An Ambitious Man

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.