Harvest

"If you had known? I wish I"d thought to tell you. But it was really only settled a few days ago."

"I don"t like having a lot of strange men about the farm," she said abruptly, "especially when I have girls to look after."

"Oh, the camp"s a long way from the farm," he said consolingly. "And these woods will come last."

Still Miss Henderson"s face did not quite recover its cheerfulness. She looked at her watch.

"Don"t let me keep you, Mr. Hastings. I"ll lock up the house, if you"ll tell me where to leave the key."

He showed her where to put it, in a corner of the stable, for him to find on the morrow. Then, in her rapid way, Miss Henderson offered him the post of bailiff on the farm, from the date of her entry. He agreed at once; his salary was settled, and he departed with a more cheerful aspect than when he arrived. The hopefulness and spring of youth had long since left him, and he had dreaded the new experience of this first meeting with a woman-farmer, from whom he desired employment simply because he was very badly off, he was getting old, and Mr. Wellin"s widow had treated him shabbily. He had lost his nerve for new ventures. But Miss Henderson had made things easy. She had struck him as considerate and sensible--a "good sort." He would do his best for her.

Rachel Henderson, left to herself, did not immediately re-enter the house. She went with a face on which the cloud still rested to look at the well which was to be found under the cart-shed, at the eastern end of the house.

It was covered with a wooden lid which she removed. Under the shed roof there was but little light left. A faint gleam showed the level of the water, which, owing to the long drought, was very low. Hastings had told her that the well was extremely deep---150 feet at least, and inexhaustible. The water was chalky but good. It would have to be pumped up every morning for the supply of the house and stables.

The well had a brick margin. Rachel sat down upon it, her eyes upon that distant gleam below. The dusk was fast possessing itself of all the farm, and an evening wind was gustily blowing through the cart-shed, playing with some old guano sacks that had been left there, and whistling round the corners of the house. Outside, Rachel could hear the horse fidgeting, and old Jonathan coughing--no doubt as a signal to her that she had kept him long enough.

Still, she sat bent together on the margin of the well. Then she drew off her glove, and felt for something in the leather bag she carried on her wrist. She took it out, and the small object sparkled a little as she held it poised for a moment--as though considering. Then with a rapid movement, she bent over the well, and dropped it into the water. There was a slight splash.

Rachel Henderson raised herself and stood up.

"That"s done with!" she said to herself, with a straightening of all her young frame.

Yet all the way back to London she was tormented by thoughts of what she had declared was "done with"; of scenes and persons, that is, which she was determined to forget, and had just formally renounced for ever by her symbolic action at the well.

II

"You do seem to have hit on a rather nice spot, Rachel, though lonesome,"

said Miss Henderson"s friend and partner, Janet Leighton, as they stood on the front steps of Great End Farm, surveying the scene outside, on an August evening, about a week after she and Rachel had arrived with their furniture and personal belongings to take possession of the farm.

During that week they had both worked hard--from dawn till dark, both outside and in. The harvest was in full swing, and as the dusk was filling, Janet Leighton, who had just returned herself from the fields, could watch the scene going on in the wheat-field beyond the farm-yard, where, as the reaping machine steadily pared away the remaining square of wheat, two or three men and boys with guns lay in wait outside the square for the rabbits as they bolted from their fast lessening shelter. The gold and glow of harvest was on the fields and in the air. At last the sun had come back to a sodden land, after weeks of cold and drenching showers which, welcomed in June, had by the middle of August made all England tremble for the final fate of the gorgeous crops then filling the largest area ever tilled on British soil with their fat promise. Wheat, oats, and barley stood once more erect, roots were saved, and the young vicar of Ips...o...b.. was reflecting as he walked towards Great End Farm that his harvest festival sermon might now after all be rather easier to write than had seemed probable during the foregoing anxious weeks of chill and storm.

Rachel Henderson, who had thrown herself--tired out--into a chair in the sitting-room window, which was wide open, nodded as she caught her friend"s remark and smiled. But she did not want to talk. She was in that state of physical fatigue when mere rest is a positive delight. The sun, the warm air, the busy harvest scene, and all the long hours of hard but pleasant work seemed to be still somehow in her pulses, thrilling through her blood. It was long since she had known the acute physical pleasure of such a day; but her sense of it had conjured up involuntarily recollections of many similar days in a distant scene--great golden s.p.a.ces, blinding sun, and huge reaping machines, twice the size of that at work in the field yonder. The recollections were unwelcome. Thought was unwelcome. She wanted only food and sleep--deep sleep--renewing her tired muscles, till the delicious early morning came round again, and she was once more in the fields directing her team of workers.

"Why, there"s the vicar!" said Janet Leighton, perceiving the tall and willowy figure of Mr. Shenstone, as its owner stopped to speak to one of the boys with the guns who were watching the game.

Rachel looked round with a look of annoyance.

"Oh, dear, what a bore," she said wearily. "I suppose I must go and tidy up. n.o.body ought to be allowed to pay visits after five o"clock."

"You asked him something about a village woman to help, didn"t you?"

"I did, worse luck!" sighed Rachel, gathering up her sunbonnet and disappearing from the window. Janet heard her go upstairs, and a hasty opening of cupboards overhead. She herself had come back an hour earlier from the fields than Rachel in order to get supper ready, and had slipped a skirt over the khaki tunic and knickerbockers which were her dress--and her partner"s--when at work on the farm. She wondered mischievously what Rachel would put on. That her character included an average dose of vanity, the natural vanity of a handsome woman, Rachel"s new friend was well aware. But Janet, Rachel"s elder by five years, was only tenderly amused by it. All Rachel"s foibles, as far as she knew them, were pleasant to her. They were in that early stage of a new friendship when all is glamour.

