LI
There was no prayer time at the Vicarage any more.
* * * * *
There was no more time at all there as the world counts time.
The hours no longer passed in a procession marked by distinguishable days. They rolled round and round in an interminable circle, monotonously renewed, monotonously returning upon itself. The Vicar was the center of the circle. The hours were sounded and measured by his monotonously recurring needs. But the days were neither measured nor marked. They were all of one shade. There was no difference between Sunday and Monday in the Vicarage now. They talked of the Vicar's good days and his bad days, that was all.
For in this house where time had ceased they talked incessantly of time. But it was always his time; the time for his early morning cup of tea; the time for his medicine; the time for his breakfast; the time for reading his chapter to him while he dozed; the time for washing him, for dressing him, for taking him out (he went out now, in a wheel-chair drawn by Peacock's pony); the time for his medicine again; his dinner time; the time for his afternoon sleep; his tea-time; the time for his last dose of medicine; his supper time and his time for being undressed and put to bed. And there were several times during the night which were his times also.
The Vicar had desired supremacy in his Vicarage and he was at last supreme. He was supreme over his daughter Gwenda. The stubborn, intractable creature was at his feet. She was his to bend or break or utterly destroy. She who was capable of anything was capable of an indestructible devotion. His times, the relentless, the monotonously recurring, were her times too.
If it had not been for Steven Rowcliffe she would have had none to call her own (except night time, when the Vicar slept). But Rowcliffe had kept to his days for visiting the Vicarage. He came twice or thrice a week; not counting Wednesdays. Only, though Mary did not know it, he came as often as not in the evenings at dusk, just after the Vicar had been put to bed. When it was wet he sat in the dining-room with Gwenda. When it was fine he took her out on to the moor under Karva.
They always went the same way, up the green sheep-track that they knew; they always turned back at the same place, where the stream he had seen her jumping ran from the hill; and they always took the same time to go and turn. They never stopped and never lingered; but went always at the same sharp pace, and kept the same distance from each other. It was as if by saying to themselves, "Never any further than the stream; never any longer than thirty-five minutes; never any nearer than we are now," they defined the limits of their whole relation. Sometimes they hardly spoke as they walked. They parted with casual words and with no touching of their hands and with the same thought unspoken—"Till the next time."
But these times which were theirs only did not count as time. They belonged to another scale of feeling and another order of reality. Their moments had another pulse, another rhythm and vibration. They burned as they beat. While they lasted Gwenda's life was lived with an intensity that left time outside its measure. Through this intensity she drew the strength to go on, to endure the unendurable with joy.
* * * * *
But Rowcliffe could not endure the unendurable at all. He was savage when he thought of it. That was her life and she would never get away from it. She, who was born for the wild open air and for youth and strength and freedom, would be shut up in that house and tied to that half-paralyzed, half-imbecile old man forever. It was damnable. And he, Rowcliffe, could have prevented it if he had only known. And if Mary had not lied to him.
And when his common sense warned him of their danger, and his conscience reproached him with leading her into it, he said to himself, "I can't help it if it is dangerous. It's been taken out of my hands. If somebody doesn't drag her out of doors, she'll get ill. If somebody doesn't talk to her she'll grow morbid. And there's nobody but me."
He sheltered himself in the immensity of her tragedy. Its darkness covered them. Her sadness and her isolation sanctified them. Alice had her husband and her child. Mary had—all she wanted. Gwenda had nobody but him.
* * * * *
She had never had anybody but him. For in the beginning the Vicar and his daughters had failed to make friends among their own sort. Up in the Dale there had been few to make, and those few Mr. Cartaret had contrived to alienate one after another by his deplorable legend and by the austere unpleasantness of his personality. People had not been prepared for intimacy with a Vicar separated so outrageously from his third wife. Nobody knew whether it was he or his third wife who had been outrageous, but the Vicar's manner was not such as to procure for him the benefit of any doubt. The fact remained that the poor man was handicapped by an outrageous daughter, and Alice's behavior was obviously as much the Vicar's fault as his misfortune. And it had been felt that Gwenda had not done anything to redeem her father's and her sister's eccentricities, and that Mary, though she was a nice girl, had hardly done enough. For the last eighteen months visits at the Vicarage had been perfunctory and very brief, month by month they had diminished, and before Mary's marriage they had almost ceased.
Still, Mary's marriage had appeased the parish. Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe had atoned for the third Mrs. Cartaret's suspicious absence and for Gwenda Cartaret's flight. Lady Frances Gilbey's large wing had further protected Gwenda.
Then, suddenly, the tale of Alice Cartaret and Greatorex went round, and it was as if the Vicarage had opened and given up its secret.
At first, the sheer extremity of his disaster had sheltered the Vicar from his own scandal. Through all Garthdale and Rathdale, in the Manors and the Lodges and the Granges, in the farmhouses and the cottages, in the inns and little shops, there was a stir of pity and compassion. The people who had left off calling at the Vicarage called again with sympathy and kind inquiries. They were inclined to forget how impossible the Cartarets had been. They were sorry for Gwenda. But they had been checked in their advances by Gwenda's palpable recoil. She had no time to give to callers. Her father had taken all her time. The callers considered themselves absolved from calling.
Slowly, month by month, the Vicarage was drawn back into its silence and its loneliness. It assumed, more and more, its aspect of half-sinister, half-sordid tragedy. The Vicar's calamity no longer sheltered him. It took its place in the order of accepted and irremediable events.
* * * * *
Only the village preserved its sympathy alive. The village, that obscure congregated soul, long-suffering to calamity, welded together by saner instincts and profound in memory, the soul that inhabited the small huddled, humble houses, divided from the Vicarage by no more than the graveyard of its dead, the village remembered and it knew.
