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."




L


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.




LI


There was no prayer time at the Vicarage any more.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was no more time at all there as the world counts time.

The hours no longer passed in a procession marked by distinguishable
days. They rolled round and round in an interminable circle,
monotonously renewed, monotonously returning upon itself. The Vicar
was the center of the circle. The hours were sounded and measured by
his monotonously recurring needs. But the days were neither measured
nor marked. They were all of one shade. There was no difference
between Sunday and Monday in the Vicarage now. They talked of the
Vicar's good days and his bad days, that was all.

For in this house where time had ceased they talked incessantly of
time. But it was always _his_ time; the time for his early morning
cup of tea; the time for his medicine; the time for his breakfast;
the time for reading his chapter to him while he dozed; the time for
washing him, for dressing him, for taking him out (he went out now,
in a wheel-chair drawn by Peacock's pony); the time for his medicine
again; his dinner time; the time for his afternoon sleep; his
tea-time; the time for his last dose of medicine; his supper time and
his time for being undressed and put to bed. And there were several
times during the night which were his times also.

The Vicar had desired supremacy in his Vicarage and he was at last
supreme. He was supreme over his daughter Gwenda. The stubborn,
intractable creature was at his feet. She was his to bend or break
or utterly destroy. She who was capable of anything was capable of an
indestructible devotion. His times, the relentless, the monotonously
recurring, were her times too.

If it had not been for Steven Rowcliffe she would have had none to
call her own (except night time, when the Vicar slept). But Rowcliffe
had kept to his days for visiting the Vicarage. He came twice or
thrice a week; not counting Wednesdays. Only, though Mary did not know
it, he came as often as not in the evenings at dusk, just after the
Vicar had been put to bed. When it was wet he sat in the dining-room
with Gwenda. When it was fine he took her out on to the moor under
Karva.

They always went the same way, up the green sheep-track that they
knew; they always turned back at the same place, where the stream he
had seen her jumping ran from the hill; and they always took the same
time to go and turn. They never stopped and never lingered; but went
always at the same sharp pace, and kept the same distance from each
other. It was as if by saying to themselves, "Never any further than
the stream; never any longer than thirty-five minutes; never any
nearer than we are now," they defined the limits of their whole
relation. Sometimes they hardly spoke as they walked. They parted with
casual words and with no touching of their hands and with the same
thought unspoken--"Till the next time."

But these times which were theirs only did not count as time. They
belonged to another scale of feeling and another order of reality.
Their moments had another pulse, another rhythm and vibration. They
burned as they beat. While they lasted Gwenda's life was lived with an
intensity that left time outside its measure. Through this intensity
she drew the strength to go on, to endure the unendurable with joy.

       *       *       *       *       *

But Rowcliffe could not endure the unendurable at all. He was savage
when he thought of it. That was her life and she would never get away
from it. She, who was born for the wild open air and for youth and
strength and freedom, would be shut up in that house and tied to that
half-paralyzed, half-imbecile old man forever. It was damnable. And
he, Rowcliffe, could have prevented it if he had only known. And if
Mary had not lied to him.

And when his common sense warned him of their danger, and his
conscience reproached him with leading her into it, he said to
himself, "I can't help it if it is dangerous. It's been taken out of
my hands. If somebody doesn't drag her out of doors, she'll get ill.
If somebody doesn't talk to her she'll grow morbid. And there's nobody
but me."

He sheltered himself in the immensity of her tragedy. Its darkness
covered them. Her sadness and her isolation sanctified them. Alice had
her husband and her child. Mary had--all she wanted. Gwenda had nobody
but him.

       *       *       *       *       *

She had never had anybody but him. For in the beginning the Vicar and
his daughters had failed to make friends among their own sort. Up in
the Dale there had been few to make, and those few Mr. Cartaret had
contrived to alienate one after another by his deplorable legend and
by the austere unpleasantness of his personality. People had not been
prepared for intimacy with a Vicar separated so outrageously from his
third wife. Nobody knew whether it was he or his third wife who had
been outrageous, but the Vicar's manner was not such as to procure for
him the benefit of any doubt. The fact remained that the poor man
was handicapped by an outrageous daughter, and Alice's behavior was
obviously as much the Vicar's fault as his misfortune. And it had been
felt that Gwenda had not done anything to redeem her father's and her
sister's eccentricities, and that Mary, though she was a nice girl,
had hardly done enough. For the last eighteen months visits at the
Vicarage had been perfunctory and very brief, month by month they had
diminished, and before Mary's marriage they had almost ceased.

