"As Carlyle said to the old Queen, 'I'm getting old, madam, and with your
leave I'll take a chair--'"
He pushed an arm-chair forward.
"And let me make up the fire. It's beginning to freeze outside."
Lady Winton moved quickly to the fireplace, holding out a prohibiting
hand.
"There is quite enough fire, thank you. I am going out presently."
Delane sat down, and extended a pair of still shapely feet to the slender
flame in the grate.
"Dick's boots!" he said, tapping them with his cane, and looking round at
his sister. "What a lot of wear I've got out of them since he threw them
away! His overcoat, too. And now that it's the thing to be shabby, Dick's
clothes are really a godsend. I defraud Jones. But I have no doubt that
Jones gets a good deal more than is good for him."
"Look here, Roger!--suppose you stop talking this nonsense and come to
business," said Marianne Winton, in pale exasperation. "I've sent Jones
out with a note--but he'll be back directly. And I've got an appointment.
What are you doing? Have you got any work to do?"
She took a seat not far from her brother, who perceived from her tone
that he had perhaps gone as far as was prudent.
"Oh, dear, no, I've got no work to do," he said, smiling. "That's not a
commodity that comes my way. But I must somehow manage to keep a roof
over Anita and the child. So what can I do but count on your assistance,
my dear? My father left you a great deal of money which in equity
belonged to me--and I am bound to remind you of it."
"You know very well why he left you so little!" said Lady Winton. "We
needn't go into that old story. I ask you again, what do you want?" She
took out her watch. "I have just ten minutes."
"What do I want?" He looked at her with a slow, whimsical laugh. "Money,
my dear, money! Money means everything that I must have--food, coals,
clothes, doctor, chemist, buses--decent houseroom for Anita and myself--"
A shiver of revulsion ran through his sister.
"Have you married that woman?"
He laughed.
"As you seemed to think it desirable, Anita and I did take a trip to a
Registry Office about a month ago. It's all lawful now--except for our
abominable English law that doesn't legitimize the children. But"--he
sprang to his feet with a movement which startled her--"whom do you think
I've seen lately?"
His sister stared at him, amazed at the change in him--the animation, the
rush of colour in the hollow, emaciated face.
"_Rachel_!--my wife--my former--precious--wife. I thought she was in
Canada. No doubt she thought the same of me. But I've stumbled upon her
quite by chance--living close to the place where I had taken lodgings for
Anita and the babe, in September, in case there were more raids this
winter. What do you think of that?"
"It doesn't interest me at all," said Lady Winton coldly.
"Then you have no dramatic sense, my dear. Just think! I stroll out, for
want of anything better to do, with Anita, into the market-place of a
beastly little country town, to see a silly sort of show--a mixture of a
Harvest Festival and a Land Girls' beano--when without a moment's
warning--standing up in a decorated wagon--I behold--_Rachel_!--handsomer
than ever!--in a kind of khaki dress--tunic, breeches, and
leggings--enormously becoming!--and, of course, the observed of all
observers. More than that!--I perceive a young man, in an American
uniform, dancing attendance upon her--taking her orders--walking her off
to church--Oh, a perfectly clear case!--no doubt about it at all. And
there I stood--within a few yards of her--and she never saw me!"
He broke off, staring at his sister--a wild, exultant look--which struck
her uncomfortably. Her face showed her arrested, against her will.
"Are you sure she didn't see you?"
"Sure. I put the child on my shoulder, and hid behind her. Besides--my
dear--even Rachel might find it difficult to recognize her discarded
husband--in this individual!"
He tapped his chest lightly. Lady Winton could not withdraw her
own eyes from him. Yes, it was quite true. The change in him was
shocking--ghastly. He had brought it entirely on himself. But she
could not help saying, in a somewhat milder tone,--
"Have you seen that doctor again?"
"To whom you so obligingly sent me? Yes, I saw him yesterday. One lung
seems to have finally struck work--_caput_! as the Germans say. The other
will last a bit longer yet."
A fit of coughing seized him. His sister instinctively moved farther away
from him, looking at him with frightened and hostile eyes.
