XVIII
The next day, which was a Tuesday, Alice was up and about again. Rowcliffe saw her on Wednesday and on Saturday, when he declared himself satisfied with her progress and a little surprised.
So surprised was he that he said he would not come again unless he was sent for.
And then in three days Alice slid back.
But they were not to worry about her, she said. There was nothing the matter with her except that she was tired. She was so tired that she lay all Tuesday on the drawing-room sofa and on Wednesday morning she was too tired to get up and dress.
And on Wednesday afternoon Dr. Rowcliffe found a note waiting at the blacksmith's cottage in Garth village, where he had a room with a brown gauze blind in the window and the legend in gilt letters:
SURGERY
Dr. S. Rowcliffe, M.D., F.R.C.S.
Hours of Attendance
Wednesday, 2.30-4.30.
The note ran:
"DEAR DR. ROWCLIFFE: Can you come and see me this afternoon? I think I'm rather worse. But I don't want to frighten my people—so perhaps, if you just looked in about teatime, as if you'd called?
"Yours truly,
"ALICE CARTARET."
Essy Gale had left the note that morning.
Rowcliffe looked at it dubiously. He was honest and he had the large views of a man used to a large practice. His patients couldn't complain that he lengthened his bills by paying unnecessary visits. If he wanted to add to his income in that way, he wasn't going to begin with a poor parson's hysterical daughter. But as the Vicar of Garth had called on him and left his card on Monday, there was no reason why he shouldn't look in on Wednesday about teatime. Especially as he knew that the Vicar was in the habit of visiting Upthorne and the outlying portions of his parish on Wednesday afternoons.
* * * * *
All day Alice lay in her little bed like a happy child and waited. Propped on her pillows, with her slender arms stretched out before her on the counterpane, she waited.
Her sullenness was gone. She had nothing but sweetness for Mary and for Essy. Even to her father she was sweet. She could afford it. Her instinct was now sure. From time to time a smile flickered on her small face like a light almost of triumph.
* * * * *
The Vicar and Miss Cartaret were out when Rowcliffe called at the
Vicarage, but Miss Gwendolen was in if he would like to see her.
He waited in the crowded shabby gray and amber drawing-room with the
Erard in the corner, and it was there that she came to him.
He said he had only called to ask after her sister, as he had heard in the village that she was not so well.
"I'm afraid she isn't."
"May I see her? I don't mean professionally—just for a talk."
The formula came easily. He had used it hundreds of times in the houses of parsons and of clerks and of little shopkeepers, to whom bills were nightmares.
She took him upstairs.
On the landing she turned to him.
"She doesn't look worse. She looks better."
"All right. She won't deceive me."
She did look better, better than he could have believed. There was a faint opaline dawn of color in her face.
Heaven only knew what he talked about, but he talked; for over a quarter of an hour he kept it up.
And when he rose to go he said, "You're not worse. You're better. You'll be perfectly well if you'll only get up and go out. Why waste all this glorious air?"
"If I could live on air!" said Alice.
"You can—you do to a very large extent. You certainly can't live without it."
Downstairs he lingered. But he refused the tea that Gwenda offered him. He said he hadn't time. Patients were waiting for him.
"But I'll look in next Wednesday, if I may."
"At teatime?"
"Very well—at teatime."
* * * * *
"How's Alice?" said the Vicar when he returned from Upthorne.
"She's better."
"Has that fellow Rowcliffe been here again?"
"He called—on you, I think."
(Rowcliffe's cards lay on the table flap in the passage, proving plainly that his visit was not professional.)
"And you made him see her?" he insisted.
"He saw her."
"Well?"
"He says she's all right. She'll be well if only she'll go out in the open air."
"It's what I've been dinning into her for the last three months. She doesn't want a doctor to tell her that."
He drew her into the study and closed the door. He was not angry. He had more than ever his air of wisdom and of patience.
"Look here, Gwenda," he said gravely. "I know what I'm doing. There's nothing in the world the matter with her. But she'll never be well as long as you keep on sending for young Rowcliffe."
But his daughter Gwendolen was not impressed. She knew what it meant—that air of wisdom and of patience.
Her unsubmissive silence roused his temper.
"I won't have him sent for—do you hear?"
And he made up his mind that he would go over to Morfe again and give young Rowcliffe a hint. It was to give him a hint that he had called on Monday.
* * * * *
But the Vicar did not call again in Morfe. For before he could brace himself to the effort Alice was well again.
Though the Vicar did not know it, Rowcliffe had looked in at teatime the next Wednesday and the next after that.
Alice was no longer compelled to be ill in order to see him.
XIX
"'Oh Gawd, our halp in a-ages paasst,
Our 'awp in yeears ter coom,
Our shal-ter from ther storm-ee blaasst,
And our ee-tarnal 'oam!'"
"'Ark at 'im! That's Jimmy arl over. T' think that 'is poor feyther's not in 'is graave aboove a moonth, an' 'e singin' fit t' eave barn roof off! They should tak' an' shoot 'im oop in t' owd powder magazine," said Mrs. Gale.
"Well—but it's a wonderful voice," said Gwenda Cartaret.
"I've never heard another like it, and I know something about voices,"
Alice said.
They had gone up to Upthorne to ask Mrs. Gale to look in at the
Vicarage on her way home, for Essy wasn't very well.
But Mrs. Gale had shied off from the subject of Essy. She had done it with the laughter of deep wisdom and a shake of her head. You couldn't teach Mrs. Gale anything about illness, nor about Essy.
"I knaw Assy," she had said. "There's nowt amiss with her. Doan't you woorry."
And then Jim Greatorex, though unseen, had burst out at them with his big voice. It came booming from the mistal at the back.
Alice told the truth when she said she had never heard anything like it; and even in the dale, so critical of strangers, it was admitted that she knew. The village had a new schoolmaster who was no musician, and hopeless with the choir. Alice, as the musical one of the family, had been trained to play the organ, and she played it, not with passion, for it was her duty, but with mechanical and perfunctory correctness, as she had been taught. She was also fairly successful with the village choir.
