Chapter 17

She pulled a letter out of her pocket, and looked at Janet through a mist of despairing tears.

"It's a letter from George. It came this morning. He wants me to marry him at once--next week. He's got some new work in France, and he saw that I was miserable because he was going away. And why shouldn't I? _Why shouldn't I?_ I love him. There's nothing wrong with me, except that wretched story. Well, there are two reasons. First"--she spoke with slow and bitter emphasis--"I don't believe for a moment Roger will keep his word. I know him. He is frightfully ill. He says he's dying. He may die--before he's got through this money. That would be the best thing that could happen to me--wouldn't it? But probably he won't die--and certainly he'll get through the money! Then he'll come back--and I shall begin bribing him again--and telling lies to hide it from George--and in the end it'll be no use--for Roger's quite reckless--you can't appeal to him through anything but money. He'll see George, whatever I do, and try it on with him. And then--George will know how to deal with _him_, I dare say--but when we are alone--and he asks _me_--"

She sank down again on the floor, kneeling, and put her hands on Janet's knees.

"You see, Janet, don't you? You see?"

It was the cry of a soul in anguish.

"You poor, poor thing!"

Janet, trembling from head to foot, bowed her head on Rachel's, and the two clung together, in silence, broken only by two deep sobs from Rachel. Then Janet disengaged herself. She was pale, but no longer agitated, and her blue eyes which were her only beauty were clear and shining.

"You'll let me say just what I feel, Rachel?"

"Of course."

"You can't marry him without telling him. No, no--you couldn't do that!"

Rachel said nothing. She was, sitting on the floor, her eyes turned away from Janet.

"You couldn't do that, Rachel," Janet resumed, as though she were urgently thinking her way; "you'd never have a happy moment."

"Oh, yes, of course," said Rachel, throwing up her head with a half scornful gesture. "One says that--but how do you know? I might never think of it again--if Roger and that man Dempsey were out of the way. It's dead--it's _dead_! Why do we trouble about such things!"

"It would be dead," said Janet in a low voice, "if you'd told him--and he'd forgiven!"

"What has he to do with it?" cried Rachel, stubbornly, "it was before he knew me. I was a different being."

"No--it is always the same self, which we are making, all the time. Don't you see--dear, dear Rachel!--it's your chance now to put it all behind you--just by being true. Oh, I don't want to preach to you--but I see it so clearly!"

"But it isn't as a man would see it--a man like George," said Rachel, shaking her head. "Look there"--she pointed to a little bundle of letters lying on the table--"there are letters from his people which he brought me this morning. It's awful!--how they take me at his valuation--just because he loves me. I must be everything that's good, because he says so. And you can see what kind of people they are--what they think of him--and what they imagine about me--what they think I _must_ be--for him to love me. I don't mean they're prigs--they aren't a bit. It's just their life coming out, quite naturally. You see what they are--quite simply--what they can't help being, and what they expect from him and the woman he marries. And he's got to take me home to them--some time--to present me to them. The divorce is difficult enough. Even if they think of me as quite innocent, it will be hard for them, that George should marry a divorced woman."

"What have they to do with it?" interrupted Janet. "It's only George that matters--no other person has any right whatever to know! You needn't consider anybody else."

"Yes--but think of _him_. It's bad enough that I should know something he doesn't know--but at least _he's_ spared. He can take me home to his mother--whom he adores--and if _I_ know that I'm a cheat and a sham--he doesn't--it will be all easy for him."

Janet was silenced for the moment by the sheer passion of the voice. She sat, groping a little, under the stress of her own thought, and praying inwardly--without words--for light and guidance.

"And think of _me_, please!" Rachel went on. "If I tell him, it's done--for ever. He'll forgive me, I think. He may be everything that's dear, and good, and kind"--her voice broke--"but it'd hit him dreadfully hard. A man like that can't forget such a thing. When I've once said it, I shall have changed everything between us. He must think--some time--when he's alone--when I'm not there--'It was Dick Tanner once--it will be some one else another time!' I shall have been pulled down from the place where he puts me now--even after he knows all about Roger and the divorce--pulled down for good and all--however much he may pity me--however good he may be to me. It will be love perhaps--but another kind of love. He can't trust me again. No one could. And it's that I can't bear--I can't _bear_!"

