XIII
In the low lighted room the thing that Gwenda Cartaret had seen lay stretched in the middle of the great bed, covered with a sheet. The bed, with its white mound, was so much too big for the four walls that held it, the white plaster of the ceiling bulging above it stooped so low, that the body of John Greatorex lay as if already closed up in its tomb.
Jim Greatorex, his son, sat on a wooden chair at the head of the bed. His young, handsome face was loose and flushed as if he had been drinking. His eyes—the queer, blue, wide-open eyes that had hitherto looked out at you from their lodging in that ruddy, sensuous face, incongruously spiritual, high and above your head, like the eyes of a dreamer and a mystic—Jim's eyes were sunken now and darkened in their red and swollen lids. They stared at the rug laid down beside the bed, while Jim's mind set itself to count, stupidly and obstinately, the snippets of gray and scarlet cloth that made the pattern on the black. Every now and then he would recognise a snippet as belonging to some suit his father had worn years ago, and then Jim's brain would receive a shock and would stagger and have to begin its counting all over again.
The door opened to let Rowcliffe in. And at the sound of the door, as if a spring had been suddenly released in his spine, Jim Greatorex shot up and started to his feet.
"Well, Greatorex——"
"Good evening, Dr. Rawcliffe." He came forward awkwardly, hanging his head as if detected in an act of shame.
There was a silence while the two men turned their backs upon the bed, determined to ignore what was on it. They stood together by the window, pretending to stare at things out there in the night; and so they became aware of the men carrying the coffin.
They could no longer ignore it.
"Wull yo look at 'Im, doctor?"
"Better not——." Rowcliffe would have laid his hand on the young man's arm, muttering a refusal, but Greatorex had moved to the bed and drawn back the sheet.
What Gwenda Cartaret had seen was revealed.
The dead man's face, upturned with a slight tilt to the ceiling that bulged so brutally above it, the stiff dark beard accentuating the tilt, the eyes, also upturned, white under their unclosing lids, the nostrils, the half-open mouth preserved their wonder and their terror before a thing so incredible—that the walls and roof of a man's room should close round him and suffocate him. On this horrified face there were the marks of dissolution, and, at the corners of the grim beard and moustache, a stain.
It left nothing to be said. It was the face of the man who had drunk hard and had told his son that he had never been the worse for drink.
Jim Greatorex stood and looked at it as if he knew what Rowcliffe was thinking of it and defied him to think.
Rowcliffe drew up the sheet and covered it. "You'd better come out of this. It isn't good for you," he said.
"I knaw what's good for me, Dr. Rawcliffe."
Jim stuck his hands in his breeches and gazed stubbornly at the sheeted mound.
"Come," Rowcliffe said, "don't give way like this. Buck up and be a man."
"A ma-an? You wait till yor turn cooms, doctor."
"My turn came ten years ago, and it may come again."
"And yo'll knaw then what good it doos ta-alkin'." He paused, listening. "They've coom," he said.
There was a sound of scuffling on the stone floor below and on the stairs. Mrs. Gale's voice was heard out on the landing, calling to the men.
"Easy with un—easy. Mind t' lamp. Eh—yo'll never get un oop that road. Yo mun coax un round corner."
A swinging thud on the stone wall. Then more and more desperate scuffling with muttering. Then silence.
Mrs. Gale put her head in at the door.
"Jimmy, yo mun coom and gie a haand wi' t' coffin. They've got un faasst in t' turn o' t' stair."
Through the open doorway Rowcliffe could see the broad shoulders of the coffin jammed in the stairway.
Jim, flushed with resentment, strode out; and the struggling and scuffling began again, subdued, this time, and respectful. Rowcliffe went out to help.
Mrs. Gale on the landing went on talking to herself. "They sud 'ave browt trestles oop first. There's naw place to stond un in. Eh dear! It's job enoof gettin' un oop. What'll it be gettin' un down again wit' 'E layin' in un? 'Ere—yo get oonder un, Jimmy, and 'eave un oop."
Jim crouched and went backward down the stair under the coffin. His flushed face, with its mournful, mystic eyes, looked out at Rowcliffe for a moment under the coffin head. Then, with a heave of his great back and pushing with his powerful arms against the wall and stair rail, he loosened the shoulders of the coffin and bore it, steadied by Rowcliffe and the men, up the stair and into the room.
They set it on its feet beside the bed, propped against the wall. And
Jim Greatorex stood and stared at it.
Rowcliffe went down into the kitchen, followed by Mrs. Gale.
"What d'yo think o' Jimmy, Dr. Rawcliffe?"
"He oughtn't to be left alone. Isn't there any sister or anybody who could come to him?"
"Naw; 'e's got naw sisters, Jimmy 'assn't."
"Well, you must get him to lie down and eat."
"Get 'im? Yo can do nowt wi' Jimmy. 'E'll goa 'is own road. 'Is feyther an' 'e they wuss always quar'ling, yo med say. Yet when t' owd gentleman was taaken bad, Jimmy, 'e couldn' do too mooch for 'im. 'E was set on pullin' 's feyther round. And when 'e found 'e couldn't keep t' owd gentleman, 'e gets it on 'is mind like—broodin'. And 'e's got nowt to coomfort 'im."
She sat down to it now.
