Phase IV
I
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.
II
“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.”
III
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.
“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.”
That same day, Mary answered his letter.
“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.”
“‘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.”
IV
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.
V
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.
VI
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.
VII
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.
VIII
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.
IX
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.