Chapter 6

"Whatever have you done your hair like that for?" said Mary on a Wednesday when Ally came down in the afternoon with her gold spread out above her ears and twisted in a shining coil on the top of her head.

"To make it grow better," said Ally.

"Don't let Papa catch you at it," said Gwenda, "if you want it to grow any more."

Gwenda was going out. She had her hat on, and was taking her walking-stick from the stand. Ally stared.

"You're _not_ going out?"

"I am," said Gwenda.

And she laughed as she went. She wasn't going to stay at home for Rowcliffe every Wednesday.

* * * * *

As for Ally, the Vicar did catch her at it. He caught her the very next Wednesday afternoon. She thought he had started for Upthorne when he hadn't. He was bound to catch her.

For the best looking-glass in the house was in the Vicar's bedroom. It went the whole length and width of the wardrobe door, and Ally could see herself in it from head to foot. And on the Vicar's dressing-table there lay a large and perfect hand-glass that had belonged to Ally's mother. Only by opening the wardrobe door and with the aid of the hand-glass could Ally obtain a satisfactory three-quarters view of her face and figure.

Now, by the Vicar's magnanimity, his daughters were allowed to use his bedroom twice in every two years, in the spring and in the autumn, for the purpose of trying on their new gowns; but this year they were wearing out last winter's gowns, and Ally had no business in the Vicar's bedroom at four o'clock in the afternoon.

She was turning slowly round and round, with her head tilted back over her left shoulder; she had just caught sight of her little white nose as it appeared in a vanishing profile and was adjusting her head at another and still more interesting angle when the Vicar caught her.

He was well in the middle of the room, and staring at her, before she was aware of him. The wardrobe door, flung wide open, had concealed his entrance, but if Ally had not been blinded and intoxicated with her own beauty she would have seen him before she began smiling, full-face first, then three-quarters, then sideways, a little tilted.

Then she shut to the door of the wardrobe (for the back view that was to reassure her as to the utter prettiness of her shoulders and the nape of her neck), and it was at that moment that she saw him, reflected behind her in the long looking-glass.

She screamed and dropped the hand-glass. She heard it break itself at her feet.

"Papa," she cried, "how you frightened me!"

It was not so much that he had caught her smiling at her own face, it was that _his_ face, seen in the looking-glass, was awful. And besides being awful it was evil. Even to Ally's innocence it was evil. If it had been any other man Ally's instinct would have said that he looked horrid without Ally knowing or caring to know what her instinct meant. But the look on her father's face was awful because it was mysterious. Neither she nor her instinct had a word for it. There was cruelty in it, and, besides cruelty, some quality nameless and unrecognisable, subtle and secret, and yet crude somehow and vivid. The horror of it made her forget that he had caught her in one of the most deplorably humiliating situations in which a young girl can be caught--deliberately manufacturing smiles for her own amusement.

"You've no business to be here," said the Vicar.

He picked up the broken hand-glass, and as he looked at it the cruelty and the nameless quality passed out of his face as if a hand had smoothed it, and it became suddenly weak and pathetic, the face of a child whose precious magic thing another child has played with and broken.

Then Alice remembered that the hand-glass had been her mother's.

"I'm sorry I've broken it, Papa, if you liked it."

Her voice recalled him to himself.

"Ally," he said, "what am I to think of you? Are you a fool--or what?"

The sting of it lashed Ally's brain to a retort. (All that she had needed hitherto to be effective was a little red blood in her veins, and she had got it now.)

"I'd be a fool," she said, "if I cared two straws what you think of me, since you can't see what I am. I'm sorry if I've broken your old hand-glass, though I didn't break it. You broke it yourself."

Carrying her golden top-knot like a crown, she left the room.

The Vicar took the broken hand-glass and hid it in a drawer. He was sorry for himself. The only impression left on his mind was that his daughter Ally had been cruel to him.

* * * * *

But Ally didn't care a rap what he thought of her, or what impression she had left on his mind. She was much too happy. Besides, if you once began caring what Papa thought there would be no peace for anybody. He was so impossible that he didn't count. He wasn't even an effective serpent in her Paradise. He might crawl all over it (as indeed he did crawl), but he left no trail. The thought of how he had caught her at the looking-glass might be disagreeable, but it couldn't slime those holy lawns. Neither could it break the ecstasy of Wednesday, that heavenly day. Nothing could break it as long as Dr. Rowcliffe continued to look in at tea-time and her father to explore the furthest borders of his parish.

