"So 't would. I naver thought of it like thot."
She rose. She knew the moment of surrender, and she knew, woman-like, that it must not be overpassed. She stood before him, drawing on her gloves, fastening her squirrel collar and settling her chin in the warm fur with the movement of a small burrowing animal, a movement that captivated Greatorex. Then, deliberately and finally, she held out her hand.
"Good-bye, Mr. Greatorex. It's all right, isn't it? You're coming to sing for him, you know, not for us."
"I'm coomin'," said Greatorex.
She settled her chin again, tucked her hands away in the squirrel muff and went quickly toward the door. He followed.
"Let me putt Daasy in t' trap, Miss Cartaret, and drive yo' home."
"I wouldn't think of it. Thank you all the same."
She was in the kitchen now, on the outer threshold. He followed her there.
"Miss Cartaret—"
She turned. "Well?"
His face was flushed to the eyes. He struggled visibly for expression.
"Yo' moosn' saay I doan' like yo'. Fer it's nat the truth."
"I'm glad it isn't," she said.
He walked with her down the bridle path to the gate. He was dumb after his apocalypse.
They parted at the gate.
With long, slow, thoughtful strides Greatorex returned along the bridle path to his house.
* * * * *
Alice went gaily down the hill to Garth. It was the hill of Paradise. And if she thought of Greatorex and of how she had cajoled him into singing, and of how through singing she would reclaim him, it was because Greatorex and his song and his redemption were a small, hardly significant part of the immense thought of Rowcliffe.
"How pleased he'll be when he knows what I've done!"
And her pure joy had a strain in it that was not so pure. It pleased her to please Rowcliffe, but it pleased her also that he should realise her as a woman who could cajole men into doing for her what they didn't want to do.
* * * * *
"I've got him! I've got him!" she cried as she came, triumphant, into the dining-room where her father and her sisters still sat round the table. "No, thanks. I've had tea."
"Where did you get it?" the Vicar asked with his customary suspicion.
"At Upthorne. Jim Greatorex gave it me."
The Vicar was appeased. He thought nothing of it that Greatorex should have given his daughter tea. Greatorex was part of the parish.
XXV
Rowcliffe was coming to the concert. Neither floods nor tempests, he declared, would keep him away from it.
For hours, night after night, of the week before the concert, Jim
Greatorex had been down at Garth, in the schoolhouse, practicing with
Alice Cartaret until she assured him he was perfect.
Night after night the schoolhouse, gray in its still yard, had a door kept open for them and a light in the solemn lancet windows. The tall gray ash tree that stood back in the angle of the porch knew of their coming and their going. The ash tree was friendly. When the north wind tossed its branches it beckoned to the two, it summoned them from up and down the hill.
And now the tables and blackboards had been cleared out of the big schoolroom. The matchboarding of white pine that lined the lower half of its walls had been hung with red twill, with garlands of ivy and bunches of holly. Oil lamps swung from the pine rafters of the ceiling and were set on brackets at intervals along the walls. A few boards raised on joists made an admirable platform. One broad strip of red felt was laid along the platform, another hid the wooden steps that led to it. On the right a cottage piano was set slantwise. In the front were chairs for the principal performers. On the left, already in their places, were the glee-singers chosen from the village choir. Behind, on benches, the rest of the choir.
Over the whole scene, on the chalk white of the dado, the blond yellow of varnished pinewood, the blazing scarlet of the hangings, the dark glitter of the ivy and the holly; on the faces, ruddy and sallow, polished with cleanliness, on the sleek hair, on the pale frocks of the girls, the bright neckties of the men, the lamplight rioted and exulted; it rippled and flowed; it darted; it lay suave and smooth as still water; it flaunted; it veiled itself. Stately and tall and in a measured order, the lancet windows shot up out of the gray walls, the leaded framework of their lozenges gray on the black and solemn night behind them.
A smell of dust, of pine wood, of pomade, of burning oil, of an iron stove fiercely heated, a thin, bitter smell of ivy and holly; that wonderful, that overpowering, inspiring and revolting smell, of elements strangely fused, of flying vapors, of breathing, burning, palpitating things.
Greatorex, conspicuous in his front seat on the platform, drew it in with great heavings of his chest. He loved that smell. It fairly intoxicated him every time. It soared singing through his nostrils into his brain, like gin. There could be no more violent and voluptuous contrast of sensations than to come straight from the cold, biting air of Upthorne and to step into that perfect smell. It was a thick, a sweet, a fiery and sustaining smell. It helped him to face without too intolerable an agony the line of alien (he deemed them alien) faces in the front row of the audience: Mr. Cartaret and Miss Cartaret (utter strangers; he had never got, he never would get used to them) and Dr. Rowcliffe (not altogether a stranger, after what he had done one night for Greatorex's mare Daisy); then Miss Gwendolen (not a stranger either after what she had done, and yet formidably strange, the strangest, when he came to think of it, and the queerest of them all). Rowcliffe, he observed, sat between her and her sister. Divided from them by a gap, more strangers, three girls whom Rowcliffe had driven over from Morfe and afterward (Greatorex observed that also, for he kept his eye on him) had shamelessly abandoned.
If Greatorex had his eye on Rowcliffe, Rowcliffe had his eye, though less continuously, on him. He did not know very much about Greatorex, after all, and he could not be sure that his man would turn up entirely sober. He was unaware of Greatorex's capacity for substituting one intoxication for another. He had no conception of what the smell of that lighted and decorated room meant for this man who lived so simply and profoundly by his senses and his soul. It was interfused and tangled with Greatorex's sublimest feelings. It was the draw-net of submerged memories, of secret, unsuspected passions. It held in its impalpable web his dreams, the divine and delicate things that his grosser self let slip. He would forget, forget for ages, until, in the schoolroom at concert time, at the first caress of the magical smell, those delicate and divine, those secret, submerged, and forgotten things arose, and with the undying poignancy and subtlety of odors they entered into him again. And besides these qualities which were indefinable, the smell was vividly symbolic. It was entwined with and it stood for his experience of art and ambition and the power to move men and women; for song and for the sensuous thrill and spiritual ecstasy of singing and for the subsequent applause. It was the only form of intoxication known to him that did not end in headache and in shame.