"Yo see, Dr. Rawcliffe, Jim's feyther and 'is granfeyther before 'im, they wuss good Wesleyans. It's in t' blood. But Jim's moother that died, she wuss Choorch. And that slip of a laass, when John Greatorex coom courtin', she turned 'im. 'E was that soft wi' laasses. 'Er feyther 'e was steward to lord o' t' Manor and 'e was Choorch and all t' family saame as t' folk oop at Manor. Yo med say, Jim Greatorex, 'e's got naw religion. Neither Choorch nor Chapel 'e is. Nowt to coomfort 'im."
Upstairs the scuffling and the struggling became frightful. Jim's feet and Jim's voice were heard above the muttering of the undertaker's men.
Mrs. Gale whispered. "They're gettin' 'im in. 'E's gien a haand wi' t' body. Thot's soomthin'."
She brooded ponderously. A sound of stamping and scraping at the back door roused her.
"Eh—oo's there now?" she asked irritably.
Willie, the farm lad, appeared on the threshold. His face was flushed and scared.
"Where's Jim?" he said in a thick voice.
"Ooosh-sh! Doan't yo' knaw t' coffin's coom? 'E's oopstairs w' t' owd maaster."
"Well—'e mun coom down. T' mare's taaken baad again in 'er insi-ide."
"T' mare, Daasy?"
"Yes."
"Eh dear, there's naw end to trooble. Yo go oop and fatch Jimmy."
Willie hesitated. His flush deepened.
"I daarss'nt," he whispered hoarsely.
"Poor laad, 'e 's freetened o' t' body," she explained. "Yo stay there, Wullie. I'll goa. T' body's nowt to me. I've seen too many o' they," she muttered as she went.
They heard her crying excitedly overhead. "Jimmy! Yo coom to t' ma-are! Yo coom to t' ma-are!"
The sounds in the room ceased instantly. Jim Greatorex, alert and in violent possession of all his faculties, dashed down the stairs and out into the yard.
Rowcliffe followed into the darkness where his horse and trap stood waiting for him.
* * * * *
He was lighting his lamps when Jim Greatorex appeared beside him with a lantern.
"Dr. Rawcliffe, will yo joost coom an' taak a look at lil maare?"
Jim's sullenness was gone. His voice revealed him humble and profoundly agitated.
Rowcliffe sighed, smiled, pulled himself together and turned with
Greatorex into the stable.
In the sodden straw of her stall, Daisy, the mare, lay, heaving and snorting after her agony. From time to time she turned her head toward her tense and swollen flank, seeking with eyes of anguish the mysterious source of pain. The feed of oats with which Willie had tried to tempt her lay untouched in the skip beside her head.
"I give 'er they oats an hour ago," said Willie. "An' she 'assn't so mooch as nosed 'em."
"Nawbody but a donmed gawpie would have doon thot with 'er stoomach raw. Yo med 'ave killed t' mare."
Willie, appalled by his own deed and depressed, stooped down and fondled the mare's face, to show that it was not affection that he lacked.
"Heer—clear out o' thot and let doctor have a look in."
Willie slunk aside as Rowcliffe knelt with Greatorex in the straw and examined the sick mare.
"Can yo tell at all what's amiss, doctor?"
"Colic, I should say. Has the vet seen her?"
"Ye-es. He sent oop soomthing—"
"Well, have you given it her?"
Jim's voice thickened. "I sud have given it her yesterda."
"And why on earth didn't you?"
"The domned thing went clane out o' my head."
He turned to the window ledge by the stable door where, among a confusion of cobwebs and dusty bottles and tin cans, the drench of turpentine and linseed oil, the little phial of chlorodyne, and the clean tin pannikin with its wide protruding mouth, stood ready, all gleaming in the lantern light, forgotten since the day before.
"Thot's the stoof. Will yo halp me give it 'er, doctor?"
"All right. Can you hold her?"
"That I can. Coom oop, Daasy. Coom oop. There, my beauty. Gently, gently, owd laass."
Rowcliffe took off his coat and shook up the drench and poured it into the pannikin, while Greatorex got the struggling mare on to her feet.
Together, with gentleness and dexterity they cajoled her. Then Jim laid his hands upon her mouth and opened it, drawing up her head against his breast. Willie, suddenly competent, held the lantern while Rowcliffe poured the drench down her throat.
Daisy, coughing and dribbling, stood and gazed at them with sad and terrified eyes. And while the undertaker's men screwed down the lid upon John Greatorex in his coffin, Jim Greatorex, his son, watched with Daisy in her stall.
And Steven Rowcliffe watched with him, nursing the sick mare, making up a fresh, clean bed for her, rubbing and fomenting her swollen and tortured belly. When Daisy rolled in another agony, Rowcliffe gave her chlorodyne and waited till suddenly she lay still.
In Jim's face, as he looked down at her, there was an infinite tenderness and pity and compunction.
Rowcliffe, wriggling into his coat, regarded him with curiosity and wonder, till Jim drew himself up and fixed him with his queer, unhappy eyes.
"Shall I save her, doctor?"
"I can't tell you yet. I'd better send the vet up tomorrow hadn't I?"
"Ay——" Jim's voice was strangled in the spasm of his throat. But he took Rowcliffe's hand and wrung it, discharging many emotions in that one excruciating grip.
Rowcliffe pointed to the little phial of chlorodyne lying in the straw. "If I were you," he said, "I shouldn't leave that lying about."
Through his long last night in the gray house haunted by the moon, John Greatorex lay alone, screwed down under a coffin lid, and his son, Jim, wrapped in a horse-blanket and with his head on a hay sack, lay in the straw of the stable, beside Daisy his mare. From time to time, as his mood took him, he turned and laid his hand on her in a poignant caress. As if she had been his first-born, or his bride, he spoke to her in the thick, soft voice of passion, with pitiful, broken words and mutterings.
