Harvest by Mrs. Humphry Ward (most read books in the world of all time txt) 📕

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