It was again a very still and misty night,--extraordinarily mild for the
time of year. A singular brooding silence held all the woodlands above
Great End Farm. There was not a breath of wind. Every dead branch that
fell, every bird that moved, every mouse scratching among the fallen
beech leaves, produced sounds disproportionately clear and startling, and
for the moment there would be a rustle of disturbance, as though
something or some one, in the forest heart, took alarm. Then the deep
waters of quiet closed again, and everything--except that watching
presence--slept.
The hut in Denman Wood, which had formerly played a hospitable part as
the scene of many a Gargantuan luncheon to Colonel Shepherd's shooting
parties, had long been an abandoned spot. All the Colonel's keepers under
fifty had gone to fight; and there was left only an old head keeper, with
one decrepit helper, who shot the scanty game which still survived on
strict business principles, to eke out the household rations of the big
house. The Ipscombe woods were rarely visited. They were a long way from
the keeper's cottage, and the old man, depressed by the difference
between war and pre-war conditions, found it quite enough to potter round
the stubbles and turnips of the home farm when game had to be shot.
The paths leading through the underwood to the hut were now in these four
years largely over-grown. A place more hidden and forgotten it would
have been difficult to find. And for this reason, combined with its
neighbourhood to Rachel Henderson's farm, Roger Delane had chosen to
inhabit it.
It was the third night after his interview with his former wife. He
reached the hut after dark, by various by-paths over the wide commons
stretching between it and X--the station at which he now generally
alighted. He carried in his pocket some evening newspapers, a new
anthology, and a novel. Owing to an injection of morphia--a habit to
which he had only lately taken--he felt unusually fit, and his brain was
unusually alert. At the same time he had had a disagreeable interview
with a doctor that morning who had been insisting on Sanatorium treatment
if the remaining lung was to be preserved and his life prolonged. He did
not want to prolong his life, but only to avoid the beastliness of pain.
It seemed to him that morphia--good stuff!--was going to do that for him.
Why hadn't he begun it before? But his brain was queer--he was conscious
of that. He had asked the doctor about some curious mental symptoms. The
reply was that phthisis was often accompanied by them.
Obsession--fixed ideas--in the medical sense: half of him,
psychologically, was quite conscious that the other half was under their
influence. The sound self was observing the unsound self, but apparently
with no power over it. Otherwise how was it that he was here again,
hiding like a wild beast in a lair, less than a mile from Great End Farm,
and Rachel Henderson?
He had found his way to London in the small hours of the day following
his scene with Rachel, intending to keep his promise, and let his former
wife alone. The cashing of Rachel's cheque had given him and Anita some
agreeable moments; though Anita was growing disturbed that he would not
tell her where the money came from. They had found fresh lodgings in a
really respectable Bloomsbury street; they had both bought clothes, and
little Netta had been rigged out. Delane had magnificently compounded
with his most pressing creditors, and had taken Anita to a theatre. But
he had been discontented with her appearance there. She had really lost
all her good looks. If it hadn't been for the kid--
And now, after this interval, his obsession had swooped upon him again.
It was an obsession of hate--which simply could not endure, when it came
to the point, that Rachel Henderson should vanish unscathed into the
future of a happy marriage, while he remained the doomed failure and
outcast he knew himself to be. Rachel's implied confession rankled in him
like a burn. _Tanner!_--that wretched weakling, with his miserable daubs
that nobody wanted to buy. So Rachel had gone to him, as soon as she had
driven her husband away, no doubt to complain of her ill-treatment, to
air her woes. The fellow had philandered round her some time, and had
shown an insolent and interfering temper once or twice towards himself.
Yes!--he could imagine it all!--her flight, and Tanner's maudlin
sympathy--tears--caresses--the natural sequel. And then her pose of
complete innocence at the divorce proceedings--the Judge's remarks.
Revolting hypocrisy! If Tanner had been still alive, he would somehow
have exposed him--somehow have made him pay. Lucky for him he was drowned
in that boat accident on Lake Nipissing! And no doubt Rachel thought that
the accident had made everything safe for her.
