Chapter 17

The house door shut and she came to them. She paused in the doorway, looking at the three who stood facing her, embarrassed and expectant. She seemed to be thinking that it was odd that they should stand there. The door, thrown back, hid Alice, who lay behind it on her sofa.

"Come in, Gwenda," said the Vicar with exaggerated suavity.

She came in and closed the door. Then she saw Alice.

She took the hand that Rowcliffe held out to her without looking at him. She was looking at Alice.

Alice gave a low cry and struggled to her feet.

"I thought you were never coming," she said.

Gwenda held her in her arms. She faced them.

"What have you been doing to her--all of you?"

Rowcliffe answered. Though he was the innocent one of the three he looked the guiltiest. He looked utterly ashamed.

"We've had rather a scene, and it's been a bit too much for her," he said.

"So I see," said Gwenda. She had not greeted Mary or her father.

"If you could persuade her to go upstairs to bed----"

"I've told you I won't go till he comes," said Ally.

She sat down on the sofa as a sign that she was going to wait.

"Till who comes?" Gwenda asked.

She stared at the three with a fierce amazement. And they were abashed.

"She doesn't know, Steve," said Mary.

"I certainly don't," said Gwenda.

She sat down beside Ally.

"Has anybody been bullying you, Ally?"

"They've all been bullying me except Steven. Steven's been an angel. He doesn't believe what they say. Papa says I'm a shameful girl, and Mary says I took Jim Greatorex from Essy. And they think----"

"Never mind what they think, darling."

"I must protest----"

The Vicar would have burst out again but that his son-in-law restrained him.

"Better leave her to Gwenda," he said.

He opened the door of the study. "Really, sir, I think you'd better. And you, too, Mary."

And with her husband's compelling hand on her shoulder Mary went into the study.

The Vicar followed them.

* * * * *

As the door closed on them Alice looked furtively around.

"What is it, Ally?" Gwenda said.

"Don't you know?" she whispered.

"No. You haven't told me anything."

"You don't know why I sent for you? Can't you think?"

Gwenda was silent.

"Gwenda--I'm in the most awful trouble----" She looked around again. Then she spoke rapidly and low with a fearful hoarse intensity.

"I won't tell them, but I'll tell you. They've been trying to get it out of me by bullying, but I wasn't going to let them. Gwenda--they wanted to make me tell straight out, there--before Steven. And I wouldn't--I wouldn't. They haven't got a word out of me. But it's true, what they say."

She paused.

"About me."

"My lamb, I don't know what they say about you."

"They say that I'm going to----"

Crouching where she sat, bent forward, staring with her stare, she whispered.

"Oh--Ally--darling----"

"I'm not ashamed, not the least little bit ashamed. And I don't care what they think of me. But I'm not going to tell them. I've told _you_ because I know you won't hate me, you won't think me awful. But I won't tell Mary, and I won't tell Papa. Or Steven. If I do they'll make me marry him."

"Was it--was it----"

Ally's instinct heard the name that her sister spared her.

"Yes--Yes--Yes. It is."

She added, "I don't care."

"Ally--what made you do it?"

"I don't--know."

"Was it because of Steven?"

Ally raised her head.

"No. It was _not_. Steven isn't fit to black his boots. I know that----"

"But--you don't care for him?"

"I did--I did. I do. I care awfully----"

"Well----"

"Oh, Gwenda, can they _make_ me marry him?"

"You don't want to marry him?"

Ally shook her head, slowly, forlornly.

"I see. You're ashamed of him."

"I'm _not_ ashamed. I told you I wasn't. It isn't that----"

"What is it?"

"I'm afraid."

"Afraid----"

"It isn't his fault. He wants to marry me. He wanted to all the time. He never meant that it should be like this. He asked me to marry him. Before it happened. Over and over again he asked me and I wouldn't have him."

"Why wouldn't you?"

"I've told you. Because I'm afraid."

"Why are you afraid?"

"I don't know. I'm not really afraid of _him_. I think I'm afraid of what he might do to me if I married him."

"_Do_ to you?"

"Yes. He might beat me. They always do, you know, those sort of men, when you marry them. I couldn't bear to be beaten."

"Oh----" Gwenda drew in her breath.

"He wouldn't do it, Gwenda, if he knew what he was about. But he might if he didn't. You see, they say he drinks. That's what frightens me. That's why I daren't tell Papa. Papa wouldn't care if he did beat me. He'd say it was my punishment."

"If you feel like that about it you mustn't marry him."

"They'll make me."

