XIV
Rachel woke the following morning in that dreary mood when all the colour and the glamour seem to have been washed out of life, and the hopes and dreams which keep up a perpetual chatter in every normal mind are suddenly dumb.
How was she going to face Ellesborough's long absence? It had been recently assumed between them that he would be very soon released from his forestry post, that the infantry commission he had been promised would come to nothing, now the Armistice was signed, and that in a very few weeks they would be free to think only of themselves and their own future. This offer of Intelligence work at the American Headquarters had changed everything.
In ten days, if nothing happened, he would be gone, and she would be left behind to grapple alone with Roger—who might at any moment torment her again; with the presence of Dempsey, who was thinking of settling in the village, and for whom she would be called upon very soon to fulfil the hopes she had raised in him; and finally, with the struggle and misery in her own mind.
But something must happen. As she was dressing by candle-light in the winter dawn, her thoughts were rushing forward—leaping some unexplored obstacles lying in the foreground—to a possible marriage before Ellesborough went to France; just a quiet walk to a registry office, without any fuss or any witness but Janet. If she could reach that haven, she would be safe; and this dumb fever of anxiety, this terrified conviction that in the end Fate would somehow take him from her, would be soothed away.
But how to reach it? For there was now between them, till they also were revealed and confessed, a whole new series of events: not only the Tanner episode, but Delane's reappearance, her interview with him, her rash attempt to silence Dempsey. By what she had done in her bewilderment and fear, in order to escape the penalty of frankness, she might only—as she was now beginning to perceive—have stumbled into fresh dangers. It was as though she stood on the friable edge of some great crater, some gulf of destruction, on which her feet were perpetually slipping and sinking, and only Ellesborough's hold could ultimately save her.
And Janet's—Janet's first. Rachel's thought clung to her, as the shipwrecked Southern sailor turns to his local saint to intercede for him with the greater spiritual lights. Janet's counsel and help—she knew she must ask for them—that it was the next step. Yet she had been weakly putting it off day by day. And through this mist of doubt and dread, there kept striking all the time, as though quite independent of it, the natural thoughts of a woman in love.
During the farm breakfast, hurried through by candle-light, with rain beating on the windows, Rachel was thinking—"Why didn't he propose it?"—this scheme of marrying before he went. Wasn't it a most natural thing to occur to him? She tormented herself all the morning with the problem of his silence.
Then—as though in rebuke of her folly—at midday came a messenger, a boy on a bicycle, with a letter. She took it up to her own room, and read it with fluttering breath—laughing, yet with tears in her eyes.
"My Darling—What an idiot I was last night! This morning I have woke up to a brilliant idea—why I didn't propose it to you yesterday I can't imagine! Let us marry before I go. Meet me in London, a week to-day, and let us go into the country, or to the sea, for a blessed forty-eight hours, afterwards. Then you will see me off—and I shall know, wherever I go, that you are my very, very own, and I am yours. I don't want to hurry you. Take time to think, and write to me to-night, or wire me to-morrow morning. But the very idea that you may say 'Yes' makes me the happiest of men. Take time to think—but—all the same—don't keep me too long waiting!
"Your own,
"G.E."
All day she kept the letter hidden in the loose front of her dress. "I'll wire to-morrow morning," she thought. But before that—something had got to happen. Every now and then she would pause in her own work to watch Janet—Janet butter-making, Janet feeding the calves, Janet cooking—for on that homely figure in white cap and apron everything seemed to depend.
The frost had come, and clear skies with it. The day passed in various miscellaneous business, under shelter, in the big barn.
And at night, after supper, Rachel stood on the front steps looking into a wide starry heaven, moonless, cold, and still. Betty and Jenny had just gone up to bed. Janet was in the kitchen, putting the porridge for the morrow's breakfast which she had just made into the hay-box, which would keep it steaming all night. But she would soon have done work. The moment seemed to have come.
Rachel walked into the kitchen and closed the door behind her. The supper had been cleared away and the table on which they had eaten it shone spotlessly clean and bare. The fire would soon be raked out for the night, and Janet would lay the breakfast before she left the kitchen. Everything was in the neatest possible order, and the brilliant polish of a great stew-pan hanging on the wall particularly caught the eye. Janet was humming to herself—one of the war tunes—when Rachel entered.
"Janet, I want to speak to you."
Janet looked up—startled. And yet something in her was not startled! She had been strangely expectant all these days. It seemed to her she had already seen Rachel come in like that—had already heard her say those words.
She shut up the hay-box, and came gently forward.
"Here, Rachel?"
"You've nearly done?"
"In a few minutes. If you'll go into the sitting-room, I'll join you directly."
And while she hurried through the rest of her work, her mind was really running forward in prophecy. She more or less knew what she was going to hear. And as she closed the kitchen door behind her there was in her a tremulous sense as though of some sacred responsibility.
Rachel was crouching over the fire as usual, and Janet drew up a stool beside her, and laid a hand on her knee.
"What is it?"
Rachel turned.
