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Three Sisters

<h2 id="id04089" style="margin-top: 4em">LIX</h2> Wednesday was still the Vicar's day for visiting his parish. It was also Rowcliffe's day for visiting his daughter. But the Vicar was not going to change it on that account. On Wednesday, if it was a fine afternoon, she was always sure of having Rowcliffe to herself. Rowcliffe himself had become the creature of unalterable habit. She was conscious now of the normal pulse of time, a steady pulse that beat with a large rhythm, a measure of seven days, from Wednesday to Wednesday. She filled the days between with reading and walking and parish work. There had been changes in Garthdale. Mr. Grierson had got married in one of his bursts of enthusiasm and had gone away. His place had been taken by Mr. Macey, the strenuous son of a Durlingham grocer. Mr. Macey had got into the Church by sheer strenuousness and had married, strenuously, a sharp and sallow wife. Between them they left very little parish work for Gwenda. She had become a furious reader. She liked hard stuff that her brain could bite on. It fell on a book and gutted it, throwing away the trash. She read all the modern poets and novelists she cared about, English and foreign. They left her stimulated but unsatisfied. There were not enough good ones to keep her going. She worked through the Elizabethan dramatists and all the Vicar's Tudor Classics, and came on Jowett's Translations of the Platonic Dialogues by the way, and was lured on the quest of Ultimate Reality, and found that there was nothing like Thought to keep you from thinking. She took to metaphysics as you take to dram-drinking. She must have strong, heavy stuff that drugged her brain. And when she found that she could trust her intellect she set it deliberately to fight her passion. At first it was an even match, for Gwenda's intellect, like her body, was robust. It generally held its ground from Thursday morning till Tuesday night. But the night that followed Wednesday afternoon would see its overthrow. This Wednesday it fought gallantly till the very moment of Steven's arrival. She was still reading Bergson, and her brain struggled to make out the sense and rhythm of the sentences across the beating of her heart. After seven years her heart still beat at Steven's coming. It remained an excitement and adventure, for she never knew how he would be. Sometimes he hadn't a word to say to her and left her miserable. Sometimes, after a hard day's work, he would be tired and heavy; she saw him middle-aged and her heart would ache for him. Sometimes he would be young almost as he used to be. She knew that he was only young for her. He was young because he loved her. She had never seen him so with Mary. Sometimes he would be formal and frigid. He talked to her as a man talks to a woman he is determined to keep at a distance. She hated Steven then, as passion hates. He had come before now in a downright bad temper and was the old, irritable Steven who found fault with everything she said and did. And she had loved him for it as she had loved the old Steven. It was his queer way of showing that he loved her. But he had not been like that for a very long time. He had grown gentler as he had grown older. To-day he showed her more than one of his familiar moods. She took them gladly as so many signs of his unchanging nature. He still kept up his way of coming in, the careful closing of the door, the slight pause there by the threshold, the look that sought her and that held her for an instant before their hands met. She saw it still as the look that pleaded with her while it caressed her, that said, "I know we oughtn't to be so pleased to see each other, but we can't help it, can we?" It was the look of his romantic youth. As long as she saw it there it was nothing to her that Rowcliffe had changed physically, that he moved more heavily, that his keenness and his slenderness were going, that she saw also a slight thickening of his fine nose, a perceptible slackening of the taut muscles of his mouth, and a decided fulness about his jaw and chin. She saw all these things; but she did not see that his romantic youth lay dying in the pathos of his eyes and that if it pleaded still it pleaded forgiveness for the sin of dying. His hand fell slackly from hers as she took it. It was as if they were still on their guard, still afraid of each other's touch. As he sat in the chair that faced hers he held his hands clasped loosely in front of him, and looked at them with a curious attention, as if he wondered what kind of hands they were that could resist holding her. When he saw that she was looking at him they fell apart with a nervous gesture. They picked up the book she had laid down and turned it. His eyes examined the title page. Their pathos lightened and softened; it became compassion; they smiled at her with a little pitiful smile, half tender, half ironic, as if they said, "Poor Gwenda, is that what you're driven to?" He opened the book and turned the pages, reading a little here and there. He scowled. His look changed. It darkened. It was angry, resentful, inimical. The dying youth in it came a little nearer to death. Rowcliffe had found that he could not understand what he had