"But they told me—I mean I thought you were in London with Mrs.
Cartaret, all the time."
She laughed.
"Did Papa tell you that?"
"No. I don't know who told me. I—I got the impression." He almost stammered. "I must have misunderstood."
She meditated.
"It sounds awfully like Papa. He simply can't believe, poor thing, that I'd stick to anything so respectable."
"Hah!" He laughed out his contempt for the Vicar. He had forgotten that he too had wondered.
"Chuck it, Gwenda," he said, "chuck it."
"I can't," she said. "Not yet. It's too lucrative."
"But if it makes you seedy?"
"It doesn't. It won't. It isn't hard work. Only——" She broke off.
"It's time for you to go."
"Steve! Steve!"
Rowcliffe's youngest cousin was calling from the study window.
"Come along. Mary's ready."
"All right," he shouted. "I'm coming."
But he stood still there at the end of the orchard under the gray wall.
"Good-bye, Steven."
Gwenda put out her hand.
He held her with his troubled eyes. He did not see her hand. He saw her eyes only that troubled his.
"I say, is it very beastly?"
"No. Not a bit. You must go, Steven, you must go."
"If I'd only known," he persisted.
They were going down the path now toward the house.
"I wouldn't have let you——"
"You couldn't have stopped me."
(It was what she had always said to all of them.)
She smiled. "You didn't stop me going, you know."
"If you'd only told me—"
She smiled again, a smile as of infinite wisdom. "Dear Steven, there was nothing to tell."
They had come to the door in the wall. It led into the garden. He opened to let her pass through.
The wedding-party was gathered together on the flagged path before the house. It greeted them with laughter and cries, cheerfully ironic.
The bride in her traveling dress stood on the threshold. Outside the carriage waited at the open gate.
Rowcliffe took Mary's hand in his and they ran down the path.
"He can sprint fast enough now," said Rowcliffe's uncle.
* * * * *
But his youngest cousin and Harker, his best friend, had gone faster. They were waiting together on the bridge, and the girl had a slipper in her hand.
"Were you ever," she said, "at such an awful wedding?"
Harker saw nothing wrong about the wedding but he admitted that his experience was small.
The youngest cousin was not appeased by his confession. She went on.
"Why on earth didn't Steven try to marry Gwenda?"
"Not much good trying," said the doctor, "if she wouldn't have him."
"You believe that silly story? I don't. Did you see her face?"
Harker admitted that he had seen her face.
And then, as the carriage passed, Rowcliffe's youngest cousin did an odd thing. She tossed the slipper over the bridge into the beck.
Harker had not time to comment on her action. They were coming for him from the house.
Rowcliffe's youngest sister-in-law had fainted away on the top landing.
Everybody remembered then that it was she who had been in love with him.
XLVIII
Alice had sent for Gwenda.
Three months had gone by since her sister's wedding, and all her fears were gathered together in the fear of her father and of what was about to happen to her.
And before Gwenda could come to her, Rowcliffe and Mary had come to the Vicar in his study. They had been a long time with him, and then Rowcliffe had gone out. They had sent him to Upthorne. And the two had gone into the dining-room and they had her before them there.
It was early in a dull evening in February. The lamps were lit and in their yellow light Ally's face showed a pale and quivering exaltation. It was the face of a hunted and terrified thing that has gathered courage in desperation to turn and stand. She defended herself with sullen defiance and denial.
It had come to that. For Ned, the shepherd at Upthorne, had told what he had seen. He had told it to Maggie, who told it to Mrs. Gale. He had told it to the head-gamekeeper at Garthdale Manor, who had a tale of his own that he too had told. And Dr. Harker had a tale. Harker had taken his friend's practice when Rowcliffe was away on his honeymoon. He had seen Alice and Greatorex on the moors at night as he had driven home from Upthorne. And he had told Rowcliffe what he had seen. And Rowcliffe had told Mary and the Vicar.
And at the cottage down by the beck Essy Gale and her mother had spoken together, but what they had spoken and what they had heard they had kept secret.
"I haven't been with him," said Alice for the third time. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Ally—there's no use your saying that when you've been seen with him."
It was Mary who spoke.
"I ha—haven't."
"Don't lie," said the Vicar.
"I'm not. They're l-l-lying," said Ally, shaken into stammering now.
"Who do you suppose would lie about it?" Mary said.
"Essy would."
"Well—I may tell you, Ally, that you're wrong. Essy's kept your secret. So has Mrs. Gale. You ought to go down on your knees and thank the poor girl—after what you did to her."
"It was Essy. I know. She's mad to marry him herself, so she goes lying about me."
"Nobody's lying about her," said the Vicar, "but herself. And she's condemning herself with every word she says. You'd better have left Essy out of it, my girl."
"I tell you that she's lying if she says she's seen me with him. She's never seen me."
"It wasn't Essy who saw you," Mary said.
"Somebody else is lying then. Who was it?"
"If you must know who saw you," the Vicar said, "it was Dr. Harker. You were seen a month ago hanging about Upthorne alone with that fellow."
"Only once," Ally murmured.
"You own to 'once'? You—you——" he stifled with his fury. "Once is enough with a low blackguard like Greatorex. And you were seen more than once. You've been seen with him after dark." He boomed. "There isn't a poor drunken slut in the village who's disgraced herself like you."
Mary intervened. "Sh—sh—Papa. They'll hear you in the kitchen."
"They'll hear her." (Ally was moaning.) "Stop that whimpering and whining."