Suddenly the charm that had sustained him ceased to work.
Under it he had been sitting in suspense, waiting for something, knowing and not daring to own to himself what it was he waited for. The suspense and the waiting seemed all part of the original excitement.
Then Alice Cartaret came up the room.
Her passage had been obscured and obstructed by the crowd of villagers at the door. But they had cleared a way for her and she came.
She carried herself like a crowned princess. The cords of her cloak (it was of dove color, lined with blue) had loosened in her passage, and the cloak had slipped, showing her naked shoulders. She wore a little dove-gray gown with some blue about it and a necklace of pale amber. Her white arms hung slender as a child's from the immense puffs of the sleeves. Her fair hair was piled in front of a high amber comb.
As she appeared before the platform Rowcliffe rose and took her cloak from her (Greatorex saw him take it, but he didn't care; he knew more about the doctor than the doctor knew himself). He handed her up the steps on to the platform and then turned, like a man who has done all that chivalry requires of him, to his place between her sisters. The hand that Rowcliffe had let go went suddenly to her throat, seizing her necklace and loosening it as if it choked her. Rowcliffe was not looking at her.
Still with her hand at her throat, she smiled and bowed to the audience, to the choir, to Greatorex, to the schoolmaster who came forward (Greatorex cursed him) and led her to the piano.
She sat down, wiped her hands on her handkerchief, and waited, enduring like an angel the voices of the villagers and the shuffling of their feet.
Then somebody (it was the Vicar) said, "Hush!" and she began to play.
In her passion for the unattainable she had selected Chopin's Grande
Valse in A Flat, beginning with the long shake of eight bars.
Greatorex did not know whether she played well or badly. He only knew it looked and sounded wonderful. He could have watched forever her little hands that were like white birds. He had never seen anything more delicious and more amusing than their fluttering in the long shake and their flying with spread wings all over the piano.
Then the jumping and the thumping began; and queer noises, the like of which Greatorex had never heard, came out of the piano. It jarred him; but it made him smile. The little hands were marvelous the way they flew, the way they leaped across great spaces of piano.
Alice herself was satisfied. She had brought out the air; she had made it sing above the confusion of the bass and treble that evidently had had no clear understanding when they started; as for the bad bits, the tremendous crescendo chords that your hands must take at a flying leap or miss altogether, Rowcliffe had already assured her that they were impracticable anyhow; and Rowcliffe knew.
Flushed and softened with the applause (Rowcliffe had joined in it), she took her place between Greatorex and the schoolmaster. The glee-singers, two men and two women, came forward and sang their glees, turning and bowing to each other like mummers. The schoolmaster recited the "Pied Piper of Hamelin." A young lady who had come over from Morfe expressly for that purpose sang the everlasting song about the miller.
Leaning stiffly forward, her thin neck outstretched, her brows bent toward Rowcliffe, summoning all that she knew of archness to her eyes, she sang.
"Oh miller, miller, miller, miller, miller, let me go!"
sang the young lady from Morfe. Alice could see that she sang for Rowcliffe and at Rowcliffe; she sang into his face until he turned it away, and then, utterly unabashed, she sang into his left ear.
The presence and the song of the young lady from Morfe would have been torture to Alice, but that her eyelids and her face were red as if perpetually smitten by the east wind and scarified with weeping. To Alice, at the piano, it was terrible to be associated with the song of the young lady from Morfe. She felt that Rowcliffe was looking at her (he wasn't) and she strove by look and manner to detach herself. As the young lady flung herself into it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe. She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady's intentions. It grew graver and graver. It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge. The dirge of the last hope of the young lady from Morfe.
When it ceased there rose from the piano that was its grave the Grande Polonaise of Chopin. It rose in splendor and defiance; Alice's defiance of the young lady from Morfe. It brought down the schoolhouse in a storm of clapping and thumping, of "Bravos" and "Encores." Even Rowcliffe said, "Bravo!"
But Alice, still seated at the piano, smiled and signaled.
And Jim Greatorex stood up to sing.
* * * * *
He stood facing the room, but beside her, so that she could sign to him if anything went wrong.
"'Oh, that we two-oo were May-ing
Down the stream of the so-oft spring breeze,
Like children with vi-olets pla-aying.'"
Greatorex's voice was a voice of awful volume and it ranged somewhere from fairly deep barytone almost to tenor. It was at moments unmanageable, being untrained, yet he seemed to do as much with it as if it had been bass and barytone and tenor all in one. It had grown a little thick in the last year, but he brought out of its very thickness a brooding, yearning passion and an intolerable pathos.
The song, overladen with emotion, appealed to him; it expressed as nothing else could have expressed the passions that were within him at that moment. It swept the whole range of his experiences, there were sheep in it and a churchyard and children (his lady could never be anything more to him than a child).
"'Oh, that we two-oo were ly-ing
In our nest in the chu-urch-yard sod,
With our limbs at rest on the quiet earth's breast,
And our souls—at home—with God!'"
That finished it. There was no other end.
And as he sang it, looking nobly if a little heavily over the heads of his audience, he saw Essy Gale hidden away, and trying to hide herself more, beside her mother in the farthest corner of the room.
He had forgotten Essy.
And at the sight of her his nobility went from him and only his heaviness remained.
It didn't matter that they shouted for him to sing again, that they stamped and bellowed, and that he did sing, again and again, taking the roof off at the last with "John Peel."
Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered. Nothing could matter now.
