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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
May Sinclair's novel, 'The Three Sisters,' is a compelling exploration of early 20th-century feminism and the role of women in society. Set against the backdrop of World War I, the story follows the lives of the three Hill sisters as they navigate love, loss, and personal growth. Sinclair's literary style is characterized by its introspective narration and keen psychological insight into her characters, making the novel a poignant and thought-provoking read. The themes of gender roles and societal expectations are subtly woven into the narrative, adding depth and complexity to the story. As a prominent figure in the early feminist movement, Sinclair's work reflects her own struggles and beliefs, making 'The Three Sisters' a powerful and important contribution to feminist literature. Readers interested in exploring the evolving role of women in the early 20th century will find this novel both enlightening and engaging.
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The Three Sisters
Table of Contents
II
Through four of its five front windows the house gave back darkness to the dark. One, on the ground floor, showed a golden oblong, skirted with watery gray where the lamp-light thinned the solid blackness of the wall.
The three sisters, Mary, Gwendolen and Alice, daughters of James Cartaret, the Vicar of Garth, were sitting there in the dining-room behind the yellow blind, doing nothing. In their supine, motionless attitudes they seemed to be waiting for something to happen, to happen so soon that, if there had been anything to do, it was not worth their while doing it.
All three were alike in the small, broad faces that brooded, half sullen and half sad; in the wide eyes that watched vaguely; in the little tender noses, and in the mouths, tender and sullen, too; in the arch and sweep of the upper lips, the delicate fulness of the lower; in the way of the thick hair, parted and turned back over the brows in two wide and shallow waves.
Mary, the eldest, sat in a low chair by the fireside. Her hands were clasped loosely on the black woolen socks she had ceased to darn.
She was staring into the fire with her gray eyes, the thick gray eyes that never let you know what she was thinking. The firelight woke the flame in her reddish-tawny hair. The red of her lips was turned back and crushed against the white. Mary was shorter than her sisters, but she was the one that had the color. And with it she had a stillness that was not theirs. Mary's face brooded more deeply than their faces, but it was untroubled in its brooding.
She had learned to darn socks for her own amusement on her eleventh birthday, and she was twenty-seven now.
Alice, the youngest girl (she was twenty-three) lay stretched out on the sofa.
She departed in no way from her sister's type but that her body was slender and small boned, that her face was lightly finished, that her gray eyes were clear and her lips pale against the honey-white of her face, and that her hair was colorless as dust except where the edge of the wave showed a dull gold.
Alice had spent the whole evening lying on the sofa. And now she raised her arms and bent them, pressing the backs of her hands against her eyes. And now she lowered them and lifted one sleeve of her thin blouse, and turned up the milk-white under surface of her arm and lay staring at it and feeling its smooth texture with her fingers.
Gwendolen, the second sister, sat leaning over the table with her arms flung out on it as they had tossed from her the book she had been reading.
She was the tallest and the darkest of the three. Her face followed the type obscurely; and vividly and emphatically it left it. There was dusk in her honey-whiteness, and dark blue in the gray of her eyes. The bridge of her nose and the arch of her upper lip were higher, lifted as it were in a decided and defiant manner of their own. About Gwenda there was something alert and impatient. Her very supineness was alive. It had distinction, the savage grace of a creature utterly abandoned to a sane fatigue.
Gwenda had gone fifteen miles over the moors that evening. She had run and walked and run again in the riotous energy of her youth.
Now she was too tired to read.
Gwenda was the first to speak.
"Is it ten yet?"
"No." Mary smiled, but the word shuddered in her throat like a weary moan.
"How long?"
"Forty-three minutes."
"Oh, Lord——" Gwenda laughed the laugh of brave nerves tortured.
From her sofa beyond the table Alice sighed.
At ten o'clock Essy Gale, the maid-servant, would come in from the kitchen and the Vicar from the inner room. And Essy would put the Bible and Prayer-book on the table, and the Vicar would read Prayers.
That was all they were waiting for. It was all that could happen. It happened every night at ten o'clock.
III
Alice spoke next.
"What day of the month is it?"
"The thirtieth." Mary answered.
"Then we've been here exactly five months to-day."
"That's nothing," said Mary, "to the months and years we shall be here."
"I can't think what possessed Papa to come and bury us all in this rotten place."
"Can't you?" Mary's eyes turned from their brooding. Her voice was very quiet, barely perceptible the significant stress.
"Oh, if you mean it's me he wants to bury——. You needn't rub that in."
"I'm not rubbing it in."
"You are. You're rubbing it in every time you look like that. That's the beastly part of it. Supposing he does want to get back on me, why should he go and punish you two?"
"If he thinks he's punishing me he's sold," said Gwenda.
"He couldn't have stuck you in a rottener hole."
Gwenda raised her head.
"A hole? Why, there's no end to it. You can go for miles and miles without meeting anybody, unless some darling mountain sheep gets up and looks at you. It's—it's a divine place, Ally."
"Wait till you've been another five months in it. You'll be as sick as I am."
"I don't think so. You haven't seen the moon get up over Greffington Edge. If you had—if you knew what this place was like, you wouldn't lie there grizzling. You wouldn't talk about punishing. You'd wonder what you'd done to be allowed to look at it—to live in it a day. Of course I'm not going to let on to Papa that I'm in love with it."
