V Hester
V Reaping
VI Threshing
VII Garnered Grain

Epilogue

BOOK I

SOWING

SECRET BREAD

PROLOGUE

There was silence in the room where James Ruan lay in the great bed,
awaiting his marriage and his death--a silence so hushed that it was not
broken, only faintly stirred, by the knocking of a fitful wind at the
casement, and the occasional collapse of the glowing embers on the
hearth. The firelight flickered over the whitewashed walls, which were
dimmed to a pearly greyness by the stronger light without; the sick
man's face was deep in shadow under the bed canopy, but one full-veined
hand showed dark upon the blue and white check of the counterpane. All
life, both without and within, was dying life--waning day at the
casement, failing fire on the hearth, and in the shadowy bed a man's
soul waiting to take wing.

Ruan lay with closed eyes, so still he might have been unconscious, but
in reality he was gathering together all of force and energy he
possessed; every sense was concentrated on the bare act of keeping
alive--keenly and clearly alive--until the wished-for thing was
accomplished. Then, the effort over, the stored-up vitality spent, he
hoped to go out swiftly, no dallying on the dim borderland. As he lay
his closed lids seemed like dull red films against the firelight, and
across them floated a series of memory-pictures, which he noted
curiously, even with a dry amusement.

He saw himself, as a big-boned surly lad, new to his heritage; then as a
middle-aged man, living in a morose isolation save for Annie and the
children. Little half-forgotten incidents drifted past him, and always,
with the strange detachment of the dying, he saw himself from the
outside, as it were, even as he saw Annie and the children. Finally, his
travelling mind brought him to the present still hour of dusk, so soon
to deepen into night. Thinking of that which was to come, his mouth
twitched to a smile; he flattered himself he had kept his neighbours
well scandalised during his life; now, from his death-bed, he would send
widening circles of amazement over the whole county, and set tongues
clacking and heads wagging at the last freak of that old reprobate, Ruan
of Cloom. He lay there, grimly smiling, the pleasure of the successful
creator in his mind as he thought over the last situation of his making.
The smouldering patches of red on the crumbling logs shrank smaller and
smaller as the close-set litt