Every incident now, every phase of his conversation with her was
assuming a monstrous and distorted significance in his mind. How easily
she had yielded on the subject of the money! He might have asked a great
deal more--and he would have got it. Very likely Ellesborough was well
off--Yankees generally were--and she knew that what she gave Delane as
hush money would make very little difference to her. Ellesborough no
doubt would not look very closely into her shekels, having sufficient of
his own. Otherwise it might occur to him to wonder how she had got rid of
that £500. Would it pinch her? Probably, if all she had for capital was
the old chap's legacy. Well--serve her right--serve her, damned, doubly
right! Ellesborough's kisses would make up.
These thoughts, after a momentary respite, held him in their grip as he
walked London streets. Suspicion of the past--ugly and venomous--flapped
its black wings about him. Had Rachel ever been faithful to him--even in
the early days? She had made acquaintance with the Tanners very soon
after their marriage. Looking back, a number of small incidents and
scenes poked their heads out of the dead level of the past. Rachel
and Tanner, discussing the Watts photograph when Rachel first acquired
it--Tanner's eager denunciatory talk--he called himself an
"impressionist"--the creature!--because he couldn't draw worth a
cent--Rachel all smiles and deference. She had never given _him_ that
sort of attention. Or Rachel at a housewarming in the next farm to
his--Rachel in a pale green dress, the handsomest woman there, dancing
with Tanner--Rachel quarrelling with him in the buggy on the way home,
because he called Tanner a milksop--"He cares for beautiful things, and
you don't!--but that's no reason why you should abuse him."
And what about those weeks not very long after that dance, when he had
gone off to the land-sale at Edmonton (that was the journey, by the way,
when he first saw Anita!), and Rachel had stayed at home, with a girl
friend, a girl they knew in Winnipeg? But that girl hadn't stayed all
the time. To do her justice, Rachel had made no secret of that. He
remembered her attacking him when he came home for having left her for
three or four days quite alone. Why had he been so long away? Probably a
mere bluff--though he had been taken in by it at the time, and being
still in love with her, had done his best to appease her. But what had
she been doing all the time she was alone? In the light of what he knew
now, she might have been doing anything. _Was the child his_?
So, piece by piece, with no auditor but his own brain, shut in upon
himself by the isolation which his own life had forged for him, he built
up a hideous indictment against the woman he had once loved. He wished he
had put off his interview with her till he had had time to think things
out more. As he came to realize how she had tricked and bested him, her
offence became incredibly viler than it seemed at first. He had let her
off far too cheaply that night at the farm. Scenes of past violence
returned upon him, and the memory of them seemed to satisfy a rising
thirst. Especially the recollection of the divorce proceedings maddened
him. His morbid brain took hold on them with a grip that his will could
not loosen. Her evidence--he had read it in the Winnipeg newspapers--the
remarks of the prating old judge--and of her cad of a lawyer--good God!
And all the time it was _she_ who ought to have been in the dock, and he
the accuser, if he had known--if he hadn't been a trusting idiot, a
bleating fool.
A brooding intensity of rage, as this inward process went on, gradually
drowned in him every other feeling and desire. The relief and amusement
of the money and its spending were soon over. He thought no more of it.
Anita, and his child even--the child for whom he really cared--passed out
of his mind. As he sat drinking whisky in the dull respectable lodging,
at night after Anita had gone to bed, he felt the sinister call of those
dark woods above Rachel's farm, and tasted the sweetness of his new power
to hurt her, now that she had paid him this blackmail, and damned herself
thereby--past help. She had threatened him. But what could she do--or the
Yankee fellow either? She had given the show away. As for his promise,
when he had no right to make it,--no right to allow such a woman to get
off scot-free, with plenty of money and a new lover.
So on the Thursday evening he took train for X. It was still the
Armistice week. The London streets were crowded with soldiers and young
women of every sort and kind. He bought a newspaper and read it in the
train. It gave him a queer satisfaction--for one half of him was still
always watching the other--to discover that he could feel patriotic
emotion like anybody else and could be thrilled by the elation of
Britain's victory--_his_ victory. He read the telegrams, the positions on
the Rhine assigned to the Second Army, and the Fourth,--General Plumer
General Rawlinson--General F.--Gad! he used to know the son of that last
old fellow at King's.
