Cruel as it was, it had the sting of truth. She dared not look at her and could only wait in trembling for her reply.

She might have gained courage had she looked. Those blows had not beaten Mary to her knees. With her head thrown back, she waited for the last word, as though, now they had come to it, there were rules to be observed and pride in her own strength put aside all need to ignore them.

"Have you anything more to say?" she asked with a clear voice.

"Do you want any more than that?" retorted Jane.

"I don't mind how much more there is," replied Mary quietly, "we're saying all we feel. We aren't mincing things. I'm going to say what I feel. I'm going to hit and hurt as hard as you, so go on if you want to. This isn't a squabble. I don't want to bicker or cavil or interrupt. We're not just cats fighting now, we're women and we'll try and talk fair. Say anything more you've got to say."

"Well, if that's not enough for you," continued Jane, "if it is not enough to allude to what I saw with my own eyes, or to tell you there are servant girls who could behave better than that, then I'll talk of what, thank G.o.d, I didn't see and I'll tell you it's worse than shame what you have done and not even the excuse of being betrayed by love that you have to offer for it. I'll say it, Mary, and I don't care now because you've asked for it. You must be a bad woman in your heart, there must be something vile about you that makes you not fit to touch us or be in the same house with us. You've asked for that and you've got it. You've wanted every word there is to say. I should have left that unspoken if you hadn't asked for it. But that's what I feel. If you were a woman off the streets in London and sitting there at our table, I couldn't feel more sick or ashamed at the sight of you."

"Jane!" cried Hannah. "Oh, don't say anything so horrible or terrible as that!"

"What's terrible about it? What's horrible about it?" asked Mary. "It isn't true. Jane knows it isn't true. When a woman's fighting for the conventions Jane's fighting for, she doesn't use the truth--she's incapable of using it."

"What is the truth then?" exclaimed Jane. "If you've satisfied yourself you know, if you've invented anything truer than what I've said to make an excuse for yourself, let's hear what it is."

"Yes, you shall hear it," said Mary, and a deep breath she drew to steady the torrent of words that was surging in her mind. "First of all it's not true that I didn't love. I did. She's perverted the truth there. I did love. I'm not going to tear my heart open and show you how much. I don't love any longer. That's what Jane has made use of--the best she could. But what I feel now has nothing to do with it. What I feel now is the result of circ.u.mstances it won't help any way to explain. What happened that makes the vileness she talks about, happened when I was in love, as deeply in love as any woman can be, and as I never expect to be again. But it's not because of love that I'm going to defend myself. It's not because of love that I show this arrogance, as you call it. That's not the truth I've found or invented for myself. Love's only half the truth when you come to value and add up the things that count in a woman's life. Of all the married people we know, how many women who have found completion and justification for their existence really love their husbands? Love! Oh, I don't know!

Love's an ecstasy that gives you a divine impetus towards the great purposes of life. I don't want to talk as though I'd been reading things out of a book. That almost sounds like it. But you can't imagine I haven't been thinking. These two months, these last six months, ever since something that happened last Christmas time, I have.

And thinking's like reading, I suppose. It's reading your own thoughts."

A smile of security twitched at Jane's lips.

"Well, is this the wonderful truth?" she asked. "Are we to sit and listen to you, the youngest of us, telling us that love's an ecstasy?

Because if you're going to give us a lecture about love, perhaps you'd like a gla.s.s of water beside you."

"No, that's not the wonderful truth," she replied quietly. She felt Jane could not sting her to anger and somehow she smiled. "The truth is this, which they up there had never learnt and no one seems to know.

Life's not for wasting, but what have been our lives here, we four girls--girls! Women now! What has it been? Waste--waste--nothing but waste. Why has Hannah's hair gone gray? Why are you, Jane, bitter and sour and dry in your heart? Why's f.a.n.n.y drawn and tired and thin and spare? Why do I look older than I am? Because we're waste--because Life's discarded us and thrown us on one side, because for a long time now there's been nothing in the world for us to do but sit in this room with those portraits looking down on our heads and just wait till we filter out like streams that have no flood of purpose to carry them to the sea. Our lives have only been a ditch, for water to stagnate in.