read. "Huh! What do you addle your brains with that stuff for?" he said. "It amuses me." "Oh—so long as you're amused." He pushed away the book that had offended him. They talked—about the Vicar, about Alice, about Rowcliffe's children, about the changes in the Dale, the coming of the Maceys and the going of young Grierson. "He wasn't a bad chap, Grierson." He softened, remembering Grierson. "I can't think why you didn't care about him." And at the thought of how Gwenda might have cared for Grierson and hadn't cared his youth revived; it came back into his eyes and lit them; it passed into his scowling face and caressed and smoothed it to the perfect look of reminiscent satisfaction. Rowcliffe did not know, neither did she, how his egoism hung upon her passion, how it drew from it food and fire. He raised his head and squared his shoulders with the unconscious gesture of his male pride. * * * * * It was then that she saw for the first time that he wore the black tie and had the black band of mourning on his sleeve. "Oh Steven—what do you wear that for?" "This? My poor old uncle died last week." "Not the one I saw?" "When?" "At Mary's wedding." "No. Another one. My father's brother." He paused. "It's made a great difference to me and Mary." He said it gravely, mournfully almost. She looked at him with tender eyes. "I'm sorry, Steven." He smiled faintly. "Sorry, are you?" "Yes. If you cared for him." "I'm afraid I didn't very much. It's not as if I'd seen a lot of him." "You said it's made a difference." "So it has. He's left me a good four hundred a year." "Oh—that sort of difference." "My dear girl, four hundred a year makes all the difference; it's no use pretending that it doesn't." "I'm not pretending. You sounded sorry and I was sorry for you. That was all." At that his egoism winced. It was as if she had accused him of pretending to be sorry. He looked at her sharply. His romantic youth died in that look. * * * * * Silence fell between them. But she was used to that. She even welcomed it. Steven's silences brought him nearer to her than his speech. Essy came in with the tea-tray. He lingered uneasily after the meal, glancing now and then at the clock. She was used to that, too. She also had her eyes on the clock, measuring the priceless moments. * * * * * "Is anything worrying you, Steven?" she said presently. "Why? Do I look worried?" "Not exactly, but you don't look well." "I'm getting a bit rusty. That's what's the matter with me. I want some hard work to rub me up and put a polish on me and I can't get it here. I've never had enough to do since I left Leeds. Harker was a wise chap to stick to it. It would do me all the good in the world if I went back." "Then," she said, "you'll have to go, Steven." She did not know, in her isolation, that Rowcliffe had been going about saying that sort of thing for the last seven years. She thought it was the formidable discovery of time. "You ought to go if you feel like that about it. Why don't you?" "I don't know." "You do know." She did not look at him as she spoke, so she missed his bewilderment. "You know why you stayed, Steven." He understood. He remembered. The dull red of his face flushed with the shock of the memory. "Do I?" he said. "I made you." His flush darkened. But he gave no other sign of having heard her. "I don't know why I'm staying now." He rose and looked at his watch. "I must be going home," he said. He turned at the threshold. "I forgot to give you Mary's message. She sent her love and she wants to know when you're coming again to see the babies." "Oh—some day soon." "You must make it very soon or they won't be babies any more. She's dying to show them to you." "She showed them to me the other day." "She says it's ages since you've been. And if she says it is she thinks it is." Gwenda was silent. "I'm coming all right, tell her." "Well, but what day? We'd better fix it. Don't come on a Tuesday or a Friday, I'll be out." "I must come when I can." <h2 id="id04180" style="margin-top: 4em">LX</h2> She went on a Tuesday. She had had tea with her father first. Meal-time had become sacred to the Vicar and he hated her to be away for any one of them. She walked the four miles, going across the moor under Karva and loitering by the way, and it was past six before she reached Morfe. She was shown into the room that was once Rowcliffe's study. It had been Mary's drawing-room ever since last year when the second child was born and they turned the big room over the dining-room into a day nursery. Mary had made it snug and gay with cushions and shining, florid chintzes. There were a great many things in rosewood and brass; a piano took the place of Rowcliffe's writing table; a bureau and a cabinet stood against the wall where his bookcases had been; and a tall palm-tree in a pot filled the little window that looked on to the orchard. She had only to close her eyes and shut out these objects and she saw the room as it used to be. She closed them now and instantly she opened them again, for the vision hurt her. She went restlessly about the room, picking up things and looking at them without seeing them. In the room upstairs she heard the cries of Rowcliffe's children, bumping and the scampering of feet. She stood still then and clenched her hands. The pain at