"Mebbe yo 'aven't 'eard anoother," said Mrs. Gale. "It's rackoned there isn't anoother woon like it in t' daale."
"But it's just what we want for our choir—a big barytone voice. Do you think he'd sing for us, Mrs. Gale?"
Alice said it light-heartedly, for she did not know what she was asking. She knew nothing of the story of Jim Greatorex and his big voice. It had been carefully kept from her.
"I doan knaw," said Mrs. Gale. "Jim, look yo, 'e useter sing in t'
Choorch choir."
"Why ever did he leave it?"
Mrs. Gale looked dark and tightened up her face. She knew perfectly well why Jim Greatorex had left. It was because he wasn't going to have that little milk-faced lass learning him to sing. His pride wouldn't stomach it. But not for worlds would Mrs. Gale have been the one to let Miss Alice know that.
Her eyes sought for inspiration in a crack on the stone floor.
"I can't rightly tall yo', Miss Olice. 'E sang fer t' owd schoolmaaster, look yo, an' wann schoolmaaster gaave it oop, Jimmy, 'e said 'e'd give it oop too."
"But don't you think he'd sing for me, if I were to ask him?"
"Yo' may aask 'im, Miss Olice, but I doan' knaw. Wann Jim Greatorex is sat, 'e's sat."
"There's no harm in asking him."
"Naw. Naw 'aarm there isn't," said Mrs. Gale doubtfully.
"I think I'll ask him now," said Alice.
"I wouldn', look yo, nat ef I wuss yo, Miss Olice. I wouldn' gaw to 'im in t' mistal all amoong t' doong. Yo'll sha-ame 'im, and yo'll do nowt wi' Jimmy ef 'e's sha-amed."
"Leave it, Ally. We can come another day," said Gwenda.
"Thot's it," said Mrs. Gale. "Coom another daay."
And as they turned away Jim's voice thundered after them from his stronghold in the mistal.
"From av-ver-lasstin'—THOU ART GAWD!
To andless ye-ears ther sa-ame!"
The sisters stood listening. They looked at each other.
"I say!" said Gwenda.
"Isn't he gorgeous? We'll have to come again. It would be a sin to waste him."
"It would."
"When shall we come?"
"There's heaps of time. That voice won't run away."
"No. But he might get pneumonia. He might die."
"Not he."
But Alice couldn't leave it alone.
"How about Sunday? Just after dinner? He'll be clean then."
"All right. Sunday."
But it was not till they had passed the schoolhouse outside Garth village that Alice's great idea came to her.
"Gwenda! The Concert! Wouldn't he be ripping for the Concert!"
XX
But the concert was not till the first week in December; and it was in November that Rowcliffe began to form the habit that made him remarkable in Garth, of looking in at the Vicarage toward teatime every Wednesday afternoon.
Mrs. Gale, informed by Essy, was the first to condole with Mrs.
Blenkiron, the blacksmith's wife, who had arranged to provide tea for
Rowcliffe every Wednesday in the Surgery.
"Wall, Mrs. Blenkiron," she said, "yo' 'aven't got to mak' tae for yore doctor now?"
"Naw. I 'aven't," said Mrs. Blenkiron. "And it's sexpence clane gone out o' me packet av'ry week."
Mrs. Blenkiron was a distant cousin of the Greatorexes. She had what was called a superior manner and was handsome, in the slender, high-nosed, florid fashion of the Dale.
"But there," she went on. "I doan't groodge it. 'E's yoong and you caann't blaame him. They's coompany for him oop at Vicarage."
"'E's coompany fer they, I rackon. And well yo' med saay yo' doan't groodge it ef yo knawed arl we knaw, Mrs. Blenkiron. It's no life fer yoong things oop there, long o' t' Vicar. Mind yo"—Mrs. Gale lowered her voice and looked up and down the street for possible eavesdroppers—"ef 'e was to 'ear on it, thot yoong Rawcliffe wouldn't be 'lowed t' putt 's nawse in at door agen. But theer—there's nawbody'd be thot crool an' spittiful fer to goa an' tall 'im. Our Assy wouldn't. She'd coot 'er toong out foorst, Assy would."
"Nawbody'll get it out of mae, Mrs. Gale, though it's wae as 'as to sooffer for 't."
"Eh, but Dr. Rawcliffe's a good maan, and 'e'll mak' it oop to yo', naw feear, Mrs. Blenkiron."
"And which of 'em will it bae, Mrs. Gaale, think you?"
"I caann't saay. But it woonna bae t' eldest. Nor t' yoongest—joodgin'."
"Well—the lil' laass isn' breaaking 'er 'eart fer him, t' joodge by the looks of 'er. I naver saw sech a chaange in anybody in a moonth."
"'T assn' takken mooch to maake 'er 'appy," said Mrs. Gale. For Essy, who had informed her, was not subtle.
* * * * *
But of Ally's happiness there could be no doubt. It lapped her, soaked into her like water and air. Her small head flowered under it and put out its secret colors; the dull gold of her hair began to shine again, her face showed a shallow flush under its pallor; her gray eyes were clear as if they had been dipped in water. Two slender golden arches shone above them. They hadn't been seen there for five years.
"Who would have believed," said Mary, "that Ally could have looked so pretty?"
Ally's prettiness (when she gazed at it in the glass) was delicious, intoxicating joy to Ally. She was never tired of looking at it, of turning round and round to get new views of it, of dressing her hair in new ways to set it off.
"Whatever have you done your hair like that for?" said Mary on a Wednesday when Ally came down in the afternoon with her gold spread out above her ears and twisted in a shining coil on the top of her head.
"To make it grow better," said Ally.
"Don't let Papa catch you at it," said Gwenda, "if you want it to grow any more."
Gwenda was going out. She had her hat on, and was taking her walking-stick from the stand. Ally stared.
"You're not going out?"
"I am," said Gwenda.
And she laughed as she went. She wasn't going to stay at home for
Rowcliffe every Wednesday.
* * * * *
As for Ally, the Vicar did catch her at it. He caught her the very next Wednesday afternoon. She thought he had started for Upthorne when he hadn't. He was bound to catch her.
