← catalogue

Harvest

by Mrs. Humphry Ward · English · Gutenberg #13801 · 442,551 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Harvest
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Harvest

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward


        
Release date: October 19, 2004 [eBook #13801]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13801

Credits: E-text prepared by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HARVEST ***

HARVEST

by

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Author of _Robert Elsmere_, _Lady Rose's Daughter_, _Missing_,
_Helena_, etc.

1920







I


Two old labourers came out of the lane leading to Great End Farm. Both
carried bags slung on sticks over their shoulders. One, the eldest and
tallest, was a handsome fellow, with regular features and a delicately
humorous mouth. His stoop and his slouching gait, the gray locks also,
which straggled from under his broad hat, showed him an old man--probably
very near his old-age pension. But he carried still with him a look
of youth, and he had been a splendid creature in his time. The other
was short of stature and of neck, bent besides by field work. A
broadly-built, clumsy man, with something gnome-like about him, and the
cheerful look of one whose country nerves had never known the touch of
worry or long sickness. The name of the taller man was Peter Halsey, and
Joseph Batts was his companion.

It was a fine July evening, with a cold north wind blowing from the plain
which lay stretched to their right. Under the unclouded sun, which by its
own "sun-time" had only reached half-past four in the afternoon, though
the clock in the village church had already struck half-past five, the
air was dry and parching, and the fields all round, the road itself, and
the dusty hedges showed signs of long drought.

"It du want rain," said Peter Halsey, looking at a crop of oats through
an open gate, "it du want rain--_bad_."

"Aye!" said the other, "that it du. Muster Shenstone had better 'a read
the prayer for rain lasst Sunday, I'm thinkin', than all them long ones
as ee _did_ read."

Halsey was silent a moment, his half-smiling eyes glancing from side to
side. At last he said slowly,--

"We du be prayin' a lot about ower sins, and Muster Shenstone is allus
preachin' about 'em. But it's the sins o' the _Garmins_ I be thinkin' of.
If it hadn't a bin for the sins o' the Garmins my Tom wouldn't ha' lost
'is right hand."

"An' ower Jim wouldn't be goin' into them trenches next November as ever
is," put in Batts. "It's the sins o' the Garmins as ha' done _that_, an'
nothin' as you or I ha' done, Peter."

Halsey shook his head assentingly.

"Noa--for all that pratin', pacifist chap was sayin' lasst week. I
didn't believe a word ee said. 'Yis,' I says, 'if you want this war to
stop, I'm o' your mind,' I says, 'but when you tells me as _England_
done it--you'm--'"

The short man burst into a cackling laugh.

"'You'm a liar!' Did you say that, Peter?"

Peter fenced a little.

"There be more ways nor one o' speakin' your mind," he said at last. "But
I stood up to un. Did you hear, Batts, as Great End Farm is let?"

The old man turned an animated look on his companion.

"Well, for sure!" said Batts, astonished. "An' who's the man?"

"It's not a man. It's a woman."

"A woman!" repeated Batts, wondering. "Well, these be funny times to live
in, when the women go ridin' astride an' hay-balin', an' steam-ploughin',
an' the Lord knows what. And now they must be takin' the farms, and
turnin' out the men. Well, for sure."

A mild and puzzled laughter crossed the speaker's face.

Halsey nodded.

"An' now they've got the vote. That's the top on't! My old missis, she
talks poltiks now to me of a night. I don't mind her, now the childer be
all gone. But I'd ha' bid her mind her own business when they was yoong
an' wanted seein' to."

"Now, what can a woman knoa about poltiks?" said Batts, still in the same
tone of pleasant rumination. "It isn't in natur. _We_ warn't given the
producin' o' the babies--we'd ha' cried out if we 'ad been!"

A chuckle passed from one old man to the other.

"Well, onyways the women is all in a flutter about the votin'," said
Halsey, lighting his pipe with old hands that shook. "An' there's chaps
already coomin' round lookin' out for it."

"You bet there is!" was Batts's amused reply. "But they'll take their
toime, will the women. 'Don't you try to hustle-bustle me like you're
doin',' say my missus sharp-like to a Labour chap as coom round lasst
week, 'cos yo' won't get nothin' by it.' And she worn't no more
forthcomin' to the Conservative man when ee called."

"Will she do what _you_ tell her, Batts?" asked Halsey, with an evident
interest in the question.

"Oh, Lord, no!" said Batts placidly, "shan't try. But now about this
yoong woman an' Great End?--"

"Well, I ain't heared much about her--not yet awhile. But they say as
she's nice-lookin', an' Muster Shentsone ee said as she'd been to college
somewhere, where they'd larn't her farmin'."

Batts made a sound of contempt.

"College!" he said, with a twitching of the broad nostrils which seemed
to spread over half his face. "_They_ can't larn yer farmin'!"

"She's been on a farm too somewhere near Brighton, Muster Shenstone says,
since she was at college; and ee told me she do seem to be terr'ble
full o' new notions."

"She'd better be full o' money," said the other, cuttingly. "Notions is
no good without money to 'em."

"Aye, they're wunnerfull costly things is notions. Yo'd better by a long
way go by the folk as know. But they do say she'll be payin' good wages."

"I dessay she will! She'll be obleeged. It's Hobson's choice, as you
might say!" said Batts, chuckling again.

Halsey was silent, and the two old men trudged on with cheerful
countenances. Through the minds of both there ran pleasant thoughts
of the contrast between the days before the war and the days now
prevailing. Both of them could remember a wage of fifteen and sixteen
shillings a week. Then just before the war, it had risen to eighteen
shillings and a pound. And now--why the Wages Board for Brookshire had
fixed thirty-three shillings as a weekly minimum, and a nine-hours' day!
Prices were high, but they would go down some day; and wages would not go
down. The old men could not have told exactly why this confidence lay so
deep in them; but there it was, and it seemed to give a strange new
stability and even dignity to life. Their sons were fighting; and they
had the normal human affection for their sons. They wished the war to
end. But, after all, there was something to be said for the war.
They--old Peter Halsey and old Joe Batts--were more considered and more
comfortable than they would have been before the war. And it was the
consideration more even than the comfort that warmed their hearts.

The evening grew hotter, and the way to the village seemed long. The old
men were now too tired to talk; till just as they came in sight of the
first houses, they perceived the village wagonette coming towards them.

"There she be! I did hear as Webb wor to meet her at the station. He's
took her over once before," said old Halsey, raising his eyes for a
moment and then dropping them again. Batts did the same. The glance was
momentary. But both men had the same impression of a pleasant-faced young
woman sitting erect behind Jonathan Webb, the decrepit driver of the
wagonette, and looking straight at them as they passed her. There was a
general effect of youth and bright colour; of pale brown hair, too,
over very dark eyes.

"Aye, she be quite nice-lookin'," said Batts, with unction, "rayther
uncommon. She minds me summat o' my missis when she wor a young 'un."
Halsey's mouth twitched a little, but though his thoughts were ironical,
he said nothing. It was generally admitted by the older people that Mrs.
Batts had been through many years the village beauty, but her fall from
that high place was now of such ancient date that it seemed foolish of
Batts to be so fond of referring to it.

The wagonette passed on. The woman sitting in it carefully took note of
the scene around her, in a mood of mingled hope and curiosity. She was to
live in this valley without a stream, under these high chalk downs with
their hanging woods, and within a mile or so of the straggling village
she had just driven through. At last, after much wandering, she was to
find a home--a real home of her own. The word "home" had not meant
much--or much at least that was agreeable--to her, till now. Her large
but handsome mouth took a bitter fold as she thought over various past
events.

Now they had left the village behind, and were passing through fields
that were soon to be her fields. Her keen eyes appraised the crops
standing in them. She had paid the family of her predecessor a good
price for them, but they were worth it. And just ahead, on her left, was
a wide stretch of newly-ploughed land rising towards a bluff of grassy
down-land on the horizon. The ploughed land itself had been down up to a
few months before this date; thin pasture for a few sheep, through many
generations. She thought with eagerness of the crops she was going to
make it bear, in the coming year. Wheat, or course. The wheat crops all
round the village were really magnificent. This was going to be the
resurrection year for English farming, after fifty years of "death and
damnation"--comparatively. And there would be many good years to come
after.

Yes, Mr. Thomas Wellin, whose death had thrown the farm which she had now
taken on the market, had done well for the land. And it was not his fault
but the landlord's that the farmhouse and buildings had been allowed to
fall into such a state. Mr. Wellin had not wanted the house, since he was
only working the land temporarily in addition to his own farm half a mile
away. But the owner, Colonel Shepherd, ought to have looked after the
farmhouse and buildings better. Still, they were making her a fair
allowance for repairs.

She was longing to know how the workmen from Millsboro had been getting
on. Hastings, the Wellins' former bailiff, now temporarily hers, had
promised to stay behind that evening to meet her at the farm. She only
meant to insist on what was absolutely necessary. Even if she had wished
for anything more, the lack of labour would have prevented it.

The old horse jogged on, and presently from a row of limes beside the
road, a wave of fragrance, evanescent and delicious, passed over the
carriage. Miss Henderson sniffed it with delight. "But one has never
_enough_ of it!" she thought discontentedly. And then she remembered how
as a child--in far-away Sussex--she used to press her face into the
lime-blossom in her uncle's garden--passionately, greedily, trying to get
from it a greater pleasure than it would ever yield. For the more she
tried to compel it, by a kind of violence, the more it escaped her. She
used to envy the bees lying drunk among the blooms. They at least were
surfeited and satisfied.

It struck her that there was a kind of parable in it of her whole
life--so far.

But now there was a new world opening. The past was behind her. She drew
herself stiffly erect, conscious through every limb of youth and
strength, and filled with a multitude of vague hopes. Conscious, too, of
the three thousand pounds that Uncle Robert had so opportunely left her.
She had never realized that money could make so much difference; and she
thought gratefully of the elderly bachelor, her mother's brother, who had
unexpectedly remembered her. It had enabled her to get her year's
training, and to take this farm with a proper margin of capital. She
wished she had been able to tell Uncle Robert before he died what it
meant to her.

They passed one or two pairs of labourers going home, then a group of
girls in overalls, then a spring cart containing four workmen behind a
ragged pony, no doubt the builder's men who had been at work on the Great
End repairs. They all looked at her curiously, and Rachel Henderson
looked back at them--steadily, without shyness. They were evidently aware
of who she was and where she was going. Some of them perhaps would soon
be in her employ. She would be settling all that in a week or two.

Ah, there was the house. She leant forward and saw it lying under the
hill, the woods on the slope coming down to the back of it. Yes, it was
certainly a lonely situation. That was why the house, the farm lands,
too, had been so long unlet, till old Wellin, the farm's nearest
neighbour, having made a good deal of money, had rented the land from
Colonel Shepherd, to add to his own. The farm buildings, too, he had made
some use of, keeping carts and machines, and certain stores there. But
the house he had refused to have any concern with. It had remained empty
and locked up for a good many years.

The wagonette turned into the rough road leading through the middle of a
fine field of oats to the house. The field was gaily splashed with
poppies, which ran, too, along the edges of the crop, swayed by the
evening breeze, and flaming in the level sun. Though lonesome and
neglected, the farm in July was a pleasant and picturesque object. It
stood high and the air about it blew keen and fresh. The chalk hill
curved picturesquely round it, and the friendly woods ran down behind to
keep it company. Rachel Henderson, in pursuit of that campaign she was
always now waging against a natural optimism, tried to make herself
imagine it in winter--the leafless trees, the solitary road, the treeless
pasture or arable fields, that stretched westward in front of the farm,
covered perhaps with snow; and the distant stretches of the plain. There
was not another house, not even a cottage, anywhere in sight. The
village had disappeared. She herself, in the old wagonette, seemed the
only living thing.

No, there was a man emerging from the farm-gate, and coming to meet
her--the bailiff, George Hastings. She had only seen him once before, on
her first hurried visit, when, after getting a rough estimate from him of
the repairs necessary to the house and buildings, she had made up her
mind to take the farm, if the landlord would agree to do them.

"Yon's Muster Hastings," said Jonathan Webb, turning on her a benevolent
and wrinkled countenance, with two bright red spots in the midst of each
weather-beaten cheek. Miss Henderson again noticed the observant
curiosity in the old man's eyes. Everybody, indeed, seemed to look at her
with the same expression. As a woman farmer she was no doubt just a
freak, a sport, in the eyes of the village. Well, she prophesied they
would take her seriously before long.

"I'm afraid I haven't as much to show you, miss, as I'd like," said
Hastings, as he helped her to alight. "It's cruel work nowadays trying to
do anything of this kind. Two of the men that began work last week have
been called up, and there's another been just 'ticed away from me this
week. The wages that some people about will give are just mad!" He threw
up his hands. "Colonel Shepherd says he can't compete."

Miss Henderson replied civilly but decidedly that somehow or other the
work would have to be done. If Colonel Shepherd couldn't find the wages,
she must pay the difference. Get in some time, during August, she must.

The bailiff looked at her with a little sluggish surprise. He was not
used to being hustled, still less to persons who were ready to pay rather
than be kept waiting. He murmured that he dared say it would be all
right, and she must come and look.

They turned to the right up a stony pitch, through a dilapidated gate,
and so into the quadrangle of the farm. To the left was a long row of
open cow-sheds, then cow-houses and barns, the stables, a large shed in
which stood an old and broken farm cart, and finally the house, fronting
the barns.

The house was little more than a large cottage built in the shabbiest way
forty years ago, and of far less dignity than the fine old barn on which
it looked. It abutted at one end on the cart-shed, and between it and the
line of cow-sheds was the gate into the farmyard.

Miss Henderson stepped up to the house and looked at it.

"It is a poor place!" she said discontentedly; "and those men don't seem
to have done much to it yet."

Hastings admitted it. But they had done a little, he said, shamefacedly,
and he unlocked the door. Miss Henderson lingered outside a moment.

"I never noticed," she said, "that the living room goes right through.
What draughts there'll be in the winter!"

For as she stood looking into the curtainless window that fronted the
farm-yard, she saw through it a further window at the back of the room,
and beyond that a tree. Both windows were large and seemed to take up
most of the wall on either side of the small room. The effect was
peculiarly comfortless, as though no one living in the room could
possibly enjoy any shred of privacy. There were no cosy corners in it
anywhere, and Miss Henderson's fancy imagined rows of faces looking in.

Inside a little papering and whitewashing had been done, but certainly
the place looked remarkably unviting. A narrow passage ran from front
to back, on one side of which was the living room with the two windows,
while on the other were the kitchen and scullery. Upstairs there were two
good-sized bedrooms with a small third room in a lean-to at the back, the
lower part of which was occupied by a wash-house. Through the windows
could be seen a neglected bit of garden, and an untidy orchard.

But when she had wandered about the rooms a little, Rachel Henderson's
naturally buoyant temperament reasserted itself. She had brought some
bright patterns of distemper with her which she gave to Hastings with
precise instructions. She had visions of casement curtains to hide the
nakedness of the big windows with warm serge curtains to draw over them
in the winter. The floors must be stained. There should be a deep
Indian-red drugget in the sitting-room, with pigeon-blue walls, and she
thought complacently of the bits of old furniture she had been
collecting, which were stored in a friend's flat in town. An old dresser,
a grandfather's clock, some bits of brass, two arm-chairs, an old oak
table--it would all look very nice when it was done, and would cost
little. Then the bedrooms. She had brought with her some rolls of flowery
paper. She ran to fetch them from the wagonette, and pinned some pieces
against the wall. The larger room with the south aspect should be
Janet's. She would take the north room for herself. She saw them both in
her mind's eye already comfortably furnished; above all fresh and bright.
There should be no dirt or dinginess in the house, if she could help it.
In the country whitewash and distemper are cheap.

Then Hastings followed her about through the farm buildings, where her
quick eye, trained in modern ways, perceived a number of small
improvements to be made that he would never have noticed. She was always
ready, he saw, to spend money on things that would save labour or lessen
dirt. But she was not extravagant, and looking through the list of her
directions and commissions, as he hastily jotted them down, he admitted
to himself that she seemed to know what she was about. And being an
honest man himself, and good-tempered, though rather shy and dull, he
presently recognized the same qualities of honesty and good temper in
her; and took to her. Insensibly their tone to each other grew friendly.
Though he was temporarily in the landlord's employ, he had been for some
years in the service of the Wellin family. Half-consciously he contrasted
Miss Henderson's manner to him with theirs. In his own view he had been
worse treated than an ordinary farm labourer throughout his farming life,
though he had more education, and was expected naturally to have more
brains and foresight than the labourer. He was a little better paid; but
his work and that of his wife was never done. He had got little credit
for success and all the blame for failure. And the Wellin women-folk had
looked down on his wife and himself. A little patronage sometimes, and
worthless gifts, that burnt in the taking; but no common feeling, no real
respect. But Miss Henderson was different. His rather downtrodden
personality felt a stimulus. He began to hope that when she came into
possession she would take him on. A woman could not possibly make
anything of Great End without a bailiff!

Her "nice" looks, no doubt, counted for something. Her face was, perhaps,
a little too full for beauty--the delicately coloured cheeks and the
large smiling mouth. But her brown eyes were very fine, with very dark
pupils, and marked eyebrows; and her nose and chin, with their soft,
blunted lines, seemed to promise laughter and easy ways. She was very
lightly and roundly made; and everything about her, her step, her
sunburn, her freckles, her evident muscular strength, spoke of open-air
life and physical exercise. Yet, for all this general aspect of a comely
country-woman, there was much that was sharply sensitive and individual
in the face. Even a stranger might well feel that its tragic, as well as
its humorous or tender possibilities, would have to be reckoned with.

"All right!" said Miss Henderson at last, closing her little notebook
with a snap, "now I think we've been through everything. I'll take
over one cart, and Mrs. Wellin must remove the other. I'll buy the
chaff-cutter and the dairy things, but not the reaping machine--"

"I'm afraid that'll put Mrs. Wellin out considerably!" threw in Hastings.

"Can't help it. I can't have the place cluttered up with old iron like
that. It's worth nothing. I'm sure _you_ wouldn't advise me to buy it!"

She looked with bright decision at her companion, who smiled a little
awkwardly, and said nothing. The old long habit of considering the Wellin
interest first, before any other in the world, held him still, though he
was no longer their servant.

Miss Henderson moved back towards the house.

"And you'll hurry these men up?--as much as you can? They _are_
slow-coaches! I must get in the week after next. Miss Leighton and I
intend to come, whatever happens."

Hastings understood that "Miss Leighton" was to be Miss Henderson's
partner in the farm, specially to look after the dairy work. Miss
Henderson seemed to think a lot of her.

"And you must please engage those two men you spoke of. Neither of them,
you say, under sixty! Well, there's no picking and choosing now. If they
were eighty I should have to take them! till the harvest's got in. There
are two girls coming from the Land Army, and you've clinched that other
girl from the village?"

Hastings nodded.

"Well, I dare say we shall get the harvest in somehow," she said,
standing at the gate, and looking over the fields. "Miss Leighton and I
mean to put our backs into it. But Miss Leighton isn't as strong as I
am."

Her eyes wandered thoughtfully over the wheat-field, ablaze under the
level gold of the sun. Then she suddenly smiled.

"I expect you think it a queer business, Mr. Hastings, women taking to
farming?"

"Well, it's new, you see, Miss Henderson."

"I believe it's going to be very common. Why shouldn't the women do it!"
She frowned a little.

"Oh, no reason at all," said Hastings hurriedly, thinking he had offended
her. "I've nothing against it myself. And there won't be men enough to go
round, after the war."

She looked at him sharply.

"You've got a son in the war?"

"Two, and one's been killed."

"Last year?"

"No, last month."

Miss Henderson said nothing, but her look was full of softness. "He was
to have been allowed home directly," Hastings went on, "for two or three
months. He was head woodman before the war on Lord Radley's property." He
pointed to the wooded slopes of the hill. "And they were to have given
him leave to see to the cutting of these woods."

"These woods!" Miss Henderson turned a startled face upon him. "You don't
mean to say they're coming down!"

"Half of them commandeered," said Hastings, with a shrug. "The Government
valuers have been all over them these last weeks. They're splendid
timber, you know. There's been a timber camp the other side of the hills
a long while. They've got Canadians, and no doubt they'll move on here."

Miss Henderson made another quick movement. She said nothing, however.
She was staring at the woods, which shone in the glow now steadily
creeping up the hill, and Hastings thought she was protesting from the
scenery point of view.

"Well, the Government must have the wood," he said, with resignation.
"We've got to win the war. But it does seem a pity."

"I don't know that I should have taken the farm," she said, under her
breath--

"If you had known? I wish I'd thought to tell you. But it was really only
settled a few days ago."

"I don't like having a lot of strange men about the farm," she said
abruptly, "especially when I have girls to look after."

