The Three Sisters Part 54

"I think that's Alice. I should like you to see her. If you--"

Rowcliffe gathered that the entrance of Alice had better coincide with his departure. He followed the Vicar as he went to open the front door.

Alice stood on the doorstep.

She was not at first aware of him where he lingered in the half-darkness at the end of the pa.s.sage.

"Alice," said the Vicar, "Dr. Rowcliffe is here. You're just in time to say good-bye to him."

"It's a pity if it's good-bye," said Alice.

Her voice might have been the voice of a young woman who is sanely and innocently gay, but to Rowcliffe's ear there was a sound of exaltation in it.

He could see her now clearly in the light of the open door. The Vicar had not lied. Alice had all the appearances of health. Something had almost cured her.

But not quite. As she stood there with him in the doorway, chattering, Rowcliffe was struck again with the excitement of her voice and manner, imperfectly restrained, and with the quivering glitter of her eyes. By these signs he gathered that if Alice was happy her happiness was not complete. It was not happiness in his sense of the word. But Alice's face was unmistakably the face of hope.

Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with him. He saw that Alice's eyes faced him now with the light, unseeing look of indifference, and that they turned every second toward the wall at the bottom of the garden. She was listening to something.

He was then aware of footsteps on the road. They came down the hill, pa.s.sing close under the Vicarage wall and turning where it turned to skirt the little lane at the bottom between the garden and the churchyard. The lane led to the pastures, and the pastures to the Manor. And from the Manor grounds a field track trailed to a small wicket gate on the north side of the churchyard wall. A flagged path went from the wicket to the door of the north transept. It was a short cut for the lord of the Manor to his seat in the chancel, but it was not the nearest way for anybody approaching the church from the high road.

Now, the slope of the Vicarage garden followed the slope of the road in such wise that a person entering the churchyard from the high road could be seen from the windows of the Vicarage. If that person desired to remain unseen his only chance was to go round by the lane to the wicket gate, keeping close under the garden wall.

Rowcliffe heard the wicket gate click softly as it was softly opened and shut.

And he could have sworn that Alice heard it too.

He waited twenty minutes or so in his surgery. Then, instead of sending at once to the Red Lion for his trap, he walked back to the church.

Standing in the churchyard, he could hear the sound of the organ and of a man's voice singing.

He opened the big west door softly and went softly in.

XLII

There is no rood-screen in Garth church. The one aisle down the middle of the nave goes straight from the west door to the chancel-rails.

Standing by the west door, behind the font, Rowcliffe had an uninterrupted view of the chancel.

The organ was behind the choir stalls on the north side. Alice was seated at the organ. Jim Greatorex stood behind her and so that his face was turned slantwise toward Rowcliffe. Alice's face was in pure profile. Her head was tilted slightly backward, as if the music lifted it.

Rowcliffe moved softly to the s.e.xton's bench in the left hand corner.

Sitting there he could see her better and ran less risk of being seen.

The dull stained gla.s.s of the east window dimmed the light at that end of the church. The organ candles were lit. Their jointed brackets, brought forward on each side, threw light on the music book and the keys, also on the faces of Alice and Greatorex. He stood so close to her as almost to touch her. She had taken off her hat and her hair showed gold against the drab of his waist-coat.

On both faces there was a look of ecstasy.

It was essentially the same ecstasy; only, on Alice's face it was more luminous, more conscious, and at the same time more abandoned, as if all subterfuge had ceased in her and she gave herself up, willing and exulting, to the unspiritual sense that flooded her.

On the man's face this look was more confused. It was also more tender and more poignant, as if in soaring Jim's rapture gave him pain. You would have said that he had not given himself to it, but that he was driven by it, and that yet, with all its sensuous trouble, there ran through it, secret and profoundly pure, some strain of spiritual longing.

And in his thick, his poignant and tender half-barytone, half-tenor, Greatorex sang:

"'At e-ee-vening e-er the soon was set, The sick, oh Lo-ord, arou-ound thee laay-- Oh, with what divers pains they met, And with what joy they went a-waay--'"

But Alice stopped playing and Rowcliffe heard her say, "Don't let's have that one, Jim, I don't like it."

It might have pa.s.sed--even the name--but that Rowcliffe saw Greatorex put his hand on Alice's head and stroke her hair.

Then he heard him say, "Let's 'ave mine," and he saw that his hand was on Alice's shoulders as he leaned over her to find the hymn.

"Good G.o.d!" said Rowcliffe to himself. "That explains it."

He got up softly. Now that he knew, he felt that it was horrible to spy on her.

But Greatorex had begun singing again, and the sheer beauty of the voice held Rowcliffe there to listen.

"'Lead--Kindly Light--amidst th' encircling gloo-oom, Lead Thou me o-on.

Keep--Thou--my--feet--I do not aa-aa.s.sk too-oo see-ee-ee Ther di-is-ta-aant scene, woon step enoo-oof for mee-eea.'"

Greatorex was singing like an angel. And as he sang it was as if two pa.s.sions, two longings, the earthly and the heavenly, met and mingled in him, so that through all its emotion his face remained incongruously mystic, queerly visionary.

"'O'er moor and fen--o'er crag and torrent ti-ill----'"

The evocation was intolerable to Rowcliffe.

He turned away and Greatorex's voice went after him.

"'And--with--the--morn tho-ose angel fa-a-ce-es smile Which I-i--a-ave looved--long since--and lo-ost awhi-ile.'"

Again Rowcliffe turned; but not before he had seen that Greatorex had his hand on Alice's shoulder a second time, and that Alice's hand had gone up and found it there.

The latch of the west door jerked under Rowcliffe's hand with a loud clashing. Alice and Greatorex looked round and saw him as he went out.

Alice got up in terror. The two stood apart on either side of the organ bench, staring into each other's faces.

Then Alice went round to the back of the organ and addressed the small organ-blower.

"Go," she said, "and tell the choir we're waiting for them. It's five minutes past time."