The Three Sisters Part 84

"I know. It does, dreadfully," said Mary.

She summoned a flash and let him have it. "But she's magnificent."

"Magnificent!" he echoed with his robust enthusiasm.

But what he thought was that it was magnificent of Mrs. Rowcliffe to praise her sister.

And Rowcliffe smiled grimly at young Grierson and his Platonic pa.s.sion. He said to himself, "If I'd only known. If I'd only had the sense to wait six months. Grierson would have done just as well for Molly."

Still, though Grierson had come too late, he welcomed him and his Platonic pa.s.sion. It wasn't good for Grierson but it was good for Molly. At least, he supposed it was better for her than nothing. And for him it was infinitely better. It kept Grierson off Gwenda.

Young Grierson was right when he said that Gwenda didn't see that he was there. He had been two years in Garthdale and she was as far from seeing it as ever. He didn't mind; he was even amused by her indifference, only he couldn't help thinking that it was rather odd of her, considering that he _was_ there.

The village, as simple in its thinking as young Grierson, shared his view. It thought that it was something more than odd. And it had a suspicion that Mrs. Rowcliffe was at the bottom of it. She wouldn't be happy if she didn't get that young man away from her sister. The village hinted that it wouldn't be for the first time.

But in two years, with the gradual lifting of the pressure that had numbed her, Gwenda had become aware. Not of young Grierson, but of her own tragedy, of the slow life that dragged her, of its relentless motion and its ma.s.s. Now that her father's need of her was intermittent she was alive to the tightness of the tie. It had been less intolerable when it had bound her tighter; when she hadn't had a moment; when it had dragged her all the time. Its slackening was torture. She pulled then, and was jerked on her chain.

It was not only that Rowcliffe's outburst had waked her and made her cruelly aware. He had timed it badly, in her moment of revived lucidity, the moment when she had become vulnerable again. She was the more sensitive because of her previous apathy, as if she had died and was new-born to suffering and virgin to pain.

What hurt her most was her father's gentleness. She could stand his fits of irritation and obstinacy; they braced her, they called forth her will. But she was defenseless against his pathos, and he knew it.

He had phrases that wrung her heart. "You're a good girl, Gwenda."

"I'm only an irritable old man, my dear. You mustn't mind what I say."

She suffered from the incessant drain on her pity; for she wanted all her will if she was to stand against Rowcliffe. Pity was a dangerous solvent in which her will sank and was melted away.

There were moments when she saw herself as two women. One had still the pa.s.sion and the memory of freedom. The other was a cowed and captive creature who had forgotten; whose cramped motions guided her; whose instinct of submission she abhorred.

Her isolation was now extreme. She had had nothing to give to any friends she might have made. Rowcliffe had taken all that was left of her. And now, when intercourse was possible, it was they who had withdrawn. They shared Mr. Grierson's inability to make her out. They had heard rumors; they imagined things; they remembered also. She was the girl who had raced all over the country with Dr. Rowcliffe, the girl whom Dr. Rowcliffe, for all their racing, had not cared to marry.

She was the girl who had run away from home to live with a dubious step-mother; and she was the sister of that awful Mrs. Greatorex, who--well, everybody knew what Mrs. Greatorex was.

Gwenda Cartaret, like her younger sister, had been talked about. Not so much in the big houses of the Dale. The queer facts had been tossed up and down a smokeroom for one season and then dropped. In the big houses they didn't remember Gwenda Cartaret. They only remembered to forget her.

But in the little shops and in the little houses in Morfe there had been continual whispering. They said that even after Dr. Rowcliffe's marriage to that nice wife of his, who was her own sister, the two had been carrying on. If there wasn't any actual harm done, and maybe there wasn't, the doctor had been running into danger. He was up at Garthdale more than he need be now that the old Vicar was about again.

And they had been seen together. The head gamekeeper at Garthdale had caught them more than once out on the moor, and after dark too. It was said in the little houses that it wasn't the doctor's fault. (In the big houses judgment had been more impartial, but Morfe was loyal to its doctor.) It was hers, every bit, you might depend on it. Of Rowcliffe it was said that maybe he'd been tempted, but he was a good man, was Dr. Rowcliffe, and he'd stopped in time. Because they didn't know what Gwenda Cartaret was capable of, they believed, like the Vicar, that she was capable of anything.

It was only in her own village that they knew. The head gamekeeper had never told his tale in Garth. It would have made him too unpopular.

Gwenda Cartaret remained unaware of what was said. Rumor protected her by cutting her off from its own sources.

And she had other consolations besides her ignorance. So long as she knew that Rowcliffe cared for her and always had cared, it did not seem to matter to her so much that he had married Mary. She actually considered that, of the two, Mary was the one to be pitied; it was so infinitely worse to be married to a man who didn't care for you than not to be married to a man who did.

