Missing, Mrs. Humphry Ward [free e books to read online .TXT] 📗

this height above valley and stream, had raised and strengthened her, soul and body, as Farrell and Hester had hoped. Her soul, perhaps, rather than her body; for she was still the frailest of creatures, without visible ill, and yet awakening in every quick-eyed spectator the same misgiving as in the Manchester doctor. But she was calmer, less apparently absorbed in her own grief; though only, perhaps, the more accessible to the world misery of the war. In these restless nights, her remarkable visualising power, which had only thriven, it seemed, upon the flagging of youth and health, carried her through a series of waking dreams, almost always concerned with the war. Under the stimulus of Farrell's intelligence, she had become a close student of the war. She read much, and what she read, his living contact with men and affairs--with that endless stream of wounded in particular, which passed through the Carton hospital--and his graphic talk illumined for her. Then in the night arose the train of visions; the trenches--always the trenches; those hideous broken woods of the Somme front, where the blasted soil has sucked the best life-blood of England; those labyrinthine diggings and delvings in a tortured earth, made for the Huntings of Death--'Death that lays man at his length'--for panting pursuit, and breathless flight, and the last crashing horror of the bomb, in some hell-darkness at the end of all:--these haunted her. Or she saw visions of men swinging from peak to peak above fathomless depths of ice and snow on the Italian front; climbing precipices where the foot holds by miracle, and where not only men but guns must go; or vanishing, whole lines of them, awfully forgotten in the winter snows, to reappear a frozen and ghastly host, with the melting of the spring.

And always, mingled with everything, in the tense night hours--that slender khaki figure, tearing the leaf from his sketch-book, leaping over the parados,--falling--in the No Man's Land. But, by day, the obsession of it now often left her.

It was impossible not to enjoy her new home. Farrell had taken an old Westmorland farm, with its white-washed porch, its small-paned windows outlined in white on the grey walls, its low raftered rooms, and with a few washes of colour--pure blue, white, daffodil yellow--had made all bright within, to match the bright spaces of air and light without. There was some Westmorland oak, some low chairs, a sofa and a piano from the old Manchester house, some etchings and drawings, hung on the plain walls by Farrell himself, with the most fastidious care; and a few--a very few things--from his own best stores, which Hester allowed him to 'house' with Nelly from time to time--picture, or pot, or tapestry. She played watch-dog steadily, not resented by Farrell, and unsuspected by Nelly. Her one aim was that the stream of Nelly's frail life should not be muddied by any vile gossip; and she achieved it. The few neighbours who had made acquaintance with 'little Mrs. Sarratt' had, all of them been tacitly, nay eagerly willing, to take their cue from Hester. To be vouched for by Hester Martin, the 'wise woman' and saint of a country-side, was enough. It was understood that the poor little widow had been commended to the care of William Farrell and his sister, by the young husband whose gallant death was officially presumed by the War Office. Of course, Mrs. Sarratt, poor child, believed that he was still alive--that was so natural! But that hope would die down in time. And then--anything might happen!

Meanwhile, elderly husbands--the sole male inhabitants left in the gentry houses of the district--who possessed any legal knowledge, informed their wives that no one could legally presume the death of a vanished husband, under seven years, unless indeed they happen to have a Scotch domicile, in which case two years was enough. _Seven years_!--preposterous!--in time of war, said the wives. To which the husbands would easily reply that, in such cases as Mrs. Sarratt's, the law indeed might be 'an ass,' but there were ways round it. Mrs. Sarratt might re-marry, and no one could object, or would object. Only--if Sarratt did rise from the dead, the second marriage would be _ipso facto_ null and void. But as Sarratt was clearly dead, what did that matter?

So that the situation, though an observed one--for how could the Farrell comings and goings, the Farrell courtesies and benefactions, possibly be hid?--was watched only by friendly and discreet eyes, thanks always to Hester. Most people liked William Farrell; even that stricter sect, who before the war had regarded him as a pleasure loving dilettante, and had been often scandalised by his careless levity in the matter of his duties as a landlord and county magnate. 'Bill Farrell' had never indeed evicted or dealt hardly with any mortal tenant. He had merely neglected and ignored them; had cared not a brass farthing about the rates which he or they, paid--why should he indeed, when he was so abominably rich from other sources than land?--nothing about improving their cows, or sheep or pigs; nothing about 'intensive culture,' or jam or poultry, or any of the other fads with which the persons who don't farm plague the persons who do; while the very mention of a public meeting, or any sort of public duty, put him to instant flight. Yet even the faddists met him with pleasure, and parted from him with regret. He took himself 'so jolly lightly'; you couldn't expect him to take other people seriously. Meanwhile, his genial cheery manner made him a general favourite, and his splendid presence, combined with his possessions and his descent, was universally accepted as a kind of Cumberland asset, to which other counties could hardly lay claim. If he wanted the little widow, why certainly, let him have her! It was magnificent what he had done for his hospital; when nobody before the war had thought him capable of a stroke of practical work. Real good fellow, Farrell! Let him go in and win. His devotion, and poor Nelly's beauty, only infused a welcome local element of romance into the ever-darkening scene of war.