It remembered how the Vicar had come and gone over its thresholds, how no rain nor snow nor storm had stayed him in his obstinate and punctual visiting. And whereas it had once looked grimly on its Vicar, it looked kindly on him now. It endured him for his daughter Gwenda's sake, in spite of what it knew.
For it knew why the Vicar's third wife had left him. It knew why Alice Cartaret had gone wrong with Greatorex. It knew what Gwenda Cartaret had gone for when she went away. It knew why and how Dr. Rowcliffe had married Mary Cartaret. And it knew why, night after night, he was to be seen coming and going on the Garthdale road.
* * * * *
The village knew more about Rowcliffe and Gwenda Cartaret than
Rowcliffe's wife knew.
For Rowcliffe's wife's mind was closed to this knowledge by a certain sensual assurance. When all was said and done, it was she and not Gwenda who was Rowcliffe's wife. And she had other grounds for complacency. Her sister, a solitary Miss Cartaret, stowed away in Garth Vicarage, was of no account. She didn't matter. And as Mary Cartaret Mary would have mattered even less. But Steven Rowcliffe's professional reputation served him well. He counted. People who had begun by trusting him had ended by liking him, and in two years' time his social value had become apparent. And as Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe Mary had a social value too.
But while Steven, who had always had it, took it for granted and never thought about it, Mary could think of nothing else. Her social value, obscured by the terrible two years in Garthdale, had come to her as a discovery and an acquisition. For all her complacency, she could not regard it as a secure thing. She was sensitive to every breath that threatened it; she was unable to forget that, if she was Steven Rowcliffe's wife, she was Alice Greatorex's sister.
Even as Mary Cartaret she had been sensitive to Alice. But in those days of obscurity and isolation it was not in her to cast Alice off. She had felt bound to Alice, not as Gwenda was bound, but pitiably, irrevocably, for better, for worse. The solidarity of the family had held.
She had not had anything to lose by sticking to her sister. Now it seemed to her that she had everything to lose. The thought of Alice was a perpetual annoyance to her.
For the neighborhood that had received Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe had barred her sister.
As long as Alice Greatorex lived at Upthorne Mary went in fear.
This fear was so intolerable to her that at last she spoke of it to
Rowcliffe.
They were sitting together in his study after dinner. The two armchairs were always facing now, one on each side of the hearth.
"I wish I knew what to do about Alice," she said.
"What to do about her?"
"Yes. Am I to have her at the house or not?"
He stared.
"Of course you're to have her at the house."
"I mean when we've got people here. I can't ask her to meet them."
"You must ask her. It's the very least you can do for her."
"People aren't going to like it, Steven."
"People have got to stick a great many things they aren't going to like. I'm continually meeting people I'd rather not meet. Aren't you?"
"I'm afraid poor Alice is—"
"Is what?"
"Well, dear, a little impossible, to say the least of it. Isn't she?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't see anything impossible about 'poor Alice.' I never did."
"It's nice of you to say so."
He maintained himself in silence under her long gaze.
"Steven," she said, "you are awfully good to my people."
She saw that she could hardly have said anything that would have annoyed him more.
He positively writhed with irritation.
"I'm not in the least good to your people."
The words stung her like a blow. She flushed, and he softened.
"Can't you see, Molly, that I hate the infernal humbug and the cruelty of it all? That poor child had a dog's life before she married. She did the only sane thing that was open to her. You've only got to look at her now to see that she couldn't have done much better for herself even if she hadn't been driven to it. What's more, she's done the best thing for Greatorex. There isn't another woman in the world who could have made that chap chuck drinking. You mayn't like the connection. I don't suppose any of us like it."
"My dear Steven, it isn't only the connection. I could get over that.
It's—the other thing."
His blank stare compelled her to precision.
"I mean what happened."
"Well—if Gwenda can get over 'the other thing', I should think you might. She has to see more of her."
"It's different for Gwenda."
"How is it different for Gwenda?"
She hesitated. She had meant that Gwenda hadn't anything to lose. What she said was, "Gwenda hasn't anybody but herself to think of. She hasn't let you in for Alice."
"No more have you."
He smiled. Mary did not understand either his answer or his smile.
He was saying to himself, "Oh, hasn't she? It was Gwenda all the time who let me in."
Mary had a little rush of affection.
"My dear—I think I've let you in for everything. I wouldn't mind—I wouldn't really—if it wasn't for you."
"You needn't bother about me," he said. "I'd rather you bothered about your sister."
"Which sister?"
For the life of her she could not tell what had made her say that. The words seemed to leap out suddenly from her mind to her tongue.
"Alice," he said.
"Was it Alice we were talking about?"
"It was Alice I was thinking about."
"Was it?"
Again her mind took its insane possession of her tongue.
* * * * *
The evening dragged on. The two chairs still faced each other, pushed forward in their attitude of polite attention and expectancy.
But the persons in the chairs leaned back as if each withdrew as far as possible from the other. They made themselves stiff and upright as if they braced themselves, each against the other in the unconscious tension of hostility. And they were silent, each thinking an intolerable thought.
Rowcliffe had taken up a book and was pretending to read it. Mary's hands were busy with her knitting. Her needles went with a rapid jerk, driven by the vibration of her irritated nerves. From time to time she glanced at Rowcliffe under her bent brows. She saw the same blocks of print, a deep block at the top, a short line under it, then a narrower block. She saw them as vague, meaningless blurs of gray stippled on white. She saw that Rowcliffe's eyes never moved from the deep top paragraph on the left-hand page. She noted the light pressure of his thumbs on the margins.
