CHAPTER I

SOME PASSAGES FROM JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE's LOCKED BOOK

The drought was slow in breaking. Day after day ragged-headed thunder pillars boiled up along the southeastern horizon; and, drifting northward, inland, in portentous procession as the afternoon advanced, massed themselves as a mighty mountain range against the sulky blue of the upper sky. About their flanks, later, sheet lightning streaked and quivered, making the hot night unrestful, as with the winking of malevolent and monstrous eyes.

Owing to the lie of the land and the encircling trees, this aerial drama was not visible from the Tower House. But the atmospheric pressure, and nervous tension produced by it, very sensibly invaded the great woodland. The French window of Joanna Smyrthwaite's bedroom stood wide open on to the balcony. She had drawn an easy-chair close up to it, and, dressed in her white woolen _négligé_, sat there in the half-dark. She left the _négligé_ unfastened at the neck, it being an unsuitably warm garment to wear on so hot a night. She was aware it caused her discomfort; despite which she wore it. The pristine freshness of it was passed. It was slightly soiled, and the knife-pleatings, losing their sharpness of edge, sagged irregularly in places, like the bellows of an old concertina. More than once Mrs. Isherwood had declared, "Miss Joanna ought to buy herself a new wrapper, or at any rate let this poor old object go to the cleaners'." But Joanna refused, almost angrily, to part with it even for a week. She gave no reason for her refusal, but locked the insulted garment away in a drawer of her wardrobe, whence she extracted it with jealous tenderness after Isherwood had left her at night. Then she wore it, if but for half an hour; and, wearing it, she brooded, fondling her right hand, which, upon two occasions, Adrian Savage had kissed.

At the opposite end of the lawn, in front of the tennis pavilion, figures sauntered to and fro and voices were raised in desultory talk. Amy Woodford giggled. The elder Busbridge boy whistled "Yip-i-addy," and, losing his breath, coughed. The odor of cigarettes mingled with that of the trumpet-honeysuckle and jasmine encircling the pillars of the veranda below the window. Joanna neither looked at nor listened to the others. Her eyes were fixed upon the circle of fir-trees, where the dense plumed darkness of their topmost branches met the only less dense darkness of the sky. And she brooded. Once she kissed the hand which Adrian Savage had kissed.

But the figures and voices came nearer. Amy Woodford, her Oxford undergraduate brother, and the two Busbridge boys were saying good-night. Their feet tapped and scraped on the quarries of the veranda. Somebody ran into a chair, toppled it over, gave a yelp, and the whole company laughed. These playful goings-on came between Joanna and her brooding. She rose impatiently, crossed the room to her bureau, lighted the candles, and sat down to write.

"_August 21, 190-_

"We are never alone. I try not to be irritable, but this constant entertaining wears me out. It is contrary to all the traditions of our home life. I cannot help thinking how strongly papa would have condemned it. Even mamma would have disapproved. I fear I am wanting in moral courage and firmness in not expressing disapproval more often myself; but Margaret always imputes wrong motives to me and inverts the meaning of that which I say. She cannot be brought to see that I object on principle, and accuses me of a selfish attempt to shirk exertion. She says I am inhospitable and elusive. She even accuses me of being niggardly and grudging my share in the increased household expenditure. This is unjust, and I cannot help resenting it. Yesterday I remonstrated with her, and our discussion degenerated to a wrangle, which was painful and unbecoming. To-day she has avoided speaking to me unless positively obliged to do so. I feel I have failed in regard to Margaret, and that I ought to have kept up a higher standard since papa died and I became, virtually, the head of the house. Margaret is entirely occupied with amusement and with dress. This must be, in part, my fault, though dear mamma always feared frivolous inclinations in Margaret. It is all very trying. I doubt whether Marion Chase's influence is good for her. I am sure Mr. Challoner's is not. Marion is fairly well educated, but is without cultivated tastes. Mr. Challoner is not even well educated. They both flatter her and defer to her wishes far too much. Other people flatter her too, even serious persons, such as the Norbitons and Mrs. Paull. I do not think I am jealous of Margaret, but I will scrutinize my own feelings more closely upon this point.