Yet Janet did sometimes reflect, "How little I really know about her. She is a darling--but a mystery!"

They had met at college, taken their farm training together, and fallen in love with each other. Janet had scarcely a relation in the world.

Rachel possessed, it seemed, a brother in Canada, another in South Africa, and some cousins whom she scarcely knew, children of the uncle who had left her three thousand pounds. Each had been attracted by the loneliness of the other, and on leaving college nothing was more natural than they should agree to set up together. Rachel, as the capitalist, was to choose the farm and take command. Janet went to a Cheshire dairy farm for a time to get some further training in practical work; and she was now responsible for the dairy at Great End, with the housekeeping and the poultry thrown in. She was a thin, tall woman with spectacles, and had just seen her thirty-second birthday. Her eyes were honest and clear, her mouth humorous. She never grudged other women their beauty or their success. It always seemed to her she had what she deserved.

Meanwhile the vicar approached, and Miss Leighton descended the steps and went to meet him at the gate. His aspect showed him apologetic.

"I have come at an unearthly hour, Miss Leighton. But I thought I should have no chance of finding Miss Henderson free till the evening, and I came to tell you that I think I have found a woman to do your work."

Janet bade him come in, and a.s.sured him that Rachel would soon be visible. She ushered him into the sitting-room, which he entered on a note of wonderment.

"How nice you have made it all," he said, looking round him. "When I think what a deserted hole this has been for years. You know, the village people firmly believe it is haunted? Old Wellin never could get anybody to sleep here. But tramps often used it, I"m certain. They got in through the windows. Hastings told me he had several times found a smouldering fire in the kitchen."

"What sort is the ghost?" Janet inquired, as she pointed him to a chair, devoutly hoping that Rachel would hurry herself.

"Well, there"s a story--but I wonder whether I ought to tell you--"

"I a.s.sure you as to ghosts--I have no nerves!" said Janet with a confident laugh, "and I don"t think Rachel has either. We are more frightened of rats. This farm-yard contains the biggest I"ve ever seen.

I dream of them at night."

"It"s not exactly the ghost--" said the vicar, hesitating.

"But the story that produced the ghost? What--a murder?"

"Half a century ago," said the vicar rea.s.suringly; "you won"t mind that?"

"Not the least. A century ago would be romantic. If it was just the other day, we should feel we ought to have got the farm cheaper. But half a century doesn"t matter. It"s a mid-Victorian, just a plain, old-fashioned murder. Who did it?"

The vicar opened his eyes a little. Miss Leighton was, he saw, a lady, and perhaps clever. Her spectacles looked like it. No doubt she had been at Oxford or Cambridge before going to Swanley? These educated women in new professions were becoming a very pressing and common fact! As to the murder, he explained that it had been just an ordinary poaching affair.

An old gamekeeper on the Shepherd estate had been attacked by a gang of poachers in the winter of 1866. He had been shot in one of the woods, and though mortally wounded had been able to drag himself to the outskirts of the farm where his strength had failed him. He was found dead under the cart-shed which backed on the stables, and the traces of blood on the hill marked the stages of his struggle for life. Two men were suspected, one of them a labourer on the Great End Farm; but there was no evidence.

The suspected labourer had gone to Canada the year after the murder, and no one knew what had happened to him.

But having told the tale the vicar was again seized with compunction.

"I oughtn"t to have told you--I really oughtn"t; just on your settling in--I hope you won"t tell Miss Henderson?"

Janet"s amused reply was interrupted by Rachel"s entrance. The vicar arose with eagerness to receive her. He was evidently attracted by his new parishioners and anxious to make a good impression on them. Miss Henderson"s reception of the vicar, however, was far more guarded. The easy friendliness of manner which had attracted the bailiff Hastings was, at first at any rate, entirely absent. Her att.i.tude was almost that of a woman defending herself against possible intrusion, and Janet Leighton, looking on, and occasionally sharing in the conversation, was surprised by it, as indeed she was by so many things concerning Rachel now that their acquaintance was deepening; surprised also, as though it were a new thing, by her friend"s good looks as she sat languidly chatting with the vicar. Rachel had merely put on a blue overall above her land-worker"s dress. But her beautiful head, with its wealth of brown hair, and her face, with its sensuous fulness of cheek and lip, its rounded lines, and lovely colour--like a slightly overblown rose--were greatly set off by the simple folds of blue linen; and her feet and legs, shapely but not small, in their khaki stockings and shoes, completed the general effect of lissom youth. The flush and heat of hard bodily work had pa.s.sed away.

She had had time to plunge her face into cold water and smooth her hair.

But the atmosphere of the harvest field, its ripeness and glow, seemed to be still about her. A cla.s.sically minded man might have thought of some nymph in the train of Demeter, might have fancied a horn of plenty, or a bow, slung from the sunburnt neck.

But the vicar had forgotten his cla.s.sics. _En revanche_, however, he was doing his best to show himself sympathetic and up-to-date with regard to women and their new spheres of work--especially on the land. He had noticed three girls, he said, working in the harvest field. Two of them he recognized as from the village; the third he supposed was a stranger?

"She comes from Ralstone," said Rachel.

"Ah, that"s the village where the new timber camp is. You really must see that camp, Miss Henderson."

"I hate to think of the woods coming down," she said, frowning a little.

"We all do. But that"s the war. It can"t be helped, alack! But it"s wonderful to see the women at work, measuring and checking, doing the brain work, in fact, while the men do the felling and loading. It makes one envious."

The vicar sighed. A flush appeared on his young but slightly cadaverous face.