"They shan't make you. I won't let them. It'll be all right, darling. I'll take you away with me to-morrow, and look after you, and keep you safe."

"But--they'll have to know."

"Yes. They'll have to know. I'll tell them."

She rose.

"Stay here," she said. "And keep quiet. I'm going to tell them now."

"Not now--please, not now."

"Yes. Now. It'll be all over. And you'll sleep."

* * * * *

She went in to where they waited for her.

Her father and her sister lifted their eyes to her as she came in. Rowcliffe had turned away.

"Has she said anything?"

(Mary spoke.)

"Yes."

The Vicar looked sternly at his second daughter.

"She denies it?"

"No, Papa. She doesn't deny it."

He drove it home. "Has--she--confessed?"

"She's told me it's true--what you think."

In the silence that fell on the four Rowcliffe stayed where he stood, downcast and averted. It was as if he felt that Gwenda could have charged him with betrayal of a trust.

The Vicar looked at his watch. He turned to Rowcliffe.

"Is that fellow coming, or is he not?"

"He won't funk it," said Rowcliffe.

He turned. His eyes met Gwenda's. "I think I can answer for his coming."

"Do you mean Jim Greatorex?" she said.

"Yes."

"What is it that he won't funk?"

She looked from one to the other. Nobody answered her. It was as if they were, all three, afraid of her.

"I see," she said. "If you ask me I think he'd much better not come."

"My dear Gwenda----" The Vicar was deferent to the power that had dragged Ally's confession from her.

"We _must_ get through with this. The sooner the better. It's what we're all here for."

"I know. Still--I think you'll have to leave it."

"Leave it?"

"Yes, Papa."

"We can't leave it," said Rowcliffe. "Something's got to be done."

The Vicar groaned and Rowcliffe had pity on him.

"If you'd like me to do it--I can interview him."

"I wish you would."

"Very well." He moved uneasily. "I'd better see him here, hadn't I?"

"You'd better not see him anywhere," said Gwenda. "He can't marry her."

She held them all three by the sheer shock of it.

The Vicar spoke first. "What do you mean, 'he can't'? He _must_."

"He must not. Ally doesn't want to marry him. He asked her long ago and she wouldn't have him."

"Do you mean," said Rowcliffe, surprised out of his reticence, "before this happened?"

"Yes."

"And she wouldn't have him?"

"No. She was afraid of him."

"She was afraid of him--and yet----" It was Mary who spoke now.

"Yes, Mary. And yet--she cared for him."

The Vicar turned on her.

"You're as bad as she is. How can you bring yourself to speak of it, if you're a modest girl? You've just told us that your sister's shameless. Are we to suppose that you're defending her?"

"I am defending her. There's nobody else to do it. You've all set on her and tortured her----"

"Not all, Gwenda," said Rowcliffe. But she did not heed him.

"She'd have told you everything if you hadn't frightened her. You haven't had an atom of pity for her. You've never thought of _her_ for a minute. You've been thinking of yourselves. You might have killed her. And you didn't care."

The Vicar looked at her.

"It's you, Gwenda, who don't care."

"About what she's done, you mean? I don't. You ought to be gentle with her, Papa. You drove her to it."

Rowcliffe answered.

"We'll not say what drove her, Gwenda."

"She was driven," she said.

"'Let no man say he is tempted of God when he is driven by his own lusts and enticed,'" said the Vicar.

He had risen, and the movement brought him face to face with Gwenda. And as she looked at him it was as if she saw vividly and for the first time the profound unspirituality of her father's face. She knew from what source his eyes drew their darkness. She understood the meaning of the gross red mouth that showed itself in the fierce lifting of the ascetic, grim moustache. And she conceived a horror of his fatherhood.

"No man ought to say that of his own daughter. How does he know what's her own and what's his?" she said.

Rowcliffe stared at her in a sort of awful admiration. She was terrible; she was fierce; she was mad. But it was the fierceness and the madness of pity and of compassion.

She went on.

"You've no business to be hard on her. You must have known."

"I knew nothing," said the Vicar.

He appealed to her with a helpless gesture of his hands.

"You did know. You were warned. You were told not to shut her up. And you did shut her up. You can't blame her if she got away. You flung her to Jim Greatorex. There wasn't anybody who cared for her but him."

"Cared for her!" He snarled his disgust.

"Yes. Cared for her. You think that's horrible of her--that she should have gone to him--and yet you want to tie her to him when she's afraid of him. And I think it's horrible of you."