He wasn't reading at all; he was only pretending to read. He had set up his book as a barrier between them, and he was holding on to it for dear life.
Rowcliffe moved irritably under Mary's eyes. She lowered them and waited for the silken sound that should have told her that he had turned a page.
And all the time she kept on saying to herself, "He was thinking about Gwenda. He's sorry for Alice because of Gwenda, not because of me. It isn't my people that he's good to."
The thought went round and round in Mary's mind, troubling its tranquillity.
She knew that something followed from it, but she refused to see it. Her mind thrust from it the conclusion. "Then it's Gwenda that he cares for." She said to herself, "After all I'm married to him." And as she said it she thrust up her chin in a gesture of assurance and defiance.
In the chair that faced her Rowcliffe shifted his position. He crossed his legs and the tilted foot kicked out, urged by a hidden savagery. The clicking of Mary's needles maddened him.
He glanced at her. She was knitting a silk tie for his birthday.
She saw the glance. The fierceness of the small fingers slackened; they knitted off a row or two, then ceased. Her hands lay quiet in her lap.
She leaned her head against the back of the chair. Her grieved eyes let down their lids before the smouldering hostility in his.
Her stillness and her shut eyes moved him to compunction. They appeased him with reminiscence, with suggestion of her smooth and innocent sleep.
He had been thinking of what she had done to him; of how she had lied to him about Gwenda; of the abominable thing that Alice had cried out to him in her agony. The thought of Mary's turpitude had consoled him mysteriously. Instead of putting it from him he had dwelt on it, he had wallowed in it; he had let it soak into him till he was poisoned with it.
For the sting of it and the violence of his own resentment were more tolerable to Rowcliffe than the stale, dull realisation of the fact that Mary bored him. It had come to that. He had nothing to say to Mary now that he had married her. His romantic youth still moved uneasily within him; it found no peace in an armchair, facing Mary. He dreaded these evenings that he was compelled to spend with her. He dreaded her speech. He dreaded her silences ten times more. They no longer soothed him. They were pervading, menacing, significant.
He thought that Mary's turpitude accounted for and justified the exasperation of his nerves.
Now as he looked at her, lying back in the limp pose reminiscent of her sleep, he thought, "Poor thing. Poor Molly." He put down his book. He stood over her a moment, sighed a long sigh like a yawn, turned from her and went to bed.
Mary opened her eyes, sighed, stretched herself, put out the light, and followed him.
LII
Not long after that night it struck Mary that Steven was run down. He worked too hard. That was how she accounted to herself for his fits of exhaustion, of irritability and depression.
But secretly, for all her complacence, she had divined the cause.
She watched him now; she inquired into his goings out and comings in. Sometimes she knew that he had been to Garthdale, and, though he went there many more times than she knew, she had noticed that these moods of his followed invariably on his going. It was as if Gwenda left her mark on him. So much was certain, and by that certainty she went on to infer his going from his mood.
One day she taxed him with it.
Rowcliffe had tried to excuse his early morning temper on the plea that he was "beastly tired."
"Tired?" she had said. "Of course you're tired if you went up to
Garthdale last night."
She added, "It isn't necessary."
He was silent and she knew that she was on his trail.
Two evenings later she caught him as he was leaving the house.
"Where are you going?" she said.
"I'm going up to Garthdale to see your father."
Her eyes flinched.
"You saw him yesterday."
"I did."
"Is he worse?"
He hesitated. Lying had not as yet come lightly to him.
"I'm not easy about him," he said.
She was not satisfied. She had caught the hesitation.
"Can't you tell me," she persisted, "if he's worse?"
He looked at her calmly.
"I can't tell you till I've seen him."
That roused her. She bit her lip. She knew that whatever she did she must not show temper.
"Did Gwenda send for you?"
Her voice was quiet.
"She did not."
He strode out of the house.
After that he never told her when he was going up to Garthdale toward nightfall. He was sometimes driven to lie. It was up Rathdale he was going, or to Greffington, or to smoke a pipe with Ned Alderson, or to turn in for a game of billiards at the village club.
And whenever he lied to her she saw through him. She was prepared for the lie. She said to herself, "He is going to see Gwenda. He can't keep away from her."
And then she remembered what Alice had said to her. "You'll know some day."
She knew.
LIII
And with her knowledge there came a curious calm.
She no longer watched and worried Rowcliffe. She knew that no wife ever kept her husband by watching and worrying him.
She was aware of danger and she faced it with restored complacency.
For Mary was a fount of sensual wisdom. Rowcliffe was ill. And from his illness she inferred his misery, and from his misery his innocence.
She told herself that nothing had happened, that she knew nothing that she had not known before. She saw that her mistake had been in showing that she knew it. That was to admit it, and to admit it was to give it a substance, a shape and color it had never had and was not likely to have.
And Mary, having perceived her blunder, set herself to repair it.
She knew how. Under all his energy she had discerned in her husband a love of bodily ease, and a capacity for laziness, undeveloped because perpetually frustrated. Insidiously she had set herself to undermine his energy while she devised continual opportunities for ease.
Rowcliffe remained incurably energetic. His profession demanded energy.
Still, there were ways by which he could be captured. He was not so deeply absorbed in his profession as to be indifferent to the arrangements of his home. He liked and he showed very plainly that he liked, good food and silent service, the shining of glass and silver, white table linen and fragrant sheets for his bed.
With all these things Mary had provided him.
And she had her own magic and her way.
Her way, the way she had caught him, was the way she would keep him. She had always known her power, even unpracticed. She had always known by instinct how she could enthrall him when her moment came. Gwenda had put back the hour; but she had done (and Mary argued that therefore she could do) no more.