And then something bigger than his heart, bigger than his voice, something immense and brutal and defiant, asserted itself and said that Come to that Essy didn't matter. She had put herself in his way. And Maggie had been before and after her. And Maggie didn't matter either.
* * * * *
For the magical smell had wrapped itself round Alice Cartaret, and her dove-gray gown and dove-gray eyes, and round the thought of her. It twined and tangled her in the subtle mesh. She was held and embalmed in it forever.
XXVI
It was Wednesday, the day after the concert.
Mr. Cartaret was standing before the fire in his study. He had just rung the bell and now he waited in an attitude of wisdom and of patience. It was only ten o'clock in the morning and wisdom and patience should not be required of any man at such an hour. But the Vicar had a disagreeable duty to perform.
Whenever the Vicar had a disagreeable duty to perform he performed it as early as possible in the morning, so that none of its disagreeableness was lost. The whole day was poisoned by it.
He waited a little longer. And as he waited his patience began to suffer imperceptibly, though his wisdom remained intact.
He rang again. The bell sounded through the quiet house, angry and terrifying.
In another moment Essy came in. She had on a clean apron.
She stood by the roll-top desk. It offered her a certain cover and support. Her brown eyes, liquid and gentle, gazed at him. But for all her gentleness there was a touch of defiance in her bearing.
"Did you not hear me ring?" said the Vicar.
"Naw, sir."
Nothing more clear and pure than the candor of Essy's eyes. They disconcerted him.
"I have nothing to say to you, Essy. You know why I sent for you."
"Naw, sir." She thought it was a question.
He underlined it.
"You—know—why."
"Naw. I doan' knaw, sir."
"Then, if you don't know, you must find out. You will go down to the surgery this afternoon and see Dr. Rowcliffe, and he will report on your case."
She started and the red blood rose in her face.
"I s'all not goa and see him, Mr. Cartaret."
She was very quiet.
"Very good. Then I shall pay you a month's wages and you will go on
Saturday."
It was then that her mouth trembled so that her eyes shone large through her tears.
"I wasn't gawn to staay, sir—to be a trooble. I sud a gien yo' nawtice in anoother moonth."
She paused. There was a spasm in her throat as if she swallowed with difficulty her bitter pride. Her voice came thick and hoarse.
"Woan't yo' kape me till th' and o' t' moonth, sir?" Her voice cleared suddenly. "Than I can see yo' trow Christmas."
The Vicar opened his mouth to speak; but instead of speaking he stared. His open mouth stared with a supreme astonishment. Up till now, in his wisdom and his patience, he had borne with Essy, the Essy who had come before him one evening in September, dejected and afraid. He hated Essy and he hated her sin, but he had borne with her then because of her sorrow and her shame.
And here was Essy with not a sign of sorrow or of shame about her, offering (in the teeth of her deserved dismissal), actually offering as a favor to stay over Christmas and to see them through. The naked impudence of it was what staggered him.
"I have no intention of keeping you over Christmas. You will take your notice and your wages from to-day, and you will go on Saturday."
"Yes, sir."
In her going Essy turned.
"Will yo' taake me back, sir, when it's all over?"
"No. No. I shouldn't think of taking you back."
The Vicar hid his hands in his pockets and leaned forward, thrusting his face toward Essy as he spoke.
"I'm afraid, my girl, it never will be all over, as long as you regard your sin as lightly as you do."
Essy did not see the Vicar's face thrust toward her. She was sidling to the door. She had her hand on the doorknob.
"Come back," said the Vicar. "I have something else to say to you."
Essy came no nearer. She remained standing by the door.
"Who is the man, Essy?"
At that Essy's face began to shake piteously. Standing by the door, she cried quietly, with soft sobs, neither hiding her face nor drying her tears as they came.
"You had better tell me," said the Vicar.
"I s'all nat tall yo'," said Essy, with passionate determination, between the sobs.
"You must."
"I s'all nat—I s'all nat."
"Hiding it won't help you," said the Vicar.
Essy raised her head.
"I doan' keer. I doan' keer what 'appens to mae. What wae did—what wae did—lies between him and mae."
"Did he tell you he'd marry you, Essy?"
Essy sobbed for answer.
"He didn't? Is he going to marry you?"
"'Tisn' likely 'e'll marry mae. An' I'll not force him."
"You think, perhaps, it doesn't matter?"
She shook her head in utter helplessness.
"Come, make a clean breast of it."
Then the storm burst. She turned her tormented face to him.
"A clane breast, yo' call it? I s'all mak' naw clane breasts, Mr. Cartaret, to yo' or anybody. I'll 'ave nawbody meddlin' between him an' mae!"
"Then," said the Vicar, "I wash my hands of you."
But he said it to an empty room. Essy had left him.
* * * * *
In the outer room the three sisters sat silent and motionless. Their faces were turned toward the closed door of the study. They were listening to the sounds that went on behind it. The burden of Essy hung heavy over them.
The study door opened and shut. Then the kitchen door.
"Poor Essy," said Gwenda.
"Poor Essy," said Alice. She was sorry for Essy now. She could afford to be sorry for her.
Mary said nothing, and from her silence you could not tell what she was thinking.
The long day dragged on to prayer time.
The burden of Essy hung heavy over the whole house.
* * * * *
That night, at a quarter to ten, fifteen minutes before prayer time,
Gwenda came to her father in his study.
"Papa," she said, "is it true that you've sacked Essy at three days' notice?"
"I have dismissed Essy," said the Vicar, "for a sufficient reason."
"There's no reason to turn her out before Christmas."
"There is," said the Vicar, "a very grave reason. We needn't go into it."
He knew that his daughter knew his reason. But he ignored her knowledge as he ignored all things that were unpleasant to him.
"We must go into it," said Gwenda. "It's a sin to turn her out at three days' notice."
"I know what I'm doing, Gwenda, and why I'm doing it."
"So do I. We all do. None of us want her to go—yet. You could easily have kept her another two months. She'd have given notice herself."