"What is it, Daasy——what is it? There, did they, then, did they? My beauty—my lil laass. I—I wuss a domned brute to forget tha, a domned brute."
All that night and the next night he lay beside her. The funeral passed like a fantastic interlude between the long acts of his passion. His great sorrow made him humble to Mrs. Gale so that he allowed her to sustain him with food and drink. And on the third day it was known throughout Garthdale that young Greatorex, who had lost his father, had saved his mare.
Only Steven Rowcliffe knew that the mare had saved young Greatorex.
* * * * *
And the little phial of chlorodyne was put back among the cobwebs and forgotten.
XIV
Down at the Vicarage the Vicar was wrangling with his youngest daughter. For the third time Alice declared that she was not well and that she didn't want her milk.
"Whether you want it or not you've got to drink it," said the Vicar.
Alice took the glass in her lap and looked at it.
"Am I to stand over you till you drink it?"
Alice put the rim of the glass to her mouth and shuddered.
"I can't," she said. "It'll make me sick."
"Leave the poor child alone, Papa," said Gwenda.
But the Vicar ignored Gwenda.
"You'll drink it, if I stand here all night," he said.
Alice struggled with a spasm in her throat. He held the glass for her while she groped piteously.
"Oh, where's my hanky?"
With superhuman clemency he produced his own.
"It'll serve you right if I'm ill," said Alice.
"Come," said the Vicar in his wisdom and his patience. "Come."
He proffered the disgusting cup again.
"I'd drink it and have done with it, if I were you," said Mary in her soft voice.
Mary's soft voice was too much for Alice.
"Why c-can't you leave me alone? You—you—beast, Mary," she sobbed.
And Mr. Cartaret began again, "Am I to stand here——"
Alice got up, she broke loose from them and left the room.
"You might have known she wasn't going to drink it," Gwenda said.
But the Vicar never knew when he was beaten.
"She would have drunk it," he said, "if Mary hadn't interfered."
* * * * *
Alice had not got the pneumonia that had killed John Greatorex. Such happiness, she reflected, was not for her. She had desired it too much.
But she was doing very well with her anæmia.
Bloodless and slender and inert, she dragged herself about the village. She could not get away from it because of the steep hills she would have had to climb. A small, unhappy ghost, she haunted the fields in the bottom and the path along the beck that led past Mrs. Gale's cottage.
The sight of Alice was more than ever annoying to the Vicar. Only you wouldn't have known it. As she grew whiter and weaker he braced himself, and became more hearty and robust. When he caught her lying on the sofa he spoke to her in a robust and hearty tone.
"Don't lie there all day, my girl. Get up and go out. What you want is a good blow on the moor."
"Yes. If I didn't die before I got there," Alice would say, while she thought, "Serve him right, too, if I did."
And the Vicar would turn from her in disgust. He knew what was the matter with his daughter Alice.
At dinner time he would pull himself together again, for, after all, he was her father. He was robust and hearty over the sirloin and the leg of mutton. He would call for a glass and press into it the red juice of the meat.
"Don't peak and pine, girl. Drink that. It'll put some blood into you."
And Alice would refuse to drink it.
Next she refused to drink her milk at eleven. She carried it out to
Essy in the scullery.
"I wish you'd drink my milk for me, Essy. It makes me sick," she said.
"I don't want your milk," said Essy.
"Please—" she implored her.
But Essy was angry. Her face flamed and she banged down the dishes she was drying. "I sail not drink it. What should I want your milk for? You can pour it in t' pig's bucket."
And the milk would be left by the scullery window till it turned sour and Essy poured it into the pig's bucket that stood under the sink.
* * * * *
Three weeks passed, and with every week Alice grew more bloodless, more slender, and more inert, and more and more like an unhappy ghost. Her small face was smaller; there was a tinge of green in its honey-whiteness, and of mauve in the dull rose of her mouth. And under her shallow breast her heart seemed to rise up and grow large, while the rest of Alice shrank and grew small. It was as if her fragile little body carried an enormous engine, an engine of infernal and terrifying power. When she lay down and when she got up and with every sudden movement its throbbing shook her savagely.
Night and morning she called to her sister: "Oh Gwenda, come and feel my heart. I do believe it's growing. It's getting too big for my body. It frightens me when it jumps about like that."
It frightened Gwenda.
But it did not really frighten Alice. She rejoiced in it, rather, and exulted. After all, it was a good thing that she had not got pneumonia, which might have killed her as it had killed John Greatorex. She had got what served her purpose better. It served all her purposes. If she had tried she could not have hit on anything that would have annoyed her father more or put him more conspicuously in the wrong. To begin with, it was his doing. He had worried her into it. And he had brought her to a place which was the worst place conceivable for anybody with a diseased heart, since you couldn't stir out of doors without going up hill.
Night and morning Alice stood before the looking-glass and turned out the lining of her lips and eyelids and saw with pleasure the pale rose growing paler. Every other hour she laid her hand on her heart and took again the full thrill of its dangerous throbbing, or felt her pulse to assure herself of the halt, the jerk, the hurrying of the beat. Night and morning and every other hour she thought of Rowcliffe.
"If it goes on like this, they'll have to send for him," she said.
But it had gone on, the three weeks had passed, and yet they had not sent. The Vicar had put his foot down. He wouldn't have the doctor. He knew better than a dozen doctors what was the matter with his daughter Alice.
