The Safety Curten by Ethel May Dell (ebook e reader .txt) 📖

to-day, do you know? I can't think how you do it. There isn't a feature in your face worth mentioning, but, notwithstanding, you make an entrancing whole."
Doris sternly repressed a smile. "Please don't take the trouble to be complimentary."
Hugh groaned. "There's no pleasing you. And still you haven't let me into the secret as to why you want to be a farmer's wife."
Doris was unpacking the tea-things energetically. "You never understand anything without being told," she said. "Don't you know that I positively hate the life I live now?"
"I can quite believe it," said Hugh Chesyl. "But, if you will allow me to say so, I think your remedy would be worse than the disease. Your utmost ingenuity will fail to persuade me that the life of a farmer's wife would suit you."
"I should like the simplicity of it," she maintained.
"And getting up at five in the morning to make the butter? And having a hulking brute of a husband--like Jeff Ironside--tramping into your kitchen with his muddy boots and beastly clothes (which you would have to mend) just when you had got things into good order? I can see you doing it!" Hugh Chesyl's speech went into his easy, high-bred laugh. "You of all people--the dainty and disdainful Miss Elliot, for whom no man is good enough!"
"I don't know why you say that." There was quick protest in the girl's voice. She clattered the cups and saucers as if something in the lazy argument had exasperated her. "I like a man who is a man--the hard, outdoor, wholesome kind--who isn't afraid of taking a little trouble--who knows what he wants and how to get it. I shouldn't quarrel with him on the score of muddy boots. I should be only glad that he had enough of the real thing in him to go out in all weathers and not to care."
"All of which is aimed at me," said Hugh to the trees above him. "I'm afraid I'm boring you more than usual this afternoon."
"You can't help it," said Doris.
Hugh Chesyl's good-looking face crumpled a little, then smoothed itself again to its usual placid expression. "Ah, well!" he said equably, "we won't quarrel about it. Let's have some tea!"
He sat up in the punt and looked across at her; but she would not meet his eyes, and there ensued a considerable pause before he said gently, "I'm sorry you are not happy, you know."
"Are you?" she said.
"Yes. That's why I want you to marry me."
"Should I be any happier if I did?" said Doris, with a smile that was somehow slightly piteous.
"I don't know." Hugh Chesyl's voice was as pleasantly vague as his personality. "I shouldn't get in your way at all, and, at least, you would have a home of your own."
"To be miserable in," said Doris, with suppressed vehemence.
"I don't know why you should be miserable," he said. "You wouldn't have anything to do that you didn't like."
She uttered a laugh that caught her breath as if it had been a sob. "Oh, don't talk about it, Hugh! I should be bored--bored to death. I want the real thing--the real thing--not a polite substitute."
"Sorry," said Hugh imperturbably. "I have offered the utmost of which I am capable. May I have my tea here, please? It's less trouble than scrambling ashore."
She acceded to his request without protest; but she stepped on to the bank herself, and sat down with her back to a corn-sheaf. Very young and slender she looked sitting there with the sunshine on her brown, elf-like face, but she was by no means without dignity. There was a fairy queenliness about her that imparted an indescribable charm to her every movement. Her eyes were grey and fearless.
"How lovely to own a field like this!" she said. "And plough it and sow it and watch it grow up, and then cut it and turn it into sheaves! How proud the man who owns it must be!"
Something stirred on the other side of the sheaf, and she started a little and glanced backwards. "What's that?"
"A rat probably," said Hugh Chesyl serenely from his couch in the punt. "I expect the place is full of 'em. Won't you continue your rhapsody? The man who owns this particular field is a miller as well as a farmer. He grinds his own grain."
"Oh, is he that man?" Eagerly she broke in. "Does he live in that perfectly exquisite old red-brick house on the water with the wheel turning all day long? Oh, isn't he lucky?"
"I doubt if he thinks so," said Hugh Chesyl. "I've never met a contented farmer yet."
"I don't like people to be too contented," said Doris perversely. "It's a sign of laziness and--yes--weakness of purpose."
"Oh, is it?" Again he uttered his good-tempered laugh; then, as he began to drink his tea, he gradually sobered. "Has anything happened lately to make you specially discontented with your lot?" he asked presently.
Doris's brows contracted. "Things are always happening. My stepmother gets more unbearable every day. I sometimes think I will go and work for my living, but my father won't hear of it. And what can I do? I haven't qualified for anything. The only thing open to me is to fill a post of unpaid companion to a rich and elderly cousin who would put up with me but doesn't much want me. She lives at Kensington, too, and I can breathe only in the country."
"Poor little girl!" said Hugh kindly.
"Oh, don't pity me!" she said quickly. "You can't do anything to help. And I shouldn't grumble to you if there were anyone else to grumble to." She leaned back against her sheaf with her eyes on the sunlit water below. "I suppose I shall just go on in the same old way till something happens. Anyhow, I can't see my way out at present. It's such a shame to be unhappy, too, when life might be so ecstatic."