"She can't help it."
"She can help it if she likes. Come, Ally, we're all here——Poor Mary's come up and Steven. There are things we've got to know and I insist on knowing them. You've brought the most awful trouble and shame on me and your sister and brother-in-law, and the least you can do is to answer truthfully. I can't stand any more of this distressing altercation. I'm not going to extort any painful confession. You've only got to answer a simple Yes or No. Were you anywhere with Jim Greatorex before Dr. Harker saw you in December? Think before you speak. Yes or No."
She thought.
"N-no."
"Remember, Ally," said Mary, "he saw you in November."
"He didn't. Where?"
The Vicar answered her. "At your sister's wedding."
She recovered. "Of course he did. Jim Greatorex wasn't there, anyhow."
"He was not."
The stress had no significance for Ally. Her brain was utterly bewildered.
"Well. You say you were never anywhere with Greatorex before December.
You were not with him in—when was it, Mary?"
"August," said Mary. "The end of August."
Ally simply stared at him in her white bewilderment. Dates had no meaning as yet for her cowed brain.
He helped her.
"In the Three Fields. On a Sunday afternoon. Did you or did you not go into the barn?"
At that she cried out with a voice of anguish. "No—No—No!"
But Mary had her knife ready and she drove it home.
"Ally—Ned Langstaff saw you."
* * * * *
When Rowcliffe came back from Upthorne he found Alice cowering in a corner of the couch and crying out to her tormentors.
"You brutes—you brutes—if Gwenda was here she wouldn't let you bully me!"
Mary turned to her husband.
"Steven—will you speak to her? She won't tell us anything. We've been at it more than half an hour."
Rowcliffe stared at her and the Vicar with strong displeasure.
"I should think you had by the look of her. Why can't you leave the poor child alone?"
At the sound of his voice, the first voice of compassion that had yet spoken to her, Alice cried to him.
"Steven! Steven! They've been saying awful things to me. Tell them it isn't true. Tell them you don't believe it."
"There—there——" His voice stuck in his throat.
He put his hand on her shoulder, standing between her and her father.
"Tell them——" She looked up at him with her piteous eyes.
"She's worried to death," said Rowcliffe. "You might have left it for to-night at any rate."
"We couldn't, Steven, when you've sent for Greatorex. We must get at the truth before he comes."
Rowcliffe shrugged his shoulders.
"Have you brought him?" said the Vicar.
"No, I haven't. He's in Morfe. I've sent word for him to come on here."
Alice looked sharply at him.
"What have you sent for him for? Do you suppose he'd give me away?"
She began to weep softly.
"All this," said Rowcliffe, "is awfully bad for her."
"You don't seem to consider what it is for us."
Rowcliffe took no notice of the Vicar.
"Look here, Mary—you'd better take her upstairs before he comes. Put her to bed. Try and get her to sleep."
"Very well. Come, Ally." Mary was gentler now.
Then Ally became wonderful.
She stood up and faced them all.
"I won't go," she said. "I'll stay till he comes if I sit up all night. How do I know what you're going to do to him? Do you suppose I'm going to leave him with you? If anybody touches him I'll kill them."
"Ally, dear——"
Mary put her hand gently on her sister's arm to lead her from the room.
Ally shook off the hand and turned on her in hysteric fury.
"Stop pawing me—you! How dare you touch me after what you've said.
Steven—she says I took Essy's lover from her."
"I didn't, Ally. She doesn't know what she's saying."
"You did say it. She did, Steven. She said I ought to thank Essy for not splitting on me when I took her lover from her. As if she could talk when she took Steven from Gwenda."
"Oh—Steven!"
Rowcliffe shook his head at Mary, frowning, as a sign to her not to mind what Alice said.
"You treat me as if I was dirt, but I'd have died rather than have done what she did."
"Come, Alice, come. You know you don't mean it," said Rowcliffe, utterly gentle.
"I do mean it! She sneaked you from behind Gwenda's back and lied to you to make you think she didn't care for you——"
"Be quiet, you shameful girl!"
"Be quiet yourself, Papa. I'm not as shameful as Molly is. I'm not as shameful as you are yourself. You killed Mother."
"Oh—my—God——" The words were almost inaudible in the Vicar's shuddering groan.
He advanced on her to turn her from the room. Ally sank on her sofa as she saw him come.
Rowcliffe stepped between them.
"For God's sake, sir——"
Ally was struggling in hysterics now, choking between her piteous and savage cries.
Rowcliffe laid her on the sofa and put a cushion under her head. When he tried to loosen her gown at her throat she screamed.
"It's all right, Ally, it's all right."
"Is it? Is it?" The Vicar hissed at him.
"It won't be unless you leave her to me. If you go on bullying her much longer I won't answer for the consequences. You surely don't want——"
"It's all right, Ally. Lie quiet, there—like that. That's a good girl. Nobody's going to worry you any more."
He was kneeling by the sofa, pressing his hand to her forehead. Ally still sobbed convulsively, but she lay quiet. She closed her eyes under Rowcliffe's soothing hand.
"You might go and see if you can find some salvolatile, Mary," he said.
Mary went.
The Vicar, who had turned his back on this scene, went, also, into his study.
Ally still kept her eyes shut.
"Has Mary gone?"
"Yes."
"And Papa?"
"Yes. Lie still."
She lay still.
* * * * *
There was the sound of wheels on the road. It brought Mary and the
Vicar back into the room. The wheels stopped. The gate clanged.
