THE THREE SISTERS

BY

MAY SINCLAIR

1914







THE THREE SISTERS

I


North of east, in the bottom, where the road drops from the High Moor,
is the village of Garth in Garthdale.

It crouches there with a crook of the dale behind and before it,
between half-shut doors of the west and south. Under the mystery and
terror of its solitude it crouches, like a beaten thing, cowering from
its topmost roof to the bowed back of its stone bridge.

It is the last village up Garthdale; a handful of gray houses, old
and small and humble. The high road casts them off and they turn their
backs to it in their fear and huddle together, humbly, down by the
beck. Their stone roofs and walls are naked and blackened by wind and
rain as if fire had passed over them.

They have the silence, the darkness and the secrecy of all ultimate
habitations.

North, where the high road begins to rise again, the Vicarage stands
all alone. It turns its face toward the village, old and gray and
humble as any house there, and looks on the road sideways, through the
small shy window of its gable end. It has a strip of garden in front
and on its farther side and a strip of orchard at the back. The garden
slopes down to the churchyard, and a lane, leading to the pastures,
runs between.

And all these things of stone, the village, the Vicarage, the church,
the churchyard and the gravestones of the dead are alike naked
and black, blackened as if fire had passed over them. And in their
grayness and their desolation they are one with each other and with
the network of low walls that links them to the last solitary farm on
the High Moor. And on the breast of the earth they show, one moment,
solid as if hewn out of her heart, and another, slender and wind-blown
as a tangle of gray thread on her green gown.




II


Through four of its five front windows the house gave back darkness
to the dark. One, on the ground floor, showed a golden oblong, skirted
with watery gray where the lamp-light thinned the solid blackness of
the wall.

The three sisters, Mary, Gwendolen and Alice, daughters of James
Cartaret, the Vicar of Garth, were sitting there in the dining-room
behind the yellow blind, doing nothing. In their supine, motionless
attitudes they seemed to be waiting for something to happen, to happen
so soon that, if there had been anything to do, it was not worth their
while doing it.

All three were alike in the small, broad faces that brooded, half
sullen and half sad; in the wide eyes that watched vaguely; in the
little tender noses, and in the mouths, tender and sullen, too; in the
arch and sweep of the upper lips, the delicate fulness of the lower;
in the way of the thick hair, parted and turned back over the brows in
two wide and shallow waves.

Mary, the eldest, sat in a low chair by the fireside. Her hands were
clasped loosely on the black woolen socks she had ceased to darn.

She was staring into the fire with her gray eyes, the thick gray eyes
that never let you know what she was thinking. The firelight woke the
flame in her reddish-tawny hair. The red of her lips was turned back
and crushed against the white. Mary was shorter than her sisters, but
she was the one that had the color. And with it she had a stillness
that was not theirs. Mary's face brooded more deeply than their faces,
but it was untroubled in its brooding.

She had learned to darn socks for her own amusement on her eleventh
birthday, and she was twenty-seven now.

Alice, the youngest girl (she was twenty-three) lay stretched out on
the sofa.

She departed in no way from her sister's type but that her body was
slender and small boned, that her face was lightly finished, that her
gray eyes were clear and her lips pale against the honey-white of her
face, and that her hair was colorless as dust except where the edge of
the wave showed a dull gold.

Alice had spent the whole evening lying on the sofa. And now she
raised her arms and bent them, pressing the backs of her hands against
her eyes. And now she lowered them and lifted one sleeve of her thin
blouse, and turned up the milk-white under surface of her arm and lay
staring at it and feeling its smooth texture with her fingers.

Gwendolen, the second sister, sat leaning over the table with her
arms flung out on it as they had tossed from her the book she had been
reading.

She was the tallest and the darkest of the three. Her face followed
the type obscurely; and vividly and emphatically it left it. There was
dusk in her honey-whiteness, and dark blue in the gray of her eyes.
The bridge of her nose and the arch of her upper lip were higher,
lifted as it were in a decided and defiant manner of their own. About
Gwenda there was something alert and impatient. Her very supineness
was alive. It had distinction, the savage grace of a creature utterly
abandoned to a sane fatigue.

Gwenda had gone fifteen miles over the moors that evening. She had run
and walked and run again in the riotous energy of her youth.

Now she was too tired to read.

Gwenda was the first to speak.

"Is it ten yet?"

"No." Mary smiled, but the word shuddered in her throat like a weary
moan.

"How long?"

"Forty-three minutes."

"Oh, Lord----" Gwenda laughed the laugh of brave nerves tortured.

From her sofa beyond the table Alice sighed.

At ten o'clock Essy Gale, the maid-servant, would come in from the
kitchen and the Vicar from the inner room. And Essy would put the
Bible and Prayer-book on the table, and the Vicar would read Prayers.

That was all they were waiting for. It was all that could happen. It
happened every night at ten o'clock.




III


Alice spoke next.

"What day of the month is it?"

"The thirtieth." Mary answered.

"Then we've been here exactly five months to-day."

"That's nothing," said Mary, "to the months and years we shall be
here."

"I can't think what possessed Papa to come and bury us all in this
rotten place."

"Can't you?" Mary's eyes turned from their brooding. Her voice was
very quiet, barely perceptible the significant stress.

"Oh, if you mean it's _me_ he wants to bury----. You needn't rub that
in."

"I'm not rubbing it in."

"You are. You're rubbing it in every time you look like that. That's
the beastly part of it. Supposing he does want to get back on me, why
should he go and punish you two?"

