The Three Sisters Part 25

"Not for me," she protested.

But Greatorex was on his knees before her, lighting the fire.

"You'll 'ave wet feet coomin' over t' moor. Cauld, too, yo'll be."

She sat and watched him. He was deft with his great hands, like a woman, over his fire-lighting.

"There--she's burning fine." He rose, turning triumphantly on his hearth as the flame leaped in the grate.

"Yo'll let me mak' yo' a coop of tae, Miss Cartaret."

There was an interrogative lilt at the end of all his sentences, even when, as now, he was making statements that admitted of no denial. But his guest missed the incontrovertible and final quality of what was said.

"Please don't trouble."

"It's naw trooble--naw trooble at all. Maaggie'll 'ave got kettle on."

He strode out of his parlor into his kitchen. "Maaggie! Maaggie!" he called. "Are yo' there? Putt kettle on and bring tae into t' parlor."

Alice looked about her while she waited.

Though she didn't know it, Jim Greatorex's parlor was a more tolerable place than the Vicarage drawing-room. Brown cocoanut matting covered its stone floor. In front of the wide hearth on the inner wall was a rug of dyed sheepskin bordered with a strip of scarlet snippets. The wooden chimney-piece, the hearth-place, the black hobs, the straight barred grate with its frame of fine fluted iron, belonged to a period of simplicity. The oblong mahogany table in the center of the room, the sofa and chairs, upholstered in horsehair, were of a style austere enough to be almost beautiful. Down the white ground of the wall-paper an endless succession of pink nosegays ascended and descended between parallel stripes of blue.

There were no ornaments to speak of in Greatorex's parlor but the grocer's tea-caddies on the mantelshelf and the little china figures, the spotted cows, the curly dogs, the boy in blue, the girl in pink; and the l.u.s.tre ware and the tea-sets, the white and gold, the blue and white, crowded behind the diamond panes of the two black oak cupboards. Of these one was set in the most conspicuous corner, the other in the middle of the long wall facing the east window, bare save for the framed photographs of Greatorex's family, the groups, the portraits of father and mother and of grandparents, enlarged from vignettes taken in the seventies and eighties--faces defiant, stolid and pathetic; yearning, mournful, tender faces, slightly blurred.

All these objects impressed themselves on Ally's brain, adhering to its obsession and receiving from it an immense significance and importance.

She heard Maggie's running feet, and the great leisurely steps of Greatorex, and his voice, soft and kind, encouraging Maggie.

"Theer--that's t' road. Gently, laa.s.s--moor' 'aaste, less spead. Now t' tray--an' a clane cloth--t' woon wi' laace on 't. Thot's t' road."

Maggie whispered, awestruck by these preparations:

"Which coops will yo' 'ave, Mr. Greatorex?"

"T' best coops, Maaggie."

Maggie had to fetch them from the corner cupboard (they were the white and gold). At Greatorex's command she brought the little round oak table from its place in the front window and set it by the hearth before the visitor. Humbly, under her master's eye, yet with a sort of happy pride about her, she set out the tea-things and the gla.s.s dishes of jam and honey and tea-cakes.

Greatorex waited, silent and awkward, till his servant had left the room. Then he came forward.

"Theer's caake," he said. "Maaggie baaked un yesterda'. An' theer's hooney."

He made no servile apologies for what he set before her. He was giving her nothing that was not good, and he knew it.

And he sat down facing her and watched her pour out her tea and help herself with her little delicate hands. If he had been a common man, a peasant, his idea of courtesy would have been to leave her to herself, to turn away his eyes from her in that intimate and sacred act of eating and drinking. But Greatorex was a farmer, the descendant of yeomen, and by courtesy a yeoman still, and courtesy bade him watch and see that his guest wanted for nothing.

That he did not sit down at the little table and drink tea with her himself showed that his courtesy knew where to draw the dividing line.

"But why aren't you having anything yourself?" said Alice. She really wondered.

He smiled. "It's a bit too early for me, thank yo'. Maaggie'll mak' me a coop by and bye."

And she said to herself, "How beautifully he did it."

He was indeed doing it beautifully all through. He watched her little fingers, and the very instant they had disposed of a morsel he offered her another. It was a deep and exquisite pleasure to him to observe her in that act of eating and drinking. He had never seen anything like the prettiness, the dainty precision that she brought to it. He had never seen anything so pretty as Ally herself, in the rough gray tweed that exaggerated her fineness and fragility; never anything so distracting and at the same time so heartrending as the gray m.u.f.f and collar of squirrel fur, and the little gray fur hat with the bit of blue peac.o.c.k's breast laid on one side of it like a folded wing.

As he watched her he thought, "If I was to touch her I should break her."

Then the conversation began.

"I was sorry," he said, "to hear yo was so poorly, Miss Cartaret."

"I'm all right now. You can see I'm all right."

He shook his head. "I saw yo' a moonth ago, and I didn't think then I sud aver see yo' at Oopthorne again."

He paused.

"'E's a woonderful maan, Dr. Rawcliffe."

"He is," said Alice.

Her voice was very soft, inaudible as a breath. All the blood in her body seemed to rush into her face and flood it and spread up her forehead to the roots of the gold hair that the east wind had crisped round the edges of her hat. She thought, "It'll be awful if he guesses, and if he talks." But when she looked at Greatorex his face rea.s.sured her, it was so utterly innocent of divination. And the next moment he went straight to the matter in hand.

"An' what's this thing you've coom to aa.s.sk me, Miss Cartaret?"

"Well"--she looked at him and her gray eyes were soft and charmingly candid--"it _was_ if you'd be kind enough to sing at our concert.

You've heard about it?"

"Ay, I've heard about it, right enoof."

"Well--_won't_ you? You _have_ sung, you know."

"Yes. I've soong. But thot was in t' owd schoolmaaster's time. Yo'

wouldn't care to hear my singin' now. I've got out of the way of it, like."

"You haven't, Mr. Greatorex. I've heard you. You've got a magnificent voice. There isn't one like it in the choir."

"Ay, there's not mooch wrong with my voice, I rackon. But it's like this, look yo. I joost soong fer t' schoolmaaster. He was a friend--a personal friend of mine. And he's gone. And I'm sure I doan' knaw--"

"I know, Mr. Greatorex. I know exactly how you feel about it. You sang to please your friend. He's gone and you don't like the idea of singing for anybody else--for a set of people you don't know."

She had said it. It was the naked truth and he wasn't going to deny it.