The Three Sisters Part 83

She smiled her pitiful, strained smile. It said, "Don't you see that it would kill me if you went?"

And again it was by her difference, her helplessness, that she had him.

He too smiled drearily.

"You don't suppose I really could have left you?"

He saw that it was impossible, unthinkable, that he should leave her.

He rose. She went with him to the door. She thought of something there.

"Steven," she said, "don't worry about to-night. It was all my fault."

"You--you," he murmured. "You're adorable."

"It was really," she said. "I made you come in."

She gave him her cold hand. He raised it and brushed it with his lips and put it from him.

"Your little conscience was always too tender."

LV

Two years pa.s.sed.

Life stirred again in the Vicarage, feebly and slowly, with the slow and feeble stirring of the Vicar's brain.

Ten o'clock was prayer time again.

Twice every Sunday the Vicar appeared in his seat in the chancel.

Twice he p.r.o.nounced the Absolution. Twice he tottered to the altar rails, turned, s.h.i.+fted his stick from his left hand to his right, and, with his one good arm raised, he gave the Benediction. These were the supreme moments of his life.

Once a month, kneeling at the same altar rails, he received the bread and wine from the hands of his ritualistic curate, Mr. Grierson.

It was his uttermost abas.e.m.e.nt.

But, whether he was abased or exalted, the parish was proud of its Vicar. He had shown grit. His paris.h.i.+oners respected the indestructible instinct that had made him hold on.

For Mr. Cartaret was better, incredibly better. He could creep about the house and the village without any help but his stick. He could wash and feed and dress himself. He had no longer any use for his wheel-chair. Once a week, on a Wednesday, he was driven over his parish in an ancient pony carriage of Peac.o.c.k's. It was low enough for him to haul himself in and out.

And he had recovered large tracts of memory, all, apparently, but the one spot submerged in the catastrophe that had brought about his stroke. He was aware of events and of their couplings and of their sequences in time, though the origin of some things was not clear to him. Thus he knew that Alice was married and living at Upthorne, though he had forgotten why. That she should have married Greatorex was a strange thing, and he couldn't think how it had happened. He supposed it must have happened when he was laid aside, for he would never have permitted it if he had known. Mary's marriage also puzzled him, for he had a most distinct idea that it was Gwenda who was to have married Rowcliffe, and he said so. But he would own humbly that he might be mistaken, his memory not being what it was.

He had settled more or less into his state of gentleness and submission, broken from time to time by fits of violent irritation and relieved by pride, pride in his feats of independence, his comings and goings, his was.h.i.+ng, his dressing and undressing of himself. Sometimes this pride was stubborn and insistent; sometimes it was sweet and joyous as a child's. His mouth, relaxed forever by his stroke, had acquired a smile of piteous and appealing innocence. It smiled upon the just and upon the unjust. It smiled even on Greatorex, whom socially he disapproved of (he took care to let it be known that he disapproved of Greatorex socially), though he tolerated him.

He tolerated all persons except one. And that one was the ritualistic curate, Mr. Grierson.

He had every reason for not tolerating him. Not only was Mr.

Grierson a ritualist, which was only less abominable than being a non-conformist, but he had been foisted on him without his knowledge or will. The Vicar had simply waked up one day out of his confused twilight to a state of fearful lucidity and found the young man there.

Worse than all it was through the third Mrs. Cartaret that he had got there.

For the Vicar of Greffington had applied to the Additional Curates Aid Society for a grant on behalf of his afflicted brother, the Vicar of Garthdale, and he had applied in vain. There was a prejudice against the Vicar of Garthdale. But the Vicar of Greffington did not relax his efforts. He applied to young Mrs. Rowcliffe, and young Mrs. Rowcliffe applied to her step-mother, and not in vain. Robina, answering by return of post, offered to pay half the curate's salary. Rowcliffe made himself responsible for the other half.

Robina, in her compact little house in St. John's Wood, had become the prey of remorse. Her conscience had begun to bother her by suggesting that she ought to go back to her husband now that he was helpless and utterly inoffensive. She ought not to leave him on poor Gwenda's hands. She ought, at any rate, to take her turn.

But Robina couldn't face it. She couldn't leave her compact little house and go back to her husband. She couldn't even take her turn.

Flesh and blood shrank from the awful sacrifice. It would be a living death. Your conscience has no business to send you to a living death.

Robina's heart ached for poor Gwenda. She wrote and said so. She said she knew she was a brute for not going back to Gwenda's father. She would do it if she could, but she simply couldn't. She hadn't got the nerve.

And Robina did more. She pulled wires and found the curate. That he was a ritualist was no drawback in Robina's eyes. In fact, she declared it was a positive advantage. Mr. Grierson's practices would wake them up in Garthdale. They needed waking. She had added that Mr.

Grierson was well connected, well behaved and extremely good-looking.

Even charity couldn't subdue the merry devil in Robina.

"I can't see," said Mary reading Robina's letter, "what Mr. Grierson's good looks have got to do with it."

Rowcliffe's face darkened. He thought he could see.

But Mr. Grierson did not wake Garthdale up. It opened one astonished eye on his practices and turned over in its sleep again. Mr. Grierson was young, and the village regarded all he did as the folly of his youth. It saw no harm in Mr. Grierson; not even when he conceived a Platonic pa.s.sion for Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe, and spent all his spare time in her drawing-room and on his way to and from it.

The curate lodged in the village at the Blenkirons' over Rowcliffe's surgery, and from that vantage ground he lay in wait for Rowcliffe.

He watched his movements. He was ready at any moment to fling open his door and spring upon Rowcliffe with ardor and enthusiasm. It was as if he wanted to prove to him how heartily he forgave him for being Mrs.

Rowcliffe's husband. There was a robust innocence about him that ignored the doctor's irony.

Mary had her own use for Mr. Grierson. His handsome figure, a.s.siduous but restrained, the perfect image of integrity in adoration, was the very thing she wanted for her drawing-room. She knew that its presence there had the effect of heightening her own sensual attraction. It served as a reminder to Rowcliffe that his wife was a woman of charm, a fact which for some time he appeared to have forgotten. She could play off her adorer against her husband, while the candid purity of young Grierson's homage renewed her exquisite sense of her own goodness.

And then the Curate really was a cousin of Lord Northfleet's and Mrs.

Rowcliffe had calculated that to have him in her pocket would increase prodigiously her social value. And it did. And Mrs. Rowcliffe's social value, when observed by Grierson, increased his adoration.

And when Rowcliffe told her that young Grierson's Platonic friends.h.i.+p wasn't good for him, she made wide eyes at him and said, "Poor boy! He must have _some_ amus.e.m.e.nt."

She didn't suppose the curate could be much amused by calling at the Vicarage. Young Grierson had confided to her that he couldn't "make her sister out."

"I never knew anybody who could," she said, and gave him a subtle look that disturbed him horribly.

"I only meant--" He stammered and stopped, for he wasn't quite sure what he did mean. His fair, fresh face was strained with the effort to express himself.

He meditated.

"You know, she's really rather fascinating. You can't help looking at her. Only--she doesn't seem to see that you're there. I suppose that's what puts you off."