Mary smiled again.
"It's all very well for you," she said. "As long as you've got a moor to walk on you're all right."
"Yes. I'm all right," Gwenda said.
Her head had sunk again and rested in the hollow of her arms. Her voice, muffled in her sleeve, came soft and thick. It died for drowsiness.
In the extreme immobility and stillness of the three the still house stirred and became audible to them, as if it breathed. They heard the delicate fall of the ashes on the hearth, and the flame of the lamp jerking as the oil sputtered in the burnt wick. Their nerves shook to the creeping, crackling sounds that came from the wainscot, infinitely minute. A tongue of fire shot hissing from the coal. It seemed to them a violent and terrifying thing. The breath of the house passed over them in thick smells of earth and must, as the fire's heat sucked at its damp.
The church clock struck the half hour. Once, twice; two dolorous notes that beat on the still house and died.
Somewhere out at the back a door opened and shut, and it was as if the house drew in its breath at the shock of the sound.
Presently a tremor crept through Gwenda's young body as her heart shook it.
She rose and went to the window.
IV
She was slow and rapt in her going like one walking in her sleep, moved by some impulse profounder than her sleep.
She pulled up the blind. The darkness was up against the house, thick and close to the pane. She threw open the window, and the night entered palpably like slow water, black and sweet and cool.
From the unseen road came the noise of wheels and of a horse that in trotting clanked forever one shoe against another.
It was young Rowcliffe, the new doctor, driving over from Morthe to Upthorne on the Moor, where John Greatorex lay dying.
The pale light of his lamps swept over the low garden wall.
Suddenly the four hoofs screamed, grinding together in the slide of their halt. The doctor had jerked his horse up by the Vicarage gate.
The door at the back opened and shut again, suddenly, sharply, as if in fear.
A voice swung out like a mournful bell into the night. A dalesman's voice; such a voice as the lonely land fashions sometimes for its own delight, drawling and tender, hushed by the hills and charged with the infinite, mysterious sadness of their beauty.
It belonged to young Greatorex and it came from the doorway of the Vicarage yard.
"That yo, Dr. Rawcliffe? I wuss joost gawn oop t'road t' see ef yo wuss coomin'."
"Of course I was coming."
The new doctor was short and stern with young Greatorex.
The two voices, the soft and the stern, spoke together for a moment, low, inaudible. Then young Greatorex's voice was heard again, and in its softness there was the furtive note of shame.
"I joost looked in to Vicarage to leave woord with Paason."
The noise of the wheels and hoofs began again, the iron shoes clanked together and struck out the rhythm that the sisters knew.
And with the first beat of it, and with the sound of the two voices in the road, life, secret and silent, stirred in their blood and nerves. It quivered like a hunting thing held on the leash.
V
Their stillness, their immobility were now intense. And not one spoke a word to the other.
All three of them were thinking.
Mary thought, "Wednesday is his day. On Wednesday I will go into the village and see all my sick people. Then I shall see him. And he will see me. He will see that I am kind and sweet and womanly." She thought, "That is the sort of woman that a man wants." But she did not know what she was thinking.
Gwenda thought, "I will go out on to the moor again. I don't care if I am late for Prayers. He will see me when he drives back and he will wonder who is that wild, strong girl who walks by herself on the moor at night and isn't afraid. He has seen me three times, and every time he has looked at me as if he wondered. In five minutes I shall go." She thought (for she knew what she was thinking), "I shall do nothing of the sort. I don't care whether he sees me or not. I don't care if I never see him again. I don't care."
Alice thought, "I will make myself ill. So ill that they'll have to send for him. I shall see him that way."
VI
Alice sat up. She was thinking another thought.
"If Mr. Greatorex is dead, Dr. Rowcliffe won't stay long at Upthorne. He will come back soon. And he will have to call and leave word. He will come in and I shall see him."
But if Mr. Greatorex wasn't dead? If Mr. Greatorex were a long time over his dying? Then he might be kept at Upthorne, perhaps till midnight, perhaps till morning. Then, even if he called to leave word, she would not see him. When she looked deep she found herself wondering how long Mr. Greatorex would be over his dying. If she had looked a little deeper she would have found herself hoping that Mr. Greatorex was already dead.
If Mr. Greatorex was dead before he got to Upthorne he would come very soon, perhaps before prayer-time.
And he would be shown into the drawing-room.
Would he? Would Essy have the sense? No. Not unless the lamp was lit there. Essy wouldn't show him into a dark room. And Essy was stupid. She might have no sense. She might take him straight into the study and Papa would keep him there. Trust Papa.
Alice got up from her sofa and left the room; moving with her weary grace and a little air of boredom and of unconcern. She was always most unconcerned when she was most intent.
Outside in the passage she stood a moment, listening. All the ways of the house gave upon the passage in a space so narrow that by stretching out one arm she could have touched both walls.
With a door open anywhere the passage became a gully for the north wind. Now, with all doors shut, it was as if the breath of the house was being squeezed out there, between closing walls. The passage, instead of dividing the house, drew it together tight. And this tightness was intolerable to Alice.
