The Three Sisters Part 10

"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 anaemia.

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."

"Yes. If I didn't die before I got there," Alice would say, while she thought, "Serve him right, too, if I did."

And the Vicar would turn from her in disgust. He knew what was the matter with his daughter Alice.

At dinner time he would pull himself together again, for, after all, he was her father. He was robust and hearty over the sirloin and the leg of mutton. He would call for a gla.s.s and press into it the red juice of the meat.

"Don't peak and pine, girl. Drink that. It'll put some blood into you."

And Alice would refuse to drink it.

Next she refused to drink her milk at eleven. She carried it out to Essy in the scullery.

"I wish you'd drink my milk for me, Essy. It makes me sick," she said.

"I don't want your milk," said Essy.

"Please--" she implored her.

But Essy was angry. Her face flamed and she banged down the dishes she was drying. "I sail not drink it. What should I want your milk for?

You can pour it in t' pig's bucket."

And the milk would be left by the scullery window till it turned sour and Essy poured it into the pig's bucket that stood under the sink.

Three weeks pa.s.sed, and with every week Alice grew more bloodless, more slender, and more inert, and more and more like an unhappy ghost. Her small face was smaller; there was a tinge of green in its honey-whiteness, and of mauve in the dull rose of her mouth. And under her shallow breast her heart seemed to rise up and grow large, while the rest of Alice shrank and grew small. It was as if her fragile little body carried an enormous engine, an engine of infernal and terrifying power. When she lay down and when she got up and with every sudden movement its throbbing shook her savagely.

Night and morning she called to her sister: "Oh Gwenda, come and feel my heart. I do believe it's growing. It's getting too big for my body.

It frightens me when it jumps about like that."

It frightened Gwenda.

But it did not really frighten Alice. She rejoiced in it, rather, and exulted. After all, it was a good thing that she had not got pneumonia, which might have killed her as it had killed John Greatorex. She had got what served her purpose better. It served all her purposes. If she had tried she could not have hit on anything that would have annoyed her father more or put him more conspicuously in the wrong. To begin with, it was his doing. He had worried her into it. And he had brought her to a place which was the worst place conceivable for anybody with a diseased heart, since you couldn't stir out of doors without going up hill.

Night and morning Alice stood before the looking-gla.s.s and turned out the lining of her lips and eyelids and saw with pleasure the pale rose growing paler. Every other hour she laid her hand on her heart and took again the full thrill of its dangerous throbbing, or felt her pulse to a.s.sure herself of the halt, the jerk, the hurrying of the beat. Night and morning and every other hour she thought of Rowcliffe.

"If it goes on like this, they'll _have_ to send for him," she said.

But it had gone on, the three weeks had pa.s.sed, and yet they had not sent. The Vicar had put his foot down. He wouldn't have the doctor. He knew better than a dozen doctors what was the matter with his daughter Alice.

Alice said nothing. She simply waited. As if some profound and dead-sure instinct had sustained her, she waited, sickening.

And on the last night of the third week she fainted. She had dragged herself upstairs to bed, staggered across the little landing and fallen on the threshold of her room.

They kept her in bed next day. At one o'clock she refused her chicken-broth. She would neither eat nor drink. And a little before three Gwenda went for the doctor.

She had not told Alice she was going. She had not told anybody.

XV

She had to walk, for Mary had taken her bicycle. n.o.body knew where Mary had gone or when she had started or when she would be back.

But the four miles between Garth and Morfe were nothing to Gwenda, who would walk twenty for her own amus.e.m.e.nt. She would have stretched the way out indefinitely if she could; she would have piled Garthdale Moor on Greffington Edge and Karva on the top of them and put them between Garth and Morfe, so violent was her fear of Steven Rowcliffe.

She had no longer any desire to see him or to be seen by him. He had seen her twice too often, and too early and too late. After being caught on the moor at dawn, it was preposterous that she should show herself in the doorway of Upthorne at night.

How was he to know that she hadn't done it on purpose? Girls did these things. Poor little Ally had done them. And it was because Ally had done them that she had been taken and hidden away here where she couldn't do them any more.

But--couldn't she? Gwenda stood still, staring in her horror as the frightful thought struck her that Ally could, and that she would, the very minute she realised young Rowcliffe. And he would think--not that it mattered in the least what he thought--he would think that there were two of them.

If only, she said to herself, if only young Rowcliffe were a married man. Then even Ally couldn't--

Not that she blamed poor little Ally. She looked on little Ally as the victim of a malign and tragic tendency, the fragile vehicle of an alien and overpowering impulse. Little Ally was doomed. It wasn't her fault if she was made like that.

And this time it wouldn't be her fault at all. Their father would have driven her. Gwenda hated him for his persecution and exposure of the helpless creature.