CHAPTER X.JETHROwas hoeing peas in the burning June sun. His white linen hat flapped over his calm, shrewd eyes. Pamela, loitering along the grass paths, marveled intolerantly at his choice of an occupation. Why should a man of substance, a man of birth, a man with acres and with laborers, hoe peas? She paced the paths thoughtfully, looking at her neat, broad border of new roses, taking up a fluttering label now and then to read the half-obliterated name. They were all the very latest and choicest roses, and had been planted in the spring by the nurseryman at Liddleshorn, to whom she had given a large order.Her heart told her that Edred was close behind, and she turned, her eyes seeking his humbly, pleading for tender recognition. He did not trouble to look at her, but merely plucked one of her beautiful pink Verdier roses without permission, and stuck it in his coat, with a scornful laugh at its huge size.Jethro, across his little heaps of flagging weeds and clods of yellow earth, watched the two gloomily. He was tired of Pamela’s elegant brother; he was suspicious, although he could not have explained why. His welcome to the shipwrecked stranger had been warm—it had even extended to a free drawing on his check-book; but he did notwant his kinsman’s-hospitality to be construed into a life invitation. He remembered a funny story he had once heard about an engaging Irishman who had come on a month’s visit to a country house and stayed forty-five years. Edred had lamed his best horse; he had considerably reduced the cask of old whisky; he dipped too deeply into the tobacco-jar. He might stay until the wedding, and when that was over he must take himself off—to the West Coast of Africa, to another wreck, if he chose. The busy man, hoeing peas not because it was necessary but as a positive outlet for his energy, was heartily sick of the idle one, who strolled languidly along the rose border, the smoke from his cigar making a lean, blue string.The wicket-gate creaked. Pamela looked up sharply. Heels clattered on the raised brick path, and a blithe voice called out, “Where are you all?”“It’s Nancy.”Edred moved forward so abruptly that he broke the long ash of his cigar, which he had been carefully preserving. Pamela followed. A tall, slim figure stood for a moment in the frame of the shining holly arch at the entrance of the garden. The sun caught Nancy’s masses of brick-red hair and enveloped her pretty face in flame. She called out to Jethro:“Mother wants you to tell me how much you think she ought to get a load for her hay. Write it down, please, or I am sure to forget.”She met Pamela at the beginning of the grass path. They kissed. Edred watched the tame little salutecynically. Then he took Nancy’s hand in the cycling glove with the perforated palm—like a thin crumpet—and watched her white lids fall. She was such a child that she never tried to hide her feelings.Pamela dragged off a great branch of damask rose and tore her fingers.“You should always cut roses,” Nancy said reprovingly, taking up a label. “Francesca Kruger—that’s flesh, tinged with saffron, isn’t it?”“Copper,” returned Pamela curtly.“I wish we could have some good roses. Evergreen isn’t successful with flowers. But he lets us have plenty of vegetables. I came to know if you would both come over to Malling Flower Show next Thursday. We could bike—that would be great fun, wouldn’t it? Mr. Meadows has asked me to judge the wild flowers, and I feel so horribly nervous. But I’ve been reading it up.”“You can’t go to Malling,” Pamela said, looking sternly at the weak, radiant face, and hating Nancy all the more fiercely because her temples were so purely white, and because the ruddy hair grew round them so charmingly. “It’s lecture-day at Liddleshorn—the nursing lecture. It will be very interesting; we are going to bandage a small boy.”“But I don’t care for the lecture. We are not going to finish the course. Annie says that her mother—Aunt Jerusha—thought scientific nursing a great mistake, and always said that no woman could expect to be a good nurse until she had been the mother of a large family and had buried two-thirds of it. Youmustcome to Malling.”She was speaking to Pamela, but her blue eyes were on Edred.“I’ll come, anyhow,” he said lightly. “I’ll call at Turle about three. Will that do? Pamela would rather go to Liddleshorn and bandage her small boy.”“That would be fun. And you’ll come into supper afterward. I must go now. Mother told me to look in at Hone’s—Nick Hone’s.”“Where there are so many children?” asked Pamela, her gloomy eyes on the straight line of beauty afforded by her choice roses.“No. Those are the Peter Hones. The Bert Hones live near us. But Nick Hone is a neighbor of yours. Jethro!” she called out shrilly, and he came across the rough, dry ground, hoe in hand, “do send poor Nick Hone in some new potatoes. You have plenty.” She glanced along the beds at the rows in white blossom. “He’s dying, and he keeps saying that if he had a dish of new potatoes he’d get better. Mrs. Hone went and dug some yesterday, but they were only as large as cob-nuts. Mother would have sent some, but Evergreen is a little touchy. He doesn’t like us to interfere with the vegetables.”“Daborn shall take a trug full,” said Jethro carelessly. “Dying, is he? That’s drink. Never knew such a fellow! Three gallons of cider a day at harvest time wasn’t enough for him. The other men save some and take it home to their wives.”