Harvest - Mrs. Humphry Ward (free novels .TXT) 📗

out of humour, and at once set herself to appease him. And in the few minutes which elapsed before she parted with him at the gate she had quite succeeded.

Then she turned to Ellesborough.

"Shall we go up the hill a little?"

They slipped through a side gate of the farmyard, crossed a field, and found themselves on an old grass road leading gently upward along the side of the down into the shadow of the woods. The still, warm night held them enwrapped. Rachel had thrown a white scarf over her head and throat, which gave a mysterious charm to the face within it. As she strolled beside her hew friend she played him with all the arts of a woman resolved to please. And he allowed himself to be handled at her will. He told her about his people, and his friends, about the ideas and ambitions, also, with which he had come to Europe, which were now in abeyance, but were to spring to active life after the war. Forestry on a great scale; a part to be played in the preservation and development of the vast forest areas of America which had been so wilfully wasted; business and patriotism combined; fortune possible; but in any case the public interest served. He talked shrewdly, but also with ardour and imagination; she was stirred, excited even; and all the time she liked the foreignness of his voice, the outline of his profile against the sky, and all the other elements of his physical presence.

But in the midst of his castle-building he broke off.

"However, I'm a silly fool to talk like this. I'm going out to the front directly. Perhaps my bullet's waiting for me."

"Oh, no!" she said involuntarily--"no!"

"I hope not. I don't want to die just yet. I want to get married, for one thing."

He spoke lightly, and she laughed.

"Well, that's easy enough."

He shook his head, but said nothing. They walked on till they reached the edge of the hill, when Rachel, out of breath, sat down on a fallen log to rest a little. Below them stretched the hollow upland, with its encircling woods and its white stubble fields. Far below lay the dark square of the farm, with a light in one of its windows.

Rachel pointed to the grass road by which they had come.

"We haven't seen the ghost!"

He asked her for the story, and she told it. By now she had pieced it all together; and it seemed to Ellesborough that it had a morbid fascination for her.

"He dragged himself down this very path," she said. "They tracked him by the blood stains; his wounds dripped all along it. And then he fell, just under my cart-shed. It was a horrible, bitter night. Of course the silly people here say they hear groans and dragging steps: That's all nonsense, but I sometimes wish it hadn't happened at my farm."

He couldn't help laughing gently at her foolishness.

"Why, it's a great distinction to have a ghost!"

She disagreed--decidedly.

"Any one can have my ghost that wants. I'm awfully easily scared."

"Are you?" There was a deep note in his voice. "No, I don't believe that. I'm sure you're a plucky woman. I know you are!"

She laughed out.

"How do you know?"

"Why, no one but a plucky woman could have taken this farm and be working it as you're doing."

"That's not pluck," she said, half scornfully. "But if it is--well, I've got plenty of pluck of that kind. But I am often scared, downright scared, about nothing. It's just fear, that's what it is."

"Fear of what?"

"I don't know."

She spoke in a sombre, shrinking tone, which struck him uncomfortably. But when he tried further to discover what she meant, she would say nothing more. He noticed, indeed, that she would often seem to turn the talk upon herself, only to cut it short again immediately. She offered him openings, and then he could make nothing of them; so that when they reached the outskirts of the farm on their return, he had given her all the main outlines of his own history, and she had said almost nothing of hers.

But all the same the walk had drawn them much nearer.

He stopped her at the little gate to say,--

"I'm going to ask you again--I want you to write to me when I'm in France."

And this time she said almost eagerly,--

"Yes, I'll write; indeed I'll write! But you'll come over again before you go?"

"Rather," he said joyously; "rather! Why, there's a month. You'll be tired of me before you've done."

A few minutes later she was standing in her own little room, listening to the retreating rush of his motor-cycle down the road. There was a great tumult in her mind.

"Am I falling in love with him? Am I--am I?"

But in the dark, when she had put out her light, the cry that shaped itself in her mind was identical with that sudden misgiving of the afternoon, when on Ellesborough's arrival she had first heard his voice downstairs talking to Janet.

"_I wish he knew_!" But this time it was no mere passing qualm. It had grown into something intense and haunting.

* * * * *

On this same September afternoon, a dark-eyed, shabby woman, with a little girl, alighted at Millsborough Station. They were met by a man who had been lounging about the station for some time and whose appearance had attracted some attention. "See him at a distance, and you might take him for a lord; but get him close, my word!--" said the station-master to the booking-clerk, with a shrug, implying many things.