"If he thinks he's punishing me he's sold," said Gwenda.

"He couldn't have stuck you in a rottener hole."

Gwenda raised her head.

"A hole? Why, there's no end to it. You can go for miles and miles
without meeting anybody, unless some darling mountain sheep gets up
and looks at you. It's--it's a divine place, Ally."

"Wait till you've been another five months in it. You'll be as sick as
I am."

"I don't think so. You haven't seen the moon get up over Greffington
Edge. If you had--if you knew what this place was like, you wouldn't
lie there grizzling. You wouldn't talk about punishing. You'd wonder
what you'd done to be allowed to look at it--to live in it a day. Of
course I'm not going to let on to Papa that I'm in love with it."

Mary smiled again.

"It's all very well for you," she said. "As long as you've got a moor
to walk on _you're_ all right."

"Yes. I'm all right," Gwenda said.

Her head had sunk again and rested in the hollow of her arms. Her
voice, muffled in her sleeve, came soft and thick. It died for
drowsiness.

In the extreme immobility and stillness of the three the still house
stirred and became audible to them, as if it breathed. They heard the
delicate fall of the ashes on the hearth, and the flame of the lamp
jerking as the oil sputtered in the burnt wick. Their nerves shook to
the creeping, crackling sounds that came from the wainscot, infinitely
minute. A tongue of fire shot hissing from the coal. It seemed to them
a violent and terrifying thing. The breath of the house passed over
them in thick smells of earth and must, as the fire's heat sucked at
its damp.

The church clock struck the half hour. Once, twice; two dolorous notes
that beat on the still house and died.

Somewhere out at the back a door opened and shut, and it was as if the
house drew in its breath at the shock of the sound.

Presently a tremor crept through Gwenda's young body as her heart
shook it.

She rose and went to the window.




IV


She was slow and rapt in her going like one walking in her sleep,
moved by some impulse profounder than her sleep.

She pulled up the blind. The darkness was up against the house,
thick and close to the pane. She threw open the window, and the night
entered palpably like slow water, black and sweet and cool.

From the unseen road came the noise of wheels and of a horse that in
trotting clanked forever one shoe against another.

It was young Rowcliffe, the new doctor, driving over from Morthe to
Upthorne on the Moor, where John Greatorex lay dying.

The pale light of his lamps swept over the low garden wall.

Suddenly the four hoofs screamed, grinding together in the slide of
their halt. The doctor had jerked his horse up by the Vicarage gate.

The door at the back opened and shut again, suddenly, sharply, as if
in fear.

A voice swung out like a mournful bell into the night. A dalesman's
voice; such a voice as the lonely land fashions sometimes for its own
delight, drawling and tender, hushed by the hills and charged with the
infinite, mysterious sadness of their beauty.

It belonged to young Greatorex and it came from the doorway of the
Vicarage yard.

"That yo, Dr. Rawcliffe? I wuss joost gawn oop t'road t' see ef yo
wuss coomin'."

"Of course I was coming."

The new doctor was short and stern with young Greatorex.

The two voices, the soft and the stern, spoke together for a moment,
low, inaudible. Then young Greatorex's voice was heard again, and in
its softness there was the furtive note of shame.

"I joost looked in to Vicarage to leave woord with Paason."

The noise of the wheels and hoofs began again, the iron shoes clanked
together and struck out the rhythm that the sisters knew.

And with the first beat of it, and with the sound of the two voices in
the road, life, secret and silent, stirred in their blood and nerves.
It quivered like a hunting thing held on the leash.




V


Their stillness, their immobility were now intense. And not one spoke
a word to the other.

All three of them were thinking.

Mary thought, "Wednesday is his day. On Wednesday I will go into the
village and see all my sick people. Then I shall see him. And he
will see me. He will see that I am kind and sweet and womanly." She
thought, "That is the sort of woman that a man wants." But she did not
know what she was thinking.

Gwenda thought, "I will go out on to the moor again. I don't care if I
_am_ late for Prayers. He will see me when he drives back and he will
wonder who is that wild, strong girl who walks by herself on the moor
at night and isn't afraid. He has seen me three times, and every time
he has looked at me as if he wondered. In five minutes I shall go."
She thought (for she knew what she was thinking), "I shall do nothing
of the sort. I don't care whether he sees me or not. I don't care if I
never see him again. I don't care."

Alice thought, "I will make myself ill. So ill that they'll _have_ to
send for him. I shall see him that way."




VI


Alice sat up. She was thinking another thought.

"If Mr. Greatorex is dead, Dr. Rowcliffe won't stay long at Upthorne.
He will come back soon. And he will have to call and leave word. He
will come in and I shall see him."

But if Mr. Greatorex wasn't dead? If Mr. Greatorex were a long time
over his dying? Then he might be kept at Upthorne, perhaps till
midnight, perhaps till morning. Then, even if he called to leave
word, she would not see him. When she looked deep she found herself
wondering how long Mr. Greatorex would be over his dying. If she had
looked a little deeper she would have found herself hoping that Mr.
Greatorex was already dead.

If Mr. Greatorex was dead before he got to Upthorne he would come very
soon, perhaps before prayer-time.

And he would be shown into the drawing-room.

Would he? Would Essy have the sense? No. Not unless the lamp was lit
there. Essy wouldn't show him into a dark room. And Essy was stupid.
She might have _no_ sense. She might take him straight into the study
and Papa would keep him there. Trust Papa.

