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

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.

The frost had come, and clear skies with it. The day passed in various miscellaneous business, under shelter, in the big barn.

And at night, after supper, Rachel stood on the front steps looking into a wide starry heaven, moonless, cold, and still. Betty and Jenny had just gone up to bed. Janet was in the kitchen, putting the porridge for the morrow's breakfast which she had just made into the hay-box, which would keep it steaming all night. But she would soon have done work. The moment seemed to have come.

Rachel walked into the kitchen and closed the door behind her. The supper had been cleared away and the table on which they had eaten it shone spotlessly clean and bare. The fire would soon be raked out for the night, and Janet would lay the breakfast before she left the kitchen. Everything was in the neatest possible order, and the brilliant polish of a great stew-pan hanging on the wall particularly caught the eye. Janet was humming to herself--one of the war tunes--when Rachel entered.

"Janet, I want to speak to you."

Janet looked up--startled. And yet something in her was not startled! She had been strangely expectant all these days. It seemed to her she had already seen Rachel come in like that--had already heard her say those words.

She shut up the hay-box, and came gently forward.

"Here, Rachel?"

"You've nearly done?"

"In a few minutes. If you'll go into the sitting-room, I'll join you directly."

And while she hurried through the rest of her work, her mind was really running forward in prophecy. She more or less knew what she was going to hear. And as she closed the kitchen door behind her there was in her a tremulous sense as though of some sacred responsibility.

Rachel was crouching over the fire as usual, and Janet drew up a stool beside her, and laid a hand on her knee.

"What is it?"

Rachel turned.

"I told you one secret, Janet, the other day. Now this is another. And it's--" She flushed, and broke off, beginning again after a moment--"I didn't mean to tell you, or any one. I can't make up my mind whether I'm bound to or not. But I want you to advise me, Janet. I'm awfully troubled."

And suddenly, she slipped to the floor, and laid her head against Janet's knees, hiding her face.

Janet bent over her, instinctively caressing the brown hair. She was only three or four years older than Rachel, but she looked much older, and the close linen cap she wore on butter-making afternoons, and had not yet removed, gave her a gently austere look, like that of a religious.

"Tell me--I'll do my best."

"In the first place," said Rachel, in a low voice, "who do you think was the ghost?"

"What do you mean?"

"The ghost--was Roger Delane!"

Janet uttered an exclamation of surprise and horror--while fact after fact rushed together in her mind, fitting into one explanatory whole. Why had she never thought of that possibility, among all the others?

"Oh, Rachel, have you ever seen him?"

"Twice. He stopped me on the road, when I was coming back from Millsborough on Armistice Day. And he came to see me the day after. You remember you were astonished to find I had sent the girls to the Shepherds' dance? I did it to get them out of the way--and if you hadn't said you were going to that service I should have had to invent something to send you away."

"I always thought he was in Canada?" said Janet, in bewilderment. "What did he want? Have you told Captain Ellesborough?"

"No, I haven't told George. I don't know whether I shall. Roger wanted money--as usual. I gave him some."

"_You gave him some! Rachel!_"

"I had to--I had to buy him off. And I've seen John Dempsey also without your knowing. And I've had to bribe him too."

Rachel was now sitting up, very hard and erect, her hands round her knees. Her first object seemed to be to avoid emotion, and to prevent Janet from showing any. Janet had gone very pale. The name "Dick Tanner" was drumming in her ear.

"I know you can't understand me, Janet," said Rachel, after a pause, "you could never do what I've done. I dare say when you've let me tell you the story you'll not be able to forgive me. You'll think I ought never to have let you settle with me--that I told a lie when I said I wasn't a bad woman--that I've disgraced you. I hope you won't. That--that would about finish it." Her voice shook at last.

Janet was speechless. But instinctively she laid a hand on Rachel's shoulder. And at the touch, in a moment, the story came out.

Confused and hardly intelligible! For Rachel herself could scarcely now disentangle all the threads and motives of it. But certain things stood out--the figure of a young artist, sensitive, pure-minded, sincere, with certain fatal weaknesses of judgment and will, which had made him a rolling stone, and the despair of his best friends, but, as compared with Roger Delane after six months of marriage--Hyperion to a satyr; then the attraction of such a man for his neighbour, a young wife, brought up in a refined home, the child of a saint and dreamer, outraged since her marriage in every fibre by the conduct and ways of her husband, and smarting under the sense of her own folly; their friendship, so blameless till its last moment, with nothing to hide, and little to regret, a woman's only refuge indeed from hours of degradation and misery; and finally the triumph of something which was not passion, at least on Rachel's side, but of mere opportunity, strengthened, made irresistible, by the woman's pain and despair: so the tale, the common tale, ran.