"I am not going to discuss it with you."
The Vicar put his head under the roll top of his desk and pretended to be looking for papers. Gwenda seated herself familiarly on the arm of the chair he had left.
"You'll have to, I'm afraid," she said. "Please take your head out of the desk, Papa. There's no use behaving like an ostrich. I can see you all the time. The trouble is, you know, that you won't think. And you must think. How's Essy going to do without those two months' wages she might have had? She'll want every shilling she can lay her hands on for the baby."
"She should have thought of that before."
The Vicar was answering himself. He did not acknowledge his daughter's right to discuss Essy.
"She'll think of it presently," said Gwenda in her unblushing calm. "Look here, Papa, while you're trying how you can make this awful thing more awful for her, what do you think poor Essy's bothering about? She's not bothering about her sin, nor about her baby. She's bothering about how she's landed us."
The Vicar closed his eyes. His patience was exhausted. So was his wisdom.
"I am not arguing with you, Gwenda."
"You can't. You know perfectly well what a beastly shame it is."
That roused him.
"You seem to think no more of Essy's sin than Essy does."
"How do you know what Essy thinks? How do I know? It isn't any business of ours what Essy thinks. It's what we do. I'd rather do what Essy's done, any day, than do mean or cruel things. Wouldn't you?"
The Vicar raised his eyebrows and his shoulders. It was the gesture of a man helpless before the unspeakable.
He took refuge in his pathos.
"I am very tired, Gwenda; and it's ten minutes to ten."
* * * * *
It may have been because the Vicar was tired that his mind wandered somewhat that night during family prayers.
Foremost among the many things that the Vicar's mind refused to consider was the question of the status, of the very existence, of family prayers in his household.
But for Essy, though the Vicar did not know it, it was doubtful whether family prayers would have survived what he called his daughters' godlessness. Mary, to be sure, conformed outwardly. She was not easily irritated, and, as she put it, she did not really mind prayers. But to Alice and Gwendolen prayers were a weariness and an exasperation. Alice would evade them under any pretext. By her father's action in transporting her to Gardale, she considered that she was absolved from her filial allegiance. But Gwendolen was loyal. In the matter of prayers, which—she made it perfectly clear to Alice and Mary—could not possibly annoy them more than they did her, she was going to see Papa through. It would be beastly, she said, not to. They couldn't give him away before Essy.
But of the clemency and generosity of Gwendolen's attitude Mr. Cartaret was not aware. He believed that the custom of prayers was maintained in his household by his inflexible authority and will. He gloried in them as an expression of his power. They were a form of coercion which it seemed he could apply quite successfully to his womenkind, those creatures of his flesh and blood, yet so alien and intractable. Family prayers gave him a keener spiritual satisfaction than the church services in which, outwardly, he cut a far more imposing figure. In a countryside peopled mainly by abominable Wesleyans and impure Baptists (Mr. Cartaret spoke and thought of Wesleyans and Baptists as if they were abominable and impure pure) he had some difficulty in procuring a congregation. The few who came to the parish church came because it was respectable and therefore profitable, or because they had got into the habit and couldn't well get out of it, or because they liked it, not at all because his will and his authority compelled them. But to emerge from his study inevitably at ten o'clock, an hour when the souls of Mary and Gwendolen and Alice were most reluctant and most hostile to the thought of prayers, and by sheer worrying to round up the fugitives, whatever they happened to be doing and wherever they happened to be, this (though he said it was no pleasure to him) was more agreeable to Mr. Cartaret than he knew. The very fact that Essy was a Wesleyan and so far an unwilling conformist gave a peculiar zest to the performance.
It was always the same. It started with a look through his glasses, leveled at each member of his household in turn, as if he desired to satisfy himself as to the expression of their faces while at the same time he defied them to protest. For the rest, his rule was that of his father, the schoolmaster, before him. First, a chapter from the Bible, the Old Testament in the morning, the New Testament in the evening, working straight through from Genesis to Revelation (omitting Leviticus as somewhat unsuitable for family reading). Then prayers proper, beginning with what his daughter Gwendolen, seventeen years ago, had called "fancy prayers," otherwise prayers not lifted from the Liturgy, but compiled and composed in accordance with the freer Evangelical taste in prayers. Then (for both Mr. Cartaret and the schoolmaster, his father, held that the Church must not be ignored) there followed last Sunday's Collect, the Collect for Grace, the Benediction, and the Lord's Prayer.
Now, as his rule would have it, that evening of the fifth of December brought him to the Eighth chapter of St. John, in the one concerning the woman taken in adultery, which was the very last chapter which Mr. Cartaret that evening could have desired to read. He had always considered that to some minds it might be open to misinterpretation as a defense of laxity.
"'Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?'
"She said, 'No man, Lord.' And Jesus said unto her, 'Neither do I condemn thee.'"
Mr. Cartaret lowered his voice and his eyes as he read, for he felt
Gwendolen's eyes upon him.
But he recovered himself on the final charge.
"'Go'"—now he came to think of it, that was what he had said to
Essy—"'and sin no more.'"
(After all, he was supported.)
Casting another and more decidedly uneasy glance at his family, he knelt down. He felt better when they were all kneeling, for now he had their backs toward him instead of their faces.
He then prayed. On behalf of himself and Essy and his family he prayed to a God who (so he assumed his Godhead) was ever more ready to hear than they to pray, a God whom he congratulated on His ability to perform for them far more than they either desired or deserved; he thanked him for having mercifully preserved them to the close of another blessed day (as in the morning he would thank him for having spared them to see the light of another blessed day); he besought him to pardon anything which that day they had done amiss; to deliver them from disobedience and self-will, from pride and waywardness (he had inserted this clause ten years ago for Gwendolen's benefit) as well as from the sins that did most easily beset them, for the temptations to which they were especially prone. This clause covered all the things he couldn't mention. It covered his wife, Robina's case; it covered Essy's; he had dragged Alice's case as it were from under it; he had a secret fear that one day it might cover Gwendolen's.