"Oh, the camp's a long way from the farm," he said consolingly. "And
these woods will come last."

Still Miss Henderson's face did not quite recover its cheerfulness. She
looked at her watch.

"Don't let me keep you, Mr. Hastings. I'll lock up the house, if you'll
tell me where to leave the key."

He showed her where to put it, in a corner of the stable, for him to find
on the morrow. Then, in her rapid way, Miss Henderson offered him the
post of bailiff on the farm, from the date of her entry. He agreed at
once; his salary was settled, and he departed with a more cheerful aspect
than when he arrived. The hopefulness and spring of youth had long since
left him, and he had dreaded the new experience of this first meeting
with a woman-farmer, from whom he desired employment simply because he
was very badly off, he was getting old, and Mr. Wellin's widow had
treated him shabbily. He had lost his nerve for new ventures. But Miss
Henderson had made things easy. She had struck him as considerate and
sensible--a "good sort." He would do his best for her.

Rachel Henderson, left to herself, did not immediately re-enter the
house. She went with a face on which the cloud still rested to look at
the well which was to be found under the cart-shed, at the eastern end of
the house.

It was covered with a wooden lid which she removed. Under the shed roof
there was but little light left. A faint gleam showed the level of the
water, which, owing to the long drought, was very low. Hastings had told
her that the well was extremely deep---150 feet at least, and
inexhaustible. The water was chalky but good. It would have to be pumped
up every morning for the supply of the house and stables.

The well had a brick margin. Rachel sat down upon it, her eyes upon that
distant gleam below. The dusk was fast possessing itself of all the farm,
and an evening wind was gustily blowing through the cart-shed, playing
with some old guano sacks that had been left there, and whistling round
the corners of the house. Outside, Rachel could hear the horse fidgeting,
and old Jonathan coughing--no doubt as a signal to her that she had kept
him long enough.

Still, she sat bent together on the margin of the well. Then she drew off
her glove, and felt for something in the leather bag she carried on her
wrist. She took it out, and the small object sparkled a little as she
held it poised for a moment--as though considering. Then with a rapid
movement, she bent over the well, and dropped it into the water. There
was a slight splash.

Rachel Henderson raised herself and stood up.

"That's done with!" she said to herself, with a straightening of all her
young frame.

Yet all the way back to London she was tormented by thoughts of what she
had declared was "done with"; of scenes and persons, that is, which she
was determined to forget, and had just formally renounced for ever by her
symbolic action at the well.




II


"You do seem to have hit on a rather nice spot, Rachel, though lonesome,"
said Miss Henderson's friend and partner, Janet Leighton, as they stood
on the front steps of Great End Farm, surveying the scene outside, on an
August evening, about a week after she and Rachel had arrived with their
furniture and personal belongings to take possession of the farm.

During that week they had both worked hard--from dawn till dark, both
outside and in. The harvest was in full swing, and as the dusk was
filling, Janet Leighton, who had just returned herself from the fields,
could watch the scene going on in the wheat-field beyond the farm-yard,
where, as the reaping machine steadily pared away the remaining square of
wheat, two or three men and boys with guns lay in wait outside the square
for the rabbits as they bolted from their fast lessening shelter. The
gold and glow of harvest was on the fields and in the air. At last the
sun had come back to a sodden land, after weeks of cold and drenching
showers which, welcomed in June, had by the middle of August made all
England tremble for the final fate of the gorgeous crops then filling the
largest area ever tilled on British soil with their fat promise. Wheat,
oats, and barley stood once more erect, roots were saved, and the young
vicar of Ipscombe was reflecting as he walked towards Great End Farm that
his harvest festival sermon might now after all be rather easier to write
than had seemed probable during the foregoing anxious weeks of chill and
storm.

Rachel Henderson, who had thrown herself--tired out--into a chair in the
sitting-room window, which was wide open, nodded as she caught her
friend's remark and smiled. But she did not want to talk. She was in that
state of physical fatigue when mere rest is a positive delight. The sun,
the warm air, the busy harvest scene, and all the long hours of hard but
pleasant work seemed to be still somehow in her pulses, thrilling through
her blood. It was long since she had known the acute physical pleasure of
such a day; but her sense of it had conjured up involuntarily
recollections of many similar days in a distant scene--great golden
spaces, blinding sun, and huge reaping machines, twice the size of that
at work in the field yonder. The recollections were unwelcome. Thought
was unwelcome. She wanted only food and sleep--deep sleep--renewing
her tired muscles, till the delicious early morning came round again, and
she was once more in the fields directing her team of workers.

"Why, there's the vicar!" said Janet Leighton, perceiving the tall and
willowy figure of Mr. Shenstone, as its owner stopped to speak to one of
the boys with the guns who were watching the game.

Rachel looked round with a look of annoyance.

"Oh, dear, what a bore," she said wearily. "I suppose I must go and tidy
up. Nobody ought to be allowed to pay visits after five o'clock."

"You asked him something about a village woman to help, didn't you?"

"I did, worse luck!" sighed Rachel, gathering up her sunbonnet and
disappearing from the window. Janet heard her go upstairs, and a hasty
opening of cupboards overhead. She herself had come back an hour earlier
from the fields than Rachel in order to get supper ready, and had slipped
a skirt over the khaki tunic and knickerbockers which were her dress--and
her partner's--when at work on the farm. She wondered mischievously what
Rachel would put on. That her character included an average dose of
vanity, the natural vanity of a handsome woman, Rachel's new friend was
well aware. But Janet, Rachel's elder by five years, was only tenderly
amused by it. All Rachel's foibles, as far as she knew them, were
pleasant to her. They were in that early stage of a new friendship when
all is glamour.

Yet Janet did sometimes reflect, "How little I really know about her. She
is a darling--but a mystery!"

They had met at college, taken their farm training together, and fallen
in love with each other. Janet had scarcely a relation in the world.
Rachel possessed, it seemed, a brother in Canada, another in South
Africa, and some cousins whom she scarcely knew, children of the uncle
who had left her three thousand pounds. Each had been attracted by the
loneliness of the other, and on leaving college nothing was more natural
than they should agree to set up together. Rachel, as the capitalist, was
to choose the farm and take command. Janet went to a Cheshire dairy farm
for a time to get some further training in practical work; and she was
now responsible for the dairy at Great End, with the housekeeping and the
poultry thrown in. She was a thin, tall woman with spectacles, and had
just seen her thirty-second birthday. Her eyes were honest and clear, her
mouth humorous. She never grudged other women their beauty or their
success. It always seemed to her she had what she deserved.

Meanwhile the vicar approached, and Miss Leighton descended the steps and
went to meet him at the gate. His aspect showed him apologetic.

"I have come at an unearthly hour, Miss Leighton. But I thought I should
have no chance of finding Miss Henderson free till the evening, and I
came to tell you that I think I have found a woman to do your work."

Janet bade him come in, and assured him that Rachel would soon be
visible. She ushered him into the sitting-room, which he entered on a
note of wonderment.

"How nice you have made it all," he said, looking round him. "When I
think what a deserted hole this has been for years. You know, the village
people firmly believe it is haunted? Old Wellin never could get anybody
to sleep here. But tramps often used it, I'm certain. They got in through
the windows. Hastings told me he had several times found a smouldering
fire in the kitchen."

"What sort is the ghost?" Janet inquired, as she pointed him to a chair,
devoutly hoping that Rachel would hurry herself.

"Well, there's a story--but I wonder whether I ought to tell you--"

"I assure you as to ghosts--I have no nerves!" said Janet with a
confident laugh, "and I don't think Rachel has either. We are more
frightened of rats. This farm-yard contains the biggest I've ever seen.
I dream of them at night."

"It's not exactly the ghost--" said the vicar, hesitating.

"But the story that produced the ghost? What--a murder?"

"Half a century ago," said the vicar reassuringly; "you won't mind that?"

"Not the least. A century ago would be romantic. If it was just the other
day, we should feel we ought to have got the farm cheaper. But half a
century doesn't matter. It's a mid-Victorian, just a plain, old-fashioned
murder. Who did it?"

The vicar opened his eyes a little. Miss Leighton was, he saw, a lady,
and perhaps clever. Her spectacles looked like it. No doubt she had been
at Oxford or Cambridge before going to Swanley? These educated women in
new professions were becoming a very pressing and common fact! As to the
murder, he explained that it had been just an ordinary poaching affair.
An old gamekeeper on the Shepherd estate had been attacked by a gang of
poachers in the winter of 1866. He had been shot in one of the woods, and
though mortally wounded had been able to drag himself to the outskirts of
the farm where his strength had failed him. He was found dead under the
cart-shed which backed on the stables, and the traces of blood on the
hill marked the stages of his struggle for life. Two men were suspected,
one of them a labourer on the Great End Farm; but there was no evidence.
The suspected labourer had gone to Canada the year after the murder, and
no one knew what had happened to him.

But having told the tale the vicar was again seized with compunction.

"I oughtn't to have told you--I really oughtn't; just on your settling
in--I hope you won't tell Miss Henderson?"

Janet's amused reply was interrupted by Rachel's entrance. The vicar
arose with eagerness to receive her. He was evidently attracted by his
new parishioners and anxious to make a good impression on them. Miss
Henderson's reception of the vicar, however, was far more guarded. The
easy friendliness of manner which had attracted the bailiff Hastings was,
at first at any rate, entirely absent. Her attitude was almost that of a
woman defending herself against possible intrusion, and Janet Leighton,
looking on, and occasionally sharing in the conversation, was surprised
by it, as indeed she was by so many things concerning Rachel now that
their acquaintance was deepening; surprised also, as though it were a new
thing, by her friend's good looks as she sat languidly chatting with the
vicar. Rachel had merely put on a blue overall above her land-worker's
dress. But her beautiful head, with its wealth of brown hair, and her
face, with its sensuous fulness of cheek and lip, its rounded lines, and
lovely colour--like a slightly overblown rose--were greatly set off by
the simple folds of blue linen; and her feet and legs, shapely but not
small, in their khaki stockings and shoes, completed the general effect
of lissom youth. The flush and heat of hard bodily work had passed away.
She had had time to plunge her face into cold water and smooth her hair.
But the atmosphere of the harvest field, its ripeness and glow, seemed to
be still about her. A classically minded man might have thought of some
nymph in the train of Demeter, might have fancied a horn of plenty, or a
bow, slung from the sunburnt neck.

But the vicar had forgotten his classics. _En revanche_, however, he was
doing his best to show himself sympathetic and up-to-date with regard to
women and their new spheres of work--especially on the land. He had
noticed three girls, he said, working in the harvest field. Two of them
he recognized as from the village; the third he supposed was a stranger?

"She comes from Ralstone," said Rachel.

"Ah, that's the village where the new timber camp is. You really must see
that camp, Miss Henderson."

"I hate to think of the woods coming down," she said, frowning a little.

"We all do. But that's the war. It can't be helped, alack! But it's
wonderful to see the women at work, measuring and checking, doing the
brain work, in fact, while the men do the felling and loading. It makes
one envious."

The vicar sighed. A flush appeared on his young but slightly cadaverous
face.

"Of the men--or the women?"

"Oh, their work, I mean. They're doing something for the war. I've done
my best. But the Bishop won't hear of it."

And he rather emphatically explained how he had applied in vain for an
army chaplaincy. Health and the shortage of clergy had been against him.
"I suppose there must be some left at home," he said with a shrug, "and
the doctors seem to have a down on me."

Janet was quite sorry for the young man--he was so eagerly apologetic, so
anxious to propitiate what he imagined ought to be their feelings about
him. And Rachel all the time sat so silent and unresponsive.

Miss Leighton drew the conversation back to the timber camp; she would
like to go and see it, she said. Every one knew the Canadians were
wonderful lumbermen.

The Vicar's eyes had travelled back to Rachel.

"Were you ever in Canada, Miss Henderson?" The question was evidently
thrown out nervously at a venture, just to evoke a word or a smile from
the new mistress of the farm.

Rachel Henderson frowned slightly before replying.

"Yes, I have been in Canada."

"You have? Oh, then, you know all about it."

"I know nothing about Canadian lumbering."

"You were on the prairies?"

"I lived some time on a prairie farm."

"Everything here must seem very small to you," said the vicar
sympathetically. But this amiable tone fell flat. Miss Henderson still
sat silent. The vicar began to feel matters awkward and took his hat from
the floor.

"I trust you will call upon me for any help I can possibly be to you," he
said, turning to Janet Leighton. "I should be delighted to help in the
harvest if you want it. I have a pair of hands anyway, as you see!" He
held them out.

He expatiated a little more on his disappointment as to the front. Janet
threw in a few civil words. Rachel Henderson had moved to the window, and
was apparently looking at the farm-girls carrying straw across the yard.

"Good-night, Miss Henderson," said the young man at last, conscious of
rebuff, but irrepressibly effusive and friendly all the time. "I hope you
will let your Ralstone girl come sometimes to the clubroom my sister and
I have in the village? We feel young people ought to be amused,
especially when they work hard."

"Thank you, but it's so far away. We don't like them to be out late."

"Certainly not. But in the long evenings--don't you know?" The vicar
smiled persuasively. "However, there it is--whenever she comes she will
be welcome. And then, as to your seat in church. There is a pew that has
always belonged to the farm. It is about half-way up."

"We don't go to church," said Rachel, facing him. "At least, I don't."
She looked at her companion.

"And I can't be counted on," said Janet, smiling.

The vicar flushed a little.

"Then you're not Church of England?"

"I am," said Rachel indifferently; "at least I'm not anything else. Miss
Leighton is a Unitarian." Then her eyes lit up with a touch of fun, and
for the first time she smiled. "I'm afraid you'll think us dreadful
heathens, Mr. Shenstone!"

What the vicar did think was that he had never seen a smile transform a
face so agreeably. And having begun to smile, Rachel perversely continued
it. She walked to the gate with her visitor, talking with irrelevant
animation, inviting him to come the following day to help in the
"carrying," asking questions about the village and its people, and
graciously consenting to fix a day when she and her friend would go to
tea with Miss Shenstone at the vicarage. The young man fairly beamed
under the unexpected change, and lingered at the gate as though unable to
tear himself away; till with a little peremptory nod, though still
smiling, Rachel dismissed him.

Janet Leighton meanwhile watched it all. She had seen Rachel treat a new
male acquaintance before as she had just treated the vicar. To begin
with, the manners of an icicle; then a sudden thaw, just in time to save
the situation. She had come with amusement to the conclusion that,
however really indifferent or capricious, her new friend could not in the
long run resign herself to be disliked, even by a woman, and much more in
the case of a man. Was it vanity, or sex, or both? Temperament perhaps;
the modern word which covers so much. Janet remembered a little niece of
her own who in her mother's absence entertained a gentleman visitor with
great success. When asked for his name, she shook her pretty head. "Just
a man, mummy," she said, bridling. Janet Leighton suspected that similar
tales might have been told of Miss Henderson in her babyhood.

And yet impressions recurred to her of another kind--of a sensitive,
almost fierce delicacy--a shrinking from the ugly or merely physical
facts of life, as of one who had suffered some torment in connection with
them.

Janet's eyes followed the curly brown head as its possessor came slowly
back from the gate. She was thinking of a moment when, one evening, while
they were both still at college, they had realized their liking for each
other, and had agreed to set up in partnership. Then Rachel, springing to
her feet, with her hands behind her, and head thrown back, had said
suddenly: "I warn you, I have a story. I don't want to tell you, to tell
anybody. I shan't tell you. It's done with. I give you my word that I'm
not a bad woman. But if you don't want to be my partner on these terms,
say so!"

And Janet had felt no difficulty whatever in becoming Rachel Henderson's
partner on these terms. Nor had she ever yet regretted it.

The light farm cart which had been sent to the station for stores drove
up to the yard gate as Rachel left it. She turned back to receive some
parcels handed out by the "exempted" man who drove it, together with some
letters which had been found lying at the village post office. Two of the
letters were for Janet. She sent them up to the house, and went herself
towards the harvest field.

There they stood--the rows of golden "shocks" or stooks. The "shockers"
had just finished their day's work. She could hear the footsteps of the
last batch, a cheerful chatter, while talk and laughter came softened
through the evening air. The man who had been driving the reaping machine
was doing some rough repairs to it in a far corner of the field, with a
view to the morrow, and she caught sight of her new bailiff, Hastings,
who had waited to see everybody off, disappearing towards his own
cottage, which stood on a lonely spur of the down. The light was fast
going, but the deep glow of the western sky answered the paler gold of
the new-made stubble and the ranged stooks, while between rose the dark
and splendid masses of the woods.

Rachel stood looking at the scene, possessed by a pleasure which in her
was always an ardour. She felt nothing by halves. The pulse of life beat
in her still with an energy, a passion, that astonished herself. She was
full of eagerness for her new work and for success in it, full of
desires, too, for vague, half-seen things, things she had missed so
Far--her own fault. But somewhere in the long, hidden years, they must,
they should be waiting for her.

The harvest was magnificent. She had paid the Wellins a high price for
the standing crops, but there was going to be a profit on her bargain.
Her mind was full of schemes, if only she could get the labour to carry
them out. Farming was now on the up-grade. She had come into it at the
very best moment, and England would never let farming go down again,
after the war, for her own safety's sake.

_The War_! She felt towards it as to some distant force, which, so far as
she personally was concerned, was a force for good. Owing to the war,
farming was booming all over England, and she was in the boom, taking
advantage of it. Yet she was ashamed to think of the war only in that
way. She tried to tame the strange ferment in her blood, and could only
do it by reminding herself of Hastings's wounded son, whose letter he had
showed her. And then--in imagination--she began to see thousands of
others like him, in hospital beds, or lying dead in trampled fields. Her
mood softened, the tears came into her eyes.

Suddenly--a slight whimper--a child's whimper--close beside her. She
paused in amazement, looking round her, till the whimper was renewed; and
there, almost at her feet, cradled in the fragrant hollow of a wheat
stook, she saw a tiny child--a baby about a year old, a fair, plump
thing, just waking from sleep.

At sight of the face bending over her, the child set up a louder cry,
which was not angry, however, only forlorn. The tears welled fast into
her blue eyes. She looked piteously at Rachel.

"Mummy, mummy!"

"You poor little thing!" said Rachel. "Whose are you?"

One of the village women who had been helping in the "shocking," she
supposed, had brought the child. She had noticed a little girl playing
about the reapers in the afternoon--no doubt an elder sister brought to
look after the baby. Between the mother and the sister there must have
been some confusion, and one or other would come running back directly.

But meanwhile she took up the child, who at first resisted passionately,
fighting with all its chubby strength against the strange arms. But
Rachel seemed to have a way with her--a spell, which worked. She bent
over the little thing, soothing and cooing to her, and then finding a few
crumbs of cake in the pocket of her overall, the remains of her own lunch
in the field, she daintily fed the rosy mouth, till the sobs ceased and
the child stared upwards in a sleep wonder, her blue eyes held by the
brown ones above her.

"Mummy!" she repeated, still whimpering slightly.

"Mummy's coming," said Rachel tenderly. "What a duck it is!"

And bending, she kissed the soft, downy cheek greedily, with the same
ardour she had just been throwing into her own dreams of success.

She carried the child, now quiet and comforted, towards the house. The
warm weight upon her arms was delicious to her. Only as she neared the
gate in the now moonlit dusk, her lips quivered suddenly, and two tears
rolled down her cheeks.

"I haven't carried a child," she thought, "since--"

Suddenly there was a shout from the farther gate of the harvest field,
and a girl came running at top speed. It was the little one's elder
sister, and with a proper scolding, Rachel gave up her prize.

The two land-girls had finished giving food and water to the cattle and a
special mush to new-born calves. Everything was now in order for the
night, and Janet, standing on the steps of the farm-house, rang a bell,
which meant that supper would be ready in a few minutes. The two partners
and their employees were soon gathered round the table in the kitchen,
which was also the dining-room. It was a cold meal of bacon, with
lettuce, bread and jam, some tea made on a "Tommy's cooker," and potatoes
which Janet, who was for the present housekeeper and cook, produced hot
and steaming from the hay-box to which she had consigned them after the
midday dinner. A small oil-lamp had been lit, and through the open
windows afterglow and moonrise streamed in to mingle with its light.
There was a pot of flowers on the table--purple scabious, and tall
cow-parsley, gathered from the orchard, where no one had yet had time to
cut the ragged hay beneath the trees.

The scene was typical of a new England. Women governing--and women
serving--they were all alike making their way through new paths to new
ends. It was no household in the ordinary sense. The man was wanting. The
two elder women were bound to the two younger by a purely business tie,
which might or might not develop into something more personal. The two
land-lasses had come to supper in their tunics and breeches, while Rachel
Henderson and Janet had now both put on the coloured overalls which
disguised the masculine garb beneath, and gave them something of the
usual feminine air. Rachel's overall, indeed, was both pretty and
artistic, embroidered a little here and there, and showing a sunburnt
throat beneath the rounded chin.

