mother gave utterance to little phases of detraction, as it is the part of a mother to do.

‘You’re very soon back; you’re back maist as soon as me. I am just waiting for the water to come a-boil, and then I’ll mask the tea. You will be better, after a’ yon botheration, and the trouble you’ve been giving yoursel’, of a good cup of tea.’

‘I had some in the tent, granny,’ said Joyce, sitting down wearily near the door.

‘Oh ay! in the tent. If yon’s what pleases the leddies it doesna please me. What’s the matter with ye? You’ve just weariet yoursel’ with thae weans and their pieces, till ye canna tell whether you’re on your head or your heels. Na, na; sit still and rest. I’ve had naething to tire me. I’ll get out the cups mysel’, and we’ll keep the teapot warm at the side of the fire for Peter. He likes it a’ the better the mair it tastes o’ the pot.’

‘What did you think of it all, granny? Who did you like best? Did you like the tableau, with the Queen and the ladies? Wasn’t it like a picture? I wonder if the real Queen Margaret was as handsome as ours, and all her maidens as sweet.’

‘Your head is just turned with them, J’yce; and yon would be your doing, too? Putting up Mrs. Bellendean upon a throne, as if she was the duchess. I thought that bid to be one o’ your fancies; and they just do what ye tell them, it seems to me, young and auld, and the leddy hersel’. Your head would be just turned, if it werena for me, that never spoilt ye. Sit to the table like a reasonable creature, and take your tea.’

‘I don’t want any tea, granny. I am only tired. There was a gentleman there——’

‘And what’s that to you, if there were a hundred gentlemen?’ said her guardian quickly. ‘Na, na; there’s to be nae talk about gentlemen between you and me.’

‘It was an old gentleman, granny,’ said Joyce, with a smile curving slightly the grave lines of her mouth.

‘The auld anes are often waur than the young anes,’ the old woman said.

‘Oh, granny!’ cried Joyce, ‘what is that to me, if they are old or young? This one asked me—granny, listen! listen! for my heart is beating hard, and I must get some one to listen to me;—he asked me, where I had got my name,—who had given me my name? with a look—oh, if I could let you see his look! Not as some do, just staring, which means nothing but folly—but a look that made his eyes open wide, and the colour go out of his face.’

‘It was just very impident of any man to look at you like that.’

‘No, it was not impudent. He was an old man with a sweet face, as if he was somebody’s father—some girl’s father that is my age. And he asked me, “Young lady” (he did not know who I was)—“young lady, where did you get your name?"’

The terms of this address moved Janet much more than the meaning. ‘Well, I’ll not say that I’m surprised: for if ever there was a young lass that looked like a lady, no to flatter ye—for flattery’s no my way——’

‘Granny, granny, you don’t see what I mean. It was not me that he was thinking of. He was wondering to hear me called Joyce; and he knew somebody—he knew—some one that was like me—that had the same name.’

Old Janet paused in the act of pouring out the tea. ‘I mind now,’ she said. ‘There was somebody asking me where ye got it,—if it was a name in the family; but I took no thought. Bless me! can ye no be contented with them that have done their best for you all your life?’

‘I am very well contented,’ said Joyce; but the involuntary movement of her mouth contradicted her words. She added, after a little pause, ‘No one is so well off as I am. I have the kind of work I like, and my big girls that learn so well, and you, granny dear, that are always so kind.’

‘Kind!’ said the old woman, with quick offence; ‘if you think I’m wanting to be thought kind——’

‘But I should like,’ said Joyce, who in the meantime had been murmuring something to herself about the ‘Happy Warrior,’ and had not given much attention to this disclaimer—‘oh, I should like to hear who I am,—to hear something about her, to know——’ She paused, as if words were insufficient to express her thoughts, with a thrill of meaning more intense than anything she could say, quivering in her lips.

‘Oh ay,’ said Janet, ‘I ken what you mean; to hear that you were born a grand lady, though you’ve been bred up a cottage lass; that you’re Leddy Joyce or maybe Princess—how can I tell?—instead of just what you are, Joyce Matheson, that has made herself very weel respectit, and a’ her ain doing—which is a far greater credit than to be born a queen.’

