ruth courthope seer stood on her own doorstep and was content. she looked across the garden and the four-acre field with the white may hedge boundary. it was all hers. her eyes slowly followed the way of the sun. another field, lush and green, sloped to a stream, where, if the agents had spoken truth, dwelt trout in dim pools beneath the willows. field and stream, they too were hers. good fields they were, clover thick, worthy fields for feed for those five shorthorns, bought yesterday at uckfield market.
the love of the land, the joy of possession, the magic of the spring, they swept through her being like great clean winds. she was over forty; she had worked hard all her life. fate had denied her almost everything—father or mother, brother or sister, husband or children. she had never had a home of her own. and now fate had given her enough money to buy thorpe farm. the gift was immense, still almost unbelievable.
2“you perfectly exquisite, delicious, duck of a place,” she said, and kissed her hand to it.
the house stood high, and she could see on the one hand the dust-white road winding for the whole mile to mentmore station; on the other, green fields and good brown earth, woodland, valley, and hill, stretching to the wide spaces of the downs, beyond which lay the sea. in 1919, the year of the great peace, spring had come late, but in added and surpassing beauty. the great yearly miracle of creation was at its height, and behold, it was very good.
in front of her sat sarah and selina. the day’s work was over. they had watched seeds planted and seeds watered. they had assisted at the staking of sweet-peas and the two-hourly feeding of small chicken. now they demanded, as their habit was, in short sharp barks of a distinctly irritating nature, that they should be taken for a walk.
sarah and selina were the sole extravagance of ruth’s forty years of life. they had been unwanted in a hard world. aberdeens were out of fashion, and their sex, like ruth’s own in the struggle for existence, had been against them. so bare pennies which ruth could ill afford had gone to the keep of sarah and selina, and in return they loved her as only a dog can love.
3sarah was a rather large lady, usually of admirable manners and behaviour. only once had she seriously fallen from grace, and, to ruth’s horror, had presented her with five black and white puppies of a description unknown before in heaven or earth. moreover, she was quite absurdly pleased with herself, and selina was, equally absurdly, quite unbearably jealous.
selina had never been a lady, either in manners or behaviour. she was younger and smaller than sarah, and of infinite wickedness both in design and execution.
ruth looked at them as they sat side by side before her.
“to the stile and back,” she said, “and you may have ten minutes’ hunt in the wood.”
the pathway to the stile led through a field of buttercups, the stile into the station road. that field puzzled ruth. it was radiantly beautiful, but it was bad farming. also it was the only bit of bad farming on the whole place. every other inch of ground was utilized to the best advantage, cultivated up to the hilt, well-fed, infinitely cared for.
ruth was not curious, and had asked no questions concerning the late owner of thorpe, nor was any one of this time left on the farm. the war had swept them away. but after two months’ possession of the place, she had begun 4to realize the extraordinary amount of love and care that had been bestowed on it by some one. in a subtle way the late owner had materialized for her. she had begun to wonder why he had done this or that. once or twice she had caught herself wishing she could ask his advice over some possible improvement.
so she looked at the buttercups and wondered, and by the stile she noticed a hole in the hedge on the left-hand side, and wondered again. it was the only hole she had found in those well-kept hedges.
she sat on the stile and sniffed the spring scents luxuriously, while sarah and selina had their hunt. the may, and the wild geranium, and the clover. heavens, how good it all was! the white road wandered down the hill, but no one came. she had the whole beautiful world to herself. and then a small streak came moving slowly along the centre of the road. presently it resolved itself into a dog. tired, sore-footed, by the way it ran, covered with dust, but running steadily. a dog with a purpose. sarah and selina, scenting another of their kind, emerged hot foot and giving tongue from the centre of the wood. the dog—ruth could see now it was a gordon setter in haste about his business—slipped through the hole in the hedge, and went, trotting wearily but without 5pause, across the buttercup field towards the house. to ruth’s amazement, sarah and selina made no attempt to follow. instead they sat down side by side in front of her and proceeded to explain.
ruth looked at the hole, wondering. “he must have belonged here once, of course,” she said, “i wonder how far he has come, the poor dear.” she hurried up the slope, and reached the house in time to hear miss mccox’s piercing wail rend the air from the kitchen.
