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.