PHASE VIIt 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."IIIt 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.IIIThere 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!"IVMary 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.
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.