"Don't be alarmed," he said, as soon as he had found his voice again,
"I'm drenched in disinfectant. I take all proper precautions--for the
child's sake. Now then"--he rose with an effort to his feet--"what are
you going to do for me?"
His aspect had altered, had assumed a sinister and passionate intensity.
His sister was conscious of the menace in it, and hastily taking up a
small hand-bag lying near her, she produced a purse from it.
"I have saved twenty pounds for you--out of my own money--with _great_
difficulty," she said, with indignant emphasis. "If I were to tell
Richard, he would be furious. And I cannot--do--_anything_--more for you,
beyond the allowance I give you. Everything you suffer from, you have
brought upon, yourself. It is hopeless to try and help you."
He laughed.
"Well, then, I must try Rachel!" he said carelessly, as he looked for his
hat.
"That I think would be the lowest depth!" said Lady Winton, breathing
quick, "to beg money from the wife who divorced you!"
"I am ready to beg for money--requisition is the better word--from
anybody in the world who has more of it than I. I am a Bolshevist. You
needn't talk to me about property, or rights. I don't acknowledge them.
I want something that you've got, and I haven't. I shall take it if I
find the opportunity--civilly if I can, uncivilly, if I must."
Lady Winton made no reply. She stood, a statue of angry patience waiting
for him to go. He slowly buttoned on his coat, and then stepped coolly
across the room to look at an enlarged photograph of a young soldier
standing on the piano.
"Handsome chap! You're in luck, Marianne. I suppose you managed to get
him into a staff job of some sort, out of harm's way?"
He turned to her with a sneer on his lips. His sister was still silent.
The man moving about the room was perhaps the thing she feared and
hated most in the world. Every scene of this kind--and he forced them
on her, in spite of her futile resistance, at fairly frequent
intervals--represented to her an hour of torture and humiliation. How to
hide the scenes and the being who caused them, from her husband, her
servants, her friends, was becoming almost her chief preoccupation.
She was beginning to be afraid of her brother. For some time she had
regarded him as incipiently insane, and as she watched him this evening
he seemed to her more than ever charged with sinister possibilities. It
appeared to be impossible to influence or frighten him; and she realized
that as he seemed not to care a fig whether she caused a scandal or not,
and she cared with every pulse of her being, she was really in his power,
and it was no good struggling.
"Well, good-night, Edith," he said at last, taking up his hat. "This'll
last for a bit--but not very long, I warn you--prices being what they
are. Oh, by the way, my name just now is Wilson--make a note of it!"
"What's that for?" she said disdainfully.
"Some Canadian creditors of mine got wind of me--worse luck. I had to
change my quarters, and drop the old name--for a bit. However--what's
in a name?" He laughed, and held out his hand.
"Going to shake hands, Edie? You used to be awfully fond of me, when you
were small."
She stood, apparently unmoved, her hands hanging. The pathetic note had
been tried on her too often.
"Good-night, Roger. Nannie will show you out."
The door closed on him, and Lady Winton dropped on a sofa by the fire,
her face showing white and middle-aged in the firelight. She was just
an ordinary woman, only with a stronger will than most; and as an
ordinary woman, amid all her anger and fear, she was not wholly proof
against such a spectacle as that now presented by her once favourite
brother. It was not his words that affected her--but a hundred little
personal facts which every time she saw him burnt a little more deeply
into her consciousness the irreparableness of his personal ruin--physical
and moral. Idleness, drink, disease--the loss of shame, of self-respect,
of manners--the sense of something vital gone for ever--all these fatal
things stared out upon her, from his slippery emaciated face, his
borrowed clothes, his bullying voice--the scent on him of the mews in
which he lived!
She covered her face with her hands and cried a little. She could
remember when he was the darling and pride of the family--especially of
his father. How had it happened? He had said to her once, "There must
have been a black drop somewhere in our forbears, Edie. It has reappeared
in me. We are none of us responsible, my dear, for our precious selves. I
may be a sinner and a loafer--but that benevolent Almighty of yours made
me."
