The Three Sisters Part 45

Gwenda went on with her packing.

"It will be time enough," she thought, "to tell Ally tomorrow."

Ally was in her room. She never came downstairs now; and this week she was worse and had stayed all day in bed. They couldn't rouse her.

But something had roused her this evening.

A sort of scratching on the door made Gwenda look up from her packing.

Ally stood on the threshold. She had dressed herself completely in her tweed skirt, white blouse and knitted tie. Her strength had failed her only in the struggle with her hair. The coil had fallen, and hung in a loose pigtail down her back. Slowly, in the weakness of her apathy, she trailed across the floor.

"Ally, what is it? Why didn't you send for me?"

"It's all right. I wanted to get up. I'm coming down to supper. You can leave off packing that old trunk. You haven't got to go."

"Who told you I was going?"

"n.o.body. I knew it." She answered Gwenda's eyes. "I don't know how I knew it, but I did. And I know why you're going and it's all rot.

You're going because you know that if you stay Steven Rowcliffe'll marry you, and you think that if you go he'll marry me."

"Whatever put that idea into your head?"

"Nothing put it. It came. It shows how awful you must think me if you think I'd go and do a beastly thing like that."

"Like what?"

"Why--sneaking him away from you behind your back when I know you like him. You needn't lie about it. You _do_ like him.

"I may be awful," she went on. "In fact I know I'm awful. But I'm decent. I couldn't do a caddish thing like that--I couldn't really.

And, if I couldn't, there's no need for you to go."

She was sitting on the trunk where Mary had sat, and when she began to speak she had looked down at her small hands that grasped the edge of the lid, their fingers picking nervously at the ragged flap. They ceased and she looked up.

And in her look, a look that for the moment was divinely lucid, Gwenda saw Ally's secret and hidden kins.h.i.+p with herself. She saw it as if through some medium, once troubled and now made suddenly transparent.

It was because of that queer kins.h.i.+p that Ally had divined her.

However awful she was, however tragically foredoomed and driven, Ally was decent. She knew what Gwenda was doing because it was what, if any sustained lucidity were ever given her, she might have done herself.

But in Ally no idea but the one idea was very deeply rooted. Sustained lucidity never had been hers. It would be easy to delude her.

"I'm going," Gwenda said, "because I want to. If I stayed I wouldn't marry Steven Rowcliffe, and Steven Rowcliffe wouldn't marry me."

"But--I thought--I thought----"

"What did you think?"

"That there was something between you. Papa said so."

"If Papa said so you might have known there was nothing in it."

"And isn't there?"

"Of course there isn't. You can put that idea out of your head forever."

"All the same I believe that's why you're going."

"I'm going because I can't stand this place any longer. You said I'd be sick of it in three months."

"You're not sick of it. You love it. It's me you can't stand."

"No, Ally--no."

She plunged for another argument and found it.

"What I can't stand is living with Papa."

Ally agreed that this was rather more than plausible.

x.x.xVIII

The next person to be told was Rowcliffe.

It was known in the village through the telegrams that Gwenda was going away. The postmistress told Mrs. Gale, who told Mrs. Blenkiron.

These two persons and four or five others had known ever since Sunday that the Vicar's daughter was going away; and the Vicar did not know it yet.

And Mrs. Blenkiron told Rowcliffe on the Wednesday before Alice told him.

For it was Alice who told him, and not Gwenda. Gwenda was not at home when he called at the Vicarage at three o'clock. But he heard from Alice that she would be back at four.

And it was Alice who told Mrs. Gale that when the doctor called again he was to be shown into the study.

He had waited there thirteen minutes before Gwenda came to him.

He looked at her and was struck by a difference he found in her, a difference that recalled some look in her face that he had seen before. It was dead white, and in its whiteness her blue eyes, dark and dilated, quivered with defiance and a sort of fear. She looked older and at the same time younger, as young as Alice and as helpless in her fear. Then he remembered that she had looked like that the night she had pa.s.sed him in the doorway of the house at Upthorne.

"How cold your hands are," he said.

She hid them behind her back as if they had betrayed her.

"Do you want to see me about Ally?"

"No, I don't want to see you about Ally. I want to see you about yourself."