The Marshalls took endless thought and trouble for the child, searching
out every means to save her limb and her active freedom. They spared no
effort and no money, they spared no strength of will. With all their
slow, heavy power of will they willed that Joyce should save her liberty
of movement, should win back her wild, free grace. Even if it took a long
time to recover, it should be recovered.
So the situation stood. And Joyce submitted, week after week, month after
month to the tyranny and pain of the treatment. She acknowledged the
honourable effort on her behalf. But her flamy reckless spirit was her
father's. It was he who had all the glamour for her. He and she were like
members of some forbidden secret society who know one another but may not
recognize one another. Knowledge they had in common, the same secret of
life, the father and the child. But the child stayed in the camp of her
mother, honourably, and the father wandered outside like Ishmael, only
coming sometimes to sit in the home for an hour or two, an evening or two
beside the camp fire, like Ishmael, in a curious silence and tension,
with the mocking answer of the desert speaking out of his silence, and
annulling the whole convention of the domestic home.
His presence was almost an anguish to Winifred. She prayed against it.
That little cleft between his brow, that flickering, wicked, little smile
that seemed to haunt his face, and above all, the triumphant loneliness,
the Ishmael quality.
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