Part 13

He never knew he learnt. He never realized the soil he grew in. Up to the light he came, the light she gave him from the emotion of her own ideals; up to the light like a sapling tree, well planted in the wood, with space and air to stretch its branches to the sun.

"Mummy, what's death?" he asked her one day as he sat with her while she milked the cows. "What's death?"

For a long time she continued with her milking in silence. She had taught him never to bother for an answer to his questions and only to ask again when he made sure his question had not been heard. Now he leant up against the stall waiting in patience, watching her face. Peeping at her then when making sure she had not heard, he asked once more.

"Mummy, what's death? Is that too soon?"

She smiled and pressed his hand with her own that was warm and wet with milk.

"Why do you ask that, John?" she inquired.

"There were two moles got chopped with the hay knives. I saw them. They were lying in a lump and all bloody and still. Is that death? Mr. Peverell said they was quite dead. Is death being quite dead?"

She shook her head and went back to her milking; still for a while in silence.

These were moments she feared, yet had no real dread of, seeing they had to be. Here was a young twig seeking to the light, a young twig that one day would become a branch and must be set in surest purpose or in the full growth, sooner or later, would reveal its stunted lines and the need there had been for vision in its training.

"Death's not the same as being dead," she said presently. "Nothing is quite dead." She stripped her cow, the last that evening and, putting the pail aside from long habits of precaution, she turned and took both his hands in hers.

"Do you know what a difficult question you've asked me, John?" she said.

He shook his head.

"You have, and awfully badly I want to answer it. I could quite easily if you were a little bit older. I'm so afraid I can't make it simple enough for you to understand now. And if I told you something you didn't understand, you'd make your own understanding of it and it might be all wrong."

"Only want to know about the moles," said he.

"Yes, I know. But what's happened to the moles happens to people."

"When?"

"Oh, all sorts of times. They get caught in the mowing knives."

"But can't they tie themselves up with bits of rag and make it all right and stop the blooding?"

"Not when it cuts into their hearts, they can't. Even a whole tablecloth couldn't stop the bleeding then."

"What happens then?"

"They get all still like the moles."

"And are they dead then?"

"No, that's where it's so difficult to explain. If I were to say--that's death, but they're not dead--how could you understand?"

"Couldn't," he agreed, and leant his head up against her cheek, sympathizing with her difficulties. "I've always thought death was being quite dead."

"Nothing's quite dead," she repeated, half to herself, as though by the reiteration of that she might capture out of the void the inspiration for what she wanted to say.

"Do you remember what I told you about God?" she asked suddenly.

He nodded his head.

"Well, when things go quite still, they've gone back to God. They can't feel thirsty then, or tired or unhappy. They haven't got any bodies to feel tired or thirsty with."

"But what does God do with all the dead things and people?"

Mary clasped her courage and went on.

"He just lets them rest," she said, "rest till they're ready to bear being thirsty and tired again."

"Were the moles so thirsty or so tired that they couldn't bear it any more?"

"They may have been. You can never know when God chooses to take you back again. Life, the thing that makes you move about and laugh and run, the thing that makes you able to bear being thirsty, you can give that back to God just when you feel strongest."

"What would you give it back for?"

"Something that was worth while. Suppose you and I were out for a walk together and I fell in the river and I couldn't swim and I was nearly going to be drowned and be quite still, because when you're under the water you can't breathe and that's another thing that makes you go quite still, what would you do?"

"I'd jump in and I'd swim and I'd take you in my arms and I'd swim with my legs and I'd get to the bank and then I'd pull you out and I'd call to Mr. Peverell."

He felt the tightening of her arm about him.

"But supposing I was too heavy and yet you still held on and I dragged you down under the water with me and you couldn't breathe and became quite still--then you'd have given the thing that had made you run to the bank and jump into the water, you'd have given it back to God."

"That would have been worth while, Mummy," said he.

"Would it, John?"

"Well, what would have been the good of going on looking for birds' eggs or making the hay or getting up in the morning if you'd been quite still?"

"So I fill your life, do I?" she whispered.

"No fun if you were like the moles," said he without sentiment.

And this, she thought of a sudden, is what so many women are denied, this actual virtue of being the very essence of the whole world to one little, living body that had not a lover's sentiments and passions to urge upon its mind, but stood alone absorbed, contained in its beliefs.

"Well, then, if you gave it back to God for something like that that seemed worth while, it would not be because you were tired then--would it?"

"No--I shouldn't want no rest. Shouldn't want to be quite still for long."

She lifted him up swiftly into her arms, a sudden sight of him quite still chilling through her blood.

"If you gave it back, generously, like that, my darling," she whispered, "He might accept it like Mr. Peverell always does when you give him an apple out of his own orchard. You always find it on your plate again next morning."