“That is kind of you. Mrs. Hone will be sopleased. I’ll be off now. Three o’clock on Thursday, Mr. Crisp.”He seemed amused by her adorable air of sheepishness when he took her hand. They all four went out into the inclosed garden, Jethro and Pamela dropping behind as a matter of course—his eyes on her, and hers fixed blankly on the well-cut back of Edred’s coat. Jethro picked up a flat wooden basket, with pieces of wood at the bottom like the rockers of a cradle. It stood by a row of early peas.“Here’s a trug. Daborn shall take it to Hone when he goes home to dinner. Here, Daborn!”He put his earthy, hard hand to his mouth and shouted. Pamela saw the man hurrying from the greenhouse, where he was getting young tomato plants ready for planting out. She followed Nancy and Edred, dreading to leave them alone for a moment, despising herself for dreading. They had just passed through the holly hedge. She scurried after, not knowing why she put her feet so softly on the gravel and coaxed her skirt close to her limbs so that it should not brush the box edging. When she stood in the frame of the arch she stopped. Her clear, jealous eyes went straight across the garden, across the bed of newly-planted cauliflowers which Chalcraft had been allowed to dibble in for the last time—next year she would have a lawn and carriage-drive. She looked across the brick path, through the tall heads of June flowers, to the umbrella yew-tree beneath which Gainah’s lilies were blooming.They were standing behind it, between the thickfoliage and the square lattice of the dining-parlor window. She saw Edred peer through to see if the room was empty. She saw Nancy, her head down, her arms and hands jerking, pretending to admire the lilies—bemoaning, in her imbecile way, no doubt, because Evergreen would not let her have lilies too.They were very close together in the bosky kindness of the yew; no doubt it had been a witness to many like scenes and been discreet. Nancy seemed to sway a bit nearer the lithe figure in gray. Pamela saw his face and her heart came to a startled stop. He had looked like that when he kissed her for the first time—on the stairs of the boarding-house. It had been the first man’s kiss of her life.Nancy’s eyes and cheeks and lips blazed like her ruddy hair. He pulled her toward him with the easy, insolent air of a man who is sure of his woman—who has been sure of women all his life—and kissed her on lids, lips, brows.Pamela, wearing a white cotton gown, her head bare, looked like statue—one of the statues that used to decorate old gardens. She forgot everything—her approaching marriage and magnificence, her border of tea roses, the carriage-drive, her wedding clothes—all the big and little things which equally made her happiness or misery. For the first time for many months she seemed to touch her past self. She had almost forgotten, in the new strong life, the old one of dull days, and sloppy streets, and shop-windows, and a struggle for the latest fashion at the least possible cost. She was again that sharp-wittedgirl in Bloomsbury, that wildly wretched one who used to take omnibus in spare hours just to stand on the common and stare hungrily at a wall.He was kissing Nancy; he meant to marry her. She couldn’t let him do that. She must abandon Jethro. Her life must run side by side with Edred’s. She didn’t care what sort of life—one of poverty, hard work, hard words; blows, perhaps. One of guilty prosperity, winding up with the prison again for him. It didn’t matter—so long as they were together, if only for a little. He didn’t love her. He wasn’t capable, as she knew love. But she loved him, even when she saw him stoop again to those red pouting lips behind the yew. All her rage was for Nancy.Daborn came behind with the trug full of yellow-skinned potatoes. She stepped back and watched him go through the yard, and presently watched Nancy go down the bricked path, mount her bicycle, and skim away like a light swallow. Nancy had forgotten the marked quotation for hay. She could not carry two ideas in that limited head of hers.The world was too gay and warm for Pamela’s blank misery. The hot sun darted into her strained eyes like needles. She went round the house, hugging the lichened wall, her head down, the woolly leaves and spiral tendrils of the vine touching her dull hair. At the garden door she met Gainah, with a flush on her wasted face and a gleam of the old industry and importance in her cold eyes. She was attired in a loose garment of unbleached calico, cut like an antiquated bathing garment. Her skirtswere bunched under it. She had a battered straw hat, round which was firmly fixed a veil of green net. A pair of old stockings were pulled over her hands and arms. She carried a tin frying-pan, which she constantly beat with a long iron skimmer.The air was hot and noisy. There seemed an unusual commotion along the line of beehives which were set by the south wall. They were straw skeps, which in winter were covered with turf to keep out the cold. Pamela, who had read up bee-keeping, with other branches of country life, had long decided to have bar-frame hives when she was mistress of Folly Corner. But her knowledge of bees was only theoretical. She was very frightened of them, and the deft, fearless way in which Gainah would take a swarm excited her admiration and made her grudgingly admit that it might be a point of superiority.The angry buzzing grew louder, the monotonous tom-tom beating of the frying-pan and skimmer more persistent.