XXX
Plenty of time. The last week of January passed. Through the first weeks of February Rowcliffe was kept busy, for sickness was still in the Dale.
Whether he required it or not, Rowcliffe had a respite from decision. No opportunity arose. If he looked in at the Vicarage on Wednesdays it was to drink a cup of tea in a hurry while his man put his horse in the trap. He took his man with him now on his longer rounds to save time and trouble. Once in a while he would meet Gwenda Cartaret or overtake her on some road miles from Garth, and he would make her get up and drive on with him, or he would give her a lift home.
It pleased her to be taken up and driven. She liked the rapid motion and the ways of the little brown horse. She even loved the noise he made with his clanking hoofs. Rowcliffe said it was a beastly trick. He made up his mind about once a week that he'd get rid of him. But somehow he couldn't. He was fond of the little brown horse. He'd had him so long.
And she said to herself. "He's faithful then. Of course. He would be."
It was almost as if he had wanted her to know it.
Then April came and the long spring twilights. The sick people had got well. Rowcliffe had whole hours on his hands that he could have spent with Gwenda now, if he had known.
And as yet he did not altogether know.
There was something about Gwenda Cartaret for which Rowcliffe with all his sureness and all his experience was unprepared. Their whole communion rested and proceeded on undeclared, unacknowledged, unrealised assumptions, and it was somehow its very secrecy that made it so secure. Rather than put it to the test he was content to leave their meetings to luck and his own imperfect ingenuity. He knew where and at what times he would have the best chance of finding her. Sometimes, returning from his northerly rounds, he would send the trap on, and walk back to Morfe by Karva, on the chance. Once, when the moon was up, he sighted her on the farther moors beyond Upthorne, when he got down and walked with her for miles, while his man and the trap waited for him in Garth.
Once, and only once, driving by himself on the Rathdale moors beyond Morfe, he overtook her, picked her up and drove her through Morfe (to the consternation of its inhabitants) all the way to Garth and to the very gate of the Vicarage.
But that was reckless.
* * * * *
And in all those hours, for his opportunities counted by hours now, he had never found his moment. There was plenty of time, and their isolation (his and hers) in Garthdale left him dangerously secure. All the same, by April Rowcliffe was definitely looking for the moment, the one shining moment, that must sooner or later come.
It was, indeed, always coming. Over and over again he had caught sight of it; it signaled, shining; he had been ready to seize it, when something happened, something obscured it, something put him off.
He never knew what it was at the time, but when he looked back on these happenings he discovered that it was always something that Gwenda Cartaret did. You would have said that no scene on earth could have been more favorable to a lover's enterprise than these long, deserted roads and the vast, twilit moors; and that a young woman could have found nothing to distract her from her lover there.
But it was not so. On the open moors, as often as not, they had to go single file through the heather, along a narrow sheep track, Rowcliffe leading; and it is difficult, not to say impossible, to command the attention of a young woman walking in your rear. And a thousand things distracted Gwenda: the cry of a mountain sheep, the sound and sight of a stream, the whirr of dark wings and the sudden "Krenk-er-renk-errenk!" of the grouse shooting up from the heather. And on the high roads where they went abreast she was apt to be carried away by the pageant of earth and sky; the solid darkness that came up from the moor; the gray, aerial abysses of the dale; the awful, blank withdrawal of Greffington Edge into the night. She was off, Heaven knew where, at the lighting of a star in the thin blue; the movement of a cloud excited her; or she was held enchanted by the pale aura of moonrise along the rampart of Greffington Edge. She shared the earth's silence and the throbbing passion of the earth as the orbed moon swung free.
And in her absorption, her estranging ecstasy, Rowcliffe at last found something inimical.
* * * * *
He told himself that it was an affectation in her, or a lure to draw him after her, as it would have been in any other woman. The little red-haired nurse would have known how to turn the earth and the moon to her own purposes and his. But all the time he knew that it was not so. There was no purpose in it at all, and it was unaware of him and of his purposes. Gwenda's joy was pure and profound and sufficient to itself. He gathered that it had been with her before he came and that it would remain with her after he had gone.
He hated to think that she should know any joy that had not its beginning and its end in him. It took her from him. As long as it lasted he was faced with an incomprehensible and monstrous rivalry.
And as a man might leave a woman to his uninteresting rival in the certainty that she will be bored and presently return to him, Rowcliffe left Gwenda to the earth and moon. He sulked and was silent.
* * * * *
Then, suddenly, he made up his mind.
XXXI
It was one night in April. He had met her at the crossroads on Morfe Green, and walked home with her by the edge of the moor. It had blown hard all day, and now the wind had dropped, but it had left darkness and commotion in the sky. The west was a solid mass of cloud that drifted slowly in the wake of the departing storm, its hindmost part shredded to mist before the path of the hidden moon.
For, mercifully, the moon was hidden. Rowcliffe knew his moment.
He meditated—the fraction of a second too long.
"I wonder——" he began.
Just then the rear of the cloud opened and cast out the moon, sheeted in the white mist that she had torn from it.
And then, before he knew where he was, he was quarreling with Gwenda.
"Oh, look at the moon!" she cried. "All bowed forward with the cloud wrapped round her head. Something's calling her across the sky, but the mist holds her and the wind beats her back—look how she staggers and charges head-downward. She's fighting the wind. And she goes—she goes!"
"She doesn't go," said Rowcliffe. "At least you can't see her going, and the cloud isn't wrapped round her head, it's nowhere near her. And the wind isn't driving her, it's driving the cloud on. It's the cloud that's going. Why can't you see things as they are?"
