The Three Sisters. Sinclair May
refused her chicken-broth. She would neither eat nor drink. And a little before three Gwenda went for the doctor.
She had not told Alice she was going. She had not told anybody.
XV
She had to walk, for Mary had taken her bicycle. Nobody knew where
Mary had gone or when she had started or when she would be back.
But the four miles between Garth and Morfe were nothing to Gwenda, who would walk twenty for her own amusement. She would have stretched the way out indefinitely if she could; she would have piled Garthdale Moor on Greffington Edge and Karva on the top of them and put them between Garth and Morfe, so violent was her fear of Steven Rowcliffe.
She had no longer any desire to see him or to be seen by him. He had seen her twice too often, and too early and too late. After being caught on the moor at dawn, it was preposterous that she should show herself in the doorway of Upthorne at night.
How was he to know that she hadn't done it on purpose? Girls did these things. Poor little Ally had done them. And it was because Ally had done them that she had been taken and hidden away here where she couldn't do them any more.
But—couldn't she? Gwenda stood still, staring in her horror as the frightful thought struck her that Ally could, and that she would, the very minute she realised young Rowcliffe. And he would think—not that it mattered in the least what he thought—he would think that there were two of them.
If only, she said to herself, if only young Rowcliffe were a married man. Then even Ally couldn't—
Not that she blamed poor little Ally. She looked on little Ally as the victim of a malign and tragic tendency, the fragile vehicle of an alien and overpowering impulse. Little Ally was doomed. It wasn't her fault if she was made like that.
And this time it wouldn't be her fault at all. Their father would have driven her. Gwenda hated him for his persecution and exposure of the helpless creature.
She walked on thinking.
It wouldn't end with Ally. They were all three exposed and persecuted. For supposing—it wasn't likely, but supposing—that this Rowcliffe man was the sort of man she liked, supposing—what was still more unlikely—that he was the sort of man who would like her, where would be the good of it? Her father would spoil it all. He spoiled everything.
Well, no, to be perfectly accurate, not everything. There was one thing he had not spoiled, because he had never suspected its existence—her singular passion for the place. Of course, if he had suspected it, he would have stamped on it. It was his business to stamp on other people's passions. Luckily, it wasn't in him to conceive a passion for a place.
It had come upon her at first sight as they drove between twilight and night from Reyburn through Rathdale into Garthdale. It was when they had left the wooded land behind them and the moors lifted up their naked shoulders, one after another, darker than dark, into a sky already whitening above the hidden moon. And she saw Morfe, gray as iron, on its hill, bearing the square crown and the triple pendants of its lights; she saw the long straight line of Greffington Edge, hiding the secret moon, and Karva with the ashen west behind it. There was something in their form and in their gesture that called to her as if they knew her, as if they waited for her; they struck her with the shock of recognition, as if she had known them and had waited too.
And close beside her own wonder and excitement she had felt the deep and sullen repulsion of her companions. The Vicar sat huddled in his overcoat. His nostrils, pinched with repugnance, sniffed as they drank in the cold, clean air. From time to time he shuddered, and a hoarse muttering came from under the gray woolen scarf he had wound round his mouth and beard. He was the righteous man, sent into uttermost abominable exile for his daughter's sin. Behind him, on the back seat of the trap, Alice and Mary cowed under their capes and rugs. They had turned their shoulders to each other, hostile in their misery. Gwenda was sorry for them.
The gray road dipped and turned and plunged them to the bottom of Garthdale. The small, scattering lights of the village waited for her in the hollow, with something humble and sad and familiar in their setting. They too stung her with that poignant and secret sense of recognition.
"This is the place," the Vicar had said. He had addressed himself to Alice; and it had been as if he had said, This the place, the infernal, the damnable place, you've brought us to with your behavior.
Their hatred of it had made Gwenda love it. "You can have your old
Garthdale all to yourself," Alice had said. "Nobody else wants it."
That, to Gwenda, was the charm of it. The adorable place was her own. Nobody else wanted it. She loved it for itself. It had nothing but itself to offer her. And that was enough. It was almost, as she had said, too much. Her questing youth conceived no more rapturous adventure than to follow the sheep over Karva, to set out at twilight and see the immense night come down on the high moors above Upthorne; to get up when Alice was asleep and slip out and watch the dawn turning from gray to rose, and from rose to gold above Greffington Edge.
As it happened you saw sunrise and moonrise best from the platform of Morfe Green. There Greffington Edge breaks and falls away, and lets slip the dawn like a rosy scarf from its shoulder, and sets the moon free of her earth and gives her to the open sky.
But, just as the Vicar had spoiled Rowcliffe, so Rowcliffe had spoiled Morfe for Gwenda. Therefore her fear of him was mingled with resentment. It was as if he had had no business to be living there, in that house of his looking over the Green.
Incredible that she should have wanted to see and to know this person.
But now, that she didn't want to, of course she was going to see him.
* * * * *
At the bend of the road, within a mile of Morfe, Mary came riding on Gwenda's bicycle. Large parcels were slung from her handle bars. She had been shopping in the village.
Mary, bowed forward as she struggled with an upward slope, was not aware of Gwenda. But Gwenda was aware of Mary, and, not being in the mood for her, she struck off the road on to the moor and descended upon Morfe by the steep lane that leads from Karva into Rathdale.
It never occurred to her to wonder what Mary had been doing in Morfe, so evident was it that she had been shopping.
XVI
The doctor was at home, but he was engaged, at the moment, in the surgery.
The maid-servant asked if she would wait.
She waited in the little cold and formal dining-room that looked through two windows on to the Green. So formal and so cold, so utterly impersonal was the air of the doctor's mahogany furniture that her fear left her. It was as if the furniture assured her that she would not really see Rowcliffe; as for knowing him, she needn't worry.
She had sent in her card, printed for convenience with the names of the three sisters:
Miss Cartaret.
Miss Gwendolen Cartaret.
Miss Alice Cartaret.
She felt somehow that it protected her. She said to herself, "He won't know which of us it is."
* * * * *
Rowcliffe was washing his hands in the surgery when the card was brought to him. He frowned at the card.
"But—You've brought this before," he said. "I've seen the lady."
"No, sir. It's another lady."
"Another? Are you certain?"
"Yes,