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

firmly believe it is haunted? Old Wellin never could get anybody to sleep here. But tramps often used it, I'm certain. They got in through the windows. Hastings told me he had several times found a smouldering fire in the kitchen."

"What sort is the ghost?" Janet inquired, as she pointed him to a chair, devoutly hoping that Rachel would hurry herself.

"Well, there's a story--but I wonder whether I ought to tell you--"

"I assure you as to ghosts--I have no nerves!" said Janet with a confident laugh, "and I don't think Rachel has either. We are more frightened of rats. This farm-yard contains the biggest I've ever seen. I dream of them at night."

"It's not exactly the ghost--" said the vicar, hesitating.

"But the story that produced the ghost? What--a murder?"

"Half a century ago," said the vicar reassuringly; "you won't mind that?"

"Not the least. A century ago would be romantic. If it was just the other day, we should feel we ought to have got the farm cheaper. But half a century doesn't matter. It's a mid-Victorian, just a plain, old-fashioned murder. Who did it?"

The vicar opened his eyes a little. Miss Leighton was, he saw, a lady, and perhaps clever. Her spectacles looked like it. No doubt she had been at Oxford or Cambridge before going to Swanley? These educated women in new professions were becoming a very pressing and common fact! As to the murder, he explained that it had been just an ordinary poaching affair. An old gamekeeper on the Shepherd estate had been attacked by a gang of poachers in the winter of 1866. He had been shot in one of the woods, and though mortally wounded had been able to drag himself to the outskirts of the farm where his strength had failed him. He was found dead under the cart-shed which backed on the stables, and the traces of blood on the hill marked the stages of his struggle for life. Two men were suspected, one of them a labourer on the Great End Farm; but there was no evidence. The suspected labourer had gone to Canada the year after the murder, and no one knew what had happened to him.

But having told the tale the vicar was again seized with compunction.

"I oughtn't to have told you--I really oughtn't; just on your settling in--I hope you won't tell Miss Henderson?"

Janet's amused reply was interrupted by Rachel's entrance. The vicar arose with eagerness to receive her. He was evidently attracted by his new parishioners and anxious to make a good impression on them. Miss Henderson's reception of the vicar, however, was far more guarded. The easy friendliness of manner which had attracted the bailiff Hastings was, at first at any rate, entirely absent. Her attitude was almost that of a woman defending herself against possible intrusion, and Janet Leighton, looking on, and occasionally sharing in the conversation, was surprised by it, as indeed she was by so many things concerning Rachel now that their acquaintance was deepening; surprised also, as though it were a new thing, by her friend's good looks as she sat languidly chatting with the vicar. Rachel had merely put on a blue overall above her land-worker's dress. But her beautiful head, with its wealth of brown hair, and her face, with its sensuous fulness of cheek and lip, its rounded lines, and lovely colour--like a slightly overblown rose--were greatly set off by the simple folds of blue linen; and her feet and legs, shapely but not small, in their khaki stockings and shoes, completed the general effect of lissom youth. The flush and heat of hard bodily work had passed away. She had had time to plunge her face into cold water and smooth her hair. But the atmosphere of the harvest field, its ripeness and glow, seemed to be still about her. A classically minded man might have thought of some nymph in the train of Demeter, might have fancied a horn of plenty, or a bow, slung from the sunburnt neck.

But the vicar had forgotten his classics. _En revanche_, however, he was doing his best to show himself sympathetic and up-to-date with regard to women and their new spheres of work--especially on the land. He had noticed three girls, he said, working in the harvest field. Two of them he recognized as from the village; the third he supposed was a stranger?

"She comes from Ralstone," said Rachel.

"Ah, that's the village where the new timber camp is. You really must see that camp, Miss Henderson."

"I hate to think of the woods coming down," she said, frowning a little.

"We all do. But that's the war. It can't be helped, alack! But it's wonderful to see the women at work, measuring and checking, doing the brain work, in fact, while the men do the felling and loading. It makes one envious."

The vicar sighed. A flush appeared on his young but slightly cadaverous face.

"Of the men--or the women?"

"Oh, their work, I mean. They're doing something for the war. I've done my best. But the Bishop won't hear of it."

And he rather emphatically explained how he had applied in vain for an army chaplaincy. Health and the shortage of clergy had been against him. "I suppose there must be some left at home," he said with a shrug, "and the doctors seem to have a down on me."

Janet was quite sorry for the young man--he was so eagerly apologetic, so anxious to propitiate what he imagined ought to be their feelings about him. And Rachel all the time sat so silent and unresponsive.

Miss Leighton drew the conversation back to the timber camp; she would like to go and see it, she said. Every one knew the Canadians were wonderful lumbermen.