Rowcliffe rose.
"That's Greatorex. I'll go to him."
Ally lay very still now, still as a corpse, with closed eyes.
The house door opened.
Rowcliffe drew back into the room.
"It isn't Greatorex," he said. "It's Gwenda."
"Who sent for her?" said the Vicar.
"I did," said Ally.
She had opened her eyes.
"Thank God for that, anyhow," said Rowcliffe.
Mary and her father looked at each other. Neither of them seemed to want to go out to Gwenda. It struck Rowcliffe that the Vicar was afraid.
They waited while Gwenda paid her driver and dismissed him. They could hear her speaking out there in the passage.
The house door shut and she came to them. She paused in the doorway, looking at the three who stood facing her, embarrassed and expectant. She seemed to be thinking that it was odd that they should stand there. The door, thrown back, hid Alice, who lay behind it on her sofa.
"Come in, Gwenda," said the Vicar with exaggerated suavity.
She came in and closed the door. Then she saw Alice.
She took the hand that Rowcliffe held out to her without looking at him. She was looking at Alice.
Alice gave a low cry and struggled to her feet.
"I thought you were never coming," she said.
Gwenda held her in her arms. She faced them.
"What have you been doing to her—all of you?"
Rowcliffe answered. Though he was the innocent one of the three he looked the guiltiest. He looked utterly ashamed.
"We've had rather a scene, and it's been a bit too much for her," he said.
"So I see," said Gwenda. She had not greeted Mary or her father.
"If you could persuade her to go upstairs to bed——"
"I've told you I won't go till he comes," said Ally.
She sat down on the sofa as a sign that she was going to wait.
"Till who comes?" Gwenda asked.
She stared at the three with a fierce amazement. And they were abashed.
"She doesn't know, Steve," said Mary.
"I certainly don't," said Gwenda.
She sat down beside Ally.
"Has anybody been bullying you, Ally?"
"They've all been bullying me except Steven. Steven's been an angel.
He doesn't believe what they say. Papa says I'm a shameful girl, and
Mary says I took Jim Greatorex from Essy. And they think——"
"Never mind what they think, darling."
"I must protest——"
The Vicar would have burst out again but that his son-in-law restrained him.
"Better leave her to Gwenda," he said.
He opened the door of the study. "Really, sir, I think you'd better.
And you, too, Mary."
And with her husband's compelling hand on her shoulder Mary went into the study.
The Vicar followed them.
* * * * *
As the door closed on them Alice looked furtively around.
"What is it, Ally?" Gwenda said.
"Don't you know?" she whispered.
"No. You haven't told me anything."
"You don't know why I sent for you? Can't you think?"
Gwenda was silent.
"Gwenda—I'm in the most awful trouble——" She looked around again.
Then she spoke rapidly and low with a fearful hoarse intensity.
"I won't tell them, but I'll tell you. They've been trying to get it out of me by bullying, but I wasn't going to let them. Gwenda—they wanted to make me tell straight out, there—before Steven. And I wouldn't—I wouldn't. They haven't got a word out of me. But it's true, what they say."
She paused.
"About me."
"My lamb, I don't know what they say about you."
"They say that I'm going to——"
Crouching where she sat, bent forward, staring with her stare, she whispered.
"Oh—Ally—darling——"
"I'm not ashamed, not the least little bit ashamed. And I don't care what they think of me. But I'm not going to tell them. I've told you because I know you won't hate me, you won't think me awful. But I won't tell Mary, and I won't tell Papa. Or Steven. If I do they'll make me marry him."
"Was it—was it——"
Ally's instinct heard the name that her sister spared her.
"Yes—Yes—Yes. It is."
She added, "I don't care."
"Ally—what made you do it?"
"I don't—know."
"Was it because of Steven?"
Ally raised her head.
"No. It was not. Steven isn't fit to black his boots. I know that——"
"But—you don't care for him?"
"I did—I did. I do. I care awfully——"
"Well——"
"Oh, Gwenda, can they make me marry him?"
"You don't want to marry him?"
Ally shook her head, slowly, forlornly.
"I see. You're ashamed of him."
"I'm not ashamed. I told you I wasn't. It isn't that——"
"What is it?"
"I'm afraid."
"Afraid——"
"It isn't his fault. He wants to marry me. He wanted to all the time.
He never meant that it should be like this. He asked me to marry him.
Before it happened. Over and over again he asked me and I wouldn't
have him."
"Why wouldn't you?"
"I've told you. Because I'm afraid."
"Why are you afraid?"
"I don't know. I'm not really afraid of him. I think I'm afraid of what he might do to me if I married him."
"Do to you?"
"Yes. He might beat me. They always do, you know, those sort of men, when you marry them. I couldn't bear to be beaten."
"Oh——" Gwenda drew in her breath.
"He wouldn't do it, Gwenda, if he knew what he was about. But he might
if he didn't. You see, they say he drinks. That's what frightens me.
That's why I daren't tell Papa. Papa wouldn't care if he did beat me.
He'd say it was my punishment."
"If you feel like that about it you mustn't marry him."
"They'll make me."
"They shan't make you. I won't let them. It'll be all right, darling. I'll take you away with me to-morrow, and look after you, and keep you safe."
"But—they'll have to know."
"Yes. They'll have to know. I'll tell them."
She rose.
"Stay here," she said. "And keep quiet. I'm going to tell them now."
"Not now—please, not now."
"Yes. Now. It'll be all over. And you'll sleep."
