Joanna Godden Part 26

Ellen took refuge in a haughty silence, and Joanna began to feel uneasy and depressed. She thought that Ellen was "fast." Was this what she had learned at school--to flout the standards of her home?

--6

The next morning Joanna overslept herself, in consequence of a restless hour during the first part of the night. As a result, it had struck half past seven before she went into her sister's room. She was not the kind of person who knocks at doors, and burst in to find Ellen, inadequately clothed in funny little garments, doing something very busily inside the cupboard.

"Hullo, duckie! And how did you sleep in your lovely bed?"

She was once more aglow with the vitality and triumph of her own being, but the next moment she experienced a vague sense of chill--something was the matter with the room, something had happened to it. It had lost its sense of cheerful riot, and wore a chastened, hangdog air. In a spasm of consternation Joanna realized that Ellen had been tampering with it.

"What have you done?--Where's my pictures?--Where've you put the window curtains?" she cried at last.

Ellen stiffened herself and tried not to look guilty.

"I'm just trying to find room for my own things."

Joanna stared about her.

"Where's father's Buffalo certificate?"

"I've put it in the cupboard."

"In the cupboard!--father's ... and I'm blessed if you haven't taken down the curtains."

"They clash with the carpet--it quite hurts me to look at them. Really, Joanna, if this is my room, you oughtn't to mind what I do in it."

"Your room, indeed!--You've got some sa.s.s!--And I spending more'n forty pound fixing it up for you. I've given you new wall paper and new carpet and new curtains and all the best pictures, and took an unaccountable lot of trouble, and now you go and mess it up."

"I haven't messed it up. On the contrary"--Ellen's vexation was breaking through her sense of guilt--"I'm doing the best I can to make it look decent. Since you say you've done it specially for me and spent all that money on it, I think at least you might have consulted my taste a little."

"And what is your taste, ma'am?"

"A bit quieter than yours," said Ellen saucily. "There are about six different shades of red and pink in this room."

"And what shades would you have chosen, may I be so bold as to ask?"

Joanna's voice dragged ominously with patience--"the same shade as your last night's gownd, which is the colour of the mould on jam? I'll have the colours I like in my own house--I'm sick of your dentical, die-away notions. You come home from school thinking you know everything, when all you've learned is to despise my best pictures, and say my curtains clash with the carpet, when I chose 'em for a nice match. I tell you what, ma'am, you can just about put them curtains back, and them pictures, and that certificate of poor father's that you're so ashamed of."

"I want to put my own pictures up," said Ellen doggedly--"if I've got to live with your carpet and wallpaper, I don't see why I shouldn't have my own pictures."

Joanna swept her eye contemptuously over "The Vigil," "Sir Galahad,"

"The Blessed Damozel," and one or two other schoolgirl favourites that were lying on the bed.

"You can stick those up as well--there ain't such a lot."

"But can't you see, Joanna, that there are too many pictures on the wall already?--It's simply crowded with them. Really, you're an obstinate old beast," and Ellen began to cry.

Joanna fought back in herself certain symptoms of relenting. She could not bear to see Ellen cry, but on the other hand she had "fixed up" this room for Ellen--she had had it furnished and decorated for her--and now Ellen must and should appreciate it. She should not be allowed to disguise and bowdlerize it to suit the unwelcome tastes she had acquired at school. The sight of her father's Buffalo certificate, lying face downwards on the cupboard floor, gave strength to her flagging purpose.

"You pick that up and hang it in its proper place."

"I won't."

"You will."

"I won't! Why should I have that hideous thing over my bed?"

"Because it was your father's, and you should ought to be proud of it."

"It's some low drinking society he belonged to, and I'm not proud--I'm ashamed."

Joanna boxed her ears.

"You don't deserve to be his daughter, Ellen G.o.dden, speaking so. It's you that's bringing us all to shame--thank goodness you've left school, where you learned all that tedious, proud nonsense. You hang those pictures up again, and those curtains, and you'll keep this room just what I've made it for you."

Ellen was weeping bitterly now, but her sacrilege had hardened Joanna's heart. She did not leave the room till the deposed dynasty of curtains and pictures was restored, with poor father's certificate once more in its place of honour. Then she marched out.

--7

The days till Christmas were full of strain. Joanna had won her victory, but she did not find it a satisfying one. Ellen's position in the Ansdore household was that of a sulky rebel--resentful, plaintive, a nurse of hard memories--too close to be ignored, too hostile to be trusted.

The tyrant groaned under the heel of her victim. She was used to quarrels, but this was her first experience of a prolonged estrangement.

It had been all very well to box Ellen's ears as a child, and have her s.h.i.+ns kicked in return, and then an hour or two later be nursing her on her lap to the tune of "There was an Old Woman," or "Little Boy Blue".... But this dragged out antagonism wore down her spirits into a long sadness. It was the wrong start for that happy home she had planned, in which Ellen, the little sister, was to absorb that overflowing love which had once been Martin's, but which his memory could not hold in all its power.