Still, Mary's marriage had appeased the parish. Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe
had atoned for the third Mrs. Cartaret's suspicious absence and for
Gwenda Cartaret's flight. Lady Frances Gilbey's large wing had further
protected Gwenda.

Then, suddenly, the tale of Alice Cartaret and Greatorex went round,
and it was as if the Vicarage had opened and given up its secret.

At first, the sheer extremity of his disaster had sheltered the Vicar
from his own scandal. Through all Garthdale and Rathdale, in the
Manors and the Lodges and the Granges, in the farmhouses and the
cottages, in the inns and little shops, there was a stir of pity and
compassion. The people who had left off calling at the Vicarage called
again with sympathy and kind inquiries. They were inclined to forget
how impossible the Cartarets had been. They were sorry for Gwenda. But
they had been checked in their advances by Gwenda's palpable recoil.
She had no time to give to callers. Her father had taken all her time.
The callers considered themselves absolved from calling.

Slowly, month by month, the Vicarage was drawn back into its
silence and its loneliness. It assumed, more and more, its aspect of
half-sinister, half-sordid tragedy. The Vicar's calamity no longer
sheltered him. It took its place in the order of accepted and
irremediable events.

       *       *       *       *       *

Only the village preserved its sympathy alive. The village, that
obscure congregated soul, long-suffering to calamity, welded together
by saner instincts and profound in memory, the soul that inhabited
the small huddled, humble houses, divided from the Vicarage by no more
than the graveyard of its dead, the village remembered and it knew.

It remembered how the Vicar had come and gone over its thresholds,
how no rain nor snow nor storm had stayed him in his obstinate and
punctual visiting. And whereas it had once looked grimly on its Vicar,
it looked kindly on him now. It endured him for his daughter Gwenda's
sake, in spite of what it knew.

For it knew why the Vicar's third wife had left him. It knew why Alice
Cartaret had gone wrong with Greatorex. It knew what Gwenda Cartaret
had gone for when she went away. It knew why and how Dr. Rowcliffe had
married Mary Cartaret. And it knew why, night after night, he was to
be seen coming and going on the Garthdale road.

       *       *       *       *       *

The village knew more about Rowcliffe and Gwenda Cartaret than
Rowcliffe's wife knew.

For Rowcliffe's wife's mind was closed to this knowledge by a certain
sensual assurance. When all was said and done, it was she and not
Gwenda who was Rowcliffe's wife. And she had other grounds for
complacency. Her sister, a solitary Miss Cartaret, stowed away in
Garth Vicarage, was of no account. She didn't matter. And as Mary
Cartaret Mary would have mattered even less. But Steven Rowcliffe's
professional reputation served him well. He counted. People who had
begun by trusting him had ended by liking him, and in two years' time
his social value had become apparent. And as Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe
Mary had a social value too.

But while Steven, who had always had it, took it for granted and never
thought about it, Mary could think of nothing else. Her social value,
obscured by the terrible two years in Garthdale, had come to her as a
discovery and an acquisition. For all her complacency, she could not
regard it as a secure thing. She was sensitive to every breath that
threatened it; she was unable to forget that, if she was Steven
Rowcliffe's wife, she was Alice Greatorex's sister.

Even as Mary Cartaret she had been sensitive to Alice. But in those
days of obscurity and isolation it was not in her to cast Alice off.
She had felt bound to Alice, not as Gwenda was bound, but pitiably,
irrevocably, for better, for worse. The solidarity of the family had
held.

She had not had anything to lose by sticking to her sister. Now it
seemed to her that she had everything to lose. The thought of Alice
was a perpetual annoyance to her.

For the neighborhood that had received Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe had
barred her sister.

As long as Alice Greatorex lived at Upthorne Mary went in fear.

This fear was so intolerable to her that at last she spoke of it to
Rowcliffe.

They were sitting together in his study after dinner. The two
armchairs were always facing now, one on each side of the hearth.

"I wish I knew what to do about Alice," she said.

"What to _do_ about her?"

"Yes. Am I to have her at the house or not?"

He stared.

"Of course you're to have her at the house."

"I mean when we've got people here. I can't ask her to meet them."