Alice said nothing. She simply waited. As if some profound and dead-sure instinct had sustained her, she waited, sickening.
And on the last night of the third week she fainted. She had dragged herself upstairs to bed, staggered across the little landing and fallen on the threshold of her room.
They kept her in bed next day. At one o'clock she refused her chicken-broth. She would neither eat nor drink. And a little before three Gwenda went for the doctor.
She had not told Alice she was going. She had not told anybody.
XV
She had to walk, for Mary had taken her bicycle. Nobody knew where
Mary had gone or when she had started or when she would be back.
But the four miles between Garth and Morfe were nothing to Gwenda, who would walk twenty for her own amusement. She would have stretched the way out indefinitely if she could; she would have piled Garthdale Moor on Greffington Edge and Karva on the top of them and put them between Garth and Morfe, so violent was her fear of Steven Rowcliffe.
She had no longer any desire to see him or to be seen by him. He had seen her twice too often, and too early and too late. After being caught on the moor at dawn, it was preposterous that she should show herself in the doorway of Upthorne at night.
How was he to know that she hadn't done it on purpose? Girls did these things. Poor little Ally had done them. And it was because Ally had done them that she had been taken and hidden away here where she couldn't do them any more.
But—couldn't she? Gwenda stood still, staring in her horror as the frightful thought struck her that Ally could, and that she would, the very minute she realised young Rowcliffe. And he would think—not that it mattered in the least what he thought—he would think that there were two of them.
If only, she said to herself, if only young Rowcliffe were a married man. Then even Ally couldn't—
Not that she blamed poor little Ally. She looked on little Ally as the victim of a malign and tragic tendency, the fragile vehicle of an alien and overpowering impulse. Little Ally was doomed. It wasn't her fault if she was made like that.
And this time it wouldn't be her fault at all. Their father would have driven her. Gwenda hated him for his persecution and exposure of the helpless creature.
She walked on thinking.
It wouldn't end with Ally. They were all three exposed and persecuted. For supposing—it wasn't likely, but supposing—that this Rowcliffe man was the sort of man she liked, supposing—what was still more unlikely—that he was the sort of man who would like her, where would be the good of it? Her father would spoil it all. He spoiled everything.
Well, no, to be perfectly accurate, not everything. There was one thing he had not spoiled, because he had never suspected its existence—her singular passion for the place. Of course, if he had suspected it, he would have stamped on it. It was his business to stamp on other people's passions. Luckily, it wasn't in him to conceive a passion for a place.
It had come upon her at first sight as they drove between twilight and night from Reyburn through Rathdale into Garthdale. It was when they had left the wooded land behind them and the moors lifted up their naked shoulders, one after another, darker than dark, into a sky already whitening above the hidden moon. And she saw Morfe, gray as iron, on its hill, bearing the square crown and the triple pendants of its lights; she saw the long straight line of Greffington Edge, hiding the secret moon, and Karva with the ashen west behind it. There was something in their form and in their gesture that called to her as if they knew her, as if they waited for her; they struck her with the shock of recognition, as if she had known them and had waited too.
And close beside her own wonder and excitement she had felt the deep and sullen repulsion of her companions. The Vicar sat huddled in his overcoat. His nostrils, pinched with repugnance, sniffed as they drank in the cold, clean air. From time to time he shuddered, and a hoarse muttering came from under the gray woolen scarf he had wound round his mouth and beard. He was the righteous man, sent into uttermost abominable exile for his daughter's sin. Behind him, on the back seat of the trap, Alice and Mary cowed under their capes and rugs. They had turned their shoulders to each other, hostile in their misery. Gwenda was sorry for them.
The gray road dipped and turned and plunged them to the bottom of Garthdale. The small, scattering lights of the village waited for her in the hollow, with something humble and sad and familiar in their setting. They too stung her with that poignant and secret sense of recognition.
"This is the place," the Vicar had said. He had addressed himself to Alice; and it had been as if he had said, This the place, the infernal, the damnable place, you've brought us to with your behavior.
Their hatred of it had made Gwenda love it. "You can have your old
Garthdale all to yourself," Alice had said. "Nobody else wants it."
That, to Gwenda, was the charm of it. The adorable place was her own. Nobody else wanted it. She loved it for itself. It had nothing but itself to offer her. And that was enough. It was almost, as she had said, too much. Her questing youth conceived no more rapturous adventure than to follow the sheep over Karva, to set out at twilight and see the immense night come down on the high moors above Upthorne; to get up when Alice was asleep and slip out and watch the dawn turning from gray to rose, and from rose to gold above Greffington Edge.
As it happened you saw sunrise and moonrise best from the platform of Morfe Green. There Greffington Edge breaks and falls away, and lets slip the dawn like a rosy scarf from its shoulder, and sets the moon free of her earth and gives her to the open sky.
But, just as the Vicar had spoiled Rowcliffe, so Rowcliffe had spoiled Morfe for Gwenda. Therefore her fear of him was mingled with resentment. It was as if he had had no business to be living there, in that house of his looking over the Green.
Incredible that she should have wanted to see and to know this person.
But now, that she didn't want to, of course she was going to see him.
* * * * *
At the bend of the road, within a mile of Morfe, Mary came riding on Gwenda's bicycle. Large parcels were slung from her handle bars. She had been shopping in the village.
Mary, bowed forward as she struggled with an upward slope, was not aware of Gwenda. But Gwenda was aware of Mary, and, not being in the mood for her, she struck off the road on to the moor and descended upon Morfe by the steep lane that leads from Karva into Rathdale.