The peace of Paradise came down on the Vicarage every Wednesday the very minute the garden gate had swung back behind the Vicar. He started so early and he was back so late that there was never any chance of his encountering young Rowcliffe.

* * * * *

To be sure, young Rowcliffe hardly ever said a word to her. He always talked to Mary or to Gwenda. But there was nothing in his reticence to disturb Ally's ecstasy. It was bliss to sit and look at Rowcliffe and to hear him talk. When she tried to talk to him herself her brain swam and she became unhappy and confused. Intellectual effort was destructive to the blessed state, which was pure passivity, untroubled contemplation in its early stages, before the oncoming of rapture.

The fact that Mary and Gwenda could talk to him and talk intelligently showed how little they cared for him or were likely to care, and how immeasurably far they were from the supreme act of adoration. Similarly, the fact that Rowcliffe could talk to Mary and to Gwenda showed how little _he_ cared. If he had cared, if he were ever going to care as Ally understood caring, his brain would have swum like hers and his intellect would have abandoned him.

Whereas, it was when he turned to Ally that he hadn't a word to say, any more than she had, and that he became entangled in his talk, and that the intellect he tried to summon to him tottered and vanished at his call.

Another thing--when he caught her looking at him (and though Ally was careful he did catch her now and then) he always either lowered his eyelids or looked away. He was afraid to look at her; and _that_, as everybody knew, was an infallible sign. Why, Ally was afraid to look at _him_, only she couldn't help it. Her eyes were dragged to the terror and the danger.

So Ally reasoned in her Paradise.

For when Rowcliffe was once gone her brain was frantically busy. It never gave her any rest. From the one stuff of its dreams it span an endless shining thread; from the one thread it wove an endless web of visions. From nothing at all it built up drama after drama. It was all beautiful what Ally's brain did, all noble, all marvelously pure. (The Vicar would have been astonished if he had known how pure.) There was no sullen and selfish Ally in Ally's dreams. They were all of sacrifice, of self-immolation, of beautiful and noble things done for Rowcliffe, of suffering for Rowcliffe, of dying for him. All without Rowcliffe being very palpably and positively there.

It was only at night, when Ally's brain slept among its dreams, that Rowcliffe's face leaned near to hers without ever touching it, and his arms made as if they clasped her and never met. Even then, always at the first intangible approach of him, she woke, terrified because dreams go by contraries.

"Is your sister always so silent?" Rowcliffe asked that Wednesday (the Wednesday when Ally had been caught).

He was alone with Mary.

"Who? Ally? No. She isn't silent at all. What do you think of her?"

"I think," said Rowcliffe, "she looks extraordinarily well."

"That's owing to you," said Mary. "I never saw her pull round so fast before."

"No? I assure you," said Rowcliffe, "I haven't anything to do with it." He was very stiff and cold and stern.

Rowcliffe was annoyed because it was two Wednesdays running that he had found himself alone with the eldest and the youngest Miss Cartaret. The second one had gone off heaven knew where.

XXI

The Vicar of Garth considered himself unhappy (to say the least of it) in his three children, but he had never asked himself what, after all, would he have done without them? After all (as they had frequently reminded themselves), without them he could never have lived comfortably on his income. They did the work and saved him the expenses of a second servant, a housekeeper, an under-gardener, an organist and two curates.

The three divided the work of the Vicarage and parish, according to the tastes and abilities of each. At home Mary kept the house and did the sewing. Gwenda looked after the gray and barren garden, she trimmed the narrow paths and the one flower-bed and mowed the small square of grass between. Alice trailed through the lower rooms, dusting furniture feebly; she gathered and arranged the flowers when there were any in the bed. Outside, Mary, being sweet and good, taught in the boys' Sunday-school; Alice, because she was fond of children, had the infants. For the rest, Mary, who was lazy, had taken over that small portion of the village that was not Baptist or Wesleyan or Congregational. Gwenda, for her own amusement, and regardless of sect and creed, the hopelessly distant hamlets and the farms scattered on the long, raking hillsides and the moors. Alice declared herself satisfied with her dominion over the organ and the village choir.

