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

him.

"Tell me what to do, and I'll do it."

He loosened the boy's collar and very gently tried to ease his position.

"Mamma!" murmured the boy, with the accent of a miserable child in a bad dream. Ellesborough's face softened. He bent over him and said something in German. Rachel did not understand it--only the compassionate look in the man's blue eyes.

"Give him more brandy if you can, and try and keep him still," said Ellesborough as he rose to his feet. "I shall be back directly."

Her glance answered. By this time there was commotion below, the engine had stopped working and men were running up the hill. Ellesborough went bounding down the steep slope to meet them. They turned back with him, and Rachel supposed they had gone to fetch a stretcher, and if possible a doctor, from the small camp hospital which Mrs. Fergusson had pointed out to her near the gate. Meanwhile, for a few minutes, she was alone with this suffering lad. Was he fatally hurt--dying? She managed to get some brandy down, and then he lay groaning and unconscious, murmuring incoherent words. She caught "Mamma" again, then "Lisa," "Hans," and broken phrases that meant nothing to her. Was his mind back in some German home, which, perhaps, he would never see again?

All sorts of thoughts passed through her: vague memories gathered from the newspapers, of what the Germans had done in Belgium and France--horrible, indescribable things! Oh, not this boy, surely! He could not be more than nineteen. He must have been captured in the fighting of July, perhaps in his first action. Captain Ellesborough had said to her that there was no fighting spirit among any of the prisoners. They were thankful to find themselves out of it, "safely captured," as one of them had had the bravado to say, and with enough to eat. No doubt this boy had dreamt day and night of peace, and getting back to Germany, to "Mamma" and "Lisa" and "Hans." To die, if he was to die, by this clumsy accident, in an enemy country, was hard!

Pity, passionate pity sprang up in her, and it warmed her heart to remember the pity in the face of Captain Ellesborough. She would have hated him if he had shown any touch of a callous or cruel spirit towards this helpless creature. But there had been none.

In a few more minutes she was aware of Mrs. Fergusson and Janet climbing rapidly towards her. And behind them came stretcher-bearers, the captain, and possibly a doctor.

* * * * *

The accident broke up the working afternoon. The injured lad was carried to hospital, where the surgeon shook his head, and refused to prophesy till twenty-four hours were over.

Captain Ellesborough disappeared, while Rachel and Janet were given tea at the woman's hostel and shown the camp. Rachel took an absorbed interest in it all. This world of the new woman, with its widening horizons, its atmosphere of change and discovery, its independence of men, soothed some deep smart in her that Janet was only now beginning to realize. And yet, Janet remembered the vicar, and had watched the talk with Ellesborough. Clearly to be the professed enemy of man did not altogether disincline you for his company!

At any rate it seemed quite natural to Janet Leighton that, when it was time to go, and a charming girl in khaki with green facings caught the pony, and harnessed it for Mrs. Fergusson's parting guests, Ellesborough should turn up, as soon as the farewells were over; and that she should find herself driving the pony-carriage up the hill, while Ellesborough and Rachel walked behind, and at a lengthening distance. Once or twice she looked back, and saw that the captain was gathering some of the abounding wild flowers which had sprung up on the heels of the retreating forest, and that Rachel had fastened a bunch of them into her hat. She smiled to herself, and drove steadily on. Rachel was young and pretty. Marriage with some man--some day--was certainly her fate. The kind, unselfish Janet intended to "play up."

Then, with a jerk, she remembered there was a story. Nonsense! An unhappy love affair, no doubt, which had happened in her first youth, and in Canada. Well, such things, in the case of a girl with the temperament of Rachel, are only meant to be absorbed in another love affair. They are the leaf mould that feeds the final growth. Janet cheerfully said to herself that, probably, her partnership with Rachel would only be a short one.

The pair behind were, indeed, much occupied with each other. The tragic incident of the afternoon seemed to have carried them rapidly through the preliminary stages of acquaintance. At least, it led naturally to talk about things and feelings more real and intimate than generally haunt the first steps. And in this talk each found the other more and more congenial. Ellesborough was now half amused, half touched, by the mixture of childishness and maturity in Rachel. One moment her ignorance surprised him, and the next, some shrewd or cynical note in what she was saying scattered the _ingenue_ impression, and piqued his curiosity afresh. She was indeed crassly ignorant about many current affairs in which he himself was keenly interested, and of which he supposed all educated women must by now have learnt the ABC. She could not have given him the simplest historical outline of the great war; he saw that she was quite uncertain whether Lloyd George or Asquith were Prime Minister; and as to politics and public persons in Canada, where she had clearly lived some time, her mind seemed to be a complete blank. None the less she had read a good deal--novels and poetry at least--and she took a queerly pessimistic view of life. She liked her farm work; she said so frankly. But on a sympathetic reply from him to the effect that he knew several other women who had taken to it, and they all seemed to be "happy" in it, she made a scornful mouth.