* * * * *
She went in to where they waited for her.
Her father and her sister lifted their eyes to her as she came in.
Rowcliffe had turned away.
"Has she said anything?"
(Mary spoke.)
"Yes."
The Vicar looked sternly at his second daughter.
"She denies it?"
"No, Papa. She doesn't deny it."
He drove it home. "Has—she—confessed?"
"She's told me it's true—what you think."
In the silence that fell on the four Rowcliffe stayed where he stood, downcast and averted. It was as if he felt that Gwenda could have charged him with betrayal of a trust.
The Vicar looked at his watch. He turned to Rowcliffe.
"Is that fellow coming, or is he not?"
"He won't funk it," said Rowcliffe.
He turned. His eyes met Gwenda's. "I think I can answer for his coming."
"Do you mean Jim Greatorex?" she said.
"Yes."
"What is it that he won't funk?"
She looked from one to the other. Nobody answered her. It was as if they were, all three, afraid of her.
"I see," she said. "If you ask me I think he'd much better not come."
"My dear Gwenda——" The Vicar was deferent to the power that had dragged Ally's confession from her.
"We must get through with this. The sooner the better. It's what we're all here for."
"I know. Still—I think you'll have to leave it."
"Leave it?"
"Yes, Papa."
"We can't leave it," said Rowcliffe. "Something's got to be done."
The Vicar groaned and Rowcliffe had pity on him.
"If you'd like me to do it—I can interview him."
"I wish you would."
"Very well." He moved uneasily. "I'd better see him here, hadn't I?"
"You'd better not see him anywhere," said Gwenda. "He can't marry her."
She held them all three by the sheer shock of it.
The Vicar spoke first. "What do you mean, 'he can't'? He must."
"He must not. Ally doesn't want to marry him. He asked her long ago and she wouldn't have him."
"Do you mean," said Rowcliffe, surprised out of his reticence, "before this happened?"
"Yes."
"And she wouldn't have him?"
"No. She was afraid of him."
"She was afraid of him—and yet——" It was Mary who spoke now.
"Yes, Mary. And yet—she cared for him."
The Vicar turned on her.
"You're as bad as she is. How can you bring yourself to speak of it, if you're a modest girl? You've just told us that your sister's shameless. Are we to suppose that you're defending her?"
"I am defending her. There's nobody else to do it. You've all set on her and tortured her——"
"Not all, Gwenda," said Rowcliffe. But she did not heed him.
"She'd have told you everything if you hadn't frightened her. You haven't had an atom of pity for her. You've never thought of her for a minute. You've been thinking of yourselves. You might have killed her. And you didn't care."
The Vicar looked at her.
"It's you, Gwenda, who don't care."
"About what she's done, you mean? I don't. You ought to be gentle with her, Papa. You drove her to it."
Rowcliffe answered.
"We'll not say what drove her, Gwenda."
"She was driven," she said.
"'Let no man say he is tempted of God when he is driven by his own lusts and enticed,'" said the Vicar.
He had risen, and the movement brought him face to face with Gwenda. And as she looked at him it was as if she saw vividly and for the first time the profound unspirituality of her father's face. She knew from what source his eyes drew their darkness. She understood the meaning of the gross red mouth that showed itself in the fierce lifting of the ascetic, grim moustache. And she conceived a horror of his fatherhood.
"No man ought to say that of his own daughter. How does he know what's her own and what's his?" she said.
Rowcliffe stared at her in a sort of awful admiration. She was terrible; she was fierce; she was mad. But it was the fierceness and the madness of pity and of compassion.
She went on.
"You've no business to be hard on her. You must have known."
"I knew nothing," said the Vicar.
He appealed to her with a helpless gesture of his hands.
"You did know. You were warned. You were told not to shut her up. And you did shut her up. You can't blame her if she got away. You flung her to Jim Greatorex. There wasn't anybody who cared for her but him."
"Cared for her!" He snarled his disgust.
"Yes. Cared for her. You think that's horrible of her—that she should have gone to him—and yet you want to tie her to him when she's afraid of him. And I think it's horrible of you."
"She must marry him." Mary spoke again. "She's brought it on herself,
Gwenda."
"She hasn't brought it on herself. And she shan't marry him."
"I'm afraid she'll have to," Rowcliffe said.
"She won't have to if I take her away somewhere and look after her. I mean to do it. I'll work for her. I'll take care of the child."
"Oh, you—you——!" The Vicar waved her away with a frantic flapping of his hands.
He turned to his son-in-law.
"Rowcliffe—I beg you—will you use your influence?"
"I have none."
That drew her. "Steven—help me—can't you see how terrible it is if she's afraid of him?"
"But is she?"
He looked at her with his miserable eyes, then turned them from her, considering gravely what she had said. It was then, while Rowcliffe was considering it, that the garden gate opened violently and fell to.
They waited for the sound of the front door bell.
Instead of it they heard two doors open and Ally's voice calling to
Greatorex in the hall.
As the Vicar flung himself from his study into the other room he saw Alice standing close to Greatorex by the shut door. Her lover's arms were round her.
He laid his hands on them as if to tear them apart.
"You shall not touch my daughter—until you've married her."
The young man's right arm threw him off; his left arm remained round
Alice.
"It's yo' s'all nat tooch her, Mr. Cartaret," he said. "Ef yo' coom between her an' mae I s'all 'ave t' kill yo'. I'd think nowt of it. Dawn't yo' bae freetened, my laass," he murmured tenderly.