Then he fell to his old furtive watching of the people on the platform,
the men getting in and out of the train. At any moment he might fall in
with one of his old Cambridge acquaintances, in one of these smart
officers, with their decorations and their red tabs. But in the first
place they wouldn't travel in this third class where he was sitting--not
till the war was over. And in the next, he was so changed--had taken
indeed such pains to be--that it was long odds against his being
recognized. Eleven years, was it, since he left Cambridge? About.
At X. he got out. The ticket collector noticed him for that faint touch
of a past magnificence that still lingered in his carriage and gait; but
there were so many strangers about that he was soon forgotten.
He passed under a railway arch and climbed a hill, the hill on which he
had met Dempsey. At the top of the hill he left the high-road for a grass
track across the common. There was just enough light from a declining
moon to show him where he was. The common was full of dark shapes--old
twisted thorns, and junipers, and masses of tall grass--shapes which
often seemed to him to be strargely alive, the silent but conscious
witnesses of his passage.
The wood was very dark. He groped his way through it with difficulty
and found the hut. Once inside it, he fastened the door with a wooden
bar he had himself made, and turned on his electric torch. Bit by bit
in the course of his night visits he had accumulated a few necessary
stores--some firewood, a few groceries hidden in a corner, a couple
of brown blankets, and a small box of tools. A heap of dried bracken in a
corner, raised on a substratum of old sacks, had often served him for a
bed; and when he had kindled a wood fire in the rough grate of loose
bricks where Colonel Shepherd's keepers had been accustomed to warm the
hot meat stews sent up for the shooting luncheons, and had set out his
supper on the upturned fragment of an old box which had once held meal
for pheasants, he had provided at least what was necessary for his night
sojourn. This food he had brought with him; a thermos bottle full of hot
coffee, with slices of ham, cheese, and bread; and he ate it with
appetite, sitting on a log beside the fire, and pleasantly conscious as
he looked round him, like the Greek poet of long ago, of that "cuteness"
of men which conjures up housing, food, and fire in earth's loneliest
places. Outside that small firelit space lay the sheer silence of the
wood, broken once or twice by the call and flight of an owl past the one
carefully darkened window of the hut, or by the mysterious sighing
and shuddering which, from time to time, would run through the crowded
stems and leafless branches.
A queer "hotel" this, for mid-November! He might, if he had chosen, have
been amusing himself, _tant bien que mal_, in one or other of those
shabby haunts,--bars, night-clubs, dancing-rooms, to which his poverty
and his _moeurs_ condemned him, while his old comrades, the lads he had
been brought up with at school and college, guardsmen, Hussars, and the
rest, were holding high revel for the Peace at the Ritz or the Carlton;
he might even, as far as money was concerned, now that he had bagged his
great haul from Rachel, have been supping himself at the Ritz, if he had
only had time to exchange his brother-in-law's old dress suit, which
Marianne had passed on to him, for a new one, and if he could have made
up his mind to the possible recognitions and rebuffs such a step would
have entailed. As it was, he preferred his warm hiding-place in the heart
of the woods, coupled with this exultant sense of an unseen and
mysterious power which was running, like alcohol, through his nerves.
Real alcohol, however, was not wanting to his solitary meal. He drenched
his coffee in the cognac he always carried about with him, and then,
cigarette in hand, he fell back on the heap of bracken to read a while.
The novel he sampled and threw away; the anthology soon bored him; and he
spent the greater part of two hours lying on his back, smoking and
thinking--till it was safe to assume that the coast was clear round Great
End Farm. About ten o'clock, he slipped noiselessly out of the hut, after
covering up the fire to wait for his return, and hiding as far as he
could the other traces of his occupation. The damp mist outside held all
the wood stifled, and the darkness was profound. Stepping as lightly as
possible, and using his torch with the utmost precaution, he gradually
made his way to the edge of the wood, and the lip of the basin beyond it.
