.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 41895
   :PG.Title: The Green Bough
   :PG.Released: 2013-01-21
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: \E. Temple Thurston
   :DC.Title: The Green Bough
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1921
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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THE GREEN BOUGH
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      Cover

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      THE GREEN BOUGH

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      BY
      E. TEMPLE THURSTON

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      AUTHOR OF "THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE,"
      "THE WORLD OF WONDERFUL REALITY," ETC.

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      D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
      NEW YORK
      MCMXXI  

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      COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
      D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

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      PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA   

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      TO
      E. F. COWLIN

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.. _`PHASE I`:

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   PHASE I

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   I

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The life of Mary Throgmorton, viewed as one
would scan the chronicles of history, impersonally,
without regard to the conventions, is
the life of a woman no more than fulfilled in the
elements of her being.

All women would be as Mary Throgmorton if they
dared.  All women would love as Mary Throgmorton
loved--suffer as she suffered.  Perhaps not all might
yield, as she yielded towards the end; not all might
make her sacrifices.  But, in the latitudinous
perspective of Time where everything vanishes to the point
of due proportion, she must range with that vast army
of women who have hungered, loved, been fed and
paid the reckoning with the tears out of their eyes
and the very blood out of their hearts.

It is only when she comes to be observed in the
immediate and narrow surroundings of her circumstance
that her life stands out tragically apart.  She
becomes then as a monument, set up on a high and
lonely hill amongst the many of those hills in drowsy
Devon, a monument, silently claiming the birthright
of all women which the laws men make by force have
so ungenerously circumscribed.

There is no woman who could look at that
monument without secret emotions of a deep respect, while
there were many in her lifetime who spurned Mary
Throgmorton with tongue and with a glance of eye,
and still would spurn her to-day in the narrow streets
where it is their wont to walk.

The respect of one's neighbors is a comforting thing
to live with, but it is mostly the little people who earn
it and find the pleasure of its warmth.  The respect of
the world is won often by suffering and in the wild
and open spaces of the earth.  It was on Gethsemane
and not in Bethlehem that Christianity revealed its
light.

In Bridnorth, the name of Mary Throgmorton was
a byword for many a day.  They would have erased
her from their memory if they could.  It was in the
hush of voices they spoke of her--that hush with
which women muffle and conceal the envy beneath their
spite.

No one woman in Bridnorth, unless it was Fanny
Throgmorton, the third of her three sisters, could have
had honesty enough in her heart to confess, even in
silence, her real regard for Mary.

Who should blame them for this?  The laws had
made them and what is made in a shapen mold can
bend neither to the left nor to the right.  They were
too close to her to see her beauty; all too personally
involved to look dispassionately at the greatness of her
soul.

Yet there in spirit, as it were some graven monument
upon those hills of Devon, she stands, a figure of
tragic nobility.  Had indeed they carved her in stone
and set her there upon the hills that overlooked the
sea, they would have recognized then in her broad
brow, in the straight direction of her eyes, the big, if
not beautiful then generous line of her lips, the full
firm curve of her breasts, how fine a mate she must
have made, how strong a mother even in the weakest
hour of her travail.

Stone truly would have been the medium for her.
It was not in color that she claimed the eye.  The fair
hair, neither quite golden nor quite brown, that clear,
healthy skin, neither warmed with her blood nor
interestingly pale, these would have franked her passage
in a crowd and none might have noticed her go by.

There on the rising of that cliff in imagination is the
place to see her with the full sweep of Bridnorth bay
and that wide open sea below and all the heathered
stretches of the moors behind her.  There, had they
carved a statue for her in rough stone, you must have
seen at once the beauty that she had.

But because it was in stone her beauty lay and not
in pink white flesh that makes a fool of many a man,
they had the less of mercy for her.  Because it was in
stone, man found her cold of touch and stood away.
And yet again because it was in stone, once molten
with the heat of life, there was no hand in little
Bridnorth that could have stayed her fate.

Once stirred, the little pettiness of Bridnorth folk
charred all like shavings from the plane at touch of
her.  Once stirred, she had in her passion to defy
them every one.  Once stirred, herself could raise that
monument to the birthright of women which, in fancy,
as her tale is read, will be seen there over Bridnorth
on the high cliff's edge.





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   II

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Hannah, Jane, Fanny and Mary, these
were the four sisters of the Throgmorton
family in the order of their respective ages.
A brother they had, but he comes into no part of this
history.  The world had taken him when he was
twenty-three.  He left Bridnorth, the mere speck upon
the map it was and, with the wide affairs of life at his
touch, the mere speck it became in his memory.
Stray letters reached Mary, his favorite sister.  Read
aloud at the breakfast table, they came, bringing
strange odors of the world to those four girls.  Vague
emotions they experienced as they heard these
infrequent accounts of where he was and what he did.

Silently Fanny's imagination would carry her to the
far places he wrote of.  Into the big eyes she had
would rise a haze of distance across which an
untrained vision had power vaguely to transport her.
Hannah listened in a childish wonder.  Jane made her
sharp comments.  It was Mary who said--

"Why do men have the real best of it?  He'll never
come back to Bridnorth again."

He never did come back.  From the time their
father and mother died they lived in Bridnorth alone.

Theirs was the square, white early Victorian house
in the middle of the village through which the coach
road runs from Abbotscombe to King's Tracey.

That early Victorian house, the furniture it
contained, the narrow strip of garden in front protected
from the road by low iron palings so that all who
passed could see in the front windows, the unusually
large garden at the back surrounded by a high brick
wall, all these composed the immediate atmosphere in
which Mary and her three sisters had been brought up
from childhood.

It must be supposed that that condition of being
overlooked through the front windows was not without
its effect upon their lives.  If it takes all sorts to
make a world, it is all the variety of conditions that go
to make such sorts as there are.  For it was not only
the passers-by who looked in at the Throgmorton
windows and could have told to a fraction of time when
they had their meals, when Hannah was giving lessons
to the children she taught, those hours that Fanny was
sitting alone in her bedroom writing her verses of
poetry.  Also it was the Throgmorton girls
themselves who preferred the occupation of the rooms
fronting the road to those whose windows overlooked
the shady and secluded garden at the back.

This was the attraction of the stream for those who
walk in quiet meadows.  There on the banks you will
find the footpath of the many who have passed that
way.  They sat at those front windows, sewing,
reading, often writing their letters on blotting pads upon
their laps, scarcely conscious that the little filtering
stream of life in Bridnorth drew them there.  For
had they been questioned on these matters, one and all,
severally or together they would have laughed, saying
that for the greater half of the year there was no life
in Bridnorth to pass by, and certainly none that
concerned them.

Nevertheless it was the stream, however lightly they
may have turned the suggestion away.  The passing
of the postman, of the Vicar or the Vicar's wife, these
were the movements of life, such as you see in a
meadow stream and follow, dreaming in your mind, as
they catch in the eddies and are whirled and twisted
out of sight.  So they had dreamt in their minds, in
Bridnorth, these Throgmorton girls.  So Mary had
dreamed the twenty years and more that dreams had
come to her.

For the greater half of the year, they might have
said there was no life in Bridnorth.  But from late
Spring through Summer to the Autumn months they
must have claimed with pride that their Devon village
had a life of its own.  The old coach with its four
horses, beating out the journey from Abbotscombe to
King's Tracey, brought visitors from all parts;
generally the same every year.  For a few months they
leased whatever furnished houses there were to be had,
coming regularly every season for the joy of that quiet
place by the sea where there was a sandy beach to
bathe on, and lonely cliffs on which to wander their
holidays away.

So the Throgmorton girls made friends with some
whose lives lay far outside the meadows through which
the Bridnorth stream flowed peacefully between its
banks.  To these friends sometimes they paid visits
when the Summer was passed.  They went out of Bridnorth
themselves by the old coach, later returning, like
pigeons homing, with the wind of the outside world
still in their wing feathers, restless for days until the
dreams came back again.  Then once more it seemed
a part of life to sit at the window sewing and watch
the postman go by.

There were regular visitors who came every
summer, renewing their claim from year to year upon the
few houses that were to be let, so that there was little
available accommodation of that nature for any
outsiders.  They called Bridnorth theirs, and kept it to
themselves.  But every year, they had their different
friends to stay with them and always there was the
White Hart, where strangers could secure rooms by
the day or the week all through the season.

The Bridnorth stream was in flood those days of
the late Spring where every afternoon the coach came
rumbling up the hill past the Throgmortons' house to
set down its passengers at the hotel only a little farther
up the road.

Like the Severn bore it was, for coming from
Abbotscombe down the winding road that had risen with
the eminence of the cliffs, the coach could be seen
descending by twists and turns and serpentine progressions
to the bottom of Bridnorth village, crossing the
bridge that spans the little river Watchett and climbing
again with the contour of the cliffs once more on its
way to King's Tracey.

Leaning far out of one of the upper windows of the
square, white house or standing even at the gate in the
iron paling, the little cloud of dust or, in rainy weather,
the black speck moving slowly like a fly crawling down
a suspended thread of cotton, could easily be seen two
miles away heralding the coming of the coach.

She who leant out of the window might certainly
retire, closing it slowly as the coach drew near.  She
who stood at the gate in the iron palings might return
casually into the house.  But once they were out of
sight of those on the other bank of the Bridnorth
stream, there would be voices crying through the rooms
that the coach was coming.

Thus, as it passed, there might four figures be seen
at different windows, who, however engrossing their
occupations, would look out with confessions of mild
interest at the sound of the horses' hoofs on the stony
road, at the rattle of harness, the rumbling of wheels
and, casually, at the passengers come to Bridnorth.

Any visitor catching sight of these temperate
glances from his box seat on the coach might have
supposed the eyes that offered them were so well-used to
that daily arrival as to find but little entertainment in
the event.  From their apparent indifference, he would
never have believed that even their hearts had added a
pulse in the beating, or that to one at least that coach
was the vehicle of Fate which any day might bring the
burden of her destiny.





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   III

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It is by the ages of these four they can most easily
and comprehensively be classified; yet the age of
one at least of them was never known, or ever
asked in Bridnorth.

Hannah might have been forty or more.  She might
well have been less.  But the hair was gray on her head
and she took no pains to conceal it.  Hers, if any, was
the contented soul in that household.  With her it was
not so much that she had given up the hope that every
woman has, as that before she knew what life might be,
that hope had passed her by.  She was as one who
stands in a crowd to see the runners pass and, before
even she has raised herself on tiptoe to catch a glimpse
above the heads around her, is told that the race is over.

This was Hannah, busying her life with the household
needs and, for interest, before all reward, teaching
the little children of friends in Bridnorth and the
neighborhood, teaching them their lessons every morning;
every morning kissing them when they came, every
morning kissing them when they left.

To her, the arrival of the coach was significant no
more than in the unaccustomed passage and hurry of
life it brought.  To her it was a noise in a silent street.
She came to the windows as a child would come to see a
circus go by.  She watched its passengers descend
outside the Royal George with the same light of childish
interest in her eyes.  Nothing of what those passengers
were or what they meant reached the communicating
functions of her mind.  They were no more than mere
performers in the circus ring.  What their lives were
behind that flapping canvas of the tent, which is the veil
concealing the lives of all of us, she did not trouble to
ask herself.  Like the circus performers, they would be
here to-day and to-morrow their goods and chattels
would be packed, the naphtha flares beneath whose light
they had for a moment appeared would be extinguished.
Only the bare ring over which their horses
had pranced would remain in Hannah's mind to show
where they had been.  And in Hannah's mind the grass
would soon grow again to blot it out of sight.

To Hannah Throgmorton, these advents and excursions
were no more than this.





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   IV

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Somehow they knew in Bridnorth that Jane
was thirty-six.  She hid her gray beneath the
careful combing of her back hair.

There is a different attitude of mind in the woman
who hides these things successfully and her who still
hides but knows that she fails.  Sharp antagonism and
resentment, this is the mind of the latter.  Not only
does she know that she fails.  She knows how others
realize that she has tried.  Yet something still urges in
her purpose.

Jane knew she failed.  That was bitter enough.
But the greater bitterness lay in the knowledge that had
she succeeded it would have been of no avail.  For
some years, unlike her sister Hannah, she had relinquished
hope, flung it aside in all consciousness of loss;
flung it aside and often looked her God in the face with
the accusing glances of unconcealed reproach.

To Jane that coming of the coach was the reminding
spur that pricked her memories to resentment.  No
Destiny for her was to be found in the freight it
carried.  For each passenger as they descended outside the
Royal George, she had her caustic comment.  Hers
was the common but forgivably ungenerous spirit, of
the critic in whose breast the milk of human kindness
has grown sour from standing overlong in the idleness
of impotent ability.

Yet reminding spur that it was, and deeply as it hurt
her, her eyes were as swift and sharp as any to take
note of the new arrivals.  Perhaps it was the very pain
that she cherished.  Life is a texture of sensations, and
if only the thread of pain be left to keep the whole
together, there are many who welcome it rather than feel
the bare boards beneath their feet.

Whenever a man, strange to them amongst the regular
visitors to Bridnorth, slipped off the coach at the
Royal George, she knew his arrival meant nothing in
Destiny to her.  Yet often she would be the first to
pick him out.

"He's new.  Wonder if he's come with the Tollursts."

And having taken him in with a swiftness of
apprehension, her glances would shoot from Fanny to Mary
and back again as though she could steal the secrets of
Fate out of their eyes.

It was Fanny she read most easily of all; Fanny who
in such moments revealed to the shrewdness of her gaze
that faint acceleration of pulse, to the realization of
which nothing but the bitterness in her heart could have
sharpened her.  It was upon Fanny then in these
moments her observation concentrated.  Mary eluded her.
Indeed Mary, it seemed, was the calmest and serenest
of them all.  Sometimes if she were engrossed in
reading she did not even come to the window, but
was content from her chair to hear what they had to report.

And when there were no visitors descending from the
coach, in language their brother had long brought home
from school and left behind him in phrases when he
went, it was Jane, with a laugh, who turned upon those
other three and said--

"What a suck for everybody!"





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   V

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Then there was Fanny, whose age in
Bridnorth was variously guessed to be between
thirty and thirty-three.  No one knew.  Her
sisters never revealed it.  Jane had her loyalties and
this was one.

Only Fanny herself, in those quiet moments when a
woman is alone before the judgment of her own
mirror, knew that the gray hairs had begun to make their
appearance amidst the black.  They were not even for
concealment yet.  It was as though they tried to hide
themselves from the swift searching of her eyes.  But
she had found them out.  Each one as pensively she
rolled it round her fingers, hiding it away or burning
it in the fire, was a thorn that pricked and drew blood.

Hope had not yet been laid aside by her.  In that
vivid if untrained imagination of hers, Romance still
offered her promise of the untold joys and ecstasies of
a woman's heart.  She had not laid Hope aside, but
frettingly and constantly Hope was with her.  She
was conscious of it, as of a hidden pain that warns of
some disease only the knife can cure.

Always she was clutching it and only the writing of
her ill-measured verses of poetry could anesthetize her
knowledge of its presence.  Then, when she was
beating out her fancies in those uncomely words of almost
childish verse, the pain of the hope she had would lie
still, soothed to sleepfulness by the soporific of her
wandering imagination.

What, can it be supposed, was the coming of the
coach to her?

The vehicle of Fate it has been said it was, bringing
a Destiny which for thirty years and more had lingered
on its journey, for never had it been set down at the
Royal George.

Already she knew that she was tired of waiting for
it.  Often that tiredness overcame her.  Through the
long winter months when the Bridnorth stream was
languid and shallow in its flow, she became listless
when she was not irritable, and the look of those
thirty-three years was added in their fullness in her
eyes.

A visit into the world amongst those friends they
had, transitory though those visits may have been,
revived courage in her.  And all through the Spring and
Summer season, she fought that fatigue as a woman
must and will so long as the hope of Romance has even
one red spark of fire in her heart.

It was not a man so much she wanted, as Romance.
She alone could have told what was meant by that.
The one man she had known had almost made her hate
his sex.  It was not so much to her a stranger who
stepped down outside the Royal George and trod her
pulse to acceleration, as the urgent wonder of what
might happen in the weeks to come; of what might
happen to her in the very core of her being.  He was
no more than a medium, an instrument to bring about
those happenings.  She knew in herself what ecstasy
she could suffer, how her heart could throb behind her
wasted breast, how every vein threading her body
would become the channel for a warmer race of blood.

It was not so much that she wanted a man to love as
to feel love itself with all its accompanying sensations
of fear and wonder, yet knowing all the time that
before these emotions could happen to her, she must
attract and be found acceptable, must in another waken
some strange need to be the kindling spark in her.

Only once had it seemed she had succeeded.  There
had come a visitor to the Royal George with whom in
the ordinary course of the summer life of Bridnorth,
acquaintance had soon been made.  None of them
were slow to realize the interest he had taken in Fanny.
Before he left they twice had walked over the moors
to where on the highest and loneliest point of the cliffs
you can see the whole sweep of Bridnorth bay and in
clear weather the first jutting headland on the Cornish
coast.

Many a love match in Bridnorth had been made
about those heathered moors.  It was no love match
he made with Fanny.  What happened only Mary
knew.  He had taken Fanny in his arms and he had
kissed her.  For many months she had felt those
kisses, not in the touch of his lips so much as in waves
of emotion that tumbled in a riot through her veins and
left her trembling in the darkness of night.  For he
had never told her that he loved her.

In three weeks he had gone away having said no
word to bind her.  In two months' time or little more,
she read of his marriage in the London papers and that
night stared and stared at her reflection in the mirror
when she went to bed.

For in her heart and below the communicating
consciousness of her thoughts, she knew what had
happened.  Never could she have told herself; far less
spoken of it to others.  But while he had held her in
his arms, she had known even then.  She had felt her
body thin and spare and meager against his.  Something
unalluring in herself she had realized as his lips
touched the eagerness of her own.

That strange need of which in experience she had
no knowledge, she knew in that instant had not
wakened in him as he held her.  However passionate his
kisses in their strangeness had seemed, they lacked a
fire of which, knowing nothing, she yet knew all.

Still, nevertheless, she waited and the fatigue of that
waiting each year was added in her eyes.

The coming of the coach to her was like that of a
ship, hard-beating into harbor with broken spars and
sails all rent.  Yet with every coming, her heart lifted,
and with every new arrival, strange to Bridnorth, her
eyes would wear a brighter light, her laugh would catch
a brighter ring.

"Really, you'd never think Fanny was thirty-three!" Hannah
once said on one of these occasions.

"You wait for a week or two," retorted Jane.

And in a week or two when the visitor had departed,
Jane would catch Hannah's eyes across the breakfast
table and direct them silently to Fanny sitting there.
There was no need to say--"I told you so."  Jane
could convey all and more in her glance than that.  She
took charge of Hannah's vision, as Hannah took charge
of her children.  That was enough.





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   VI

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It was to Mary Throgmorton in those days that
this coming of the Abbotscombe coach is most
elusive of all to define.  So much less of the
emotions of hopefulness, of curiosity, or even of childish
interest did she betray, that there is little in action
or conduct to illuminate her state of mind.

In those days, which must be understood to mean
the beginning of this history, and in fact were the final
decade of the last century, Mary was twenty-nine.

That is a significant age and, to any more versed in
experience than she, must bring deep consideration
with it.  By then a woman knows the transitoriness of
youth; she realizes how short is the span of time in
which a woman can control her destiny.  She sees in
the eyes of others that life is slipping by her; she
discovers how those who were children about her in her
youth are gliding into the age of attractiveness, claiming
attention that is not so readily hers as it was or as
she imagines perhaps it might have been.

In such a state of mind must many a woman pause.
It is as though for one instant she had power to arrest
the traffic of time that she might take this crossing in
the streets of life with unhampered deliberation.  For
here often she will choose her direction in the full
consciousness of thought.  No longer dare she leave her
destiny to the hazard of chance.  It has become, not
the Romance that will happen upon her in the glorious
and unexpected suddenness of ecstasy, but the Romance
she must find, eager in her searching, swift in her
choice lest life all go by and the traffic of time sweep
over her.

This choice she must make or work must save her,
for life has become as vital to women as it is to men.
At twenty-nine this is many a woman's dilemma.  Yet
at twenty-nine no such consciousness of the need of
deliberation had entered the mind of Mary Throgmorton.
Perhaps it was because there were no younger
creatures about her, growing up to the youth she was
leaving behind; perhaps because in the quietness of
seclusion, by that Bridnorth stream, the gentle, rippling
song of it had never wakened her to life.

In the height of its flood, that Bridnorth stream had
never a note to distress the placidity of her thoughts.
She had heard indeed the Niagara of life in London,
but as a tourist only, standing for a moment on its brink
with a guide shouting the mere material facts of
so-called interest in her ears.  It was all too deafening
and astounding to be more than a passing wonder in
her mind.  She would return to Bridnorth with its
thunder roaring in her ears, glad of the quiet stream
again and having gained no more experience of life
than does an American tourist of the life of London
when he counts the steps up to the dome of St. Paul's
Cathedral and hurries down to catch the train to the
birthplace of Shakespeare.

At twenty-nine, Mary Throgmorton was in many
respects still the same girl as when at the age of
eighteen she had first bound that fair hair upon her
head and looked with all the seriousness of her gray
eyes at the vision the reflecting mirror presented to her.
Scarcely had she noticed her growth into womanhood
for, as has been said, her beauty was not that of the
flesh that is pink and white.  It was in stone her
beauty lay and even her own hands did not warm to
the touch of it.  But where in Bridnorth was there
kindling enough to light so fierce a fire as she needed
to overwhelm her?

This is the tragedy of a thousand women who pass
through life and never touch its meaning; these
thousand women who one day will alter the force-made
laws for a world built nearer to the purpose of their
being; these thousand women to whom the figure of
Mary Throgmorton stands there by Bridnorth village
in her monument of stone upon the Devon cliffs.

With all this unconsciousness of design in the
pattern of her life, the coming of the coach to Mary is
well-nigh too subtle to admit of capture in the rigid
medium of words.  Truly enough, if deeply engaged
in one of the many books she read, there were times
and often when, from those front windows of the
square, white house, she would let her sisters report
upon the new or strange arrivals set down outside the
Royal George.

Even Jane, with her shrewdness of vision, was
misled by this into the belief that Mary cared less than
them all what interest the Abbotscombe coach might
bring for the moment into their lives.

"I wonder what his handicap is," she had said when
they had described a young man descending from the
box seat with a bag of golf clubs.

Notwithstanding all Mary's undoubted excellence
at that game or indeed at any game to which she gave
her hand, Jane, disposed by nature to doubt, would
sharply look at her.  But apparently there was no
intention to deceive.  If the book was really engrossing,
she would return to its pages no sooner than the
remark was made, as though time would prove what sort
of performer he was, since all golfers who came to
Bridnorth found themselves glad to range their skill
against hers on the links.

And when, as it happened, she joined them at those
front windows, consenting to their little deceptions of
casual interest in the midst of more important
occupations--for Jane would say, "Mary, you can't just
stare"--it was with no more than calculation as to
what amusement the visitors would provide that Mary
appeared to regard their arrival.

Not one of them, however, not even Fanny, knew
that there were days in those Spring and Summer
months, when Mary, setting forth with her strong
stride and walking alone up on to the heathered moors
would, with intention, seat herself in a spot where the
Abbotscombe coach could be seen winding its way
down the hill into Bridnorth.  It was one spot alone
from which the full stretch of the road could be
observed.  By accident one day she had found it, just at
that hour when the coach went by.  She had known
and made use of it for six years and more.

At first it was the mere interest of a moving thing
passing in the far line of vision to its determined
destination; the interest of that floating object the stream
catches in its eddies and carries in its flowing out of
sight.

So it was at first, until in some subconscious way it
grew to hold for her a sense of mystery.  She would
never have called it mystery herself--the attraction
had no name in her mind.  No more did she do than
sit and watch its passage, dimly conscious that that
little moving speck upon the road, framed in its aura of
dust, was moving into the horizon of her life and as
soon would move out again, leaving her the same as she
was before.

Habit it was to think she would be left the same;
yet always whilst it was there in the line of her eyes, it
had seemed that something, having no word in her
consciousness, might happen to her with its passing.

So vividly sometimes it appeared to be moving
directly into her life.  So vividly sometimes, when it
had gone, it appeared to have left her behind.  She
would have described it no more graphically or
consciously than that.

For during those six years, nothing indeed had
happened to her.  The passing of the coach along that
thread of road had remained a mystery.  Companions
and acquaintances it had brought and often; women
with whom she had formed friendships, men with
whom she had played strenuously and enjoyably in
their games of golf.

Never had it brought her even such an experience as
her elder sister's.  She had never wished it should.
There was no such readiness to yield in her as there
was in Fanny; no undisguised eagerness for life such
as might tempt the heartlessness of a man to a passing
flirtation.

She treated all men the same with the frank candor
of her nature, which allowed no familiarity of
approach.  Only with his heart could a man have reached
her, never with his arms or his lips as Fanny had been.

Perhaps in those brief acquaintanceships, mainly
occupied with their games, there was no time for the
deeper emotions of a man's heart to be stirred.  But
most potent reason of all, it was that she had none of
the superficial allurements of her sex.  Strength was
the beauty of her.  It was a common attitude of hers
to stand with legs apart set firmly on her feet as she
talked.  Yet there was no masculinity she conveyed.
Only it was that so would a man find her if he sought
passion in her arms and perhaps they feared the
passion they might discover.

It was the transitoriness not only of hers but of all
those women's touch with life that made the pattern of
their destiny.  No man had stayed long enough in
Bridnorth to discover the tenderness and nobility of
Mary Throgmorton.  In that cold quality of her
beauty they saw her remotely and only in the distances
in which she placed herself.  None had come close
enough to observe that gentle smile the sculptor had
curved about her lips, the deep and tender softness of
her eyes.  It was in outline only they beheld her, never
believing that beneath that firm full curve of her breast
there could beat a heart as wildly and as fearfully as
a netted bird's, or that once beating so, that heart would
beat for them forever.

It was just the faint knowledge of this in herself
which made that passing coach a mystery to Mary.  It
was not as with Fanny that she thought of it as a
vehicle of her Destiny, but that, as she sat there on the
moors above Bridnorth, it was a link with the world
she had so often read of in her books.

It came to her out of the blue over the hill, as a
pigeon come with a message under its wing.  Detaching
that message again and again, she read it in a
whisper in her heart.

"There is life away there beyond the hill," it ran.
"There is life away there beyond the hill--and life
is pain as well as joy and life is sorrow as well as
happiness; but life is ours and we are here to live."

That message somewhere in the secrets of her heart
she kept and every time the coach passed by when she
was in the house the horses' hoofs on the village road
beat in her thoughts--"Life is ours, we are here to live."





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   VII

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Portraits in oil of Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton
hung on the walls of the dining-room in
their square, white house.  Though painted
by a local artist when Mary was quite a child, they had
one prominent virtue of execution.  They were
arresting likenesses.

It is open to question whether a man has a right to
impose his will when he is gone upon those who follow
after him.  With Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton it was
not so much an imposition of will.  Their money had
been left without reservation to be divided equally
amongst the four girls.  If any imposition there might
be, it was of their personality.  Looking down at their
children from those two portraits on the wall, they still
controlled the spirit of that house as surely as when
they had been alive.

Every morning and evening, Hannah read the prayers
as her father had done before her.  No more could
she have ceased from doing this than could any one of
them have removed his portrait from its exact place in
the dining-room.

It was the look in her father's and her mother's eyes
more than any comment of her sisters' that Fanny
feared to meet after her episode with the visitor to
Bridnorth.

For in their lifetime, Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton
had been parents of that rigid Victorian spirit.  Love
they must have given their children or their influence
would never have survived.  Love indeed they did
give, but it was a stern and passionless affection.

Looking down upon their four daughters in those
days of the beginning of this story, they must have
been well satisfied that if not one of them had found
the sanctity of married life then at least not one of
them, unless perhaps it was Fanny, had known the
shame of an unhallowed passion.

Fanny they might have had their doubts about.  After
that episode she often felt they had; often seemed to
detect a glance not so much of pity as of pain in her
mother's eyes.  At her father, for some weeks after the
visitor's departure, she was almost afraid to look.  In
his life he had been just.  He would have been just in
his condemnation of her then.  Self-control had been
the measure of all his actions.  Of self-control in that
moment on the cliffs she knew she had had none.  She
had leant herself into his arms because in the violent
beating of her breast it had seemed she had no strength
to do otherwise.  And when he kissed her, it had felt
as though all the strength she had in her soul and body
had been taken from her into his.

Had her father known such sensations as that when
he talked of self-control?

Well indeed did she know what her mother would
have said.  To all those four girls she had said the
same with parental regard; and to each one severally
as they had come to that age when she had felt it
expedient to enlighten them.

"God knows," she had always begun, for the use of
the name of God hallowed such moments as these to
her and softened the terribleness of all she had to say,
"God knows, my dear, what future there is in store for
you.  If it is His will you should never marry, you
will be spared much of the pain, much of the trouble
and the penalties of life.  I love your father.  No
woman could have loved him more.  He is a fine and
a good man.  But there are things a woman must
submit to in her married life--that is the cross she
must bear--which no words of mine can describe to
you.  Nevertheless, don't think I complain.  Don't
think I do not realize there is a blessed reward.  Her
children are the light of life to her.  Without them, I
dread to think what she must suffer at the hands of
Nature when the mercy of God has no recompense in
store.  Eve was cursed with the bearing of children,
but they brought the mercy of God to her in their little
hands when once they were born."

This usually had been her concluding phrase.  This
without variation she repeated to all of them.  Of this
phrase, if vanity she had at all, she was greatly proud.
It seemed to her, in illuminating language to comprise
the whole meaning of her discourse.

Hannah, Jane, Fanny, all in their turn had accepted
it in silence.  It had been left to Mary to say--

"It seems hard on a man that he should have to
suffer, because he doesn't get the reward of having
children like the woman does.  Of course they're
his--but he doesn't bring them into the world."

At this issue, Mrs. Throgmorton had taken her
daughter's hands in hers and, in a tone of voice Mary
had never forgotten, she had replied--

"I never said, my dear, that the man did suffer.
He doesn't.  If it were not for the sanctity of
marriage, it would have to be described as unholy pleasure
to him.  That pleasure a woman must submit to.
That pleasure it is her bitter duty to give.  That's why
I say I dread to think what she must suffer, as some
unfortunately do, when the mercy of God does not
recompense her with the gift of children."

Closely watching her daughter's face in the silence
that followed, Mrs. Throgmorton had known that
Mary's mind was not yet satisfied with the food for
thought and conduct she had given it.  She became
conscious of a dread of what this youngest child of
hers would say next.  And when Mary spoke at last,
her worst fears were realized.

"Can a woman," she said, "give pleasure to the
man she loves when all the time she is suffering shame
and agony herself?  If he loves her, what pleasure
could it be to him?"

Mrs. Throgmorton had closed her eyes and doubtless
in that moment of their closure she had prayed.
So confused had been her mind in face of this question
that for the instant she could do no more than say--

"What do you mean?"

"Well--simply--" replied Mary in a childlike
innocence--"simply that it seems to me if a woman is
giving pleasure to a man she really loves, she must be
getting pleasure herself.  If I give you a present at
Christmas and you like it and it gives you pleasure,
I'm not sure it doesn't give me more pleasure than you
to see you pleased, because--well, because I love you.
Why do you say 'It's more blessed to give than to
receive'?"

That little touch of affection from her daughter had
stirred Mrs. Throgmorton's heart.  Unable to restrain
herself, she had taken Mary's hands again with a closer
warmth in her own.

"Ah, more blessed, dear--yes--there is of course
the pleasure of blessedness, the satisfaction of duty
uncomplainingly done.  I have never denied that."

She had spoken this triumphantly, feeling that light
at last had been shown in answer to her prayer.  Not
for a moment was she expectant of her daughter's
reply.

"I don't mean that, mother," Mary had said.
"Satisfaction seems to me a thing you know in your
own heart.  No one can share it with you.  Of course
I don't know the feelings of a man, how could I?  I'm
not married.  But if I were a man it wouldn't give
me any pleasure to think that the woman I loved was
just satisfied because she'd done her duty.  I should
want to share my pleasure with her, not look on at a
distance at her satisfaction.  If a man ever loves me,
I believe I shall feel what he feels and if I do, I shall
be glad of it and make him glad too."

She had said it all without emotion, almost without
one note of feeling in her voice; but the mere words
themselves were sufficient to strike terror into
Mrs. Throgmorton's heart.  That terror showed itself
undisguised in her face.

"My dear--my dear--" she whispered--"I pray
God you never do feel so, or if it be His will you
should, that you will never forget your modesty or
your self-respect so much as to reveal it to any man
however much you may love him."

To these four girls in that square, white house in
Bridnorth, this was such an influence as still reigned
in undisputed sway.  The eyes of their parents from
those portraits still looked down upon them at their
prayers or at their meals.  Still the voice of
Mrs. Throgmorton whispered in Mary's ears--"I pray
God you will never forget your modesty or your
self-respect."  Still, even when she was twenty-nine,
Mary's eyes would lift to her father's face gazing down
from the wall upon her, wondering if he had ever
known the life she had suspicion of from the books
she read.  Still she would glance at them both,
prepared to believe that, however dominant it was in their
home, the expression of their lives had been only the
husk of existence.

And then perhaps at that very moment the coach
might pass by on its way to the Royal George and the
horses' hoofs would sing as they beat upon the
road--"Life is ours--we are here to live--Life is
ours--we are here to live."

Yet there in Bridnorth at twenty-nine, no greater
impetus had come to her to live than the most vague
wonderings, the most transient of dreams.





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   VIII

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It was the Sunday before Christmas of the year
1894.  No coach had come to Bridnorth for
three weeks.  The snow which had fallen there
was still lying six inches deep all over the countryside
and on the roads where it had been beaten down at all,
was as hard as ice.  Footmarks had mottled it.  It
shone in the sun like the skin of a snow leopard.

The hills around Bridnorth and all the fields as far
as eye could see were washed the purest white.  Every
hedge had its mantle, every tree and every branch its
sleeves of snow.  The whole world seemed buried.
Scarce one dark object was to be seen.  Only the sea
stretched dark and gray like ice water, the little waves
in that still air there was, falling on the beach with the
brittle noises of breaking glass.

Only for this, a silence had fallen everywhere.
Footsteps made no sound.  The birds were hidden in
the hearts of the hedges and even when hunger drew
them forth in search of berries, it was without noise
they went, in swift, dipping flights--a dark thing
flashing by, no more.

Every one put on goloshes to climb or descend the
hill to church.  The Vicar and his wife came stepping
over from the Vicarage close by like a pair of storks
and when the bell stopped ringing it was as though
another cloak of silence had been flung over Bridnorth
village.  The Vicar felt that additional silence as
acutely as any one.  It seemed to him it fell to
prepare the way for worship in the house of God and the
sermon he was about to preach.

The attendance that morning was no different from
what it would have been had the roads been clear.
Going to church in the country is a comfortable habit.
At their midday meal afterwards the subject of the
attendance would crop up at the Vicar's table as it
always did, ever full of interest as is the subject of the
booking-office returns to a theatrical manager.  He
would congratulate himself upon the numbers he had
seen below him from that eminence of the pulpit and
would have been hurt beyond degree had any one
suggested it was largely habit that brought them there.

The Throgmorton family would no more have
thought of staying away because of the weather than
they would have thought of turning the two portraits in
the dining-room with their faces to the wall.

They collected in the square hall of the square, white
house.  They put on their gloves and their goloshes;
they held their prayer books in their hands; they each
looked for the last time to see that their threepenny
bits were safe in the palms of their gloves.  Then they
set off.

The church in the country is a meeting place in a
sense other than that of worship.  You may desire at
most times the quietness of your own home, but you
like to see the world about you in a public place.

They worshipped God, those people in Bridnorth.
Who could hope to maintain that they did not?  They
were close enough to Him in all conscience and fact on
those Devon hills.  But that worship was more in the
silence of their own hearts, more on the floor at their
own bedside than ever it was at the service conducted
by the Vicar as so many services are conducted by so
many Vicars in so many parishes throughout the length
and breadth of the whole country.

The interest of seeing a fresh face, of even seeing an
old face if it be under a new hat; the mere interest of
human contact, of exchanging a word as they went in
or mildly criticizing as they came out; the mild
necessity of listening to what the Vicar said from the
pulpit, the sterner necessity of trying to understand what
he meant; the excitement of wearing a new frock, the
speculations upon the new frock worn by another, these
were more the causes of a good attendance in the worst
of weather, these and that same consciousness of being
overlooked, of having one's conduct under the gaze of
all who chose to satisfy themselves about it.

As the Vicar climbed the pulpit steps, the congregation
settled themselves down with that moving in their
pews with all customary signs of that spirit of patience
every priest believes to be one of interest.  Leaning
her square, strong shoulders against the upright back
of the Throgmorton pew, Mary composed her mind
with mild attention.  Fanny shifted her hassock to the
most restful position for her feet.  That sharp interrogative
look of criticism drew itself out in the line of
Jane's lips and steadied itself in her eyes.  Hannah was
the only one upon whose face a rapt expression fell.
With all her gray hair and her forty years, she was
the youngest of them all, still cherishing her ideals of
the infallible priest in the man of cloth; still believing
that the voice of God could speak even through the
inferior brain of a country Vicar.  Above all there were
her children who the next morning would ask her what
the sermon meant.  It was necessary if only for their
sakes she should not lose a word that was said.

After that pause on his knees when the Vicar's head
was bent in prayer, he rose to his feet and, as he spread
out the pages of his sermon before him, cast a
significant glance around the church.  This was preliminary
to every sermon he preached.  It was as though he
said--"I cannot have any signs of inattention.  If
your minds have wandered at all during the service,
they must wander no more.  I feel I have got
something to say which is vital to all of you."

All this happened that December morning, just as it
had occurred every morning for the twenty years he
had been the shepherd of their souls.  It was almost as
long as Mary could remember.

Having cast that glance about him, he cleared his
throat--the same sounds as Jane once caustically
remarked they had heard one thousand times, allowing
two Sundays in the year for a *locum tenens*.

Then he gave out his text: "And the Angel said
unto her--'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor
with God.'"


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   IX

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Perhaps it was the sound of her own name
there amongst all those people which stirred
her mind and added a quicker beat of the pulse
to Mary Throgmorton's heart.  The full significance
of the text, the circumstance to which it referred, these
could not have reached her mind so swiftly, even
though Fanny with a sharp turn of the head had looked
at her.

"'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.'"

It was at first the sound of her name, the more as
he repeated it.  Listening to that habitual intonation
of the Vicar's voice, it meant nothing to her as yet that
Mary had found favor with her God.  The only effect
it had was the more completely to arrest her mind in
a manner in which she had never been conscious of its
arrest before.  She folded her hands in her lap.  It
was a characteristic sign of attention in her.  She
folded her hands and raised her eyes steadily to the pulpit.

"There are some things," began the Vicar, "which
it is necessary for us to understand though they are
completely outside the range of our comprehension."

Involuntarily her interest was set back.  It was the
delivery of such statements as these with which the
Vicar had fed the mind of his congregation for the
last twenty years.  For how could one understand that
which was completely outside the range of comprehension?
Insensibly Mary's fingers relaxed as they lay in
her lap.  She drew a long breath of disappointment.

"The immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary,"
he continued, "is one of those mysteries in the
teaching of the Church which passes comprehension but
which it is expedient for us to understand, lest we be
led away by it towards such false conceptions as are
held by the Church of Rome."

There was scarcely a sermon he preached in which
the Vicar lost opportunity for such attacks as these.
He seemed to fear the Roman Catholic Church as a
man fears the alluring attractions of an unscrupulous
woman.  From the eminence of his pulpit, he would
have cursed it if he could and, firmly as she had been
brought up to disapprove of the Romish doctrines,
Mary often found in her mind a wonder of this fear of
his, an inclination to suspect the power of the Roman
Catholic Church.

From that moment, fully anticipating all they were
going to be told, her mind became listless.  She looked
about her to see if the Mainwarings were in Church.
Often there were moments in the sermon when she
would catch the old General's eye which for her
appreciation would lift heavenwards with a solemn
expression of patient forbearance.

They lived too far out of Bridnorth.  It was not to
be expected they would have walked all that distance in
the snow.  Her eyes had scarcely turned back from
their empty pew when the Vicar's words arrested her
again.

"Because Mary was the sinless mother of Our
Lord," he was saying, "is no justification for us to
direct our prayers to her.  For this is what it is
necessary for us to understand.  It is necessary for us to
understand that Mary was the mother of Our Lord's
manhood.  His divinity comes from God alone.
What is the Trinity to which we attach our faith?  It
is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the three in
one.  Mary, the Virgin, has no place here and it is
beyond this in our thoughts of worship we have no power
or authority to go.

