The Three Sisters Part 86

She had thought of Gwenda just then because she heard the sound of Dr.

Rowcliffe's motor car tearing up the Dale.

The woman in the other room heard it too. She had heard its horn hooting on the moor road nearly a mile away.

She raised her hand and listened. It hooted again, once, twice, placably, at the turning of the road, under Karva. She shivered at the sound.

It hooted irritably, furiously, as the car tore through the village.

Its lamps swung a shaft of light over the low garden wall.

At the garden gate the car made a shuddering pause.

Gwenda's face and all her body listened. A little unborn, undying hope quivered in her heart always at that pausing of the car at her gate.

It hardly gave her time for one heart-beat before she heard the grinding of the gear as the car took the steep hill to Upthorne.

But she was always taken in by it. She had always that insane hope that the course of things had changed and that Steven had really stopped at the gate and was coming to her.

It _was_ insanity, for she knew that Rowcliffe would never come to see her in the evening now. After his outburst, more than five years ago, there was no use pretending to each other that they were safe. He had told her plainly that, if she wanted him to hold out, he must never be long alone with her at any time, and he must give up coming to see her late at night. It was much too risky.

"When I can come and see you _that_ way," he had said, "it'll mean that I've left off caring. But I'll look in every Wednesday if I can.

Every Wednesday as long as I live."

He _had_ come now and then, not on a Wednesday, but "that way." He had not been able to help it. But he had left longer and longer intervals between. And he had never come ("that way") since last year, when his second child was born.

Nothing but life or death would bring Rowcliffe out in his car after nightfall. Yet the thing had her every time. And it was as if her heart was ground with the grinding and torn with the tearing of the car.

Then she said to herself, "I must end it somehow. It's horrible to go on caring like this. He was right. It would be better not to see him at all."

And she began counting the days and the hours till Wednesday when she would see him.

LIX

Wednesday was still the Vicar's day for visiting his parish. It was also Rowcliffe's day for visiting his daughter. But the Vicar was not going to change it on that account. On Wednesday, if it was a fine afternoon, she was always sure of having Rowcliffe to herself.

Rowcliffe himself had become the creature of unalterable habit.

She was conscious now of the normal pulse of time, a steady pulse that beat with a large rhythm, a measure of seven days, from Wednesday to Wednesday.

She filled the days between with reading and walking and parish work.

There had been changes in Garthdale. Mr. Grierson had got married in one of his bursts of enthusiasm and had gone away. His place had been taken by Mr. Macey, the strenuous son of a Durlingham grocer. Mr.

Macey had got into the Church by sheer strenuousness and had married, strenuously, a sharp and sallow wife. Between them they left very little parish work for Gwenda.

She had become a furious reader. She liked hard stuff that her brain could bite on. It fell on a book and gutted it, throwing away the trash. She read all the modern poets and novelists she cared about, English and foreign. They left her stimulated but unsatisfied. There were not enough good ones to keep her going. She worked through the Elizabethan dramatists and all the Vicar's Tudor Cla.s.sics, and came on Jowett's Translations of the Platonic Dialogues by the way, and was lured on the quest of Ultimate Reality, and found that there was nothing like Thought to keep you from thinking. She took to metaphysics as you take to dram-drinking. She must have strong, heavy stuff that drugged her brain. And when she found that she could trust her intellect she set it deliberately to fight her pa.s.sion.

At first it was an even match, for Gwenda's intellect, like her body, was robust. It generally held its ground from Thursday morning till Tuesday night. But the night that followed Wednesday afternoon would see its overthrow.

This Wednesday it fought gallantly till the very moment of Steven's arrival. She was still reading Bergson, and her brain struggled to make out the sense and rhythm of the sentences across the beating of her heart.

After seven years her heart still beat at Steven's coming.

It remained an excitement and adventure, for she never knew how he would be. Sometimes he hadn't a word to say to her and left her miserable. Sometimes, after a hard day's work, he would be tired and heavy; she saw him middle-aged and her heart would ache for him.

Sometimes he would be young almost as he used to be. She knew that he was only young for her. He was young because he loved her. She had never seen him so with Mary. Sometimes he would be formal and frigid.

He talked to her as a man talks to a woman he is determined to keep at a distance. She hated Steven then, as pa.s.sion hates. He had come before now in a downright bad temper and was the old, irritable Steven who found fault with everything she said and did. And she had loved him for it as she had loved the old Steven. It was his queer way of showing that he loved her.

But he had not been like that for a very long time. He had grown gentler as he had grown older.

To-day he showed her more than one of his familiar moods. She took them gladly as so many signs of his unchanging nature.

He still kept up his way of coming in, the careful closing of the door, the slight pause there by the threshold, the look that sought her and that held her for an instant before their hands met.

She saw it still as the look that pleaded with her while it caressed her, that said, "I know we oughtn't to be so pleased to see each other, but we can't help it, can we?"

It was the look of his romantic youth.

As long as she saw it there it was nothing to her that Rowcliffe had changed physically, that he moved more heavily, that his keenness and his slenderness were going, that she saw also a slight thickening of his fine nose, a perceptible slackening of the taut muscles of his mouth, and a decided fulness about his jaw and chin. She saw all these things; but she did not see that his romantic youth lay dying in the pathos of his eyes and that if it pleaded still it pleaded forgiveness for the sin of dying.

His hand fell slackly from hers as she took it.

It was as if they were still on their guard, still afraid of each other's touch.

As he sat in the chair that faced hers he held his hands clasped loosely in front of him, and looked at them with a curious attention, as if he wondered what kind of hands they were that could resist holding her.

When he saw that she was looking at him they fell apart with a nervous gesture.

They picked up the book she had laid down and turned it. His eyes examined the t.i.tle page. Their pathos lightened and softened; it became compa.s.sion; they smiled at her with a little pitiful smile, half tender, half ironic, as if they said, "Poor Gwenda, is that what you're driven to?"

He opened the book and turned the pages, reading a little here and there.

He scowled. His look changed. It darkened. It was angry, resentful, inimical. The dying youth in it came a little nearer to death.

Rowcliffe had found that he could not understand what he had read.

"Huh! What do you addle your brains with that stuff for?" he said.

"It amuses me."

"Oh--so long as you're amused."

He pushed away the book that had offended him.