“and into every room has he been like greased lightning before i could hinder, and covered with dust and dirt, and me that have enough to do to keep things clean as it is, with those two dirty beasts that mistress seer sets such store by. but it’s encouraging such things she is, caring for the brutes that perish more than for christian men and women with mortal souls——”
red of face, shrewish of tongue, but most excellent as a cook, miss mccox paused for breath.
“she do be wonderful set on animals,” said the slow sussex voice of the cowman. he settled his folded arms on the kitchen window-sill. a chat about the new mistress of thorpe never failed in interest. “but ’tis all right so long as we understand one another.”
6ruth passed his broad back, politely blind to miss mccox’s facial efforts to inform him of her appearance in the background.
the dog was now coming up the garden path between apple-trees still thickest with blossom. a drooping dejected dog, a dog sick at heart with disappointment, a dog who could not understand. a dusty forlorn thing wholly out of keeping with the jubilant spring world.
ruth called to him, and he came, politely and patiently.
“oh, my dear,” she said. “you have come to look for some one and he is not here, and i cannot help you.”
she did what she could. fetched some water, which he drank eagerly, and food, which he would not look at. she bathed his sore feet and brushed the dust from his silky black and tan coat, until he stood revealed as a singularly beautiful dog. so beautiful that even miss mccox expressed unwilling admiration.
sarah and selina behaved with the utmost decorum. this was unusual when a stranger entered their domain. ruth wondered while she brushed. it seemed they acknowledged some greater right. perhaps he had belonged to the man who had so loved and cared for thorpe before she came. and he had left all—and the dog.
7presently the dog lay down in a chosen place from which he could command a view of both the front drive and the road from the station. he lay with his nose between his paws and watched.
after supper ruth seer went and sat with him. the stars looked down with clear bright eyes. the night wind brought the scent of a thousand flowers. an immense peace and beauty filled the heavens. yet, as she sat, she fancied she heard again the low monotonous boom from the channel to which people had grown so accustomed through the long war years. she knew it could not really be; it was just fancy. but suddenly her eyes were full of tears. she had lost no one out there—she had no one to lose. but she was an english woman. they were all her men. and there were so many white roads, from as many stations.
the next morning the stranger dog had vanished, after, so miss mccox reported bitterly at 6 a. m., a night spent on the spare-room bed. it was a perfect wonder of a morning. even on that first morning when the stars sang together it could not have been more wonderful, thought ruth seer, looking, as she never tired of looking, at the farm that was hers. the five shorthorns chewed the cud in the four-acre field. the verdict of miss mccox, the 8cowman and the boy, upon them was favourable. to-morrow morning ruth would have her first lesson in milking. the berkshire sow, bought also at uckfield market, had produced during the night, somewhat unexpectedly, but very successfully, thirteen small black pigs, shining like satin and wholly delectable.
the only blot on the perfection of the day was the behaviour of selina. at 11 a. m. she was detected by miss mccox, in full pursuit of the last hatched brood of chicken. caught, or to be fair to selina, cornered, by the entire staff, at 11.30, she was well and handsomely whipped, and crept, an apparently chastened dog, into the shelter of the house. there, however, so soon as the clang of the big bell proclaimed the busy dinner hour, she had proceeded to the room sacred to the slumbers of miss mccox and, undisturbed, had diligently made a hole in the pillow on which miss mccox’s head nightly reposed, extracting therefrom the feathers of many chickens. these she spread lavishly, and without favouritism, over the surface of the entire carpet, and, well content, withdrew silently and discreetly from the precincts of thorpe farm.
at tea time she was still missing, and sarah alone, stiff with conscious rectitude, sat in front of ruth and ate a double portion of cake and 9bread-and-butter. visions of rabbit holes, steel traps, of angry gamekeepers with guns, had begun to form in ruth’s mind. her well-earned appetite for tea vanished. full forgiveness and an undeservedly warm welcome awaited selina whenever she might choose to put in an appearance.