For the best looking-glass in the house was in the Vicar's bedroom. It went the whole length and width of the wardrobe door, and Ally could see herself in it from head to foot. And on the Vicar's dressing-table there lay a large and perfect hand-glass that had belonged to Ally's mother. Only by opening the wardrobe door and with the aid of the hand-glass could Ally obtain a satisfactory three-quarters view of her face and figure.
Now, by the Vicar's magnanimity, his daughters were allowed to use his bedroom twice in every two years, in the spring and in the autumn, for the purpose of trying on their new gowns; but this year they were wearing out last winter's gowns, and Ally had no business in the Vicar's bedroom at four o'clock in the afternoon.
She was turning slowly round and round, with her head tilted back over her left shoulder; she had just caught sight of her little white nose as it appeared in a vanishing profile and was adjusting her head at another and still more interesting angle when the Vicar caught her.
He was well in the middle of the room, and staring at her, before she was aware of him. The wardrobe door, flung wide open, had concealed his entrance, but if Ally had not been blinded and intoxicated with her own beauty she would have seen him before she began smiling, full-face first, then three-quarters, then sideways, a little tilted.
Then she shut to the door of the wardrobe (for the back view that was to reassure her as to the utter prettiness of her shoulders and the nape of her neck), and it was at that moment that she saw him, reflected behind her in the long looking-glass.
She screamed and dropped the hand-glass. She heard it break itself at her feet.
"Papa," she cried, "how you frightened me!"
It was not so much that he had caught her smiling at her own face, it was that his face, seen in the looking-glass, was awful. And besides being awful it was evil. Even to Ally's innocence it was evil. If it had been any other man Ally's instinct would have said that he looked horrid without Ally knowing or caring to know what her instinct meant. But the look on her father's face was awful because it was mysterious. Neither she nor her instinct had a word for it. There was cruelty in it, and, besides cruelty, some quality nameless and unrecognisable, subtle and secret, and yet crude somehow and vivid. The horror of it made her forget that he had caught her in one of the most deplorably humiliating situations in which a young girl can be caught—deliberately manufacturing smiles for her own amusement.
"You've no business to be here," said the Vicar.
He picked up the broken hand-glass, and as he looked at it the cruelty and the nameless quality passed out of his face as if a hand had smoothed it, and it became suddenly weak and pathetic, the face of a child whose precious magic thing another child has played with and broken.
Then Alice remembered that the hand-glass had been her mother's.
"I'm sorry I've broken it, Papa, if you liked it."
Her voice recalled him to himself.
"Ally," he said, "what am I to think of you? Are you a fool—or what?"
The sting of it lashed Ally's brain to a retort. (All that she had needed hitherto to be effective was a little red blood in her veins, and she had got it now.)
"I'd be a fool," she said, "if I cared two straws what you think of me, since you can't see what I am. I'm sorry if I've broken your old hand-glass, though I didn't break it. You broke it yourself."
Carrying her golden top-knot like a crown, she left the room.
The Vicar took the broken hand-glass and hid it in a drawer. He was sorry for himself. The only impression left on his mind was that his daughter Ally had been cruel to him.
* * * * *
But Ally didn't care a rap what he thought of her, or what impression she had left on his mind. She was much too happy. Besides, if you once began caring what Papa thought there would be no peace for anybody. He was so impossible that he didn't count. He wasn't even an effective serpent in her Paradise. He might crawl all over it (as indeed he did crawl), but he left no trail. The thought of how he had caught her at the looking-glass might be disagreeable, but it couldn't slime those holy lawns. Neither could it break the ecstasy of Wednesday, that heavenly day. Nothing could break it as long as Dr. Rowcliffe continued to look in at tea-time and her father to explore the furthest borders of his parish.
The peace of Paradise came down on the Vicarage every Wednesday the very minute the garden gate had swung back behind the Vicar. He started so early and he was back so late that there was never any chance of his encountering young Rowcliffe.
* * * * *
To be sure, young Rowcliffe hardly ever said a word to her. He always talked to Mary or to Gwenda. But there was nothing in his reticence to disturb Ally's ecstasy. It was bliss to sit and look at Rowcliffe and to hear him talk. When she tried to talk to him herself her brain swam and she became unhappy and confused. Intellectual effort was destructive to the blessed state, which was pure passivity, untroubled contemplation in its early stages, before the oncoming of rapture.
The fact that Mary and Gwenda could talk to him and talk intelligently showed how little they cared for him or were likely to care, and how immeasurably far they were from the supreme act of adoration. Similarly, the fact that Rowcliffe could talk to Mary and to Gwenda showed how little he cared. If he had cared, if he were ever going to care as Ally understood caring, his brain would have swum like hers and his intellect would have abandoned him.
Whereas, it was when he turned to Ally that he hadn't a word to say, any more than she had, and that he became entangled in his talk, and that the intellect he tried to summon to him tottered and vanished at his call.
Another thing—when he caught her looking at him (and though Ally was careful he did catch her now and then) he always either lowered his eyelids or looked away. He was afraid to look at her; and that, as everybody knew, was an infallible sign. Why, Ally was afraid to look at him, only she couldn't help it. Her eyes were dragged to the terror and the danger.
So Ally reasoned in her Paradise.
For when Rowcliffe was once gone her brain was frantically busy. It never gave her any rest. From the one stuff of its dreams it span an endless shining thread; from the one thread it wove an endless web of visions. From nothing at all it built up drama after drama. It was all beautiful what Ally's brain did, all noble, all marvelously pure. (The Vicar would have been astonished if he had known how pure.) There was no sullen and selfish Ally in Ally's dreams. They were all of sacrifice, of self-immolation, of beautiful and noble things done for Rowcliffe, of suffering for Rowcliffe, of dying for him. All without Rowcliffe being very palpably and positively there.
It was only at night, when Ally's brain slept among its dreams, that Rowcliffe's face leaned near to hers without ever touching it, and his arms made as if they clasped her and never met. Even then, always at the first intangible approach of him, she woke, terrified because dreams go by contraries.
