Chapter 3

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 low close room was still in his nostrils, and in his ears the sounds of dying and of mourning, and at his heart the oppression (he was still young enough to feel it) of the secret and abominable things he knew. And in his eyes the unknown girl and her behavior became suddenly adorable. She was the darting joy and the poignant sweetness, and the sheer extravagant ardor and energy of life. His tempestuously romantic youth rose up and was troubled at the sight of her. And his eyes, that had stared at her in wonder and amusement and inquisitive interest, followed her now with that queer pathos that they had. It was the look that he relied on to move desire in women's eyes; and now it traveled, forlorn and ineffectual, abject almost in its futility, over the gray moorgrass where she went.

* * * * *

That was on Wednesday the fourteenth. On Friday the sixteenth he saw her again at nightfall, in the doorway of John Greatorex's house.

He had overtaken the cart that was carrying John Greatorex's coffin to Upthorne. Low lighted, the long gray house brooded over the marshes, waiting to be disencumbered of its dead.

In the east the broken shoulders of the hills receded, winding with the dale like a coast line of gray cliffs above the mist that was their sea. Tortured, mutilated by the jagged cloud that held her, the moon struggled and tore her way, she lifted and freed herself high and struck the marshes white. Defaced and sinister, above her battlements, she looked at the house and made it terrible, moon-haunted. Its door, low lighted, stood open to the night.

Rowcliffe drew back from the threshold to let a woman pass out. Looking up, he was aware that he had seen her again. He supposed it was the light of that detestable moon that gave her face its queer morbid whiteness.

She went by without seeing him, clenching her hands and carrying her young head high; and he saw that her eyes still held the tears that she was afraid to spill.

Mrs. Gale stood behind her with a lamp, lighting her passage.

"Who is that young lady?" he asked.

"T' Vicar's laass, Gwanda."

The woman leaned to him and whispered, "She's seen t' body."

And in the girl's fear and blindness and defiance he saw the pride of her youth beaten and offended by that which it had seen.

Out there, in the bridle path leading from the high road to the farm, the cart had stopped. The men were lifting the coffin out, shouldering it, carrying it along. He saw Gwenda Cartaret swerve out of their way. Presently he heard her running down the road.

Then he remembered what he had been sent for.

He turned his attention to Mrs. Gale. She was a square-set, blunt-featured woman of forty-five or so, who had once been comely like her daughter Essy. Now her soft chin had sagged; in her cheeks the stagnant blood crawled through a network of little veins, and the gloss had gone from her dark hair. Her brown eyes showed a dull defiance and deprecation of the human destiny.

"Where is he?" he said.

"Oop there, in t' room wi' 's feyther."

"Been drinking again, or what?"

"Naw, Dr. Rawcliffe, 'e 'assn't. I suddn' a sent for yo all this road for nowt."

She drew him into the house place, and whispered.

"I'm feared 'e'll goa queer in 'is 'head, like. 'E's sot there by t' body sence yesterda noon. 'E's not takken off 'is breeches for tree daas. 'E caaun't sleap; 'e wunna eat and 'e wunna drink. There's work to be doon and 'e wunna lay haand to it. Wull yo goa oop t' 'im, Dr. Rawcliffe?"

Rowcliffe went up.

XIII

In the low lighted room the thing that Gwenda Cartaret had seen lay stretched in the middle of the great bed, covered with a sheet. The bed, with its white mound, was so much too big for the four walls that held it, the white plaster of the ceiling bulging above it stooped so low, that the body of John Greatorex lay as if already closed up in its tomb.

Jim Greatorex, his son, sat on a wooden chair at the head of the bed. His young, handsome face was loose and flushed as if he had been drinking. His eyes--the queer, blue, wide-open eyes that had hitherto looked out at you from their lodging in that ruddy, sensuous face, incongruously spiritual, high and above your head, like the eyes of a dreamer and a mystic--Jim's eyes were sunken now and darkened in their red and swollen lids. They stared at the rug laid down beside the bed, while Jim's mind set itself to count, stupidly and obstinately, the snippets of gray and scarlet cloth that made the pattern on the black. Every now and then he would recognise a snippet as belonging to some suit his father had worn years ago, and then Jim's brain would receive a shock and would stagger and have to begin its counting all over again.

