The Three Sisters Part 76

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 pa.s.sed 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.

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 pa.s.sed 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 was.h.i.+ng him, for dressing him, for taking him out (he went out now, in a wheel-chair drawn by Peac.o.c.k'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 d.a.m.nable. 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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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. n.o.body 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 compa.s.sion. 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 a.s.sumed, 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 a.s.surance. 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.