That was wicked stuff, of course; but there had been a twist in him from
the beginning. Had _she_ done her best for him? There were times when her
conscience pricked her.
The clock struck seven. The sound brought her to her feet. She must go
and dress. Richard would be home directly, and they were dining out, to
meet a distinguished General, in London for a few days' leave from the
front. Dick must, of course, know nothing of Roger's visit; and she must
hurriedly go and look up the distinguished General's career in case she
had to sit next him. Vehemently she put the preceding hour out of her
mind. The dinner-party to which she was going flattered her vanity. It
turned her cold to think that Roger might some day do something which
would damage that "position" which she had built up for herself and her
husband, by ten years' careful piloting of their joint lives. She knew
she was called a "climber." She knew also that she had "climbed"
successfully, and that it was Roger's knowledge of the fact, combined
with a horrid recklessness which seemed to be growing in him, that made
the danger of the situation.
Meanwhile Delane stepped out into the fog, which, however, was lifting a
little. He made his way down into Piccadilly, which was crowded with
folk, men and women hurrying home from their offices, and besieging the
omnibuses--with hundreds of soldiers too, most of them with a girl beside
them, and smart young officers of every rank and service--while the whole
scene breathed an animation and excitement, which meant a common
consciousness, in the crowd, of great happenings. All along the street
were men with newspapers, showing the headlines to passers-by. "President
Wilson's answer to the German appeal expected to-morrow." "The British
entry into Lille."
Delane bought an _Evening News_, glanced at the headlines, and threw it
away. What did the war matter to him?--or the new world that fools
supposed to be coming after it? Consumptives had a way, no doubt, of
living longer than people expected--or hoped. Still, he believed that a
couple of years or so would see him out. And that being so, he felt
a kind of malignant indifference towards this pushing, chattering world,
aimlessly going about its silly business, as though there were any real
interest or importance in it.
Then, as he drifted with the crowd, he found himself caught in a
specially dense bit of it, which had gathered round some fallen horses. A
thin slip of a girl beside him, who was attempting to get through the
crush, was roughly elbowed by a burly artilleryman determined to see the
show. She protested angrily, and Delane suddenly felt angry, too. "You
brute, you,--let the lady pass!" he called to the soldier, who turned
with a grin, and was instantly out of reach and sight. "Take my arm,"
said Delane to the girl--"Where are you going?" The little thing looked
up--hesitated--and took his arm. "I'm going to get a bus at the Circus."
"All right. I'll see you there." She laughed and flushed, and they walked
on together. Delane looked at her with curiosity. High cheek-bones--a red
spot of colour on them--a sharp chin--small, emaciated features, and
beautiful deep eyes. Phthisical!--like himself--poor little wretch! He
found out that she was a waitress in a cheap eating-house, and had very
long hours. "Jolly good pay, though, compared to what it used to be! Why,
with tips, on a good day, I can make seven and eight shillings. That's
good, ain't it? And now the war's goin' to stop. Do you think I want it
to stop? I don't think! Me and my sister'll be starvin' again, I
suppose?"
He found out she was an orphan, living with her sister, who was a typist,
in Kentish town. But she refused to tell him her address, which he idly
asked her. "What did you want with it?" she said, with a sudden frown.
"I'm straight, I am. There's my bus! Night! night!--So long!" And with a
half-sarcastic wave of her tiny hand, she left him, and was soon engulfed
in the swirl round a north-bound bus.
He wandered on along Regent Street, and Waterloo Place, down the Duke of
York's steps into the Mall, where some captured guns were already in
position, with children swarming about them; and so through St. James's
Park to the Abbey. The fog was now all but clear, and there were frosty
stars overhead. The Abbey towers rose out of a purple haze, etherially
pale and moon-touched. The House of Commons was sitting, but there was
still no light on the Clock Tower, and no unmuffling of the lamps. London
was waiting, as the world was waiting, for the next step in the vast
drama which had three continents for its setting; and meanwhile, save for
the added movements in the streets, and a new something in the faces of
the crowds hurrying along the pavements, there was nothing to show that
all was in fact over, and the war won.