"Has God a beard like Mr. Peverell?" he asked.

IX

It was when John came to the age of eleven that Mary first learnt the pangs of jealousy.

A neighboring farm came into the market one Michaelmas and was bought by a young farmer bringing a wife and three children to the house that lay in the trees at the bottom of the Highfield meadow. No one knew why it was called Highfield, that meadow. It had been so called for centuries, yet it lay low. A brook ran through it. Some winters it lay under water. A kind of rush grew thick in the grass in one corner under the poplar trees. Every year it was put down for hay. Every year, so damp the soil, it grew a generous crop.

Farms so close together as Mr. Kemp's and Mr. Peverell's lend each other a helping hand. There is only a friendly rivalry between those whose hearts are in the soil. The spirit of giving maintains if it does not rule. Mr. Peverell's crops were generally better to his way of thinking than any one else's. But he loved the sight of a well grown field nevertheless. He wished no harm but the best to any man who tilled and cleansed his land.

"Cultivation," he said, "that's taking side wi' Nature. Weeds is folly and Nature can't abide that. A field run fallow makes my stomach turn."

It was at the haymaking in the Highfield meadow, when the womenfolk, and at lifting time the men as well, came in to help, that John first met Lucy Kemp.

She was a year younger than he; dark haired with solemn, wondering eyes that gazed with steady glances at the world.

In the midst of his frolics in the new cut hay, John came suddenly before those eyes, not knowing what he saw, ceased from his antics in a swift arrest.

"What are you looking at?" he asked with unceremonious directness.

"Looking at you," said she.

He glanced down at his clothes to see if anything was wrong.

"What's the matter with me?" he inquired.

"I like you," she replied.

"Why?"

"Cos you can stop playing all quick, like this, when you play."

She must have had some vague conception of what she meant. He must have had some vague conception of what he understood. It was the first time it had ever been made apparent to him that any one could like him as well as his mother.

"Aren't you going to play?" he asked.

"I've got a headache," she replied.

"What's that?"

"A pain--all over here!" She laid her hands across her forehead.

"Does it hurt?"

He gave sympathy in his voice at once.

"Keeps on frobbing," said she.

"Let God feel it frob and come and play," he suggested with greater wisdom than he knew.

That had to be explained to her. They sat down in the hay, the first man in him explaining the mysteries of life to the first woman in her. Mary found them, fast friends, sitting together behind a high cock of hay.

"I thought I'd lost you, John," she said, and when he did not look up on the instant, knew she had indeed lost something of him she could never find again. No longer was she the only woman in his world. In a strange and unexpected moment he had found some one he could turn to to hide his pain if she became quite still like the moles.

They met often after that day. In a little while they became inseparable.

"Young things must have young things to play with," Mary told herself. It was Nature. They never reared young calves alone on the farm. Always they had companions.

"They grows better," said Mr. Peverell. "Young and young. It comes that way."

So she stilled her heart from painful beating. But one day Mrs. Peverell pointed out those two together in the fields and said--

"A love child they say takes easy to love. If that doant please 'ee, 'ee must stop it soon."

"Why shouldn't it please me?" she asked and her heart was trembling in swift flutterings that were not pulses in her breast, but were like wings beating, disturbing the air she breathed.

"Well, she be just an ordinary child, like one of us, and if John stays on the farm and one day takes it after Mr. Peverell, as I doant mind tellin' 'ee Mr. Peverell means 'en to take it if he likes the work, then he'll wed wi' her, you mark my words for it."

Mary took the hand with its knuckles far more knotted now and held it for comfort against her breast.

"You have been good to me," she muttered thickly. "I have never thought till now he could mean to leave the farm to John."

"His name's in the Bible," said Mrs. Peverell.

"Yes, yes, my dear, I know what that means to you. But I never thought you meant it so practically as that. If John does take on the farm, why shouldn't he marry Lucy? Wouldn't that be right? Wouldn't that be the very best?"

"I thought by the way 'ee looked at them 'ee mind was all against it. I thought 'ee'd got greater prospects for him than that. She's only an ordinary child, I says, and that's all she is. I thought it 'ud upset 'ee plans for 'en."

"My plans," said Mary. "They're only for his happiness and the best that's in him. I can't have him always, can I? Not always to myself?" She turned her eyes across the field to where they stood together.

"She's come--with her big eyes," she whispered and she walked away.

PHASE V

I

It was a still hot day at the end of the month of July in the following year. Vast mountain ranges of cumulus clouds too heavy on the horizon to sweep across the sky with the storm they promised hung sullen and low in masses of pale purple rimmed with golden pink. Rain was sadly wanted all the country round. Only the Highfield meadow at Yarningdale was lush and green. The cows were there grazing on the aftermath.

