The Three Sisters Part 75

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 antic.i.p.ated.

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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 l.u.s.t, 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. G.o.d 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.