"The Roman Catholic Church claims the mediation
of the Virgin Mary between the hearts of its people
and the divine throne of God.  Lest we should drift
into such distress of error as that, let us understand the
mystery of the Immaculate Conception, however much
as a mystery we allow it to be beyond our comprehension.
Being the Son of God, Christ must have been
born without sin, yet being the Son of Man, He must,
with His manhood, have shared all the inheritance of
suffering which is the accompaniment of our earthly
life.  How else could He have been tempted in the
Wilderness?  How else could He have passed through
His agony on the Cross?

"To what conclusion then are we thus led?  It is to
the conclusion that Mary, the Mother of that manhood
in Christ, must have suffered as all women suffer.
She had found favor with God; but the Angel did not
say she had found immunity from that nature which,
being born in sin as are we all, was her inevitable portion.

"So, lest we fall into the temptation of raising her
in dignity to the very throne of God, lest we succumb
to the false teaching of those who would address their
prayers to her, it becomes incumbent upon us to see the
Virgin Mary in a clear and no uncertain light.
Mystery in her conception there must always be, but in
her giving birth in that manger of Bethlehem, it is as
Mary the wife of Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, we
must regard her."

To all those present in the congregation this was no
more than one of the many tirades the Vicar had so
often preached against the Roman Catholic Church.
They listened as they had always listened before, with
patience but without interest.  It was no real matter
of concern to them.  They had no desire to be
converted.  They had not in the silence of their homes
been reading the works of Roman Catholic authorities
as the Vicar had done.  They did not entertain the
spirit of rivalry or feel the sense of competition as he
felt it.  They listened because it was their duty to
listen and one and all of them except Mary, thinking of
their warm firesides, hoped that he would soon make an end.

Only Mary amongst them all sat now with heart and
mind attentive to what he said, pursuing not the
meaning he intended to convey, but a train of thought, the
sudden illumination of an idea which yet she dared not
find words in her consciousness to express.

"We must think of her," the Vicar continued, "as
a woman passing through the hours of her travail.
We must think of her brought in secret haste by the
fear of consequence and the expedience of necessity to
that manger in Bethlehem, where, upon her bed of
straw, with the cattle all about her in their stalls, she
gave birth to a man child in all the suffering and all
the pain it is the lot of women to endure.  For here
is the origin of that manhood in which we must place
our faith if we are to appreciate the fullness of
sacrifice our Savior made upon the Cross.  It was a
woman, as any one of you, who was the mother of
Our Lord.  A woman, blessed above all women to be
the link between the divinity of God the Father and
the manhood of God the Son.  It was a woman who
had found favor in the eyes of her Creator, such favor
as had sought her out to be the instrument of the will
and mercy of God.

"And the Angel said unto her--'Fear not, Mary,
for thou hast found favor with God.'"

So often had Mary's name been repeated that by now
no association was left in Fanny's mind with her
sister.  She turned and looked at her no more.  But to
Mary herself, with this last reiteration of all, the sound
of it throbbed in every vein and beat in violent echoes
in her heart.  For now no longer could she keep back
the conscious words that sought expression of those
thoughts in her mind.  She knew beyond concealment
the idea which had forced itself in a suspicion upon her
acceptance.

In all his eagerness to lead their minds away from
worship of the Virgin Mary, the Vicar had destroyed
for her every shred of that mystery it had been his
earnest intention to maintain.  Now indeed it seemed
she did understand and nothing was left that lay
beyond her comprehension.

It was the woman, as he had urged them, whom she
saw, the woman on her bed of straw, with that look in
the eyes, the look of a woman waiting for her hour
which often she had seen in the eyes of others it had
been her duty to visit in Bridnorth.  It was the woman,
eager and suffering, with that eagerness she sometimes
had felt as though it were a vision seen within herself.
He had substituted a woman--just such a woman it
might be as herself.

And here it was then that the thought leapt upon her
like some ambushed thing, bearing her down beneath
its weight; beating at her heart, lacerating her mind
so that she knew she never in any time to come could
hide from herself the scars it made.

"If she had suffered," Mary asked herself--"must
she not also have known?"  And then, shaking her
with the terror of its blasphemy, there sprang upon her
mind the words--

"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"

"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Ghost!" a voice intoned in a far distance and
with all the others she rose automatically to her feet.
Her eyes were glazed.  She scarcely could see the
Vicar as he descended from the pulpit.  Her heart
was thumping in her breast.  She could hear only that.





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   X

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They walked home in groups and in couples
when the service was over.  Only Fanny kept
alone.  A verse of poetry was building itself
in her mind.  One couplet already had formed a
rounded phrase.  It had been revolving in her thoughts
all through the sermon.  Round and about she had
beaten it as with a pestle in a mortar until she had
pounded it into shape.

   |   "Were all the trees as green to you
   |     As they were green to me?"
   |

It was not so much what rhymed with "you" or
"me" that was troubling her as what more she could
continue to make the full matter of her verse.  She
could think of no more.  The whole substance of life
was summed up in those two lines to her.  She walked
alone that morning, cutting words to a measure that
would not meet and had no meaning.

Mary walked with Jane.  The sound of the voice and
the laughter of others behind her in that sharp air
was like the breaking of china falling upon a floor as
hard as that beaten snow beneath their feet.  She was
still in an amaze with the bewilderment of what she
had thought.  Every long-trained sense in her was
horrified at the knowledge of its blasphemy.  She
tried to believe she had never thought it.  To induce
that belief, she would have persuaded herself if she
could that the Vicar had never preached his sermon,
that it was not to church they had been, that it was all
a dream, horrible and more vivid than life itself, but a
dream.

For life was peaceful and sweet enough there in
Bridnorth.  Notwithstanding the song the hoofs of the
coach horses had always beaten out for her on the
roads, she had been well content with it.  Often
doubtless the call of life had come to her there beyond the
hill; it came with its cry of pain and joy, its voice of
sorrow as well as happiness.  But now, here amongst
the peace and the sweetness, where none of these vital
contrasts had ever existed, there had come something
more terrible than pain, more cruel and relentless than
sorrow.

In moments she was astonished at herself that she
did not dismiss it all with one sweep of her mind,
dismiss it all as lies and blasphemy, as machinations of
the Devil himself.  For what was the good just of
telling herself it was a dream, of pretending to hide
her thoughts from it as though it were not there?  It
was there!  She had thought it and so had the thought
come to her like a light suddenly in dark corners, that
she knew it was true.  Never now could she cast out
its significance from the processes of her mind.  In
the desperate fear that the very foundations of her
religious beliefs were shaken, she might buttress her
faith with the determined exclusion of all blasphemy
in her thoughts.  Never again might she allow her
mind to dwell upon the origin of the manhood of that
figure of Christ, still dearer to her than life itself.
With persistent effort of will, she knew she could make
blind her vision of that scene in the manger at
Bethlehem which the Vicar in his ignorance and the
pettiness of his apprehensions had conjured forth so clearly
in her sight.

All this she might do, clinging to the faith in which
she had been brought up; but never could she efface the
change which in those few moments had been made in
her.  How could she know so soon what that change
might be?  She knew only it was there.  She was a
different being.  Already she felt apart and aloof
from her sisters.  Even Jane, walking there beside her,
appeared at a strange distance in which was a clearer
light for her to see by, a crystal atmosphere through
which she could distinguish nothing but the truth.

Suddenly as they walked together, these two in
silence, Jane looked up and said--

"I wish some one would kill that bee in the Vicar's
bonnet.  As if there was the slightest chance of any of
us becoming Roman Catholics!"

It was like Jane, that remark.  Suddenly Mary
knew how like it was.  But more she knew in that
moment the change had not come to her sisters.  They
had not seen what she had seen.  No vision such as
hers had been vouchsafed to them.  Still they were
happy, contented, and at peace in their garden of Eden.
It was she alone who had tasted of the fruit; she alone
who now had knowledge of good and evil.

Already she felt the edge of the sword of the angel
of God turned against her.  The gates of that garden
they lived in were opened.  In the deep consciousness
of her heart she felt she was being turned away.  How
it would difference her life, where she should go now
that she had been driven forth, what even the world
outside those gates might be, she did not know.

All she realized was that for twenty-nine years a
Mary Throgmorton had been living in Bridnorth, that
now she had gone and another Mary Throgmorton had
taken her place.

Looking down at Jane beside her when she spoke,
she saw for the first time a sad figure of a woman,
shrivelled and dried of heart, bitter and resentful of
mind.  No longer was she the Jane who, with her
sharp tongue, had often made them laugh, who, with
her shrewd criticisms had often shown them their little
weaknesses and the pettiness of their thoughts.  In
place of her she saw a woman wilted and seared, a
body parched with the need of the moisture of life; one
who had been cut from the tree to wither and decay,
one, the thought then sprang upon her, who had never
found favor with God or man.





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.. class:: center large

   XI

.. vspace:: 2

They came loitering to the square, white house,
pausing at the gate and talking to friends,
lingering over the removal of their goloshes
indoors.  The crisp air was in their lungs.  There
was the scent of cooking faintly in the hall.  It rose
pleasantly in their nostrils.  They laughed and chatted
like a nestful of starlings.  Jane was more amusing
than usual.  Her comments upon the hat bought by the
police sergeant's wife in Exeter and worn that Sunday
morning for the first time were shrewd and close of
observation; too close to be kind, yet so shrewd as to
prick even the soft heart of Hannah to laughter she
would have restrained if she could.

Even Fanny, with mind still beating out her meters,
lost that far-off look in her eyes and lingered in the
hall to listen to Jane's sallies, to every one of which
Hannah would murmur between her laughter--

"Jane!  Jane--how can you?  Fancy your noticing
that!  Oh dear! we oughtn't to be laughing at all.
Poor thing!  She can't help her eye or her figure."

"If I were fat," said Jane, "I wouldn't go in stripes.
You don't put hoops round a barrel to make it look thin."

Foolish though that might have sounded in London
drawing-rooms, it found a burst of laughter in the
square, white house.

On her knees above, upstairs in her bedroom, Mary
heard the noise of it.  She could guess well the kind
of remark from Jane that had evoked it.  Until those
moments Jane had been a source of amusement to her
as much as to any of them.  She was a source of
amusement no longer.  Even there on her knees with
the sound of their laughter far away in the distance of
the house, it was that sad figure of a woman, shrivelled
and dried, bitter with the need of sun to ripen her, that
came before her eyes.

Then what were the others?  With this new vision,
she dreaded to think that she in time must look
at them.  What thoughts to have on one's knee!
What thoughts to bring into the sight and mind of God!

She had come there alone to her bedroom to
pray--but what for?  How could prayer help?  Could she
by prayer make numb and dead the motion of her
mind?  By prayer could she silence her thoughts,
inducing oblivion as a drug could induce sleep?

Hastening away alone to her bedroom, she had hoped
she could.  Even then she cherished the belief of all
she had been taught of the efficacy of prayer.  But
having fallen upon her knees at her bedside, what could
she pray?  Nothing.

"Oh--God, my heavenly Father," she began, and
staring before her with rigid eyes at the pillow on her
bed it became a twisted bundle of straw on which for
poor comfort rested the pale face of a woman patient
and enduring in her hour.

How could prayer put away such visions as these?
With conscious muscular effort she closed her eyes
and began repeating in a voice her ears could
hear--"Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy
name."

So she would have decoyed herself into the attitude
of mind of prayer, but the sound of laughter in the
house broke in upon the midst of it.  She saw that
thin, withered woman in whom the sap of life had
dried to pith, and, casting away the formula of
supplication, her voice had cried out for understanding of
it all.

"Something's all wrong!" she said aloud as though
one were there in the room beside her to hear and
oppose her accusations.  "I don't know what it is.  I've
never thought it was wrong before.  And perhaps
after all it's I who am wrong."

She knew what she meant by that.  Wrong she
might insist it was for her to have thought what she
thought in church.  And yet some quality of deliberation
seemed necessary to compose the substance of evil.
What deliberation had there been in her?  Out of the
even and placid monotony of life had shrilled this voice
into her heart.

"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"

She had not beckoned the voice.  It had lifted out
of nowhere above the soulless intonation of the Vicar's
sermon.  But what was more, now once she had heard
it, it appeared as though it long had been waiting to
cry its message in her ears.  She wondered why she
had never heard it before.  For twenty-nine years she
realized as she knelt there on her knees, she had been
little more than a child.  Now in the lateness of the
day she was a woman, knowing more of the world than
ever she would have learnt by experience.

The deeper purposes of life they were that had come
without seeking upon her imagination.  It was not this
or that she knew about women, not this or that which
had come in revelation to her about men.  Only that
there was a meaning within herself, pitiably and almost
shamefully unfulfilled.  Something there was wrong--all
wrong.  Half she suspected in herself what it
was.  For those few moments as they walked back
from church, she had caught actual sight of it in her
sister Jane.

Would she discern it in the others?  Discovering it
in them would she know what it was in her?  Why
was she on her knees for thoughts like this?  This was
not prayer.  She could not pray.

The sound of the bell downstairs raised her slowly
to her feet.  She took off her hat and laid it on the
bed.  Automatically she crossed to the mirror and
began to tidy her hair.

Was there anything in her face that made her heart
beat the faster?  She stood looking at her reflection,
pondering that there was not.  What beauty of color
was there in her cheeks?  What line of beauty in her
lips?  And why did she look for these things and why,
when behind her eyes she saw something in her mind
she dared not speak, did her heart set up a beating in
every pulse?

With a gesture of impatient self-rebuke, she turned
away and went downstairs.





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.. class:: center large

   XII

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Jane carved.  As their father had always done,
she still gave them just portions of fat so that
the joint might evenly be consumed.  There
was not the same necessity to eat it when it was hot as
there had been when Mr. Throgmorton was alive; yet
even still, Fanny with an unconquerable distaste for
it, did her best to leave a clean plate.

When Mary came in, they were already seated at the
table.  Hannah had said grace.  They all asked where
she had been.

"Tidying up," said she, and pulling out her chair,
sat down, beginning her meal at once with her eyes
steady upon her plate.  Fanny was opposite to her.
Being the eldest, Hannah sat at the head of the table.
With the new vision of mind that had come to her,
there were long moments before Mary could determine
to raise her head and look at them.  It was sufficient to
hear them talking.  The subject of Christmas presents
was monopolizing the conversation.  They were all
going in to Exeter for a day's shopping if the roads
permitted.  Mary found herself caught in astonishment
at the apparent note of happiness in their voices.

Were they happy after all?  Had she herself
become morbid and supersensitive with the sudden
unexpectedness of her revelation?  Was it all a mood?
Would she wake on the morrow after a night of sleep,
finding the whole aspect of life set back again to its old
focus?

In a sudden hope and expectancy that it might be so,
she raised her head and looked across the table at Fanny
seated there with the full light of the window on her
face.

It was a moment when, in a pause of the conversation,
Fanny's thoughts had slipped back to the labor of
her verses.

   |   "Were ever the trees so green to you
   |     As they were green to me?"
   |

The strained expression of fretted composition was
settled on her forehead.  The far-off look of a
memory clutching at the past was a pain in her eyes.  In
every outline and feature of her pale, thin face were
the unmistakable signs of the utter weariness of her soul.

In that one glance, Mary knew her vision was true.
It was no mood.  All those signs of fatigue she had
seen in Fanny's face again and again.  It was her
health, she had often said to herself.  Fanny was not
strong.  Ill-health it might have been, but the root of
the evil was in her spirit, not in her blood.

Sitting there opposite, as in all the countless times
from childhood upwards she had seen her, it was
another Fanny--the real Fanny--she beheld, just as
she knew now it was the real Jane.  These three
sisters of hers, suddenly they had all become real.
Hannah with her heart more in the flow of the Bridnorth
stream, to the smooth round edges of contentment,
each one of them in her turn they were presented
with their new significance in her eyes.

But it was Fanny most of all in whom she felt full
sense of the tragedy of circumstance.  That episode of
the visitor to Bridnorth came now with a fresh
meaning upon Mary's mind.  They had all felt deeply sorry
for Fanny at the time, but one and all they had agreed
she had had a lucky escape.

Was it such a lucky escape after all?  Did Fanny
regard it in that light?  Could they be considered
fortunate who escaped from life however it might
wound and ill-treat them?

Mary realized as she sat there, fascinated by the
terribleness of her thoughts, that they all had escaped
from life.  Not in one of them had there been the
moment's fulfillment of their being.  They were women,
but it was not as women they had lived.  One by one
the purpose of life was running slower in their veins.
She with the rest of them.  Her turn would come.
First she would become a Fanny, tired with waiting.
That eager look of a spirit hunger would come into her
eyes, alternating as events came and passed her by
with those dull, dead shadows of fatigue.  Hope she
would cling to as a blind man to the string that is
knotted to the collar of his dog.  Hope, becoming
fainter and weaker year by year, would lead her until,
as with Jane, bitter and seared and dry of heart, she
sought its services no more.  Still like the blind man
then she would beat with her stick up and down
the unchanging pavements of her life till at last
with Hannah she found a numbed contentment in her lot.

Something indeed, as she had cried up there alone
in her room, something was wrong.  She had come as
just a few women do to that conscious realization.
But her vision had not power to show her what it
was.  In those moments it never occurred to her to
raise her eyes to the portrait of her father on the wall.
She was not didactic enough of mind to argue it with
herself or trace the origin of those conventions which
had bound and still were binding the lives of those
three women her eyes were watching.

Something was wrong.  Vaguely she sensed it was
the waste of life.  It was beyond the function of her
mind to follow the reason of that wastage to its source.
Her process of thought could not seek out the social
laws that had woven themselves about the lives of
women until, so much were they the slaves of the law,
that they would preach it, earnestly, fervently,
believingly as her mother had done.

Something was wrong.  That was just all she knew;
but in those moments, she knew it well.  There were
those three women about her to prove how wrong it
was.  There was she herself nearing that phase when
the wrong would be done to her, and she would be
powerless as they had been to prevent it.

"Fear not, Mary--" it was as though she heard a
voice beckoning within her--"Fear not, Mary, for
thou hast found favor with God."

Ever since they had come to an age of understanding,
their spirits had been warped and twisted with the
formalities of life.  To fit the plan of those laws man
makes by force, they had been bent in their growing
to the pattern of his needs.  It was those needs of his
that had invented the forced virtues of their modesty
and self-respect, beneath the pressure of which he kept
them as he required them, trained and set back to
fulfill the meaning of his self-centered purpose.

Modesty and self-respect, surely these were qualities
of all, of men as well as women.  By unnatural
temperatures to force them in their growth was to produce
exotic flowers having none of the simple sweetness of
sun-given odors in their scent.

As life was meant, it grew in the open spaces; it was
an upright tree, spreading its green boughs under the
pure light of heaven.  There was nothing artificial
about life.  It was free.

It was the favor of God.  That was the truth she
had come by and with her eyes marking that weary
look of resignation in Fanny's face, she knew she
would not fear it whenever or however it came.

This was the seed, planted in the heart of Mary
Throgmorton, which in its season was to bring forth
and, for the life of the woman she was, bear the fruit
of her being.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`PHASE II`:

.. class:: center x-large

   PHASE II

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large

   I

.. vspace:: 2

It was in the summer of 1895 that Julius Liddiard
came to Bridnorth.  He came alone, having
engaged rooms at the White Hart.

From the Throgmorton windows he was observed
descending at the George Hotel when, with a glance at
Mary, it was announced by Jane that he played golf.
As he slung a bulky satchel over his shoulder, Fanny
surmised him to be an artist, entertaining for a swift
moment as it sped across her mind, a vision of herself
sitting beside him, watching his sketches with
absorbing interest as they came to life beneath his brush.

It remained with Jane to make the final observation
as, accompanied by a man carrying his trunk, he passed
the windows on his way back to the White Hart.

"Has his suit case polished," she said.  "He's not
an artist.  Paints for fun.  Probably has a valet.
Too wealthy for the likes of Bridnorth.  Comes here
to be alone."

If judging the facts of appearance leads to a concept
of truth, these observations of Jane were shrewdly
accurate.  Time, during the first week, proved the
soundness of their deduction.

He was seen by Fanny on the cliff's edge above the
bay, painting with pleasing amateurish results and so
engrossed in his work as scarcely to notice her
presence.  She had looked over his shoulder as she passed.
She was no critic but had, what is more common to
find, the candor of ill-formed opinion.

"It was not bad," she said--"rather slobbery.  It
was running all over the paper.  P'r'aps he pulls it
together.  Course I didn't stop."

Jane's eyes narrowed.  It was superfluous to say
she did not stop.  That was one of Fanny's lies; one
of the lies all women tell which record their conscious
intentions while they belie the subconscious things
they do.  She had not meant to stop.  It was obvious
to Jane that she did.  Her next words proved it.

"Can't understand," she said, "how any one can
become so engrossed, messing about with paints on a
piece of paper."

She had stopped and he had not noticed her.
After a week had passed, Mary came back one
evening from the golf club.  They were all having
tea.

"His name's Liddiard," she said casually in the
midst of a silence, and they all knew to whom she
alluded and what had occurred.

Questions poured upon her then from all but
Hannah, who went on eating her pieces of bread and
butter, letting her eyes wander from one to another as
they spoke.

She informed them of all she had gathered about him
during their game of golf, but gave her information
only under pressure of their questioning.

Ever since her eyes had penetrated the veil that for
so long had hidden her sisters from her, Mary had
resented, while so well she understood, their curiosity
about the visitors who came to Bridnorth.  There
were times when it almost had a savor of indecency
to her; times when she felt her cheeks grow warm at
the ill-hidden purpose of their interest; times when it
seemed to her as though Fanny, revealing her soul, had
dressed it in diaphanous garments which almost were
immodest in their transparent flimsiness.

She knew Fanny's soul now.  She knew the souls
of all of them.  She knew her own and often she
prayed that however Fate might treat her, even if as it
now treated them, she still would keep it secret and
hidden from eyes that were not meant to see.

"He comes from Somerset," she told them.  "He
has a large estate there.  Something like two thousand
acres and I suppose a big house.  No--does nothing.
I expect looking after a place like that is work enough.
Farms himself, I believe--the way he speaks about
it.  Yes--married."

Jane thought the annoyance with which she gave it
out was upon her own account.  There was a smile in
her eyes when Mary admitted it, as though her
rejoinder might have been--"What a suck for you."

Such good nature as she had kept the words from
utterance.  But as well it was that Mary's annoyance
had really had nothing to do with herself.  Their
question, chimed from Fanny and Jane together, had made
the blood tingle in her cheeks.  Why did they expose
themselves like that?  She would sooner have seen
them with too short a skirt or too low a bodice.
Scarcely conscious of this shame in Mary, it yet had
had power to hold back the words from Jane's lips.
Nevertheless she credited it to her virtue.

"They say I'm bitter," she thought.  "They don't
know how bitter I could be."

"Why isn't his wife with him?" she asked.

Mary professed complete indifference and ignorance.

"Do you suppose I asked him?" she said.  "Marriage
isn't a grazing in one field, is it?  Life isn't one
acre to everybody."

How interestingly he must have talked about his
estate and farming.  That came leaping at once into
Jane's mind.  A grazing in one field--that was a
new-learnt phrase for Mary.  There was little she knew
about grazing and could not tell an acre from a rood.

"How does he play golf?" she inquired.

"Fairly well."

"How many strokes did he give you?"

"None--we played level."

"What did he win by?"

"I did--two and one."

"So you're going to play again?"

"Well, of course.  It was a tight match."

Jane rose from the table to go and make out the
linen for the laundry.  Fanny sat staring at the tea
leaves in the bottom of her cup.  Hannah inquired in
her gentle voice if any one wanted the last piece of
bread and butter.





.. vspace:: 4



.. class:: center large

   II

.. vspace:: 2

It was a closer observation than she knew when
Jane said that Julius Liddiard came to Bridnorth
to be alone.

He was a lonely man.  There is that condition of
loneliness more insuperable than others, the loneliness
of mind in a body surrounded by the evidences of
companionship.  In this condition he suffered, unable
to explain, unable to express.

Much as he loved it, in his own home at times he
felt a stranger, whose presence within its walls was
largely upon sufferance.  Mastery, he claimed, exacting
the purpose of his will, but in the very consciousness
that it must be forced upon those about him, he
felt his loneliness the more.

Authority was not his conception of a home.  He
had looked for unity, but could not find it.  His wife
and her sister who lived with them, the frequent visits
of their friends and relations, these were the evidences
of a companionship that served merely to drive him
further and deeper into the lonely companionship of
himself.

She had her right to life, he was forced in common
justice to tell himself, and if she chose the transitory
gayeties, finding more substance of life in a late night
in London than an early morning on Somersetshire
downs, that was her view of things to which she was
fully entitled.

Of his own accord, he had invited her sister to live
with them, seeking to please her; hoping to please
himself.  She made her home there.  It was too late
actually to turn her away when he had discovered the
habit of her life was an incurable laziness which fretted
and jarred against the energies of his mind.

"We make our lives," he said, enigmatically to
Mary, that first day when they were playing golf.
"Lord knows what powers direct us.  I may make
the most perfect approach on to this green, but
nothing on earth can tell me exactly which way the ball is
going to kick."

He had approached his life with all the precision of
which he was capable, but the kick had come and it
had come the wrong way.  There was no accounting
for its direction.  It was obvious to him he could not
see the world through his wife's eyes.  After some
years it had become no less obvious that she could not
see it through his.

He wandered through the rooms of his own house, a
stranger to the sounds of meaningless laughter that
echoed there.  He took his walking-stick, called a dog
and strode out on to the downs, glad to be in fact
alone.

Gradually such laughter as there was in him--he
had his full share of it--died out of him.  Much as
he loved his wife, much as she loved him, he knew he
was becoming more and more of a disappointment to
her.  In the keener moments of consciousness of his
loneliness, she found him morose, until, unable to
sing or laugh with the songs and laughter of that
house, he came at times to believe he was morose
himself.

"What's happening to me," he would say when he
was alone; "what's happening to me is that I'm losing
the joy of life."

Yet the sight of the countryside at Springtime
seemed to himself to give him more sense of joy than
all the revels in London that made his wife's eyes dance
with youth.

He had laughed inordinately once; had won her
heart by the compound of his spirits, grave and gay.
It was quite true when she accused him of becoming
too serious-minded.  He heard the absence of his
laughter and sometimes took himself away and alone
that she might notice it the less.

There were times when it seemed she had lost all
touch with his mind that once had interested her.  He
took his mind away and left his heart there at Wenlock
Hall behind him.

What can happen with a man's mind when he holds
it alone in his keeping is what happened to Julius Liddiard.

Jane was more accurate than she knew when she
declared that he had come to Bridnorth to be alone.

It was his intention to sketch and play golf with the
professional until such time as the longing for his
home again would urge him back with a mind ready
to ignore its disappointments in the joy of mating and
meeting with his heart again.

Upon his first appearance on the golf links, the
professional had disappointed him.  Mary Throgmorton
had stepped into the breach, recommended by the
secretary as being able to give him as good a game as
many of the members.

For the first half, they had played with little
interchange of conversation.  As they left the ninth green,
she was two up.  Then he had looked at her with an
increasing interest, seeing what most men saw, the
strong shoulders, the straight line of her back, the full
strength of her figure, the firm stance she took as she
played her game.

It was not until after the game was over and they
sat at tea in the Club Room, that he noticed her face
with any interest.  Had this observation been denied
him, he would have gone away from Bridnorth,
describing her as a girl of the country, bred on sea air;
the type of mother for sons of Englishmen, if ever she
found her proper mate.

But across that tea-table, his mind saw more.  He
saw in flashes of expression out of the gray eyes that
faced him, that soul which Mary had only so lately
discovered in herself.  He saw a range of emotion that
could touch in its flight the highest purpose; he heard
in her voice the laughter his mind could laugh with,
the thoughts his mind could think with.

"Well, we've had a good game," he had said
steadily.  "Do you think I've a chance of beating you
if we play again to-morrow?"

"I like to win," said she, "if there's a chance of
being beaten.  I expect you'll beat me next time.  You
don't know the course yet."

"We'll play to-morrow," he said.

And it had been arranged.





.. vspace:: 4



.. class:: center large

   III

.. vspace:: 2

This time they played in the morning.  They
had a simple lunch of boiled eggs such as the
Club provided.  It was a common occurrence
for Mary to stay on the links all day.

Hannah thought nothing of her absence at the
mid-day meal.  Fanny thought a great deal, but said no
word.  Jane, thinking little, casually questioned why
it was always married men who came to Bridnorth.

"And invariably married men who play golf," she
added.  Indeed in those days the younger men
somewhat left the game to their elders.  "I believe Mary's
a bit of a fool," she went on.  "If she really wanted
to marry, she'd play tennis or sit on the beach at
bathing time.  That girl Hyland got married last year
throwing pebbles at an old bottle.  We've all thought
marriage was a serious business.  That was the way
they brought us up."  She looked at her mother's
portrait.  "That's what's been all wrong with us.  It
isn't the one who sits quietest who's chosen.  It's the
one who fusses about and chooses for herself.  You've
got to be able to throw pebbles at glass bottles now.
Crochet hooks aren't any good.  All our chances have
been lost in two purl and one plain.  It's their fault,
both of them--it's their fault."

Jane spoke so terribly near the truth sometimes that
it was agony for those others to listen to her.  To
Hannah it was sacrilege almost, against the spirit of
those still ruling in that house.  To Fanny it was no
sacrilege.  She too knew it had been their fault.  But
the truth of it was a whip, driving her, not that she
forgot her fatigue, but so as to urge her on, stumbling,
feeling the hope in her heart like harness wearing into
the flesh.

Almost visibly she aged as she listened.  Her
expression drooped.  Her eyes fixed in a steady gaze
upon Jane's face while she was speaking as though the
weight of lead were holding them from movement.

"Don't speak like that, Jane!" Hannah exclaimed.
"How can you say it's their fault?  They did the very
best they knew for us.  Wouldn't you sooner be as
you are than like that girl Hyland?"

"She's got a baby now," Jane replied imperturbably.
"She'll steady down.  She's contributed more than we
have.  It isn't much when all you can say is that you've
given a few old clothes to jumble sales."

"I know what Jane means," said Fanny.  Her memory
had caught her back to that late evening on the
cliffs when she felt again, like an internal wound,
that spareness of her body in the arms which for those
few moments had held her close.  "I know what Jane
means," she repeated, and rose from the table, leaving
the room, not waiting for her coffee.

At the Golf Club over their boiled eggs and the gritty
coffee while Liddiard smoked, they talked of Wenlock
Hall, the history of it, the farm and lands surrounding
it, the meaning that it had for him.

"How many children have you?" asked Mary.

"None," said he.

It was a question as to whether they should play
the final match that afternoon.  Each had won a game.

"Why get through good things all at once?" said
he.  "That's a sky for sketching--my sort of
amiable sketching.  The view across the bay from that
Penlock hill will be wonderful."

Her readiness to part with his company for the
afternoon was simple and genuine.

"Of course," she said, "you're here for a holiday.
I was getting selfish.  I don't often get a good game,
you see.  We've plenty of opportunity if, as you say,
you don't go till next week."

"Oh, I meant you to come if you would," he
explained quickly.  "Not much fun, I know.  But
there's the walk out there and back and I like being
talked to while I'm painting.  Not much of a
conversationalist then, I admit.  I'm doing all the
selfishness--but one doesn't often get the chance of being talked
to--as you talk."

It was the first time she had ever been told that any
power of interesting conversation was hers.  She felt
a catch of excitement in her breath.  When she
answered him, she could not quite summon her voice to
speak on a casual note.  It sounded muffled and thick,
as though her heart were beating in her throat and she
had to speak through it.  Yet she was not conscious
that it was.

"I'll come if you really want me to," she said, and
her acceptance was neither eager nor restrained.  She
went as freely as she walked and she walked with a
loose, swinging stride.  It became a mental observation
with him as they climbed the cliff path, that their steps
fell together with even regularity.

His sketch was a failure.  The atmosphere defied
him, or the talk they made distracted his mind.  He
threw the block face downwards on the grass.

"Oh! why do you do that?" she asked, regretting
consciously that which she did not know she was glad
of--"It looked as if it were going to be so nice."

"It had got out of hand," said he.  "They do, so
often.  I know when I can't pull 'em together.
Besides, talking's better, isn't it?  You can't give your
whole interest to two things at once."

How long had they known each other?  Two days--less!
He felt he had been talking to her constantly,
over a long period of time.  She knew he felt that and
was kept in wonder as to what her interest could be to
him.

Once definitely having put his sketch out of his mind,
he lay back on the close, sharp-bitten grass, looking no
more across the bay, but talking to Mary about herself.
Tentative and restrained as his questions were, they
sought her out.  She felt no desire for concealment,
but sat there, upright, as one would most times find
her, drawing a thread of sea grass backwards and
forwards through her fingers, answering the questions he
asked, sometimes briefly, sometimes with far excursion
into her mind, expressing thoughts she scarcely had
been conscious of till then.

"You make me a great egotist," she said presently,
with a laugh.

"Isn't yours the age for egotism?" he answered.
"Why shouldn't you think about yourself when you're
young, and all's in front of you?  When you come up
with it you'll have no time."

"When I'm young," she laughed.  "You'd better
guess how old I am," and she laughed again, knowing
what Hannah or Jane would think to hear her.

"I don't want to guess," said he.  "Suppose you
were twenty-eight--or even thirty, I say all's in front
of you.  That's your age.  That's the impression you
give me."

"I'm twenty-nine," said she, and her eyebrow lifted
with suppressed laughter as he sat up in his surprise to
look at her.

"Twenty-nine?" he repeated.  "What have you
been doing with your life?  Why are you here,
playing an occasional game of golf, attending mothers'
meetings, going to your little church every Sunday to
listen to that fool of a parson you have?  It's
waste--waste--utter waste!"

"Have you ever thought how many women do waste
in the world?" she asked and then of a sudden felt the
hot sweep of blood into her face.  How had it
happened she had come to talk to a man and a stranger like
this?  Yet wasn't it true, and wasn't there some sort of
exciting satisfaction in saying it?  She could not have
said that to Hannah, to Jane, not even to Fanny.
Why was it possible to exchange such intimate thoughts
with a man and he, an utter stranger she had met only
the day before?

Suddenly, in the speaking of that thought, she had
learnt something about herself and not herself only but
about all women and the whole of life.  All that her
mother had taught her was wrong.  Concealment,
deception, fraud, these were not the outward symbols of
modesty.  Just as for the ailments of her body she
could not have gone to a woman doctor, so with the
smoldering fever of her inmost thoughts, it was only
to a man she could speak.

Then did men understand?  With the rest of her
sex she had always argued that they did not.  If it
was not for understanding, then why had she spoken?
It must be that they understood; but not with their
minds, not cruelly, scorchingly, calculatingly, as women
did, judging shrewdly the relation between character
and the fact confided, but more spiritually than this;
the inner meaning, the deeper purpose, relating that
confidence to the soul of the woman who made it,
rather than to her conduct.

In that moment she had learnt the indefinable
complement between the sexes.  In that moment,
Mary Throgmorton had for the first time in her
life answered to the cry of Nature calling mate to mate.

The heat of the blood lifted in temperature in her
cheeks as she came upon her knowledge, but he said
nothing of the flush that lingered in them.  A woman
would have noticed that and to her shrewd observation
they would have burnt the more.  As he sat there, not
looking at her, but staring through the pine trees across
the bay, she found a feeling of comfort in being with
him as her cheeks grew cool again.

Never looking at her, he asked if women were conscious
of that sense of waste, and the tone of his voice
was neither searching nor inquisitive.  It had no
suggestion of personal curiosity behind it.  He spoke
from inside himself, from inner purposes and from the
inner purposes within herself she answered him,
feeling no sense of restraint.

"Do you imagine they wouldn't be?" she replied.
"Not perhaps in their everyday life, but in moments
in those days when even in a crowd you suddenly drop
out of existence, like a star falling, and find yourself
alone.  Of course they feel it.  Every energy of man
it seems to me has been to keep women from the touch
of life.  But sometimes they find a loophole and get
out and find the sense of it, if it's only in the tips of
their fingers.  They may be only moments, but every
woman has them."

She had never talked like this to any one before.
Had there been any one to talk to?  Would she have
spoken to them in such a fashion if there had?  It was
only since that sermon, the Christmas before, she had
been aware such thoughts were in the composition of
her mind and never had they expressed themselves so
definitely as this.

Yet her wonder was more of him than of herself.
Until that moment she could never have believed a
man could have understood.  And it was not from
what he said that she felt he did.  He was sitting
up now and he was nursing his knees as he gazed
out across the bay towards Kingsnorth.  It was in
the abstract penetration of his gaze, the silence
about him as he listened that she sensed his understanding.

Yet had she known it, he was thinking more of
himself than of her.  Something echoed in him with all
she had said.  It was not that he had never gained, but
that he had lost his touch with life.  The spirit in him
was wandering and alone and it had chanced upon
hers, wandering also.

This sense of mutual understanding was merely the
call of Nature.  The hazard of all things had tumbled
them together in the crowd of the world.  Something
had touched.  They knew it that second day.  She
was answering some purpose in him--he in her.  And
the explanation that Nature vouchsafed to her was that
he understood women; and the explanation that
Nature vouchsafed to him was that he was beginning to
understand himself, and that there was much in him
that needed much in her.

It was too soon to think that.  It was too upheaving.

He rose quickly to his feet, saying, half under his
breath, but loud enough for her to hear, "It's
odd--it's all odd."

And she knew what he meant.





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   IV

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The bay at Bridnorth is inclosed by two
headlands of sandy stone.  That to the east rises
irregularly with belts of pine wood and
sea-bent oaks, opening later in heathered moors that
stretch in broad plateaus, then sink to sheltered
hollows where one farm at least lies hidden in its clump
of trees.

It is always a romantic world, that land which lies
to the cliff edge beside the sea.  The man who farms
it is forever at close grips with the elements.  He
wrestles with Nature as those inland with their
screening hedgerows have little knowledge of.  The
hawthorn and the few scattered trees that grow, all are
trained by the prevailing winds into fantastic shapes
no hand of man can regulate.  Sheep may do well upon
those windy pastures, but the cattle, ever at hiding in
the hollows, wear a weather-beaten look.  Crops are
hazardous ventures and, like the sower, scattering his
grain, must plant their feet full firmly in the soil if
they would stand until their harvest time against the
winds that sweep up from the sea.

Up through the belt of pine wood and across the
heathered moors, Mary came often those days with her
friend.  The views from countless places called for his
brush.  Once she had brought him there to show him
her Devon, he sought the golf links no more.  They
never played their final match.

On the first two occasions of their excursions beyond
Penlock Hill, he painted assiduously.  Mary brought
a book and read.  Long whiles between her reading
she watched him, smiling, when, with almost childish
distress, he assured her he had done pictures that at
least were worth glancing at in a portfolio, if not a
permanent frame.

For either it was, as in the first instance, that the
atmosphere of a strange country defeated him and
tricked his sense of color, or his mind was bent on
other things, but both days were fruitless of results.
On each of these occasions, as before, he threw the
sketches down, unfinished, and fretted at his lack of
skill.

"This Devon of yours," said he, "has got more
color than I can get out of my box.  What really is
the matter is that it has more color than I've got in my
eyes.  If it's not in your eyes, it's not in your box.
You can't squeeze a green field out of a tube of oxide
of chromium.  Paint's only the messenger between
you and Nature."

Her sympathy was real.  Notwithstanding that it
gave her more of his attention, she fretted for him too.
When the next day they met at the foot of Penlock
Hill and she found him without his satchel, she was
genuinely disappointed and unhappy.

"Aren't you sufficiently selfish," he asked, "to be
sensible of the obvious fact that I'd far sooner talk to
you than spend my time in useless efforts?"

"Perhaps it isn't in the nature of women to be really
selfish," she said, with a laugh to lighten her meaning.

That set them at discussion upon the comparative
selfishness of the sexes as they mounted the hill and
took the beaten path across the heather.

For a man, he had strange points of view to her.
With an honest bitterness, he complained about the
selfishness of men.

"But what else can we be?" said he.  "As things
are, what else can we be?  We run the world and this
civilization's our conception of the measures on which
it has to be run, and this civilization is built up on a
solid rock of egotism and selfishness, with brute force
to insist upon the upholding of the standard.  I
wonder what would happen," he went on, "if fair women,
as Meredith visioned, rose in revolt.  I wonder what
would happen if they suddenly combined to refuse to
give the world the material it builds its civilization with.
I wonder where our brute force would come in then.
What sort of children should we have if women had
to be taken by brute force?  And should we so take
them if really they were to resist?  Brute force has
been opposed only with brute force.  Our highest
conception is that the strongest brute force wins.  I
wonder what brute force would do if it were opposed with
the force of the spiritual ideals that women have and
scarcely are awake to even yet.  Are you awake to
the spiritual ideals in you?"

He looked at her suddenly as they walked and as
suddenly and as firmly she said--

"Yes."

"By Jove!" he exclaimed.  "You're the first
woman I've ever met who would have answered as
straight and direct as that.  All the rest would have
hedged and shilly-shallied.  Some would have giggled.
Half of them would frankly not have known what I meant."

"I know very well what you mean," she replied.
"But if you're surprised at a woman knowing, I don't
think you're any more surprised than I am at a man
asking the question.  How did you know to begin with
that women have spiritual ideals at all, strong enough
ever to think of their being ranged against brute force?"

