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

more minutes they were in the sitting-room, Rachel throwing off her thick coat with Ellesborough's help, and declaring that she was not the least tired.

"Don't believe her!" said Ellesborough, smiling at Janet. "She is not a truthful woman!"

And his proud eyes returned to Rachel as though now that there was light to see her by he had no other use for them.

Rachel, indeed, was in a radiant mood. Pallor and depression had vanished; she was full of chatter about the streets, the crowds, the shops.

"But it's hopeless to go shopping with a man! He can't make up his mind one bit!"

"He hadn't a mind to make up!" murmured Ellesborough, looking up at her as she perched above him on a corner of the table.

She laughed.

"That, I suppose, was what made him want to buy the whole place! If I'd taken his advice, Janet, I should have been just cleaned out!"

"What's the good of being economical when one's going to be married!" said Ellesborough, joyously. "Why--"

Rachel interrupted him--with a hand on his shoulder.

"And we've settled our plans, Janet--that is, if you're agreeable. Will you mind looking after the farm for six months?"

"You see, if the armistice is signed--and we shall know to-morrow," said Ellesborough, "I shall be free in a month or so, and then we propose to marry and get a passage before Christmas. I must go home, and she says she'll come with me!"

A shadow had fallen suddenly, it seemed to Janet, over Rachel's aspect, but she at once endorsed what Ellesborough had said.

"We can't settle things--can we?--till we've seen his people. We've got to decide whether I'll go to America, or he'll come here."

"But we want to say"--Ellesborough turned gravely to Janet--"that first and foremost, we wish to do the best for you."

The sudden tears came into Janet's eyes. But they did not show.

"Oh, that'll be all right. Don't bother about me."

"We shall bother!" said Rachel with energy, "but I'll tell you all about it presently. He won't stay to supper."

She descended from the table, and Ellesborough rose. After a little more chat about the day and its doings, he said good-night to Janet.

"How do you get back?"

"Oh, I left my bike in the village. I shall walk and pick it up there."

Rachel took up her thick coat and slipped it on again. She would walk with him to the road, she said--there were some more things to say.

Janet watched them go out into the wide frosty night, where the sky was shedding its clouds, and the temperature was falling rapidly. She realized that they were in that stage of passion when everything is unreal outside the one supreme thing, and all other life passes like a show half-seen. And all the while the name Tanner--Dick Tanner--echoed in her mind. Such a simple thing to put a careless question to Rachel! Yet perhaps--after all--not so simple.

Meanwhile the two lovers were together on the path through the stubbles, walking hand-in-hand through the magic of the moonlight.

"Will you write a little line to my mother to-morrow?"

"Yes, of course. But--"

He caught her long breath.

"I have prepared the way, darling. I promise you--it will be all right."

"But why--why--didn't I see you first?" It was a stifled cry, which seemed somehow to speak for them both. And she added, bitterly, "It's no good talking--it can't ever be the same--to you, or to your people."

"It shall be the same! Or rather, we shall owe you a double share of love to make up to you--for that horrible time. Forget it, dear--make yourself forget it. My mother would tell you so at once."

"Isn't she--very strict about divorce?"

Ellesborough hesitated--just a moment.

"She couldn't have any doubts about your case--dearest--who could? You fell among thieves, and--"

"And you're picking me up, and taking me to the inn?"

He pressed her hand passionately. They walked in silence till the gate appeared.

"Go back, dearest. I shall be over on Sunday."

"Not till then?"

"I'm afraid not. If the peace news comes tomorrow, the camp'll go mad, and I shall have to look after them."

They paused at the gate, and he kissed her. She lay passive in his arms, the moonlight touched her brown hair, and the beautiful curves of her cheek and throat.

"Wasn't it heavenly to-day?" she whispered.

"Heavenly! Go home!"

She turned back towards the farm, drawing her cloak and its fur collar close round her, against the cold. And indeed Ellesborough was no sooner gone, the rush of the motor cycle along the distant road had no sooner died away, than a shiver ran through her which was more than physical. So long as he was there, she was happy, excited, hopeful. And when he was not there, the protecting screen had fallen, and she was exposed to all the stress and terror of the storm raging in her own mind.

"Why can't I forget it all--_everything_! It's dead--_it's dead_!" she said to herself again and again in an anguish, as she walked back through the broad open field where the winter-sown corn was just springing in the furrows--the moon was so bright that she could see the tiny green spears of it.