"You must ask her. It's the very least you can do for her."

"People aren't going to like it, Steven."

"People have got to stick a great many things they aren't going to
like. I'm continually meeting people I'd rather not meet. Aren't you?"

"I'm afraid poor Alice is--"

"Is what?"

"Well, dear, a little impossible, to say the least of it. Isn't she?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't see anything impossible about 'poor Alice.' I never did."

"It's nice of you to say so."

He maintained himself in silence under her long gaze.

"Steven," she said, "you are awfully good to my people."

She saw that she could hardly have said anything that would have
annoyed him more.

He positively writhed with irritation.

"I'm not in the least good to your people."

The words stung her like a blow. She flushed, and he softened.

"Can't you see, Molly, that I hate the infernal humbug and the cruelty
of it all? That poor child had a dog's life before she married. She
did the only sane thing that was open to her. You've only got to look
at her now to see that she couldn't have done much better for herself
even if she hadn't been driven to it. What's more, she's done the best
thing for Greatorex. There isn't another woman in the world who could
have made that chap chuck drinking. You mayn't like the connection. I
don't suppose any of us like it."

"My dear Steven, it isn't only the connection. I could get over that.
It's--the other thing."

His blank stare compelled her to precision.

"I mean what happened."

"Well--if Gwenda can get over 'the other thing', I should think _you_
might. She has to see more of her."

"It's different for Gwenda."

"How is it different for Gwenda?"

She hesitated. She had meant that Gwenda hadn't anything to lose.
What she said was, "Gwenda hasn't anybody but herself to think of. She
hasn't let you in for Alice."

"No more have you."

He smiled. Mary did not understand either his answer or his smile.

He was saying to himself, "Oh, hasn't she? It was Gwenda all the time
who let me in."

Mary had a little rush of affection.

"My dear--I think I've let you in for everything. I wouldn't mind--I
wouldn't really--if it wasn't for you."

"You needn't bother about me," he said. "I'd rather you bothered about
your sister."

"Which sister?"

For the life of her she could not tell what had made her say that. The
words seemed to leap out suddenly from her mind to her tongue.

"Alice," he said.

"Was it Alice we were talking about?"

"It was Alice I was thinking about."

"Was it?"

Again her mind took its insane possession of her tongue.

       *       *       *       *       *

The evening dragged on. The two chairs still faced each other, pushed
forward in their attitude of polite attention and expectancy.

But the persons in the chairs leaned back as if each withdrew as far
as possible from the other. They made themselves stiff and upright as
if they braced themselves, each against the other in the unconscious
tension of hostility. And they were silent, each thinking an
intolerable thought.

Rowcliffe had taken up a book and was pretending to read it. Mary's
hands were busy with her knitting. Her needles went with a rapid jerk,
driven by the vibration of her irritated nerves. From time to time she
glanced at Rowcliffe under her bent brows. She saw the same blocks of
print, a deep block at the top, a short line under it, then a narrower
block. She saw them as vague, meaningless blurs of gray stippled on
white. She saw that Rowcliffe's eyes never moved from the deep top
paragraph on the left-hand page. She noted the light pressure of his
thumbs on the margins.

He wasn't reading at all; he was only pretending to read. He had set
up his book as a barrier between them, and he was holding on to it for
dear life.

Rowcliffe moved irritably under Mary's eyes. She lowered them and
waited for the silken sound that should have told her that he had
turned a page.

And all the time she kept on saying to herself, "He _was_ thinking
about Gwenda. He's sorry for Alice because of Gwenda, not because of
me. It isn't _my_ people that he's good to."

The thought went round and round in Mary's mind, troubling its
tranquillity.

She knew that something followed from it, but she refused to see it.
Her mind thrust from it the conclusion. "Then it's Gwenda that he
cares for." She said to herself, "After all I'm married to him." And
as she said it she thrust up her chin in a gesture of assurance and
defiance.

In the chair that faced her Rowcliffe shifted his position. He crossed
his legs and the tilted foot kicked out, urged by a hidden savagery.
The clicking of Mary's needles maddened him.

He glanced at her. She was knitting a silk tie for his birthday.

She saw the glance. The fierceness of the small fingers slackened;
they knitted off a row or two, then ceased. Her hands lay quiet in her
lap.

