Chapter 18

To be sure Jim's tenderness was partly penitential. Only it was Ally alone who had moved him to a perfect and unbearable contrition. For the two women whom he had loved and left Greatorex had felt nothing but a passing pang. For the woman he had made his wife he would go always with a wound in his soul.

And with Ally, too, the supernatural came to Nature's aid. Her fear had a profound strain of the uncanny in it, and Jim's bodily presence was her shelter from her fear. And as it bound them flesh to flesh, closer and closer, it wedded them in one memory, one consolation and one soul.

* * * * *

One day she had followed him into the stable, and on the window-sill, among all the cobwebs where it had been put away and forgotten, she found the little bottle of chlorodyne.

She took it up, and Jim scolded her gently as if she had been a child.

"Yore lil haands is always maddlin'. Yo' put thot down."

"What is it?"

"It's poison, is thot. There's enoof there t' kill a maan. Yo' put it down whan I tall yo'."

She put it down obediently in its place on the window-sill among the cobwebs.

He made a nest for her of clean hay, where she sat and watched him as he gave Daisy her feed of corn. She watched every movement of him, every gesture, thoughtful and intent.

"I can't think, Jim, why I ever was afraid of you. _Was_ I afraid of you?"

Greatorex grinned.

"Yo' used t' saay yo' were."

"How silly of me. And I used to be afraid of Maggie."

"_I_'ve been afraaid of Maaggie afore now. She's got a roough side t' 'er toongue and she can use it. But she'll nat use it on yo'. Yo've naw call to be afraaid ef annybody. There isn't woon would hoort a lil thing like yo'."

"They say things about me. I know they do."

"And yo' dawn't keer what they saay, do yo'?"

"I don't care a rap. But I think it's cruel of them, all the same."

"But yo're happy enoof, aren't yo'--all the same?"

"I'm very happy. At least I would be if it wasn't for poor Papa. It wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for what we did."

Wherever they started, whatever round they fetched, it was to this that they returned.

And always Jim met it with the same answer:

"'Tisn' what we doon; 'tis what 'e doon. An' annyhow it had to bae."

Every week Rowcliffe came to see her and every week Jim said to him: "She's at it still and I caan't move 'er."

And every week Rowcliffe said: "Wait. She'll be better before long."

And Jim waited.

He waited till one afternoon in February, when they were again in the stable together. He had turned his back on her for a moment.

When he looked round she was gone from her seat on the cornsacks. She was standing by the window-sill with the bottle of chlorodyne in her hand and at her lips. He thought she was smelling it.

She tilted her head back. Her eyes slewed sidelong toward him. They quivered as he leaped to her.

She had not drunk a drop and he knew it, but she clutched her bottle with a febrile obstinacy. He had to loosen her little fingers one by one.

He poured the liquid into the stable gutter and flung the bottle on to the dung heap in the mistal.

"What were you doing wi' thot stoof?" he said.

"I don't know. I was thinking of Papa."

After that he never left her until Rowcliffe came.

Rowcliffe said: "She's got it into her head he's going to die, and she thinks she's killed him. You'd better let me take her to see him."

L

The Vicar had solved his problem by his stroke, but not quite as he had anticipated.

Nothing had ever turned out as he had planned or thought or willed. He had planned to leave the parish. He had thought that in his wisdom he had saved Alice by shutting her up in Garthdale. He had thought that she was safe at choir-practice with Jim Greatorex. He had thought that Mary was devoted to him and that Gwenda was capable of all disobedience and all iniquity. She had gone away and he had forbidden her to come back again. He had also forbidden Greatorex to enter his house.

And Greatorex was entering it every day, for news of him to take to Alice at Upthorne. Gwenda had come back and would never go again, and it was she and not Mary who had proved herself devoted. And it was not his wisdom but Greatorex's scandalous passion for her that had saved Alice. As for leaving the parish because of the scandal, the Vicar would never leave it now. He was tied there in his Vicarage by his stroke.

It left him with a paralysis of the right side and an utter confusion and enfeeblement of intellect.

