It worried him as he ate his meal. It always worried him. Somehow it seemed to make the food taste dry in his mouth. It had no such succulence as when all was just right, and he had come in for his dinner after a hard morning's work. For never by conscious word had he hurt her. Never, in all the thirty-seven years they had been married, had there been an instant's intent in him to make her suffer.

It was in these unaccountable ways, in chance words, harmless enough in all conscience to him, in little things he did and little things he left undone, that this look she had, came in these sudden moments into her face.

"Women be queer cattle," he would say to himself. "There be no ways treatin' 'em alike. 'Ee might think 'ee'd got 'em goin' one way when round they'll come and go t'other."

As a rule this silent summary of the whole s.e.x would satisfy him in regard to the one in particular he had in mind. With a sweep of his hand across his mouth after his meal was over, he would go back to his work and once his feet felt the fields beneath them, he would forget all about it.

Somehow this time he seemed to know there was little hope of forgetting.

Whether it was his food tasted drier than usual; whether some meaning of what she had said about the sweat on his brow and the sweat of her who labored upstairs there with her child had reached with faint rays of illumination to his appreciative mind, whatever it was, the fields called in vain to him.

He was restless, uneasy. Without cause he knew of, he felt a little ashamed. Rising from the table, he moved about the room lighting his pipe. He felt like some child with a lie or a theft upon his conscience. When his pipe was well lit and hard rammed down, finding he had no patience to sit awhile as was his custom, he went in search of his wife.

From something she had said about making as little noise as possible, he knew she was not upstairs with her patient. If he asked her straight out, perhaps she would tell him what was the matter, what he had said, what possibly he had done.

She was not in the scullery. Softly he opened the door of the larder and looked in. She was not there. With his heart beating in unaccustomed pulses he crept upstairs to their bedroom, thinking to himself, "Plowed fields be better walking for the likes of me."

"Mother," he whispered, and opened the door.

She was not there.

In despair he turned to the stairs again, drawing a deep breath when he reached the bottom. Only the parlor was left, unless she were out of the house altogether. He looked in. It was empty. He was turning away when there caught his attention the unusual sight of the big Bible lying open on the table. He crossed the room to look at it. Was it so bad she'd had to be reading some of that?

It was opened at the first, clean page. No printing was on it, but there in ink, still wet, was written in her handwriting--"John Throgmorton, at Yarningdale, March 17th, 1896."

Some idea flashed out from that page as he leant over it. It reached some hitherto unused function of perception in his brain. He knew now why that look had come into her eyes. He knew even what it was he had said, or rather what he had forgotten to say that had hurt her. All this was reminding her how she wanted a child of her own. But had he not wanted one too? Was not the loss as much his that he had no son to take the handles of the plow when his hands had ceased to hold them?

He turned as she entered the room with a piece of blotting paper she had fetched from his desk in the kitchen where he wrote out his accounts.

"Mother," he said, and he fidgeted with his hands, "I know what's worryin' 'ee. I ought t'have thought of it afore now, but we been past it these many years, it had gone out o' my head for the moment. B'lieve me I've wanted one same as 'ee."

She knew he was a good man as she looked at him, but could not think of that then.

"I've wanted 'ee to have fair crops," said she, "but it's only been disappointment to me when they've failed. Yet I've seen it make 'ee feel 'ee was not man enough for the task G.o.d had set 'ee."

With a steady hand, she blotted the page and shut the book, then taking him by the arm, she led him out of the room and closed the door.

"There's one of them young black minorcas has the croup," said she.

"They be plaguy things," he replied.

V

Talking of the future one day with Mrs. Peverell, Mary had said that if it were a boy, his name must be John. So definite had she been in her decision about this, that without further question the good woman had written it in the big Bible.

"John's a man's name," Mary had said; "there's work in it." Then, dismissing her smile and speaking still more earnestly, she had continued, "If anything were to happen to me, I should leave him to you.

Would you take him?"

The sunken eyes were quite steady before the gaze they met.

"How could we give 'en the bringin' up?" she asked.

"He shall have no bringing up but this," Mary had replied. "I told you first of all I didn't come here to hide. I chose this place because I knew I could touch life here and make him all I wanted him to be. This is what I want him, a good man and a true man and a real one, like your husband. I want him to know that he owes all to the earth he works in.

What money I have shall be yours to keep and clothe him. Indeed I hope nothing will happen for I know so well what I want him to be. I've always known it, it seems to me now. I've only realized it these last few months. Milking these cows, walking in the meadows, living here on this farm, I've learnt to realize it. Giving is life. We can't all give the same thing, but it is in the moment of giving that most we feel alive. Acquiring, possessing, putting a value on things and h.o.a.rding them by, there's only a living death, a stagnant despair and discontent in that."