Gwendolen was the child who, he declared and believed, had always given him most trouble. He recalled (perversely) a certain thing that (at thirteen) she had said about this prayer.
"It oughtn't to be prayed," she had said. "You don't really think you can fool God that way, Papa? If I had a servant who groveled to me like that I'd tell him he must learn to keep his chin up or go."
She had said it before Robina who had laughed. And Mr. Cartaret's answer to it had been to turn his back on both of them and leave the room. At least he thought it was his answer. Gwendolen had thought that in a flash of intellectual honesty he agreed with her, only that he hadn't quite enough honesty to say so before Mummy.
All this he recalled, and the question she had pursued him with about that time. "What are the sins that do most easily beset us? What are the temptations to which we are especially prone?" And his own evasive answer. "Ask yourself, my child."
Another year and she had left off asking him questions. She drew back into herself and became every day more self-willed, more solitary, more inaccessible.
And now, if he could have seen things as they really were, Mr. Cartaret would have perceived that he was afraid of Gwenda. As it was, he thought he was only afraid of what Gwenda might do.
Alice was capable of some things; but Gwenda was capable of anything.
* * * * *
Suddenly, to Gwenda's surprise, her father sighed; a dislocating sigh.
It came between the Benediction and the Lord's Prayer.
For, even as he invoked the blessing Mr. Cartaret suddenly felt sorry for himself again. His children were no good to him.
By which he meant that his third wife, Robina, was no good.
But he did not know that he visited his wife's shortcomings on their heads, any more than he knew that he hated Essy and her sin because he himself was an enforced, reluctant celibate.
XXVII
The next day at dusk, Essy Gale slipped out to her mother's cottage down by the beck.
Mrs. Gale had just cleared the table after her tea, had washed up the tea-things and was putting them away in the cupboard when Essy entered. She looked round sharply, inimically.
Essy stood by the doorway, shamefaced.
"Moother," she said softly, "I want to speaak to yo."
Mrs. Gale struck an attitude of astonishment and fear, although she had expected Essy to come at such an hour and with such a look, and only wondered that she had not come four months ago.
"Yo're nat goain' t' saay as yo've got yoresel into trooble?"
For four months Mrs. Gale had preserved an innocent face before her neighbors and she desired to preserve it to the last possible moment. And up to the last possible moment, even to her daughter, she was determined to ignore what had happened.
But she knew and Essy knew that she knew.
"Doan yo saay it, Assy. Doan yo saay it."
Essy said nothing.
"D'yo 'ear mae speaakin' to yo? Caann't yo aanswer? Is it thot, Assy?
Is it thot?"
"Yas, moother, yo knaw 'tis thot."
"An' yo dare to coom 'ear and tell mae! Yo dirty 'oossy! Toorn an' lat's 'ave a look at yo."
Now that the innocence of her face was gone, Mrs. Gale had a stern duty to perform by Essy.
"They've gien yo t' saack?"
"T' Vicar give it mae."
"Troost'im! Whan did 'e gie it yo?"
"Yasterda'."
"T'moonth's nawtice?"
"Naw. I aassked 'im t' kape me anoother two moonths an' 'e woonna.
I aassked 'im t' kape me over Christmas an' 'e woonna. I'm to leaave
Saturda'."
"Did yo expact 'im t' kape yo, yo gawpie? Did yo think you'd nowt to do but t' laay oop at t' Vicarage an' 'ave th yoong laadies t' do yore wark for yo, an' t' waait on yo 'and an' foot? Miss Gwanda t' mak' yore bafe-tae an' chicken jally and t' Vicar t' daandle t' baaby?
"'Oo's goan t' kape yo? Mae? I woonna kape yo an' I canna' kape yo. Yo ain' t' baaby! I doan' waant naw squeechin', squallin' brats mookin' oop t' plaace as faast as I clanes it, An' 'E woonna kape yo—ef yo're raakonin' on 'im. Yo need na tall mae oo t' maan is. I knaw."
"'Tis'n 'im, Moother. 'Tis'n 'im."
"Yo lil blaack liar! 'Tis 'im. Ooo alse could it bae? Yo selly! Whatten arth possessed yo t' goa an' tak oop wi' Jim Greatorex? Ef yo mun get into trooble yo medda chawsen battern Jim. What for did I tak' yo from t' Farm an' put yo into t' Vicarage ef 't wasn't t' get yo out o' Jimmy's road? 'E'll naver maarry yo. Nat 'e! Did 'e saay as 'e'd maarry yo? Naw, I warrant yo did na waat fer thot. Yo was mad t' roon affter 'im afore 'e called yo. Yo dirty cat!"
That last taunt drew blood. Essy spoke up.
"Naw, naw. 'E looved mae. 'E wanted mae bad."
"'E wanted yo? Coorse 'e wanted yo. Yo sud na 'ave gien in to 'im, yo softie. D'yo think yo're the only woon thot's tampted? Look at mae. I could 'a got into trooble saven times to yore woonce, ef I 'ad'n kaped my 'ead an' respected mysel. Yore Jim Greatorex! Ef a maan like Jim 'ad laaid a 'and on mae, 'e'd a got soomthin' t' remamber afore I'd 'a gien in to 'im. An' yo've naw 'scuse for disgracin' yoresel. Yo was brought oop ralegious an' respactable. Did yo aver 'ear saw mooch aa a bad woord?"
"It's doon, Moother, it's doon. There's naw good taalkin'."
"Eh! Yo saay it's doon, it's doon, an' yo think nowt o' 't. An' nowt yo think o' t' trooble yo're brengin' on mae. I sooppawse yo'll be tallin' mae naxt yo looved 'im! Yo looved'im!"