It never occurred to her to wonder what Mary had been doing in Morfe, so evident was it that she had been shopping.
XVI
The doctor was at home, but he was engaged, at the moment, in the surgery.
The maid-servant asked if she would wait.
She waited in the little cold and formal dining-room that looked through two windows on to the Green. So formal and so cold, so utterly impersonal was the air of the doctor's mahogany furniture that her fear left her. It was as if the furniture assured her that she would not really see Rowcliffe; as for knowing him, she needn't worry.
She had sent in her card, printed for convenience with the names of the three sisters:
Miss Cartaret.
Miss Gwendolen Cartaret.
Miss Alice Cartaret.
She felt somehow that it protected her. She said to herself, "He won't know which of us it is."
* * * * *
Rowcliffe was washing his hands in the surgery when the card was brought to him. He frowned at the card.
"But—You've brought this before," he said. "I've seen the lady."
"No, sir. It's another lady."
"Another? Are you certain?"
"Yes, sir. Quite certain."
"Did she come on a bicycle?"
"No, sir, that was the lady you've seen. I think this'll be her sister."
Rowcliffe was still frowning as he dried his hands with fastidious care.
"She's different, sir. Taller like."
"Taller?"
"Yes, sir."
Rowcliffe turned to the table and picked up a probe and a lancet and dropped them into a sterilising solution.
The maid waited. Rowcliffe's absorption was complete.
"Shall I ask her to call again, sir?"
"No. I'll see her. Where is she?"
"In the dining-room, sir."
"Show her into the study."
* * * * *
Nothing could have been more distant and reserved than Rowcliffe's dining-room. But, to a young woman who had made up her mind that she didn't want to know anything about him, Rowcliffe's study said too much. It told her that he was a ferocious and solitary reader; for in the long rows of book shelves the books leaned slantwise across the gaps where his hands had rummaged and ransacked. It told her that his gods were masculine and many—Darwin and Spencer and Haeckel, Pasteur, Curie and Lord Lister, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman and Bernard Shaw. Their photogravure portraits hung above the bookcase. He was indifferent to mere visible luxury, or how could he have endured the shabby drugget, the cheap, country wall-paper with its design of dreadful roses on a white watered ground? But the fire in the grate and the deep arm-chair drawn close to it showed that he loved warmth and comfort. That his tastes made him solitary she gathered from the chair's comparatively unused and unworn companion, lurking and sulking in the corner where it had been thrust aside.
The one window of this room looked to the west upon a little orchard, gray trunks of apple trees and plum trees against green grass, green branches against gray stone, gray that was softened in the liquid autumn air, green that was subtle, exquisite, charmingly austere.
He could see his little orchard as he sat by his fire. She thought she rather liked him for keeping his window so wide open.
She was standing by it looking at the orchard as he came in.
* * * * *
He was so quiet in his coming that she did not see or hear him till he stood before her.
And in his eyes, intensely quiet, there was a look of wonder and of incredulity, almost of concern.
Greetings and introductions over, the unused arm-chair was brought out from its lair in the corner. Rowcliffe, in his own arm-chair, sat in shadow, facing her. What light there was fell full on her.
"I'm sorry you should have had to come to me," he said, "your sister was here a minute or two ago."
"My sister?"
"I think it must have been your sister. She said it was her sister
I was to go and see."
"I didn't know she was coming. She never told me."
"Pity. I was coming out to see you first thing tomorrow morning."
"Then you know? She told you?"
"She told me something." He smiled. "She must have been a little overanxious. You don't look as if there was very much the matter with you."
"But there isn't. It isn't me."
"Who is it then?"
"My other sister."
"Oh. I seem to have got a little mixed."
"You see, there are three of us."
He laughed.
"Three! Let me get it right. I've seen Miss Cartaret. You are Miss
Gwendolen Cartaret. And the lady I am to see is—?
"My youngest sister, Alice."
"Now I understand. I wondered how you managed those four miles. Tell me about her."
She began. She was vivid and terse. He saw that she made short cuts to the root of the matter. He showed himself keen and shrewd. Once or twice he said "I know, I know," and she checked herself.
"My sister has told you all that."
"No, she hasn't. Nothing like it. Please go on."
She went on till he interrupted her. "How old is she?"
"Just twenty-three."
"I see. Yes." He looked so keen now that she was frightened.
"Does that make it more dangerous?" she said.
He laughed. "No. It makes it less so. I don't suppose it's dangerous at all. But I can't tell till I've seen her. I say, you must be tired after that long walk."
"I'm never tired."
"That's good."
He rang the bell. The maid appeared.
"Tell Acroyd I want the trap. And bring tea—at once."
"For two, sir?"
"For two."
Gwenda rose. "Thanks very much, I must be going."
"Please stay. It won't take five minutes. Then I can drive you back."
"I can walk."
"I know you can. But—you see—" His keenness and shrewdness went from him. He was almost embarrassed. "I was going round to see your sister in the morning. But—I think I'd rather see her to-night. And—" He was improvising freely now—"I ought, perhaps, to see you after, as you understand the case. So, if you don't mind coming back with me—"
She didn't mind. Why should she?
She stayed. She sat in Rowcliffe's chair before his fire and drank his tea and ate his hot griddle-cakes (she had a healthy appetite, being young and strong). She talked to him as if she had known him a long time. All these things he made her do, and when he talked to her he made her forget what had brought her there; he made her forget Alice and Mary and her father.