She hated it. She hated the whole house. It was so built that there wasn't a corner in it where you could get away from Papa. His study had one door opening into the passage and one into the dining-room. The window where he sat raked the garden on the far side. The window of his bedroom raked the front; its door commanded the stairhead. He was aware of everything you did, of everything you didn't do. He could hear you in the dining-room; he could hear you overhead; he could hear you going up and downstairs. He could positively hear you breathe, and he always knew whether you were in bed or not. She drew in her breath lest he should hear it now.
At the far end of the passage, on the wall-space between the staircase and the kitchen door, raised on a small bracket, a small tin lamp showed a thrifty flame. Under it, on a mahogany table-flap, was a row of bedroom candlesticks with their match-boxes.
Her progress to the table-flap was stealthy. She exalted this business of lighting the drawing-room lamp to a desperate, perilous adventure. The stone floor deadened her footsteps as she went.
Her pale eyes, half sullen, half afraid, slewed round to the door of the study on her right. With a noiseless hand she secured her matches and her candle. With noiseless feet she slid into the darkness of the drawing-room. She dared not light her candle out there in the passage. For the Vicar was full of gloom and of suspicion in the half hour before prayer-time, and at the spurt of the match he might come out blustering and insist on knowing what she was doing and where she was going, whereas presently he would know, and he might be quiet as long as he was satisfied that she wasn't shirking Prayers.
Stealthily, with her air of desperate adventure, she lit the drawing-room lamp. She shook out the puffs and frills of its yellow paper shade. Under its gaudy skirts the light was cruel to the cramped and shabby room, to the huddled furniture, to the tarnished gilt, the perishing tones of gray and amber.
Alice set the lamp on the top of the cottage piano that stood slantwise in a side window beyond the fireplace. She had pulled back the muslin curtains and opened both windows wide so that the room was now bared to the south and west. Then, with the abrupt and passionate gesture of desire deferred, she sat down at the little worn-out Erard and began to play.
Sitting there, with the open window behind her, she could be seen, and she knew that she could be seen from over the wall by anybody driving past in a high dog-cart.
And she played. She played the Chopin Grande Polonaise, or as much of it as her fingers, tempestuous and inexpert, could clutch and reach. She played, neither with her hands nor with her brain, but with her temperament, febrile and frustrate, seeking its outlet in exultant and violent sound. She fell upon the Erard like some fierce and hungry thing, tearing from the forlorn, humble instrument a strange and savage food. She played—with incredible omissions, discords and distortions, but she played. She flung out her music through the windows into the night as a signal and an appeal. She played (on the little worn-out Erard) in ecstasy and expectation, as if something momentous hung upon her playing. There was joy and triumph and splendor in the Grande Polonaise; she felt them in her heart and nerves as a delicate, dangerous tremor, the almost intolerable on coming of splendor, of triumph and of joy.
And as she played the excitement gathered; it swung in more and more vehement vibrations; it went warm and flooding through her brain like wine. All the life of her bloodless body swam there, poised and thinned, but urgent, aspiring to some great climax of the soul.
VII
The whole house was full of the Chopin Grande Polonaise.
It raged there like a demon. Tortured out of all knowledge, the Grande Polonaise screamed and writhed in its agony. It writhed through the windows, seeking its natural attenuation in the open air. It writhed through the shut house and was beaten back, pitilessly, by the roof and walls. To let it loose thus was Alice's defiance of the house and her revenge.
Mary and Gwenda heard it in the dining-room, and set their mouths and braced themselves to bear it. The Vicar in his study behind the dining-room heard it and scowled. Essy, the maid-servant, heard it, she heard it worse than anybody, in her kitchen on the other side of the wall. Now and then, when the Polonaise screamed louder, Mary drew a hissing breath of pain through her locked teeth, and Gwenda grinned. Not that to Gwenda there was anything funny in the writhing and screaming of the Grande Polonaise. It was that she alone appreciated its vindictive quality; she admired the completeness, the audacity of Alice's revenge.
But Essy in her kitchen made no effort to stand up to the Grande Polonaise. When it began she sat down and laid her arms on the kitchen table, and her head, muffled in her apron, on her arms, and cried. She couldn't have told you what the Polonaise was like or what it did to her; all that she could have said was that it went through and through her. She didn't know, Essy didn't, what had come over her; for whatever noise Miss Alice made, she hadn't taken any notice, not at first. It was in the last three weeks that the Polonaise had found her out and had begun to go through and through her, till it was more than she could bear. But Essy, crying into her apron, wouldn't have lifted a finger to stop Miss Alice.
"Poor laass," Essy said to herself, "she looves to plaay. And Vicar, he'll not hold out mooch longer. He'll put foot down fore she gets trow."
Through the screaming of the Polonaise Essy listened for the opening of the study door.
VIII
The study door did not open all at once.
"Wisdom and patience, wisdom and patience——" The Vicar kept on muttering as he scowled. Those were his watchwords in his dealings with his womenkind.
The Vicar was making a prodigious effort to maintain what seemed to him his god-like serenity. He was unaware that he was trying to control at one and the same time his temper and his temperament.