even miss mccox, when she cleared away the tea, withdrew the notice given in the heat of discovery, and suggested that selina might be hunting along the stream. she had seen the strange dog down there no longer than an hour ago.
it seemed to ruth a hopeful suggestion. also she loved to wander by the stream. in all her dreams of a domain of her own always there had been running water. and now that too was hers. one of the slow sussex streams moving steadily and very quietly between flowered banks, under overhanging branches. so quietly that you did not at first realize its strength. so quietly that you did not at first hear its song.
it was that strange and wonderful hour which comes before sunset after a cloudless day of may sunshine, when it is as if the world had laughed, rejoiced, and sung itself to rest in the everlasting arms. there is a sudden hush, a peace falls, a strange silence—if you listen.
ruth ceased to worry about selina. she 10drifted along the path down the stream, and love of the whole world folded her in a great content. a sense of oneness with all that moved and breathed, with the little brethren in hole and hedge, with the flowers’ lavish gift of scent and colour, with the warmth of the sun, a oneness that fused her being with theirs as into one perfect flame. dear god, how good it all was, how wonderful! the marshy ground where the kingcups and the lady smocks were just now in all their gold and silver glory, the wild cherry, lover of water, still in this late season blossoming among its leaves, the pool where the kingfishers lived among the willows and river palms.
and, dreaming, she came to a greensward place where lay the stranger dog. a dog well content, who waved a lazy tail as she came. his nose between his paws, he watched no longer a lonely road. he watched a man. a man in a brown suit who lay full length on the grass. ruth could not see his face, only the back of a curly head propped by a lean brown hand; and he too was watching something. his absolute stillness made ruth draw her breath and remain motionless where she stood. no proprietor’s fury against trespassers touched her. perhaps because she had walked so long on the highway, looking over walls and barred 11gateways at other people’s preserves. she crept very softly forward so that she too could see what so engrossed him. a pair of kingfishers teaching their brood to fly.
two had already made the great adventure and sat side by side on a branch stretching across the pool. even as ruth looked, surrounded by a flashing escort, the third joined them, and there sat all three, very close together for courage, and distinctly puffed with pride.
the parent birds with even greater pride skimmed the surface of the stream, wheeled and came back, like radiant jewels in the sunlight. ruth watched entranced. hardly she dared to breathe. all was very still.
and then suddenly the scream of a motor siren cleft the silence like a sword. ruth started and turned round. when she looked again all were gone. man, dog and birds. wiped out as it were in a moment. the birds’ swift flight, even the dog’s, was natural enough, but how had the slower-moving human being so swiftly vanished? ruth looked and, puzzled, looked again, but the man had disappeared as completely as the kingfishers. then she caught sight of the dog. saw him run across the only visible corner of the lower field, and disappear in the direction of the front gate. 12towards the front gate also sped a small two-seated car, down the long hill from the main road which led to the pleasant town of fairbridge.
ruth felt suddenly caught up in some sequence of events outside her consciousness. something, she knew not what, filled her also with a desire to reach the front gate. she ran across the plank which bridged the stream at that point, and, taking a short cut, arrived simultaneously with the car and the dog. and lo and behold! beside the driver, very stiff and proud, sat selina; the strange dog had hurled himself into the driver’s arms, while, mysteriously sprung from somewhere, sarah whirled round the entire group, barking furiously.
ruth laughed. the events were moving with extraordinary rapidity.
“larry will have already explained my sudden appearance,” said the driver, looking at her with a pair of humorous tired eyes over the top of the dog’s head.
“oh, is his name larry?” gasped ruth, breathless from selina’s sudden arrival in her arms after a scramble over the man and a takeoff from the side of the car; “i did so want to know. be quiet, selina; you are a bad dog.”
“i must explain,” said the driver gravely, “that i have not kidnapped selina. we 13stopped to water the car at mentmore, and she got in and refused to get out. she seemed to know what she wanted, so i brought her along.”