She leaned her head against the back of the chair. Her grieved eyes
let down their lids before the smouldering hostility in his.

Her stillness and her shut eyes moved him to compunction. They
appeased him with reminiscence, with suggestion of her smooth and
innocent sleep.

He had been thinking of what she had done to him; of how she had lied
to him about Gwenda; of the abominable thing that Alice had cried out
to him in her agony. The thought of Mary's turpitude had consoled him
mysteriously. Instead of putting it from him he had dwelt on it, he
had wallowed in it; he had let it soak into him till he was poisoned
with it.

For the sting of it and the violence of his own resentment were more
tolerable to Rowcliffe than the stale, dull realisation of the fact
that Mary bored him. It had come to that. He had nothing to say to
Mary now that he had married her. His romantic youth still moved
uneasily within him; it found no peace in an armchair, facing Mary.
He dreaded these evenings that he was compelled to spend with her. He
dreaded her speech. He dreaded her silences ten times more. They no
longer soothed him. They were pervading, menacing, significant.

He thought that Mary's turpitude accounted for and justified the
exasperation of his nerves.

Now as he looked at her, lying back in the limp pose reminiscent of
her sleep, he thought, "Poor thing. Poor Molly." He put down his book.
He stood over her a moment, sighed a long sigh like a yawn, turned
from her and went to bed.

Mary opened her eyes, sighed, stretched herself, put out the light,
and followed him.




LII


Not long after that night it struck Mary that Steven was run down. He
worked too hard. That was how she accounted to herself for his fits of
exhaustion, of irritability and depression.

But secretly, for all her complacence, she had divined the cause.

She watched him now; she inquired into his goings out and comings in.
Sometimes she knew that he had been to Garthdale, and, though he went
there many more times than she knew, she had noticed that these moods
of his followed invariably on his going. It was as if Gwenda left her
mark on him. So much was certain, and by that certainty she went on to
infer his going from his mood.

One day she taxed him with it.

Rowcliffe had tried to excuse his early morning temper on the plea
that he was "beastly tired."

"Tired?" she had said. "Of course you're tired if you went up to
Garthdale last night."

She added, "It isn't necessary."

He was silent and she knew that she was on his trail.

Two evenings later she caught him as he was leaving the house.

"Where are you going?" she said.

"I'm going up to Garthdale to see your father."

Her eyes flinched.

"You saw him yesterday."

"I did."

"Is he worse?"

He hesitated. Lying had not as yet come lightly to him.

"I'm not easy about him," he said.

She was not satisfied. She had caught the hesitation.

"Can't you tell me," she persisted, "if he's worse?"

He looked at her calmly.

"I can't tell you till I've seen him."

That roused her. She bit her lip. She knew that whatever she did she
must not show temper.

"Did Gwenda send for you?"

Her voice was quiet.

"She did not."

He strode out of the house.

After that he never told her when he was going up to Garthdale toward
nightfall. He was sometimes driven to lie. It was up Rathdale he was
going, or to Greffington, or to smoke a pipe with Ned Alderson, or to
turn in for a game of billiards at the village club.

And whenever he lied to her she saw through him. She was prepared for
the lie. She said to herself, "He is going to see Gwenda. He can't
keep away from her."

And then she remembered what Alice had said to her. "You'll know some
day."

She knew.




LIII


And with her knowledge there came a curious calm.

She no longer watched and worried Rowcliffe. She knew that no wife
ever kept her husband by watching and worrying him.

She was aware of danger and she faced it with restored complacency.

For Mary was a fount of sensual wisdom. Rowcliffe was ill. And
from his illness she inferred his misery, and from his misery his
innocence.

She told herself that nothing had happened, that she knew nothing that
she had not known before. She saw that her mistake had been in showing
that she knew it. That was to admit it, and to admit it was to give it
a substance, a shape and color it had never had and was not likely to
have.

And Mary, having perceived her blunder, set herself to repair it.

She knew how. Under all his energy she had discerned in her husband a
love of bodily ease, and a capacity for laziness, undeveloped because
perpetually frustrated. Insidiously she had set herself to undermine
his energy while she devised continual opportunities for ease.

Rowcliffe remained incurably energetic. His profession demanded
energy.

Still, there were ways by which he could be captured. He was not
so deeply absorbed in his profession as to be indifferent to the
arrangements of his home. He liked and he showed very plainly that he
liked, good food and silent service, the shining of glass and silver,
white table linen and fragrant sheets for his bed.

