Harvest, Mrs. Humphry Ward [best pdf reader for ebooks txt] 📗

and he began to talk of you. Then this came out. But of course I always knew that it--or something like it--would come out. Your puritanical airs never deceived me--for a moment."

"I suppose you are talking of John Dempsey?" The scorn in her voice enraged him.

"I know nothing about John Dempsey. Of course I can track the man who told me, if I want to--with the greatest ease. He was coming here to call. He saw either you or your partner. And I shall track him--if you force me."

She was silent--and he smiled.

"Assume, please, that I have my witness at hand. Well, then, he saw you alone--at night--in Dick Tanner's charge, a few days apparently, after you and I quarrelled. What were you doing there?"

"It was during that great snowstorm, I suppose," she said, in her most ordinary voice, taking up her knitting. "I remember going over to the Tanners' to ask for something--and being snow-bound. Lucy Tanner was always ready to help me--and be sorry for me."

At this he laughed out, and the note of the laugh dismayed her.

"Lucy Tanner? Yes, that's good. I thought you'd play her! Now, I'll tell you something. The day after I left you, I was on the train going to Regina. We stopped a long time. I don't remember why--at Medicine Hat--and walking up and down the platform was--_Lucy Tanner_! Does that surprise you? She told me she couldn't stand the Manitoba climate, and was going to a friend at Kamloops for the winter. Is that news to you?"

Rachel had turned white, but he saw no other sign of discomposure.

"Not at all. Naturally, I went over expecting to find her. But as you say, she was gone, and Mr. Tanner drove me back, when the storm went down."

Then she threw down her knitting and faced him.

"What's the use of talking like this, Roger? You won't make anything out of this story you're so proud of. Hadn't you better come to business? Why have you been spying on me, and dogging me like this? You know, of course, I could give you in charge to-morrow, or I could get Captain Ellesborough to do it. And I will--unless you give me your solemn promise to leave this place, to go out of my life altogether, and stop molesting me in this scandalous way. Now, of course, I understand who it is that has been prowling about the farm all these weeks. And I warn you the police too know all about it, and are on the watch. They may have tracked you here to-night for all I know."

"Not they! I passed one bobby fellow on the hill, going safely away north, as I came down. I was scarcely three yards from him, and he never twigged. And the other's gone to Millsborough. You could hardly be more alone, more entirely at my mercy--than you are at this moment, Miss Henderson!" He laid an ironic emphasis on the name.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"All the same the people who live with me in this house will soon be back. I recommend you to make haste. I ask you again--what is it you want?"

She had stood up pluckily--he admitted it. But, as he observed her closely it seemed to him that the strain on her nerves was telling. She was beginning to look pinched, and her hand as it lay beside her knitting shook.

"Well, I'll tell you," he said coolly. He took a half sheet of note-paper out of the breast-pocket of his coat, drew the lamp on the table towards him, and looked at certain figures and notes written on the paper.

"I went this morning in town to look up your uncle's will. Of course I remember all about that old chap at Manchester. I often speculated on what he was going to leave you. Unfortunately for me he lived just a little too long. But I find from the copy of the will that he left you--three--thousand--pounds. Not bad, considering that you were never at all civil to him. But three thousand pounds is more than you require to run this small farm on. You owe me damages for the injury you inflicted on me by the loss of--first, your society; second, your financial prospects. I assess it at five hundred pounds. Pay me that small sum, and--well, I engage to leave you henceforth to the Captain,--and your conscience."

He bent forward across the table, his mocking eyes fixed intently upon her. There was silence a moment--till she said:--

"And if I refuse?"

"Oh, well, then--" he lifted a paper-knife and balanced it on his hand as though considering--"I shall of course have to work up my case. What do you call this man?--John Dempsey? A great fool--but I dare say I shall get enough out of him. And then--well, then I propose to present the story to Captain Ellesborough--for his future protection."

"He won't believe a word of it."

But her lips had blanched--her voice had begun to waver--and with a cruel triumph he saw that he had won the day.

"I dare say not. That's for him to consider. But if I were you, I wouldn't put him to the test."

Silence again. He saw the fluttering of her breath. With a complete change of tone, he said, smiling, in a low voice:--

"Rachel!--when did you begin to prefer Dick Tanner to me? No doubt you had a jolly time with him. I suppose I can't undo the divorce--but you would never have got it, if I hadn't been such an innocent."

She sprang up, and he saw that he had gone too far.

"If you say any more such things to me, you will get nothing from me--and you may either _go_--" she pointed passionately to the door--"or you may sit there till my people come back--which you like."

