What exactly had happened, or what she thought, it was impossible to know.She had delicate, black brows, and between them appeared two delicate, fierce lines.Her eyes were of a purplish-gray, "the color of thunder," a snubbed admirer had once said.Between their black lashes they were more deeply thunder-colored.Her life with her mother was a thing not to be spoken of.To the desperate girl's agony of rebellion against the horror of fate Lady Mallowe's taunts and beratings were devilish.There was a certain boudoir in the house in Hill Street which was to Joan like the question chamber of the Inquisition.Shut up in it together, the two went through scenes which in their cruelty would have done credit to the Middle Ages.Lady Mallowe always locked the door to prevent the unexpected entrance of a servant, but servants managed to hover about it, because her ladyship frequently forgot caution so far as to raise her voice at times, as ladies are not supposed to do.
"We fight," Joan said with a short, horrible laugh one morning--"we fight like cats and dogs.No, like two cats.A cat-and-dog fight is more quickly over.Some day we shall scratch each other's eyes out.""Have you no shame?" her mother cried.
"I am burning with it.I am like St.Lawrence on his gridiron.'Turn me over on the other side,'" she quoted.
This was when she had behaved so abominably to the Duke of Merthshire that he had actually withdrawn his more than half-finished proposal.
That which she hated more than all else was the God she had prayed to when she asked she might be helped to control her temper.
She had not believed in Him at the time, but because she was frightened after she had stuck the scissors into Fraulein she had tried the appeal as an experiment.The night after she met Jem, when she went to her room in Hill Street for the night, she knelt down and prayed because she suddenly did believe.Since there was Jem in the world, there must be the other somewhere.
As day followed day, her faith grew with her love.She told Jem about it, and they agreed to say a prayer together at the same hour every night.The big young man thought her piety beautiful, and, his voice was unsteady as they talked.But she told him that she was not pious, but impious.
"I want to be made good," she said."I have been bad all my life.Iwas a bad child, I have been a bad girl; but now I must be good."On the night after the tragic card-party she went to her room and kneeled down in a new spirit.She knelt, but not to cover her face, she knelt with throat strained and her fierce young face thrown back and upward.
Her hands were clenched to fists and flung out and shaken at the ceiling.She said things so awful that her own blood shuddered as she uttered them.But she could not--in her mad helplessness--make them awful enough.She flung herself on the carpet at last, her arms outstretched like a creature crucified face downward on the cross.
"I believed in You!" she gasped."The first moment you gave me a reason I believed.I did! I did! We both said our prayer to You every night, like children.And you've done this--this--this!" And she beat with her fists upon the floor.
Several years had passed since that night, and no living being knew what she carried in her soul.If she had a soul, she said to herself, it was black--black.But she had none.Neither had Jem had one; when the earth and stones had fallen upon him it had been the end, as it would have been if he had been a beetle.
This was the guest who was coming to the house where Miles Hugo smiled from his frame in the picture-gallery--the house which would to-day have been Jem's if T.Tembarom had not inherited it.
Tembarom returned some twenty-four hours after Miss Alicia had received his visitors for him.He had been "going into" absorbing things in London.His thoughts during his northward journey were puzzled and discouraged ones.He sat in the corner of the railway carriage and stared out of the window without seeing the springtime changes in the flying landscape.
The price he would have given for a talk with Ann would not have been easy to compute.Her head, her level little head, and her way of seeing into things and picking out facts without being rattled by what didn't really count, would have been worth anything.The day itself was a discouraging one, with heavy threatenings of rain which did not fall.
The low clouds were piles of dark-purple gray, and when the sun tried to send lances of ominous yellow light through them, strange and lurid effects were produced, and the heavy purple-gray masses rolled together again.He wondered why he did not hear low rumblings of thunder.
He went to his room at once when he reached home.He was late, and Pearson told him that the ladies were dressing for dinner.Pearson was in waiting with everything in readiness for the rapid performance of his duties.Tembarom had learned to allow himself to be waited upon.