Chapter 16

The figure disappeared; he heard the closing of the window, which was soon dark. Then he crept down to the farm wall, and round the corner of it to that outer cart-shed, where he had bound up his bleeding hand on the night when Halsey--silly ass!--had seen the ghost. He did not dare to smoke lest spark or smell might betray him. Sitting on a heap of sacks in a sheltered corner, his hands hanging over his knees, he spent some long time brooding and pondering--conscious all the while of the hidden and silent life of the house and farm at his back. By now he fancied he understood the evening ways of the place. The two girls went up to bed first, about nine; the two ladies, about an hour later; and the farm bailiff as a rule did not sleep on the premises, though there was a bed in the loft over the stable which could be used on occasion. That window, too, through which he had watched the pair of lovers, when the Yankee discovered him--that also seemed to fit into a scheme.

Yes!--the Yankee had discovered him. His start, his sudden movement as though to make a rush at the window, had shown it. Meanwhile Delane had not waited for developments. Quick as thought he had made for one of those sunken climbing lanes in which the chalk downs of the district abound, a lane which lay to the south of the farm, while the green terraced path connected with the ghost-story lay to the north of it. No doubt there had been a hue and cry, a search of the farm and its immediate neighbourhood. But the night was dark and the woods wide. Once in their shelter, he had laughed at pursuit. What had the Yankee said to Rachel? And since he had stopped her in the lane, what had Rachel been saying to the Yankee? Had she yet explained that the face he had seen at the window--supposing always that he had told her what he had seen--and why shouldn't he?--was not the face of a casual tramp or lunatic, but the face of a discarded husband, to whom all the various hauntings and apparitions at the farm had been really due?

That was the question--the all-important question. Clearly some one--Ellesborough probably--had given a warning to the police. On what theory?--ghost?--tramp?--or husband?

Or had Rachel just held her tongue, and had the Yankee been led to believe that the husband--for Rachel must have owned up about the husband though she did call herself Miss Henderson!--was still some thousands of miles away--in Canada--safely dead and buried, as far as Rachel was concerned?

On the whole, he thought it most probable that Rachel had held her tongue about his reappearance. If she had thought it worth while to bribe him so heavily, it was not very likely that she would now herself have set the American on the track of a secret which she so evidently did not want an expectant bridegroom to know.

The American--d--n him! A furious and morbid jealousy rushed upon the man crouching under the cart-shed. The world was rapidly reducing itself for him to these two figures--figures of hate--figures against whom he felt himself driven by a kind of headlong force, a force of destruction.

How still the farm was, except for the movements of the cows inside the shippen at his back, or of the horses in the stable! Rachel, no doubt, was now asleep. In the old days he had often--enviously--watched her tumble asleep as soon as her bright head was on the pillow; while in his own case sleep had been for years a difficult business.

Somebody else would watch her sleeping now.

Yes, if he, the outcast, allowed it. And again the frenzied sense of power swept through him. _If he allowed it_! It rested with him.

The following day, Ellesborough set out in the early afternoon for Great End Farm, the bearer of much news.

The day was dark and rainy, with almost a gale blowing, but his spirits had never been higher. The exultation of the great victory, the incredible Victory, seemed to breathe upon him from the gusty wind, to be driving the westerly clouds, and crying in all the noises of the woods. Was it really over?--over and done?--the agony of these four years--the hourly sacrifice of irreplaceable life--the racking doubt as to the end--the torturing question in every conscious mind--"Is there a God in Heaven--a God who cares for men--or is there not?"

He could have shouted the answer aloud--"There is--there is a God! And He is just."

Faith was natural to him, and nourished on his new happiness no less than on the marvellous issue of the war, it set his heart singing on this dull winter's day. How should he find her? Threshing, perhaps, in the big barn, and he would turn to, and work with her and the girls till work was done, and they could have the sitting-room to themselves, and he could tell her all his news. Janet--the ever-kind and thoughtful Janet--would see to that. The more he saw of the farm-life the more he admired Janet. She was a little slow. She was not clever; and she had plenty of small prejudices which amused him. But she was the salt of the earth. Trust her--lean upon her--she would never let you down. And now he was going to trust his beloved to her--for a while.

