"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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion! Consequences! My G.o.d! 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion, 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 rea.s.surance, 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 t.i.the 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 pa.s.sing 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 t.i.the 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 t.i.the 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sion 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.