"Oh, well--'happy'?--that's a different thing. But it does as well as anything else."

The last thing she wanted, apparently, was to talk about Canada. He, himself, as a temporary settler in the Great Dominion, cherished an enthusiasm for Canada and a belief in the Canadian future, not, perhaps, very general among Americans; but although her knowledge of the country gave them inevitably some common ground, she continually held back from it, she entered on it as little as she could. She had been in the Dominion, he presently calculated, about seven or eight years; but she avoided names and dates, how adroitly, he did not perceive till they had parted, and he was thinking over their walk. She must have gone out to Canada immediately after leaving school. He gathered that her father had been a clergyman, and was dead; that she knew the prairie life, but had never been in British Columbia, and only a few days in Montreal and Toronto. That was all that, at the end of their walk, he knew; and all apparently she meant him to know. Whereas she on her side showed a beguiling power of listening to all he had to say about the mysterious infinity of the Canadian forest-lands and the wild life that, winter or spring, a man may live among them, which flattered the very human conceit of a strong and sensitive nature.

But at last they had climbed the tree-strewn slope, and were on the open ridge with the northern plain in view. The sun was now triumphantly out, just before his setting; the clouds had been flung aside, and he shone full upon the harvest world--such a harvest world as England had not seen for a century. There they lay, the new and golden fields, where, to north and south, to east and west, the soil of England, so long unturned, had joyously answered once more to its old comrade the plough.

"'An enemy hath done this,'" quoted Ellesborough, with an approving smile, as he pointed towards the plain. "But there was a God behind him!"

Rachel laughed. "Well, I've got three fields still to get in," she said. "And they're the best. Goodnight."

She gave him her hand, standing transfigured in the light, the wind blowing her beautiful hair about her.

"May I come and see you?" he asked, rather formally.

She smiled assent.

"Next week _everything_ will be in, and some of it threshed. I shall be freer then. You'll like our place."

He pressed her hand, and she was off, running like a fawn after the retreating pony carriage.

He turned away, a little dazzled and shaken. The image of her on the ridge remained; but what perhaps had struck deepest had been the sweetness of her as she hung above the injured boy. He went slowly towards the camp, conscious that the day now departing had opened a new door in the House of Life.


IV

Ellesborough allowed a week to pass before making the call at Great End he had arranged with Rachel. But at last, when he thought that her harvesting would be really over, he set out on his motor bicycle, one fine evening, as soon as work at the camp was over. According to summer time it was about seven o'clock, and the sun was still sailing clear above the western woods.

Part of his way lay over a broad common chequered with fine trees and groups of trees, some of them of great age; for the rest he ran through a world where harvest in its latest stages was still the governing fact. In some fields the corn was being threshed on the spot, without waiting for the stacks; in others, the last loads were being led; and everywhere in the cleared fields there were scattered figures of gleaners, casting long shadows on the gold and purple carpet of the stubble. For Ellesborough the novelty of this garden England, so elaborately combed and finished in comparison with his own country, was by no means exhausted. There were times when the cottage gardens, the endless hedge-rows, and miniature plantations pleased him like the detail in those early Florentine pictures in the Metropolitan Museum, for which, business man as he was, and accustomed to the wilds, he had once or twice, on visits to New York, discovered in himself a considerable taste. He was a man, indeed, of many aptitudes, and of a loyal and affectionate temper. His father, a country doctor, now growing old, his mother, still pretty at sixty, and his two unmarried sisters were all very dear to him. He wrote to them constantly, and received many letters from them. They belonged to one of the old Unitarian stocks still common in New England; and such stocks are generally conspicuous for high standards and clean living. "Discipline" was among the chief marks of the older generation. A father or mother dreaded an "undisciplined" child, and the word was often on their lips, though in no Pharisaical way; while the fact was evident in their lives, and in those private diaries which they were apt to keep, wherein, up to old age, they jealously watched their own daily thoughts and actions from the same point of view.

And though the younger generation, like the younger generation of Quakers, shows change and some disintegration, the old Puritan traditions and standards are still, as we all know, of great effect among