The Three Sisters Part 85

LVI

But one day in April, in the fourth year of her marriage, Mary sent for Gwenda.

Rowcliffe was out on his rounds. She had thought of that. She was fond of having Gwenda with her in Rowcliffe's absence, when she could talk to her about him in a way that a.s.sumed his complete indifference to Gwenda and utter devotion to herself. Gwenda was used to this habit of Mary's and thought nothing of it.

She found her in Rowcliffe's study, the room that she knew better than any other in his house. The window was closed. The panes cut up the colors of the orchard and framed them in small squares.

Mary received her with a gentle voice and a show of tenderness. She said very little. They had tea together, and when Gwenda would have gone Mary kept her.

She still said very little. She seemed to brood over some happy secret.

Presently she spoke. She told her secret.

And when she had told it she turned her eyes to Gwenda with a look of subtle penetration and of triumph.

"At last," she said,--"After three years."

And she added, "I knew you would be glad."

"I _am_ glad," said Gwenda.

She _was_ glad. She was determined to be glad. She looked glad. And she kissed Mary and said again that she was very glad.

But as she walked back the four miles up Garthdale under Karva, she felt an aching at her heart which was odd considering how glad she was.

She said to herself, "I _will_ be glad. I want Mary to be happy. Why shouldn't I be glad? It's not as if it could make any difference."

LVII

In September Mary sent for her again.

Mary was very ill. She lay on her bed, and Rowcliffe and her sister stood on either side of her. She gazed from one to the other with eyes of terror and entreaty. It was as if she cried out to them--the two who were so strong--to help her. She stretched out her arms on the counterpane, one arm toward each of them; her little hands, palm-upward, implored them.

Each of them laid a hand in Mary's hand that closed on it with a clutch of agony.

Rowcliffe had sat up all night with her. His face was white and haggard and there was fear and misery in his eyes. They never looked at Gwenda's lest they should see the same fear and the same misery there. It was as if they had no love for each other, only a profound and secret pity that sprang in both of them from their fear.

Only once they found each other, outside on the landing, when they had left Mary alone with Hyslop, the old doctor from Reyburn, and the nurse. Each spoke once.

"Steven, is there really any danger?"

"Yes. I wish to G.o.d I'd had Harker. Do you mind sending him a wire? I must go and see what that fool Hyslop's doing."

He turned back again into the room.

Gwenda went out and sent the wire.

But at noon, before Harker could come to them, it was over. Mary lay as Alice had lain, weak and happy, with her child tucked in the crook of her arm. And she smiled at it dreamily.

The old doctor and the nurse smiled at Rowcliffe.

It couldn't, they said, have gone off more easily. There hadn't been any danger, nor any earthly reason to have sent for Harker. Though, of course, if it had made Rowcliffe happier--!

The old doctor added that if it had been anybody else's wife Rowcliffe would have known that it was going all right.

And in the evening, when her sister stood again at her bedside, as Mary lifted the edge of the flannel that hid her baby's face, she looked at Gwenda and smiled, not dreamily but subtly in a triumph that was almost malign.

That night Gwenda dreamed that she saw Mary lying dead and with a dead child in the crook of her arm.

She woke in anguish and terror.

LVIII

Three years pa.s.sed and six months. The Cartarets had been in Garthdale nine years.

Gwenda Cartaret sat in the dining-room at the Vicarage alone with her father.

It was nearly ten o'clock of the March evening. They waited for the striking of the clock. It would be prayer time then, and after prayers the Vicar would drag himself upstairs to bed, and in the peace that slid into the room when he left it Gwenda would go on with her reading.

She had her sewing in her lap and her book, Bergson's _evolution creatrice_ propped open before her on the table. She sewed as she read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked. Toward ten his silence would be broken by a continual sighing and yearning. The Vicar longed for prayer time to come and end his day. But he had decreed that prayer time was ten o'clock and he would not have permitted it to come a minute sooner.

He nursed a book on his knees, but he made no pretence of reading it. He had taken off his gla.s.ses and sat with his hands folded, in an att.i.tude of utter resignation to his own will.

In the kitchen Essy Gale sat by the dying fire and waited for the stroke of ten. And as she waited she st.i.tched at the torn breeches of her little son.

Essy had come back to the house where she had been turned away. For her mother was wanted by Mrs. Greatorex at Upthorne and what Mrs.

Greatorex wanted she got. There were two more children now at the Farm and work enough for three women in the house. And Essy, with all her pride, had not been too proud to come back. She had no feeling but pity for the old man, her master, who had bullied her and put her to shame. If it pleased G.o.d to afflict him that was G.o.d's affair, and, even as a devout Wesleyan, Essy considered that G.o.d had about done enough.

As Essy sat and st.i.tched, she smiled, thinking of Greatorex's son who lay in her bed in the little room over the kitchen. Miss Gwenda let her have him with her on the nights when Mrs. Gale slept up at the Farm.

It was quiet in the Vicarage kitchen. The door into the back yard was shut, the door that Essy used to keep open when she listened for a footstep and a whisper. That door had betrayed her many a time when the wind slammed it to.

Essy's heart was quiet as the heart of her sleeping child. She had forgotten how madly it had leaped to her lover's footsteps, how it had staggered at the slamming of the door. She had forgotten the tears that she had shed when Alice's wild music had rocked the house, and what the Vicar had said to her that night when she spilled the gla.s.s of water in the study.

But she remembered that Gwenda had given her son his first little Sunday suit; and that, before Jimmy came, when Essy was in bed, crying with the face-ache, she had knocked at her door and said, "What is it, Essy? Can I do anything for you?" She could hear her saying it now.

Essy's memory was like that.