The door opened to let Rowcliffe in. And at the sound of the door, as if a spring had been suddenly released in his spine, Jim Greatorex shot up and started to his feet.

"Well, Greatorex----"

"Good evening, Dr. Rawcliffe." He came forward awkwardly, hanging his head as if detected in an act of shame.

There was a silence while the two men turned their backs upon the bed, determined to ignore what was on it. They stood together by the window, pretending to stare at things out there in the night; and so they became aware of the men carrying the coffin.

They could no longer ignore it.

"Wull yo look at 'Im, doctor?"

"Better not----." Rowcliffe would have laid his hand on the young man's arm, muttering a refusal, but Greatorex had moved to the bed and drawn back the sheet.

What Gwenda Cartaret had seen was revealed.

The dead man's face, upturned with a slight tilt to the ceiling that bulged so brutally above it, the stiff dark beard accentuating the tilt, the eyes, also upturned, white under their unclosing lids, the nostrils, the half-open mouth preserved their wonder and their terror before a thing so incredible--that the walls and roof of a man's room should close round him and suffocate him. On this horrified face there were the marks of dissolution, and, at the corners of the grim beard and moustache, a stain.

It left nothing to be said. It was the face of the man who had drunk hard and had told his son that he had never been the worse for drink.

Jim Greatorex stood and looked at it as if he knew what Rowcliffe was thinking of it and defied him to think.

Rowcliffe drew up the sheet and covered it. "You'd better come out of this. It isn't good for you," he said.

"I knaw what's good for me, Dr. Rawcliffe."

Jim stuck his hands in his breeches and gazed stubbornly at the sheeted mound.

"Come," Rowcliffe said, "don't give way like this. Buck up and be a man."

"A ma-an? You wait till yor turn cooms, doctor."

"My turn came ten years ago, and it may come again."

"And yo'll knaw then what good it doos ta-alkin'." He paused, listening. "They've coom," he said.

There was a sound of scuffling on the stone floor below and on the stairs. Mrs. Gale's voice was heard out on the landing, calling to the men.

"Easy with un--easy. Mind t' lamp. Eh--yo'll never get un oop that road. Yo mun coax un round corner."

A swinging thud on the stone wall. Then more and more desperate scuffling with muttering. Then silence.

Mrs. Gale put her head in at the door.

"Jimmy, yo mun coom and gie a haand wi' t' coffin. They've got un faasst in t' turn o' t' stair."

Through the open doorway Rowcliffe could see the broad shoulders of the coffin jammed in the stairway.

Jim, flushed with resentment, strode out; and the struggling and scuffling began again, subdued, this time, and respectful. Rowcliffe went out to help.

Mrs. Gale on the landing went on talking to herself. "They sud 'ave browt trestles oop first. There's naw place to stond un in. Eh dear! It's job enoof gettin' un oop. What'll it be gettin' un down again wit' 'E layin' in un? 'Ere--yo get oonder un, Jimmy, and 'eave un oop."

Jim crouched and went backward down the stair under the coffin. His flushed face, with its mournful, mystic eyes, looked out at Rowcliffe for a moment under the coffin head. Then, with a heave of his great back and pushing with his powerful arms against the wall and stair rail, he loosened the shoulders of the coffin and bore it, steadied by Rowcliffe and the men, up the stair and into the room.

They set it on its feet beside the bed, propped against the wall. And Jim Greatorex stood and stared at it.

Rowcliffe went down into the kitchen, followed by Mrs. Gale.

"What d'yo think o' Jimmy, Dr. Rawcliffe?"

"He oughtn't to be left alone. Isn't there any sister or anybody who could come to him?"

"Naw; 'e's got naw sisters, Jimmy 'assn't."

"Well, you must get him to lie down and eat."

"Get 'im? Yo can do nowt wi' Jimmy. 'E'll goa 'is own road. 'Is feyther an' 'e they wuss always quar'ling, yo med say. Yet when t' owd gentleman was taaken bad, Jimmy, 'e couldn' do too mooch for 'im. 'E was set on pullin' 's feyther round. And when 'e found 'e couldn't keep t' owd gentleman, 'e gets it on 'is mind like--broodin'. And 'e's got nowt to coomfort 'im."

She sat down to it now.

