*       *       *       *       *

But one night in September, when the moon was high in the south, as
he was driving toward Garth on his way to Upthorne, the eyes of
young Rowcliffe were startled out of their aversion by the sudden and
incredible appearance of a girl.

It was at the bend of the road where Karva lowers its head and sinks
back on the moor; and she came swinging up the hill as Rowcliffe's
horse scraped his way slowly down it. She was in white (he couldn't
have missed her) and she carried herself like a huntress; slender
and quick, with high, sharp-pointed breasts. She looked at him as she
passed and her face was wide-eyed and luminous under the moon. Her
lips were parted with her speed, so that, instinctively, his hands
tightened on the reins as if he had thought that she was going to
speak to him. But of course she did not speak.

He looked back and saw her swing off the high road and go up Karva. A
flock of mountain sheep started from their couches on the heather and
looked at her, and she went driving them before her. They trailed up
Karva slowly, in a long line, gray in the moonlight. Their mournful,
musical voices came to him from the hill.

He saw her again late--incredibly late--that night as the moon swept
from the south toward Karva. She was a long way off, coming down from
her hill, a white speck on the gray moor. He pulled up his horse and
waited below the point where the track she followed struck the high
road; he even got out of his trap and examined, deliberately, his
horse's hoofs in turn, spinning out the time. When he heard her he
drew himself upright and looked straight at her as she passed him. She
flashed by like a huntress, like Artemis carrying the young moon on
her forehead. From the turn of her head and the even falling of her
feet he felt her unconscious of his existence. And her unconsciousness
was hateful to him. It wiped him clean out of the universe of
noticeable things.

The apparition fairly cried to his romantic youth. And he said to
himself. "Who is the strange girl who walks on the moor by herself at
night and isn't afraid?"

       *       *       *       *       *

He saw her three times after that; once in the broad daylight, on the
high road near Morfe, when she passed him with a still more perfect
and inimical unconsciousness; once in the distance on the moor, when
he caught her, short-skirted and wild, jumping the wide water courses
as they came, evidently under the impression that she was unobserved.
And he smiled and said to himself, "She's doing it for fun, pure fun."

The third time he came upon her at dawn with the dew on her skirts
and on her hair. She darted away at the clank of his horse's hoofs,
half-savage, divinely shy. And he said to himself that time, "I'm
getting on. She's aware of me all right."

She had come down from Karva, and he was on his way to Morfe from
Upthorne. He had sat up all night with John Greatorex who had died at
dawn.

The smell of the sick man, and of the bed and of the low close room
was still in his nostrils, and in his ears the sounds of dying and of
mourning, and at his heart the oppression (he was still young enough
to feel it) of the secret and abominable things he knew. And in his
eyes the unknown girl and her behavior became suddenly adorable.
She was the darting joy and the poignant sweetness, and the sheer
extravagant ardor and energy of life. His tempestuously romantic youth
rose up and was troubled at the sight of her. And his eyes, that
had stared at her in wonder and amusement and inquisitive interest,
followed her now with that queer pathos that they had. It was the look
that he relied on to move desire in women's eyes; and now it traveled,
forlorn and ineffectual, abject almost in its futility, over the gray
moorgrass where she went.

       *       *       *       *       *

That was on Wednesday the fourteenth. On Friday the sixteenth he saw
her again at nightfall, in the doorway of John Greatorex's house.

He had overtaken the cart that was carrying John Greatorex's coffin to
Upthorne. Low lighted, the long gray house brooded over the marshes,
waiting to be disencumbered of its dead.

In the east the broken shoulders of the hills receded, winding with
the dale like a coast line of gray cliffs above the mist that was
their sea. Tortured, mutilated by the jagged cloud that held her, the
moon struggled and tore her way, she lifted and freed herself high and
struck the marshes white. Defaced and sinister, above her battlements,
she looked at the house and made it terrible, moon-haunted. Its door,
low lighted, stood open to the night.

Rowcliffe drew back from the threshold to let a woman pass out.
Looking up, he was aware that he had seen her again. He supposed it
was the light of that detestable moon that gave her face its queer
morbid whiteness.

She went by without seeing him, clenching her hands and carrying her
young head high; and he saw that her eyes still held the tears that
she was afraid to spill.

Mrs. Gale stood behind her with a lamp, lighting her passage.

"Who is that young lady?" he asked.

"T' Vicar's laass, Gwanda."

The woman leaned to him and whispered, "She's seen t' body."

And in the girl's fear and blindness and defiance he saw the pride of
her youth beaten and offended by that which it had seen.

Out there, in the bridle path leading from the high road to the farm,
the cart had stopped. The men were lifting the coffin out, shouldering
it, carrying it along. He saw Gwenda Cartaret swerve out of their way.
Presently he heard her running down the road.

Then he remembered what he had been sent for.

He turned his attention to Mrs. Gale. She was a square-set,
blunt-featured woman of forty-five or so, who had once been comely
like her daughter Essy. Now her soft chin had sagged; in her cheeks
the stagnant blood crawled through a network of little veins, and
the gloss had gone from her dark hair. Her brown eyes showed a dull
defiance and deprecation of the human destiny.

"Where is he?" he said.

"Oop there, in t' room wi' 's feyther."

"Been drinking again, or what?"

"Naw, Dr. Rawcliffe, 'e 'assn't. I suddn' a sent for yo all this road
for nowt."

She drew him into the house place, and whispered.

"I'm feared 'e'll goa queer in 'is 'head, like. 'E's sot there by t'
body sence yesterda noon. 'E's not takken off 'is breeches for tree
daas. 'E caaun't sleap; 'e wunna eat and 'e wunna drink. There's work
to be doon and 'e wunna lay haand to it. Wull yo goa oop t' 'im, Dr.
Rawcliffe?"