‘Granny, you whip me, but it’s with roses—no, not roses, for there are thorns to them, but lily flowers. Oh no, not Lady Joyce, nor anything of the kind,’ she went on, with a tell-tale blush suddenly dyeing her pale face. ‘I might have thought that when I was young—but not now. It is only a kind of yearning to know—to know—I cannot tell what I want to know—about my mother,’ she added in a lower tone.

‘Bairn,’ said Janet, ‘let that be—let it be. Poor young thing, she’s been long long in her Maker’s hands, and a’ forgotten and forgiven.’

‘If there was anything to forget and forgive; you take that for granted, granny!’ cried the girl, with a sudden flush of indignation.

‘Onything to forgive? There’s aye plenty to forgive even to the best; but oh, J’yce, my poor lassie, take my advice and let it be. Many strange things happen in this world: but a poor thing that wanders into a strange place her lane with no a living creature to care if she lives or dies—oh, J’yce, my bonnie bairn, let it be!’

Joyce had risen, as if the remark was intolerable, and stood at the window looking out blankly. It was a discussion which had taken place often before, and always with the same result. Old Mrs. Matheson took, as was natural, the matter-of-fact view of the question, and felt a certainty that shame as well as sorrow must be involved in the secret of Joyce’s birth, and that to inquire into it was very undesirable. But, as was equally natural, Joyce, since she had been old enough to understand, had built a hundred castles in the air on the subject of her birth, and occupied many an hour with dreams of perhaps a father who should come and seek her, perhaps a mother’s mother, like an old queen—people who would be noble in look and thought—perhaps, who could tell, in birth too? The Lady Joyce, with which old Janet taunted her, had not been altogether a fiction. Who could say? Mysteries were more common among the great than among the small, the girl said to herself. And how many romances are there in which such a story appears? There was the ‘Gentle Shepherd,’ the one poem beside Burns and Blair’s ‘Grave,’ which was to be found in the cottage, and which she had known by heart almost before she could speak. Was not the shepherd Patie a gentleman all the time and Peggy a lady? and both of them in their first estate full of poetry, and distinguished among their seeming peers, as Joyce was well aware she had always been?

By some strange grace of nature Joyce had escaped the self-conceit which is so common to the self-taught, so usual, must we say it, in Scotland? Her consciousness of being able to do a great many things as other people could not do them, got vent in a little innocent astonishment at the other people, who either were dull beyond what is permitted, or would not ‘give their thoughts’ to the proper subjects. She grew impatient by times with their determined stupidity, but thought it their fault, and not any special gift of hers that made the difference. It was for this reason that she had very sedately accepted the addresses of Mr. Andrew Halliday, who was schoolmaster in the next parish. He was a young man who was full of intellectual ambitions. He could talk of books, and quote poetry as long and as much as any one could desire. Joyce had been moved by enthusiasm on their first acquaintance. She had felt herself altogether lifted out of the vulgarities of common life, when he talked about Shakespeare and Shelley, and Scott and Burns—and with a little smiling commendation, as from a superior altitude, even of the ‘Gentle Shepherd.’ It sobered her a little to find that, like the other ‘lads’ in the village, he was intent upon a ‘lass,’ and that she was the object of his choice. But she gave in to it with dignity, feeling that he was indeed the only person with whom she could mate; and looked forward to the career of the schoolmistress, the schoolmaster’s wife, with an adaptation to herself of the now so well-worn lines of the ‘Happy Warrior,’ which Joyce was not aware anybody had ever appropriated before. Yes; she would work out her life upon the plan which had pleased her childish thought. For it had been her ambition since ever she began to be able to do and learn so many things which the girls around her would not in their invincible ignorance be persuaded to attempt to do—to coax, or drag, or force them into better things. Who but a teacher who would never let them rest, who would give them no peace till they understood, could do that? And she was resolved to do it, with a hope that Providence might throw in the possibility of something heroical—the saving of somebody’s life, the redemption of some one who was going wrong—to make up. This was all laid out before her, the career which was to be hers.

