Harvest

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

XIII

It was again a very still and misty night,—extraordinarily mild for the time of year. A singular brooding silence held all the woodlands above Great End Farm. There was not a breath of wind. Every dead branch that fell, every bird that moved, every mouse scratching among the fallen beech leaves, produced sounds disproportionately clear and startling, and for the moment there would be a rustle of disturbance, as though something or some one, in the forest heart, took alarm. Then the deep waters of quiet closed again, and everything—except that watching presence—slept.

The hut in Denman Wood, which had formerly played a hospitable part as the scene of many a Gargantuan luncheon to Colonel Shepherd's shooting parties, had long been an abandoned spot. All the Colonel's keepers under fifty had gone to fight; and there was left only an old head keeper, with one decrepit helper, who shot the scanty game which still survived on strict business principles, to eke out the household rations of the big house. The Ipscombe woods were rarely visited. They were a long way from the keeper's cottage, and the old man, depressed by the difference between war and pre-war conditions, found it quite enough to potter round the stubbles and turnips of the home farm when game had to be shot.

The paths leading through the underwood to the hut were now in these four years largely over-grown. A place more hidden and forgotten it would have been difficult to find. And for this reason, combined with its neighbourhood to Rachel Henderson's farm, Roger Delane had chosen to inhabit it.

It was the third night after his interview with his former wife. He reached the hut after dark, by various by-paths over the wide commons stretching between it and X—the station at which he now generally alighted. He carried in his pocket some evening newspapers, a new anthology, and a novel. Owing to an injection of morphia—a habit to which he had only lately taken—he felt unusually fit, and his brain was unusually alert. At the same time he had had a disagreeable interview with a doctor that morning who had been insisting on Sanatorium treatment if the remaining lung was to be preserved and his life prolonged. He did not want to prolong his life, but only to avoid the beastliness of pain. It seemed to him that morphia—good stuff!—was going to do that for him. Why hadn't he begun it before? But his brain was queer—he was conscious of that. He had asked the doctor about some curious mental symptoms. The reply was that phthisis was often accompanied by them.

Obsession—fixed ideas—in the medical sense: half of him, psychologically, was quite conscious that the other half was under their influence. The sound self was observing the unsound self, but apparently with no power over it. Otherwise how was it that he was here again, hiding like a wild beast in a lair, less than a mile from Great End Farm, and Rachel Henderson?

He had found his way to London in the small hours of the day following his scene with Rachel, intending to keep his promise, and let his former wife alone. The cashing of Rachel's cheque had given him and Anita some agreeable moments; though Anita was growing disturbed that he would not tell her where the money came from. They had found fresh lodgings in a really respectable Bloomsbury street; they had both bought clothes, and little Netta had been rigged out. Delane had magnificently compounded with his most pressing creditors, and had taken Anita to a theatre. But he had been discontented with her appearance there. She had really lost all her good looks. If it hadn't been for the kid—

And now, after this interval, his obsession had swooped upon him again. It was an obsession of hate—which simply could not endure, when it came to the point, that Rachel Henderson should vanish unscathed into the future of a happy marriage, while he remained the doomed failure and outcast he knew himself to be. Rachel's implied confession rankled in him like a burn. Tanner!—that wretched weakling, with his miserable daubs that nobody wanted to buy. So Rachel had gone to him, as soon as she had driven her husband away, no doubt to complain of her ill-treatment, to air her woes. The fellow had philandered round her some time, and had shown an insolent and interfering temper once or twice towards himself. Yes!—he could imagine it all!—her flight, and Tanner's maudlin sympathy—tears—caresses—the natural sequel. And then her pose of complete innocence at the divorce proceedings—the Judge's remarks. Revolting hypocrisy! If Tanner had been still alive, he would somehow have exposed him—somehow have made him pay. Lucky for him he was drowned in that boat accident on Lake Nipissing! And no doubt Rachel thought that the accident had made everything safe for her.

Every incident now, every phase of his conversation with her was assuming a monstrous and distorted significance in his mind. How easily she had yielded on the subject of the money! He might have asked a great deal more—and he would have got it. Very likely Ellesborough was well off—Yankees generally were—and she knew that what she gave Delane as hush money would make very little difference to her. Ellesborough no doubt would not look very closely into her shekels, having sufficient of his own. Otherwise it might occur to him to wonder how she had got rid of that £500. Would it pinch her? Probably, if all she had for capital was the old chap's legacy. Well—serve her right—serve her, damned, doubly right! Ellesborough's kisses would make up.