Rowcliffe went up.




XIII


In the low lighted room the thing that Gwenda Cartaret had seen lay
stretched in the middle of the great bed, covered with a sheet. The
bed, with its white mound, was so much too big for the four walls that
held it, the white plaster of the ceiling bulging above it stooped so
low, that the body of John Greatorex lay as if already closed up in
its tomb.

Jim Greatorex, his son, sat on a wooden chair at the head of the
bed. His young, handsome face was loose and flushed as if he had been
drinking. His eyes--the queer, blue, wide-open eyes that had hitherto
looked out at you from their lodging in that ruddy, sensuous face,
incongruously spiritual, high and above your head, like the eyes of a
dreamer and a mystic--Jim's eyes were sunken now and darkened in their
red and swollen lids. They stared at the rug laid down beside the bed,
while Jim's mind set itself to count, stupidly and obstinately, the
snippets of gray and scarlet cloth that made the pattern on the black.
Every now and then he would recognise a snippet as belonging to some
suit his father had worn years ago, and then Jim's brain would receive
a shock and would stagger and have to begin its counting all over
again.

The door opened to let Rowcliffe in. And at the sound of the door,
as if a spring had been suddenly released in his spine, Jim Greatorex
shot up and started to his feet.

"Well, Greatorex----"

"Good evening, Dr. Rawcliffe." He came forward awkwardly, hanging his
head as if detected in an act of shame.

There was a silence while the two men turned their backs upon the
bed, determined to ignore what was on it. They stood together by the
window, pretending to stare at things out there in the night; and so
they became aware of the men carrying the coffin.

They could no longer ignore it.

"Wull yo look at 'Im, doctor?"

"Better not----." Rowcliffe would have laid his hand on the young
man's arm, muttering a refusal, but Greatorex had moved to the bed and
drawn back the sheet.

What Gwenda Cartaret had seen was revealed.

The dead man's face, upturned with a slight tilt to the ceiling that
bulged so brutally above it, the stiff dark beard accentuating the
tilt, the eyes, also upturned, white under their unclosing lids, the
nostrils, the half-open mouth preserved their wonder and their terror
before a thing so incredible--that the walls and roof of a man's room
should close round him and suffocate him. On this horrified face there
were the marks of dissolution, and, at the corners of the grim beard
and moustache, a stain.

It left nothing to be said. It was the face of the man who had drunk
hard and had told his son that he had never been the worse for drink.

Jim Greatorex stood and looked at it as if he knew what Rowcliffe was
thinking of it and defied him to think.

Rowcliffe drew up the sheet and covered it. "You'd better come out of
this. It isn't good for you," he said.

"I knaw what's good for me, Dr. Rawcliffe."

Jim stuck his hands in his breeches and gazed stubbornly at the
sheeted mound.

"Come," Rowcliffe said, "don't give way like this. Buck up and be a
man."

"A ma-an? You wait till yor turn cooms, doctor."

"My turn came ten years ago, and it may come again."

"And yo'll knaw then what good it doos ta-alkin'." He paused,
listening. "They've coom," he said.

There was a sound of scuffling on the stone floor below and on the
stairs. Mrs. Gale's voice was heard out on the landing, calling to the
men.

"Easy with un--easy. Mind t' lamp. Eh--yo'll never get un oop that
road. Yo mun coax un round corner."

A swinging thud on the stone wall. Then more and more desperate
scuffling with muttering. Then silence.

Mrs. Gale put her head in at the door.

"Jimmy, yo mun coom and gie a haand wi' t' coffin. They've got un
faasst in t' turn o' t' stair."

Through the open doorway Rowcliffe could see the broad shoulders of
the coffin jammed in the stairway.

Jim, flushed with resentment, strode out; and the struggling and
scuffling began again, subdued, this time, and respectful. Rowcliffe
went out to help.

Mrs. Gale on the landing went on talking to herself. "They sud 'ave
browt trestles oop first. There's naw place to stond un in. Eh dear!
It's job enoof gettin' un oop. What'll it be gettin' un down again
wit' 'E layin' in un? 'Ere--yo get oonder un, Jimmy, and 'eave un
oop."

Jim crouched and went backward down the stair under the coffin. His
flushed face, with its mournful, mystic eyes, looked out at Rowcliffe
for a moment under the coffin head. Then, with a heave of his great
back and pushing with his powerful arms against the wall and stair
rail, he loosened the shoulders of the coffin and bore it, steadied by
Rowcliffe and the men, up the stair and into the room.

They set it on its feet beside the bed, propped against the wall. And
Jim Greatorex stood and stared at it.

Rowcliffe went down into the kitchen, followed by Mrs. Gale.

"What d'yo think o' Jimmy, Dr. Rawcliffe?"

"He oughtn't to be left alone. Isn't there any sister or anybody who
could come to him?"

"Naw; 'e's got naw sisters, Jimmy 'assn't."

"Well, you must get him to lie down and eat."

"Get 'im? Yo can do nowt wi' Jimmy. 'E'll goa 'is own road. 'Is
feyther an' 'e they wuss always quar'ling, yo med say. Yet when t' owd
gentleman was taaken bad, Jimmy, 'e couldn' do too mooch for 'im. 'E
was set on pullin' 's feyther round. And when 'e found 'e couldn't
keep t' owd gentleman, 'e gets it on 'is mind like--broodin'. And 'e's
got nowt to coomfort 'im."

She sat down to it now.