Alice got up from her sofa and left the room; moving with her weary
grace and a little air of boredom and of unconcern. She was always
most unconcerned when she was most intent.

Outside in the passage she stood a moment, listening. All the ways
of the house gave upon the passage in a space so narrow that by
stretching out one arm she could have touched both walls.

With a door open anywhere the passage became a gully for the north
wind. Now, with all doors shut, it was as if the breath of the house
was being squeezed out there, between closing walls. The passage,
instead of dividing the house, drew it together tight. And this
tightness was intolerable to Alice.

She hated it. She hated the whole house. It was so built that there
wasn't a corner in it where you could get away from Papa. His study
had one door opening into the passage and one into the dining-room.
The window where he sat raked the garden on the far side. The window
of his bedroom raked the front; its door commanded the stairhead. He
was aware of everything you did, of everything you didn't do. He could
hear you in the dining-room; he could hear you overhead; he could hear
you going up and downstairs. He could positively hear you breathe, and
he always knew whether you were in bed or not. She drew in her breath
lest he should hear it now.

At the far end of the passage, on the wall-space between the staircase
and the kitchen door, raised on a small bracket, a small tin lamp
showed a thrifty flame. Under it, on a mahogany table-flap, was a row
of bedroom candlesticks with their match-boxes.

Her progress to the table-flap was stealthy. She exalted this business
of lighting the drawing-room lamp to a desperate, perilous adventure.
The stone floor deadened her footsteps as she went.

Her pale eyes, half sullen, half afraid, slewed round to the door of
the study on her right. With a noiseless hand she secured her matches
and her candle. With noiseless feet she slid into the darkness of the
drawing-room. She dared not light her candle out there in the passage.
For the Vicar was full of gloom and of suspicion in the half hour
before prayer-time, and at the spurt of the match he might come out
blustering and insist on knowing what she was doing and where she was
going, whereas presently he would know, and he might be quiet as long
as he was satisfied that she wasn't shirking Prayers.

Stealthily, with her air of desperate adventure, she lit the
drawing-room lamp. She shook out the puffs and frills of its yellow
paper shade. Under its gaudy skirts the light was cruel to the cramped
and shabby room, to the huddled furniture, to the tarnished gilt, the
perishing tones of gray and amber.

Alice set the lamp on the top of the cottage piano that stood
slantwise in a side window beyond the fireplace. She had pulled back
the muslin curtains and opened both windows wide so that the room was
now bared to the south and west. Then, with the abrupt and passionate
gesture of desire deferred, she sat down at the little worn-out Erard
and began to play.

Sitting there, with the open window behind her, she could be seen, and
she knew that she could be seen from over the wall by anybody driving
past in a high dog-cart.

And she played. She played the Chopin Grande Polonaise, or as much of
it as her fingers, tempestuous and inexpert, could clutch and reach.
She played, neither with her hands nor with her brain, but with her
temperament, febrile and frustrate, seeking its outlet in exultant
and violent sound. She fell upon the Erard like some fierce and hungry
thing, tearing from the forlorn, humble instrument a strange and
savage food. She played--with incredible omissions, discords and
distortions, but she played. She flung out her music through the
windows into the night as a signal and an appeal. She played (on the
little worn-out Erard) in ecstasy and expectation, as if something
momentous hung upon her playing. There was joy and triumph and
splendor in the Grande Polonaise; she felt them in her heart and
nerves as a delicate, dangerous tremor, the almost intolerable on
coming of splendor, of triumph and of joy.

And as she played the excitement gathered; it swung in more and more
vehement vibrations; it went warm and flooding through her brain
like wine. All the life of her bloodless body swam there, poised and
thinned, but urgent, aspiring to some great climax of the soul.




VII


The whole house was full of the Chopin Grande Polonaise.

It raged there like a demon. Tortured out of all knowledge, the Grande
Polonaise screamed and writhed in its agony. It writhed through the
windows, seeking its natural attenuation in the open air. It writhed
through the shut house and was beaten back, pitilessly, by the roof
and walls. To let it loose thus was Alice's defiance of the house and
her revenge.

Mary and Gwenda heard it in the dining-room, and set their mouths
and braced themselves to bear it. The Vicar in his study behind the
dining-room heard it and scowled. Essy, the maid-servant, heard it,
she heard it worse than anybody, in her kitchen on the other side of
the wall. Now and then, when the Polonaise screamed louder, Mary drew
a hissing breath of pain through her locked teeth, and Gwenda grinned.
Not that to Gwenda there was anything funny in the writhing and
screaming of the Grande Polonaise. It was that she alone appreciated
its vindictive quality; she admired the completeness, the audacity of
Alice's revenge.

But Essy in her kitchen made no effort to stand up to the Grande
Polonaise. When it began she sat down and laid her arms on the kitchen
table, and her head, muffled in her apron, on her arms, and cried. She
couldn't have told you what the Polonaise was like or what it did to
her; all that she could have said was that it went through and
through her. She didn't know, Essy didn't, what had come over her; for
whatever noise Miss Alice made, she hadn't taken any notice, not at
first. It was in the last three weeks that the Polonaise had found her
out and had begun to go through and through her, till it was more than
she could bear. But Essy, crying into her apron, wouldn't have lifted
a finger to stop Miss Alice.

"Poor laass," Essy said to herself, "she looves to plaay. And Vicar,
he'll not hold out mooch longer. He'll put foot down fore she gets
trow."

Through the screaming of the Polonaise Essy listened for the opening
of the study door.