"I am afraid the servants observe that she and I are not on happy terms. This worries me. I dread the household taking sides. Isherwood and Johnson, and, I believe, Smallbridge are quite faithful to me. So is Rossiter, though I cannot help attributing that mainly to her dislike of the increased work in the kitchen. But Margaret's new maid and her chauffeur--whose manner I consider much too familiar--create a fresh element in our establishment. They both are showy, and I mistrust the effect of their companionship upon the younger servants. I no longer really feel mistress in my own house. My position is rendered undignified. Sometimes I regret the old days at Highdene, or here, before papa's death. But that is weak of me, even hypocritical, since it is dread of responsibility rather than affection for the past which dictates the wish. I must school myself to indifference, and try more earnestly to rise superior to these worries. I must look forward rather than look back."

Joanna laid down her pen, held up her right hand, kissed the back of it just above the ridge of the knuckles, thrust it within the open neck of her _négligé_ and, placing her left hand over it, pressed it against her meager bosom.

"I must look forward," she said half aloud. "'Nothing is changed between us.' He told me so himself the night before he left. I must rest in that."

She got up and paced the length of the room for a while, repeating--"I must rest in that, must rest in that."

A sound of voices still rose from the garden, now a man's and a woman's in low and evidently intimate talk. Joanna stood still. The note of intimacy excited subconscious, unacknowledged envy within her. She did not distinguish, nor did she attempt to distinguish, the words said. The tones were enough. It got upon her nerves to hear a man and woman speak thus. A little longer and she felt she should be unable to bear it--she must command them to stop.

She went back to her bureau again. Here, at a distance from the window, the voices were less audible. She sat down and forced herself to write.

"This is the second dinner-party we have given, or, rather, which Margaret has given, within a week. I absented myself, pleading neuralgia, and remained up-stairs in the blue sitting-room. With the exception of Marion and Mr. Challoner, it was a boy-and-girl party. I do not feel at my ease in such company. I fail to see the point of their slang expressions and their jokes, and I do not understand the technical terms regarding games which they so constantly employ. No doubt my dining up-stairs will be a cause of offense, but I cannot help it. If Margaret invites her own friends here so often she must at least contrive sometimes to entertain them without my assistance. I will try to dismiss this subject from my mind. To dwell upon it only irritates me.

"I really needed to be alone to-night. I live stupidly, from day to day. I feel that I ought to have a more definite routine of reading and of self-culture. I ought to spend the present interval in educating myself more thoroughly for my future occupations and duties. I will draw up some general scheme of study. And I will keep my diary more regularly. I so seldom write now, yet I know it is good for me. Writing obliges me to be clear in my intentions and in my thought. I am self-indulgent and allow myself to be too indefinite and vague, to let my mind drift. Papa always warned me against that. He used to say no woman was ever a sufficiently close thinker. The inherent inferiority of the feminine intelligence was, he held, proved by this cardinal defect. I know my inclination has always been toward too great introspection, and I regret now that I have not striven more consistently after mental directness and grasp. I have been reading the _Révue de Deux Mondes_ lately, feeling it a duty to acquaint myself with modern French literature. The luminous objectivity of the French mind impresses me very strongly--an objectivity which is neither superficial nor unduly materialistic. When listening to Adrian I was often struck by this quality--"

Joanna laid down her pen once more. She sat still, her hands resting upon the flat space of the desk on either side the blotting-pad, her head thrown back and her eyes closed. The voices in the garden had ceased, and the silence, save for the shutting of a door in a distant part of the house and the faint grinding of wheels and bell of a tram-car on the Barryport Road, was complete. For some minutes she remained in the same position, her body inert, her inward activity intense. At last she raised her hands as though in protest, and, bending down, fell to work upon her diary again with a smothered violence.

"I have resisted the temptation to write about it till now. I have been afraid of myself, afraid for myself. But to-night I feel differently. I feel a necessity to refer to it--to set it down in words, and to relieve myself of the burden of the 'thing unspoken.' On former occasions when I have been greatly harassed and troubled I have found alleviation in so doing.

