Joy Irving had come to Beryngford at the time when the discoveries of
the quarries caused that village to spring into sudden prominence as
a growing city. Newspaper accounts of the building of the new
church, and the purchase of a large pipe organ, chanced to fall under
her eye just as she was planning to leave the scene of her
unhappiness.
"I can at least only fail if I try for the position of organist
there," she said, "and if I succeed in this interior town, I can hide
myself from all the world without incurring heavy expense."
So all unconsciously Joy fled from the metropolis to the very place
from which her mother had vanished twenty-two years before.
She had been the organist in the grand new Episcopalian Church now
for three years; and she had made many cordial acquaintances who
would have become near friends, if she had encouraged them. But
Joy's sweet and trustful nature had received a great shock in the
knowledge of the shadow which hung about her birth. Where formerly
she had expected love and appreciation from everyone she met, she now
shrank from forming new ties, lest new hurts should await her.
She was like a flower in whose perfect heart a worm had coiled. Her
entire feeling about life had undergone a change. For many weeks
after her self-imposed exile, she had been unable to think of her
mother without a mingled sense of shame and resentment; the adoring
love she had borne this being seemed to die with her respect. After
a time the bitterness of this sentiment wore away, and a pitying
tenderness and sorrow took its place; but from her heart the twin
angels, Love and Forgiveness, were absent. She read her mother's
manuscript over, and tried to argue herself into the philosophy which
had sustained the author of her being through all these years.
But her mind was shaped far more after the conventional pattern of
her paternal ancestors, who had been New England Puritans, and she
could not view the subject as Berene had viewed it.
In spite of the ideality which her mother had woven about him, Joy
entertained the most bitter contempt for the unknown man who was her
father, and the whole tide of her affections turned lavishly upon the
memory of Mr Irving, whom she felt now more than ever so worthy of
her regard.
Reason as she would on the supremacy of love over law, yet the bold,
unpleasant fact remained that she was the child of an unwedded
mother. She shrank in sensitive pain from having this story follow
her, and the very consciousness that her mother's experience had been
an exceptional one, caused her the greater dread of having it known
and talked of as a common vulgar liaison.