"I didn't love him," said Rachel at last, her hands over her eyes--"I don't pretend I did. I liked him--I was awfully sorry for him--as he was for me. But--well, there it is! I went over to his house. I honestly thought his sister was there; but, above all, I wanted him to sympathize with me--and pity me--because he knew everything. And she wasn't there--and I stayed three days and nights with him. _Voila_!"

There was silence a little. Janet's thoughts were in a tumult. Rachel began again:

"Now, why am I telling you all this? I need never have told anybody--at least up to a few days ago. Poor Dick was drowned just before I got my divorce, in a boat accident on Lake Nipissing. He had gone there to paint, and was camping out. If he hadn't been drowned, perhaps, he would have made me marry him. So there was no one in the world who knew I was ever with him except--"

She turned sharply upon Janet--

"Except this man who turned up here in George's own camp--and in the village, two months ago, but whom I never saw till this week--_this week_--Armistice Day--John Dempsey. That was a queer chance, wasn't it? The sort of thing nobody could have expected. I was coming back from Millsborough. I was--well, just that evening, I was awfully happy. I expected nothing. And then--within twenty minutes--"

She told the story to Janet's astounded ears, of the two apparitions in the road, of her two interviews--first with Dempsey, and the following evening with Delane--and of her own attempts to bribe them both.

And at that her composure broke down.

"Why did I do it?" she said wildly, springing to her feet. "It was idiotic! Why didn't I just accept the boy's story, and say quietly, 'Yes, I was staying with the Tanners'? And why didn't I defy Roger--go straight to George, and hand him over to the police? Don't you see why? Because it is true!--_it's true!_--and I'm terrified. If I lost George, I should kill myself. I never thought I should be--I could be--in love with anybody like this. But yet I suppose it was in me all the time. I was always seeking--reaching out--to somebody I could love with every bit of me, soul and body--somebody I could follow--for I can't manage for myself--I'm not like you, Janet. And now I've found him--and--Do you know what that is?"

She pulled a letter out of her pocket, and looked at Janet through a mist of despairing tears.

"It's a letter from George. It came this morning. He wants me to marry him at once--next week. He's got some new work in France, and he saw that I was miserable because he was going away. And why shouldn't I? _Why shouldn't I?_ I love him. There's nothing wrong with me, except that wretched story. Well, there are two reasons. First"--she spoke with slow and bitter emphasis--"I don't believe for a moment Roger will keep his word. I know him. He is frightfully ill. He says he's dying. He may die--before he's got through this money. That would be the best thing that could happen to me--wouldn't it? But probably he won't die--and certainly he'll get through the money! Then he'll come back--and I shall begin bribing him again--and telling lies to hide it from George--and in the end it'll be no use--for Roger's quite reckless--you can't appeal to him through anything but money. He'll see George, whatever I do, and try it on with him. And then--George will know how to deal with _him_, I dare say--but when we are alone--and he asks _me_--"

She sank down again on the floor, kneeling, and put her hands on Janet's knees.

"You see, Janet, don't you? You see?"

It was the cry of a soul in anguish.

"You poor, poor thing!"

Janet, trembling from head to foot, bowed her head on Rachel's, and the two clung together, in silence, broken only by two deep sobs from Rachel. Then Janet disengaged herself. She was pale, but no longer agitated, and her blue eyes which were her only beauty were clear and shining.

"You'll let me say just what I feel, Rachel?"

"Of course."

"You can't marry him without telling him. No, no--you couldn't do that!"

Rachel said nothing. She was, sitting on the floor, her eyes turned away from Janet.

"You couldn't do that, Rachel," Janet resumed, as though she were urgently thinking her way; "you'd never have a happy moment."

"Oh, yes, of course," said Rachel, throwing up her head with a half scornful gesture. "One says that--but how do you know? I might never think of it again--if Roger and that man Dempsey were out of the way. It's dead--it's _dead_! Why do we trouble about such things!"

"It would be dead," said Janet in a low voice, "if you'd told him--and he'd forgiven!"

"What has he to do with it?" cried Rachel, stubbornly, "it was before he knew me. I was a different being."

"No--it is always the same self, which we are making, all the time. Don't you see--dear, dear Rachel!--it's your chance now to put it all behind you--just by being true. Oh, I don't want to preach to you--but I see it so clearly!"

"But it isn't as a man would see it--a man like George," said Rachel, shaking her head. "Look there"--she pointed to a little bundle of letters lying on the table--"there are letters from his people which he