We find nothing. We can't even find ourselves. f.a.n.n.y there, grows thinner every year. And who's to blame for it?"

Her eyes shot up to the portraits on the wall and half furtively all their eyes followed hers.

"They're to blame, but not first of all they aren't. What makes it possible that Jane can speak as she does, talking about what has happened to me as the vilest of all vile things? Men have made it possible, because men have needed children for one reason and one reason only. Possession, inheritance and all the traditions of family and estate. These are the things men have wanted children for and so they made the social laws to meet their needs. But there are more things in the world to inherit than a pile of bricks and a handful of acres. Do you think I want my child to have no more inheritance than that? I tell you almost I'm glad he has no father! I'm glad he won't possess. There are things more wonderful than bricks and acres that are going to be his if I have the power to show them to him. There are things in the world more wonderful than those which you can just call your own. And it's those laws of possession and inheritance we have to thank for the idleness our lives have been set in. Jane thinks herself a true woman just because she's clung to modesty and chast.i.ty and a fierce reserve, but those things are of true value only when they're needed, and what man has needed them of us? Who cares at all whether we've been chaste and pure? None but ourselves! And what's made us care but these false values that make Jane's shame of me?"

With flashing eyes she turned to Jane.

"You've asked for the truth," she cried now. "Well, you shall have it as you thought you gave it to me. You're not really ashamed of me. You're envious, jealous, and you're stung with spite. Calling me a servant girl or a woman of the streets only feeds your spite, it doesn't satisfy your heart. You'd give all you know to have what I have, but having allowed yourself to be a slave to the law all you have left is to take a pride in your slavery and deck it out with the pale flowers of modesty and self-respect."

She stood up suddenly from her chair and walked to the door. An instant there, she turned.

"As soon as I can get my things together," she said, "I'm going to a place in Warwickshire. If Hannah wants to know my plans afterwards I'll write and tell her. Don't think I'm not quite aware of being turned out. That's quite as it ought to be from Jane's point of view. You'd dismiss a servant at once. But don't think you've made me ashamed. I only want you to remember I went as proud, prouder than you stayed."

This was the real moment of Mary Throgmorton's departure from the square, white house in Bridnorth. When a few days later she left in the old coach that wound its way over the crest of the hill on which so often she had watched it, it was the mere anticlimax of her going and to all who saw that departure must have seemed but a simple happening in her life.

PHASE IV

I

The hay was made and stacked when Mary returned to Yarningdale Farm.

They were thatching the day she arrived, wherefore there was none to meet her. The old fly with its faded green and musty cushions brought her over from the station. Those were long moments for contemplation as they trundled down the country roads and turned into the lanes that led ultimately to the farm.

The train had been too swift for arrested concentration of thought. In the train she had not been alone. Here, as the iron-rimmed wheels rumbled beneath her, crunching the grit upon the road with their unvarying monotonous note, she felt at last she had come into her haven and could turn without distraction into the thoughts of her being.

Had ever that old vehicle carried such burden before? With the things Jane had said still beating up and down in the cage of memory, she pictured some weeping servant girl dismissed her place, carrying her burden away with her in shame and fearfulness to find a hiding place in a staring, watchful world.

Looking out upon the fields as they pa.s.sed, knowing them as property, to whoever they might belong, again she felt how the right of possession amongst men it was that had made shame of the right of creation amongst women.

"Trespa.s.sers will be prosecuted," she read on a pa.s.sing board that stood out conspicuously in the hedge as they rolled by.

There it was! That was the law! Trespa.s.sers upon the rights of man!

The law would descend with all its force upon their heads. But had they not trespa.s.sed upon the rights of women? Which was the greater? To inherit and possess? To conceive and create? Did not the world reach the utmost marches of its limitations in that grasping pa.s.sion to possess? Was that not the root of the evil of war, the ugliness of crime, the stagnation of ideals? To possess and to increase his possessions, to number Israel and to keep all he had got, were not these the very letters of the law that held the world in slavery; were not these the chains in which, like bondwomen, she and her sisters had walked wearily through the years of their life?