He was a man of middle height and squarish build, dark, pale-skinned and blue-eyed like his daughter Gwendolen. The Vicar's body stretched tight the seams of his black coat and kept up, at fifty-seven, a false show of muscular energy. The Vicar's face had a subtle quality of deception. The austere nose, the lean cheek-bones, the square-cut moustache and close-clipped, pointed beard (black, slightly grizzled) made it appear, at a little distance, the face of an ascetic. It approached, and the blue of the eyes, and the black of their dilated pupils, the stare of the nostrils and the half hidden lines of the red mouth revealed its profound and secret sensuality.
The interior that contained him was no less deceptive. Its book-lined walls advertised him as the scholarly recluse that he was not. He had had an eye to this effect. He had placed in prominent positions the books that he had inherited from his father, who had been a schoolmaster. You were caught at the very door by the thick red line of The Tudor Classics; by the eleven volumes of The Bekker's Plato, with Notes, bound in Russia leather, side by side with Jowett's Translations in cloth; by Sophocles and Dean Plumptre, the Odyssey and Butcher and Lang; by Æschylus and Robert Browning. The Vicar had carried the illusion of scholarship so far as to hide his Aristophanes behind a little curtain, as if it contained for him an iniquitous temptation. Of his own accord and with a deliberate intention to deceive, he had added the Early Fathers, Tillotsen's Sermons and Farrar's Life of Christ.
On another shelf, rather less conspicuous, were some bound volumes of The Record, with the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Marie Corelli. On the ledge of his bureau Blackwood's Magazine, uncut, lay ready to his hand. The Spectator, in process of skimming, was on his knees. The Standard, fairly gutted, was on the floor. There was no room for it anywhere else.
For the Vicar's study was much too small for him. Sitting there, in an arm-chair and with his legs in the fender, he looked as if he had taken flight before the awful invasion of his furniture. His bookcases hemmed him in on three sides. His roll-top desk, advancing on him from the window, had driven and squeezed him into the arm-chair. His bureau, armed to the teeth, leaning from its ambush in the recess of the fireplace, threatened both the retreat and the left flank movement of the chair. The Vicar was neither tall nor powerful, but his study made him look like a giant imprisoned in a cell.
The room was full of the smell of tobacco, of a smoldering coal fire, of old warm leather and damp walls, and of the heavy, virile odor of the Vicar.
A brown felt carpet and thick serge curtains shut out the draft of the northeast window.
On a September evening the Vicar was snug enough in his cell; and before the Grande Polonaise had burst in upon him he had been at peace with God and man.
* * * * *
But when he heard those first exultant, challenging bars he scowled inimically.
Not that he acknowledged them as a challenge. He was inclined rather to the manly course of ignoring the Grande Polonaise altogether. And not for a moment would he have admitted that there had been anything in his behavior that could be challenged or defied, least of all by his daughter Alice. To himself in his study Mr. Cartaret appeared as the image of righteousness established in an impregnable place. Whereas his daughter Alice was not at all in a position to challenge and defy.
She had made a fool of herself.
She knew it; he knew it; everybody knew it in the parish they had left five months ago. It had been the talk of the little southern seaside town. He thanked God that nobody knew it, or was ever likely to know it, here.
For Alice's folly was not any ordinary folly. It was the kind that made the parish which was so aware of it uninhabitable to a sensitive vicar.
He reflected that she would be clever if she made a fool of herself here. By his decisive action in removing her from that southern seaside town he had saved her from continuing her work. In order to do it he had ruined his prospects. He had thrown up a good living for a poor one; a living that might (but for Alice it certainly would) have led to preferment for a living that could lead to nothing at all; a living where he could make himself felt for a living where there was nobody to feel him.
And, having done it, he was profoundly sorry for himself.
So far as Mr. Cartaret could see there had been nothing else to do. If it had all to be done over again, he told himself that he would do it.
But there Mr. Cartaret was wrong. He couldn't have done it or anything like it twice. It was one of those deeds, supremeful sacrificial, that strain a man's moral energies to breaking point and render him incapable of further sacrifice; if, indeed, it did not render further sacrifice superfluous. Mr. Cartaret honestly felt that even an exacting deity could require no more of him.
And it wasn't the first time either, nor his daughter Alice the first woman who had come between the Vicar and his prospects. Looking back he saw himself driven from pillar to post, from parish to parish, by the folly or incompetence of his womankind.
Strictly speaking, it was his first wife, Mary Gwendolen, the one the children called Mother, who had begun it. She had made his first parish unendurable to him by dying in it. This she had done when Alice was born, thereby making Alice unendurable to him, too. Poor Mamie! He always thought of her as having, inscrutably, failed him.
All three of them had failed him.
His second wife, Frances, the one the children called Mamma (the Vicar had made himself believe that he had married her solely on their account), had turned into a nervous invalid on his hands before she died of that obscure internal trouble which he had so wisely and patiently ignored.
His third wife, Robina (the one they called Mummy), had run away from him in the fifth year of their marriage. When she implored him to divorce her he said that, whatever her conduct had been, that course was impossible to him as a churchman, as she well knew; but that he forgave her. He had made himself believe it.
