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Title: Joan Haste (1895)
Author: H. Rider Haggard
eBook No.: 0500311.txt
Edition: 1
Language: English
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Date first posted: March 2005
Date most recently updated: March 2005
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Production notes:
This text was prepared from a 1902 reissue of the 1897 edition,
published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 89 Paternoster Row, London
and Bombay, as part of the Longmansâ Colonial Library. It was
printed from American plates by Spottiswoode and Co., New-Street
Square, London. Illustrations by F. S. Wilson.
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Title: Joan Haste (1895)
Author: H. Rider Haggard
JOAN HASTE
BY
H. RIDER HAGGARD
âIl y a une page effrayante dans le livre des destinĂ©es humaines;
on y lit en tĂȘte ces motesââles dĂ©sirs accomplisâââGeorges Sand
DEDICATIONTO I. H.
PREPARERâS NOTE
This text was prepared from a 1902 reissue of the 1897 edition,
published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 89 Paternoster Row, London
and Bombay, as part of the Longmansâ Colonial Library. It was
printed from American plates by Spottiswoode and Co., New-Street
Square, London. Illustrations by F. S. Wilson.
JOAN HASTE
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 Englandâthat of Yarmouth alone
exceptedâand, 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 partsâthat is, those of them who are alive to
such mattersâthink 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 registersâ
âOf Rambroâ, north and west and south,
Manâs eyes can never see enough;
Yet winterâs gloom or summerâs light,
Wide England hath no sadder sight.â
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,
âOur troubles are done with, yours lie before you. Be like us, be like
us.â
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
trueâbut 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 Joanâin 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 Joanâs position. Her parentage was a mystery, at
least so far as her father was concerned. Her mother was her auntâs
younger sister; but she had never known this mother, whose short life
closed within two years of Joanâs 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 mementoâa 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
browâa 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. Gillingwaterâif, 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 Joanâs
mind, was scarcely mitigated
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