She paused, but it was so obvious she had still more
to say that he waited rather than interrupt the train of
her thought.

"I expect your wife's a very wonderful woman,"
she said.

In that pause she had wrestled with herself.

It had been the first time she had mentioned his
wife in all their conversation.  Well she knew what
would be the effect of it.  It would call her there
between them.  Inevitably it would thrust him a
little away from her to give his wife room in their
minds.

It had been an irresistible thought, yet why should
she spoil the contact of mind between them by
speaking it?  Was it incumbent upon her in any way to
remind him of his wife?

Yet partly she was curious to know, and wholly she
was honest to speak.  There was his wife.  Nothing
in Mary's thoughts would be reckoned without her.
Did he find a deep interest in speaking to her?  She
believed he did, but there was his wife.  She knew
there was no attraction of physical beauty in her, yet
had he not made it obvious in the last ten days that
still she had attraction for him?  It seemed certain to
her that he had; but there was his wife.

At every turn in their conversation, at the end of
every steadied glance, this woman she had never seen
effected some intervention in thought or vision in
Mary's mind.  More plainly a thousand times it seemed
she felt her presence than did he.  There were
moments when enthusiasm caught him and it appeared he
had forgotten every one and everything but Mary there
before him.

It became imperative then for her to summon that
vision before her mind.  She did it with an effort.
But later, when alone at night before she turned to
sleep, it came without call, trembling her with
emotion at the thought that a moment might happen upon
them when they would both forget or come to memory
too late.

And what did she mean by that--too late?  In all
frankness and honesty, she did not know.  It were
better explained, she would not allow herself to know.
Reaching that issue in her conscious thought about it
all, emotion would sweep like a hot wind upon her.
She would lie, half trembling in the darkness, pressing
her hand upon her breast to frighten herself into some
sort of terrible joy at the rapid beating of her heart
and then, driving all conscious thought away from her,
she would straighten her limbs in the bed, exerting her
physical control, as when she nerved herself to play
her game, thus forcing herself to quietude and
ultimately to sleep.

So she came always consciously to a point of thought
which, bringing her the vision of his wife and the sense
of her own emotion, drifted her towards that
subconsciousness of being wherein the pattern of so many a
woman's life is made.  She thought no more but, had
she permitted it, would have lain, silent-minded in an
ecstasy.  It was no less than physical control, the
straightening of her limbs, the clenching of her hands,
the beating of her pillow into new resting places for
her head, that put the ecstasy away.

Here, in some likeness, was that same moment, in
the broad light of day with him beside her and the
crisp heather roots beneath their feet.  It was almost
a physical effort in her throat that gave her strength
to say--

"I expect your wife's a very wonderful woman."

She meant him to realize that in her thoughts it was
through his wife he had become possessed of such
knowledge about women; that there was his wife; that
she was there between them; that if he had for the
instant forgotten her, she had not.  It was as though,
in a violent muscular effort, Mary had seized her by
the wrist and jerked her into step with them.  Almost
was she catching for her breath when she had done it.

"My wife is a wonderful woman," said he quietly.
"She has as big a heart as all this stretch of acres and
that breadth of sea, but to-day is her to-morrow.  I
didn't learn about the spiritual ideals of women from
her."

"Where did you learn it then?" asked Mary.

"Now you're asking me something I couldn't possibly
tell you," said he, and then he smiled.  He had
seen the look leap slanting across her eyes as she
thought of the other woman who had taught him.

"Because," he added--"I don't know."





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   V

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If it were Fanny who first had sense of what was
happening, it was Jane who, when she discovered
it, spoke out her mind about the matter.

Fanny knew by instinct, long before the first
suspicions had fermented her elder sister's thoughts.  She
detected a sharper, brighter look in Mary's eyes; she
calculated a greater distance in Mary's meditative
glance.

At first it was as subtle a detection as the record of
that weightless rider one straddles on the balance arm.
Faintly the scales of her suspecting answered to the
application of the signs which she observed.  Faintly
the weight of a thought was registered upon her
consciousness.

If it was not as yet that Mary was in love, at least
her mind was centering on that which any moment
might turn to burning thoughts.

They occupied the same room together, these two.
This had been a habit from childhood.  Since the death
of Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton, the accommodation of
that house did not necessitate it.  But they had grown
used to each other's company.  They would have
missed the sound of each other's voices those moments
before the approach of sleep, the exchange of more
lucid conversation in the mornings as they dressed.

It was in unaccustomed pauses as she undressed at
night that Fanny's mind found the first whispers of
her instinct about Mary.  It was not that she said to
herself--"I used to sit on my bed like that--I used
to stare at the wall--I can just remember what I used
to think about."  Far more it was that, at the sight of
Mary doing these things, there came, like an echo into
Fanny's pulses, the old emotions through which she
had passed when she had been walking round those
cliff paths waiting for the destiny that should declare
itself for her.

She watched her sister, even more closely than she
knew.  It was emotional, not conscious observation.
Once the matter had fastened itself upon her imagination,
the whole spirit of it emotionalized her.  She
noted all the indications of Mary's condition of mind,
without looking for them; almost without knowing she
had seen them.

The processes of her thought during that first
fortnight when at the last Liddiard was meeting Mary
every day, were subtle, subliminal and beyond any
conscious intent.  Often watching her sister as, regarding
herself in the mirror while she did her hair, with those
indefinite touches of greater care and more calculating
consideration, she found a pain fretting at her heart--a
hunger-pain as of one who is ill-nourished, keeping
life together but no more.

In this it was as also in the choice of the skirts and
blouses Mary wore.  It needed no great selection of
wardrobe to trace this to its source.

Fanny could never have dreamt of expressing the
knowledge that women dress to the dictation of their
emotions even if it be something that is never revealed,
the color of a ribbon on their undergarments, even the
choice of those undergarments themselves.  That
which touches their skin means insensibly something
to them when their emotions are astir.  It was not
that Fanny had learnt this; she knew it.  But it was
not that she could speak of her knowledge.

All that happened with Fanny those days was that
the observation of these things in Mary emotionalized
her.  Lying in bed there, watching her sister as she
dressed, she found her pulses beating more quickly.
She felt a restlessness of body as well as mind.  She
threw the bedclothes from her and got up, not because
she wanted to be dressed herself, but because she
could not stay in bed any longer.

And then, when one morning, Mary said--

"I've been thinking, Fanny--why shouldn't I turn
that room looking over the garden into a bedroom?
We're awfully cramped here.  It's just like us to go
on with the same arrangements, merely because we're
used to them."

Then Fanny knew, and her knowledge was more of
an upheaval in her mind than any thought of this
revolution against the placid routine of their existence.
So much greater was it that she could not even bestir
herself to resentment against Mary for preferring to
be alone.

The thought crossed her mind--

"How do I interfere with her?  It's awfully selfish
of her to want to be alone.  It isn't as if we hadn't
shared the same room for years."

Such thoughts as these would have been poignant at
any other time.  Mary was prepared for the assertion
of them.  But they seemed idle to Fanny then--foolish
and utterly devoid of purpose.

She sat on the side of her bed, staring at Mary
busily engaged in doing her hair.  And she knew so
well what the meaning of that centered occupation was.
Such a moment she would have chosen herself for an
announcement of that nature.

Mary was in love, and with a man who had a wife
already.  She was surprised in her own soul at the
littleness of weight the second half of that realization
carried in her thoughts.  She did not ask herself
what--this being so--Mary was going to do about it.
As a problem of impenetrable solution, it meant
scarcely anything to her.  All that kept repeating itself
in her mind was just the knowledge that Mary was in
love--Mary was in love.

She felt a sickness in her throat.  It was not of
fear.  It was not exactly of joy.  She might have been
seized of an ague, for she trembled.  The sensation
was like waves breaking over her; as though she were
in water, fathoms deep, and were struggling to keep
her lips above the surface that she might breathe freely.
But she could not breathe; only in stolen moments, as
if breath were no longer hers to hold.

Mary was in love.  She wanted that room by
herself so that at night she could lie alone with her
thoughts and none could touch or spoil them with their
presence.  She wanted that room alone so that in the
morning she could wake with none but her thoughts
beside her.  She was in love.  Suddenly the world to
Fanny seemed bitter and black and cold.  She was
out of it.  It had gone by.  She was left there on the
roadside--trembling.

Love was the magic by which she herself could be
revealed to herself when, coming upon this sudden
knowledge of Mary, it was that she realized there was
no magic in the world for her.

She was alone, unloved, unloving.  In that there
was merely consciousness, a staring, hungry consciousness
of herself.  Only in the abandonment of generosity
that came with love could she find any meaning in
her soul.  Only by giving could she gain.

The tragedy of Fanny Throgmorton and the countless
women that are like her was that she had none to
whom she could give.

All this, without a word in her thoughts that could
have given it expression, was what she felt about Mary
as she sat on her bedside that morning and watched
her sister doing her hair.





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   VI

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Jane made the discovery for herself, but by
chance.

One morning when Mary had gone out, indicating
the likelihood of her playing a game of golf,
Jane put on her oldest hat, took the path through the
marshes which avoided the necessity of going through
the village where she would be seen and criticized for
her clothes, and went alone up onto the cliffs beyond
Penlock.

These were rare, but definite, occasions with her.
She felt the necessity of them at unexpected intervals
as a Catholic, apart from Saints' days and Holy days,
feels the necessity of confession and straightway, in
the midst of business hours or household duties, seeks
out the priest and speaks his mind.

To Jane, those lonely walks with the solemn solitude
of those cliffs, were confessional moments when,
setting herself at a distance which that wide environment
could lend her, she could look on at herself, could
calmly inspect and almost dispassionately criticize.

She went without knowledge of her purposes.  It
was just for a walk, she said, and if questioned why
she insisted upon going alone, she would find herself
becoming angry at their curiosity.

"Mayn't I sometimes like my own company better
than anybody else's?" she would ask shortly and that
was about all she knew definitely of these confessional
calls.  If she was aware of any mental exercise
during those walks, it was in momentary observations of
Nature, a lark soaring, a flight of gulls upon the water,
the life of that farm in the hollow above Penlock.  Of
that inquisitorial examination of herself, practically
she knew nothing.  It took place behind the bolts of
doors, all sound of it shut out, barring admittance to
her conscious self.

Coming back for the midday meal she would say to
Hannah across the table--

"How you can stick in the house all day, one week
after another, beats me.  It was perfectly lovely this
morning up there on the moors.  We all make life so
automatic here that one might as well put a penny in
the slot and have finished with it.  It's only a
pennyworth we get."

From this they received the impression she had also
given to herself, that she had been drinking in the
beauties of the countryside.  If she had, it was but a
sip of wine at the altar where she had been kneeling in
inmost meditation.

This morning, feeling the sun too hot for energy,
she had found for herself a sheltered bed in the heather
where, through a gap in the jungle it became as she lay
in the midst of it, she could see the farm in its hollow,
the sea of cerulean beyond and, nearer in the
foreground, a belt of pine trees standing up amongst their
surrounding gorse and bracken.

It was there upon a path leading through the bracken
to a gate in one of the farmer's hedges, she caught her
first glimpse of Mary and Liddiard.  The mere fact of
her not being on the golf links as she had said drove
the suspicion hot, like a branding iron, on Jane's
thoughts.

She watched them pass by below the hill on which
she had found her bed and her eyes followed them like
a bird's, alert and keen.  When they stopped at the
gate and Liddiard seated himself on it with his feet
resting on the bar beneath while Mary stood below him,
Jane made for herself a window in that secreting wall
of heather and lay there, watching them, with all her
blood fermenting to a biting acid that tasted in her
mouth and smarted in her eyes, becoming even, as it
were, a self-righteous irritation beneath her skin.

To her it was obvious enough.  Their Mary who
read so many books, who seemed to care so little what
destiny the fateful coach to Bridnorth brought her,
was sport of Fate and surely now.  Their Mary was in
love.

Jane angered at the realization of it to think what
a fool her sister was.  It would be talked about the
whole village over, especially then, during the holidays
when the summer visitors were there.  One visitor
there was in particular who came every year and spent
most of her mornings after bathing drying her hair on
the beach and talking scandal till hunger and the
mid-day meal called her homewards.

What a fool she was!  This story of herself and
a married man would linger long whiles in Bridnorth.
They had not much to talk of.  They preserved their
gossipings with assiduous care.  Each year it would
be whispered about her and men would keep her at a
greater distance than ever.

They talked there together for an hour and more.
For an hour and more, Jane lay and watched them.
What were they talking of?  Sometimes by the way he
spoke, leaning down and riveting each word upon
Mary's attention, it seemed as though their
conversation were of the most serious nature.

How could it be serious?  What a fool she must be
if she thought it was!  It was an idle flirtation with
him, a married man, alone on his holidays, amusing
himself with the most likely girl that offered herself.
Yet never with all her astuteness would Jane have
considered that Mary was the most likely.  Always Mary
had seemed, except for her games, insensible to the
attractions of men.  What had come over her?  Fanny
was the one whom men with inclination for harmless
passing of their time had singled out for semi-serious
interchange of ideas.  Fanny was romantic.  Men
liked that when it did not become too serious to
interfere with the free pursuit of their enjoyments.

But this, as she watched them there through her
curtain of heather, looked more romantic than anything
she could ever have imagined about Fanny.  Had they
been strangers and had she come across them thus she
would have felt herself in the presence of something
not meant for her to see and, passing them by, she
would have given all impression of looking the other
way, however covertly she might have observed.

Yet here it was her own sister and, to herself, calling
it her duty, she watched them both with every sense
stretched forth to clutch each sign or movement that
might give evidence to her impulsive mind how far the
thing had gone between them.

She was not long in learning the utmost truth.
After a long silence, Liddiard slipped down off the gate
and stood in the bracken looking directly into Mary's
eyes.  Jane felt that look.  She held her breath as it
pierced into her own eyes.  Then, when he laid his
hands upon Mary's shoulders and for an instant held
her so as he spoke, Jane swallowed in her throat and
against the roots of heather felt her heart beating like
a trapped bird in her breast.

At that distance, more sure than Mary, she knew
what was going to happen.  More sure than either of
them, she knew.  When suddenly, as though some
leaping power had swept upon him unexpectedly, he took
her in his arms and their heads were one together,
linked with his kisses, Jane had known of it more surely
than he.

Feeling those kisses on her own lips, on her eyes, her
throat, and like hammers beating in her heart, Jane
buried her face in the heather but did not know that
she moaned with pain.

When she looked up, they had gone.





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.. class:: center large

   VII

.. vspace:: 2

If those kisses were hurtful to Jane, they were a
sublime realization to Mary.  In the rush of them
as they pressed against her lips, she felt a
consummation of all those forces of life which, with the
Bridnorth coach, had so often called to her as it came
and passed with its message out of the world.

Rightly or wrongly in the accepted standards of
morality, Mary felt such completed justification in
those moments as to be sensitive of the surging
intentions of life triumphing within her.  This, she knew
then, was the fullness of meaning in a woman's life.
If it were pleasure, it was not the pleasure of sensation;
not even the pleasure of the promise of gratification.
None of the joys of amorous delay were mingled in
those kisses for her.

What she felt in the rushing torrent in her veins
was all subsidiary to the overwhelming sense of fulfillment.

He would have lingered there beside that gateway in
the bracken, would have dallied with the joy it was to
him to feel her whole being in response to his.  But
Mary had no need of that.

If this was what her mother had meant by concealment
of her own sensations, she surely had it then.
This was not an hour of dalliance in her life.  It was
the deep-sounding prelude to the realization of the very
spiritual substance of her being.

At her dictation they left that place in the bracken.
In response to her wish they turned from the gateway
and sought the beaten path through the heather again.
In that moment she wanted no more of his kisses;
partly perhaps because in her emotions she could have
borne no more; but mostly it was that she wanted space
and freedom for her thoughts; to speak them to him
if need be, certainly to review them in her mind.  It
was time she demanded--time to touch the wonder
that was coming to her, which, from the power of those
kisses, she somehow assumed could not be withheld
from her now.

"I could not help that," he said almost apologetically
when she insisted upon their going on.  "Somehow or
other--I don't know--honestly, I couldn't help it,
and I suppose I've offended you now."

For one instant she turned her eyes upon him with
a searching glance.

"Offended?" she repeated.  "Didn't you realize
that I let you kiss me--not once--but--"  Suddenly
she realized in a swift vision the Mary Throgmorton
that was; the Mary Throgmorton of the square, white
Georgian house; the sister of Hannah and Jane and
Fanny, and she could not say how many times he had
kissed her.  Her cheeks flamed.

"Don't talk about offense," said she almost hotly,
and walked on with him some time in silence, saying
no more, leaving him in an amaze of wondering what
her thoughts could be and whether that denial of
offense was not merely a screen to hide from him the
shame she felt at what had happened.

Was she ashamed?  It seemed to him then that she
was.  That probably was the last time he would touch
her lips, yet having touched them and felt, not the
eagerness as with Fanny, but the sureness of their
response, there had been awakened in him the full
consciousness of desire to touch them with his lips again.
For now he felt, not master of her, but a servant.
At the mere utterance of her command, he must obey.
With all his eagerness to stay there longer at that
gate there was no power in him of conflict with her
wishes when she expressed the desire to go on.

What was it she was thinking as she walked?  Did
really she hate him for what he had done?  The cry
her nature had made to his in those moments of the
closeness of their bodies had redoubled and redoubled
in its intensity.  Yet he was less sure of her than he
had been before.

He felt like one struggling blindly through the
storm of his emotions, answering some call that was
not for help but of command.  Was that the end of it
all?  Would he never again hold her in his arms?
Tentatively he took her hand which did not resist his
holding as they walked.

"My dear," he said--almost below his breath--"I
suppose I've seemed weak--but--I love you.
It was not weakness.  I can't explain it, but if you
knew, really it was strength."

"Please don't say any more--not now," said she
and lengthened her stride and threw back her head that
all the full sweep of the air might beat upon her face
and throat.

It never consciously occurred to her that a woman's
throat and the fine column of her neck could express
her beauty to a man.  Yet as they walked, she knew
that his eyes had seen such beauty in hers.

So it was, when Jane looked up again, they had
gone.  For another half hour and more she sat there
in her bed in the heather, trying to appreciate all that
it meant.  But again and again the sequence of her
conventional thoughts was disturbed by the vision of
those two as her eyes turned to the gateway in the
bracken and she saw them in her mind with lips touching
and heads close pressed together in that long embrace.

With that vision all conventionality slipped from
her control, even from the very substance of her
thoughts.  Instinctively she knew she had been
witness of something she had neither power nor right to
judge when, forcing herself to regard it as all the
years of habit and custom would have her do, she
shut her eyes to the sight of them in that bracken and
called upon her judgment to dispassionate her mind.

That evening she contrived to be alone with Mary
after tea.  They walked in the garden, round the
paths with their borders of thrift in heavy cushions
of growth.

In a tone of casual unconcern, Jane asked her about
her game of golf.

Her pause in answering was significant.  In full
confidence, Jane expected the lie and understood her
sister still the less when, having weighed the truth
against expediency, she replied--

"We didn't play golf.  We went up onto the
moors above Penlock."

It gave Jane the opportunity she sought, but in the
frankness of giving confused her.  So had her mind
forestalled all the progressions of that conversation,
that for a moment she was silent.

What sort of woman was this Mary of theirs who
seemed to have no guiltiness of conscience, when
from childhood she had been trained to listen to the
still, small voice?  Did she not realize the enormity
of what she was doing?  Jane's lips set to their
thinnest line.

"Do you think it's wise," she began, and in that
tone of voice which, with a sharp edge, cut the plain
pattern of her meaning--"Do you think it's wise to
go about so much with this man?  Even if he weren't
married--do you think it's wise?"

The sharp glance which Jane stole at her sister then
revealed Mary possessed and unconcerned.  So well
had she known what Jane was going to say that
surprise had no power to disconcert her.  But beyond
that, there was in some chamber of her mind a certain
sureness of herself, a steadying confidence in all she
did.  This it had also been even in the high torrent
of her emotion when she would have no more of his
kisses and seemed in that moment to him the
substance of unyielding stone his temperature of
passion had heated but a moment and no more.

"I think," she replied, after a moment's silence;
"I think that this wisdom you talk about--worldly
wisdom--is a very over-rated virtue.  I think we've
lost a lot--all of us--by cultivating it.  I find
Mr. Liddiard much more interesting than any one
or any thing in Bridnorth.  Life after all is short
enough--dull enough.  Why shouldn't I take what
interest it offers when I can, while I can?  He goes
in a few days.  What's worldly wisdom to the
feeling that your mind is growing instead of stagnating?
If you mean you think I ought not to go out with him
again, I can't agree with you."

She spoke like a woman addressing a community
of women, not as one sister to another.  There was a
note of detachment in her voice, Jane had never
heard before.  In all that household, Jane always
assumed she had herself the final power of control.
She felt it no longer here.  So long as Mary was
speaking, it appeared to her as though she were one
listening to some authority far superior to her own.
It was in Mary's voice and yet seemed outside and
beyond her as well.  There was power behind it.
She could not sense the direction or origin of that
power, but it dominated her.  She felt small beside
it, and feeling small and realizing that it was this
Mary, their youngest, who was the voice of it, she
grew angry.  All control of that situation she had
intended to conduct left her.  It left her fretting with
the sensation of her own impotence.

"You can't agree with me, can't you!" retorted
Jane hotly.  "You wouldn't agree, I suppose, if I
said that, beside being unwise, I thought it beastly and
sinful and horrible altogether, to see a girl kissing a
married man, kissing him in a beastly way too?"

Never, even from the first moment of her discovery,
had she ever meant to say this.  This was not
Jane's method.  What flood of emotion had borne her
thus far out of her course?  Fully it had been her
intention to speak of Mary's friendship with Liddiard
as though it were a flippant and a passing thing; to
belittle it until, in its littleness, she had shown this
foolish sister of hers what folly it was.

How had it happened she had thus exaggerated its
importance by the heat of her words?  Something
had pricked and spurred her.  Something had driven
her beyond her control.  Finding herself opposed by
a force so infinitely greater than her own, she had
struggled and fought.  It had been a moment's
hysteria in the sudden consciousness of her impotence.
Then what power was it?  Not merely Mary herself.
She could not submit her mind to that admission.  It
was greater than Mary and yet, becoming the voice of
it, she felt that this sister of hers was greater than
herself.

To Mary, the shock of realization that Jane had
seen them that moment in the bracken was not one
that seemed to tremble or emotionalize her at all.  If
she felt any anger at the thought that she had been
spied upon--for swiftly recalling the place of that
happening, she knew Jane must have been in hiding,--it
was an anger that burnt out, like ignited powder,
a flash, no more.  It left no trace.  All her
consciousness assembled in her mind to warn her that the
meaning of Life which had come in those last two
weeks to her was in jeopardy of being made meaningless.
It did not frighten her, but set the beating
of her heart to a slow and deliberate measure.

Whatever Jane knew and however she intended to
use her knowledge, Mary determined to fight for this
new-found purpose of her existence.  If they were
fools, if theirs was the folly of waste, if they let all
life go by them to be worldly wise, she could not help
or wait for them now.

Something had come with its promise of fulfillment
to her, her nature urged her not to ignore.  What if
he was married?  There had been moments in the
inception and growth of their relationship when she
had thought first of his wife.  She thought first of
her no longer.  She was stealing no intrinsic thing.
In a few days he would go back to his house in
Somerset and what he had given her of his mind, as she had
seen, had been his to give her; and, if he had kissed
her, what had she stolen from his wife in that?  He
would still kiss his wife.  She knew that.  As plainly
as if they were there before her, she could see their
embrace.  It meant nothing to her.  They would not
be the same kisses he had given Mary.

Whatever had been the call of Nature to him in
that moment when passion had spoken out of his
lips, his eyes, the power she felt in his arms as they
crushed her, it had been not through the channel of
his body, but his mind.

Insensibly she was learning the multitudinous
courses by which Nature came to claim her own.
She was stealing nothing from his wife.  All that
was coming to her was her own and with the sudden
realization of Jane's knowledge of what had happened,
her first sensation was a warning that her very
soul was in jeopardy.

There was nothing to be said then; no defense that
she could, or cared to, offer.  She knew quite well
from those long years of knowledge, how horrible
their kisses must have seemed to Jane.  Once upon a
time, she might have thought them horrible herself.
Now, there was nothing to be said that might serve in
her defense.

Taking a deep breath, she looked straight in Jane's
eyes and stood there, arresting their movement on
the garden path to paint the defiant attitude of her mind.

"Well--if you've seen," said she, "you've seen.
There's no more to be said about it.  We've all lived
together so long, I suppose it's hard for any one of us
to realize that our lives are really all separate things.
You talk about it as being beastly.  I can assure you
there was nothing beastly in our minds.  However,
you must think whatever your mind suggests to you
to think, and you must start yourself all the talk about
us you say is bound to come when I'm seen about with
him, if you feel that way inclined.  But I'll tell you
just one thing--you can't make me ashamed of
myself.  I'm twenty-nine."

She turned away, walked with all the firmness of
her stride into the house and left Jane, standing there,
withered and dry between those borders of spreading
thrift and flowers all dropping their seed into the
mold that waited for them.





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.. class:: center large

   VIII

.. vspace:: 2

Liddiard was returning to Somerset in
three days' time.  Before their parting that
day above Penlock, he had urged for their
next meeting as soon as she was free of household
duties the following day.

"Only three more chances," said he, "of being
with you, and when I thought most I understood you,
understood you so well that my arms seemed the only
place in which to hold you, I find I understand you
less than ever.  You don't ask what it means.  You
don't say "What are we going to do?"  I've told
you I love you, but you don't appear to want to know
anything about the future.  It seems to me that any
other girl would be wanting to know what was to
become of her.  You're so quiet--so silent."

Climbing back down the cliffs, holding on to one
of the pine trees in her descent, Mary had turned and
smiled at him.  It was an inscrutable smile to
Liddiard.  It was not that he tried to understand it.  It
was, as it penetrated his mind, that he knew it to be
quite impossible of comprehension.  More it was as
if Nature had smiled upon him, than the mere bright
light of the parting of a woman's lips.  In its
illumination it seemed to reveal to him the vision of
himself in a strange powerlessness.  He felt like some
tool of a workman as it lies idle on the bench, waiting
the moment for those hands to pick it up and give it
purpose.  So it appeared to him might a carpenter
have smiled with pleasure at the chisel he knew his
hands could wield for perfect work.  All the more
that he had meant to say dried into silence on his lips.

"I don't want to know anything about the future,"
said Mary as she walked on, "I know you love me
and I think I understand what you love and why you
love.  I know I'm not sophisticated.  I've no
experience of the world.  I don't pretend to understand
these things in the light of experience.  I haven't got
any wisdom about it, but I feel it's not unreal or
impossible for you to love me and love your wife as
well.  I don't feel I want you to say you don't love
your wife in order to prove that you love me.  I think
it would finish everything in my mind if you said you
didn't love her.  I'm not thinking about the future,
because there is no future as you used the word.  I
don't ask what we're going to do, because I know
what we're going to do."

"What are we going to do?" he asked.

"In two days' time," she replied, "you're going
home to Somerset and I'm going to stay on here in
Bridnorth."

Suddenly she turned again swiftly and barred his
passage as he came along down the cliff path behind her.

"Why don't you understand me?" she asked
abruptly.  "It all seems so plain.  Don't you realize
how I've been brought up?  I know there's a certain
sacredness in marriage.  I've been trained to regard
it as one of the most unbreakable ties in the world.
I wouldn't dream of expecting or claiming anything
from you, however much you said you loved me.
Whatever happened, I shouldn't dream of that.
You're half afraid of it.  I can see you are.  I don't
love you any the less because I see it.  It seems
natural you should be afraid.  It seems to me most men
would be with most women.  But you needn't be."

She had let him be drawn close to her again.  He
put his hands on her shoulders and looked with all his
passion into her eyes.

"That's the first time you've said you loved," he
whispered.  "Do you know what it sounded like to me?"

She shook her head.

"Like an organ playing in an empty church.  My
God!  You're wonderful."

Then she had let him kiss her again; again,
herself, being the one to draw away when emotion rose
to stifling in her throat.  Again was he obedient to
her wishes.

They had arranged to meet the next morning on
the cliffs.  Liddiard had promised he would bring
lunch.

"They'll think we're up at the Golf dub," he had
said, for already in their minds had appeared that
urgency for deception which should secure for them
the certainty of their meeting.

But the next morning, after her conversation with
Jane, Mary dispatched a note to Liddiard at the
White Hart Hotel.

He tore it open with fingers that had dread in them.

.. vspace:: 2

"Meet me on the beach at 11.30," she had written,
"near the bathing tents.  Don't bother about lunch."

.. vspace:: 2

With a sudden chill it struck him.  It was all over.
The night had brought her calmer thoughts.  Emotion
was steadied in her now.  She was not going to
trust herself alone with him again.  It was all
finished.  On an impulse he took a piece of paper and
wrote on it--

.. vspace:: 2

"Have been called back to Somerset this morning; so
sorry I shall have no opportunity to say good-by."

.. vspace:: 2

When he had written, he stared at it, reading it
again and again.

Was not this the best?  It was too wonderful to be
true; too wonderful to last.  He knew himself well
enough to realize that any prolonged deception with
his wife would be impossible.  He had the honesty
of his emotions; the courage of his thoughts.  He
could not practice deception with any ease.
Wonderful as it was, could any wonder compensate for
the utter wrecking of his home?  It was not as
though in the wonder that had come to her, she
refused to recognize his wife.  That was what brought
him such amaze of her.  Any other woman he would
have expected to be jealous, exacting, cruel.  She
appeared to be none of these.

What, in the name of God, was it she wanted?
The sudden wish to understand, the sudden curiosity
to find out communicated with the energy in his
fingers.  He tore up the note he had written and flung
the pieces away, sending back the messenger without
a reply.

It was playing with life, a sport that in other men
earned for them his deepest contempt.  It was playing
with life, yet the call to it was greater than he
could or cared to resist.

At half-past eleven, he went down to the beach
where all the inhabitants of Bridnorth sat and whiled
away their time till the midday meal, and there he
found her, dressed with more care and more effect
than she had ever been before.  She was lying down
under the warm shade of a brilliantly colored
parasol and, as he approached her, it seemed to him that
there was a deeper beauty in her then than in any
other woman in the world.

"Why this?" he said as he sat down.  "Here of
all places?  Do you know very nearly I didn't come?"

"Yes, I was afraid of that," she replied.  "Afraid
for a moment.  Not really afraid.  But I couldn't
explain in my note."

"What is it then?"

"We were seen yesterday."

"Who by?"

"My sister--Jane."

"Seen where?"

"By that gate in the bracken."

He screwed up his mouth and bit at a piece of loose
skin on his lip.

"What's she going to do?" he asked.

"Nothing.  What can she do?  No one must know
if we meet again--that's all.  We must be more
careful."

He stared at her in bewildered astonishment.

"I don't understand you," he muttered.  "Sometimes
you seem like adamant when your voice is softest
of all."

She looked at him and with her eyes told him that
she loved him and with a little odd twist of her lips,
which scarcely she herself knew of, she kissed his lips
and at that distance at which he sat from her, he
felt the kiss like a leaf falling with a flutter to the
ground.

"What do you mean--we must be more careful?"
he said thickly.  "What do you mean by that?  How
can we be more careful?  Where else could we hope
to be more alone than on those
cliffs--unless--unless--"  His breath clung in his throat.  He
swallowed it back and went on in a hoarse
voice--"Unless it were the time we went there."

"What time?" she asked.

"Night," said he.  "Midnight and all the hours
of early morning."

She lay back on her cushion beneath the warm
shadow of her parasol and closed her eyes, saying
nothing while he sat staring at the curved line of her
throat.





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.. class:: center large

   IX

.. vspace:: 2

It was no difficult matter to rise unheard at
midnight in her room, unheard to creep quietly
downstairs, to open and close the kitchen door into the
yard.  Having accomplished that, it was but a few
steps to the door through the wall into the road.

Now that she slept alone in that room at the back
of the house, Mary had no fear of discovery.
Nevertheless her heart was beating, an even but heavy
throb, nor settling to the normal pulse, even when she
found herself out in the lane and turning towards
the path across the marshes by the mouth of the River
Watchett that leads a solitary way to Penlock Head.

She questioned herself in nothing that she did.
Her mind was made.  It was no moment for questioning.
All questions such as there had been, and
doubtless there were many, she had answered.  It
was no habit of hers to look back over her shoulder.
She fixed her destination with firm resolve, and, once
the fear of immediate discovery was left behind, she
walked with a firm stride.  Imagination played no
havoc with her nerves.  Already her heart was in
their meeting place.

A restive heart it was, all bounding at sudden
visions, leaping, shying; at moments in riot almost at
thought of lying in his arms.  Sometimes even there
was fear, a fear, not of the thing she would fly; not
a fear that made the heart craven.  Rather it was a
fear that steeled her courage to face whatever might
befall.

Some sense undoubted she had of the mad riot of
passion, that it could terrify, that it was frightening
like sudden thunder bursting.  But just as she would
lie still in her bed at home through the fiercest storm,
so now she knew, however deep her fear, that she
would not complain.

She walked that way through the marshes to their
meeting place at the foot of Penlock Hill like one,
firm in her step, who went to a glorious death.
Death was terrible, but in all the meaning it had, she
felt no fear of it.

In such manner as this did Mary Throgmorton go
to the confirmation of her faith in Life, and behind
her, in the square, white house, she left one to the
bitterest of its realizations.

Fanny could not sleep that night.  Near midnight,
she lit a candle and began to read.  But no reading
could still the unsettled temper of her mind.  Again
and again her eyes lifted from the printed page,
seeking corners of the room where, in that candlelight,
the shadows gathered, harbor for the vague
wandering of her thoughts.

Long after midnight, in the communicating silence
which falls about a sleeping house, she heard a sound
and sat up in bed.  Some one had opened and shut
the gate into the lane.  She got up and went to the
window.  If any one passed into the road in front
of the house, she must see them.  No one came.  All
was silence again.

Yet something within her insisted upon her
conviction that she had not been mistaken.  Some one
had left the house and, if they had turned the other
way, could not possibly have been seen by her.

In that midnight silence, the fantastic shapes the
beams of the candle cast, the heavy darkness of the
night outside, slight as the incident was, grossly
exaggerated it in her mind.  She felt she must tell some
one.  Jane was the person to tell.  Jane's fancies were
slowly stirred.  She might turn it all to ridicule, but
if anything were the matter, she would be practical at
least.

Slipping her arms into her dressing gown, she went
out onto the landing.  The door of Jane's room was
at the further end.  As she passed Mary's door on
her way, something came out of the recesses of her
mind and took her heart and held it fast.

Mary's door was open.  She stood there staring at
it while all the pulses in her body accelerated to the
stimulus of her imagination.

Always Mary slept with her door closed.  It was
not to be understood how she had departed from that
habit now that she slept alone.  Why had she chosen
to sleep alone?  Was it more definite a reason than
Fanny had supposed?  What more definite than
thoughts of love?

Scarcely aware of the change of her intentions or
that Jane for the instant had dropped completely out
of her thoughts, Fanny pushed open the door and
softly entered Mary's room.

Just within the threshold, she stopped, half held by
darkness and whispered Mary's name.

"Mary--Mary--"

There was no reply.  There was no sound of
breathing.  Never had the whole world seemed so
still.  She was faintly conscious that her eyes were
staring wide in that darkness, staring to find softly
what she knew now the dazzling glitter of a light
would reveal to her in all its startling truth.  All
beating of her heart appeared to be arrested as she
felt her way across the room to the bedside table where
she knew the box of matches lay.  Something
fluttered in her thin breast, like a thing suspended in
mid-air, but it had no relation to the passage of the blood
through her veins.  It seemed to need purchase, a
solid wall against it before it could beat again.  Yet
no solid wall was there.  Flesh and bones in all her
substance, Fanny felt as though in those moments her
body were a floating thing in an ether of sensation.
She found the matches.  With fingers that were
damp and cold, she struck one.  It flamed up with
blinding brightness into her staring eyes.  She closed
them swiftly and then she looked.

The bed was empty.  Their Mary was away.
With trembling fingers, she lit the candle; then
gazed down at the crumpled bedclothes, the sheets
thrown back, the pillow tossed.

With automatic calculation she leant down and
felt the bedclothes with her hand as one feels a thing
just dead.

They were warm--still warm.  And where now
was the body that had warmed them?

With a sudden catch in her throat that was not a
sob and had no more moisture of tears in it than a
thing parched dry with the sun, she flung herself
down on the bed and leant her body against the warm
sheets and buried her head in the warm pillow,
fighting for her breath like some frightened beast that
has been driven to the last of all its hiding places.





.. vspace:: 4



.. class:: center large

   X

.. vspace:: 2

They met in silence on the worn path at the
foot of Penlock Hill; two black figures
joining in the darkness and, without word of
greeting, without question of the way, turning by
common consent towards the moors and vanishing
into the pine trees.

Never was their silence broken while they climbed
the hill.  They had breath for that ascent, but no
more.  Coming to a steep place, he offered his hand
to help her and then still held it till they reached the
moors.

It was a late rising moon that crept up, shimmering
wet with its pale light out of the sea.  They stood
with the heather about their knees and watched it,
hand in hand, still silent; but he felt her trembling
and she heard when he swallowed in his throat.

"It had to be a night like this," he said presently
when the moon at last rose clear and the light seemed
to fall from her in glittering drops that splashed like
pieces of silver into the sea.  "I know this is the one
night of my life," he went on.  "I know there'll
never be moments like it again as long as I live.
Perhaps you don't believe that.  You'll think I've said
such things before; yet the whole of my existence,
past, present and future, is all crowded into this hour.
I know I shall realize it the more fully as I grow
older and Time wipes Time away."

She clung to his arm.  It was now she was most
afraid.  The moors were so still about them.  Down
in its hollow amongst the firs and the misshapen oaks,
the farm lay silent and black.  No light was there.
She thought of them asleep in their beds.  So
sleeping, she thought of Hannah, Jane, and Fanny.  Only
they two were awake in all the world it seemed.
Only for some vague yet impelling purpose did the
world exist at all and alone for them.

She did not feel at his mercy.  She was not afraid
of him.  Indeed she clung to his arm as they stood
in the heather, clung to his arm, trembling, appealing
as though he alone were left between herself and
Fate to soften it; as though to less terrible a note, he
could still the sound of voices shouting in her ears.

These were sensations she had no words for.

"You stand there trembling," he said in a whisper.
"What are you thinking of, my dear?"

"It's all so quiet," she whispered in reply, and a
short laugh with no mirth in it escaped from her
throat.  "I don't know why I should expect or want
it to be anything else."

"And do you want it to be anything else?"

"I suppose I must, or I shouldn't have said that."

"My dear, are you afraid?"

She jerked her head, reluctant to give assent to that.

No wonder, he thought.  My God, no wonder
women are afraid.  If anything should happen,
she'll have the brunt of it.  Wouldn't I be afraid if I
were her?

Such thoughts as these caught him to hesitation a
moment stronger than the urging passion in his blood.

Was it fair to her?  This girl, who in that stagnating
corner of the world knew so little, was it fair?
Hadn't he strength to resist it even now; to turn their
steps back; to let her go, the great-hearted thing she
was, as he had found her?  If it might be the one
moment in his life to him, would it be the less for
letting it pass by?  Would realization make it the
greater?  Might it not make it the less?

A surging desire to be master of himself swept over
him.  A rushing inclination to protect her from the
forces of Nature in himself took louder voice than all
his needs.  She was too wonderful to spoil with the
things that might happen in a sordid world.

For what would they say and think, those sisters of
hers, and what sort of hell would life become for
her in those narrow streets of little Bridnorth?

It was no good saying things might not happen.

What right had he to subject her to chance?  She
was too fine, too great of heart for that.  With all
the generosity of her soul she had placed herself in
his hands, it was for him to save her even now, before
it was too late.  She was afraid.  Then if there were
a God who gave men strength, he could be strong
enough to let her go.

He held her even the tighter with his fingers as in
his mind he set her free.

"Mary," he said, "I told you it was strength, not
weakness that made me kiss you.  I expect you didn't
believe that.  It was true.  And I feel stronger now
than then.  We're going back again, my dear, now,
without waiting, I couldn't stay here longer.  We're
going back."

"Where?"

She said it in her breath.

"Back to Bridnorth--to our beds.  I love you,
my dear, that's why we're going back."

She felt a sudden chill and shivered.

"Back?" she whispered.  No other word but that
could her mind grasp.

As swiftly then the chill blew by.  She felt as
though she stood in scorching flames, as if the very
heather were alight about her.  There was pain and
it gave her a fierce power she never thought she had
possessed.  It brought her anger to think she could
suffer so much for such return.

Back?  They could not go back!  Not now!  She
had been through it all.  This that must happen was
just a moment.  It was nothing to the hours her mind
had lived till then.

She took off her hat and flung it down beside her in
the heather.