"Yo see, Dr. Rawcliffe, Jim's feyther and 'is granfeyther before 'im,
they wuss good Wesleyans. It's in t' blood. But Jim's moother that
died, she wuss Choorch. And that slip of a laass, when John Greatorex
coom courtin', she turned 'im. 'E was that soft wi' laasses. 'Er
feyther 'e was steward to lord o' t' Manor and 'e was Choorch and all
t' family saame as t' folk oop at Manor. Yo med say, Jim Greatorex,
'e's got naw religion. Neither Choorch nor Chapel 'e is. Nowt to
coomfort 'im."

Upstairs the scuffling and the struggling became frightful. Jim's feet
and Jim's voice were heard above the muttering of the undertaker's
men.

Mrs. Gale whispered. "They're gettin' 'im in. 'E's gien a haand wi' t'
body. Thot's soomthin'."

She brooded ponderously. A sound of stamping and scraping at the back
door roused her.

"Eh--oo's there now?" she asked irritably.

Willie, the farm lad, appeared on the threshold. His face was flushed
and scared.

"Where's Jim?" he said in a thick voice.

"Ooosh-sh! Doan't yo' knaw t' coffin's coom? 'E's oopstairs w' t' owd
maaster."

"Well--'e mun coom down. T' mare's taaken baad again in 'er insi-ide."

"T' mare, Daasy?"

"Yes."

"Eh dear, there's naw end to trooble. Yo go oop and fatch Jimmy."

Willie hesitated. His flush deepened.

"I daarss'nt," he whispered hoarsely.

"Poor laad, 'e 's freetened o' t' body," she explained. "Yo stay
there, Wullie. I'll goa. T' body's nowt to me. I've seen too many o'
they," she muttered as she went.

They heard her crying excitedly overhead. "Jimmy! Yo coom to t'
ma-are! Yo coom to t' ma-are!"

The sounds in the room ceased instantly. Jim Greatorex, alert and in
violent possession of all his faculties, dashed down the stairs and
out into the yard.

Rowcliffe followed into the darkness where his horse and trap stood
waiting for him.

       *       *       *       *       *

He was lighting his lamps when Jim Greatorex appeared beside him with
a lantern.

"Dr. Rawcliffe, will yo joost coom an' taak a look at lil maare?"

Jim's sullenness was gone. His voice revealed him humble and
profoundly agitated.

Rowcliffe sighed, smiled, pulled himself together and turned with
Greatorex into the stable.

In the sodden straw of her stall, Daisy, the mare, lay, heaving and
snorting after her agony. From time to time she turned her head
toward her tense and swollen flank, seeking with eyes of anguish the
mysterious source of pain. The feed of oats with which Willie had
tried to tempt her lay untouched in the skip beside her head.

"I give 'er they oats an hour ago," said Willie. "An' she 'assn't so
mooch as nosed 'em."

"Nawbody but a donmed gawpie would have doon thot with 'er stoomach
raw. Yo med 'ave killed t' mare."

Willie, appalled by his own deed and depressed, stooped down and
fondled the mare's face, to show that it was not affection that he
lacked.

"Heer--clear out o' thot and let doctor have a look in."

Willie slunk aside as Rowcliffe knelt with Greatorex in the straw and
examined the sick mare.

"Can yo tell at all what's amiss, doctor?"

"Colic, I should say. Has the vet seen her?"

"Ye-es. He sent oop soomthing--"

"Well, have you given it her?"

Jim's voice thickened. "I sud have given it her yesterda."

"And why on earth didn't you?"

"The domned thing went clane out o' my head."

He turned to the window ledge by the stable door where, among a
confusion of cobwebs and dusty bottles and tin cans, the drench of
turpentine and linseed oil, the little phial of chlorodyne, and the
clean tin pannikin with its wide protruding mouth, stood ready, all
gleaming in the lantern light, forgotten since the day before.

"Thot's the stoof. Will yo halp me give it 'er, doctor?"

"All right. Can you hold her?"

"That I can. Coom oop, Daasy. Coom oop. There, my beauty. Gently,
gently, owd laass."

Rowcliffe took off his coat and shook up the drench and poured it into
the pannikin, while Greatorex got the struggling mare on to her feet.

Together, with gentleness and dexterity they cajoled her. Then Jim
laid his hands upon her mouth and opened it, drawing up her head
against his breast. Willie, suddenly competent, held the lantern while
Rowcliffe poured the drench down her throat.

Daisy, coughing and dribbling, stood and gazed at them with sad and
terrified eyes. And while the undertaker's men screwed down the lid
upon John Greatorex in his coffin, Jim Greatorex, his son, watched
with Daisy in her stall.

And Steven Rowcliffe watched with him, nursing the sick mare, making
up a fresh, clean bed for her, rubbing and fomenting her swollen and
tortured belly. When Daisy rolled in another agony, Rowcliffe gave her
chlorodyne and waited till suddenly she lay still.

In Jim's face, as he looked down at her, there was an infinite
tenderness and pity and compunction.

Rowcliffe, wriggling into his coat, regarded him with curiosity and
wonder, till Jim drew himself up and fixed him with his queer, unhappy
eyes.

"Shall I save her, doctor?"

"I can't tell you yet. I'd better send the vet up tomorrow hadn't I?"

"Ay----" Jim's voice was strangled in the spasm of his throat. But he
took Rowcliffe's hand and wrung it, discharging many emotions in that
one excruciating grip.

Rowcliffe pointed to the little phial of chlorodyne lying in the
straw. "If I were you," he said, "I shouldn't leave that lying about."