She was detestable to him in that moment.
"Because nobody sees them as they are. And you're spoiling the idea."
"The idea being so much more valuable than the truth."
He longed to say cruel and biting things to her.
"It isn't valuable to anybody but me, so you might have left it to me."
"Oh, I'll leave it to you, if you're in love with it."
"I'm not in love with it because it's mine. Anyhow, if I am in love
I'm in love with the moon and not with my idea of the moon."
"You don't know how to be in love with anything—even the moon. But I suppose it's all right as long as you're happy."
"Of course I'm happy. Why shouldn't I be?"
"Because you haven't got anything to make you happy."
"Oh, haven't I?"
"You might have. But you haven't. You're too obstinate to be happy."
"But I've just told you that I am happy."
"What have you got?" he persisted.
"I've got heaps of things. I've got my two hands and my two feet. I've got my brain——"
"So have I. And yet——"
"It's absurd to say I've 'got' these things. They're me. Happiness isn't in the things you've got. It's either in you or it isn't."
"It generally isn't. Go on. What else? You've got the moon and your idea of the moon. I don't see that you've got much more."
"Anyhow, I've got my liberty."
"Your liberty—if that's all you want!"
"It's pretty nearly all. It covers most things."
"It does if you're an incurable egoist."
"You think I'm an egoist? And incurable?"
"It doesn't matter what I think."
"Not much. If you think that."
Silence. And then Rowcliffe burst out again.
"There are two things that I can't stand—a woman nursing a dog and a woman in love with the moon. They mean the same thing. And it's horrible."
"Why?"
"Because if it's humbug she's a hypocrite, and if it's genuine she's a monster."
"And if I'm in love with the moon—and you said I was——"
"I didn't. You said it yourself."
"Not at all. I said if I was in love with the moon, I'd be in love with it and not with my idea of it. I want reality."
"So do I. We're not likely to get it if we can't see it."
"No. If you're only in love with what you see."
"Oh, you're too clever. Too clever for me."
"Am I too clever for myself?"
"Probably."
He laughed abominably.
"I don't see the joke."
"If you don't see it this minute you'll see it in another ten years."
"Now," she said, "you're too clever for me."
They walked on in silence again. The mist gathered and dripped about them.
Abruptly she spoke.
"Has anything happened?"
"No, it hasn't."
"I mean—anything horrid?"
Her voice sounded such genuine distress that he dropped his hostile and contemptuous tone.
"No," he said, "why should it?"
"Because I've noticed that, when people are unusually horrid, it always means that something horrid's happened to them."
"Really?"
"Papa, for instance, is only horrid to us because Mummy—my stepmother, you know—was horrid to him."
"What did Mummy do to him?"
"She ran away from him. It's always that way. People aren't horrid on purpose. At least I'm sure you wouldn't be."
"Was I horrid?"
"Well—for the last half-hour——"
"You see, I find you a little exasperating at times."
"Not always?"
"No. Not by any means always."
"Can I tell when I am? Or when I'm going to be?"
He laughed (not at all abominably). "No. I don't think you can. That's rather what I resent in you."
"I wish I could tell. Then perhaps I might avoid it. You might just give me warning when you think I'm going to be it."
"I did give you warning."
"When?"
"When it began."
"There you are. I don't know when it did begin. What were we talking about?"
"I wasn't talking about anything. You were talking about the moon."
"It was the moon that did it."
"I suppose it was the moon."
"I see. I bored you. How awful."
"I didn't say you bored me. You never have bored me. You couldn't bore me."
"No—I just irritate you and drive you mad."
"You just irritate me and drive me mad."
The words were brutal but the voice caressed her. He took her by the arm and steered her amicably round a hidden boulder.
"Do you know many women?" she asked.
The question was startling by reason of its context. The better to consider it Rowcliffe withdrew his protecting arm.
"No," he said, "not very many."
"But those you do know you get on with? You get on all right with
Mary?"
"Yes. I get on all right with 'Mary.'"
"You'd be horrid if you didn't. Mary's a dear."
"Well—I know where I am with her."
"And you get on all right—really—with Papa, as long as I'm not there."
"As long as you're not there, yes."
"So that," she pursued, "I'm the horrid thing that's happened to you? It looks like it."
"It feels like it. Let's say you're the horrid thing that's happened to me, and leave it at that."
They left it.
Rowcliffe had a sort of impression that he had said all that he had had to say.
XXXII
The Vicar had called Gwenda into his study one day.
"What's this I hear," he said, "of you and young Rowcliffe scampering about all over the country?"
The Vicar had drawn a bow at a venture. He had not really heard anything, but he had seen something; two forms scrambling hand in hand up Karva; not too distant to be recognisable as young Rowcliffe and his daughter Gwenda, yet too distant to be pleasing to the Vicar. It was their distance that made them so improper.
"I don't know, Papa," said Gwenda.
"Perhaps you know what was said about your sister Alice? Do you want the same thing to be said about you?"
"It won't be, Papa. Unless you say it yourself."
She had him there; for what was said about Alice had been said first of all by him.
"What do you mean, Gwenda?"
"I mean that I'm a little different from Alice."
"Are you? Are you? When you're doing the same thing?"
"Let me see. What was the dreadful thing that Ally did? She ran after young Rickards, didn't she? Well—if you'd really seen us scampering you'd know that I'm generally running away from young Rowcliffe and that young Rowcliffe is generally running after me. He says it's as much as he can do to keep up with me."
