XIV

Rachel woke the following morning in that dreary mood when all the colour

and the glamour seem to have been washed out of life, and the hopes and

dreams which keep up a perpetual chatter in every normal mind are

suddenly dumb.

How was she going to face Ellesborough's long absence? It had been

recently assumed between them that he would be very soon released from

his forestry post, that the infantry commission he had been promised

would come to nothing, now the Armistice was signed, and that in a very

few weeks they would be free to think only of themselves and their own

future. This offer of Intelligence work at the American Headquarters had

changed everything.

In ten days, if nothing happened, he would be gone, and she would be left

behind to grapple alone with Roger--who might at any moment torment her

again; with the presence of Dempsey, who was thinking of settling in the

village, and for whom she would be called upon very soon to fulfil the

hopes she had raised in him; and finally, with the struggle and misery in

her own mind.

But something must happen. As she was dressing by candle-light in the

winter dawn, her thoughts were rushing forward--leaping some unexplored

obstacles lying in the foreground--to a possible marriage before

Ellesborough went to France; just a quiet walk to a registry office,

without any fuss or any witness but Janet. If she could reach that

haven, she would be safe; and this dumb fever of anxiety, this terrified

conviction that in the end Fate would somehow take him from her, would be

soothed away.

But how to reach it? For there was now between them, till they also were

revealed and confessed, a whole new series of events: not only the Tanner

episode, but Delane's reappearance, her interview with him, her rash

attempt to silence Dempsey. By what she had done in her bewilderment and

fear, in order to escape the penalty of frankness, she might only--as

she was now beginning to perceive--have stumbled into fresh dangers. It

was as though she stood on the friable edge of some great crater, some

gulf of destruction, on which her feet were perpetually slipping and

sinking, and only Ellesborough's hold could ultimately save her.

And Janet's--Janet's first. Rachel's thought clung to her, as the

shipwrecked Southern sailor turns to his local saint to intercede for him

with the greater spiritual lights. Janet's counsel and help--she knew she

must ask for them--that it was the next step. Yet she had been weakly

putting it off day by day. And through this mist of doubt and dread,

there kept striking all the time, as though quite independent of it, the

natural thoughts of a woman in love.

During the farm breakfast, hurried through by candle-light, with rain

beating on the windows, Rachel was thinking--"Why didn't _he_ propose

it?"--this scheme of marrying before he went. Wasn't it a most natural

thing to occur to him? She tormented herself all the morning with the

problem of his silence.

Then--as though in rebuke of her folly--at midday came a messenger, a boy

on a bicycle, with a letter. She took it up to her own room, and read it

with fluttering breath--laughing, yet with tears in her eyes.

"My Darling--What an idiot I was last night! This morning I have woke up

to a brilliant idea--why I didn't propose it to you yesterday I can't

imagine! Let us marry before I go. Meet me in London, a week to-day, and

let us go into the country, or to the sea, for a blessed forty-eight

hours, afterwards. Then you will see me off--and I shall know, wherever I

go, that you are my very, very own, and I am yours. I don't want to hurry

you. Take time to think, and write to me to-night, or wire me to-morrow

morning. But the very idea that you may say 'Yes' makes me the happiest

of men. Take time to think--but--all the same--don't keep me too long

waiting!

"Your own,

"G.E."

All day she kept the letter hidden in the loose front of her dress. "I'll

wire to-morrow morning," she thought. But before that--something had got

to happen. 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. _Voilà_!"

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--"