The talk turned on the day's work, the weather prospects, the vagaries of
the cows at milking time, and those horrid little pests the "harvesters,"
which haunt the chalk soils. The two "hands" were clear by now that they
liked Miss Leighton the best of the two ladies, they hardly knew why.
Betty Rolfe, the younger of them, who came from Ralstone, was a taking
creature, with deep black, or rather violet, eyes, small features framed
in curly hair, and the bloom of ripe fruit. She was naturally full of
laughter and talk, and only spoilt by her discoloured and uneven teeth,
which showed the usual English neglect of such things in childhood.

Her companion, Jenny Harberton, was a much more ordinary type, with broad
cheeks, sandy hair, and a perpetual friendly grin, which generally served
her instead of speech, at least in her employer's presence. She was a
capital milker, and a good honest child. Her people lived in the village,
and her forebears had always lived there. They were absolutely indigenous
and autochthonous--a far older Brookshire family than any of the dwellers
in the big houses about.

Then in the midst of a loving report by Betty on the virtues and docility
of a beautiful Jersey cow who was the pride of Miss Henderson's new herd,
Janet Leighton remembered one of her letters of the evening and drew it
out of her pocket.

"Who do you think is going to be--is already--the commandant of the
timber girls in the new camp?"

Rachel couldn't guess.

"You remember Mrs. Fergusson--at College?"

Rachel raised her eyebrows.

"The Irish lady? Perfectly."

"Well, it's she. She writes to me to say she is quite settled, with
thirty girls, that the work is fascinating, and they all love it, and you
and I _must_ go over to see her."

Rachel looked irresponsive.

"It's a long way."

"Oh, Miss," said Jenny Harberton timidly, "it's not so very far. An' it's
lovely when you get there. Father was there last week, drivin' some
officers. He says it _is_ interestin'!"

Jenny's father, a plumber in the village, owned a humble open car which
was in perpetual request.

"There are a hundred Canadians apparently," said Janet Leighton, looking
at her letter, "and German prisoners, quite a good few, and these thirty
girls. Mrs. Fergusson begs us to come. Sunday's no good because we
couldn't see the work, but--after the harvest? We could get there with
the pony quite well."

Rachel said nothing.

Janet Leighton dropped the subject for the moment, but after supper, with
her writing-desk on her knee, she returned to it.

"Can't you go without me?" said Rachel, who was standing with her back to
the room, looking out of the window.

"Well, I could," said Janet, feeling rather puzzled, "but I thought you
were curious to see these new kinds of work for women?"

"So I am. It isn't the women."

"The German prisoners, then?" laughed Janet.

"Heavens, no!"

"The Canadians?" asked Janet--in wonder--after a moment. Rachel turned
abruptly towards her.

"Well, I didn't have exactly a good time in Canada," she said, as though
the admission was dragged out of her; adding immediately, "but of course
I'll go--sometime--after the harvest."

On which she left the room, and presently Janet saw her wandering among
the stooks in the gloaming, her hands behind her back. She seemed in her
ripe and comely youth to be somehow the very spirit of the harvest.

A little later, just before ten o'clock, while the sunset glow was still
brooding on the harvest fields, the two farm-girls, after a last visit to
the cows, slipped into the little sitting-room. Janet, who was mending
her Sunday dress, greeted them with a smile and a kind word. Then she
moved to the table and took up a New Testament that was lying there. She
was an ardent and mystically-minded Unitarian, and her mind was much set
towards religion.

"Shall we have prayers at night?" she had said quite simply to the f
arm-girls on their arrival. "Don't if you don't want to." And they had
shyly said "yes"--not particularly attracted by the proposal, but willing
to please Miss Leighton, who was always nice to them.

So Janet read some verses from the sixth chapter of St. John: "Verily,
verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on Me hath everlasting
life ... I am the Bread of Life ... I am the living Bread which came down
from Heaven ... The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they
are life."

Closing the book, while her quiet eyes shone in the gleaming dusk, she
said a few simple things about the Words of Christ, and how the human
soul may feed on them--the Word of Love--the Word of Purity--the Word of
Service. While she was still speaking, the door opened and Rachel came
in. It had been agreed between her and Janet that although she had no
objection to the prayers, she was not to be asked to take part in them.
So that Janet's pulses fluttered a little when she appeared. But there
was no outward sign of it. The speaker finished what she had to say,
while the eyes of her three hearers were sometimes on her face and
sometimes on the wide cornfield beyond the open window, where the harvest
moon, as yet only a brilliant sickle, was rising. The Earth Bread
without--the "Bread of Life" within; even in Jenny's primitive mind,
there was a mingling of the two ideas, which brought a quiet joy. She sat
with parted lips, feeling that she liked Miss Leighton very much, and
would try to please her with the cows.

Betty, meanwhile, beside her, passed into a waking dream. She was
thinking of a soldier in the village: the blacksmith's son, a tall,
handsome fellow, who had just arrived on leave for ten days. She had
spent Sunday evening wandering in the lanes with him. She felt
passionately that she must see him again--soon.

The little reading passed into the Lord's Prayer. Then it was over and
the two girls disappeared to bed. Janet felt a little awkward when she
was left alone with Rachel, but she went back to her sewing and began to
talk of the day's news of the war. Rachel answered at random, and very
soon said good-night.

But long after everybody else in the solitary farmhouse was asleep,
Rachel Henderson was sitting up in bed, broad awake, her hands round her
knees. The window beside her was open. She saw the side of the hill and
the bare down in which it ended, with the moonlight bright upon it, and
the dark woods crowning it. There were owls calling from the hill, and
every now and then a light wind rustled through the branches of an oak
that stood in the farm-yard.

She was thinking of what Janet had said about the "Words" of Christ--the
Word of Purity--and the Word of Love. How often she had heard her
father read and expound that chapter! very differently as far as
phraseology--perhaps even as far as meaning--went, yet with all his
heart, like Janet. He was an Anglican clergyman who had done missionary
service in the Canadian West. He had been dead now three years, and her
mother five. She had bitterly missed them both when she was in her worst
need; yet now she was thankful they had died--before--

What would her father think of her now? Would he grant that she was free,
or would he still hold to those rigid, those cruel views of his? Oh, he
must grant it! She _was_ free! Her breast shook with the fervour of her
protest. She had been through passion and wrong, through things that
seared and defiled. She knew well that she had been no mere innocent
sufferer. Yet now she had her life before her again; and both heart and
senses were hungry for the happiness she had so abominably missed. And
her starved conscience--that, too, was eagerly awake. She had her
self-respect to recover--the past to forget.

_Work_! that was the receipt--hard work! And this dear woman, Janet
Leighton, to help her; Janet, with her pure, modest life and her high
aims. So, at last, clinging to the thought of her new friend like a
wearied child, Rachel Henderson fell asleep.




III


"A jolly view!"

Janet assented. She was sitting behind the pony, while Rachel had walked
up the hill beside the carriage, to the high point where both she and the
pony--a lethargic specimen of the race--had paused to take breath.

They were on a ridge whence there was a broad bit of the world to see. To
the north, a plain rich in all the diversities of English land--field and
wood, hamlet and church, the rising grounds and shallow depressions, the
small enclosures and the hedgerow timber, that make all the difference
between the English midlands and, say, the plain of Champagne, or a
Russian steppe. Across the wide, many-coloured scene, great clouds from
the west were sweeping, with fringes of rain and sudden bursts of light
or shadow, which in their perpetual movement--suggesting attack from the
sky and response from the earth--gave drama and symbol to the landscape.

On the south--things very different! First, an interlocked range of
hills, forest-clothed, stretching east and west, and, at the very feet of
the two women, a forest valley offering much that was strange to English
eyes. Two years before it had been known only to the gamekeeper and the
shooting guests of a neighbouring landowner. Now a great timber camp
filled it. The gully ran far and deep into the heart of the forest
country, with a light railway winding along the bottom, towards an unseen
road. The steep sides of the valley--Rachel and Janet stood on the edge
of one of them--were covered with felled trees, cut the preceding winter,
and left as they fell. The dead branch and leaf of the trees had turned
to a rich purple, and dyed all the inside of the long deep cup. But along
its edges stretched the forest, still untouched, and everywhere, in the
bare spaces left here and there by the felling among the "rubble and
woody wreck," green and gold mosses and delicate grasses had sprung up,
a brilliant enamel, inlaid with a multitude of wild flowers.

"Look!" cried Rachel.

For suddenly, down below them, a huge trunk began to move as though of
its own accord. Hissing and crashing like some gray serpent, it glided
down the hill-side, till it approached a group of figures and horses
congregated at the head of the valley, near an engine puffing smoke. Then
something invisible happened, and presently a trolley piled high with
logs detached itself from the group, and set out on a solitary journey
down the railway, watched here and there by men in queer uniforms with
patches on their backs.

"German prisoners!" said Janet, and strained her eyes to see, thinking
all the time of a letter she had received that morning from her soldier
brother fighting with the English troops to the west of Rheims:--

"The beggars are on the run! Foch has got them this time. But, oh, Lord,
the sight they've made of all this beautiful country! Trampled, and
ruined, and smashed! all of it. Deliberate loot and malice everywhere,
and tales of things done in the villages that make one see red. We
captured a letter to his wife on a dead German this morning: 'Well, the
offensive is a failure, but we've done one thing--we've smashed up
another bit of France!' How are we ever going to live with this people in
the same world after the war?"

And there below, in the heart of this remote English woodland, now being
sacrificed to the war, moved the sons of this very people, cast up here
by the tide of battle. Janet had heard that nobody spoke to them during
the work, except to give directions; after work they had their own wired
camp, and all intercourse between them and the Canadian woodmen, or the
English timber girls, was forbidden. But what were they saying among
themselves--what were they thinking--these peasants, some perhaps from
the Rhineland, or the beautiful Bavarian country, or the Prussian plains?
Janet had travelled a good deal in Germany before the war, using her
holidays as a mistress in a secondary school, and her small savings, in a
kind of wandering which had been a passion with her. She had known
Bavarians and Prussians at home. But here, in this corner of rural
England, with this veil of silence drawn between them and the nation
which at last, in this summer of 1918, was grimly certain, after four
years of vengeance and victory, what ferments were, perhaps, working in
the German mind?

Yes, there was the German camp, and beyond it under the hill the Canadian
forestry camp; whilst just beneath them could be seen the roof of the
large women's hostel.

Another exclamation from Rachel, as, on their left, another great tree
started for the bottom of the hollow.

"But haven't you seen all this before?" asked Janet.

"No, I never saw anything of lumbering."

The tone showed the sudden cooling and reserve that were always apparent
in Rachel's manner when any subject connected with Canada came into
conversation. Yet Janet had noticed with surprise that it was Rachel
herself who, when the harvest was nearly over, had revived the subject of
the camp, and planned the drive for this Saturday afternoon. It had
seemed to Janet once or twice that she was forcing herself to do it, as
though braving some nervousness of which she was ashamed.

The rough road on which they were driving wound gradually downward
through the felled timber. Soon they could hear the clatter of the
engine, and the hissing of the saws which seized the trees on their
landing, and cut and stripped them in a trice, ready for loading. Round
the engine and at the starting-place of the trolleys was a busy crowd:
lean and bronzed Canadians; women in leather breeches and coats, busily
measuring and marking; a team of horses showing silvery white against the
purple of the hill; and everywhere the German prisoner lads, mostly quite
young and of short stature. The pony carriage passed a group of them, and
they stared with cheerful, furtive looks at the two women.

Then the group of timber girls below perceived the approaching visitors,
and a figure, detaching itself from the rest, came to meet the carriage.
A stately woman, black-haired, in coat and breeches like the rest, with a
felt hat, and a badge of authority, touches of green besides on the khaki
uniform. Janet recognized her at once as Mrs. Fergusson, their comrade
for a time at college, and much liked both by her and Rachel.

She came laughing, with hands outstretched.

"Well, here we meet again! Jolly to see you! A new scene, isn't it? Life
doesn't stand still nowadays! One of my girls will take the carriage for
you."

A stalwart maiden unharnessed the pony and let him graze.

Mrs. Fergusson took possession of her visitors, and walked on beside
them, describing the different stages of the work, and sections of the
workers.

"You see those tall fellows farthest off? Those work the saws and cut up
the trees as they come down. Then the horses bring them to the rollers,
and the Canadians guide them with those hooks till the crane seizes hold
of them and lifts them on to the trolley. But before the hooks get
them--you see the girls there?--they do all the measuring; they note
everything in their books and they mark every log. All the payments of
the camp, the wages paid, the sums earned by the trolley contractor who
takes them to the station, the whole finance in fact, depends on the
_women_. I've trained scores besides and sent them out to other camps!
But now come, I must introduce you to the commandant of the camp."

"A Canadian?" asked Janet.

"No, an American! He comes from Maine, but he had been lumbering in
Canada, with several mills and, camps under him. So he volunteered a year
ago to bring over a large Forestry battalion--mostly the men he had been
working with in Quebec. Splendid fellows! But he's the king!"

Then she raised her voice,--

"Captain Ellesborough!"

A young man in uniform, with a slouch hat, came forward, leaping over the
logs in his path. He gave a military salute to the two visitors, and a
swift scrutinizing look to each of them. Rachel was aware of a thin,
handsome face bronzed by exposure, a pair of blue eyes, rather pale in
colour, to which the sunburn of brow and cheek gave a singular
brilliance, and a well-cut, determined mouth. The shoulders were those of
an athlete, but on the whole the figure was lightly and slenderly built,
making an impression rather of grace and elasticity than of exceptional
strength.

"You would like to see the camp?" he said, looking at Rachel.

"Aren't you too busy to show it?"

"Not at all. I am not wanted just now. Let me help you over those logs."
He held out his hand.

"Oh, thank you, I don't want any help," said Rachel a little scornfully.
He smiled in approving silence, and she followed his lead, leaping and
scrambling over the piles of wood, with a deer's sureness of foot, till
he invited her to stop and watch the timber girls at their measuring. As
the two visitors approached, land-women and forest-women eyed each other
with friendly looks, but without speech. For talk, indeed, the business
in hand was far too strenuous. The logs were coming in fast; there must
be no slip in measurement or note. The work was hard, and the women doing
it had been at it all day. But on the whole, what a comely and energetic
group, with the bright eyes, the clear skins, the animation born of open
air and exercise.

"They can't talk to you now!" said Mrs. Fergusson in Janet's ear, amid
the din of the engines, "but they'll talk at tea. And there's a dance
to-night."

Janet looked round the wild glen in wonder.

"Who come?"

"Oh, there's an Air Force camp half a mile away--an Army Service camp on
the other side. The officers come--some of them--every Saturday. We take
down the partitions in our huts. You can't think what pretty frocks the
girls put on! And we dance till midnight."

"And you've no difficulty with the men working in the camp?"

"You mean--how do they treat the girls?" laughed Mrs. Fergusson. "They're
_charming_ to the girls! Chivalrous, kind, everything they should be. But
then," she added proudly, "my girls are the pick--educated women all of
them. I could trust them anywhere. And Captain Ellesborough--you won't
get any mischief going on where he is."

Meanwhile the captain, well out of earshot of Mrs. Fergusson's praise,
was explaining the organization of the camp to Rachel as they slowly
climbed the hill, on the opposite side from that by which she and Janet
had descended.

"Which works hardest, I wonder?" she said at last, as they paused to look
down on the scene below. "We on our farm, or you here? I've never had
more than five hours' sleep through the harvest? But now things are
slacker."

He threw his head back with a laugh.

"Why, this seems to me like playing at lumbering! It's all so tiny--so
babyish. Oh, yes, there's plenty of work--for the moment. But it'll be
all done, in one more season; not a stick left. England can't grow a real
forest."

"Compared to America?"

"Well, I was thinking of Canada. Do you know Canada?"

"A little." Then she added hastily: "But I never saw any lumbering."

"What a pity! It's a gorgeous life. Oh, not for women. These women
here--awfully nice girls, and awfully clever too--couldn't make anything
of it in Canada. I had a couple of square miles of forest to look
after--magnificent stuff!--Douglas fir most of it--and two pulping mills,
and about two hundred men--a rough lot."

"But you're not Canadian?"

"Oh, Lord, no! My people live in Maine. I was at Yale. I got trained
at the forest school there, and after a bit went over the Canadian
frontier with my brother to work a big concession in Quebec. We did very
well--made a lot of money. Then came the war. My brother joined up with
the Canadian army. I stayed behind to try and settle up the business,
till the States went in, too. Then they set me and some other fellows to
raise a Forestry battalion--picked men. We went to France first, and last
winter I was sent here--to boss this little show! But I shan't stay here
long! It isn't good enough. Besides, I want to fight! They've promised me
a commission in our own army."

He looked at her with sparkling eyes, and her face involuntarily answered
the challenge of his; so much so that his look prolonged itself. She was
wonderfully pleasant to look upon, this friend of Mrs. Fergusson's. And
she was farming on her own? A jolly plucky thing to do! He decided that
he liked her; and his talk flowed on. He was frank about himself, and
full of self-confidence; but there was a winning human note in it, and
Rachel listened eagerly, talking readily, too, whenever there was an
opening. They climbed to the top of the hill where they stood on the
northern edge of the forest, looking across the basin and the busy throng
below. He pointed out to her a timber-slide to their right, and they
watched the trees rushing down it, dragged, as he now saw plainly, by the
wire cable which was worked by the engine in the hollow. A group of
German prisoners, half-way down, were on the edge of the slide, guiding
the logs.

"We don't have any trouble with them," said the captain carelessly.
"They're only too thankful to be here. They've two corporals of their own
who keep order. Oh, of course we have our eyes open. There are some sly
beggars among them. Our men have no truck with them. I shouldn't advise
you to employ them. It wouldn't do for women alone."

His smile was friendly, and Rachel found it pleasant to be advised by
him. As to employing prisoners, she said, even were it allowed, nothing
would induce her to risk it. There were a good many on Colonel Shepherd's
estate, and she sometimes met them, bicycling to and from their billets
in the village, in the evening after work. "Once or twice they've jeered
at me," she said, flushing.

"Jeered at you!" he repeated in surprise.

"At my dress, I mean. It seems to amuse them."

"I see. You wear the land army dress like these girls?"

"When I'm at work."

"Well, I'm glad you don't wear it always," he said candidly. "These girls
here look awfully nice of an evening. They always change."

He glanced at her curiously. Her dress of dark blue linen, her pretty hat
to match, with its bunch of flowers, not to speak of the slender ankles
and feet in their blue stockings and khaki shoes, seemed to him
extraordinarily becoming. But she puzzled him. There was something about
her quite different from the girls of the hostel. She appeared to be
older and riper than they; yet he did not believe she was a day more than
five-and-twenty, and some of them were older than that. Unmarried, he
supposed. "Miss Henderson?" Yes, he was sure that was the name Mrs.
Fergusson had mentioned. His eyes travelled discreetly to her bare, left
hand. That settled it.

"Well, if I came across these fellows jeering at an Englishwoman, I'd
know the reason why!" he resumed hotly. "You should have complained."

She shook her head, smiling. "One doesn't want to be a nuisance in war
time. One can always protect oneself."

He smiled.

"That's what women always say, and--excuse me--they can't!"

She laughed.

"Oh, yes, we can--the modern woman."

"I don't see much difference between the modern woman and the
old-fashioned woman," he said obstinately. "It isn't dress or working at
munitions that makes the difference."

"No, but--what they signify."

"What?--a freer life, getting your own way, seeing more of the world?"
The tone was a trifle antagonistic.

"_Knowing_ more of the world," she said, quietly. "We're not the ignorant
babes our grandmothers were at our age. That's why we can protect
ourselves."

And again he was aware of something sharp or bitter in her--some note of
disillusionment--that jarred with the soft, rather broad face and dreamy
eyes. It stirred him, and they presently found themselves plunged in a
free and exciting discussion of the new place and opportunities of women
in the world, the man from the more conservative, the women from the more
revolutionary point of view. Secretly, he was a good deal repelled by
some of his companion's opinions, and her expression of them. She quoted
Wells and Shaw, and he hated both. He was an idealist and a romantic,
with a volume of poems in his pocket. She, it seemed, was still on a
rising wave of rebellion, moral and social, like so many women; while his
wave had passed, and he was drifting in the trough of it. He supposed she
had dropped religion, like everything else. Well, the type didn't attract
him. He believed the world was coming back to the old things. The war had
done it--made people think. No doubt this girl had rushed through a lot
of things already, and thought she knew everything. But she didn't.

Then, as their talk went on, this first opinion dropped in confusion. For
instead of presenting him with a consistent revolutionist, his companion
was, it appeared, full of the most unexpected veins and pockets of
something much softer and more appealing. She had astonishing returns
upon herself; and after some sentiment that had seemed to him silly or
even outrageous, a hurried "Oh, I dare say that's all nonsense!" would
suddenly bewilder or appease a marked trenchancy of judgment in himself
which was not accustomed to be so tripped up.