The next instant he was fierce again.
"An' look yo' 'ere, Mr. Cartaret. It was yo' who aassked mae t' marry Assy. Do yo' aassk mae t' marry Assy now? Naw! Assy may rot for all yo' care. (It's all right, my sweet'eart. It's all right.) I'd a married Assy right enoof ef I'd 'a' looved her. But do yo' suppawss I'd 'a' doon it fer yore meddlin'? Naw! An' yo' need n' aassk mae t' marry yore daughter—(There—there—my awn laass)—"
"You are not going to be asked," said Gwenda. "You are not going to marry her."
"Gwenda," said the Vicar, "you will be good enough to leave this to me."
"It can't be left to anybody but Ally."
"It s'all be laft to her," said Greatorex.
He had loosened his hold of Alice, but he still stood between her and her father.
"It's for her t' saay ef she'll 'aave mae."
"She has said she won't, Mr. Greatorex."
"Ay, she's said it to mae, woonce. But I rackon she'll 'ave mae now."
"Not even now."
"She's toald yo'?"
He did not meet her eyes.
"Yes."
"She's toald yo' she's afraid o' mae?"
"Yes. And you know why."
"Ay. I knaw. Yo're afraid o' mae, Ally, because yo've 'eard I haven't always been as sober as I might bae; but yo're nat 'aalf as afraid o' mae, droonk or sober, as yo' are of yore awn faather. Yo' dawn't think I s'all bae 'aalf as 'ard an' crooil to yo' as yore faather is. She doosn't, Mr. Cartaret, an' thot's Gawd's truth."
"I protest," said the Vicar.
"Yo' stond baack, sir. It's for 'er t' saay."
He turned to her, infinitely reverent, infinitely tender.
"Will yo' staay with 'im? Or will yo' coom with mae?"
"I'll come with you."
With one shoulder turned to her father, she cowered to her lover's breast.
"Ay, an' yo' need n' be afraaid I'll not bae sober. I'll bae sober enoof now. D'ye 'ear, Mr. Cartaret? Yo' need n' bae afraaid, either. I'll kape sober. I'd kape sober all my life ef it was awnly t' spite yo'. An' I'll maake 'er 'appy. For I rackon theer's noothin' I could think on would spite yo' moor. Yo' want mae t' marry 'er t' poonish 'er. I knaw."
"That'll do, Greatorex," said Rowcliffe.
"Ay. It'll do," said Greatorex with a grin of satisfaction.
He turned to Alice, the triumph still flaming in his face. "Yo're nat afraaid of mae?"
"No," she said gently. "Not now."
"Yo navver were," said Greatorex; and he laughed.
That laugh was more than Mr. Cartaret could bear. He thrust out his face toward Greatorex.
Rowcliffe, watching them, saw that he trembled and that the thrust-out, furious face was flushed deeply on the left side.
The Vicar boomed.
"You will leave my house this instant, Mr. Greatorex. And you will never come into it again."
But Greatorex was already looking for his cap.
"I'll navver coom into et again," he assented placably.
* * * * *
There were no prayers at the Vicarage that night.
* * * * *
It was nearly eleven o'clock. Greatorex was gone. Gwenda was upstairs helping Alice to undress. Mary sat alone in the dining-room, crying steadily. The Vicar and Rowcliffe were in the study.
In all this terrible business of Alice, the Vicar felt that his son-in-law had been a comfort to him.
"Rowcliffe," he said suddenly, "I feel very queer."
"I don't wonder, sir. I should go to bed if I were you."
"I shall. Presently."
The one-sided flush deepened and darkened as he brooded. It fascinated
Rowcliffe.
"I think it would be better," said the Vicar slowly, "if I left the parish. It's the only solution I can see."
He meant to the problem of his respectability.
Rowcliffe said yes, perhaps it would be better.
He was thinking that it would solve his problem too.
For he knew that there would be a problem if Gwenda came back to her father.
The Vicar rose heavily and went to his roll-top desk. He opened it and began fumbling about in it, looking for things.
He was doing this, it seemed to his son-in-law, for quite a long time.
But it was only eleven o'clock when Mary heard sounds in the study that terrified her, of a chair overturned and of a heavy body falling to the floor. And then Steven called to her.
She found him kneeling on the floor beside her father, loosening his clothes. The Vicar's face, which she discerned half hidden between the bending head of Rowcliffe and his arms, was purple and horribly distorted.
Rowcliffe did not look at her.
"He's in a fit," he said. "Go upstairs and fetch Gwenda. And for God's sake don't let Ally see him."
XLIX
The village knew all about Jim Greatorex and Alice Cartaret now. Where their names had been whispered by two or three in the bar of the Red Lion, over the post office counter, in the schoolhouse, in the smithy, and on the open road, the loud scandal of them burst with horror.
For the first time in his life Jim Greatorex was made aware that public opinion was against him. Wherever he showed himself the men slunk from him and the women stared. He set his teeth and held his chin up and passed them as if he had not seen them. He was determined to defy public opinion.
Standing in the door of his kinsman's smithy, he defied it.
It was the day before his wedding. He had been riding home from Morfe Market and his mare Daisy had cast a shoe coming down the hill. He rode her up to the smithy and called for Blenkiron, shouting his need.
Blenkiron came out and looked at him sulkily.
"I'll shoe t' maare," he said, "but yo'll stand outside t' smithy, Jim
Greatorex."
For answer Jim rode the mare into the smithy and dismounted there.