"Is your sister always so silent?" Rowcliffe asked that Wednesday (the
Wednesday when Ally had been caught).
He was alone with Mary.
"Who? Ally? No. She isn't silent at all. What do you think of her?"
"I think," said Rowcliffe, "she looks extraordinarily well."
"That's owing to you," said Mary. "I never saw her pull round so fast before."
"No? I assure you," said Rowcliffe, "I haven't anything to do with it." He was very stiff and cold and stern.
Rowcliffe was annoyed because it was two Wednesdays running that he had found himself alone with the eldest and the youngest Miss Cartaret. The second one had gone off heaven knew where.
XXI
The Vicar of Garth considered himself unhappy (to say the least of it) in his three children, but he had never asked himself what, after all, would he have done without them? After all (as they had frequently reminded themselves), without them he could never have lived comfortably on his income. They did the work and saved him the expenses of a second servant, a housekeeper, an under-gardener, an organist and two curates.
The three divided the work of the Vicarage and parish, according to the tastes and abilities of each. At home Mary kept the house and did the sewing. Gwenda looked after the gray and barren garden, she trimmed the narrow paths and the one flower-bed and mowed the small square of grass between. Alice trailed through the lower rooms, dusting furniture feebly; she gathered and arranged the flowers when there were any in the bed. Outside, Mary, being sweet and good, taught in the boys' Sunday-school; Alice, because she was fond of children, had the infants. For the rest, Mary, who was lazy, had taken over that small portion of the village that was not Baptist or Wesleyan or Congregational. Gwenda, for her own amusement, and regardless of sect and creed, the hopelessly distant hamlets and the farms scattered on the long, raking hillsides and the moors. Alice declared herself satisfied with her dominion over the organ and the village choir.
Alice was behaving like an angel in her Paradise. No longer listless and sullen, she swept through the house with an angel's energy. A benign, untiring angel sat at the organ and controlled the violent voices of the choir.
The choir looked upon Ally's innocent art with pride and admiration and amusement. It tickled them to see those little milk-white hands grappling with organ pieces that had beaten the old schoolmaster.
Ally enjoyed the pride and admiration of the choir and was unaware of its amusement. She enjoyed the importance of her office. She enjoyed the massive, voluptuous vibrations that made her body a vehicle for the organ's surging and tremendous soul. Ally's body had become a more and more tremulous, a more sensitive and perfect medium for vibrations. She would not have missed one choir practice or one service.
And she said to herself, "I may be a fool, but Papa or the parish would have to pay an organist at least forty pounds a year. It costs less to keep me. So he needn't talk."
* * * * *
Then in November came the preparations for the village concert.
They were stupendous.
All morning the little Erad piano shook with the Grande Valse and the Grande Polonaise of Chopin. The diabolic thing raged through the shut house, knowing that it went unchallenged, that its utmost violence was licensed until the day after the concert.
Rowcliffe heard it whenever he drove past the Vicarage on his way over the moors.
XXII
Rowcliffe was now beginning to form that other habit (which was to make him even more remarkable than he was already), the hunting down of Gwendolen Cartaret in the open.
He was annoyed with Gwendolen Cartaret. When she had all the rest of the week to walk in she would set out on Wednesdays before teatime and continue until long after dark. He had missed her twice now. And on the third Wednesday he saw her swinging up the hill toward Upthorne as he, leaving his surgery, came round the corner of the village by the bridge.
"I believe," he thought, "she's doing it on purpose. To avoid me."
He was determined not to be avoided.
* * * * *
"The doctor's very late this afternoon," said Mary. "I suppose he's been sent for somewhere."
Alice said nothing. She couldn't trust herself to speak. She lived in sickening fear that on some Wednesday afternoon he would be sent for. It had never happened yet, but that made it all the more likely that it had happened now.
They waited till five; till a quarter-past.
"I really can't wait any longer," said Mary, "for a man who doesn't come."
* * * * *
By that time Rowcliffe and Gwenda were far on the road to Upthorne.
He had overtaken her about a hundred yards above the schoolhouse, before the road turned to Upthorne Moor.
"I say, how you do sprint up these hills!"
She turned.
"Is that you, Dr. Rowcliffe?"
"Of course it's me. Where are you off to?"
"Upthorne. Anywhere."
"May I come too?"
"If you want to."
"Of course I want to."
"Have you had any tea?"
"No."
"Weren't they in?"
"I didn't stop to ask."
"Why not?"
"Because I saw you stampeding on in front of me, and I swore I'd overtake you before you got round that corner. And I have overtaken you."
"Shall we go back? We've time."
He frowned. "No. I never turn back. Let's get on. Get on."
They went on at a terrific pace. And as she persisted in walking about half a foot in front of him he saw the movement of her fine long limbs and the little ripple of her shoulders under the gray tweed.
Presently he spoke.
"It wasn't you I heard playing the other night?"
"No. It must have been my youngest sister."
"I knew it wasn't you."
"It might have been for all you knew."
"It couldn't possibly. If you played you wouldn't play that way."
"What way?"
"Your sister's way. Whatever you wanted to do you'd do it beautifully or not at all."
She made no response. She did not even seem to have heard him.
"I don't mean to say," he said, "that your sister doesn't play beautifully."
She turned malignly. He liked her when she turned.
"You mean that she plays abominably."
"I didn't mean to say it."
"Why shouldn't you say it?"
"Because you don't say those things. It isn't polite."
"But I know Alice doesn't play well—not those big things. The wonder is she can play them at all."
"Why does she attempt—the big things?"
"Why does anybody? Because she loves them. She's never heard them properly played. So she doesn't know. She just trusts to her feeling."
"Is there anything else, after all, you can trust?"
"I don't know. You see, Alice's feeling tells her it's all right to play like that, and my feeling tells me it's all wrong."
"You can trust your feelings."
"Why mine more than hers?"
"Because your feelings are the feelings of a beautifully sane and perfectly balanced person."
"How can you possibly tell? You don't know me."
"I know your type."
"My type isn't me. You can't tell by that."
"You can if you're a physiologist."
