It was almost as if he had wanted her to know it.
Then April came and the long spring twilights. The sick people had got
well. Rowcliffe had whole hours on his hands that he could have spent
with Gwenda now, if he had known.
And as yet he did not altogether know.
There was something about Gwenda Cartaret for which Rowcliffe with
all his sureness and all his experience was unprepared. Their
whole communion rested and proceeded on undeclared, unacknowledged,
unrealised assumptions, and it was somehow its very secrecy that made
it so secure. Rather than put it to the test he was content to leave
their meetings to luck and his own imperfect ingenuity. He knew
where and at what times he would have the best chance of finding her.
Sometimes, returning from his northerly rounds, he would send the trap
on, and walk back to Morfe by Karva, on the chance. Once, when the
moon was up, he sighted her on the farther moors beyond Upthorne, when
he got down and walked with her for miles, while his man and the trap
waited for him in Garth.
Once, and only once, driving by himself on the Rathdale moors beyond
Morfe, he overtook her, picked her up and drove her through Morfe (to
the consternation of its inhabitants) all the way to Garth and to the
very gate of the Vicarage.
But that was reckless.
* * * * *
And in all those hours, for his opportunities counted by hours now,
he had never found his moment. There was plenty of time, and their
isolation (his and hers) in Garthdale left him dangerously secure. All
the same, by April Rowcliffe was definitely looking for the moment,
the one shining moment, that must sooner or later come.
It was, indeed, always coming. Over and over again he had caught
sight of it; it signaled, shining; he had been ready to seize it, when
something happened, something obscured it, something put him off.
He never knew what it was at the time, but when he looked back on
these happenings he discovered that it was always something that
Gwenda Cartaret did. You would have said that no scene on earth could
have been more favorable to a lover's enterprise than these long,
deserted roads and the vast, twilit moors; and that a young woman
could have found nothing to distract her from her lover there.
But it was not so. On the open moors, as often as not, they had to go
single file through the heather, along a narrow sheep track, Rowcliffe
leading; and it is difficult, not to say impossible, to command the
attention of a young woman walking in your rear. And a thousand things
distracted Gwenda: the cry of a mountain sheep, the sound and
sight of a stream, the whirr of dark wings and the sudden
"Krenk-er-renk-errenk!" of the grouse shooting up from the heather.
And on the high roads where they went abreast she was apt to be
carried away by the pageant of earth and sky; the solid darkness
that came up from the moor; the gray, aerial abysses of the dale; the
awful, blank withdrawal of Greffington Edge into the night. She was
off, Heaven knew where, at the lighting of a star in the thin blue;
the movement of a cloud excited her; or she was held enchanted by
the pale aura of moonrise along the rampart of Greffington Edge. She
shared the earth's silence and the throbbing passion of the earth as
the orbed moon swung free.
And in her absorption, her estranging ecstasy, Rowcliffe at last found
something inimical.
* * * * *
He told himself that it was an affectation in her, or a lure to draw
him after her, as it would have been in any other woman. The little
red-haired nurse would have known how to turn the earth and the moon
to her own purposes and his. But all the time he knew that it was not
so. There was no purpose in it at all, and it was unaware of him and
of his purposes. Gwenda's joy was pure and profound and sufficient to
itself. He gathered that it had been with her before he came and that
it would remain with her after he had gone.
He hated to think that she should know any joy that had not its
beginning and its end in him. It took her from him. As long as it
lasted he was faced with an incomprehensible and monstrous rivalry.
And as a man might leave a woman to his uninteresting rival in
the certainty that she will be bored and presently return to him,
Rowcliffe left Gwenda to the earth and moon. He sulked and was silent.
* * * * *
Then, suddenly, he made up his mind.