These thoughts, after a momentary respite, held him in their grip as he walked London streets. Suspicion of the past—ugly and venomous—flapped its black wings about him. Had Rachel ever been faithful to him—even in the early days? She had made acquaintance with the Tanners very soon after their marriage. Looking back, a number of small incidents and scenes poked their heads out of the dead level of the past. Rachel and Tanner, discussing the Watts photograph when Rachel first acquired it—Tanner's eager denunciatory talk—he called himself an "impressionist"—the creature!—because he couldn't draw worth a cent—Rachel all smiles and deference. She had never given him that sort of attention. Or Rachel at a housewarming in the next farm to his—Rachel in a pale green dress, the handsomest woman there, dancing with Tanner—Rachel quarrelling with him in the buggy on the way home, because he called Tanner a milksop—"He cares for beautiful things, and you don't!—but that's no reason why you should abuse him."

And what about those weeks not very long after that dance, when he had gone off to the land-sale at Edmonton (that was the journey, by the way, when he first saw Anita!), and Rachel had stayed at home, with a girl friend, a girl they knew in Winnipeg? But that girl hadn't stayed all the time. To do her justice, Rachel had made no secret of that. He remembered her attacking him when he came home for having left her for three or four days quite alone. Why had he been so long away? Probably a mere bluff—though he had been taken in by it at the time, and being still in love with her, had done his best to appease her. But what had she been doing all the time she was alone? In the light of what he knew now, she might have been doing anything. Was the child his?

So, piece by piece, with no auditor but his own brain, shut in upon himself by the isolation which his own life had forged for him, he built up a hideous indictment against the woman he had once loved. He wished he had put off his interview with her till he had had time to think things out more. As he came to realize how she had tricked and bested him, her offence became incredibly viler than it seemed at first. He had let her off far too cheaply that night at the farm. Scenes of past violence returned upon him, and the memory of them seemed to satisfy a rising thirst. Especially the recollection of the divorce proceedings maddened him. His morbid brain took hold on them with a grip that his will could not loosen. Her evidence—he had read it in the Winnipeg newspapers—the remarks of the prating old judge—and of her cad of a lawyer—good God! And all the time it was she who ought to have been in the dock, and he the accuser, if he had known—if he hadn't been a trusting idiot, a bleating fool.

A brooding intensity of rage, as this inward process went on, gradually drowned in him every other feeling and desire. The relief and amusement of the money and its spending were soon over. He thought no more of it. Anita, and his child even—the child for whom he really cared—passed out of his mind. As he sat drinking whisky in the dull respectable lodging, at night after Anita had gone to bed, he felt the sinister call of those dark woods above Rachel's farm, and tasted the sweetness of his new power to hurt her, now that she had paid him this blackmail, and damned herself thereby—past help. She had threatened him. But what could she do—or the Yankee fellow either? She had given the show away. As for his promise, when he had no right to make it,—no right to allow such a woman to get off scot-free, with plenty of money and a new lover.

So on the Thursday evening he took train for X. It was still the Armistice week. The London streets were crowded with soldiers and young women of every sort and kind. He bought a newspaper and read it in the train. It gave him a queer satisfaction—for one half of him was still always watching the other—to discover that he could feel patriotic emotion like anybody else and could be thrilled by the elation of Britain's victory—his victory. He read the telegrams, the positions on the Rhine assigned to the Second Army, and the Fourth,—General Plumer General Rawlinson—General F.—Gad! he used to know the son of that last old fellow at King's.

Then he fell to his old furtive watching of the people on the platform, the men getting in and out of the train. At any moment he might fall in with one of his old Cambridge acquaintances, in one of these smart officers, with their decorations and their red tabs. But in the first place they wouldn't travel in this third class where he was sitting—not till the war was over. And in the next, he was so changed—had taken indeed such pains to be—that it was long odds against his being recognized. Eleven years, was it, since he left Cambridge? About.

At X. he got out. The ticket collector noticed him for that faint touch of a past magnificence that still lingered in his carriage and gait; but there were so many strangers about that he was soon forgotten.

He passed under a railway arch and climbed a hill, the hill on which he had met Dempsey. At the top of the hill he left the high-road for a grass track across the common. There was just enough light from a declining moon to show him where he was. The common was full of dark shapes—old twisted thorns, and junipers, and masses of tall grass—shapes which often seemed to him to be strargely alive, the silent but conscious witnesses of his passage.