Yes--Rachel and the girls, they were all in the high barn, feeding the greedy maw of the threshing machine; a business which strained muscles and backs, and choked noses and throats with infinitesimal particles of oil and the fine flying chaff. He watched Rachel a few minutes as she lifted and pitched--a typical figure of a New Labour, which is also a New Beauty, on this old earth. Then he drew her away, flung off his tunic, and took her place, while she, smiling and panting, her hands on her sides, leaned against the wall, and watched in her turn.

Then when the engine stopped, and the great hopper full of grain lay ready for the miller, they found themselves alone in the barn for a minute. The girls and Janet had gone to milk, and Hastings with them. There was a lantern in the barn, which showed Rachel in the swirl of the corn dust with which the barn was full, haloed and golden with it, like a Homeric goddess in a luminous cloud. Her soft brown head, her smile, showing the glint of her white teeth, her eyes, and all the beauty of her young form, in its semi-male dress--they set his blood on fire. Just as he was, in his khaki shirt-sleeves, he came to her, and took her in his arms. She clung to him passionately.

"I thought you were never coming."

It was one of the reproaches that have no sting.

"I came at the first moment. I left a score of things undone."

"Have you been thinking of me?"

"Always--always. And you?"

"Nearly always," she said teasingly. "But I have been making up my accounts."

"Avaricious woman!--thinking of nothing but money. Dear--I have several bits of news for you. But let me wash!" He held out his hands--"I am not fit to touch you!"

She disengaged herself quietly.

"What news?"

"Some letters first," he said, smiling. "A budget and a half--mostly for you, from all my home people. Can you face it?"

"In reply to your cable?"

"My most extravagant cable! On the top of course of sacks of letters!"

"Before we were engaged?"

He laughed as he thrust his arms into his tunic.

"My mother seems to have guessed from my very first mention of you."

"But--she doesn't know yet?" said Rachel, slowly.

They had passed out of the range of the lantern. He could not see her face, could only just hear her voice.

"No, not yet, dear. My last long letter should reach her next week."

Her hand lay close in his as they groped their way to the door. When he unlatched it they came out into the light of a stormy sunset. The rain had momentarily ceased, and there were fiery lines of crimson burning their way through the black cloud masses in the western sky. The red light caught Rachel's face and hair. But even so, it seemed to him that she was pale.

"I say--you've done too much threshing!" he said with energy. "Don't do any more--get an extra man."

"Can't find one," she said, laughing at him, but rather languidly. "I'll go and get the tea ready."

He went off to wash, and when he entered the sitting-room a little later, she too was fresh and neat again, in a new frock of some soft bluish-green stuff, which pleased his eye amazingly. Outside, the sunset was dying rapidly, and at a sign from her, he drew down the blinds over the two windows, and pulled the curtains close. He stood at the window looking at the hill-side for a moment with the blind in his hand. He was recalling the face he had seen, of which neither he nor any one else had yet said a word to Rachel; recalling also his talk with one of the Millsborough police the day before. "Nothing more heard of him, Captain. Oh, we get queer people about these hills sometimes. It's a very lonely bit of country. Why, a year ago, we were hunting a couple of German prisoners about these commons for days!"

"Any more ghosts?" he said lightly, glancing round at Rachel, as he drew the curtains across.

"Not that I know of. Come and have your tea."

He took a cup from her hand, and leaning against the chimney surveyed the room with a radiant face. Then he stooped over her and said:--

"I love this little room! Don't you?"

She made a restless movement.

"I don't know. Why do you love it?"

"As if you didn't know!" Their eyes met, his intense and passionate,--hers, less easy to read. "Darling, I have some other news for you. I think you'll like it--though it'll separate us for a little."

And drawing a letter from his pocket, he handed it to her. It was a letter from the American Headquarters, offering him immediate work in the American Intelligence Department at Coblentz.

