"Oh, yes, of course," said Rachel, throwing up her head with a half scornful gesture. "One says that--but how do you know? I might never think of it again--if Roger and that man Dempsey were out of the way.

It's dead--it's _dead_! Why do we trouble about such things!"

"It would be dead," said Janet in a low voice, "if you'd told him--and he'd forgiven!"

"What has he to do with it?" cried Rachel, stubbornly, "it was before he knew me. I was a different being."

"No--it is always the same self, which we are making, all the time. Don't you see--dear, dear Rachel!--it's your chance now to put it all behind you--just by being true. Oh, I don't want to preach to you--but I see it so clearly!"

"But it isn't as a man would see it--a man like George," said Rachel, shaking her head. "Look there"--she pointed to a little bundle of letters lying on the table--"there are letters from his people which he brought me this morning. It's awful!--how they take me at his valuation--just because he loves me. I must be everything that's good, because he says so. And you can see what kind of people they are--what they think of him--and what they imagine about me--what they think I _must_ be--for him to love me. I don't mean they're prigs--they aren't a bit. It's just their life coming out, quite naturally. You see what they are--quite simply--what they can't help being, and what they expect from him and the woman he marries. And he's got to take me home to them--some time--to present me to them. The divorce is difficult enough. Even if they think of me as quite innocent, it will be hard for them, that George should marry a divorced woman."

"What have they to do with it?" interrupted Janet. "It's only George that matters--no other person has any right whatever to know! You needn't consider anybody else."

"Yes--but think of _him_. It's bad enough that I should know something he doesn't know--but at least _he's_ spared. He can take me home to his mother--whom he adores--and if _I_ know that I'm a cheat and a sham--he doesn't--it will be all easy for him."

Janet was silenced for the moment by the sheer pa.s.sion of the voice. She sat, groping a little, under the stress of her own thought, and praying inwardly--without words--for light and guidance.

"And think of _me_, please!" Rachel went on. "If I tell him, it's done--for ever. He'll forgive me, I think. He may be everything that's dear, and good, and kind"--her voice broke--"but it'd hit him dreadfully hard. A man like that can't forget such a thing. When I've once said it, I shall have changed everything between us. He must think--some time--when he's alone--when I'm not there--'It was d.i.c.k Tanner once--it will be some one else another time!' I shall have been pulled down from the place where he puts me now--even after he knows all about Roger and the divorce--pulled down for good and all--however much he may pity me--however good he may be to me. It will be love perhaps--but another kind of love. He can't trust me again. No one could.

And it's that I can't bear--I can't _bear_!"

She looked defiantly at Janet, and the little room with its simple furnishings seemed too small a stage for such an energy of fear and distress.

"Yes--that you could bear," said Janet quietly, "with him to help you--and G.o.d. It would all straighten out in the end--because the first step would be right."

Rachel turned upon her.

"Now that I've told you," she cried, "can _you_ ever think the same of me again? You know you can't!"

Janet caught her cold hands, and held them close, looking up to her.

"Not the same--no, not the same! But if I cared for you before, Rachel--I care for you ten thousand times more now. Don't you see?--it will be the same with him?"

Rachel shook her head.

"No--a _man's_ different," she repeated, "a man's different!"

"Anyway, you _must_," said Janet resolutely, "you know you must. You don't need me to tell you."

Rachel wrenched herself away with a little moan and hid her face in her hands as she leaned against the mantelpiece. Janet, looking up, and transfigured by that spiritual energy, that ultimate instinctive faith which was the root force in her, went on, pleading.

"Dear Rachel, one goes on living side by side--doing one's daily work--and thinking just one's ordinary thoughts--and all the time one never speaks of the biggest things of all--the only things that matter, really. Isn't it G.o.d that matters--and the law in our hearts? If we break it--if we aren't true--if we wrong those that love us--if we injure and deceive--how will it be when we grow old--when we come to die? Whatever our gain--we shall have lost our souls?"

"You think I should injure him by marrying him?" cried Rachel.

"No--no! A thousand times, no! But by deceiving him--by not trusting him--with all your heart, and all your life--that would be the worst injury."

"How do you know all there may have been in his life?" said Rachel, vehemently--"I don't ask."

"I think you do know."