"It's stifling, this heat," she muttered.  "Everything
seems burning."

He saw her throw down her hat.  He heard what
she said.  The blood that had been strong like a
courageous wine, turned all to water in his veins.  He
felt his limbs trembling.  Something in her was
stronger than the greatest purpose he had ever had
in his life.  It was a purpose he felt might be even
stronger than she, yet knew he could not make it so.

It occurred to him, with an ironical laugh in the
thought, that she was master of their moments and
not he.  And yet not she herself.  Men were the
stronger sex.  That was an inherent thought,
whatever might be said in abstract argument.  Coming to
such a moment in life as this, it was the man who must
direct.  With all the violence of his passions, he
could still control.

This, with a loud voice, he told himself in his mind.
Yet there was her hat lying in the heather and there
in his ears were the sounds of her breathing as she
stood beside him.  His eyes fell upon her breast that
rose and fell as her heart beat beneath it and he knew
the current he had breasted with such confidence of
power was bearing him back.  In all his bodily
consciousness then, it was as though his will were failing.

One last effort he made.  Stooping, he picked up
her hat.

"Shall we go now?" he said.

She swung in an instant's unsteadiness as she stood
before him, but made no movement otherwise.  One
fear had gone in her, thrusting another in its place.
Something terrified her now, a fear in her heart that
over-rode all bodily fear.

If he should win in purpose now, the world were
such an empty mockery of life as she well knew she
had no strength to face.  Hannah, Jane, Fanny, they
might have survived the hollow meaninglessness of it
all.  They might have taken place in the senseless
procession of Time, puppets of women, wasted lives in the
thrusting crowd.  Never could she fall in with them now.

Yet what was it she was struggling against?
Something that had its purpose as well as she?
Somehow she sensed it was the laws that men had
made for the best of women to live by.  He was
attempting the best that was in him.  But she had no
pity for that.  If love and contempt, passion and
disgust can link in one, they met together in her then.

She never knew she thought all this.  It was not in
words she thought it.  But those laws were wrong--all
wrong.  Possession was the very texture of them
and all through the intricate fabric of life, she knew
possession did not count.  In instinct, reaching back,
beyond the most distant consciousness of mind, she
felt there was no possession in the world.  No more
would she belong to him than he to her.  It was he
who must give that which she most needed to take.
And why had it resolved itself into this struggle,
when all she had ever heard or known of men was
nothing but the eagerness of passion to express desire?

These were not thoughts.  Through all her
substance they swept, a stream of voiceless impulses that
had more power than words.

"We're not going now," she said in a strange
quietness.  "We didn't come here to go back.  Not as we
came."

Suddenly she put her hands upon his shoulders.
He could feel her breath warm and though her voice
was so close, it came from far away like the voices
of the sirens calling which he knew would always call
and which he knew a man must stop his ears and bind
his limbs to resist.

"Do you want me to say it?" she whispered.
"I'm yours--this moment I'm yours.  For God's
sake take me now."

It all was darkness then.  The moon had no light
for them.  The very stars were blotted out and far
away across the moors, with its insistent note, a
night-jar whistled to its mate.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`PHASE III`:

.. class:: center x-large

   PHASE III

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large

   I

.. vspace:: 2

Many times Fanny tried to speak of that
night and of the night that followed before
Liddiard went away, but there was a
strange serenity in Mary's face in those days which
suppressed all Fanny's emotions of sympathy,
confidence and vital curiosity.

There were times when she hoped Mary might
speak herself, if not of what actually had happened,
at least in some measure of Liddiard and herself.
Ever since their youth, being much of an age
together, sharing the same room, they had had few
secrets from each other.  If she were to ask no more
than Fanny's opinion of Liddiard, it would have
afforded loophole for confidence.  One discussion
would have led to another.  If necessary, Fanny
would even have revived in her memory all that she
had told Mary about her own little tragedy on those
cliffs.  To have gained that confidence every sense
in her needed so much, she would have suffered the
crudest flagellation of memory; the more cruel it
was, the more exquisite would have been her pain.

But never had Mary been more aloof.  Never had
she been more distant and reserved.  To Hannah
perhaps, if to any, she showed an even closer
affection, sometimes helping her with the teaching of her
children and every day spending an hour and even
more in their prattling company.

For long walks she went alone.  Frequently at
night, when she had retired to her room and Fanny
on some feminine pretext came to her door, she found
it locked.

"What is it?" asked Mary from within.

"Just Fanny."

"What do you want?"

"Oh--nothing!  I wondered if you'd finished
with that book."  Such as this might be her excuse.

"Yes, I have.  I left it downstairs in the dining-room."

"Well--good-night, Mary."

"Good-night, Fanny."

No more than this.  That locked door seemed
symbolical of Mary in those days.  So had she barred all
entrance to her soul from them and like the Holy of
Holies behind the locked gates of the Temple was
inapproachable to their unsanctified feet.

And all this seeming was no less than the actual
truth.  To Mary her body had indeed become the
sanctuary, the very chalice of the Host of sacred
things.  She knew she was going to have a child.
Such knowledge was pure folly and had no foundation
upon fact.  It lay only in her imagination.

Yet lying awake at night and waking early in the
mornings with the first light the sun cast into her
room, she had sensations, inventions only of the
fancy, that were unmistakable to her.

Already she was conscious of the dual life of her
being.  Such had happened to her as indeed had
separated her in difference from them all in that house.

Her thoughts of Liddiard were glowing thoughts.
Sometimes as she lay, half sleeping in her bed, she felt
him there beside her.  But in all her fully conscious
moments, she had no need of his return.

Their meetings upon the cliffs those two nights
before he had gone from Bridnorth, had left her calm
rather than excited.  Almost she would have resented
his actual presence in her life just then.  In the
distance which separated them, she felt the warm sense
of that part of her being he had become; but his
absence was not fretting her with the need of his
embraces.  No furnace of sexual inclination had there
been set alight in her.  In this respect he had not
differenced her.  She was the same Mary Throgmorton
of outwardly passionless stone, only the hidden
flame he had set light within her was that, unquenchable,
which the stress of circumstance in time would
burn with such a fervid purpose as none of them could
stay.

Behind that locked door of her bedroom the night
after his departure, she sat and wrote to him.  A
short letter it was, free of restraint, as though across
some narrow space dividing them, she had just called
out of her heart to him and laughed.

.. vspace:: 2

"I love you," she wrote.  "Don't let it interfere with
life.  You have given some greater thing than you could
ever dream of, and need not think of breaking hearts or
things that do not happen in a healthy world.  I am not
thinking of the future.  For just these few moments, the
present is wonderful enough.  Just because I belong to
you, I sign myself--YOUR MARY."

.. vspace:: 2

Herself, with jealous hands, that morning she
posted it and when she came back to the house a
letter from him was awaiting her.

Both Jane and Fanny watched her as, with an
amazing calmness, she picked it up and put it in her
lap.

Both, knowing what they knew, were swift to ask
themselves again, was this their Mary who had grown
so confident with love.

A smile of expectation twitched about Jane's lips
as Hannah, simple as a child, inquired who it was
had written.

This would confuse her, Jane thought, and almost
with the eagerness of spite, she waited for the
flaming cheeks, for all the discomfort of her lip and eye.

Mary looked up quietly from her plate.  Almost
she felt sorry for them then that they were ignorant
of all she knew.  What was there to hide in telling
them that?  She realized Jane knew.  She felt her
waiting for those signs of the distressing confusion
of a guilty heart.  She had no guilt in her heart.
She was not ashamed.  They had no power to shame her.

"It's from Mr. Liddiard," she replied openly.

"Mr. Liddiard!" repeated Hannah.  "What's he
writing to you about?"

"I shall know when I read the letter," replied Mary
quietly.

"I wonder how you can manage to wait till then,"
said Jane.

"I don't suppose it's very important," said
Hannah, and Jane laughed, but Fanny could bear it no
longer.  None of them knew what she knew.  She
left the room.





.. vspace:: 4



.. class:: center large

   II

.. vspace:: 2

Alone to her room, Mary brought her
letter.  That room had become the chapel of
her most sacred thoughts.  There, in that
house, she was alone.  There, as though it were the
very script of her faith, she brought her letter and,
locking the door, took it across to her chair by the
window and sat down.

There was something she needed in this message
from him.  Courage had not failed her.  No pricks
of conscience fretted her peace of mind.  More it was
that in the conventional outlook of that house, in the
atmosphere indeed of all Bridnorth, she felt set aside.
Nor did she fear to be thus separated.  Only it was
at moments that it was chill.  At times she shivered
as though the cold edge of a draught through
unsuspected chinks had found her out and for the moment
set back the temperature of her courage.

Merely momentary were these misgivings.  With
a shaking of her shoulders, she could dispel them.
The touch of his hand across that distance which
separated them, the sound of his voice, all to be contained
in her letter, these would drive them utterly away.

Alone there in that house, she needed her letter and
her fingers were warm and her heart was beating with
a quiet assurance as she tore open the envelope.

"Mary--" it began.  She liked that.  Her heart
answered to it.  It was not the passionate embrace
she sought; rather it was the firm touch of a hand
in her own.  This simple use of her name fully gave
it her.

.. vspace:: 2

"Mary--I have been wanting to write to you, my dear,
ever since I came home.  I even tried in the train coming
back when, not only my hand on the paper, but it seemed
my mind as well, were so jolted about that I gave it up
as a bad job.

"I want you to believe, my dear, that I know my own
weakness, but only for your sake do I honestly regret it.
For myself, I have no real regrets at all.  Knowing you,
as I have done, has made a greater fullness in my life.
Knowing me, as you have done, can only have brought
bitterness and, I am ashamed to think of it, perhaps shame
to yours."

.. vspace:: 2

Mary laid the letter down in her lap.  Fingers of
ice were touching on her heart.  He thought he had
brought her shame.  Shame?  What shame?  If
with his wife it were greater fullness to him, what
fullness must it not be to her with none other than
him beside her?  She picked up the letter and the
pupils of her eyes as she read on were sharpened to
the finest pinpoints.

.. vspace:: 2

"I blame myself utterly and I blame myself alone.
Life was all new to you.  It was not new to me.  I should
have had the courage of my experience.  If my character
had been worth anything at all, I ought to have had the
will of restraint even to the last.  I wonder will you ever
forgive me, for believe me, my dear, it is a great wish in
my heart, always to be thought well of by you.  I suppose
thoughts are prayers and if they are, then you do not
know how often I pray that nothing may happen to you.
But if my thoughts are not answered and you have to
suffer, for my weakness, you may know I will do all I
can.  None need ever know.  With care that could be
achieved, but we will not talk of that yet, or will I think
of it if I can help it until you let me know for certain.
Not once did you mention it, even after the first time we
were alone in the wonderful still night on those cliffs.
So many another woman would.  So many another would
have reckoned the cost before she knew the full account.
You said nothing.  You are wonderful, Mary, and if
any woman deserves to escape the consequences of
passion, it is you."

.. vspace:: 2

Again she laid the letter down.  For a while she
could read no more.  The consequences of passion!
Reckoned the cost!  The full account!  God!  Was
that the little mind her own had met with?

None need ever know!  With care that could be
achieved!  She started to her feet in sudden impulse
of feeling that her body held a hateful thing.
Instinctively she turned to the mirror on her dressing
table, standing there some moments and looking at
her reflection, as though in her face she might find
truly whether it were hateful or not.

Seemingly she found her answer, for as she stood
there, without the effort of speech or conscious
motion of the muscles of her throat, the words came
between her lips--"Fear not, Mary--"  Scarcely did
she know she had said them, yet, nevertheless, they
were the voice of something more deep and less
approachable than the mere thoughts of her mind.

It was not hateful.  There was all of wonder and
something more beautiful about it than she could
express.

Had she been told she was to receive such a letter,
she would have feared to open it lest it should destroy
courage and make hideous the very sight of life.  But
in trust and confidence having opened it, and in
gradual realization having read, its effect upon her had
been utterly different from what she might have
anticipated.

Such an effect as this upon any other woman it
might have had.  But this Mary Throgmorton was
of imperishable stone, set, not in sheltered places, or
protected from the winds of ill-repute, but apart and
open for all the storms of heaven to beat upon with
failing purpose to destroy.

It may have alienated her that letter.  Indeed it
cut off and put her consciously alone.  She knew in
that moment she no longer loved.  She knew how in
the deepest recesses of her soul there did not live a
father to her child.  It was hers.  It was hers alone.
If this was a man, then men were nothing to women.
Two nights of burning passion he had been with her
and for those moments they had been inseparably
one.  But now he had gone as though the whole world
divided them.  The future was hers, not his.  With
that letter he had cancelled all existence in the
meaning of life.  There was no meaning in him.  A mere
shell of empty substance had fallen from her.  To
herself she seemed as though she were looking from a
great height down which that hollow thing fluttered
into the nothingness of space, leaving her in a radiant
ether that none could enter or disturb.

Then of a sudden and in all consciousness now,
there came with rushing memory into her mind, the
thought of that sermon at Christmas time.

"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God."

She repeated the words aloud; hearing them now
as she spoke them in her throat and knowing, with all
the fullness of its meaning to her, the realization it
gave expression to when she voiced the thought which
that day in church had followed it.

"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"

Might there not indeed, as here with her, have been
no father at all?  The mere servant of Nature,
whipped with passion to her purpose, then feared by
the laws he and his like had made to construct a world;
feared by them, disemboweled by them and by Nature
herself driven out and cast aside.

It was not that these ideas had any definite
substance of thought in her mind.  Those few words she
repeated aloud.  The rest had merely stirred in her
like some nebulous form of life, having neither shape
nor power of volition.

She did not know to what plane of thought she had
raised herself.  She did not appreciate any distinct
purpose that it brought.  All she knew and in a form
of vision, was that she was alone; that it was not a
hateful thing her body held; that she was possessed of
something no power but tragic Fate could despoil her
of; that it was something over which she had direct
power of perfecting in creation; that in the essence of
her womanhood, she was greater than he who at the
hands of Nature had been driven to her arms and
left them, clasping that air which, in her ears, was
full of the voices of life, full of the greatest meaning
of existence.





.. vspace:: 4



.. class:: center large

   III

.. vspace:: 2

For three days she left this letter unanswered,
tempted at moments to misgiving about
herself and the future that spread before her,
yet always in ultimate confidence, rising above the
mood that assailed her.

On the third day, receiving another letter of the
same remorseful nature, begging her to write and say
she was not in her silence thinking the worst of him,
she sent her reply.  To the sure dictation of her
heart, she wrote--

.. vspace:: 2

"I have never thought about forgiveness, not once.  I
can scarcely believe you wrote these two letters which I
have received.  Do you remember once we talked about
women wasting their lives beneath the burden of
prejudice?  You were the one man I had ever met, you were
the one man, I thought, in all the world, who understood
the truth about women.  But I suppose there is something
in the very nature of men that makes it impossible for
them to realize the simple forces that make us what we
are.  All they see are the thousand conventionalities they
have set about us to complicate us.  We are not
complicated.  It is only the laws that make us appear so.

"That first of our two nights on the cliffs, did you find
me complicated or difficult of understanding?  I showed,
as well as gave you myself and this is how you have
treated that revelation.  I will not let it make me unhappy.
It could so deeply if I allowed it to get the upper hand.
If I need anything now, now that I know I am going to
have a child--don't be frightened yet, I only feel it in
my heart--do you think it is help or advice for
concealment?  Do you think it is any assistance to me to
know that all the world will be ashamed of me, but only
you are not?

"Why do you even hint about shame to me?  Did you
think I shared what you call your weakness?  Did you
think for those moments that, as you say of yourself, I
forgot or lost restraint?

"Never write to me again.  Unfortunately for me, it is
you most of all who could succeed in making me feel
ashamed and I will not be ashamed.  What lies before me
is not to be endured but to be made wonderful.  Will
shame help me to do that?

"Perhaps you think I am an extraordinary woman.
You say to yourself, 'Well, if that's her nature, it can't be
helped, we've got to go through with it.'  You would not
believe me if I told you that all women in their essence
are the same.  It is only with so many that the prize of
self-advancement, the hollow dignity of social position,
the chimera--I don't know if I've spelt it right--of
good repute, all of which you offer them if they obey the
laws you have made to protect your property, are more
attractive and alluring than the pain and discomfort and
difficulty of bringing children into a competitive world.
But you call this the line of least resistance.

"Because you find the majority of women so ready to
be slaves to your laws do you imagine that they are not in
essence the same as me?  But starve one of those women
as I and my sisters have been starved by circumstance,
deny to her the first function which justifies her existence
by the side of men with their work, as thousands and
thousands are denied, taking in the end any husband who
will fulfill their needs of life, and you will find her
behave as I behaved.

"I have to thank you for one thing.  Since I met you,
my mind has opened out and in a lot of things, such as
these which I am writing, I can think in words what a lot
of women only feel but cannot express.  I have to thank
you too, that for those moments I loved.  So many women
don't even do that, not as they understand love.

"All that time together, playing golf, walking and talking
on the cliffs, I felt our minds were at one.  That with
a woman is the beginning of love.  All unities follow
inevitably after that.  It is not so with men.  Your letters
prove it to me.  Perhaps this is why the formality of
marriage is so necessary to make a screen for shame.  I
wonder if you realize in how many married women it is
a screen and no more.  I know now that to my own
mother it was no more than that.

"I had no shame then.  I loved.  Loving no longer, I
still now have no shame because, and believe me it is not
in anger, we have no cause to meet again.  I know I am
going to have a child.  I know he is going to be wonderful
if I can make him so.  I shall get my love from him as he
grows in years and I am sure there is only one love.
Passion is only an expression of it.  My life will be fuller
than yours with all the possessions you have.  Bringing
him up into the world will absorb the whole heart of me.

"Oh, my dear--I feel a great moment of pain to think
what we have lost and truly I do not forget my gratitude
for what I have gained.  Never worry yourself in your
thoughts by what you imagine I shall have to face.  I
know what my sisters will say, but what they will say
will be no expression of the envy they will feel.  I am
quite human enough to find much courage in that.

"When it comes, I expect I shall leave Bridnorth.  I
confess I am not a Bombastes.  I shall hide my shoes in
my cupboard, but none shall step into them, nevertheless.

"I hate to say this and do not say it in any backbiting
spirit.  I know you will think you have to support me.
You have not.  Fortunately my share of what we girls
have is enough to support me and enable me to bring him
up as I mean him to be brought up.  So please send me
nothing.  It would hurt me to hurt you by returning it.

"I do not think I can say any more.  I count them up--six
sheets of paper.  Yet I believe you will read them all.

.. class:: noindent

   "Good-by."





.. vspace:: 4



.. class:: center large

   IV

.. vspace:: 2

In the appointed time, Mary knew that the reality
of her life had come to her.  At the first
opportunity after the sureness of her knowledge,
she attended Holy Communion in Bridnorth church.
It was not so much to pray she went, as to wait in
that silence which falls, even upon the unimaginative
mind, during the elevation of the host and all the
accompanying ceremony of the rubric.

She asked no favor of her God.  She waited.  She
said no prayers.  She listened.  It was a spiritual
communion, beyond the need of symbols, above the
necessity of words.  Psychology has no function to
describe it.  It was her first absolute submission of
both mind and body to the mystery of life.  Here
consciously, she felt she could do nothing.  Here, as
it might be, was the instant of conception.  Whatever
it was, whether it were God or Nature, this was the
moment in which she held herself in suspension,
feeling she had no conscious part to play.

When she rose from her knees, it was with an inner
and hidden knowledge of satisfaction that she had
passed successfully through some ordeal of her soul;
that whatever it was within her, it had not failed in
the supreme test of her being; that, in a word, she
was a woman at last and that life had justified itself
in her.

If such a moment there be as this instant of
conception; if in her soul where no words conceal and no
thoughts have substance, a woman can spiritually be
aware of it, such an instant this was in the life of
Mary Throgmorton.

From this moment onward, she set her mind upon
definite things.  In two months' time she had planned
everything that she was to do.

Passing once through Warwickshire lanes one summer
when she had been staying with friends in Henley-in-Arden,
a storm of rain had driven them for shelter.
They had come to the towpath of the canal near by
where it flows into the lock at Lonesome Ford when
the clouds that had been threatening all day heaped
up to thunder and broke above them with a sudden
deluge of rain.

Sharply from the towpath where they walked, the
ground rose in high banks of apple orchard, through
the trees of which, on the top of the hill, could just
be seen the half-timbered gables of an old farmhouse.

Taking a gap in the hedge and climbing the
orchard hill, they had hastened there for shelter.  It
was close upon tea-time.  The farmer's wife had let
them in.

She was a sour-visaged woman, slow and sparing of
speech, yet in the silent, considerate way she gave
them welcome and tended to their wants, there had
been something intangible yet inviting that attracted
Mary to her.

With an expression upon her long, thin and deeply
lined face that suggested resentment to them all, she
showed them into the best parlor, the room that had
its black horsehaired sofa, its antimacassars on all
the chairs, its glass cases containing, one a stuffed
white owl, the other a stuffed jay; the room where the
family Bible lay on a home-worked mat reposing on
a small round table; the room that had nothing to do
with their lives, but was an outward symbol of them
as God-fearing and cleanly people.

In time Mary came to learn that with those who
work upon the land, there are no spare moments; that
the duties and demands of the earth know no Sabbath
day of rest.  That afternoon, she pictured them on
Sundays in that room, with hands folded in their laps,
reading perhaps with quaint intonations and
inflections from the massive volume on its crocheted mat.
It was never as thus she saw them.

As they went by, catching a glimpse of the parlor
kitchen with its heavy beams of oak in the ceiling,
she had wished they might have had their tea there.
But the old lady was too unapproachable for her to
ask such a favor then.  In the best parlor they sat,
eating the bread and butter and homemade bullace
jam which she had brought them, commenting upon
the enlarged photographs in their gilt frames on the
walls.

One picture there was of a young girl, a very early
photograph which had suffered sadly from unskillful
process of enlargement.  Yet unskillful though it
had been, the photograph had not been able to destroy
its certain beauty.  Mary had called her friends'
attention to it, but it seemed they could not detect the
beauty that she saw.

"I don't think a long face like that is beautiful in
a woman," one of them had said.

"I didn't mean the features," replied Mary.
"She looks--"

She stopped, words came in no measure with her
thoughts in those days.  But when the farmer's wife
had returned later to inquire if they wanted any more
bread and butter cut, she questioned her with an
interest none could have resented as to who the girl
might be.

"Is she a daughter of yours?" asked Mary.

"Darter?"  She shook her head and where
another woman might have smiled at the compliment of
Mary's interest, she merely turned her eyes upon the
portrait as though she looked across the years at some
one who had gone away.  "That was me," said she.
"It was took of me three days afore I was married.
My old man had it out a few years ago and got it
made big like that.  Waste of money I told him."

And with that, having learnt their needs, she went
out of the room.

It was later, when they had finished tea, and the sun
was striking through the lace curtains into that room,
almost obliterating its artificialities, when indeed they
knew the storm was over, they left the parlor and
finding the farmer with his wife in the kitchen, came
there asking what they must pay.

"We beant settin' out to provide teas," she replied
with no gratuity of manner in her voice.

"I guess you didn't come lookin' for tea," said the
farmer, who had evidently talked it over with her and
decided what they should do and say--"The storm
drove 'ee."

While her friends stood arguing upon the issue,
Mary had looked about her, observing the warm color
of the brick-paved floor, the homely sense of confidence
in the open chimney with its seats at either side,
the jar of wild flowers, all mingled, that stood upon
the window sill, the farmer's gun on its rest over the
mantel-shelf; then the farmer and his wife themselves.

Once having seen that enlarged portrait, she knew
well what it was that attracted her to the sour visage,
the uninviting expression and the attenuated features
of the farmer's wife.  The girl she had been, the
wistful creature she had set out for company with through
life, somewhere, lurking, was in company with her
still.  She needed the finding, that was all.

"Waste of money," she had told him.  There lay
much behind that accusation; much that Mary if she
had had time would have liked to find out.

The farmer himself, at first glance, would have
taken the heart of any one.  He smiled at them as he
spoke with an ingenuous twinkle of good humor in
his eyes.  A mere child he was; a child of the land.
Such wisdom as he had, of the land it was.  The
world had nothing of it.  His thoughts, his emotions,
they were in the soil itself.  Adam he was, turned
out of his garden, scarce conscious of the flaming
sword that had driven him from the fruitful places,
but seeking the first implement his hands could find
to toil with and bring the earth to good account.

Unable to persuade these two that they should give
any return for the meal they had had, they expressed
their gratitude as best they could and went away.  It
was not until they had come back through the sloping
orchard and were again upon the towing path of the
canal, that Mary thought of the possibility of
returning there at some other time.

The simplicity of the life of those two, the sense
she had had of that nearness to the earth they lived
on had touched her imagination deeper than she knew.

"Just wait for me a moment," said she.  "I must
go back--" when, before they could ask her reason,
she had left them and was running back through the
orchard.

The door which led into the parlor kitchen was
opened to her knocking by the farmer's wife.  Face
to face with her purpose, she stammered in confusion
as she spoke.

"I know you don't think of supplying teas or
anything like that," she said awkwardly--"but I do so
like your--your farm, your house here, that I
wondered if there'd ever be any chance of coming back
again for a little while; staying here I mean.  I
wondered if you would let me a room and--if there'd be
any trouble about providing me with meals, then let
me get them for myself.  I should like to come here
so much that I had to come back, just to ask."

With no change of expression, no sign of pleasure
at Mary's appreciation of their home, the farmer's
wife looked round at her husband still seated at his
tea and said,

"Well--what do 'ee think, Mr. Peverell?"

His mouth was full.  He passed the back of his
hand across it in the effort of swallowing to make
way for words and then, as best he could, he mumbled,

"'Tis for you to say, Missis.  'Twon't stop me
milking cows or cuttin' barley."

She turned to Mary.

"'Ee'd have a mighty lot to do for 'eeself," she had
said--"If 'ee come, 'twould be no grand lodging.
'Ee'd be one of us."

What better, she had thought.  To be one of them
was to be one with everything about them, the fruit
trees in the orchards, the dead leaves and the new.
Even then, although she never knew it clearly, the
fruitful scents of the earth had entered and for long
were to linger in her nostrils.

It was not that she had any knowledge of the soil,
or could have explained to herself how one crop should
follow another.  She knew nothing of the laws a
farmer lives by, the servant of Nature that he is, or
the very earth he grows to be a part of and learns
to finger as it were the very ingredient of his being.

She had not been trained to reason.  All that she
felt of the attraction of that place did not suggest
itself in the direct progression of purposes to her
mind.  There were the odors of life in the air.  She
took them in through her senses alone.  Through her
senses alone she knew their fecundity.  That fruitfulness
it was which filtered like drops of some magic
elixir into her blood.

It had been two years since she went that day to
Yarningdale Farm, yet the odors still lingered, calling
some sense and purpose in her soul which, until the
sermon at that Christmas-time and following her
meeting with Liddiard, had been all vague, illusive and
intangible.

Now, with more assurance, she knew.  In that old
farmhouse, if they would have her, she was going to
bring her child into the world.  There, in what seemed
not the long but the speedy months to her, she was
going to breathe in the scents of the earth, absorbing
the clean purposes of life as they are set forth in the
tilling of the soil, the sowing of the seed, the reaping
of the harvest.

It was to be close to the very earth itself she needed.
There is no clear line of argument to trace in a
woman's mind.  Her marriage bed had been the
heathered moors.  The scent of the earth had been
all about her as she lay in Liddiard's arms.  No soft
or spotless pillows had there been for her head to
rest on.  In no garments had she decked herself for
his embrace.  No ceremony had there been, no
formalities observed.  There was nothing that had
happened to associate it in her mind with the conventional
wedding night, blessed by the church, approved of by all.

If blessing there had been, and truly she felt there
had, then the stars had blessed them, the soft wind
from off the sea across the heather roots had touched
her with its fingers; the dark night with all its
silence had been full approval in her heart.

And he who was to come out of such a union as
that, what else could he be but a wild, uncultivated
thing?  A seed falling from the tree, not sowed by
the hand of man in exotic places; a young shoot
finding its soil in the rotting fibers of earth that only
Nature had prepared; a green bough that Nature only
in her wildest could train, fighting its way upwards
through the forest shades to the clear brilliance of the
eternal light.

Such she felt he was.  As such she meant him to
be.  There was no science in her purpose, no clear
argument of thought.  No reason other than this first
impression she had had can be traced to justify the
determination to which she came.

To Mrs. Peverell she wrote asking if they could let
her have their little room beneath the eaves of the
thatch when, hearing it was vacant, she replied that
she would come down for a day or two and see them
first.

But before she went, one thing had she set herself
to perform.  Now her sisters must know.  Her mind
was prepared.  It was Hannah she determined to tell.





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   V

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It was a morning in the middle of the week, after
the children's lessons were over.  With eyes
that recorded intangible impressions to her mind,
Mary watched her eldest sister kissing each one as they
went.  With each one, it was not merely a disposal,
but a parting; not a formality but an act, an act that
had its meaning, however far removed it might have
been from Hannah's appreciation of it.

"What do you feel about those children?" she
asked her, suddenly and unexpectedly when the last
one had gone and the door had closed.

"Feel about them?"

Hannah looked up in surprised bewilderment.

"I've never thought what I felt," she added.
"They're darlings--is that what you mean?"

"No--that's not quite what I mean.  Of course
they're darlings.  Do you ever think what you feel,
Hannah?"

"No."

"Never think in words--all higgledy-piggledy
and upside-down, of course--but words that explain
to you, even if they couldn't explain to anybody else?"

"No."

"I don't believe any of us have ever done that,"
Mary continued--"unless perhaps Jane.  She
thinks in words sometimes, I believe, but I'm sure they
hurt her when she does, so she probably does it as
little as possible.  Just to say they're darlings doesn't
convey what you feel.  You don't know what you do
really feel--do you?"

"No--I suppose I don't."

"I expect that's why, when you have to deal with
real things where words only can explain, they come
like claps of thunder and are all frightening.  I've
got something to tell you that will frighten you,
Hannah.  But it wouldn't have frightened you so much if
you'd ever thought about those children in words.  I
don't believe it would frighten Jane.  It would only
make her angry."

"What is it?" asked Hannah.  She was not frightened
as yet.  Mary's voice was so quiet, her manner
so undisturbed and assured, that as yet no faint
suspicion of what she was to hear was troubling her mind.

"Let's come out into the garden," said Mary.

Even there, with that issue, she felt she wanted the
light of open air, the growing things about her, the
environment her whole body now was tuned to.  That
room was confined, and suffocating to her.  There
were the two portraits on the wall, who never, with
all their love, would be able to understand what she
had to tell.  There were the echoes of countless
family prayers that had had no meaning.  There was
all the atmosphere of conventional formality in which
she felt neither she nor her child had any place.  It
was of him she was going to tell.  She could not tell
it there.

"Come out into the garden," she repeated and
herself led the way, when there being something to hear
which already Mary had wrapped in this mystery of
introduction, Hannah could do no less than follow
with obedience.

It was between those borders, now massed white
with double pinks, softening the air with the scent of
them as they breathed it in, that they walked, just as
Jane and she had done before.

"Do you ever wish you'd had a child, Hannah?"
Mary asked presently, and Hannah replied--

"I don't think I've ever really wanted to be married."

So much was it an answer that would have satisfied
her once, that Mary smiled to think how different she
had become.  Not for one moment had it been her
meaning that Hannah should see that smile.  Not for
one moment would she have understood it.  Yet she
saw.  The sudden seizing of her fingers on Mary's
arm almost frightened.

"You smiled," she whispered--"Why did you smile?"

The honest simplicity of her brought Mary to a
sudden confusion.  She could not answer.  Seeing
that smile, Hannah had caught her unawares in her
thoughts.  She knew then she was going to hurt this
gentle creature with her simple view of life and her
infinite forbearance of the world's treatment of her.

Here was the first moment when truly she felt
afraid.  Here was the first time she realized that
pain is the inevitable accompaniment of life.  She
tried to begin what she had to say, but fear dried up
the words.  She moistened her lips, but could not
speak.

"Tell me why you smiled," repeated Hannah
importunately.  "What is it you've got to say?"

Mary had thought it would be easy.  So proud, so
sure she was, that abruptness had seemed as though
it must serve her mood.  She tried to be abrupt, but
failed.

"Oh, Hannah, I've got such a lot to say," she
began, and with an impulse took her sister's arm and
of a sudden felt this gentle, gray-haired woman might
be as a mother to her when all the world, as now she
was realizing with her first confession of it, would be
turned against her.  "I don't know how to begin.
I know you must understand, and I think I want you
to understand, more than anybody else.  No one else
will.  Of course I can be sure of that."

She had succeeded, as well she knew she would, in
frightening Hannah now.  She was trembling.
Leaning on her arm, Mary could feel those vibrations
of fear.  So unused to all but the even flow of life,
and finding herself thus suddenly in a morass of
apprehension, the poor creature's mind was floundering
helplessly.  One step of speculation after another only
left her the more deeply embedded in her fears.

"Tell me what it is," she whispered--"Tell me
quickly.  Was it that Mr. Liddiard?"

How surely she had sensed the one thing terrible
in her life a woman can have to tell.  Never having
known the first thrilling thoughts of love, her mind
had reached at once to this.  Countless little incidents
during the time that Liddiard was in Bridnorth,
incidents that had attracted her notice but which she
had never observed, had come now swiftly together
as the filings of iron are drawn to a magnet's point.
The times they were together, the letters she had
received, sometimes a look in Jane's face when she
spoke of him, sometimes a look in Fanny's when she
was silent.  One by one but with terrible acceleration,
they heaped up in her mind to the pinnacle of
vague but certain conclusion.

"Was it that Mr. Liddiard?" she repeated.

"Yes."

"I felt it was.  I felt it was.  Don't say you're
in love with him--a married man--Oh, Mary, that
would be terrible."

"I'm not in love," said Mary.

The deep sigh that drew through Hannah's lips
made her afraid the more.  How could she tell her?
Every moment it was becoming harder.  Every
moment the pride she felt was not so much leaving her
as being crowded into the back of her mind by these
conventional instincts, the habit of affection for her
family, the certain knowledge of their shame, the
disproportionate value of their thoughts of her.

A few hours before she had asked herself what
mattered it if they thought the very worst, if they
had no sympathy, if with their contempt of her they
turned her from the house.  In any case she was
going.  Never could she stay there.  Never could this
child of hers breathe first the stifling air that she had
breathed so long.

Yet now when her moment of confession was upon
her, pride seemed a little thing to help her through.
The piteous fear in Hannah weakened it to water in
her blood.  She felt sorry for her sister who had
done nothing to deserve the shame she was sure to
feel.  Conscious of that sorrow, she almost was
ashamed of herself.  Nothing was there as yet to
whip her pride to life again.  With mighty efforts of
thought, she tried to revive it, but it lay still in her
heart.  This fear of Hannah's, her deep relief when
the worst she could think of proved untrue, kept it
low.  With all the strength she had, Mary could not
resuscitate her pride.

"What is it then?" Hannah continued less
tremulously--"What is it if you're not in love?  Was he
a brute?  Did he make love to you?"

With all the knowledge she had gained, Mary now
found herself amazed at this simplicity of mind which
once quite well she knew had been her own.  For an
instant it gave her courage.  For an instant it set
up this new antagonism she had found against the
laws that kept her sex in the bondage of servitude to
the needs of man.  So in that instant and with that
courage, she spoke it out, abruptly, sharply as she had
known she must.  The swift, the sudden blow, it
made the cleanest wound.

"I'm going to have a child, Hannah," she said, and
in a moment that garden seemed full of a surging joy
to her that now they knew; and in a moment that
garden seemed to Hannah a place all horrible with
evil growing things that twined about her heart and
brought their heavy, nauseating perfume, pungent
and overbearing to her nostrils.

She dropped Mary's arm that held her own.  With
lips already trembling to the inevitable tears, she stood
still on the path between those rows of double pinks,
now bearing up an evil, heavy scent to her, as she
stared before her.

It could not be true!  How could it be true?  She
fought with that, the refusal to believe its truth.

"He was only here a fortnight," she muttered
oddly.  "You didn't know him.  You'd never met
him before.  You only played golf with him, or you
walked on the cliffs.  You didn't know him.  How
can you expect me to believe it happened--in a
fortnight?  Mother was engaged to father for two years.
I--I wasn't born till fourteen months after they'd
been married!"

She laughed--a thin crackle of laughter.

"You're a fool, Mary.  You don't know what
you're talking about.  He was only here a fortnight."

"It's quite true, Hannah," said Mary quietly.
"I'm going to have a child."

Her heart was beating evenly now.  They knew.
Pride was returning with warming blood through her
veins.  Less and less she felt the chill of fear.

Swiftly Hannah turned upon her.

"But you said you weren't in love!" she exclaimed.

How quickly she was learning!  Already love
might have explained, excused, extenuated.

"I'm not in love," said Mary--"I know now I'm
not in love.  I was at the time.  At least I know
what love is.  The thing you love doesn't destroy
love when it goes.  Once you love, you can't stop
loving.  The object may alter.  Your love doesn't.
If there's no object then your love just goes on
eating your heart away.  But it's there."

"Oh, my God!" cried Hannah--"Where did you
learn all this--you!  Mary!  The youngest of all
of us!  Whom do you love then if you don't love
him?  Oh, it's horrible!  Is your heart eating itself
away?"

"No."

"Then what?  What is it?  I don't understand!
How could I understand?  I am an old woman now.
Somehow you seem to make me know I'm an old
woman.  What is it?  What do you love?"

"I told you I'm going to have a child," whispered
Mary--"Isn't that something to love?  It's here
with us as I'm talking now.  There are three of us,
Hannah, not two.  Isn't that something to love?"

For a long moment, Hannah gazed at her, then,
suddenly clasping her hands about her face she turned
and with swift steps ran, almost, down the path and
disappeared into the house.  It was as she watched
her going, that Mary had a flash of knowledge how
deep the wound had gone.





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   VI

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Now this much was accomplished in the
schedule of her mind.  They would all
know.  She left it to Hannah to tell them.
The next day after this confession to her sister, she
went to Yarningdale Farm, having made all arrangements
to stay there two or three days and complete her
plans for the future.

It had been a difficult moment to tell Hannah.  She
had not quite realized beforehand how difficult it
would be.  Pride she had calculated would have
helped her from the first; pride of the very purposes
of life that had passed her sisters by.  But pride had
not been so ready to her thoughts when the actual
moment of contact had come.  The habitual instincts
of convention had intervened.  Pride, when it had
come to her aid, had not been pride of herself.  It was
proud she was of her sex when in the abruptness of
that instant she had flung her confession before Hannah.

There would be no question of pride; no support
could it give her when she came to tell Mrs. Peverell.
To that simple farmer's wife it could only seem that
here was one, pursued by the error of her ways,
seeking sanctuary and hiding her shame in the remotest
corner she could find.

Giving no reason to Jane or Fanny, but only to
Hannah for her sudden departure, she went the next
day into Warwickshire.

"You can tell them when I'm away," she said to
Hannah.  "It's no good thinking you needn't tell
them.  Hiding it won't conceal.  They must know."

With an impulsive gesture she laid her hands on
Hannah's shoulders and looked into those eyes that
indeed, as she had said, even in those few short hours
of knowledge, had grown conscious that she was old.

"I don't know how much you hate me for bringing
all this trouble on you.  It shan't be much trouble,
I promise you.  No one need know why I've gone
away.  But I sort of feel sure of this, Hannah, you
don't hate me for the thing itself--not so much as
you might have thought you would have done."

Hannah tried to meet the gaze of Mary's eyes.
Her own held fast a moment, then faltered and fell.
Something in Mary's glance seemed to have tracked
down something in her.  The one with her child
had glimpsed into the heart of her who had none.
It had been like a shaft of light, slanting into a cellar,
some chamber underground that for long had been
locked, the bolts on whose door were rusty and past
all use, the floor of which was no longer paved for
feet to walk upon.

For so many years untenanted had that underground
chamber been that, as has been said, Hannah
had forgotten its existence.  Content had come to her
with the house of life she lived in and now by the
illumination of this ray of light, shooting through
cellar windows, lighting up the very foundations of
the structure of her being, she had been made aware,
when it was all too late, of the solid and real
substance upon which Nature had built the wasted thing
she had become.

"Don't!" she muttered.  "Don't--don't!" and
almost in shame it might have been she hung her head
as though it were Mary who might accuse, as though
Mary it were who rose in judgment above her then.

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Mr. Peverell in a spring cart from the nearest
station brought Mary to Yarningdale Farm.  She had
no need to touch Henley-in-Arden.  There was no
likelihood that whilst there she would ever come across
her friends.  They had walked many miles that day.
It was the highest improbability they would ever
walk that way again; and certainly not to visit the
farm.

"It happen be a quiet day," he said as he gathered
up the reins, "or I couldn't have come for 'ee with
the spring cart.  No--I couldn't have come for 'ee
with the spring cart if it didn't happen to be a quiet
day.  I got the machine ready last night and we be
cuttin' hay to-morrow."

