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

life was bringing understanding. She realized the shock to him, and wept over it. She saw, too, that she had been unjust and cowardly in letting the situation go so far without speaking; and that there was no real excuse for her.

Would he give her up? She had told him that all was at an end between them; but that was only pride--making a virtue of a necessity. Oh, no, no, he must not give her up! It was only six weeks since their first meeting, and though it would be untrue to say that since the meeting he had wholly possessed her thoughts, she had been capable all through them of that sort of dallying with the vicar which Janet thought unkind. She had been able to find plenty of mind for her work, and for the ambitions of her new profession, and had spent many a careless hour steeped in the sheer physical pleasure of the harvest. Yet, from the beginning, his personality had laid its grip on hers. She had never been able to forget him for long. One visit from him was no sooner over than she was calculating on and dreaming of the next. And as the consciousness of some new birth in her had grown, and sudden glimpses had come to her of some supreme joy, possibly within her grasp, so fear had grown, and anxiety. She looked back upon her past, and knew it stained--knew that it must at some point rise as an obstacle between her and him.

But how great an obstacle? She was going to tell him, faithfully, frankly, all the story of her marriage--accuse her own rash self-will in marrying Delane, confess her own failings as a wife; she would tell no hypocritical tale. She would make it plain that Roger had found in her no mere suffering saint, and that probably her intolerance and impatience had contributed to send him to damnation. But, after all, when it was told, what could Ellesborough do but pity her?--take her in his arms--and comfort her--for those awful years--and her lost child?

The tears rained down her cheeks. He loved her! She was certain of that. When he had once heard the story, he could not forsake her! She already saw the pity in his deep grey eyes; she already felt his honest, protecting arms about her.

Ah--_but then_? Beyond that imagined scene, which rose, as though it were staged, before her, Rachel's shrinking eyes, in the windy darkness, seemed to be penetrating to another--a phantom scene in a dim distance--drawn not from the future, but the past. Two figures moved in it. One was herself. The other was not Roger Delane.

The brown owl seemed to be shrieking just outside her window. Her nerves quivered under the sound as though it were her own voice. Why was life so cruel, so miserable? Why cannot even the gods themselves make undone what is done? She was none the worse--permanently--for what had happened in that distant scene--that play within a play? How was she the worse? She was "not a bad woman!"--as she had said so passionately to Janet, when they joined hands. There was no lasting taint left in mind and soul--nothing to prevent her being a pure and faithful wife to George Ellesborough, and a good mother to his children. It was another Rachel to whom all that had happened, a Rachel she had a right to forget! She was weak in will--she had confessed it. But George Ellesborough was strong. Leaning on him, and on kind Janet, she could be all, she would be all, that he still dreamed. The past--_that_ past--was dead. It had no existence. Nothing--neither honour nor love--obliged her to disclose it. Except in her own mind it was dead and buried--as though it had never been. No human being shared her knowledge of it, or ever would.

And yet the Accuser came closer and closer, wrestling with her shrinking heart. "You can't live a lie beside him all your life!" "It won't be a lie. All that matters to him is what I am now--not what I was. And it wasn't I!--it was another woman--a miserable, battered creature who couldn't help herself." "It will rise up between you, and perhaps--after all--in some way--he will discover it." "How can he? Dick and I--who in all the world knew, but us two?--and Dick is dead." "Are you sure that no one knew:--that no one saw you? Think!"

A pale face grew paler in the dim light, as thought hesitated:--

"There was that wagon--and the boy--in the storm." "Yes--what then?" "Well--what then? The boy scarcely saw me." "He did see you." "And if he did--it is the commonest thing in a Canadian winter to be caught by a storm, to ask shelter from a neighbour." "Still--even if he drew no malicious conclusion, he saw you--alone in that farm with Dick Tanner, and he probably knew your name." "How should he know my name?" "He had seen you before--you had seen him before." "I didn't know his name--I don't know it now." "No--but in passing your farm once, he had dropped a parcel for a neighbour--and you had seen him once--at a railway station." "Is it the least likely that I shall ever see him again--or that he remembers seeing me at Dick Tanner's door?" "Not likely, perhaps--but possible--quite possible."

And while this question and answer passed through the brain, the woman sitting up in bed seemed to be transported to a howling wintry scene of whirling snow--a November twilight--and against that background, the hood of a covered wagon, a boy holding the reins, the heavy cape on his shoulders white with snow, the lamps of the wagon shining dimly on him, and making a kind of luminous mist round the cart. She heard a parley, saw a tall and slender man with fair hair go out to the boy with hot milk and bread, caught directions as to the road, and saw herself as a half-hidden figure in the partially open door.