“There’s a swarm over there in the crab-tree,” Gainah said excitedly, forgetting for the time all party feeling. “I must go and take it. They know me. They’ve been talking all the morning; I knew we should have a flitting by dinner-time.”Pamela languidly turned her head. A dark, pear-shaped mass hung from the lower branch of the crab tree in the oat-field.“They know I’m coming,” Gainah said, advancing and still beating, “they know everything.These are fierce—I crossed them with an Italian queen ten years ago—but they never sting me. They have more sense and feeling than half the folk about. When old Bert Hone died and young Bert took the bees from his mother, they didn’t flourish. He hadn’t acted fair and they knew it. When there’s a swarm in the thatch none of the girls in a house ever get married. All Len Daborn’s girls are maids still.”She strode on, a spare distorted figure in her calico wrapper, with the green veil tucked safely down in her scraggy throat. Pamela watched her vanish and reappear beyond the fruit-bushes. On any other day she might have asserted herself—given a wise homily on bee-keeping up to date, or deprecated old-world superstitions.She went under the low door with the wooden hood and sat down in the dull dining-parlor, her eyes vaguely looking out of the window at the space between the casement and the yew. Nancy’s flame-colored hair and thick scarlet lips seemed to stand out in relief from the curled somber leaves.Gainah’s work, just as she had thrown it down when the bees swarmed, was huddled on the floor, and the blue cambric hearts which she had cut ready for patching on the white dimity were dotted like huge pale turquoises on the narrow oak table.Pamela looked at the half-made quilt. Gainah had told her once, in a moment of expansiveness, that the blue cambric and white dimity had been her mother’s wedding petticoat and gown. It was a dainty quilt, all white groundwork, with blue borderingand bands and carefully cut hearts and leaves. The stitches were small and regular. Gainah sat at patchwork from breakfast until supper, now that the garden and the house were no longer under her control. In the lower drawer of her chest she already had five quilts folded neatly away in camphor.The front door opened. Edred came in, rang the hand-bell on the table in the passage. Pamela heard voices—a little deprecating cackle, a man’s voice subdued to a cautious bass growl. Unable to bear any more, she started up, threw back the door, and advanced into the passage. As she did so, the deep rose-color of Nettie’s cotton gown whisked out of sight into the kitchen. She went, her head high on her throat, into the drawing-room, and Edred followed.Fate seemed to decide that her moments of decided comedy or tragedy should be played in that room: the room with the ugly grate and marble mantelpiece which Jethro’s father had put in to make the place smart for Gainah; with the painted milking-stools and fretwork brackets and cheap embroideries which she had herself brought from Liddleshorn.The roses in the blue bowls were drooping, candle-grease had dropped on to the keys of the piano, the open door of the china closet displayed dusty shelves and a floor on which the gay red-and-blue rugs were kicked up. Pamela saw these things; they reminded her sharply of the change that of late had come over her. She no longer took a housewifelypride in anything; her life was occupied in playing cat, with Nancy and Edred for mice.“Are you going to marry Nancy?” she asked abruptly.“Are you going to marry Jethro?” he returned aptly.“I—I suppose so. And yet, when it comes to the point—— Everything depends on you.”She looked at him again in an appealing way.“We’re in a bit of a mess,” he said, shrugging his thin shoulders and impatiently pulling the fine points of his black mustache.She hunched her shoulders and clenched her hands between her knees as if she were in actual physical pain.“Oh! why did you come?” she moaned.“Nonsense. It was very fortunate for me. I couldn’t have kept on with sewing-machines—cut my throat, rather. And you can’t execute acoupof any kind without capital. This sort of thing isn’t permanent, of course. Old Jeth’s getting sick—he’s a good fellow. Men of that type always show their feeling in mean ways. He ought to swear at me, kick me out—he only looks blue when I fill up my glass. I must either marry Nancy—it can’t make any difference to you, Pam—or I must get a couple of hundred to set me up in life again. There are lots of good things going in the City—beastly nuisance not seeing the evening papers. My head is full of ideas. If I had a couple of hundreds I could turn them into thousands in a week. Balaclavas have run up to——”“Don’t talk to me about stocks; I don’t understand—and it is so unimportant——”“By Jove! it’s all-important to me.”She straightened her curved back. He saw a convulsive lump working in her throat, and the rims of her lids grew faintly pink. He frowned. She was going to cry. A woman’s tears lashed him to any sort of brutality.“When I saw you kiss Nancy,” she broke out, “it nearly killed me.”“So you saw! But when old Jeth kisses you, in his open, whole-hearted, smacking fashion?”“It doesn’t affect you. Men are different—and you more different than any other man,” she said confusedly.