"Gwenda," said the Vicar solemnly. "I won't have it."
"How do you propose to stop it, Papa?"
"You'll see how."
(It was thus that his god lured the Vicar to destruction. For he had no plan. He knew that he couldn't move into another parish.)
"It's no good locking me up in my room," said Gwenda, "for I can get out at the window. And you can't very well lock young Rowcliffe up in his surgery."
"I can forbid him the house."
"That's no good either so long as he doesn't forbid me his."
"You can't go to him there, my girl."
"I can do anything when I'm driven."
The Vicar groaned.
"You're right," he said. "You are different from Alice. You're worse than she is—ten times worse. You'd stick at nothing. I've always known it."
"So have I."
The Vicar leaned against the chimney-piece and hid his face in his hands to shut out the shame of her.
And then Gwenda had pity on him.
"It's all right, Papa. I'm not going to Dr. Rowcliffe, because there's no need. You're not going to lock him up in his surgery and you're not going to forbid him the house. You're not going to do anything. You're going to listen to me. It's not a bit of good trying to bully me. You'll be beaten every time. You can bully Alice as much as you like. You can bully her till she's ill. You can shut her up in her bedroom and lock the door and I daresay she won't get out at the window. But even Alice will beat you in the end. Of course there's Mary. But I shouldn't try it on with Mary either. She's really more dangerous than I am, because she looks so meek and mild. But she'll beat you, too, if you begin bullying her."
The Vicar raised his stricken head.
"Gwenda," he said, "you're terrible."
"No, Papa, I'm not terrible. I'm really awfully kind. I'm telling you these things for your good. Don't you worry. I shan't run very far after young Rowcliffe."
XXXIII
Left to himself, the Vicar fairly wallowed in his gloom. He pressed his hands tightly to his face, crushing into darkness the image of his daughter Gwenda that remained with him after the door had shut between them.
It came over him with the very shutting of the door not only that there never was a man so cursed in his children (that thought had occurred to him before) but that, of the three, Gwenda was the one in whom the curse was, so to speak, most active, through whom it was most likely to fall on him at any moment. In Alice it could be averted. He knew, he had always known, how to deal with Alice. And it would be hard to say exactly where it lurked in Mary. Therefore, in his times of profoundest self-commiseration, the Vicar overlooked the existence of his daughter Mary. He was an artist in gloom and Mary's sweetness and goodness spoiled the picture. But in Gwenda the curse was imminent and at the same time incalculable. Alice's behavior could be fairly predicted and provided for. There was no knowing what Gwenda would do next. The fear of what she might do hung forever over his head, and it made him jumpy.
And yet in this sense of cursedness the Vicar had found shelter for his self-esteem.
And now his fear, his noble and righteous fear of what Gwenda might do, his conviction that she would do something, disguised more than ever his humiliating fear of Gwenda. She was, as he had said, terrible. There was no dealing with Gwenda; there never had been. Patience failed before her will and wisdom before the deadly thrust of her intelligence. She had stabbed him in several places before she had left the room.
* * * * *
The outcome of his brooding (it would have shocked the Vicar if he could have traced its genesis) was an extraordinary revulsion in Rowcliffe's favor. So far from shutting the Vicarage door in the young man's face, the Vicar was, positively he was, inclined to open it. He couldn't stand the idea of other people marrying since he wasn't really married himself, and couldn't be as long as Robina persisted in being alive (thus cruelly was he held up by that unscrupulous and pitiless woman) and the idea of any of his daughters marrying was peculiarly disagreeable to him. He didn't know why it was disagreeable, and it would have shocked him unspeakably if you had told him why. And if you had asked him he would have had half a dozen noble and righteous reasons ready for you at his finger-ends. But the Vicar with his eyes shut could see clearly that if Gwenda married Rowcliffe the unpleasant event would have its compensation. He would be rid of an everlasting source of unpleasantness at home. He didn't say to himself that his egoism would be rid of an everlasting fear. He said that if Rowcliffe married Gwenda he would keep her straight.
And then another consoling thought struck him.
He could deal with Alice more effectually than ever. Neither Mary nor Alice knew what he knew. They hadn't dreamed that it was Gwenda that young Rowcliffe wanted. He would use his knowledge to bring Alice to her senses.
* * * * *
It was on a Wednesday that he dealt with her.
He was coming in some hours earlier than usual from his rounds when she delivered herself into his hands by appearing at the foot of the staircase with her hair extravagantly dressed, and wearing what he took, rightly, to be a new blue gown.
He opened the study door, and, with a treacherous smile, invited her to enter. Then he looked at her.
"Is that another new dress you've got on?" he inquired, still with his bland treachery.
"Yes, Papa," said Alice. "Do you like it?"
The Vicar drew himself up, squared his shoulders and smiled again, not quite so blandly. His attitude gave him a sensation of exquisite and powerful virility.
"Do I like it? I should, perhaps, if I were a millionaire."
"It didn't cost so much as all that," said Alice.
"I'm not asking you what it cost. But I think you must have anticipated your next allowance."
Alice stared with wide eyes of innocence.
"What if I did? It won't make any difference in the long run."
The Vicar, with his hands plunged in his trousers pockets, jerked forward at her from the waist. It was his gesture when he thrust.
"For all the difference it'll make to you, my dear child, you might have spared yourself the trouble and expense."
He paused.
"Has young Rowcliffe been here to-day?"
