Alice got up, she broke loose from them and left the room.
"You might have known she wasn't going to drink it," Gwenda said.
But the Vicar never knew when he was beaten.
"She would have drunk it," he said, "if Mary hadn't interfered."
* * * * *
Alice had not got the pneumonia that had killed John Greatorex. Such
happiness, she reflected, was not for her. She had desired it too
much.
But she was doing very well with her anæmia.
Bloodless and slender and inert, she dragged herself about the
village. She could not get away from it because of the steep hills
she would have had to climb. A small, unhappy ghost, she haunted the
fields in the bottom and the path along the beck that led past Mrs.
Gale's cottage.
The sight of Alice was more than ever annoying to the Vicar. Only
you wouldn't have known it. As she grew whiter and weaker he braced
himself, and became more hearty and robust. When he caught her lying
on the sofa he spoke to her in a robust and hearty tone.
"Don't lie there all day, my girl. Get up and go out. What you want is
a good blow on the moor."
"Yes. If I didn't die before I got there," Alice would say, while she
thought, "Serve him right, too, if I did."
And the Vicar would turn from her in disgust. He knew what was the
matter with his daughter Alice.
At dinner time he would pull himself together again, for, after all,
he was her father. He was robust and hearty over the sirloin and the
leg of mutton. He would call for a glass and press into it the red
juice of the meat.
"Don't peak and pine, girl. Drink that. It'll put some blood into
you."
And Alice would refuse to drink it.
Next she refused to drink her milk at eleven. She carried it out to
Essy in the scullery.
"I wish you'd drink my milk for me, Essy. It makes me sick," she said.
"I don't want your milk," said Essy.
"Please--" she implored her.
But Essy was angry. Her face flamed and she banged down the dishes she
was drying. "I sail not drink it. What should I want your milk for?
You can pour it in t' pig's bucket."
And the milk would be left by the scullery window till it turned sour
and Essy poured it into the pig's bucket that stood under the sink.
* * * * *
Three weeks passed, and with every week Alice grew more bloodless,
more slender, and more inert, and more and more like an unhappy
ghost. Her small face was smaller; there was a tinge of green in its
honey-whiteness, and of mauve in the dull rose of her mouth. And under
her shallow breast her heart seemed to rise up and grow large, while
the rest of Alice shrank and grew small. It was as if her fragile
little body carried an enormous engine, an engine of infernal and
terrifying power. When she lay down and when she got up and with every
sudden movement its throbbing shook her savagely.
Night and morning she called to her sister: "Oh Gwenda, come and feel
my heart. I do believe it's growing. It's getting too big for my body.
It frightens me when it jumps about like that."
It frightened Gwenda.
But it did not really frighten Alice. She rejoiced in it, rather,
and exulted. After all, it was a good thing that she had not
got pneumonia, which might have killed her as it had killed John
Greatorex. She had got what served her purpose better. It served all
her purposes. If she had tried she could not have hit on anything that
would have annoyed her father more or put him more conspicuously in
the wrong. To begin with, it was his doing. He had worried her into
it. And he had brought her to a place which was the worst place
conceivable for anybody with a diseased heart, since you couldn't stir
out of doors without going up hill.
Night and morning Alice stood before the looking-glass and turned out
the lining of her lips and eyelids and saw with pleasure the pale rose
growing paler. Every other hour she laid her hand on her heart and
took again the full thrill of its dangerous throbbing, or felt her
pulse to assure herself of the halt, the jerk, the hurrying of the
beat. Night and morning and every other hour she thought of Rowcliffe.
"If it goes on like this, they'll _have_ to send for him," she said.
But it had gone on, the three weeks had passed, and yet they had not
sent. The Vicar had put his foot down. He wouldn't have the doctor. He
knew better than a dozen doctors what was the matter with his daughter
Alice.
Alice said nothing. She simply waited. As if some profound and
dead-sure instinct had sustained her, she waited, sickening.
And on the last night of the third week she fainted. She had dragged
herself upstairs to bed, staggered across the little landing and
fallen on the threshold of her room.
They kept her in bed next day. At one o'clock she refused her
chicken-broth. She would neither eat nor drink. And a little before
three Gwenda went for the doctor.
She had not told Alice she was going. She had not told anybody.