There were times when she knew so well all that there lay before her.

Then pain seemed almost welcome to her mind. Then she would promise herself with a fierce joy she would not submit to any of the subterfuges of skill to ease her of it.

"I'll know he's being born," she would say aloud. "I'll know every moment to keep for memory. Why should I hide away from life, or lose an instant because it comes with pain?"

So Mary Throgmorton traversed the months that brought her to fulfillment; so time slipped by with its clear mornings and the dropping lights of evening till winter came and still, with the nearing approach of her hour, she continued milking the cows for Mr. Peverell. Not all the persuasion they offered could make her cease from her duties.

"I'm milkmaid here," she said. "Any farm girl would keep on to the last. There'll be some days yet for my hands to lie in my lap. Let them touch something till then."

They let her have her way. Only the carter and the boy were there about the place to see her. She had no sense of shyness with them. Every now and again some cow was taken to a farm near by to profit. It was common talk, unhampered by any reticence, to comment upon the condition of each beast as she neared her calving time. The functions and operations of Nature were part of the vast plan of that ever-revolving cycle to them.

They knew no coa.r.s.eness in their att.i.tude of mind; they knew no preciousness of modesty.

Before she had been at Yarningdale for long, Mary realized with the greater fullness of perception how vast a degree of false modesty there was in the world as people congregated in the cities and with brick walls and plaster shut themselves out from the sight of Nature.

It had all been false, that modesty which their mother had taught them.

Love, pleasure and pa.s.sion, if these were the fruits of the soul man had won for himself, what shame could there be in permitting them their just expression? Love was uplifting and in the ecstasy it brought were not the drops flung farther, higher from the wheel in the acceleration of its revolutions? Was not the stream in flood, those moments when love came in its torrent to the heart of a man? Once for a moment she had loved and knew now that ecstasy could never come to her again.

Pleasure, it was true, she had never known, but the deep pa.s.sion of motherhood none could rob her of. All those days and weeks and months were hours of pa.s.sionate joy to her. Never was she idle. Never was her pa.s.sion still.

That moment, one night it was with the moonlight falling on her bed, when first she felt the movement of her child within her, was so pa.s.sionate a joy of physical realization that she sat up in her bed and, with the pale light on her face, the tears swelled to overflowing in her eyes.

"What should I have done, what should I have been," she whispered to herself, "if this had never happened to me?"

Occasionally during those seven months there were letters reaching her from Bridnorth. f.a.n.n.y wrote and Hannah wrote. Never was there a letter from Jane. At first they asked if they might come and see her, but when she replied she was happier alone, that seeing her as she was, they might the less be able to understand her happiness, they asked no more.

In further letters they wrote giving her Bridnorth news, the people who had come down that summer, the comments that were made upon her absence and later, when the actual truth leaked out.

"People have been very kind on the whole," wrote Hannah in a subsequent letter. "I think they are really sorry. Only yesterday the Vicar said, 'G.o.d has strange ways of visiting us with trouble. We must take it that He means it for the best, impossible though it is for us to see what good can come of it.' I had never realized," was Hannah's comment, "that he was as broad-minded as this, and it has given me much help. I hope you are taking every care of yourself and that the old farmer's wife is competent to give you good advice upon what you ought to do.

You say you are still working on the farm. Is that wise? Mother used to go to bed every day for an hour or so before you were born. I remember it so well. Oh, Mary, why did you ever let it happen?"

Why? Why? Why had G.o.d ever found such favor in her in preference to them? That was all she asked herself.

One day a letter lay on her plate at breakfast. It was readdressed from Bridnorth and was in Liddiard's handwriting. For long she debated whether she would open it or not. What memories might it not revive?

What wound might it not open, even the scar of which she could hardly trace by now?

Her child had no father. Touch with Liddiard's mind again in those moments might make her wish he had; might make her wish she had a hand to hold when her hour should come; might make her need the presence of some one close that she might not feel so completely alone.

Yet even nursing these thoughts, her fingers had torn the envelope without volition; her eyes had turned to the paper without intent.