In three months he recovered partially from the paralysis. But the flooding of his brain had submerged or carried away whole tracts of recent memory, and the last vivid, violent impression--Alice's affair--was wiped out.

There was no reason why he should not stay on. What was left of his memory told him that Alice was at the Vicarage, and he was worried because he never saw her about.

He did not know that the small gray house above the churchyard had become a place of sinister and scandalous tragedy; that his name and his youngest daughter's name were bywords in three parishes; and that Alice had been married in conspicuous haste by the horrified Vicar of Greffington to a man whom only charitable people regarded as her seducer.

And the order of time had ceased for him with this breach in the sequence of events. He had a dim but enduring impression that it was always prayer time. No hours marked the long stretches of blank darkness and of confused and crowded twilight. Only, now and then, a little light pulsed feebly in his brain, a flash that renewed itself day by day; and day by day, in a fresh experience, he was aware that he was ill.

It was as if the world stood still and his mind moved. It "wandered," as they said. And in its wanderings it came upon strange gaps and hollows and fantastic dislocations, landslips where a whole foreground had given way. It looked at these things with a serene and dreamlike wonder and passed on.

And in the background, on some half-lit, isolated tract of memory, raised above ruin, and infinitely remote, he saw the figure of his youngest daughter. It was a girlish, innocent figure, and though, because of the whiteness of its face, he confused it now and then with the figure of Alice's dead mother, his first wife, he was aware that it was really Alice.

This figure of Alice moved him with a vague and tender yearning.

What puzzled and worried him was that in his flashes of luminous experience he didn't see her there. And it was then that the Vicar would make himself wonderful and piteous by asking, a dozen times a day, "Where's Ally?"

For by the stroke that made him wonderful and piteous the Vicar's character and his temperament were changed. Nothing was left of Ally's tyrant and Robina's victim, the middle-aged celibate, filled with the fury of frustration and profoundly sorry for himself. His place was taken by a gentle old man, an old man of an appealing and childlike innocence, pure from all lust, from all self-pity, enjoying, actually enjoying, the consideration that his stroke had brought him.

He was changed no less remarkably in his affections. He was utterly indifferent to Mary, whom he had been fond of. He yearned for Alice, whom he had hated. And he clung incessantly to Gwenda, whom he had feared.

When he looked round in his strange and awful gentleness and said, "Where's Ally?" his voice was the voice of a mother calling for her child. And when he said, "Where's Gwenda?" it was the voice of a child calling for its mother.

And as he continually thought that Alice was at the Vicarage when she was at Upthorne, so he was convinced that Gwenda had left him when she was there.

* * * * *

Rowcliffe judged that this confusion of the Vicar's would be favorable to his experiment.

And it was.

When Mr. Cartaret saw his youngest daughter for the first time since their violent rupture he gazed at her tranquilly and said, "And where have _you_ been all this time?"

"Not very far, Papa."

He smiled sweetly.

"I thought you'd run away from your poor old father. Let me see--was it Ally? My memory's going. No. It was Gwenda who ran away. Wasn't it Gwenda?"

"Yes, Papa."

"Well--she must come back again. I can't do without Gwenda."

"She has come back, Papa."

"She's always coming hack. But she'll go away again. Where is she?"

"I'm here, Papa dear."

"Here one minute," said the Vicar, "and gone the next."

"No--no. I'm not going. I shall never go away and leave you."

"So you say," said the Vicar. "So you say."

He looked round uneasily.

"It's time for Ally to go to bed. Has Essy brought her milk?"

His head bowed to his breast. He fell into a doze. Ally watched.

And in the outer room Gwenda and Steven Rowcliffe talked together.

"Steven--he's always going on like that. It breaks my heart."

"I know, dear, I know."

"Do you think he'll ever remember?"

"I don't know. I don't think so."

Then they sat together without speaking. She was thinking: "How good he is. Surely I may love him for his goodness?" And he that the old man in there had solved _his_ problem, but that his own had been taken out of his hands.

And he saw no solution.

If the Vicar had gone away and taken Gwenda with him, that would have solved it. God knew he had been willing enough to solve it that way.

