Joan Haste | Page 2

glory of June, when lizards run across the grey

stonework and the gorse shows its blaze of gold, there is a stamp of
native sadness on the landscape which lies between Bradmouth and
Ramborough, that neither the hanging woodlands to the north, nor the
distant glitter of the sea, on which boats move to and fro, can altogether
conquer. Nature set that seal upon the district in the beginning, and the
lost labours of the generations now sleeping round its rotting churches
have but accentuated the primal impress of her hand.
Though on the day in that June when this story opens, the sea shone
like a mirror beneath her, and the bees hummed in the flowers growing
on the ancient graves, and the larks sang sweetly above her head, Joan
felt this sadness strike her heart like the chill of an autumn night. Even
in the midst of life everything about her seemed to speak of death and
oblivion: the ruined church, the long neglected graves, the barren
landscape, all cried to her with one voice, seeming to say, "Our troubles
are done with, yours lie before you. Be like us, be like us."
It was no high-born lady to whom these voices spoke in that
appropriate spot, nor were the sorrows which opened her ears to them
either deep or poetical. To tell the truth, Joan Haste was but a village
girl, or, to be more accurate, a girl who had spent most of her life in a
village. She was lovely in her own fashion, it is true--but of this
presently; and, through circumstances that shall be explained, she
chanced to have enjoyed a certain measure of education, enough to
awaken longings and to call forth visions that perhaps she would have
been happier without. Moreover, although Fate had placed her humbly,
Nature gave to her, together with the beauty of her face and form, a
mind which, if a little narrow, certainly did not lack for depth, a
considerable power of will, and more than her share of that noble
dissatisfaction without which no human creature can rise in things
spiritual or temporal, and having which, no human creature can be
happy.
Her troubles were vulgar enough, poor girl: a scolding and
coarse-minded aunt, a suitor toward whom she had no longings, the
constant jar of the talk and jest of the ale-house where she lived, and
the irk of some vague and half-understood shame that clung to her

closely as the ivy clung to the ruined tower above her. Common though
such woes be, they were yet sufficiently real to Joan--in truth, their
somewhat sordid atmosphere pressed with added weight upon a mind
which was not sordid. Those misfortunes that are proper to our station
and inherent to our fate we can bear, if not readily, at least with some
show of resignation; those that fall upon us from a sphere of which we
lack experience, or arise out of a temperament unsuited to its
surroundings, are harder to endure. To be different from our fellows, to
look upwards where they look down, to live inwardly at a mental level
higher than our circumstances warrant, to desire that which is too far
above us, are miseries petty in themselves, but gifted with Protean
reproductiveness.
Put briefly, this was Joan's position. Her parentage was a mystery, at
least so far as her father was concerned. Her mother was her aunt's
younger sister; but she had never known this mother, whose short life
closed within two years of Joan's birth. Indeed, the only tokens left to
link their existences together were a lock of soft brown hair and a faded
photograph of a girl not unlike herself, who seemed to have been
beautiful. Her aunt, Mrs. Gillingwater, gave her these mementos of the
dead some years ago, saying, with the brutal frankness of her class, that
they were almost the only property that her mother had left behind her,
so she, the daughter, might as well take possession of them.
Of this mother, however, there remained one other memento--a mound
in the churchyard of the Abbey, where until quite recently the
inhabitants of Ramborough had been wont to be laid to sleep beside
their ancestors. This mound Joan knew, for, upon her earnest entreaty,
Mr. Gillingwater, her uncle by marriage, pointed it out to her; indeed,
she was sitting by it now. It had no headstone, and when Joan asked
him why, he replied that those who were neither wife nor maid had best
take their names with them six feet underground.
The poor girl shrank back abashed at this rough answer, nor did she
ever return to the subject. But from this moment she knew that she had
been unlucky in her birth, and though such an accident