"I want to make it quite clear to myself that I have never doubted consideration for me, a desire to spare me distress and agitation, dictated Adrian's silence regarding his sudden and unexpected departure. He knew how painful it would be to me to part with him,

## particularly after our conversation regarding Bibby. Seeing how

overwrought I had been by that conversation, he wished to put no further strain upon me. I want to make it quite clear to myself that the letter he left for us with Smallbridge was all that good taste and courtesy demanded. Yet it hurt me. It hurts me still. He took pains to thank us for our hospitality and to express his pleasure in having helped us through all the business connected with our succession to papa's property. He said a number of kind and friendly things. Few persons could have written a more graceful or cousinly letter. I know all this. I entertain no doubt of his sincerity. Still the letter did hurt me. Margaret appropriated it. It was addressed to her as well as to me, so, I suppose, she believed herself to have a right to take possession of it. And I am not sure I wished to keep it. I could not have put it with his other letters, since it only belonged to me in part. Yet I often wonder what Margaret has done with it--thrown it into the waste-paper basket most likely! And it is very dreadful to think any letter of his has been thrown away or burned. Just because it was only half mine I feel so bitterly about it. I am afraid I have allowed this bitterness to affect my attitude toward Margaret; but it is very painful that she should share, in any degree, the correspondence which is of such infinite value to me. I do accept the fact that he acted in good faith, without an idea how deeply so apparently simple a thing would wound me. I excuse him of the most remote wish to wound me. But I was, and am, wounded; and his letters since then--there are five of them--have failed to heal the wound.

"It is dreadful to write all this down; but it is far more dreadful to let it remain on my mind, corroding all my thought of him. Not that it really does so. In my agitation I overstate. 'Nothing is changed between us.' No, nothing, Adrian--believe me, nothing. Yet in those last five letters I do detect a change. They have not the playful frankness of the earlier ones. I detect effort in them. They are very interesting and very kind, I know; still there is something lacking which I can only describe as the personal note. They are written as a duty, they lack spontaneity. He tells me he has been detained in Paris, all the summer, by the illness--nervous breakdown--of a former schoolfellow. He tells me of his continued efforts to trace Bibby. But these are outside things, of which he might write to any acquaintance. I read and re-read these letters in the hope of discovering some word, some message, actual or implied, addressed to me as me, the woman he has so wonderfully chosen. But I do not find it, so the wound remains unhealed.

"Yet how ungrateful I am to complain! To do so shows me my own nature in a dreadful light--grasping, impatient, suspicious. Innumerable duties and occupations may so readily interfere to prevent his writing more frequently or more fully! Why cannot I trust him more? Is it not the very height of ingratitude thus to cavil and to doubt?"

Overcome by emotion, Joanna left the bureau and paced the room once more, her arms hanging straight at her sides, her hands plucking at the pleatings of her _négligé_. The heat seemed to her to have increased to an almost unbearable extent, notwithstanding which she clung to her woolen garment. Crossing to the washing-stand, she dipped a handkerchief in the water and, folding it into a bandage, held it across her forehead. She blew out the candles and, returning to the open window, sank into the easy-chair. The sky remained unclouded, but in the last hour had so thickened with thunder haze that it was difficult to distinguish the tree-tops from it. Joanna gazed fixedly at this hardly determinable line of junction. Presently she began to talk to herself in short, hurried sentences.

"I know I told him I would wait. I believed I had strength sufficient for entire submission. But I am weaker than I supposed. I despise myself for that weakness. But I cannot wait. He is my life. Without him I have no life--none that is coherent and progressive. My loneliness and emptiness, apart from my relation to him, are dreadful. And lately jealousy has grown shockingly upon me. I think of nothing else. I am jealous of every person whom he sees, of every object which he touches, of his literary work because it interests him--jealous of the old schoolfellow whom he is nursing; jealous of Bibby, for whom he searches; jealous of the very air he breathes and ground on which he treads. All these come between him and me, stealing from me that which should be mine, since they are close to him and engage his attention and thought."

