Chapter I

It was a still hot day at the end of the month of July in the following year. Vast mountain ranges of cumulus clouds too heavy on the horizon to sweep across the sky with the storm they promised hung sullen and low in masses of pale purple rimmed with golden pink. Rain was sadly wanted all the country round. Only the Highfield meadow at Yarningdale was lush and green. The cows were there grazing on the aftermath.

With her sewing, Mary had come down to the field an hour or more before there was need to drive them in. John was playing with Lucy down the stream. She could hear their voices in and out of the willows. They were like dryad and faun, laughing together. His voice was as a lute to Mary. She listened to it and to the very words he said, as she would have listened to a faun playing on his pipe, half bewitched by it, half tricked to laughter and to joy that was scarcely of this world.

"If I'm the captain," she heard him saying, "you have to dance whether you like it or not."

Claude Duval and Treasure Island! Both flung together in the melting pot of his fancy.

She peered down the field through the trunks of the pollarded willows and saw a dryad dancing before a faun sitting cross-legged in the grass. A fay-looking sight it was in the hazy mist of that sunshine. With unsteady balance, Lucy swayed in and out of the tree shadows, alternately a thing of darkness and a thing of light. And there below her in the grass he sat, with his mop of hair and his profile cut sharp against the dark trunk of a willow tree, looking to Mary who saw him with the mist in his eyes like pagan Nature, back to the times of Pan. Herself as well, as there she watched, she felt she could have danced for him.

Was that what love was--the thing that she had never known? Could this be it, this godlike power that Nature lent to man to make a woman dance for him, and, as she danced, trick all his senses till he was no more than man, when Nature snatched her loan away and with Pan's laughter caught the woman in her arms and vanished in the trees and hid herself?

That moment then she seemed to see it so and with a later vision beheld the woman stepping out from underneath the shadows of the wood, leading a faun, so young his feet seemed scarcely touching the grass he walked upon.

Her sewing fluttered to her lap. In that midsummer heat, her eyes half closed, then opened, startled at the sound of solid footsteps by her side. She looked up and there stood Liddiard, his hat in his hand, a nervous smile upon his lips. She was too taken unawares to fathom them.

"Am I dreaming?" she muttered.

"You were asleep," said he.

"But this isn't dreaming?"

"No--you're awake now."

"Why--? What is it? Why have you come here?"

"To see you."

"After all these years?"

"Twelve of them."

He sat down on the grass a little apart from her, watching her face.

"You look very little older, Mary. There isn't a gray hair in your head. I've plenty."

"My hair's nondescript," she replied, still in an amaze. "It takes a long time to go gray. Why have you come here? Did they tell you at Bridnorth where I was?"

"Yes."

"Then why have you come?"

"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 grass, 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 passion 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 passion! Consequences! My God! 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 passion 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 passion, 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 reassurance, 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 tithe 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 passing 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."