§1

Time passed on, healing the wounds of the Marsh. At Donkey Street, the neighbours were beginning to get used to young Honisett and his bride, at Rye and Lydd and Romney the farmers had given up expecting Arthur Alce to come round the corner on his grey horse, with samples of wheat or prices of tegs. At Ansdore, too, the breach was healed. Joanna and Ellen lived quietly together, sharing their common life without explosions. Joanna had given up all idea of "having things out" with Ellen. There was always a bit of pathos about Joanna's surrenders, and in this case Ellen had certainly beaten her. It was rather difficult to say exactly to what the younger sister owed her victory, but undoubtedly she had won it, and their life was in a measure based upon it. Joanna accepted her sister—past and all; she accepted her little calm assumptions of respectability together with those more expected tendencies towards the "French." When Ellen had first come back, she had been surprised and resentful to see how much she took for granted in the way of acceptance, not only from Joanna but from the neighbours. According to her ideas, Ellen should have kept in shamed seclusion till public opinion called her out of it, and she had been alarmed at her assumptions, fearing rebuff, just as she had almost feared heaven's lightning stroke for that demure little figure in her pew on Sunday, murmuring "Lord have mercy" without tremor or blush.

But heaven had not smitten and the neighbours had not snubbed. In some mysterious way Ellen had won acceptance from the latter, whatever her secret relations with the former may have been. The stories about her grew ever more and more charitable. The Woolpack pronounced that Arthur Alce would not have gone away "if it had been all on her side," and it was now certainly known that Mrs. Williams had been at San Remo.... Ellen's manner was found pleasing—"quiet but affable." Indeed, in this respect she had much improved. The Southlands took her up, forgiving her treatment of their boy, now comfortably married to the daughter of a big Folkestone shopkeeper. They found her neither brazen nor shamefaced—and she'd been as shocked as any honest woman at Lady Mountain's trial in the Sunday papers ... if folk only knew her real story, they'd probably find....

In fact, Ellen was determined to get her character back.

She knew within herself that she owed a great deal to Joanna's protection—for Joanna was the chief power in the parishes of Brodnyx and Pedlinge, both personally and territorially. Ellen had been wise beyond the wisdom of despair when she came home. She was not unhappy in her life at Ansdore, for her escapade had given her a queer advantage over her sister, and she now found that she could to a certain extent, mould the household routine to her comfort. She was no longer entirely dominated, and only a small amount of independence was enough to satisfy her, a born submitter, to whom contrivance was more than rule. She wanted only freedom for her tastes and pleasures, and Joanna did not now strive to impose her own upon her. Occasionally the younger woman complained of her lot, bound to a man whom she no longer cared for, wearing only the fetters of her wifehood—she still hankered after a divorce, though Arthur must be respondent. This always woke Joanna to rage, but Ellen's feelings did not often rise to the surface, and on the whole the sisters were happy in their life together—more peaceful because they were more detached than in the old days. Ellen invariably wore black, hoping that strangers and newcomers would take her for a widow.

This she actually became towards the close of the year 1910. Arthur did a fair amount of hunting with his brother in the shires, and one day his horse came down at a fence, throwing him badly and fracturing his skull. He died the same night without regaining consciousness—death had treated him better on the whole than life, for he died without pain or indignity, riding to hounds like any squire. He left a comfortable little fortune, too—Donkey Street and its two hundred acres—and he left it all to Joanna.

Secretly he had made his will anew soon after going to the shires, and in it he had indulged himself, ignoring reality and perhaps duty. Evidently he had had no expectations of a return to married life with Ellen, and in this new testament he ignored her entirely, as if she had not been. Joanna was his wife, inheriting all that was his, of land and money and live and dead stock—"My true, trusty friend, Joanna Godden."

Ellen was furious, and Joanna herself was a little shocked. She understood Arthur's motives—she guessed that one of his reasons for passing over Ellen had been his anxiety to leave her sister dependent on her, knowing her fear that she would take flight. But this exaltation of her by his death to the place she had refused to occupy during his life, gave her a queer sense of smart and shame. For the first time it struck her that she might not have treated Arthur quite well....

However, she did not sympathize with Ellen's indignation—

"You shouldn't ought to have expected a penny, the way you treated him."

"I don't see why he shouldn't have left me at least some furniture, seeing there was about five hundred pounds of my money in that farm. He's done rather well out of me on the whole—making me no allowance whatever when he was alive."

"Because I wouldn't let him make it—I've got some pride if you haven't."

"Your pride doesn't stop you taking what ought to have been mine."

"'Ought to'.... I never heard such words. Not that I'm pleased he should make it all over to me, but it ain't my doing."

Ellen looked at her fixedly out of her eyes which were like the shallow floods.

"Are you quite sure? Are you quite sure, Joanna, that you honestly played a sister's part by me while I was away?"

"What d'you mean?"

"I mean, Arthur seems to have got a lot fonder of you while I was away than he—er—seemed to be before."

Joanna gaped at her.

"Of course it was only natural," continued Ellen smoothly—"I know I treated him badly—but don't you think you needn't have taken advantage of that?"

"Well, I'm beat ... look here, Ellen ... that man was mine from the first, and I gave him over to you, and I never took him back nor wanted him, neither."

"How generous of you, Jo, to have 'given him over' to me."

A little maddening smile twisted the corners of her mouth, and Joanna remembered that now Arthur was dead and there was no hope of Ellen going back to him she need not spare her secret.

"Yes, I gave him to you," she said bluntly—"I saw you wanted him, and I didn't want him myself, so I said to him 'Arthur, look here, you take her'—and he said to me—'I'd sooner have you, Jo'—but I said 'you won't have me even if you wait till the moon's cheese, so there's no good hoping for that. You take the little sister and please me'—and he said 'I'll do it to please you, Jo.' That's the very thing that happened, and I'm sorry it happened now—and I never told you before, because I thought it ud put you against him, and I wanted you to go back to him, being his wife; but now he's dead, and you may as well know, seeing the upstart notions you've got."

She looked fiercely at Ellen, to watch the effect of the blow, but was disconcerted to see that the little maddening smile still lingered. There were dimples at the flexing corners of her sister's mouth, and now they were little wells of disbelieving laughter. Ellen did not believe her—she had told her long-guarded secret and her sister did not believe it. She thought it just something Joanna had made up to salve her pride—and nothing would ever make her believe it, for she was a woman who had been loved and knew that she was well worth loving.