Alice was behaving like an angel in her Paradise. No longer listless and sullen, she swept through the house with an angel's energy. A benign, untiring angel sat at the organ and controlled the violent voices of the choir.

The choir looked upon Ally's innocent art with pride and admiration and amusement. It tickled them to see those little milk-white hands grappling with organ pieces that had beaten the old schoolmaster.

Ally enjoyed the pride and admiration of the choir and was unaware of its amusement. She enjoyed the importance of her office. She enjoyed the massive, voluptuous vibrations that made her body a vehicle for the organ's surging and tremendous soul. Ally's body had become a more and more tremulous, a more sensitive and perfect medium for vibrations. She would not have missed one choir practice or one service.

And she said to herself, "I may be a fool, but Papa or the parish would have to pay an organist at least forty pounds a year. It costs less to keep me. So he needn't talk."

* * * * *

Then in November came the preparations for the village concert.

They were stupendous.

All morning the little Erad piano shook with the Grande Valse and the Grande Polonaise of Chopin. The diabolic thing raged through the shut house, knowing that it went unchallenged, that its utmost violence was licensed until the day after the concert.

Rowcliffe heard it whenever he drove past the Vicarage on his way over the moors.

XXII

Rowcliffe was now beginning to form that other habit (which was to make him even more remarkable than he was already), the hunting down of Gwendolen Cartaret in the open.

He was annoyed with Gwendolen Cartaret. When she had all the rest of the week to walk in she would set out on Wednesdays before teatime and continue until long after dark. He had missed her twice now. And on the third Wednesday he saw her swinging up the hill toward Upthorne as he, leaving his surgery, came round the corner of the village by the bridge.

"I believe," he thought, "she's doing it on purpose. To avoid me."

He was determined not to be avoided.

* * * * *

"The doctor's very late this afternoon," said Mary. "I suppose he's been sent for somewhere."

Alice said nothing. She couldn't trust herself to speak. She lived in sickening fear that on some Wednesday afternoon he would be sent for. It had never happened yet, but that made it all the more likely that it had happened now.

They waited till five; till a quarter-past.

"I really can't wait any longer," said Mary, "for a man who doesn't come."

* * * * *

By that time Rowcliffe and Gwenda were far on the road to Upthorne.

He had overtaken her about a hundred yards above the schoolhouse, before the road turned to Upthorne Moor.

"I say, how you do sprint up these hills!"

She turned.

"Is that you, Dr. Rowcliffe?"

"Of course it's me. Where are you off to?"

"Upthorne. Anywhere."

"May I come too?"

"If you want to."

"Of course I want to."

"Have you had any tea?"

"No."

"Weren't they in?"

"I didn't stop to ask."

"Why not?"

"Because I saw you stampeding on in front of me, and I swore I'd overtake you before you got round that corner. And I have overtaken you."

"Shall we go back? We've time."

He frowned. "No. I never turn back. Let's get on. Get on."

They went on at a terrific pace. And as she persisted in walking about half a foot in front of him he saw the movement of her fine long limbs and the little ripple of her shoulders under the gray tweed.

Presently he spoke.

"It wasn't you I heard playing the other night?"

"No. It must have been my youngest sister."

"I knew it wasn't you."

"It might have been for all you knew."

"It couldn't possibly. If you played you wouldn't play that way."

"What way?"

"Your sister's way. Whatever you wanted to do you'd do it beautifully or not at all."

She made no response. She did not even seem to have heard him.

"I don't mean to say," he said, "that your sister doesn't play beautifully."

She turned malignly. He liked her when she turned.

"You mean that she plays abominably."

"I didn't mean to _say_ it."

"Why shouldn't you say it?"

"Because you don't say those things. It isn't polite."

"But I know Alice doesn't play well--not those big things. The wonder is she can play them at all."

"Why does she attempt--the big things?"

"Why does anybody? Because she loves them. She's never heard them properly played. So she doesn't know. She just trusts to her feeling."

"Is there anything else, after all, you _can_ trust?"

"I don't know. You see, Alice's feeling tells her it's all right to play like that, and _my_ feeling tells me it's all wrong."

"You can trust _your_ feelings."