"'Ee's talkin' beyond me," said Mrs. Peverell watching her. "'Ee's well taught at school and 'ee's talkin' beyond me. I never had no learnin'

what I got of use to me out of books. But come one day an' another, I've learnt that wantin' things may help 'ee gettin' 'em, but it stales 'em when they come. All I could have given my man, ain't there for givin'. G.o.d knows best why. Most willing would I have gone wi'out life to give 'en a child to patter its feet on these bricks. He doant know that. I wouldn't tell 'en. He'd say there warn't no sense in my talkin' that way. Men want life to live by, but it seems to me sometimes death's an easy thing to a woman when it comes that way. I s'pose it's what 'ee'd call the moment of givin' and doant seem like death to her."

Mary had leant forward, stretching out her hand and taking the knotted knuckles in her fingers.

"You haven't lost much," she had said, "by not having my advantage of education. What you've just said is bigger than any learning could make it. I don't think we speak any more of truth because we have more words to express it with. I'm sure we think less. Do you think I could find any one better to teach him than you? It is women who teach. Your husband will show him the way, but you will give him that idea in his heart to take it. I long so much to give it to him myself that I haven't your courage. Sometimes I'm afraid I may die. I don't let it have any power over me but sometimes I confess I'm afraid, because you see I want to give him more than his life. I want to give him his ideals. Perhaps that's because I've no one else to give him to. My life won't seem complete unless I can live beyond that. Anyhow I wanted to say this. If I have to give him, I want it to be to you and I want you to know that that is how I wish him to be brought up. If he has big things in life to give, he'll find them out. He'll leave the farm.

Perhaps he'll break your heart in leaving--perhaps he'll break mine if I live, but I want him first to learn from the earth itself the life there is in giving and then, let it be what it may, for him to give his best."

Mrs. Peverell nodded her head to imply understanding.

"It's them as doant suffer can talk about sin," she had said, which by no means was Mary's train of thought, though her words had somehow suggested it to Mrs. Peverell's range of comprehension. "I should have called all this sin years ago. Didn't I say 'twas sin when first 'ee told me? Well, it beats me what sin is. 'Tain't what I thought it. We be born with it, they say. Well, if the babes I seen be born with sin, 'tain't what any one thinks it."

It was obvious Mrs. Peverell had not followed her in the flight of her hopes and purposes. The right and the wrong of it, the pain and the joy of it, these were all that her mind grasped. But these she grasped with a clearness of vision that a.s.sured Mary's heart of a safe guardianship if ill should befall her. Such a clearness of vision it was as set her high above many of the women she had known.

How was that? What was it about women that so few of them had any vision at all? To how many she knew would she entrust her child? Often she had listened in amazement to Hannah instructing the children at home. She remembered the mistresses where she had been at school herself. She recalled her mother's advice to her when she had left school. Everywhere it was the same.

Only here and there where a woman had suffered at the hands of life did vision seem to be awakened in her. Many were worldly, many were shrewd and clever enough in their dealings with circ.u.mstance. But how few there were who knew of any purpose in their souls beyond that of dressing their bodies for honest vanity's sake, or marrying suitably for decent comfort's sake.

Here, was it again the force-made laws, the laws by which men set a paled and barbed fence about the possessions they had won? Were all these women their possessions too, as little capable of freedom of thought as were of action their dogs, their horses, the cattle on their hedged-in fields?

She had heard of votes for women in those days. In Bridnorth as in most places it was a jest. What would they do with the vote when they had it? They laughed with the rest. Women in Parliament! They would only make fools of themselves with their trembling voices raised in a company of men.

She could not herself quite see all that the vote might mean. Little may that be wondered at, seeing that when they obtained it, there would be countless among them who still would be ignorant of its worth and power. Whatever it might mean, she knew in those days that her s.e.x had little of the vision of the ideal; she knew it was little aware of the true values and meanings of life, that thousands of her sisters wasted out their days in ceaseless pandering to the acquisitive pa.s.sions of men.

"'Ee's thinkin' long and deep, maidy," Mrs. Peverell had said when the silence after her last remarks had closed about them. "Are 'ee wonderin' after all this time what the sin of it might be? Are 'ee thinkin' what the Vicar'll say when 'ee has to explain it all to 'en."

"Why must I tell him?" asked Mary.

"Don't 'ee want the child baptized?"

With all the thoughts she had had, with all the preparation she had made, she had not thought of this. The habit of her religion was about her still. Every Sunday morning she had sat with the Peverells in the pew it was their custom to occupy. Something there was in religion no clearness of vision seemed able to destroy.

"He must be baptized," she had said and turned in their mind to face once more the difficulties with which the world beset her.

VI

The upbringing of John Throgmorton at Yarningdale Farm has more of the nature of an idyll in it than one is wont to ask for in a modern world, where idylls are out of fashion and it has become the habit to set one's teeth at life.