“This sort of thing doesn’t help us,” he cried impatiently. “Which shall it be? Turle, with Nancy as a wife and Aunt Sophy as a mother-in-law, or London, with two hundred pounds in my pocket?”“I haven’t fifty pounds.”“But Jethro has. Get it out of him; you’ll do it better than I should. Go to him frankly; say I’ve a scheme for making a fortune. He will be delighted to get rid of me. He’s suspicious, without knowing why, poor chap. This brother and sister humbug is the merest farce. If these people were not fools, the most generous, gullible fools in the world, they would have found us out long ago.”He crossed to the sofa, threw himself beside her, and laxly hooked his long arm round her firm waist.“Get me the couple of hun, Pam,” he said tenderly,“and I’ll be off. Nancy is a pretty imbecile. I’ll go to town. I’ll keep out of mischief, sail just within the wind—don’t bother your dear anxious head about me. Marry old Jeth; cut a figure in the neighborhood. With his money and your brains you can be county swells.”“And you?”“I told you—don’t worry. Forget No. 4658.”She started nervously.“How can you think of that time without a shudder? Even now, when I go to sleep at night, the prison wall shoots up and blinds me. Yet you—were inside. And you say that number—the number thatwasyou—without a tremor. I’m afraid to let you go. It will happen again.”“Not if I know it. I was green. Overent and Bladden victimized me. Only fools are found out. Sin is a short name for stupidity. I shall never overshoot the mark again. There are fifty ways—five hundred—of making a fortune. No man but a fool need work—in these commercial days. Milligan cleared fifty thousand only last week, just by buying a concern and turning it into a company. He’s a prominent man, a politician, a baronet. Ten years ago he kept a newspaper and sweetstuff shop at Hornsey. Lady Milligan, whose drawing-room gowns are sketched in the fashion papers, boiled toffee and sold it in pennyworths. No one calls Milligan a blackguard.”“He must have swindled somebody. It’s impossible else.”“Of course he did. But everybody swindleseverybody else—that’s the commercial spirit; it has made us a great nation.”“Jethro——”“Was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He is a fool; without his inheritance, he’d be plowing and hay-making. Why discuss idly and waste time? The dinner gong will sound soon.”He took out his watch. It was a costly gold hunter, which he had bought in his brief prosperous time. He had put it in her hands only half an hour before his arrest—when Overent and Bladden had flown with forty thousand pounds and he was madly packing his bag in the Bloomsbury back bedroom.“What am I to do?”“Get two hundred pounds out of Jethro. I will go away and make my fortune. Some day, when you read the papers—a day old,” he sneered, “you’ll see my name as chairman of a public dinner, or recipient of a testimonial. I mean to be generous—when generosity can be made to pay. I’ll present my district with a public library, a clock tower, or a drinking fountain, and be knighted.”“You’ll come to Folly Corner sometimes?”“Never.” Even his honor, just because he was a man, was stronger than hers. “I thought at first that it would work—you as Jethro’s wife, I as Nancy’s husband. But you are one of those emotional women who go to the devil and drag a man with them. When I leave here it will be for good. You won’t even know my address.”“I couldn’t bear it.”Her eyes were not on him, but on the lattice. She looked across the great field, with its uplands and its belt of oaks. She had seen it in so many aspects—half shorn; plowed, the wet furrows shining like glass; seen it smoothly iced with January snow; watched the green needle-points of young grain. That outlook, that deep bay window, had known the tearing of her heart.She looked. The ripeness of harvest was suggested. There were the long stretches of gray-green grain, soon to be golden, soon to rustle with the dry, hot breeze of August. She saw the tossed-up lavish boughs of wild roses wreathing above the hedge-rows, and saw the long grass on the banks, tropical in its growth, and going rapidly to seed.She couldn’t stay here and watch the changes of the season for years—year after year and then death—without word of him.“I couldn’t bear it,” she repeated.“You wouldn’t be fool enough to throw Jethro over? You wouldn’t come with me to London and take pot luck—a knight’s wife some day, perhaps, or only the starving wife of—a number. I mean to be careful—but failure’s on the cards. Even men like Milligan come a cropper now and then. I’ve heard shaky stories about him. He doesn’t know when to stop.”His eyes were shining. Something of the old passion was stamping itself anew on his face. She was looking lovely—the daredevil expression of perfect abandonment and sacrifice strong on hermouth, on her quickly-breathing body, on the very hands which shook in the lap of her white gown.“You wouldn’t come?” he said, under his breath.She gave a quick sigh, a last sharp glance at the gray, gently-moving uplands and the wreaths of dog-roses.“I would go with you—anywhere. I would have gone with you to the prison, been a number, a thing less than an animal behind the prison wall—but they wouldn’t let me.”He put his mouth to hers.“Dear little woman! In India you’d go to the Suttee. Then it is settled. Tackle Jethro to-night.”