She looked defiantly at Janet, and the little room with its simple furnishings seemed too small a stage for such an energy of fear and distress.

"Yes--that you could bear," said Janet quietly, "with him to help you--and God. It would all straighten out in the end--because the first step would be right."

Rachel turned upon her.

"Now that I've told you," she cried, "can _you_ ever think the same of me again? You know you can't!"

Janet caught her cold hands, and held them close, looking up to her.

"Not the same--no, not the same! But if I cared for you before, Rachel--I care for you ten thousand times more now. Don't you see?--it will be the same with him?"

Rachel shook her head.

"No--a _man's_ different," she repeated, "a man's different!"

"Anyway, you _must_," said Janet resolutely, "you know you must. You don't need me to tell you."

Rachel wrenched herself away with a little moan and hid her face in her hands as she leaned against the mantelpiece. Janet, looking up, and transfigured by that spiritual energy, that ultimate instinctive faith which was the root force in her, went on, pleading.

"Dear Rachel, one goes on living side by side--doing one's daily work--and thinking just one's ordinary thoughts--and all the time one never speaks of the biggest things of all--the only things that matter, really. Isn't it God that matters--and the law in our hearts? If we break it--if we aren't true--if we wrong those that love us--if we injure and deceive--how will it be when we grow old--when we come to die? Whatever our gain--we shall have lost our souls?"

"You think I should injure him by marrying him?" cried Rachel.

"No--no! A thousand times, no! But by deceiving him--by not trusting him--with all your heart, and all your life--that would be the worst injury."

"How do you know all there may have been in his life?" said Rachel, vehemently--"I don't ask."

"I think you do know."

Rachel considered the words, finally dropping her face again out of sight.

"Well, I dare say I do!" she said wearily. "Of course he's a hundred times too good for me."

"Don't turn it off like that! It's for oneself one has to think--one's own fulfilling of the law. Love--_is_ the fulfilling of the law. And love means trust--and truth."

Janet's voice sank. She had said her say. Rachel was silent for some time, and Janet sat motionless. The clock and the fire were the only sounds. At last Rachel moved. With a long sigh, she pressed back the ruffled hair from her temples, and standing tiptoe before a small mirror that hung over the mantelpiece, she began to pin up some coils that had broken loose. When that was done, she turned slowly towards Janet.

"Very well. That's settled. How shall it be done? Shall I write it or say it?"

Janet gasped a little between laughing and crying. Then she caught Rachel's cold unresisting hand, and laid it tenderly against her own cheek.

"Write it."

"All right." The voice was that of an automaton. "How shall I send it?"

"Would you--would you trust me to take it?"

"You mean--you'd talk to him?"

"If you gave me leave."

Rachel thought a little, and then made a scarcely perceptible sign of assent. A few more words passed as to the best time at which to find Ellesborough at leisure. It was decided that Janet should aim at catching him in the midday dinner hour. "I should bicycle, and get home before dark."

"And now let's talk of something else," said Rachel, imperiously.

She found some business letters that had to be answered, and set to work on them. Janet wrote up her milk records and dairy accounts. The fire sank gently to its end. Janet's cat came with tail outstretched, and rubbed itself sociably, first against Janet's skirts, and then against Rachel. No trace remained in the little room, where the two women sat at their daily work, of the scene which had passed between them, except in Rachel's pallor, and the occasional shaking of her hand as it passed over the paper.

Then when Janet put up her papers with a look at the clock, which was just going to strike ten o'clock, Rachel too cleared away, and with that instinct for air and the open which was a relic of her Canadian life, and made any closed room after a time an oppression to her, she threw a cloak over her shoulders, and went out again to breathe the night. There was a young horse who, on the previous day, had needed the vet. She went across the yard to the stable to look at him.