Delane followed a stream of people entering the Abbey through the north
transept. He was carried on by them, till a verger showed him into a seat
near the choir, and he mechanically obeyed, and dropped on his knees.
When he rose from them, the choir was filing in, and the vergers with
their pokers were escorting the officiating Canon to his seat. Delane had
not been inside a church for two or three years, and it was a good deal
more since he had stood last in Westminster Abbey. But as he watched the
once familiar spectacle there flowed back upon him, with startling force,
old impressions and traditions. He was in Cambridge again, a King's man,
attending King's Chapel. He was thinking of his approaching Schools, and
there rose in his mind a number of figures, moving or at rest, Cambridge
men like himself, long since dismissed from recollection. Suddenly memory
seemed to open out--to become full, and urgent, and emphatic. He appeared
to be living at a great rate, to be thinking and feeling with peculiar
force. Perhaps it was fever. His hands burnt.
"_My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my
Saviour!_"
As the chant rose, and he recognized the words, he felt extraordinarily
exalted, released, purified. Why not think away the past? It has no
existence, except in thought.
"I am what I conceive myself to be--who can prove me to be anything else?
What am I then! An educated man, with a mind--an intelligence. I have
damaged it, but there it is--still mine."
His eyes wandered, during the Lesson, to the line of sculptured Statesmen
in the north transept. He had taken History honours, and his thoughts
began to play with matter still stored in them: an essay on Dizzy and
Cobden he had written for a Cambridge club--or Gladstone's funeral, which
he had seen as a boy of seventeen. He had sat almost in this very place,
with his mother, who had taken pains to bring him to see it as an
historic spectacle which he might wish to remember. A quiet, dull woman,
his mother--taciturn, and something of a bookworm. She had never
understood him, nor he her. But she had occasionally shown moments of
expansion and emotion, when the soul within glowed a little through its
coverings; and he remembered the look in her eyes as the coffin
disappeared into the earth, amid the black-coated throng of Lords and
Commons. She had been for years a great though silent worshipper of Mr.
Gladstone, to the constant amusement of her Tory husband and sons.
Then, suddenly, a face, a woman's pretty face, in the benches of the
north transept, caught his eye, and with a leap, as of something
unchained, the beast within him awoke. It had reminded him of Rachel; and
therewith the decent memories of the distant past disappeared, engulfed
by the seething, ugly, mud-stained present. He was again crouching on the
hill-side, in the shelter of the holly, watching the scene within: Rachel
in that man's arms! Had the American seen him? He remembered his own
backward start of alarm, as Ellesborough suddenly turned and walked
towards the window. He had allowed himself, in his eagerness to see, to
press too near. He had exposed himself? He did not really believe that he
had been discovered--unless the American was an uncommonly cool hand! Any
way, his retreat to the wooded cover of the hill had been prompt. Once
arrived in the thick plantation on the crest, he had thrown himself down
exhausted. But as he sat panting there, on the fringe of the wood, he had
fancied voices and the flash of a light in the hollow beneath him. These
slight signs of movement, however, had quickly disappeared. Darkness and
silence resumed possession of the farm, and he had had no difficulty in
finding his way unmolested through the trees to the main road, and to the
little town, five miles nearer to London than Millsborough, at which he
had taken a room, under his present name of Wilson.