Through his long last night in the gray house haunted by the moon,
John Greatorex lay alone, screwed down under a coffin lid, and his
son, Jim, wrapped in a horse-blanket and with his head on a hay sack,
lay in the straw of the stable, beside Daisy his mare. From time to
time, as his mood took him, he turned and laid his hand on her in a
poignant caress. As if she had been his first-born, or his bride, he
spoke to her in the thick, soft voice of passion, with pitiful, broken
words and mutterings.

"What is it, Daasy----what is it? There, did they, then, did they? My
beauty--my lil laass. I--I wuss a domned brute to forget tha, a domned
brute."

All that night and the next night he lay beside her. The funeral
passed like a fantastic interlude between the long acts of his
passion. His great sorrow made him humble to Mrs. Gale so that he
allowed her to sustain him with food and drink. And on the third day
it was known throughout Garthdale that young Greatorex, who had lost
his father, had saved his mare.

Only Steven Rowcliffe knew that the mare had saved young Greatorex.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the little phial of chlorodyne was put back among the cobwebs and
forgotten.




XIV


Down at the Vicarage the Vicar was wrangling with his youngest
daughter. For the third time Alice declared that she was not well and
that she didn't want her milk.

"Whether you want it or not you've got to drink it," said the Vicar.

Alice took the glass in her lap and looked at it.

"Am I to stand over you till you drink it?"

Alice put the rim of the glass to her mouth and shuddered.

"I can't," she said. "It'll make me sick."

"Leave the poor child alone, Papa," said Gwenda.

But the Vicar ignored Gwenda.

"You'll drink it, if I stand here all night," he said.

Alice struggled with a spasm in her throat. He held the glass for her
while she groped piteously.

"Oh, where's my hanky?"

With superhuman clemency he produced his own.

"It'll serve you right if I'm ill," said Alice.

"Come," said the Vicar in his wisdom and his patience. "Come."

He proffered the disgusting cup again.

"I'd drink it and have done with it, if I were you," said Mary in her
soft voice.

Mary's soft voice was too much for Alice.

"Why c-can't you leave me alone? You--you--beast, Mary," she sobbed.

And Mr. Cartaret began again, "Am I to stand here----"

Alice got up, she broke loose from them and left the room.

"You might have known she wasn't going to drink it," Gwenda said.

But the Vicar never knew when he was beaten.

"She would have drunk it," he said, "if Mary hadn't interfered."

       *       *       *       *       *

Alice had not got the pneumonia that had killed John Greatorex. Such
happiness, she reflected, was not for her. She had desired it too
much.

But she was doing very well with her anæmia.

Bloodless and slender and inert, she dragged herself about the
village. She could not get away from it because of the steep hills
she would have had to climb. A small, unhappy ghost, she haunted the
fields in the bottom and the path along the beck that led past Mrs.
Gale's cottage.

The sight of Alice was more than ever annoying to the Vicar. Only
you wouldn't have known it. As she grew whiter and weaker he braced
himself, and became more hearty and robust. When he caught her lying
on the sofa he spoke to her in a robust and hearty tone.

"Don't lie there all day, my girl. Get up and go out. What you want is
a good blow on the moor."

"Yes. If I didn't die before I got there," Alice would say, while she
thought, "Serve him right, too, if I did."

And the Vicar would turn from her in disgust. He knew what was the
matter with his daughter Alice.

At dinner time he would pull himself together again, for, after all,
he was her father. He was robust and hearty over the sirloin and the
leg of mutton. He would call for a glass and press into it the red
juice of the meat.

"Don't peak and pine, girl. Drink that. It'll put some blood into
you."

And Alice would refuse to drink it.

Next she refused to drink her milk at eleven. She carried it out to
Essy in the scullery.

"I wish you'd drink my milk for me, Essy. It makes me sick," she said.

"I don't want your milk," said Essy.

"Please--" she implored her.

But Essy was angry. Her face flamed and she banged down the dishes she
was drying. "I sail not drink it. What should I want your milk for?
You can pour it in t' pig's bucket."

And the milk would be left by the scullery window till it turned sour
and Essy poured it into the pig's bucket that stood under the sink.

       *       *       *       *       *

Three weeks passed, and with every week Alice grew more bloodless,
more slender, and more inert, and more and more like an unhappy
ghost. Her small face was smaller; there was a tinge of green in its
honey-whiteness, and of mauve in the dull rose of her mouth. And under
her shallow breast her heart seemed to rise up and grow large, while
the rest of Alice shrank and grew small. It was as if her fragile
little body carried an enormous engine, an engine of infernal and
terrifying power. When she lay down and when she got up and with every
sudden movement its throbbing shook her savagely.

Night and morning she called to her sister: "Oh Gwenda, come and feel
my heart. I do believe it's growing. It's getting too big for my body.
It frightens me when it jumps about like that."

It frightened Gwenda.

But it did not really frighten Alice. She rejoiced in it, rather,
and exulted. After all, it was a good thing that she had not
got pneumonia, which might have killed her as it had killed John
Greatorex. She had got what served her purpose better. It served all
her purposes. If she had tried she could not have hit on anything that
would have annoyed her father more or put him more conspicuously in
the wrong. To begin with, it was his doing. He had worried her into
it. And he had brought her to a place which was the worst place
conceivable for anybody with a diseased heart, since you couldn't stir
out of doors without going up hill.

Night and morning Alice stood before the looking-glass and turned out
the lining of her lips and eyelids and saw with pleasure the pale rose
growing paler. Every other hour she laid her hand on her heart and
took again the full thrill of its dangerous throbbing, or felt her
pulse to assure herself of the halt, the jerk, the hurrying of the
beat. Night and morning and every other hour she thought of Rowcliffe.

"If it goes on like this, they'll _have_ to send for him," she said.