The upshot of it was that both Rachel and her new acquaintance enjoyed
an agreeable, an adventurous half hour. They got rapidly beyond
conventionalities. One moment she thought him rude, the next delightful;
just as she alternately appeared to him feminist and feminine. Above them
the doomed beech trees, still green in the late August afternoon, spread
their canopy of leaf, and through their close stems ran dark aisles of
shadow. Below them was the tree-strewn hill-side. In the hollow Rachel
could see Janet Leighton and Mrs. Fergusson among the measuring girls;
the horses moving to and fro; the Canadian lumber-men catching at and
guiding the logs; the trolleys descending the valley; while just opposite
to them trunk after trunk was crashing down the hill, the line of the
steel cable gleaming now and then in a fitful sunshine which had begun
to slip out below a roof of purple cloud. Only one prisoner was left to
look after the slide. The others had just gone down the hill, at a
summons from below. Suddenly Ellesborough sprang to his feet.

"Good Heavens! what's that?" For a loud cry had rung out, accompanied by
what sounded like a report. The man who had been standing among the dead
brushwood on the other side of the descending timber, about a hundred
yards away, had disappeared; and the huge beech just launched from above
had ceased to move.

Another cry for help.

"The cable's broken!" said Ellesborough, starting at full speed for the
slide. Rachel rushed after him, and presently caught him up where he
knelt beside a man lying on the ground, and writhing in great pain. The
prisoner's cap had fallen off, and revealed a young German lad of
nineteen or twenty, hardly conscious, and groaning pitifully at
intervals. As he lay crouched on his face, the red patches on his back,
intended to guide the aim of an armed guard in case of any attempt to
escape, showed with a sinister plainness.

"The cable snapped, and has caught him round the body," Ellesborough
explained. "Give him this brandy, please, while I try and make out--"

With skilled and gentle fingers he began to explore the injury.

"A rib broken, I think." He looked with anxiety at some blood that had
begun to appear on the lips. "I must go down and get some men and a
stretcher. They won't know what to do without me. My second in command is
off duty for the day. Can you look after him while I go? Awfully sorry
to--"

He gave her a swift, investigating glance.

She interrupted him.

"Tell me what to do, and I'll do it."

He loosened the boy's collar and very gently tried to ease his position.

"Mamma!" murmured the boy, with the accent of a miserable child in a bad
dream. Ellesborough's face softened. He bent over him and said something
in German. Rachel did not understand it--only the compassionate look in
the man's blue eyes.

"Give him more brandy if you can, and try and keep him still," said
Ellesborough as he rose to his feet. "I shall be back directly."

Her glance answered. By this time there was commotion below, the engine
had stopped working and men were running up the hill. Ellesborough went
bounding down the steep slope to meet them. They turned back with him,
and Rachel supposed they had gone to fetch a stretcher, and if possible a
doctor, from the small camp hospital which Mrs. Fergusson had pointed out
to her near the gate. Meanwhile, for a few minutes, she was alone with
this suffering lad. Was he fatally hurt--dying? She managed to get some
brandy down, and then he lay groaning and unconscious, murmuring
incoherent words. She caught "Mamma" again, then "Lisa," "Hans," and
broken phrases that meant nothing to her. Was his mind back in some
German home, which, perhaps, he would never see again?

All sorts of thoughts passed through her: vague memories gathered
from the newspapers, of what the Germans had done in Belgium and
France--horrible, indescribable things! Oh, not this boy, surely!
He could not be more than nineteen. He must have been captured in the
fighting of July, perhaps in his first action. Captain Ellesborough had
said to her that there was no fighting spirit among any of the prisoners.
They were thankful to find themselves out of it, "safely captured," as
one of them had had the bravado to say, and with enough to eat. No doubt
this boy had dreamt day and night of peace, and getting back to Germany,
to "Mamma" and "Lisa" and "Hans." To die, if he was to die, by this
clumsy accident, in an enemy country, was hard!

Pity, passionate pity sprang up in her, and it warmed her heart to
remember the pity in the face of Captain Ellesborough. She would have
hated him if he had shown any touch of a callous or cruel spirit towards
this helpless creature. But there had been none.

In a few more minutes she was aware of Mrs. Fergusson and Janet climbing
rapidly towards her. And behind them came stretcher-bearers, the captain,
and possibly a doctor.

       *       *       *       *       *

The accident broke up the working afternoon. The injured lad was carried
to hospital, where the surgeon shook his head, and refused to prophesy
till twenty-four hours were over.

Captain Ellesborough disappeared, while Rachel and Janet were given tea
at the woman's hostel and shown the camp. Rachel took an absorbed
interest in it all. This world of the new woman, with its widening
horizons, its atmosphere of change and discovery, its independence of
men, soothed some deep smart in her that Janet was only now beginning
to realize. And yet, Janet remembered the vicar, and had watched the talk
with Ellesborough. Clearly to be the professed enemy of man did not
altogether disincline you for his company!

At any rate it seemed quite natural to Janet Leighton that, when it was
time to go, and a charming girl in khaki with green facings caught the
pony, and harnessed it for Mrs. Fergusson's parting guests, Ellesborough
should turn up, as soon as the farewells were over; and that she should
find herself driving the pony-carriage up the hill, while Ellesborough
and Rachel walked behind, and at a lengthening distance. Once or twice
she looked back, and saw that the captain was gathering some of the
abounding wild flowers which had sprung up on the heels of the retreating
forest, and that Rachel had fastened a bunch of them into her hat. She
smiled to herself, and drove steadily on. Rachel was young and pretty.
Marriage with some man--some day--was certainly her fate. The kind,
unselfish Janet intended to "play up."

Then, with a jerk, she remembered there was a story. Nonsense! An unhappy
love affair, no doubt, which had happened in her first youth, and in
Canada. Well, such things, in the case of a girl with the temperament of
Rachel, are only meant to be absorbed in another love affair. They are
the leaf mould that feeds the final growth. Janet cheerfully said to
herself that, probably, her partnership with Rachel would only be a short
one.

The pair behind were, indeed, much occupied with each other. The tragic
incident of the afternoon seemed to have carried them rapidly through the
preliminary stages of acquaintance. At least, it led naturally to talk
about things and feelings more real and intimate than generally haunt the
first steps. And in this talk each found the other more and more
congenial. Ellesborough was now half amused, half touched, by the mixture
of childishness and maturity in Rachel. One moment her ignorance
surprised him, and the next, some shrewd or cynical note in what she was
saying scattered the _ingénue_ impression, and piqued his curiosity
afresh. She was indeed crassly ignorant about many current affairs in
which he himself was keenly interested, and of which he supposed all
educated women must by now have learnt the ABC. She could not have given
him the simplest historical outline of the great war; he saw that she was
quite uncertain whether Lloyd George or Asquith were Prime Minister; and
as to politics and public persons in Canada, where she had clearly lived
some time, her mind seemed to be a complete blank. None the less she had
read a good deal--novels and poetry at least--and she took a queerly
pessimistic view of life. She liked her farm work; she said so frankly.
But on a sympathetic reply from him to the effect that he knew several
other women who had taken to it, and they all seemed to be "happy" in it,
she made a scornful mouth.

"Oh, well--'happy'?--that's a different thing. But it does as well as
anything else."

The last thing she wanted, apparently, was to talk about Canada. He,
himself, as a temporary settler in the Great Dominion, cherished an
enthusiasm for Canada and a belief in the Canadian future, not, perhaps,
very general among Americans; but although her knowledge of the country
gave them inevitably some common ground, she continually held back from
it, she entered on it as little as she could. She had been in the
Dominion, he presently calculated, about seven or eight years; but she
avoided names and dates, how adroitly, he did not perceive till they had
parted, and he was thinking over their walk. She must have gone out to
Canada immediately after leaving school. He gathered that her father had
been a clergyman, and was dead; that she knew the prairie life, but had
never been in British Columbia, and only a few days in Montreal and
Toronto. That was all that, at the end of their walk, he knew; and all
apparently she meant him to know. Whereas she on her side showed a
beguiling power of listening to all he had to say about the mysterious
infinity of the Canadian forest-lands and the wild life that, winter or
spring, a man may live among them, which flattered the very human conceit
of a strong and sensitive nature.

But at last they had climbed the tree-strewn slope, and were on the open
ridge with the northern plain in view. The sun was now triumphantly out,
just before his setting; the clouds had been flung aside, and he shone
full upon the harvest world--such a harvest world as England had not seen
for a century. There they lay, the new and golden fields, where, to north
and south, to east and west, the soil of England, so long unturned, had
joyously answered once more to its old comrade the plough.

"'An enemy hath done this,'" quoted Ellesborough, with an approving
smile, as he pointed towards the plain. "But there was a God behind him!"

Rachel laughed. "Well, I've got three fields still to get in," she said.
"And they're the best. Goodnight."

She gave him her hand, standing transfigured in the light, the wind
blowing her beautiful hair about her.

"May I come and see you?" he asked, rather formally.

She smiled assent.

"Next week _everything_ will be in, and some of it threshed. I shall be
freer then. You'll like our place."

He pressed her hand, and she was off, running like a fawn after the
retreating pony carriage.

He turned away, a little dazzled and shaken. The image of her on the
ridge remained; but what perhaps had struck deepest had been the
sweetness of her as she hung above the injured boy. He went slowly
towards the camp, conscious that the day now departing had opened a new
door in the House of Life.




IV


Ellesborough allowed a week to pass before making the call at Great End
he had arranged with Rachel. But at last, when he thought that her
harvesting would be really over, he set out on his motor bicycle, one
fine evening, as soon as work at the camp was over. According to summer
time it was about seven o'clock, and the sun was still sailing clear
above the western woods.

Part of his way lay over a broad common chequered with fine trees and
groups of trees, some of them of great age; for the rest he ran through a
world where harvest in its latest stages was still the governing fact. In
some fields the corn was being threshed on the spot, without waiting for
the stacks; in others, the last loads were being led; and everywhere in
the cleared fields there were scattered figures of gleaners, casting long
shadows on the gold and purple carpet of the stubble. For Ellesborough
the novelty of this garden England, so elaborately combed and finished in
comparison with his own country, was by no means exhausted. There were
times when the cottage gardens, the endless hedge-rows, and miniature
plantations pleased him like the detail in those early Florentine
pictures in the Metropolitan Museum, for which, business man as he was,
and accustomed to the wilds, he had once or twice, on visits to New York,
discovered in himself a considerable taste. He was a man, indeed, of many
aptitudes, and of a loyal and affectionate temper. His father, a country
doctor, now growing old, his mother, still pretty at sixty, and his two
unmarried sisters were all very dear to him. He wrote to them constantly,
and received many letters from them. They belonged to one of the old
Unitarian stocks still common in New England; and such stocks are
generally conspicuous for high standards and clean living. "Discipline"
was among the chief marks of the older generation. A father or mother
dreaded an "undisciplined" child, and the word was often on their lips,
though in no Pharisaical way; while the fact was evident in their lives,
and in those private diaries which they were apt to keep, wherein, up to
old age, they jealously watched their own daily thoughts and actions from
the same point of view.

And though the younger generation, like the younger generation of
Quakers, shows change and some disintegration, the old Puritan
traditions and standards are still, as we all know, of great effect
among them. Especially with regard to women, and all that concerns them.
Among the Ellesborough clan, which was a large one, there prevailed,
along with the traditional American consideration for women, and
especially among the women of the family themselves--a strict and even
severe standard of sexual morals. There was no hypocrisy in it; they
talked of it but little, but they lived by it; and their men were brought
up in the atmosphere created by it. And as affection and tenderness and
self-sacrifice were freely mixed with the asceticism, there was
no rebellion--at any rate no open rebellion--among their men folk. The
atmosphere created led, no doubt, to certain evasions of the hard
problems of life; and to some quiet revaluations of things and persons
when the sons of the family came to men's estate. But in general the "ape
and tiger," still surviving in the normal human being, had been really
and effectively tamed in the Ellesborough race. There was also a
sensitive delicacy both of thought and speech among them; answering to
more important and tested realities. Their marriages were a success;
their children were well brought up, under light but effective control;
and, if it be true, as Americans are ready to say, that the old
conception of marriage is being slowly but profoundly modified over large
sections of their great Commonwealth, towards a laxity undreamt of half a
century ago, the Ellesboroughs could neither be taxed nor applauded in
the matter. They stood by the old ways, and they stood by them
whole-heartedly.

Ellesborough himself, no doubt, had knocked about the world more than
most of his kindred, and had learnt to look at many things differently.
But essentially, he was the son of his race. His attitude towards women
was at once reverential and protective. He believed women were better
than men, because practically he had found it so in his own circle; but
he held also very strong beliefs, seldom expressed, as to their social
disadvantages and their physical weakness. The record of the Germans
towards women in France and Flanders, a record he had verified for
himself, had perhaps done more than anything else to feed the stern flame
of war in his own soul. At thirty-two, he would probably have already
been a married man, but for the war. He rather fiercely held that it was
a man's duty to marry and have children. But beyond a few passing fancies
he had never been in love; and since the American declaration of war, he
had been, like his President, out to "make the world safe for democracy";
and the ardour of the struggle had swept his private interests out of
sight.

All the same here he was, walking his motor cycle up the field road
leading to Great End Farm, and looking eagerly about him. A lonely
position, but beautiful! On the woods behind the house he turned a
professional eye. Fine timber! The man who was to succeed him at Ralstone
would no doubt have the cutting of it. The farm quadrangle, with its
sixteenth century barn, out of which the corn seemed to be actually
bursting from various open doors and windows, appeared to him through
that glamour which, for the intelligent American, belongs to everything
that medieval and Elizabethan England has bequeathed to the England of
the present. He will back himself, he thinks, to plan and build a modern
town better than the Britisher--in any case quicker. But the mosses and
tiles of an old Brookshire barn beat him.

Ellesborough paused at the gate to watch two land lassies carrying
pails of milk across the yard towards a prolongation of the farm-house,
which he supposed was the dairy. Just beyond the farm-yard, two great
wheat-stacks were visible; while in the hayfields running up to the
woods, large hay-stacks, already nearly thatched, showed dimly in the
evening light. And all this was run by women, worked by Women! Well,
American women, so he heard from home, were doing the same in the fields
and farms of the States. It was all part, he supposed, of a world
movement, by which, no less than by the war itself, these great years
would be for ever remembered.

The farm-house itself, however, seemed to him from the outside a poor,
flimsy thing, unworthy of the old farm buildings. He could see that the
walls of it were only a brick thick, and in spite of the pretty curtains,
he was struck by the odd feature of the two large windows exactly
opposite each other, so that a spectator on either side of the house
might look right through it.

"Seems like being in the street. However, if there's nobody to look at
you, I suppose it don't matter."

Then he laughed, for just as he led his motor cycle into the yard, and
passed the sitting-room window, he was struck by the appearance of two
large sheep, who seemed to be actually in the sitting-room, at its
farther end. They were standing, he presently perceived, upon the steep
down beyond the house, on the slope of which the farm was built; which on
the southern side of the farm quadrangle came right up to the house wall.
At the same moment he saw a woman inside get up and shoo them from the
open window, so that they ran away.

But when Jenny Harberton had admitted him, and he was waiting in the
sitting-room, from which the woman he had seen had disappeared, he was in
the mood to admire everything. How nice the two women had made it! His
own rough life, both before and since the war, had only increased a
natural instinct for order and seemliness. The pretty blue paper, the
fresh drugget, the photographs on the wall, the flowers, and the delicate
neatness of everything delighted him. He went round looking at the
pictures and the few books, perfectly conscious that everything which he
saw had a more than common interest for him. The room seemed to be
telling a story--opening points of view.

"Ah!"

He paused, a broad smile overspreading his bronzed face.

For he had perceived a popular History of the War lying open and face
downwards on the table, one that he had recommended to the mistress of
the farm. So she had followed his advice. It pleased him particularly! He
had gathered that she was never a great reader; still, she was an
educated woman, she ought to know something of what her country had done.

And there was actually a piano! He wondered whether she played, or her
friend.

Meanwhile Rachel was changing her dress upstairs--rather deliberately.
She did not want to look too glad to see her visitor, to flatter him by
too much hurry. When he arrived she had just come in from the fields
where she had been at the threshing machine all day. It had covered her
with dirt and chaff; and the process of changing was only half through
when she heard the rattle of Ellesborough's cycle outside. She stood now
before the glass, a radiant daughter of air and earth; her veins, as it
were, still full of the sheer pleasure of her long day among the stubbles
and the young stock. She was tired, of course; and she knew very well
that the winter, when it came, would make a great difference, and that
much of the work before her would be hard and disagreeable. But for the
moment, her deep satisfaction with the life she had chosen, the congruity
between it and her, gave her a peculiar charm. She breathed content, and
there is no more beautifying thing.

She had thought a good deal about Ellesborough since their meeting; yet
not absorbingly, for she had her work to do. She was rather inclined to
quarrel with him for having been so long in making his call; and this
feeling, perhaps, induced her to dawdle a little over the last touches of
her toilet. She had put on a thin, black dress, which tamed the
exuberance of her face and hair, and set off the brilliance and fineness
of her skin where the open blouse displayed it. The beautiful throat was
sunburnt, indeed, but not unbecomingly so; and she was about to fasten
round it a slender gold chain, when she suddenly dropped the chain. Some
association had passed through her mind which made her shrink from it.

She chose instead a necklace of bluish-green beads, long, and curiously
interwoven, which gave a touch of dignity to the plain dress. Then she
paused to consider the whole effect, in a spirit of meditation rather
than mere vanity. "_I wish he knew_!" she thought, and the glass
reflected a frown of perplexity. Had she been wise, after all, to make
such a complete mystery of the past? People in and about Ipscombe would
probably know some time--what all her Canadian friends knew. And then,
the thought of the endless explanations and gossip, of the horrid
humiliation involved in any renewed contact whatever with the ugly things
she had put behind her, roused a sudden, surging disgust.

"Yes, I was quite right," she thought vehemently. "I was quite right!"

Voices in the room downstairs! That meant that Janet had gone in to greet
the visitor. Should they ask him to stay for supper? The vicar was
coming, and his pious little sister. There would be quite enough to eat.
Cold ham, potatoes and salad, with their own butter and bread--Janet made
beautiful bread--was enough for anybody in war time. Rachel was in the
mood to feel a certain childish exultation in the plenty of the farm,
amid the general rationing. The possession of her seven milch cows, the
daily pleasure of the milk, morning and evening, the sight of the rich
separated cream, and of the butter as it came fresh from the churn, the
growing weight and sleekness of the calves; all these things gave her a
warm sense of protection against the difficulties and restrictions of the
war. She and Janet were "self-suppliers." No need to bother about ounces
of butter, or spoonfuls of cream. Of course they sold all they could, but
they could still feed their few guests well--better, perhaps, than any of
the folk in the villa houses round Millsborough.

"Yes! and no one's leave to ask!"

She threw out her arms in a vehement gesture as she turned away from the
glass. It was the gesture of a wild bird taking flight.

By which, however, she was not hurling defiance at the gentle but most
efficient little lady who represented the Food Control of the
neighbourhood, and the mere sight of whom was enough to jog uneasy
consciences in the matter of rations. Rachel was long since on the best
of terms with her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Captain Ellesborough was asked to stay to supper, and gladly accepted.
The vicar and his young sister arrived and were introduced to the
American. Betty and Jenny, alarmed at so much company and the quality of
it, hurriedly asked to be allowed to take their meal in the tiny scullery
behind the living room. But the democratic and dissenting Janet would not
hear of it. There was room for everybody, she said, and while she lived
in it there should only be one table for all who worked on the farm. If
the vicar and Miss Shenstone objected, she was sorry for them. But they
wouldn't object.

So the small living room of the farm was soon full of a merry company:
the two mistresses, in their Sunday frocks, the land girls in their
uniforms, the young vicar in a short coat and round collar, his little
sister of nineteen, who was training to be a missionary, and carried
about with her already the sweet and dedicated look of her calling; and
Ellesborough, a striking and manly figure in full khaki. Ellesborough was
on Rachel's right, the vicar on Janet's; Miss Shenstone sat between the
two girls, and was so far from objecting to their company that she no
sooner found she was to sit next the daughter of her brother's handy-man
than her childish face flushed with pleasure. She had seen Jenny already
at her brother's Bible-class, and she had been drawn to her. Something in
the character of the labourer's daughter seemed to make a special appeal
to the delicate and mystical temper of the vicar's sister, in whom the
ardour of the "watcher for souls" was a natural gift. Jenny seemed to be
aware of it. She was flushed and a little excited, alternately shy and
communicative--like the bird under fascination, already alive to the
signal of its captor. At any rate, Margaret Shenstone kept both her
companions happy through the meal.