With all these things Mary had provided him.

And she had her own magic and her way.

Her way, the way she had caught him, was the way she would keep him.
She had always known her power, even unpracticed. She had always known
by instinct how she could enthrall him when her moment came. Gwenda
had put back the hour; but she had done (and Mary argued that
therefore she could do) no more.

Here Mary's complacency betrayed her. She had fallen into the error of
all innocent and tranquil sensualists. She trusted to the present. She
had reckoned without Rowcliffe's future or his past.

And she had done even worse. By habituating Rowcliffe's senses to her
way, she had produced in him, through sheer satisfaction, that sense
of security which is the most dangerous sense of all.




LIV


One week in June Rowcliffe went up to Garthdale two nights running. He
had never done this before and he had had to lie badly about it both
to himself and Mary.

He had told himself that the first evening didn't count.

For he had quarreled with Gwenda the first evening. Neither of them
knew how it had happened or what it was about. But he had hardly come
before he had left her in his anger.

The actual outburst moved her only to laughter, but the memory of it
was violent in her nerves, it shook and shattered her. She had not
slept all night and in the morning she woke tired and ill. And, as
if he had known what he had done to her, he came to see her the next
evening, to make up.

That night they stayed out later than they had meant.

As they touched the moor the lambs stirred at their mothers' sides and
the pewits rose and followed the white road to lure them from their
secret places; they wheeled and wheeled round them, sending out their
bored and weary cry. In June the young broods kept the moor and the
two were forced to the white road.

And at the turn they came in sight of Greffington Edge.

She stood still. "Oh--Steven--look," she said.

He stood with her and looked.

The moon was hidden in the haze where the gray day and the white night
were mixed. Across the bottom on the dim, watery green of the eastern
slope, the thorn trees were in flower. The hot air held them like
still water. It quivered invisibly, loosening their scent and
scattering it. And of a sudden she saw them as if thrown back to a
distance where they stood enchanted in a great stillness and clearness
and a piercing beauty.

There went through her a sudden deep excitement, a subtle and
mysterious joy. This passion was as distant and as pure as ecstasy.
It swept her, while the white glamour lasted, into the stillness where
the flowering thorn trees stood.

       *       *       *       *       *

She wondered whether Steven had seen the vision of the flowering thorn
trees. She longed for him to see it. They stood a little apart and her
hand moved toward him without touching him, as if she would draw him
to the magic.

"Steven--" she said.

He came to her. Her hand hung limply by her side again. She felt his
hand close on it and press it.

She knew that he had seen the vision and felt the subtle and
mysterious joy.

She wanted nothing more.

"Say good-night now," she said.

"Not yet. I'm going to walk back with you."

They walked back in a silence that guarded the memory of the mystic
thing.

They lingered a moment by the half-open door; she on the threshold, he
on the garden path; the width of a flagstone separated them.

"In another minute," she thought, "he will be gone."

It seemed to her that he wanted to be gone and that it was she who
held him there against his will and her own.

She drew the door to.

"Don't shut it, Gwenda."

It was as if he said, "Don't let's stand together out here like this
any longer."

She opened the door again, leaning a little toward it across the
threshold with her hand on the latch.

She smiled, raising her chin in the distant gesture that was their
signal of withdrawal.

But Steven did not go.

       *       *       *       *       *

"May I come in?" he said.

Something in her said, "Don't let him come in." But she did not heed
it. The voice was thin and small and utterly insignificant, as if
one little brain cell had waked up and started speaking on its own
account. And something seized on her tongue and made it say "Yes," and
the full tide of her blood surged into her throat and choked it, and
neither the one voice nor the other seemed to be her own.

He followed her into the little dining-room where the lamp was. The
Vicar was in bed. The whole house was still.

Rowcliffe looked at her in the lamplight.

"We've walked a bit too far," he said.

He made her lean back on the couch. He put a pillow at her head and a
footstool at her feet.

"Just rest," he said, and she rested.

But Rowcliffe did not rest. He moved uneasily about the room.

A sudden tiredness came over her.

She thought, "Yes. We walked too far." She leaned her head back on
the cushion. Her thin arms lay stretched out on either side of her,
supported by the couch.

Rowcliffe ceased to wander. He drew up with his back against the
chimney-piece, where he faced her.