But it had gone on, the three weeks had passed, and yet they had not
sent. The Vicar had put his foot down. He wouldn't have the doctor. He
knew better than a dozen doctors what was the matter with his daughter
Alice.

Alice said nothing. She simply waited. As if some profound and
dead-sure instinct had sustained her, she waited, sickening.

And on the last night of the third week she fainted. She had dragged
herself upstairs to bed, staggered across the little landing and
fallen on the threshold of her room.

They kept her in bed next day. At one o'clock she refused her
chicken-broth. She would neither eat nor drink. And a little before
three Gwenda went for the doctor.

She had not told Alice she was going. She had not told anybody.




XV


She had to walk, for Mary had taken her bicycle. Nobody knew where
Mary had gone or when she had started or when she would be back.

But the four miles between Garth and Morfe were nothing to Gwenda, who
would walk twenty for her own amusement. She would have stretched the
way out indefinitely if she could; she would have piled Garthdale Moor
on Greffington Edge and Karva on the top of them and put them between
Garth and Morfe, so violent was her fear of Steven Rowcliffe.

She had no longer any desire to see him or to be seen by him. He had
seen her twice too often, and too early and too late. After being
caught on the moor at dawn, it was preposterous that she should show
herself in the doorway of Upthorne at night.

How was he to know that she hadn't done it on purpose? Girls did these
things. Poor little Ally had done them. And it was because Ally had
done them that she had been taken and hidden away here where she
couldn't do them any more.

But--couldn't she? Gwenda stood still, staring in her horror as the
frightful thought struck her that Ally could, and that she would, the
very minute she realised young Rowcliffe. And he would think--not that
it mattered in the least what he thought--he would think that there
were two of them.

If only, she said to herself, if only young Rowcliffe were a married
man. Then even Ally couldn't--

Not that she blamed poor little Ally. She looked on little Ally as
the victim of a malign and tragic tendency, the fragile vehicle of an
alien and overpowering impulse. Little Ally was doomed. It wasn't her
fault if she was made like that.

And this time it wouldn't be her fault at all. Their father would have
driven her. Gwenda hated him for his persecution and exposure of the
helpless creature.

She walked on thinking.

It wouldn't end with Ally. They were all three exposed and persecuted.
For supposing--it wasn't likely, but supposing--that this Rowcliffe
man was the sort of man she liked, supposing--what was still more
unlikely--that he was the sort of man who would like her, where
would be the good of it? Her father would spoil it all. He spoiled
everything.

Well, no, to be perfectly accurate, not everything. There was
one thing he had not spoiled, because he had never suspected its
existence--her singular passion for the place. Of course, if he had
suspected it, he would have stamped on it. It was his business
to stamp on other people's passions. Luckily, it wasn't in him to
conceive a passion for a place.

It had come upon her at first sight as they drove between twilight and
night from Reyburn through Rathdale into Garthdale. It was when they
had left the wooded land behind them and the moors lifted up their
naked shoulders, one after another, darker than dark, into a sky
already whitening above the hidden moon. And she saw Morfe, gray as
iron, on its hill, bearing the square crown and the triple pendants of
its lights; she saw the long straight line of Greffington Edge, hiding
the secret moon, and Karva with the ashen west behind it. There was
something in their form and in their gesture that called to her as
if they knew her, as if they waited for her; they struck her with the
shock of recognition, as if she had known them and had waited too.

And close beside her own wonder and excitement she had felt the deep
and sullen repulsion of her companions. The Vicar sat huddled in his
overcoat. His nostrils, pinched with repugnance, sniffed as they drank
in the cold, clean air. From time to time he shuddered, and a hoarse
muttering came from under the gray woolen scarf he had wound round
his mouth and beard. He was the righteous man, sent into uttermost
abominable exile for his daughter's sin. Behind him, on the back seat
of the trap, Alice and Mary cowed under their capes and rugs. They had
turned their shoulders to each other, hostile in their misery. Gwenda
was sorry for them.

The gray road dipped and turned and plunged them to the bottom of
Garthdale. The small, scattering lights of the village waited for her
in the hollow, with something humble and sad and familiar in their
setting. They too stung her with that poignant and secret sense of
recognition.

"This is the place," the Vicar had said. He had addressed himself
to Alice; and it had been as if he had said, This the place, the
infernal, the damnable place, you've brought us to with your behavior.

Their hatred of it had made Gwenda love it. "You can have your old
Garthdale all to yourself," Alice had said. "Nobody else wants it."

That, to Gwenda, was the charm of it. The adorable place was her own.
Nobody else wanted it. She loved it for itself. It had nothing but
itself to offer her. And that was enough. It was almost, as she
had said, too much. Her questing youth conceived no more rapturous
adventure than to follow the sheep over Karva, to set out at twilight
and see the immense night come down on the high moors above Upthorne;
to get up when Alice was asleep and slip out and watch the dawn
turning from gray to rose, and from rose to gold above Greffington
Edge.

As it happened you saw sunrise and moonrise best from the platform of
Morfe Green. There Greffington Edge breaks and falls away, and lets
slip the dawn like a rosy scarf from its shoulder, and sets the moon
free of her earth and gives her to the open sky.

But, just as the Vicar had spoiled Rowcliffe, so Rowcliffe had
spoiled Morfe for Gwenda. Therefore her fear of him was mingled with
resentment. It was as if he had had no business to be living there, in
that house of his looking over the Green.

Incredible that she should have wanted to see and to know this person.
But now, that she didn't want to, of course she was going to see him.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the bend of the road, within a mile of Morfe, Mary came riding on
Gwenda's bicycle. Large parcels were slung from her handle bars. She
had been shopping in the village.