On the bare down was enough faint moonlight to see by, and he
extinguished his little lantern before leaving the wood. Below him were
the dim outlines of the farm, a shadowy line of road beyond, and, as it
were, a thicker fold of darkness, to mark the woods on the horizon. There
was not a light anywhere; the village was invisible, and he listened for
a long time without hearing anything but the rush of a distant train.
Ah!--Yes, there was a sound down there in the hollow--footsteps,
reverberating in the silence. He bent his head listening intently. The
footsteps seemed to approach the farm, then the sounds ceased, till
suddenly, on the down slope below him, he saw something moving. He threw
back his head with a quiet laugh.
The Ipscombe policeman, no doubt, on his round. Would he come up the
hill? Hardly, on such a misty night. If not, his retreating steps on the
farm lane would soon tell his departure.
In a few minutes, indeed, the click of an opening gate could be clearly
heard through the mist, and afterwards, steps. They grew fainter and
fainter. All clear!
Choosing a circuitous route, Delane crept down the hill, and reached a
spot on the down-side rather higher than the farm enclosure, from which
the windows of the farm-house could be seen. There was a faint light in
one of the upper two--in which he had some reason to think was that of
Rachel's bedroom. It seemed to him the window was open; he perceived
something like the swaying of a blind inside it. The night was
marvellously mild for mid-November; and he remembered Rachel's old
craving for air, winter and summer.
The light moved, there was a shadow behind the blind, and suddenly the
window was thrown up widely, and a pale figure--a woman's figure--stood
in the opening. Rachel, no doubt! Delane slipped behind a thorn growing
on the bare hill-side. His heart thumped. Instinctively his hand groped
for something in his pocket. If she had guessed that he was there--within
twenty yards of her!
Then, as he watched the faint apparition in the mist, it roused in
him a fresh gust of rage. Rachel, the sentimental Rachel, unable to
sleep--Rachel, happy and serene, thinking of her lover--the lies of her
divorce all forgotten--and the abominable Roger cut finally out of her
life!--
The figure disappeared; he heard the closing of the window, which was
soon dark. Then he crept down to the farm wall, and round the corner of
it to that outer cart-shed, where he had bound up his bleeding hand on
the night when Halsey--silly ass!--had seen the ghost. He did not dare to
smoke lest spark or smell might betray him. Sitting on a heap of sacks in
a sheltered corner, his hands hanging over his knees, he spent some long
time brooding and pondering--conscious all the while of the hidden and
silent life of the house and farm at his back. By now he fancied he
understood the evening ways of the place. The two girls went up to bed
first, about nine; the two ladies, about an hour later; and the farm
bailiff as a rule did not sleep on the premises, though there was a bed
in the loft over the stable which could be used on occasion. That window,
too, through which he had watched the pair of lovers, when the Yankee
discovered him--that also seemed to fit into a scheme.
Yes!--the Yankee had discovered him. His start, his sudden movement as
though to make a rush at the window, had shown it. Meanwhile Delane
had not waited for developments. Quick as thought he had made for one of
those sunken climbing lanes in which the chalk downs of the district
abound, a lane which lay to the south of the farm, while the green
terraced path connected with the ghost-story lay to the north of it. No
doubt there had been a hue and cry, a search of the farm and its
immediate neighbourhood. But the night was dark and the woods wide. Once
in their shelter, he had laughed at pursuit. What had the Yankee said to
Rachel? And since he had stopped her in the lane, what had Rachel been
saying to the Yankee? Had she yet explained that the face he had seen at
the window--supposing always that he had told her what he had seen--and
why shouldn't he?--was not the face of a casual tramp or lunatic, but the
face of a discarded husband, to whom all the various hauntings and
apparitions at the farm had been really due?
That was the question--the all-important question. Clearly some
one--Ellesborough probably--had given a warning to the police. On what
theory?--ghost?--tramp?--or husband?
Or had Rachel just held her tongue, and had the Yankee been led to
believe that the husband--for Rachel must have owned up about the husband
though she did call herself Miss Henderson!--was still some thousands of
miles away--in Canada--safely dead and buried, as far as Rachel was
concerned?