"Close your eyes," he said.

She did not close them. But the tired lids drooped. The lifted bow of
her mouth drooped. The small, sharp-pointed breasts drooped.

And as he watched her he remembered how he had quarreled with her in
that room last night. And the thought of his brutality was intolerable
to him.

His heart ached with tenderness, and his tenderness was intolerable
too.

The small white face with its suffering eyes and drooping eyelids, the
drooping breasts, the thin white arms slackened along the couch, the
childlike helplessness of the tired body moved him with a vehement
desire. And his strength that had withstood her in her swift, defiant
beauty melted away.

"Steven--"

"Don't speak," he said.

She was quiet for a moment.

"But I want to, Steven. I want to say something."

He sighed.

"Well--say it."

"It's something I want to ask you."

"Don't ask impossibilities."

"I don't think it's impossible. At least it wouldn't be if you really
knew. I want you to be more careful with me."

She paused.

He turned from her abruptly.

His turning made it easier for her. She went on.

"It's only a little thing--a silly little thing. I want you, when
you're angry with me, not to show it quite so much."

He had turned again to her suddenly. The look on his face stopped her.

"I'm never angry with you," he said.

"I know you aren't--really. I know. I know. But you make me think you
are; and it hurts so terribly."

"I didn't know you minded."

"I don't always mind. But sometimes, when I'm stupid, I simply can't
bear it. It makes me feel as if I'd done something. Last night I got
it into my head--"

"What did you get into your head? Tell me--"

"I thought I'd made you hate me. I thought you thought I was
awful--like poor Ally."

"_You?_"

He drew a long breath and sent it out again.

"You know what I think of you."

He looked at her, threw up his head suddenly and went to her.

His words came fast now and thick.

"You know I love you. That's why I've been such a brute to
you--because I couldn't have you in my arms and it made me mad. And
you know it. That's what you mean when you say it hurts you. You
shan't be hurt any more. I'm going to end it."

He stooped over her suddenly, steadying himself by his two hands laid
on the back of her chair. She put out her arms and pushed with her
hands against his shoulders, as if she would have beaten him off. He
sank to her knees and there caught her hands in his and kissed them.
He held them together helpless with his left arm and his right arm
gathered her to him violently and close.

His mouth came crushing upon her parted lips and her shut eyes.

Her small thin hands struggled piteously in his and for pity he
released them. He felt them pushing with their silk-soft palms against
his face. Their struggle and their resistance were pain to him and
exquisite pleasure.

"Not that, Steven! Not that! Oh, I didn't think--I didn't think you
would."

"Don't send me away, Gwenda. It's all right. We've suffered enough.
We've got to end it this way."

"No. Not this way."

"Yes--yes. It's all right, darling. We've struggled till we can't
struggle any more. You must. Why not? When you love me."

He pressed her closer in his arms. She lay quiet there. When she was
quiet he let her speak.

"I can't," she said. "It's Molly. Poor little Molly."

"Don't talk to me of Molly. She lied about you."

"Whatever she did she couldn't help it."

"Whatever we do now we can't help it."

"We can. We're different. Oh--don't! Don't hold me like that. I can't
bear it."

His arms tightened. His mouth found hers again as if he had not heard
her.

She gave a faint cry that pierced him.

He looked at her. The lips he had kissed were a purplish white in her
thin bloodless face. "I say, are you ill?"

She saw her advantage and took it.

"No. But I can't stand things very well. They make me ill. That's what
I meant when I asked you to be careful."

Her helplessness stilled his passion as it had roused it. He released
her suddenly.

He took the thin arm surrendered to his gentleness, turned back her
sleeve and felt the tense jerking pulse.

He saw what she had meant.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Do you mind my sitting beside you if I keep quiet?"

She shook her head.

"Can you stand my talking about it?"

"Yes. If you don't touch me."

"I won't touch you. We've got to face the thing. It's making you ill."

"It isn't."

"What is, then?"

"Living with Papa."

He smiled through his agony. "That's only another name for it.

"It can't go on. Why shouldn't we be happy?

"Why shouldn't we?" he insisted. "It's not as if we hadn't tried."

"I--can't."

"You're afraid?"

"Oh, no, I'm not afraid. It's simply that I can't."

"You think it's a sin? It isn't. It's we who are sinned against.