Cutting hay!

"May I help?" she asked with an impulsive
eagerness.  He looked down at her on the lower seat
beside him and his eyes were twinkling with a kindly
amusement.

"'Ee can help," said he, "but hay-makin' ain't
'helpin'--it's work.  When they cut the grass over
at Stapeley--Lord Orford's place there over--there's
some of the ladies puts on them dimity-like
sunbonnets and come and help.  But then you see
there's plenty to do the work."  His eyes twinkled
again.  "We've only got hundred and thirteen acres
and there's me and the carter and a boy.  My missis
comes out.  So does the carter's wife.  But 'tain't
helpin'.  'Tis work.  We can't 'ford amusements
like helpin' each other.  We have to work--if you
understand what I mean."

"But I mean that too," she said quickly.  "I
meant to work.  Of course I don't know anything
about it; but couldn't I really do something?"

"We'll be beginning half-past five to-morrow
morning," he said and she felt he was chuckling in his
heart.  She felt that all who did not know the land
as he knew it were mere children to him.

"Can't I get up at half-past five?" she asked.

"Can 'ee?"

"Of course I can.  I want to work.  Do you know
that's one of the things I want to come here for.
When I come and stay--that's what I've come to
arrange with Mrs. Peverell--when I come and stay, I
want to work.  I can do what I'm told."

"There's few as can," said he.  "Them things
we're told to do, get mighty slow in doin'.  Could 'ee
drive a horse rake?"

"I can drive a horse."

He whipped up the old mare and said no more until
she asked him why they had not cut the grass that
day.  It was so fine, she said, and fine weather she
thought was what they wanted first of all.

"There be plenty of fine days when the grass is
green," said he.  "'Twill be fine now a few days,
time we'd be gettin' it in.  We'd a shower yesterday--a
nice drop of rain it was.  Sun to-day and they
trefolium'll have their seed just right and nigh to
droppin'.  'Ee want the seed ripe in the stack.
'Tain't no good leavin' it in the bottom of the wagon."

She let him talk on.  She did not know what
trefolium was.  He needed a listener, no more.
Questions would not have pleased his ear.  All the way
back he talked about the land and as to one who
understood every word he said.  There was his heart
and there he spoke it as a lover might who needed no
more than a listener to hear the charms of his
mistress.  The mere sound of his voice, the ring it had of
vital energy, these were enough to make that talking
a thrilling song to her.  It echoed to something in
her.  She did not know what it was.  Scarce a word
of it did she understand; yet not a word of it would
she have lost.

This something that there was in him, was something
also in her.  Indistinctly she knew it was that
which she must feed and stimulate to make her child.
As little would he have understood that as she had
comprehension of his talk of crops and soil.  Their
language might not be the same, but the same urging
force was there to give them speech and thought.
Just as he spoke of the land though never of himself
or his part with it, so she thought of her child, a
thing that needed soil to grow in.  No haphazard
chance of circumstance did she feel it to be.  Tilling
must she do and cleansing of the earth, before her
harvest could be reaped.  Her night would come,
that night before, that night when all was ready, that
night after rain and sun when the seed was ripe and
must be gathered in the stack and none be wasted
on the wagon floor.

"'Ee understand what I'm sayin'," she suddenly
heard him interpose between the level of her thoughts.

"Yes, yes--I understand," said she.  "And you
don't know how interesting it is."

He turned the mare into the farm gate and tossed the
reins on to her back.

"She's a knowsome girl," he said that night as he
lay beside his wife.  "She's a knowsome girl.
'Twon't rain to-morrow.  There was no rain in they
clouds."





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.. class:: center large

   VII

.. vspace:: 2

The next evening it was, after the first day in
the hayfield and while Mr. Peverell in the big
barn was sharpening the knives of the mowing
machine, that Mary set herself to the task of telling his
wife why she wanted to come to the farm.

Hard as she knew it would be, so much the harder it
became when alone she found herself watching that
sallow face with its sunken and lusterless eyes, the
thin, unforgiving line of lip, the chin set square,
obediently to turn the other cheek to the smiting hand of
Fate.

Mrs. Peverell was knitting.

"A woolly vest," said she--"for the old man, come
next winter.  Time they leaves be off the apple trees,
the wind ain't long afindin' we'd be here top of the
hill."

For a while Mary sat in silence counting her
stitches--two purl, two plain, two purl, two plain.  The
needles clicked.  The knotted knuckles turned and
twisted, catching the light with rhythmic precision.
And all the time she kept saying to herself--"Soon
he'll come back from the barn and I shan't have said
it.  Soon he'll come back."

"Did you make all your children's things for
them?" she asked with sudden inspiration, striking the
note to key her thoughts when she could speak them.

The needles clicked on.  The knotted knuckles
twisted and turned as though she had never heard.
The head was bent, the eyes fastened upon her stitches.

Thinking she had not heard, Mary was about to
repeat her question when suddenly she looked.  Stone
her eyes were, even and gray.  Through years, each
one of which was notched upon her memory, she looked
at Mary across the dim light of their parlor kitchen.

"I had no children," she said hardly; "all the
stitches I've ever gathered was for my man."

Her gaze upon Mary continued for a long silence
then, as though her needles had called them, her eyes
withdrew to her knitting.  Saying no more, she
continued her occupation.

To Mary could she have said less?  There was the
gap filled in between that winsome creature whose
portrait hung upon the wall in the other room and this
woman, sour of countenance, whose blood had turned
to vinegar in her heart.

Many another woman would have been still more
afraid, possessed of such knowledge as that.  With a
heart that swelled in her to pity, Mary found her fear
had gone.

Somewhere in that forbidding exterior, she knew
she could find the response of heart she needed.  Even
Nature, with her crudest whip, could not drive out the
deeper kindliness of the soul.  It was only the body
she could dry up and wither, with the persisting
ferment of discontent; only the external woman she could
embitter with her disregard.

For here was one whom circumstance had offered
and Nature had flung aside.  Great as the tragedy of
her sisters' lives might be, Mary knew how much
greater a tragedy was this.  Here there was no remedy,
no fear of convention to make excuse, no want of
courage to justify.  Like a leper she was outcast amongst
women.  The knowledge of it was all in her face.
And such tragedy as this, though it might wither the
body and turn sour the heart, could only make the soul
great that suffered it.

Mary's fear was gone.  At sight of the unforgiving
line of lip and square set chin to meet adversity, she
knew a great soul was hidden behind that sallow mask.

The long silence that had followed Mrs. Peverell's
admission added a fullness of meaning to Mary's words.

"It'd sound foolish and empty if I said I was
sorry," she said quietly, "but I know what you must
feel."

The lusterless eyes shot up quickly from their
hollows.  Almost a light was kindling in them now.

"'Ee bain't a married girl," she said, "Miss Throgmorton
or what 'ee call it, that's how I wrote my letter
to 'ee."

"Yes."

"How could 'ee know things I'd feel?

"I do."

"How old are 'ee?"

"Thirty next September."

"Why haven't 'ee married?"

"I haven't been asked.  Look at me."

"I am."

"But look at me well."

Mrs. Peverell stared into her eyes.

"I have three sisters older than me," Mary went on.
"Four girls--four women.  We're none of us married.
None of us was ever as pretty or sweet as you
were when that photograph was taken of you in the
other room."

The silence that fell between them then as Mrs. Peverell
gazed at her was more significant than words.
For all they said, once understanding, they did not need
words.  Indications of speech sufficed.

"Did any of 'ee want to be married?" asked the
farmer's wife.  "Did you?"

"Did you?" replied Mary.

"I wanted a good man," said she, "and I got him."

"Yes, but looking back on it now--all these years--back
to that photograph in there, was that what you wanted?"

All this time Mrs. Peverell had been holding her
needles as though at any moment the conversation
might command her full attention no longer and she
would return to her knitting.  Definitely, at last she
laid it in her lap and, leaning forward, she set her
eyes, now lit indeed, upon Mary's face before her.

"'Ee know so much," said she slowly.  "How did
'ee learn?  What is it 'ee have to tell me?"

Without fear, Mary met her gaze.  Long it was and
keen but she met it full, nor turned, nor dropped her
eyes.  Brimmed and overflowing that silence was as
they sat there.  Words would have been empty sounds
had they been spoken.  Then, but not until it had
expressed all their thoughts, Mrs. Peverell's lips parted.

"It's sin," she said.

"Is it?" replied Mary, and, so still her voice was
that it made no vibrations to disturb the deeper meaning
she implied.  In their following silence, that deeper
meaning filtered slowly but inevitably through the
strata of Mrs. Peverell's mind, till drop by drop it fell
into the core of her being.  In the far hidden soul of
her, she knew it was no sin.  She knew moreover that
Mary had full realization of her knowledge.  Too far
the silence had gone for her to deny it now.  Whatever
were the years between them, in those moments they
were just women between whom no screen was set to
hide their shame.  They had no shame.  All that they
thought and had no words for was pure as the clearest
water in the deepest well.

It was at this moment as they sat there, still, without
speech, that the door opened and Mr. Peverell entered.
Swiftly his wife turned.

"'Ee'll not be wanted here awhile," she said sharply.
"Go and sit in the parlor, or back to the barn, or get
to bed maybe.  The hay'll make without talking."

Obediently, like a child, he went out at once and
closed the door.  It was not things they talked of that
he might not hear.  Not even was it things they talked
of that he might not understand.  Here it was that no
man had place or meaning; in that region their minds
were wandering in, no laws existed but those of
Nature.  They walked in a world where women are alone.

The opening of that door as he came in, the closing
of it as obediently he went out, seemed to make definite
the thoughts they had.  At the sound of his footsteps
departing, Mrs. Peverell turned to Mary.

"Say all 'ee've got to say," she muttered.  "I'm
listenin'."

And as definitely Mary replied--

"I'm going to have a baby.  Seven months from
now.  I don't want you to think I'm hiding here.  I
could take refuge anywhere.  I'm not ashamed.  But
there are seven months.  They won't be long to me.
Indeed they'll be all too short.  Children aren't just
born.  They're made.  Thousands are born, I know.
I don't want just to bear mine.  When I came here
that day, two years ago, I felt something about this
place.  You'll think nothing of this.  You live here.
It's so much part of your life that you don't know what
it means.  But you're close to the earth--you're all
one with growing things.  You touch Nature at every
turn.  Oh--do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I don't understand," said Mrs. Peverell, "but I'm
listenin' and I beant too old to feel."

Mary sped on with the words that now were rushing
in her thoughts.

"Well--all that means such a lot to me.  That's
how I want to make my child, as you make your lives
here.  No cheating.  You can't cheat Nature.  No
pretence--no shame.  There's nothing so flagrant or
unashamed as Nature when she brings forth.  Out
there in the world, there where I live, they'd do all they
could to make me ashamed.  At every turn they'd
shriek at me it was a sin.  The laws would urge them
to it, just as for that one moment they urged you.  It's
not a sin.  It's not a shame.  It's the most wonderful
thing in the world.  Do you think if women had the
making of the laws that rule them, they'd ever have
made of it the shame it is out there?  When I knew
that this was going to happen to me, I remembered
my impressions of this place two years ago, and I
knew it was here I would make him, month by month,
while he's leaning in me to make him.  Oh--I know
I must be talking strangely to you; that half of what
I say sounds feather-brained nonsense, but--don't you
know it's true, don't you feel it's true?"

With an impulsive gesture when words had failed,
she leant forward and caught the knotted knuckles in
her hand.

Mrs. Peverell glanced up.

"In that room there," said she, pointing in the
direction of the parlor sitting room, "there's a girt Bible
lies heavy on a mat.  We bought it marriage time to
write the names of those we had."

"I saw it," said Mary.

"'Tis clean paper lies on front of it," she went on.
"It shan't be clean for long.  We'll write his name
there."





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.. class:: center large

   VIII

.. vspace:: 2

The moment Mary entered the square, white
house on her return to Bridnorth, she was
aware that both Jane and Fanny knew.  The
coach had set her down outside the Royal George, but
no faces had been at the windows as she went by.  No
servant had been sent up the road to carry back her bag.
Outwardly she smiled.  Her disgrace had begun.

This was the end of Bridnorth life for her.  Here
was to begin a new phase wherein she had none but
herself to lean upon; wherein the whole world was
against her and in that substance of stone already
hardening in her spirit, she must stand alone.

The whole house seemed empty as she came in.  She
went to her room without meeting any one.  They
could not long have finished tea.  She looked into the
drawing-room as she went by.  No tea had been left
out for her.

Her bed was prepared to sleep in.  There were clean
towels and a clean mat on the dressing table; but the
sign by which they always welcomed each other's
return after absence was missing.  There were no
flowers in the room.  The garden was full-yielding.
Flowers in profusion were withering in the beds.
There was no bowl of them in her room.

It was here, indeed it was everywhere, she felt the
presence of Jane.  It was not Hannah, now that she
had time to think it out, it was not Fanny, but Jane
she had come back to meet.  Jane with the unyielding
spirit of those laws Mary had found consciousness of,
against which she set herself in no less unyielding
antagonism.

It was bitterness, as it is with so many, that had
ranged Jane in battle against her sex.  She made no
allowances.  Almost with a fierce joy, she kept to the
very letter of the law.  Hers was the justice of revenge
and there are no circumstances can mitigate one woman
in another's eyes when she transgresses as Mary had done.

In her room she waited, unpacking her things, then
sitting and looking out into the garden until the bell
rang for their evening meal.  With sensations divided
between a high temper of courage and a feeling of
being outcast in that house she had known so long as
home, she went down to the dining-room.

They were already seated.  Jane was carving the
joint.  She did not look up.  Fanny raised her eyes
in silence.  The wish to give her welcome was
overawed by wonder of curiosity.  It was Hannah who
said--

"You told us in your letter you were coming back
by this afternoon's coach, but we weren't quite sure."

Caught in an instant's impulse, with an effort Mary
controlled herself from saying--

"Didn't you do what Jane told you to do?"

She held her tongue and sat down.

It was a strange and oppressive silence that fell upon
them during that meal.  Oppressive it was, but
electrical as well.  Vivid, vital forces were at work in all
their minds.  Storms were gathering they all knew
must burst at last.  Something there was that had
power to gather those forces to their utmost before
they broke and were dispersed in speech.

There they were, four unmarried women, seated
about that table with the two portraits looking down
upon them in their silence.  So they had occupied their
allotted positions year by year--year by year.  Often
there had been quarrelings between them.  Often they
had not been on speaking terms.  Winds of disagreement
had fretted the peaceful surface of that house
again and again.

But this which was upon them now was unlike any
silence that had fallen upon them before.  Then they
had kept silent because they would.  It was now they
kept silent because they must.  The pervading presence
of something about them was tying their tongues from
speech.  Without the courage to tell themselves what
it was, they knew.

There was another in their midst.  Those four
women, they were not alone.  It was not as it had been
for so many years.  They knew it could never be so
again.  Something had happened to one of them that
set her apart.  Each in the variety of her imagination
was picturing what that something was.  Hannah it
frightened.  Jane it enraged.  Fanny it stirred so
deeply that many times through the terribleness of that
meal, she thought she must faint.

One and all they might have spoken, had it been no
more than this.  But that presence in the midst of
them kept their tongues to stillness.  Life was springing
up, where for so long there had been all the silence
of a barren field.  They could hear it in their hearts.
Almost it was a thunder rolling that awed and overwhelmed.

The sound of their knives and forks, even the
swallowing of their food hammered across that distant
thunder to their conscious ears.  Each one knew it was
becoming more and more unendurable.  Each one
knew the moment must come when she could bear it
no longer.  It was Mary who reached that moment first.

Laying down her knife and fork and pushing away
her plate unfinished, she flung back her head with eyes
that gathered their eyes to hers.

"Why don't you speak?" she cried to them.
"Why can't you say what you're all wanting to
say--what's got to be said sooner or later?  I know you
know--all of you.  Hannah's told you.  And you've
thought it all out, as much as it can be thought out.  I
don't want any favors from you.  This has been my
home.  I'm quite ready for it to be my home no
longer.  In any case I'm going away.  There's no
question, if you're afraid of that, of my appealing to
you for pity or generosity.  It's only a question of the
spirit in which I go and the spirit of what I leave
behind.  That's all.  And why can't you say it?  Why
can't you tell me what it is?  You, Jane!  Why don't
you speak?  You're the one who has anything to say.
You told them not to meet the coach.  You told them
not to put any flowers in my room.  If it's something
really to fight about, let's fight now.  I'm not going
to fight again.  I'm going away where my child will
be born with all the best that I can give it, but I'll hear
what you've got to say now, only for God's sake say it!"





.. vspace:: 4



.. class:: center large

   IX

.. vspace:: 2

None of them knew their Mary like this.
Until that moment scarcely in such fashion had
she known herself.  New instincts had risen
in her blood.  Already the creative force was striking
a dominant note in her voice, setting to fire a light in
her eyes.

They felt that evening she had gained power that
would never be theirs.  Hannah fell obedient to it as
one who humbles herself before mighty things; Fanny
fell to fear, awed by this note of battle that rang like a
challenge in her voice.

Jane alone it was who stood out away from them
and, from amidst the ranks of that army of women
who acknowledge the oath of convention, offering both
heart and blood in its service, accepted the call to
combat.

"You talk," she said, with her voice rising swiftly to
the pitch of conflict; "you talk as though there were
two ways of looking at what you've done.  You talk
as though there were something fine and splendid in it,
but were not quite sure whether we were fine or splendid
enough to see it.  I never heard anything so arrogant
in all my life.  You seem to think it's a concession
on your part to say you're going away.  Of course
you're going away.  We've lived decently and cleanly
in this place all these years.  They've had no reason
to be ashamed of us," her eyes flashed to the portraits
and back to Mary, "not till now.  Do you think we're
going to flaunt our shame in their faces!"

Catching a look of pain in Hannah's eyes, as though
that last blow had been too searching and too keen,
she struck it home again.

"It is shame!" she said.  "I'm not so different
from all of you.  I feel ashamed and so do they.
What else can we possibly feel--a married man--a
man you don't even love.  It's filthy!  And if you
want to find another word for it than that, it's because
you've even come to be ashamed of the truth.  There's
something in decency; there's something in modesty and
cleanliness.  They taught us it.  The whole of their
lives they taught us that.  They brought us up to be
proud of the class we belong to, not to behave like
servant girls snatching kisses that don't belong to us with
any man who comes along and likes to make a fool of us."

Fanny, who up to that moment had been gazing at
her sister, caught in a wonder at this flow of speech,
now of a sudden dropped her eyes, twining and
untwining the fingers in her lap.  How could Mary answer
that?  Cruel as it was, it had the sting of truth.  She
dared not look at her and could only wait in trembling
for her reply.

She might have gained courage had she looked.
Those blows had not beaten Mary to her knees.  With
her head thrown back, she waited for the last word, as
though, now they had come to it, there were rules to be
observed and pride in her own strength put aside all
need to ignore them.

"Have you anything more to say?" she asked with a
clear voice.

"Do you want any more than that?" retorted Jane.

"I don't mind how much more there is," replied
Mary quietly, "we're saying all we feel.  We aren't
mincing things.  I'm going to say what I feel.  I'm
going to hit and hurt as hard as you, so go on if you
want to.  This isn't a squabble.  I don't want to
bicker or cavil or interrupt.  We're not just cats
fighting now, we're women and we'll try and talk fair.  Say
anything more you've got to say."

"Well, if that's not enough for you," continued Jane,
"if it is not enough to allude to what I saw with my
own eyes, or to tell you there are servant girls who
could behave better than that, then I'll talk of what,
thank God, I didn't see and I'll tell you it's worse than
shame what you have done and not even the excuse of
being betrayed by love that you have to offer for it.
I'll say it, Mary, and I don't care now because you've
asked for it.  You must be a bad woman in your
heart, there must be something vile about you that
makes you not fit to touch us or be in the same house
with us.  You've asked for that and you've got it.
You've wanted every word there is to say.  I should
have left that unspoken if you hadn't asked for it.
But that's what I feel.  If you were a woman off the
streets in London and sitting there at our table, I
couldn't feel more sick or ashamed at the sight of you."

"Jane!" cried Hannah.  "Oh, don't say anything
so horrible or terrible as that!"

"What's terrible about it?  What's horrible about
it?" asked Mary.  "It isn't true.  Jane knows it isn't
true.  When a woman's fighting for the conventions
Jane's fighting for, she doesn't use the truth--she's
incapable of using it."

"What is the truth then?" exclaimed Jane.  "If
you've satisfied yourself you know, if you've invented
anything truer than what I've said to make an excuse
for yourself, let's hear what it is."

"Yes, you shall hear it," said Mary, and a deep
breath she drew to steady the torrent of words that was
surging in her mind.  "First of all it's not true that I
didn't love.  I did.  She's perverted the truth there.
I did love.  I'm not going to tear my heart open and
show you how much.  I don't love any longer.  That's
what Jane has made use of--the best she could.  But
what I feel now has nothing to do with it.  What I feel
now is the result of circumstances it won't help any
way to explain.  What happened that makes the
vileness she talks about, happened when I was in love, as
deeply in love as any woman can be, and as I never
expect to be again.  But it's not because of love that
I'm going to defend myself.  It's not because of love
that I show this arrogance, as you call it.  That's not
the truth I've found or invented for myself.  Love's
only half the truth when you come to value and add up
the things that count in a woman's life.  Of all the
married people we know, how many women who have
found completion and justification for their existence
really love their husbands?  Love!  Oh, I don't know!
Love's an ecstasy that gives you a divine impetus
towards the great purposes of life.  I don't want to talk
as though I'd been reading things out of a book.  That
almost sounds like it.  But you can't imagine I haven't
been thinking.  These two months, these last six
months, ever since something that happened last Christmas
time, I have.  And thinking's like reading, I suppose.
It's reading your own thoughts."

A smile of security twitched at Jane's lips.

"Well, is this the wonderful truth?" she asked.
"Are we to sit and listen to you, the youngest of us,
telling us that love's an ecstasy?  Because if you're
going to give us a lecture about love, perhaps you'd like
a glass of water beside you."

"No, that's not the wonderful truth," she replied
quietly.  She felt Jane could not sting her to anger and
somehow she smiled.  "The truth is this, which they
up there had never learnt and no one seems to know.
Life's not for wasting, but what have been our lives
here, we four girls--girls!  Women now!  What
has it been?  Waste--waste--nothing but waste.
Why has Hannah's hair gone gray?  Why are you,
Jane, bitter and sour and dry in your heart?  Why's
Fanny drawn and tired and thin and spare?  Why do
I look older than I am?  Because we're waste--because
Life's discarded us and thrown us on one side,
because for a long time now there's been nothing in the
world for us to do but sit in this room with those
portraits looking down on our heads and just wait till we
filter out like streams that have no flood of purpose to
carry them to the sea.  Our lives have only been a
ditch, for water to stagnate in.  We find nothing.  We
can't even find ourselves.  Fanny there, grows thinner
every year.  And who's to blame for it?"

Her eyes shot up to the portraits on the wall and
half furtively all their eyes followed hers.

"They're to blame, but not first of all they aren't.
What makes it possible that Jane can speak as she does,
talking about what has happened to me as the vilest of
all vile things?  Men have made it possible, because
men have needed children for one reason and one reason
only.  Possession, inheritance and all the traditions
of family and estate.  These are the things men have
wanted children for and so they made the social laws
to meet their needs.  But there are more things in the
world to inherit than a pile of bricks and a handful of
acres.  Do you think I want my child to have no more
inheritance than that?  I tell you almost I'm glad he
has no father!  I'm glad he won't possess.  There are
things more wonderful than bricks and acres that are
going to be his if I have the power to show them to him.
There are things in the world more wonderful than
those which you can just call your own.  And it's those
laws of possession and inheritance we have to thank for
the idleness our lives have been set in.  Jane thinks
herself a true woman just because she's clung to
modesty and chastity and a fierce reserve, but those things
are of true value only when they're needed, and what
man has needed them of us?  Who cares at all whether
we've been chaste and pure?  None but ourselves!
And what's made us care but these false values that
make Jane's shame of me?"

With flashing eyes she turned to Jane.

"You've asked for the truth," she cried now.
"Well, you shall have it as you thought you gave it to
me.  You're not really ashamed of me.  You're envious,
jealous, and you're stung with spite.  Calling me
a servant girl or a woman of the streets only feeds your
spite, it doesn't satisfy your heart.  You'd give all you
know to have what I have, but having allowed yourself
to be a slave to the law all you have left is to take a
pride in your slavery and deck it out with the pale
flowers of modesty and self-respect."

She stood up suddenly from her chair and walked
to the door.  An instant there, she turned.

"As soon as I can get my things together," she said,
"I'm going to a place in Warwickshire.  If Hannah
wants to know my plans afterwards I'll write and tell
her.  Don't think I'm not quite aware of being turned
out.  That's quite as it ought to be from Jane's point
of view.  You'd dismiss a servant at once.  But don't
think you've made me ashamed.  I only want you to
remember I went as proud, prouder than you stayed."

This was the real moment of Mary Throgmorton's
departure from the square, white house in Bridnorth.
When a few days later she left in the old coach that
wound its way over the crest of the hill on which so
often she had watched it, it was the mere anticlimax
of her going and to all who saw that departure must
have seemed but a simple happening in her life.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`PHASE IV`:

.. class:: center x-large

   PHASE IV

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large

   I

.. vspace:: 2

The hay was made and stacked when Mary
returned to Yarningdale Farm.  They were
thatching the day she arrived, wherefore there
was none to meet her.  The old fly with its faded
green and musty cushions brought her over from the
station.  Those were long moments for contemplation
as they trundled down the country roads and turned
into the lanes that led ultimately to the farm.

The train had been too swift for arrested concentration
of thought.  In the train she had not been alone.
Here, as the iron-rimmed wheels rumbled beneath her,
crunching the grit upon the road with their unvarying
monotonous note, she felt at last she had come into her
haven and could turn without distraction into the
thoughts of her being.

Had ever that old vehicle carried such burden before?
With the things Jane had said still beating up and down
in the cage of memory, she pictured some weeping
servant girl dismissed her place, carrying her burden away
with her in shame and fearfulness to find a hiding place
in a staring, watchful world.

Looking out upon the fields as they passed, knowing
them as property, to whoever they might belong, again
she felt how the right of possession amongst men it
was that had made shame of the right of creation
amongst women.

"Trespassers will be prosecuted," she read on a
passing board that stood out conspicuously in the hedge as
they rolled by.

There it was!  That was the law!  Trespassers upon
the rights of man!  The law would descend with all its
force upon their heads.  But had they not trespassed
upon the rights of women?  Which was the greater?
To inherit and possess?  To conceive and create?
Did not the world reach the utmost marches of its
limitations in that grasping passion to possess?  Was
that not the root of the evil of war, the ugliness of
crime, the stagnation of ideals?  To possess and to
increase his possessions, to number Israel and to keep
all he had got, were not these the very letters of the
law that held the world in slavery; were not these the
chains in which, like bondwomen, she and her sisters
had walked wearily through the years of their life?

The last lane they passed along led through a heavily
timbered wood before they reached the farm.  Some
children there were gathering fagots into their aprons.
She leant out of the window to watch them, her mind
set free for that moment of the encompassing sense of
possession.

That was the spirit that should rule the world.  She
knew how hopeless it was to think that it could be so.
It was the spur of possession that urged men to
competition.  The whip of competition in turn it was that
drove out idleness from the hearts of men.  And yet,
if women had the forming of ideals in the children
that were theirs, might they not conceive some higher
and more altruistic plane than this?  Giving, not
keeping, might not this be the deep source of a new
civilization other than that which drove the whole world with
the stinging lash of distrust?

She was going to bring a child into the world that
would have nothing it could call its own, not even a
name.  The fagots of life it must gather.  The berries
on the hedgerows which belong to all would be its food.
So she would train its heart to wish for only those
things that belonged to all.  Never should it know the
fretting passion of possession.  Work was man's
justification, not ownership, and a workman he should be;
one who gave with the sweat of his brow and who, by
the heart to give which she would stir in him, would
covet of none the things they called their own.

In this spirit--and little more it was in a grasping
world than an ecstasy of thought--Mary Throgmorton
came to Yarningdale Farm.

She knew it was a dream she had had; a dream
induced in her by the heat of the day, the monotonous
vibrations of that old vehicle she had ridden in, the
still quiet of the countryside through which she had
passed.  Yet, nevertheless, for all its ecstasy, for all
the dream it might be, such a dream it was as any
woman must surely have, so circumstanced as she; so
driven to rely upon what she alone could give her child
for walking staff to serve him on his journey.
Knowing it was a dream, it seemed no less real to
her.  Lying that night on the hard-mattressed bed, in
her little room beneath the eaves of the thatch, she took
the dream in purpose into her very soul.  Give she
must, and all she had, and what else had she to give but
this?  For that moment and for all the months to
follow it could be given in the utmost fullness of her
mind.  Was it not now and most of all when he was
closer to her being than ever it should so chance again,
that she could give out of her heart the spirit that
should go to make him strong to face the world that
lay before him?

Dreams they might be, but such thoughts would she
hold with all the tenacity of her mind until, through
external means alone, she was compelled to feed him.
For all those seven months to come, she herself would
work--work in the fields as he must work.  The sweat
should be on her brow as it should be on his.  Her
limbs should ache as one day his in happy fatigue of
labor should ache as well.

It was thus she would make him while yet the time
of creation was all her own and then, when out of her
breast he was to take his feed of life, there would be
ways by which she alone could train him to his purpose.

So still she lay, thinking it all out with thoughts that
knew no words to hamper them, that when at last she
fell asleep, it was as one passing through the hanging
of a curtain that just fell into its concealing folds
behind her as she went.





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.. class:: center large

   II

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"I've told the old man," Mrs. Peverell informed
Mary the next morning.  "Not all of it, I
haven't.  Men don't understand what beant
just so.  He can't abide what's dropped in the
farmyard comin' up.  ''Tis wheat,' I tell 'en.  ''Tain't
crops,' says he.  ''Twill make a bag of seed,' I says.
'The ground weren't prepared for it,' says he.  That's
men.  Mebbe they're right.  'Nature may have her
plan,' I tell 'en, 'but God have his accidents.'  'I can't
grow nawthing by accident,' says he.  'You can't,'
says I, 'but afore you came, that's the very way they
did grow and I guess there's as much rule about
accidents as there is of following peas with wheat.'  He
looks at me then and he says no more, which is good
as sayin'--'You women be daft things,' for he picks up
his hat and goes out and the understandin' doant come
back into his eyes afore he feels the tilled earth under
his feet."

So Mr. Peverell knew that in certain time Mary was
going to have a baby.  He looked at her shyly when
next they met.  It was in the orchard sloping down the
hill that drops to the towpath of the canal.  He was
calculating the yield of apples, just showing their green
and red, and she had come to tell him that the midday
meal was ready.

"Thank you, ma'am," said he, when he had always
called her "Miss" before.  This was the hedge, the
boundary of that tilled and cultivated field his mind
had placed her in.  Beyond that limit, as Mrs. Peverell
had said, he would not understand.  With a childish
simplicity he had accepted all that his wife had told him.
She had appeased his need for understanding.
Perfectly satisfied, he asked for no more.

"Are you going to give me work to do?" she asked
as they walked back together to the house.  "Real
work, I mean.  I can work and I'm so interested."

"Work won't be easy for the likes of you," said he.

"No, but there are things I could do.  Things that
aren't quite so laborious as others.  I could milk the
cows, couldn't I?  If once I got the trick of it, it would
be easy enough, wouldn't it?"

"Women beant bad milkers," he agreed with
encouragement.  "There's no harm in 'ee tryin'."

"When could I begin?"

"'Ee could try a hand this evenin' when our lad
brings the cows in.  They be fair easy--them's we've
got now.  Easy quarters they all of them have and
they stand quiet enough wi' a bit of coaxin'.  I dessay
'ee could coax 'em well enough.  'Ee've a softy voice
to listen to when 'ee's wantin' a thing and means to get it."

She laughed.

"I didn't know I had," she said.

"No?  Women doant know nawthin', seems to me.
'Mazin' 'tis to me how well they manages along."

She went into the cow sheds that evening and had her
first lesson.  It was tiring and trying and unsuccessful
and her back ached.  But in the last few minutes, just
when she was giving up all hope of ever being able to
do it and the strain of trying had relaxed in her fingers,
a stream of milk shot forth from the quarter she held
in response to the simplest pressure of her hand.

"That's it!  That's it!" exclaimed the boy.

"Doant 'ee get into the way of strippin' 'em with 'ee's
fingers, not till they've got to be stripped and 'twon't
come t'other way."

She rose the next morning early when through her
window she heard the cows coming into the yard and
slipping on her clothes without thought of how she
looked, she went down to the shed and tried again.

In three days' time she had mastered it and gave an
exhibition of her skill to Mr. Peverell who stood by
with smiles suffusing his face.

"That'll do," said he.  "The lad couldn't do no
better'n that."

"Well, can't I look after the cows altogether?" she
begged.  "Drive them in and out and feed and milk
them?  Then you can have the boy for other work."

"It's a samesome job," he warned her.  "There's
clockwork inside them cows' udders and 'tain't always
convenient to a lady like yourself to go by it."

"Can't you believe me," she exclaimed, "when I
tell you I don't consider myself a lady, any more than
Mrs. Peverell wastes her time in doing?  I'm just a
woman like she is and I want to work, not
spasmodically, not just here and there, but all the time.  Do you
remember what you said about helping?"

"I've no recollection," he replied.

"Well, you said it wasn't help was wanted in a
hay-field, 'twas work.  I want to make something of myself
while I'm here.  I don't just want to think I'm
making something.  Can't you trust me to do it?"

Mr. Peverell looked with a smile at his wife who
had come out to witness the exhibition.

"What do you think, mother?" said he.

"I think women knows a lot more'n what you
understand, Mr. Peverell.  You can understand all what
you can handle and if you could handle her mind, you'd
know well enough she could do it."

"So be," said he obediently and he turned to the
boy.  "You can take cartin' that grass out 'long them
hedges this afternoon," he said.  "There woant be no
cows for 'ee to spend 'ee time milkin'.  We've got a
milkmaid come to Yarningdale.  They'll think I be
doin' mighty well with my crops come I tell 'em next
market I've got a milkmaid well as a boy."





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.. class:: center large

   III

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The life of Mary Throgmorton during those
months while she worked at Yarningdale
Farm was a succession of days so full of
peace, so instinct with the real beauties which enter the
blood, suffuse the heart, and beat through all the veins,
that her soul, as she had meant it should be, was
attuned by them to minister to its purpose.

At six every morning she descended from her little
room beneath the thatched eaves.  At that hour the air
was still.  The chill of the dew that had fallen was
yet in it.  The grass as she walked through the
meadows was always wet underfoot.  Mist of heat on the
fine days was lingering over the fields.  Out of it the
cows lifted their heads in a welcome following their
curiosity as she came to drive them back into the farm.

When once they had come to know her voice, when
once they had come to recognize that straight figure in
the cotton frocks she wore, no further need there was
for her but to reach the gate and open it, calling a name
she knew one by.  They ceased their grazing at once
and turned towards her.  One by one they trooped
through into the lane that led to the farm.  One after
another, she had a name to murmur as they went by.

No moment in all that labor there was but had its
freedom for contemplation.  As she walked through
the meadows to gather them; as she followed them
down the lanes; as against the flanks of them she leant
her cheek, cool with that morning air, stealing their
warmth, there ever was opportunity for her thoughts.

It soon became automatic that process of milking.
Only at the last moment when the hot stream of milk
began to be flagging in its flow, did she have to detach
her thoughts from the purpose that governed her, and
concentrate her mind upon the necessary measure of
stripping them to the last drop.

But for these moments, her thoughts were never
absent from that sacred freight she carried to its
journey's end.  The very occupation she had chosen all
contributed to such meditation as her mind had need of.
The milk she wet her fingers with as she settled down
upon the stool before each patient beast, hot with the
temperature of its blood, was stream of the very
fountain of life her thoughts were built on.  The rhythmic,
sibilant note as it hissed into the pail between her knees,
became motif for the melody of her contemplation.

She whispered to them sometimes as she milked.
Whisperings they were that defy the capture of
expression.  No words could voice them as she voiced
them with the murmur on her lips.  Sometimes it was
she whispered to the quiet beast against whose velvet
flank her cheek was warming.  Sometimes she whispered
to her child as though his cheek were there fast
pressed against her and his lips were drawing the
stream of life out of her breast.

It cannot be wondered that she thought often of these
things while she was milkmaid at Yarningdale Farm.
In any environment the mind of a woman at such a
time must seek them out, stealing pictures of the future
to feed her imagination upon.  But there, in those
surroundings, Mary Throgmorton was close upon her
very purpose as the days turned from morn to evening
and the weeks slipped by towards the hour for which
she waited.

But deeper than all such thoughts as these, there had
entered her soul the wider and fuller conceptions of
life.  Subconsciously she realized the cycle it was, the
endless revolving of the circle of design that had no
beginning and no end but was forever emerging from
and entering into itself in its eternal revolutions,
always creating some surplus of the divine essence of
energy, always discharging it in thought, in word and
deed; flung from it, as drops of water are flung from
the speed of the mill wheel while it turns to the
ceaseless flowing of the stream.

What else could she see with a heart for seeing,
what else, so close to Nature as she was, could she see
but this?  Every day, every night, the cattle ate their
fill of the grass that had grown in their pastures.
Every morning, every evening, they gave their yield of
all they had consumed.  It was no definite and
conscious observation that brought to her eyes those vivid
and luxuriant patches of green in the fields where the
cows had manured the grass; it was no determined
deduction that conveyed to her the realization how a field
must be grazed, must be eaten away and consumed to
increase it in the virtue of its bearing.  It was no
mechanical process of mind which led her to the
understanding of how when the field was cut for hay and
stacked within the yard to feed the cattle through the
winter months, still it returned in its inevitable cycle
to the fields to feed the flow of life.

Through the winter months the cows were stalled
and kept in their pound.  In that pound they trod to
manure the straw the fields had grown and back again
it would come in the early spring to lie once more upon
the fields that had given it; so ever and ever in its
ceaseless procession, some surplus of the energy that
was created would be set free.  A calf would go out
of the farm and be sold at the nearest market.  For
three days its mother would cry through the fields, hurt
with her loss, grudging her milk, but in the end Nature
would assert itself.  She would be caught back into
the impetus of the everlasting cycle of progression,
fulfilling the purpose of life, contributing to the creation
of that energy which was to find its expression in the
sons of men.

All this without knowing it she learnt in the fields
and under the thatch of Yarningdale Farm.  All this,
as she had meant to do, she assimilated into her being
to feed that which she herself, in her own purpose, was
creating.

So her son should live, if it were a boy she bore.
So she planned for him a life that had none of the
limitations of possession, but must give back again
all that it took with interest compounded of noblest
purpose.  This alone should be his inheritance, this
generosity of heart and soul and being that knew no
other impulse than to give the whole and more than it
had received.

Not one of these impressions came with set outline
of idea to the mind of Mary Throgmorton.  In the
evenings as she sat in the kitchen parlor, sewing the
tiny garments she would need and listening to
Mr. Peverell talking as he always did about the land, it was
thus she absorbed them.  Drawn in with her breath
they were, as though the mere act of breathing assimilated
them rather than a precise effort of receptivity.

The same it was in the fields where she walked, in
the stalls where she milked her cows.  Each breath
she took was deep.  It was as if the scent of those
stalls, the air about the meadows, the lights of morning
and evening all taught her that which she wished to
learn.

Her mind was relaxed and just floating upon life
those days.  It is not to be understood where she learnt
that this must be so.  It is not to be conceived how,
with her utter inexperience, she knew that no determined
effort to create her child could serve the purpose
that she had.  In through the pores of her being, as it
became the very air her lungs inhaled, she took the
sensations which day by day were borne upon her.

There were times when, after the first physical
consciousness of her condition, she forgot she was going
to bear a child.  There were times when the knowledge
of it seemed so distant, that it was as though she
walked and lived in a dream, a sensuous dream, where
there was no pain, no suffering of mind, but things
were and were not, just as they happened like clouds
to pass before her vision.

There were times when she knew so well all that
there lay before her.  Then pain seemed almost
welcome to her mind.  Then she would promise herself
with a fierce joy she would not submit to any of the
subterfuges of skill to ease her of it.

"I'll know he's being born," she would say aloud.
"I'll know every moment to keep for memory.  Why
should I hide away from life, or lose an instant because
it comes with pain?"

So Mary Throgmorton traversed the months that
brought her to fulfillment; so time slipped by with its
clear mornings and the dropping lights of evening till
winter came and still, with the nearing approach of her
hour, she continued milking the cows for Mr. Peverell.
Not all the persuasion they offered could make her
cease from her duties.

"I'm milkmaid here," she said.  "Any farm girl
would keep on to the last.  There'll be some days yet
for my hands to lie in my lap.  Let them touch
something till then."