At that Essy began to cry, softly, in her manner.
"Doan' yo tall mae thot taale."
Mrs. Gale suddenly paused in her tirade and began to poke the fire with fury.
"It's enoof t' sicken t' cat!"
She snatched the kettle that stood upon the hob; she stamped out to the scullery and re-filled it at the tap. She returned, stamping, and set it with violence upon the fire.
She tore out of the cupboard a teapot, a cup and a saucer, a loaf on a plate and a jar of dripping. Still with violence (slightly modulated to spare the comparative fragility of the objects she was handling) she dashed them one by one upon the table where Essy, with elbows planted, propped her head upon her hands and wept.
Mrs. Gale sat down herself in the chair facing her, and kept one eye on the kettle and the other on her daughter. From time to time mutterings came from her, breaking the sad rhythm of Essy's sobs.
"Eh dear! I'd like t' knaw what I've doon t' ave this trooble!"—
—"'Tis enoof t' raaise yore pore feyther clane out of 'is graave!"—
—"'E'd sooner 'ave seed yo in yore coffin, Assy."—
She rose and took down the tea-caddy from the chimney-piece and flung a reckless measure into the tea-pot.
"Ef 'e'd 'a been a-livin', 'E'd a killed yo. Thot's what 'e'd 'a doon."
As she said it she grasped the kettle and poured the boiling water into the tea-pot.
She set the tea-pot before Essy.
"There's a coop of tae. An' there's bread an' drippin'. Yo'll drink it oop."
But Essy, desolated, shook her head.
"Wall," said Mrs. Gale. "I doan' want ter look at yo. 'T mak's mae seek."
As if utterly revolted by the sight of her daughter, she turned from her and left the kitchen by the staircase door.
Her ponderous stamping could be heard going up the staircase and on the floor overhead. There was a sound as of drawers opening and shutting and of a heavy box being dragged from under the bed.
Essy poured herself out a cup of tea, tried to drink it, choked and pushed it from her.
She was still weeping when her mother came to her.
Mrs. Gale came softly.
All alone in the room overhead she had evidently been doing something that had pleased her. The ghost of a smile still haunted her bleak face. She carried on her arm tenderly a pile of little garments.
These she began to spread out on the table before Essy, having first removed the tea-things.
"There!" she said. "'Tis the lil cleathes fer t' baaby. Look, Assy, my deear—there's t' lil rawb, wi' t' lil slaves, so pretty—an' t' flanny petticut—an' t' lil vasst—see. 'Tis t' lil things I maade fer 'ee afore tha was born."
But Essy pushed them from her. She was weeping violently now.
"Taake 'em away!" she cried. "I doan' want t' look at 'em."
Mrs. Gale sat and stared at her.
"Coom," she said, "tha moos'n' taake it saw 'ard, like."
Between the sobs Essy looked up with her shining eyes. She whispered.
"Will yo kape mae, Moother?"
"I sail 'ave t' kape yo. There's nawbody 'll keer mooch fer thot job but yore moother."
But Essy still wept. Once started on the way of weeping, she couldn't stop.
Then, all of a sudden, Mrs. Gale's face became distorted.
She got up and put her hand heavily on her daughter's shoulder.
"There, there, Assy, loove," she said. "Doan' tha taake on thot road.
It's doon, an' it caann't be oondoon."
She stood there in a heavy silence. Now and again she patted the heaving shoulder, marking time to Essy's sobs. Then she spoke.
"Tha'll feel batter whan t' lil baaby cooms."
Profoundly disturbed and resentful of her own emotion Mrs. Gale seized upon the tea-pot as a pretext and shut herself up with it in the scullery.
* * * * *
Essy, staggering, rose and dried her eyes. For a moment or so she stared idly at the square window with the blue-black night behind it.
Then she looked down. She smiled faintly. One by one she took the little garments spread out in front of her. She folded them in a pile.
Her face was still and dreamy.
She opened the scullery door and looked in.
"Good-night, Moother."
"Good-night, Assy."
* * * * *
It was striking seven as she passed the church.
Above the strokes of the hour she heard through the half-open door a sound of organ playing and of a big voice singing.
And she began to weep again. She knew the singer, and the player too.
XXVIII
Christmas was over and gone.
It was the last week in January.
All through December Rowcliffe's visits to the Vicarage had continued. But in January they ceased. That was not to be wondered at. Even Ally couldn't wonder. There was influenza in every other house in the Dale.
Then, one day, Gwenda, walking past Upthorne, heard wheels behind her and the clanking hoofs of the doctor's horse. She knew what would happen. Rowcliffe would pull up a yard or two in front of her. He would ask her where she was going and he would make her drive with him over the moor. And she knew that she would go with him. She would not be able to refuse him.
But the clanking hoofs went by and never stopped. There were two men in the trap. Acroyd, Rowcliffe's groom, sat in Rowcliffe's place, driving. He touched his hat to her as he passed her.
Beside him there was a strange man.
She said to herself, "He's away then. I think he might have told me."
And Ally, passing through the village, had seen the strange man too.
"Dr. Rowcliffe must be away," she said at tea-time. "I wonder if he'll be back by Wednesday."
Wednesday, the last day in January, came, but Rowcliffe did not come.
The strange man took his place in the surgery.
Mrs. Gale brought the news into the Vicarage dining-room at four o'clock.
She had taken her daughter's place for the time being. She was a just woman and she bore no grudge against the Vicar on Essy's account. He had done no more than he was obliged to do. Essy had given trouble enough in the Vicarage, and she had received a month's wages that she hadn't worked for. Mrs. Gale was working double to make up for it. And the innocence of her face being gone, she went lowly and humbly, paying for Essy, Essy's debt of shame. That was her view.
"Sall I set the tae here, Miss Gwanda," she enquired. "Sence doctor isn't coomin'?"
"How do you know he isn't coming?" Alice asked.