The vicar employed himself in vigorously making friends with Janet
Leighton, keenly alive all the time to that vivid and flower-like vision
of Miss Henderson at the farther end of the table. But some instinct
warned him that beside the splendid fellow in khaki his own claim on her
could be but a modest one. He must watch his opportunity. It was natural
that certain misgivings had already begun to rise in the mind of his
elder sister, Eleanor, who was his permanent companion and housekeeper at
the vicarage. For why should her brother be so specially assiduous in the
harvest operations at Great End? She was well aware that it was the right
and popular thing for the young clergy who were refused service at the
front to be seen in their shirt sleeves as agricultural volunteers, or in
some form of war work. A neighbouring curate in whom she was greatly
interested spent the greater part of his week, for instance, on munition
work at a national factory. She thought him a hero. But if it was to be
harvesting, then it seemed to her that her brother should have divided
his help more evenly among the farms of the village. She was afraid of
"talk." And it troubled her greatly that neither Miss Henderson nor Miss
Leighton came to church.

Meanwhile, the vicar, like a wise man, was securing the position with
Janet. What he wished, what he was really driving at, he would not let
himself inquire. What he _knew_ was that no woman had ever fluttered his
quiet mind as Miss Henderson had fluttered it during these summer weeks.
To watch her, erect and graceful, "pitching" the sheaves on to the
harvest cart, where he and a labourer received and packed them; to be
privileged to lead the full cart home, with her smile and thanks at the
barn door for reward, or to stand with her while she proudly watched her
new reaping machine, with the three fine horses abreast, sweeping round
her biggest field, while the ripe sheaves fell beside it, as of old they
fell beside the reapers that Hoephoestus wrought in gleaming gold on the
shield of Achilles; and then perhaps to pay a last visit with her to the
farm buildings in the warm dusk and watch the cattle coming in from the
fields and the evening feed, and all the shutting up for the night after
the long, hot, busy day: these things had lately made a veritable idyll
of the vicar's life. He felt as though a hundred primitive sensations and
emotions, that he had only talked of or read about before, had at last
become real to him. Oxford memories revived. He actually felt a wish to
look at his Virgil or Theocritus again, such as had never stirred in him
since he had packed his Oxford books to send home, after the sobering
announcement of his third class. After all, it seemed these old fellows
knew something about the earth and its joys!

So that a golden light lay over these past weeks. And in the midst of it
stood the figure of a silent and--as far as he was concerned--rather
difficult woman, without which there would have been no transfiguring
light at all. He confessed to himself that she had never had much to say
to him. But wherever she was she drew the male creature after her. There
was no doubt as to that. She was a good employer--fair, considerate,
intelligent; but it was the _woman_--so the vicar believed--who got her
way.

From which it will be seen that Miss Eleanor Shenstone had some reason
for misgiving, and that the vicar's own peace of mind was in danger. His
standards also were no longer what they were. He had really ceased to
care that Miss Leighton was a Unitarian!

"I suppose you have been horribly busy?" said Rachel to Ellesborough,
when, thanks to the exertions of Janet and the two girls, everybody had
been provided with a first course.

"Not more than usual. Do you mean--" He looked at her, smiling, and
Rachel's eyebrows went up slightly. "Ah, I see--you thought I had
forgotten?"

"Oh, no," she said indifferently. "It is a long way to come."

He flushed a little.

"That never occurred to me for a moment!" he said with emphasis. "But you
said you would have finished with the harvest in a week. So I waited. I
didn't want to be a nuisance."

At which she smiled, a smile that overflowed eyes and lips, and stirred
the senses of the man beside her.

"How is the prisoner?"

"Poor boy! He died the day before yesterday. We did everything we could,
but he had no chance from the first. Hard lines!"

"Why, he might have been home next year!"

"He might, indeed. Yes, Miss Henderson, it'll be peace next year--perhaps
this year! Who knows! But I hope I'll have a look in first. I've got my
orders. As soon as they've appointed my successor here, I'm off. About a
month, I suppose. They've accepted me for the Air Force."

His eyes glowed. Rachel said nothing. She felt hurt that he expressed no
regret at going. Then the vicar struck into the conversation with some
enthusiastic remarks about the steady flowing in of the American army.
That, indeed, was the great, the overpowering fact of these August days.
Ellesborough responded eagerly, describing the huge convoy with which he
himself had come over; and that amazing, that incredible march across
three thousand miles of sea and land, which every day was pouring into
the British Isles, and so into France, some 15,000 men--the flower of
American manhood, come to the rescue of the world. He told the great
story well, with the graphic phrases of a quick mind, well fed on facts,
yet not choked by them. The table hung on him. Even little Jenny, with
parted lips, would not have missed a word.

He meanwhile was led on--for he was not a man of facile or boastful
speech--by the eyes of Rachel Henderson, and those slight gestures or
movements by which from time to time when the talk flagged she would set
it going again.

Margaret Shenstone was particularly stirred.

"What friends we shall be!" she said presently, with a long, quivering
breath--"I mean America and England. Friends for ever! And we quarrelled
once. That's so wonderful. That shows good does come out of evil!"

"I should jolly well think so," said Ellesborough, looking kindly at the
young girl. "Why, if it hadn't been for this war, millions of these boys
who are coming over now would never have seen England or Europe at all.
It'll change the face of everything!"

"Only we must play up," said the vicar anxiously. "We must get rid of our
abominable shyness, and let your people really see how we really welcome
them."

Rachel gave a little defiant shake of the head.

"America's got to thank us, too!" she said, with a challenging look at
Ellesborough. "We've borne it for four years. Now it's your turn!"

"Well, here we are," said Ellesborough quietly, "up to the neck. But--of
course--don't thank us. It's our business just as much as yours."

The talk dropped a moment, and Janet took advantage of it to bring in
coffee as a finish to the meal. Under cover of the slight bustle,
Ellesborough said to Rachel, in a voice no longer meant for the table,--

"Could you spare me a letter sometimes, Miss Henderson--at the front?"

He had both elbows on the table, and was playing with a cigarette. There
was nothing the least patronizing or arrogant in his manner. But there
was a male note in it--perhaps a touch of self-confidence--which
ruffled her.

"Oh, I am a bad letter-writer," she said, as she got up from the table.
"Shall we go and look at the cows?"

They all went out into the warm September night. Ellesborough followed
Rachel, cigarette in hand, his strong mouth twisting a little. The night
was almost cloudless. The pale encircling down, patched at intervals with
dark hanging woods, lay quiet under a sky full of faint stars. The scent
of the stubblefields, of the great corn-stack just beyond the farmyard,
of the big barn so full that the wide wooden doors could not be closed,
was mingled with the strong ammonia smells of the farm-yard, and here
and there with the sweetness left in the evening air by the chewing cows
on their passage to the cow-house on the farther side of the yard.

Rachel led the way to the cow-house--a vast fifteenth-century barn, with
an interlacing forest of timber in its roof, where the six cows stood
ranged, while Janet and the two land lassies, with Hastings the bailiff
to help them, were changing the litter and filling up the racks with hay.
Rachel went along the line pointing out the beauties of each separate
beast to Ellesborough, and caressing two little calves whom Jenny was
feeding by hand. Ellesborough was amused by her technical talk and her
proprietor's airs. It seemed to him a kind of play-acting, but it
fascinated him. Janet had brought in a lantern, and the light and shade
of it seemed to have been specially devised to bring into relief Rachel's
round and tempting beauty, the bright brown of her hair where it curled
on the temples, and the lovely oval of the cheeks. Ellesborough watched
her, now passing into deep shadow, and now brilliantly lit up, as the
light of the lantern caught her; overhead, the criss-cross of the arching
beams as of some primitive cathedral, centuries old; and on either side
the dim forms of the munching cattle, and the pretty movements of the
girls busy with their work.

"Take care," laughed Rachel as she passed him. "There are horrid holes in
this floor. I haven't had time to mend them."

As she spoke, she slipped and almost fell. Ellesborough threw out a quick
hand and caught her by the arm. She smiled into his face.

"Neatly done!" she said composedly, submitting to be led by him over a
very broken bit of pavement near the door. His hand held her firmly. Nor
did she make any effort to release herself till they were outside. Here
were the vicar and his sister waiting to say good-night--the vicar much
chagrined that he had seen so little of his chief hostess, and inclined
to feel that his self-sacrificing attention to Miss Leighton at supper
had been but poorly rewarded. Rachel, however, saw that he was out of
humour, and at once set herself to appease him. And in the few minutes
which elapsed before she parted with him at the gate she had quite
succeeded.

Then she turned to Ellesborough.

"Shall we go up the hill a little?"

They slipped through a side gate of the farmyard, crossed a field, and
found themselves on an old grass road leading gently upward along the
side of the down into the shadow of the woods. The still, warm night held
them enwrapped. Rachel had thrown a white scarf over her head and throat,
which gave a mysterious charm to the face within it. As she strolled
beside her hew friend she played him with all the arts of a woman
resolved to please. And he allowed himself to be handled at her will.
He told her about his people, and his friends, about the ideas and
ambitions, also, with which he had come to Europe, which were now in
abeyance, but were to spring to active life after the war. Forestry on a
great scale; a part to be played in the preservation and development of
the vast forest areas of America which had been so wilfully wasted;
business and patriotism combined; fortune possible; but in any case the
public interest served. He talked shrewdly, but also with ardour and
imagination; she was stirred, excited even; and all the time she liked
the foreignness of his voice, the outline of his profile against the sky,
and all the other elements of his physical presence.

But in the midst of his castle-building he broke off.

"However, I'm a silly fool to talk like this. I'm going out to the front
directly. Perhaps my bullet's waiting for me."

"Oh, no!" she said involuntarily--"no!"

"I hope not. I don't want to die just yet. I want to get married, for one
thing."

He spoke lightly, and she laughed.

"Well, that's easy enough."

He shook his head, but said nothing. They walked on till they reached the
edge of the hill, when Rachel, out of breath, sat down on a fallen log to
rest a little. Below them stretched the hollow upland, with its
encircling woods and its white stubble fields. Far below lay the dark
square of the farm, with a light in one of its windows.

Rachel pointed to the grass road by which they had come.

"We haven't seen the ghost!"

He asked her for the story, and she told it. By now she had pieced it all
together; and it seemed to Ellesborough that it had a morbid fascination
for her.

"He dragged himself down this very path," she said. "They tracked him by
the blood stains; his wounds dripped all along it. And then he fell, just
under my cart-shed. It was a horrible, bitter night. Of course the silly
people here say they hear groans and dragging steps: That's all nonsense,
but I sometimes wish it hadn't happened at my farm."

He couldn't help laughing gently at her foolishness.

"Why, it's a great distinction to have a ghost!"

She disagreed--decidedly.

"Any one can have my ghost that wants. I'm awfully easily scared."

"Are you?" There was a deep note in his voice. "No, I don't believe that.
I'm sure you're a plucky woman. I know you are!"

She laughed out.

"How do you know?"

"Why, no one but a plucky woman could have taken this farm and be working
it as you're doing."

"That's not pluck," she said, half scornfully. "But if it is--well, I've
got plenty of pluck of that kind. But I am often scared, downright
scared, about nothing. It's just fear, that's what it is."

"Fear of what?"

"I don't know."

She spoke in a sombre, shrinking tone, which struck him uncomfortably.
But when he tried further to discover what she meant, she would say
nothing more. He noticed, indeed, that she would often seem to turn the
talk upon herself, only to cut it short again immediately. She offered
him openings, and then he could make nothing of them; so that when they
reached the outskirts of the farm on their return, he had given her all
the main outlines of his own history, and she had said almost nothing of
hers.

But all the same the walk had drawn them much nearer.

He stopped her at the little gate to say,--

"I'm going to ask you again--I want you to write to me when I'm in
France."

And this time she said almost eagerly,--

"Yes, I'll write; indeed I'll write! But you'll come over again before
you go?"

"Rather," he said joyously; "rather! Why, there's a month. You'll be
tired of me before you've done."

A few minutes later she was standing in her own little room, listening to
the retreating rush of his motor-cycle down the road. There was a great
tumult in her mind.

"Am I falling in love with him? Am I--am I?"

But in the dark, when she had put out her light, the cry that shaped
itself in her mind was identical with that sudden misgiving of the
afternoon, when on Ellesborough's arrival she had first heard his voice
downstairs talking to Janet.

"_I wish he knew_!" But this time it was no mere passing qualm. It had
grown into something intense and haunting.

       *       *       *       *       *

On this same September afternoon, a dark-eyed, shabby woman, with a
little girl, alighted at Millsborough Station. They were met by a man who
had been lounging about the station for some time and whose appearance
had attracted some attention. "See him at a distance, and you might take
him for a lord; but get him close, my word!--" said the station-master to
the booking-clerk, with a shrug, implying many things.

"Wouldn't give a bob for his whole blessed turn-out," said the
booking-clerk. "But right you are, when you sort of get the hang of him,
far enough away on the other platform, might be a dook!"

Meanwhile, the man had shouldered some of the bags and parcels brought by
the woman and the child, though hardly his fair share of them; and they
finally reached the exit from the station.

"If you're going into the town, the bus will be here in a few minutes,"
said a porter civilly to the woman. "It'll help you with all those
things."

The man gruffly answered for her that they preferred to walk, and they
started, the woman and the child dragging wearily beside him.

"Now, you've got to be content with what I've found for you," he said to
her roughly as they reached the first houses of the town. "There isn't
scarcely a lodging or a cottage to be had. Partly it's the holidays
still, and partly it's silly folk like you--scared of raids."

"I couldn't go through another winter like last, for Nina's sake," said
the woman plaintively.

"Why, you silly goose, there won't be any raids this winter. I've told
you so scores of times. We've got the upper hand now, and the Boche will
keep his planes at home. But as you won't listen to me, you've got to
have your way, I suppose. Well, I've got you rooms of a sort. They'll
have to do. I haven't got money enough for anything decent."

The woman made no reply, and to the porter idly looking after them they
were soon lost from sight in the gathering dusk of the road.




V


The little town of Millsborough was _en fête_. There was a harvest
festival going on, and the County Agricultural Committee had taken the
opportunity to celebrate the successful gathering of the crops, and the
part taken in it by the woman land-workers under their care. They had
summoned the land lasses from far and wide; in a field on the outskirts
of the town competitions had been in full swing all the morning, and now
there were to be speeches in the market-place, and a final march of land
girls, boy scouts, and decorated wagons to the old Parish Church, where a
service was to be held.

All Millsborough, indeed, was in the streets to look at the procession,
and the crowd was swelled by scores of cadets from a neighbouring camp,
who were good-heartedly keeping the route, and giving a military air to
the show. But the flower-decked wagons were the centre of interest. The
first in the line was really a brilliant performance. It was an old wagon
of Napoleonic days, lent by a farmer, whose forebears had rented the same
farm since William and Mary. Every spoke of the wheels blazed with red
geraniums; there was a fringe of heather along the edge of the cart,
while vegetables, huge marrows, turnips, carrots, and onions dangled from
its sides, and the people inside sat under a nodding canopy of tall and
splendid wheat, mixed with feathery barley. But the passengers were
perhaps the most attractive thing about it. They were four old women in
lilac sunbonnets. They were all over seventy, and they had all worked
bravely in the harvest. The crowd cheered them vociferously, and they
sat, looking timidly out on the scene with smiling eyes and tremulous
lips, their grey hair blowing about their wrinkled, wholesome faces.

Beside the wagon walked a detachment of land girls. One of them was the
granddaughter of one of the old women, and occasionally a word would
pass between them.

"Eh, Bessie, but I'd like to git down! They mun think us old fools,
dizened up this way."

"No, gran; you must ride. You're the very best bit of the show. Why, just
listen how the folk cheer you!"

The old woman sighed.

"I'd like to look at it mysel'," she said with a childish plaintiveness.
But her tall granddaughter, in full uniform, with a rake over her
shoulder, thought this a foolish remark, and made no reply.

In the second wagon, Rachel Henderson in full land-dress--tunic,
knee-breeches, and leggings--stood in the front of the cart, guiding two
white horses, their manes and tails gaily plaited with ribbons, and
scarlet badges on their snowy heads.

"Eh, but yon's a fine woman!" said an old farmer of the humbler sort to
his neighbour. "Yo'll not tell me she's a land lassie?"

"Noa, noa; she's the new farmer at Great End--a proud body, they say, an'
a great hustler! The men say she's allus at 'em. But they don't mind
her neither. She treats 'em well. Them's her two land girls walking
beside."

For Betty and Jenny mounted guard, their harvest rakes on their
shoulders, beside their mistress, who attracted all eyes as she passed,
and knew it. Behind her in the cart sat Janet Leighton; and the two
remaining seats were filled by the Vicar of Ipscombe and Lady Alicia
Shepherd, the wife of the owner of Great End Farm and of the middle-sized
estate to which the farm belonged.

Lady Alicia was a thin woman, with an excitable temperament, to judge
from her restless mouth and eyes, which were never still for a moment.
She was very fashionably dressed and held a lace parasol. The crowd
scarcely recognized her, which annoyed her, for in her own estimation she
was an important member of the Women's Committee which looked after the
land girls. The war had done a great deal for Lady Alicia. It had dragged
her from a sofa, where she was rapidly becoming a neurasthenic invalid,
and had gradually drilled her into something like a working day. She
lived in a flurry of committees; but as committees must exist, and Lady
Alicias must apparently be on them; she had found a sort of vocation, and
with the help of other persons of more weight she had not done badly.

She did not quite understand how it was that she found herself in Miss
Henderson's wagon. The committee had refused to have a wagon of its own,
and the good-natured vicar had arranged it for her. She did not herself
much like Miss Henderson. Her husband had sent her to call upon the new
tenants, and she had been much puzzled. They were ladies, she supposed.
They spoke quite nicely, and Miss Henderson seemed to be the daughter of
a clergyman. But she was afraid they were dreadful Socialists! She had
talked to Miss Henderson about the awful--the _wicked_--wages that the
Brookshire board had just fixed for the labourer.

"My husband says they'll simply crush the life out of farming. We shall
all be ruined, and where will the labourer be then?"

And Miss Henderson had looked quite unpleasant. It was high time, she
said, that the labourer should have enough to live on--_decently_; really
thrown the word at you. And Colonel Shepherd had told his wife that he
understood from Hastings Miss Henderson had raised her wages before the
award of the Wages Board. Well, he only hoped the young woman had got
some money behind her, otherwise she would be finding herself in Queer
Street and he would be whistling for his rent.

The wagons drew up in the centre of the market-place, and the band which
the cadets had brought with them struck up "God Save the King." Lady
Alicia rose at once and nudged her little boy, whom she had brought with
her, to take off his cap. She looked approvingly over the crowd, which
was growing denser and denser every moment. It was so that she really
enjoyed the populace--at a safe distance--and ready to lend itself to the
blandishments of its natural leaders. Where was her husband, Colonel
Shepherd? Of course they would want him to speak at some time in the
proceedings. But she looked for him in vain.

Meanwhile, the speaking was beginning from the first cart. A land girl
who had played a rousing part in the recruiting campaign of the early
summer was speaking in a high voice, clearly heard by the crowd. She
was tall and pretty, and spoke without a sign of hesitation or
self-consciousness. She gloried in the harvest, in the splendid news from
the war, in the growth of the Woman's Land Army. "We've just been proud
to do our bit at home while our boys have been fighting over there.
They'll be home soon, perhaps, and won't we give them a welcome! And
we'll show them the harvest that we've helped to reap--the biggest
harvest that England's ever known!--the harvest that's going to beat the
Boche." The young simple voice flowed on, with its simple story and its
note of enthusiasm, and sometimes of humour. "It's hard work, but we love
it! It's cold work often, but we love it! The horses and the cows and the
pigs--they're naughty often, but they're nice!---yes, the pigs, too. It's
the beasts and the fields and the open air we love!"

Betty looked at Jenny with a grin.

"Jenny!--them pigsties yesterday; d'ye think she's ever cleaned one out?"

"I know she has," said Jenny confidentially. "She's Farmer Green's girl,
out Ralstone way. Ee says there ain't nothing she can't do. Ee don't
want no men while he's got 'er. They offered him soldiers, and ee
wouldn't have 'em."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Silly, sentimental young woman," said a tall man, with a pipe in his
mouth, who had just lounged up to the outskirts of the crowd, from a side
street. "Who's she going to take in here? What's the good of talking
poetry about farming to a lot of country people? A London shop-girl, I
guess. What does she know about it?"

"You bets she knows a lot," said a young man beside him, who, to judge
from his uniform, was one of the Canadians employed at Ralstone camp.
He had been taken with the "sentimental young woman," and was annoyed by
the uncivil remarks of his neighbour. "Wonder what farm she's on?"

"Oh, you know these parts?" said the other, removing his pipe for a
moment and looking down on his companion.