"How could life be ecstatic?" asked Hugh, passing up his cup to be refilled.
She threw him a quick glance. "You wouldn't understand if I were to tell you," she said. "It never could be--for you."
He sighed. "I know I'm very limited. But it's a mistake to expect too much from life, believe me. Ask but little, and perhaps--if you're lucky--you won't be disappointed."
"I would rather have nothing than that," she said quickly.
Hugh Chesyl turned and regarded her curiously. "Would you really?" he said.
She nodded several times emphatically. "Yes; just live my own life out-of-doors and do without everything else." She pulled a long stalk of corn from the sheaf against which she rested and looked at it thoughtfully. Her eyes were downcast, and the man in the punt could not see the deep shadow of pain they held. "If I can't have corn," she said slowly, with the air of one pronouncing sentence, "I won't have husks. I will die of starvation sooner."
And with that very suddenly she rose and walked round the sheaf.
The movement was abrupt, so abrupt that Hugh Chesyl lifted his brows in astonishment. He was still more surprised a moment later when he heard her clear, girlish voice raised in admonition.
"I don't think it's very nice of you to lie there listening and not to let us know."
Hugh sat upright in the punt. Who on earth was it that she was reproving thus?
The next moment he saw. A huge man with the frame of a bull rose from behind the sheaf and confronted his young companion. He had his hat in his hand, and the afternoon sun fell full upon his uncovered head, revealing a rugged, clean-shaven face that had in it a good deal of British strength and a suspicion of gipsy alertness. To Chesyl's further amazement he did not appear in the least abashed by the encounter.
"I'm sorry I overheard you," he said, with blunt deference. "I was half-asleep at first. Afterwards, I didn't like to intrude."
Doris's grey eyes looked him up and down for a moment or two in silence, and a flush rose in her tanned face. It seemed to Hugh that she was likely to become the more embarrassed of the two, and he wondered if he ought to go to the rescue.
Then swiftly Doris collected her forces. "I suppose you know you are trespassing?" she said.
At that Hugh laid himself very suddenly down again in the bottom of the boat, and left her to fight her own battles.
The man on the bank looked down at his small assailant with a face of grim decorum. "No, I didn't know," he said.
"Well, you are," said Doris. "All this ground is private property. You can see for yourself. It's a cornfield."
The intruder's eyes travelled over the upstanding sheaves, passed gravely over the man in the punt, and came back to the girl. "Yes; I see," he said stolidly.
"Then don't you think you'd better go?" she said.
He put his hat on somewhat abruptly. "Yes. I think I had better," he said, and with that he turned on his heel and walked away through the stubble.
"Such impertinence!" said Doris, as she stepped down the bank to her companion.
"It was rather," said Hugh.
She looked at him somewhat sharply. "I don't see that there is anything to laugh at," she said.
"Don't you?" said Hugh.
"No. Why are you laughing?"
Hugh explained. "It only struck me as being a little funny that you should order the man off his own ground in that cavalier fashion."
"Hugh!" Genuine dismay shone in the girl's eyes. "That wasn't--wasn't--"
"Jeff Ironside? Yes, it was," said Hugh. "I wonder you have never come across him before. He works like a nigger."
"Hugh!" Doris collapsed upon the bank in sheer horror. "I have seen him before--seen him several times. I thought he was just--a labourer--till to-day."
"Oh, no," said Hugh. "He's just your hard, outdoor, wholesome farmer. Fine animal, isn't he? Always reminds me of a prize bull."
"How frightful!" said Doris with a gasp. "It's the worst _faux pas_ I have ever made."
"Cheer up!" said Hugh consolingly. "No doubt he was flattered by the little attention. He took it very well."
"That doesn't make matters any better," said Doris. "I almost wish he hadn't."
Whereupon Hugh laughed again. "Oh, don't wish that! I should think he would be quite a nasty animal when roused. I shouldn't have cared to fight him on your behalf. He could wipe the earth with me were he so minded."
Doris's eyes, critical though not unkindly, rested upon him as he lay. "Yes," she said thoughtfully, "I should almost think he could."


CHAPTER II
THE PLOUGHMAN

It was on a day six weeks later that Doris Elliot next found herself upon the scene of her discomfiture. She had ridden from her home three miles distant very early on a morning of September to join a meeting of the foxhounds and go cub-hunting. There had been a heavy fall of rain, and the ground was wet and slippery.
The field that had been all yellow with the shocks of corn was now in process of being ploughed, and her horse Hector sank up to the fetlocks at every stride, a fact which he resented with obvious impatience. She guided him down to the edge of the river where the ground looked a little harder.
The run was over and she had enjoyed it; but she wanted now to take as short a cut home as possible, and it was through this particular field that the most direct route undoubtedly lay. She was alone, but she knew every inch of the countryside, and but for this mischance of the plough she would have been