VIII


The study door did not open all at once.

"Wisdom and patience, wisdom and patience----" The Vicar kept on
muttering as he scowled. Those were his watchwords in his dealings
with his womenkind.

The Vicar was making a prodigious effort to maintain what seemed
to him his god-like serenity. He was unaware that he was trying to
control at one and the same time his temper and his temperament.

He was a man of middle height and squarish build, dark, pale-skinned
and blue-eyed like his daughter Gwendolen. The Vicar's body stretched
tight the seams of his black coat and kept up, at fifty-seven, a false
show of muscular energy. The Vicar's face had a subtle quality of
deception. The austere nose, the lean cheek-bones, the square-cut
moustache and close-clipped, pointed beard (black, slightly grizzled)
made it appear, at a little distance, the face of an ascetic. It
approached, and the blue of the eyes, and the black of their dilated
pupils, the stare of the nostrils and the half hidden lines of the red
mouth revealed its profound and secret sensuality.

The interior that contained him was no less deceptive. Its book-lined
walls advertised him as the scholarly recluse that he was not. He had
had an eye to this effect. He had placed in prominent positions
the books that he had inherited from his father, who had been a
schoolmaster. You were caught at the very door by the thick red line
of The Tudor Classics; by the eleven volumes of The Bekker's Plato,
with Notes, bound in Russia leather, side by side with Jowett's
Translations in cloth; by Sophocles and Dean Plumptre, the Odyssey
and Butcher and Lang; by Г†schylus and Robert Browning. The Vicar had
carried the illusion of scholarship so far as to hide his Aristophanes
behind a little curtain, as if it contained for him an iniquitous
temptation. Of his own accord and with a deliberate intention to
deceive, he had added the Early Fathers, Tillotsen's _Sermons_ and
Farrar's _Life of Christ_.

On another shelf, rather less conspicuous, were some bound volumes
of _The Record_, with the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Marie
Corelli. On the ledge of his bureau _Blackwood's Magazine_, uncut, lay
ready to his hand. The _Spectator_, in process of skimming, was on his
knees. The _Standard_, fairly gutted, was on the floor. There was no
room for it anywhere else.

For the Vicar's study was much too small for him. Sitting there, in
an arm-chair and with his legs in the fender, he looked as if he had
taken flight before the awful invasion of his furniture. His bookcases
hemmed him in on three sides. His roll-top desk, advancing on him
from the window, had driven and squeezed him into the arm-chair. His
bureau, armed to the teeth, leaning from its ambush in the recess of
the fireplace, threatened both the retreat and the left flank movement
of the chair. The Vicar was neither tall nor powerful, but his study
made him look like a giant imprisoned in a cell.

The room was full of the smell of tobacco, of a smoldering coal fire,
of old warm leather and damp walls, and of the heavy, virile odor of
the Vicar.

A brown felt carpet and thick serge curtains shut out the draft of the
northeast window.

On a September evening the Vicar was snug enough in his cell; and
before the Grande Polonaise had burst in upon him he had been at peace
with God and man.

       *       *       *       *       *

But when he heard those first exultant, challenging bars he scowled
inimically.

Not that he acknowledged them as a challenge. He was inclined rather
to the manly course of ignoring the Grande Polonaise altogether. And
not for a moment would he have admitted that there had been anything
in his behavior that could be challenged or defied, least of all by
his daughter Alice. To himself in his study Mr. Cartaret appeared
as the image of righteousness established in an impregnable place.
Whereas his daughter Alice was not at all in a position to challenge
and defy.

She had made a fool of herself.

She knew it; he knew it; everybody knew it in the parish they had left
five months ago. It had been the talk of the little southern seaside
town. He thanked God that nobody knew it, or was ever likely to know
it, here.

For Alice's folly was not any ordinary folly. It was the kind that
made the parish which was so aware of it uninhabitable to a sensitive
vicar.

He reflected that she would be clever if she made a fool of herself
here. By his decisive action in removing her from that southern
seaside town he had saved her from continuing her work. In order to do
it he had ruined his prospects. He had thrown up a good living for a
poor one; a living that might (but for Alice it certainly would) have
led to preferment for a living that could lead to nothing at all; a
living where he could make himself felt for a living where there was
nobody to feel him.

And, having done it, he was profoundly sorry for himself.

So far as Mr. Cartaret could see there had been nothing else to do. If
it had all to be done over again, he told himself that he would do it.

But there Mr. Cartaret was wrong. He couldn't have done it or anything
like it twice. It was one of those deeds, supremeful sacrificial,
that strain a man's moral energies to breaking point and render him
incapable of further sacrifice; if, indeed, it did not render further
sacrifice superfluous. Mr. Cartaret honestly felt that even an
exacting deity could require no more of him.

And it wasn't the first time either, nor his daughter Alice the first
woman who had come between the Vicar and his prospects. Looking back
he saw himself driven from pillar to post, from parish to parish, by
the folly or incompetence of his womankind.

Strictly speaking, it was his first wife, Mary Gwendolen, the one
the children called Mother, who had begun it. She had made his first
parish unendurable to him by dying in it. This she had done when Alice
was born, thereby making Alice unendurable to him, too. Poor Mamie! He
always thought of her as having, inscrutably, failed him.

All three of them had failed him.

His second wife, Frances, the one the children called Mamma (the
Vicar had made himself believe that he had married her solely on their
account), had turned into a nervous invalid on his hands before she
died of that obscure internal trouble which he had so wisely and
patiently ignored.