"No," said Alice defiantly, "he hasn't."
"You expected him?"
"I daresay Mary did."
"I'm not asking what Mary did. Did you expect him or did you not?"
"He said he might turn up."
"He said he might turn up. You expected him. And he hasn't turned up.
And you can't think why. Isn't that so?"
"I don't know what you mean, Papa."
"I mean, my child, that you're living in a fool's paradise."
"I haven't a notion what you mean by that."
"Perhaps Gwenda can enlighten you."
The color died in Ally's scared face.
"I can't see," she said, "what Gwenda's got to do with it."
"She's got something to do with young Rowcliffe's not turning up, I think. I met the two of them half way between Upthorne and Bar Hill at half past four."
He took out his watch.
"And it's ten past six now."
He sat down, turning his chair so as not to see her face. He did not, at the moment, care to look at her.
"You might go and ask Mrs. Gale to send me in a cup of tea."
Alice went out.
XXXIV
"It's a quarter past six now," she said to herself. "They must come back from Bar Hill by Upthorne. I shall meet them at Upthorne if I start now."
She slipped her rough coat over the new gown and started.
Her fear drove her, and she went up the hill at an impossible pace.
She trembled, staggered, stood still and went on again.
The twilight of the unborn moon was like the horrible twilight of dreams. She walked as she had walked in nightmares, with knees, weak as water, that sank under her at every step.
She passed the schoolhouse with its beckoning ash-tree. The schoolhouse stirred the pain under her heart. She remembered the shining night when she had shown herself there and triumphed.
The pain then was so intolerable that her mind revolted from it as from a thing that simply could not be. The idea by which she lived asserted itself against the menace of destruction. It was not so much an idea as an instinct, blind, obstinate, immovable. It had behind it the wisdom and the persistence of life. It refused to believe where belief meant death to it.
She said to herself, "He's lying. He's lying. He's made it all up. He never met them."
* * * * *
She had passed the turn of the hill. She had come to the high towers, sinister and indistinct, to the hollow walls and haunted arcades of the dead mining station. Upthorne was hidden by the shoulder of the hill.
She stopped suddenly, there where the road skirted the arcades. She was struck by a shock of premonition, an instinct older and profounder than that wisdom of the blood. She had the sense that what was happening now, her coming, like this, to the towers and the arcades, had happened before, and was so related to what was about to happen that she knew this also and with the same shock of recognition.
It would happen when she had come to the last arch of the colonnade.
It was happening now. She had come to the last arch.
* * * * *
That instant she was aware of Rowcliffe and Gwenda coming toward her down the hill.
Their figures were almost indiscernible in the twilight. It was by their voices that she knew them.
Before they could see her she had slipped out of their path behind the shelter of the arch.
She knew them by their voices. Yet their voices had something in them that she did not know, something that told her that they had been with each other many times before; that they understood each other; that they were happy in each other and absorbed.
The pain was no longer inside her heart but under it. It was dull rather than sharp, yet it moved there like a sharp sickle, a sickle that gathered and ground the live flesh it turned in and twisted. A sensation of deadly sickness made her draw farther yet into the corner of the arcade, feeling her way in the darkness with her hand on the wall. She stumbled on a block of stone, sank on it and cowered there, sobbing and shivering.
Down in Garth village the church clock struck the half hour and the quarter and the hour.
At the half hour Blenkiron, the blacksmith, put Rowcliffe's horse into the trap. The sound of the clanking hoofs came up the hill. Rowcliffe heard them first.
"There's something wrong down there," he said. "They're coming for me."
In his heart he cursed them. For it was there, at the turn of the road, below the arches, that he had meant to say what he had not said the other night. There was no moon. The moment was propitious. And there (just like his cursed luck) was Blenkiron with the trap.
They met above the schoolhouse as the clock struck the quarter.
"You're wanted, sir," said the blacksmith, "at Mrs. Gale's."
"Is it Essy?"
"Ay, it's Assy."
* * * * *
In the cottage down by the beck Essy groaned and cried in her agony.
And on the road to Upthorne, under the arches by the sinister towers,
Alice Cartaret, crouching on her stone, sobbed and shivered.
Not long after seven Essy's child was born.
* * * * *
Just before ten the three sisters sat waiting, as they had always waited, bored and motionless, for the imminent catastrophe of Prayers.
"I wonder how Essy's getting on," said Gwenda.
"Poor little Essy!" Mary said.
"She's as pleased as Punch," said Gwenda. "It's a boy. Ally—did you know that Essy's had a baby?"
"I don't care if she has," said Ally violently. "It's got nothing to do with me. I wish you wouldn't talk about her beastly baby."
As the Vicar came out of his study into the dining-room, he fixed his eyes upon his youngest daughter.
"What's the matter with you?" he said.
"Nothing's the matter," said Alice defiantly. "Why?"
"You look," he said, "as if somebody was murdering you."
XXXV
Ally was ill; so ill this time that even the Vicar softened to her. He led her upstairs himself and made her go to bed and stay there. He would have sent for Rowcliffe but that Ally refused to see him.
Her mortal apathy passed for submission. She took her milk from her father's hand without a murmur. "There's a good girl," he said, as she drank it down.
But it didn't do her any good. Nothing did. The illness itself was no good to her, considering that she didn't want to be ill this time. She wanted to die. And of course she couldn't die. It would have been too much happiness and they wouldn't let her have it.