"Being a physiologist won't tell you anything about me."
"Oh, won't it?"
"It can't."
"Why not?"
"How can it?"
"You think it can't tell me anything about your soul?"
"Oh—my soul——" Her shoulders expressed disdain for it.
"Do you dislike my mentioning it? Would you rather we didn't talk about it? Perhaps you're tired of having it talked about?"
"No; my poor soul has never done anything to get itself talked about."
"I only thought that as your father, perhaps, specialises in souls—"
"He doesn't specialise in mine. He knows nothing about it."
"The specialist never does. To know anything—the least little thing—about the soul, you must know everything—everything you can know—about the body. So that you're wrong even about your soul. Being a physiologist tells me that your sort of body—a transparently clean and strong and utterly unconscious body—goes with a transparently clean and strong and utterly unconscious soul."
"Utterly unconscious?"
He was silent a moment and then answered:
"Utterly unconscious."
They walked on in silence till they came in sight of the marshes and the long gray line of Upthorne Farm.
"That's where I met you once," he said. "Do you remember? You were coming out of the door as I went in."
"You seem to have been always meeting me."
"Always meeting you. And then—-always missing you. Just when I expected most to find you."
"If we go much farther in this direction," said Gwenda, "we shall meet
Papa."
"Well—I suppose some day I shall have to meet him. Do you realise that I've never met him yet?"
"Haven't you?"
"No. Always I've been on the point of meeting him, and always some malignant fate has interfered."
She smiled. He loved her smile.
"Why are you smiling?"
"I was only wondering whether the fate was really so malignant."
"You mean that if he met me he'd dislike me?"
"He always has disliked anybody we like. You see, he's a very funny father."
"All fathers," said Rowcliffe, "are more or less funny."
She laughed. Her laughter enchanted him.
"Yes. But my father doesn't mean to be as funny as he is."
"I see. He wouldn't really mean to dislike me. Then, perhaps, if I regularly laid myself out for it, by years of tender and untiring devotion I might win him over?"
She laughed again; she laughed as youth laughs, for the pure joy of laughter. She looked on her father as a persistent, delightful jest. He adored her laughter.
It proved how strong and sane she was—if she could take him like that. Rowcliffe had seen women made bitter, made morbid, driven into lunatic asylums by fathers who were as funny as Mr. Cartaret.
"You wouldn't, you wouldn't," she said. "He's funnier than you've any idea of."
"Is he ever ill?"
"Never."
"That of course makes it difficult."
"Except colds in his head. But he wouldn't have you for a cold in his head. He wouldn't have you for anything if he could help it."
"Well—perhaps—if he's as funny as all that, we'd better turn."
They turned.
They were walking so fast now that they couldn't talk.
Presently they slackened and he spoke.
"I say, shall you ever get away from this place?"
"Never, I think."
"Do you never want to get away?"
"No. Never. You see, I love it."
"I know you do." He said it savagely, as if he were jealous of the place.
"So do you," she answered.
"If I didn't I suppose I should have to."
"Yes, it's better, if you've got to live in it."
"That wasn't what I meant."
After that they were silent for a long time. She was wondering what he did mean.
When they reached the Vicarage gate he sheered off the path and held out his hand.
"Oh—aren't you coming in for tea?" she said.
"Thanks. No. It's a little late. I don't think I want any."
He paused. "I've got what I wanted."
He stepped backward, facing her, raising his cap, then he turned and hurried down the hill.
Gwenda walked slowly up the flagged path to the house door. She stood there, thinking.
"He's got what he wanted. He only wanted to see what I was like."
XXIII
Rowcliffe had ten minutes on his hands while they were bringing his trap round from the Red Lion.
He was warming his hands at the surgery fire when he heard voices in the parlor on the other side of the narrow passage. One voice pleaded, the other reserved judgment.
"Do you think he'd do it if I were to go up and ask him?" It was Alice
Cartaret's voice.
"I caann't say, Miss Cartaret, I'm sure."
"Could you persuade him yourself, Mrs. Blenkiron?"
"It wouldn't be a bit of good me persuadin' him. Jim Greatorex wouldn' boodge that mooch for me."
A pause. Alice was wavering, aware, no doubt, of the folly of her errand. Rowcliffe had only to lie low and she would go.
"Could Mr. Blenkiron?"
No. Rowcliffe in the surgery smiled all to himself as he warmed his hands. Alice was holding her ground. She was spinning out the time.
"Not he. Mr. Blenkiron's got soomat alse to do without trapseing after
Jim Greatorex."
"Oh."
Alice's voice was distant and defensive. He was sorry for Alice. She was not yet broken in to the north country manner, and her softness winced under these blows. There was nobody to tell her that Mrs. Blenkiron's manner was a criticism of her young kinsman, Jim Greatorex.
Mrs. Blenkiron presently made this apparent.
"Jim's sat oop enoof as it is. You'd think there was nawbody in this village good enoof to kape coompany wi' Jimmy, the road he goas. Ef I was you, Miss Olice, I should let him be."
"I would, but it's his voice we want. I'm thinking of the concert,
Mrs. Blenkiron. It's the only voice we've got that'll fill the room."
Mrs. Blenkiron laughed.
"Eh—he'll fill it fer you, right enoof. You'll have all the yoong laads and laasses in the Daale toomblin' in to hear Jimmy."
"We want them. We want everybody. You Wesleyans and all."
Another pause. Rowcliffe was interested. Alice was really displaying considerable intelligence. Almost she persuaded him that her errand was genuine.
"Do you think Essy Gale could get him to come?"
In the surgery Rowcliffe whistled inaudibly. That was indeed a desperate shift.
Rowcliffe had turned and was now standing with his back to the fire.
He was intensely interested.
"Assy Gaale? He would n' coom for Assy's asskin', a man like
Greatorex."
Mrs. Blenkiron's blood, the blood of the Greatorexes, was up.
"Naw," said Jim Greatorex's kinswoman, "if you want Greatorex to sing for you as bad as all that, Miss Cartaret, you'd better speak to the doctor."