"I have heard from your sister Jane," he wrote. "She tells me she thinks I ought to know what is happening to you. She writes bitterly in every word as though I had cast you off to bear the burden of this alone. G.o.d knows that is not true. In the first letter I wrote you after I left Bridnorth, if you have kept it, you will find how earnestly I a.s.sured you I would, in such an event, do all I could. Where are you and why have you never appealed to me? Surely I could have helped and so willingly I would. Wherever you are, won't you let me come and see you? One of these days, of course without mentioning your name, I shall tell my wife everything. I have some feeling in my heart she will understand."

That same day, Mary answered his letter.

"Please take no notice of my sister Jane. She would punish you as she has punished me. That is her view of what has happened. I know you would do all you could. It hurts me a little to hear you think I should doubt it. Do not worry about me. I am away in the country and intensely happy. Never was I so happy. Never I expect will I be quite so happy again. You have nothing to fret yourself about. It would cast some kind of shadow over all this happiness if I thought you were. You have no cause for it. I shall always be grateful to you. I do not put my address at the head of this letter, because somehow I fear you would come to see me, however strong my wishes were that you should not."

"'Ee's thoughtful, Maidy," Mrs. Peverell said to her when she returned from posting her letter in Lonesome Ford.

"Am I?"

"'Ee've had a letter from him."

"How did you know?"

"How do my Peverell know there'd be rain acomin'? He says he feels it in his bones. Men's bones and women's hearts be peculiarsome things."

IV

It was a boy. Full in the month of March he came, with a storm rushing across the fields where the rooks already were gathering in the elm trees and the first, dull red of blossom was flushing the winter black of the branches against the clouds of thunder blue.

High as was the cry of that southwest wind, sweeping the trees and rattling the windows in their cas.e.m.e.nts, his first cry beneath the thatch of Yarningdale Farm uplifted above every other sound in the ears of Mrs. Peverell and Mary as they heard it.

The doctor who attended her from Henley-in-Arden had proposed an anaesthetic.

"Your first child," he said. "It'll just make things easier."

Had her pain been less she would have spoken for herself. Had she spoken, a cry might have escaped with the words between her lips. She looked across at Mrs. Peverell who knew her mind and she shook her head.

"She wants it just natural," said the farmer's wife.

"'Ee can see for 'eeself she's strong. 'Tain't no hide and seek affair with her."

"It's going to be a bit worse than she thinks," muttered the doctor.

"Can't be worse'n a woman thinks," retorted Mrs. Peverell. "Let 'ee mind as carefully as 'ee can what she feels--what she thinks'll be beyond 'ee or me."

Peverell came back from plowing at midday with the clods of earth on his boots.

"Come there be no rain to-night," said he. "I'll have that corn sown in to-morrow."

"We have our harvest in upstairs a'ready," said she.

He wheeled round in his chair with his eyes wide upon her.

"d.a.m.n it!" he exclaimed. "I'd complete forgot our maidy on her birth-bed."

She gazed at him a moment in silence, with words unspoken in her glance he had uncomfortable consciousness of, yet did not know one instant all they meant. It left him with a disagreeable sense of inferiority, just when he had been congratulating himself on a piece of work well done.

"'Ee won't forget when 'ee sows the seed to-morrow in that field," said she quietly. "Come time 'ee has it broadcast sown, the sweat'll be on thy brow, an' 'ee limbs be aching." She lifted the corner of her ap.r.o.n significantly. "I've wiped the sweat off her brow and laid her body comfortable in the bed and now I'll get the meat to put in 'ee stomach."

He knew he had made some grievous error somewhere. Forgetting their maidy and her babe upstairs no doubt. He ate the food she brought him in silence, like a child aware of disgrace; but why it should be so, just because he had forgotten about a woman having a baby was more than he could account for. It was not as if it had been a slack day or a Sabbath. That ground was just nice and ready for the wheat to go in.

Still, it was no good saying anything. He had hurt her feelings some way and there was an end of it. He knew well that steady look in the sunken eyes, the set line, a little tighter drawn in the thin lips.