But here they were, flung together, thrust toward each other when they should have torn themselves apart; tied, both of them, to a place they could not leave. Week in, week out, he would be obliged to see her whether he would or no. And when her tired face rebuked his senses, she drew him by her tenderness; she held him by her goodness. There was only one thing for him to do--to clear out. It was his plain and simple duty. If it hadn't been for Alice and for that old man he would have done it. But, because of them, it was his still plainer and simpler duty to stay where he was, to stick to her and see her through.

He couldn't help it if his problem was taken out of his hands.

They started. They looked at each other and smiled their strained and tragic smile.

In the inner room the Vicar was calling for Gwenda.

It was prayer time, he said.

* * * * *

Rowcliffe had to drive Alice back that night to Upthorne.

"Well," he said, as they left the Vicarage behind them, "you see he isn't going to die."

"No," said Alice. "But he's out of his mind. I haven't killed him. I've done worse. I've driven him mad."

And she stuck to it. She couldn't afford to part with her fear--yet.

Rowcliffe was distressed at the failure of his experiment. He told Greatorex that there was nothing to be done but to wait patiently till June. Then--perhaps--they would see.

In his own mind he had very little hope. He said to himself that he didn't like the turn Ally's obsession had taken. It was _too_ morbid.

But when May came Alice lay in the big bed under the sagging ceiling with a lamentably small baby in her arms, and Greatorex sat beside her by the hour together, with his eyes fixed on her white face. Rowcliffe had told him to be on the lookout for some new thing or for some more violent sign of the old obsession. But nine days had passed and he had seen no sign. Her eyes looked at him and at her child with the same lucid, drowsy ecstasy.

And in nine days she had only asked him once if he knew how poor Papa was?

Her fear had left her. It had served its purpose.

LI

There was no prayer time at the Vicarage any more.

* * * * *

There was no more time at all there as the world counts time.

The hours no longer passed in a procession marked by distinguishable days. They rolled round and round in an interminable circle, monotonously renewed, monotonously returning upon itself. The Vicar was the center of the circle. The hours were sounded and measured by his monotonously recurring needs. But the days were neither measured nor marked. They were all of one shade. There was no difference between Sunday and Monday in the Vicarage now. They talked of the Vicar's good days and his bad days, that was all.

For in this house where time had ceased they talked incessantly of time. But it was always _his_ time; the time for his early morning cup of tea; the time for his medicine; the time for his breakfast; the time for reading his chapter to him while he dozed; the time for washing him, for dressing him, for taking him out (he went out now, in a wheel-chair drawn by Peacock's pony); the time for his medicine again; his dinner time; the time for his afternoon sleep; his tea-time; the time for his last dose of medicine; his supper time and his time for being undressed and put to bed. And there were several times during the night which were his times also.

The Vicar had desired supremacy in his Vicarage and he was at last supreme. He was supreme over his daughter Gwenda. The stubborn, intractable creature was at his feet. She was his to bend or break or utterly destroy. She who was capable of anything was capable of an indestructible devotion. His times, the relentless, the monotonously recurring, were her times too.

If it had not been for Steven Rowcliffe she would have had none to call her own (except night time, when the Vicar slept). But Rowcliffe had kept to his days for visiting the Vicarage. He came twice or thrice a week; not counting Wednesdays. Only, though Mary did not know it, he came as often as not in the evenings at dusk, just after the Vicar had been put to bed. When it was wet he sat in the dining-room with Gwenda. When it was fine he took her out on to the moor under Karva.

They always went the same way, up the green sheep-track that they knew; they always turned back at the same place, where the stream he had seen her jumping ran from the hill; and they always took the same time to go and turn. They never stopped and never lingered; but went always at the same sharp pace, and kept the same distance from each other. It was as if by saying to themselves, "Never any further than the stream; never any longer than thirty-five minutes; never any nearer than we are now," they defined the limits of their whole relation. Sometimes they hardly spoke as they walked. They parted with casual words and with no touching of their hands and with the same thought unspoken--"Till the next time."