And all the time he was aware, without admitting it, that, if the thing came into court, Robina's evidence might be a little damaging to the appearances of wisdom and patience, of austerity and dignity, which he had preserved so well. He had had an unacknowledged vision of Robina standing in the witness box, very small and shy, with her eyes fluttering while she explained to the gentlemen of the jury that she ran away from her husband because she was afraid of him. He could hear the question, "Why were you afraid?" and Robina's answer—but at that point he always reminded himself that it was as a churchman that he objected to divorce.
For his profession had committed him to a pose. He had posed for more than thirty years to his parish, to his three wives, to his three children, and to himself, till he had become unconscious of his real thoughts, his real motives, his real likings and dislikings. So that when he told himself that it would have been better if his third wife had died, he thought he meant that it would have been better for her and for his opinion of her, whereas what he really did mean was that it would have been better for himself.
For if Robina had died he could have married again. As it was, her infidelity condemned him to a celibacy for which, as she knew, he was utterly unsuited.
Therefore he thought of her as a cruel and unscrupulous woman. And when he thought of her he became more sorry for himself than ever.
Now, oddly enough, the Grande Polonaise had set Mr. Cartaret thinking of Robina. It was not that Robina had ever played it. Robina did not play. It was not the discords introduced into it by Alice, though Robina had been a thing of discords. It was that something in him, obscurely but intimately associated with Robina, responded to that sensual and infernal tremor that Alice was wringing out of the Polonaise. So that, without clearly knowing why it was abominable, Mr. Cartaret said to himself that the tune Alice was playing was an abominable tune and must be stopped at once.
He went into the drawing-room to stop it.
And Essy, in the kitchen, raised her head and dried her eyes on her apron.
"If you must make a noise," said Mr. Cartaret, "be good enough to make one that is less—disturbing."
* * * * *
He stood in the doorway staring at his daughter Alice.
Her excitement had missed by a hairsbreadth the spiritual climax. It had held itself in for one unspeakable moment, then surged, crowding the courses of her nerves. Beaten back by the frenzy of the Polonaise, it made a violent return; it rose, quivering, at her eyelids and her mouth; it broke, and, with a shudder of all her body, split itself and fell.
The Vicar stared. He opened his mouth to say something, and said nothing; finally he went out, muttering.
"Wisdom and patience. Wisdom and patience."
It was a prayer.
Alice trailed to the window and leaned out, listening for the sound of hoofs and wheels. Nothing there but the darkness and stillness of the moors. She trailed back to the Erard and began to play again.
This time it was Beethoven, the Pathetic Sonata.
IX
Mr. Cartaret sat in his study, manfully enduring the Pathetic Sonata.
He was no musician and he did not certainly know when Alice went wrong; therefore, except that it had some nasty loud moments, he could not honestly say that the First Movement was disturbing. Besides, he had scored. He had made Alice change her tune.
Wisdom and patience required that he should be satisfied, so far. And, being satisfied, in the sense that he no longer had a grievance, meant that he was very badly bored.
He began to fidget. He took his legs out of the fender and put them back again. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, but without relief. He turned over his Spectator to see what it had to say about the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, and found that he was not interested in what it had to say. He looked at his watch and compared it with the clock in the faint hope that the clock might be behindhand.
The watch and clock both agreed that it was not a minute later than fifteen minutes to ten. A whole quarter of an hour before Prayer-time.
There was nothing but Prayer-time to look forward to.
He began to fidget again. He filled his pipe and thought better about smoking it. Then he rang the bell for his glass of water.
After more delay than was at all necessary Essy appeared, bringing the glass of water on a plate.
She came in, soft-footed, almost furtive, she who used to enter so suddenly and unabashed. She put the plate down on the roll-top desk and turned softly, furtively, away.
The Vicar looked up. His eyes were large and blue as suspicion drew in the black of their pupils.
"Put it down here," he said, and he indicated the ledge of the bureau.
Essy stood still and stared like a half-wild creature in doubt as to its way. She decided to make for the bureau by rounding the roll-top desk on the far side, thus approaching her master from behind.
"What are you doing?" said the Vicar. "I said, Put it down here."
Essy turned again and came forward, tilting the plate a little in her nervousness. The large blue eyes, the stern voice, fascinated her, frightened her.
The Vicar looked at her steadily, remorselessly, as she came.
Essy's lowered eyelids had kept the stain of her tears. Her thick brown hair was loose and rumpled under her white cap. But she had put on a clean, starched apron. It stood out stiffly, billowing, from her waist. Essy had not always been so careless about her hair or so fastidious as to her aprons. There was a little strained droop at the corners of her tender mouth, as if they had been tied with string. Her dark eyes still kept their young largeness and their light, but they looked as if they had been drawn tight with string at their corners too.
All these signs the Vicar noted as he stared. And he hated Essy. He hated her for what he saw in her, and for her buxom comeliness, and for the softness of her youth.
"Did I hear young Greatorex round at the back door this evening?" he said.
Essy started, slanting her plate a little more.
"I doan knaw ef I knaw, sir."
"Either you know or you don't know," said the Vicar.
"I doan know, I'm sure, sir," said Essy.
The Vicar was holding out his hand for his glass of water, and Essy pushed the plate toward him, so blindly and at such a perilous slant that the glass slid and toppled over and broke itself against the Vicar's chair.