"Some friends of mine there, seem to have been getting busy about me. You see I know German pretty well."

And he explained to her that as a boy he had spent a year in Germany before going to Yale. She scarcely listened, so absorbed was she in the official letter.

"When must you go?" she said at last, looking up.

"At the end of next week, I'm afraid."

"And how long will it be?"

"That I don't know. But three or four months certainly. It will put off our wedding, dearest, a bit. But you'd like me to go, wouldn't you? I should be at the hub of things."

The colour rushed into her cheeks.

"_Must you go_?"

Her manner amazed him. He had expected that one so ambitious and energetic in her own way of life would have greeted his news with eagerness. The proposal was really a great compliment to him--and a great chance.

"I don't see how I could refuse it," he said with an altered countenance. "Indeed--I don't think I could."

She dropped her face into her hands, and stared into the fire. In some trouble of mind, he knelt down beside her, and put his arm round her.

"I'll write every day. It won't be long, darling."

She shook her head, and he felt a shudder run through her.

"It's silly of me--I don't know why--but--I'm just afraid--"

"Afraid of what?"

She smiled at him tremulously--but he saw the tears in her eyes.

"I told you--I can't always help it. I'm a fool, I suppose--but--"

Then she threw her arms round his neck--murmuring in his ear: "You'll have time to think--when you're away from me--that it was a great pity--you ever asked me."

He kissed and scolded her, till she smiled again. Afterwards she made a strong effort to discuss the thing reasonably. Of course he must go--it would be a great opening--a great experience. And they would have all the more time to consider their own affairs. But all the evening afterwards he felt in some strange way that he had struck her a blow from which she was trying in vain to rally. Was it all the effect of her suffering at that brute's hands--aided by the emotion and strain of the recent scenes between herself and him?

As for her, when she turned back from the gate where she had bid him good-bye, she saw Janet in the doorway waiting for her almost with a sense of exasperation. She had not yet said one word to Janet. That plunge was all to take!

XIV

Rachel woke the following morning in that dreary mood when all the colour and the glamour seem to have been washed out of life, and the hopes and dreams which keep up a perpetual chatter in every normal mind are suddenly dumb.

How was she going to face Ellesborough's long absence? It had been recently assumed between them that he would be very soon released from his forestry post, that the infantry commission he had been promised would come to nothing, now the Armistice was signed, and that in a very few weeks they would be free to think only of themselves and their own future. This offer of Intelligence work at the American Headquarters had changed everything.

In ten days, if nothing happened, he would be gone, and she would be left behind to grapple alone with Roger--who might at any moment torment her again; with the presence of Dempsey, who was thinking of settling in the village, and for whom she would be called upon very soon to fulfil the hopes she had raised in him; and finally, with the struggle and misery in her own mind.

But something must happen. As she was dressing by candle-light in the winter dawn, her thoughts were rushing forward--leaping some unexplored obstacles lying in the foreground--to a possible marriage before Ellesborough went to France; just a quiet walk to a registry office, without any fuss or any witness but Janet. If she could reach that haven, she would be safe; and this dumb fever of anxiety, this terrified conviction that in the end Fate would somehow take him from her, would be soothed away.

But how to reach it? For there was now between them, till they also were revealed and confessed, a whole new series of events: not only the Tanner episode, but Delane's reappearance, her interview with him, her rash attempt to silence Dempsey. By what she had done in her bewilderment and fear, in order to escape the penalty of frankness, she might only--as she was now beginning to perceive--have stumbled into fresh dangers. It was as though she stood on the friable edge of some great crater, some gulf of destruction, on which her feet were perpetually slipping and sinking, and only Ellesborough's hold could ultimately save her.

And Janet's--Janet's first. Rachel's thought clung to her, as the shipwrecked Southern sailor turns to his local saint to intercede for him with the greater spiritual lights. Janet's counsel and help--she knew she must ask for them--that it was the next step. Yet she had been weakly putting it off day by day. And through this mist of doubt and dread, there kept striking all the time, as though quite independent of it, the natural thoughts of a woman in love.

