Harvest Part 20

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 p.r.i.c.ked 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. d.i.c.k 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 pa.s.sers-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 pa.s.s!" 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 unm.u.f.fling 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 G.o.d 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 s.p.a.ces 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.toned 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 Ips...o...b...

"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 a.s.sumed indifference, Delane began to ask questions.

He discovered that his companion's name was Dempsey; and before many minutes had pa.s.sed 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 Ips...o...b.. 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 Ips...o...b.. 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?"