Essy gave a little frightened cry.
"Clever girl. She did that on purpose," said the Vicar to himself.
Essy was on her knees beside him, picking up the bits of glass and gathering them in her apron. She was murmuring, "I'll mop it oop. I'll mop it oop."
"That'll do," he said roughly. "That'll do, I tell you. You can go."
Essy tried to go. But it was as if her knees had weights on them that fixed her to the floor. Holding up her apron with one hand, she clutched the arm of her master's chair with the other and dragged herself to her feet.
"I'll mop it oop," she repeated, shamefast.
"I told you to go," said the Vicar.
"I'll fetch yo anoother glass?" she whispered. Her voice was hoarse with the spasm in her throat.
"No," said the Vicar.
Essy slunk back into her kitchen with terror in her heart.
X
"Attacca subito l'Allegro."
Alice had fallen on it suddenly.
"I suppose," said Mary, "it's a relief to her to make that row."
"It isn't," said Gwenda. "It's torture. That's how she works herself up. She's playing on her own nerves all the time. If she really could play——If she cared about the music——If she cared about anything on earth except——"
She paused.
"Molly, it must be awful to be made like that."
"Nothing could be worse for her than being shut up here."
"I know. Papa's been a frightful fool about her. After all, Molly, what did she do?"
"She did what you and I wouldn't have done."
"How do you know what you wouldn't have done? How do I know? If we'd been in her place——"
"If I'd been in her place I'd have died rather."
"How do you know Ally wouldn't have rather died if she could have chosen? She didn't want to fall in love with that young ass, Rickards. And I don't see what she did that was so very awful."
"She managed to let everybody else see, anyhow."
"What if she did? At least she was honest. She went straight for what she wanted. She didn't sneak and scheme to get him from any other girl. And she hadn't a mother to sneak and scheme for her. That's fifty times worse, yet it's done every day and nobody thinks anything of it."
She went on. "Nobody would have thought anything as it was, if Papa hadn't been such a frantic fool about it. It he'd had the pluck to stand by her, if he'd kept his head and laughed in their silly faces, instead of grizzling and growling and stampeding out of the parish as if poor Ally had disgraced him."
"Well—it isn't a very pleasant thing for the Vicar of the parish——"
"It wasn't a very pleasant thing for any of us. But it was beastly of him to go back on her like that. And the silliness of it! Caring so frightfully about what people think, and then going on so as to make them think it."
"Think what?"
"That she really had done something."
"Do you suppose they did?"
"Yes. You can't blame them. He couldn't have piled it on more if she had. It's enough to make her."
"Oh Gwenda!"
"It would be his own fault. Just as it's his own fault that he hates her."
"He doesn't hate her. He's fond of all of us, in his way."
"Wot of Ally. Don't you know why? He can't look at her without thinking of how awful he is."
"And if he is—a little——You forget what he's had to go through."
"You mean Mummy running away from him?"
"Yes. And Mamma's dying. And before that—there was Mother."
Gwenda raised her head.
"He killed Mother."
"What do you mean?"
"He did. He was told that Mother would die or go mad if she had another baby. And he let her have Ally. No wonder Mummy ran away from him."
"Who told you that story?"
"Mummy."
"It was horrid of her."
"Everything poor Mummy did was horrid. It was horrid of her to run away from him, I suppose."
"Why did you tell me that? I didn't know it. I'd rather not have known."
"Well, now you do know, perhaps you'll be sorrier for Ally."
"I am sorry for Ally. But I'm sorry for Papa, too. You're not."
"I'd be sorry for him right enough if he wasn't so sorry for himself."
"Gwenda, you're awful."
"Because I won't waste my pity? Ally's got nothing—He's got everything."
"Not what he cares most for."
"He cares most for what people think of him. Everybody thought him a good kind husband. Everybody thinks him a good kind father."
* * * * *
The music suddenly ceased. A sound of voices came instead of it.
"There," said Gwenda. "He's gone in and stopped her."
He had, that time.
And in the sudden ceasing of the Pathetic Sonata the three sisters heard the sound of wheels and the clank of horseshoes striking together.
Mr. Greatorex was not yet dead of his pneumonia. The doctor had passed the Vicarage gate.
And as he passed he had said to himself. "How execrably she plays."
* * * * *
The three sisters waited without a word for the striking of the church clock.
XI
The church clock struck ten.
At the sound of the study bell Essy came into the dining-room. Essy was the acolyte of Family Prayers. Though a Wesleyan she could not shirk the appointed ceremonial. It was Essy who took the Bible and Prayerbook from their place on the sideboard under the tea-urn and put them on the table, opening them where the Vicar had left a marker the night before. It was Essy who drew back the Vicar's chair from the table and set it ready for him. It was Essy whom he relied on for responses that were responses and not mere mumblings and mutterings. She was Wesleyan, the one faithful, the one devout person in his household.
To-night there was nothing but a mumbling and a muttering. And that was Mary. She was the only one who was joining in the Lord's Prayer.
Essy had failed him.
* * * * *
Prayers over, there was nothing to sit up for. All the same, it was Mr. Cartaret's rule to go back into the study and to bore himself again for a whole hour till it was bed-time. He liked to be sure that the doors were all bolted and that everybody else was in bed before he went himself.