Then Blenkiron spoke.
"You'd best 'ave staayed where yo' were. But yo've coom in an' yo' s'all 'ave a bit o' my toongue. To-morra's yore weddin' day, I 'ear?"
Jim intimated that if it was his wedding day it was no business of
Blenkiron's.
"Wall," said the blacksmith, "ef they dawn't gie yo' soom roough music to-morra night, it'll bae better loock than yo' desarve—t' two o' yo'."
Greatorex scowled at his kinsman.
"Look yo' 'ere, John Blenkiron, I warn yo'. Any man in t' Daale thot speaaks woon word agen my wife 'e s'all 'ave 'is nack wroong."
"An' 'ow 'bout t' women, Jimmy? There'll bae a sight o' nacks fer yo' t' wring, I rackon. They'll 'ave soomat t' saay to 'er, yore laady."
"T' women? T' women? Domned sight she'll keer for what they saay. There is n' woon o' they bitches as is fit t' kneel in t' mood to 'er t' tooch t' sawle of 'er boots."
Blenkiron peered up at him from the crook of the mare's hind leg.
"Nat Assy Gaale?" he said.
"Assy Gaale? 'Oo's she to mook 'er naame with 'er dirty toongue?"
"Yo'll not goa far thot road, Jimmy. 'Tis wi' t' womenfawlk yo'll 'aave t' racken."
He knew it.
The first he had to reckon with was Maggie.
Maggie, being given notice, had refused to take it.
"Yo' can please yoresel, Mr. Greatorex. I can goa. I can goa. But ef I goa yo'll nat find anoother woman as'll coom to yo'. There's nat woon as'll keer mooch t' work for yore laady."
"Wull yo' wark for 'er, Maaggie?" he had said.
And Maggie, with a sullen look and hitching her coarse apron, had replied remarkably:
"Ef Assy Gaale can wash fer er I rackon I can shift to baake an' clane."
"Wull yo' waait on 'er?" he had persisted.
Maggie had turned away her face from him.
"Ay, I'll waait on 'er," she said.
And Maggie had stayed to bake and clean. Rough and sullen, without a smile, she had waited on young Mrs. Greatorex.
* * * * *
But Alice was not afraid of Maggie. She was not going to admit for a moment that she was afraid of her. She was not going to admit that she was afraid of anything but one thing—that her father would die.
If he died she would have killed him.
Or, rather, she and Greatorex would have killed him between them.
This statement Ally held to and reiterated and refused to qualify.
For Alice at Upthorne had become a creature matchless in cunning and of subtle and marvelous resource. She had been terrified and tortured, shamed and cowed. She had been hounded to her marriage and conveyed with an appalling suddenness to Upthorne, that place of sinister and terrible suggestion, and the bed in which John Greatorex had died had been her marriage bed. Her mind, like a thing pursued and in deadly peril, took instantaneously a line. It doubled and dodged; it hid itself; its instinct was expert in disguises, in subterfuges and shifts.
In her soul she knew that she was done for if she once admitted and gave in to her fear of Upthorne and of her husband's house, or if she were ever to feel again her fear of Greatorex, which was the most intolerable of all her fears. It was as if Nature itself were aware that, if Ally were not dispossessed of that terror before Greatorex's child was born her own purpose would be insecure; as if the unborn child, the flesh and blood of the Greatorexes that had entered into her, protested against her disastrous cowardice.
So, without Ally being in the least aware of it, Ally's mind, struggling toward sanity, fabricated one enormous fear, the fear of her father's death, a fear that she could own and face, and set it up in place of that secret and dangerous thing which was the fear of life itself.
Ally, insisting a dozen times a day that she had killed poor Papa, was completely taken in by this play of her surreptitiously self-preserving soul. Even Rowcliffe was taken in by it. He called it a morbid obsession. And he began to wonder whether he had not been mistaken about Ally after all, whether her nature was not more subtle and sensitive than he had guessed, more intricately and dangerously mixed.
For the sadness of the desolate land, of the naked hillsides, of the moor marshes with their ghostly mists; the brooding of the watchful, solitary house, the horror of haunted twilights, of nightfall and of midnights now and then when Greatorex was abroad looking after his cattle and she lay alone under the white ceiling that sagged above her bed and heard the weak wind picking at the pane; her fear of Maggie and of what Maggie had been to Greatorex and might be again; her fear of the savage, violent and repulsive elements in the man who was her god; her fear of her own repulsion; the tremor of her recoiling nerves; premonitions of her alien blood, the vague melancholy of her secret motherhood; they were all mingled together and hidden from her in the vast gloom of her one fear.
And once the dominant terror was set up, her instinct found a thousand ways of strengthening it. Through her adoration of her lover her mind had become saturated with his mournful consciousness of sin. In their moments of contrition they were both convinced that they would be punished. But Ally had borne her sin superbly; she had declared that it was hers and hers only, and that she and not Greatorex would be punished. And now the punishment had come. She persuaded herself that her father's death was the retribution Heaven required.