But nevertheless (though she had abandoned all that folly about the Lady Joyce), when her mind was free, and nothing before her that compelled her attention, the romance of her unknown origin would come in, with a hundred vague attractions; and Colonel Hayward’s question was more than enough to call everything back. ‘Young lady, where did you get your name?’ and then his look! She had caught that look again, constantly coming back to her. Joyce was well enough aware what looks of admiration are like. She had met them of every kind—the innocent, the modest, the bold—but this was not one of them; not even the fatherly kind, of which she had been conscious too. This look was very different: it was the look of a man so startled, so absorbed, that he could think of nothing else; and then he had said, ‘I once knew—some one’—Joyce stood and listened, yet did not listen to what old Janet went on saying behind. The old woman was launched on a subject which filled her with eloquence. She was jealous of the poor little mother who had died—jealous at least of the idea that somebody might arrive some fine morning who would turn out to have a better claim than herself upon her nursling. In her heart Janet had always been certain that this was what would happen some day. She had spoken of it freely when the child was young, bidding Peter, her husband, to ‘haud a loose grip.’ ‘We maunna think too much of her,’ she had said; ‘for just when we’re bound up in her, and canna do without her, her ain kith and kin will come and carry her away.’ She had gone on saying this until the slumbering light in Joyce’s eyes had leaped out, and her quick intelligence had seized upon the expectation; after which Janet had changed her tone. She went on now in a very different strain, while Joyce stood at the window turning her back. ‘If I were in your place,’ she was saying, ‘I wouldna hear a word—no a word—that would maybe make me think shame o’ my mother. Oh, I wouldna listen—no, if it was the Queen hersel’!’ Joyce made no reply to these exhortations, but her heart burned. Her imagination rejected the idea with a fervour of suppressed indignation and resentment, which it needed all her gratitude and affection to keep in check. She stood and looked out, her foot tapping impatiently on the floor, her hand on the window. It was hard, very hard, to keep silent, though it was her duty so to do.

‘Granny,’ she said at last, ‘say no more, please. For one thing, I cannot bear it—and for another, here is Miss Greta, and I think she is coming to our door.’

‘Miss Greta! They might have kept her to her ain right name, which is a hantle bonnier than ony of your outlandish names; but she’s very free to come and very welcome, and grand company for you—I’m aye glad to see her coming here: is that her at the door? Come in, come in, my bonnie leddy. Joyce was just telling me—and we’re just awfu’ fain to see you, both her and me.’

‘Oh, thank you, Mrs. Matheson. Joyce! you are to come up to the house to-night,’ said the young lady, coming in, in the gaiety of her pretty summer dress, like a sunbeam. ‘Aunt Margaret has sent me to tell you: and I’ve run half the way, but I could not catch you up; you are to come to-night.’

Once more Joyce became crimson with expectation and excitement. Her eyes seemed to send out eager questions, and her lips to repeat the answer before the question was made. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Has the gentleman——’ and then stopped short, devouring the young visitor with eager eyes.

‘We want to have tableaux,’ cried the girl; ‘it was you yourself that put it into our heads: and you must come and help us—we could do nothing without you. Joyce, we want to do Queen Margaret—the same scene we had on the lawn for one. Captain Bellendean said it was beautiful: and then—something else. You are the one that knows all about Queen Margaret, Joyce.’

