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Three Sisters

<h2 id="id03480" style="margin-top: 4em">XLIX</h2> 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." <h2 id="id03559" style="margin-top: 4em">L</h2> 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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