He looked at her, under his eyebrows, smiling mechanically--weighing the relative advantages of prudence or violence. Prudence carried the day.

"You are just the same spitfire, I see, as you used to be! All right. I see you understand. Well, now, how am I to get my money--my damages?" She turned away, and went quickly to an old bureau that had been her uncle's. He watched her, exultant. It was all true, then. Dick Tanner had been her lover, and Ellesborough knew nothing. He did not know whether to be the more triumphant in her tacit avowal, or the more enraged by the testimony borne by her acquiescence to her love for Ellesborough. He hated her; yet he had never admired her so much, as his eyes followed her stooping over the drawers of the bureau, her beautiful head and neck in a warm glow of firelight.

Then, suddenly, he began to cough. She, hunting for her cheque-book, took no notice at first. But the paroxysm grew; it shook the very life out of him; till at last she stood arrested and staring-while he fell back in his chair like a dead man, his eyes shut, his handkerchief to his lips.

"Shall I--shall I get you some brandy?" she said, coldly. He nodded assent. She hurriedly looked for her keys, and went to a cupboard in the kitchen, where Janet kept a half bottle of brandy for medical use if needed.

He drank off what she brought--but it was some time before he recovered speech. When he did it was in a low tone that made the words a curse:---

"That's your doing!"

Her only answer was a gesture.

"It is," he insisted, speaking in gasps. "You never showed me any real love--any forbearance. You never cared for me--as you know I cared for you. You told me so once. You married me for a home--and then you deserted--and betrayed me."

There was a guilty answer in her consciousness which made her speak without anger.

"I know my own faults very well. And now you must go--we can't either of us stand this any more. Do you give me your solemn promise that you will trouble me no more---or the man I am going to marry--if I do this for you?"

"Give me a piece of paper--" he said, huskily.

He wrote the promise, signed it, and pushed it to her. Then he carefully examined the self cheque "to bearer" which she had written.

"Well, I dare say that will see me out--and bury me decently. I shall take my family down to the sea. You know I've got a little girl--about three? Oh, I never told any lies about Anita. I've married her now."

Rachel stood like a stone, without a word. Her one consuming anxiety was to see him gone, to be done with him.

He rose slowly--with difficulty. And the cough seized him again. Rachel in a fevered exasperation watched him clinging to the table for support. Would he die--or faint--then and there--and be found by Janet, who must now be on her way home? She pressed brandy on him again. But he pushed it away. "Let me be!" She could only wait.

When he could speak and move again, he put the cheque away in his pocket, and buttoned his coat over it.

"Well, good-night." Then straightening himself, he fixed her with a pair of burning eyes. "Good-night. Anita will be kind to me--when I die--Anita will be a woman to me. You were never kind--you never thought of any one but yourself. Good-bye. Good luck!"

And walking uncertainly to the door, he opened it and was gone. She heard his slow steps in the farmyard, and the opening of the wicket gate. Then all sounds died away.

For a few minutes she crouched sobbing over the fire, weeping for sheer nervous exhaustion. Then the dread seized her of being caught in such a state by Janet, and she went upstairs, locked her door, and threw herself on her bed. The bruise of an intolerable humiliation seemed to spread through soul and body. She knew that for the first time she had confessed her wretched secret which she had thought so wholly her own--and confessed it--horrible and degrading thought!--to Roger Delane. Not in words indeed--but in act. No innocent woman would have paid the blackmail. The dark room in which she lay seemed to be haunted by Delane's exultant eyes.

And the silence was haunted too by his last words. There arose in her a reluctant and torturing pity for the wretched man who had been her husband; a pity, which passed on into a storm of moral anguish. Her whole past life looked incredibly black to her as she lay there in the dark--stained with unkindness, and selfishness, and sin.

Which saw her the more truly?--Roger, or Ellesborough?--the man who hated and cursed her, or the man who adored her?

She was struggling, manoeuvring, fighting, to keep the truth from George Ellesborough. It was quite uncertain whether she would succeed. Roger's word was a poor safeguard! But if she did, the truth itself would only the more certainly pursue and beat her down.

And again, the utter yearning for confession and an unburdened soul came upon her intolerably. The religious psychologist describes such a crisis as "conversion," or "conviction of sin," or the "working of grace." And he knows from long experience that it is the result in the human soul not so much of a sense of evil, as of a vision of good. Goodness had been brought near to Rachel in the personality--the tender self-forgetting trust--of George Ellesborough. It was goodness, not fear--goodness, unconscious of any threatened wrong--that had pierced her