The Three Sisters Part 35

There was something about Gwenda Cartaret for which Rowcliffe with all his sureness and all his experience was unprepared. Their whole communion rested and proceeded on undeclared, unacknowledged, unrealised a.s.sumptions, and it was somehow its very secrecy that made it so secure. Rather than put it to the test he was content to leave their meetings to luck and his own imperfect ingenuity. He knew where and at what times he would have the best chance of finding her.

Sometimes, returning from his northerly rounds, he would send the trap on, and walk back to Morfe by Karva, on the chance. Once, when the moon was up, he sighted her on the farther moors beyond Upthorne, when he got down and walked with her for miles, while his man and the trap waited for him in Garth.

Once, and only once, driving by himself on the Rathdale moors beyond Morfe, he overtook her, picked her up and drove her through Morfe (to the consternation of its inhabitants) all the way to Garth and to the very gate of the Vicarage.

But that was reckless.

And in all those hours, for his opportunities counted by hours now, he had never found his moment. There was plenty of time, and their isolation (his and hers) in Garthdale left him dangerously secure. All the same, by April Rowcliffe was definitely looking for the moment, the one shining moment, that must sooner or later come.

It was, indeed, always coming. Over and over again he had caught sight of it; it signaled, shining; he had been ready to seize it, when something happened, something obscured it, something put him off.

He never knew what it was at the time, but when he looked back on these happenings he discovered that it was always something that Gwenda Cartaret did. You would have said that no scene on earth could have been more favorable to a lover's enterprise than these long, deserted roads and the vast, twilit moors; and that a young woman could have found nothing to distract her from her lover there.

But it was not so. On the open moors, as often as not, they had to go single file through the heather, along a narrow sheep track, Rowcliffe leading; and it is difficult, not to say impossible, to command the attention of a young woman walking in your rear. And a thousand things distracted Gwenda: the cry of a mountain sheep, the sound and sight of a stream, the whirr of dark wings and the sudden "Krenk-er-renk-errenk!" of the grouse shooting up from the heather.

And on the high roads where they went abreast she was apt to be carried away by the pageant of earth and sky; the solid darkness that came up from the moor; the gray, aerial abysses of the dale; the awful, blank withdrawal of Greffington Edge into the night. She was off, Heaven knew where, at the lighting of a star in the thin blue; the movement of a cloud excited her; or she was held enchanted by the pale aura of moonrise along the rampart of Greffington Edge. She shared the earth's silence and the throbbing pa.s.sion of the earth as the orbed moon swung free.

And in her absorption, her estranging ecstasy, Rowcliffe at last found something inimical.

He told himself that it was an affectation in her, or a lure to draw him after her, as it would have been in any other woman. The little red-haired nurse would have known how to turn the earth and the moon to her own purposes and his. But all the time he knew that it was not so. There was no purpose in it at all, and it was unaware of him and of his purposes. Gwenda's joy was pure and profound and sufficient to itself. He gathered that it had been with her before he came and that it would remain with her after he had gone.

He hated to think that she should know any joy that had not its beginning and its end in him. It took her from him. As long as it lasted he was faced with an incomprehensible and monstrous rivalry.

And as a man might leave a woman to his uninteresting rival in the certainty that she will be bored and presently return to him, Rowcliffe left Gwenda to the earth and moon. He sulked and was silent.

Then, suddenly, he made up his mind.

x.x.xI

It was one night in April. He had met her at the crossroads on Morfe Green, and walked home with her by the edge of the moor. It had blown hard all day, and now the wind had dropped, but it had left darkness and commotion in the sky. The west was a solid ma.s.s of cloud that drifted slowly in the wake of the departing storm, its hindmost part shredded to mist before the path of the hidden moon.

For, mercifully, the moon was hidden. Rowcliffe knew his moment.

He meditated--the fraction of a second too long.

"I wonder----" he began.

Just then the rear of the cloud opened and cast out the moon, sheeted in the white mist that she had torn from it.

And then, before he knew where he was, he was quarreling with Gwenda.

"Oh, look at the moon!" she cried. "All bowed forward with the cloud wrapped round her head. Something's calling her across the sky, but the mist holds her and the wind beats her back--look how she staggers and charges head-downward. She's fighting the wind. And she goes--she goes!"

"She doesn't go," said Rowcliffe. "At least you can't see her going, and the cloud isn't wrapped round her head, it's nowhere near her. And the wind isn't driving her, it's driving the cloud on. It's the cloud that's going. Why can't you see things as they are?"

She was detestable to him in that moment.

"Because n.o.body sees them as they are. And you're spoiling the idea."

"The idea being so much more valuable than the truth."

He longed to say cruel and biting things to her.

"It isn't valuable to anybody but me, so you might have left it to me."

"Oh, I'll leave it to you, if you're in love with it."

"I'm not in love with it because it's mine. Anyhow, if I _am_ in love I'm in love with the moon and not with my idea of the moon."

"You don't know how to be in love with anything--even the moon. But I suppose it's all right as long as you're happy."

"Of course I'm happy. Why shouldn't I be?"

"Because you haven't got anything to make you happy."

"Oh, haven't I?"

"You might have. But you haven't. You're too obstinate to be happy."

"But I've just told you that I _am_ happy."

"What have you _got?_" he persisted.

"I've got heaps of things. I've got my two hands and my two feet. I've got my brain----"

"So have I. And yet----"

"It's absurd to say I've 'got' these things. They're me. Happiness isn't in the things you've got. It's either in you or it isn't."

"It generally isn't. Go on. What else? You've got the moon and your idea of the moon. I don't see that you've got much more."

"Anyhow, I've got my liberty."

"Your liberty--if that's all you want!"

"It's pretty nearly all. It covers most things."

"It does if you're an incurable egoist."

"You think I'm an egoist? And incurable?"