The wooded common, indeed, with its high, withered bracken, together with
the hills encircling the farm, had been the cover from which he had
carried out his prying campaign upon his former wife. As he sat or knelt,
mechanically, under the high and shadowy spaces of the Abbey, his mind
filled with excited recollections of that other evening when, after
tearing his hand badly on some barbed wire surrounding one of Colonel
Shepherd's game preserves, so that it bled profusely, and he had nothing
to bandage it with, he had suddenly become aware of voices behind him,
and of a large party of men in khaki--Canadian foresters, by the look
of them, from the Ralstone timber camp, advancing, at some distance, in a
long extended line through the trees; so that they were bound to come
upon him if he remained in the wood. He turned back at once, faced the
barbed wire again, with renewed damage both to clothes and hands, and
ran, crouching, down the green road leading to the farm, his wound
bleeding as he ran. Then he had perceived an old labourer making for him
with shouts. But under the shelter of the cart-shed, he had first
succeeded in tying his handkerchief so tightly round his wrist, with his
teeth and one hand, as to check the bleeding, which was beginning to make
him feel faint. Then, creeping round the back of the farm, he saw that
the upper half of the stable door was open, and leaping over it, he had
hidden among the horses, just as Halsey came past in pursuit. The old
man--confound him!--had made the circuit of the farm, and had then gone
up the grass road to the hill. Delane, looking out from the dark stable,
had been able to watch him through the dusk, keeping an eye the while to
the opposite door opening on the farm-yard. But the labourer disappeared,
and in the dark roomy stable, with its beamed roof, nothing could be
heard but the champing and slow tramping movements of the splendid
cart-horses. Rachel's horses! Delane passed his free hand over two of
them, and they turned their stately heads and nosed him in a quiet way.
Then he vaulted again over the half door, and hurried up the hill, in the
gathering darkness.
He was aware of the ghost-story. He had heard it and the story of the
murder from a man cutting bracken on the common; and he had already
formed some vague notions of making use of it for the blackmailing of
Rachel. It amused him to think that perhaps his sudden disappearance
would lead to a new chapter of the old tale.
Then at the recollection of Rachel's prosperity and peace, of her sleek
horses and cows, her huge hay and corn stacks, her comfortable home, and
her new lover, a fresh shudder of rage and hatred gripped him. She had
once been his thing--his chattel; he seemed to see her white neck and
breast, her unbound hair on the pillow beside him--and she had escaped
him, and danced on him.
Of course she had betrayed him--of course she had had a lover! What other
explanation was there of her turning against him?--of her flight from his
house? But she had been clever enough to hide all the traces of it. He
recalled his own lame and baffled attempts to get hold of some evidence
against her, with gnashing of teeth....
* * * * *
"_For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are
not seen are eternal!_"
He caught the words staring at him from the page of the open prayer book
beside him, and automatically the Greek equivalent suggested itself. He
had always done well in "divinners"! Then he became aware that the
blessing had been given, that the organ was playing, and the congregation
was breaking up.
* * * * *
Twenty-four hours later, Delane found himself on a road leading up from
the town where he was lodging to the summit of the wide stretch of common
land on the western side of which lay Great End Farm. Half way up a long
hill, he came upon a young man in uniform, disconsolately kneeling beside
a bicycle which he seemed to be vainly trying to mend. As Delane came up
with him, he looked up and asked for a light. Delane produced a match,
and the young man, by the help of it, inspected his broken machine.
"No go!" he said with a shrug, "I shall have to walk."
He rose from the ground, put up the tool he had been using, and buttoned
up his coat. Then he asked Delane where he was going. Delane named a
little village on the farther edge of the common.
"Oh, well, that's straight ahead. I turn off to the right," said the
young soldier, "at the cross road."
They walked on together, Delane rather unwillingly submitting to the
companionship thus sprung upon him. He saw from the badge on the man's
shoulder that he belonged to one of the Canadian Forestry Corps in the
district, and was at once on his guard. They started in silence, till
Delane, pulling his mind back with a jerk, asked his companion if he was
going to Ipscombe.
"No--only to Great End Farm."
Darkness hid the sudden change in Delane's countenance.
"You know some one there?"
"No, but I want to see one of the ladies about something. There's two of
them running the farm. But Miss Henderson's the boss."
Cautiously, with assumed indifference, Delane began to ask questions.
He discovered that his companion's name was Dempsey; and before many
minutes had passed the murderer's grandson was in the full swing of his
story. Delane, despising the young man for a chattering fool, listened,
nevertheless, with absorbed attention to every item of his tale.
