Add files from ibiblio as of 2025-03-03 07:13:27HEADmain

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 8698 deletions

diff --git a/41895.txt b/41895.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 7d24fc6..0000000
--- a/41895.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,8698 +0,0 @@
-                            THE GREEN BOUGH
-
-
-
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
-no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
-eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-
-Title: The Green Bough
-
-Author: E. Temple Thurston
-
-Release Date: January 21, 2013 [EBook #41895]
-[Last updated: September 25, 2020]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: US-ASCII
-
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREEN BOUGH ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Al Haines.
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration: Cover]
-
-
-
-
-                            THE GREEN BOUGH
-
-
-                                   BY
-                           E. TEMPLE THURSTON
-
-
-
-              AUTHOR OF "THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE,"
-                 "THE WORLD OF WONDERFUL REALITY," ETC.
-
-
-
-                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
-                                NEW YORK
-                                 MCMXXI
-
-
-
-
-                          COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
-                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
-
-
-
-                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
-
-
-
-
-                                   TO
-                              E. F. COWLIN
-
-
-
-
-                                PHASE I
-
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-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!"
-
-
-
-
-                                   V
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   VI
-
-
-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."
-
-
-
-
-                                  VII
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                  VIII
-
-
-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.'"
-
-
-
-
-                                   IX
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   X
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   XI
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                  XII
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                PHASE II
-
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-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."
-
-
-
-
-                                   V
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   VI
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                  VII
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                  VIII
-
-
-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.
-
-
-"Meet me on the beach at 11.30," she had written, "near the bathing
-tents.  Don't bother about lunch."
-
-
-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--
-
-
-"Have been called back to Somerset this morning; so sorry I shall have
-no opportunity to say good-by."
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   IX
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   X
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                               PHASE III
-
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-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.
-
-
-"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."
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-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.
-
-
-"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."
-
-
-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.
-
-
-"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."
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-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--
-
-
-"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.
-
-"Good-by."
-
-
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   V
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   VI
-
-
-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.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-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."
-
-
-
-
-                                  VII
-
-
-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."
-
-
-
-
-                                  VIII
-
-
-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!"
-
-
-
-
-                                   IX
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                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
-anaesthetic.
-
-"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.
-
-
-
-
-                                PHASE V
-
-
-
-                                   I
-
-
-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."
-
-
-
-
-                                   II
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                  III
-
-
-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!"
-
-
-
-
-                                   IV
-
-
-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!"
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-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.
-
-
-"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.
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   V
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                   VI
-
-
-It was just before the summer vacation, when John was eighteen, that he
-had written to Mary, saying--
-
-
-"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."
-
-
-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.
-
-
-"I can't explain in writing," the letter continued, "but you must see
-her before any one else."
-
-
-The degree of her gratitude for that for a moment drove away all fear,
-but not for long.
-
-
-"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."
-
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                  VII
-
-
-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.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-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."
-
-
-
-
-                                  VIII
-
-
-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.
-
-
-"DEAR OLD MATER--"
-
-
-She heard the ring of vitality in that.
-
-
-"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."
-
-
-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.
-
-
-"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."
-
-
-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.
-
-
-"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."
-
-
-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.
-
-
-"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."
-
-
-
-
-                                   IX
-
-
-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.
-
-                     *      *      *      *      *
-
-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.
-
-
-
-
-                                THE END
-
-
-
-
-
-
-           *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *
-
-
-
-
-
-
-                      Books By E. Temple Thurston
-
-
-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
-
-
-
-
-
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREEN BOUGH ***
-
-
-
-
-A Word from Project Gutenberg
-
-
-We will update this book if we find any errors.
-
-This book can be found under: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41895
-
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one
-owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and
-you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission
-and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth in the
-General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
-distributing Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic works to protect the
-Project Gutenberg(tm) concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a
-registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks,
-unless you receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything
-for copies of this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may
-use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative
-works, reports, performances and research. They may be modified and
-printed and given away - you may do practically _anything_ with public
-domain eBooks.  Redistribution is subject to the trademark license,
-especially commercial redistribution.