"Why mine more than hers?"

"Because _your_ feelings are the feelings of a beautifully sane and perfectly balanced person."

"How can you possibly tell? You don't know me."

"I know your type."

"My type isn't me. You can't tell by that."

"You can if you're a physiologist."

"Being a physiologist won't tell you anything about _me_."

"Oh, won't it?"

"It can't."

"Why not?"

"How can it?"

"You think it can't tell me anything about your soul?"

"Oh--my soul----" Her shoulders expressed disdain for it.

"Do you dislike my mentioning it? Would you rather we didn't talk about it? Perhaps you're tired of having it talked about?"

"No; my poor soul has never done anything to get itself talked about."

"I only thought that as your father, perhaps, specialises in souls--"

"He doesn't specialise in mine. He knows nothing about it."

"The specialist never does. To know anything--the least little thing--about the soul, you must know everything--everything you _can_ know--about the body. So that you're wrong even about your soul. Being a physiologist tells me that your sort of body--a transparently clean and strong and utterly unconscious body--goes with a transparently clean and strong and utterly unconscious soul."

"Utterly unconscious?"

He was silent a moment and then answered:

"Utterly unconscious."

They walked on in silence till they came in sight of the marshes and the long gray line of Upthorne Farm.

"That's where I met you once," he said. "Do you remember? You were coming out of the door as I went in."

"You seem to have been always meeting me."

"Always meeting you. And then---always missing you. Just when I expected most to find you."

"If we go much farther in this direction," said Gwenda, "we shall meet Papa."

"Well--I suppose some day I shall have to meet him. Do you realise that I've never met him yet?"

"Haven't you?"

"No. Always I've been on the point of meeting him, and always some malignant fate has interfered."

She smiled. He loved her smile.

"Why are you smiling?"

"I was only wondering whether the fate was really so malignant."

"You mean that if he met me he'd dislike me?"

"He always _has_ disliked anybody we like. You see, he's a very funny father."

"All fathers," said Rowcliffe, "are more or less funny."

She laughed. Her laughter enchanted him.

"Yes. But _my_ father doesn't mean to be as funny as he is."

"I see. He wouldn't really mean to dislike me. Then, perhaps, if I regularly laid myself out for it, by years of tender and untiring devotion I might win him over?"

She laughed again; she laughed as youth laughs, for the pure joy of laughter. She looked on her father as a persistent, delightful jest. He adored her laughter.

It proved how strong and sane she was--if she could take him like that. Rowcliffe had seen women made bitter, made morbid, driven into lunatic asylums by fathers who were as funny as Mr. Cartaret.

"You wouldn't, you wouldn't," she said. "He's funnier than you've any idea of."

"Is he ever ill?"

"Never."

"That of course makes it difficult."

"Except colds in his head. But he wouldn't have you for a cold in his head. He wouldn't have you for anything if he could help it."

"Well--perhaps--if he's as funny as all that, we'd better turn."

They turned.

They were walking so fast now that they couldn't talk.

Presently they slackened and he spoke.

"I say, shall you ever get away from this place?"

"Never, I think."

"Do you never want to get away?"

"No. Never. You see, I love it."

"I know you do." He said it savagely, as if he were jealous of the place.

"So do you," she answered.

"If I didn't I suppose I should have to."

"Yes, it's better, if you've got to live in it."

"That wasn't what I meant."

After that they were silent for a long time. She was wondering what he did mean.

When they reached the Vicarage gate he sheered off the path and held out his hand.

"Oh--aren't you coming in for tea?" she said.

"Thanks. No. It's a little late. I don't think I want any."

He paused. "I've got what I wanted."

He stepped backward, facing her, raising his cap, then he turned and hurried down the hill.

Gwenda walked slowly up the flagged path to the house door. She stood there, thinking.

"He's got what he wanted. He only wanted to see what I was like."

XXIII

Rowcliffe had ten minutes on his hands while they were bringing his trap round from the Red Lion.

He was warming his hands at the surgery fire when he heard voices in the parlor on the other side of the narrow passage. One voice pleaded, the other reserved judgment.

"Do you think he'd do it if I were to go up and ask him?" It was Alice Cartaret's voice.

"I caann't say, Miss Cartaret, I'm sure."

