The Three Sisters Part 7

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 sc.r.a.ped 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She looked at him as she pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 un.o.bserved.

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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 moorgra.s.s 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 disenc.u.mbered 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sage.

"Who is that young lady?" he asked.

"T' Vicar's laa.s.s, 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 'a.s.sn'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.