Mary, bowed forward as she struggled with an upward slope, was not
aware of Gwenda. But Gwenda was aware of Mary, and, not being in the
mood for her, she struck off the road on to the moor and descended
upon Morfe by the steep lane that leads from Karva into Rathdale.

It never occurred to her to wonder what Mary had been doing in Morfe,
so evident was it that she had been shopping.




XVI


The doctor was at home, but he was engaged, at the moment, in the
surgery.

The maid-servant asked if she would wait.

She waited in the little cold and formal dining-room that looked
through two windows on to the Green. So formal and so cold, so utterly
impersonal was the air of the doctor's mahogany furniture that her
fear left her. It was as if the furniture assured her that she would
not really _see_ Rowcliffe; as for knowing him, she needn't worry.

She had sent in her card, printed for convenience with the names of
the three sisters:

  Miss Cartaret.
  Miss Gwendolen Cartaret.
  Miss Alice Cartaret.

She felt somehow that it protected her. She said to herself, "He won't
know which of us it is."

       *       *       *       *       *

Rowcliffe was washing his hands in the surgery when the card was
brought to him. He frowned at the card.

"But--You've brought this before," he said. "I've seen the lady."

"No, sir. It's another lady."

"Another? Are you certain?"

"Yes, sir. Quite certain."

"Did she come on a bicycle?"

"No, sir, that was the lady you've seen. I think this'll be her
sister."

Rowcliffe was still frowning as he dried his hands with fastidious
care.

"She's different, sir. Taller like."

"Taller?"

"Yes, sir."

Rowcliffe turned to the table and picked up a probe and a lancet and
dropped them into a sterilising solution.

The maid waited. Rowcliffe's absorption was complete.

"Shall I ask her to call again, sir?"

"No. I'll see her. Where is she?"

"In the dining-room, sir."

"Show her into the study."

       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing could have been more distant and reserved than Rowcliffe's
dining-room. But, to a young woman who had made up her mind that she
didn't want to know anything about him, Rowcliffe's study said too
much. It told her that he was a ferocious and solitary reader; for in
the long rows of book shelves the books leaned slantwise across the
gaps where his hands had rummaged and ransacked. It told her that his
gods were masculine and many--Darwin and Spencer and Haeckel, Pasteur,
Curie and Lord Lister, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman and Bernard
Shaw. Their photogravure portraits hung above the bookcase. He was
indifferent to mere visible luxury, or how could he have endured
the shabby drugget, the cheap, country wall-paper with its design of
dreadful roses on a white watered ground? But the fire in the grate
and the deep arm-chair drawn close to it showed that he loved warmth
and comfort. That his tastes made him solitary she gathered from the
chair's comparatively unused and unworn companion, lurking and sulking
in the corner where it had been thrust aside.

The one window of this room looked to the west upon a little orchard,
gray trunks of apple trees and plum trees against green grass, green
branches against gray stone, gray that was softened in the liquid
autumn air, green that was subtle, exquisite, charmingly austere.

He could see his little orchard as he sat by his fire. She thought she
rather liked him for keeping his window so wide open.

She was standing by it looking at the orchard as he came in.

       *       *       *       *       *

He was so quiet in his coming that she did not see or hear him till he
stood before her.

And in his eyes, intensely quiet, there was a look of wonder and of
incredulity, almost of concern.

Greetings and introductions over, the unused arm-chair was brought out
from its lair in the corner. Rowcliffe, in his own arm-chair, sat in
shadow, facing her. What light there was fell full on her.

"I'm sorry you should have had to come to me," he said, "your sister
was here a minute or two ago."

"My sister?"

"I think it _must_ have been your sister. She said it was _her_ sister
I was to go and see."

"I didn't know she was coming. She never told me."

"Pity. I was coming out to see you first thing tomorrow morning."

"Then you know? She told you?"

"She told me something." He smiled. "She must have been a little
overanxious. You don't look as if there was very much the matter with
you."

"But there isn't. It isn't me."

"Who is it then?"

"My other sister."

"Oh. I seem to have got a little mixed."

"You see, there are three of us."

He laughed.

"Three! Let me get it right. I've seen Miss Cartaret. You are Miss
Gwendolen Cartaret. And the lady I am to see is--?

"My youngest sister, Alice."

"Now I understand. I wondered how you managed those four miles. Tell
me about her."

She began. She was vivid and terse. He saw that she made short cuts
to the root of the matter. He showed himself keen and shrewd. Once or
twice he said "I know, I know," and she checked herself.

"My sister has told you all that."

"No, she hasn't. Nothing like it. Please go on."

She went on till he interrupted her. "How old is she?"

"Just twenty-three."

"I see. Yes." He looked so keen now that she was frightened.

"Does that make it more dangerous?" she said.

He laughed. "No. It makes it less so. I don't suppose it's dangerous
at all. But I can't tell till I've seen her. I say, you must be tired
after that long walk."

"I'm never tired."

"That's good."

He rang the bell. The maid appeared.

"Tell Acroyd I want the trap. And bring tea--at once."

"For two, sir?"

"For two."

Gwenda rose. "Thanks very much, I must be going."

"Please stay. It won't take five minutes. Then I can drive you back."

"I can walk."

"I know you can. But--you see--" His keenness and shrewdness went
from him. He was almost embarrassed. "I _was_ going round to see
your sister in the morning. But--I think I'd rather see her to-night.
And--" He was improvising freely now--"I ought, perhaps, to see you
after, as you understand the case. So, if you don't _mind_ coming back
with me--"

She didn't mind. Why should she?