At first she resented what she called their interference. She declared, as she had declared before, that there was nothing the matter with her. She was only tired. Couldn't they see that she was tired? That they tired her?
"Why can't you leave me alone? If only you'd go away," she moaned, "—all of you—and leave me alone."
But very soon she was too tired even to be irritable. She lay quiet, sunk in the hollow of her bed, and kept her eyes shut, so that she never knew, she said, whether they were there or not. And it didn't matter. Nothing mattered so long as she could just lie there.
It was only when they talked of sending for Rowcliffe that they roused her. Then she sat up and became, first vehement, then violent.
"You shan't send for him," she cried. "I won't see him. If he comes into the house I'll crawl out of it."
* * * * *
One day (it was the last Wednesday in April) Gwenda came to her and told her that Rowcliffe was there and had asked to see her.
Ally's pale eyes lightened and grew large. They were transparent as glass in her white face.
"Did you send for him?"
"No."
"Who did then?"
"Papa."
She closed her eyes. The old sense of ecstasy came over her, of triumph too, of solemn triumph, as if she, whom they thought so insignificant, had vindicated her tragic dignity at last.
For if her father had sent for Rowcliffe it could only mean that she was really dying. Nothing else—nothing short of that—would have made him send.
And of course that was what she wanted, that Rowcliffe should see her die. He wouldn't forget her then. He would be compelled to think of her.
"You will see him, won't you, Ally?"
Ally smiled her little triumphant and mysterious smile.
"Oh yes, I'll see him."
* * * * *
The Vicar did not go on his rounds that afternoon. He stayed at home to talk to Rowcliffe. The two were shut up together in his study for more than half an hour.
As they entered the drawing-room at tea-time it could be seen from their manner and their faces that something had gone wrong. The Vicar bore himself like a man profoundly aggrieved, not to say outraged, in his own house, who nevertheless was observing a punctilious courtesy towards the offending guest. Rowcliffe's shoulders and his jaw were still squared in the antagonism that had closed their interview. He too observed the most perfect courtesy. Only by the consummate restraint of his manner did he show how impossible he had found the Vicar, while his face betrayed a grave preoccupation in which the Vicar counted not at all.
Mary began to talk to him about the weather. Neither she nor Gwenda dared ask him what he thought of Alice.
And in ten minutes he was gone. The Vicar went with him to the gate.
Still standing as they had stood to take leave of Rowcliffe, the sisters looked at each other. Mary spoke first.
"Whatever can Papa have said to him?"
This time Gwenda knew what Mary was thinking.
"It isn't that," she said. "It's something he's said to Papa."
XXXVI
That night, about nine o'clock, Gwenda came for the third time to
Rowcliffe at his house.
She was shown into his study, where Rowcliffe was reading.
Though the servant had prepared him for her, he showed signs of agitation.
Gwenda's eyes were ominously somber and she had the white face of a ghost, a face that to Rowcliffe, as he looked at it, recalled the white face of Alice. He disliked Alice's face, he always had disliked it, he disliked it more than ever at that moment; yet the sight of this face that was so like it carried him away in an ecstasy of tenderness. He adored it because of that likeness, because of all that the likeness revealed to him and signified. And it increased, quite unendurably, his agitation.
Gwenda was supernaturally calm.
In another instant the illusion that her presence had given him passed. He saw what she had come for.
"Has anything gone wrong?" he asked.
She drew in her breath sharply.
"It's Alice."
"Yes, I know it's Alice. Is anything wrong?" he said. "What is it?"
"I don't know. I want you to tell me. That's what I've come for. I'm frightened."
"D'you mean, is she worse?"
She did not answer him. She looked at him as if she were trying to read in his eyes something that he was trying not to tell her.
"Yes," he said, "she is worse."
"I know that," she said impatiently. "I can see it. You've got to tell me more."
"But I have told you. You know I have," he pleaded.
"I know you tried to tell me."
"Didn't I succeed?"
"You told me why she was ill—I know all that——"
"Do sit down." He turned from her and dragged the armchair forward.
"There." He put a cushion at her back. "That's better."
As she obeyed him she kept her eyes on him. The book he had been reading lay where he had put it down, on the hearthrug at her feet. Its title, "État mental des hystériques;" Janet, stared at him. He picked it up and flung it out of sight as if it had offended him. With all his movements her head lifted and turned so that her eyes followed him.
He sat down and gazed at her quietly.
"Well," he said, "and what didn't I tell you?"
"You didn't tell me how it would end."
He was silent.
"Is that what you told father?"
"Hasn't he said anything?"
"He hasn't said a word. And you went away without saying anything."
"There isn't much to say that you don't know——"
"I know why she was ill. You told me. But I don't know why she's worse. She was better. She was quite well. She was running about doing things and looking so pretty—only the other day. And look at her now."
"It's like that," said Rowcliffe. "It comes and goes."
He said it quietly. But the blood rose into his face and forehead in a painful flush.
"But why? Why?" she persisted. "It's so horribly sudden."
"It's like that, too," said Rowcliffe.
"If it's like that now what is it going to be? How is it going to end?
That's what you won't tell me."
"It's difficult——" he began.
"I don't care how difficult it is or how you hate it. You've got to."
All he said to that was "You're very fond of her?"
Her upper lip trembled. "Yes. But I don't think I knew it until now."
"That's what makes it difficult."
"My not knowing it?"
"No. Your being so fond of her."
"Isn't that just the reason why I ought to know?"
"Yes. I think it is. Only——"
She held him to it.
"Is she going to die?"