His third wife, Robina (the one they called Mummy), had run away from
him in the fifth year of their marriage. When she implored him to
divorce her he said that, whatever her conduct had been, that course
was impossible to him as a churchman, as she well knew; but that he
forgave her. He had made himself believe it.

And all the time he was aware, without admitting it, that, if the
thing came into court, Robina's evidence might be a little damaging
to the appearances of wisdom and patience, of austerity and dignity,
which he had preserved so well. He had had an unacknowledged vision of
Robina standing in the witness box, very small and shy, with her eyes
fluttering while she explained to the gentlemen of the jury that she
ran away from her husband because she was afraid of him. He could hear
the question, "Why were you afraid?" and Robina's answer--but at that
point he always reminded himself that it was as a churchman that he
objected to divorce.

For his profession had committed him to a pose. He had posed for more
than thirty years to his parish, to his three wives, to his three
children, and to himself, till he had become unconscious of his real
thoughts, his real motives, his real likings and dislikings. So that
when he told himself that it would have been better if his third wife
had died, he thought he meant that it would have been better for her
and for his opinion of her, whereas what he really did mean was that
it would have been better for himself.

For if Robina had died he could have married again. As it was, her
infidelity condemned him to a celibacy for which, as she knew, he was
utterly unsuited.

Therefore he thought of her as a cruel and unscrupulous woman. And
when he thought of her he became more sorry for himself than ever.

Now, oddly enough, the Grande Polonaise had set Mr. Cartaret thinking
of Robina. It was not that Robina had ever played it. Robina did not
play. It was not the discords introduced into it by Alice, though
Robina had been a thing of discords. It was that something in him,
obscurely but intimately associated with Robina, responded to that
sensual and infernal tremor that Alice was wringing out of the
Polonaise. So that, without clearly knowing why it was abominable,
Mr. Cartaret said to himself that the tune Alice was playing was an
abominable tune and must be stopped at once.

He went into the drawing-room to stop it.

And Essy, in the kitchen, raised her head and dried her eyes on her
apron.

"If you must make a noise," said Mr. Cartaret, "be good enough to make
one that is less--disturbing."

       *       *       *       *       *

He stood in the doorway staring at his daughter Alice.

Her excitement had missed by a hairsbreadth the spiritual climax. It
had held itself in for one unspeakable moment, then surged, crowding
the courses of her nerves. Beaten back by the frenzy of the Polonaise,
it made a violent return; it rose, quivering, at her eyelids and her
mouth; it broke, and, with a shudder of all her body, split itself and
fell.

The Vicar stared. He opened his mouth to say something, and said
nothing; finally he went out, muttering.

"Wisdom and patience. Wisdom and patience."

It was a prayer.

Alice trailed to the window and leaned out, listening for the sound of
hoofs and wheels. Nothing there but the darkness and stillness of the
moors. She trailed back to the Erard and began to play again.

This time it was Beethoven, the Pathetic Sonata.




IX


Mr. Cartaret sat in his study, manfully enduring the Pathetic Sonata.

He was no musician and he did not certainly know when Alice went
wrong; therefore, except that it had some nasty loud moments, he could
not honestly say that the First Movement was disturbing. Besides, he
had scored. He had made Alice change her tune.

Wisdom and patience required that he should be satisfied, so far. And,
being satisfied, in the sense that he no longer had a grievance, meant
that he was very badly bored.

He began to fidget. He took his legs out of the fender and put them
back again. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, but
without relief. He turned over his _Spectator_ to see what it had to
say about the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, and found that he was not
interested in what it had to say. He looked at his watch and
compared it with the clock in the faint hope that the clock might be
behindhand.

The watch and clock both agreed that it was not a minute later than
fifteen minutes to ten. A whole quarter of an hour before Prayer-time.

There was nothing but Prayer-time to look forward to.

He began to fidget again. He filled his pipe and thought better about
smoking it. Then he rang the bell for his glass of water.

After more delay than was at all necessary Essy appeared, bringing the
glass of water on a plate.

She came in, soft-footed, almost furtive, she who used to enter so
suddenly and unabashed. She put the plate down on the roll-top desk
and turned softly, furtively, away.

The Vicar looked up. His eyes were large and blue as suspicion drew in
the black of their pupils.

"Put it down here," he said, and he indicated the ledge of the bureau.

Essy stood still and stared like a half-wild creature in doubt as to
its way. She decided to make for the bureau by rounding the roll-top
desk on the far side, thus approaching her master from behind.

"What are you doing?" said the Vicar. "I said, Put it down here."

Essy turned again and came forward, tilting the plate a little in her
nervousness. The large blue eyes, the stern voice, fascinated her,
frightened her.

The Vicar looked at her steadily, remorselessly, as she came.

Essy's lowered eyelids had kept the stain of her tears. Her thick
brown hair was loose and rumpled under her white cap. But she had put
on a clean, starched apron. It stood out stiffly, billowing, from
her waist. Essy had not always been so careless about her hair or so
fastidious as to her aprons. There was a little strained droop at the
corners of her tender mouth, as if they had been tied with string. Her
dark eyes still kept their young largeness and their light, but they
looked as if they had been drawn tight with string at their corners
too.

All these signs the Vicar noted as he stared. And he hated Essy. He
hated her for what he saw in her, and for her buxom comeliness, and
for the softness of her youth.

"Did I hear young Greatorex round at the back door this evening?" he
said.

Essy started, slanting her plate a little more.