She stayed. She sat in Rowcliffe's chair before his fire and drank his
tea and ate his hot griddle-cakes (she had a healthy appetite, being
young and strong). She talked to him as if she had known him a long
time. All these things he made her do, and when he talked to her he
made her forget what had brought her there; he made her forget Alice
and Mary and her father.

When he left her for a moment she got up, restless and eager to be
gone. And when he came back to her she was standing by the open window
again, looking at the orchard.

Rowcliffe looked at _her_, taking in her tallness, her slenderness,
the lithe and beautiful line of her body, curved slightly backward as
she leaned against the window wall.

Never before and never again, afterwards, never, that was to say, for
any other woman, did Rowcliffe feel what he felt then. Looking back on
it (afterward) he could only describe it as a sense of certainty. It
lacked, surprisingly, the element of surprise.

"You like my north-country orchard?" (He was certain that she did.)

She turned, smiling. "I like it very much."

They had been a long time over tea. It was half-past five before they
started. He brought an overcoat and put it on her. He wrapped a rug
round her knees and feet and tucked it well in.

"You don't like rugs," he said (he knew she didn't), "but you've got
to have it."

She did like it. She liked his rug and his overcoat, and his little
brown horse with the clanking hoofs. And she liked him, most decidedly
she liked him, too. He was the sort of man you could like.

They were soon out on the moor.

Rowcliffe's youth rose in him and put words into his mouth.

"Ripping country, this."

She said it was ripping.

For the life of them they couldn't have said more about it. There were
no words for the inscrutable ecstasy it gave them.

As they passed Karva Rowcliffe smiled.

"It's all right," he said, "my driving you. Of course you don't
remember, but we've met--several times before."

"Where?"

"I'll show you where. Anyhow, that's your hill, isn't it?"

"How did you know it was?"

"Because I've seen you there. The first time I ever saw you--No,
_that_ was a bit farther on. At the bend of the road. We're coming to
it."

They came.

"Just here," he said.

And now they were in sight of Garthdale.

"Funny I should have thought it was you who were ill."

"I'm never ill."

"You won't be as long as you can walk like that. And run. And jump--"

A horrid pause.

"You did it very nicely."

Another pause, not quite so horrid.

And then--"Do you _always_ walk after dark and before sunrise?"

And it was as if he had said, "Why am I always meeting you? What do
you do it for? It's queer, isn't it?"

But he had given her her chance. She rose to it.

"I've done it ever since we came here." (It was as if she had said
"Long before _you_ came.") "I do it because I like it. That's the best
of this place. You can do what you like in it. There's nobody to see
you."

("Counting me," he thought, "as nobody.")

"I should like to do it, too," he said--"to go out before sunrise--if
I hadn't got to. If I did it for fun--like you."

He knew he would not really have liked it. But his romantic youth
persuaded him in that moment that he would.




XVII


Mary was up in the attic, the west attic that looked on to the road
through its shy gable window.

She moved quietly there, her whole being suffused exquisitely with a
sense of peace, of profound, indwelling goodness. Every act of hers
for the last three days had been incomparably good, had been, indeed,
perfect. She had waited on Alice hand and foot. She had made the
chicken broth refused by Alice. There was nothing that she would not
do for poor little Ally. When little Ally was petulant and sullen,
Mary was gentle and serene. She felt toward little Ally, lying there
so little and so white, a poignant, yearning tenderness. Today she
had visited all the sick people in the village, though it was not
Wednesday, Dr. Rowcliffe's day. (Only by visiting them on other days
could Mary justify and make blameless her habit of visiting them on
Wednesdays.) She had put the house in order. She had done her shopping
in Morfe to such good purpose that she had concealed even from herself
the fact that she had gone into Morfe, surreptitiously, to fetch the
doctor.

Of course Mary was aware that she had fetched him. She had been driven
to that step by sheer terror. All the way home she kept on saying to
herself, "I've saved Ally." "I've saved Ally." That thought, splendid
and exciting, rushed to the lighted front of Mary's mind; if the
thought of Rowcliffe followed its shining trail, it thrust him back,
it spread its luminous wings to hide him, it substituted its heavenly
form for his.

So effectually did it cover him that Mary herself never dreamed that
he was there.

Neither did the Vicar, when he saw her arrive, laden with parcels,
wholesomely cheerful and reddened by her ride. He had said to her
"You're a good girl, Mary," and the sadness of his tone implied that
he wished her sister Gwendolen and her sister Alice were more like
her. And he had smiled at her under his austere moustache, and carried
in the biggest parcels for her.

The Vicar was pleased with his daughter Mary. Mary had never given him
an hour's anxiety. Mary had never put him in the wrong, never made him
feel uncomfortable. He honestly believed that he was fond of her. She
was like her poor mother. Goodness, he said to himself, was in her
face.

There had been goodness in Mary's face when she went into Alice's room
to see what she could do for her. There was goodness in it now, up in
the attic, where there was nobody but God to see it; goodness at peace
with itself, and utterly content.

She had been back more than an hour. And ever since teatime she had
been up in the attic, putting away her summer gowns. She shook them
and held them out and looked at them, the poor pretty things that she
had hardly ever worn. They hung all limp, all abashed and broken in
her hands, as if aware of their futility. She said to herself,
"They were no good, no good at all. And next year they'll all be
old-fashioned. I shall be ashamed to be seen in them." And she folded
them and laid them by for their winter's rest in the black trunk. And
when she saw them lying there she had a moment of remorse. After
all, they had been part of herself, part of her throbbing, sensuous
womanhood, warmed once by her body. It wasn't their fault, poor
things, any more than hers, if they had been futile and unfit. She
shut the lid down on them gently, and it was as if she buried them
gently out of her sight. She could afford to forgive them, for she
knew that there was no futility nor unfitness in her. Deep down in her
heart she knew it.