"She must marry him." Mary spoke again. "She's brought it on herself, Gwenda."

"She hasn't brought it on herself. And she shan't marry him."

"I'm afraid she'll have to," Rowcliffe said.

"She won't have to if I take her away somewhere and look after her. I mean to do it. I'll work for her. I'll take care of the child."

"Oh, you--_you----!_" The Vicar waved her away with a frantic flapping of his hands.

He turned to his son-in-law.

"Rowcliffe--I beg you--will you use your influence?"

"I have none."

That drew her. "Steven--help me--can't you see how terrible it is if she's afraid of him?"

"But _is_ she?"

He looked at her with his miserable eyes, then turned them from her, considering gravely what she had said. It was then, while Rowcliffe was considering it, that the garden gate opened violently and fell to.

They waited for the sound of the front door bell.

Instead of it they heard two doors open and Ally's voice calling to Greatorex in the hall.

As the Vicar flung himself from his study into the other room he saw Alice standing close to Greatorex by the shut door. Her lover's arms were round her.

He laid his hands on them as if to tear them apart.

"You shall not touch my daughter--until you've married her."

The young man's right arm threw him off; his left arm remained round Alice.

"It's yo' s'all nat tooch her, Mr. Cartaret," he said. "Ef yo' coom between her an' mae I s'all 'ave t' kill yo'. I'd think nowt of it. Dawn't yo' bae freetened, my laass," he murmured tenderly.

The next instant he was fierce again.

"An' look yo' 'ere, Mr. Cartaret. It was yo' who aassked mae t' marry Assy. Do yo' aassk mae t' marry Assy now? Naw! Assy may rot for all yo' care. (It's all right, my sweet'eart. It's all right.) I'd a married Assy right enoof ef I'd 'a' looved her. But do yo' suppawss I'd 'a' doon it fer yore meddlin'? Naw! An' yo' need n' aassk mae t' marry yore daughter--(There--there--my awn laass)--"

"You are not going to be asked," said Gwenda. "You are not going to marry her."

"Gwenda," said the Vicar, "you will be good enough to leave this to me."

"It can't be left to anybody but Ally."

"It s'all be laft to her," said Greatorex.

He had loosened his hold of Alice, but he still stood between her and her father.

"It's for her t' saay ef she'll 'aave mae."

"She has said she won't, Mr. Greatorex."

"Ay, she's said it to mae, woonce. But I rackon she'll 'ave mae now."

"Not even now."

"She's toald yo'?"

He did not meet her eyes.

"Yes."

"She's toald yo' she's afraid o' mae?"

"Yes. And you know why."

"Ay. I knaw. Yo're afraid o' mae, Ally, because yo've 'eard I haven't always been as sober as I might bae; but yo're nat 'aalf as afraid o' mae, droonk or sober, as yo' are of yore awn faather. Yo' dawn't think I s'all bae 'aalf as 'ard an' crooil to yo' as yore faather is. She doosn't, Mr. Cartaret, an' thot's Gawd's truth."

"I protest," said the Vicar.

"Yo' stond baack, sir. It's for 'er t' saay."

He turned to her, infinitely reverent, infinitely tender.

"Will yo' staay with 'im? Or will yo' coom with mae?"

"I'll come with you."

With one shoulder turned to her father, she cowered to her lover's breast.

"Ay, an' yo' need n' be afraaid I'll not bae sober. I'll bae sober enoof now. D'ye 'ear, Mr. Cartaret? Yo' need n' bae afraaid, either. I'll kape sober. I'd kape sober all my life ef it was awnly t' spite yo'. An' I'll maake 'er 'appy. For I rackon theer's noothin' I could think on would spite yo' moor. Yo' want mae t' marry 'er t' poonish 'er. _I_ knaw."

"That'll do, Greatorex," said Rowcliffe.

"Ay. It'll do," said Greatorex with a grin of satisfaction.

He turned to Alice, the triumph still flaming in his face. "Yo're _nat_ afraaid of mae?"

"No," she said gently. "Not now."

"Yo navver were," said Greatorex; and he laughed.

That laugh was more than Mr. Cartaret could bear. He thrust out his face toward Greatorex.

Rowcliffe, watching them, saw that he trembled and that the thrust-out, furious face was flushed deeply on the left side.

The Vicar boomed.

"You will leave my house this instant, Mr. Greatorex. And you will never come into it again."

But Greatorex was already looking for his cap.

"I'll navver coom into et again," he assented placably.

* * * * *

There were no prayers at the Vicarage that night.