Here Mary's complacency betrayed her. She had fallen into the error of all innocent and tranquil sensualists. She trusted to the present. She had reckoned without Rowcliffe's future or his past.
And she had done even worse. By habituating Rowcliffe's senses to her way, she had produced in him, through sheer satisfaction, that sense of security which is the most dangerous sense of all.
LIV
One week in June Rowcliffe went up to Garthdale two nights running. He had never done this before and he had had to lie badly about it both to himself and Mary.
He had told himself that the first evening didn't count.
For he had quarreled with Gwenda the first evening. Neither of them knew how it had happened or what it was about. But he had hardly come before he had left her in his anger.
The actual outburst moved her only to laughter, but the memory of it was violent in her nerves, it shook and shattered her. She had not slept all night and in the morning she woke tired and ill. And, as if he had known what he had done to her, he came to see her the next evening, to make up.
That night they stayed out later than they had meant.
As they touched the moor the lambs stirred at their mothers' sides and the pewits rose and followed the white road to lure them from their secret places; they wheeled and wheeled round them, sending out their bored and weary cry. In June the young broods kept the moor and the two were forced to the white road.
And at the turn they came in sight of Greffington Edge.
She stood still. "Oh—Steven—look," she said.
He stood with her and looked.
The moon was hidden in the haze where the gray day and the white night were mixed. Across the bottom on the dim, watery green of the eastern slope, the thorn trees were in flower. The hot air held them like still water. It quivered invisibly, loosening their scent and scattering it. And of a sudden she saw them as if thrown back to a distance where they stood enchanted in a great stillness and clearness and a piercing beauty.
There went through her a sudden deep excitement, a subtle and mysterious joy. This passion was as distant and as pure as ecstasy. It swept her, while the white glamour lasted, into the stillness where the flowering thorn trees stood.
* * * * *
She wondered whether Steven had seen the vision of the flowering thorn trees. She longed for him to see it. They stood a little apart and her hand moved toward him without touching him, as if she would draw him to the magic.
"Steven—" she said.
He came to her. Her hand hung limply by her side again. She felt his hand close on it and press it.
She knew that he had seen the vision and felt the subtle and mysterious joy.
She wanted nothing more.
"Say good-night now," she said.
"Not yet. I'm going to walk back with you."
They walked back in a silence that guarded the memory of the mystic thing.
They lingered a moment by the half-open door; she on the threshold, he on the garden path; the width of a flagstone separated them.
"In another minute," she thought, "he will be gone."
It seemed to her that he wanted to be gone and that it was she who held him there against his will and her own.
She drew the door to.
"Don't shut it, Gwenda."
It was as if he said, "Don't let's stand together out here like this any longer."
She opened the door again, leaning a little toward it across the threshold with her hand on the latch.
She smiled, raising her chin in the distant gesture that was their signal of withdrawal.
But Steven did not go.
* * * * *
"May I come in?" he said.
Something in her said, "Don't let him come in." But she did not heed it. The voice was thin and small and utterly insignificant, as if one little brain cell had waked up and started speaking on its own account. And something seized on her tongue and made it say "Yes," and the full tide of her blood surged into her throat and choked it, and neither the one voice nor the other seemed to be her own.
He followed her into the little dining-room where the lamp was. The
Vicar was in bed. The whole house was still.
Rowcliffe looked at her in the lamplight.
"We've walked a bit too far," he said.
He made her lean back on the couch. He put a pillow at her head and a footstool at her feet.
"Just rest," he said, and she rested.
But Rowcliffe did not rest. He moved uneasily about the room.
A sudden tiredness came over her.
She thought, "Yes. We walked too far." She leaned her head back on the cushion. Her thin arms lay stretched out on either side of her, supported by the couch.
Rowcliffe ceased to wander. He drew up with his back against the chimney-piece, where he faced her.
"Close your eyes," he said.
She did not close them. But the tired lids drooped. The lifted bow of her mouth drooped. The small, sharp-pointed breasts drooped.
And as he watched her he remembered how he had quarreled with her in that room last night. And the thought of his brutality was intolerable to him.
His heart ached with tenderness, and his tenderness was intolerable too.
The small white face with its suffering eyes and drooping eyelids, the drooping breasts, the thin white arms slackened along the couch, the childlike helplessness of the tired body moved him with a vehement desire. And his strength that had withstood her in her swift, defiant beauty melted away.
"Steven—"
"Don't speak," he said.
She was quiet for a moment.
"But I want to, Steven. I want to say something."
He sighed.
"Well—say it."
"It's something I want to ask you."
"Don't ask impossibilities."
"I don't think it's impossible. At least it wouldn't be if you really knew. I want you to be more careful with me."
She paused.
He turned from her abruptly.
His turning made it easier for her. She went on.
"It's only a little thing—a silly little thing. I want you, when you're angry with me, not to show it quite so much."
He had turned again to her suddenly. The look on his face stopped her.
"I'm never angry with you," he said.
"I know you aren't—really. I know. I know. But you make me think you are; and it hurts so terribly."
"I didn't know you minded."
"I don't always mind. But sometimes, when I'm stupid, I simply can't bear it. It makes me feel as if I'd done something. Last night I got it into my head—"
"What did you get into your head? Tell me—"
"I thought I'd made you hate me. I thought you thought I was awful—like poor Ally."
"You?"
He drew a long breath and sent it out again.
"You know what I think of you."
He looked at her, threw up his head suddenly and went to her.
His words came fast now and thick.
"You know I love you. That's why I've been such a brute to you—because I couldn't have you in my arms and it made me mad. And you know it. That's what you mean when you say it hurts you. You shan't be hurt any more. I'm going to end it."