"I don't say she's going to die. But—in the state she's in—she might get anything and die of it if something isn't done to make her happy."
"Happy——"
"I mean of course—to get her married. After all, you know, you've got to face the facts."
"You think she's dying now, and you're afraid to tell me."
"No—I'm afraid I think—she's not so likely to die as to go out of her mind."
"Did you tell my father that?"
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
"He said she was out of her mind already."
"She isn't!"
"Of course she isn't. No more than you and I. He talks about putting the poor child under restraint——"
"Oh——"
"It's preposterous. But he'll make it necessary if he continues his present system. What I tried to impress on him is that she will go out of her mind if she's kept shut up in that old Vicarage much longer. And that she'd be all right—perfectly all right—if she was married. As far as I can make out he seems to be doing his best to prevent it. Well—in her case—that's simply criminal. The worse of it is I can't make him see it. He's annoyed with me."
"He never will see anything he doesn't like."
"There's no reason why he should dislike it so much—I mean her illness. There's nothing awful about it."
"There's nothing awful about Ally. She's as good as gold."
"I know she's as good as gold. And she'd be as strong as iron if she was married and had children. I've seen no end of women like that, and I'm not sure they don't make the best wives and mothers. I told your father that. But it's no good trying to tell him the truth."
"No. It's the one thing he can't stand."
"He seems," said Rowcliffe, "to have such an extraordinary distaste for the subject. He approaches it from an impossible point of view—as if it was sin or crime or something. He talks about her controlling herself, as if she could help it. Why, she's no more responsible for being like that than I am for the shape of my nose. I'm afraid I told him that if anybody was responsible he was, for bringing her to the worst place imaginable."
"He did that on purpose."
"I know. And I told him he might as well have put her in a lunatic asylum at once."
He meditated.
"It's not as if he hadn't anybody but himself to think of."
"That's no good. He never does think of anybody but himself. And yet he'd be awfully sorry, you know, if Ally died."
They sat silent, not looking at each other, until Gwenda spoke again.
"Dr. Rowcliffe—"
He smiled as if it amused him to be addressed so formally.
"Do you really mean it, or are you frightening us? Will Ally really die—or go mad—if she isn't—happy?"
He was grave again.
"I really mean it. It's a rather serious case. But it's only 'if.' As
I told you, there are scores of women—"
But she waived them all away.
"I only wanted to know."
Her voice stopped suddenly, and he thought that she was going to break down.
"You mustn't take it so hard," he said. "It's not as if it wasn't absolutely curable. You must take her away."
Suddenly he remembered that he didn't particularly want Gwenda to go away. He couldn't, in fact, bear the thought of it.
"Better still," he said, "send her away. Is there anybody you could send her to?"
"Only Mummy—my stepmother." She smiled through her tears. "Papa would never let Ally go to her."
"Why not?"
"Because she ran away from him."
He tried not to laugh.
"She's really quite decent, though you mightn't think it." Rowcliffe smiled. "And she's fond of Ally. She's fond of all of us—except Papa. And," she added, "she knows a lot of people."
He smiled again. He pictured the third Mrs. Cartaret as a woman of affectionate gaiety and a pleasing worldliness, so well surrounded by adorers of his own sex that she could probably furnish forth her three stepdaughters from the numbers of those she had no use for. He was more than ever disgusted with the Vicar who had driven from him a woman so admirably fitted to play a mother's part.
"She sounds," he said, "as if she'd be the very one."
"She would be. It's an awful pity."
"Well," he said, "we won't talk any more about it now. We'll think of something. We simply must get her away."
He was thinking that he knew of somebody—a doctor's widow—who also would be fitted. If they could afford to pay her. And if they couldn't, he would very soon have the right——
That was what his "we" meant.
Presently he excused himself and went out to see, he said, about getting her some tea. He judged that if she were left alone for a moment she would pull herself together and be as ready as ever for their walk back to Garthdale.
* * * * *
It was in that moment when he left her that she made her choice. Not that when her idea had come to her she had known a second's hesitation. She didn't know when it had come. It seemed to her that it had been with her all through their awful interview.
It was she and not Ally who would have to go away.
She could see it now.
It had been approaching her, her idea, from the very instant that she had come into the room and had begun to speak to him. And with every word that he had said it had come closer. But not until her final appeal to him had she really faced it. Then it became clear. It crystallised. There was no escaping from the facts.
Ally would die or go mad if she didn't marry.
Ally (though Rowcliffe didn't know it) was in love with him.
And, even if she hadn't been, as long as they stayed in Garthdale there was nobody but Rowcliffe whom she could marry. It was her one chance.
And there were three of them there. Three women to one man.
And since she was the one—she knew it—who stood between him and
Ally, it was she who would have to go away.
It seemed to her that long ago—all the time, in fact, ever since she had known Rowcliffe—she had known that this was what she would have to face.
She faced it now with a strange courage and a sort of spiritual exaltation, as she would have faced any terrible truth that Rowcliffe had told her, if, for instance, he had told her that she was going to die.
That, of course, was what it felt like. She had known that it would feel like that.
And, as sometimes happens to people who are going to die and know it, there came to her a peculiar vivid and poignant sense of her surroundings. Of Rowcliffe's room and the things in it,—the chair he had sat in, the pipe he had laid aside, the book he had been reading and that he had flung away. Outside the open window the trees of the little orchard, whitened by the moonlight, stood as if fixed in a tender, pure and supernatural beauty. She could see the flags on the path and the stones in the gray walls. They stood out with a strange significance and importance. As if near and yet horribly far away, she could hear Rowcliffe's footsteps in the passage.