-
-
-
-The Full Project Gutenberg License
-
-
-_Please read this before you distribute or use this work._
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg(tm) mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
-any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
-Gutenberg(tm) License available with this file or online at
-http://www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Section 1. General Terms of Use & Redistributing Project Gutenberg(tm)
-electronic works
-
-
-*1.A.* By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg(tm)
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the
-terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all
-copies of Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic works in your possession. If
-you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
-Gutenberg(tm) electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
-
-*1.B.* "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things
-that you can do with most Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic works even
-without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph
-1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg(tm) electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic
-works. See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-*1.C.* The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
-Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of
-Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic works. Nearly all the individual works
-in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you
-from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating
-derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project
-Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the
-Project Gutenberg(tm) mission of promoting free access to electronic
-works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg(tm) works in compliance with
-the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg(tm) name
-associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this
-agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full
-Project Gutenberg(tm) License when you share it without charge with
-others.
-
-
-*1.D.* The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
-a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
-Gutenberg(tm) work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
-States.
-
-*1.E.* Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-*1.E.1.* The following sentence, with active links to, or other
-immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg(tm) License must appear
-prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg(tm) work (any work
-on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
-phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
-performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
-
-    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
-    or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
-    included with this eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org
-
-*1.E.2.* If an individual Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic work is
-derived from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating
-that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can
-be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying
-any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a
-work with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on
-the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs
-1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
-Project Gutenberg(tm) trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
-1.E.9.
-
-*1.E.3.* If an individual Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic work is
-posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
-distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and
-any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
-will be linked to the Project Gutenberg(tm) License for all works posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
-this work.
-
-*1.E.4.* Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project
-Gutenberg(tm) License terms from this work, or any files containing a
-part of this work or any other work associated with Project
-Gutenberg(tm).
-
-*1.E.5.* Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg(tm) License.
-
-*1.E.6.* You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
-word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg(tm) work in a format other than
-"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg(tm) web site
-(http://www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or
-expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a
-means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original
-"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include
-the full Project Gutenberg(tm) License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-*1.E.7.* Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg(tm) works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-*1.E.8.* You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic works
-provided that
-
-  - You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-    the use of Project Gutenberg(tm) works calculated using the method
-    you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
-    to the owner of the Project Gutenberg(tm) trademark, but he has
-    agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
-    Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
-    within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
-    legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
-    payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
-    Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
-    Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
-    Literary Archive Foundation."
-
-  - You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-    you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-    does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg(tm)
-    License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
-    copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
-    all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg(tm)
-    works.
-
-  - You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
-    any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-    electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
-    receipt of the work.
-
-  - You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-    distribution of Project Gutenberg(tm) works.
-
-
-*1.E.9.* If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
-Gutenberg(tm) electronic work or group of works on different terms than
-are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
-from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg(tm) trademark. Contact the
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3. below.
-
-*1.F.*
-
-*1.F.1.* Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg(tm) collection.
-Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic works, and the
-medium on which they may be stored, may contain "Defects," such as, but
-not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription
-errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a
-defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer
-codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
-
-*1.F.2.* LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg(tm) trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg(tm) electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees.
-YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY,
-BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN
-PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND
-ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR
-ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES
-EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
-
-*1.F.3.* LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
-your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
-refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
-opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-*1.F.4.* Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS,' WITH NO OTHER
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-*1.F.5.* Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
-the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
-
-*1.F.6.* INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic works in accordance
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic works,
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg(tm)
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
-Project Gutenberg(tm) work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
-
-
-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg(tm)
-
-
-Project Gutenberg(tm) is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
-people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg(tm)'s
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg(tm) collection will remain
-freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and
-permanent future for Project Gutenberg(tm) and future generations. To
-learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and
-how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the
-Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org .
-
-
-Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
-Foundation
-
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state
-of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue
-Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification number is
-64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
-http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf . Contributions to the
-Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the
-full extent permitted by U.S.  federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr.
-S. Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
-throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at 809
-North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
-business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact
-information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official page
-at http://www.pglaf.org
-
-For additional contact information:
-
-    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-    Chief Executive and Director
-    gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-
-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation
-
-
-Project Gutenberg(tm) depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where
-we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
-DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
-visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any
-statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside
-the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other ways
-including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To donate,
-please visit: http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
-
-
-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg(tm) electronic
-works.
-
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg(tm)
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
-with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
-Gutenberg(tm) eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg(tm) eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. unless
-a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks
-in compliance with any particular paper edition.
-
-Each eBook is in a subdirectory of the same number as the eBook's eBook
-number, often in several formats including plain vanilla ASCII,
-compressed (zipped), HTML and others.
-
-Corrected _editions_ of our eBooks replace the old file and take over
-the old filename and etext number. The replaced older file is renamed.
-_Versions_ based on separate sources are treated as new eBooks receiving
-new filenames and etext numbers.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
-
-    http://www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg(tm),
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.