her heart was like no other pain. It was as if she hated Rowcliffe's children. Presently she would have to go up and see them. She waited. Mary was taking her own time. Upstairs the doors opened and shut on the sharp grief of little children carried unwillingly to bed. Gwenda's heart melted and grew tender at the sound. But its tenderness was more unbearable to her than its pain. The maid-servant came to the door. "Mrs. Rowcliffe says will you please go upstairs to the night nursery, Miss Gwenda. She can't leave the children." That was the message Mary invariably sent. She left the children for hours together when other visitors were there. She could never leave them for a minute when her sister came. Unless Steven happened to be in. Then Mary would abandon whatever she was doing and hurry to the two. In the last year Gwenda had never found herself alone with Steven for ten minutes in his house. If Mary couldn't come at once she sent the nurse in with the children. Upstairs in the night nursery Mary sat in the nurse's low chair. Her year-old baby sprawled naked in her lap. The elder infant stood whining under the nurse's hands. Mary had changed a little in three and a half years. She was broader and stouter; the tender rose had hardened over her high cheek bones. Her face still kept its tranquil brooding, but her slow gray eyes had a secret tremor, they were almost alert, as if she were on the watch. And Mary's mouth, with its wide, turned back lips, had lost its subtlety, it had coarsened slightly and loosened, under her senses' continual content. Gwenda brushed Mary's mouth lightly with the winged arch of her upper lip. Mary laughed. "You don't know how to kiss," she said. "If you're going to treat Baby that way, and Molly too—" Gwenda stooped over the soft red down of the baby's head. To Gwenda it was as if her heart kept her hands off Rowcliffe's children, as if her flesh shrank from their flesh while her lips brushed theirs in tenderness and repulsion. But seeing them was always worse in anticipation than reality. For there was no trace of Rowcliffe in his children. The little red-haired, white-faced things were all Cartaret. Molly, the elder, had a look of Ally, sullen and sickly, as if some innermost reluctance had held back the impulse that had given it being. Even the younger child showed fragile as if implacable memory had come between it and perfect life. Gwenda did not know why her fierceness was appeased by this unlikeness, nor why she wanted to see Mary and nothing but Mary in Rowcliffe's children, nor why she refused to think of them as his; she only knew that to see Rowcliffe in Mary's children would have been more than her flesh and blood could bear. "You've come just in time to see Baby in her bath," said Mary. "I seem to be always in time for that." "Well, you're not in time to see Steven. He won't be home till nine at least." "I didn't expect to see him. He told me he'd be out." She saw the hidden watcher in Mary's eyes looking out at her. "When did he tell you that?" "Last Wednesday." The watcher hid again, suddenly appeased. Mary busied herself with the washing of her babies. She did it thoroughly and efficiently, with no sentimental tendernesses, but with soft, sensual pattings and strokings of the white, satin-smooth skins. And when they were tucked into their cots and disposed of for the night Mary turned to Gwenda. "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 glass 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. Nobody 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. <h2 id="id04251" style="margin-top: 4em">LXI</h2> 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 shimmered 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. Loud noises came from the open windows of the dining-room where the family were at tea; the barking of dogs, the competitive laughter of small children, a gurgling and crowing and spluttering; with now and then the sudden delicate laughter of Ally and the bellowing of Jim. "Oh—there's Gwenda!" said Ally. Jim stopped between a bellowing and a choking, for his mouth was full. "Ay—it's 'er." He washed down his mouthful. "Coom, Ally, and open door t' 'er." But Ally did not come. She had her year-old baby on her knees and was feeding him. At the door of the old kitchen Jim grasped his sister-in-law by the hand. "Thot's right," he said. "Yo've joost coom in time for a cup o' tae. T' misses is in there wi' t' lil uns." He jerked his thumb toward his dining-room and led the way there. Jim was not quite so alert and slender as he had been. He had lost his savage grace. But he moved with his old directness and dignity, and he still looked at you with his pathetic, mystic gaze. Ally was contrite; she raised her face to her sister to be kissed. "I can't get up," she said, "I'm feeding Baby. He'd howl if I left off." "I'd let 'im howl. I'd spank him ef 'twas me," said Jim. "He wouldn't, Gwenda." "Ay, thot I would. An' 'e knows it, doos Johnny, t' yoong rascal." Gwenda kissed the four children; Jimmy, and Gwendolen Alice, and little Steven and the baby John. They lifted little sticky faces and wiped them on Gwenda's face, and the happy din went on. Ally didn't seem to mind it. She had grown plump and pink and rather like Mary without her