It came over her that she was sitting in Rowcliffe's room—like this—for the last time.
Then her heart dragged and tore at her, as if it fought against her will to die. But it never occurred to her that this dying of hers was willed by her. It seemed foredoomed, inevitable.
* * * * *
And now she was looking up in Rowcliffe's face and smiling at him as he brought her her tea.
"That's right," he said.
He was entirely reassured by her appearance.
"Look here, shall I drive you back or do you feel like another four-mile walk?"
She hesitated.
"It's late," he said. "But no matter. Let's be reckless."
"There's no need. I've got my bicycle."
"Then I'll get mine."
She rose. "Don't. I'm going back alone."
"You're not. I'm coming with you. I want to come."
"If you don't mind, I'd rather you didn't—to-night."
"I'll drive you, then. I can't let you go alone."
"But I want," she said, "to be alone."
He stood looking at her with a sort of sullen tenderness.
"You're not going to worry about what I told you?"
"You didn't tell me. I knew."
"Then——"
But she persisted.
"No. I shall be all right," she said. "There's a moon."
In the end he let her have her way.
Moon or no moon he saw that it was not his moment.
XXXVII
What Gwenda had to do she did quickly.
She wrote to the third Mrs. Cartaret that night. She told her nothing except that she wanted to get something to do in London and to get it as soon as possible, and she asked her stepmother if she could put her up for a week or two until she got it. And would Mummy mind wiring Yes or No on Saturday morning?
It was then Thursday night.
She slipped out into the village about midnight to post the letter, though she knew that it couldn't go one minute before three o'clock on Friday afternoon.
She had no conscious fear that her will would fail her, but her instinct was appeased by action.
On Saturday morning Mrs. Cartaret wired: "Delighted. Expect you
Friday. Mummy."
Five intolerable days. They were not more intolerable than the days that would come after, when the thing she was doing would be every bit as hard. Only her instinct was afraid of something happening within those five days that would make the hard thing harder.
On Sunday Mrs. Cartaret's letter came. Her house, she said, was crammed with fiends till Friday. There was a beast of a woman in Gwenda's room who simply wouldn't go. But on Friday Gwenda's room would be ready. It had been waiting for her all the time. Hadn't they settled it that Gwenda was to come and live with her if things became impossible at home? Robina supposed they were impossible? She sent her love to Alice and Mary, and she was always Gwenda's loving Mummy. And she enclosed a five-pound note; for she was a generous soul.
On Monday Gwenda told Peacock the carrier to bring her a Bradshaw from
Reyburn.
* * * * *
She then considered how she was to account to her family for her departure.
She decided that she would tell Mary first. And she might as well tell her the truth while she was about it, since, if she didn't, Mary would be sure to find it out. She was sweet and good. Not so sweet and good that she couldn't hold her own against Papa if she was driven to it, but sweet enough and good enough to stand by Ally and to see her through.
It would be easy for Mary. It wasn't as if she had ever even begun to care for Rowcliffe. It wasn't as if Rowcliffe had ever cared for her.
And she could be trusted. A secret was always safe with Mary. She was positively uncanny in her silence, and quite superhumanly discreet.
Mary, then, should be told the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Her father should be told as much of it as he was likely to believe.
Ally, of course, mustn't have an inkling.
Mary herself had an inkling already when she appeared that evening in the attic where Gwenda was packing a trunk. She had a new Bradshaw in her hand.
"Peacock gave me this," said Mary. "He said you ordered it."
"So I did," said Gwenda.
"What on earth for?"
"To look up trains in."
"Why—is anybody coming?"
"Does anybody ever come?"
Mary's face admitted her absurdity.
"Then"—she made it out almost with difficulty—"somebody must be going away."
"How clever you are. Somebody is going away."
Mary twisted her brows in her perplexity. She was evidently thinking things.
"Do you mean—Steven Rowcliffe?"
"No, dear lamb." (What on earth had put Steven Rowcliffe into Mary's head?) "It's not as bad as all that. It's only a woman. In fact, it's only me."
Mary's face emptied itself of all expression; it became a blank screen suddenly put up before the disarray of hurrying, eager things, unclothed and unexpressed.
"I'm going to stay with Mummy."
Gwenda closed the lid of the trunk and sat on it.
(Perturbation was now in Mary's face.)
"You can't, Gwenda. Papa'll never let you go."
"He can't stop me."
"What on earth are you going for?"
"Not for my own amusement, though it sounds amusing."
"Does Mummy want you?"
"Whether she wants me or not, she's got to have me."
"For how long?"
(Mary's face was heavy with thought now.)
"I don't know. I'm going to get something to do."
"To do?"
(Mary said to herself, then certainly it was not amusing. She pondered it.)
"Is it," she brought out, "because of Steven Rowcliffe?"
"No. It's because of Ally."
"Ally?"
"Yes. Didn't Papa tell you about her?"
"Not he. Did he tell you?"
"No. It was Steven Rowcliffe."
And she told Mary what Rowcliffe had said to her.
She had made room for her on her trunk and they sat there, their bodies touching, their heads drawn back, each sister staring with eyes that gave and took the other's horror.
* * * * *
"Don't, Molly, don't——"
Mary was crying now.
"Does Papa know—that she'll die—or go mad?"
"Yes."
"But"—Mary lifted her stained face—"that's what they said about
Mother."