"Well, not exactly." The reply was hesitating. "My grandfather went out
to Canada from a place near here sixty years ago. I used to hear him and
my mother talk about Millsborough."

"Beastly hole!" said the other, replacing his pipe.

"I don't agree with you at all," said the other angrily. "It's as nice a
little town of its size as you'd find anywhere."

The other shrugged his shoulders. A man a few yards off in the crowd
happened at that moment to be looking in the direction of the two
speakers. It was the ticket-collector at the station, enjoying an
afternoon off. He recognized the taller of the two men as the "dook" he
had seen at Millsborough station about a week ago. The man's splendid
carriage and iron-grey head were not to be mistaken--also his cadaverous
and sickly look, and his shabby clothes. The ticket-collector saw that
the man was holding the dark-eyed, "furrin-looking" child by the hand,
which the woman he met had brought down with her. "Furriners," he
supposed, all of them; part of that stream of fugitives from air raids
that had been flowing out of London during the preceding winter, and was
now flowing out again, as the next winter approached, though in less
volume. Every house and lodging in Millsborough was full, prices had gone
up badly, and life in Millsborough was becoming extremely uncomfortable
for its normal inhabitants--"all along o' these panicky aliens!" thought
the ticket-collector, resentfully, as he looked at the tall man.

The tall man, however, was behaving as though the market-place belonged
to him, talking to his neighbours, who mostly looked at him askance, and
every now and then breaking into a contemptuous laugh, provoked
apparently by the eloquence of the young woman in the wagon. Meanwhile
the little girl whose hand he held was trying to pull him into a better
place for seeing the rest of the procession. For from the place where
they stood on the outskirts of the crowd, the foremost wagon with its
nodding wheat and sheaves, its speaker, its old women, and its bodyguard
of girls entirely hid the cart behind it.

"Dis way, pappa, dis way," said the child, dragging him. He let her draw
him, and suddenly from behind the speaker's cart there emerged the second
wagon with its white horses; Rachel Henderson, the observed of all
beholders, standing flushed and smiling, with the reins in her hands, the
vicar just behind her, and Lady Alicia's lace parasol.

"My God!" said the man.

His sudden start, and clutch at the child's hand made the child cry out.
He checked her with a savage word, and while she whimpered unheeded, he
stood motionless, sheltering himself behind a girl with a large hat who
stood in front of him, his eyes fixed on the Great End wagon. A ghastly
white had replaced the patchy red on his cheeks, and had any careful
observer chanced to notice him at the moment, he or she would have been
struck by the expression of his face--as of some evil, startled beast
aware of its enemy, and making ready to spring.

But the expression passed. With a long breath, Roger Delane pulled
himself together.

"Hold your noise, Nina," he said roughly to the child. "If you'll be a
good girl, I'll put you on my shoulder."

The child stopped crying at once, and Delane, raising her on to his
shoulder, pulling his own soft hat over his eyes and placing the child so
that her dress concealed his own features. Then he resumed an excited
scrutiny of the Great End wagon. At the same moment he saw a man in
uniform making his way through the crowd towards Miss Henderson who was
waving to him. An officer--an American officer. Delane recognized at once
the high collar and the leathern peak to the cap.

The crowd had already begun to cheer him. He reached the Great End wagon,
and its mistress, all smiles, bent over to speak to him. She and the
vicar seemed to be giving directions, to which the American with a
laughing shrug assented, going off to the front wagon, evidently in
obedience to orders. There the girl speaker had just sat down amid a
hearty cheer from the crowd; and the chairman of the meeting, a burly
farmer, eagerly came to the side of the wagon, and helped the American
officer into the cart. Then with a stentorian voice the chairman
announced that Captain Ellesborough from Ralstone camp had come "to tell
us what America is doing!" A roar from the crowd. Ellesborough saluted
gaily, and then his hands in his pockets began to talk to them. His
speech, which was a racy summary of all that America was doing to help
the Allies, was delivered to a ringing accompaniment of cheers from the
thronged market-place, rising to special thunder when the captain dwelt
on the wheat and bacon that America was pouring across the Atlantic
to feed a hungry Europe.

"We've tightened our own belts already; we can tighten them, I dare say,
a few holes more. Everybody in America's growing something, and making
something. When a man thinks he's done enough, and wants to rest a bit,
the man next him gets behind him with a bradawl. There's no rest for
anybody. We've just registered _thirteen million_ men. That sounds like
business, doesn't it? No slacking there! Well, we mean business. And you
mean business. And the women mean business."

Then a passage about the women, which set the land girls grinning at each
other, and at the men in the crowd, ending in three cheers for Marshal
Foch and Sir Douglas Haig, which came echoing back from the Fourteenth
Century church and the old houses which ringed the market-place.

All eyes were on the speaker, no one noticed the tall man with the
olive-skinned child on his shoulder. He himself, with thumping pulses,
never ceased to watch the figures and movements in the second wagon. He
saw Miss Henderson sit down and another woman also in tunic and knickers
take her place. He watched her applauding the speaker, or talking with
the clergyman behind her, or the lady with the lace parasol. And when the
speech was over, amid a hurricane of enthusiasm, when the resolution had
been put and carried, and the bells in the old church-tower began to ring
out a deafening joy-peal above the dispersing crowd, he saw the American
officer jump down from the speaker's wagon and return to Miss Henderson.
Steps were brought, and Captain Ellesborough handed out the ladies. Then
he and Rachel Henderson went away side by side, laughing and talking,
towards the porch of the church, where Delane lost them from sight.

The market-place emptied rapidly. The decorated wagons moved off to the
field where the competitions had been held in the morning, and some
of the crowd with them. Another portion streamed into the church, and
soon only a few scattered groups were left.

The tall man put down the child, and was seized with a fit of coughing,
which left him more pallid and sunken-eyed than before. When it was over,
he noticed a group of elderly labourers. They had come late into the
meeting, and were making for the bar of the Cow-roast Inn, but before
they entered it Delane went up to one of them.

"I'm a stranger here," he said carelessly. "Can you tell me who all these
people were in the wagons?"

The man addressed--who was old Halsey--gave the speaker a reconnoitring
look.

"Well, I dunno neither," he said cautiously, "leastways, many of 'em.
There was my old missus, in the first one. She didn't want to go, dressed
up in them sunbonnets. But they made such a fuss of her, she had to.
There was Farmer Broughton I seed, an' I don't know nobody else."

"Well, but the second wagon?" said Delane impatiently.

"Oh, the second wagon. Why, that was Miss Henderson. Don't ye know 'er? I
works for 'er?"

"Is she on the land?"

The old man laughed.

"That she be! She's a farmer, is Miss Henderson, an' she frames pretty
fair. She don't know much yet, but what she don't know Hastings tells,
her."

"Who's Hastings?"

"Why, her bailiff, to be sure. You do be a stranger, not knowin' Muster
Hastings?"

"I'm just here for a few weeks. It's a rum business, isn't it, this of
women taking farms?"

Halsey nodded reflectively.

"Aye, it's a queer business. But they do be cleverer at it than ye'd
think. Miss Henderson's a good head-piece of her own."

"And some money, I suppose?"

"Well, that's not my look out, is it, so long as I gits my wages? I
dessay Colonel Shepherd, ee sees to that. Well, good-day to you. I'm
goin' in to get summat to drink. It's a dryin' wind to-day, and a good
bit walk from Ipscombe."

"Is that where you live?"

"Aye--an' Miss Henderson's place is just t'other side. A good mile to
Ipscombe, and near a mile beyont. I didn't want to come, but my old woman
she nagged me to come an' see her 'ome."

And with another nod, the old man turned into the public, where his mates
were already enjoying the small beer of the moment.

For a few minutes, Delane strolled down the main road in silence, the
child playing at his heels. Then he turned abruptly, called the child,
and went up the side street from which he had appeared when the
meeting began.

A quarter of an hour later he returned to the market-place alone. The
service in the church was still going on. He could hear them singing, the
harvest hymn: "We plough the fields and scatter--The good seed on the
land." But he did not stop to listen. He walked on rapidly in the
direction of Ipscombe.

Delane found the main line from Millsborough to Ipscombe dotted
at intervals with groups of persons returning from the harvest
festival--elderly women with children, a few old labourers, a few
soldiers on leave, with a lively fringe of noisy boys and girls
skirmishing round and about their elders, like so many young animals on
the loose. The evening light was failing. The pools left by a passing
shower, gleamed along the road, and the black elms and oaks, scarcely
touched as yet by autumn gold, stood straight and sharp against a rainy
sky.

The tall, slouching man scrutinized the various groups as he passed them,
as though making up his mind whether to address them or not. He wore a
shabby greatcoat, warmer than the day demanded, and closely buttoned
across the chest. The rest of his dress, felt hat, dark trousers, and tan
boots, had all of it come originally from expensive shops, but was now
only just presentable. The one thing in good condition about him was the
Malacca cane he carried, which had a carved jade handle, and was
altogether out of keeping with his general appearance.

All the same there was something striking in that appearance. Face,
figure and dress represented the wreck of more than one kind of
distinction. The face must once have been exceptionally handsome, before
an underlying commonness and coarseness had been brought out or
emphasized by developments of character and circumstance. The mouth was
now loose and heavy. The hazel eyes had lost their youth, and were
disfigured by the premature wrinkles of either ill-health or dissipation.
None the less, a certain carriage of the head and shoulders, a certain
magnificence in the whole general outline of the man, especially in the
defiant eyes and brow, marked him out from the crowd, and drew attention
of strangers.

Many persons looked at him, as he at them, while he swung slowly along
the road. At last he crossed over towards an elderly man in company with
a young soldier, who was walking lamely with a stick.

"Excuse me," he said, formally, addressing the elder man, "but am I right
for Ipscombe?"

"That you are, muster. The next turnin' to the right'll bring yer to it."
Peter Betts looked the stranger over as he spoke, with an inquisitive
eye.

"You've come from the meeting, I suppose?"

"Ay. We didn't go to the service. That worn't in our line. But we heerd
the speeches out o' doors."

"The carts were fine!--especially the second one."

"Ay--that's our missis. She and the two girls done the dressin' o' the
cart."

"What's her name?"

"Well, her name's Henderson," said the old man, speaking with an amiable,
half careless detachment, the manner rather of a philosopher than a
gossip.

"She's the farmer's wife?"

"Noa, she ain't. She's the farmer herself--'at's what she is. She's took
the farm from Colonel Shepherd--she did--all on her own. To be sure
there's Miss Leighton as lives with her. But it do seem to me as Miss
Henderson's--as you might say--the top 'un. And me an' James Halsey works
for her."

"_Miss_ Henderson? She's not married?"

"Not she!" said old Betts emphatically. "She's like a lot o' women
nowadays, I guess. They doan't want to be married."

"Perhaps nobody 'as wanted to marry 'em, dad!" said his elder son,
grinning at his own stale jest.

Betts shook a meditative head.

"Noa--yo'll not explain it that way," he said mildly. "Some of 'em's
good-looking--Miss Henderson 'ersel', by token. A very 'andsome
up-standin' young woman is Miss Henderson."

Delane followed all these remarks with close attention, and continued a
rather skilful examination. He learnt that Great End was a farm of about
two hundred and fifty acres, that Miss Henderson seemed to have "lots o'
money," and had sold her autumn crops very well, that Miss Leighton
managed the stock and the dairy with the help of two land-girls, and it
was thought by the village that the two ladies "was doin' fine."

Arrived at the village, Betts turned into his cottage, with a nod to his
companion, and Delane went on his way.

The lane on the farther side of the village was dark under branching
trees. Delane stumbled along it, coughing at intervals, and gripped by
the rising chill of the September evening. A little beyond the trees he
caught sight of the farm against the hill. Yes, it was lonesome, as the
old man said, but a big, substantial-looking place. Rachel's place! And
Rachel had "lots o' money"--and as to her health and well-being, why the
sight of her on that cart was enough. That vision of her indeed--of the
flushed, smiling face under the khaki hat, of the young form in the trim
tunic and leggings, and, not least, of the admiring crowd about her, kept
returning upon the man's furious sense as something not to be borne, a
recurrent blow from which he could not escape.

And that American chap--that Yankee officer who had walked off with her
to the church--what was the meaning of that? They were not strangers,
that was plain. She had beckoned to him from the cart. The manner of
their short conversation, indeed, showed them well acquainted. She told
him to go and speak--and he had gone--with alacrity--smiling back at her.
Courting, no doubt! Rachel could never let a man alone--or live, without
a man after her. A brutal phrase shaped itself--a vile epithet or
two--flung into the solitude of the lane.

When he emerged from the trees into a space of greater light between two
stubble fields, Delane suddenly drew a letter from his pocket. While
Rachel was flaunting with "lots of money"--this was how his affairs were
going.

"DEAR ROGER,--I can do nothing for you. Your demands are simply
insatiable. If you write me any more begging letters, or if you attempt
again to force your way into my house as you did last week, I shall tell
the bank to cancel your allowance, and wash my hands of you altogether.
My husband's determined to stop this kind of thing. Don't imagine you can
either threaten us, or come round us. We have tried again and again to
help and reform you. It is no good--and now we give you up. You have
worn us out. If you are wise, you will not answer this--and if you keep
quiet the allowance shall be continued. MARIANNE TILNEY."

That was a nice letter to get from a man's only sister! Allowance! What
was £100 a year to a woman as rich as Marianne? And what was the use
of £100 a year to him, with living at the price it was now? His wretched
pittance besides, doled out to him by his father's trustees under his
father's will, brought his whole income up to £300 a year. How was a man
to live on that, and support a woman and child?

And here was Rachel--free--bursting with health--and possessed of "lots
of money." She thought, no doubt, that she had done with him--thrust him
out of her life altogether. He'd let her see! Whose fault was it that he
had taken up with Anita? Nagging, impossible creature!--with her fine
ladyisms and her tempers, and her insolent superior ways!

He walked on, consumed with a bitterness which held him like a physical
anguish. By now he had reached the farm gate. The sunset had cleared and
deepened. Great rosy thunder-clouds topped the down, and strong lights
were climbing up the bronzed masses of wood behind the house. No one to
be seen. At Millsborough they could hardly be out of church yet. He had
time before him. He walked cautiously up the farm-lane, diverging to the
left as he reached the buildings so as to escape the notice of any one
who might be left in charge. As he slipped under the large cart-shed
which backed on the cow-house, he heard somebody whistling inside. It was
old Halsey, who had done the afternoon milking in the absence of the
girls. Delane could hear the movements of the labourer, and the munching
of the cows. A little farther on was the stable, and two horses' heads,
looking pensively out from the open half of the door. Delane peered into
the stable with the eye of one to whom all farming matters were familiar.
Three fine horses--d---d fine horses!--must have cost £100 a piece at
least. No doubt the cows were equally good stuff. And he had noticed
under the outer cart-shed a brand-new reaper and binder, and other farm
implements and machines of the best quality. Rachel was doing the thing
in style.

But where was the farm-house? Then as he crept round the third side of
the rough quadrangle, he became aware of a large window with white
curtains. Looking through it with his face against the glass, he was
startled to find that he was looking straight into the farm-yard through
another window of equal size on the other side of the room. And at the
moment Halsey came out of the cow-shed carrying a pail of milk in either
hand. Delane drew hastily back into the shelter of an old holly that grew
against the wall, till the old man had disappeared. Then he eagerly
examined the room, which was still suffused by the sunset. Its prettiness
and comfort were so many fresh exasperations. He contrasted it inwardly
with the wretched lodging from which he had just come. Why, he knew the
photographs on the walls--her father, the old parson, and her puritanical
mother, whom Rachel had always thrown in his teeth. Her eldest brother,
too, who had been drowned at sea. And that engraving--that sentimental
thing by Watts, "Love and Death," that Rachel had bought once on a visit
to Toronto, and he had scolded her for buying. There it was, as large as
life. How did it come there? Was it her property or his? He believed he
could claim it, if he chose. Gad!--what would she say if she knew where
he was at that moment, and what he was doing!

For eighteen months she had hidden herself so cleverly that he had
entirely lost sight of her. When her lawyers communicated with him in the
spring they had been careful to give no address. On the whole he had
believed her to be still in Canada. She, on the other hand, unless she
were a greater fool than he thought her, _must_ have guessed that he
would get back to England somehow. Why, the farm had ended in bankruptcy,
and what else was there to do but to come home and dun his relations!
Yet she had not been afraid to come home herself, and set up in this
conspicuous way. She supposed, of course, that she had done with him for
good--kicked him off like an old shoe! The rage in his blood set his
heart beating to suffocation. Then his cough seized him again. He stifled
it as best he could, flattened against the wall, in the shadow of a
yew-tree.

The sound, however, was apparently heard, for there were rapid steps
across the farm-yard, and a gate opened. "Hallo--who's there?" The voice
was, no doubt, that of the labourer he had seen. Delane slipped
noiselessly along the wall, and to the back of the stables, till all was
quiet again within the farm.

But outside in the road there were persons approaching. He mounted the
hill a little way into the shelter of the trees which covered the steep
face of the down, and ran up into the great woods along the crest.
Through the gathering dusk he saw the large farm-cart clattering up the
lane with several figures in it. The cart carried lamps, which sent
shafts of light over the stubbles. There was a sound of talk and
laughter, and alongside the cart he saw a man leading a motor-bicycle,
and apparently talking to the women in the cart. A man in uniform.
The American, no doubt!

The cart drew up at the farm-yard gates, and the old labourer came to
open them. Everybody dismounted, except one of the girls, who, standing
in the wagon, drove the horses. Then, for a time, Delane could see
nothing more. The farm quadrangle had absorbed the party. Occasionally a
light flashed, or a voice could be heard calling, or laughter came
floating up the hill through an open door or window. But in a little
while all was silence.

Delane sat down on a fallen trunk, and watched. All kinds of images were
rushing through his brain--wide wheat fields with a blazing sun on the
stooks--a small frame house set nakedly on the flat prairie with a bit of
untidy garden round it--its living room in winter, with a huge fire, and
a woman moving about--the creek behind it, and himself taking horses down
to water. They were images of something that had once meant happiness and
hope--a temporary break or interlude in a dismal tale which had closed
upon it before and after.

Darkness came down. The man on the hill said to himself, "Now they are
having supper," and he crept down again to the farm, and crouching and
wriggling along he made his way again to the big window, over which the
curtains had been drawn. There was no one in the sitting-room, however,
to judge from the silence, but from the kitchen across the passage came a
rush of voices, together with a clatter of plates. The kitchen looked out
on the front of the farm, and a wooden shutter had been fastened across
the window. But the wood of the shutter was old and full of chinks, and
Delane, pressing his face to the window, was able to get just a glimpse
of the scene within--Rachel at the head of the table, the man in uniform
beside her--three other women. A paraffin lamp threw the shadow of the
persons at the table sharply on the white distempered wall. There were
flowers on the table, and the meal wore a home-like and tempting air to
the crouching spy outside. Rachel smiled incessantly, and it seemed to
Delane that the handsome man beside her could not take his eyes from her.
Nor could Delane. Her brown head and white throat, her soft, rose-tinted
face emerging from the black dress, were youth itself--a vision of youth
and lusty-hood brilliantly painted on the white wall.

Delane looked his fill. Then he dropped down the bank on which the farm
stood, and avoiding the open track through the fields, he skirted a hedge
which led down to the road, and was lost in the shadows of advancing
night.




VI


Rain!--how it pelted the September fields day after day and week after
week, as though to remind a world still steeped in, still drunk with the
most wonderful of harvests, that the gods had not yet forgotten their old
jealousy of men, and men's prosperity. Whenever a fine day came the early
ploughing and seeding was in full swing, and Rachel on one side of the
largest field could watch the drill at work, and on the other the harrow
which covered in the seed. In the next field, perhaps, she would find
Betty and Jenny lifting potatoes, and would go to help with them, digging
and sorting, till every limb ached and she seemed to be a part herself of
the damp brown earth that she was robbing of its treasure. For a time
when the harvest was done, when the ricks were thatched ready for
threshing, there had been a moment of ease. But with the coming of
October, the pressure began again. The thought of the coming frost and of
all those greedy mouths of cattle, sheep, and horses to be filled through
the winter, drove and hunted the workers on Great End Farm, as they have
driven and hunted the children of earth since tilling and stock-keeping
began. Under the hedges near the house, the long potato caves had been
filled and covered in; the sheep were in the turnips, and every two or
three days, often under torrents of rain, Rachel and the two girls must
change the hurdles, and put the hungry, pushing creatures on to fresh
ground. On the top of the down, there was fern to be cut and carted for
the winter fodder, and fallen wood to be gathered for fuel, under the
daily threats of the coal-controller.