“i am ever so grateful,” said ruth; “she has been missing since twelve o’clock, and i have been really worried.”
he nodded sympathetically.
“one never knows, does one? larry, you rascal, let me get out. i have been worried about larry too. i only came home two hours ago and found he had been missing since yesterday morning. may i introduce myself? my name is roger north.”
“oh!” exclaimed ruth, involuntarily.
it was a name world-famous in science and literature.
“yes, the roger north! it is quite all right. people always say ‘oh,’ like that when i introduce myself. and you are the new owner of thorpe.”
“i am that enormously lucky person,” said ruth. “do come in, won’t you? and won’t you have some tea—or something? that sounds rather vague, but i haven’t a notion as to time.”
“capital! is that a usual habit of yours, or only this once?” asked this somewhat strange person who was the roger north. “i don’t 14know if you’ve noticed it, but most people seem to spend their days wondering what time it is! and i can drink tea at any moment, thanks very much. take care of the car, larry.”
larry jumped on the seat, stretched himself at full length and became a dog of stone.
“the car belonged to his master,” explained roger north, as they went up the garden path. “larry and the car both came to me when he went to france, and though the old dog has often run over here and had a hunt round, this is the first time he has not come straight back to me.”
“he arrived here about six o’clock last evening,” said ruth. “he hunted everywhere, as you say, and then lay down and watched. i gather he spent the night in the spare room, but this morning he had disappeared, and i only found him again half an hour ago down by the stream. quite happy apparently with a man. i don’t know who the man is. he was lying by the stream watching some kingfishers, and then your car startled us all, and i can’t think where he disappeared to.”
north shook his head.
“i don’t know who it could have been. all the men larry knew here left long ago, and he doesn’t make friends readily.”
the path to the house was a real cottage-garden 15path, bordered thickly with old-fashioned flowers, flowers which must have grown undisturbed for many a long year, only thinned out, or added to, with the forethought born of love. memories thronged north’s mind as he looked. he wondered what demon had induced him to come in, to accept tea. it was unlike him. but to his relief the new owner of thorpe made no attempt at small talk. indeed, she left his side, and gathered a bunch of the pinks, whose fragrance went up like evening incense to heaven, leaving him to walk alone.
for ruth seer sensed the shadow of a great grief. it fell like a chill across the sunlight. a sense of pity filled her. fearing the tongue of miss mccox, which ceased not nor spared, she fetched the tea herself, out on to the red-bricked pathway, facing south, and proudly called the terrace.
sarah and selina had somehow crowded into the visitor’s chair and fought for the largest space.
“i won’t apologize,” said ruth. “that means you are a real dog lover.”
he laughed. “my wife says because they cannot answer me! how did the little ladies take larry’s intrusion?”
“they seemed to know he had the greater right.”
16north dropped a light kiss on each black head.
“bless you!” he said.
he drank his tea and fed the dogs shamelessly, for the most part in silence, and ruth watched him in the comfortable certainty that he was quite oblivious of her scrutiny. he interested her, this man of a world-wide fame, not because of that fame, but because her instinct told her that between him and the late owner of thorpe there had been a great love. when she no longer met the glance of the humorous, tired eyes, and the pleasant voice, talking lightly, was silent, she could see the weary soul of the man in his face. a tragic face, tragic because it was both powerful and hopeless. he turned to her presently and asked, “may i light a pipe, and have a mouch round?”
ruth nodded. she felt a sense of comradeship already between them.
“you will find me here when you come back,” she said. “this is my hour for the newspaper.”
but though she unfolded it and spread it out, crumpling its pages in the effort, after the fashion of women, she was not reading of “the railway deadlock,” of “the victory march of the guards,” or of “the 1,000–mile flight by british airship,” all spread temptingly before her; she was thinking of the man who had 17owned thorpe farm, the man whom larry and roger north had loved, the man who lived for her, who had never known him, in the woods and fields that had been his.
the first evening shadows began to fall softly; a flight of rooks cawed home across the sky. the sounds of waking life about the farm died out one by one.
presently roger north came back and sat down again, pulling hard at his pipe. his strong dark face was full of shadows too.