subtlety. She sat smiling, tranquil among the cries of her offspring. Jim turned three dogs out into the yard by way of discipline. He and Ally tried to talk to each other across the tumult that remained. Now and then Ally and the children talked to Gwenda. They told her that the black and white cow had calved, and that the blue lupins had come up in the garden, that the old sow had died, that Jenny, the chintz cat, had kittened and that the lop-eared rabbit had a litter. "And Baby's got another tooth," said Ally. "I'm breaakin' in t' yoong chestnut," said Jim. "Poor Daasy's gettin' paasst 'er work." All these happenings were exciting and wonderful to Ally. "But you're not interested, Gwenda." "I am, darling, I am." She was. Ally knew it but she wanted perpetual reassurance. "But you never tell us anything." "There's nothing to tell. Nothing happens." "Oh, come," said Ally, "how's Papa?" "Much the same except that he drove into Morfe yesterday to see Molly." "Yes, darling, of course you may." Ally was abstracted, for Gwenny had slipped from her chair and was whispering in her ear. It never occurred to Ally to ask what Gwenda had been doing, or what she had been thinking of, or what she felt, or to listen to anything she had to say. Her sister might just as well not have existed for all the interest Ally showed in her. She hadn't really forgotten what Gwenda had done for her, but she couldn't go on thinking about it forever. It was the sort of thing that wasn't easy or agreeable to think about and Ally's instinct of self-preservation urged her to turn from it. She tended to forget it, as she tended to forget all dreadful things, such as her own terrors and her father's illness and the noises Greatorex made when he was eating. Gwenda was used to this apathy of Ally's and it had never hurt her till to-day. To-day she wanted something from Ally. She didn't know what it was exactly, but it was something Ally hadn't got. She only said, "Have you seen the thorn-trees on Greffington Edge?" And Ally never answered. She was heading off a stream of jam that was creeping down Stevey's chin to plunge into his neck. "Gwenda's aasskin' yo 'ave yo seen t' thorn-trees on Greffington Edge," said Greatorex. He spoke to Ally as if she were deaf. She made a desperate effort to detach herself from Stevey. "The thorn-trees? Has anybody set fire to them?" "Tha silly laass!——" "What about the thorn-trees, Gwenda?" "Only that they're all in flower," Gwenda said. She didn't know where it had come from, the sudden impulse to tell Ally about the beauty of the thorn-trees. But the impulse had gone. She thought sadly, "They want me. But they don't want me for myself. They don't want to talk to me. They don't know what to say. They don't know anything about me. They don't care—really. Jim likes me because I've stuck to Ally. Ally loves me because I would have given Steven to her. They love what I was, not what I am now, nor what I shall be. "They have nothing for me." It was Jim who answered her. "I knaw," he said, "I knaw." "Oh! You little, little—lamb!" Baby John had his fingers in his mother's hair. * * * * * Greatorex rose. "You'll not get mooch out o' Ally as long as t' kids are about. Yo'd best coom wi' mae into t' garden and see t' loopins." She went with him. He was silent as they threaded the garden path together. She thought, "I know why I like him." They came to a standstill at the south wall where the tall blue lupins rose between them, vivid in the tender air and very still. Greatorex also was still. His eyes looked away over the blue spires of the lupins to the naked hillside. They saw neither the hillside nor anything between. When he spoke his voice was thick, almost as though he were in love or intoxicated. "I knaw what yo mane about those thorn-trees. 'Tisn' no earthly beauty what yo see in 'em." "Jim," she said, "shall I always see it?" "I dawn—knaw. It cooms and it goas, doos sech-like." "What makes it come?" "What maakes it coom? Yo knaw better than I can tall yo." "If I only did know. I'm afraid it's going." "I can tell yo this for your coomfort. Ef yo soofer enoof mebbe it'll coom t' yo again. Ef yo're snoog and 'appy sure's death it'll goa." He paused. "It 'assn't coom t' mae sence I married Ally." She was wrong about Jim. He had not forgotten her. He was not saying these things for himself; he was saying them for her, getting them out of himself with pain and difficulty. It was odd to think that nobody but she understood Jim, and that nobody but Jim had ever really understood her. Steven didn't understand her, any more than Ally understood her husband. And it made no difference to her, and it made no difference to Jim. "I'll tell yo anoother quare thing. 'T' assn't got mooch t' do wi' good and baad. T' drink 'll nat drive it from yo, an' sin'll nat drive it from yo. Saw I raakon 't is mooch t' saame thing as t' graace o' Gawd." "Did the grace of God go away from you when you married, Jim?" "Mebbe t' would 'aave ef I'd roon aaffter it. 'Tis a tricky thing is Gawd's graace." "But it's gone," she said. "You gave your soul for Ally when you married her." He smiled. "I toald 'er I'd give my sawl t' marry 'er," he said. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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