During the farm breakfast, hurried through by candle-light, with rain beating on the windows, Rachel was thinking--"Why didn't _he_ propose it?"--this scheme of marrying before he went. Wasn't it a most natural thing to occur to him? She tormented herself all the morning with the problem of his silence.

Then--as though in rebuke of her folly--at midday came a messenger, a boy on a bicycle, with a letter. She took it up to her own room, and read it with fluttering breath--laughing, yet with tears in her eyes.

"My Darling--What an idiot I was last night! This morning I have woke up to a brilliant idea--why I didn't propose it to you yesterday I can't imagine! Let us marry before I go. Meet me in London, a week to-day, and let us go into the country, or to the sea, for a blessed forty-eight hours, afterwards. Then you will see me off--and I shall know, wherever I go, that you are my very, very own, and I am yours. I don't want to hurry you. Take time to think, and write to me to-night, or wire me to-morrow morning. But the very idea that you may say 'Yes' makes me the happiest of men. Take time to think--but--all the same--don't keep me too long waiting!

"Your own,

"G.E."

All day she kept the letter hidden in the loose front of her dress. "I'll wire to-morrow morning," she thought. But before that--something had got to happen. Every now and then she would pause in her own work to watch Janet--Janet butter-making, Janet feeding the calves, Janet cooking--for on that homely figure in white cap and apron everything seemed to depend.

The frost had come, and clear skies with it. The day passed in various miscellaneous business, under shelter, in the big barn.

And at night, after supper, Rachel stood on the front steps looking into a wide starry heaven, moonless, cold, and still. Betty and Jenny had just gone up to bed. Janet was in the kitchen, putting the porridge for the morrow's breakfast which she had just made into the hay-box, which would keep it steaming all night. But she would soon have done work. The moment seemed to have come.

Rachel walked into the kitchen and closed the door behind her. The supper had been cleared away and the table on which they had eaten it shone spotlessly clean and bare. The fire would soon be raked out for the night, and Janet would lay the breakfast before she left the kitchen. Everything was in the neatest possible order, and the brilliant polish of a great stew-pan hanging on the wall particularly caught the eye. Janet was humming to herself--one of the war tunes--when Rachel entered.

"Janet, I want to speak to you."

Janet looked up--startled. And yet something in her was not startled! She had been strangely expectant all these days. It seemed to her she had already seen Rachel come in like that--had already heard her say those words.

She shut up the hay-box, and came gently forward.

"Here, Rachel?"

"You've nearly done?"

"In a few minutes. If you'll go into the sitting-room, I'll join you directly."

And while she hurried through the rest of her work, her mind was really running forward in prophecy. She more or less knew what she was going to hear. And as she closed the kitchen door behind her there was in her a tremulous sense as though of some sacred responsibility.

Rachel was crouching over the fire as usual, and Janet drew up a stool beside her, and laid a hand on her knee.

"What is it?"

Rachel turned.

"I told you one secret, Janet, the other day. Now this is another. And it's--" She flushed, and broke off, beginning again after a moment--"I didn't mean to tell you, or any one. I can't make up my mind whether I'm bound to or not. But I want you to advise me, Janet. I'm awfully troubled."

And suddenly, she slipped to the floor, and laid her head against Janet's knees, hiding her face.

Janet bent over her, instinctively caressing the brown hair. She was only three or four years older than Rachel, but she looked much older, and the close linen cap she wore on butter-making afternoons, and had not yet removed, gave her a gently austere look, like that of a religious.

"Tell me--I'll do my best."

"In the first place," said Rachel, in a low voice, "who do you think was the ghost?"

"What do you mean?"

"The ghost--was Roger Delane!"

Janet uttered an exclamation of surprise and horror--while fact after fact rushed together in her mind, fitting into one explanatory whole. Why had she never thought of that possibility, among all the others?

"Oh, Rachel, have you ever seen him?"