The wood was very dark. He groped his way through it with difficulty and found the hut. Once inside it, he fastened the door with a wooden bar he had himself made, and turned on his electric torch. Bit by bit in the course of his night visits he had accumulated a few necessary stores—some firewood, a few groceries hidden in a corner, a couple of brown blankets, and a small box of tools. A heap of dried bracken in a corner, raised on a substratum of old sacks, had often served him for a bed; and when he had kindled a wood fire in the rough grate of loose bricks where Colonel Shepherd's keepers had been accustomed to warm the hot meat stews sent up for the shooting luncheons, and had set out his supper on the upturned fragment of an old box which had once held meal for pheasants, he had provided at least what was necessary for his night sojourn. This food he had brought with him; a thermos bottle full of hot coffee, with slices of ham, cheese, and bread; and he ate it with appetite, sitting on a log beside the fire, and pleasantly conscious as he looked round him, like the Greek poet of long ago, of that "cuteness" of men which conjures up housing, food, and fire in earth's loneliest places. Outside that small firelit space lay the sheer silence of the wood, broken once or twice by the call and flight of an owl past the one carefully darkened window of the hut, or by the mysterious sighing and shuddering which, from time to time, would run through the crowded stems and leafless branches.

A queer "hotel" this, for mid-November! He might, if he had chosen, have been amusing himself, tant bien que mal, in one or other of those shabby haunts,—bars, night-clubs, dancing-rooms, to which his poverty and his moeurs condemned him, while his old comrades, the lads he had been brought up with at school and college, guardsmen, Hussars, and the rest, were holding high revel for the Peace at the Ritz or the Carlton; he might even, as far as money was concerned, now that he had bagged his great haul from Rachel, have been supping himself at the Ritz, if he had only had time to exchange his brother-in-law's old dress suit, which Marianne had passed on to him, for a new one, and if he could have made up his mind to the possible recognitions and rebuffs such a step would have entailed. As it was, he preferred his warm hiding-place in the heart of the woods, coupled with this exultant sense of an unseen and mysterious power which was running, like alcohol, through his nerves.

Real alcohol, however, was not wanting to his solitary meal. He drenched his coffee in the cognac he always carried about with him, and then, cigarette in hand, he fell back on the heap of bracken to read a while. The novel he sampled and threw away; the anthology soon bored him; and he spent the greater part of two hours lying on his back, smoking and thinking—till it was safe to assume that the coast was clear round Great End Farm. About ten o'clock, he slipped noiselessly out of the hut, after covering up the fire to wait for his return, and hiding as far as he could the other traces of his occupation. The damp mist outside held all the wood stifled, and the darkness was profound. Stepping as lightly as possible, and using his torch with the utmost precaution, he gradually made his way to the edge of the wood, and the lip of the basin beyond it. On the bare down was enough faint moonlight to see by, and he extinguished his little lantern before leaving the wood. Below him were the dim outlines of the farm, a shadowy line of road beyond, and, as it were, a thicker fold of darkness, to mark the woods on the horizon. There was not a light anywhere; the village was invisible, and he listened for a long time without hearing anything but the rush of a distant train.

Ah!—Yes, there was a sound down there in the hollow—footsteps, reverberating in the silence. He bent his head listening intently. The footsteps seemed to approach the farm, then the sounds ceased, till suddenly, on the down slope below him, he saw something moving. He threw back his head with a quiet laugh.

The Ipscombe policeman, no doubt, on his round. Would he come up the hill? Hardly, on such a misty night. If not, his retreating steps on the farm lane would soon tell his departure.

In a few minutes, indeed, the click of an opening gate could be clearly heard through the mist, and afterwards, steps. They grew fainter and fainter. All clear!

Choosing a circuitous route, Delane crept down the hill, and reached a spot on the down-side rather higher than the farm enclosure, from which the windows of the farm-house could be seen. There was a faint light in one of the upper two—in which he had some reason to think was that of Rachel's bedroom. It seemed to him the window was open; he perceived something like the swaying of a blind inside it. The night was marvellously mild for mid-November; and he remembered Rachel's old craving for air, winter and summer.

The light moved, there was a shadow behind the blind, and suddenly the window was thrown up widely, and a pale figure—a woman's figure—stood in the opening. Rachel, no doubt! Delane slipped behind a thorn growing on the bare hill-side. His heart thumped. Instinctively his hand groped for something in his pocket. If she had guessed that he was there—within twenty yards of her!

Then, as he watched the faint apparition in the mist, it roused in him a fresh gust of rage. Rachel, the sentimental Rachel, unable to sleep—Rachel, happy and serene, thinking of her lover—the lies of her divorce all forgotten—and the abominable Roger cut finally out of her life!—

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!