And then afterwards--the warm farm kitchen shutting out the storm--a man at her knees--his arms round her--his kisses on her cheek.

And again the irrevocableness of it closed down upon her. It could _never_ be undone: that was the terrible commonplace which held her in its grasp. It could never be wiped out from one human mind, which must bear the burden of it as best it could, till gradually--steadily--the life, had been killed out of the ugly, haunting thing, and it had been buried--drowned, out of sight and memory.

But the piteous dialogue began again.

"How _could_ I have resisted? I was so miserable--so lonely--so weak!" "You didn't love him!" "No--but I was alone in the world." "Well, then, tell George Ellesborough--he is a reasonable man--he would understand." "I can't--I _can't_! I have deceived him up till now by passing as unmarried. If I confess this, too, there will be no chance for me. He'll never trust me in anything!--he'll suspect everything I do or say--even if he goes on loving me. And I couldn't bear it!--nor could he."

And so at last the inward debate wore itself out, and sleep, sudden and deep, came down upon Rachel Henderson. When she woke in the morning it was to cleared skies both in her own mind and in the physical world. The nightmare through which she had passed seemed to her now unreal, even a little absurd. Her nerves were quieted by sleep, and she saw plainly what she had to do. That "old, unhappy, far-off thing" lurking in the innermost depth of memory had nothing more to do with her. She would look it calmly in the face, and put it finally--for ever--away. But of her marriage she would tell everything--everything!--to George Ellesborough, and he should deal with her as he pleased.

* * * * *

The day was misty and still. October, the marvellous October of this year, was marching on. Every day, Foch on the battlefield of France and Belgium was bringing down the old Europe, and clearing the ground for the new. In English villages and English farms, no less than in the big towns, there was ferment and excitement, though it showed but little. Would the boys be home by Christmas--the sons, the brothers, the husbands? What would the change be like--the life after the war? If there were those who yearned and prayed for it--there were those who feared it. The war had done well for some, and hideously for others. And all through the play of individual interests and desires, and even in the dullest minds there ran the intoxicating sense of Victory, of an England greater and more powerful than even her own sons and daughters had dared to dream--an England which knew herself now, by the stern test of the four years' struggle, to be possessed of powers and resources, spiritual, mental, physical, which amazed herself. In all conscious minds, brooding on the approaching time, there rose the question: "What are we going to do with it?" and even in the unconscious, the same thought was present, as a vague disturbing impulse.

Janet had just read the war telegrams to Rachel, who had come down late, complaining of a headache; but when Janet--the reserved and equable Janet--after going through the news of the recapture of Ostend, Zeebrugge, and Bruges, broke into the passionate, low-spoken comment: "The Lord is King--be the people never so unquiet!" or could not, for tears, finish the account of the entry into recaptured Lille, and the joy of its inhabitants, Rachel sat irresponsive--or apparently so.

How would it affect Ellesborough--this astounding news? Would it take him from her the sooner, or delay his going? That was all she seemed capable of feeling.

Janet was troubled by her look and attitude, and being well aware that the two had had a long _tete-a-tete_ the day before, wondered how things were going. But she said nothing; and after breakfast Rachel joined the two girls in the potato-field, and worked as hard as they, hour after hour. But her usual gaiety was gone, and the girls noticed at once the dark rims under her eyes. They wondered secretly what Miss Henderson's "friend" had been doing. For that the "Cap'n" was courting their employer had long been plain to them. Betty, of course, had a "friend," the young soldier whose sick leave was nearly up, and the child's deep velvety eyes were looking nearly as tired as Miss Henderson's. While Jenny, too, the timid, undeveloped Jenny had lately begun to take an interest in a "friend," a young fellow belonging to Ellesborough's forestry camp whom she had met in Millsborough the day of the Harvest Festival. They had hardly exchanged half an hour's real conversation. But he had bought her some sweets at Millsborough, and walked a bit of the way home with her. Then she had seen him in the village once or twice. He had some relations there--there was some talk of him, and that old murder at the farm--she didn't know rightly what it was. But she felt somehow that Miss Henderson wouldn't want to have him about--Miss Henderson didn't like talk of the murder--so Jenny had never asked him to look her up. But her raw, childish mind was full of him, and the ferments of sex were stirring. In the secret opinion of both girls, "friends" were quite as much pain as pleasure. No girl could do without them; but they were pretty certain to cause heart-aches, to make a girl wish at some time or other that she had never