"Could you persuade him yourself, Mrs. Blenkiron?"

"It wouldn't be a bit of good me persuadin' him. Jim Greatorex wouldn' boodge _that_ mooch for me."

A pause. Alice was wavering, aware, no doubt, of the folly of her errand. Rowcliffe had only to lie low and she would go.

"Could Mr. Blenkiron?"

No. Rowcliffe in the surgery smiled all to himself as he warmed his hands. Alice was holding her ground. She was spinning out the time.

"Not he. Mr. Blenkiron's got soomat alse to do without trapseing after Jim Greatorex."

"Oh."

Alice's voice was distant and defensive. He was sorry for Alice. She was not yet broken in to the north country manner, and her softness winced under these blows. There was nobody to tell her that Mrs. Blenkiron's manner was a criticism of her young kinsman, Jim Greatorex.

Mrs. Blenkiron presently made this apparent.

"Jim's sat oop enoof as it is. You'd think there was nawbody in this village good enoof to kape coompany wi' Jimmy, the road he goas. Ef I was you, Miss Olice, I should let him be."

"I would, but it's his voice we want. I'm thinking of the concert, Mrs. Blenkiron. It's the only voice we've got that'll fill the room."

Mrs. Blenkiron laughed.

"Eh--he'll fill it fer you, right enoof. You'll have all the yoong laads and laasses in the Daale toomblin' in to hear Jimmy."

"We want them. We want everybody. You Wesleyans and all."

Another pause. Rowcliffe was interested. Alice was really displaying considerable intelligence. Almost she persuaded him that her errand was genuine.

"Do you think Essy Gale could get him to come?"

In the surgery Rowcliffe whistled inaudibly. _That_ was indeed a desperate shift.

Rowcliffe had turned and was now standing with his back to the fire. He was intensely interested.

"Assy Gaale? He would n' coom for Assy's asskin', a man like Greatorex."

Mrs. Blenkiron's blood, the blood of the Greatorexes, was up.

"Naw," said Jim Greatorex's kinswoman, "if you want Greatorex to sing for you as bad as all that, Miss Cartaret, you'd better speak to the doctor."

Rowcliffe became suddenly grave. He watched the door.

"He'd mebbe do it for him. He sats soom store by Dr. Rawcliffe."

"But"--Ally's voice sounded nearer--"he's gone, hasn't he?"

(The minx, the little, little minx!)

"Naw. But he's joost goin'. Shall I catch him?"

"You might."

Mrs. Blenkiron caught him on the threshold of the surgery.

"Will you speak to Miss Cartaret a minute, Dr. Rawcliffe?"

"Certainly."

Mrs. Blenkiron withdrew. The kitchen door closed on her flight. For the first time in their acquaintance Rowcliffe was alone with Alice Cartaret, and though he was interested he didn't like it.

"I thought I heard your voice," said he with reckless geniality.

They stood on their thresholds looking at each other across the narrow passage. It was as if Alice Cartaret's feet were fixed there by an invisible force that held her fascinated and yet frightened.

Rowcliffe had paused too, as at a post of vantage, the better to observe her.

A moment ago, warming his hands in the surgery, he could have sworn that she, the little maneuvering minx, had laid a trap for him. She had come on her fool's errand, knowing that it was a fool's errand, for nothing on earth but that she might catch him, alone and defenseless, in the surgery. It was the sort of thing she did, the sort of thing she always would do. She didn't want to know (not she!) whether Jim Greatorex would sing or not, she wanted to know, and she meant to know, why he, Steven Rowcliffe, hadn't turned up that afternoon, and where he had gone, and what he had been doing, and the rest of it. There were windows at the back of the Vicarage. Possibly she had seen him charging up the hill in pursuit of her sister, and she was desperate. All this he had believed and did still believe.

But, as he looked across at the little hesitating figure and the scared face framed in the doorway, he had compassion on her. Poor little trapper, so pitifully trapped; so ignorant of the first rules and principles of trapping that she had run hot-foot after her prey when she should have lain low and lured it silently into her snare. She was no more than a poor little frightened minx, caught in his trap, peering at him from it in terror. God knew he hadn't meant to set it for her, and God only knew how he was going to get her out of it.

"Poor things," he thought, "if they only knew how horribly they embarrass me!"