* * * * *
And all the time, through the perilous months, Nature, mindful of her own, tightened her hold on Ally through Ally's fear. Ally was afraid to be left alone with it. Therefore she never let Greatorex out of her sight if she could help it. She followed him from room to room of the sad house where he was painting and papering and whitewashing to make it fine for her. Where he was she had to be. Stowed away in some swept corner, she would sit with her sweet and sorrowful eyes fixed on him as he labored. She trotted after him through the house and out into the mistal and up the Three Fields. She would crouch on a heap of corn-sacks, wrapped in a fur coat, and watch him at his work in the stable and the cow-byre. In her need to immortalise this passion she could not have done better. Her utter dependence on him flattered and softened the distrustful, violent and headstrong man. Her one chance, and Ally knew it, was to cling. If she had once shamed him by her fastidious shrinking she would have lost him; for, as Mrs. Gale had told her long ago, you could do nothing with Jimmy when he was shamed. Maggie, for all her coarseness, had contrived to shame him; so had Essy in her freedom and her pride. Ally's clinging, so far from irritating or obstructing him, drew out the infinite pity and tenderness he had for all sick and helpless things. He could no more have pushed little Ally from him than he could have kicked a mothering ewe, or stamped on a new dropped lamb. He would call to her if she failed to come. He would hold out his big hand to her as he would have held it to a child. Her smallness, her fineness and fragility enchanted him. The palms of her hands had the smoothness and softness of silk, and they made a sound like silk as they withdrew themselves with a lingering, stroking touch from his. He still felt, with a fearful and admiring wonder, the difference of her flesh from his.
To be sure Jim's tenderness was partly penitential. Only it was Ally alone who had moved him to a perfect and unbearable contrition. For the two women whom he had loved and left Greatorex had felt nothing but a passing pang. For the woman he had made his wife he would go always with a wound in his soul.
And with Ally, too, the supernatural came to Nature's aid. Her fear had a profound strain of the uncanny in it, and Jim's bodily presence was her shelter from her fear. And as it bound them flesh to flesh, closer and closer, it wedded them in one memory, one consolation and one soul.
* * * * *
One day she had followed him into the stable, and on the window-sill, among all the cobwebs where it had been put away and forgotten, she found the little bottle of chlorodyne.
She took it up, and Jim scolded her gently as if she had been a child.
"Yore lil haands is always maddlin'. Yo' put thot down."
"What is it?"
"It's poison, is thot. There's enoof there t' kill a maan. Yo' put it down whan I tall yo'."
She put it down obediently in its place on the window-sill among the cobwebs.
He made a nest for her of clean hay, where she sat and watched him as he gave Daisy her feed of corn. She watched every movement of him, every gesture, thoughtful and intent.
"I can't think, Jim, why I ever was afraid of you. Was I afraid of you?"
Greatorex grinned.
"Yo' used t' saay yo' were."
"How silly of me. And I used to be afraid of Maggie."
"I've been afraaid of Maaggie afore now. She's got a roough side t' 'er toongue and she can use it. But she'll nat use it on yo'. Yo've naw call to be afraaid ef annybody. There isn't woon would hoort a lil thing like yo'."
"They say things about me. I know they do."
"And yo' dawn't keer what they saay, do yo'?"
"I don't care a rap. But I think it's cruel of them, all the same."
"But yo're happy enoof, aren't yo'—all the same?"
"I'm very happy. At least I would be if it wasn't for poor Papa. It wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for what we did."
Wherever they started, whatever round they fetched, it was to this that they returned.
And always Jim met it with the same answer:
"'Tisn' what we doon; 'tis what 'e doon. An' annyhow it had to bae."
Every week Rowcliffe came to see her and every week Jim said to him:
"She's at it still and I caan't move 'er."
And every week Rowcliffe said: "Wait. She'll be better before long."
And Jim waited.
He waited till one afternoon in February, when they were again in the stable together. He had turned his back on her for a moment.
When he looked round she was gone from her seat on the cornsacks. She was standing by the window-sill with the bottle of chlorodyne in her hand and at her lips. He thought she was smelling it.
She tilted her head back. Her eyes slewed sidelong toward him. They quivered as he leaped to her.
She had not drunk a drop and he knew it, but she clutched her bottle with a febrile obstinacy. He had to loosen her little fingers one by one.
He poured the liquid into the stable gutter and flung the bottle on to the dung heap in the mistal.
"What were you doing wi' thot stoof?" he said.
"I don't know. I was thinking of Papa."
After that he never left her until Rowcliffe came.
Rowcliffe said: "She's got it into her head he's going to die, and she thinks she's killed him. You'd better let me take her to see him."
L
The Vicar had solved his problem by his stroke, but not quite as he had anticipated.
Nothing had ever turned out as he had planned or thought or willed. He had planned to leave the parish. He had thought that in his wisdom he had saved Alice by shutting her up in Garthdale. He had thought that she was safe at choir-practice with Jim Greatorex. He had thought that Mary was devoted to him and that Gwenda was capable of all disobedience and all iniquity. She had gone away and he had forbidden her to come back again. He had also forbidden Greatorex to enter his house.
And Greatorex was entering it every day, for news of him to take to Alice at Upthorne. Gwenda had come back and would never go again, and it was she and not Mary who had proved herself devoted. And it was not his wisdom but Greatorex's scandalous passion for her that had saved Alice. As for leaving the parish because of the scandal, the Vicar would never leave it now. He was tied there in his Vicarage by his stroke.
It left him with a paralysis of the right side and an utter confusion and enfeeblement of intellect.
In three months he recovered partially from the paralysis. But the flooding of his brain had submerged or carried away whole tracts of recent memory, and the last vivid, violent impression—Alice's affair—was wiped out.
There was no reason why he should not stay on. What was left of his memory told him that Alice was at the Vicarage, and he was worried because he never saw her about.