Rowcliffe became suddenly grave. He watched the door.
"He'd mebbe do it for him. He sats soom store by Dr. Rawcliffe."
"But"—Ally's voice sounded nearer—"he's gone, hasn't he?"
(The minx, the little, little minx!)
"Naw. But he's joost goin'. Shall I catch him?"
"You might."
Mrs. Blenkiron caught him on the threshold of the surgery.
"Will you speak to Miss Cartaret a minute, Dr. Rawcliffe?"
"Certainly."
Mrs. Blenkiron withdrew. The kitchen door closed on her flight. For the first time in their acquaintance Rowcliffe was alone with Alice Cartaret, and though he was interested he didn't like it.
"I thought I heard your voice," said he with reckless geniality.
They stood on their thresholds looking at each other across the narrow passage. It was as if Alice Cartaret's feet were fixed there by an invisible force that held her fascinated and yet frightened.
Rowcliffe had paused too, as at a post of vantage, the better to observe her.
A moment ago, warming his hands in the surgery, he could have sworn that she, the little maneuvering minx, had laid a trap for him. She had come on her fool's errand, knowing that it was a fool's errand, for nothing on earth but that she might catch him, alone and defenseless, in the surgery. It was the sort of thing she did, the sort of thing she always would do. She didn't want to know (not she!) whether Jim Greatorex would sing or not, she wanted to know, and she meant to know, why he, Steven Rowcliffe, hadn't turned up that afternoon, and where he had gone, and what he had been doing, and the rest of it. There were windows at the back of the Vicarage. Possibly she had seen him charging up the hill in pursuit of her sister, and she was desperate. All this he had believed and did still believe.
But, as he looked across at the little hesitating figure and the scared face framed in the doorway, he had compassion on her. Poor little trapper, so pitifully trapped; so ignorant of the first rules and principles of trapping that she had run hot-foot after her prey when she should have lain low and lured it silently into her snare. She was no more than a poor little frightened minx, caught in his trap, peering at him from it in terror. God knew he hadn't meant to set it for her, and God only knew how he was going to get her out of it.
"Poor things," he thought, "if they only knew how horribly they embarrass me!"
For of course she wasn't the first. The situation had repeated itself, monotonously, scores of times in his experience. It would have been a nuisance even if Alice Cartaret had not been Gwendolen Cartaret's sister. That made it intolerable.
All this complex pity and repugnance was latent in his one sense of horrible embarrassment.
Then their hands met.
"You want to see me?"
"I did—" She was writhing piteously in the trap.
"You'd better come into the surgery. There's a fire there."
He wasn't going to keep her out there in the cold; and he wasn't going to walk back with her to the Vicarage. He didn't want to meet the Vicar and have the door shut in his face. Rowcliffe, informed by Mrs. Blenkiron, was aware, long before Gwenda had warned him, that he ran this risk. The Vicar's funniness was a byword in the parish.
But he left the door ajar.
"Well," he said gently, "what is it?"
"Shall you be seeing Jim Greatorex soon?"
"I might. Why?"
She told her tale again; she told it in little bursts of excitement punctuated with shy hesitations. She told it with all sorts of twists and turns, winding and entangling herself in it and coming out again breathless and frightened, like a lost creature that has been dragged through the brake. And there were long pauses when Alice put her head on one side, considering, as if she held her tale in her hands and were looking at it and wondering whether she really could go on.
"And what is it you want me to do?" said Rowcliffe finally.
"To ask him."
"Hadn't you better ask him yourself?"
"Would he do it for me?"
"Of course he would."
"I wonder. Perhaps—if I asked him prettily—"
"Oh, then—he couldn't help himself."
There was a pause. Rowcliffe, a little ashamed of himself, looked at the floor, and Alice looked at Rowcliffe and tried to fathom the full depth of his meaning from his face. That there was a depth and that there was a meaning she never doubted. This time Rowcliffe missed the pathos of her gray eyes.
An idea had come to him.
"Look here—Miss Cartaret—if you can get Jim Greatorex to sing for you, if you can get him to take an interest in the concert or in any mortal thing besides beer and whisky, you'll be doing the best day's work you ever did in your life."
"Do you think I could?" she said.
"I think you could probably do anything with him if you gave your mind to it."
He meant it. He meant it. That was really his opinion of her. Her lifted face was radiant as she drank bliss at one draught from the cup he held to her. But she was not yet satisfied.
"You'd like me to do it?"
"I should very much."
His voice was firm, but his eyes looked uneasy and ashamed.
"Would you like me to get him back in the choir?"
"I'd like you to get him back into anything that'll keep him out of mischief."
She raised her chin. There was a more determined look on her small, her rather insignificant face than he would have thought to see there.
She rose.
"Very well," she said superbly. "I'll do it."
He held out his hand.
"I don't say, Miss Cartaret, that you'll reclaim him."
"Nor I. But—if you want me to, I'll try."
They parted on it.
Rowcliffe smiled as he closed the surgery door behind him.
"That'll give her something else to think about," he said to himself.
"And it'll take her all her time."
XXIV
The next Sunday, early in the afternoon, Alice went, all by herself, to Upthorne.
Hitherto she had disliked going to Upthorne by herself. She had no very subtle feeling for the aspects of things; but there was something about the road to Upthorne that repelled her. A hundred yards or so above the schoolhouse it turned, leaving behind it the wide green bottom and winding up toward the naked moor. To the north, on her right, it narrowed and twisted; the bed of the beck lay hidden. A thin scrub of low thorn trees covered the lower slopes of the further hillside. Here and there was a clearing and a cottage or a farm. On her left she had to pass the dead mining station, the roofless walls, the black window gaps, the melancholy haunted colonnades, the three chimneys of the dead furnaces, square cornered, shooting straight and high as the bell-towers of some hill city of the South, beautiful and sinister, guarding that place of ashes and of ruin. Then the sallow winter marshes. South of the marshes were the high moors. Their flanks showed black where they have been flayed by the cuttings of old mines. At intervals, along the line of the hillside, masses of rubble rose in hummocks or hung like avalanches, black as if they had been discharged by blasting. Beyond, in the turn of the Dale, the village of Upthorne lay unseen.