"If she had children. It's if Ally hasn't any."
"And Papa knew it then. And he knows it now—how awful."
"It isn't as awful as Steven Rowcliffe thinks. He doesn't really know what's wrong with her. He doesn't know she's in love with him."
"Poor Ally. What's the good? He isn't in love with her."
"He isn't now," said Gwenda. "But he will be."
"Not he. It's you he cares for—if he cares for anybody."
"I know. That's why I'm going."
"Oh, Gwenda——"
Mary's face was somber as she took it in.
"That won't do Ally any good. If you know he cares."
"I don't absolutely know it. And if I did it wouldn't make any difference."
"And if—you care for him?"
"That doesn't make any difference either. I've got to clear out. It's her one chance, Molly. I've got to give it her. How can I let her die, poor darling, or go mad? She'll be all right if he marries her."
"And if he doesn't?"
"He may, Molly, he may, if I clear out in time. Anyhow, there isn't anybody else."
"If only," Mary said, "Papa had kept a curate."
"But he hasn't kept a curate. He never will keep a curate. And if he does he'll choose a man with a wife and seven children—no, he'll choose no children. The wife mustn't have a chance of dying."
"Gwenda—do you think anybody knows? They did, you know—before, and it was awful."
"Nobody knows this time, except Papa and Steven Rowcliffe and you and me."
"I wish I didn't. I wish you hadn't told me."
"You had to know or I wouldn't have told you. Do you think Steven
Rowcliffe would have told me——"
"How could he? It was awful of him."
"He could because he isn't a coward or a fool and he knew that I'm not a coward or a fool either. He thought Ally had nobody but me. She'll have nobody but you when I'm gone. You mustn't let her see you think her awful. You mustn't think it. She isn't. She's as good as gold. Steven Rowcliffe said so. If she wasn't, Molly, I wouldn't ask you to help her—with him."
"Gwenda, you mustn't put it all on me. I'd do anything for poor Ally, but I can't make him marry her if he doesn't want to."
"I think Ally can make him want to, if she gets a chance. You've only got to stick to her and see her through. You'll have to ask him here, you know. She can't. And you'll have to keep Papa off her. If you're not very careful, he'll go and put her under restraint or something."
"Oh—would it come to that?"
"Yes. Papa'd do it like a shot. I believe he'd do it just to stop her marrying him. You mustn't tell Papa what I've told you. You mustn't tell Ally. And you mustn't tell him. Do you hear, Molly? You must never tell him."
"Of course I won't tell him. But it's no use thinking we can do things."
Gwenda stood up.
"We haven't got to do things. That's his business. We've only got to sit tight and play the game."
* * * * *
Gwenda went on with her packing.
"It will be time enough," she thought, "to tell Ally tomorrow."
Ally was in her room. She never came downstairs now; and this week she was worse and had stayed all day in bed. They couldn't rouse her.
But something had roused her this evening.
A sort of scratching on the door made Gwenda look up from her packing.
Ally stood on the threshold. She had dressed herself completely in her tweed skirt, white blouse and knitted tie. Her strength had failed her only in the struggle with her hair. The coil had fallen, and hung in a loose pigtail down her back. Slowly, in the weakness of her apathy, she trailed across the floor.
"Ally, what is it? Why didn't you send for me?"
"It's all right. I wanted to get up. I'm coming down to supper. You can leave off packing that old trunk. You haven't got to go."
"Who told you I was going?"
"Nobody. I knew it." She answered Gwenda's eyes. "I don't know how
I knew it, but I did. And I know why you're going and it's all rot.
You're going because you know that if you stay Steven Rowcliffe'll
marry you, and you think that if you go he'll marry me."
"Whatever put that idea into your head?"
"Nothing put it. It came. It shows how awful you must think me if you think I'd go and do a beastly thing like that."
"Like what?"
"Why—sneaking him away from you behind your back when I know you like him. You needn't lie about it. You do like him.
"I may be awful," she went on. "In fact I know I'm awful. But I'm decent. I couldn't do a caddish thing like that—I couldn't really. And, if I couldn't, there's no need for you to go."
She was sitting on the trunk where Mary had sat, and when she began to speak she had looked down at her small hands that grasped the edge of the lid, their fingers picking nervously at the ragged flap. They ceased and she looked up.
And in her look, a look that for the moment was divinely lucid, Gwenda saw Ally's secret and hidden kinship with herself. She saw it as if through some medium, once troubled and now made suddenly transparent. It was because of that queer kinship that Ally had divined her. However awful she was, however tragically foredoomed and driven, Ally was decent. She knew what Gwenda was doing because it was what, if any sustained lucidity were ever given her, she might have done herself.
But in Ally no idea but the one idea was very deeply rooted. Sustained lucidity never had been hers. It would be easy to delude her.
"I'm going," Gwenda said, "because I want to. If I stayed I wouldn't marry Steven Rowcliffe, and Steven Rowcliffe wouldn't marry me."
"But—I thought—I thought——"
"What did you think?"
"That there was something between you. Papa said so."
"If Papa said so you might have known there was nothing in it."
"And isn't there?"
"Of course there isn't. You can put that idea out of your head forever."
"All the same I believe that's why you're going."
"I'm going because I can't stand this place any longer. You said I'd be sick of it in three months."
"You're not sick of it. You love it. It's me you can't stand."
"No, Ally—no."
She plunged for another argument and found it.
"What I can't stand is living with Papa."
Ally agreed that this was rather more than plausible.