On the whole, he thought it most probable that Rachel had held her tongue
about his reappearance. If she had thought it worth while to bribe him so
heavily, it was not very likely that she would now herself have set the
American on the track of a secret which she so evidently did not want an
expectant bridegroom to know.
The American--d--n him! A furious and morbid jealousy rushed upon the man
crouching under the cart-shed. The world was rapidly reducing itself
for him to these two figures--figures of hate--figures against whom he
felt himself driven by a kind of headlong force, a force of destruction.
How still the farm was, except for the movements of the cows inside the
shippen at his back, or of the horses in the stable! Rachel, no doubt,
was now asleep. In the old days he had often--enviously--watched her
tumble asleep as soon as her bright head was on the pillow; while in his
own case sleep had been for years a difficult business.
Somebody else would watch her sleeping now.
Yes, if he, the outcast, allowed it. And again the frenzied sense of
power swept through him. _If he allowed it_! It rested with him.
The following day, Ellesborough set out in the early afternoon for Great
End Farm, the bearer of much news.
The day was dark and rainy, with almost a gale blowing, but his spirits
had never been higher. The exultation of the great victory, the
incredible Victory, seemed to breathe upon him from the gusty wind, to be
driving the westerly clouds, and crying in all the noises of the woods.
Was it really over?--over and done?--the agony of these four years--the
hourly sacrifice of irreplaceable life--the racking doubt as to the
end--the torturing question in every conscious mind--"Is there a God in
Heaven--a God who cares for men--or is there not?"
He could have shouted the answer aloud--"There is--there is a God! And He
is just."
Faith was natural to him, and nourished on his new happiness no less than
on the marvellous issue of the war, it set his heart singing on this dull
winter's day. How should he find her? Threshing, perhaps, in the big
barn, and he would turn to, and work with her and the girls till work was
done, and they could have the sitting-room to themselves, and he could
tell her all his news. Janet--the ever-kind and thoughtful Janet--would
see to that. The more he saw of the farm-life the more he admired Janet.
She was a little slow. She was not clever; and she had plenty of small
prejudices which amused him. But she was the salt of the earth. Trust
her--lean upon her--she would never let you down. And now he was going to
trust his beloved to her--for a while.
Yes--Rachel and the girls, they were all in the high barn, feeding the
greedy maw of the threshing machine; a business which strained muscles
and backs, and choked noses and throats with infinitesimal particles of
oil and the fine flying chaff. He watched Rachel a few minutes as she
lifted and pitched--a typical figure of a New Labour, which is also a New
Beauty, on this old earth. Then he drew her away, flung off his tunic,
and took her place, while she, smiling and panting, her hands on her
sides, leaned against the wall, and watched in her turn.
Then when the engine stopped, and the great hopper full of grain lay
ready for the miller, they found themselves alone in the barn for a
minute. The girls and Janet had gone to milk, and Hastings with them.
There was a lantern in the barn, which showed Rachel in the swirl of the
corn dust with which the barn was full, haloed and golden with it, like a
Homeric goddess in a luminous cloud. Her soft brown head, her smile,
showing the glint of her white teeth, her eyes, and all the beauty of her
young form, in its semi-male dress--they set his blood on fire. Just as
he was, in his khaki shirt-sleeves, he came to her, and took her in his
arms. She clung to him passionately.
"I thought you were never coming."
It was one of the reproaches that have no sting.
"I came at the first moment. I left a score of things undone."
"Have you been thinking of me?"
"Always--always. And you?"
"Nearly always," she said teasingly. "But I have been making up my
accounts."
"Avaricious woman!--thinking of nothing but money. Dear--I have several
bits of news for you. But let me wash!" He held out his hands--"I am
not fit to touch you!"
She disengaged herself quietly.
"What news?"
"Some letters first," he said, smiling. "A budget and a half--mostly for
you, from all my home people. Can you face it?"
"In reply to your cable?"
"My most extravagant cable! On the top of course of sacks of letters!"
"Before we were engaged?"
He laughed as he thrust his arms into his tunic.
"My mother seems to have guessed from my very first mention of you."