While Greta made her little speech, with a wondering sense after a word or two that she had stumbled into the midst of some dramatic scene which she did not understand, the face of Joyce was like a changing sky, save that the changes upon it were of swifter operation than those which alter the face of the heavens. It was full of a brilliant glow and flush of expectation at first: then the clouds suddenly swept over it, extinguishing all the higher lights: and then the shadows in their turn wavered and broke, and a chill clearness of self-repression came in their place, a calm which was like the usual calm of the countenance in repose, but intensified by the fact that this repose was not that of nature but of a violent effort, and had in it the gleam of self-scorn which answered in a certain vivid paleness to the effect of the light. A few instants were enough to work out all this drama, which was the truest reflection of Joyce’s mind. For one wild moment of hope, she had thought with a kind of certainty that her patroness, ‘the lady,’ the source of so many pleasures in Joyce’s life, was sending for her to tell her that her anticipations were realised, that her birth and kindred were discovered, and that she was to be told who she was. So swift are the operations of the mind that in her instantaneous conception of this, Joyce had time to make sure that there was no shame but only happiness in the revelation about to be made, or Mrs. Bellendean, always kind, would not have sent for her in this marked way. The thought sent the blood dancing through her veins, and though, perhaps, she did not picture herself as Lady Joyce, her mind yet rushed towards unknown glories in which insignificance at least had no place. And then there came a sense of absolute and sickening disappointment, such as seems to check the very fountains of life—disappointment so overwhelming that she felt herself stand up merely like a piece of mechanism by no strength or will of her own—a state of mental collapse from which she awoke to such scorn of herself for her former incoherent hopes as brought the blood to her cheeks again.

It takes longer time to describe these varying moods than it did to go through them, one sensation sweeping through her mind after the other. She had come to herself again after mounting to those heights and descending to those depths, when she replied, rather coldly, vaguely, to Greta’s petition, ‘If I can get away—if I can be spared from home.’

‘Spared from home! oh ay, she can be spared, Miss Greta, weel spared. She is aye so busy and taken up with thae bairns that a little pleasure will just do her a great deal of good.’

‘Pleasure!’ said Joyce, echoing the word. ‘I will come if the lady wants me; but there is a good deal to do—things to prepare. And then—and then——’ She paused with a conscious effort, making the most of her hindrances— ‘I am expecting a friend to-night.’

‘A friend?—that will be Andrew Halliday,’ said the old woman, again interposing anxiously; ‘you can see him ony day of the week; he’s no that far away nor sweared to come. Where are your manners, Joyce? to keep Miss Greta standing, and hum and ha, as if ye werena aye ready to do what will pleasure the lady—aye ready, night or day.’

‘If Joyce is tired, Mrs. Matheson,’ said Greta, ‘I will not have her troubled. But are you really so tired, Joyce? We cannot do anything without you. And it was all my idea, for there is no party or anything: but I thought it would please—all of them. Only I could do nothing without you.’

‘Yes, yes, I am coming,’ cried Joyce suddenly; ‘I was only what granny calls cankered and out of heart.’

‘Why should you be out of heart,’ said the other girl, ‘when everything went so well and everybody was so pleased? It is perhaps because you will miss Mr. Halliday? But then he can come up for you, and it’s moonlight, and that will be better than sitting in the house. Don’t you think so, Joyce?’

‘The moonlight is fine coming down the avenue,’ Joyce said vaguely. And then she asked, ‘Will the old Colonel—the old gentleman—will he be there?’

‘Oh, did you take a fancy to him, Joyce? So have I. Yes, he will be there—they will all be there. We are to have it in the great drawing-room—and leave to rummage in all the presses in the red room, you know, where the old Lady’s dresses are kept, and to take what we like.’

‘That would be fine,’ said Joyce, ‘if it was for last century; but if Queen Margaret is what you are wanting, that’s far, far back, and the old Lady’s dresses will do little good. There will be nothing half so old as Queen Margaret——’

‘Oh,’ cried Greta, her countenance falling, ‘I never thought of that.’

Joyce hesitated a moment, and the light returned to her eyes. ‘I will go up with you to the house now, if granny can spare me, and I will speak to Merritt, and we will think, she and I; and when you come out from your dinner we will have settled something. Oh, never fear but we will find something. It is just what I like,’ said Joyce, restored to full energy—‘to make out what’s impossible. That’s real pleasure!’ she cried, with sparkling eyes.

‘Did ever ony mortal see the like,’ said Janet to herself as she stood at the door watching the two girls go down the village street. ‘What’s impossible! that’s just what she likes, that wonderful bairn. And if onybody was to ask which was the leddy, it’s our Joyce and not Miss Greta that ilka ane would say. But, eh me! though I am so fain to get her a bit pleasure, what’s to come o’ a’ that if she is just to settle doon and marry Andrew Halliday? That’s what is impossible, and nae pleasure in it so far as I can see!’