"I told you one secret, Janet, the other day. Now this is another. And it's—" She flushed, and broke off, beginning again after a moment—"I didn't mean to tell you, or any one. I can't make up my mind whether I'm bound to or not. But I want you to advise me, Janet. I'm awfully troubled."
And suddenly, she slipped to the floor, and laid her head against Janet's knees, hiding her face.
Janet bent over her, instinctively caressing the brown hair. She was only three or four years older than Rachel, but she looked much older, and the close linen cap she wore on butter-making afternoons, and had not yet removed, gave her a gently austere look, like that of a religious.
"Tell me—I'll do my best."
"In the first place," said Rachel, in a low voice, "who do you think was the ghost?"
"What do you mean?"
"The ghost—was Roger Delane!"
Janet uttered an exclamation of surprise and horror—while fact after fact rushed together in her mind, fitting into one explanatory whole. Why had she never thought of that possibility, among all the others?
"Oh, Rachel, have you ever seen him?"
"Twice. He stopped me on the road, when I was coming back from Millsborough on Armistice Day. And he came to see me the day after. You remember you were astonished to find I had sent the girls to the Shepherds' dance? I did it to get them out of the way—and if you hadn't said you were going to that service I should have had to invent something to send you away."
"I always thought he was in Canada?" said Janet, in bewilderment. "What did he want? Have you told Captain Ellesborough?"
"No, I haven't told George. I don't know whether I shall. Roger wanted money—as usual. I gave him some."
"You gave him some! Rachel!"
"I had to—I had to buy him off. And I've seen John Dempsey also without your knowing. And I've had to bribe him too."
Rachel was now sitting up, very hard and erect, her hands round her knees. Her first object seemed to be to avoid emotion, and to prevent Janet from showing any. Janet had gone very pale. The name "Dick Tanner" was drumming in her ear.
"I know you can't understand me, Janet," said Rachel, after a pause, "you could never do what I've done. I dare say when you've let me tell you the story you'll not be able to forgive me. You'll think I ought never to have let you settle with me—that I told a lie when I said I wasn't a bad woman—that I've disgraced you. I hope you won't. That—that would about finish it." Her voice shook at last.
Janet was speechless. But instinctively she laid a hand on Rachel's shoulder. And at the touch, in a moment, the story came out.
Confused and hardly intelligible! For Rachel herself could scarcely now disentangle all the threads and motives of it. But certain things stood out—the figure of a young artist, sensitive, pure-minded, sincere, with certain fatal weaknesses of judgment and will, which had made him a rolling stone, and the despair of his best friends, but, as compared with Roger Delane after six months of marriage—Hyperion to a satyr; then the attraction of such a man for his neighbour, a young wife, brought up in a refined home, the child of a saint and dreamer, outraged since her marriage in every fibre by the conduct and ways of her husband, and smarting under the sense of her own folly; their friendship, so blameless till its last moment, with nothing to hide, and little to regret, a woman's only refuge indeed from hours of degradation and misery; and finally the triumph of something which was not passion, at least on Rachel's side, but of mere opportunity, strengthened, made irresistible, by the woman's pain and despair: so the tale, the common tale, ran.
"I didn't love him," said Rachel at last, her hands over her eyes—"I don't pretend I did. I liked him—I was awfully sorry for him—as he was for me. But—well, there it is! I went over to his house. I honestly thought his sister was there; but, above all, I wanted him to sympathize with me—and pity me—because he knew everything. And she wasn't there—and I stayed three days and nights with him. Voilà!"
There was silence a little. Janet's thoughts were in a tumult. Rachel began again:
"Now, why am I telling you all this? I need never have told anybody—at least up to a few days ago. Poor Dick was drowned just before I got my divorce, in a boat accident on Lake Nipissing. He had gone there to paint, and was camping out. If he hadn't been drowned, perhaps, he would have made me marry him. So there was no one in the world who knew I was ever with him except—"
She turned sharply upon Janet—
"Except this man who turned up here in George's own camp—and in the village, two months ago, but whom I never saw till this week—this week—Armistice Day—John Dempsey. That was a queer chance, wasn't it? The sort of thing nobody could have expected. I was coming back from Millsborough. I was—well, just that evening, I was awfully happy. I expected nothing. And then—within twenty minutes—"
She told the story to Janet's astounded ears, of the two apparitions in the road, of her two interviews—first with Dempsey, and the following evening with Delane—and of her own attempts to bribe them both.
And at that her composure broke down.
"Why did I do it?" she said wildly, springing to her feet. "It was idiotic! Why didn't I just accept the boy's story, and say quietly, 'Yes, I was staying with the Tanners'? And why didn't I defy Roger—go straight to George, and hand him over to the police? Don't you see why? Because it is true!—it's true!—and I'm terrified. If I lost George, I should kill myself. I never thought I should be—I could be—in love with anybody like this. But yet I suppose it was in me all the time. I was always seeking—reaching out—to somebody I could love with every bit of me, soul and body—somebody I could follow—for I can't manage for myself—I'm not like you, Janet. And now I've found him—and—Do you know what that is?"
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.