* * * * *

It was nearly eleven o'clock. Greatorex was gone. Gwenda was upstairs helping Alice to undress. Mary sat alone in the dining-room, crying steadily. The Vicar and Rowcliffe were in the study.

In all this terrible business of Alice, the Vicar felt that his son-in-law had been a comfort to him.

"Rowcliffe," he said suddenly, "I feel very queer."

"I don't wonder, sir. I should go to bed if I were you."

"I shall. Presently."

The one-sided flush deepened and darkened as he brooded. It fascinated Rowcliffe.

"I think it would be better," said the Vicar slowly, "if I left the parish. It's the only solution I can see."

He meant to the problem of his respectability.

Rowcliffe said yes, perhaps it would be better.

He was thinking that it would solve his problem too.

For he knew that there would be a problem if Gwenda came back to her father.

The Vicar rose heavily and went to his roll-top desk. He opened it and began fumbling about in it, looking for things.

He was doing this, it seemed to his son-in-law, for quite a long time.

But it was only eleven o'clock when Mary heard sounds in the study that terrified her, of a chair overturned and of a heavy body falling to the floor. And then Steven called to her.

She found him kneeling on the floor beside her father, loosening his clothes. The Vicar's face, which she discerned half hidden between the bending head of Rowcliffe and his arms, was purple and horribly distorted.

Rowcliffe did not look at her.

"He's in a fit," he said. "Go upstairs and fetch Gwenda. And for God's sake don't let Ally see him."

XLIX

The village knew all about Jim Greatorex and Alice Cartaret now. Where their names had been whispered by two or three in the bar of the Red Lion, over the post office counter, in the schoolhouse, in the smithy, and on the open road, the loud scandal of them burst with horror.

For the first time in his life Jim Greatorex was made aware that public opinion was against him. Wherever he showed himself the men slunk from him and the women stared. He set his teeth and held his chin up and passed them as if he had not seen them. He was determined to defy public opinion.

Standing in the door of his kinsman's smithy, he defied it.

It was the day before his wedding. He had been riding home from Morfe Market and his mare Daisy had cast a shoe coming down the hill. He rode her up to the smithy and called for Blenkiron, shouting his need.

Blenkiron came out and looked at him sulkily.

"I'll shoe t' maare," he said, "but yo'll stand outside t' smithy, Jim Greatorex."

For answer Jim rode the mare into the smithy and dismounted there.

Then Blenkiron spoke.

"You'd best 'ave staayed where yo' were. But yo've coom in an' yo' s'all 'ave a bit o' my toongue. To-morra's yore weddin' day, I 'ear?"

Jim intimated that if it was his wedding day it was no business of Blenkiron's.

"Wall," said the blacksmith, "ef they dawn't gie yo' soom roough music to-morra night, it'll bae better loock than yo' desarve--t' two o' yo'."

Greatorex scowled at his kinsman.

"Look yo' 'ere, John Blenkiron, I warn yo'. Any man in t' Daale thot speaaks woon word agen my wife 'e s'all 'ave 'is nack wroong."

"An' 'ow 'bout t' women, Jimmy? There'll bae a sight o' nacks fer yo' t' wring, I rackon. They'll 'ave soomat t' saay to 'er, yore laady."

"T' women? T' women? Domned sight she'll keer for what they saay. There is n' woon o' they bitches as is fit t' kneel in t' mood to 'er t' tooch t' sawle of 'er boots."

Blenkiron peered up at him from the crook of the mare's hind leg.

"Nat Assy Gaale?" he said.

"Assy Gaale? 'Oo's she to mook _'er_ naame with 'er dirty toongue?"

"Yo'll not goa far thot road, Jimmy. 'Tis wi' t' womenfawlk yo'll 'aave t' racken."

He knew it.

The first he had to reckon with was Maggie.

Maggie, being given notice, had refused to take it.

"Yo' can please yoresel, Mr. Greatorex. I can goa. I can goa. But ef I goa yo'll nat find anoother woman as'll coom to yo'. There's nat woon as'll keer mooch t' work for _yore_ laady."

"Wull yo' wark for 'er, Maaggie?" he had said.

And Maggie, with a sullen look and hitching her coarse apron, had replied remarkably:

"Ef Assy Gaale can wash fer er I rackon _I_ can shift to baake an' clane."

"Wull yo' waait on 'er?" he had persisted.

Maggie had turned away her face from him.

"Ay, I'll waait on 'er," she said.

And Maggie had stayed to bake and clean. Rough and sullen, without a smile, she had waited on young Mrs. Greatorex.