"I doan knaw ef I knaw, sir."

"Either you know or you don't know," said the Vicar.

"I doan know, I'm sure, sir," said Essy.

The Vicar was holding out his hand for his glass of water, and Essy
pushed the plate toward him, so blindly and at such a perilous slant
that the glass slid and toppled over and broke itself against the
Vicar's chair.

Essy gave a little frightened cry.

"Clever girl. She did that on purpose," said the Vicar to himself.

Essy was on her knees beside him, picking up the bits of glass and
gathering them in her apron. She was murmuring, "I'll mop it oop. I'll
mop it oop."

"That'll do," he said roughly. "That'll do, I tell you. You can go."

Essy tried to go. But it was as if her knees had weights on them
that fixed her to the floor. Holding up her apron with one hand, she
clutched the arm of her master's chair with the other and dragged
herself to her feet.

"I'll mop it oop," she repeated, shamefast.

"I told you to go," said the Vicar.

"I'll fetch yo anoother glass?" she whispered. Her voice was hoarse
with the spasm in her throat.

"No," said the Vicar.

Essy slunk back into her kitchen with terror in her heart.




X


_"Attacca subito l'Allegro."_

Alice had fallen on it suddenly.

"I suppose," said Mary, "it's a relief to her to make that row."

"It isn't," said Gwenda. "It's torture. That's how she works herself
up. She's playing on her own nerves all the time. If she really
_could_ play----If she cared about the music----If she cared about
anything on earth except----"

She paused.

"Molly, it must be awful to be made like that."

"Nothing could be worse for her than being shut up here."

"I know. Papa's been a frightful fool about her. After all, Molly,
what did she do?"

"She did what you and I wouldn't have done."

"How do you know what you wouldn't have done? How do I know? If we'd
been in her place----"

"If _I'd_ been in her place I'd have died rather."

"How do you know Ally wouldn't have rather died if she could have
chosen? She didn't want to fall in love with that young ass, Rickards.
And I don't see what she did that was so very awful."

"She managed to let everybody else see, anyhow."

"What if she did? At least she was honest. She went straight for what
she wanted. She didn't sneak and scheme to get him from any other
girl. And she hadn't a mother to sneak and scheme _for_ her. That's
fifty times worse, yet it's done every day and nobody thinks anything
of it."

She went on. "Nobody would have thought anything as it was, if Papa
hadn't been such a frantic fool about it. It he'd had the pluck to
stand by her, if he'd kept his head and laughed in their silly faces,
instead of grizzling and growling and stampeding out of the parish as
if poor Ally had disgraced him."

"Well--it isn't a very pleasant thing for the Vicar of the parish----"

"It wasn't a very pleasant thing for any of us. But it was beastly of
him to go back on her like that. And the silliness of it! Caring so
frightfully about what people think, and then going on so as to make
them think it."

"Think what?"

"That she really _had_ done something."

"Do you suppose they did?"

"Yes. You can't blame them. He couldn't have piled it on more if she
_had_. It's enough to make her."

"Oh Gwenda!"

"It would be his own fault. Just as it's his own fault that he hates
her."

"He doesn't hate her. He's fond of all of us, in his way."

"Wot of Ally. Don't you know why? He can't look at her without
thinking of how awful _he_ is."

"And if he _is_--a little----You forget what he's had to go through."

"You mean Mummy running away from him?"

"Yes. And Mamma's dying. And before that--there was Mother."

Gwenda raised her head.

"He killed Mother."

"What do you mean?"

"He did. He was told that Mother would die or go mad if she had
another baby. And he let her have Ally. No wonder Mummy ran away from
him."

"Who told you that story?"

"Mummy."

"It was horrid of her."

"Everything poor Mummy did was horrid. It was horrid of her to run
away from him, I suppose."

"Why did you tell me that? I didn't know it. I'd rather not have
known."

"Well, now you do know, perhaps you'll be sorrier for Ally."

"I am sorry for Ally. But I'm sorry for Papa, too. You're not."

"I'd be sorry for him right enough if he wasn't so sorry for himself."

"Gwenda, _you're_ awful."

"Because I won't waste my pity? Ally's got nothing--He's got
everything."

"Not what he cares most for."

"He cares most for what people think of him. Everybody thought him a
good kind husband. Everybody thinks him a good kind father."

       *       *       *       *       *

The music suddenly ceased. A sound of voices came instead of it.

"There," said Gwenda. "He's gone in and stopped her."

He had, that time.

And in the sudden ceasing of the Pathetic Sonata the three sisters
heard the sound of wheels and the clank of horseshoes striking
together.

Mr. Greatorex was not yet dead of his pneumonia. The doctor had passed
the Vicarage gate.

And as he passed he had said to himself. "How execrably she plays."

       *       *       *       *       *

The three sisters waited without a word for the striking of the church
clock.




XI


The church clock struck ten.

At the sound of the study bell Essy came into the dining-room. Essy
was the acolyte of Family Prayers. Though a Wesleyan she could not
shirk the appointed ceremonial. It was Essy who took the Bible and
Prayerbook from their place on the sideboard under the tea-urn and put
them on the table, opening them where the Vicar had left a marker the
night before. It was Essy who drew back the Vicar's chair from the
table and set it ready for him. It was Essy whom he relied on for
responses that _were_ responses and not mere mumblings and mutterings.
She was Wesleyan, the one faithful, the one devout person in his
household.