The last lane they pa.s.sed along led through a heavily timbered wood before they reached the farm. Some children there were gathering f.a.gots into their ap.r.o.ns. She leant out of the window to watch them, her mind set free for that moment of the encompa.s.sing sense of possession.

That was the spirit that should rule the world. She knew how hopeless it was to think that it could be so. It was the spur of possession that urged men to compet.i.tion. The whip of compet.i.tion in turn it was that drove out idleness from the hearts of men. And yet, if women had the forming of ideals in the children that were theirs, might they not conceive some higher and more altruistic plane than this? Giving, not keeping, might not this be the deep source of a new civilization other than that which drove the whole world with the stinging lash of distrust?

She was going to bring a child into the world that would have nothing it could call its own, not even a name. The f.a.gots of life it must gather.

The berries on the hedgerows which belong to all would be its food. So she would train its heart to wish for only those things that belonged to all. Never should it know the fretting pa.s.sion of possession. Work was man's justification, not ownership, and a workman he should be; one who gave with the sweat of his brow and who, by the heart to give which she would stir in him, would covet of none the things they called their own.

In this spirit--and little more it was in a grasping world than an ecstasy of thought--Mary Throgmorton came to Yarningdale Farm.

She knew it was a dream she had had; a dream induced in her by the heat of the day, the monotonous vibrations of that old vehicle she had ridden in, the still quiet of the countryside through which she had pa.s.sed.

Yet, nevertheless, for all its ecstasy, for all the dream it might be, such a dream it was as any woman must surely have, so circ.u.mstanced as she; so driven to rely upon what she alone could give her child for walking staff to serve him on his journey. Knowing it was a dream, it seemed no less real to her. Lying that night on the hard-mattressed bed, in her little room beneath the eaves of the thatch, she took the dream in purpose into her very soul. Give she must, and all she had, and what else had she to give but this? For that moment and for all the months to follow it could be given in the utmost fullness of her mind.

Was it not now and most of all when he was closer to her being than ever it should so chance again, that she could give out of her heart the spirit that should go to make him strong to face the world that lay before him?

Dreams they might be, but such thoughts would she hold with all the tenacity of her mind until, through external means alone, she was compelled to feed him. For all those seven months to come, she herself would work--work in the fields as he must work. The sweat should be on her brow as it should be on his. Her limbs should ache as one day his in happy fatigue of labor should ache as well.

It was thus she would make him while yet the time of creation was all her own and then, when out of her breast he was to take his feed of life, there would be ways by which she alone could train him to his purpose.

So still she lay, thinking it all out with thoughts that knew no words to hamper them, that when at last she fell asleep, it was as one pa.s.sing through the hanging of a curtain that just fell into its concealing folds behind her as she went.

II

"I've told the old man," Mrs. Peverell informed Mary the next morning.

"Not all of it, I haven't. Men don't understand what beant just so. He can't abide what's dropped in the farmyard comin' up. "Tis wheat,' I tell 'en. "Tain't crops,' says he. "Twill make a bag of seed,' I says. 'The ground weren't prepared for it,' says he. That's men. Mebbe they're right. 'Nature may have her plan,' I tell 'en, 'but G.o.d have his accidents.' 'I can't grow nawthing by accident,' says he. 'You can't,' says I, 'but afore you came, that's the very way they did grow and I guess there's as much rule about accidents as there is of following peas with wheat.' He looks at me then and he says no more, which is good as sayin'--'You women be daft things,' for he picks up his hat and goes out and the understandin' doant come back into his eyes afore he feels the tilled earth under his feet."

So Mr. Peverell knew that in certain time Mary was going to have a baby.

He looked at her shyly when next they met. It was in the orchard sloping down the hill that drops to the towpath of the ca.n.a.l. He was calculating the yield of apples, just showing their green and red, and she had come to tell him that the midday meal was ready.