* * * * *

But Alice was not afraid of Maggie. She was not going to admit for a moment that she was afraid of her. She was not going to admit that she was afraid of anything but one thing--that her father would die.

If he died she would have killed him.

Or, rather, she and Greatorex would have killed him between them.

This statement Ally held to and reiterated and refused to qualify.

For Alice at Upthorne had become a creature matchless in cunning and of subtle and marvelous resource. She had been terrified and tortured, shamed and cowed. She had been hounded to her marriage and conveyed with an appalling suddenness to Upthorne, that place of sinister and terrible suggestion, and the bed in which John Greatorex had died had been her marriage bed. Her mind, like a thing pursued and in deadly peril, took instantaneously a line. It doubled and dodged; it hid itself; its instinct was expert in disguises, in subterfuges and shifts.

In her soul she knew that she was done for if she once admitted and gave in to her fear of Upthorne and of her husband's house, or if she were ever to feel again her fear of Greatorex, which was the most intolerable of all her fears. It was as if Nature itself were aware that, if Ally were not dispossessed of that terror before Greatorex's child was born her own purpose would be insecure; as if the unborn child, the flesh and blood of the Greatorexes that had entered into her, protested against her disastrous cowardice.

So, without Ally being in the least aware of it, Ally's mind, struggling toward sanity, fabricated one enormous fear, the fear of her father's death, a fear that she could own and face, and set it up in place of that secret and dangerous thing which was the fear of life itself.

Ally, insisting a dozen times a day that she had killed poor Papa, was completely taken in by this play of her surreptitiously self-preserving soul. Even Rowcliffe was taken in by it. He called it a morbid obsession. And he began to wonder whether he had not been mistaken about Ally after all, whether her nature was not more subtle and sensitive than he had guessed, more intricately and dangerously mixed.

For the sadness of the desolate land, of the naked hillsides, of the moor marshes with their ghostly mists; the brooding of the watchful, solitary house, the horror of haunted twilights, of nightfall and of midnights now and then when Greatorex was abroad looking after his cattle and she lay alone under the white ceiling that sagged above her bed and heard the weak wind picking at the pane; her fear of Maggie and of what Maggie had been to Greatorex and might be again; her fear of the savage, violent and repulsive elements in the man who was her god; her fear of her own repulsion; the tremor of her recoiling nerves; premonitions of her alien blood, the vague melancholy of her secret motherhood; they were all mingled together and hidden from her in the vast gloom of her one fear.

And once the dominant terror was set up, her instinct found a thousand ways of strengthening it. Through her adoration of her lover her mind had become saturated with his mournful consciousness of sin. In their moments of contrition they were both convinced that they would be punished. But Ally had borne her sin superbly; she had declared that it was hers and hers only, and that she and not Greatorex would be punished. And now the punishment had come. She persuaded herself that her father's death was the retribution Heaven required.

* * * * *

And all the time, through the perilous months, Nature, mindful of her own, tightened her hold on Ally through Ally's fear. Ally was afraid to be left alone with it. Therefore she never let Greatorex out of her sight if she could help it. She followed him from room to room of the sad house where he was painting and papering and whitewashing to make it fine for her. Where he was she had to be. Stowed away in some swept corner, she would sit with her sweet and sorrowful eyes fixed on him as he labored. She trotted after him through the house and out into the mistal and up the Three Fields. She would crouch on a heap of corn-sacks, wrapped in a fur coat, and watch him at his work in the stable and the cow-byre. In her need to immortalise this passion she could not have done better. Her utter dependence on him flattered and softened the distrustful, violent and headstrong man. Her one chance, and Ally knew it, was to cling. If she had once shamed him by her fastidious shrinking she would have lost him; for, as Mrs. Gale had told her long ago, you could do nothing with Jimmy when he was shamed. Maggie, for all her coarseness, had contrived to shame him; so had Essy in her freedom and her pride. Ally's clinging, so far from irritating or obstructing him, drew out the infinite pity and tenderness he had for all sick and helpless things. He could no more have pushed little Ally from him than he could have kicked a mothering ewe, or stamped on a new dropped lamb. He would call to her if she failed to come. He would hold out his big hand to her as he would have held it to a child. Her smallness, her fineness and fragility enchanted him. The palms of her hands had the smoothness and softness of silk, and they made a sound like silk as they withdrew themselves with a lingering, stroking touch from his. He still felt, with a fearful and admiring wonder, the difference of her flesh from his.