But to-night he had bored himself so badly that the thought of his study was distasteful to him. So he stayed where he was with his family. He believed that he was doing this solely on his family's account. He told himself that it was not right that he should leave the three girls too much to themselves. It did not occur to him that as long as he had had a wife to sit with, he hadn't cared how much he had left them. He knew that he had rather liked Mary and Gwendolen when they were little, and though he had found himself liking them less and less as they grew into their teens he had never troubled to enquire whose fault that was, so certain was he that it couldn't be his. Still less was it his fault if they were savage and inaccessible in their twenties. Of course he didn't mean that Mary was savage and inaccessible. It was Gwendolen that he meant.
So, since he couldn't sit there much longer without saying something, he presently addressed himself to Mary.
"Any news of Greatorex today?"
"I haven't heard. Shall I ask Essy?"
"No," said Mr. Cartaret, so abruptly that Mary looked at him.
"He was worse yesterday," said Gwenda.
They all looked at Gwenda.
"Who told you that?" said Mr. Cartaret by way of saying something.
"Mrs. Gale."
"When did she tell you?"
"Yesterday, when I was up at the farm."
"What were you doing at the farm?"
"Nothing. I went to see if I could do anything." She said to herself, "Why does he go on at us like this?" Aloud she said, "It was time some of us went."
She had him there. She was always having him.
"I shall have to go myself tomorrow," he said.
"I would if I were you," said Gwenda.
"I wonder what Jim Greatorex will do if his father dies."
It was Mary who wondered.
"He'll get married, like a shot," said Alice.
"Who to?" said Gwenda. "He can't marry all the girls——"
She stopped herself. Essy Gale was in the room. Three months ago Essy had been a servant at the Farm where her mother worked once a fortnight.
She had come in so quietly that none of them had noticed her. She brought a tray with a fresh glass of water for the Vicar and a glass of milk for Alice. She put it down quietly and slipped out of the room without her customary "Anything more, Miss?" and "Good-night."
"What's the matter with Essy?" Gwenda said.
Nobody spoke but Alice who was saying that she didn't want her milk.
More than a year ago Alice had been ordered milk for her anæmia. She had milk at eleven, milk at her midday dinner, milk for supper, and milk last thing at night. She did not like milk, but she liked being ordered it. Generally she would sit and drink it, in the face of her family, pathetically, with little struggling gulps. She took a half-voluptuous, half-vindictive pleasure in her anæmia. She knew that it made her sisters sorry for her, and that it annoyed her father.
Now she declared that she wasn't feeling well, and that she didn't want her milk.
"In that case," said Mr. Cartaret, "you had better go to bed."
Alice went, raising her white arms and rubbing her eyes along the backs of her hands, like a child dropping with sleep.
One after another, they rose and followed her.
* * * * *
At the half-landing five steep steps in a recess of the wall led aside to the door of Essy's bedroom. There Gwenda stopped and listened.
A sound of stifled crying came from the room. Gwenda went up to the door and knocked.
"Essy, are you in bed?"
A pause. "Yes, miss."
"What is it? Are you ill?"
No answer.
"Is there anything wrong?"
A longer pause. "I've got th' faace-ache."
"Oh, poor thing! Can I do anything for you?"
"Naw, Miss Gwenda, thank yo."
"Well, call me if I can."
But somehow she knew that Essy wouldn't call.
She went on, passing her father's door at the stair head. It was shut. She could hear him moving heavily within the room. On the other side of the landing was the room over the study that she shared with Alice.
The door stood wide. Alice in her thin nightgown could be seen sitting by the open window.
The nightgown, the small, slender body showing through, the hair, platted for the night, in two pig-tails that hung forward, one over each small breast, the tired face between the parted hair made Alice look childlike and pathetic.
Gwendolen had a pang of compassion.
"Dear lamb," she said. "That isn't any good. Fresh air won't do it. You'd much better wait till Papa gets a cold. Then you can catch it."
"It'll be his fault anyway," said Alice. "Serve him jolly well right if I get pneumonia."
"Pneumonia doesn't come to those who want it. I wonder what's wrong with Essy."
Alice was tired and sullen. "You'd better ask Jim Greatorex," she said.
"What do you mean, Ally?"
But Ally had set her small face hard.
"Can't you he sorry for her?" said Gwenda.
"Why should I be sorry for her? She's all right."
She had sorrow enough, but none to waste on Essy. Essy's way was easy. Essy had only to slink out to the back door and she could have her will. She didn't have to get pneumonia.
XII
John Greatorex did not die that night. He had no mind to die: he was a man of stubborn pugnacity and he fought his pneumonia.
The long gray house at Upthorne looks over the marshes of the high land above Garth. It stands alone, cut off by the marshes from the network of gray walls that links the village to the hill farms.