He stooped over her suddenly, steadying himself by his two hands laid on the back of her chair. She put out her arms and pushed with her hands against his shoulders, as if she would have beaten him off. He sank to her knees and there caught her hands in his and kissed them. He held them together helpless with his left arm and his right arm gathered her to him violently and close.
His mouth came crushing upon her parted lips and her shut eyes.
Her small thin hands struggled piteously in his and for pity he released them. He felt them pushing with their silk-soft palms against his face. Their struggle and their resistance were pain to him and exquisite pleasure.
"Not that, Steven! Not that! Oh, I didn't think—I didn't think you would."
"Don't send me away, Gwenda. It's all right. We've suffered enough.
We've got to end it this way."
"No. Not this way."
"Yes—yes. It's all right, darling. We've struggled till we can't struggle any more. You must. Why not? When you love me."
He pressed her closer in his arms. She lay quiet there. When she was quiet he let her speak.
"I can't," she said. "It's Molly. Poor little Molly."
"Don't talk to me of Molly. She lied about you."
"Whatever she did she couldn't help it."
"Whatever we do now we can't help it."
"We can. We're different. Oh—don't! Don't hold me like that. I can't bear it."
His arms tightened. His mouth found hers again as if he had not heard her.
She gave a faint cry that pierced him.
He looked at her. The lips he had kissed were a purplish white in her thin bloodless face. "I say, are you ill?"
She saw her advantage and took it.
"No. But I can't stand things very well. They make me ill. That's what
I meant when I asked you to be careful."
Her helplessness stilled his passion as it had roused it. He released her suddenly.
He took the thin arm surrendered to his gentleness, turned back her sleeve and felt the tense jerking pulse.
He saw what she had meant.
* * * * *
"Do you mind my sitting beside you if I keep quiet?"
She shook her head.
"Can you stand my talking about it?"
"Yes. If you don't touch me."
"I won't touch you. We've got to face the thing. It's making you ill."
"It isn't."
"What is, then?"
"Living with Papa."
He smiled through his agony. "That's only another name for it.
"It can't go on. Why shouldn't we be happy?
"Why shouldn't we?" he insisted. "It's not as if we hadn't tried."
"I—can't."
"You're afraid?"
"Oh, no, I'm not afraid. It's simply that I can't."
"You think it's a sin? It isn't. It's we who are sinned against.
"If you're afraid of deceiving Mary—I don't care if I do. She deceived me first. Besides we can't. She knows and she doesn't mind. She can't suffer as you suffer. She can't feel as you feel. She can't care."
"She does care. She must have cared horribly or she wouldn't have done it."
"She didn't. Anybody would have done for her as well as me. I tell you
I don't want to talk about Mary or to think about her."
"Then I must."
"No. You must think of me. You don't owe anything to Mary. It's me you're sinning against. You think a lot about sinning against Mary, but you think nothing about sinning against me."
"When did I ever sin against you?"
"Last year. When you went away. That was the beginning of it all. Why did you go, Gwenda? You knew. We should have been all right if you hadn't."
"I went because of Ally. She had to be married. I thought—perhaps—if
I wasn't there——"
"That I'd marry her? Good God! Ally! What on earth made you think I'd do that? I wouldn't have married her if there hadn't been another woman in the world."
"I couldn't be sure. But after what you said about her I had to give her a chance."
"What did I say?"
"That she'd die or go mad if somebody didn't marry her."
"I never said that. I wouldn't be likely to."
"But you did, dear. You frightened me. So I went away to see if that would make it any better."
"Any better for whom?"
"For Ally."
"Oh—Ally. I see."
"I thought if it didn't—if you didn't marry her—I could come back again. And when I did come back you'd married Mary."
"And Mary knew that?"
"There's no good bothering about Mary now."
Utterly weary of their strife, she lay back and closed her eyes.
"Poor Gwenda."
Again he had compassion on her. He waited.
"You see how it was," she said.
"It doesn't help us much, dear. What are we going to do?"
"Not what you want, Steven, I'm afraid."
"Not now. But some day. You'll see it differently when you've thought of it."
"Never. Never any day. I've had all these months to think of it and I can't see it differently yet."
"You have thought of it?"
"Not like that."
"But you did think. You knew it would come to this."
"I tried not to make it come. Do you know why I tried? I don't think it was for Molly. It was for myself. It was because I wanted to keep you. That's why I shall never do what you want."
"But that's how you would keep me. There's no other way."
She rose with a sudden gesture of her shoulders as if she shook off the obsession of him.
She stood leaning against the chimney-piece in the attitude he knew, an attitude of long-limbed, insolent, adolescent grace that gave her the advantage. Her eyes disdained their pathos. They looked at him with laughter under their dropped lids.
"How funny we are," she said, "when we know all the time we couldn't really do a caddish thing like that."
He smiled queerly.
"I suppose we couldn't."
* * * * *
He too rose and faced her.
"Do you know what this means?" he said. "It means that I've got to clear out of this."
"Oh, Steven——" The brave light in her face went out.
"You wouldn't go away and leave me?"
"God knows I don't want to leave you, Gwenda. But we can't go on like this. How can we?"
"I could."
"Well, I can't. That's what it means to me. That's what it means to a man. If we're going to be straight we simply mustn't see each other."
"Do you mean for always? That we're never to see each other again?"
"Yes, if it's to be any good."
"Steven, I can bear anything but that. It can't mean that."
"I tell you it's what it means for me. There's no good talking about it. You've seen what I've been like tonight."
"This? This is nothing. You'll get over this. But think what it would mean to me."
"It would be hard, I know."
"Hard?"
"Not half so hard as this."