To-night there was nothing but a mumbling and a muttering. And that
was Mary. She was the only one who was joining in the Lord's Prayer.

Essy had failed him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Prayers over, there was nothing to sit up for. All the same, it was
Mr. Cartaret's rule to go back into the study and to bore himself
again for a whole hour till it was bed-time. He liked to be sure that
the doors were all bolted and that everybody else was in bed before he
went himself.

But to-night he had bored himself so badly that the thought of his
study was distasteful to him. So he stayed where he was with his
family. He believed that he was doing this solely on his family's
account. He told himself that it was not right that he should leave
the three girls too much to themselves. It did not occur to him that
as long as he had had a wife to sit with, he hadn't cared how much
he had left them. He knew that he had rather liked Mary and Gwendolen
when they were little, and though he had found himself liking them
less and less as they grew into their teens he had never troubled to
enquire whose fault that was, so certain was he that it couldn't be
his. Still less was it his fault if they were savage and inaccessible
in their twenties. Of course he didn't mean that Mary was savage and
inaccessible. It was Gwendolen that he meant.

So, since he couldn't sit there much longer without saying something,
he presently addressed himself to Mary.

"Any news of Greatorex today?"

"I haven't heard. Shall I ask Essy?"

"No," said Mr. Cartaret, so abruptly that Mary looked at him.

"He was worse yesterday," said Gwenda.

They all looked at Gwenda.

"Who told you that?" said Mr. Cartaret by way of saying something.

"Mrs. Gale."

"When did she tell you?"

"Yesterday, when I was up at the farm."

"What were you doing at the farm?"

"Nothing. I went to see if I could do anything." She said to herself,
"Why does he go on at us like this?" Aloud she said, "It was time some
of us went."

She had him there. She was always having him.

"I shall have to go myself tomorrow," he said.

"I would if I were you," said Gwenda.

"I wonder what Jim Greatorex will do if his father dies."

It was Mary who wondered.

"He'll get married, like a shot," said Alice.

"Who to?" said Gwenda. "He can't marry _all_ the girls----"

She stopped herself. Essy Gale was in the room. Three months ago
Essy had been a servant at the Farm where her mother worked once a
fortnight.

She had come in so quietly that none of them had noticed her. She
brought a tray with a fresh glass of water for the Vicar and a glass
of milk for Alice. She put it down quietly and slipped out of the room
without her customary "Anything more, Miss?" and "Good-night."

"What's the matter with Essy?" Gwenda said.

Nobody spoke but Alice who was saying that she didn't want her milk.

More than a year ago Alice had been ordered milk for her anæmia. She
had milk at eleven, milk at her midday dinner, milk for supper, and
milk last thing at night. She did not like milk, but she liked being
ordered it. Generally she would sit and drink it, in the face of
her family, pathetically, with little struggling gulps. She took a
half-voluptuous, half-vindictive pleasure in her anæmia. She knew that
it made her sisters sorry for her, and that it annoyed her father.

Now she declared that she wasn't feeling well, and that she didn't
want her milk.

"In that case," said Mr. Cartaret, "you had better go to bed."

Alice went, raising her white arms and rubbing her eyes along the
backs of her hands, like a child dropping with sleep.

One after another, they rose and followed her.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the half-landing five steep steps in a recess of the wall led aside
to the door of Essy's bedroom. There Gwenda stopped and listened.

A sound of stifled crying came from the room. Gwenda went up to the
door and knocked.

"Essy, are you in bed?"

A pause. "Yes, miss."

"What is it? Are you ill?"

No answer.

"Is there anything wrong?"

A longer pause. "I've got th' faace-ache."

"Oh, poor thing! Can I do anything for you?"

"Naw, Miss Gwenda, thank yo."

"Well, call me if I can."

But somehow she knew that Essy wouldn't call.

She went on, passing her father's door at the stair head. It was shut.
She could hear him moving heavily within the room. On the other side
of the landing was the room over the study that she shared with Alice.

The door stood wide. Alice in her thin nightgown could be seen sitting
by the open window.

The nightgown, the small, slender body showing through, the hair,
platted for the night, in two pig-tails that hung forward, one over
each small breast, the tired face between the parted hair made Alice
look childlike and pathetic.

Gwendolen had a pang of compassion.

"Dear lamb," she said. "_That_ isn't any good. Fresh air won't do it.
You'd much better wait till Papa gets a cold. Then you can catch it."

"It'll be his fault anyway," said Alice. "Serve him jolly well right
if I get pneumonia."

"Pneumonia doesn't come to those who want it. I wonder what's wrong
with Essy."

Alice was tired and sullen. "You'd better ask Jim Greatorex," she
said.

"What do you mean, Ally?"

But Ally had set her small face hard.

"Can't you he sorry for her?" said Gwenda.

"Why should I be sorry for her? _She's_ all right."

She had sorrow enough, but none to waste on Essy. Essy's way was easy.
Essy had only to slink out to the back door and she could have her
will. _She_ didn't have to get pneumonia.




XII


John Greatorex did not die that night. He had no mind to die: he was a
man of stubborn pugnacity and he fought his pneumonia.

The long gray house at Upthorne looks over the marshes of the high
land above Garth. It stands alone, cut off by the marshes from the
network of gray walls that links the village to the hill farms.