It seemed as if she would be forced to acknowledge Ellen's education as another of her failures. She had sent her to school to be made a lady of, but the finished article was nearly as disappointing as the cross-bred lambs of Socknersh's unlucky day. If Ellen had wanted to lie abed of a morning, never to do a hand's turn of work, or had demanded a table napkin at all her meals, Joanna would have humoured her and bragged about her. But, on the contrary, her sister had learned habits of early rising at school, and if left to herself would have been busy all day with piano or pencil or needle of the finer sort. Also she found more fault with the beauties of Ansdore's best parlour than the rigours of its kitchen; there lay the sting--her revolt was not against the toils and austerities of the farm's life but against its glories and comelinesses. She despised Ansdore for its very splendours, just as she despised her sister's best clothes more than her old ones.

By Christmas Day things had righted themselves a little. Ellen was too young to sulk more than a day or two, and she began to forget her grievances in the excitement of the festival. There was the usual communal midday dinner, with Arthur Alce back in his old place at Joanna's right hand. Alce had behaved like a gentleman, and refused to take back the silver tea set, his premature wedding gift. Then in the evening, Joanna gave a party, at which young Vines and Southlands and Furneses offered their sheepish admiration to her sister Ellen. Of course everyone was agreed that Ellen G.o.dden gave herself lamentable airs, but she appealed to her neighbours' curiosity through her queer, exotic ways, and the young men found her undeniably beautiful--she had a thick, creamy skin, into which her childhood's roses sometimes came as a dim flush, and the younger generation of the Three Marshes was inclined to revolt from the standards of its fathers.

So young Stacey Vine kissed her daringly under the mistletoe at the pa.s.sage bend, and was rewarded with a gasp of sweet scent, which made him talk a lot at the Woolpack. While Tom Southland, a man of few words, went home and closed with his father's offer of a partners.h.i.+p in his farm, which hitherto he had thought of setting aside in favour of an escape to Australia. Ellen was pleased at the time, but a night's thought made her scornful.

"Don't you know any really nice people?" she asked Joanna. "Why did you send me to school with gentlemen's daughters if you just meant me to mix with common people when I came out?"

"You can mix with any gentlefolk you can find to mix with. I myself have been engaged to marry a gentleman's son, and his father would have come to my party if he hadn't been away for Christmas."

She felt angry and sore with Ellen, but she was bound to admit that her grievance had a certain justification. After all, she had always meant her to be a lady, and now, she supposed, she was merely behaving like one. She cast about her for means of introducing her sister into the spheres she coveted ... if only Sir Harry Trevor would come home!--But she gathered there was little prospect of that for some time. Then she thought of Mr. Pratt, the rector.... It was the first time that she had ever considered him as a social a.s.set--his poverty, his inefficiency and self-depreciation had quite outweighed his gentility in her ideas; he had existed only as the Voice of the Church on Walland Marsh, and the spasmodic respect she paid him was for his office alone. But now she began to remember that he was an educated man and a gentleman, who might supply the want in her sister's life without in any way encouraging those more undesirable "notions" she had picked up at school.

Accordingly, Mr. Pratt, hitherto neglected, was invited to Ansdore with a frequency and enthusiasm that completely turned his head. He spoiled the whole scheme by misinterpreting its motive, and after about the ninth tea-party, became buoyed with insane and presumptuous hopes, and proposed to Joanna. She was overwhelmed, and did not scruple to overwhelm him, with anger and consternation. It was not that she did not consider the rectory a fit match for Ansdore, even with only two hundred a year attached to it, but she was furious that Mr. Pratt should think it possible that she could fancy him as a man--"a little rabbity chap like him, turned fifty, and scarce a hair on him. If he wants another wife at his age he should get an old maid like Miss G.o.dfrey or a hopeful widder like Mrs. Woods--not a woman who's had real men to love her, and ud never look at anything but a real, stout feller."

However, she confided the proposal to Ellen, for she wanted her sister to know that she had had an offer from a clergyman, and also that she was still considered desirable--for once or twice Ellen had thrown out troubling hints that she thought her sister middle-aged. Of course she was turned thirty now, and hard weather and other hard things had made her inclined to look older, by reddening and lining her face. But she had splendid eyes, hair and teeth, and neither the grace nor the energy of youth had left her body, which had coa.r.s.ened into something rather magnificent, tall and strong, plump without stoutness, clean-limbed without angularity.

She could certainly now have had her pick among the unmarried farmers--which could not have been said when she first set up her masters.h.i.+p at Ansdore. Since those times men had learned to tolerate her swaggering ways, also her love affair with Martin had made her more normal, more of a soft, accessible woman. Arthur Alce was no longer the only suitor at Ansdore--it was well known that Sam Turner, who had lately moved from inland to Northlade, was wanting to have her, and Hugh Vennal would have been glad to bring her as his second wife to Beggar's Bush. Joanna was proud of these attachments and saw to it that they were not obscure--also, one or two of the men, particularly Vennal, she liked for themselves, for their vitality and "set-upness"; but she s.h.i.+ed away from the prospect of marriage. Martin had shown her all that it meant in the way of renunciation, and she felt that she could make its sacrifices for no one less than Martin. Also, the frustration of her hopes and the inadequacy of her memories had produced in her a queer antipathy to marriage--a starting aside. Her single state began to have for her a certain worth in itself, a respectable rigour like a pair of stays. For a year or so after Martin's death, she had maintained her solace of secret kisses, but in time she had come to withdraw even from these, and by now the full force of her vitality was pouring itself into her life at Ansdore, its ambitions and business, her love for Ellen, and her own pride.