"If you're afraid of deceiving Mary--I don't care if I do. She
deceived me first. Besides we can't. She knows and she doesn't mind.
She can't suffer as you suffer. She can't feel as you feel. She can't
care."

"She does care. She must have cared horribly or she wouldn't have done
it."

"She didn't. Anybody would have done for her as well as me. I tell you
I don't want to talk about Mary or to think about her."

"Then I must."

"No. You must think of me. You don't owe anything to Mary. It's me
you're sinning against. You think a lot about sinning against Mary,
but you think nothing about sinning against me."

"When did I ever sin against you?"

"Last year. When you went away. That was the beginning of it all. Why
_did_ you go, Gwenda? You knew. We should have been all right if you
hadn't."

"I went because of Ally. She had to be married. I thought--perhaps--if
I wasn't there----"

"That I'd marry her? Good God! Ally! What on earth made you think
I'd do that? I wouldn't have married her if there hadn't been another
woman in the world."

"I couldn't be sure. But after what you said about her I had to give
her a chance."

"What _did_ I say?"

"That she'd die or go mad if somebody didn't marry her."

"I never said that. I wouldn't be likely to."

"But you did, dear. You frightened me. So I went away to see if that
would make it any better."

"Any better for whom?"

"For Ally."

"Oh--Ally. I see."

"I thought if it didn't--if you didn't marry her--I could come back
again. And when I did come back you'd married Mary."

"And Mary knew that?"

"There's no good bothering about Mary now."

Utterly weary of their strife, she lay back and closed her eyes.

"Poor Gwenda."

Again he had compassion on her. He waited.

"You see how it was," she said.

"It doesn't help us much, dear. What are we going to do?"

"Not what you want, Steven, I'm afraid."

"Not now. But some day. You'll see it differently when you've thought
of it."

"Never. Never any day. I've had all these months to think of it and I
can't see it differently yet."

"You _have_ thought of it?"

"Not like that."

"But you did think. You knew it would come to this."

"I tried not to make it come. Do you know why I tried? I don't think
it was for Molly. It was for myself. It was because I wanted to keep
you. That's why I shall never do what you want."

"But that's how you _would_ keep me. There's no other way."

She rose with a sudden gesture of her shoulders as if she shook off
the obsession of him.

She stood leaning against the chimney-piece in the attitude he knew,
an attitude of long-limbed, insolent, adolescent grace that gave her
the advantage. Her eyes disdained their pathos. They looked at him
with laughter under their dropped lids.

"How funny we are," she said, "when we know all the time we couldn't
really do a caddish thing like that."

He smiled queerly.

"I suppose we couldn't."

       *       *       *       *       *

He too rose and faced her.

"Do you know what this means?" he said. "It means that I've got to
clear out of this."

"Oh, Steven----" The brave light in her face went out.

"You wouldn't go away and leave me?"

"God knows I don't want to leave you, Gwenda. But we can't go on like
this. How can we?"

"I could."

"Well, I can't. That's what it means to me. That's what it means to a
man. If we're going to be straight we simply mustn't see each other."

"Do you mean for always? That we're never to see each other again?"

"Yes, if it's to be any good."

"Steven, I can bear anything but that. It _can't_ mean that."

"I tell you it's what it means for me. There's no good talking about
it. You've seen what I've been like tonight."

"This? This is nothing. You'll get over this. But think what it would
mean to me."

"It would be hard, I know."

"Hard?"

"Not half so hard as this."

"But I can bear this. We've been so happy. We can be happy still."

"This isn't happiness."

"It's _my_ happiness. It's all I've got. It's all I've ever had."

"What is?"

"Seeing you. Or not even seeing you. Knowing you're there."

"Poor child. Does that make you happy?"

"Utterly happy. Always."

"I didn't know."

He stooped forward, hiding his face in his hands.

"You don't realise it. You've no idea what it'll mean to be boxed up
in this place together, all our lives, with this between us."

"It's always been between us. We shall be no worse off. It may have
been bad now and then, but conceive what it'll be like when you go."

"I suppose it would be pretty beastly for you if I did go."

"Would it be too awful for you if you stayed?"

He was a long time before he answered.

"Not if it really made you happier."

"Happier?"

She smiled her pitiful, strained smile. It said, "Don't you see that
it would kill me if you went?"

And again it was by her difference, her helplessness, that she had
him.