Of course, there was the tie. Her sister had outward and visible possession of him. But she said to herself "I wouldn't give what I have for _that,_ if I can't have both."

And of course there was Steven, and Steven's misery which was more unbearable to her than her own. At least she thought it was more unbearable. She didn't ask herself how bearable it would have been if Steven's marriage had brought him a satisfaction that denied her and cast her out.

For she was persuaded that Steven also had his consolation. He knew that she cared for him. She conceived this knowledge of theirs as const.i.tuting an immaterial and immutable possession of each other.

And it did not strike her that this knowledge might be less richly compensating to Steven than to her.

Her woman's pa.s.sion, forced inward, sustained her with an inward peace, an inward exaltation. And in this peace, this exaltation, it became one with her pa.s.sion for the place.

She was unaware of what was happening in her. She did not know that her soul had joined the two beyond its own power to put asunder. She still looked on her joy in the earth as a solitary emotion untouched by any other. She still said to herself "Nothing can take this away from me."

For she had hours, now and again, when she shook off the slave-woman who held her down. In those hours her inner life moved with the large rhythm of the seasons and was soaked in the dyes of the visible world; and the visible world, pa.s.sing into her inner life, took on its radiance and intensity. Everything that happened and that was great and significant in its happening, happened there.

Outside nothing happened; nothing stood out; nothing moved. No procession of events trod down or blurred her perfect impressions of the earth and sky. They eternalised themselves in memory. They became her memory.

The days were carved for her in the lines of the hills and painted for her in their colors; days that were dim green and gray, when the dreaming land was withdrawn under a veil so fine that it had the transparency of water, or when the stone walls, the humble houses and the high ramparts, drenched with mist and with secret sunlight, became insubstantial; days when all the hills were hewn out of one opal; days that had the form of Karva under snow, and the thin blues and violets of the snow. She remembered purely, without thinking, "It was in April that I went away from Steven," or, "It was in November that he married Mary," or "It was in February that we knew about Ally, and Father had his stroke."

Her nature was sound and sane; it refused to brood over suffering. She was not like Alice and in her unlikeness she lacked some of Alice's resources. She couldn't fling herself on to a Polonaise of a Sonata any more than she could lie on a couch all day and look at her own white hands and dream. Her pa.s.sion found no outlet in creating violent and voluptuous sounds. It was pa.s.sive, rather, and attentive. Cut off from all contacts of the flesh, it turned to the distant and the undreamed. Its very senses became infinitely subtle; they discerned the hidden soul of the land that had entranced her.

There were no words for this experience. She had no sense of self in it and needed none. It seemed to her that she _was_ what she contemplated, as if all her senses were fused together in the sense of seeing and what her eyes saw they heard and touched and felt.

But when she came to and saw herself seeing, she said, "At least this is mine. n.o.body, not even Steven, can take it away from me."

She also reminded herself that she had Alice.

She meant Alice Greatorex. Alice Cartaret, oppressed by her own "awfulness," had loved her with a sullen selfish love, the love of a frustrated and unhappy child. But there was no awfulness in Alice Greatorex. In the fine sanity of happiness she showed herself as good as gold.

Marriage, that had made Mary hard, made Alice tender. Mary was wrapped up in her husband and her house, and in her social relations and young Grierson's Platonic pa.s.sion, so tightly wrapped that these things formed round her an impenetrable sh.e.l.l. They hid a secret and inaccessible Mary.

Alice was wrapped up in her husband and children, in the boy of three who was so like Gwenda, and in the baby girl who was so like Greatorex. But through them she had become approachable. She had the ways of some happy household animal, its quick rushes of affection, and its gaze, the long, spiritual gaze of its maternity, mysterious and appealing. She loved Gwenda with a sad-eyed, remorseful love. She said to herself, "If I hadn't been so awful, Gwenda might have married Steven." She saw the appalling extent of Gwenda's sacrifice. She saw it as it was, monstrous, absurd, altogether futile.

It was the futility of it that troubled Alice most. Even if Gwenda had been capable of sacrificing herself for Mary, which had been by no means her intention, that would have been futile too. Alice was of Rowcliffe's opinion that young Grierson would have done every bit as well for Mary.

Better, for Mary had no children.

"And how," said Alice, "could she expect to have them?"

She saw in Mary's childlessness not only G.o.d's but Nature's justice.

There were moments when Mary saw it too. But she left G.o.d out of it and called it Nature's cruelty.

If it was not really Gwenda. For in flashes of extreme lucidity Mary put it down to Rowcliffe's coldness.

And she had come to know that Gwenda was responsible for that.