She sat on the trunk in the attitude of one waiting, waiting in the
utter stillness of assurance. She could afford to wait. All her being
was still, all its secret impulses appeased by the slow and orderly
movements of her hands.

Suddenly she started up and listened. She heard out on the road the
sound of wheels, and of hoofs that struck together. And she frowned.
She thought, He might as well have called today, if he's passing.

The clanking ceased, the wheels slowed down, and Mary's peaceful heart
moved violently in her breast. The trap drew up at the Vicarage gate.

She went over to the window, the small, shy gable window that looked
on to the road. She saw her sister standing in the trap and Rowcliffe
beneath her, standing in the road and holding out his hand. She saw
the two faces, the man's face looking up, the woman's face looking
down, both smiling.

And Mary's heart drew itself together in her breast. Through her shut
lips her sister's name forced itself almost audibly.

"_Gwen_-da!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Suddenly she shivered. A cold wind blew through the open window. Yet
she did not move to shut it out. To have interfered with the attic
window would have been a breach of compact, an unholy invasion of her
sister's rights. For the attic, the smallest, the coldest, the
darkest and most thoroughly uncomfortable room in the whole house,
was Gwenda's, made over to her in the Vicar's magnanimity, by way of
compensation for the necessity that forced her to share her room with
Alice. As the attic was used for storing trunks and lumber, only two
square yards of floor could be spared for Gwenda. But the two square
yards, cleared, and covered with a strip of old carpet, and furnished
with a little table and one chair; the wall-space by the window with
its hanging bookcase; the window itself and the corner fireplace near
it were hers beyond division and dispute. Nobody wanted them.

And as Mary from among the boxes looked toward her sister's territory,
her small, brooding face took on such sadness as good women feel in
contemplating a character inscrutable and unlike their own. Mary was
sorry for Gwenda because of her inscrutability and unlikeness.

Then, thinking of Gwenda, Mary smiled. The smile began in pity for her
sister and ended in a nameless, secret satisfaction. Not for a moment
did Mary suspect its source. It seemed to her one with her sense of
her own goodness.

When she smiled it was as if the spirit of her small brooding face
took wings and fluttered, lifting delicately the rather heavy corners
of her mouth and eyes.

Then, quietly, and with no indecorous haste, she went down into the
drawing-room to receive Rowcliffe. She was the eldest and it was her
duty.

By the mercy of Heaven the Vicar had gone out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gwenda left Rowcliffe with Mary and went upstairs to prepare Alice for
his visit. She had brushed out her sister's long pale hair and platted
it, and had arranged the plats, tied with knots of white ribbon, one
over each low breast, and she had helped her to put on a little white
flannel jacket with a broad lace collar. Thus arrayed and decorated,
Alice sat up in her bed, her small slender body supported by huge
pillows, white against white, with no color about her but the dull
gold of her hair.

Gwenda was still in the room, tidying it, when Mary brought Rowcliffe
there.

It was a Rowcliffe whom she had not yet seen. She had her back to him
as he paused in the doorway to let Mary pass through. Ally's bed faced
the door, and the look in Ally's eyes made her aware of the change in
him. All of a sudden he had become taller (much taller than he really
was) and rigid and austere. His youth and its charm dropped clean away
from him. He looked ten years older than he had been ten minutes ago.
Compared with him, as he stood beside her bed, Ally looked more than
ever like a small child, a child vibrating with shyness and fear, a
child that implacable adult authority has found out in foolishness and
naughtiness; so evident was it to Ally that to Rowcliffe nothing was
hidden, nothing veiled.

It was as a child that he treated her, a child who can conceal
nothing, from whom most things--all the serious and important
things--must be concealed. And Ally knew the terrible advantage that
he took of her.

It was bad enough when he asked her questions and took no more notice
of her answers than if she had been a born fool. That might have been
his north-country manners and probably he couldn't help them. But
there was no necessity that Ally could see for his brutal abruptness,
and the callous and repellent look he had when she bared her breast to
the stethescope that sent all her poor secrets flying through the long
tubes that attached her heart to his abominable ears. Neither (when
he had disentangled himself from the stethescope) could she understand
why he should scowl appallingly as he took hold of her poor wrist to
feel her pulse.

She said to herself, "He knows everything about me and he thinks I'm
awful."

It was anguish to Ally that he should think her awful.

And (to make it worse, if anything could make it) there was Mary
standing at the foot of the bed and staring at her. Mary knew
perfectly well that he was thinking how awful she was. It was what
Mary thought herself.

If only Gwenda had stayed with her! But Gwenda had left the room when
she saw Rowcliffe take out his stethescope.

And as it flashed on Ally what Rowcliffe was thinking of her, her
heart stopped as if it was never going on again, then staggered, then
gave a terrifying jump.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rowcliffe had done with Ally's little wrist. He laid it down on the
counterpane, not brutally at all, but gently, almost tenderly, as if
it had been a thing exquisitely fragile and precious.

He rose to his feet and looked at her, and then, all of a sudden,
as he looked, Rowcliffe became young again; charmingly young, almost
boyish. And, as if faintly amused at her youth, faintly touched by
her fragility, he smiled. With a mouth and with eyes from which all
austerity had departed he smiled at Alice.

(It was all over. He had done with her. He could afford to be kind to
her as he would have been kind to a little, frightened child.)

And Alice smiled back at him with her white face between the pale
gold, serious bands of platted hair.

She was no longer frightened. She forgot his austerity as if it had
never been. She saw that he hadn't thought her awful in the least. He
couldn't have looked at her like that if he had.