JETHROwas hoeing peas in the burning June sun. His white linen hat flapped over his calm, shrewd eyes. Pamela, loitering along the grass paths, marveled intolerantly at his choice of an occupation. Why should a man of substance, a man of birth, a man with acres and with laborers, hoe peas? She paced the paths thoughtfully, looking at her neat, broad border of new roses, taking up a fluttering label now and then to read the half-obliterated name. They were all the very latest and choicest roses, and had been planted in the spring by the nurseryman at Liddleshorn, to whom she had given a large order.
Her heart told her that Edred was close behind, and she turned, her eyes seeking his humbly, pleading for tender recognition. He did not trouble to look at her, but merely plucked one of her beautiful pink Verdier roses without permission, and stuck it in his coat, with a scornful laugh at its huge size.
Jethro, across his little heaps of flagging weeds and clods of yellow earth, watched the two gloomily. He was tired of Pamela’s elegant brother; he was suspicious, although he could not have explained why. His welcome to the shipwrecked stranger had been warm—it had even extended to a free drawing on his check-book; but he did notwant his kinsman’s-hospitality to be construed into a life invitation. He remembered a funny story he had once heard about an engaging Irishman who had come on a month’s visit to a country house and stayed forty-five years. Edred had lamed his best horse; he had considerably reduced the cask of old whisky; he dipped too deeply into the tobacco-jar. He might stay until the wedding, and when that was over he must take himself off—to the West Coast of Africa, to another wreck, if he chose. The busy man, hoeing peas not because it was necessary but as a positive outlet for his energy, was heartily sick of the idle one, who strolled languidly along the rose border, the smoke from his cigar making a lean, blue string.
The wicket-gate creaked. Pamela looked up sharply. Heels clattered on the raised brick path, and a blithe voice called out, “Where are you all?”
“It’s Nancy.”
Edred moved forward so abruptly that he broke the long ash of his cigar, which he had been carefully preserving. Pamela followed. A tall, slim figure stood for a moment in the frame of the shining holly arch at the entrance of the garden. The sun caught Nancy’s masses of brick-red hair and enveloped her pretty face in flame. She called out to Jethro:
“Mother wants you to tell me how much you think she ought to get a load for her hay. Write it down, please, or I am sure to forget.”
She met Pamela at the beginning of the grass path. They kissed. Edred watched the tame little salutecynically. Then he took Nancy’s hand in the cycling glove with the perforated palm—like a thin crumpet—and watched her white lids fall. She was such a child that she never tried to hide her feelings.
Pamela dragged off a great branch of damask rose and tore her fingers.
“You should always cut roses,” Nancy said reprovingly, taking up a label. “Francesca Kruger—that’s flesh, tinged with saffron, isn’t it?”
“Copper,” returned Pamela curtly.
“I wish we could have some good roses. Evergreen isn’t successful with flowers. But he lets us have plenty of vegetables. I came to know if you would both come over to Malling Flower Show next Thursday. We could bike—that would be great fun, wouldn’t it? Mr. Meadows has asked me to judge the wild flowers, and I feel so horribly nervous. But I’ve been reading it up.”
“You can’t go to Malling,” Pamela said, looking sternly at the weak, radiant face, and hating Nancy all the more fiercely because her temples were so purely white, and because the ruddy hair grew round them so charmingly. “It’s lecture-day at Liddleshorn—the nursing lecture. It will be very interesting; we are going to bandage a small boy.”
“But I don’t care for the lecture. We are not going to finish the course. Annie says that her mother—Aunt Jerusha—thought scientific nursing a great mistake, and always said that no woman could expect to be a good nurse until she had been the mother of a large family and had buried two-thirds of it. Youmustcome to Malling.”
She was speaking to Pamela, but her blue eyes were on Edred.
“I’ll come, anyhow,” he said lightly. “I’ll call at Turle about three. Will that do? Pamela would rather go to Liddleshorn and bandage her small boy.”
“That would be fun. And you’ll come into supper afterward. I must go now. Mother told me to look in at Hone’s—Nick Hone’s.”
“Where there are so many children?” asked Pamela, her gloomy eyes on the straight line of beauty afforded by her choice roses.
“No. Those are the Peter Hones. The Bert Hones live near us. But Nick Hone is a neighbor of yours. Jethro!” she called out shrilly, and he came across the rough, dry ground, hoe in hand, “do send poor Nick Hone in some new potatoes. You have plenty.” She glanced along the beds at the rows in white blossom. “He’s dying, and he keeps saying that if he had a dish of new potatoes he’d get better. Mrs. Hone went and dug some yesterday, but they were only as large as cob-nuts. Mother would have sent some, but Evergreen is a little touchy. He doesn’t like us to interfere with the vegetables.”
“Daborn shall take a trug full,” said Jethro carelessly. “Dying, is he? That’s drink. Never knew such a fellow! Three gallons of cider a day at harvest time wasn’t enough for him. The other men save some and take it home to their wives.”
