The Three Sisters Part 24

She raised her chin. There was a more determined look on her small, her rather insignificant face than he would have thought to see there.

She rose.

"Very well," she said superbly. "I'll do it."

He held out his hand.

"I don't say, Miss Cartaret, that you'll reclaim him."

"Nor I. But--if you want me to, I'll try."

They parted on it.

Rowcliffe smiled as he closed the surgery door behind him.

"That'll give her something else to think about," he said to himself.

"And it'll take her all her time."

XXIV

The next Sunday, early in the afternoon, Alice went, all by herself, to Upthorne.

Hitherto she had disliked going to Upthorne by herself. She had no very subtle feeling for the aspects of things; but there was something about the road to Upthorne that repelled her. A hundred yards or so above the schoolhouse it turned, leaving behind it the wide green bottom and winding up toward the naked moor. To the north, on her right, it narrowed and twisted; the bed of the beck lay hidden. A thin scrub of low thorn trees covered the lower slopes of the further hillside. Here and there was a clearing and a cottage or a farm. On her left she had to pa.s.s the dead mining station, the roofless walls, the black window gaps, the melancholy haunted colonnades, the three chimneys of the dead furnaces, square cornered, shooting straight and high as the bell-towers of some hill city of the South, beautiful and sinister, guarding that place of ashes and of ruin. Then the sallow winter marshes. South of the marshes were the high moors. Their flanks showed black where they have been flayed by the cuttings of old mines.

At intervals, along the line of the hillside, ma.s.ses of rubble rose in hummocks or hung like avalanches, black as if they had been discharged by blasting. Beyond, in the turn of the Dale, the village of Upthorne lay unseen.

And hitherto, in all that immense and inhuman desolation nothing (to Alice) had been more melancholy, more sinister, more haunted than the house where John Greatorex had died. With its gray, unsleeping face, its lidless eyes, staring out over the marshes, it had lost (for Alice) all likeness to a human habitation. It repudiated the living; it remembered; it kept a grim watch with its dead.

But Alice's mind, acutely sensitive in one direction, had become callous in every other.

Greatorex was in the kitchen, smoking his Sunday afternoon pipe in the chimney corner, screened from the open doorway by the three-foot thickness of the house wall.

Maggie, his servant, planted firmly on the threshold, jerked her head over her shoulder to call to him.

"There's a yoong laady wants to see yo, Mr. Greatorex!"

There was no response but a sharp tapping on the hob, as Greatorex knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

Maggie stood looking at Alice a little mournfully with her deep-set, blue, pathetic eyes. Maggie had once been pretty in spite of her drab hair and flat features, but where her high color remained it had hardened with her thirty-five years.

"Well yo' coom?"

Maggie called again and waited. Courageous in her bright blue Sunday gown, she waited while her master rose, then, shame-faced as if driven by some sharp sign from him, she slunk into the scullery.

Jim Greatorex appeared on his threshold.

On his threshold, utterly sober, carrying himself with the a.s.surance of the master in his own house, he would not have suffered by comparison with any man. Instead of the black broadcloth that Alice had expected, he wore a loose brown shooting jacket, drab corduroy breeches, a drab cloth waistcoat and brown leather leggings, and he wore them with a distinction that Rowcliffe might have envied. His face, his whole body, alert and upright, had the charm of some shy, half-savage animal. When he stood at ease his whole face, with all its features, sensed you and took you in; the quivering eyebrows were aware of you; the nose, with its short, high bridge, its fine, wide nostrils, repeated the sensitive stare of the wide eyes; his mouth, under its golden brown moustache, was somber with a sort of sullen apprehension, till in a sudden, childlike confidence it smiled. His whole face and all its features smiled.

He was smiling at Alice now, as if struck all of a sudden by her smallness.

"I've come to ask a favor, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice.

"Ay," said Greatorex. He said it as if ladies called every day to ask him favors. "Will you coom in, Miss Cartaret?" It was the mournful and musical voice that she had heard sometimes last summer on the road outside the back door of the Vicarage.

She came in, pausing on the threshold and looking about her, as if she stood poised on the edge of an adventure. Her smallness, and the delicious, exploring air of her melted Jim's heart and made him smile at her.

"It's a roough plaace fer a laady," he said.

"It's a beautiful place, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice.

And she did actually think it was beautiful with its stone floor, its white-washed walls, its black oak dresser and chest and settle; not because of these things but because it was on the border of her Paradise. Rowcliffe had sent her there. Jim Greatorex had glamour for her, less on his own account than as a man in whom Rowcliffe was interested.

"You'd think it a bit loansoom, wouldn' yo', ef yo' staayed in it yeear in and yeear out?"

"I don't know," said Alice doubtfully. "Perhaps--a little," she ventured, encouraged by Greatorex's indulgent smile.

"An' loansoom it is," said Greatorex dismally.

Alice explored, penetrating into the interior.

"Oh--but aren't you glad you've got such a lovely fireplace?"

"I doan' knaw as I've thought mooch about it. We get used to our own."

"What are those hooks for in the chimney?"

"They? They're fer 'angin' the haams on--to smoak 'em."

"I see."

She would have sat there on the oak settle but that Greatorex was holding open the door of an inner room.

"Yo'd better coom into t' parlor, Miss Cartaret. It'll be more coomfortable for you."

She rose and followed him. She had been long enough in Garth to know that if you are asked to go into the parlor you must go. Otherwise you risk offending the kind G.o.ds of the hearth and threshold.

The parlor was a long low room that continued the line of the house to its southern end. One wide mullioned window looked east over the marsh, the other south to the hillside across a little orchard of dwarfed and twisted trees.

To Alice they were the trees of her Paradise and the hillside was its boundary.

Greatorex drew close to the hearth the horsehair and mahogany armchair with the white antimaca.s.sar.

"Sit yo' down and I'll putt a light to the fire."