The Three Sisters Part 79

LIII

And with her knowledge there came a curious calm.

She no longer watched and worried Rowcliffe. She knew that no wife ever kept her husband by watching and worrying him.

She was aware of danger and she faced it with restored complacency.

For Mary was a fount of sensual wisdom. Rowcliffe was ill. And from his illness she inferred his misery, and from his misery his innocence.

She told herself that nothing had happened, that she knew nothing that she had not known before. She saw that her mistake had been in showing that she knew it. That was to admit it, and to admit it was to give it a substance, a shape and color it had never had and was not likely to have.

And Mary, having perceived her blunder, set herself to repair it.

She knew how. Under all his energy she had discerned in her husband a love of bodily ease, and a capacity for laziness, undeveloped because perpetually frustrated. Insidiously she had set herself to undermine his energy while she devised continual opportunities for ease.

Rowcliffe remained incurably energetic. His profession demanded energy.

Still, there were ways by which he could be captured. He was not so deeply absorbed in his profession as to be indifferent to the arrangements of his home. He liked and he showed very plainly that he liked, good food and silent service, the s.h.i.+ning of gla.s.s and silver, white table linen and fragrant sheets for his bed.

With all these things Mary had provided him.

And she had her own magic and her way.

Her way, the way she had caught him, was the way she would keep him.

She had always known her power, even unpracticed. She had always known by instinct how she could enthrall him when her moment came. Gwenda had put back the hour; but she had done (and Mary argued that therefore she could do) no more.

Here Mary's complacency betrayed her. She had fallen into the error of all innocent and tranquil sensualists. She trusted to the present. She had reckoned without Rowcliffe's future or his past.

And she had done even worse. By habituating Rowcliffe's senses to her way, she had produced in him, through sheer satisfaction, that sense of security which is the most dangerous sense of all.

LIV

One week in June Rowcliffe went up to Garthdale two nights running. He had never done this before and he had had to lie badly about it both to himself and Mary.

He had told himself that the first evening didn't count.

For he had quarreled with Gwenda the first evening. Neither of them knew how it had happened or what it was about. But he had hardly come before he had left her in his anger.

The actual outburst moved her only to laughter, but the memory of it was violent in her nerves, it shook and shattered her. She had not slept all night and in the morning she woke tired and ill. And, as if he had known what he had done to her, he came to see her the next evening, to make up.

That night they stayed out later than they had meant.

As they touched the moor the lambs stirred at their mothers' sides and the pewits rose and followed the white road to lure them from their secret places; they wheeled and wheeled round them, sending out their bored and weary cry. In June the young broods kept the moor and the two were forced to the white road.

And at the turn they came in sight of Greffington Edge.

She stood still. "Oh--Steven--look," she said.

He stood with her and looked.

The moon was hidden in the haze where the gray day and the white night were mixed. Across the bottom on the dim, watery green of the eastern slope, the thorn trees were in flower. The hot air held them like still water. It quivered invisibly, loosening their scent and scattering it. And of a sudden she saw them as if thrown back to a distance where they stood enchanted in a great stillness and clearness and a piercing beauty.

There went through her a sudden deep excitement, a subtle and mysterious joy. This pa.s.sion was as distant and as pure as ecstasy.

It swept her, while the white glamour lasted, into the stillness where the flowering thorn trees stood.

She wondered whether Steven had seen the vision of the flowering thorn trees. She longed for him to see it. They stood a little apart and her hand moved toward him without touching him, as if she would draw him to the magic.

"Steven--" she said.

He came to her. Her hand hung limply by her side again. She felt his hand close on it and press it.

She knew that he had seen the vision and felt the subtle and mysterious joy.

She wanted nothing more.

"Say good-night now," she said.

"Not yet. I'm going to walk back with you."

They walked back in a silence that guarded the memory of the mystic thing.

They lingered a moment by the half-open door; she on the threshold, he on the garden path; the width of a flagstone separated them.

"In another minute," she thought, "he will be gone."

It seemed to her that he wanted to be gone and that it was she who held him there against his will and her own.

She drew the door to.

"Don't shut it, Gwenda."

It was as if he said, "Don't let's stand together out here like this any longer."

She opened the door again, leaning a little toward it across the threshold with her hand on the latch.

She smiled, raising her chin in the distant gesture that was their signal of withdrawal.

But Steven did not go.

"May I come in?" he said.