The Three Sisters. Sinclair May
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.
* * * * *
But one night in September, when the moon was high in the south, as he was driving toward Garth on his way to Upthorne, the eyes of young Rowcliffe were startled out of their aversion by the sudden and incredible appearance of a girl.
It was at the bend of the road where Karva lowers its head and sinks back on the moor; and she came swinging up the hill as Rowcliffe's horse scraped his way slowly down it. She was in white (he couldn't have missed her) and she carried herself like a huntress; slender and quick, with high, sharp-pointed breasts. She looked at him as she passed and her face was wide-eyed and luminous under the moon. Her lips were parted with her speed, so that, instinctively, his hands tightened on the reins as if he had thought that she was going to speak to him. But of course she did not speak.
He looked back and saw her swing off the high road and go up Karva. A flock of mountain sheep started from their couches on the heather and looked at her, and she went driving them before her. They trailed up Karva slowly, in a long line, gray in the moonlight. Their mournful, musical voices came to him from the hill.
He saw her again late—incredibly late—that night as the moon swept from the south toward Karva. She was a long way off, coming down from her hill, a white speck on the gray moor. He pulled up his horse and waited below the point where the track she followed struck the high road; he even got out of his trap and examined, deliberately, his horse's hoofs in turn, spinning out the time. When he heard her he drew himself upright and looked straight at her as she passed him. She flashed by like a huntress, like Artemis carrying the young moon on her forehead. From the turn of her head and the even falling of her feet he felt her unconscious of his existence. And her unconsciousness was hateful to him. It wiped him clean out of the universe of noticeable things.
The apparition fairly cried to his romantic youth. And he said to himself. "Who is the strange girl who walks on the moor by herself at night and isn't afraid?"
* * * * *
He saw her three times after that; once in the broad daylight, on the high road near Morfe, when she passed him with a still more perfect and inimical unconsciousness; once in the distance on the moor, when he caught her, short-skirted and wild, jumping the wide water courses as they came, evidently under the impression that she was unobserved. And he smiled and said to himself, "She's doing it for fun, pure fun."
The third time he came upon her at dawn with the dew on her skirts and on her hair. She darted away at the clank of his horse's hoofs, half-savage, divinely shy. And he said to himself that time, "I'm getting on. She's aware of me all right."
She had come down from Karva, and he was on his way to Morfe from Upthorne. He had sat up all night with John Greatorex who had died at dawn.
The smell of the sick man, and of the bed and of the