Joan Haste - H. Rider Haggard (fiction books to read .TXT) 📗

CHAPTER I

JOAN HASTE

 

Alone and desolate, within hearing of the thunder of the waters of the

North Sea, but not upon them, stand the ruins of Ramborough Abbey.

Once there was a city at their feet, now the city has gone; nothing is

left of its greatness save the stone skeleton of the fabric of the

Abbey above and the skeletons of the men who built it mouldering in

the earth below. To the east, across a waste of uncultivated heath,

lies the wide ocean; and, following the trend of the coast northward,

the eye falls upon the red roofs of the fishing village of Bradmouth.

When Ramborough was a town, this village was a great port; but the

sea, advancing remorselessly, has choked its harbour and swallowed up

the ancient borough which to-day lies beneath the waters.

 

With that of Ramborough the glory of Bradmouth is departed, and of its

priory and churches there remains but one lovely and dilapidated fane,

the largest perhaps in the east of England—that of Yarmouth alone

excepted—and, as many think, the most beautiful. At the back of

Bradmouth church, which, standing upon a knoll at some distance from

the cliff, has escaped the fate of the city that once nestled beneath

it, stretch rich marsh meadows, ribbed with raised lines of roadway.

But these do not make up all the landscape, for between Bradmouth and

the ruins of Ramborough, following the indentations of the sea coast

and set back in a fold or depression of the ground, lie a chain of

small and melancholy meres, whose brackish waters, devoid of sparkle

even on the brightest day, are surrounded by coarse and worthless

grass land, the haunt of the shore-shooter, and a favourite

feeding-place of curlews, gulls, coots and other wildfowl. Beyond

these meres the ground rises rapidly, and is clothed in gorse and

bracken, interspersed with patches of heather, till it culminates in

the crest of a bank that marks doubtless the boundary of some primeval

fiord or lake, where, standing in a ragged line, are groups of

wind-torn Scotch fir trees, surrounding a grey and solitary house

known as Moor Farm.

 

The dwellers in these parts—that is, those of them who are alive to

such matters—think that there are few more beautiful spots than this

slope of barren land pitted with sullen meres and bordered by the sea.

Indeed, it has attractions in every season: even in winter, when the

snow lies in drifts upon the dead fern, and the frost-browned gorse

shivers in the east wind leaping on it from the ocean. It is always

beautiful, and yet there is truth in the old doggerel verse that is

written in a quaint Elizabethan hand upon the fly-lead of one of the

Bradmouth parish registers—

 

“Of Rambro’, north and west and south,

Man’s eyes can never see enough;

Yet winter’s gloom or summer’s light,

Wide England hath no sadder sight.”

 

And so it is; even in the 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 is by no means

unusual in country villages, the sense of it galled her, lowering her

in her own esteem. Still she bore no resentment against this dead and

erring mother, but rather loved her with a strange and wondering love

than which there could be nothing more pathetic. The woman who bore

her, but whom she had never seen with remembering eyes, was often in

her thoughts; and once, when some slight illness had affected the

balance of her mind, Joan believed that she came and kissed her on the

brow—a vision whereof the memory was sweet to her, though she knew it

to be but a dream. Perhaps it was because she had nothing else to love

that she clung thus to the impalpable, making a companion of the

outcast dead whose blood ran in her veins. At the least this is sure,

that when her worries overcame her, or the sense of incongruity in her

life grew too strong, she was accustomed to seek this lowly mound,

and, seated by it, heedless of the weather, she would fix her eyes

upon the sea and soothe herself with a sadness that seemed deeper than

her own.

 

Her aunt, indeed, was left to her, but from this relation she won no

comfort. From many incidents trifling in themselves, but in the mass

irresistible, Joan gathered that there had been little sympathy

between her mother and Mrs. Gillingwater—if, in truth, their attitude

was not one of mutual dislike. It would appear also that in her own

case this want of affection was an hereditary quality, seeing that she

found it difficult to regard her aunt with any feeling warmer than

tolerance, and was in turn held in an open aversion, which to Joan’s

mind, was scarcely mitigated