"But I can bear this. We've been so happy. We can be happy still."
"This isn't happiness."
"It's my happiness. It's all I've got. It's all I've ever had."
"What is?"
"Seeing you. Or not even seeing you. Knowing you're there."
"Poor child. Does that make you happy?"
"Utterly happy. Always."
"I didn't know."
He stooped forward, hiding his face in his hands.
"You don't realise it. You've no idea what it'll mean to be boxed up in this place together, all our lives, with this between us."
"It's always been between us. We shall be no worse off. It may have been bad now and then, but conceive what it'll be like when you go."
"I suppose it would be pretty beastly for you if I did go."
"Would it be too awful for you if you stayed?"
He was a long time before he answered.
"Not if it really made you happier."
"Happier?"
She smiled her pitiful, strained smile. It said, "Don't you see that it would kill me if you went?"
And again it was by her difference, her helplessness, that she had him.
He too smiled drearily.
"You don't suppose I really could have left you?"
He saw that it was impossible, unthinkable, that he should leave her.
He rose. She went with him to the door. She thought of something there.
"Steven," she said, "don't worry about to-night. It was all my fault."
"You—you," he murmured. "You're adorable."
"It was really," she said. "I made you come in."
She gave him her cold hand. He raised it and brushed it with his lips and put it from him.
"Your little conscience was always too tender."
LV
Two years passed.
Life stirred again in the Vicarage, feebly and slowly, with the slow and feeble stirring of the Vicar's brain.
Ten o'clock was prayer time again.
Twice every Sunday the Vicar appeared in his seat in the chancel. Twice he pronounced the Absolution. Twice he tottered to the altar rails, turned, shifted his stick from his left hand to his right, and, with his one good arm raised, he gave the Benediction. These were the supreme moments of his life.
Once a month, kneeling at the same altar rails, he received the bread and wine from the hands of his ritualistic curate, Mr. Grierson.
It was his uttermost abasement.
But, whether he was abased or exalted, the parish was proud of its Vicar. He had shown grit. His parishioners respected the indestructible instinct that had made him hold on.
* * * * *
For Mr. Cartaret was better, incredibly better. He could creep about the house and the village without any help but his stick. He could wash and feed and dress himself. He had no longer any use for his wheel-chair. Once a week, on a Wednesday, he was driven over his parish in an ancient pony carriage of Peacock's. It was low enough for him to haul himself in and out.
And he had recovered large tracts of memory, all, apparently, but the one spot submerged in the catastrophe that had brought about his stroke. He was aware of events and of their couplings and of their sequences in time, though the origin of some things was not clear to him. Thus he knew that Alice was married and living at Upthorne, though he had forgotten why. That she should have married Greatorex was a strange thing, and he couldn't think how it had happened. He supposed it must have happened when he was laid aside, for he would never have permitted it if he had known. Mary's marriage also puzzled him, for he had a most distinct idea that it was Gwenda who was to have married Rowcliffe, and he said so. But he would own humbly that he might be mistaken, his memory not being what it was.
He had settled more or less into his state of gentleness and submission, broken from time to time by fits of violent irritation and relieved by pride, pride in his feats of independence, his comings and goings, his washing, his dressing and undressing of himself. Sometimes this pride was stubborn and insistent; sometimes it was sweet and joyous as a child's. His mouth, relaxed forever by his stroke, had acquired a smile of piteous and appealing innocence. It smiled upon the just and upon the unjust. It smiled even on Greatorex, whom socially he disapproved of (he took care to let it be known that he disapproved of Greatorex socially), though he tolerated him.
He tolerated all persons except one. And that one was the ritualistic curate, Mr. Grierson.
He had every reason for not tolerating him. Not only was Mr. Grierson a ritualist, which was only less abominable than being a non-conformist, but he had been foisted on him without his knowledge or will. The Vicar had simply waked up one day out of his confused twilight to a state of fearful lucidity and found the young man there. Worse than all it was through the third Mrs. Cartaret that he had got there.
For the Vicar of Greffington had applied to the Additional Curates Aid Society for a grant on behalf of his afflicted brother, the Vicar of Garthdale, and he had applied in vain. There was a prejudice against the Vicar of Garthdale. But the Vicar of Greffington did not relax his efforts. He applied to young Mrs. Rowcliffe, and young Mrs. Rowcliffe applied to her step-mother, and not in vain. Robina, answering by return of post, offered to pay half the curate's salary. Rowcliffe made himself responsible for the other half.
Robina, in her compact little house in St. John's Wood, had become the prey of remorse. Her conscience had begun to bother her by suggesting that she ought to go back to her husband now that he was helpless and utterly inoffensive. She ought not to leave him on poor Gwenda's hands. She ought, at any rate, to take her turn.
But Robina couldn't face it. She couldn't leave her compact little house and go back to her husband. She couldn't even take her turn. Flesh and blood shrank from the awful sacrifice. It would be a living death. Your conscience has no business to send you to a living death.
Robina's heart ached for poor Gwenda. She wrote and said so. She said she knew she was a brute for not going back to Gwenda's father. She would do it if she could, but she simply couldn't. She hadn't got the nerve.
And Robina did more. She pulled wires and found the curate. That he was a ritualist was no drawback in Robina's eyes. In fact, she declared it was a positive advantage. Mr. Grierson's practices would wake them up in Garthdale. They needed waking. She had added that Mr. Grierson was well connected, well behaved and extremely good-looking.
Even charity couldn't subdue the merry devil in Robina.
"I can't see," said Mary reading Robina's letter, "what Mr. Grierson's good looks have got to do with it."
Rowcliffe's face darkened. He thought he could see.
