The Three Sisters Part 27

Suddenly the charm that had sustained him ceased to work.

Under it he had been sitting in suspense, waiting for something, knowing and not daring to own to himself what it was he waited for. The suspense and the waiting seemed all part of the original excitement.

Then Alice Cartaret came up the room.

Her pa.s.sage had been obscured and obstructed by the crowd of villagers at the door. But they had cleared a way for her and she came.

She carried herself like a crowned princess. The cords of her cloak (it was of dove color, lined with blue) had loosened in her pa.s.sage, and the cloak had slipped, showing her naked shoulders. She wore a little dove-gray gown with some blue about it and a necklace of pale amber. Her white arms hung slender as a child's from the immense puffs of the sleeves. Her fair hair was piled in front of a high amber comb.

As she appeared before the platform Rowcliffe rose and took her cloak from her (Greatorex saw him take it, but he didn't care; he knew more about the doctor than the doctor knew himself). He handed her up the steps on to the platform and then turned, like a man who has done all that chivalry requires of him, to his place between her sisters. The hand that Rowcliffe had let go went suddenly to her throat, seizing her necklace and loosening it as if it choked her. Rowcliffe was not looking at her.

Still with her hand at her throat, she smiled and bowed to the audience, to the choir, to Greatorex, to the schoolmaster who came forward (Greatorex cursed him) and led her to the piano.

She sat down, wiped her hands on her handkerchief, and waited, enduring like an angel the voices of the villagers and the shuffling of their feet.

Then somebody (it was the Vicar) said, "Hush!" and she began to play.

In her pa.s.sion for the unattainable she had selected Chopin's Grande Valse in A Flat, beginning with the long shake of eight bars.

Greatorex did not know whether she played well or badly. He only knew it looked and sounded wonderful. He could have watched forever her little hands that were like white birds. He had never seen anything more delicious and more amusing than their fluttering in the long shake and their flying with spread wings all over the piano.

Then the jumping and the thumping began; and queer noises, the like of which Greatorex had never heard, came out of the piano. It jarred him; but it made him smile. The little hands were marvelous the way they flew, the way they leaped across great s.p.a.ces of piano.

Alice herself was satisfied. She had brought out the air; she had made it sing above the confusion of the ba.s.s and treble that evidently had had no clear understanding when they started; as for the bad bits, the tremendous crescendo chords that your hands must take at a flying leap or miss altogether, Rowcliffe had already a.s.sured her that they were impracticable anyhow; and Rowcliffe knew.

Flushed and softened with the applause (Rowcliffe had joined in it), she took her place between Greatorex and the schoolmaster. The glee-singers, two men and two women, came forward and sang their glees, turning and bowing to each other like mummers. The schoolmaster recited the "Pied Piper of Hamelin." A young lady who had come over from Morfe expressly for that purpose sang the everlasting song about the miller.

Leaning stiffly forward, her thin neck outstretched, her brows bent toward Rowcliffe, summoning all that she knew of archness to her eyes, she sang.

"Oh miller, miller, miller, miller, miller, let me go!"

sang the young lady from Morfe. Alice could see that she sang for Rowcliffe and at Rowcliffe; she sang into his face until he turned it away, and then, utterly unabashed, she sang into his left ear.

The presence and the song of the young lady from Morfe would have been torture to Alice, but that her eyelids and her face were red as if perpetually smitten by the east wind and scarified with weeping. To Alice, at the piano, it was terrible to be a.s.sociated with the song of the young lady from Morfe. She felt that Rowcliffe was looking at her (he wasn't) and she strove by look and manner to detach herself.

As the young lady flung herself into it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe. She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady's intentions. It grew graver and graver. It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge. The dirge of the last hope of the young lady from Morfe.

When it ceased there rose from the piano that was its grave the Grande Polonaise of Chopin. It rose in splendor and defiance; Alice's defiance of the young lady from Morfe. It brought down the schoolhouse in a storm of clapping and thumping, of "Bravos" and "Encores." Even Rowcliffe said, "Bravo!"

But Alice, still seated at the piano, smiled and signaled.

And Jim Greatorex stood up to sing.

He stood facing the room, but beside her, so that she could sign to him if anything went wrong.

"'Oh, that we two-oo were May-ing Down the stream of the so-oft spring breeze, Like children with vi-olets pla-aying.'"

Greatorex's voice was a voice of awful volume and it ranged somewhere from fairly deep barytone almost to tenor. It was at moments unmanageable, being untrained, yet he seemed to do as much with it as if it had been ba.s.s and barytone and tenor all in one. It had grown a little thick in the last year, but he brought out of its very thickness a brooding, yearning pa.s.sion and an intolerable pathos.

The song, overladen with emotion, appealed to him; it expressed as nothing else could have expressed the pa.s.sions that were within him at that moment. It swept the whole range of his experiences, there were sheep in it and a churchyard and children (his lady could never be anything more to him than a child).

"'Oh, that we two-oo were ly-ing In our nest in the chu-urch-yard sod, With our limbs at rest on the quiet earth's breast, And our souls--at home--with G.o.d!'"

That finished it. There was no other end.

And as he sang it, looking n.o.bly if a little heavily over the heads of his audience, he saw Essy Gale hidden away, and trying to hide herself more, beside her mother in the farthest corner of the room.

He had forgotten Essy.

And at the sight of her his n.o.bility went from him and only his heaviness remained.

It didn't matter that they shouted for him to sing again, that they stamped and bellowed, and that he did sing, again and again, taking the roof off at the last with "John Peel."

Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered. Nothing could matter now.

And then something bigger than his heart, bigger than his voice, something immense and brutal and defiant, a.s.serted itself and said that Come to that Essy didn't matter. She had put herself in his way.

And Maggie had been before and after her. And Maggie didn't matter either.

For the magical smell had wrapped itself round Alice Cartaret, and her dove-gray gown and dove-gray eyes, and round the thought of her. It twined and tangled her in the subtle mesh. She was held and embalmed in it forever.

XXVI

It was Wednesday, the day after the concert.

Mr. Cartaret was standing before the fire in his study. He had just rung the bell and now he waited in an att.i.tude of wisdom and of patience. It was only ten o'clock in the morning and wisdom and patience should not be required of any man at such an hour. But the Vicar had a disagreeable duty to perform.

Whenever the Vicar had a disagreeable duty to perform he performed it as early as possible in the morning, so that none of its disagreeableness was lost. The whole day was poisoned by it.

He waited a little longer. And as he waited his patience began to suffer imperceptibly, though his wisdom remained intact.

He rang again. The bell sounded through the quiet house, angry and terrifying.

In another moment Essy came in. She had on a clean ap.r.o.n.

She stood by the roll-top desk. It offered her a certain cover and support. Her brown eyes, liquid and gentle, gazed at him. But for all her gentleness there was a touch of defiance in her bearing.

"Did you not hear me ring?" said the Vicar.

"Naw, sir."

Nothing more clear and pure than the candor of Essy's eyes. They disconcerted him.