Rachel gave a little defiant shake of the head.
"America"s got to thank us, too!" she said, with a challenging look at Ellesborough. "We"ve borne it for four years. Now it"s your turn!"
"Well, here we are," said Ellesborough quietly, "up to the neck. But--of course--don"t thank us. It"s our business just as much as yours."
The talk dropped a moment, and Janet took advantage of it to bring in coffee as a finish to the meal. Under cover of the slight bustle, Ellesborough said to Rachel, in a voice no longer meant for the table,--
"Could you spare me a letter sometimes, Miss Henderson--at the front?"
He had both elbows on the table, and was playing with a cigarette. There was nothing the least patronizing or arrogant in his manner. But there was a male note in it--perhaps a touch of self-confidence--which ruffled her.
"Oh, I am a bad letter-writer," she said, as she got up from the table.
"Shall we go and look at the cows?"
They all went out into the warm September night. Ellesborough followed Rachel, cigarette in hand, his strong mouth twisting a little. The night was almost cloudless. The pale encircling down, patched at intervals with dark hanging woods, lay quiet under a sky full of faint stars. The scent of the stubblefields, of the great corn-stack just beyond the farmyard, of the big barn so full that the wide wooden doors could not be closed, was mingled with the strong ammonia smells of the farm-yard, and here and there with the sweetness left in the evening air by the chewing cows on their pa.s.sage to the cow-house on the farther side of the yard.
Rachel led the way to the cow-house--a vast fifteenth-century barn, with an interlacing forest of timber in its roof, where the six cows stood ranged, while Janet and the two land la.s.sies, with Hastings the bailiff to help them, were changing the litter and filling up the racks with hay.
Rachel went along the line pointing out the beauties of each separate beast to Ellesborough, and caressing two little calves whom Jenny was feeding by hand. Ellesborough was amused by her technical talk and her proprietor"s airs. It seemed to him a kind of play-acting, but it fascinated him. Janet had brought in a lantern, and the light and shade of it seemed to have been specially devised to bring into relief Rachel"s round and tempting beauty, the bright brown of her hair where it curled on the temples, and the lovely oval of the cheeks. Ellesborough watched her, now pa.s.sing into deep shadow, and now brilliantly lit up, as the light of the lantern caught her; overhead, the criss-cross of the arching beams as of some primitive cathedral, centuries old; and on either side the dim forms of the munching cattle, and the pretty movements of the girls busy with their work.
"Take care," laughed Rachel as she pa.s.sed him. "There are horrid holes in this floor. I haven"t had time to mend them."
As she spoke, she slipped and almost fell. Ellesborough threw out a quick hand and caught her by the arm. She smiled into his face.
"Neatly done!" she said composedly, submitting to be led by him over a very broken bit of pavement near the door. His hand held her firmly. Nor did she make any effort to release herself till they were outside. Here were the vicar and his sister waiting to say good-night--the vicar much chagrined that he had seen so little of his chief hostess, and inclined to feel that his self-sacrificing attention to Miss Leighton at supper had been but poorly rewarded. Rachel, however, saw that he was out of humour, and at once set herself to appease him. And in the few minutes which elapsed before she parted with him at the gate she had quite succeeded.
Then she turned to Ellesborough.
"Shall we go up the hill a little?"
They slipped through a side gate of the farmyard, crossed a field, and found themselves on an old gra.s.s road leading gently upward along the side of the down into the shadow of the woods. The still, warm night held them enwrapped. Rachel had thrown a white scarf over her head and throat, which gave a mysterious charm to the face within it. As she strolled beside her hew friend she played him with all the arts of a woman resolved to please. And he allowed himself to be handled at her will.
He told her about his people, and his friends, about the ideas and ambitions, also, with which he had come to Europe, which were now in abeyance, but were to spring to active life after the war. Forestry on a great scale; a part to be played in the preservation and development of the vast forest areas of America which had been so wilfully wasted; business and patriotism combined; fortune possible; but in any case the public interest served. He talked shrewdly, but also with ardour and imagination; she was stirred, excited even; and all the time she liked the foreignness of his voice, the outline of his profile against the sky, and all the other elements of his physical presence.
But in the midst of his castle-building he broke off.
"However, I"m a silly fool to talk like this. I"m going out to the front directly. Perhaps my bullet"s waiting for me."
"Oh, no!" she said involuntarily--"no!"
"I hope not. I don"t want to die just yet. I want to get married, for one thing."
He spoke lightly, and she laughed.
"Well, that"s easy enough."
He shook his head, but said nothing. They walked on till they reached the edge of the hill, when Rachel, out of breath, sat down on a fallen log to rest a little. Below them stretched the hollow upland, with its encircling woods and its white stubble fields. Far below lay the dark square of the farm, with a light in one of its windows.
Rachel pointed to the gra.s.s road by which they had come.
"We haven"t seen the ghost!"
He asked her for the story, and she told it. By now she had pieced it all together; and it seemed to Ellesborough that it had a morbid fascination for her.
"He dragged himself down this very path," she said. "They tracked him by the blood stains; his wounds dripped all along it. And then he fell, just under my cart-shed. It was a horrible, bitter night. Of course the silly people here say they hear groans and dragging steps: That"s all nonsense, but I sometimes wish it hadn"t happened at my farm."
He couldn"t help laughing gently at her foolishness.
"Why, it"s a great distinction to have a ghost!"
She disagreed--decidedly.
"Any one can have my ghost that wants. I"m awfully easily scared."
"Are you?" There was a deep note in his voice. "No, I don"t believe that.
I"m sure you"re a plucky woman. I know you are!"
She laughed out.
"How do you know?"
"Why, no one but a plucky woman could have taken this farm and be working it as you"re doing."
"That"s not pluck," she said, half scornfully. "But if it is--well, I"ve got plenty of pluck of that kind. But I am often scared, downright scared, about nothing. It"s just fear, that"s what it is."
"Fear of what?"
"I don"t know."
She spoke in a sombre, shrinking tone, which struck him uncomfortably.
But when he tried further to discover what she meant, she would say nothing more. He noticed, indeed, that she would often seem to turn the talk upon herself, only to cut it short again immediately. She offered him openings, and then he could make nothing of them; so that when they reached the outskirts of the farm on their return, he had given her all the main outlines of his own history, and she had said almost nothing of hers.
But all the same the walk had drawn them much nearer.
He stopped her at the little gate to say,--
"I"m going to ask you again--I want you to write to me when I"m in France."
And this time she said almost eagerly,--
"Yes, I"ll write; indeed I"ll write! But you"ll come over again before you go?"
"Rather," he said joyously; "rather! Why, there"s a month. You"ll be tired of me before you"ve done."
A few minutes later she was standing in her own little room, listening to the retreating rush of his motor-cycle down the road. There was a great tumult in her mind.
"Am I falling in love with him? Am I--am I?"
But in the dark, when she had put out her light, the cry that shaped itself in her mind was identical with that sudden misgiving of the afternoon, when on Ellesborough"s arrival she had first heard his voice downstairs talking to Janet.