The Vicar's eyes had travelled back to Rachel.

"Were you ever in Canada, Miss Henderson?" The question was evidently thrown out nervously at a venture, just to evoke a word or a smile from the new mistress of the farm.

Rachel Henderson frowned slightly before replying.

"Yes, I have been in Canada."

"You have? Oh, then, you know all about it."

"I know nothing about Canadian lumbering."

"You were on the prairies?"

"I lived some time on a prairie farm."

"Everything here must seem very small to you," said the vicar sympathetically. But this amiable tone fell flat. Miss Henderson still sat silent. The vicar began to feel matters awkward and took his hat from the floor.

"I trust you will call upon me for any help I can possibly be to you," he said, turning to Janet Leighton. "I should be delighted to help in the harvest if you want it. I have a pair of hands anyway, as you see!" He held them out.

He expatiated a little more on his disappointment as to the front. Janet threw in a few civil words. Rachel Henderson had moved to the window, and was apparently looking at the farm-girls carrying straw across the yard.

"Good-night, Miss Henderson," said the young man at last, conscious of rebuff, but irrepressibly effusive and friendly all the time. "I hope you will let your Ralstone girl come sometimes to the clubroom my sister and I have in the village? We feel young people ought to be amused, especially when they work hard."

"Thank you, but it's so far away. We don't like them to be out late."

"Certainly not. But in the long evenings--don't you know?" The vicar smiled persuasively. "However, there it is--whenever she comes she will be welcome. And then, as to your seat in church. There is a pew that has always belonged to the farm. It is about half-way up."

"We don't go to church," said Rachel, facing him. "At least, I don't." She looked at her companion.

"And I can't be counted on," said Janet, smiling.

The vicar flushed a little.

"Then you're not Church of England?"

"I am," said Rachel indifferently; "at least I'm not anything else. Miss Leighton is a Unitarian." Then her eyes lit up with a touch of fun, and for the first time she smiled. "I'm afraid you'll think us dreadful heathens, Mr. Shenstone!"

What the vicar did think was that he had never seen a smile transform a face so agreeably. And having begun to smile, Rachel perversely continued it. She walked to the gate with her visitor, talking with irrelevant animation, inviting him to come the following day to help in the "carrying," asking questions about the village and its people, and graciously consenting to fix a day when she and her friend would go to tea with Miss Shenstone at the vicarage. The young man fairly beamed under the unexpected change, and lingered at the gate as though unable to tear himself away; till with a little peremptory nod, though still smiling, Rachel dismissed him.

Janet Leighton meanwhile watched it all. She had seen Rachel treat a new male acquaintance before as she had just treated the vicar. To begin with, the manners of an icicle; then a sudden thaw, just in time to save the situation. She had come with amusement to the conclusion that, however really indifferent or capricious, her new friend could not in the long run resign herself to be disliked, even by a woman, and much more in the case of a man. Was it vanity, or sex, or both? Temperament perhaps; the modern word which covers so much. Janet remembered a little niece of her own who in her mother's absence entertained a gentleman visitor with great success. When asked for his name, she shook her pretty head. "Just a man, mummy," she said, bridling. Janet Leighton suspected that similar tales might have been told of Miss Henderson in her babyhood.

And yet impressions recurred to her of another kind--of a sensitive, almost fierce delicacy--a shrinking from the ugly or merely physical facts of life, as of one who had suffered some torment in connection with them.

Janet's eyes followed the curly brown head as its possessor came slowly back from the gate. She was thinking of a moment when, one evening, while they were both still at college, they had realized their liking for each other, and had agreed to set up in partnership. Then Rachel, springing to her feet, with her hands behind her, and head thrown back, had said suddenly: "I warn you, I have a story. I don't want to tell you, to tell anybody. I shan't tell you. It's done with. I give you my word that I'm not a bad woman. But if you don't want to be my partner on these terms, say so!"

And Janet had felt no difficulty whatever in becoming Rachel Henderson's partner on these terms. Nor had she ever yet regretted it.

The light farm cart which had been sent to the station for stores drove up to the yard gate as Rachel left it. She turned back to receive some parcels handed out by the "exempted" man who drove it, together with some letters which had been found lying at the village post office. Two of the letters were for Janet. She sent them up to the house, and went herself towards the harvest field.

There they stood--the rows of golden "shocks" or stooks. The "shockers" had just finished their day's work. She could hear the footsteps of the last batch, a cheerful chatter, while talk and laughter came softened through the evening air. The man who had been driving the reaping machine was doing some rough repairs to it in a far corner of the field, with a