They let her have her way.  Only the carter and the
boy were there about the place to see her.  She had no
sense of shyness with them.  Every now and again
some cow was taken to a farm near by to profit.  It was
common talk, unhampered by any reticence, to comment
upon the condition of each beast as she neared
her calving time.  The functions and operations of
Nature were part of the vast plan of that ever-revolving
cycle to them.  They knew no coarseness in their
attitude of mind; they knew no preciousness of modesty.

Before she had been at Yarningdale for long, Mary
realized with the greater fullness of perception how vast
a degree of false modesty there was in the world as
people congregated in the cities and with brick walls
and plaster shut themselves out from the sight of
Nature.

It had all been false, that modesty which their mother
had taught them.  Love, pleasure and passion, if
these were the fruits of the soul man had won for
himself, what shame could there be in permitting them
their just expression?  Love was uplifting and in the
ecstasy it brought were not the drops flung farther,
higher from the wheel in the acceleration of its
revolutions?  Was not the stream in flood, those moments
when love came in its torrent to the heart of a man?
Once for a moment she had loved and knew now that
ecstasy could never come to her again.

Pleasure, it was true, she had never known, but the
deep passion of motherhood none could rob her of.
All those days and weeks and months were hours of
passionate joy to her.  Never was she idle.  Never
was her passion still.

That moment, one night it was with the moonlight
falling on her bed, when first she felt the movement of
her child within her, was so passionate a joy of physical
realization that she sat up in her bed and, with the
pale light on her face, the tears swelled to overflowing
in her eyes.

"What should I have done, what should I have
been," she whispered to herself, "if this had never
happened to me?"

Occasionally during those seven months there were
letters reaching her from Bridnorth.  Fanny wrote and
Hannah wrote.  Never was there a letter from Jane.
At first they asked if they might come and see her, but
when she replied she was happier alone, that seeing
her as she was, they might the less be able to
understand her happiness, they asked no more.

In further letters they wrote giving her Bridnorth
news, the people who had come down that summer, the
comments that were made upon her absence and later,
when the actual truth leaked out.

"People have been very kind on the whole," wrote
Hannah in a subsequent letter.  "I think they are
really sorry.  Only yesterday the Vicar said, 'God has
strange ways of visiting us with trouble.  We must
take it that He means it for the best, impossible though
it is for us to see what good can come of it.'  I had
never realized," was Hannah's comment, "that he was
as broad-minded as this, and it has given me much help.
I hope you are taking every care of yourself and that
the old farmer's wife is competent to give you good
advice upon what you ought to do.  You say you are
still working on the farm.  Is that wise?  Mother used
to go to bed every day for an hour or so before you
were born.  I remember it so well.  Oh, Mary, why
did you ever let it happen?"

Why?  Why?  Why had God ever found such
favor in her in preference to them?  That was all she
asked herself.

One day a letter lay on her plate at breakfast.  It
was readdressed from Bridnorth and was in Liddiard's
handwriting.  For long she debated whether she would
open it or not.  What memories might it not revive?
What wound might it not open, even the scar of which
she could hardly trace by now?

Her child had no father.  Touch with Liddiard's
mind again in those moments might make her wish he
had; might make her wish she had a hand to hold
when her hour should come; might make her need
the presence of some one close that she might not feel
so completely alone.

Yet even nursing these thoughts, her fingers had
torn the envelope without volition; her eyes had turned
to the paper without intent.

.. vspace:: 2

"I have heard from your sister Jane," he wrote.  "She
tells me she thinks I ought to know what is happening to
you.  She writes bitterly in every word as though I had
cast you off to bear the burden of this alone.  God knows
that is not true.  In the first letter I wrote you after I
left Bridnorth, if you have kept it, you will find how
earnestly I assured you I would, in such an event, do all
I could.  Where are you and why have you never
appealed to me?  Surely I could have helped and so
willingly I would.  Wherever you are, won't you let me come
and see you?  One of these days, of course without
mentioning your name, I shall tell my wife everything.  I
have some feeling in my heart she will understand."

.. vspace:: 2

That same day, Mary answered his letter.

.. vspace:: 2

"Please take no notice of my sister Jane.  She would
punish you as she has punished me.  That is her view of
what has happened.  I know you would do all you could.
It hurts me a little to hear you think I should doubt it.
Do not worry about me.  I am away in the country and
intensely happy.  Never was I so happy.  Never I
expect will I be quite so happy again.  You have nothing
to fret yourself about.  It would cast some kind of
shadow over all this happiness if I thought you were.
You have no cause for it.  I shall always be grateful to
you.  I do not put my address at the head of this letter,
because somehow I fear you would come to see me,
however strong my wishes were that you should not."

.. vspace:: 2

"'Ee's thoughtful, Maidy," Mrs. Peverell said to her
when she returned from posting her letter in Lonesome
Ford.

"Am I?"

"'Ee've had a letter from him."

"How did you know?"

"How do my Peverell know there'd be rain acomin'?
He says he feels it in his bones.  Men's bones and
women's hearts be peculiarsome things."





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.. class:: center large

   IV

.. vspace:: 2

It was a boy.  Full in the month of March he
came, with a storm rushing across the fields where
the rooks already were gathering in the elm
trees and the first, dull red of blossom was flushing the
winter black of the branches against the clouds of
thunder blue.

High as was the cry of that southwest wind,
sweeping the trees and rattling the windows in their
casements, his first cry beneath the thatch of Yarningdale
Farm uplifted above every other sound in the ears of
Mrs. Peverell and Mary as they heard it.

The doctor who attended her from Henley-in-Arden
had proposed an anæsthetic.

"Your first child," he said.  "It'll just make things
easier."

Had her pain been less she would have spoken for
herself.  Had she spoken, a cry might have escaped
with the words between her lips.  She looked across at
Mrs. Peverell who knew her mind and she shook her
head.

"She wants it just natural," said the farmer's wife.

"'Ee can see for 'eeself she's strong.  'Tain't no hide
and seek affair with her."

"It's going to be a bit worse than she thinks,"
muttered the doctor.

"Can't be worse'n a woman thinks," retorted
Mrs. Peverell.  "Let 'ee mind as carefully as 'ee can what
she feels--what she thinks'll be beyond 'ee or me."

Peverell came back from plowing at midday with
the clods of earth on his boots.

"Come there be no rain to-night," said he.  "I'll
have that corn sown in to-morrow."

"We have our harvest in upstairs a'ready," said she.

He wheeled round in his chair with his eyes wide
upon her.

"Damn it!" he exclaimed.  "I'd complete forgot
our maidy on her birth-bed."

She gazed at him a moment in silence, with words
unspoken in her glance he had uncomfortable
consciousness of, yet did not know one instant all they
meant.  It left him with a disagreeable sense of
inferiority, just when he had been congratulating
himself on a piece of work well done.

"'Ee won't forget when 'ee sows the seed to-morrow
in that field," said she quietly.  "Come time 'ee has it
broadcast sown, the sweat'll be on thy brow, an' 'ee
limbs be aching."  She lifted the corner of her apron
significantly.  "I've wiped the sweat off her brow and
laid her body comfortable in the bed and now I'll get
the meat to put in 'ee stomach."

He knew he had made some grievous error somewhere.
Forgetting their maidy and her babe upstairs
no doubt.  He ate the food she brought him in silence,
like a child aware of disgrace; but why it should be so,
just because he had forgotten about a woman having
a baby was more than he could account for.  It was
not as if it had been a slack day or a Sabbath.  That
ground was just nice and ready for the wheat to go in.
Still, it was no good saying anything.  He had hurt
her feelings some way and there was an end of it.  He
knew well that steady look in the sunken eyes, the set
line, a little tighter drawn in the thin lips.

It worried him as he ate his meal.  It always
worried him.  Somehow it seemed to make the food taste
dry in his mouth.  It had no such succulence as when
all was just right, and he had come in for his dinner
after a hard morning's work.  For never by conscious
word had he hurt her.  Never, in all the thirty-seven
years they had been married, had there been an
instant's intent in him to make her suffer.

It was in these unaccountable ways, in chance words,
harmless enough in all conscience to him, in little things
he did and little things he left undone, that this look
she had, came in these sudden moments into her face.

"Women be queer cattle," he would say to himself.
"There be no ways treatin' 'em alike.  'Ee might think
'ee'd got 'em goin' one way when round they'll come
and go t'other."

As a rule this silent summary of the whole sex would
satisfy him in regard to the one in particular he had in
mind.  With a sweep of his hand across his mouth
after his meal was over, he would go back to his work
and once his feet felt the fields beneath them, he would
forget all about it.

Somehow this time he seemed to know there was
little hope of forgetting.  Whether it was his food
tasted drier than usual; whether some meaning of
what she had said about the sweat on his brow and the
sweat of her who labored upstairs there with her child
had reached with faint rays of illumination to his
appreciative mind, whatever it was, the fields called in
vain to him.

He was restless, uneasy.  Without cause he knew
of, he felt a little ashamed.  Rising from the table, he
moved about the room lighting his pipe.  He felt like
some child with a lie or a theft upon his conscience.
When his pipe was well lit and hard rammed down,
finding he had no patience to sit awhile as was his
custom, he went in search of his wife.

From something she had said about making as little
noise as possible, he knew she was not upstairs with
her patient.  If he asked her straight out, perhaps she
would tell him what was the matter, what he had said,
what possibly he had done.

She was not in the scullery.  Softly he opened the
door of the larder and looked in.  She was not there.
With his heart beating in unaccustomed pulses he crept
upstairs to their bedroom, thinking to himself,
"Plowed fields be better walking for the likes of
me."

"Mother," he whispered, and opened the door.

She was not there.

In despair he turned to the stairs again, drawing
a deep breath when he reached the bottom.  Only the
parlor was left, unless she were out of the house
altogether.  He looked in.  It was empty.  He was
turning away when there caught his attention the unusual
sight of the big Bible lying open on the table.  He
crossed the room to look at it.  Was it so bad she'd
had to be reading some of that?

It was opened at the first, clean page.  No printing
was on it, but there in ink, still wet, was written in
her handwriting--"John Throgmorton, at Yarningdale,
March 17th, 1896."

Some idea flashed out from that page as he leant
over it.  It reached some hitherto unused function of
perception in his brain.  He knew now why that look
had come into her eyes.  He knew even what it was
he had said, or rather what he had forgotten to say
that had hurt her.  All this was reminding her how she
wanted a child of her own.  But had he not wanted
one too?  Was not the loss as much his that he had no
son to take the handles of the plow when his hands
had ceased to hold them?

He turned as she entered the room with a piece of
blotting paper she had fetched from his desk in the
kitchen where he wrote out his accounts.

"Mother," he said, and he fidgeted with his hands,
"I know what's worryin' 'ee.  I ought t'have thought
of it afore now, but we been past it these many years,
it had gone out o' my head for the moment.  B'lieve
me I've wanted one same as 'ee."

She knew he was a good man as she looked at him,
but could not think of that then.

"I've wanted 'ee to have fair crops," said she, "but
it's only been disappointment to me when they've
failed.  Yet I've seen it make 'ee feel 'ee was not man
enough for the task God had set 'ee."

With a steady hand, she blotted the page and shut
the book, then taking him by the arm, she led him out
of the room and closed the door.

"There's one of them young black minorcas has the
croup," said she.

"They be plaguy things," he replied.





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   V

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Talking of the future one day with Mrs. Peverell,
Mary had said that if it were a boy,
his name must be John.  So definite had she
been in her decision about this, that without further
question the good woman had written it in the big
Bible.

"John's a man's name," Mary had said; "there's
work in it."  Then, dismissing her smile and speaking
still more earnestly, she had continued, "If anything
were to happen to me, I should leave him to you.
Would you take him?"

The sunken eyes were quite steady before the gaze
they met.

"How could we give 'en the bringin' up?" she asked.

"He shall have no bringing up but this," Mary had
replied.  "I told you first of all I didn't come here to
hide.  I chose this place because I knew I could touch
life here and make him all I wanted him to be.  This
is what I want him, a good man and a true man and a
real one, like your husband.  I want him to know that
he owes all to the earth he works in.  What money I
have shall be yours to keep and clothe him.  Indeed I
hope nothing will happen for I know so well what I
want him to be.  I've always known it, it seems to me
now.  I've only realized it these last few months.
Milking these cows, walking in the meadows, living
here on this farm, I've learnt to realize it.  Giving is
life.  We can't all give the same thing, but it is in the
moment of giving that most we feel alive.  Acquiring,
possessing, putting a value on things and hoarding
them by, there's only a living death, a stagnant despair
and discontent in that."

"'Ee's talkin' beyond me," said Mrs. Peverell watching
her.  "'Ee's well taught at school and 'ee's talkin'
beyond me.  I never had no learnin' what I got of
use to me out of books.  But come one day an'
another, I've learnt that wantin' things may help 'ee
gettin' 'em, but it stales 'em when they come.  All I could
have given my man, ain't there for givin'.  God knows
best why.  Most willing would I have gone wi'out life
to give 'en a child to patter its feet on these bricks.  He
doant know that.  I wouldn't tell 'en.  He'd say
there warn't no sense in my talkin' that way.  Men
want life to live by, but it seems to me sometimes
death's an easy thing to a woman when it comes that
way.  I s'pose it's what 'ee'd call the moment of givin'
and doant seem like death to her."

Mary had leant forward, stretching out her hand and
taking the knotted knuckles in her fingers.

"You haven't lost much," she had said, "by not
having my advantage of education.  What you've just
said is bigger than any learning could make it.  I don't
think we speak any more of truth because we have
more words to express it with.  I'm sure we think less.
Do you think I could find any one better to teach
him than you?  It is women who teach.  Your
husband will show him the way, but you will give him
that idea in his heart to take it.  I long so much to give
it to him myself that I haven't your courage.
Sometimes I'm afraid I may die.  I don't let it have any
power over me but sometimes I confess I'm afraid,
because you see I want to give him more than his
life.  I want to give him his ideals.  Perhaps that's
because I've no one else to give him to.  My life won't
seem complete unless I can live beyond that.  Anyhow
I wanted to say this.  If I have to give him, I want
it to be to you and I want you to know that that is
how I wish him to be brought up.  If he has big
things in life to give, he'll find them out.  He'll leave
the farm.  Perhaps he'll break your heart in
leaving--perhaps he'll break mine if I live, but I want him
first to learn from the earth itself the life there is in
giving and then, let it be what it may, for him to give
his best."

Mrs. Peverell nodded her head to imply understanding.

"It's them as doant suffer can talk about sin," she
had said, which by no means was Mary's train of
thought, though her words had somehow suggested it
to Mrs. Peverell's range of comprehension.  "I should
have called all this sin years ago.  Didn't I say 'twas
sin when first 'ee told me?  Well, it beats me what sin
is.  'Tain't what I thought it.  We be born with it,
they say.  Well, if the babes I seen be born with sin,
'tain't what any one thinks it."

It was obvious Mrs. Peverell had not followed her
in the flight of her hopes and purposes.  The right and
the wrong of it, the pain and the joy of it, these were all
that her mind grasped.  But these she grasped with a
clearness of vision that assured Mary's heart of a safe
guardianship if ill should befall her.  Such a clearness
of vision it was as set her high above many of the
women she had known.

How was that?  What was it about women that so
few of them had any vision at all?  To how many she
knew would she entrust her child?  Often she had
listened in amazement to Hannah instructing the children
at home.  She remembered the mistresses where she
had been at school herself.  She recalled her mother's
advice to her when she had left school.  Everywhere it
was the same.

Only here and there where a woman had suffered at
the hands of life did vision seem to be awakened in
her.  Many were worldly, many were shrewd and
clever enough in their dealings with circumstance.  But
how few there were who knew of any purpose in their
souls beyond that of dressing their bodies for honest
vanity's sake, or marrying suitably for decent
comfort's sake.

Here, was it again the force-made laws, the laws by
which men set a paled and barbed fence about the
possessions they had won?  Were all these women their
possessions too, as little capable of freedom of thought
as were of action their dogs, their horses, the cattle on
their hedged-in fields?

She had heard of votes for women in those days.
In Bridnorth as in most places it was a jest.  What
would they do with the vote when they had it?  They
laughed with the rest.  Women in Parliament!  They
would only make fools of themselves with their
trembling voices raised in a company of men.

She could not herself quite see all that the vote might
mean.  Little may that be wondered at, seeing that
when they obtained it, there would be countless among
them who still would be ignorant of its worth and
power.  Whatever it might mean, she knew in those
days that her sex had little of the vision of the ideal;
she knew it was little aware of the true values and
meanings of life, that thousands of her sisters wasted
out their days in ceaseless pandering to the acquisitive
passions of men.

"'Ee's thinkin' long and deep, maidy," Mrs. Peverell
had said when the silence after her last remarks had
closed about them.  "Are 'ee wonderin' after all this
time what the sin of it might be?  Are 'ee thinkin'
what the Vicar'll say when 'ee has to explain it all to 'en."

"Why must I tell him?" asked Mary.

"Don't 'ee want the child baptized?"

With all the thoughts she had had, with all the
preparation she had made, she had not thought of this.
The habit of her religion was about her still.  Every
Sunday morning she had sat with the Peverells in the
pew it was their custom to occupy.  Something there
was in religion no clearness of vision seemed able to
destroy.

"He must be baptized," she had said and turned in
their mind to face once more the difficulties with which
the world beset her.





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   VI

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The upbringing of John Throgmorton at
Yarningdale Farm has more of the nature of an
idyll in it than one is wont to ask for in a
modern world, where idylls are out of fashion and
it has become the habit to set one's teeth at life.

Still continuing, as soon as she was strong again, to
fulfill the duties of milkmaid for Mr. Peverell, Mary
spent all her spare time with her child.  No fretting
mother she was, but calm and serene in all her doings.
He took no fever of spirit from her.

"Seems as if the milk she give him must almost be
cool," said Mrs. Peverell to her husband, who now,
since the registration of John's birth had had to be told
the truth--that there was no father--that Mary was
one of those women who had gone astray.

"Fair, she beats me," he replied.  "Ain't there no
shame to her?  Not that I want to see her shamed.
But it 'mazes me seein' her calm and easy like this.
Keep them cows quiet, I told her when she 'gan
amilkin'--keep 'em easy.  Don't fret 'em.  They'll give 'ee
half as much milk again if 'ee don't fret 'em.  And
when the flies were at 'en last summer, dommed if she
didn't get more milk than that lad could have got.
That's where she's learnt it.  She ain't frettin' herself
when most women 'ud be hangin' their heads and
turnin' the milk to water in their breasts wi' shame.  I
doant make her out and that's the truth of it."

Yet he had made her out far better than he knew.
That was where she had learnt the secret, as she had
intended she should learn all the secrets it was possible
to know.  On sunny days she took her baby with her
into the fields where the cows were grazing.

One by one on the first of these occasions, solemnly
she showed them the treasure she brought.  Sponsors,
they were, she told them, having had recent acquaintance
with that word.  One by one they stared with
velvet eyes at the bundle that was presented to them.

When that ceremony was over, solemnly proclaimed
with words the written word can give no meaning to,
she found for herself a sheltered corner in the
hedgerow, there unfastening her dress and with cool fingers
lifting her breast for his lips to suckle where none could
watch her.  The warm spring air on those sunny days
was no less food for him than the milk she gave.  With
gurgling noises he drew it in.  With round, dark eyes,
set fast with the purposes of life, he took his fill as she
gazed upon him.

That there was nothing more wonderful to a woman
than this, Mary knew in all the certainty of her heart.
There alone with her baby, she wanted no other
passion, no other love, no other company.  This for a
woman was the completeness of fulfillment.  Yet this
it was that men denied to so many.

She knew then in those moments that no shame
would be too great to bear with patience for such
realization of life as this.  Realization it was and, to fail
in knowing it, was like a fallow field to have yielded
naught but a harvest of weeds in which there was
shame indeed.

Often in the previous summer she had heard
Mr. Peverell bitterly accusing himself for the bare and
weedy patches in his crops.  Twice since she had been
there on the farm had a barren cow been sent to market
for sale because it was of no use to them.  They had
been cows she herself had named.  She had fretted
when they were driven away and had taken herself far
from the yard when it came to the moment of their
departure.

Yet no word of pleading had she said to Mr. Peverell
on such occasions.  Receive and give, these were the
laws she recognized and found no power of sentiment
strong enough in her to make her seek or need to
disobey them.  Gain and keep--against such principles
as these her soul had caparisoned and armed itself,
clearly knowing how all laws in the operation must
carry with them the savor of injustice, uncomplaining
if that injustice should be measured for her portion.
For never so great an injustice could it be as that which
men in their ideals of possession and inheritance had
meted out to women.  Living there at Yarningdale
Farm so close to the land, she had found a greater
beneficence in Nature than in all the organized charity
of mankind.

On the second occasion when the barren cow had
been sent to market some delay had been made in her
departure and Mary had returned to the house just as
the flurried beast had been driven out of the yard.
With head averted, she had quickened her steps into
the house, finding Mrs. Peverell looking out of the
window in the parlor kitchen.

"Why are they drivin' that cow to market?" she
asked.  "He said naught to me 'bout sellin' a cow
to-day."

"She's barren," said Mary.  "They sent her four
times to the bull.  I've milked her nearly dry now.  It
does seem hard, doesn't it?  She was so quiet.  But
I'm afraid she's no good to us."

She had been taking off her hat as she spoke, never
appreciating the significance of what she said when, in
a moment, she became conscious of Mrs. Peverell's
silence and swiftly turned round.

She was standing quite motionless with one hand
resting on the back of a chair, staring out of the
window at the departing beast, yet seeing nothing, for,
with a searching steadfastness, her eyes were looking
inwards.

For a moment Mary's presence of mind had left
her.  She had swayed in movement, half coming
forward when indecision had arrested her.  It might not
be that her thoughts were what Mary supposed.  To
comfort her for them if they were not there was only
to put them in her mind.

"What are you thinking of?" she inquired tentatively.

"I be thinkin'," said Mrs. Peverell, "if he gets a
good price for that cow we'd have a new lot o' bricks
laid down in that wash-house.  There be holes there a
body might fall over in the dark."

A thousand times more bitter was this than the truth,
for still she stood staring inwards with her thoughts
and still standing there, with her hand on the back of
the chair and her eyes gazing through the window,
Mary had left her and gone upstairs.





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   VII

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Soon after John was born, there had come a
letter from Hannah saying that she and Fanny
were going to stay with friends in Yorkshire
and on their way intended to visit her whether she
liked it or not.

"Every one knows we're going to Yorkshire," she
had written, "so they won't guess we've broken the
journey."

Mary smiled.  Almost it was unbelievable to her
now that once she herself had thought like that.
Absolutely and actually unreal it seemed to her now that the
human body could so be led and persuaded by the
thoughts of its mind.

"Come," she wrote back.  "We shall be proud to see you."

"Proud!" said Hannah, reading that.  "It almost
seems as if she meant to say she was proud of herself.
I know she's not ashamed--but proud?"

"P'r'aps that's what she does mean," said Fanny.
"Though without love, it doesn't seem to me she's got
anything to be proud about."

Sharply Hannah looked at Fanny, for since these
events had happened in the square, white house, there
had grown a keener glance in the quiet nature of
Hannah's eyes.

"Don't tell me, Fanny," she whispered, "don't tell
me you'd go and do the same?"

"I'd do anything for love!" exclaimed Fanny
hysterically.  "Anything I'd do--but it would have to
be for love."

Hannah went away to her room to pack, considering
how swiftly the rupture of the moral code can break
down the power of principle.

"Fanny was never like that before," she muttered
as she gathered her things.  "At least she would never
have said it.  Mary's done more harm than ever she
knows.  Poor Mary!  She can't really be proud--that's
only her pride."

Yet proud indeed they found she was.  At the end
of the red brick path leading up to the house between
the beds now filled with wallflowers, she greeted them
with her baby in her arms.  This was her challenge.
So they must accept her.  It was not to be first herself
as though nothing had happened and then her child as
though what must be, must be borne with.  It was
they two or never, sisters though they might be, would
she wish to see them.

Her first thought, as they stepped out of the village
fly that brought them, was how old and pinched and
worn they looked.  For youth now had come back to
her with the youth she carried in her arms.  Thirty
she was then, yet felt a child beside them.  For one
instant at the sight of her her heart ached for Fanny.
Fanny, she knew, was the one whom the sight of her
child would hurt the most.  But the contact of
greeting, the lending him to them for their arms to hold,
deep though her heart was filled with pity for them, in
that moment there was yet the deeper welling of her
pride.

He won them, as well she knew he would.  In Hannah's
arms, he looked up with his deep, black eyes into
hers and made bubbles with his lips.  No woman could
have resisted him and she, who never would have child
of her own, clung to him in a piteous weakness of emotion.

Fanny stood by, with jerking laughter to hide her
eagerness, muttering--"Let me have him, Hannah.
Let me take him a moment now."

And when in turn she held him, then above Mary's
pride that already had had its fill, there rose the
consciousness of all her sister was suffering.  Twitching
with emotion were Fanny's lips as she kissed him.
Against that thin breast of hers she held him fast as
though she felt for him to give her the sense of life.
Not even a foolish word such as Hannah had murmured
in his ears was there in her heart to say to him.
It was life she was holding so close; life that had never
been given her to touch; life, even borrowed like this,
that had the power to swell the sluggish race of her
blood to flooding; life that stung and hurt and smarted
in her eyes, yet made her feel she was a woman
in whom the purpose of being might yet be fulfilled.

Unable any longer to bear the sight of that, Mary
turned away into the house to prepare their coming.
John, she left in Fanny's arms, having no heart to rob
her of him then.

"They've come," she whispered to Mrs. Peverell.
"They've come."

"Well?" she inquired.  "Was it to shame 'ee?"

For answer Mary took her by the arm and led her
to the window.

"Look," she said, and pointed out over the bowl of
daffodils on the window sill, down the red brick path
to the gate in the oak palings.  And that which
Mrs. Peverell beheld was the sight of two women, no longer
young, lost to all sense of foolishness in their behavior,
emotionalized beyond control, swept beyond self-criticism
by a thing, all young with life, that kicked its bare
legs and crowed and bubbled at its lips, then lying still,
lay looking at them with great eyes of wisdom as
though in wonder at their folly.

They stayed till later that afternoon, then caught an
evening train to Manchester.  Mary travelled a mile
with them in the old fly, then set out to walk home
alone.

"Don't tire yourself," said Hannah, leaning out of
the window, as they drove away.  "You must still
take care."

"Tire myself?" Mary cried back.  "I don't feel as
if I could ever be tired again."

And still leaning out of the window, watching her
with her firm stride as she disappeared into the wood,
Hannah knew their sister had found a nearer stream
to the heart of life than ever that which flowed through
Bridnorth.





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   VIII

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Days, months and years went by and with
each moment of them, Mary gave out of
herself the light of her ideals for that green
bough to grow in.

Still as ever, she continued with her work on the
farm, one indeed of them now, and when he could
walk, took John with her to fetch the cows, exacting
patience from him while he sat there in the stalls beside
her watching her milk.

"We have to work, John," she said.  "You and I
have to work.  I shall never disturb you when you're
plowing or dropping the seeds in the ground.  Work's
a holy thing, John.  Do you know that?  You
wouldn't come and disturb me while I was saying my
prayers, would you?"

Solemnly John shook his head.  He knew too well
he always held his breath, because then she had told
him God was in the room.

"Is God in the shed here now, while you're
milking?" he asked.

She nodded an affirmative to give him the impression
that so close God was she dared not speak aloud.

"Does He get thirsty when He sees all that milk in
the pail?"

She bit her lips from laughter and shook her head
again.  That was a moment when many a mother
would have taken him in her arms for the charm he
had.  She would not spoil him so.  She would not
let him think he said quaint things and so for quaintness'
sake or the attention he won by them, set out his
childish wits to gain approval.  Nothing should he
wish to gain.  All that he gave of himself he must
give without thought of its reward.

"God's never hungry or thirsty, except through us,"
she said.  "God is in pain when we're in pain.  He's
happy when we're happy.  Everything we feel is what
God is feeling because He's everywhere and close to
all of us."

John's eyes cast downwards to the bucket where the
milk was frothing white.

"He's feeling thirsty now then," said he meditatively.

"I've no doubt He is," said Mary.  "But He
knows the milk doesn't belong to Him.  He knows the
milk belongs to Mr. Peverell and Mrs. Peverell will
give Him some at tea-time."

For a long while John thought over this.  The milk
hissed into the pail as Mary watched him with her
cheek against the still, warm flank.

"What is it, John?" she asked presently.  "What
are you thinking?"

"I feel so sorry for God," said he.

"Always feel that," she whispered, seizing eagerly
the odd turn of his mind.  "He wants your pity as
well as your love, little John.  He wants the best you
have.  He's always in you.  He's never far away.
And if sometimes it seems that He is, then come and
give your best to me.  I promise you I'll give it back
to Him."

Tenderly, by his heart she led him, bringing him
ever on tiptoe to every wonder in life, whilst all in
Nature he found wonderful through her eyes.  Supplying
herself with everything in literature she could find
on subjects of natural history, recalling thereby such
memories as she had of bird's nesting and woodland
adventures with her brother, it was these books she
read now.  They held her interest as never a storybook
had held it those days in Bridnorth when the old coach
rumbled up the cobbled street.  John caught the vital
energy of her excitement whenever in the fields and
hedges she discovered the very documents of Nature
she had read of on the printed page.

No eggs were allowed to be taken from the nests.
No collection of things was made.

"They're all ours where they are," she would say.
"Men who study these things to write about them in
the books I read, they're the only ones who can
take them.  They give them all back again in their
books."

He did not understand this, but learnt obedience.

Time came when he himself could climb a tree and
peer within a nest.  Down on the ground below, Mary
would stand with heart dry on her lips, yet bidding him
no more than care of the places where he put his feet.
Never should he know fear, she determined, never
through her.

So she brought him up and to the life of the farm
as well.  With Mr. Peverell he spent many of his days.
In the hayfields and at harvest time, the measure of
his joys was full.  He knew the scent of good hay
from bad before ever he could handle a rake to gather
it.  He saw the crops thrashed.  He saw them sown.
In all the procession of those years, the coming and
going, the sowing and harvest, the receiving and the
giving of life became the statutory values of his world.

And there beside him, ever at his listening ear, was
Mary to give him the simple purpose of his young
ideals.

He never knew he learnt.  He never realized the soil
he grew in.  Up to the light he came, the light she
gave him from the emotion of her own ideals; up to
the light like a sapling tree, well planted in the wood,
with space and air to stretch its branches to the sun.

"Mummy, what's death?" he asked her one day as
he sat with her while she milked the cows.  "What's
death?"

For a long time she continued with her milking in
silence.  She had taught him never to bother for an
answer to his questions and only to ask again when he
made sure his question had not been heard.  Now he
leant up against the stall waiting in patience, watching
her face.  Peeping at her then when making sure she
had not heard, he asked once more.

"Mummy, what's death?  Is that too soon?"

She smiled and pressed his hand with her own that
was warm and wet with milk.

"Why do you ask that, John?" she inquired.

"There were two moles got chopped with the hay
knives.  I saw them.  They were lying in a lump and
all bloody and still.  Is that death?  Mr. Peverell said
they was quite dead.  Is death being quite dead?"

She shook her head and went back to her milking;
still for a while in silence.

These were moments she feared, yet had no real
dread of, seeing they had to be.  Here was a young
twig seeking to the light, a young twig that one day
would become a branch and must be set in surest purpose
or in the full growth, sooner or later, would reveal
its stunted lines and the need there had been for vision
in its training.

"Death's not the same as being dead," she said
presently.  "Nothing is quite dead."  She stripped her
cow, the last that evening and, putting the pail aside
from long habits of precaution, she turned and took
both his hands in hers.

"Do you know what a difficult question you've asked
me, John?" she said.

He shook his head.

"You have, and awfully badly I want to answer it.
I could quite easily if you were a little bit older.  I'm
so afraid I can't make it simple enough for you to
understand now.  And if I told you something you
didn't understand, you'd make your own understanding
of it and it might be all wrong."

"Only want to know about the moles," said he.

"Yes, I know.  But what's happened to the moles
happens to people."

"When?"

"Oh, all sorts of times.  They get caught in the
mowing knives."

"But can't they tie themselves up with bits of rag
and make it all right and stop the blooding?"

"Not when it cuts into their hearts, they can't.
Even a whole tablecloth couldn't stop the bleeding
then."

"What happens then?"

"They get all still like the moles."

"And are they dead then?"

"No, that's where it's so difficult to explain.  If I
were to say--that's death, but they're not dead--how
could you understand?"

"Couldn't," he agreed, and leant his head up
against her cheek, sympathizing with her difficulties.
"I've always thought death was being quite dead."

"Nothing's quite dead," she repeated, half to
herself, as though by the reiteration of that she might
capture out of the void the inspiration for what she
wanted to say.

"Do you remember what I told you about God?"
she asked suddenly.

He nodded his head.

"Well, when things go quite still, they've gone back
to God.  They can't feel thirsty then, or tired or
unhappy.  They haven't got any bodies to feel tired or
thirsty with."

"But what does God do with all the dead things and
people?"

Mary clasped her courage and went on.

"He just lets them rest," she said, "rest till they're
ready to bear being thirsty and tired again."

"Were the moles so thirsty or so tired that they
couldn't bear it any more?"

"They may have been.  You can never know when
God chooses to take you back again.  Life, the thing
that makes you move about and laugh and run, the
thing that makes you able to bear being thirsty,
you can give that back to God just when you feel
strongest."

"What would you give it back for?"

"Something that was worth while.  Suppose you
and I were out for a walk together and I fell in the
river and I couldn't swim and I was nearly going to be
drowned and be quite still, because when you're under
the water you can't breathe and that's another thing
that makes you go quite still, what would you do?"

"I'd jump in and I'd swim and I'd take you in my
arms and I'd swim with my legs and I'd get to the bank
and then I'd pull you out and I'd call to Mr. Peverell."

He felt the tightening of her arm about him.

"But supposing I was too heavy and yet you still
held on and I dragged you down under the water with
me and you couldn't breathe and became quite still--then
you'd have given the thing that had made you run
to the bank and jump into the water, you'd have given
it back to God."

"That would have been worth while, Mummy," said he.

"Would it, John?"

"Well, what would have been the good of going on
looking for birds' eggs or making the hay or getting up
in the morning if you'd been quite still?"

"So I fill your life, do I?" she whispered.

"No fun if you were like the moles," said he without
sentiment.

And this, she thought of a sudden, is what so many
women are denied, this actual virtue of being the very
essence of the whole world to one little, living body
that had not a lover's sentiments and passions to urge
upon its mind, but stood alone absorbed, contained in
its beliefs.

"Well, then, if you gave it back to God for something
like that that seemed worth while, it would not
be because you were tired then--would it?"

"No--I shouldn't want no rest.  Shouldn't want
to be quite still for long."

She lifted him up swiftly into her arms, a sudden
sight of him quite still chilling through her blood.

"If you gave it back, generously, like that, my
darling," she whispered, "He might accept it like
Mr. Peverell always does when you give him an apple out
of his own orchard.  You always find it on your plate
again next morning."

"Has God a beard like Mr. Peverell?" he asked.





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.. class:: center large

   IX

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It was when John came to the age of eleven that
Mary first learnt the pangs of jealousy.

A neighboring farm came into the market one
Michaelmas and was bought by a young farmer bringing
a wife and three children to the house that lay in
the trees at the bottom of the Highfield meadow.  No
one knew why it was called Highfield, that meadow.
It had been so called for centuries, yet it lay low.  A
brook ran through it.  Some winters it lay under
water.  A kind of rush grew thick in the grass in one
corner under the poplar trees.  Every year it was put
down for hay.  Every year, so damp the soil, it grew
a generous crop.

Farms so close together as Mr. Kemp's and Mr. Peverell's
lend each other a helping hand.  There is
only a friendly rivalry between those whose hearts are
in the soil.  The spirit of giving maintains if it does
not rule.  Mr. Peverell's crops were generally better to
his way of thinking than any one else's.  But he loved
the sight of a well grown field nevertheless.  He wished
no harm but the best to any man who tilled and cleansed
his land.

"Cultivation," he said, "that's taking side wi'
Nature.  Weeds is folly and Nature can't abide that.  A
field run fallow makes my stomach turn."

It was at the haymaking in the Highfield meadow,
when the womenfolk, and at lifting time the men as
well, came in to help, that John first met Lucy Kemp.

She was a year younger than he; dark haired with
solemn, wondering eyes that gazed with steady glances
at the world.

In the midst of his frolics in the new cut hay, John
came suddenly before those eyes, not knowing what he
saw, ceased from his antics in a swift arrest.

"What are you looking at?" he asked with
unceremonious directness.

"Looking at you," said she.

He glanced down at his clothes to see if anything
was wrong.

"What's the matter with me?" he inquired.

"I like you," she replied.

"Why?"

"Cos you can stop playing all quick, like this, when
you play."

She must have had some vague conception of what
she meant.  He must have had some vague conception
of what he understood.  It was the first time it had
ever been made apparent to him that any one could like
him as well as his mother.

"Aren't you going to play?" he asked.

"I've got a headache," she replied.

"What's that?"

"A pain--all over here!"  She laid her hands
across her forehead.

"Does it hurt?"

He gave sympathy in his voice at once.

"Keeps on frobbing," said she.

"Let God feel it frob and come and play," he
suggested with greater wisdom than he knew.

That had to be explained to her.  They sat down in
the hay, the first man in him explaining the mysteries
of life to the first woman in her.  Mary found them,
fast friends, sitting together behind a high cock of hay.

"I thought I'd lost you, John," she said, and when
he did not look up on the instant, knew she had indeed
lost something of him she could never find again.  No
longer was she the only woman in his world.  In a
strange and unexpected moment he had found some
one he could turn to to hide his pain if she became
quite still like the moles.

They met often after that day.  In a little while they
became inseparable.

"Young things must have young things to play
with," Mary told herself.  It was Nature.  They never
reared young calves alone on the farm.  Always they
had companions.

"They grows better," said Mr. Peverell.  "Young
and young.  It comes that way."

So she stilled her heart from painful beating.  But
one day Mrs. Peverell pointed out those two together in
the fields and said--

"A love child they say takes easy to love.  If that
doant please 'ee, 'ee must stop it soon."

"Why shouldn't it please me?" she asked and her
heart was trembling in swift flutterings that were not
pulses in her breast, but were like wings beating,
disturbing the air she breathed.

"Well, she be just an ordinary child, like one of us,
and if John stays on the farm and one day takes it
after Mr. Peverell, as I doant mind tellin' 'ee
Mr. Peverell means 'en to take it if he likes the work, then
he'll wed wi' her, you mark my words for it."

Mary took the hand with its knuckles far more
knotted now and held it for comfort against her breast.

"You have been good to me," she muttered thickly.
"I have never thought till now he could mean to leave
the farm to John."

"His name's in the Bible," said Mrs. Peverell.

"Yes, yes, my dear, I know what that means to you.
But I never thought you meant it so practically as that.
If John does take on the farm, why shouldn't he marry
Lucy?  Wouldn't that be right?  Wouldn't that be
the very best?"

"I thought by the way 'ee looked at them 'ee mind
was all against it.  I thought 'ee'd got greater prospects
for him than that.  She's only an ordinary child,
I says, and that's all she is.  I thought it 'ud upset 'ee
plans for 'en."

"My plans," said Mary.  "They're only for his
happiness and the best that's in him.  I can't have him
always, can I?  Not always to myself?"  She turned
her eyes across the field to where they stood together.

"She's come--with her big eyes," she whispered
and she walked away.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`PHASE V`:

.. class:: center x-large

   PHASE V

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large

   I

.. vspace:: 2

It was a still hot day at the end of the month of
July in the following year.  Vast mountain
ranges of cumulus clouds too heavy on the
horizon to sweep across the sky with the storm they
promised hung sullen and low in masses of pale purple
rimmed with golden pink.  Rain was sadly wanted all
the country round.  Only the Highfield meadow at
Yarningdale was lush and green.  The cows were there
grazing on the aftermath.

With her sewing, Mary had come down to the field
an hour or more before there was need to drive them
in.  John was playing with Lucy down the stream.
She could hear their voices in and out of the willows.
They were like dryad and faun, laughing together.
His voice was as a lute to Mary.  She listened to it
and to the very words he said, as she would have
listened to a faun playing on his pipe, half bewitched by
it, half tricked to laughter and to joy that was scarcely
of this world.

"If I'm the captain," she heard him saying, "you
have to dance whether you like it or not."

Claude Duval and Treasure Island!  Both flung
together in the melting pot of his fancy.

She peered down the field through the trunks of the
pollarded willows and saw a dryad dancing before a
faun sitting cross-legged in the grass.  A fay-looking
sight it was in the hazy mist of that sunshine.  With
unsteady balance, Lucy swayed in and out of the tree
shadows, alternately a thing of darkness and a thing of
light.  And there below her in the grass he sat, with
his mop of hair and his profile cut sharp against the
dark trunk of a willow tree, looking to Mary who saw
him with the mist in his eyes like pagan Nature, back
to the times of Pan.  Herself as well, as there she
watched, she felt she could have danced for him.