The light in its upper window burned till dawn, a sign to the brooding
and solitary land. Up there, in the low room with its sunken ceiling,
John Greatorex lay in the big bed and rallied a little as the clean
air from the moors lapped him like water. For the doctor had thrown
open all the windows of the house before he left. Presently Mrs. Gale,
the untrained village nurse, would come and shut them in terror, and
John Greatorex's pneumonia would get the upper hand. That was how the
fight went on, with Steven Rowcliffe on John Greatorex's side and Mrs.
Gale for the pneumonia. It was ten to one against John Greatorex and
the doctor, for John Greatorex was most of the time unconscious and
the doctor called but once or twice a day, while Mrs. Gale was always
there to shut the windows as fast as he opened them. In the length and
breadth of the Dale there wasn't another woman who would not have done
the same. She was secure from criticism. If she didn't know how to
nurse pneumonia, who did? Seeing that her own husband had died of it.

Young Rowcliffe was a dalesman and he knew his people. In six months
his face had grown stiff in the struggle with them. It was making his
voice stern and his eyes hard, so that they could see nothing round
him but stupidity and distrust and an obstinacy even greater than his
own.

Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for it. In his
big provincial hospital he had had it practically his own way. He had
faced a thousand horrible and intractable diseases with a thousand
appliances and with an army of assistants and trained nurses under
him. And if in his five years' private practice in Leeds he had come
to grips with human nature, it had been at any rate a fair fight. If
his work was harder his responsibility was less. He still had trained
nurses under him; and if a case was beyond him there were specialists
with whom he could consult.

Here he was single-handed. He was physician and surgeon and specialist
and nurse in one. He had few appliances and no assistant beside naked
and primeval nature, the vast high spaces, the clean waters and clean
air of the moors.

Yet it was precisely these things that his romantic youth had cried
for--that solitary combat and communion, that holy and solitary aid.

At thirty Rowcliffe was still in his romantic youth.

He had all its appearances about him. A life of continual labor
and discomfort had kept his body slender; and all the edges of
his face--clean-shaven except for its little dark moustache--were
incomparably firm and clear. His skin was bronzed and reddened by sun
and wind. The fine hard mouth under the little dark moustache was not
so hard that it could not, sometimes, be tender. His irreproachable
nose escaped the too high curve that would have made it arrogant. And
his eyes, keen and hard in movement, by simply keeping quiet under
lowered brows, became charged with a curious and engaging pathos.

Their pathos had appealed to the little red-haired, pink-skinned,
green-eyed nurse who had worked under him in Leeds. She was clever and
kind--much too kind, it was supposed--to Rowcliffe. There had been one
or two others before the little red-haired nurse, so that, though he
was growing hard, he had not grown bitter.

He was not in the least afraid of growing bitter; for he knew that his
eyes, as long as he could keep them quiet, would preserve him from all
necessity for bitterness.

Rowcliffe had always trusted a great deal to his eyes. Because of them
he had left several young ladies, his patients, quite heart-broken in
Leeds. The young ladies knew nothing about the little red-haired nurse
and had never ceased to wonder why Dr. Rowcliffe did not want to marry
them.

And Steven Rowcliffe's eyes, so disastrous to the young ladies in
Leeds, saw nobody in Morfe whom he could possibly want to marry. The
village of Morfe is built in a square round its green. The doctor's
house stands on a plot of rising ground on the north side of the
square, and from its front windows young Rowcliffe could see the
inhabitants of Morfe coming and going before him as on a stage, and he
kept count of them all. There were the three middle-aged maiden ladies
in the long house on the west side of whom all he knew was that they
ate far too many pikelets and griddle cakes for tea. There were the
two old ladies in the white house next door who were always worrying
him to sound their chests, one for her lungs and the other for her
arteries. In spite of lungs and arteries they were very gay old
ladies. The tubes of Rowcliffe's queer, new-fangled stethescope,
appearing out of his coat pocket, sent them into ecstacies of mirth.
They always made the same little joke about it; they called the
stethescope his telephone. But of course he didn't want to marry them.
There was the very old lady on the east side, who had had one stroke
and was expecting another every day. There were the two unmarried
daughters of a retired manufacturer on the far side of the Green. They
were plump and had red cheeks, if he had cared for plumpness and
red cheeks; but they had no conversation. The only pretty girl whose
prettiness appealed to Rowcliffe had an "adenoid" mouth which he held
to be a drawback. There was the daughter of his predecessor, but she
again was well over forty, rigid and melancholy and dry.

All these people became visibly excited when they saw young Rowcliffe
starting off in his trap and returning; but young Rowcliffe was never
excited, never even interested when he saw them. There was nothing
about them that appealed to his romantic youth.

As for Morfe Manor, and Garth Manor and Greffington Hall, they were
nearly always empty, so that he had not very much chance of improving
his acquaintance there.

And he had nothing to hope for from the summer visitors, girls with
queer clothes and queer manners and queer accents; bouncing, convivial
girls who spread themselves four abreast on the high roads; fat, lazy
girls who sat about on the Green; blowsed, slouching girls who tramped
the dales with knapsacks and no hats. The hard eyes of young Rowcliffe
never softened as he looked at the summer visitors. Their behavior
irritated him. It reminded him that there were women in the world and
that he missed, quite unbearably at moments, the little red-haired
nurse who had been so clever and so kind. Moreover it offended his
romantic youth. The little publicans and shop-keepers of Morfe did not
offend it; neither did the peasants and the farmers; they were part
of the place; generations of them had been born in those gray houses,
built from the gaunt ribs of the hills; whereas the presence of the
summer visitors was an outrage to the silent and solitary country that
his instincts inscrutably adored. No wonder that he didn't care to
look at them.