The Three Sisters Part 13

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

"Ripping country, this."

She said it was ripping.

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

As they pa.s.sed Karva Rowcliffe smiled.

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

"Where?"

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

"How did you know it was?"

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

They came.

"Just here," he said.

And now they were in sight of Garthdale.

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

"I'm never ill."

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

A horrid pause.

"You did it very nicely."

Another pause, not quite so horrid.

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

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

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

"I've done it ever since we came here." (It was as if she had said "Long before _you_ came.") "I do it because I like it. That's the best of this place. You can do what you like in it. There's n.o.body to see you."

("Counting me," he thought, "as n.o.body.")

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

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

XVII

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

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

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

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

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

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

There had been goodness in Mary's face when she went into Alice's room to see what she could do for her. There was goodness in it now, up in the attic, where there was n.o.body but G.o.d to see it; goodness at peace with itself, and utterly content.

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

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

Suddenly she started up and listened. She heard out on the road the sound of wheels, and of hoofs that struck together. And she frowned.

She thought, He might as well have called today, if he's pa.s.sing.

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

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

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

"_Gwen_-da!"

Suddenly she shivered. A cold wind blew through the open window. Yet she did not move to shut it out. To have interfered with the attic window would have been a breach of compact, an unholy invasion of her sister's rights. For the attic, the smallest, the coldest, the darkest and most thoroughly uncomfortable room in the whole house, was Gwenda's, made over to her in the Vicar's magnanimity, by way of compensation for the necessity that forced her to share her room with Alice. As the attic was used for storing trunks and lumber, only two square yards of floor could be spared for Gwenda. But the two square yards, cleared, and covered with a strip of old carpet, and furnished with a little table and one chair; the wall-s.p.a.ce by the window with its hanging bookcase; the window itself and the corner fireplace near it were hers beyond division and dispute. n.o.body wanted them.

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

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

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

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

By the mercy of Heaven the Vicar had gone out.