But these times which were theirs only did not count as time. They belonged to another scale of feeling and another order of reality. Their moments had another pulse, another rhythm and vibration. They burned as they beat. While they lasted Gwenda's life was lived with an intensity that left time outside its measure. Through this intensity she drew the strength to go on, to endure the unendurable with joy.

* * * * *

But Rowcliffe could not endure the unendurable at all. He was savage when he thought of it. That was her life and she would never get away from it. She, who was born for the wild open air and for youth and strength and freedom, would be shut up in that house and tied to that half-paralyzed, half-imbecile old man forever. It was damnable. And he, Rowcliffe, could have prevented it if he had only known. And if Mary had not lied to him.

And when his common sense warned him of their danger, and his conscience reproached him with leading her into it, he said to himself, "I can't help it if it is dangerous. It's been taken out of my hands. If somebody doesn't drag her out of doors, she'll get ill. If somebody doesn't talk to her she'll grow morbid. And there's nobody but me."

He sheltered himself in the immensity of her tragedy. Its darkness covered them. Her sadness and her isolation sanctified them. Alice had her husband and her child. Mary had--all she wanted. Gwenda had nobody but him.

* * * * *

She had never had anybody but him. For in the beginning the Vicar and his daughters had failed to make friends among their own sort. Up in the Dale there had been few to make, and those few Mr. Cartaret had contrived to alienate one after another by his deplorable legend and by the austere unpleasantness of his personality. People had not been prepared for intimacy with a Vicar separated so outrageously from his third wife. Nobody knew whether it was he or his third wife who had been outrageous, but the Vicar's manner was not such as to procure for him the benefit of any doubt. The fact remained that the poor man was handicapped by an outrageous daughter, and Alice's behavior was obviously as much the Vicar's fault as his misfortune. And it had been felt that Gwenda had not done anything to redeem her father's and her sister's eccentricities, and that Mary, though she was a nice girl, had hardly done enough. For the last eighteen months visits at the Vicarage had been perfunctory and very brief, month by month they had diminished, and before Mary's marriage they had almost ceased.

Still, Mary's marriage had appeased the parish. Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe had atoned for the third Mrs. Cartaret's suspicious absence and for Gwenda Cartaret's flight. Lady Frances Gilbey's large wing had further protected Gwenda.

Then, suddenly, the tale of Alice Cartaret and Greatorex went round, and it was as if the Vicarage had opened and given up its secret.

At first, the sheer extremity of his disaster had sheltered the Vicar from his own scandal. Through all Garthdale and Rathdale, in the Manors and the Lodges and the Granges, in the farmhouses and the cottages, in the inns and little shops, there was a stir of pity and compassion. The people who had left off calling at the Vicarage called again with sympathy and kind inquiries. They were inclined to forget how impossible the Cartarets had been. They were sorry for Gwenda. But they had been checked in their advances by Gwenda's palpable recoil. She had no time to give to callers. Her father had taken all her time. The callers considered themselves absolved from calling.

Slowly, month by month, the Vicarage was drawn back into its silence and its loneliness. It assumed, more and more, its aspect of half-sinister, half-sordid tragedy. The Vicar's calamity no longer sheltered him. It took its place in the order of accepted and irremediable events.

* * * * *

Only the village preserved its sympathy alive. The village, that obscure congregated soul, long-suffering to calamity, welded together by saner instincts and profound in memory, the soul that inhabited the small huddled, humble houses, divided from the Vicarage by no more than the graveyard of its dead, the village remembered and it knew.

It remembered how the Vicar had come and gone over its thresholds, how no rain nor snow nor storm had stayed him in his obstinate and punctual visiting. And whereas it had once looked grimly on its Vicar, it looked kindly on him now. It endured him for his daughter Gwenda's sake, in spite of what it knew.

For it knew why the Vicar's third wife had left him. It knew why Alice Cartaret had gone wrong with Greatorex. It knew what Gwenda Cartaret had gone for when she went away. It knew why and how Dr. Rowcliffe had married Mary Cartaret. And it knew why, night after night, he was to be seen coming and going on the Garthdale road.