"Yo see, Dr. Rawcliffe, Jim's feyther and 'is granfeyther before 'im, they wuss good Wesleyans. It's in t' blood. But Jim's moother that died, she wuss Choorch. And that slip of a laass, when John Greatorex coom courtin', she turned 'im. 'E was that soft wi' laasses. 'Er feyther 'e was steward to lord o' t' Manor and 'e was Choorch and all t' family saame as t' folk oop at Manor. Yo med say, Jim Greatorex, 'e's got naw religion. Neither Choorch nor Chapel 'e is. Nowt to coomfort 'im."

Upstairs the scuffling and the struggling became frightful. Jim's feet and Jim's voice were heard above the muttering of the undertaker's men.

Mrs. Gale whispered. "They're gettin' 'im in. 'E's gien a haand wi' t' body. Thot's soomthin'."

She brooded ponderously. A sound of stamping and scraping at the back door roused her.

"Eh--oo's there now?" she asked irritably.

Willie, the farm lad, appeared on the threshold. His face was flushed and scared.

"Where's Jim?" he said in a thick voice.

"Ooosh-sh! Doan't yo' knaw t' coffin's coom? 'E's oopstairs w' t' owd maaster."

"Well--'e mun coom down. T' mare's taaken baad again in 'er insi-ide."

"T' mare, Daasy?"

"Yes."

"Eh dear, there's naw end to trooble. Yo go oop and fatch Jimmy."

Willie hesitated. His flush deepened.

"I daarss'nt," he whispered hoarsely.

"Poor laad, 'e 's freetened o' t' body," she explained. "Yo stay there, Wullie. I'll goa. T' body's nowt to me. I've seen too many o' they," she muttered as she went.

They heard her crying excitedly overhead. "Jimmy! Yo coom to t' ma-are! Yo coom to t' ma-are!"

The sounds in the room ceased instantly. Jim Greatorex, alert and in violent possession of all his faculties, dashed down the stairs and out into the yard.

Rowcliffe followed into the darkness where his horse and trap stood waiting for him.

* * * * *

He was lighting his lamps when Jim Greatorex appeared beside him with a lantern.

"Dr. Rawcliffe, will yo joost coom an' taak a look at lil maare?"

Jim's sullenness was gone. His voice revealed him humble and profoundly agitated.

Rowcliffe sighed, smiled, pulled himself together and turned with Greatorex into the stable.

In the sodden straw of her stall, Daisy, the mare, lay, heaving and snorting after her agony. From time to time she turned her head toward her tense and swollen flank, seeking with eyes of anguish the mysterious source of pain. The feed of oats with which Willie had tried to tempt her lay untouched in the skip beside her head.

"I give 'er they oats an hour ago," said Willie. "An' she 'assn't so mooch as nosed 'em."

"Nawbody but a donmed gawpie would have doon thot with 'er stoomach raw. Yo med 'ave killed t' mare."

Willie, appalled by his own deed and depressed, stooped down and fondled the mare's face, to show that it was not affection that he lacked.

"Heer--clear out o' thot and let doctor have a look in."

Willie slunk aside as Rowcliffe knelt with Greatorex in the straw and examined the sick mare.

"Can yo tell at all what's amiss, doctor?"

"Colic, I should say. Has the vet seen her?"

"Ye-es. He sent oop soomthing--"

"Well, have you given it her?"

Jim's voice thickened. "I sud have given it her yesterda."

"And why on earth didn't you?"

"The domned thing went clane out o' my head."

He turned to the window ledge by the stable door where, among a confusion of cobwebs and dusty bottles and tin cans, the drench of turpentine and linseed oil, the little phial of chlorodyne, and the clean tin pannikin with its wide protruding mouth, stood ready, all gleaming in the lantern light, forgotten since the day before.

"Thot's the stoof. Will yo halp me give it 'er, doctor?"

"All right. Can you hold her?"

"That I can. Coom oop, Daasy. Coom oop. There, my beauty. Gently, gently, owd laass."

Rowcliffe took off his coat and shook up the drench and poured it into the pannikin, while Greatorex got the struggling mare on to her feet.

Together, with gentleness and dexterity they cajoled her. Then Jim laid his hands upon her mouth and opened it, drawing up her head against his breast. Willie, suddenly competent, held the lantern while Rowcliffe poured the drench down her throat.