Mrs. Gale's face was solemn and oppressed. She turned to Gwenda, ignoring Alice. (Mary was upstairs in her room.)
"'Aven't yo 'eerd, Miss Gwanda?"
Gwenda looked up from her book.
"No," she said. "He's away, isn't he?"
"Away? 'El'll nat get away fer long enoof. 'E's too ill."
"Ill?" Alice sent the word out on a terrified breath. Nobody took any notice of her.
"T' poastman tell mae," said Mrs. Gale. "From what 'e's 'eerd, 'twas all along o' Nad Alderson's lil baaby up to Morfe. It was took wi' the diptheery a while back. An' doctor, 'e sat oop wi' 't tree nights roonin', 'e did. 'E didn' so mooch as taak 's cleathes off. Nad Alderson, 'e said, 'e'd navver seen anything like what doctor 'e doon for t' lil' thing."
Mrs. Gale's face reddened and she sniffed.
"'E's saaved Nad's baaby for 'm, right enoof, Dr. Rawcliffe 'as. But 'e's down wi't hissel, t' poastman says."
It was at Gwenda that she gazed. And as Gwenda made no sign, Mrs. Gale, still more oppressed by that extraordinary silence, gave her own feelings way.
"Mebbe wae sall navver see 'im in t' Daale again. It'll goa 'ard, look yo, wi' a girt man like 'im, what's navver saaved 'isself. Naw, 'e's navver saaved 'issel."
She ceased. She gazed upon both the sisters now. Alice, her face white and averted, shrank back in the corner of the sofa. Gwenda's face was still. Neither of them had spoken.
* * * * *
Mary had tea alone that afternoon.
Alice had dragged herself upstairs to her bedroom and locked herself in. She had flung herself face downward on her bed. She lay there while the room grew gray and darkened. Suddenly she passed from a violent fit of writhing and of weeping into blank and motionless collapses. From time to time she hiccoughed helplessly.
But in the moment before Mary came downstairs Gwenda had slipped on the rough coat that hung on its peg in the passage. Her hat was lying about somewhere in the room where Alice had locked herself in. She went out bareheaded.
There was a movement in the little group of villagers gathered on the bridge before the surgery door. They slunk together and turned their backs on her as she passed. They knew where she was going as well as she did. And she didn't care.
She was doing the sort of thing that Alice had done, and had suffered for doing. She knew it and she didn't care. It didn't matter what Alice had done or ever would do. It didn't matter what she did herself. It was quite simple. Nothing mattered to her so long as Rowcliffe lived. And if he died nothing would ever matter to her again.
* * * * *
For she knew now what it was that had happened to her. She could no longer humbug herself into insisting that it hadn't happened. The thing had been secret and treacherous with her, and she had been secret and treacherous with it. She had refused to acknowledge it, not because she had been ashamed of it but because, with the dreadful instance of Alice before her eyes, she had been afraid. She had been afraid of how it would appear to Rowcliffe. He might see in it something morbid and perverted, something horribly like Ally. She went in terror of the taint. Where it should have held its head up defiantly and beautifully, it had been beaten back; it cowered and skulked in the dark places and waited for its hour.
And now that it showed itself naked, unveiled, unarmed, superbly defenseless, her terror of it ceased.
It had received a sanction that had been withheld from it before.
Until half an hour ago (she was aware of it) there had been something lacking in her feeling. Mary and Ally (this she was not aware of) got more "out of" Rowcliffe, so to speak, than she did. Gwenda had known nothing approaching to Mary's serene and brooding satisfaction or Ally's ecstasy. She dreaded the secret gates, the dreamy labyrinths, the poisonous air of the Paradise of Fools. In Rowcliffe's presence she had not felt altogether safe or altogether happy. But, if she stood on the edge of an abyss, at least she stood there, firm on the solid earth. She could balance herself; she could even lean forward a little and look over, without losing her head, thrilled with the uncertainty and peril of the adventure. And of course it wasn't as if Rowcliffe had left her standing. He hadn't. He had held out his hand to her, as it were, and said, "Let's get on—get on!" which was as good as saying that, as long as it lasted, it was their adventure, not hers. He had drawn her after him at an exciting pace, along the edge of the abyss, never losing his head for a minute, so that she ought to have felt safe with him. Only she hadn't. She had said to herself, "If I knew him better, if I saw what was in him, perhaps I should feel safe."
There was something she wanted to see in him; something that her innermost secret self, fastidious and exacting, demanded from him before it would loosen the grip that held her back.
And now she knew that it was there. It had been told her in four words: "He never saved himself."
She might have known it. For she remembered things, now; how he had nursed old Greatorex like a woman; how he had sat up half the night with Jim Greatorex's mare Daisy; how he kept Jim Greatorex from drinking; and how he had been kind to poor Essy when she had the face ache; and gentle to little Ally.
And now Ned Alderson's ridiculous baby would live and Rowcliffe would die. Was that what she had required of him? She felt as if somehow she had done it; as if her innermost secret self, iniquitously exacting, had thrown down the gage into the arena and that he had picked it up.
"He saved others. Himself he"—never saved.
He had become god-like to her.
And the passion she had trampled on lifted itself and passed into the phase of adoration. It had received the dangerous sanction of the soul.
* * * * *
She turned off the high road at the point where, three months ago, she had seen Mary cycling up the hill from Morfe. Now, as then, she descended upon Morfe by the stony lane from the moor below Karva.
It came over her that she was too late, that she would see rows of yellow blinds drawn down in the long front of Rowcliffe's house.
The blinds were up. The windows looked open-eyed upon the Green. She noticed that one of them on the first floor was half open, and she said to herself, "He is up there, in that room, dying of diphtheria."
The sound of the bell, muffled funereally, at the back of the house, fulfilled her premonition.
The door opened wide. The maid stood back from it to let her pass in.
"How is Dr. Rowcliffe?"