* * * * *

The first anniversary of Sarratt's disappearance was over. Nelly had gone through it quite alone. Bridget was in London, and Nelly had said to Cicely--'Don't come for a few days--nor Sir William--please! I shall be all right.'

They obeyed her, and she spent her few days partly on the fells, and partly in endless knitting and sewing for a war-workroom recently started in her immediate neighbourhood. The emotion to which she surrendered herself would soon reduce her to a dull vacancy; and then she would sit passive, not forcing herself to think, alone in the old raftered room, or in the bit of garden outside, with its phloxes and golden rods; her small fingers working endlessly--till the wave of feeling and memory returned upon her. Those few days were a kind of 'retreat,' during which she lived absorbed in the recollections of her short, married life, and, above all, in which she tried piteously and bravely to make clear to herself what she believed; what sort of faith was in her for the present and the future. It often seemed to her that during the year since George's death, her mind had been wrenched and hammered into another shape. It had grown so much older, she scarcely knew it herself. Doubts she had never known before had come to her; but also, intermittently, a much keener faith. Oh, yes, she believed in God. She must; not only because George had believed in Him, but also because she, her very self, had been conscious, again and again, in the night hours, or on the mountains, of ineffable upliftings and communings, of flashes through the veil of things. And so there must be another world; because the God she guessed at thus, with sudden adoring insight, could not have made her George, only to destroy him; only to give her to him for a month, and then strike him from her for ever. The books she learnt to know through Farrell, belonging to that central modern literature, which is so wholly sceptical that the 'great argument' itself has almost lost interest for those who are producing it, often bewildered her, but did not really affect her. Religion--a vague, but deeply-felt religion--soothed and sheltered her. But she did not want to talk about it.

After these days were over, she emerged conscious of some radical change. She seemed to have been walking with George 'on the other side,' and to have left him there--for a while. She now really believed him dead, and that she had got to live her life without him. This first full and sincere admission of her loss tranquillised her. All the more reason now that she should turn to the dear friendships that life still held, should live in and for them, and follow where they led, through the years before her. Farrell, Cicely, Hester--they stood between her weakness--oh how conscious, how scornfully conscious, she was of it!--and sheer desolation. Cicely, 'Willy,'--for somehow she and he had slipped almost without knowing it into Christian names--had become to her as brother and sister. And Hester too--so strong!--so kind!--was part of her life; severe sometimes, but bracing. Nelly was conscious, indeed, occasionally, that something in Hester disapproved something in her. 'But it would be all right,' she thought, wearily, 'if only I were stronger.' Did she mean physically or morally? The girl's thought did not distinguish.

'I believe you want me "hatched over again and hatched different"!' she said one evening to Hester, as she laid her volume of 'Adam Bede' aside.

'Do I ever say so?'

'No--but--if you were me--you wouldn't stop here moping!' said Nelly, with sudden passion. 'You'd strike out--do something!'

'With these hands?' said Hester, raising one of them, and looking at it pitifully. 'My dear--does Bridget feed you properly?'

'I don't know. I never think about it. She settles it.'

'Why do you let her settle it?'

'She will!' cried Nelly, sitting upright in her chair, her eyes bright and cheeks flushing, as though something in Hester's words accused her. 'I couldn't stop her!'

'Well, but when she's away?'

'Then Mrs. Rowe settles it,' said Nelly, half laughing. 'I never enquire. What does it matter?'

She put down her knitting, and her wide, sad eyes followed the clouds as they covered the purple breast of the Langdales, which rose in threatening, thunder light, beyond the steely tarn in front. Hester watched her anxiously. How lovely was the brown head, with its short curls enclosing the delicate oval of the face! But Nelly's lack of grip on life, of any personal demand, of any healthy natural egotism, whether towards Bridget, or anybody else, was very disquieting to Hester. In view of the situation which the older woman saw steadily approaching, how welcome would have been some signs of a greater fighting strength in the girl's nature!

* * * * *

But Nelly had made two friends since the migration to the farm with whom at any rate she laughed; and that, as Hester admitted, was something.

One was a neighbouring farmer, an old man, with splendid eyes, under dark bushy brows, fine ascetic features, grizzled hair, and a habit of carrying a scythe over his shoulder which gave him the look of 'Old