Chapter 8

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.