* * * * *

The village knew more about Rowcliffe and Gwenda Cartaret than Rowcliffe's wife knew.

For Rowcliffe's wife's mind was closed to this knowledge by a certain sensual assurance. When all was said and done, it was she and not Gwenda who was Rowcliffe's wife. And she had other grounds for complacency. Her sister, a solitary Miss Cartaret, stowed away in Garth Vicarage, was of no account. She didn't matter. And as Mary Cartaret Mary would have mattered even less. But Steven Rowcliffe's professional reputation served him well. He counted. People who had begun by trusting him had ended by liking him, and in two years' time his social value had become apparent. And as Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe Mary had a social value too.

But while Steven, who had always had it, took it for granted and never thought about it, Mary could think of nothing else. Her social value, obscured by the terrible two years in Garthdale, had come to her as a discovery and an acquisition. For all her complacency, she could not regard it as a secure thing. She was sensitive to every breath that threatened it; she was unable to forget that, if she was Steven Rowcliffe's wife, she was Alice Greatorex's sister.

Even as Mary Cartaret she had been sensitive to Alice. But in those days of obscurity and isolation it was not in her to cast Alice off. She had felt bound to Alice, not as Gwenda was bound, but pitiably, irrevocably, for better, for worse. The solidarity of the family had held.

She had not had anything to lose by sticking to her sister. Now it seemed to her that she had everything to lose. The thought of Alice was a perpetual annoyance to her.

For the neighborhood that had received Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe had barred her sister.

As long as Alice Greatorex lived at Upthorne Mary went in fear.

This fear was so intolerable to her that at last she spoke of it to Rowcliffe.

They were sitting together in his study after dinner. The two armchairs were always facing now, one on each side of the hearth.

"I wish I knew what to do about Alice," she said.

"What to _do_ about her?"

"Yes. Am I to have her at the house or not?"

He stared.

"Of course you're to have her at the house."

"I mean when we've got people here. I can't ask her to meet them."

"You must ask her. It's the very least you can do for her."

"People aren't going to like it, Steven."

"People have got to stick a great many things they aren't going to like. I'm continually meeting people I'd rather not meet. Aren't you?"

"I'm afraid poor Alice is--"

"Is what?"

"Well, dear, a little impossible, to say the least of it. Isn't she?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't see anything impossible about 'poor Alice.' I never did."

"It's nice of you to say so."

He maintained himself in silence under her long gaze.

"Steven," she said, "you are awfully good to my people."

She saw that she could hardly have said anything that would have annoyed him more.

He positively writhed with irritation.

"I'm not in the least good to your people."

The words stung her like a blow. She flushed, and he softened.

"Can't you see, Molly, that I hate the infernal humbug and the cruelty of it all? That poor child had a dog's life before she married. She did the only sane thing that was open to her. You've only got to look at her now to see that she couldn't have done much better for herself even if she hadn't been driven to it. What's more, she's done the best thing for Greatorex. There isn't another woman in the world who could have made that chap chuck drinking. You mayn't like the connection. I don't suppose any of us like it."

"My dear Steven, it isn't only the connection. I could get over that. It's--the other thing."

His blank stare compelled her to precision.

"I mean what happened."

"Well--if Gwenda can get over 'the other thing', I should think _you_ might. She has to see more of her."

"It's different for Gwenda."

"How is it different for Gwenda?"

She hesitated. She had meant that Gwenda hadn't anything to lose. What she said was, "Gwenda hasn't anybody but herself to think of. She hasn't let you in for Alice."

"No more have you."

He smiled. Mary did not understand either his answer or his smile.

He was saying to himself, "Oh, hasn't she? It was Gwenda all the time who let me in."

Mary had a little rush of affection.

"My dear--I think I've let you in for everything. I wouldn't mind--I wouldn't really--if it wasn't for you."

"You needn't bother about me," he said. "I'd rather you bothered about your sister."

"Which sister?"

For the life of her she could not tell what had made her say that. The words seemed to leap out suddenly from her mind to her tongue.

"Alice," he said.