All was well with the horse, whose swollen hock had been comfortably bandaged by Hastings before he left. But as she stood beside him, close to the divided door, opening on the hill, of which both the horizontal halves were now shut, she was aware of certain movements on the other side of the door--some one passing it--footsteps. Her nerves gave a jump. Could it be?--_again_! Impetuously she went to the door, threw open the upper half, and looked out. Nothing--but the faint starlight on the hill, and the woods crowning it.

She called.

"Who's there?" But no one answered.

Fancy, of course. But with the knowledge she now had, she could not bring herself to go round the farm. Instead she carefully closed the stable shutter, and ran back across the yard into the shelter of the house, locking the front door behind her, and going into the sitting-room and the kitchen, to see that the windows were fastened.

Janet was waiting for her at the top of the stairs. They kissed each other gravely, in silence, like those who feel that the time for speech is done. Then Rachel went into her room, and Janet heard her turn the key. Janet herself slept intermittently. But whenever she woke, it seemed to her that there was some slight sound in the next room--a movement or a rustle, which showed that Rachel was still awake--and up?

It was a night indeed which left Rachel with that sense of strange illuminations, of life painfully enlarged and deepened, which love and suffering may always bring to the woman who is capable of love and suffering. She had spent the hours in writing to Ellesborough, and in that letter she had unpacked her heart to its depths, Janet guessed. When she received the letter from Rachel on the morrow, she handled it as a sacred thing.

XV

The frost held. A sun of pearl and fire rose over the hill, as the stars finally faded out in the winter morning, and a brilliant rime lay sparkling on all the pastures and on the slopes of the down. The brilliance had partly vanished from the lower grounds when Janet started on her way; but on the high commons, winter was at its gayest and loveliest. The distant woods were a mist of brown and azure, encircling the broad frost-whitened spaces; the great single beeches and oaks under which Spenser or Sidney--the great Will himself--might have walked, shot up, magnificent, into a clear sky, proudly sheltering the gnarled thorns and furze-bushes which marched beside and round them, like dwarfs in a pageant.

Half way up the hill, Janet came across old Betts bringing down a small cart-full of furze for fodder, and she stopped to speak to him. A little later on, nearer to the camp she overtook Dempsey, who rather officiously joined her, and assuming at once that she was in quest of the Camp Commandant, directed her to a short cut leading straight to Ellesborough's quarters. There was a slight something in the manner of both men that jarred on Janet--as though their lips said one thing and their eyes another--furtive in the case of Betts, a trifle insolent in that of Dempsey. She with her tragic knowledge guessed uncomfortably at what it meant. Dempsey--as she had made up her mind after ten minutes' talk with him--was a vain gossip. It had been madness on Rachel's part to give him the smallest hold on her. Very likely he had not yet actually betrayed her--his hope of favours to come might have been sufficient to prevent that. But his self-importance would certainly show itself somehow--in a hint or a laugh. He had probably already roused in the village mind a prying curiosity, a suspicion of something underhand, which might alter Rachel's whole relation to her neighbours. For once give an English country-side reason to suspect a scandal, and it will pluck it bare in time, with a slow and secret persistence.

Well, after all, if the situation became disagreeable, Rachel would only have to choose Ellesborough's country as her own, and begin her new life there.

_Supposing that all went well!_ Janet's mind went through some painful alterations of confidence and fear, as she walked her bicycle along the rough forest-track leading to Ellesborough's hut. She believed him to be deeply in love with Rachel, and the spiritual passion in her seemed to realize in the man's inmost nature, behind all his practical ability, and his short business manner, powers of pity and tenderness like her own. But if she were wrong? If this second revelation put too great a strain upon one brought up in an exceptionally strict school where certain standards of conduct were simply taken for granted?

Mystic, and puritan as she was, there were moments when Janet felt her responsibility almost unbearable. Rachel deserted--Rachel in despair--Rachel turning on the woman who had advised her to her undoing--all these images were beating on Janet's tremulous sense, as the small military hut where Ellesborough and two of his junior officers lived came into view, together with that wide hollow of the forestry camp where he and Rachel had first met. The letter in her pocket seemed a living and sinister thing. She had still power to retain it--to keep it imprisoned.