When he left her for a moment she got up, restless and eager to be gone. And when he came back to her she was standing by the open window again, looking at the orchard.
Rowcliffe looked at her, taking in her tallness, her slenderness, the lithe and beautiful line of her body, curved slightly backward as she leaned against the window wall.
Never before and never again, afterwards, never, that was to say, for any other woman, did Rowcliffe feel what he felt then. Looking back on it (afterward) he could only describe it as a sense of certainty. It lacked, surprisingly, the element of surprise.
"You like my north-country orchard?" (He was certain that she did.)
She turned, smiling. "I like it very much."
They had been a long time over tea. It was half-past five before they started. He brought an overcoat and put it on her. He wrapped a rug round her knees and feet and tucked it well in.
"You don't like rugs," he said (he knew she didn't), "but you've got to have it."
She did like it. She liked his rug and his overcoat, and his little brown horse with the clanking hoofs. And she liked him, most decidedly she liked him, too. He was the sort of man you could like.
They were soon out on the moor.
Rowcliffe's youth rose in him and put words into his mouth.
"Ripping country, this."
She said it was ripping.
For the life of them they couldn't have said more about it. There were no words for the inscrutable ecstasy it gave them.
As they passed Karva Rowcliffe smiled.
"It's all right," he said, "my driving you. Of course you don't remember, but we've met—several times before."
"Where?"
"I'll show you where. Anyhow, that's your hill, isn't it?"
"How did you know it was?"
"Because I've seen you there. The first time I ever saw you—No, that was a bit farther on. At the bend of the road. We're coming to it."
They came.
"Just here," he said.
And now they were in sight of Garthdale.
"Funny I should have thought it was you who were ill."
"I'm never ill."
"You won't be as long as you can walk like that. And run. And jump—"
A horrid pause.
"You did it very nicely."
Another pause, not quite so horrid.
And then—"Do you always walk after dark and before sunrise?"
And it was as if he had said, "Why am I always meeting you? What do you do it for? It's queer, isn't it?"
But he had given her her chance. She rose to it.
"I've done it ever since we came here." (It was as if she had said "Long before you came.") "I do it because I like it. That's the best of this place. You can do what you like in it. There's nobody to see you."
("Counting me," he thought, "as nobody.")
"I should like to do it, too," he said—"to go out before sunrise—if
I hadn't got to. If I did it for fun—like you."
He knew he would not really have liked it. But his romantic youth persuaded him in that moment that he would.
XVII
Mary was up in the attic, the west attic that looked on to the road through its shy gable window.
She moved quietly there, her whole being suffused exquisitely with a sense of peace, of profound, indwelling goodness. Every act of hers for the last three days had been incomparably good, had been, indeed, perfect. She had waited on Alice hand and foot. She had made the chicken broth refused by Alice. There was nothing that she would not do for poor little Ally. When little Ally was petulant and sullen, Mary was gentle and serene. She felt toward little Ally, lying there so little and so white, a poignant, yearning tenderness. Today she had visited all the sick people in the village, though it was not Wednesday, Dr. Rowcliffe's day. (Only by visiting them on other days could Mary justify and make blameless her habit of visiting them on Wednesdays.) She had put the house in order. She had done her shopping in Morfe to such good purpose that she had concealed even from herself the fact that she had gone into Morfe, surreptitiously, to fetch the doctor.
Of course Mary was aware that she had fetched him. She had been driven to that step by sheer terror. All the way home she kept on saying to herself, "I've saved Ally." "I've saved Ally." That thought, splendid and exciting, rushed to the lighted front of Mary's mind; if the thought of Rowcliffe followed its shining trail, it thrust him back, it spread its luminous wings to hide him, it substituted its heavenly form for his.
So effectually did it cover him that Mary herself never dreamed that he was there.
Neither did the Vicar, when he saw her arrive, laden with parcels, wholesomely cheerful and reddened by her ride. He had said to her "You're a good girl, Mary," and the sadness of his tone implied that he wished her sister Gwendolen and her sister Alice were more like her. And he had smiled at her under his austere moustache, and carried in the biggest parcels for her.
The Vicar was pleased with his daughter Mary. Mary had never given him an hour's anxiety. Mary had never put him in the wrong, never made him feel uncomfortable. He honestly believed that he was fond of her. She was like her poor mother. Goodness, he said to himself, was in her face.
There had been goodness in Mary's face when she went into Alice's room to see what she could do for her. There was goodness in it now, up in the attic, where there was nobody but God to see it; goodness at peace with itself, and utterly content.
She had been back more than an hour. And ever since teatime she had been up in the attic, putting away her summer gowns. She shook them and held them out and looked at them, the poor pretty things that she had hardly ever worn. They hung all limp, all abashed and broken in her hands, as if aware of their futility. She said to herself, "They were no good, no good at all. And next year they'll all be old-fashioned. I shall be ashamed to be seen in them." And she folded them and laid them by for their winter's rest in the black trunk. And when she saw them lying there she had a moment of remorse. After all, they had been part of herself, part of her throbbing, sensuous womanhood, warmed once by her body. It wasn't their fault, poor things, any more than hers, if they had been futile and unfit. She shut the lid down on them gently, and it was as if she buried them gently out of her sight. She could afford to forgive them, for she knew that there was no futility nor unfitness in her. Deep down in her heart she knew it.
She sat on the trunk in the attitude of one waiting, waiting in the utter stillness of assurance. She could afford to wait. All her being was still, all its secret impulses appeased by the slow and orderly movements of her hands.