Joanna stopped, breathless, and, closing her eyes, lay back in the chair, while drops oozing from the wet bandage trickled downward and dripped upon her thin neck and breast.

"Now at last I am honest with myself," she whispered. "I have spoken the truth--the hateful truth, since it lays bare to me the inner meanness of my own nature. I no longer palliate my own repulsive qualities or attempt to excuse myself to myself. I admit my many faults. I call them by their real names. Now, possibly, I shall become calmer and more resigned. The completeness of my faith in him will come back. And then, some day in the future, when I tell him how I repent of my suspicions and rebellious doubts, he will forgive me and help me to eradicate my faults and make me more worthy of the wonderful gift of his love."

Then she lay still, exhausted by her paroxysm of self-accusation.

"Here you are at last! You do take an unconscionably long time saying good-night! I nearly gave up and went indoors to bed."

This chaffingly, from the terrace outside the veranda, in Marion Chase's hearty barytone.

"I imagine people in our situation usually have a good deal to say to each other."

Rustlings of silk and creakings followed, occasioned by the descent of a well-cushioned feminine body into a wicker chair.

"And pray, how far did you go with him?" still chaffingly.

"Only to the end of the carriage-drive, and then into the road for a minute to see the lightning. Really, it's too odd--quite creepy. Looking toward the County Gates, the sky seems to open and shut like the lid of a box."

"I shouldn't mind its opening wider and giving us some rain. It's too stuffy for words to-night. And then he proceeded to walk back with you, I suppose?"

"No, he didn't, because I dismissed him. I can be firm when I choose, you know; and I am sure it is wisest to begin as I mean to go on. I intend to be my own mistress--"

"And his master?"

"Doesn't that follow as a matter of course--a 'necessary corollary,' as Joanna would say? Too, I didn't want to run the risk of meeting any of the servants coming in. He is liable to be a little demonstrative when we are alone, don't you know."

"Margaret!"

"Well, why not? I take demonstrations quite calmly so long as they are made in private. It would be silly to do otherwise. They're just, of course, part of the--"

"Whole show?"

"Yes, if you like to be vulgar, Marion, and quote the Busbridge boys--I limit my quotations to Joanna--of the whole show."

After a short pause.

"Maggie, did you settle any dates to-night? I thought he seemed preoccupied, as if he meant business of some sort. You don't mind my asking?"

"Not in the least. He says he is bothered because his position is an equivocal one."

"So it is." This very sensibly from Marion Chase. "People begin to think you are simply mean to keep him dangling."

"Do they? How amusing!"

"Not for him, poor beast." And both young women laughed.

"He is wild to have the announcement made at once."

"In the papers, do you mean?"

"Yes, The Times and Morning Post, of course, and two local ones. He suggests the Stourmouth and Marychurch Chronicle and the Barryport Gazette. I should have thought the Courier ranked higher, but he says it's not nearly so widely read as the Chronicle. Then we ought to put it in a Yorkshire paper as well, I think."

"How awfully thrilling!"

At first to Joanna, at the open window above, still laboring with the aftermath of her gloomy outbreaks of passion, this conversation had been but as a chirping of birds or squeaking of bats. Such slipshod telegraphic chatterings between the two young ladies, obnoxious alike to her taste and scholarship, were her daily portion. Joanna had scornfully trained herself to ignore them. She could not prevent their assailing her ears; but she could, and as a rule did, successfully prevent their reaching her understanding.

To-night, however, strained and on edge as she was, her will proved incapable of prolonged effort, and indifference was unsustainable. Gradually the manner of the speakers and significance of that which they said mastered her unwilling attention. Surprise followed on surprise. She knew how the two friends talked in her presence. Was this how they talked in her absence, disclosing--especially in the case of her sister--an attitude of mind, let alone definite purposes and

## actions, of which she had been in total ignorance? And--to carry the

question a step farther--did this connote corresponding ignorance on her part in other directions? Was she, Joanna, living in worlds very much unrealized, where all manner of things of primary importance remained unknown to or misinterpreted by her?