Was that what love was--the thing that she had
never known?  Could this be it, this godlike power
that Nature lent to man to make a woman dance for
him, and, as she danced, trick all his senses till he was
no more than man, when Nature snatched her loan
away and with Pan's laughter caught the woman in
her arms and vanished in the trees and hid herself?

That moment then she seemed to see it so and with a
later vision beheld the woman stepping out from
underneath the shadows of the wood, leading a faun, so
young his feet seemed scarcely touching the grass he
walked upon.

Her sewing fluttered to her lap.  In that midsummer
heat, her eyes half closed, then opened, startled at the
sound of solid footsteps by her side.  She looked up
and there stood Liddiard, his hat in his hand, a nervous
smile upon his lips.  She was too taken unawares to
fathom them.

"Am I dreaming?" she muttered.

"You were asleep," said he.

"But this isn't dreaming?"

"No--you're awake now."

"Why--?  What is it?  Why have you come here?"

"To see you."

"After all these years?"

"Twelve of them."

He sat down on the grass a little apart from her,
watching her face.

"You look very little older, Mary.  There isn't a
gray hair in your head.  I've plenty."

"My hair's nondescript," she replied, still in an
amaze.  "It takes a long time to go gray.  Why have
you come here?  Did they tell you at Bridnorth where
I was?"

"Yes."

"Then why have you come?"

"I told you, to see you."

"But what about?"

He smiled again as he watched her.

"You haven't changed at all, Mary.  The same
directness; the same unimpressionable woman, the same
insensitiveness to the delicate word.  Does it give you
no pleasure at all to think I should come back after all
these years to see you?"

"Was I unimpressionable once?" she asked quietly,
and took no notice of the latter part of his sentence.

He looked away across the Highfield meadow and
there between the willow trees he saw the mop of hair,
the sharp cut profile, the little figure half hidden by the
grass, looking as though he grew out and was part of
the very earth itself he sat on.

Liddiard looked back at Mary.

"Is that him?" he muttered.

She nodded her head and then of a sudden a fear,
nameless and unreasonable, shook her through all her
body.

"You came to see him," she whispered.  "You
came because of him.  Didn't you?  Didn't you?"

"How did you know?" he asked.

"How did I know?"  Her throat gave out a sound
like laughter; a mirthless sound that frightened her and
awed him.  "Shouldn't I know, better than him;
better even than you?  Wouldn't I know everything that
touches him, touches him near and touches him far
away?  What do you want to see him for?  He's
nothing to do with you--nothing!"

"I know that, Mary.  He's yours.  He's nothing to
do with me; but mightn't I have something to do with him?"

Fear sickened in her throat.  She wet her lips and
gathered her sewing from her lap as though she might
run away; then laid it down again.

"Say what you mean," she said quickly.  "I don't
want delicate words.  You're right.  I never did.
They break against me and in their pieces mean
nothing.  I want the words I can understand.  What do
you mean you might be something to him?  What
could you be?  He's mine, all mine!  I made him--not
you.  I know I made him.  I meant to.  Every
moment I meant to.  It was just a moment of passion
to you, a release of your emotions.  It was ease it gave
you--I can't help how I speak now--it was ease!
It brought me the most wonderful pain in the world.
You didn't want him!  In that letter you wrote you
talked about the consequences of passion!
Consequences!  My God!  Is he no more than a
consequence!  A thing to be avoided!  A thing, as you
suggested, to be hidden away!  I made him, I tell
you--I meant to make him!  I gave every thought in my
mind and every pulse in my body to make him what he
is while you were scheming in yours how the
consequences of passion might be averted.  What is the
something you could be to him now after all these
years?  Where is the something any man can be to
the child a woman brings into the world?  Show me
the man who, in such relationship as ours, will long
for his child to be born, will give his passion, not for
relief, but in full intent to make that child his own.
Show me the man outside the convenience of the laws
that he has made who will face the shame and ignominy
he has made for himself and before all the world claim
in his arms the thing he meant to create--then I'll
admit he has something to do with the child he was the
father of.  Father!  What delicate word that is!
There's a word that breaks into a thousand little pieces
against my heart.  I don't know it!  I don't
understand it!  I pick up the pieces and look at them and
they mean nothing!  Have you come after all these
years to tell me you're his father, because if you have,
you're talking empty words to me."

A little shout of laughter fluttered down to them
through the still air.  She never heard it.  The beating
of her heart was all too loud.  Scarcely knowing what
she did, she picked up her sewing and went on with
her work, while Liddiard stared before him down the
field.

"I suppose you imagine," he said presently, "I suppose
you imagine I don't feel the justice of every word
you've said.  You think I'm incapable of it."

She made no reply and he continued.

"I know what you say is quite true.  I haven't come
here to tell you I'm his father.  I scarcely feel that I
am.  If I did, I wouldn't thrust it on you.  But there's
one thing you don't count in all you've said."

"What's that?" she sharply asked.

"For all that you made him, for all the thoughts and
pulses that you gave, he stands alone.  He is himself,
apart from you or me.  The world is in front of him
whilst it's dropping behind us two."

Again she laid her sewing down.  A deeper terror he
had struck into her heart by that.  That was true.
She knew it was true.  The coming of Lucy into that
hayfield only the summer before was proof that it was
true.  He stood alone.  She had said as much to
Mrs. Peverell herself.  "He'll give the best he has," she
had said in effect.  "Perhaps he'll leave the farm and
break your heart.  Perhaps if I live, he'll break
mine."  This was true.  Whole-heartedly she hated Liddiard
for saying it.  When all her claims were added up,
John still stood by himself--alone.

"Go on," she whispered with intense quietness.
"Say everything you've got to say.  I'm listening."

He looked about him for reassurance, doubtful and
ill at ease because of the note in her voice, yet set of
purpose upon that for which he had come.

"I have told my wife everything," he began and
paused.  She bowed her head as he waited for a sign
that she had heard.

"I told her a week ago to-day.  My wife is now
forty-seven.  We have no children.  We can have
none.  A week ago to-day we were discussing that;
that I had no one, no one directly to whom I could
leave Wenlock Hall.  She knows what that place
means to me.  I think you know too.  It was my
father's and his father's.  Well, it has been in the
family for seven generations now.  Each one of us
has done something to it to improve it.  In the Stuart
period one of my ancestors built a chapel.  Before
then a wonderful tithe barn was built.  It's one of the
finest in England.  The date is on one of the
beams--1618.  The eldest son has always inherited.  We've
never broken the line.  We were talking about it the
other night.  I was an only son.  The property is not
entailed.  The next of kin is a cousin.  He's the only
male Liddiard.  I'm not particularly fond of him, but
he's the only Liddiard.  I should leave it to him.  My
wife was saying what a pity it was.  She wondered
whose fault it could be.  'I believe it must be mine,'
she said, 'and if it is, what can I do?'"

He paused again and looked long at Mary whose
needle still with the finest of precision was passing in
and out of the material in her hands.

"I told her what she could do," he added and met
Mary's eyes as they looked up.

"What was that?" she asked quietly.

"I told her she could give our child a home and a
name," said he, "if you would consent to let him go."





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.. class:: center large

   II

.. vspace:: 2

It was in Mary's sensations as though, all
unprepared, she had turned a sudden corner and found
herself looking into an abyss, the darkness and
depth of which was unfathomable.  All sense of
balance and equilibrium seemed to leave her.  She reeled
and was giddy in her mind.  She could have laughed
aloud.  Her mental stance upon the plane of thought
became a negation.  Her grip was gone.  She was
floating, nebulously, foolishly, without power of volition
to gravitate herself to a solid conception of anything.

He proposed to take John away from her.  He was
suggesting to her by every word he said that it was
her duty to John to let him go.  Not only could she
laugh at the thought of it--she did.  After all these
twelve years when the whole of her life and John's too
were planned out like a design upon a loom, needing
only the spinning, she was to tear the whole fabric into
shreds and fling it away!  It was preposterous,
unbelievable that he could have thought it worth while to
come to her with such a suggestion.  Yet she laughed,
not because it was so ludicrous as to be unbelievable,
but because Fate had so ordered it that, in a depth of
her consciousness, she knew he could have done nothing else.

From the world's point of view it was the natural
and inevitable sequence in an extraordinary chain of
events.  Many a woman would be glad of such an
advancement for her son.  Most conceivable it was that
a man should desire his own flesh and blood to inherit
and carry on in his name that of which the generations
had made him proud.  All this she realized.  All this
was the darkness and depth of the abyss into which she
looked.

But then the sound of her laughter in her ears gave
her hold again.  More real than all worldly
considerations became the cruelty it was to her.  More real
even than that was the destruction of the ideal she had
cherished in her heart and nurtured and fed in John's.

His education was to have been the earth, the very
soil his feet trod, not the riches that came out of that
earth and more than the soft wet clay, soiled the hands
of him who touched them.  It was to give, not to
enjoy; to labor, not to possess with which she had hedged
him in upon his road to happiness and fulfillment.
These were the realizations which, with the sound of
her laughter, gave her hold again.

She saw the depth and darkness of that abyss, but
shut her eyes to it.  In full possession of herself,
having gained equilibrium once more, she turned upon
Liddiard with a scorn he had never seen in her.

"I'm forty now," she said, "and I don't think you'll
deny that I have found and faced the world.  In your
sheltered place down there in Somerset, you can't
maintain that you have met the world--as I've met it.
The real things have never threatened you to crush
your spirit or break your courage as they have mine.
Setting up a chapel or building a tithe barn aren't the
real things of life.  Keeping your lawns cut and your
borders trimmed won't make England great or set in
order the vast forces of life that govern us.  Inheriting
isn't creating, possession isn't power.  You want
to train my son to the thought that it is.  For twelve
years I've trained his little mind to the knowledge that
it isn't.  You want him to possess and enjoy.  I want
him to labor and live.  You want him to inherit your
pride.  I want him to create his own.  Doesn't it ever
occur to you that since your family established itself
in its possessions in Somersetshire, it's been decaying
in purpose, decaying in spirit, decaying in power?
Doesn't it ever occur to you that you're making no
surplus of energy in that house of Liddiard, but by means
of the laws of inheritance are living upon a little circle
of energy that goes round and round, always dissipating
itself with every generation, always becoming the
lesser instead of the greater; creating no energy that
is new, only using up that which is old; setting up
chapels for itself and building itself tithe barns, always
for itself, never making that energy really free for
the whole world to profit by?"

Liddiard stood staring at her in amazement.  She
was not talking with the words of a woman.  She was
talking with the words of a force, a new force;
something, coming up against which he felt himself puny
and small and well-nigh impotent.

"You think I'm talking like a street orator," she
said, justly reading that look.  "Very probably I am
to you.  I know nothing of the social science, none of
the facts for what I'm saying.  I've never even said
things like this before.  I'm not picking my words.
I'm only saying what I feel, what I believe all women
are feeling in their hearts.  One and all, if their
thoughts were known, I believe they know they have
contributed long enough to the possessive passions of
men.  Long enough they've been through the pains of
birth and the greater pain of disappointment in their
sons in order to give men children to inherit the
possessions that are theirs.  Long enough they've been
servants, slaves even, to the ideals of men.  The laws
have been constructed to make and keep them so.  The
civilization of the world has been built up on the
principle of 'get by force and keep by servitude.'  The
women who marry into royalty must breed or they are
put away.  That's what we do with the cows here on
this farm.  If they don't have calves and give milk,
they're sent away to the market and they're sold.  But
do you really think you can keep women upon that
plane of life forever?  Here, at Yarningdale, I set my
teeth and close my eyes when the cow is driven away.
But do you suppose women are getting for themselves
no more soul than that beast has?  Do you think
they're always quietly going to be driven away?  Do
you think they merely want to be stalled and well-fed
for their efficient service?  Do you think with men as
they are, making love and passion a horror to some
women they marry, that we are forever going to believe
they are fathers of our children and have supreme
power to teach them none but their own ideals?"

She came a little closer to him as now they stood out
there in the Highfield meadow.

"I'm outside your laws," she said.  "You can't
touch me.  I believe there are countless women who
would be as I am, if they dared.  I believe there are
countless women who would give all they know to be
able to train their sons to their own ideals as I can train
mine.  We don't know anything about government or
the forces that drive nations in peace and in war; but
we do know that the real peace is not in possession,
the real war is not in physical force and bloodshed to
keep what you have got, or win a little more.  One
day there'll come a time when women won't give their
sons for that, when they'll train themselves and train
them to higher conceptions than you men have had."

Of a sudden she turned from the reason in her mind
to the emotion in her breast.

"You shan't have my John!" she cried.  "You
shan't have him!  I made him, as every woman could
make her child if once she thought it was worth while.
Well--I've thought it worth while, as now I think it
worth while to fight for him and keep him.  When
you made your laws about illegitimacy and gave the
woman the right in her child, it was because you
considered that some men were fools and all women were
cowards and that the one must be punished for his
folly no less than the other for her fear.  But what
would you do if in the end that law turned round
against you?  What would you do if all women chose
to do as I have done and refused to bind themselves in
matrimony to the man who gave them a child?  Men
would still be fools, you may be sure of that.  Nature
relies upon their folly, while they have thought that
what she relied upon was their power.  Power it may
be with the few, the few that can inspire real love; but
folly it is with the most of men; folly and greed which
causes them to make so many women scoff at and hate
the thought of love.  Yes--hate the thought of love,
some women do.  Every young girl shrinks at the
thought of physical contact.  Many a young woman
goes to her marriage with terror in her heart and with
many that terror becomes horror when she knows.
Even we become the possession you take to yourselves.
What most of you call love--is that.  But I'm going
to teach my John better things.  When he comes to
love, he shall come awed, as a woman comes, not
tramping with the pride of victory and possession.
When he comes to love, it shall be to make her find it
as wonderful as now she falsely dreams it is.  You
can't prevent me.  I don't belong to you."

Still it was a force that spoke in her, a force before
which, with character alone, he felt he had no power
to oppose.  She was not even speaking as one amongst
the countless women she had called upon, but as
woman, setting herself up in conflict against man.
This was real war.  He had sensed well enough what
she meant by that.  Yet in the habit of his mind, with
power or no power to oppose, he took such weapons as
he could lay his hands upon and struck back at her.

"Don't let's stand here, like this," said he.  "Can't
we sit down on the grass and talk it out?"

She sat down and, as her body touched the ground,
discovered that she was trembling in every limb.

"You're an extraordinary woman, Mary," he began.
"The most extraordinary woman I've ever known.
You talk with your heart and yet you make me feel all
the time as though your heart were unapproachable.
I've never touched it.  I know that.  I never touched
it even those two nights in Bridnorth.  I thought I
had, but your letter afterwards soon proved to me I
hadn't.  Some man could, I suppose, but as you talk,
I can't conceive the type he'd be.  You know you
frighten me and you'd terrify most men.  I don't say
it in any uncomplimentary fashion, but most men,
hearing what you've said just now, would go to the ends
of the earth rather than make love to or marry you."

"You needn't talk about lack of compliment," she
said with a wry smile.  "I'm quite aware of it.
Women like me don't attract men.  They say we're not
natural.  They like natural women and by that they
mean they like women who are submissive.  But if they
think that's the natural woman, their conception of
women has stopped with the animals.  We aren't
passive.  We're coming to know that we're a force.
Look at the way this talk of the enfranchisement of
women is growing.  Who'd have listened to it twenty
years ago?  I don't profess to know what it means.
I don't profess to conjecture what it's coming to.  But
it's growing; you can't deny it."

She must have thought she had won her way.
Passing like this to abstract and speculative things,
she must have believed he had no more to say; that
question no longer existed about her keeping John.  It
only proved the want of knowledge of facts she
admitted and it was inevitable she must have.  She had
spent all the force of the vital energy of her defense,
but she had not subdued the man in him.  Right as he
knew in his heart she was, there was yet all the reserve
of reason in his mind.  The generations of years of
precedent were all behind him.  She had not subdued
him merely by victory over his emotions.  The force
she had was young and ill-tried.  She had set it up
against convention and triumphed for all these years.
She did not realize now what weight of pressing power
there was behind it, the overbearing numbers that must
tell in the end.

He was only waiting for this moment; this moment
when in the flush of seeming victory she was weakest
of all; this moment when in confidence her mind
relaxed from its purpose and, as was always happening
with his sex and hers, he could take her unawares.
None of this conscious intent there was in him.  He
was merely articulating in his mind in obedience to the
common instinct which through all the years of habit
and custom and use have become the nature of man.

"Yes, that idea about the enfranchisement of women
is growing," he admitted generously, "but I quite
agree we can none of us know what it'll come to.  It
can't alter one thing, Mary."

In a moment alert with the unyielding note in his
voice, she inquired what that might be.

"It can't alter the fact that each one of us, child, of
whatever enfranchisement we may be, stands utterly
and completely alone, encouraged or hampered in our
fulfillment by the circumstances of birth that are made
for us.  It happens that men are more equipped for
the making of those circumstances than women are.
It happens that men are more capable of wrestling
with and overcoming the difficulties of environment,
well, in other words, of providing the encouragement
of circumstance.  I don't think you can get away from
that.  I don't think you can get away from the fact
that in this short life we don't want to waste our
youth in making a suitable environment whenever it's
possible to start so much ahead and conserve our
energies for the best that's in us."

He turned quickly as he sat and looked at her.

"What have you called him?" he asked.

"John," she replied.  "He's John Throgmorton."

"Well, do you think you're giving him the best
chance of trying his soul with the biggest things?
Whatever ideals you have for him, he stands alone with
the circumstances of life in which you place him.  Do
you think he's going to do the best with them here?
Do you believe when he grows up, he'll live to bless you
for the chances of life you threw away for him to-day?
Do you think, if he has ambition, he'll be thankful that
he started life as a farmer's boy with scarcely any
education and but small prospects, when he could have
been a master of men with a big estate and no need to
consider the hampering necessity of making ends meet?
Do you think if he's ambitious, he'll be thankful to you
for that?  Ask any one who has the widest and most
generous experience of the world what they imagine
will be his state of mind when, with ambition
awakening, he comes to learn that he started with that
handicap.  Your ideals and ideas may be perfect in theory.
How do you think they'll come out in practice?  Ideas
are nothing unless they can stand against the melting
flames of fact.  The experience of every one would go
to tell you that in a practical world, which this is, you
were wrong.  Can you prove you will be right?  Can
you prove that when John grows up and ambition lights
in him, he'll thank you for your choice to-day?"

She sat in silence, listening to every word; every
word that beat with the mechanical insistence of a
hammer stroke against her brain.  They were all
arguments she would have expected any one to use in
such a case.  They were all the very forces against
which she had fought for so long.  Yet hearing them
now with this added element of emotion concerning
John, which drove them not only into her brain, but
beating up against her heart as well, she realized how
unanswerable they sounded in--he had said it---in a
practical world.

Supposing John did come to reproach her when he
learnt the opportunity of life she had refused for him?
Her heart shrank and sickened from the thought of it.
If it were for herself alone, how easy it would be to
refuse; how easy to stand by the principles and ideals
she knew in her soul were true.

But why should he ever know?  Who would there
ever be here in Yarningdale to tell him?  For one
instant that thought consoled and the next assailed her
with venomous accusations.  Was it not the
self-confession of weakness to hope for concealment and
deception to save her from retribution?  The very
realization of it shook her faith.  To be true, to be worthy,
to endure, ideals must be able to face the fiercest light;
must live, be tried, be nailed to the cross if necessary.
Only through such a test could they outlive the
mockery of those who railed at and spat on them.  She
knew she could face the contempt of the whole world.
In her own world had she not faced it already?  But
could she endure the recriminations of him whose
whole life was so inextricably woven with her own?

"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God."

Those words came to her, a beacon across the heads
of all the years; but it seemed very far away to her
then.  The light of it flickered an instant bringing
courage to her heart and then died out again.

She did fear now.  More than anything she had
feared in her life, did she shrink from the reproach of
John when he should come to years of appreciation.
Her heart was here involved.  Too shrewdly had
Liddiard struck home at her weakest point.

"Do you think he'll live to bless you for the chances
in life you threw away for him to-day?"

But why should it be to-day?  Why in a sudden
moment should this situation be thrust upon her?  Why
should she be harassed like this to say what she would
do?

"You can't expect me to give you a decision about
this all at once," she said, and there were rough edges
to her voice.  These were not the smooth words of an
easy mind.

He heard each note.  He knew she was swaying
from her purpose.  He realized the approach of what
he had come there determined to secure.

"I don't wish you to give a decision to-day," he
replied.  "Of course I couldn't expect you to.  Do you
think I don't realize what I'm asking you--however
much it may be for his sake."

"No--but I don't mean to-day or this year or the
next," she went on in her distress.  "Can't you wait
until it can be put to him, until he's old enough to
judge for himself; until he's learnt something of all
I want to teach him?"

Liddiard put out his hand.  She did not see it.

"My dear Mary," he said, as he withdrew it again,
"wonderful as your ideals are, you have the fault of
all idealists.  You don't equip them to meet the facts
of life.  They're like flowers planted on a highway.
You don't reckon on the traffic of the world that will
break them down.  Whatever your dreams may be,
they cannot stop that traffic.  The carts must go by.
You can't prevent a man from setting out on his
journeys.  You can only hinder him from reaching his
destination by the beast you give him to draw the
vehicle of his ambitions, by the sound of the ramshackle
vehicle itself which you provide him with to reach his
journey's end.  John couldn't come to Wenlock Hall
with the education of a farmer's boy.  That would be
too cruel.  That would hamper him at every turn.
The springs of his cart would be creaking.  It would
be like asking him to drive down Rotten Row in a
muck cart.  Do you think he'd find that fair?  He
must go to school.  He must go to the University.
He must learn the things that it is necessary he should
know to fill a position like that.  You can't send him.
It must be me.  I don't want your decision at once.
I can wait a week, a month, more.  But you must see
yourself it can't be years.  It can't be till he's able to
choose for himself.  That is the unpractical side of
your ideals.  You don't realize it would be too late then."

Mary sat with her elbows resting on her knees, her
face locked and hidden in her hands.  It was an abyss
which, round that unexpected corner, she had seen
yawning at her feet.  It was deep.  It was dark.
Nothing so dark or deep or fathomless had presented
itself to her in her life before.  She felt herself falling,
falling, falling into the bottomless pit of it and not one
hand was there in all the world that stretched itself out
to save her.

She had come so far, knowing at every turn that,
for all the rough and broken surfaces, her road was
right; thinking, however hard or merciless to her feet,
it yet would lead to sweet and quiet places.  Courage
she had had and fear she had known along the whole
way.  Still she had striven on as one, bearing a heavy
burden, who knows there is release and rest at her
journey's end.

But before the chasm of this abyss that fronted her,
it was not so much courage she lost as the vital essence
of volition.  For herself she did not feel afraid.
Whatever destruction might be awaiting her in those
depths, she did not shrink from it.  Eagerly, willingly,
she would have sacrificed herself, but had no strength
to take the hazard of what might chance and sacrifice him.

There was little need for Liddiard to tell her how
every precedent in life opposed the thing she had set
herself to do.  And once John had come in contact with
life itself, how could she be sure the pressure of his
thoughts would not be tinctured with regret.  What
more bitter inheritance, what more accusing testimony
of her failure than that?

Not always a faun could she keep him.  Not always
with a dryad could he play in happy meadows.  The
world it seemed had grown too old, too worn, for that.
Something must happen to stir human nature to its
depths and rearrange the threadbare and accepted values
before it could ever be young again.

Here she knew she was but dreaming dreams.
There lay the abyss before her.  Nothing in the wildest
flights of her imagination she could conceive was able
to fill its depths or make a bridge, however treacherous,
to span it.

He had said it.  These things were unanswerable in
a practical world; and in a practical world there was
no true sense of vision.  The possessions of men
had become their limitations.  Beyond them and the
ease they brought to the few years that were theirs,
they could not see.

The vision she had had was but a glimpse; a world
beyond, not a world about her.  As Liddiard watched
her, she sank her head upon her knees.  He thought
she had turned to tears.  But a heart, breaking, turns
to that water that does not flow out of the eyes.

He thought she had turned to weeping and in genuine
sympathy laid his hand gently on her arm.  And this
was the spear thrust that set free the water from the
gash his touching hand made in her side.

She drew away and lifted her head and looked at him.

"You're strangling all the joy in the world," she said.





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   III

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There came the sound of a voice through the
willow trees, across the other side of the
stream.  It was a sturdy voice, high and
ringing with encouragement.

"Bear up--be brave," it said.  "We're coming to
the ford.  Once the river's crossed there are only a few
more miles to go before we're safe."

The smile that rose into Mary's eyes found no place
to linger there.  She turned with Liddiard at the sound
to see, a faun no longer, a faun transformed to stalwart
man, bearing a distressed maiden in his arms--a
knight errant shouldering the precious burden of
outraged womanhood and bringing her to safety.

Again the smile crept back into Mary's eyes.  Again
it crept away.

"Has Lucy hurt herself?" she asked.  "What's
the matter with her?"

"There were two terrible robbers in the wood," said
he as he strode with his burden into the stream.
"They had tied her to a tree.  She was all naked when
I found her.  I've killed them both--she's--"  Then
seeing Liddiard for the first time, he stopped.
Astonishment leapt into his eyes.  He set his Lucy down and
stood staring.

"John," said Mary, "this is a friend of mine, a
Mr. Liddiard."  She turned to Liddiard.  "This is my
John," she said.

They met and solemnly shook hands.  With eyes
that sought for subtlest meanings and hidden things,
Mary watched them, the touching of their hands, the
look of the eyes.  So surely she knew, across the
unmeasured distance between them, Liddiard was casting
the javelin of his soul to pierce John's heart.  In that
silence as he stood holding John's hand, she knew he
was eagerly, determinedly, poignantly conscious of
being father of her child and in that silence was straining
to project his consciousness into the very soul of John.
Would he respond?  She watched them both, but
closest by far, her John.  Was there some voice in life
between father and child which all the years and all
their silence could not still?  With almost a jealous
dread she stood before that moment swift in her mind
to see the faintest sign.  Would he respond?

For a while John's hand lay in Liddiard's, then of
himself he took it away.

"Can we go on playing, Mummy?" he asked.
When she knew there had been no answer to Liddiard's
call; when, sure in her heart he know none but
her, she knelt down on the grass at his side and took
his cool cheeks in her hands.

"If you'll kiss me," said she, "if you'll kiss me first."

He framed his lips and kissed her eyes and stood
back laughing.  He framed his lips again and kissed
her mouth, then laughed again and lastly, flinging his
arms about her neck, he poured his kisses like a song
into her ears, then, shouting to his Lucy, ran away.

In a long silence, Liddiard turned and watched them,
faun and dryad once more, spirits of that sunshine and
those deep green shades of the trees.  He looked back
at Mary.

"You've made a sturdy, splendid thing of him,
Mary," he said emotionally.  "You've made him fit
for the very best."

She closed her eyes.

"Who's the little girl?" he asked presently.

"Lucy--Lucy Kemp.  She's the daughter of a
farmer who lives over there.  They're great friends."  She
half smiled.  "I was jealous at first.  I know now
these things must be.  Boy and girl, why shouldn't
they begin that way?  It's grown to be the sweetest of
wooings to me.  They're becoming like two young
shoots together.  One day their roots will twine."

He put on his hat.

"You can't be sure of that," said he.  "One day
perhaps he'll need his own.  I know you think, living
here, that class means nothing.  You rule out heredity
altogether.  But it comes out.  He might be content.
Do you think a girl like that could ever make him
realize the fullness of life?"

Fear sprang back into her heart again.

"Oh, why did you ever come?" she said.  "We
were all so happy here!"





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.. class:: center large

   IV

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Mary stayed on at Yarningdale when John
was taken away to school.  Had she had
fear of the pain it was, she would still have
remained.  Mr. and Mrs. Peverell were getting old
and so close by this was her life now knit with theirs,
she knew her absence would have made too deep a void
were she to leave them then.

The natural milkmaid she had become, so skillful, so
acknowledgable and conscientious in her work, that
Mr. Peverell had increased his activities in this
direction.  Where at first there had been but nine milking
cows, there now were fourteen.  All through the
summer months, he supplied thirty gallons of milk a day.
Filled in the churns, Mary drove with it every evening
in the spring cart to the station.  At her suggestion
and by means of her labor he undertook the rearing of
his own calves and the ultimate introduction of them
into the milking herd.  Whenever good fortune
brought them a promising heifer calf, it was given into
Mary's charge.  It became an interest deeper and more
exacting than she knew to wean and rear it for the herd.
So they were able to know the character and history of
each beast as it came into service, its milking qualities,
its temper, the stock from which it sprang.

As thus, having weaned him towards the vision
of life she had, Mary would have reared her John.

"Why--why did 'ee let 'en go, Maidy?" Mrs. Peverell
had cried to her the night after John's
departure when she lay stretched upon her bed, staring,
staring, staring at the paper on the wall.

"I'd taught him to give," she muttered.  "How
would he believe what I'd said one day, when he learnt
that I'd kept back?  How can you teach another how
to live if you don't know how, yourself?  There's only
one way of knowing the truth about life--living it.
I shan't lose him.  I know deep and deep and deep in
my heart, I shan't.  He's gone, but he'll come back.
Should I really have believed if I hadn't let him go?
The belief that's really in the spirit comes out in the
flesh.  It must!  It must!  Or soul and body are
never one."

It was to herself she had spoken.  Never her hopes,
ambitions or faith for John had she attempted to
explain to Mrs. Peverell.  None but the simplest issues
of life could that good woman appreciate.  Right or
wrong things were with her.  No other texture but
this they had.  In fullest conviction she knew that
Mary had been right in everything she had done.  So
close in sympathy with their Maidy was she now that
even in this parting with John, that well-nigh broke
her heart, she felt Mary must be right.

"Shall I cross his name out of the book, Maidy?"
she had asked as she was leaving the room.  "'Twon't
be nothing to him, this place, when he comes into his
big estate."

Sitting up in the bed, Mary had called Mrs. Peverell
to her, clutching her hands.

"Never do that!" she cried.  "That was his
birthright.  He was born here.  I made him here.
Promise me, don't do that.  If you did that, I should feel
I'd lost him forever!"

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.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

For the first half of every holiday at school John
came back to his mother at Yarningdale.  The
remainder of his time he spent in Somerset.  How closely
she watched him it is not difficult to suppose.  Every
term that passed brought him to her again with
something she had taught him gone, with something they
had taught him in its place.

To the outward observer, he was the same John.
All his love he gave her, teasing her with it as he grew
older, playing the lover to her shyness when she found
him turning from boy to man.

They spoke little of Liddiard or the life in Somerset
for the first year.  All invitations to Wenlock Hall
though freely offered, she refused.

.. vspace:: 2

"I appreciate your wife's generosity of wish to meet
me; don't think me seeking to make difficulties; really I
am trying to avoid them," she wrote.

.. vspace:: 2

In fact it was that Yarningdale was her home and
still, pursuant of her purpose, she would not allow John
to associate her in his mind with any other place.
Within a year they had made him feel the substance of
his inheritance.  He spoke of Wenlock Hall, knowing
it would be his.  Inevitably he made comparisons
between their lives and hers, but it was not until after his
first term at Oxford that openly he questioned her
wisdom in staying on the farm.

"They both want you down there, Mater, at Wenlock
Hall.  And after all, this is a poky little place,
isn't it?  Of course the farm's not bad, but it's a bit
ramshackle and sometimes I hate to think of you still
milking the cows in those dingy old stalls.  We've
got lovely sheds at Wenlock Hall, asphalt floor, beautifully
drained, plenty of light and as clean as a new pin."

She looked at him steadily.

"For nearly eighteen years, John, I've been milking
the cows in those stalls.  Until two weeks before you
were born, I sat there milking them.  As soon as I was
well again I went back.  You've got your little private
chapel at Wenlock Hall.  Those stalls are my chapel.
That little window hung with cobwebs through which
I've seen the sunset--oh, so many times, I don't want
any more wonderful an altar than that.  In those stalls
I've had thoughts no light through stained glass
windows could ever have brought to me.  Do you remember
sitting beside me there while I milked, oh, heaps of
times, but one time particularly when you asked me
about God?"

He thought an instant and then burst into shouts of
laughter.

"What, that time I asked you if God had a beard
like old Peverell?"

She tried to laugh with him, just as, at the time, she
had tried to control her laughter.  This was the
difference between John, then and now; was it not indeed
the difference in all of her life?

"That was the end," said she, "that was the last
question you asked.  We had said a lot before that.
Don't you remember?"

"I was just a kid then," said he.  "I suppose I was
always asking questions."

"Don't you now?"

"No, not so much, why should I?  Mater, you
don't expect me always to be a silly little fool, do you?"

The breath was deep she drew.

"You were far from being a silly little fool then,
John.  Those questions were all wonderful to me, even
the last one."

He laid both his hands upon her shoulders and looked
far into her eyes.

"You take life so seriously, Mater," he said.

"Only when it loses its seriousness, John," she
replied.  "I was full of the joy of it in those days when
always you were flinging your earnest little questions
at me.  It's now when it seems to me sometimes you
want to play with life that I take it seriously.  It's
now, when sometimes you give me the impression you
just want to enjoy life, that all the joy goes out of it.
I wonder would you understand, my dearest," she
slipped her arm about his neck, "if I told you you
were more of a man to me then than often you are now."

"Well, dash it, Mater, I can't help it.  We don't go
mooching about the 'Varsity with long faces wondering
about God.  Every chap enjoys himself as much as he
can and that all depends on the allowance he gets from
his people.  They're jolly decent to me that way.  I've
a good deal more than most fellows.  Why, I have a
corking time up there and why shouldn't I?  I shall
be young only once."

"You might always be young," she whispered.
"They're teaching you that youth's a thing to spend,
like money when you have it.  I know it's all the
training, my dear.  I ought never to have let you go.  I'd
never have taught you that."

"I shouldn't have got much joy out of working on
this bally old farm, should I?" he retaliated.  "The
Pater's busy enough down at Wenlock Hall, but he
doesn't actually do manual work.  He's always going
round the place.  I don't suppose it pays, real profits,
I mean, like old Peverell makes this pay, but it gives
plenty of employment."

"Pater?  Is that what you call him now?"

After the sound of that word, she had heard no
more.  It rang with countless echoes in her brain.
What a sound it might have had if ever she had loved.
Was it as hollow to other women as it was to her now?

"He asked me to, this year," said John.  "Just
before I went up to the 'Varsity.  I couldn't refuse,
could I?  After all, he is my father.  Lots of people
say I'm awfully like him."

Mary turned away.

"I must go out and fetch the cows now," she said.
"Would you like to come?"

He showed an instant's pause.  Before it had
passed, swiftly that instant her pride arrested it.

"Perhaps you were going to do something else,"
said she.

"Well, as a matter of fact, I was going to take old
Peverell's gun round by the wood.  It's alive with
rabbits.  He says they're spoiling his mangolds."

"All right, my dear.  I'll see you at supper-time."

She drove the cows into the shed.  One by one they
filed into their accustomed stalls.  Mechanically she
fastened the chains about their necks and took down
her stool and brought her pail.  Leaning her cheek as
so many times she had done against the first warm
flank, she looked up.  The setting sun was shining
through the window.





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.. class:: center large

   V

.. vspace:: 2

This and many other such conversations
revealed in time to Mary that which she had
both known and feared.  John was changing.
Every fresh occasion of their meeting he was altered
a little more.  The possessive passion, inherent in the
very nature of his sex, was stirring in him.
Gradually but inevitably they were wakening in him the
pride of inheritance.  Less and less did it seem to her
he was creating his own.

It was all too subtle to arrest, too elusive to oppose.
Still, as always, he had his charm.  Both Peverell and
his wife found him altered, it was true, but improved.

"There be gettin' the grand manner of the squire
about 'en," Peverell said one day when he went back
to Somerset before returning to Oxford.  "How many
acres is it coming to 'en?  Two thousand!  Well!  A
young man needs his head set right way on to let none
o' that go wastin'."

Not even did Mary let Mrs. Peverell see the wound
she had.  Scarcely herself did she realize how deep it
had gone.  But more than in his manner and the things
he said, it was in his attitude to Lucy she was made
most conscious of his change.

During his first holidays, they had played together
as though no difference had entered their lives to
separate them.  The next time they were more reserved.
A shyness had come over them which partly Mary
justified to herself, ascribing it to that awkwardness
of the schoolboy who, if he is not playing some manly
game or doing some manly thing, is ever ready to
fear the accusation of ridiculousness.

But it was before he went to Oxford, while he was
yet at school that the change in him became more than
that merely of confusion.  It was plain to be seen that
he avoided her then.  A solitary figure, wandering in
the Highfield meadow where first they had met, where,
most likely it was, they still would meet whenever he
was at Yarningdale, showed to Mary the patient heart
that watched and waited for him.

Sometimes at Mary's invitation she joined and
walked with them.  Often it was no more than a
shouted greeting from John, flung into the wind over
his shoulder, after which the little figure would
disappear through the willow trees and for the rest of those
holidays perhaps be seen no more, or ever be
mentioned by John.

"Have you lost all interest in Lucy?" Mary asked
him straightly once when, at the end of his time at
Yarningdale, he was packing up his things for the rest
of his holiday in Somerset.

He looked up, at first surprised and then with color
rising in his cheeks.

"What do you mean by interest?" he asked.  "I
like her very much.  If you mean I haven't seen her
these holidays, I can't go hunting her out, can I?"

"Can't you?  You used to once."

"Well, I was a kid then.  So was she.  She's nearly
seventeen now."

"Doesn't it all come back to a matter of interest
though?  You can't be interested, of course, if you're
not.  I'm not suggesting that you're being willfully
unkind to her.  I don't think you'd be willfully unkind
to any one; but do you know what will happen as soon
as you've gone?"

"What?"

"She'll come round here on some pretext.  She'll
contrive to seek me out and gradually we shall begin
to talk about you and then, most cunningly it will seem
to herself she is doing it, she'll ask whether you said
anything about her while you were here and if you did
what it was and how you said it or what I think you
meant by it."

John flung the things into his bag.

"I wish you wouldn't encourage her, Mater," he
exclaimed.

She came across the room to him.  She took his
hands that clumsily were folding some garment before
he could pack it.  She forced him to turn his face to
hers.

"It's just as much that she encourages me," she said.
"Do you know I was jealous of her once?"

He guffawed with laughter and took her face in his
hands and kissed her between the eyes.

"I was," she whispered, her voice made more than
tender with that kiss.  "When she first took your
thoughts a moment from me, that day you met her
when we were making hay in the Highfield meadow, I
was jealous then.  Now we have one thing, so closely
in common that, though she's only sixteen and I'm
forty-seven we've become inseparable friends."

"What do you mean, one thing in common?"

"The old John."

For an instant she gave lease to her emotion and
gently clung to him.

"That was the young John," she added in a whisper,
"the little boy with the mop of hair who was a pirate
captain and a Claude Duval and a hundred sturdy men
all contained, John, in the simplest, sweetest mind that
held one thought.  It was to be a man like Mr. Peverell
and till the soil with labor from sunrise to the sunset,
a man like Mr. Peverell who owed no thanks to any,
but out of his own heart and with his own energy made
his pride, a man like Mr. Peverell who gave all that he
had to the earth which gave all back again to him."

Her voice was almost trembling now.  Chance of
circumstance had placed this moment in her hands.
She knew she was fighting for her ideals, perhaps with
the last opportunity that would ever be given her.

Would he respond?  Her heart fluttered in her
breast with fear.  Had this opportunity come too late?
Was he past answering to it now?  She hung upon
the moment with catching breath, scarce daring to
watch his eyes, lest she should know too soon.

Feeling his arm slip round her shoulder, finding his
lips against her cheek, she could have cried aloud for
joy, yet all in strange perversity kept the stiller in his
arms.

This was response.  The touch of her mind had not
yet gone from his.  He had emotions yet that answered
to her own.  The possessive passion had not won him
wholly for its own.  A heart he had that still could
beat with hers, that still could urge the love in him to
take her in his arms.

She knew he was going to speak and waited, saying
no more herself to prompt the answer he might give,
but laying her cheek against his lips, hearing the breath
he drew as he replied.

"I don't feel that I've changed, Mater," he
murmured to her.  "I'm a bit older, that's all.  Being up
at Oxford makes you see things differently, and it's
awfully different at Wenlock Hall from what it is here.
You get out of the way of doing things for yourself,
there are so many people to do them for you.  Why
don't you come down there?  It's awfully jolly.
They'd give you an awfully good time.  I know they
would.  Let me send a wire and say you're coming
these holidays, with me, now?  Do!  Will you?"

She shook her head.  He did not know what
temptation he offered.  But there, in Yarningdale was the
citadel of her faith.  Deeply as she longed always to
be with him, she dared not sally forth on such
adventure as that.  Only her faith was there to be its
garrison.  Only by setting her standard there upon its walls
did she feel she could defend the fortress of her ideals.

