The Three Sisters Part 89

"Come into my room a minute," she said.

Mary's joy was to take her sister into her room and watch her to see if she would flinch before the signs of Steven's occupation. She drew her attention to these if Gwenda seemed likely to miss any of them.

"We've had the beds turned," she said. "The light hurt Steven's eyes.

I can't say I like sleeping with my head out in the middle of the room."

"Why don't you lie the other way then?"

"My dear, Steven wouldn't like that. Oh, what a mess my hair's in!"

She turned to the gla.s.s and smoothed her disordered waves and coils, while she kept her eyes fixed on Gwenda's image there, appraising her clothes, her slenderness and straightness, the set of her head on her shoulders, the air that she kept up of almost insolent adolescence.

She noted the delicate lines on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes; she saw that her small defiant face was still white and firm, and that her eyes looked violet blue with the dark shadows under them.

Time was the only power that had been good to Gwenda.

"She ought to look more battered," Mary thought. "She _does_ carry it off well. And she's only two years younger than I am.

"It's her figure, really, not her face. She's got more lines than I have. But if I wore that long straight coat I should look awful in it."

"It's all very well for you," she said. "You haven't had two children."

"No. I haven't. But what's all very well?"

"The good looks you contrive to keep, my dear. n.o.body would know you were thirty-three."

"_I_ shouldn't, Molly, if you didn't remind me every time."

Mary flushed.

"You'll say next that's why you don't come."

"Why--I--don't come?"

"Yes. It's ages since you've been here."

That was always Mary's cry.

"I haven't much time, Molly, for coming on the off-chance."

"The off chance! As if I'd never asked you! You can go to Alice."

"Poor Ally wouldn't have anybody to show the baby to if I didn't. You haven't seen one of Ally's babies."

"I can't, Gwenda. I must think of the children. I can't let them grow up with little Greatorexes. There are three of them, aren't there?"

"Didn't you know there's been another?"

"Steven _did_ tell me. She had rather a bad time, hadn't she?"

"She had. Molly--it wouldn't do you any harm now to go and see her.

I think it's horrid of you not to. It's such rotten humbug. Why, you used to say _I_ was ten times more awful than poor little Ally."

"There are moments, Gwenda, when I think you are."

"Moments? You always did think it. You think it still. And yet you'll have me here but you won't have her. Just because she's gone a technical howler and I haven't."

"You haven't. But you'd have gone a worse one if you'd had the chance."

Gwenda raised her head.

"You know, Molly, that that isn't true."

"I said if. I suppose you think you had your chance, then?"

"I don't think anything. Except that I've got to go."

"You haven't. You're going to stay for dinner now you're here."

"I can't, really, Mary."

But Mary was obstinate. Whether her sister stayed or went she made it hard for her. She kept it up on the stairs and at the door and at the garden gate.

"Perhaps you'll come some night when Steven's here. You know he's always glad to see you."

The sting of it was in Mary's watching eyes. For, when you came to think of it, there was nothing else she could very well have said.

LXI

That year, when spring warmed into summer, Gwenda's strength went from her.

She was always tired. She fought with her fatigue and got the better of it, but in a week or two it returned. Rowcliffe told her to rest and she rested, for a day or two, lying on the couch in the dining-room where Ally used to lie, and when she felt better she crawled out on to the moor and lay there.

One day she said to herself, "There's Ally. I'll go and see how she's getting on."

She dragged herself up the hill to Upthorne.

It was a day of heat and hidden sunlight. The moor and the marshes were drenched in the gray June mist. The hillside wore soft vapor like a cloak hiding its nakedness.

At the top of the Three Fields the nave of the old barn showed as if lifted up and withdrawn into the distance. But it was no longer solitary. The thorn-tree beside it had burst into white flower; it s.h.i.+mmered far-off under the mist in the dim green field, like a magic thing, half-hidden and about to disappear, remaining only for the hour of its enchantment.

It gave her the same subtle and mysterious joy that she had had on the night she and Rowcliffe walked together and saw the thorn-trees on Greffington Edge white under the hidden moon.

The gray Farm-house was changed, for Jim Greatorex had got on. He had built himself another granary on the north side of the mistal. He built it long and low, of hewn stone, with a corrugated iron roof. And he had made himself two fine new rooms, a dining-room and a nursery, one above the other, within the blind walls of the house where the old granary had been. The walls were blind no longer, for he had knocked four large windows out of them. And it was as if one-half of the house were awake and staring while the other half, in its old and alien beauty, dozed and dreamed under its scowling mullions.

As Gwenda came to it she wondered how the Farm could ever have seemed sinister and ghost-haunted; it had become so entirely the place of happy life.