“That is kind of you. Mrs. Hone will be sopleased. I’ll be off now. Three o’clock on Thursday, Mr. Crisp.”
He seemed amused by her adorable air of sheepishness when he took her hand. They all four went out into the inclosed garden, Jethro and Pamela dropping behind as a matter of course—his eyes on her, and hers fixed blankly on the well-cut back of Edred’s coat. Jethro picked up a flat wooden basket, with pieces of wood at the bottom like the rockers of a cradle. It stood by a row of early peas.
“Here’s a trug. Daborn shall take it to Hone when he goes home to dinner. Here, Daborn!”
He put his earthy, hard hand to his mouth and shouted. Pamela saw the man hurrying from the greenhouse, where he was getting young tomato plants ready for planting out. She followed Nancy and Edred, dreading to leave them alone for a moment, despising herself for dreading. They had just passed through the holly hedge. She scurried after, not knowing why she put her feet so softly on the gravel and coaxed her skirt close to her limbs so that it should not brush the box edging. When she stood in the frame of the arch she stopped. Her clear, jealous eyes went straight across the garden, across the bed of newly-planted cauliflowers which Chalcraft had been allowed to dibble in for the last time—next year she would have a lawn and carriage-drive. She looked across the brick path, through the tall heads of June flowers, to the umbrella yew-tree beneath which Gainah’s lilies were blooming.
They were standing behind it, between the thickfoliage and the square lattice of the dining-parlor window. She saw Edred peer through to see if the room was empty. She saw Nancy, her head down, her arms and hands jerking, pretending to admire the lilies—bemoaning, in her imbecile way, no doubt, because Evergreen would not let her have lilies too.
They were very close together in the bosky kindness of the yew; no doubt it had been a witness to many like scenes and been discreet. Nancy seemed to sway a bit nearer the lithe figure in gray. Pamela saw his face and her heart came to a startled stop. He had looked like that when he kissed her for the first time—on the stairs of the boarding-house. It had been the first man’s kiss of her life.
Nancy’s eyes and cheeks and lips blazed like her ruddy hair. He pulled her toward him with the easy, insolent air of a man who is sure of his woman—who has been sure of women all his life—and kissed her on lids, lips, brows.
Pamela, wearing a white cotton gown, her head bare, looked like statue—one of the statues that used to decorate old gardens. She forgot everything—her approaching marriage and magnificence, her border of tea roses, the carriage-drive, her wedding clothes—all the big and little things which equally made her happiness or misery. For the first time for many months she seemed to touch her past self. She had almost forgotten, in the new strong life, the old one of dull days, and sloppy streets, and shop-windows, and a struggle for the latest fashion at the least possible cost. She was again that sharp-wittedgirl in Bloomsbury, that wildly wretched one who used to take omnibus in spare hours just to stand on the common and stare hungrily at a wall.
He was kissing Nancy; he meant to marry her. She couldn’t let him do that. She must abandon Jethro. Her life must run side by side with Edred’s. She didn’t care what sort of life—one of poverty, hard work, hard words; blows, perhaps. One of guilty prosperity, winding up with the prison again for him. It didn’t matter—so long as they were together, if only for a little. He didn’t love her. He wasn’t capable, as she knew love. But she loved him, even when she saw him stoop again to those red pouting lips behind the yew. All her rage was for Nancy.
Daborn came behind with the trug full of yellow-skinned potatoes. She stepped back and watched him go through the yard, and presently watched Nancy go down the bricked path, mount her bicycle, and skim away like a light swallow. Nancy had forgotten the marked quotation for hay. She could not carry two ideas in that limited head of hers.
The world was too gay and warm for Pamela’s blank misery. The hot sun darted into her strained eyes like needles. She went round the house, hugging the lichened wall, her head down, the woolly leaves and spiral tendrils of the vine touching her dull hair. At the garden door she met Gainah, with a flush on her wasted face and a gleam of the old industry and importance in her cold eyes. She was attired in a loose garment of unbleached calico, cut like an antiquated bathing garment. Her skirtswere bunched under it. She had a battered straw hat, round which was firmly fixed a veil of green net. A pair of old stockings were pulled over her hands and arms. She carried a tin frying-pan, which she constantly beat with a long iron skimmer.
The air was hot and noisy. There seemed an unusual commotion along the line of beehives which were set by the south wall. They were straw skeps, which in winter were covered with turf to keep out the cold. Pamela, who had read up bee-keeping, with other branches of country life, had long decided to have bar-frame hives when she was mistress of Folly Corner. But her knowledge of bees was only theoretical. She was very frightened of them, and the deft, fearless way in which Gainah would take a swarm excited her admiration and made her grudgingly admit that it might be a point of superiority.
The angry buzzing grew louder, the monotonous tom-tom beating of the frying-pan and skimmer more persistent.