"Wouldn't give a bob for his whole blessed turn-out," said the booking-clerk. "But right you are, when you sort of get the hang of him, far enough away on the other platform, might be a dook!"

Meanwhile, the man had shouldered some of the bags and parcels brought by the woman and the child, though hardly his fair share of them; and they finally reached the exit from the station.

"If you're going into the town, the bus will be here in a few minutes," said a porter civilly to the woman. "It'll help you with all those things."

The man gruffly answered for her that they preferred to walk, and they started, the woman and the child dragging wearily beside him.

"Now, you've got to be content with what I've found for you," he said to her roughly as they reached the first houses of the town. "There isn't scarcely a lodging or a cottage to be had. Partly it's the holidays still, and partly it's silly folk like you--scared of raids."

"I couldn't go through another winter like last, for Nina's sake," said the woman plaintively.

"Why, you silly goose, there won't be any raids this winter. I've told you so scores of times. We've got the upper hand now, and the Boche will keep his planes at home. But as you won't listen to me, you've got to have your way, I suppose. Well, I've got you rooms of a sort. They'll have to do. I haven't got money enough for anything decent."

The woman made no reply, and to the porter idly looking after them they were soon lost from sight in the gathering dusk of the road.


V

The little town of Millsborough was _en fete_. There was a harvest festival going on, and the County Agricultural Committee had taken the opportunity to celebrate the successful gathering of the crops, and the part taken in it by the woman land-workers under their care. They had summoned the land lasses from far and wide; in a field on the outskirts of the town competitions had been in full swing all the morning, and now there were to be speeches in the market-place, and a final march of land girls, boy scouts, and decorated wagons to the old Parish Church, where a service was to be held.

All Millsborough, indeed, was in the streets to look at the procession, and the crowd was swelled by scores of cadets from a neighbouring camp, who were good-heartedly keeping the route, and giving a military air to the show. But the flower-decked wagons were the centre of interest. The first in the line was really a brilliant performance. It was an old wagon of Napoleonic days, lent by a farmer, whose forebears had rented the same farm since William and Mary. Every spoke of the wheels blazed with red geraniums; there was a fringe of heather along the edge of the cart, while vegetables, huge marrows, turnips, carrots, and onions dangled from its sides, and the people inside sat under a nodding canopy of tall and splendid wheat, mixed with feathery barley. But the passengers were perhaps the most attractive thing about it. They were four old women in lilac sunbonnets. They were all over seventy, and they had all worked bravely in the harvest. The crowd cheered them vociferously, and they sat, looking timidly out on the scene with smiling eyes and tremulous lips, their grey hair blowing about their wrinkled, wholesome faces.

Beside the wagon walked a detachment of land girls. One of them was the granddaughter of one of the old women, and occasionally a word would pass between them.

"Eh, Bessie, but I'd like to git down! They mun think us old fools, dizened up this way."

"No, gran; you must ride. You're the very best bit of the show. Why, just listen how the folk cheer you!"

The old woman sighed.

"I'd like to look at it mysel'," she said with a childish plaintiveness. But her tall granddaughter, in full uniform, with a rake over her shoulder, thought this a foolish remark, and made no reply.

In the second wagon, Rachel Henderson in full land-dress--tunic, knee-breeches, and leggings--stood in the front of the cart, guiding two white horses, their manes and tails gaily plaited with ribbons, and scarlet badges on their snowy heads.

"Eh, but yon's a fine woman!" said an old farmer of the humbler sort to his neighbour. "Yo'll not tell me she's a land lassie?"

"Noa, noa; she's the new farmer at Great End--a proud body, they say, an' a great hustler! The men say she's allus at 'em. But they don't mind her neither. She treats 'em well. Them's her two land girls walking beside."

For Betty and Jenny mounted guard, their harvest rakes on their shoulders, beside their mistress, who attracted all eyes as she passed, and knew it. Behind her in the cart sat Janet Leighton; and the two remaining seats were filled by the Vicar of Ipscombe and Lady Alicia Shepherd, the wife of the owner of Great End Farm and of the middle-sized estate to which the farm belonged.

Lady Alicia was a thin woman, with an excitable temperament, to judge from her restless mouth and eyes, which were never still for a moment. She was very fashionably dressed and held a lace parasol. The crowd scarcely recognized her, which annoyed her, for in her own estimation she was an important member of the Women's Committee which looked after the land girls. The war had done a great deal for Lady Alicia. It had dragged her from a sofa,