"But--she doesn't know yet?" said Rachel, slowly.
They had passed out of the range of the lantern. He could not see her
face, could only just hear her voice.
"No, not yet, dear. My last long letter should reach her next week."
Her hand lay close in his as they groped their way to the door. When he
unlatched it they came out into the light of a stormy sunset. The rain
had momentarily ceased, and there were fiery lines of crimson burning
their way through the black cloud masses in the western sky. The red
light caught Rachel's face and hair. But even so, it seemed to him that
she was pale.
"I say--you've done too much threshing!" he said with energy. "Don't do
any more--get an extra man."
"Can't find one," she said, laughing at him, but rather languidly. "I'll
go and get the tea ready."
He went off to wash, and when he entered the sitting-room a little
later, she too was fresh and neat again, in a new frock of some soft
bluish-green stuff, which pleased his eye amazingly. Outside, the sunset
was dying rapidly, and at a sign from her, he drew down the blinds over
the two windows, and pulled the curtains close. He stood at the window
looking at the hill-side for a moment with the blind in his hand. He was
recalling the face he had seen, of which neither he nor any one else had
yet said a word to Rachel; recalling also his talk with one of the
Millsborough police the day before. "Nothing more heard of him, Captain.
Oh, we get queer people about these hills sometimes. It's a very
lonely bit of country. Why, a year ago, we were hunting a couple of
German prisoners about these commons for days!"
"Any more ghosts?" he said lightly, glancing round at Rachel, as he drew
the curtains across.
"Not that I know of. Come and have your tea."
He took a cup from her hand, and leaning against the chimney surveyed the
room with a radiant face. Then he stooped over her and said:--
"I love this little room! Don't you?"
She made a restless movement.
"I don't know. Why do you love it?"
"As if you didn't know!" Their eyes met, his intense and
passionate,--hers, less easy to read. "Darling, I have some other news
for you. I think you'll like it--though it'll separate us for a little."
And drawing a letter from his pocket, he handed it to her. It was a
letter from the American Headquarters, offering him immediate work in the
American Intelligence Department at Coblentz.
"Some friends of mine there, seem to have been getting busy about me. You
see I know German pretty well."
And he explained to her that as a boy he had spent a year in Germany
before going to Yale. She scarcely listened, so absorbed was she in the
official letter.
"When must you go?" she said at last, looking up.
"At the end of next week, I'm afraid."
"And how long will it be?"
"That I don't know. But three or four months certainly. It will put off
our wedding, dearest, a bit. But you'd like me to go, wouldn't you? I
should be at the hub of things."
The colour rushed into her cheeks.
"_Must you go_?"
Her manner amazed him. He had expected that one so ambitious and
energetic in her own way of life would have greeted his news with
eagerness. The proposal was really a great compliment to him--and a great
chance.
"I don't see how I could refuse it," he said with an altered countenance.
"Indeed--I don't think I could."
She dropped her face into her hands, and stared into the fire. In some
trouble of mind, he knelt down beside her, and put his arm round her.
"I'll write every day. It won't be long, darling."
She shook her head, and he felt a shudder run through her.
"It's silly of me--I don't know why--but--I'm just afraid--"
"Afraid of what?"
She smiled at him tremulously--but he saw the tears in her eyes.
"I told you--I can't always help it. I'm a fool, I suppose--but--"
Then she threw her arms round his neck--murmuring in his ear: "You'll
have time to think--when you're away from me--that it was a great
pity--you ever asked me."
He kissed and scolded her, till she smiled again. Afterwards she made a
strong effort to discuss the thing reasonably. Of course he must go--it
would be a great opening--a great experience. And they would have all the
more time to consider their own affairs. But all the evening afterwards
he felt in some strange way that he had struck her a blow from which she
was trying in vain to rally. Was it all the effect of her suffering at
that brute's hands--aided by the emotion and strain of the recent scenes
between herself and him?
As for her, when she turned back from the gate where she had bid him
good-bye, she saw Janet in the doorway waiting for her almost with a
sense of exasperation. She had not yet said one word to Janet. That
plunge was all to take!