“i am glad you have this place,” he said abruptly. “he would have been glad too.”
and suddenly emboldened, ruth asked the question that had been trembling on her lips ever since he had come.
“will you tell me something about him?” she said. “lately i have so wanted to know. it isn’t idle curiosity. i would not dare to ask you if it were. and it would be only some one who cared that can tell me what i want to know. because—i don’t quite know how to explain—but i seem to have got into touch, as it were, with the mind of the man who made and loved this place. at first it was only that i kept wondering why he had done this or that, if he would approve of what i was doing. but lately i have—oh, how can i explain it?—i have a sense of awareness of him. i know in some 18sort of odd way, what he would do if he were still here. and when i have carried a thing out, made some change or improvement, i know if he is pleased. of course i expect it sounds quite mad to you. it isn’t even as if i had known him——”
she looked at north apologetically.
“my dear lady,” said north gently, “it is quite easily explained. you love the place very much, that is easily seen, and you realized at once that the previous owner had loved it too. there was evidences of that on every hand. and it was quite natural when you were making improvements to wonder what he would have done. it only wants a little imagination to carry that to feeling that he was pleased when your improvements were a success.”
ruth smiled.
“yes, i know. it sounds very natural as you put it. but, mr. north, it is more than that. how shall i explain it? my mind is in touch somehow with another mind. it is like a conscious and quiet effortless telepathy. thoughts, feelings, they pass between us without any words being necessary. it is another mind than mine which thinks, ‘it will be better to put that field down in lucerne this year,’ when i had been thinking of oats. but i catch the thought, and might not he catch mine? 19in the same way i feel when he is pleased; that is the most certain of all.”
roger north shook his head.
“such telepathy might be possible if he were alive,” he said. “we have much to learn on those lines. but there was no doubt as to his fate. he was killed instantaneously at albert.”
“you do not think any communication possible after death?”
there was a pause before north answered.
“science has no evidence of it.”
“i could not help wondering,” said ruth diffidently, and feeling as it were for her words, “whether this method by which what he thinks or wishes about thorpe seems to come to me might not possibly be the method used for communication on some other plane in the place of speech. words are by no means a very good medium for expressing our thoughts, do you think?”
“very inadequate indeed,” agreed north. he got up as he spoke, and passed behind her, ostensibly to knock the ashes out of his pipe against the window-sill. when he came back to his chair he did not continue the line of conversation.
“you asked me to tell you something of my friend, dick carey,” he said as he sat down. “and at any rate what you have told me gives 20you, i feel, the right to ask. there isn’t much to tell. we were at school and college together. charterhouse and trinity. and we knocked about the world a good bit together till i married. then he took thorpe and settled down to farming. he loved the place, as you have discovered. and he loved all beasts and birds. a wonderful chap with horses, clever too on other lines, which isn’t always the case. a great reader and a bit of a musician. he went to france with kitchener’s first hundred thousand, and he lived through two years of that hell. he wasn’t decorated, or mentioned in dispatches, but i saw the men he commanded, and cared for, and fought with. they knew. they knew what one of them called ‘the splendid best’ of him. oh well! i suppose he was like many another we lost out there, but for me, when he died, it was as if a light had gone out and all the world was a darker place.”
“thank you,” said ruth quite simply, yet the words said much.
there was a little pause, then he added:
“he became engaged to my daughter just before he was killed.”
“ah!” the little exclamation held a world of pain and pity.
he felt glad she did not add the usual “poor thing,” and possibly that was why he volunteered 21further. “she has married since, but i doubt if she has got over it.”
it was some time before either spoke again. then ruth said, almost shyly, “there is just one thing more. the buttercup field? i can’t quite understand it. it is bad farming, that field. the only bit of bad farming on the place.”
“you did not guess?”
“no.” ruth looked at him, her head a little on one side, her brow drawn, puzzled.
“he kept it for its beauty,” said north. “it is a wonderful bit of colour you know, that sheeted gold,” he added almost apologetically, when for a moment ruth did not answer.
but she was mentally kicking herself.