* * * * *
But Mr. Grierson did not wake Garthdale up. It opened one astonished eye on his practices and turned over in its sleep again. Mr. Grierson was young, and the village regarded all he did as the folly of his youth. It saw no harm in Mr. Grierson; not even when he conceived a Platonic passion for Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe, and spent all his spare time in her drawing-room and on his way to and from it.
The curate lodged in the village at the Blenkirons' over Rowcliffe's surgery, and from that vantage ground he lay in wait for Rowcliffe. He watched his movements. He was ready at any moment to fling open his door and spring upon Rowcliffe with ardor and enthusiasm. It was as if he wanted to prove to him how heartily he forgave him for being Mrs. Rowcliffe's husband. There was a robust innocence about him that ignored the doctor's irony.
Mary had her own use for Mr. Grierson. His handsome figure, assiduous but restrained, the perfect image of integrity in adoration, was the very thing she wanted for her drawing-room. She knew that its presence there had the effect of heightening her own sensual attraction. It served as a reminder to Rowcliffe that his wife was a woman of charm, a fact which for some time he appeared to have forgotten. She could play off her adorer against her husband, while the candid purity of young Grierson's homage renewed her exquisite sense of her own goodness.
And then the Curate really was a cousin of Lord Northfleet's and Mrs. Rowcliffe had calculated that to have him in her pocket would increase prodigiously her social value. And it did. And Mrs. Rowcliffe's social value, when observed by Grierson, increased his adoration.
And when Rowcliffe told her that young Grierson's Platonic friendship wasn't good for him, she made wide eyes at him and said, "Poor boy! He must have some amusement."
She didn't suppose the curate could be much amused by calling at the Vicarage. Young Grierson had confided to her that he couldn't "make her sister out."
"I never knew anybody who could," she said, and gave him a subtle look that disturbed him horribly.
"I only meant—" He stammered and stopped, for he wasn't quite sure what he did mean. His fair, fresh face was strained with the effort to express himself.
He meditated.
"You know, she's really rather fascinating. You can't help looking at her. Only—she doesn't seem to see that you're there. I suppose that's what puts you off."
"I know. It does, dreadfully," said Mary.
She summoned a flash and let him have it. "But she's magnificent."
"Magnificent!" he echoed with his robust enthusiasm.
But what he thought was that it was magnificent of Mrs. Rowcliffe to praise her sister.
And Rowcliffe smiled grimly at young Grierson and his Platonic passion. He said to himself, "If I'd only known. If I'd only had the sense to wait six months. Grierson would have done just as well for Molly."
Still, though Grierson had come too late, he welcomed him and his
Platonic passion. It wasn't good for Grierson but it was good for
Molly. At least, he supposed it was better for her than nothing. And
for him it was infinitely better. It kept Grierson off Gwenda.
* * * * *
Young Grierson was right when he said that Gwenda didn't see that he was there. He had been two years in Garthdale and she was as far from seeing it as ever. He didn't mind; he was even amused by her indifference, only he couldn't help thinking that it was rather odd of her, considering that he was there.
The village, as simple in its thinking as young Grierson, shared his view. It thought that it was something more than odd. And it had a suspicion that Mrs. Rowcliffe was at the bottom of it. She wouldn't be happy if she didn't get that young man away from her sister. The village hinted that it wouldn't be for the first time.
* * * * *
But in two years, with the gradual lifting of the pressure that had numbed her, Gwenda had become aware. Not of young Grierson, but of her own tragedy, of the slow life that dragged her, of its relentless motion and its mass. Now that her father's need of her was intermittent she was alive to the tightness of the tie. It had been less intolerable when it had bound her tighter; when she hadn't had a moment; when it had dragged her all the time. Its slackening was torture. She pulled then, and was jerked on her chain.
It was not only that Rowcliffe's outburst had waked her and made her cruelly aware. He had timed it badly, in her moment of revived lucidity, the moment when she had become vulnerable again. She was the more sensitive because of her previous apathy, as if she had died and was new-born to suffering and virgin to pain.
What hurt her most was her father's gentleness. She could stand his fits of irritation and obstinacy; they braced her, they called forth her will. But she was defenseless against his pathos, and he knew it. He had phrases that wrung her heart. "You're a good girl, Gwenda." "I'm only an irritable old man, my dear. You mustn't mind what I say." She suffered from the incessant drain on her pity; for she wanted all her will if she was to stand against Rowcliffe. Pity was a dangerous solvent in which her will sank and was melted away.
There were moments when she saw herself as two women. One had still the passion and the memory of freedom. The other was a cowed and captive creature who had forgotten; whose cramped motions guided her; whose instinct of submission she abhorred.
* * * * *
Her isolation was now extreme. She had had nothing to give to any friends she might have made. Rowcliffe had taken all that was left of her. And now, when intercourse was possible, it was they who had withdrawn. They shared Mr. Grierson's inability to make her out. They had heard rumors; they imagined things; they remembered also. She was the girl who had raced all over the country with Dr. Rowcliffe, the girl whom Dr. Rowcliffe, for all their racing, had not cared to marry. She was the girl who had run away from home to live with a dubious step-mother; and she was the sister of that awful Mrs. Greatorex, who—well, everybody knew what Mrs. Greatorex was.
Gwenda Cartaret, like her younger sister, had been talked about. Not so much in the big houses of the Dale. The queer facts had been tossed up and down a smokeroom for one season and then dropped. In the big houses they didn't remember Gwenda Cartaret. They only remembered to forget her.
