She had to walk, for Mary had taken her bicycle. Nobody knew where
Mary had gone or when she had started or when she would be back.
But the four miles between Garth and Morfe were nothing to Gwenda, who
would walk twenty for her own amusement. She would have stretched the
way out indefinitely if she could; she would have piled Garthdale Moor
on Greffington Edge and Karva on the top of them and put them between
Garth and Morfe, so violent was her fear of Steven Rowcliffe.
She had no longer any desire to see him or to be seen by him. He had
seen her twice too often, and too early and too late. After being
caught on the moor at dawn, it was preposterous that she should show
herself in the doorway of Upthorne at night.
How was he to know that she hadn't done it on purpose? Girls did these
things. Poor little Ally had done them. And it was because Ally had
done them that she had been taken and hidden away here where she
couldn't do them any more.
But--couldn't she? Gwenda stood still, staring in her horror as the
frightful thought struck her that Ally could, and that she would, the
very minute she realised young Rowcliffe. And he would think--not that
it mattered in the least what he thought--he would think that there
were two of them.
If only, she said to herself, if only young Rowcliffe were a married
man. Then even Ally couldn't--
Not that she blamed poor little Ally. She looked on little Ally as
the victim of a malign and tragic tendency, the fragile vehicle of an
alien and overpowering impulse. Little Ally was doomed. It wasn't her
fault if she was made like that.
And this time it wouldn't be her fault at all. Their father would have
driven her. Gwenda hated him for his persecution and exposure of the
helpless creature.
She walked on thinking.
It wouldn't end with Ally. They were all three exposed and persecuted.
For supposing--it wasn't likely, but supposing--that this Rowcliffe
man was the sort of man she liked, supposing--what was still more
unlikely--that he was the sort of man who would like her, where
would be the good of it? Her father would spoil it all. He spoiled
everything.
Well, no, to be perfectly accurate, not everything. There was
one thing he had not spoiled, because he had never suspected its
existence--her singular passion for the place. Of course, if he had
suspected it, he would have stamped on it. It was his business
to stamp on other people's passions. Luckily, it wasn't in him to
conceive a passion for a place.
It had come upon her at first sight as they drove between twilight and
night from Reyburn through Rathdale into Garthdale. It was when they
had left the wooded land behind them and the moors lifted up their
naked shoulders, one after another, darker than dark, into a sky
already whitening above the hidden moon. And she saw Morfe, gray as
iron, on its hill, bearing the square crown and the triple pendants of
its lights; she saw the long straight line of Greffington Edge, hiding
the secret moon, and Karva with the ashen west behind it. There was
something in their form and in their gesture that called to her as
if they knew her, as if they waited for her; they struck her with the
shock of recognition, as if she had known them and had waited too.
And close beside her own wonder and excitement she had felt the deep
and sullen repulsion of her companions. The Vicar sat huddled in his
overcoat. His nostrils, pinched with repugnance, sniffed as they drank
in the cold, clean air. From time to time he shuddered, and a hoarse
muttering came from under the gray woolen scarf he had wound round
his mouth and beard. He was the righteous man, sent into uttermost
abominable exile for his daughter's sin. Behind him, on the back seat
of the trap, Alice and Mary cowed under their capes and rugs. They had
turned their shoulders to each other, hostile in their misery. Gwenda
was sorry for them.
The gray road dipped and turned and plunged them to the bottom of
Garthdale. The small, scattering lights of the village waited for her
in the hollow, with something humble and sad and familiar in their
setting. They too stung her with that poignant and secret sense of
recognition.
"This is the place," the Vicar had said. He had addressed himself
to Alice; and it had been as if he had said, This the place, the
infernal, the damnable place, you've brought us to with your behavior.
Their hatred of it had made Gwenda love it. "You can have your old
Garthdale all to yourself," Alice had said. "Nobody else wants it."
That, to Gwenda, was the charm of it. The adorable place was her own.
Nobody else wanted it. She loved it for itself. It had nothing but
itself to offer her. And that was enough. It was almost, as she
had said, too much. Her questing youth conceived no more rapturous
adventure than to follow the sheep over Karva, to set out at twilight
and see the immense night come down on the high moors above Upthorne;
to get up when Alice was asleep and slip out and watch the dawn
turning from gray to rose, and from rose to gold above Greffington
Edge.
As it happened you saw sunrise and moonrise best from the platform of
Morfe Green. There Greffington Edge breaks and falls away, and lets
slip the dawn like a rosy scarf from its shoulder, and sets the moon
free of her earth and gives her to the open sky.
But, just as the Vicar had spoiled Rowcliffe, so Rowcliffe had
spoiled Morfe for Gwenda. Therefore her fear of him was mingled with
resentment. It was as if he had had no business to be living there, in
that house of his looking over the Green.
Incredible that she should have wanted to see and to know this person.
But now, that she didn't want to, of course she was going to see him.
* * * * *
At the bend of the road, within a mile of Morfe, Mary came riding on
Gwenda's bicycle. Large parcels were slung from her handle bars. She
had been shopping in the village.
Mary, bowed forward as she struggled with an upward slope, was not
aware of Gwenda. But Gwenda was aware of Mary, and, not being in the
mood for her, she struck off the road on to the moor and descended
upon Morfe by the steep lane that leads from Karva into Rathdale.
It never occurred to her to wonder what Mary had been doing in Morfe,
so evident was it that she had been shopping.