Her voice sounded abrupt and brutal, as it tore its way from her tense throat.
The maid raised her eyebrows. She held the door wider.
"Would you like to see him, miss?"
"Yes."
Her throat closed on the word and choked it.
Down at the end of the passage, where it was dark, a door opened, the door of the surgery, and a man came out, went in as if to look for something, and came out again.
As he moved there in the darkness she thought it was the strange doctor and that he had come out to forbid her seeing Rowcliffe. He would say that she mustn't risk the infection. As if she cared about the risk.
Perhaps he wouldn't see her. He, too, might say she mustn't risk it.
While the surgery door opened and shut, opened and shut again, she saw that her seems him was of all things the most unlikely. She remembered the house at Upthorne, and she knew that Rowcliffe was lying dead in the room upstairs.
And the man there was coming out to stop her.
* * * * *
Only—in that case—why hadn't they drawn the blinds down?
XXIX
She was still thinking of the blinds when she saw that the man who came towards her was Rowcliffe.
He was wearing his rough tweed suit and his thick boots, and he had the look of the open air about him.
"Is that you, Miss Cartaret? Good!"
He grasped her hand. He behaved exactly as if he had expected her. He never even wondered what she had come for. She might have come to say that her father or one of her sisters was dying, and would he go at once; but none of these possibilities occurred to him.
He didn't want to account for her coming to him. It was natural and beautiful that she should come.
Then, as she stepped into the lighted passage, he saw that she was bareheaded and that her eyelashes were parted and gathered into little wet points.
He took her arm gently and led her into his study and shut the door.
They faced each other there.
"I say—is anything wrong?"
"I thought you were ill."
She hadn't grasped the absurdity of it yet. She was still under the spell of the illusion.
"I? Ill? Good heavens, no!"
"They told me in the village you'd got diphtheria. And I came to know if it was true. It isn't true?"
He smiled; an odd little embarrassed smile; almost as if he were owning that it was or had been true.
"Is it?" she persisted as he went on smiling.
"Of course it isn't."
She frowned as if she were annoyed with him for not being ill.
"Then what was that other man here for?"
"Harker? Oh, he just took my place for a day or two while I had a sore throat."
"You had a throat then?"
Thus she accused him.
"And you did sit up for three nights with Ned Alderson's baby?"
She defied him to deny it.
"That's nothing. Anybody would. I had to."
"And—you saved the baby?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. Some thing or other pulled the little beggar through."
"And you might have got it?"
"I might but I didn't."
"You did get a throat. And it might have been diphtheria."
Thus by accusing him she endeavored to justify herself.
"It might," he said, "but it wasn't. I had to knock off work till I was sure."
"And you're sure now?"
"I can tell you you wouldn't be here if I wasn't."
"And they told me you were dying."
(She was utterly disgusted.)
At that he laughed aloud. An irresistible, extravagantly delighted laugh. When he stopped he choked and began all over again; the idea of his dying was so funny; so was her disgust.
"That," she said, "was why I came."
"Then I'm glad they told you."
"I'm not," said she.
He laughed again at her sudden funny dignity. Then, as suddenly, he was grave.
"I say—it was nice of you."
She held out her hand.
"And now—as you're not dead—I'm off."
"Oh no, you're not. You're going to stay and have tea and I'm going to walk back with you."
She stayed.
* * * * *
They walked over the moor by Karva. And as they went he talked to her as he hadn't talked before. It was all about himself and his tone was very serious. He talked about his work and (with considerable reservations and omissions) about his life in Leeds, and about his ambition. He told her what he had done and why he had done it and what he was going to do. He wasn't going to stay in Garthdale all his life. Not he. Presently he would want to get to the center of things. (He forgot to mention that this was the first time he had thought of it.) Nothing would satisfy him but a big London practice and a name. He might—ultimately—specialise. If he did he rather thought it would be gynæcology. He was interested in women's cases. Or it might be nervous diseases. He wasn't sure. Anyhow, it must be something big.
For under Gwenda Cartaret's eyes his romantic youth became fiery and turbulent inside him. It not only urged him to tremendous heights, it made him actually feel that he would reach them. For a solid three-quarters of an hour, walking over the moor by Karva, he had ceased to be one of the obscurest of obscure little country doctors. He was Sir Steven Rowcliffe, the great gynæcologist, or the great neurologist (as the case might be) with a row of letters after his name and a whole column under it in the Medical Directory.
And Gwenda Cartaret's eyes never for a moment contradicted him. They agreed with every one of his preposterous statements.
She didn't know that it was only his romantic youth and that he never had been and never would be more youthful than he was for that three-quarters of an hour. On the contrary, to her youth he seemed to have left youth behind him, and to have grown suddenly serious and clear-sighted and mature.
And then he stopped, right on the moor, as if he were suddenly aware of his absurdity.
"I say," he said, "what must you think of me? Gassing about myself like that."
"I think," she said, "it's awfully nice of you."
"I don't suppose I shall do anything really big. Do you?"
She was silent.
"Honestly now, do you think I shall?"
"I think the things you've done already, the things that'll never be heard of, are really big."
His silence said, "They are not enough for me," and hers, "For me they are enough."
"But the other things," he insisted—"the things I want to do——Do you think I'll do them?"
"I think"—she said slowly—"in fact I'm certain that you'll do them, if you really mean to."
"That's what you think of me?"
"That's what I think of you."
"Then it's all right," he said. "For what I think of you is that you'd never say a thing you didn't really mean."
They parted at the turn of the road, where, as he again reminded her, he had seen her first.
Going home by himself over the moor, Rowcliffe wondered whether he hadn't missed his opportunity.
He might have told her that he cared for her. He might have asked her if she cared. If he hadn't, it was only because there was no need to be precipitate. He felt rather than knew that she was sure of him.
Plenty of time. Plenty of time. He was so sure of her.