But in the little shops and in the little houses in Morfe there had been continual whispering. They said that even after Dr. Rowcliffe's marriage to that nice wife of his, who was her own sister, the two had been carrying on. If there wasn't any actual harm done, and maybe there wasn't, the doctor had been running into danger. He was up at Garthdale more than he need be now that the old Vicar was about again. And they had been seen together. The head gamekeeper at Garthdale had caught them more than once out on the moor, and after dark too. It was said in the little houses that it wasn't the doctor's fault. (In the big houses judgment had been more impartial, but Morfe was loyal to its doctor.) It was hers, every bit, you might depend on it. Of Rowcliffe it was said that maybe he'd been tempted, but he was a good man, was Dr. Rowcliffe, and he'd stopped in time. Because they didn't know what Gwenda Cartaret was capable of, they believed, like the Vicar, that she was capable of anything.
It was only in her own village that they knew. The head gamekeeper had never told his tale in Garth. It would have made him too unpopular.
* * * * *
Gwenda Cartaret remained unaware of what was said. Rumor protected her by cutting her off from its own sources.
And she had other consolations besides her ignorance. So long as she knew that Rowcliffe cared for her and always had cared, it did not seem to matter to her so much that he had married Mary. She actually considered that, of the two, Mary was the one to be pitied; it was so infinitely worse to be married to a man who didn't care for you than not to be married to a man who did.
Of course, there was the tie. Her sister had outward and visible possession of him. But she said to herself "I wouldn't give what I have for that, if I can't have both."
And of course there was Steven, and Steven's misery which was more unbearable to her than her own. At least she thought it was more unbearable. She didn't ask herself how bearable it would have been if Steven's marriage had brought him a satisfaction that denied her and cast her out.
For she was persuaded that Steven also had his consolation. He knew that she cared for him. She conceived this knowledge of theirs as constituting an immaterial and immutable possession of each other. And it did not strike her that this knowledge might be less richly compensating to Steven than to her.
* * * * *
Her woman's passion, forced inward, sustained her with an inward peace, an inward exaltation. And in this peace, this exaltation, it became one with her passion for the place.
She was unaware of what was happening in her. She did not know that her soul had joined the two beyond its own power to put asunder. She still looked on her joy in the earth as a solitary emotion untouched by any other. She still said to herself "Nothing can take this away from me."
For she had hours, now and again, when she shook off the slave-woman who held her down. In those hours her inner life moved with the large rhythm of the seasons and was soaked in the dyes of the visible world; and the visible world, passing into her inner life, took on its radiance and intensity. Everything that happened and that was great and significant in its happening, happened there.
Outside nothing happened; nothing stood out; nothing moved. No procession of events trod down or blurred her perfect impressions of the earth and sky. They eternalised themselves in memory. They became her memory.
The days were carved for her in the lines of the hills and painted for her in their colors; days that were dim green and gray, when the dreaming land was withdrawn under a veil so fine that it had the transparency of water, or when the stone walls, the humble houses and the high ramparts, drenched with mist and with secret sunlight, became insubstantial; days when all the hills were hewn out of one opal; days that had the form of Karva under snow, and the thin blues and violets of the snow. She remembered purely, without thinking, "It was in April that I went away from Steven," or, "It was in November that he married Mary," or "It was in February that we knew about Ally, and Father had his stroke."
Her nature was sound and sane; it refused to brood over suffering. She was not like Alice and in her unlikeness she lacked some of Alice's resources. She couldn't fling herself on to a Polonaise of a Sonata any more than she could lie on a couch all day and look at her own white hands and dream. Her passion found no outlet in creating violent and voluptuous sounds. It was passive, rather, and attentive. Cut off from all contacts of the flesh, it turned to the distant and the undreamed. Its very senses became infinitely subtle; they discerned the hidden soul of the land that had entranced her.
There were no words for this experience. She had no sense of self in it and needed none. It seemed to her that she was what she contemplated, as if all her senses were fused together in the sense of seeing and what her eyes saw they heard and touched and felt.
But when she came to and saw herself seeing, she said, "At least this is mine. Nobody, not even Steven, can take it away from me."
* * * * *
She also reminded herself that she had Alice.
She meant Alice Greatorex. Alice Cartaret, oppressed by her own "awfulness," had loved her with a sullen selfish love, the love of a frustrated and unhappy child. But there was no awfulness in Alice Greatorex. In the fine sanity of happiness she showed herself as good as gold.
Marriage, that had made Mary hard, made Alice tender. Mary was wrapped up in her husband and her house, and in her social relations and young Grierson's Platonic passion, so tightly wrapped that these things formed round her an impenetrable shell. They hid a secret and inaccessible Mary.
Alice was wrapped up in her husband and children, in the boy of three who was so like Gwenda, and in the baby girl who was so like Greatorex. But through them she had become approachable. She had the ways of some happy household animal, its quick rushes of affection, and its gaze, the long, spiritual gaze of its maternity, mysterious and appealing. She loved Gwenda with a sad-eyed, remorseful love. She said to herself, "If I hadn't been so awful, Gwenda might have married Steven." She saw the appalling extent of Gwenda's sacrifice. She saw it as it was, monstrous, absurd, altogether futile.
It was the futility of it that troubled Alice most. Even if Gwenda had been capable of sacrificing herself for Mary, which had been by no means her intention, that would have been futile too. Alice was of Rowcliffe's opinion that young Grierson would have done every bit as well for Mary.
Better, for Mary had no children.
"And how," said Alice, "could she expect to have them?"
She saw in Mary's childlessness not only God's but Nature's justice.
* * * * *
There were moments when Mary saw it too. But she left God out of it and called it Nature's cruelty.
If it was not really Gwenda. For in flashes of extreme lucidity Mary put it down to Rowcliffe's coldness.
And she had come to know that Gwenda was responsible for that.