“of course!” she exclaimed. “how utterly stupid of me. i ought to have understood. how utterly and completely stupid of me. i have never thought of what he would wish from that point of view. i have been simply trying to farm well. and i love that field for its beauty too. look at it in the western sunlight against the may hedge.”
“it was the same with the may hedges,” said north. “a fellow who came here to buy pigs said they ought to be grubbed up, they were waste of land. he wanted railings. he thought old dick mad when he said he got his 22value out of them to look at, and good value too.”
“i didn’t know about the hedges wasting land,” said ruth. “but i might have grubbed up the buttercups.”
she looked so genuinely distressed that north laughed.
“don’t let this idea of yours get on your nerves,” he said kindly. “believe me it is really only what i said, and don’t worry about it. i am glad though that you love the place so much. it would have hurt to have it spoilt or neglected, or with some one living here who—jarred. indeed, to own the truth, i have been afraid to come here; i could not face it. but now”—he paused, then ended the sentence deliberately—“i am glad.”
“thank you,” she said again, in that quiet simple way of hers, and for a while they sat on in silence. the warmth was still great, the stillness perfect, save for the occasional sleepy twitter of a bird in its nest.
never since dick carey had been killed had he felt so at rest. the burden of pain seemed to drop away. the bitterness and resentment faded. he felt as so often in the old days, when he had come from some worry or fret or care in the outer world or in his own home, to the peace of the farm, to dick’s smile, to dick’s 23understanding. almost it seemed that he was not dead, had never gone away. and he thought of his friend, for the first time since that telegram had come, without an anguish of pain or longing, thought of him as he used to, when the morrow, or the next week at least, meant the clasp of his hand, his “hullo, old roger,” and the content which belongs to the mere presence only of some one or two people alone in our journey through life.
he wisely made no attempt to analyse the why and wherefore. he remembered with thankfulness that he had left word at home that he might be late, and just sat on and on while peace and healing came dropping down like dew.
and this quite marvellous woman never tried to make conversation, or fussed about, moving things. she just sat there looking out at the spring world as a child looks at a play that enthralls.
she had no beauty and could never have had, either of feature or colouring, only a slender length of limb, a certain poise, small head and hands and feet, and a light that shone behind her steady eyes. a soul that wonders and worships shines even in our darkness. she gave the impression of strength and of tranquillity. her very stillness roused him at length, and he turned to look at her.
24she met the look with one of very pure friendliness.
“i hope now i have made the plunge you will let me come over here sometimes,” he said; “somehow i think we are going to be friends.”
“i think we are friends already,” she said, smiling, “and i am very glad. one or two of the neighbours have called and asked me to tea parties. but i have lived such a different life. except for those who farm or garden we haven’t much in common.”
“you have always lived on the land?” he asked.
“oh no!” she laughed, looking at him with amusement. “i lived all my life until i was seventeen at parson’s green, and after that in a little street at the back of tottenham court road, until the outbreak of war. and then i was for four years in belgium and northern france, cooking.”
“good heavens! and all the time this was what you wanted!”
“yes, this was what i wanted. i didn’t know. but this was it. and think of the luck of getting it!” she looked at him triumphantly. “the amazing wonderful luck! i feel as if i ought to be on my knees, figuratively, all the time, giving thanks.”
“of course,” said roger north slowly. 25“that is your mental attitude. no wonder you are so unusual a person. and how about the years that have gone before?”
“i sometimes wonder,” she said, thinking, “since i have come here of course, whether every part of our lives isn’t arranged definitely, with a purpose, to prepare us for the next part. it would help a bit through the bad times as well as the good, if one knew it was so, don’t you think?”
“i daresay,” roger north answered vaguely, as was his fashion, ruth soon discovered, if questioned on such things. “i wish you would tell me something of yourself. what line you came up along would really interest me quite a lot. and it isn’t idle curiosity either.”
there was a little silence.
“i should like to tell you,” she said at length.
but she was conscious at the back of her mind that some one else was interested too, and it was that some one else whom she wanted most of all to tell.