The light in its upper window burned till dawn, a sign to the brooding and solitary land. Up there, in the low room with its sunken ceiling, John Greatorex lay in the big bed and rallied a little as the clean air from the moors lapped him like water. For the doctor had thrown open all the windows of the house before he left. Presently Mrs. Gale, the untrained village nurse, would come and shut them in terror, and John Greatorex's pneumonia would get the upper hand. That was how the fight went on, with Steven Rowcliffe on John Greatorex's side and Mrs. Gale for the pneumonia. It was ten to one against John Greatorex and the doctor, for John Greatorex was most of the time unconscious and the doctor called but once or twice a day, while Mrs. Gale was always there to shut the windows as fast as he opened them. In the length and breadth of the Dale there wasn't another woman who would not have done the same. She was secure from criticism. If she didn't know how to nurse pneumonia, who did? Seeing that her own husband had died of it.
Young Rowcliffe was a dalesman and he knew his people. In six months his face had grown stiff in the struggle with them. It was making his voice stern and his eyes hard, so that they could see nothing round him but stupidity and distrust and an obstinacy even greater than his own.
Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for it. In his big provincial hospital he had had it practically his own way. He had faced a thousand horrible and intractable diseases with a thousand appliances and with an army of assistants and trained nurses under him. And if in his five years' private practice in Leeds he had come to grips with human nature, it had been at any rate a fair fight. If his work was harder his responsibility was less. He still had trained nurses under him; and if a case was beyond him there were specialists with whom he could consult.
Here he was single-handed. He was physician and surgeon and specialist and nurse in one. He had few appliances and no assistant beside naked and primeval nature, the vast high spaces, the clean waters and clean air of the moors.
Yet it was precisely these things that his romantic youth had cried for—that solitary combat and communion, that holy and solitary aid.
At thirty Rowcliffe was still in his romantic youth.
He had all its appearances about him. A life of continual labor and discomfort had kept his body slender; and all the edges of his face—clean-shaven except for its little dark moustache—were incomparably firm and clear. His skin was bronzed and reddened by sun and wind. The fine hard mouth under the little dark moustache was not so hard that it could not, sometimes, be tender. His irreproachable nose escaped the too high curve that would have made it arrogant. And his eyes, keen and hard in movement, by simply keeping quiet under lowered brows, became charged with a curious and engaging pathos.
Their pathos had appealed to the little red-haired, pink-skinned, green-eyed nurse who had worked under him in Leeds. She was clever and kind—much too kind, it was supposed—to Rowcliffe. There had been one or two others before the little red-haired nurse, so that, though he was growing hard, he had not grown bitter.
He was not in the least afraid of growing bitter; for he knew that his eyes, as long as he could keep them quiet, would preserve him from all necessity for bitterness.
Rowcliffe had always trusted a great deal to his eyes. Because of them he had left several young ladies, his patients, quite heart-broken in Leeds. The young ladies knew nothing about the little red-haired nurse and had never ceased to wonder why Dr. Rowcliffe did not want to marry them.
And Steven Rowcliffe's eyes, so disastrous to the young ladies in Leeds, saw nobody in Morfe whom he could possibly want to marry. The village of Morfe is built in a square round its green. The doctor's house stands on a plot of rising ground on the north side of the square, and from its front windows young Rowcliffe could see the inhabitants of Morfe coming and going before him as on a stage, and he kept count of them all. There were the three middle-aged maiden ladies in the long house on the west side of whom all he knew was that they ate far too many pikelets and griddle cakes for tea. There were the two old ladies in the white house next door who were always worrying him to sound their chests, one for her lungs and the other for her arteries. In spite of lungs and arteries they were very gay old ladies. The tubes of Rowcliffe's queer, new-fangled stethescope, appearing out of his coat pocket, sent them into ecstacies of mirth. They always made the same little joke about it; they called the stethescope his telephone. But of course he didn't want to marry them. There was the very old lady on the east side, who had had one stroke and was expecting another every day. There were the two unmarried daughters of a retired manufacturer on the far side of the Green. They were plump and had red cheeks, if he had cared for plumpness and red cheeks; but they had no conversation. The only pretty girl whose prettiness appealed to Rowcliffe had an "adenoid" mouth which he held to be a drawback. There was the daughter of his predecessor, but she again was well over forty, rigid and melancholy and dry.
All these people became visibly excited when they saw young Rowcliffe starting off in his trap and returning; but young Rowcliffe was never excited, never even interested when he saw them. There was nothing about them that appealed to his romantic youth.
As for Morfe Manor, and Garth Manor and Greffington Hall, they were nearly always empty, so that he had not very much chance of improving his acquaintance there.
And he had nothing to hope for from the summer visitors, girls with queer clothes and queer manners and queer accents; bouncing, convivial girls who spread themselves four abreast on the high roads; fat, lazy girls who sat about on the Green; blowsed, slouching girls who tramped the dales with knapsacks and no hats. The hard eyes of young Rowcliffe never softened as he looked at the summer visitors. Their behavior irritated him. It reminded him that there were women in the world and that he missed, quite unbearably at moments, the little red-haired nurse who had been so clever and so kind. Moreover it offended his romantic youth. The little publicans and shop-keepers of Morfe did not offend it; neither did the peasants and the farmers; they were part of the place; generations of them had been born in those gray houses, built from the gaunt ribs of the hills; whereas the presence of the summer visitors was an outrage to the silent and solitary country that his instincts inscrutably adored. No wonder that he didn't care to look at them.
* * * * *
