All Roads Lead to Calvary | Page 9

one's mother,
unquestioningly, unreasoningly, as a natural instinct. For a moment a
strange thought came to her, and swiftly, almost guiltily, she stole
across, and drawing back a corner of the blind, examined closely her
own features in the glass, comparing them with the face of the dead
woman, thus called upon to be a silent witness for or against the living.
Joan drew a sigh of relief and let fall the blind. There could be no
misreading the evidence. Death had smoothed away the lines, given
back youth. It was almost uncanny, the likeness between them. It might
have been her drowned sister lying there. And they had never known

one another. Had this also been temperament again, keeping them apart?
Why did it imprison us each one as in a moving cell, so that we never
could stretch out our arms to one another, except when at rare intervals
Love or Death would unlock for a while the key? Impossible that two
beings should have been so alike in feature without being more or less
alike in thought and feeling. Whose fault had it been? Surely her own;
she was so hideously calculating. Even Mrs. Munday, because the old
lady had been fond of her and had shown it, had been of more service
to her, more a companion, had been nearer to her than her own mother.
In self-excuse she recalled the two or three occasions when she had
tried to win her mother. But fate seemed to have decreed that their
moods should never correspond. Her mother's sudden fierce outbursts
of love, when she would be jealous, exacting, almost cruel, had
frightened her when she was a child, and later on had bored her. Other
daughters would have shown patience, unselfishness, but she had
always been so self-centred. Why had she never fallen in love like other
girls? There had been a boy at Brighton when she was at school
there--quite a nice boy, who had written her wildly extravagant
love-letters. It must have cost him half his pocket-money to get them
smuggled in to her. Why had she only been amused at them? They
might have been beautiful if only one had read them with sympathy.
One day he had caught her alone on the Downs. Evidently he had made
it his business to hang about every day waiting for some such chance.
He had gone down on his knees and kissed her feet, and had been so
abject, so pitiful that she had given him some flowers she was wearing.
And he had sworn to dedicate the rest of his life to being worthy of her
condescension. Poor lad! She wondered--for the first time since that
afternoon--what had become of him. There had been others; a third
cousin who still wrote to her from Egypt, sending her presents that
perhaps he could ill afford, and whom she answered about once a year.
And promising young men she had met at Cambridge, ready, the felt
instinctively, to fall down and worship her. And all the use she had had
for them was to convert them to her views--a task so easy as to be quite
uninteresting--with a vague idea that they might come in handy in the
future, when she might need help in shaping that world of the future.
Only once had she ever thought of marriage. And that was in favour of

a middle-aged, rheumatic widower with three children, a professor of
chemistry, very learned and justly famous. For about a month she had
thought herself in love. She pictured herself devoting her life to him,
rubbing his poor left shoulder where it seemed he suffered most, and
brushing his picturesque hair, inclined to grey. Fortunately his eldest
daughter was a young woman of resource, or the poor gentleman,
naturally carried off his feet by this adoration of youth and beauty,
might have made an ass of himself. But apart from this one episode she
had reached the age of twenty-three heart-whole.
She rose and replaced the chair. And suddenly a wave of pity passed
over her for the dead woman, who had always seemed so lonely in the
great stiffly-furnished house, and the tears came.
She was glad she had been able to cry. She had always hated herself for
her lack of tears; it was so unwomanly. Even as a child she had rarely
cried.
Her father had always been very tender, very patient towards her
mother, but she had not expected to find him so changed. He had aged
and his shoulders drooped. She had been afraid that he would want her
to stay with him and take charge of the house. It had worried her
considerably. It would be so difficult to refuse, and yet she would have
to. But when