The thought opened up vistas packed with agitation and alarm. Self-defense admits few scruples; and it appeared to poor Joanna just then that every man's hand was against her. Living in the midst of deceptions, what weapon except deceit--and in this case deceit was tacit only--remained to her? Her sense of honor, and along with it the self-respect in which the roots of honor are set, went overboard. Instead of leaving the window and refusing to hear more, Joanna stayed. A morbid desire to know, to learn all that which was being kept from her, to get at the truth of these lives lived so close to her own, to get at the truth of their opinion of her, seized upon her.

She took the moist handkerchief off her forehead, and, slipping noiselessly out of her chair, knelt upon the rug laid along the inner side of the window-sill, craning her neck forward so that no word of the conversation might escape her.

"Personally, as I told him, I was in no particular hurry."

"Pleasant news for him!" Marion Chase returned.

"But I'm not. There are several good reasons for waiting--our mourning for one thing. And then the question of a house. Heatherleigh's not large enough, or smart enough--all very well for a bachelor establishment, I dare say. What I should like is this house; but I doubt whether Joanna would give it up, though it really is altogether too extensive a place for her alone. I don't mean that she could not afford to keep it up. She could afford to; but it would be ostentatious, ridiculously out of proportion for an unmarried woman."

Joanna's indignation nearly flamed into speech. She moved impatiently, causing the chair behind her to scrape on its casters.

"What was that?" from Marion Chase.

"A fir-cone falling probably. It's hotter than ever.--No, I haven't the smallest intention of not going through with this business; but I'm in no hurry. Things are quite amusing as they are."

"I believe you enjoy taking people in, you wicked old thing."

"If keeping quiet about my own affairs is taking people in, I suppose I do enjoy it. And then, of course, you see I am bound to tell Joanna first. There's no help for that--"

"Magsie, you know her windows are open? You don't think we can be overheard?"

"No; it's all right. I looked when I came back. There's no light. Either she's still in the blue sitting-room or she's gone to bed. Too, I must do her the justice to say Joanna is not the sort of person who listens. She would consider it wrong."

Joanna drew back and was on the point of rising. Again the chair scraped.

"And then she would never condescend to listen to anything I might happen to be saying. There is a compensating freedom in being beneath notice!"

Joanna remained on her knees at the open window.

"I own I most cordially dislike the idea of telling her," Margaret continued. "I know she will be unreasonable and say things which will lead to all sorts of disputes and disagreeables between us."

"Oh! but she must know perfectly well already, only she means to make you speak first," the other returned. "It's too absurd to suppose she hasn't spotted what's been going on. Why, his state of mind has been patent for ages. She can't be off seeing."

"I don't believe for a single moment she does see. She's so frightfully self-absorbed and self-occupied. You know yourself, Marion, how extraordinarily obtuse she can be. She lives in the most hopeless state of dream--"

Joanna swayed a little as she knelt and laid hold of the folds of the striped tabaret window-curtain for support.

"I know she always has been inclined to dream; but recently it has grown upon her. For me to say anything to her about it is worse than useless. She only sits upon me, and then we 'have words,' as Isherwood says. At bottom Joanna is awfully obstinate. In many ways she reminds me very much of papa; only, being a woman, unfortunately one can't get round her as one could round him. People are beginning to notice what an odd, moody state she is in. Mrs. Norbiton said something about it when they dined here on Monday. She said Joanna seemed so absent-minded, and asked whether I thought she wasn't well. And Colonel Haig mentioned it to me the afternoon we had tea with him at the golf club. That really led to his telling me what he had heard in Paris."

"Telling you--oh, I remember! What he had heard about Mr. Savage?" Marion Chase remarked.

Joanna got on to her feet, went out on to the balcony, and hung over the red balustrade into the hot, thick darkness.

"Margaret!" she called. "Margaret, I must speak to you. Please come to my room. It is something urgent. Come at once."

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