With her sewing, Mary had come down to the field an hour or more before there was need to drive them in. John was playing with Lucy down the stream. She could hear their voices in and out of the willows. They were like dryad and faun, laughing together. His voice was as a lute to Mary. She listened to it and to the very words he said, as she would have listened to a faun playing on his pipe, half bewitched by it, half tricked to laughter and to joy that was scarcely of this world.

"If I'm the captain," she heard him saying, "you have to dance whether you like it or not."

Claude Duval and Treasure Island! Both flung together in the melting pot of his fancy.

She peered down the field through the trunks of the pollarded willows and saw a dryad dancing before a faun sitting cross-legged in the grass. A fay-looking sight it was in the hazy mist of that sunshine. With unsteady balance, Lucy swayed in and out of the tree shadows, alternately a thing of darkness and a thing of light. And there below her in the grass he sat, with his mop of hair and his profile cut sharp against the dark trunk of a willow tree, looking to Mary who saw him with the mist in his eyes like pagan Nature, back to the times of Pan. Herself as well, as there she watched, she felt she could have danced for him.

Was that what love was--the thing that she had never known? Could this be it, this godlike power that Nature lent to man to make a woman dance for him, and, as she danced, trick all his senses till he was no more than man, when Nature snatched her loan away and with Pan's laughter caught the woman in her arms and vanished in the trees and hid herself?

That moment then she seemed to see it so and with a later vision beheld the woman stepping out from underneath the shadows of the wood, leading a faun, so young his feet seemed scarcely touching the grass he walked upon.

Her sewing fluttered to her lap. In that midsummer heat, her eyes half closed, then opened, startled at the sound of solid footsteps by her side. She looked up and there stood Liddiard, his hat in his hand, a nervous smile upon his lips. She was too taken unawares to fathom them.

"Am I dreaming?" she muttered.

"You were asleep," said he.

"But this isn't dreaming?"

"No--you're awake now."

"Why--? What is it? Why have you come here?"

"To see you."

"After all these years?"

"Twelve of them."

He sat down on the grass a little apart from her, watching her face.

"You look very little older, Mary. There isn't a gray hair in your head. I've plenty."

"My hair's nondescript," she replied, still in an amaze. "It takes a long time to go gray. Why have you come here? Did they tell you at Bridnorth where I was?"

"Yes."

"Then why have you come?"

"I told you, to see you."

"But what about?"

He smiled again as he watched her.

"You haven't changed at all, Mary. The same directness; the same unimpressionable woman, the same insensitiveness to the delicate word. Does it give you no pleasure at all to think I should come back after all these years to see you?"

"Was I unimpressionable once?" she asked quietly, and took no notice of the latter part of his sentence.

He looked away across the Highfield meadow and there between the willow trees he saw the mop of hair, the sharp cut profile, the little figure half hidden by the grass, looking as though he grew out and was part of the very earth itself he sat on.

Liddiard looked back at Mary.

"Is that him?" he muttered.

She nodded her head and then of a sudden a fear, nameless and unreasonable, shook her through all her body.

"You came to see him," she whispered. "You came because of him. Didn't you? Didn't you?"

"How did you know?" he asked.

"How did I know?" Her throat gave out a sound like laughter; a mirthless sound that frightened her and awed him. "Shouldn't I know, better than him; better even than you? Wouldn't I know everything that touches him, touches him near and touches him far away? What do you want to see him for? He's nothing to do with you--nothing!"

"I know that, Mary. He's yours. He's nothing to do with me; but mightn't I have something to do with him?"

Fear sickened in her throat. She wet her lips and gathered her sewing from her lap as though she might run away; then laid it down again.

"Say what you mean," she said quickly. "I don't want delicate words. You're right. I never did. They break against me and in their pieces mean nothing. I want the words I can understand. What do you mean you might be something to him? What could you be? He's mine, all mine! I made him--not you. I know I made him. I meant to. Every moment I meant to. It was just a moment of passion to you, a release of your emotions. It was ease it gave you--I can't help how I speak now--it was ease! It brought me the most wonderful pain in the world. You didn't want him! In that letter you wrote you talked about the consequences of passion! Consequences! My God! Is he no more than a consequence! A thing to be avoided! A thing, as you suggested, to be hidden away! I made him, I tell you--I meant to make him! I gave every thought in my mind and every pulse in my body to make him what he is while you were scheming in yours how the consequences of passion might be averted. What is the something you could be to him now after all these years? Where is the something any man can be to the child a woman brings into the world? Show me the man who, in such relationship as ours, will long for his child to be born, will give his passion, not for relief, but in full intent to make that child his own. Show me the man outside the convenience of the laws that he has made who will face the shame and ignominy he has made for himself and before all the world claim in his arms the thing he meant to create--then I'll admit he has something to do with the child he was the father of. Father! What delicate word that is! There's a word that breaks into a thousand little pieces against my heart. I don't know it! I don't understand it! I pick up the pieces and look at them and they mean nothing! Have you come after all these years to tell me you're his father, because if you have, you're talking empty words to me."