“There’s a swarm over there in the crab-tree,” Gainah said excitedly, forgetting for the time all party feeling. “I must go and take it. They know me. They’ve been talking all the morning; I knew we should have a flitting by dinner-time.”
Pamela languidly turned her head. A dark, pear-shaped mass hung from the lower branch of the crab tree in the oat-field.
“They know I’m coming,” Gainah said, advancing and still beating, “they know everything.These are fierce—I crossed them with an Italian queen ten years ago—but they never sting me. They have more sense and feeling than half the folk about. When old Bert Hone died and young Bert took the bees from his mother, they didn’t flourish. He hadn’t acted fair and they knew it. When there’s a swarm in the thatch none of the girls in a house ever get married. All Len Daborn’s girls are maids still.”
She strode on, a spare distorted figure in her calico wrapper, with the green veil tucked safely down in her scraggy throat. Pamela watched her vanish and reappear beyond the fruit-bushes. On any other day she might have asserted herself—given a wise homily on bee-keeping up to date, or deprecated old-world superstitions.
She went under the low door with the wooden hood and sat down in the dull dining-parlor, her eyes vaguely looking out of the window at the space between the casement and the yew. Nancy’s flame-colored hair and thick scarlet lips seemed to stand out in relief from the curled somber leaves.
Gainah’s work, just as she had thrown it down when the bees swarmed, was huddled on the floor, and the blue cambric hearts which she had cut ready for patching on the white dimity were dotted like huge pale turquoises on the narrow oak table.
Pamela looked at the half-made quilt. Gainah had told her once, in a moment of expansiveness, that the blue cambric and white dimity had been her mother’s wedding petticoat and gown. It was a dainty quilt, all white groundwork, with blue borderingand bands and carefully cut hearts and leaves. The stitches were small and regular. Gainah sat at patchwork from breakfast until supper, now that the garden and the house were no longer under her control. In the lower drawer of her chest she already had five quilts folded neatly away in camphor.
The front door opened. Edred came in, rang the hand-bell on the table in the passage. Pamela heard voices—a little deprecating cackle, a man’s voice subdued to a cautious bass growl. Unable to bear any more, she started up, threw back the door, and advanced into the passage. As she did so, the deep rose-color of Nettie’s cotton gown whisked out of sight into the kitchen. She went, her head high on her throat, into the drawing-room, and Edred followed.
Fate seemed to decide that her moments of decided comedy or tragedy should be played in that room: the room with the ugly grate and marble mantelpiece which Jethro’s father had put in to make the place smart for Gainah; with the painted milking-stools and fretwork brackets and cheap embroideries which she had herself brought from Liddleshorn.
The roses in the blue bowls were drooping, candle-grease had dropped on to the keys of the piano, the open door of the china closet displayed dusty shelves and a floor on which the gay red-and-blue rugs were kicked up. Pamela saw these things; they reminded her sharply of the change that of late had come over her. She no longer took a housewifelypride in anything; her life was occupied in playing cat, with Nancy and Edred for mice.
“Are you going to marry Nancy?” she asked abruptly.
“Are you going to marry Jethro?” he returned aptly.
“I—I suppose so. And yet, when it comes to the point—— Everything depends on you.”
She looked at him again in an appealing way.
“We’re in a bit of a mess,” he said, shrugging his thin shoulders and impatiently pulling the fine points of his black mustache.
She hunched her shoulders and clenched her hands between her knees as if she were in actual physical pain.
“Oh! why did you come?” she moaned.
“Nonsense. It was very fortunate for me. I couldn’t have kept on with sewing-machines—cut my throat, rather. And you can’t execute acoupof any kind without capital. This sort of thing isn’t permanent, of course. Old Jeth’s getting sick—he’s a good fellow. Men of that type always show their feeling in mean ways. He ought to swear at me, kick me out—he only looks blue when I fill up my glass. I must either marry Nancy—it can’t make any difference to you, Pam—or I must get a couple of hundred to set me up in life again. There are lots of good things going in the City—beastly nuisance not seeing the evening papers. My head is full of ideas. If I had a couple of hundreds I could turn them into thousands in a week. Balaclavas have run up to——”
“Don’t talk to me about stocks; I don’t understand—and it is so unimportant——”
“By Jove! it’s all-important to me.”
She straightened her curved back. He saw a convulsive lump working in her throat, and the rims of her lids grew faintly pink. He frowned. She was going to cry. A woman’s tears lashed him to any sort of brutality.
“When I saw you kiss Nancy,” she broke out, “it nearly killed me.”
“So you saw! But when old Jeth kisses you, in his open, whole-hearted, smacking fashion?”
“It doesn’t affect you. Men are different—and you more different than any other man,” she said confusedly.
“This sort of thing doesn’t help us,” he cried impatiently. “Which shall it be? Turle, with Nancy as a wife and Aunt Sophy as a mother-in-law, or London, with two hundred pounds in my pocket?”