"Twice. He stopped me on the road, when I was coming back from Millsborough on Armistice Day. And he came to see me the day after. You remember you were astonished to find I had sent the girls to the Shepherds' dance? I did it to get them out of the way--and if you hadn't said you were going to that service I should have had to invent something to send you away."

"I always thought he was in Canada?" said Janet, in bewilderment. "What did he want? Have you told Captain Ellesborough?"

"No, I haven't told George. I don't know whether I shall. Roger wanted money--as usual. I gave him some."

"_You gave him some! Rachel!_"

"I had to--I had to buy him off. And I've seen John Dempsey also without your knowing. And I've had to bribe him too."

Rachel was now sitting up, very hard and erect, her hands round her knees. Her first object seemed to be to avoid emotion, and to prevent Janet from showing any. Janet had gone very pale. The name "Dick Tanner" was drumming in her ear.

"I know you can't understand me, Janet," said Rachel, after a pause, "you could never do what I've done. I dare say when you've let me tell you the story you'll not be able to forgive me. You'll think I ought never to have let you settle with me--that I told a lie when I said I wasn't a bad woman--that I've disgraced you. I hope you won't. That--that would about finish it." Her voice shook at last.

Janet was speechless. But instinctively she laid a hand on Rachel's shoulder. And at the touch, in a moment, the story came out.

Confused and hardly intelligible! For Rachel herself could scarcely now disentangle all the threads and motives of it. But certain things stood out--the figure of a young artist, sensitive, pure-minded, sincere, with certain fatal weaknesses of judgment and will, which had made him a rolling stone, and the despair of his best friends, but, as compared with Roger Delane after six months of marriage--Hyperion to a satyr; then the attraction of such a man for his neighbour, a young wife, brought up in a refined home, the child of a saint and dreamer, outraged since her marriage in every fibre by the conduct and ways of her husband, and smarting under the sense of her own folly; their friendship, so blameless till its last moment, with nothing to hide, and little to regret, a woman's only refuge indeed from hours of degradation and misery; and finally the triumph of something which was not passion, at least on Rachel's side, but of mere opportunity, strengthened, made irresistible, by the woman's pain and despair: so the tale, the common tale, ran.

"I didn't love him," said Rachel at last, her hands over her eyes--"I don't pretend I did. I liked him--I was awfully sorry for him--as he was for me. But--well, there it is! I went over to his house. I honestly thought his sister was there; but, above all, I wanted him to sympathize with me--and pity me--because he knew everything. And she wasn't there--and I stayed three days and nights with him. _Voilà_!"

There was silence a little. Janet's thoughts were in a tumult. Rachel began again:

"Now, why am I telling you all this? I need never have told anybody--at least up to a few days ago. Poor Dick was drowned just before I got my divorce, in a boat accident on Lake Nipissing. He had gone there to paint, and was camping out. If he hadn't been drowned, perhaps, he would have made me marry him. So there was no one in the world who knew I was ever with him except--"

She turned sharply upon Janet--

"Except this man who turned up here in George's own camp--and in the village, two months ago, but whom I never saw till this week--_this week_--Armistice Day--John Dempsey. That was a queer chance, wasn't it? The sort of thing nobody could have expected. I was coming back from Millsborough. I was--well, just that evening, I was awfully happy. I expected nothing. And then--within twenty minutes--"

She told the story to Janet's astounded ears, of the two apparitions in the road, of her two interviews--first with Dempsey, and the following evening with Delane--and of her own attempts to bribe them both.

And at that her composure broke down.

"Why did I do it?" she said wildly, springing to her feet. "It was idiotic! Why didn't I just accept the boy's story, and say quietly, 'Yes, I was staying with the Tanners'? And why didn't I defy Roger--go straight to George, and hand him over to the police? Don't you see why? Because it is true!--_it's true!_--and I'm terrified. If I lost George, I should kill myself. I never thought I should be--I could be--in love with anybody like this. But yet I suppose it was in me all the time. I was always seeking--reaching out--to somebody I could love with every bit of me, soul and body--somebody I could follow--for I can't manage for myself--I'm not like you, Janet. And now I've found him--and--Do you know what that is?"