A lady in the dress of the Women's Forestry Corps appeared on another path leading to Ellesborough's hut. Janet recognized Mrs. Fergusson, and was soon greeted by a shout of welcome.

"Well, so Miss Henderson's engaged to our Captain!" said Mrs. Fergusson, with a smiling countenance, as they shook hands. "The girls here, and I, are awfully interested. The camp began it! But do you want the Captain? I'm afraid he isn't here."

Janet's countenance fell.

"I thought I should be sure to find him in the dinner hour."

"No, he went up to town by the first train this morning on some business with the Ministry. We expect him back about three."

It was not one o'clock. Janet pondered what to do.

"You wanted to see him?" said Mrs. Fergusson, full of sympathy.

"I brought a letter for him. If I leave it, will he be sure to get it directly he returns?"

"His servant's in the hut. Let's talk to him."

Mrs. Fergusson rapped at the door of the hut, and walked in. An elderly batman appeared.

"I have a letter for Captain Ellesborough--an important letter--on business," said Janet. "I was to wait for an answer. But as he isn't here, where shall I leave it, so that he will be certain to get it?"

"On his table, if you please, ma'am," said the soldier, opening the door of the Captain's small sitting-room--"I'll see that he gets it."

"It'll be quite safe?" said Janet anxiously, placing it herself in a prominent place on the writing-table.

"Lor, yes, ma'am. Nobody comes in here but me, when the Captain's away. I'll tell him of it directly he comes home."

"May I just write a little note myself? I expected to find Captain Ellesborough in."

The servant handed her a sheet of paper. She wrote--"I brought Rachel's letter, and am very disappointed not to see you. Come at once. Don't delay. Janet Leighton."

She slipped it into an envelope, which she addressed and left beside the other. Then she reluctantly left the hut with Mrs. Fergusson.

"I am so sorry you didn't find him," said that lady. "Was it something about the wedding?" she added, smiling, her feminine curiosity getting the better of her.

"Oh, no--not yet," said Janet, startled.

"Well, I suppose it won't be long," laughed Mrs. Fergusson. "He's desperately in love, you know!"

Janet smiled in return, and Mrs. Fergusson, delighted to have the chance, broke out into praises of her Commandant.

"You see, we women who are doing all this new work with men, we know a jolly deal more about them than we ever did before. I can tell you, it searches us out, this joint life--both women and men. In this camp you can't hide what you are--the sort of man--or the sort of woman. And there isn't a woman in this camp, if she's been here any time, who wouldn't trust the Captain for all she's worth--who wouldn't tell him her love-affairs, or her debts--or march up to a machine-gun, if he told her. In a sense, they're in love with him, because--as you've no doubt found out, he has a way with him! But they all know that he's never been anything to them but the best of Commandants, and a good friend. Oh, I could never have run this camp but for him. He and I'll go together! Of course we're shutting up very soon."

So the pleasant Irishwoman ran on, as she walked beside Janet and her bicycle to the top of the hill. Janet listened and smiled. Her own mind said ditto to it all. But nevertheless, the more Ellesborough was set on a pinnacle by this enthusiastic friend and spectator of his daily life, the more Rachel's friend trembled for Rachel. A lover "not too bright and good" to understand--and forgive--that was what was wanted.

She reached the farm-gate about two o'clock, and Rachel was there, waiting for her. But before they met, Rachel watching her approach, saw that there was no news for her.

"He wasn't there?" she said, drearily, as Janet reached her.

Janet explained, and they walked up the farm lane together.

"I would have waited if I could," she said in distress. "But it would have looked strange. Mrs. Fergusson would have suspected something wrong."

"Oh no, you couldn't have waited," said Rachel, decidedly. "Well!"--she threw her arms out in a great stretch--"it's done. In half an hour he'll be reading the letter. It's like waiting for one's execution, isn't it? Nothing can stop it; I may be dead before tea!" She gave a wild laugh.