And yet in reality she perfectly understood why it was that, instead of forgetting, memory was becoming more and more poignant, more and more persecuting. It was because the searching processes of love were going deeper and deeper into her inmost soul. This good man who loved her, who was going to take her injured life into his keeping, to devote to her all his future, and all the harvest of his upright and hard-working past--she was going to marry him with a lie between them, so that she could never look him straight in the face, never be certain that, sometime or other, something would not emerge like a drowned face from the dark, and ruin all their happiness. It had seemed, at the beginning, so easy to keep silence, to tell everything but the one miserable fact that she couldn't tell! And now it was getting intolerably hard, just because she knew for the first time what love really meant, with its ardour for self-revelation, for an absolute union with the beloved. By marrying him without confession, she would not only be wronging him, she would be laying up probable misery for herself--and him--through the mere action of her own temperament.

For she knew herself. Among the girls and women she had been thrown with during the preceding year and a half, there were some moral anarchists, with whose views she had become strikingly familiar. Why, they said, make so much of these physical facts? Accept them, and the incidents that spring from them. Why all this weeping and wailing over supposed shames and disgraces? The sex-life of the present is making its own new codes. Who knows what they will ultimately be? And as for the indelible traces and effects of an act of weakness or passion that the sentimental and goody-goody people talk of, in the majority of cases they don't exist. After it, the human being concerned may be just the same as before.

Rachel was quite aware of this modern gospel. Only she was shut out from adopting it in her own case by an invincible heredity, by the spirit of her father in her, the saintly old preacher, whose uncompromising faith she had witnessed and shared through all her young years. She might and did protest that the faith was no longer hers. But it had stamped her. She could never be wholly rid of its prejudices and repulsions. What would her father have said to her divorce?--he with his mystical conception of marriage? She dreaded to think. And as to that other fact which weighed on her conscience, she seemed to hear herself pleading--with tears!--"Father!--it wasn't my will--it was my _weakness_!--Don't look at me so!"

And now, in addition, there was the pressure upon her of Ellesborough's own high ideals and religious temper; of the ideals, also, of his family, as he was tenderly and unconsciously revealing them. And, finally, there was the daily influence of Janet's neighbourhood--Janet, so austere for herself, so pitiful for others: Janet, so like Ellesborough in the unconscious sternness of her moral outlook, so full, besides, of an infinite sorrow for the sinner.

And between these two stood this variable, sensuous, woman's nature, so capable both of good and evil. Rachel felt the burden of their virtues too much for her, together with the sting of her own secret knowledge.

In some moments, even, she rebelled against her own passion. She had such a moment of revolt, in this moonlit dark, as her eyes took in the farm, the dim outlines of the farm buildings, the stacks, the new-ploughed furrows. Two months earlier her life had been absorbed in simple, clear, practical ambitions: how to improve her stock--how to grow another bushel to the acre--how and when to build a silo--whether to try electrification: a score of pleasant riddles that made the hours fly. And now this old fever had crept again into her blood, and everything had lost its savour. There were times when she bitterly, childishly, regretted it. She could almost have hated Ellesborough, because she loved him so well; and because of the terror, the ceaseless preoccupation that her love had begun to impose upon her.

Janet, watching her come in, saw that the radiance had departed, and that she crept about again like a tired woman. When, after nine o'clock, they were alone by the fire, again and again it was on the tip of Janet's tongue to say, "Tell me, who was Dick Tanner?" Then, in a sudden panic fear, lest the words should slip out, and bring something irreparable, she would get up, and make a restless pretence of some household work or other, only to sit down and begin the same inward debate once more. But she said nothing, and Rachel, too, was silent. She sat over the fire, apparently half asleep. Neither of them moved to go to bed till nearly midnight.

Then they kissed each other, and Janet raked out the fire.

"To-morrow!" she said, her eyes on the red glow of the embers, "_to-morrow_!--Will it be peace?"

And then Rachel remembered that all the civilized world was waiting for the words that would end the war. Somewhere in a French chateau there was a group of men conferring, and on the issue of this night depended the lives of thousands, and the peace of Europe.

Janet raised her clasped hands, and her plain, quiet face shone in the candle-light. She murmured something. Rachel guessed it was a prayer. But her own heart seemed dead and dumb. She could not free it from its load of personal care; she could not feel the patriotic emotion which had suddenly seized on Janet.

The morning broke grey and misty. The two labourers and the girls went about their work--raising their heads now and then to listen. And at eleven came the signal. Out rang the bells from Ipscombe Church tower. Labourers and girls threw down what they were doing, and gathered in the farm-yard round Janet and Rachel, who were waving flags on the steps of the farm-house. Then Rachel gave them all a holiday for the rest of the day, and very soon there was no one left on the farm premises but the two women and the bailiff.

"Don't stay, Hastings," said Rachel.