Presently Dempsey said with a laugh,--
"There's been people in Ipscombe all these years as always would have it
old Watson walked. I know the names of three people at least as have
sworn to seein' 'im. And there's an old fellow in Ipscombe now that
declares he's seen him, only t'ther day."
Delane lit his pipe, and nonchalantly inquired particulars.
Dempsey gave a mocking account of Halsey's story.
"He's an old fool! Did you ever hear of a ghost bleedin' before!" The
speaker threw back his head and laughed. "That's all rot! Besides, I
don't believe in ghosts--never did. But as Miss Henderson's farmin' the
very land where old Watson was done in, I thought she'd like to have the
true story and first hand. And there's no one but me knows it--not first
hand. So I wrote to her, and said as I would call at six o'clock this
evening."
"You know her?"
"No--o," said the young man, hesitating. "But I somehow fancy as I may
have seen her before."
"Where?"
"Why, in Canada. I was living on a farm, not far from Winnipeg"--he named
the place. Delane suddenly dropped his pipe, and stooped to pick it up.
"All right," he said, "go on."
"And there was a man--a sort of gentleman--his name was Delane--on
another farm about ten miles from where I was working. People talked
of him no end--he was a precious bad lot! I never saw him that I know
of--but I saw his wife twice. They say he was a brute to her. And she was
awfully handsome. You couldn't forget her when you'd once come across
her. And when I saw Miss Henderson drivin' one of the wagons in the
Millsborough Harvest Festival, a fortnight ago, I could have sworn it was
Mrs. Delane. But, of course, it was my mistake."
"Where did you see Mrs. Delane?"
"Once at her own place. I was delivering some poultry food that Delane
had bought of my employer--and once at a place belongin' to a man
called Tanner."
"Tanner?"
"Tanner. He was somethin' the same sort as Delane. We've a lot of them in
Canada--remittance men, we call them--men as can't get on in the old
country--and their relations pay 'em to go--and pay 'em to keep away. But
Tanner was a nice sort of fellow--quite different from Delane. He painted
pictures. I remember his showin' some o' them in Winnipeg. But he was
always down on his luck. He couldn't make any money, and he couldn't
keep it."
"You saw Miss Henderson there?"
Dempsey gave a guffaw.
"Oh, Lor, no! I don't say that. Why, I'd get into trouble--shouldn't I?
But I saw Mrs. Delane. I was driving past Tanner's place, with two
horses, and a heavy load, November two years ago--just before we passed
our Military Service Act, and I joined up. And an awful storm came on--a
regular blizzard. Before I got to Tanner's I was nearly wore out, an' the
horses, too. So I stopped to ask for a hot drink or somethin'. You
couldn't see the horses' heads for the snow. And Tanner brought me out
some hot coffee--I'm 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 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 château 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. "I'll get the horse and cart
myself."
For it was market day at Millsborough, and peace or no peace, she had
some business that must be done there.
"Oh, I've no call to go, Miss," said Hastings. "I'd rather stay and look
after things."
His eyes met Janet's, and she nodded imperceptibly. She was relieved to
think of Hastings--good, faithful, unassuming creature!--remaining on
guard. The very desertion of the farm-houses on this great day might
tempt marauders--especially that thief or madman who had been haunting
their own premises. She hoped the police would not forget them either.
But Hastings' offer to stay till the girls came back from the
Millsborough crowds and bands at about nine o'clock quite eased her mind.
And meanwhile she and Hastings, as had been agreed, kept their anxieties
from Rachel.
Rachel went off at twelve o'clock in her khaki suit, driving a spirited
young horse in a high cart, which was filled with farm produce. She was
to take early dinner with some new friends, and then to go and look at a
Jersey cow which Janet coveted, in a farm on the other side of
Millsborough.
"Don't wait tea for me," she said to Janet, "I shall get some somewhere."
And then with a smile to them both she was off. Janet stood looking after
her, lost in a painful uncertainty. "Can't you let it alone?" Lord
Melbourne was accustomed to say suavely to those members of the Cabinet
who brought him grievances or scandals that wanted seeing to. One half of
Janet's mind was saying, "Can't you let it alone?" to the other half.