Rachel worked hard and long. How she loved the life that once under other
skies and other conditions she had loathed! Ownership and command had
given her a new dignity, in a sense a new beauty. Her labourers and her
land girls admired and obeyed her, while--perhaps!--Janet Leighton had
their hearts. Rachel's real self seemed to be something that no one knew;
her companions were never quite at ease with her; and yet her gay,
careless ways, the humanity and natural fairness of her mind, carried a
spell that made her rule sit light upon them.

Yes!--after all these weeks together, not even Janet knew her much
better. The sense of mystery remained; although the progress of the
relation between her and Ellesborough was becoming very evident, not only
indeed to Janet, but to everybody at the farm. His departure for France
had been delayed owing to the death in action of the officer who was to
have been sent home to replace him. It might be a month now before he
left. Meanwhile, every Sunday he spent some hours at the farm, and
generally on a couple of evenings in the week he would arrive just after
supper, help to put the animals to bed, and then stay talking with Rachel
in the sitting-room, while Janet tidied up in the kitchen. Janet, the
warm-hearted, had become much attached to him. He had been at no pains to
hide the state of his feelings from her. Indeed, though he had said
nothing explicit, his whole attitude to Rachel's friend and partner was
now one of tacit appeal for sympathy. And she was more than ready to
give it. Her uprightness, and the touch of austerity in her, reached
out to similar qualities in him; and the intellectual dissent which she
derived from her East Anglican forbears, from the circles which in
eighteenth-century Norwich gathered round Mrs. Opie, the Martineaus, and
the Aldersons, took kindly to the same forces in him; forces descended
from that New England Puritanism which produced half the great men--and
women--of an earlier America. Rachel laughed at them for 'talking
theology,' not suspecting that as the weeks went on they talked--whenever
they got a chance--less and less of theology, and more and more of
herself, through the many ingenious approaches that a lover invents and
the amused and sympathetic friend abets.

For clearly Ellesborough was in love. Janet read the signs of it in the
ease with which he had accepted the postponement of his release from the
camp, eager as he was to get to the fighting line. She heard it in his
voice, saw it in his eyes; and she was well aware that Rachel saw it.
What Rachel thought and felt was more obscure. She watched for
Ellesborough; she put on her best frocks for him; she was delighted to
laugh and talk with him. But she watched for Mr. Shenstone, too, and
would say something caustic or impatient if he were two or three days
without calling. And when he called, Rachel very seldom snubbed him, as
at first. She was all smiles; the best frocks came out for him, too; and
Janet, seeing the growing beatitude of the poor vicar, and the growing
nervousness of his sister, was often inclined to be really angry with
Rachel. But they were not yet on such terms as would allow her to
remonstrate with what seemed to her a rather unkind bit of flirtation;
seeing that she did not believe that Rachel had, or ever would have, a
serious thought to give the shallow, kindly little man.

But though she held her tongue, Janet showed her feeling sometimes by a
tone, or a lifted eyebrow, and then Rachel would look at her askance,
turning the vicar's head none the less on the next occasion. Was it that
she was deceiving herself, as well as trying, very unsuccessfully, to
deceive the lookers-on? The progress of the affair with Ellesborough made
on Janet a curious and rather sinister impression, which she could hardly
explain to herself. She seemed to see that Ellesborough's suit steadily
advanced; that Rachel made no real attempt to resist his power over her.
But all the same there was no happy, spontaneous growth in it. Rachel
seemed to take her increasing subjection hardly, to be fighting obscurely
against it all the time, as though she were hampered by thought and
motives unknown to the other two. Ellesborough, Janet thought, was often
puzzled by the cynical or bitter talk with which Rachel would sometimes
deliberately provoke him. And yet it was clear that he possessed the
self-confidence of a strong man, and did not really doubt his ultimate
power to win and hold the woman he was courting.

One bitterly cold evening at the very end of September, Ellesborough,
arriving at the farm, was welcomed by Janet, and told that all hands were
in the fields "clamping" potatoes. She herself left a vegetable stew
ready for supper, safely simmering in a hay-box, and walked towards the
potato field with Ellesborough. On the way they fell in with Hastings,
the bailiff, who was walking fast, and seemed to be in some excitement.

"Miss Leighton--that old fool Halsey has given notice!"

Janet stopped in dismay. Halsey was a valuable man, an old-fashioned
labourer of many aptitudes, equally good as a woodman, as an expert in
"fagging" or sickling beaten-down corn, as a thatcher of roofs or ricks,
as a setter of traps for moles, or snares for rabbits. Halsey was the
key-stone of the farm labour. Betts was well enough. But without Halsey's
intelligence to keep him straight--Janet groaned.

"What on earth's the matter, Hastings? We raised his wages last week--and
we did it before the county award was out!"

Hastings shook his head.

"It's not wages. He says he's seen the ghost!"

Janet exclaimed, and Ellesborough laughed.

"What, the defunct gamekeeper?"

Hastings nodded.

"Vows he's seen him twice--once on the hill--on the green path--and once
disappearing round the corner of the farm. He declares that he called to
the man--who was like nobody he had ever seen before--and the man took no
notice, but went along, all hunched up--as they say the ghost is--and
talking to himself--till all of a sudden he vanished. I've argued with
him. But nothing'll hold him--old idiot! He vows he'll go---and if he
talks to the others they'll all go."

"Has he gone home?" asked Janet.

"Long ago. He left the horses to Jenny, and just marched off. In the lane
he met me, and gave notice. Such a cock-and-bull story as you never
heard! But I couldn't do anything with him."

"I'll go and tackle him," said Janet at once. "We can't lose him. The
work will go to smash."

She waved a farewell to Ellesborough, and ran back to the house. The
others, watching, saw her emerge on her bicycle and disappear towards the
village.

"Well, if anybody can move the old fellow, I suppose it's Miss Leighton,"
said Hastings disconsolately. "She's always managed to get the right side
of him so far. But I'm nearly beat, captain! Things are getting too hard
for me. You can't say a word to these men--they're off in a moment. And
the wages!--it's sinful!"

"We're supposed only to be fighting a war, Hastings," said Ellesborough
with a smile as they walked on together. "But all the time there's
revolution going on beside it--all over the world!"

Hastings made a face.

"Right you are, captain. And how's it going to work out?"

"Don't ask me!" laughed Ellesborough--"we've all got to sit tight and
hope for the best. All I know is that the people who work with their
hands are going to get a bit of their own back from the people who work
with their heads--or their cheque-books. And I'm glad of it! But ghosts
are a silly nuisance. However, I dare say Miss Leighton will get round
the old man."

Hastings looked doubtful.

"I don't know. All the talk about the murder has come up again. They say
there's a grandson come home of the man that was suspected sixty years
ago--John Dempsey. And some people tell me that this lad had the whole
story of the murder from his grandfather--who confessed it--only last
year, when the man died."

"Well, if he's dead all right, and has owned up to it, why on earth does
the ghost make a fuss?"

Hastings shook his head.

"People get talking," he said gloomily. "And when they get talking,
they'll believe anything--and see anything. It'll be the girls next."

Ellesborough tried to cheer him, but without much success. The "poor
spirit" of the bailiff was a perpetual astonishment to the American, in
the prime of his own life and vigour. Existence for Hastings was always
either drab or a black business. If the weather was warm, "a bit of cold
would ha' been better": if a man recovered from an illness, he'd still
got the "bother o' dyin' before him." He was certain we should lose the
war, and the rush of the September victories did not affect him. And if
we didn't lose it, no matter--prices and wages would still be enough to
ruin us. Rachel grew impatient under the constant drench of pessimism.
Janet remembered that the man was a delicate man, nearing the sixties,
with, as she suspected, but small provision laid up for old age; with an
ailing wife; and bearing the marks in body and spirit of years of
overwork. She never missed an opportunity of doing him a kindness; and
the consequence was that Hastings, always faithful, even to his worst
employers, was passionately faithful to his new mistresses, defending
them and fighting for their interests, as they were sometimes hardly
inclined to fight for themselves.

After showing Ellesborough the way to the "clamps," Hastings left him. In
succession to the long days of rain there had been a sudden clearing in
the skies. The day had been fine, and now, towards sunset, there was a
grand massing of rosy cloud along the edge of the down, and windy lights
over the valley. Rachel, busy with the covering of the potato "clamps,"
laid down the bundle of bracken she had been handing to Peter Betts, and
came quickly to meet her visitor. Her working dress was splashed with
mire from neck to foot, and coils of brown hair had escaped from her
waterproof cap, and hung about her brilliant cheeks. She looked happy,
but tired.

"Such a day!" she said, panting, as they met. "The girls and I began at
six this morning--lifting and sorting. It was so important to get them
in. Now they're safe if the frost does come. It's a jolly crop!"

Ellesborough looked at her, and her eyes wavered before the ardour in
his.

"I say! You work too hard! Haven't you done enough? Come and rest."

She nodded. "I'll come!"

She ran to say a word to the others and rejoined him.

They went back to the farm, not talking much, but conscious through every
nerve of the other's nearness. Rachel ran upstairs to change her dress,
and Ellesborough put the fire together, and shut the windows. For the sun
had sunk behind the hill, and a bitter wind was rising. When Rachel came
down again, the wood-fire glowed and crackled, the curtains drawn, and
she stared in astonishment at a small tea-tray beside the fire.

Ellesborough hurriedly apologized.

"I found some boiling water in the kettle, and I know by now where Miss
Janet keeps her tea."

"Janet brought us tea to the field."

"I dare say she did. That was four--this is six. You felt cold just now.
You looked cold. Be good, and take it easy!" He pointed to the only
comfortable chair, which he had drawn up to the fire.

"Are you sure it boiled?" she said sceptically, as she sank into her
chair, her eyes dancing. "No man knows when a kettle boils."

"Try it! For five winters on the Saguenay, I made my own tea--and baked
my own bread. Men are better cooks than women when they give their minds
to it!" He brought her the cup, hot and fragrant, and she sipped it in
pure content while he stood smiling above her, leaning against the
mantelpiece.

"I wanted to see you," he said presently. "I've just got my marching
orders. Let's see. This is October. I shall have just a month. They've
found another man to take over this job, but he can't come till
November."

"And--peace?" said Rachel, looking up.

For Prince Max of Baden had just made his famous peace offer of October
5th, and even in rural Brookshire there was a thrilling sense of opening
skies, of some loosening of those iron bonds in which the world had lain
for four years.

"There will be no peace!" said Ellesborough with sudden energy, "so long
as there is a single German soldier left in Belgium or France!"

She saw him stiffen from head to foot--and thrilled to the flame of
avenging will that suddenly possessed him. The male looked out upon her,
kindling--by the old, old law--the woman in her.

"And if they don't accept that?"

"Then the war will go on," he said briefly, "and I shall be in for the
last lap!"

His colour changed a little. She put down her cup and bent over the fire,
warming her hands.

"If it does go on, it will be fiercer than ever."

"Very likely. If our fellows set the pace there'll be no dawdling.
America's white hot."

"And you'll be in it?"

"I hope so," he said quietly.

There was a pause. Then he, looking down upon her, felt a sudden and
passionate joy invade him--joy which was also longing--longing
irresistible. His mind had been wrestling with many scruples and
difficulties during the preceding days. Ought he to speak--on the eve of
departure--or not? Would she accept him? Or was all her manner and
attitude towards him merely the result of the new freedom of women?
Gradually but surely his mounting passion had idealized her. Not only
her personal ways and looks had become delightful to him, but the
honourable, independent self in him had come to feel a deep admiration
for and sympathy with her honourable independence, for these new powers
in women that made them so strong in spite of their weakness. She had
become to him not only a woman but a heroine. His whole heart approved
and admired her when he saw her so active, so competent, so human. And
none the less the man's natural instinct hungered to take her in his
arms, to work for her, to put her back in the shelter of love and
home--ith her children at her knee....

And how domestic was this little scene in which they stood--the
firelight, the curtained room, the tea-things, her soft, bending form,
with the signs of labour put away!...

The tears rushed to his eyes. He bent over her, and spoke her name,
almost unconsciously.

"Rachel!"

His soul was in the name!

She started, and looked up. While he had been thinking only of her, her
thoughts had gone wandering--far away. And they seemed to have brought
back--not the happy yielding of a woman to her lover--but distress and
fear. A shock ran through him.

"Rachel!--" He held out his hands to her. He could not find words, but
his eyes spoke, and the agitation in every feature.

But she drew back.

"Don't--don't say anything--till--"

His look held her--the surprise in it--the tender appeal. She could not
take hers from it. But the disturbance in him deepened. For in the face
she raised to him there was no flood of maidenly joy. Suddenly--her eyes
were those of a culprit examining her judge. A cry sprang to his lips.

"Wait!--wait!" she said piteously.

She fell back in her chair, covering her face, her breast heaving. He saw
that she was trying to command herself, to steady her voice. One of those
forebodings which are the children of our half-conscious observation shot
through him. But he would not admit it.

He stooped over her and tried again to take her hand. But she drew it
away, and sat up in her chair. She was very white, and there were tears
in her eyes.

"I've got something to say to you," she said, with evident difficulty,
"which--I'm afraid--will surprise you very much. Of course I ought to
have told you--long ago. But I'm a coward, and--and--it was all so
horrible. I am not what you suppose me. I'm--a married woman--at least I
was. I divorced my husband--eighteen months ago. I'm quite free now. I
thought if you really cared about me--I should of course have to tell you
some time--but I've been letting it go on. It was very wrong of me--I
know it was very wrong!"

And bowing her face on her knees, she burst into a passion of weeping,
the weeping of a child who was yet a woman. The mingled immaturity and
intensity of her nature found its expression in the very abandonment of
her tears.

Ellesborough, too, had turned pale. He was astounded by what
she said. His thoughts rushed back over the six weeks of their
friendship--recalling his first impressions of something mysterious
and unexplained.

But of late, he had entirely forgotten them. She had talked so frankly
and simply of her father and mother--of her father's missionary work in
Canada, and her early journeys with him; and of her brother in Ontario,
his children and his letters. Once she had handed him a letter from this
brother to read, and he had been struck by the refined and affectionate
tone of it. Here were the same family relations as his own. His heart,
his taste were satisfied. If Rachel Henderson accepted him he would be
bringing his mother a daughter she would find it easy to love.

And all the time--instead of an unmarried girl, with the experiences
of love and marriage before her--she had been already married--and
divorced! Another man had loved and possessed her--and even if she were
innocent--but of course she was innocent!--there must be some ugly story
involved.

He tried to collect his thoughts--but all his consciousness seemed to be
bruised and in pain. He could only put his hand on her hair, and say
incoherent things,--

"Don't cry so, dear--don't cry!"

And even as he spoke he felt with bewilderment how--in a moment--their
respective attitudes had changed. She checked her sobs.

"Sit there!" she said, pointing peremptorily to a seat opposite. Then she
looked round her.

"Where is Janet?"

"She went to the village."

Rachel dried her eyes, and with trembling hands smoothed her hair back
from her face.

"I'll try and tell it shortly. It's a horrible tale."

"Do you feel able to tell it?"

For he was aghast at her pallor--the alteration in her whole aspect.

"I must," she wailed. "Weren't you--weren't you just going to ask me to
marry you?"

Strange question!--strange frowning eyes!

"I was," he said gravely. "Didn't you know I should?"

"No, no, I didn't know!" she said piteously. "I was never _sure_--till
you looked at me then. I wouldn't be sure!"

He said nothing. Speech was ice-bound till he had heard what she had to
say.

"It all began to happen three years ago," she said hurriedly, hiding her
face from him with her hand while she hung over the fire. "I was living
with my brother, who was then near Winnipeg. He offered me a home after
my father died. But he was married, and I didn't get on with his wife. I
dare say it was my fault, but I wasn't happy, and I wanted to get away.
Then a man--an Englishman--bought the next section to us, and we began
to know him. He was a gentleman--he'd been to Cambridge--his father had
some land and a house in Lincolnshire. But he was the third son, and
he'd been taught land agency, he said, as a training for the colonies.
That was all we knew. He was very good-looking, and he began courting me.
I suppose I was proud of his being a University man--a public school boy,
and all that. He told me a lot of stories about his people, and his
money--most of which were lies. But I was a fool--and I believed them. My
brother tried to stop it. Well, you know from his letters what sort of
man he is," and again she brushed the sudden tears away. "But his wife
made mischief, and I was set on having a place of my own. So I stuck to
it--and married him."

She rose abruptly from her seat and began to move restlessly about the
room, taking up a book or her knitting from the table, and putting them
down again, evidently unconscious of what she was doing. Ellesborough
waited. His lean, sharply-cut face revealed a miserable, perhaps an
agonized suspense. This crisis into which she had plunged him so suddenly
was bringing home to him all that he had at stake. That she mattered to
him so vitally he had never known till this moment.

"What's the good of going into it!" she said at last desperately. "You
can guess--what it means"--a sudden crimson rushed to her cheeks--"to
be tied to a man--without honour--or principle--or refinement--who
presently seemed to me vile all through--in what he said--or what he did.
And I was at his mercy. I had married him in such a hurry he had a right
to despise me, and he used it! And when I resisted and turned against
him, then I found out what his temper meant." She raised her shoulders
with a gesture which needed no words. "Well--we got on somehow till my
little girl was born--"

Ellesborough started. Rachel turned on him her sad, swimming eyes. But
the mere mention of her child had given her back her dignity and strength
to go on. She became visibly more composed, as she stood opposite to him,
her beautiful dark head against the sunset clouds outside.

"She only lived a few weeks. Her death was largely owing to him. But
that's a long story. And after her death I couldn't stand it any more. I
ran away. And soon I heard that he had taken up with an Italian girl.
There was a large camp of Italians on the C.P.R., quite close to us. She
was the daughter of one of the foremen. So then my brother made me go to
his lawyers in Winnipeg. We collected evidence very easily. I got my
divorce eighteen months ago. The decree was made absolute last February.
So, of course, I'm quite free--quite--_quite_ free!"

She spoke the last words almost savagely, and after them she moved away
to the window looking on the down, and stood gazing through it, as though
she had forgotten Ellesborough's presence.

"The action was not defended?" he asked, in a low voice.

She shook her head without speaking. But after a minute she added,--

"I can show you the report."

There was silence. Ellesborough turned round, put his hands on the
mantelpiece, and buried his face on them. Presently she approached him,
looked at him with a quivering lip, and said in broken sentences,--

"It has all come so suddenly--hasn't it? I had been in such good
spirits to-day, not thinking of those horrible things at all. I don't
know what I meant to do, if you did ask me--for of course I knew you
_might_. I suppose I intended to put off telling you--so as to be sure
first--_certain_--that you loved me. And then--somehow--when you looked
down on me like that, I felt--that _I_ cared--much more than I had
thought I cared--too much to let you speak--before you knew--before I'd
told you. It's always been my way--to--put off disagreeable things. And
so I thought I could put this off. But every night I have been awake
thinking--'if only he knew!'--and I was wretched--for a while--because
you didn't know. But then it went away again--and I forgot it. One does
forget things--everything--when one is hard at work. But I'm awfully
sorry. And now--I think--we'd better say good-bye."

Her voice faltered against her will. He raised himself quickly.

"No--no," he said passionately, "we won't say good-bye. But you must let
me think--for you, as well as for myself."

"It would be better to say good-bye," she persisted. "I'm afraid--you
expect in me--what I haven't got. I see that now. Because I'm keen about
this work, and I can run this farm, you think--perhaps--I'm a strong
character. But I'm not. I've no judgment--not in moral things. I give
in--I'm weak--and then--I could kill myself!"

She had grown very white again--and her eyes were strangely fixed on him.
The words seemed to him incoherent, out of touch somehow even with their
tragic conversation. But his first passing bewilderment was lost in pity
and passion. He stopped, took her hand, and kissed it. He came nearer.

But again she drew back.

"There's Janet!" she said, "we can't talk any more."

For she had caught sight of Janet in the farm-yard, leading her bicycle.

"Can you meet me to-morrow evening--on the Common?" he said. "I could be
there about six."

She frowned a little.

"Is it worth while?"

"I beg you!" he said huskily.

"Very well--I'll come. We shall be just friends, please."

"But, of course, I'll tell you more--if you wish."

Janet's voice and step were heard in the passage. How Ellesborough got
through the next ten minutes he never remembered. When they were over, he
found himself rushing through the cool and silence of the autumn night,
thankful for this sheltering nature in which to hide his trouble, his
deep, deep distress.




VII


The October night rang stormily round Great End Farm. The northwest wind
rushing over the miniature pass just beyond the farm, where the road
dropped from the level of the upland in which Ipscombe lay, to the level
of the plain, was blowing fiercely on the square of buildings which stood
naked and undefended against weather from that quarter of the heaven,
while protected by the hills and the woods from the northeast. And
mingled with the noisy or wailing gusts came the shrieking from time to
time of one of the little brown owls that are now multiplying so fast in
the English midlands.