Daisy, coughing and dribbling, stood and gazed at them with sad and terrified eyes. And while the undertaker's men screwed down the lid upon John Greatorex in his coffin, Jim Greatorex, his son, watched with Daisy in her stall.

And Steven Rowcliffe watched with him, nursing the sick mare, making up a fresh, clean bed for her, rubbing and fomenting her swollen and tortured belly. When Daisy rolled in another agony, Rowcliffe gave her chlorodyne and waited till suddenly she lay still.

In Jim's face, as he looked down at her, there was an infinite tenderness and pity and compunction.

Rowcliffe, wriggling into his coat, regarded him with curiosity and wonder, till Jim drew himself up and fixed him with his queer, unhappy eyes.

"Shall I save her, doctor?"

"I can't tell you yet. I'd better send the vet up tomorrow hadn't I?"

"Ay----" Jim's voice was strangled in the spasm of his throat. But he took Rowcliffe's hand and wrung it, discharging many emotions in that one excruciating grip.

Rowcliffe pointed to the little phial of chlorodyne lying in the straw. "If I were you," he said, "I shouldn't leave that lying about."

Through his long last night in the gray house haunted by the moon, John Greatorex lay alone, screwed down under a coffin lid, and his son, Jim, wrapped in a horse-blanket and with his head on a hay sack, lay in the straw of the stable, beside Daisy his mare. From time to time, as his mood took him, he turned and laid his hand on her in a poignant caress. As if she had been his first-born, or his bride, he spoke to her in the thick, soft voice of passion, with pitiful, broken words and mutterings.

"What is it, Daasy----what is it? There, did they, then, did they? My beauty--my lil laass. I--I wuss a domned brute to forget tha, a domned brute."

All that night and the next night he lay beside her. The funeral passed like a fantastic interlude between the long acts of his passion. His great sorrow made him humble to Mrs. Gale so that he allowed her to sustain him with food and drink. And on the third day it was known throughout Garthdale that young Greatorex, who had lost his father, had saved his mare.

Only Steven Rowcliffe knew that the mare had saved young Greatorex.

* * * * *

And the little phial of chlorodyne was put back among the cobwebs and forgotten.

XIV

Down at the Vicarage the Vicar was wrangling with his youngest daughter. For the third time Alice declared that she was not well and that she didn't want her milk.

"Whether you want it or not you've got to drink it," said the Vicar.

Alice took the glass in her lap and looked at it.

"Am I to stand over you till you drink it?"

Alice put the rim of the glass to her mouth and shuddered.

"I can't," she said. "It'll make me sick."

"Leave the poor child alone, Papa," said Gwenda.

But the Vicar ignored Gwenda.

"You'll drink it, if I stand here all night," he said.

Alice struggled with a spasm in her throat. He held the glass for her while she groped piteously.

"Oh, where's my hanky?"

With superhuman clemency he produced his own.

"It'll serve you right if I'm ill," said Alice.

"Come," said the Vicar in his wisdom and his patience. "Come."

He proffered the disgusting cup again.

"I'd drink it and have done with it, if I were you," said Mary in her soft voice.

Mary's soft voice was too much for Alice.

"Why c-can't you leave me alone? You--you--beast, Mary," she sobbed.

And Mr. Cartaret began again, "Am I to stand here----"

Alice got up, she broke loose from them and left the room.

"You might have known she wasn't going to drink it," Gwenda said.

But the Vicar never knew when he was beaten.

"She would have drunk it," he said, "if Mary hadn't interfered."

* * * * *

Alice had not got the pneumonia that had killed John Greatorex. Such happiness, she reflected, was not for her. She had desired it too much.

But she was doing very well with her anæmia.

Bloodless and slender and inert, she dragged herself about the village. She could not get away from it because of the steep hills she would have had to climb. A small, unhappy ghost, she haunted the fields in the bottom and the path along the beck that led past Mrs. Gale's cottage.

The sight of Alice was more than ever annoying to the Vicar. Only you wouldn't have known it. As she grew whiter and weaker he braced himself, and became more hearty and robust. When he caught her lying on the sofa he spoke to her in a robust and hearty tone.

"Don't lie there all day, my girl. Get up and go out. What you want is a good blow on the moor."