"I remember," he said, "that you always were particular about a man's
looks. How Martin's must have delighted you!"
His tongue did not falter over the loved, forbidden name--he spoke it
quite naturally and conversationally, as if glad that he could introduce
it at last into their business.
Joanna's body stiffened, but he did not see it, for he was gazing at the
young creeper's budding trail over the door.
"I hope you have a good photograph of him," he continued--"I know that a
very good photograph was taken of him a year before he died--much better
than any of the earlier ones. I hope you have one of those."
"Yes, I have," said Joanna gruffly. From shock she had passed into a
thrilling anger. How calmly he had spoken the dear name, how
unblushingly he had said the outrageous word "died!" How brazen,
thoughtless, cruel he was about it all!--tearing the veil from her
sorrow, talking as if her dead lived ... she felt exposed, indecent, and
she hated him, all the more because mixed with her hatred was a kind of
disapproving envy, a resentment that he should be free to remember
where she was bound to forget....
He saw her hand clench slowly at her side, and for the first time became
aware of her state of mind.
"Good-bye, Jo," he said kindly--"I'll tell Father Palmer to write to
you."
"Thanks, but I don't promise to take him," was her ungracious fling.
"No--why should you? And of course he may have already made his plans.
Good-bye, and thank you for your great kindness in offering the living
to me--it was very noble of you, considering what your family has
suffered from mine."
He had carefully avoided all reference to his father, but he now
realized that he had kept the wrong silence. It was the man who had
brought her happiness, not the man who had brought her shame, that she
was unable to speak of.
"Oh, don't you think of that--it wasn't your doing"--she melted towards
him now she had a genuine cause for indignation--"and we've come through
it better than we hoped, and some of us deserved."
Lawrence gave her an odd smile, which made his face with its innumerable
lines and pouches look rather like a gargoyle's. Then he walked off
bare-headed into the twilight.
Sec.5
Ellen was intensely relieved when she heard that he had refused the
living, and a little indignant with Joanna for having offered it to him.
"You don't seem to realize how very awkward it would have been for me--I
don't want to have anything more to do with that family."
"I daresay not," said Joanna grimly, "but that ain't no reason why this
parish shouldn't have a good parson. Lawrence ud have made the people
properly mind their ways. And it ain't becoming in you, Ellen Alce, to
let your own misdoings stand between folk and what's good for 'em."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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