And hitherto, in all that immense and inhuman desolation nothing (to Alice) had been more melancholy, more sinister, more haunted than the house where John Greatorex had died. With its gray, unsleeping face, its lidless eyes, staring out over the marshes, it had lost (for Alice) all likeness to a human habitation. It repudiated the living; it remembered; it kept a grim watch with its dead.
But Alice's mind, acutely sensitive in one direction, had become callous in every other.
* * * * *
Greatorex was in the kitchen, smoking his Sunday afternoon pipe in the chimney corner, screened from the open doorway by the three-foot thickness of the house wall.
Maggie, his servant, planted firmly on the threshold, jerked her head over her shoulder to call to him.
"There's a yoong laady wants to see yo, Mr. Greatorex!"
There was no response but a sharp tapping on the hob, as Greatorex knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
Maggie stood looking at Alice a little mournfully with her deep-set, blue, pathetic eyes. Maggie had once been pretty in spite of her drab hair and flat features, but where her high color remained it had hardened with her thirty-five years.
"Well yo' coom?"
Maggie called again and waited. Courageous in her bright blue Sunday gown, she waited while her master rose, then, shame-faced as if driven by some sharp sign from him, she slunk into the scullery.
Jim Greatorex appeared on his threshold.
On his threshold, utterly sober, carrying himself with the assurance of the master in his own house, he would not have suffered by comparison with any man. Instead of the black broadcloth that Alice had expected, he wore a loose brown shooting jacket, drab corduroy breeches, a drab cloth waistcoat and brown leather leggings, and he wore them with a distinction that Rowcliffe might have envied. His face, his whole body, alert and upright, had the charm of some shy, half-savage animal. When he stood at ease his whole face, with all its features, sensed you and took you in; the quivering eyebrows were aware of you; the nose, with its short, high bridge, its fine, wide nostrils, repeated the sensitive stare of the wide eyes; his mouth, under its golden brown moustache, was somber with a sort of sullen apprehension, till in a sudden, childlike confidence it smiled. His whole face and all its features smiled.
He was smiling at Alice now, as if struck all of a sudden by her smallness.
"I've come to ask a favor, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice.
"Ay," said Greatorex. He said it as if ladies called every day to ask him favors. "Will you coom in, Miss Cartaret?" It was the mournful and musical voice that she had heard sometimes last summer on the road outside the back door of the Vicarage.
She came in, pausing on the threshold and looking about her, as if she stood poised on the edge of an adventure. Her smallness, and the delicious, exploring air of her melted Jim's heart and made him smile at her.
"It's a roough plaace fer a laady," he said.
"It's a beautiful place, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice.
And she did actually think it was beautiful with its stone floor, its white-washed walls, its black oak dresser and chest and settle; not because of these things but because it was on the border of her Paradise. Rowcliffe had sent her there. Jim Greatorex had glamour for her, less on his own account than as a man in whom Rowcliffe was interested.
"You'd think it a bit loansoom, wouldn' yo', ef yo' staayed in it yeear in and yeear out?"
"I don't know," said Alice doubtfully. "Perhaps—a little," she ventured, encouraged by Greatorex's indulgent smile.
"An' loansoom it is," said Greatorex dismally.
Alice explored, penetrating into the interior.
"Oh—but aren't you glad you've got such a lovely fireplace?"
"I doan' knaw as I've thought mooch about it. We get used to our own."
"What are those hooks for in the chimney?"
"They? They're fer 'angin' the haams on—to smoak 'em."
"I see."
She would have sat there on the oak settle but that Greatorex was holding open the door of an inner room.
"Yo'd better coom into t' parlor, Miss Cartaret. It'll be more coomfortable for you."
She rose and followed him. She had been long enough in Garth to know that if you are asked to go into the parlor you must go. Otherwise you risk offending the kind gods of the hearth and threshold.
The parlor was a long low room that continued the line of the house to its southern end. One wide mullioned window looked east over the marsh, the other south to the hillside across a little orchard of dwarfed and twisted trees.
To Alice they were the trees of her Paradise and the hillside was its boundary.
Greatorex drew close to the hearth the horsehair and mahogany armchair with the white antimacassar.
"Sit yo' down and I'll putt a light to the fire."
"Not for me," she protested.
But Greatorex was on his knees before her, lighting the fire.
"You'll 'ave wet feet coomin' over t' moor. Cauld, too, yo'll be."
She sat and watched him. He was deft with his great hands, like a woman, over his fire-lighting.
"There—she's burning fine." He rose, turning triumphantly on his hearth as the flame leaped in the grate.
"Yo'll let me mak' yo' a coop of tae, Miss Cartaret."
There was an interrogative lilt at the end of all his sentences, even when, as now, he was making statements that admitted of no denial. But his guest missed the incontrovertible and final quality of what was said.
"Please don't trouble."
"It's naw trooble—naw trooble at all. Maaggie'll 'ave got kettle on."
He strode out of his parlor into his kitchen. "Maaggie! Maaggie!" he called. "Are yo' there? Putt kettle on and bring tae into t' parlor."
Alice looked about her while she waited.
Though she didn't know it, Jim Greatorex's parlor was a more tolerable place than the Vicarage drawing-room. Brown cocoanut matting covered its stone floor. In front of the wide hearth on the inner wall was a rug of dyed sheepskin bordered with a strip of scarlet snippets. The wooden chimney-piece, the hearth-place, the black hobs, the straight barred grate with its frame of fine fluted iron, belonged to a period of simplicity. The oblong mahogany table in the center of the room, the sofa and chairs, upholstered in horsehair, were of a style austere enough to be almost beautiful. Down the white ground of the wall-paper an endless succession of pink nosegays ascended and descended between parallel stripes of blue.