If she could but keep his love, as now in his arms
she felt she had it sure, then always there was hope
she might draw him back to the life that she had
planned for him.  A brave hope it was while she rested
there in his arms.  For one moment it soared high
indeed; the next it fluttered like a shot bird to the earth.

"Don't ask me about Lucy," he said as still he held
her to him.  "You can't expect me to feel the same
about her, or that it should grow into anything more
than it was.  After all, she's only Kemp's daughter."

She looked away.  Her hold of him loosened.
Scarcely realizing it, she had slipped from his arms and
was standing alone.





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.. class:: center large

   VI

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It was just before the summer vacation, when John
was eighteen, that he had written to Mary, saying--

.. vspace:: 2

"I've got special leave to come down next Friday and
I want to ask you something.  There's a girl I've got to
know, well, she's twenty-five and I want you to meet her
first before they do at Wenlock Hall."

.. vspace:: 2

She had come then and so soon.  The first woman
of John's own choosing now he was become a man.
The jealousy she had known concerning Lucy was as
nothing to this she felt with a sickness of apprehension
in her now.  Fate, circumstance, the mere happenings
of life, these had brought him his Lucy.  But here was
one his heart must have sought out, his soul had chosen.
She seemed to know there was no chance, but something
selective about this.  Here the nature that was in him
had been called upon.  For the first time, with no
uncertainty, she was to learn what that nature was.

Mrs. Peverell indeed had spoken true when she had
called him a love-child.  His response to passion had
been swift and soon.  And was he coming, awed to
love as once she had said she would teach him to come?
Or was he tramping with the pride of victory and
possession?  The moment she saw this girl, she
would know.  The world was full of women who
asked for no more; who judged the affections of their
men by just that measure of animal passion which in
their hearts and often upon their tongues they
professed to despise.

Only the few there were who, never asking but waiting
for the love that she had wished to teach him,
inspired it.  Had his heart sought out one of these?
With fear and trembling she read on.

.. vspace:: 2

"I can't explain in writing," the letter continued, "but
you must see her before any one else."

.. vspace:: 2

The degree of her gratitude for that for a moment
drove away all fear, but not for long.

.. vspace:: 2

"I've told her everything about myself," she read on.
"She's wonderful.  She doesn't mind a bit.  I want you
to let me bring her down to Yarningdale.  She can have
my room and I'll doss out at the Inn.  I know you'll like
her.  You must.  She's splendid.  I've warned her what
the farm is like, that it's a bit rough, but she doesn't care
and she's longing to meet you."

.. vspace:: 2

All Mary's intuitive impressions of her who did not
mind when she had heard about her John, she put away
from her and, harnessing the light horse in the spring
cart, drove down that Friday to the station.

It was characteristic of John's letters that he had not
mentioned her name.  Many of his friends at the
'Varsity she knew well by his accounts of them, having
no more classification for them in her mind than the
nicknames they went by.

John was leaning out of the carriage window as the
train drew in.  Swift enough she noted the look of
eager excitement in his eyes; but it was that figure in
the pale blue frock behind him she saw.  As they came
down the platform towards her, John first with his
bounding stride, still it was the figure behind him her
heart was watching, notwithstanding that she gave her
eyes to him.

"Here's Dorothy Fielding, Mater," he said, scarcely
with pause to exchange their kiss of meeting.

She turned with the smile that hid her hurt to meet
those eyes her John had chosen to look into.

It was a quiet woman this Dorothy saw, so calm and
serene as made her realize how all those subtle
preparations she had made for this meeting were wasted here.
That she was well gowned, well shod, that her hair was
neither too carefully dressed nor untidy in its effect,
that her hat showed confidence in her taste, all these
preparations over which she had taken such care she
knew could not avail here in the judgment of those
eyes that met hers.

This was not just a woman she had to please and
satisfy; it was something like an element, like fire or
like rushing water her soul must meet, all bare and
stripped of the disguising superficialities of life.

"This is the first time I've heard your name," said
Mary with that smile she gave her.  "John never
mentioned it in his letter.  But then I don't suppose he's
ever told you what I was like."

"Mater!  I've told Dorothy everything, haven't I,
Dee?  Described every little detail about you, rather!"

Mary's hands stretched out and held his.  Her eyes
she kept for Dorothy.

"Well, I hope you're not disappointed," she said,
"because I'm not a bit like it--am I?"

She knew so soon, at once.  So far beyond the reach
of conscious comprehension had been Dorothy's
surprise that now it came rushing to the surface of her
mind with Mary's detection of it.

"On the contrary," she replied, "I think I'd have
known you anywhere."

Then from that moment they knew they shared no
thought in common.  That first lie was the sound of
their challenge.  Each for their separate purposes they
were at enmity in their claim of John.  He stood
beside them, there upon the platform, supremely
unconscious of the forces he had set free, sublimely happy in
his achievement of bringing them together.

There were two women, dearer to him at that
moment than any two other people in the world and all
he saw was the smiles they gave each other.  The
spiritual and the material need of him they had, for
which already they had cried the challenge to battle, this
came no more even to the threshold of his mind than
came to his ears, intent on all they said, the short, sharp
whistle of the departing train.

Each in that first moment had set up her standard.
His soul was the sepulchre for which Mary fought.
There between those two, lay John's ideals and visions
of life.  It was they who had the power to make them
what they should be.  Through them he was to find
stimulus for the emotions that should govern all he
did.  Still was he for molding, still the plastic spirit
needing the highest emotion of the highest ideal to give
it noblest purpose.

And here, as ever, his mother was she who in that
malleable phase set first the welfare of his soul.  No
conception or consideration of inheritance was there
to hinder her.  It was not to a man fit for the world
she saw him grow, but to equip him for life she gave
the essence of her being.

This from the very first, before ever that cry of his
lifted above the wind in the elm trees, had been her
sure and certain purpose.  No possessions in life there
were but him to limit the perspective of her vision; and
such a possession was he as for whom, if need be, she
could make absolute sacrifice.

Already she had done so.  Already once she had
given her heart for breaking to let him go.  Fear there
was in her now she had not had courage enough in her
purpose.  Fear there was she had not trusted enough
to faith.

Would he have lived to rebuke her for the opportunity
she had thrown away?  Might he not have lived,
as she would have taught him, to thank her for the
sense of life she had given him in exchange for the
world that now was at his feet?

Once she had given her heart for breaking and it had
healed in the patient endurance of her soul.  She had
no thought to give it here.  Here in that moment as
they met upon the platform, she knew she must fight to
the last.  Men might make the world, but it was women
who created life.  Between those two women, laughing
like a schoolboy, he stood for his life to be shaped and
fashioned and all that appeared upon the surface of
things to him was that the world was a happy place.





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.. class:: center large

   VII

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It would be a false conception of Mary
Throgmorton in this phase of her being to picture her
as consenting to the common wiles of women.

She fought her battle for her John with weapons the
stress of circumstances made ready for her hand.  All
men have done the same.  Guile there may seem to
have been in her, but none greater than that which in
some one form or another is called forth from all
human nature in any conflict.  The smiles with which
Dorothy greeted her had to be met with smiles; the
delicate word she so despised demanded no other than
the delicate word from her.  To have used blunter,
heavier weapons than these might indeed have routed
her opponent, yet to have won in such a case would
have been worse than loss.

Here was war in the true sense as she knew it;
not the flinging of a greater force against a lesser,
winning on the field of battle and in the very boastful pride
of victory, losing in the field of life.  It was not to
confound her enemy she sought but to win that issue
upon which the full justice of her hope was set.  Not
for herself to gain or keep it had she made her heart
of tempered steel, but for another to find the liberty
his soul had need of.

It was for John she fought and none of his pity
dared she awaken for his Dorothy, well knowing that
though by Nature victors themselves, there was little
love in the hearts of men for a triumphant woman.

If this was guile, it was such as life demanded of her
then.  With all nobility of character to criticize
herself, she did not pause here for sentiment.  If the
weapons she must use were not to her liking, necessity
yet fitted them readily to her hold.

Never had John seen his mother so gentle or so kind.
For the first time in his conscious mind he appreciated
the pain of jealousy he knew must be pricking at her
heart.  For in some sense it was her defeat it seemed
to him he witnessed; a brave defeat with head high in
pride and eyes that sadness touched but left no tears.
He came to realize the ache of loneliness she felt
whenever in the fields, about the farm or through the woods
he went with Dorothy alone.  After a few days, it was
he, unprompted, who asked her to accompany them,
and Mary whose wisdom it was so readily to find some
duty about the house or with the cows that prevented
her acceptance.

Gradually she permitted him to come upon suspicion
that these excuses were often invented.  Gradually she
brought him to consciousness of the sacrifice she made.
He found he learnt it with effort or intent and
appreciated in himself the breadth of vision his heart had
come by.

"Did you realize," he said one day to Dorothy in
the woods, "that the Mater just invented that excuse
not to come with us?"

She shook her head.

He found amaze at that.

"She did," said he.  "Those cow stalls don't want
whitewashing again.  They're a bit ramshackle
compared with ours at Wenlock Hall, but they're as clean
as a new pin.  Old Peverell told me the inspector said
they'd never been so clean before.  She invented it."

Suddenly he took Dorothy's arm.

"Do you know you've done that for me?" he whispered.

"Done what?"

"Given me a wider view of things, taught me to
realize other people's feelings as well as my own,
shown me what she suffers when she sees me go off to
Wenlock, what she suffers when I bring you down here
and go out with you every day, leaving her alone."

"But why should she suffer?" asked Dorothy.
"She's your mother, she must love you.  She must
want to see you happy.  She must be glad you're going
to come into that beautiful place in Somersetshire."

He fell to silence, having no answer to that, yet
feeling she somehow had not understood what he had meant.

That night he came to Mary's room to say good-night
before he went down to the bedroom he had taken
at the Crooked Billet.  Always hitherto it had been a
knock upon the door, a call of good-night and then her
listening to the sound of his footsteps down the thinly
carpeted stairs.  This time he asked if he might come in.

By the light of her candle, Mary was lying in her
bed reading one of the books from a little shelf at her
bedside.  More than she knew, this request of his
startled yet spurred her no less to the swift
expediency of what she must do.

"Just one moment," she called back, steadying the
note in her voice.  Quickly then she slipped from her
bed, arranging her hair as best she could before the
mirror; with a fever almost of speed, changing her
night attire for a garment the best she had, fresh with
the scent of the lavender she kept with all her things.
Not once did her fingers fumble in their haste.
Another moment she was back in bed again, her book
put back upon the shelf and another, one of those
Nature books she used to read when he was a little boy,
taken in its place.

"Come in," she said and, because her voice was so
low with her control of eagerness, she had to repeat
her summons.

It was as the door opened and he entered that she
felt like a mistress receiving her lover.  Her heart was
beating in her throat.  Even John found her eyes more
bright than he had ever seen them before.

All love of women in that moment she knew was
the same.  For sons or lovers, if it were their hearts
beat too high for the material judgments in a material
world, what did that matter if so high they beat as to
lift the hearts of men to nobler than material things?
This, she realized it, was her function; this the power
so many women were denied, having no vision of it in
themselves because men did not grant it license in their
needs.

Not to give him possession as a lover did she admit
him then, but in the sacrifice of her love and of herself
to lift him through emotion to the most spiritual
conceptions of life that were eternal.

Never in all that relationship between herself and
John had she felt the moment so surely placed within
her hands as then.

"What is it?" she asked, so gently in her voice that
she could have laughed aloud at her own self-possession.

"Just came in to say good-night," said he with an
attempt at ease, and came across to the bed and leant
over it to kiss her cheek, uplifted to meet his, and found
that clean scent of lavender in his nostrils when, before
he had really learnt his purpose, he sat down upon the
bed at her side and remained there, gazing into her eyes.

"What are you reading?" he asked.

She turned the book round for him to see, making
no comment; allowing the memories of childhood to
waken in him of their own volition.

He shut the book up, contriving to let his hand find
hers as she contrived to let it stay there without
seeming of intent.

"What is it, John?" she whispered again.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Nothing except just what I said.  I wanted to say
good-night."  Yet he still lingered; still, without
keeping it, his hand remained in hers.

For some while he stayed there, sitting on her bed,
saying nothing, playing only with his fingers that held
her hand.  With a supreme patience she waited in
silence, knowing no words were needed there, her heart
throbbing with an expectant pulse that rose to riot as
suddenly he slipped on to his knees on the floor and
leant his head against her breast.

"I want her, Mater," he whispered.  "Haven't you
guessed that?  I'm terribly in love."

Had she guessed that?  Indeed!  But had she ever
dreamt or hoped for this, that his first love-making
would be through her?  This was the first love scene,
the first passion in the drama of his life and in awe of
what it was, he had chosen her to play it with.

Emotions such as were triumphant in Mary
Throgmorton then cannot easily be captured.  Here in
certain fact was the first hour of love her heart had surely
known; an hour, albeit not her own, which for the rest
of her life was to remain with its burning embers in
her memory.

With deep breaths she lay for a moment still,
holding him in her arms.

"Haven't you told her, John?" she asked presently.

He shook his head against her breast.

"Why not?"

"I don't know.  I can't just tell her I love her.  It's
more than that.  She wouldn't understand.  If she
did, she might hate me for it."

It might have been youth and the utter lack of his
experience.  He was only just eighteen.  But Mary
found in it more than that.  In the first great emotion
in his life, when he was stirred so deep as to touch
those very first impressions she had given him in his
childhood, he was setting on one side himself and the
demands that Nature made on him.

How little his Dorothy would appreciate that, Mary
had made certain estimate the first moment they had
met.  No awe of love was there in her; no vision his
need of her could ever destroy.  She, with the many
others, was amongst those women who, bowing herself
to the possessive passions of men, would sell her soul in
slavery to share them if she could.

Whatever of her training it was they had bereft him
of at Wenlock, however out of the true line they had
bent that green bough her hands had fashioned, still in
the vital elements of his being, he sought the clear light
above the forest trees about him.  In this swift rush
of love, a storm that beat and shook him with the force
of it, some spiritual impulse still remained.  He felt
his Dorothy was some sacred thing, too sweet to touch
with hands all fierce as his.

How long would that remain with him?  In the
materialism of his new environment would they let
him keep it for long?  Another day and drawn by the
shrilling call of Nature into the arms of Dorothy,
might he not lose it even so soon as that?

He did not know how true he spoke when he had
said she would not understand.  A product of the laws
of man she was, eager and passionate to submit, needing
that trampling spirit of possession to give her sense
of life, caring little how soon love trod itself into the
habit of familiar touch.

No emotion of ideals would she have with which
to set her children forth upon their journeys.  Into
an old and tired world they would be ushered with
grudging of the pain they brought and fretting
complaint of ugly circumstance.  Consequences of passion
they would be, no more, with nothing but the magic of
youth to give them laughter in their playgrounds.

So well did Mary know that night as he lay there
against her breast, John would not keep his spirit long
untouched when other arms than hers had held him.
Too soon had they taken her from him.  Too soon, in
that moment's want of faith, had she let him go.
Possession of the earth already had brought him scorn of
it.  Again and again had she seen that in the change
of his mind towards their simple life at Yarningdale.

The earth she would have had him labor in, was
such as now would soil his hands.  It was enjoyment
he sought, she knew it well, not life.  With that poison
of inheritance they had instilled into his blood, fast he
was becoming an echo, not a voice.  The message of
all ideals was being stilled to silence in him.  They
were teaching him to say what the Liddiards had said
one generation upon another--gain and keep, gain
and keep--it would be folly to give away.

Only in this, this love that stirred him to the very
essence of his being, was he recalling the years of
emotion she had given to the fashioning of his soul.  Here
for that moment as he lay in her arms, he was the man
her heart had meant to make him, awed by love, made
timorous almost by the power of his passion.

But how long would it survive its contact with that
casual materialism his Dorothy would blend it with?
How soon before she made his love that habit of the
sexes which bore no more than drifting consequences
upon its stream?

Neither long would it be, nor had she power now to
intervene.  Clasping her arm more tightly round him,
already she felt him slipping from her, the more
because in that brief moment he was so much her own.

"My dearest, need you tell her yet?" she asked.  "I
know you feel a man, but you're still so young.  You're
only eighteen, you couldn't marry yet.  Liddiard
wouldn't want you to marry.  Need you tell her yet?"

"I must," he muttered.  "Not for a little while yet
perhaps.  I've told you.  That was a help.  I don't
feel so much of a brute as I did.  But sooner or later I
shall have to.  I can't help being young and I'm not
inventing what I feel.  Other chaps feel it too, quite
decent fellows, but somehow or other I can't do what
they do."

"What do they do?"

Frankly she would have admitted that was curiosity,
but curious only was she to know what he did not do
rather than what they did.

"What do they do, John?" she repeated as he lay
there, silent.

"Oh, they go up to London when they get the chance.
There are women, you wouldn't understand that, Mater.
Probably you've never known there were women like
that.  How could you have known down here?  My
God!  Fancy one of those women in the fields!  She'd
drop down in the grass and she'd hide her face.
Anyhow in streets they keep their heads up.  They look
at you in the streets."

"And you couldn't do that, John?"

"No--I tried.  I went up to London once.  We
went to a night-club.  All sorts of them were dancing
there.  I just couldn't, that's all.  The fellow I was
with, he went away with one of them.  I envied him
and I hated him.  I don't know what I felt.  I
couldn't.  It didn't make me feel sick of it all.  I don't
think I felt afraid.  You kept on coming into my mind,
but just you wouldn't have stopped me if I'd really
wanted to.  I did want to.  I had wanted to.  That's
what we meant to do.  But when I got there to that
place, and one of those women kissed me, I felt there
was something else I wanted more.  I think I nearly
went mad that night.  I had a little bed in a stuffy
little room in a poky little hotel.  I couldn't sleep.  I
never slept a wink.  I nearly went mad calling myself
a fool for not doing what I'd wanted to do.  There
I'd have done it.  Then I didn't care what I did.  But
it was too late then.  I'd lost my chance.  I was sorry
I'd lost it."

He raised his head and looked at her.

"I'm not sorry now, Mater.  I wasn't sorry for
long.  Aren't men beasts?"

"My dear--my dear," she whispered.  "If they
were all like you, what a world love could make for us
to live in.  Oh, keep it all, my dear.  Never be sorry.
It isn't the right or the wrong of it, John.  It's the pity
of it.  If women had men like you to love them, think
what their children would be!  Don't tell her yet, John.
Wait a little longer if you can."

"I can't!" he moaned.  "I can't wait.  She knows
I care for her.  I'm sure she does.  I must tell her
everything."

If only it had been Lucy he had shrunk from telling,
then fear would have met with fear and mingled into
love.  It was not fear he would meet with in Dorothy.
Too wise perhaps she might be to laugh at his
timorousness, but swift enough would she turn it to the
passion to possess.

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.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

That night as John lay in Mary's arms, there
reposed with simple state in the Government House at
Sarajevo, the two dead bodies of a man and a woman
who had found rest in the shadow of the greatest
turmoil the world had ever known, which through the
minds of millions in central Europe were ringing the
words--

"The great questions are to be settled--not by
speeches and majority resolutions, but by blood and iron."





.. vspace:: 4



.. class:: center large

   VIII

.. vspace:: 2

John waited a little as he had said he would.
Two days later, keeping his silence, he returned
to Oxford.  In her first encounter with Mary,
Dorothy knew that she had lost.  She was no equal,
she realized it, to that serene and quiet woman who
gave her smile for smile and in whose eyes the smile
still lingered when in her own it had faded away.

It was not before the latter end of July that the first
whisper of war came to Yarningdale.  Conflagrations
might burst forth in Europe; the world might be set
alight.  It mattered little to them at Yarningdale farm.
Whatever might happen, the cows had still to be milked,
the crops to be gathered, the stacks to be built.  How
did it effect them what an Emperor might say, or a
little gathering of men elect to do?  They could not
stop the wheat from ripening.  They could not stop
the earth from giving back a thousandfold that which
man had given to the earth.

"War!" exclaimed Mr. Peverell.  "Men beant
such fools as that!  'Tis all a lot of talk to make the
likes of us think mighty fine of them that says they
stopped it.  We'm have taxes to pay and if those what
are in the Government doant make a noise about
something, we might begin awonderin' what they did to
earn 'em."

It was all very well to talk like that and likely enough
it sounded in their parlor kitchen at Yarningdale.  But
there were other thoughts than these in Mary's mind
and not all the confident beliefs of peace amongst
those who had nothing to gain and all to lose, could
shake her from them.

When once it had become a daily topic of speculation
and newspapers in Yarningdale were being read every
morning, she formed her own opinions as to what
would happen out of the subconscious impulses of her mind.

Deep in her heart, she knew there would be war, a
mighty war, a devastating war.  Something the spirit
of her being had sense of revealed to her that this was
the inevitable fruit of that tree of civilization men had
trained to the hour of bearing.  This was its season.
War was its yield.  With blood and iron the crop of
men's lives must be gathered.  Inevitably must the
possessive passion turn upon itself and rend the very
structure it had made.  The homes that had been built
with greed, by greed must be destroyed.  This, as they
had made it, was the everlasting cycle Nature demanded
of life.  Energy must be consumed to give out energy.
To inherit and possess was not enough.  It was no
more than weeds accumulating and clogging in the
mill-wheel.  If man had no ambition other than to
possess; if in his spirit it was not the emotion of the
earth to give, then the great plow of war must drive its
furrow through the lives of all of them.

In some untraceable fashion, Mary felt that the
whole of her life had been building up to this.
Somehow it seemed the consummation of all she had tried
and failed to do.  At the supreme moment of her life,
she had been lacking in faith of her ideals.  She had
lost the clear sight of her vision.  The whole world
had done that and now it was faced with the stern
justice of retribution.

There must be war.  She knew there must.  Men
and women, all of them had failed.  What could there
be but the devastating horror of war to cleanse the evil
and rid of the folly of weeds the idle fallows of their
lives?

"Well, if it is to be war," said the Vicar one day,
having tea with Mary and Mrs. Peverell in the parlor
kitchen, "Germany's not the nation of shrewd men
we've thought her.  If she insists upon it," he added,
his spirit rising from meekness with a glitter in his eye,
"she'll have forgotten we're the richest nation in the
world.  On the British possessions the sun never sets.
She'll have forgotten to take that into account."

Every man was talking in this fashion.  She read
the papers.  It was there as well.  Long articles
appeared describing the wealth of the German colonies
and what their acquisition would mean to England if
she were victorious on the sea.  Extracts were printed
from the German papers exposing her lust and greed
because, with envious eyes upon the British Colonies
she was already counting the spoils of victory.

There in the quiet and the seclusion at Yarningdale,
Mary with many another woman those days, not
conscious enough of vision to speak their thoughts, saw
the world gone mad in its passion to possess.

It seemed to matter little to her at whose door the
iniquity of lighting the firebrand lay.  War had been
inevitable whoever had declared it.  The cry of broken
treaties and sullied honor stirred but little in her heart
as she heard it.  What mattered it if a man was true
to his word when all through the years he had been
false to the very earth he dwelt on?

That cry of sullied honor through the land was as
unreal to her as was the cry of sullied virtue that ever
had conscripted women to the needs of men.  The
principles of possession could never be established
with honor, the functions of life could never be
circumscribed by virtue.  It was not honorable to gain
and keep.  It was not virtuous to waste and wither.

War was inevitable.  By the limitations of their own
vision men had made it so.  There was horror but no
revolt in her mind when, on the morning of that fourth
of August, she read the text of the British Ultimatum.

"They must give back now," she muttered to herself
as she stood by her dressing table gazing down at
a photograph of John in its frame.  "They must all
give back, sons, homes--everything.  They've kept
too long.  It had to come."

A few days passed and then three letters came for
her, one swift upon another.  Each one as she
received it, so certain had her subconscious knowledge
been, she read almost without emotion.  The announcement
of war had not staggered her.  She felt the ache
of pain, as when the barren cows were driven out of
the farmyard to go to the market, but since she had
been at Yarningdale, knew well enough the unerring
and merciless power of retribution in Nature upon
those who clogged the mill-wheel of life, who broke
the impetus of its ceaseless revolutions whereby no
speed was left to fling off the water drops of created
energy.

Each letter as she received it, she divined its
contents.  The first was from John.

.. vspace:: 2

"DEAR OLD MATER--"

.. vspace:: 2

She heard the ring of vitality in that.

.. vspace:: 2

"They're all going from here.  If I cock on a year or
two, they'll take me.  I sort of know you'd like me to.
Do you know why?  Do you remember once my asking
you something about a couple of moles the hay knives had
chopped?  I was thinking of it yesterday, I don't know
why, and that made me realize you'd understand.  Do
you remember what you said about Death, that sometimes
it was just a gift when things were worth while?
Well--good Lord!  It's worth while now, not that the blighters
are going to kill me.  I've got as much chance as any
one of getting through.  But you are glad I'm going,
aren't you?  You're not going to try to stop me.  They
say the Army's big enough with the French on one side
and the Russians on the other to knock Germany into a
cocked hat in three months.  But I must get out and
have one pot at 'em."

.. vspace:: 2

All this she had divined as her fingers tore open the
envelope, but never had she dared to hope that the
impulse of it would have come from his memory of
what she had said to him those days when he was in
the fashioning of her hands.  This, she had made him.
She clutched the letter in her hands and held it against
her face and thanked God she had not wholly failed.
The next two letters came together by the same post
on the following day.  She knew their handwriting.
No envelope could have concealed their contents from
her eyes.  Liddiard's she opened first.

.. vspace:: 2

"MY DEAR MARY--"

"I suppose John has written to you of this preposterous
suggestion of his that he should volunteer, and I know
you will do all you can to prevent it.  To begin with he
is not of age.  He will have to lie about it before they
can accept him and, secondly, War is a job for soldiers
and the Army is there to see it through.  If they rush
him out without proper training as I hear it is likely they
may do, it's unfair on him; it's unfair on all of us.  We've
paid for our Army as a nation and now it's got its work
to do.  Calling for recruits now as they did in the South
African war is not fair to the country.  These young
boys will go because they're hysterical with excitement for
adventure, but where will the country be if they don't come
back?

"I rely on you, my dear Mary, to do all you can to
dissuade him from this mad project of his.  With all the
knowledge that one day he is to be master of Wenlock, I
know he still looks reliantly towards you in that little
farmhouse.  Do all you can, my dear.  We cannot lose
him, neither you nor I."

.. vspace:: 2

With a hard line about her lips which, had she seen
it, would have reminded her of her sister Jane, she
laid the letter down and picked up that from Dorothy.

.. vspace:: 2

"Please--please don't let him go," it cried out from
the written page to her.  "I can't stop him.  I've tried.
He won't listen to me.  I learnt those few days while I
stayed at Yarningdale how he will listen to you.  He
belongs to me.  He told me so.  Please--please don't let
him go."

.. vspace:: 2

She picked up the other letter and stood looking at
them together, side by side, then dropped them from
her hand and from the bosom of her dress drew out
the slip of paper John had written on and pressed it
once more against her cheek.

Downstairs in the parlor kitchen with the pen and
ink that Mr. Peverell used when he kept his farm
accounts, Mary sat down and wrote to Liddiard.

.. vspace:: 2

"If I could do everything, I would do nothing," she
wrote.  "This is what I made him.  I would not
unmake him if I could.  You must give.  I must give.  We
must all give now.  We've kept too long.  Don't you
know what this war is?  It's not England fighting for her
rights or Germany for her needs.  It's Nature revolting
against man.  You've made your chapels and your tithe
barns for yourselves.  The earth is going to shake them
into the dust again.  If I could do everything, I would
do nothing.  He takes my heart with him when he goes.
But there is nothing I can do.  We must all give now--at
last--women as well as men.  These things that
happen now--these are the consequences of passion."





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   IX

.. vspace:: 2

To Mary Throgmorton, tending and milking
Mr. Peverell's cows at Yarningdale Farm,
those first few weeks of the Great War were
as the resultant dream that shadows the apprehensive mind.

Every morning after her work was done, she would
retire to her room with her newspapers, therein to read
the countless conflicting reports which they contained.
The feverish desire to give active help or be amongst
the first of those personally to contribute to the cause
found her calm and self-possessed.  She had her work
to do.  So long as the cows were there in Mr. Peverell's
meadows, they had to be milked.  Her duty it
had been for the last eighteen years to milk them.  Her
duty it seemed to her to continue.

From all the villages round about them, the young
men were going up to join the colors.  Little
processions of them accompanied by their mothers and
sweethearts passed along the roads to the station, going to
the nearest recruiting office.  Most of them had flowers
in their caps and went singing on their way, lifting
their voices to a cheer at sight of any whom they passed.

Whenever she met them, Mary cheered in fervent
response; but looking back over her shoulder when they
had gone by, there were tears, hot and stinging in her
eyes, so that always their departure to her was through
a mist.  They vanished, nebulous, like spirits, out of
her sight.  She looked till she could see no longer.
The vision of them trembled as the air trembles over
the scorching earth on a summer's day.  She felt it was
the last vision she would ever have of them.

Only their mothers and their sweethearts came back,
little weeping groups of them, along the same road.
Whenever she saw these approaching her, she would
break her way into the fields or the woods rather than
pass them by.  For more than the boys themselves
with the high light of a strange laughter in their eyes,
it was the faces of the mothers as they all went by
together, that had dragged, like the warning pains of
child-birth, at her heart.

Pale beneath the wind-burnt ruddy skins they were.
It was pallor of anger; anger of soul at the senseless
waste.  The cry of England for her sons was loud
indeed.  In countless hearts the note of it was
shrilling without need of proclamation.  These boys had
heard it and heard no more.  Their mothers had heard
it too.  No less had it rung its cry in Mary's ears.
But deeper and further-reaching was the hearing of
the women in those early days of war.

Later, doubtless, their senses became almost numb
to the true meaning of that voice flung far across the
land.  Even the vitality of despair grew still in their
breasts.  The horrors of war sickened, choked,
asphyxiated them.  They gave their sons like animals going
to the slaughter house with eyes that were staring and
wide, and in whose nostrils the heavy smell of blood
had acted as a soporific on the brain.

But at first, Mary had little doubt of the look she
saw in those mothers' eyes.  They were giving up, not
what they had got, but what they had made.  The
created thing they were sacrificing; the thing which in
love and pain and energy of soul they had offered out
of themselves to give life to.  There was little of the
fervor of patriotism about them.  To those country
railway stations they marched with their pale faces,
their set lips, the aching pain in their eyes.  Each for
her son's sake smiled as he looked at her; each for her
son's sake smiled as she waved farewell.  But on the
hollow mask she wore, that smile was but a painted
thing.  He looked to his sweetheart or he laughed to
his companions and it died away.

Somewhere in their buried and inarticulate
consciousness, those mothers knew that wrong was being
done to them.  Vaguely they knew it was man with his
laws of force and his passion of possession who had
done that wrong; vaguely they knew it, but had no
clear vision in their hearts to give them voice to revile.

Such an one Mary came upon, a day when rain had
driven her to take shelter and she came back by a
foot-path across the fields.  On the smooth rail of a
well-worn stile the woman was seated, her feet resting for
support on the step below, her body faintly swinging
to and fro, not for comfort but as though she rocked
sorrow like a suffering babe in her arms.

At sound, then sight of Mary who must cross the
stile if she passed that way, the woman sat erect and
took her feet down from their resting-place.

Once having seen her, she looked no more at Mary as
she approached, but set her face outwards with a steady
gaze in her eyes.  In an impetus of memory, Mary
recognized her as one of a little band she had seen
marching to the station earlier in the day.  She had
been alone with her son.  No sweetheart was there to
share their parting.  Alone she had bid farewell to
him.  Alone she returned.

Had there been others with her, Mary might have
turned back; at least she would have hurried by.  Now,
coming to the stile, she stopped.

"Have you lost your way?" she inquired.

"No, thank you, Miss."

"It was only I saw you coming by the road this
morning and this footpath doesn't lead to Lonesome Ford."

"We came by the road because all the boys were
going that way.  They take it easier when they go all
together.  Seems they laugh in a crowd.  What we
have acomin' back seems best alone."

Mary made gentle inquiries, what recruiting office
her son had gone to--what regiment he hoped to
join--his age--his trade--what other sons she had.

"He's my only--" she replied steadily.

Had she broken into weeping, Mary would have
comforted and left her.  Tears are their own solace
and need no company.  But there were no tears here.
She sat upon the top rail of the stile, her head high
above Mary, her features sharp and almost hard
against the sky, her eyes set fast across the rolling fields
that dipped and lifted, with elm-treed hollows and
uplands all spread gold with corn.

"I have one only," said Mary quietly.  "He's in
training now."

That made them one, but the calm voice of her who
had spoken made the other lean towards that unity for
dependence.  Impulsively she stretched out her hand
and straight and firmly Mary took it.

"I don't know who you are, Ma'am," she said with
words her emotion quickened on her lips.  "I'm more
or less of a stranger to these parts.  You may be a
grand lady for all I know and judging by your voice,
but the way you spoke and all that's happening these
days, seems to me we're all just women now."

"All just women," said Mary softly.

She responded eagerly to the gentle encouragement
and went swiftly on as though no interruption had
been made.

"What I mean," she said, "we've both just parted
from what's dearest to us in life--that makes us one.
You might be a lord's lady and I just one of common
folk--no less, we're one.  Something's happened to
us that's made us look up like and see each other--it's
made you put out your hand to me and what I want
to know is what it is that's happened, because with all
these talks of England in danger and hatred of those
beasts of Germans, there seems something else and I
can't get it right.  I know, now it's come to it, my
son's got to go out and fight.  I wouldn't stop him.
But I don't think I'd have brought him into the world
if I'd known.  There are some as like fighting.  He
doesn't.  He cried in my lap last night, but not because
he couldn't make up his mind to go.  He knew he was
going this morning, but he cried in my lap and I heard
him say, 'I know I shall fight and hate and go mad
with the rest of them when it comes to the time.'  I
don't rightly know what he meant by that.  I hope he
does hate but it seemed to me as if it was that he feared most."

"Perhaps he saw himself mad and drunk with
blood," said Mary.  "Can't you imagine he'd loathe
the sight of that?  Have you ever seen a woman
intoxicated with drink?"

"Once I did--no--twice I did."

"Would you like to think of yourself like that?"

She bent her head.

"You've made that plain," she muttered.  "I didn't
care asking him at the time.  Seemed he just wanted to
go talking on with no questions.  There'll be
hundreds like him, I suppose, thousands perhaps and some
as like fighting.  'Twill be an adventure to them, but
hell it'll be to him.  P'r'aps that's as it must be.  The
world's all sorts.  But I can't help thinking the world's
wrong for us women.  Be they the fighting kind or
not, we didn't bring 'em into the world for this
wasting.  They say that thousands of our boys were lost
during that first retreat from 'Mons' I think they call
it.  If you saw the thousands of mothers they belong
to all come together in a crowd like the boys marching
and they had some one to lead 'em, what would they
do to them as have made this war?  They'd tear them
limb from limb.  That's what they'd do.  I used to
think the world was a fair and sweet enough place
once.  They told us there, those people up in London
in the Government there could be no war.  The papers
said it.  Up to the last they said it.  Every man said
it to you, too.  There can't be no war, they said, not
a big European war, they said, the world 'd stop still
in a month, they said, there'd be no trade.  Seems to
me men go sweating in labor and toiling with work and
half the time they don't know what they're making."

Mary let her talk on.  So plain it was to be seen that
it gave her ease; so plain that this was the accumulation
of her thoughts, flowing over from the full vessel
of her heart that could hold no more.

"What's all this," she continued, "all this they've
been saying about treaties and what they call
International Law?  Seems to me we've let men make the
world long enough.  They've made hell of it.  How
could there be peace with them making all those guns
and ships and weapons which was only invented to
destroy peace?  I don't believe nothing's made to waste
in this world.  If you make a thing it'll get itself used
somehow and if it don't and goes to rust, then
something's wrong in the minds of them as wasted their time
on it.  If my man had told me before we married I'd
got to give him a son as one day would be crying in my
lap because he found life horrible, do you think I'd
have married him?  No--he told me the little home
we was going to have and all the things he'd give me
to put in it and how when I was going to have a child
he'd work so hard as we could afford to get a girl in
to help.  That's what he told me those evenings we
walked up and down the lanes courting, and that's what
it seems to me men in high places who make the
Government have been telling those thousands of mothers
that have their hearts broken now this very hour.
Men want to get hold of things in this world.
Grasping always they are.  And nations are like men,
because men have had the making of them.  And the
nation that has the most men has the most power to grasp,
and the more they grasp, the more will others get
jealous of them, and the more they get jealous, the
more they'll need to fight.  But who gives them the
power they have?  Who gives them the sons they ask
for?  And what I want to know is why do we go on
giving for them to spoil?"

Mary watched her as the last rush of her words lit
up her eyes to a sullen anger.

"Countless women will think like you," she said
quietly, "when this war's over.  They won't listen any
more when men tell them there's honor in their slavery
or pride in the service that they give.  We shall bring
children into the world on our own conditions, not on
theirs.  To our own ideals we shall train them; not
to the ideals of men.  You're not the first who's
thought these things.  I've thought them too and hundreds
of others are thinking them and we shan't be the last."

She stretched out her hand.

"There's a new world to be made," she said with a
thrill in her voice.  "Men have had their vision.  We
can't deny they've had that.  Without their vision
would they ever have been able to persuade us as they
have?  They've had their vision while we've had none.
They've had their vision and it's brought us so far.
When women find a vision of their own; when once
they see in a clear picture the thoughts that are aching
in their hearts now, nothing will stop them.  You see
and I see, but we are powerless by ourselves.  I know
just how powerless we are, even to have faith in our
own sight.  I thought I had faith once--enough faith
to carry me right through--but I hadn't.  At the
crucial moment that faith failed me.  I had trained my
son so far in the light of the vision I had and then they
came and with all the threats they made of the good
things he was losing in life, my courage failed me.  I
let them have him for their own and little by little I've
watched him drift away from me."

"Do you know," she added, coming to a swift
realization as she spoke, "do you know I'm almost glad
of this War.  He volunteered at once, though he's only
eighteen.  He volunteered against his father's wishes.
This war's going to stop him drifting.  It's going to
stop thousands from drifting as they were.  They'll
see there's something wrong with the civilization they
have built up, that it's an earthquake, a volcano, a
state of being which any moment may tumble or burst
into flame about their heads.  For that, I'm not sorry
for the War.  We couldn't have shown men how
wrong they were without it.  It'll be to their mothers
they'll go--these boys--when they come back."

She took her hand away and climbed over the stile.

"You'll have him back," she said.  "One of these
days you'll have his head in your lap again."

For one moment they looked in each other's eyes.
There was a compact in that look.  In purpose they had
found sympathy.  Out of the deep bitterness of life
they had found a meaning.

Once, as she walked away, Mary looked over her
shoulder.  The woman still sat there on the stile, still
with her features cut sharp in profile against the sky,
still gazing across the elm-treed hollows and the
uplands all spread with gold of corn.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

On Sunday night, October the fourth, in a little force
of naval reserves, John marched from Ostend to his
battle position on the Nethe.

Mary did not know where he had gone.  He had not
known himself.  In the midst of his training, the order
had come for his departure.  Two hours he had had
with her at Yarningdale; no more.  All that time he
had laughed and talked in the highest spirits.
Constrained to laugh with him, her eyes had been bright,
her courage wonderful.

It was not until she drove back alone in the spring
cart from the station, that she knew the brightness in
her eyes had sunk as in those other women's eyes to the
sullen light of anger.

"Oh--the waste--the senseless waste of it!" she
had muttered that night as she lay waiting for the relief
of sleep.

The next five days had passed in silence.  She went
about her duties as usual, but none seeing her dared
speak about the War.  It was whispered only in that
parlor kitchen; whispers that fell with sibilant noises
into silence whenever she came into the room.

Each morning, as always, she took her papers away
to her room to read.  Nothing of that which she
yearned to know could they tell her.  On the ninth of
October Antwerp had fallen.  Amongst all the strongholds
that were crumbling beneath the weight of the
German guns, this meant nothing to her.  She laid
the paper down and went out into the fields.

It was the evening of three days later when she was
milking the cows in their stalls, that Mrs. Peverell
came, bringing her a telegram into the shed.  Her
hands were wet with milk as they took it.  They slipped
on the shiny envelope as, without hesitation, she broke
it open.

When she had read it, she looked up, handing it in
silence to Mrs. Peverell, then turned with the sense of
habit alone remaining in her fingers and continued
with her milking.

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   THE END

.. vspace:: 6

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 6

.. class:: center large

   Books By E. Temple Thurston

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   The Green Bough
   The City of Beautiful Nonsense
   The World of Wonderful Reality
   Enchantment
   The Five-Barred Gate
   The Passionate Crime
   Achievement
   Richard Furlong
   The Antagonists
   The Open Window
   The Apple of Eden
   Traffic
   The Realist
   The Evolution of Katherine
   Mirage
   Sally Bishop
   The Greatest Wish in the World
   The Patchwork Papers
   The Garden of Resurrection
   The Flower of Gloster
   Thirteen

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.. pgfooter::