Rachel considered the words, finally dropping her face again out of sight.

"Well, I dare say I do!" she said wearily. "Of course he's a hundred times too good for me."

"Don't turn it off like that! It's for oneself one has to think--one's own fulfilling of the law. Love--_is_ the fulfilling of the law. And love means trust--and truth."

Janet's voice sank. She had said her say. Rachel was silent for some time, and Janet sat motionless. The clock and the fire were the only sounds. At last Rachel moved. With a long sigh, she pressed back the ruffled hair from her temples, and standing tiptoe before a small mirror that hung over the mantelpiece, she began to pin up some coils that had broken loose. When that was done, she turned slowly towards Janet.

"Very well. That's settled. How shall it be done? Shall I write it or say it?"

Janet gasped a little between laughing and crying. Then she caught Rachel's cold unresisting hand, and laid it tenderly against her own cheek.

"Write it."

"All right." The voice was that of an automaton. "How shall I send it?"

"Would you--would you trust me to take it?"

"You mean--you'd talk to him?"

"If you gave me leave."

Rachel thought a little, and then made a scarcely perceptible sign of a.s.sent. A few more words pa.s.sed as to the best time at which to find Ellesborough at leisure. It was decided that Janet should aim at catching him in the midday dinner hour. "I should bicycle, and get home before dark."

"And now let's talk of something else," said Rachel, imperiously.

She found some business letters that had to be answered, and set to work on them. Janet wrote up her milk records and dairy accounts. The fire sank gently to its end. Janet's cat came with tail outstretched, and rubbed itself sociably, first against Janet's skirts, and then against Rachel. No trace remained in the little room, where the two women sat at their daily work, of the scene which had pa.s.sed between them, except in Rachel's pallor, and the occasional shaking of her hand as it pa.s.sed over the paper.

Then when Janet put up her papers with a look at the clock, which was just going to strike ten o'clock, Rachel too cleared away, and with that instinct for air and the open which was a relic of her Canadian life, and made any closed room after a time an oppression to her, she threw a cloak over her shoulders, and went out again to breathe the night. There was a young horse who, on the previous day, had needed the vet. She went across the yard to the stable to look at him.

All was well with the horse, whose swollen hock had been comfortably bandaged by Hastings before he left. But as she stood beside him, close to the divided door, opening on the hill, of which both the horizontal halves were now shut, she was aware of certain movements on the other side of the door--some one pa.s.sing it--footsteps. Her nerves gave a jump. Could it be?--_again_! Impetuously she went to the door, threw open the upper half, and looked out. Nothing--but the faint starlight on the hill, and the woods crowning it.

She called.

"Who's there?" But no one answered.

Fancy, of course. But with the knowledge she now had, she could not bring herself to go round the farm. Instead she carefully closed the stable shutter, and ran back across the yard into the shelter of the house, locking the front door behind her, and going into the sitting-room and the kitchen, to see that the windows were fastened.

Janet was waiting for her at the top of the stairs. They kissed each other gravely, in silence, like those who feel that the time for speech is done. Then Rachel went into her room, and Janet heard her turn the key. Janet herself slept intermittently. But whenever she woke, it seemed to her that there was some slight sound in the next room--a movement or a rustle, which showed that Rachel was still awake--and up?

It was a night indeed which left Rachel with that sense of strange illuminations, of life painfully enlarged and deepened, which love and suffering may always bring to the woman who is capable of love and suffering. She had spent the hours in writing to Ellesborough, and in that letter she had unpacked her heart to its depths, Janet guessed. When she received the letter from Rachel on the morrow, she handled it as a sacred thing.

XV

The frost held. A sun of pearl and fire rose over the hill, as the stars finally faded out in the winter morning, and a brilliant rime lay sparkling on all the pastures and on the slopes of the down. The brilliance had partly vanished from the lower grounds when Janet started on her way; but on the high commons, winter was at its gayest and loveliest. The distant woods were a mist of brown and azure, encircling the broad frost-whitened s.p.a.ces; the great single beeches and oaks under which Spenser or Sidney--the great Will himself--might have walked, shot up, magnificent, into a clear sky, proudly sheltering the gnarled thorns and furze-bushes which marched beside and round them, like dwarfs in a pageant.