The noise of the storm and the clamour of the owl were not the cause of
Rachel's wakefulness; but they tended to make it more feverish and
irritable. Every now and then she would throw off the bed-clothes, and
sit up with her hands round her knees, a white and rigid figure lit by
the solitary candle beside her. Then again she would feel the chill of
the autumn night, and crouch down shivering among the bed-clothes, pining
for a sleep that would not come. Instead of sleep, she could do nothing
but rehearse the scene with Ellesborough again and again. She watched the
alterations in his face--she heard the changes in his voice--as she told
her story. She was now as sorry for him as for herself! The tears came
flooding into her eyes as she thought of him. In her selfish fears of his
anger she had forgotten his suffering. But the first true love of her
life was bringing understanding. She realized the shock to him, and wept
over it. She saw, too, that she had been unjust and cowardly in letting
the situation go so far without speaking; and that there was no real
excuse for her.

Would he give her up? She had told him that all was at an end between
them; but that was only pride--making a virtue of a necessity. Oh, no,
no, he must not give her up! It was only six weeks since their first
meeting, and though it would be untrue to say that since the meeting he
had wholly possessed her thoughts, she had been capable all through them
of that sort of dallying with the vicar which Janet thought unkind. She
had been able to find plenty of mind for her work, and for the ambitions
of her new profession, and had spent many a careless hour steeped in the
sheer physical pleasure of the harvest. Yet, from the beginning, his
personality had laid its grip on hers. She had never been able to forget
him for long. One visit from him was no sooner over than she was
calculating on and dreaming of the next. And as the consciousness
of some new birth in her had grown, and sudden glimpses had come to her
of some supreme joy, possibly within her grasp, so fear had grown, and
anxiety. She looked back upon her past, and knew it stained--knew that it
must at some point rise as an obstacle between her and him.

But how great an obstacle? She was going to tell him, faithfully,
frankly, all the story of her marriage--accuse her own rash self-will in
marrying Delane, confess her own failings as a wife; she would tell no
hypocritical tale. She would make it plain that Roger had found in her no
mere suffering saint, and that probably her intolerance and impatience
had contributed to send him to damnation. But, after all, when it was
told, what could Ellesborough do but pity her?--take her in his arms--and
comfort her--for those awful years--and her lost child?

The tears rained down her cheeks. He loved her! She was certain of that.
When he had once heard the story, he could not forsake her! She already
saw the pity in his deep grey eyes; she already felt his honest,
protecting arms about her.

Ah--_but then_? Beyond that imagined scene, which rose, as though
it were staged, before her, Rachel's shrinking eyes, in the windy
darkness, seemed to be penetrating to another--a phantom scene in a dim
distance--drawn not from the future, but the past. Two figures moved in
it. One was herself. The other was not Roger Delane.

The brown owl seemed to be shrieking just outside her window. Her
nerves quivered under the sound as though it were her own voice. Why was
life so cruel, so miserable? Why cannot even the gods themselves make
undone what is done? She was none the worse--permanently--for what had
happened in that distant scene--that play within a play? How was she the
worse? She was "not a bad woman!"--as she had said so passionately to
Janet, when they joined hands. There was no lasting taint left in mind
and soul--nothing to prevent her being a pure and faithful wife to George
Ellesborough, and a good mother to his children. It was another Rachel to
whom all that had happened, a Rachel she had a right to forget! She was
weak in will--she had confessed it. But George Ellesborough was strong.
Leaning on him, and on kind Janet, she could be all, she would be all,
that he still dreamed. The past--_that_ past--was dead. It had no
existence. Nothing--neither honour nor love--obliged her to disclose it.
Except in her own mind it was dead and buried--as though it had never
been. No human being shared her knowledge of it, or ever would.

And yet the Accuser came closer and closer, wrestling with her shrinking
heart. "You can't live a lie beside him all your life!" "It won't be a
lie. All that matters to him is what I am now--not what I was. And it
wasn't I!--it was another woman--a miserable, battered creature who
couldn't help herself." "It will rise up between you, and perhaps--after
all--in some way--he will discover it." "How can he? Dick and I--who in
all the world knew, but us two?--and Dick is dead." "Are you sure that no
one knew:--that no one saw you? Think!"

A pale face grew paler in the dim light, as thought hesitated:--

"There was that wagon--and the boy--in the storm." "Yes--what then?"
"Well--what then? The boy scarcely saw me." "He did see you." "And if he
did--it is the commonest thing in a Canadian winter to be caught by a
storm, to ask shelter from a neighbour." "Still--even if he drew no
malicious conclusion, he saw you--alone in that farm with Dick Tanner,
and he probably knew your name." "How should he know my name?" "He had
seen you before--you had seen him before." "I didn't know his name--I
don't know it now." "No--but in passing your farm once, he had dropped a
parcel for a neighbour--and you had seen him once--at a railway station."
"Is it the least likely that I shall ever see him again--or that he
remembers seeing me at Dick Tanner's door?" "Not likely, perhaps--but
possible--quite possible."

And while this question and answer passed through the brain, the woman
sitting up in bed seemed to be transported to a howling wintry scene of
whirling snow--a November twilight--and against that background, the hood
of a covered wagon, a boy holding the reins, the heavy cape on his
shoulders white with snow, the lamps of the wagon shining dimly on him,
and making a kind of luminous mist round the cart. She heard a parley,
saw a tall and slender man with fair hair go out to the boy with hot
milk and bread, caught directions as to the road, and saw herself as a
half-hidden figure in the partially open door.

And then afterwards--the warm farm kitchen shutting out the storm--a man
at her knees--his arms round her--his kisses on her cheek.

And again the irrevocableness of it closed down upon her. It could
_never_ be undone: that was the terrible commonplace which held her in
its grasp. It could never be wiped out from one human mind, which must
bear the burden of it as best it could, till gradually--steadily--the
life, had been killed out of the ugly, haunting thing, and it had been
buried--drowned, out of sight and memory.

But the piteous dialogue began again.

"How _could_ I have resisted? I was so miserable--so lonely--so weak!"
"You didn't love him!" "No--but I was alone in the world." "Well, then,
tell George Ellesborough--he is a reasonable man--he would understand."
"I can't--I _can't_! I have deceived him up till now by passing as
unmarried. If I confess this, too, there will be no chance for me. He'll
never trust me in anything!--he'll suspect everything I do or say--even
if he goes on loving me. And I couldn't bear it!--nor could he."

And so at last the inward debate wore itself out, and sleep, sudden and
deep, came down upon Rachel Henderson. When she woke in the morning it
was to cleared skies both in her own mind and in the physical world. The
nightmare through which she had passed seemed to her now unreal, even a
little absurd. Her nerves were quieted by sleep, and she saw plainly what
she had to do. That "old, unhappy, far-off thing" lurking in the
innermost depth of memory had nothing more to do with her. She would look
it calmly in the face, and put it finally--for ever--away. But of her
marriage she would tell everything--everything!--to George Ellesborough,
and he should deal with her as he pleased.

       *       *       *       *       *

The day was misty and still. October, the marvellous October of this
year, was marching on. Every day, Foch on the battlefield of France and
Belgium was bringing down the old Europe, and clearing the ground for the
new. In English villages and English farms, no less than in the big
towns, there was ferment and excitement, though it showed but little.
Would the boys be home by Christmas--the sons, the brothers, the
husbands? What would the change be like--the life after the war? If there
were those who yearned and prayed for it--there were those who feared it.
The war had done well for some, and hideously for others. And all through
the play of individual interests and desires, and even in the dullest
minds there ran the intoxicating sense of Victory, of an England greater
and more powerful than even her own sons and daughters had dared to
dream--an England which knew herself now, by the stern test of the four
years' struggle, to be possessed of powers and resources, spiritual,
mental, physical, which amazed herself. In all conscious minds, brooding
on the approaching time, there rose the question: "What are we going to
do with it?" and even in the unconscious, the same thought was present,
as a vague disturbing impulse.

Janet had just read the war telegrams to Rachel, who had come down late,
complaining of a headache; but when Janet--the reserved and equable
Janet--after going through the news of the recapture of Ostend,
Zeebrugge, and Bruges, broke into the passionate, low-spoken comment:
"The Lord is King--be the people never so unquiet!" or could not, for
tears, finish the account of the entry into recaptured Lille, and the joy
of its inhabitants, Rachel sat irresponsive--or apparently so.

How would it affect Ellesborough--this astounding news? Would it take him
from her the sooner, or delay his going? That was all she seemed capable
of feeling.

Janet was troubled by her look and attitude, and being well aware that
the two had had a long _tête-à-tête_ the day before, wondered how things
were going. But she said nothing; and after breakfast Rachel joined the
two girls in the potato-field, and worked as hard as they, hour after
hour. But her usual gaiety was gone, and the girls noticed at once the
dark rims under her eyes. They wondered secretly what Miss Henderson's
"friend" had been doing. For that the "Cap'n" was courting their employer
had long been plain to them. Betty, of course, had a "friend," the young
soldier whose sick leave was nearly up, and the child's deep velvety eyes
were looking nearly as tired as Miss Henderson's. While Jenny, too, the
timid, undeveloped Jenny had lately begun to take an interest in a
"friend," a young fellow belonging to Ellesborough's forestry camp whom
she had met in Millsborough the day of the Harvest Festival. They had
hardly exchanged half an hour's real conversation. But he had bought her
some sweets at Millsborough, and walked a bit of the way home with her.
Then she had seen him in the village once or twice. He had some relations
there--there was some talk of him, and that old murder at the farm--she
didn't know rightly what it was. But she felt somehow that Miss Henderson
wouldn't want to have him about--Miss Henderson didn't like talk of the
murder--so Jenny had never asked him to look her up. But her raw,
childish mind was full of him, and the ferments of sex were stirring.
In the secret opinion of both girls, "friends" were quite as much pain as
pleasure. No girl could do without them; but they were pretty certain to
cause heart-aches, to make a girl wish at some time or other that she had
never been born. A London factory-girl would have expressed it in the
Cockney way: "Blokes are no good--but you must have a bloke!"

The two girls then concluded that Captain Ellesborough had been causing
trouble, as all men did, at some point; and being sympathetic little
souls, they worked especially hard in the potato-field, and would not
allow Rachel to carry the heavier baskets to the "clamp."

Meanwhile Janet had been wrestling with old Halsey, till he had very
reluctantly yielded to her persuasion, and returned to work.

"I'm not the man I wor," he confided to Peter Betts, as they were eating
their dinner under a hedge in the damp October sunshine. "When I wor a
young man, I wouldn't ha' minded them things, not if it was iver so. But
now they do give me the shivers in my inside."

"What do?" said Peter Betts, with a mouthful of cold bacon. He was still
greatly in the dark as to why Halsey had left work so early in the
afternoon the day before, and why he was now in such a gruff and gloomy
mood. There was indeed a rumour in the village that old Halsey had seen
"summat," but as Halsey had gone to bed immediately after Miss Leighton
had had her say with him, and had refused to be "interviewed" even by
his wife, there was a good deal of uncertainty even in the mind of his
oldest pal, Peter Betts.

"Why--ghostisses!" said Halsey, with a frown, removing his pipe for a
moment to give emphasis to the word. "I don't see as a man can be
expected to deal with ghostisses. Anythin' else yer like in a small
way--mad dogs, or bulls, or snakes, where they keep 'em, which, thank the
Lord, they don't in these parts--but not _them_."

"What did yer see?" said Betts, after a few ruminating pulls.

"Well, I saw old Watson, the keeper, as was murdered sixty years since,
'at's what I saw," said Halsey with slow decisiveness.

"An' what might be like?" asked Betts, with equal deliberation. The day
was mild and sunny; the half-ploughed field on which they had been
working lay alternatively yellow in the stubbles and a rich brown purple
in the new turned furrows under the autumn noon. A sense of well-being
had been diffused in the two old men by food and rest. Halsey's tongue
grew looser.

"Well, I saw a man come creepin' an' crouchin' down yon grass road"--(it
was visible from where they sat, as a green streak on the side of the
hill)--"same as several people afore me 'as seen 'um--same as they allus
say old Watson must ha' come after Dempsey shot 'im. He wor shot in the
body. The doctors as come to look at 'im fust foun' that out. An' if
ye're shot in the body, I understan', yo naterally double up a bit if yo
try to walk. Well--that's jes' how I saw 'im--crouchin' along. Yo
remember it wor a dull evenin' yesterday--an' it wor gettin' dark, though
it worn't dark. It wor not much after fower, by my old watch--but I
couldn't see 'im at all plain. I wor in Top-End field--you know?--as
leads up to that road. An' I watched 'im come along making for that
outside cart-shed--that 'un that's back to back wi' the shippen, where
they foun' Watson lyin'. An' I wor much puzzled by the look on 'im. I
didn't think nothink about old Watson, fust of all--I didn't know what to
think. I was right under the hedge wi' the horses; 'ee couldna' ha' seen
me--an' I watched 'im. He stopped, onst or twice, as though he wor
restin' hisself--pullin' 'isself together--and onst I 'eered 'im cough--"

Halsey looked round suddenly on his companion as though daring him to
mock.

Betts, however, could not help himself. He gave an interrupting and
sceptical chuckle.

"Ghostisses don't cough, as ever I 'eered on."

"And why shouldn't they?" said Halsey testily. "If they can do them
other things they'd used to do when livin'--walkin' an' seein' an'
such-like--why not coughin'?"

Betts shook his head.

"Never 'eered on it," he said, with conviction.

"Well, anyways I seed him come down to that shed, an' then I lost 'im.
But I 'ad the creeps somehow and I called to Jenny to come an' take the
'orses. An' then I went after 'im. But there was all the field an' the
lane to cross, and when I come to the shed, there wasn't no one and
nothink to be seen--excep'--"

The old man paused, and again looked doubtfully at his companion.

"Well?" said Betts eagerly, his philosophic attitude giving way a little.

"Excep'--a large patch o' blood--_fresh blood_--I touched it--on one of
them ole sacks lyin' near the cart," said Halsey slowly. "An' it worn't
there in the afternoon, for I moved the sacks mysel'."

Betts whistled softly. Halsey resumed,--

"There was nothin' moved--or taken away--nothin' at all!--only that
patch. So then I went all round the farm, and there was nobody. I thought
'ee might ha' turned back by the grass road, p'raps, without my seein'
'im, so I went that way, and there was nothin'--until--a little way up
the road--there was blood again"--the old man's voice dropped--"every
couple o' yards or so--a drop or two here--an' a drop or two there--just
as they tracked old Watson by it, up the hill, and into yon wood--where
Dempsey set on him."

The two old men looked at each other. Betts was evidently impressed.

"Are you sure it was blood?"

"Sure. Last night, Hastings said it was sheep-dip! After I tole 'im, when
'ee went to look under the shed, it wor so dark 'ee couldn't see nothin'.
Well, 'ee knew better this mornin'. 'Ee fetched me, an' asst me if I'd
said anythin' to Miss Janet. And I said, no. So then he tole me I wasn't
to say nothin' to the ladies, nor the girls, nor anybody. An' 'ee'd done
summat wi' the sack--I dunno what. But 'ee might ha' held 'is tongue last
night about sheep-dip! Who's been dippin' sheep about here? 'As Miss
Henderson got any ruddle anywhere about the farm? I know she ain't!--an'
Muster Hastings knows she ain't."

"Why didn't yer tell Miss Janet?--about the bleedin'?"

"Well, I was a bit skeered. I thought I'd sleep on't, before I got
talkin' any more. But on the way 'ome, as I tellt yer, I met Hastings,
an' tole '_im_, an' then give 'im notice."

"That wor a bit hasty, worn't it?" said Betts after a moment, in a
judicial tone. But he had been clearly much exercised by his companion's
account, and his pipe hanging idly from his hands showed that his
thoughts were active.

"Well, it might ha' bin," Halsey admitted, "but as I said afore, I'm
gettin' an old man, and I don't want no truck wi' things as I don't
unnerstan'. It give me the wust night as I've had since I had that bad
turn wi' the influenza ten year ago."

"You didn't see his face?"

"No."

"An' 'ee didn't mind you of anybody?"

Halsey hesitated.

"Well, onst I did think I'd seen one o' the same build--soomwhere. But I
can't recolleck where."

"As for the blood," said Betts reflectively, "it's as curous as the
coughin'. Did you iver hear tell as ghosts could bleed?"

Hastings shook his head. Steeped in meditation, the two men smoked
silently for a while. Then Betts said, with the explosiveness of one who
catches an idea,--

"Have yer thought o' tellin' John Dempsey?"

"I hain't thought o' tellin' nobody. An' I shouldn't ha' told Miss
Leighton what I did tell her, if she 'adn't come naggin' about my givin'
notice."

"You might as well tell John Dempsey. Why, it's his business, is old
Watson! Haven't yer seen 'im at all?"

Halsey said "No," holding his handsome old head rather high. Had he
belonged to a higher station in life, his natural reticence, and a
fastidious personal dignity would have carried him far. To a modern
statesman they are at least as valuable as brains. In the small world
of Ipscombe they only meant that Halsey himself held rather scornfully
aloof from the current village gossip, and got mocked at for his pains.
The ordinary human instinct revenged itself, however, when he was
_tête-à-tête_ with his old chum Peter Betts. Betts divined at any rate
from the expression in the old man's eyes that _he_ might talk, and
welcome.

So he poured out what he knew about John Dempsey, a Canadian lad working
in the Forestry Corps at Ralstone, who turned out to be the grandson of
the Dempsey who had always been suspected of the murder of Richard Watson
in the year 1859. This young Dempsey, he said, had meant to come to
Ipscombe after the war, and put what he knew before the police. But
finding himself sent to Ralstone, which was only five miles from
Ipscombe, he saw no reason to wait, and he had already given all the
information he could to the superintendent of police at Millsborough. His
grandfather had signed a written confession before his death, and John
Dempsey had handed it over. The old man, it appeared, had "turned pious"
during a long illness before his death, and had wished to square matters
with his conscience and the Almighty. When his grandson had volunteered
for the war, and was about to sail for Europe, old Dempsey had sent for
him, had told him the story, and charged him, when he was able, to place
his confession in the proper hands. And having done that, he died "very
quiet and comfortable"--so John Dempsey reported.

"Which is more than poor Jem Watson did," growled Halsey. He felt neither
respect nor sympathy for a man who, having set up a secret, couldn't
keep it; and the confession itself, rather than the crime confessed,
confirmed the poor opinion he had always held of the elder Dempsey when
they were young men in the village together. But he agreed to let Betts
bring "young John" to see him. And thereupon they went back to the sowing
of one of Miss Henderson's big fields with winter wheat.

When the milking was done, and work was nearly over for the day, a note
brought by messenger arrived at the farm for Miss Henderson. It was from
Ellesborough--a few scribbled words. "I am prevented from coming this
evening. The Chief Forestry Officer of my district has just arrived, and
stays the night. I hope to come over to-morrow between six and seven.
Shall I find you?"

Rachel scribbled an answer, which a small boy on a bicycle carried off.
Then she went slowly back to the sitting-room, so disappointed and
unnerved that she was on the brink of tears. Janet who had just come in
from milking, was standing by the table, mending a rent in her
waterproof. She looked up as Rachel entered, and the needle paused in her
hand.

"I say, Rachel!--you do look overdone! You've been going at it too hard."

For all day long Rachel had been lifting, and sorting, and carrying, in
the potato-field, finding in the severe physical exertion the only relief
from restlessness. She shook her head irritably and came to stand by the
wood fire which Janet had just lit, a welcome brightness in the twilight
room.

"Suppose you knock up--" began Janet in a tone of remonstrance. Rachel
cut her short.

"I want to speak to you--please, Janet."

Janet looked round in astonishment and put down her work. Rachel was
standing by the fire, with her hands behind her back, her eyes fixed on
Janet. She was still in the graceful tunic and knee-breeches, in which
her young and splendid youth seemed always most at home. But she had
taken off her cap, and her brown hair was falling round a pale face.

"Janet--you know Captain Ellesborough and I had a long talk last night?"

Janet smiled.

"Of course I do. And of course I have my own thoughts about it!"

"I don't know what they are," said Rachel slowly. "But--I'd better tell
you--Captain Ellesborough asked me to marry him."

She paused.

"Did you think that would be news to any of us?" said Janet, laughing,
and then stopped. The sudden contraction of pain in Rachel's face, and
something like a sob startled her.

"Don't, Janet, please. I told him something--which made him
wonder--whether he did want to marry me after all."

Janet's heart gave an uncomfortable jump. A score of past conjectures and
misgivings rushed back upon her.

"What did you tell him?"

"What I see now I ought to have told you--as well as him--long ago.
Henderson is my maiden name. I was a married woman for three years. I
had a child which died. I divorced my husband, and he's still alive."

The colour had flamed back into her cheeks. Janet sat silent, her eyes
fixed on Rachel's.

"I did tell you I had a story, didn't I?" said

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/13801