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

a teetotaller, you see--an' a woman stood at the door, and handed it to him. She was holdin' a lamp, so I saw her quite plain. And I knew her at once, though she was only there a minute. It was Mrs. Roger Delane."

He stopped to light a cigarette. No sound came from his companion. All round them spread the great common, with its old thorns, its clumps of fir, its hollows and girdling woods, faintly lit by a ghostly moonlight that was just beginning to penetrate the misty November dusk. The cheerful light of Dempsey's cigarette shone a moment in the gloom. Delane was conscious of an excitement which it took all his will to master. But he spoke carelessly.

"And what was Mrs. Delane doing there?"

Dempsey chuckled.

"How should I know? Tanner used to have a sister staying with him sometimes. Perhaps she and Mrs. Delane were friends. But I saw that woman quite plain. It was Mrs. Delane--that I'll swear. And Miss Henderson is as like her as two peas. It might have been her sister. Miss Henderson's very uncommon-looking. You don't often see that complexion and that hair. And she has lived in Canada."

"How do you know?"

"She told old Halsey. Well, there's my road, just ahead. And if you're going to Moor End, you keep straight on. The moon's coming up. It won't be very dark." And with a careless good-night, the Canadian turned a corner, and disappeared along a road which diverged at a right angle from the main road, and led, as Delane knew, direct to Ipscombe.

He himself walked on, till he found a lane tunnelled through one of the deep woods that on their western side ran down to Great End Farm. In the heart of that wood there was a keeper's hut, disused entirely since the war. Delane had discovered it, and was quite prepared to spend a night there at a pinch. There was a rude fireplace in it, and some old sacks. With some of the fallen wood lying about, a man could make a fire, and pass a winter night in very tolerable comfort.

He made his way in, managed to prop a sack against the small cobwebbed window, fastened the door with a rusty bolt, and brought out an electric torch he always carried in his pocket.

There was not a house within a long distance. There were no keepers now on Colonel Shepherd's estate. Darkness--the woods--and the wild creatures in them--were his only companions. Half a mile away, no doubt, Rachel in her smart new parlour was talking to the Canadian fellow.

_Tanner!_ Ye gods! At last he had the clue to it all.


X

Dempsey did not find Rachel Henderson at home when he called at Great End Farm, after his meeting with his unknown companion on the common.

Ellesborough and Rachel had gone to London for the day. Ellesborough's duties at the Ralstone camp were in a state of suspended animation, since, in these expectant days before the signing of the armistice, there had been a general slackening, as though by silent and general consent, in the timber felling due to the war throughout the beautiful district in which Millsborough lay. Enough damage had been done already to the great wood-sanctuaries. On one pretext or another men held their hands.

Ellesborough then was free to take time off when he would, and to spend it in love-making. The engagement had been announced, and Ellesborough believed himself a very happy man--with the slight drawbacks that may be imagined.

In the first place--although, as he became better acquainted with Rachel's varying moods and aspects, he fell more and more deeply under the charm of her temperament--a temperament at once passionate and childish, crude, and subtle, with many signs, fugitive and surprising, of a deep and tragic reflectiveness; he became also more and more conscious of what seemed to him the lasting effects upon her of her miserable marriage. The nervous effects above all; shown by the vague "fears" of which she had spoken to him, on one of their early walks together; and by the gulfs of depression and silence into which she would often fall, after periods of high, even wild spirits.

It was this constant perception of a state of nervous suffering and irritability in this splendid physical creature--a state explained, as he thought, by her story, which had put him instantly on his guard, when that sinister vision at the window had sprung for a moment out of the darkness. Before almost he could move towards it, it had gone. And with a farewell smile at the woman he had just been holding in his arms, a smile which betrayed nothing, he had hurried away from her to investigate the mystery. A hasty word to Janet Leighton in the kitchen, and he was making a rapid circuit of the farm, and searching the farm-yard; with no results whatever.

Then he, Janet, and Hastings had held a hurried and secret colloquy in a corner of the great cow-shed, as far from Rachel's sight and hearing as possible. Clearly some one was haunting the farm for some malicious purpose. Hastings, for the first time, told the story of the blood-marks, and of two or three other supposed visions of a man, tall and stooping, with a dark sallow face, which persons working on the farm, or walking near it on the hill, had either seen or imagined. Ellesborough finally had jumped on his motor-bicycle and ridden off to the police depot at Millsborough. Some wind of the happenings at Great End Farm had already reached the police, but they could throw no light on them. They arranged, however, with Ellesborough to patrol the farm and the neighbourhood after dark as often as their diminished force would allow.

