The Three Sisters Part 78

And all the time she kept on saying to herself, "He _was_ thinking about Gwenda. He's sorry for Alice because of Gwenda, not because of me. It isn't _my_ people that he's good to."

The thought went round and round in Mary's mind, troubling its tranquillity.

She knew that something followed from it, but she refused to see it.

Her mind thrust from it the conclusion. "Then it's Gwenda that he cares for." She said to herself, "After all I'm married to him." And as she said it she thrust up her chin in a gesture of a.s.surance and defiance.

In the chair that faced her Rowcliffe shifted his position. He crossed his legs and the tilted foot kicked out, urged by a hidden savagery.

The clicking of Mary's needles maddened him.

He glanced at her. She was knitting a silk tie for his birthday.

She saw the glance. The fierceness of the small fingers slackened; they knitted off a row or two, then ceased. Her hands lay quiet in her lap.

She leaned her head against the back of the chair. Her grieved eyes let down their lids before the smouldering hostility in his.

Her stillness and her shut eyes moved him to compunction. They appeased him with reminiscence, with suggestion of her smooth and innocent sleep.

He had been thinking of what she had done to him; of how she had lied to him about Gwenda; of the abominable thing that Alice had cried out to him in her agony. The thought of Mary's turpitude had consoled him mysteriously. Instead of putting it from him he had dwelt on it, he had wallowed in it; he had let it soak into him till he was poisoned with it.

For the sting of it and the violence of his own resentment were more tolerable to Rowcliffe than the stale, dull realisation of the fact that Mary bored him. It had come to that. He had nothing to say to Mary now that he had married her. His romantic youth still moved uneasily within him; it found no peace in an armchair, facing Mary.

He dreaded these evenings that he was compelled to spend with her. He dreaded her speech. He dreaded her silences ten times more. They no longer soothed him. They were pervading, menacing, significant.

He thought that Mary's turpitude accounted for and justified the exasperation of his nerves.

Now as he looked at her, lying back in the limp pose reminiscent of her sleep, he thought, "Poor thing. Poor Molly." He put down his book.

He stood over her a moment, sighed a long sigh like a yawn, turned from her and went to bed.

Mary opened her eyes, sighed, stretched herself, put out the light, and followed him.

LII

Not long after that night it struck Mary that Steven was run down. He worked too hard. That was how she accounted to herself for his fits of exhaustion, of irritability and depression.

But secretly, for all her complacence, she had divined the cause.

She watched him now; she inquired into his goings out and comings in.

Sometimes she knew that he had been to Garthdale, and, though he went there many more times than she knew, she had noticed that these moods of his followed invariably on his going. It was as if Gwenda left her mark on him. So much was certain, and by that certainty she went on to infer his going from his mood.

One day she taxed him with it.

Rowcliffe had tried to excuse his early morning temper on the plea that he was "beastly tired."

"Tired?" she had said. "Of course you're tired if you went up to Garthdale last night."

She added, "It isn't necessary."

He was silent and she knew that she was on his trail.

Two evenings later she caught him as he was leaving the house.

"Where are you going?" she said.

"I'm going up to Garthdale to see your father."

Her eyes flinched.

"You saw him yesterday."

"I did."

"Is he worse?"

He hesitated. Lying had not as yet come lightly to him.

"I'm not easy about him," he said.

She was not satisfied. She had caught the hesitation.

"Can't you tell me," she persisted, "if he's worse?"

He looked at her calmly.

"I can't tell you till I've seen him."

That roused her. She bit her lip. She knew that whatever she did she must not show temper.

"Did Gwenda send for you?"

Her voice was quiet.

"She did not."

He strode out of the house.

After that he never told her when he was going up to Garthdale toward nightfall. He was sometimes driven to lie. It was up Rathdale he was going, or to Greffington, or to smoke a pipe with Ned Alderson, or to turn in for a game of billiards at the village club.

And whenever he lied to her she saw through him. She was prepared for the lie. She said to herself, "He is going to see Gwenda. He can't keep away from her."

And then she remembered what Alice had said to her. "You'll know some day."

She knew.