"Rachel!"

"Well, that's how I feel. If he gives me up, it will be death--though I dare say I shall go on fussing round the farm, and people will still talk to me as if I were alive. But!"--she shrugged her shoulders.

"He won't give you up--" said Janet, much troubled--"because--because he's a good man."

"All the more reason. If I were he, I should give me up. Shall I tell you a queer thing, Janet? I hate Roger, as much as I can hate anybody. It would be a great relief to me if I heard he were dead. And yet at the same time I see--oh yes, I see quite plainly--that I treated him badly. He told me so the other night--and it is so--it's _true_. I never had the least patience with him. And now he's dying--at least he says so--and though I hate him--though I pray I may never, never see him again, yet I'm sorry for him. Isn't that strange?"

She looked at Janet with a queer flickering defiance, which was also a kind of remorse, in her eyes.

"No, it isn't strange."

"Why not?--when I hate him?"

"One can be sorry even for those one hates. I suppose God is," Janet added, after a pause.

Rachel made a little face of scorn.

"Why should God hate any one? He made us. He's responsible. He must have known what He was doing. If He really pitied us, would He have made us at all?"

Janet made a little protesting sound--a sound of pain.

"Does it give you the shivers, old woman, when I talk like that?" Rachel slipped her hand affectionately through Janet's arm. "Well, I won't, then. But if--" she caught her breath a little--"if George casts me off, don't expect me to sing psalms and take it piously. I don't know myself just lately--I seem quite strange to myself."

And Janet, glancing at her sideways, wondered indeed where all that rosy-cheeked, ripe bloom had gone, which so far had made the constant charm of Rachel Henderson. Instead a bloodless face, with pinched lines, and heavy-lidded eyes! What a formidable thing was this "love," that she herself had never known, though she had had her quiet dreams of husband and children, like her fellows.

Rachel, however, would not let herself be talked with or pitied. She walked resolutely to the house, and went off to the fields to watch Halsey cutting and trimming a hedge.

"If he doesn't come before dark," she said, under her breath, to Janet, before setting off--"it will be finished. If he does--"

She hurried away without finishing the sentence, and was presently taking a lesson from old Halsey, in what is fast becoming one of the rarest of the rural arts. But in little more than half an hour, Janet bringing in the cows, saw her return and go into the house. The afternoon was still lovely--the sky, a pale gold, with thin bars of grey cloud lying across it, and the woods, all delicate shades of brown and purple, with their topmost branches clear against the gold. The old red walls and tiled roofs of the farm, the fields, the great hay and straw stacks, were all drenched in the soft winter light.

Rachel went up to her room, and sat down before the bare deal dressing-table which held her looking-glass, and the very few articles of personal luxury she possessed; a pair of silver-backed brushes and a hand-glass that had belonged to an aunt, a small leather case in which she kept some modest trinkets--a pearl brooch, a bracelet or two, and a locket that had been her mother's--and, standing on either side of the glass, two photographs of her father and mother.

There was a clock on the mantelpiece. "Nearly four o'clock--" she thought--"I'll give it an hour. He'd send--if he couldn't come, and he wanted to come--but if nothing happens--I shall know what to think."

As this passed through her mind, she opened one of the drawers of the dressing-table, in which she kept her gloves and handkerchiefs. Suddenly she perceived at the back of the drawer a small leathern case. The colour rushed into her face. She took it out and ran quickly down the stairs to the kitchen. Janet and the girls were busy milking. The coast was clear.

A bright fire which Janet had just made up was burning in the kitchen. Rachel went up to it and thrust the leathern case into the red core of it. Some crackling--a disagreeable smell--and the little thing had soon vanished. Rachel went slowly upstairs again, and locked the door of her room behind her. The drawer of the dressing-table was still open, and there was visible in it the object she was really in search of, when the little leathern case caught her eye--a small cloth-bound book marked "Diary."