He did not know that the small gray house above the churchyard had become a place of sinister and scandalous tragedy; that his name and his youngest daughter's name were bywords in three parishes; and that Alice had been married in conspicuous haste by the horrified Vicar of Greffington to a man whom only charitable people regarded as her seducer.
And the order of time had ceased for him with this breach in the sequence of events. He had a dim but enduring impression that it was always prayer time. No hours marked the long stretches of blank darkness and of confused and crowded twilight. Only, now and then, a little light pulsed feebly in his brain, a flash that renewed itself day by day; and day by day, in a fresh experience, he was aware that he was ill.
It was as if the world stood still and his mind moved. It "wandered," as they said. And in its wanderings it came upon strange gaps and hollows and fantastic dislocations, landslips where a whole foreground had given way. It looked at these things with a serene and dreamlike wonder and passed on.
And in the background, on some half-lit, isolated tract of memory, raised above ruin, and infinitely remote, he saw the figure of his youngest daughter. It was a girlish, innocent figure, and though, because of the whiteness of its face, he confused it now and then with the figure of Alice's dead mother, his first wife, he was aware that it was really Alice.
This figure of Alice moved him with a vague and tender yearning.
What puzzled and worried him was that in his flashes of luminous experience he didn't see her there. And it was then that the Vicar would make himself wonderful and piteous by asking, a dozen times a day, "Where's Ally?"
For by the stroke that made him wonderful and piteous the Vicar's character and his temperament were changed. Nothing was left of Ally's tyrant and Robina's victim, the middle-aged celibate, filled with the fury of frustration and profoundly sorry for himself. His place was taken by a gentle old man, an old man of an appealing and childlike innocence, pure from all lust, from all self-pity, enjoying, actually enjoying, the consideration that his stroke had brought him.
He was changed no less remarkably in his affections. He was utterly indifferent to Mary, whom he had been fond of. He yearned for Alice, whom he had hated. And he clung incessantly to Gwenda, whom he had feared.
When he looked round in his strange and awful gentleness and said, "Where's Ally?" his voice was the voice of a mother calling for her child. And when he said, "Where's Gwenda?" it was the voice of a child calling for its mother.
And as he continually thought that Alice was at the Vicarage when she was at Upthorne, so he was convinced that Gwenda had left him when she was there.
* * * * *
Rowcliffe judged that this confusion of the Vicar's would be favorable to his experiment.
And it was.
When Mr. Cartaret saw his youngest daughter for the first time since their violent rupture he gazed at her tranquilly and said, "And where have you been all this time?"
"Not very far, Papa."
He smiled sweetly.
"I thought you'd run away from your poor old father. Let me see—was it Ally? My memory's going. No. It was Gwenda who ran away. Wasn't it Gwenda?"
"Yes, Papa."
"Well—she must come back again. I can't do without Gwenda."
"She has come back, Papa."
"She's always coming hack. But she'll go away again. Where is she?"
"I'm here, Papa dear."
"Here one minute," said the Vicar, "and gone the next."
"No—no. I'm not going. I shall never go away and leave you."
"So you say," said the Vicar. "So you say."
He looked round uneasily.
"It's time for Ally to go to bed. Has Essy brought her milk?"
His head bowed to his breast. He fell into a doze. Ally watched.
And in the outer room Gwenda and Steven Rowcliffe talked together.
"Steven—he's always going on like that. It breaks my heart."
"I know, dear, I know."
"Do you think he'll ever remember?"
"I don't know. I don't think so."
Then they sat together without speaking. She was thinking: "How good he is. Surely I may love him for his goodness?" And he that the old man in there had solved his problem, but that his own had been taken out of his hands.
And he saw no solution.
If the Vicar had gone away and taken Gwenda with him, that would have solved it. God knew he had been willing enough to solve it that way.
But here they were, flung together, thrust toward each other when they should have torn themselves apart; tied, both of them, to a place they could not leave. Week in, week out, he would be obliged to see her whether he would or no. And when her tired face rebuked his senses, she drew him by her tenderness; she held him by her goodness. There was only one thing for him to do—to clear out. It was his plain and simple duty. If it hadn't been for Alice and for that old man he would have done it. But, because of them, it was his still plainer and simpler duty to stay where he was, to stick to her and see her through.
He couldn't help it if his problem was taken out of his hands.
They started. They looked at each other and smiled their strained and tragic smile.
In the inner room the Vicar was calling for Gwenda.
It was prayer time, he said.
* * * * *
Rowcliffe had to drive Alice back that night to Upthorne.
"Well," he said, as they left the Vicarage behind them, "you see he isn't going to die."
"No," said Alice. "But he's out of his mind. I haven't killed him.
I've done worse. I've driven him mad."
And she stuck to it. She couldn't afford to part with her fear—yet.
Rowcliffe was distressed at the failure of his experiment. He told
Greatorex that there was nothing to be done but to wait patiently till
June. Then—perhaps—they would see.
In his own mind he had very little hope. He said to himself that he didn't like the turn Ally's obsession had taken. It was too morbid.
But when May came Alice lay in the big bed under the sagging ceiling with a lamentably small baby in her arms, and Greatorex sat beside her by the hour together, with his eyes fixed on her white face. Rowcliffe had told him to be on the lookout for some new thing or for some more violent sign of the old obsession. But nine days had passed and he had seen no sign. Her eyes looked at him and at her child with the same lucid, drowsy ecstasy.
And in nine days she had only asked him once if he knew how poor Papa was?
Her fear had left her. It had served its purpose.