There were no ornaments to speak of in Greatorex's parlor but the grocer's tea-caddies on the mantelshelf and the little china figures, the spotted cows, the curly dogs, the boy in blue, the girl in pink; and the lustre ware and the tea-sets, the white and gold, the blue and white, crowded behind the diamond panes of the two black oak cupboards. Of these one was set in the most conspicuous corner, the other in the middle of the long wall facing the east window, bare save for the framed photographs of Greatorex's family, the groups, the portraits of father and mother and of grandparents, enlarged from vignettes taken in the seventies and eighties—faces defiant, stolid and pathetic; yearning, mournful, tender faces, slightly blurred.
All these objects impressed themselves on Ally's brain, adhering to its obsession and receiving from it an immense significance and importance.
* * * * *
She heard Maggie's running feet, and the great leisurely steps of
Greatorex, and his voice, soft and kind, encouraging Maggie.
"Theer—that's t' road. Gently, laass—moor' 'aaste, less spead. Now t' tray—an' a clane cloth—t' woon wi' laace on 't. Thot's t' road."
Maggie whispered, awestruck by these preparations:
"Which coops will yo' 'ave, Mr. Greatorex?"
"T' best coops, Maaggie."
Maggie had to fetch them from the corner cupboard (they were the white and gold). At Greatorex's command she brought the little round oak table from its place in the front window and set it by the hearth before the visitor. Humbly, under her master's eye, yet with a sort of happy pride about her, she set out the tea-things and the glass dishes of jam and honey and tea-cakes.
Greatorex waited, silent and awkward, till his servant had left the room. Then he came forward.
"Theer's caake," he said. "Maaggie baaked un yesterda'. An' theer's hooney."
He made no servile apologies for what he set before her. He was giving her nothing that was not good, and he knew it.
And he sat down facing her and watched her pour out her tea and help herself with her little delicate hands. If he had been a common man, a peasant, his idea of courtesy would have been to leave her to herself, to turn away his eyes from her in that intimate and sacred act of eating and drinking. But Greatorex was a farmer, the descendant of yeomen, and by courtesy a yeoman still, and courtesy bade him watch and see that his guest wanted for nothing.
That he did not sit down at the little table and drink tea with her himself showed that his courtesy knew where to draw the dividing line.
"But why aren't you having anything yourself?" said Alice. She really wondered.
He smiled. "It's a bit too early for me, thank yo'. Maaggie'll mak' me a coop by and bye."
And she said to herself, "How beautifully he did it."
He was indeed doing it beautifully all through. He watched her little fingers, and the very instant they had disposed of a morsel he offered her another. It was a deep and exquisite pleasure to him to observe her in that act of eating and drinking. He had never seen anything like the prettiness, the dainty precision that she brought to it. He had never seen anything so pretty as Ally herself, in the rough gray tweed that exaggerated her fineness and fragility; never anything so distracting and at the same time so heartrending as the gray muff and collar of squirrel fur, and the little gray fur hat with the bit of blue peacock's breast laid on one side of it like a folded wing.
As he watched her he thought, "If I was to touch her I should break her."
* * * * *
Then the conversation began.
"I was sorry," he said, "to hear yo was so poorly, Miss Cartaret."
"I'm all right now. You can see I'm all right."
He shook his head. "I saw yo' a moonth ago, and I didn't think then I sud aver see yo' at Oopthorne again."
He paused.
"'E's a woonderful maan, Dr. Rawcliffe."
"He is," said Alice.
Her voice was very soft, inaudible as a breath. All the blood in her body seemed to rush into her face and flood it and spread up her forehead to the roots of the gold hair that the east wind had crisped round the edges of her hat. She thought, "It'll be awful if he guesses, and if he talks." But when she looked at Greatorex his face reassured her, it was so utterly innocent of divination. And the next moment he went straight to the matter in hand.
"An' what's this thing you've coom to aassk me, Miss Cartaret?"
"Well"—she looked at him and her gray eyes were soft and charmingly candid—"it was if you'd be kind enough to sing at our concert. You've heard about it?"
"Ay, I've heard about it, right enoof."
"Well—won't you? You have sung, you know."
"Yes. I've soong. But thot was in t' owd schoolmaaster's time. Yo' wouldn't care to hear my singin' now. I've got out of the way of it, like."
"You haven't, Mr. Greatorex. I've heard you. You've got a magnificent voice. There isn't one like it in the choir."
"Ay, there's not mooch wrong with my voice, I rackon. But it's like this, look yo. I joost soong fer t' schoolmaaster. He was a friend—a personal friend of mine. And he's gone. And I'm sure I doan' knaw—"
"I know, Mr. Greatorex. I know exactly how you feel about it. You sang to please your friend. He's gone and you don't like the idea of singing for anybody else—for a set of people you don't know."
She had said it. It was the naked truth and he wasn't going to deny it.
She went on. "We're strangers and perhaps you don't like us very much, and you feel that singing for us would be like singing the Lord's song in a strange country; you feel as if it would be profanation—a kind of disloyalty."
"Thot's it. Thot's it." Never had he been so well interpreted.
"It's that—and it's because you miss him so awfully."
"Wall—" He seemed inclined, in sheer honesty, to deprecate the extreme and passionate emotion she suggested. I would n' saay—O' course, I sort o' miss him. I caann't afford to lose a friend—I 'aven't so many of 'em."
"I know. It's the waters of Babylon, and you're hanging up your voice in the willow tree." She could be gay and fluent enough with Greatorex, who was nothing to her. "But it's an awful pity. A willow tree can't do anything with a big barytone voice hung up in it."
He laughed then. And afterward, whenever he thought of it, he laughed.
She saw that he had adopted his attitude first of all in resentment, that he had continued it as a passionate, melancholy pose, and that he was only keeping it up through sheer obstinacy. He would be glad of a decent excuse to abandon it, if he could find one.
"And your friend must have been proud of your voice, wasn't he?"
"He sat more store by it than what I do. It was he, look yo, who trained me so as I could sing proper."
"Well, then, he must have taken some trouble over it. Do you think he'd like you to go and hang it up in a willow tree?"
Greatorex looked up, showing a shamefaced smile. The little lass had beaten him.
"Coom to think of it, I doan' knaw as he would like it mooch."
"Of course he wouldn't like it. It would be wasting what he'd done."