They were inclined to believe that some half-witted person was concerned, drawn, perhaps, from the alien population which had been floating through the district, and bent on mischief or robbery--or a mixture of both.

Rachel meanwhile knew nothing of these consultations. After her engagement was made public, she began to look so white, so tired and tremulous, that both Ellesborough and Janet were alarmed. Overwork, according to Janet, with the threshing, and in the potato-fields. Never had Rachel worked with such a feverish energy as in these autumn weeks. Add the excitement of an engagement, said Janet, and you see the result.

She would have prescribed bed and rest; but Rachel scouted the advice. The alternative was amusement--change of scene--in Ellesborough's company. Here she was more docile, feverishly submissive and happy, indeed, so long as Ellesborough made the plans, and Ellesborough watched over her. Janet wondered at certain profound changes in her. It was, she saw, the first real passion of Rachel's life.

* * * * *

So Dempsey called in vain. Miss Henderson was in town for a theatre and shopping. But he saw Janet Leighton, to whom with all the dramatic additions and flourishes he had now bestowed upon it, he told his story. Janet, who, on a hint from Hastings, had expected the visitation, was at any rate glad that Rachel was out of the way, seeing what a strong and curious dislike she had to the ghost-story, and also to any talk of the murder from which it originated.

Janet, however, listened, and with a growing and fascinated attention, to the old tale. Was there some real connection, she wondered, between it and the creature who had been prowling round the farm? Was some one personating the ghost, and for what reason? The same queries were ardently in the mind of Dempsey. He reported Halsey's adventure, commenting on it indignantly.

"It's some one as knows the story, and is playin' the fool with it. It's a very impudent thing to do! It's not playing fair, that's what it isn't; and I'd like to get hold of him."

Janet's mouth twitched. The young man's proprietorial interest in his grandfather's crime, and annoyance that any one should interfere with it, turned the whole thing to comedy. Moreover, his fatuous absorption in that side of the matter made him useless for any other purpose: so that she soon ceased from cross-examining him, and he rose to go.

"Well, I'm sorry not to have seen Miss Henderson," he said awkwardly, twisting his cap. "I'd like to have had a talk with her about Canada. It was old Halsey told me she'd lived in Canada."

"Yes," said Janet irresponsively.

Dempsey smiled broadly and seemed embarrassed. At last he said with a jerk:--

"I wonder if Miss Henderson ever knew a man called Tanner--who lived near Winnipeg?"

"I never heard her speak of him."

"Because"--he still twirled--"when I saw Miss Henderson at Millsborough that day of the rally, I thought as I'd seen her before."

"Oh?" said Janet ardently. But some instinct put her on her guard.

"Dick Tanner, they called him, was a man--an artist chap--who lived not far from the man I was with--and I once saw a lady there just like Miss Henderson."

"Did you?"

Dempsey grew bolder.

"Only it couldn't have been Miss Henderson, you see--because this lady I saw was a Mrs. Delane. But was Mrs. Delane perhaps a relation of Miss Henderson? She was just like Miss Henderson."

"I'll ask Miss Henderson," said Janet, moving towards the door, as a signal to him to take his leave. "But I expect you're confusing her with some one else."

Dempsey, however, began rather eagerly to dot the i's. The picture of the snowstorm, of the woman at the door, various points in his description of her, and of the solitary--apparently bachelor--owner of the farm, began to affect Janet uncomfortably. She got rid of the chatter-box as soon as possible, and went slowly to the kitchen, to get supper ready. As she fried the bacon, and took some vegetables out of the hay-box, she was thinking fast.

Tanner? No--she had never heard Rachel mention the name. But it happened that Dempsey had given a precise date. It was in the "November before they Passed Conscription" in Canada, _i.e._ before he himself was called up--that he saw Mrs. Delane, at night, in Dick Tanner's house. And Janet remembered that, according to the story which as they two sat by the fire alone at night, when the girls were gone to bed, Rachel had gradually built up before her. It was in that same month that Rachel had been deserted by Delane; who had gone off to British Columbia with the Italian girl, as his wife afterwards knew, leaving Rachel alone on the farm--with one Japanese servant.

Why shouldn't she have been staying on Mr. Tanner's farm? There was no doubt some one else there--whom the boy didn't see. Perhaps she had herself taken refuge there during the storm. But all the same Janet felt vaguely troubled.

* * * * *

It was nearly seven o'clock, and the moon, now at the full, was rising over the eastern hill, and balancing the stubbles and the new-turned plough-lands in the upland cup to a pearly whiteness as they lay under the dark woods and a fleecy sky. There was a sound of a motor in the lane--the village taxi bringing the travellers home.

In a few