Chapter III

The life of Mary Throgmorton during those months while she worked at Yarningdale Farm was a succession of days so full of peace, so instinct with the real beauties which enter the blood, suffuse the heart, and beat through all the veins, that her soul, as she had meant it should be, was attuned by them to minister to its purpose.

At six every morning she descended from her little room beneath the thatched eaves. At that hour the air was still. The chill of the dew that had fallen was yet in it. The grass as she walked through the meadows was always wet underfoot. Mist of heat on the fine days was lingering over the fields. Out of it the cows lifted their heads in a welcome following their curiosity as she came to drive them back into the farm.

When once they had come to know her voice, when once they had come to recognize that straight figure in the cotton frocks she wore, no further need there was for her but to reach the gate and open it, calling a name she knew one by. They ceased their grazing at once and turned towards her. One by one they trooped through into the lane that led to the farm. One after another, she had a name to murmur as they went by.

No moment in all that labor there was but had its freedom for contemplation. As she walked through the meadows to gather them; as she followed them down the lanes; as against the flanks of them she leant her cheek, cool with that morning air, stealing their warmth, there ever was opportunity for her thoughts.

It soon became automatic that process of milking. Only at the last moment when the hot stream of milk began to be flagging in its flow, did she have to detach her thoughts from the purpose that governed her, and concentrate her mind upon the necessary measure of stripping them to the last drop.

But for these moments, her thoughts were never absent from that sacred freight she carried to its journey's end. The very occupation she had chosen all contributed to such meditation as her mind had need of. The milk she wet her fingers with as she settled down upon the stool before each patient beast, hot with the temperature of its blood, was stream of the very fountain of life her thoughts were built on. The rhythmic, sibilant note as it hissed into the pail between her knees, became motif for the melody of her contemplation.

She whispered to them sometimes as she milked. Whisperings they were that defy the capture of expression. No words could voice them as she voiced them with the murmur on her lips. Sometimes it was she whispered to the quiet beast against whose velvet flank her cheek was warming. Sometimes she whispered to her child as though his cheek were there fast pressed against her and his lips were drawing the stream of life out of her breast.

It cannot be wondered that she thought often of these things while she was milkmaid at Yarningdale Farm. In any environment the mind of a woman at such a time must seek them out, stealing pictures of the future to feed her imagination upon. But there, in those surroundings, Mary Throgmorton was close upon her very purpose as the days turned from morn to evening and the weeks slipped by towards the hour for which she waited.

But deeper than all such thoughts as these, there had entered her soul the wider and fuller conceptions of life. Subconsciously she realized the cycle it was, the endless revolving of the circle of design that had no beginning and no end but was forever emerging from and entering into itself in its eternal revolutions, always creating some surplus of the divine essence of energy, always discharging it in thought, in word and deed; flung from it, as drops of water are flung from the speed of the mill wheel while it turns to the ceaseless flowing of the stream.

What else could she see with a heart for seeing, what else, so close to Nature as she was, could she see but this? Every day, every night, the cattle ate their fill of the grass that had grown in their pastures. Every morning, every evening, they gave their yield of all they had consumed. It was no definite and conscious observation that brought to her eyes those vivid and luxuriant patches of green in the fields where the cows had manured the grass; it was no determined deduction that conveyed to her the realization how a field must be grazed, must be eaten away and consumed to increase it in the virtue of its bearing. It was no mechanical process of mind which led her to the understanding of how when the field was cut for hay and stacked within the yard to feed the cattle through the winter months, still it returned in its inevitable cycle to the fields to feed the flow of life.

Through the winter months the cows were stalled and kept in their pound. In that pound they trod to manure the straw the fields had grown and back again it would come in the early spring to lie once more upon the fields that had given it; so ever and ever in its ceaseless procession, some surplus of the energy that was created would be set free. A calf would go out of the farm and be sold at the nearest market. For three days its mother would cry through the fields, hurt with her loss, grudging her milk, but in the end Nature would assert itself. She would be caught back into the impetus of the everlasting cycle of progression, fulfilling the purpose of life, contributing to the creation of that energy which was to find its expression in the sons of men.

All this without knowing it she learnt in the fields and under the thatch of Yarningdale Farm. All this, as she had meant to do, she assimilated into her being to feed that which she herself, in her own purpose, was creating.

So her son should live, if it were a boy she bore. So she planned for him a life that had none of the limitations of possession, but must give back again all that it took with interest compounded of noblest purpose. This alone should be his inheritance, this generosity of heart and soul and being that knew no other impulse than to give the whole and more than it had received.

Not one of these impressions came with set outline of idea to the mind of Mary Throgmorton. In the evenings as she sat in the kitchen parlor, sewing the tiny garments she would need and listening to Mr. Peverell talking as he always did about the land, it was thus she absorbed them. Drawn in with her breath they were, as though the mere act of breathing assimilated them rather than a precise effort of receptivity.

The same it was in the fields where she walked, in the stalls where she milked her cows. Each breath she took was deep. It was as if the scent of those stalls, the air about the meadows, the lights of morning and evening all taught her that which she wished to learn.

Her mind was relaxed and just floating upon life those days. It is not to be understood where she learnt that this must be so. It is not to be conceived how, with her utter inexperience, she knew that no determined effort to create her child could serve the purpose that she had. In through the pores of her being, as it became the very air her lungs inhaled, she took the sensations which day by day were borne upon her.

There were times when, after the first physical consciousness of her condition, she forgot she was going to bear a child. There were times when the knowledge of it seemed so distant, that it was as though she walked and lived in a dream, a sensuous dream, where there was no pain, no suffering of mind, but things were and were not, just as they happened like clouds to pass before her vision.

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 coarseness in their attitude 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 passion, 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 passion of motherhood none could rob her of. All those days and weeks and months were hours of passionate joy to her. Never was she idle. Never was her passion 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 passionate 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. Fanny 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, 'God 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 God 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. God 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 assured 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."