“I haven’t fifty pounds.”
“But Jethro has. Get it out of him; you’ll do it better than I should. Go to him frankly; say I’ve a scheme for making a fortune. He will be delighted to get rid of me. He’s suspicious, without knowing why, poor chap. This brother and sister humbug is the merest farce. If these people were not fools, the most generous, gullible fools in the world, they would have found us out long ago.”
He crossed to the sofa, threw himself beside her, and laxly hooked his long arm round her firm waist.
“Get me the couple of hun, Pam,” he said tenderly,“and I’ll be off. Nancy is a pretty imbecile. I’ll go to town. I’ll keep out of mischief, sail just within the wind—don’t bother your dear anxious head about me. Marry old Jeth; cut a figure in the neighborhood. With his money and your brains you can be county swells.”
“And you?”
“I told you—don’t worry. Forget No. 4658.”
She started nervously.
“How can you think of that time without a shudder? Even now, when I go to sleep at night, the prison wall shoots up and blinds me. Yet you—were inside. And you say that number—the number thatwasyou—without a tremor. I’m afraid to let you go. It will happen again.”
“Not if I know it. I was green. Overent and Bladden victimized me. Only fools are found out. Sin is a short name for stupidity. I shall never overshoot the mark again. There are fifty ways—five hundred—of making a fortune. No man but a fool need work—in these commercial days. Milligan cleared fifty thousand only last week, just by buying a concern and turning it into a company. He’s a prominent man, a politician, a baronet. Ten years ago he kept a newspaper and sweetstuff shop at Hornsey. Lady Milligan, whose drawing-room gowns are sketched in the fashion papers, boiled toffee and sold it in pennyworths. No one calls Milligan a blackguard.”
“He must have swindled somebody. It’s impossible else.”
“Of course he did. But everybody swindleseverybody else—that’s the commercial spirit; it has made us a great nation.”
“Jethro——”
“Was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He is a fool; without his inheritance, he’d be plowing and hay-making. Why discuss idly and waste time? The dinner gong will sound soon.”
He took out his watch. It was a costly gold hunter, which he had bought in his brief prosperous time. He had put it in her hands only half an hour before his arrest—when Overent and Bladden had flown with forty thousand pounds and he was madly packing his bag in the Bloomsbury back bedroom.
“What am I to do?”
“Get two hundred pounds out of Jethro. I will go away and make my fortune. Some day, when you read the papers—a day old,” he sneered, “you’ll see my name as chairman of a public dinner, or recipient of a testimonial. I mean to be generous—when generosity can be made to pay. I’ll present my district with a public library, a clock tower, or a drinking fountain, and be knighted.”
“You’ll come to Folly Corner sometimes?”
“Never.” Even his honor, just because he was a man, was stronger than hers. “I thought at first that it would work—you as Jethro’s wife, I as Nancy’s husband. But you are one of those emotional women who go to the devil and drag a man with them. When I leave here it will be for good. You won’t even know my address.”
“I couldn’t bear it.”
Her eyes were not on him, but on the lattice. She looked across the great field, with its uplands and its belt of oaks. She had seen it in so many aspects—half shorn; plowed, the wet furrows shining like glass; seen it smoothly iced with January snow; watched the green needle-points of young grain. That outlook, that deep bay window, had known the tearing of her heart.
She looked. The ripeness of harvest was suggested. There were the long stretches of gray-green grain, soon to be golden, soon to rustle with the dry, hot breeze of August. She saw the tossed-up lavish boughs of wild roses wreathing above the hedge-rows, and saw the long grass on the banks, tropical in its growth, and going rapidly to seed.
She couldn’t stay here and watch the changes of the season for years—year after year and then death—without word of him.
“I couldn’t bear it,” she repeated.
“You wouldn’t be fool enough to throw Jethro over? You wouldn’t come with me to London and take pot luck—a knight’s wife some day, perhaps, or only the starving wife of—a number. I mean to be careful—but failure’s on the cards. Even men like Milligan come a cropper now and then. I’ve heard shaky stories about him. He doesn’t know when to stop.”
His eyes were shining. Something of the old passion was stamping itself anew on his face. She was looking lovely—the daredevil expression of perfect abandonment and sacrifice strong on hermouth, on her quickly-breathing body, on the very hands which shook in the lap of her white gown.
“You wouldn’t come?” he said, under his breath.
She gave a quick sigh, a last sharp glance at the gray, gently-moving uplands and the wreaths of dog-roses.
“I would go with you—anywhere. I would have gone with you to the prison, been a number, a thing less than an animal behind the prison wall—but they wouldn’t let me.”
He put his mouth to hers.
“Dear little woman! In India you’d go to the Suttee. Then it is settled. Tackle Jethro to-night.”