A little shout of laughter fluttered down to them through the still air. She never heard it. The beating of her heart was all too loud. Scarcely knowing what she did, she picked up her sewing and went on with her work, while Liddiard stared before him down the field.

"I suppose you imagine," he said presently, "I suppose you imagine I don't feel the justice of every word you've said. You think I'm incapable of it."

She made no reply and he continued.

"I know what you say is quite true. I haven't come here to tell you I'm his father. I scarcely feel that I am. If I did, I wouldn't thrust it on you. But there's one thing you don't count in all you've said."

"What's that?" she sharply asked.

"For all that you made him, for all the thoughts and pulses that you gave, he stands alone. He is himself, apart from you or me. The world is in front of him whilst it's dropping behind us two."

Again she laid her sewing down. A deeper terror he had struck into her heart by that. That was true. She knew it was true. The coming of Lucy into that hayfield only the summer before was proof that it was true. He stood alone. She had said as much to Mrs. Peverell herself. "He'll give the best he has," she had said in effect. "Perhaps he'll leave the farm and break your heart. Perhaps if I live, he'll break mine." This was true. Whole-heartedly she hated Liddiard for saying it. When all her claims were added up, John still stood by himself--alone.

"Go on," she whispered with intense quietness. "Say everything you've got to say. I'm listening."

He looked about him for reassurance, doubtful and ill at ease because of the note in her voice, yet set of purpose upon that for which he had come.

"I have told my wife everything," he began and paused. She bowed her head as he waited for a sign that she had heard.

"I told her a week ago to-day. My wife is now forty-seven. We have no children. We can have none. A week ago to-day we were discussing that; that I had no one, no one directly to whom I could leave Wenlock Hall. She knows what that place means to me. I think you know too. It was my father's and his father's. Well, it has been in the family for seven generations now. Each one of us has done something to it to improve it. In the Stuart period one of my ancestors built a chapel. Before then a wonderful tithe barn was built. It's one of the finest in England. The date is on one of the beams--1618. The eldest son has always inherited. We've never broken the line. We were talking about it the other night. I was an only son. The property is not entailed. The next of kin is a cousin. He's the only male Liddiard. I'm not particularly fond of him, but he's the only Liddiard. I should leave it to him. My wife was saying what a pity it was. She wondered whose fault it could be. 'I believe it must be mine,' she said, 'and if it is, what can I do?'"

He paused again and looked long at Mary whose needle still with the finest of precision was passing in and out of the material in her hands.

"I told her what she could do," he added and met Mary's eyes as they looked up.

"What was that?" she asked quietly.

"I told her she could give our child a home and a name," said he, "if you would consent to let him go."

II

It was in Mary's sensations as though, all unprepared, she had turned a sudden corner and found herself looking into an abyss, the darkness and depth of which was unfathomable. All sense of balance and equilibrium seemed to leave her. She reeled and was giddy in her mind. She could have laughed aloud. Her mental stance upon the plane of thought became a negation. Her grip was gone. She was floating, nebulously, foolishly, without power of volition to gravitate herself to a solid conception of anything.

He proposed to take John away from her. He was suggesting to her by every word he said that it was her duty to John to let him go. Not only could she laugh at the thought of it--she did. After all these twelve years when the whole of her life and John's too were planned out like a design upon a loom, needing only the spinning, she was to tear the whole fabric into shreds and fling it away! It was preposterous, unbelievable that he could have thought it worth while to come to her with such a suggestion. Yet she laughed, not because it was so ludicrous as to be unbelievable, but because Fate had so ordered it that, in a depth of her consciousness, she knew he could have done nothing else.

From the world's point of view it was the natural and inevitable sequence in an extraordinary chain of events. Many a woman would be glad of such an advancement for her son. Most conceivable it was that a man should desire his own flesh and blood to inherit and carry on in his name that of which the generations had made him proud. All this she realized. All this was the darkness and depth of the abyss into which she looked.

But then the sound of her laughter in her ears gave her hold again. More real than all worldly considerations became the cruelty it was to her. More real even than that was the destruction of the ideal she had cherished in her heart and nurtured and fed in John's.

His education was to have been the earth, the very soil his feet trod, not the riches that came out of that earth and more than the soft wet clay, soiled the hands of him who touched them. It was to give, not to enjoy; to labor, not to possess with which she had hedged him in upon his road to happiness and fulfillment. These were the realizations which, with the sound of her laughter, gave her hold again.

She saw the depth and darkness of that abyss, but shut her eyes to it. In full possession of herself, having gained equilibrium once more, she turned upon Liddiard with a scorn he had never seen in her.