Suddenly she started up and listened. She heard out on the road the sound of wheels, and of hoofs that struck together. And she frowned. She thought, He might as well have called today, if he's passing.
The clanking ceased, the wheels slowed down, and Mary's peaceful heart moved violently in her breast. The trap drew up at the Vicarage gate.
She went over to the window, the small, shy gable window that looked on to the road. She saw her sister standing in the trap and Rowcliffe beneath her, standing in the road and holding out his hand. She saw the two faces, the man's face looking up, the woman's face looking down, both smiling.
And Mary's heart drew itself together in her breast. Through her shut lips her sister's name forced itself almost audibly.
"Gwen-da!"
* * * * *
Suddenly she shivered. A cold wind blew through the open window. Yet she did not move to shut it out. To have interfered with the attic window would have been a breach of compact, an unholy invasion of her sister's rights. For the attic, the smallest, the coldest, the darkest and most thoroughly uncomfortable room in the whole house, was Gwenda's, made over to her in the Vicar's magnanimity, by way of compensation for the necessity that forced her to share her room with Alice. As the attic was used for storing trunks and lumber, only two square yards of floor could be spared for Gwenda. But the two square yards, cleared, and covered with a strip of old carpet, and furnished with a little table and one chair; the wall-space by the window with its hanging bookcase; the window itself and the corner fireplace near it were hers beyond division and dispute. Nobody wanted them.
And as Mary from among the boxes looked toward her sister's territory, her small, brooding face took on such sadness as good women feel in contemplating a character inscrutable and unlike their own. Mary was sorry for Gwenda because of her inscrutability and unlikeness.
Then, thinking of Gwenda, Mary smiled. The smile began in pity for her sister and ended in a nameless, secret satisfaction. Not for a moment did Mary suspect its source. It seemed to her one with her sense of her own goodness.
When she smiled it was as if the spirit of her small brooding face took wings and fluttered, lifting delicately the rather heavy corners of her mouth and eyes.
Then, quietly, and with no indecorous haste, she went down into the drawing-room to receive Rowcliffe. She was the eldest and it was her duty.
By the mercy of Heaven the Vicar had gone out.
* * * * *
Gwenda left Rowcliffe with Mary and went upstairs to prepare Alice for his visit. She had brushed out her sister's long pale hair and platted it, and had arranged the plats, tied with knots of white ribbon, one over each low breast, and she had helped her to put on a little white flannel jacket with a broad lace collar. Thus arrayed and decorated, Alice sat up in her bed, her small slender body supported by huge pillows, white against white, with no color about her but the dull gold of her hair.
Gwenda was still in the room, tidying it, when Mary brought Rowcliffe there.
It was a Rowcliffe whom she had not yet seen. She had her back to him as he paused in the doorway to let Mary pass through. Ally's bed faced the door, and the look in Ally's eyes made her aware of the change in him. All of a sudden he had become taller (much taller than he really was) and rigid and austere. His youth and its charm dropped clean away from him. He looked ten years older than he had been ten minutes ago. Compared with him, as he stood beside her bed, Ally looked more than ever like a small child, a child vibrating with shyness and fear, a child that implacable adult authority has found out in foolishness and naughtiness; so evident was it to Ally that to Rowcliffe nothing was hidden, nothing veiled.
It was as a child that he treated her, a child who can conceal nothing, from whom most things—all the serious and important things—must be concealed. And Ally knew the terrible advantage that he took of her.
It was bad enough when he asked her questions and took no more notice of her answers than if she had been a born fool. That might have been his north-country manners and probably he couldn't help them. But there was no necessity that Ally could see for his brutal abruptness, and the callous and repellent look he had when she bared her breast to the stethescope that sent all her poor secrets flying through the long tubes that attached her heart to his abominable ears. Neither (when he had disentangled himself from the stethescope) could she understand why he should scowl appallingly as he took hold of her poor wrist to feel her pulse.
She said to herself, "He knows everything about me and he thinks I'm awful."
It was anguish to Ally that he should think her awful.
And (to make it worse, if anything could make it) there was Mary standing at the foot of the bed and staring at her. Mary knew perfectly well that he was thinking how awful she was. It was what Mary thought herself.
If only Gwenda had stayed with her! But Gwenda had left the room when she saw Rowcliffe take out his stethescope.
And as it flashed on Ally what Rowcliffe was thinking of her, her heart stopped as if it was never going on again, then staggered, then gave a terrifying jump.
* * * * *
Rowcliffe had done with Ally's little wrist. He laid it down on the counterpane, not brutally at all, but gently, almost tenderly, as if it had been a thing exquisitely fragile and precious.
He rose to his feet and looked at her, and then, all of a sudden, as he looked, Rowcliffe became young again; charmingly young, almost boyish. And, as if faintly amused at her youth, faintly touched by her fragility, he smiled. With a mouth and with eyes from which all austerity had departed he smiled at Alice.
(It was all over. He had done with her. He could afford to be kind to her as he would have been kind to a little, frightened child.)
And Alice smiled back at him with her white face between the pale gold, serious bands of platted hair.
She was no longer frightened. She forgot his austerity as if it had never been. She saw that he hadn't thought her awful in the least. He couldn't have looked at her like that if he had.
A sense of warmth, of stillness, of soft happiness flooded her body and her brain, as if the stream of life had ceased troubling and ran with an even rhythm. As she lay back, her tormented heart seemed suddenly to sink into it and rest, to be part of it, poised on the stream.
Then, still looking down at her, he spoke.
"It's pretty evident," he said, "what's the matter with you."
"Is it?"
Her eyes were all wide. He had frightened her again.
"It is," he said. "You've been starved."
"Oh," said little Ally, "is that all?"
And Rowcliffe smiled again, a little differently.
Mary said nothing. She had found out long ago that silence was her strength. Her small face brooded. Impossible to tell what she was thinking.
"What has become of the other one, I wonder?" he said to himself.
He wanted to see her. She was the intelligent one of the three sisters, and she was honest. He had said to her quite plainly that he would want her. Why, on earth, he wondered, had she gone away and left him with this sweet and good, this quite exasperatingly sweet and good woman who had told him nothing but lies?
He was aware that Mary Cartaret was sweet and good. But he had found that sweet and good women were not invariably intelligent. As for honesty, if they were always honest they would not always be sweet and good.
Through the door he opened for the eldest sister to pass out the other slipped in. She had been waiting on the landing.
He stopped her. He made a sign to her to come out with him. He closed the door behind them.
"Can I see you for two minutes?"
"Yes."
They whispered rapidly.
At the head of the stairs Mary waited. He turned. His smile acknowledged and paid deference to her sweetness and goodness, for Rowcliffe was sufficiently accomplished.
But not more so than Mary Cartaret. Her face, wide and candid, quivered with subdued interrogation. Her lips parted as if they said, "I am only waiting to know what I am to do. I will do what you like, only tell me."
Rowcliffe stood by the bedroom door, which he had opened for her to pass through again. His eyes, summoning their powerful pathos, implored forgiveness.
Mary, utterly submissive, passed through.
* * * * *
He followed Gwendolen Cartaret downstairs to the dining-room.
He knew what he was going to say, but what he did say was unexpected.
For, as she stood there in the small and old and shabby room, what struck him was her youth.
"Is your father in?" he said.
He surprised her as he had surprised himself.
"No," she said. "Why? Do you want to see him?"
He hesitated. "I almost think I'd better."
"He won't be a bit of good, you know. He never is. He doesn't even know we sent for you."
"Well, then—"
"You'd better tell me straight out. You'll have to, in the end. Is it serious?"
"No. But it will be if we don't stop it. How long has it been going on?"
"Ever since we came to this place."
"Six months, you said. And she's been worse than this last month?"
"Much worse."
"If it was only the anæmia—"
"Isn't it?"
"Yes—among other things."
"Not—her heart?"
"No—her heart's all right." He corrected himself. "I mean there's no disease in it. You see, she ought to have got well up here in this air. It's the sort of place you send anæmic people to to cure them."
"The dreadful thing is that she doesn't like the place."
"Ah—that's what I want to get at. She isn't happy in it?"
"No. She isn't happy."
He meditated. "Your sister didn't tell me that.'
"She couldn't."
"I mean your other sister—Miss Cartaret."
"She wouldn't. She'd think it rather awful."
He laughed. "Heaps of people think it awful to tell the truth. Do you happen to know why she doesn't like the place?"
She was silent. Evidently there was some "awfulness" she shrank from.
"Too lonely for her, I suppose?"
"Much too lonely."
"Where were you before you came here?"
She told him.
"Why did you leave it?"
She hesitated again. "We couldn't help it."
"Well—it seems a pity. But I suppose clergymen can't choose where they'll live."
She looked away from him. Then, as if she were trying to divert her from the trail he followed, "You forget—she's been starving herself. Isn't that enough?"
"Not in her case. You see, she isn't ill because she's been starving herself. She's been starving herself because she's ill. It's a symptom. The trouble is not that she starves herself—but that she's been starved."
"I know. I know."
"If you could get her back to that place where she was happy—"
"I can't. She can never go back there. Besides, it wouldn't be any good if she did."
He smiled. "Are you quite sure?"
"Certain."
"Does she know it?"
"No. She never knew it. But she would know it if she went back."
"That's why you took her away?"
She hesitated again. "Yes."
Rowcliffe looked grave.
"I see. That's rather unfortunate."
He said to himself: "She doesn't take it in yet. I don't see how I'm to tell her."
To her he said: "Well, I'll send the medicine along to-night."
As the door closed behind Rowcliffe, Mary appeared on the stairs.
"Gwenda," she said, "Ally wants you. She wants to know what he said."
"He said nothing."
"You look as if he'd said a great deal."
"He said nothing that she doesn't know."
"He told her there was nothing the matter with her except that she'd been starving herself."
"He told me she'd been starved."
"I don't see the difference."
"Well," said Gwenda. "He did."
* * * * *
That night the Vicar scowled over his supper. And before it was ended he broke loose.
"Which of you two sent for Dr. Rowcliffe?"
"I did," said Gwenda.
Mary said nothing.
"And what—do you—mean by doing such a thing without consulting me?"
"I mean," said Gwenda quietly, "that he should see Alice."
"And I meant—most particularly—that he shouldn't see her. If I'd wanted him to see her I'd have gone for him myself."
"When it was a bit too late," said Gwenda.
His blue eyes dilated as he looked at her.
"Do you suppose I don't know what's the matter with her as well as he does?"
As he spoke the stiff, straight moustache that guarded his mouth lifted, showing the sensual redness and fulness of the lips.
And of this expression on her father's face Gwenda understood nothing, divined nothing, knew nothing but that she loathed it.
"You may know what's the matter with her," she said, "but can you cure it?"
"Can he?" said the Vicar.