"It's a quarter past six now," she said to herself. "They must come
back from Bar Hill by Upthorne. I shall meet them at Upthorne if I
start now."
She slipped her rough coat over the new gown and started.
Her fear drove her, and she went up the hill at an impossible pace.
She trembled, staggered, stood still and went on again.
The twilight of the unborn moon was like the horrible twilight of
dreams. She walked as she had walked in nightmares, with knees, weak
as water, that sank under her at every step.
She passed the schoolhouse with its beckoning ash-tree. The
schoolhouse stirred the pain under her heart. She remembered the
shining night when she had shown herself there and triumphed.
The pain then was so intolerable that her mind revolted from it as
from a thing that simply could not be. The idea by which she lived
asserted itself against the menace of destruction. It was not so much
an idea as an instinct, blind, obstinate, immovable. It had behind it
the wisdom and the persistence of life. It refused to believe where
belief meant death to it.
She said to herself, "He's lying. He's lying. He's made it all up. He
never met them."
* * * * *
She had passed the turn of the hill. She had come to the high towers,
sinister and indistinct, to the hollow walls and haunted arcades of
the dead mining station. Upthorne was hidden by the shoulder of the
hill.
She stopped suddenly, there where the road skirted the arcades. She
was struck by a shock of premonition, an instinct older and profounder
than that wisdom of the blood. She had the sense that what was
happening now, her coming, like this, to the towers and the arcades,
had happened before, and was so related to what was about to happen
that she knew this also and with the same shock of recognition.
It would happen when she had come to the last arch of the colonnade.
It was happening now. She had come to the last arch.
* * * * *
That instant she was aware of Rowcliffe and Gwenda coming toward her
down the hill.
Their figures were almost indiscernible in the twilight. It was by
their voices that she knew them.
Before they could see her she had slipped out of their path behind the
shelter of the arch.
She knew them by their voices. Yet their voices had something in them
that she did not know, something that told her that they had been with
each other many times before; that they understood each other; that
they were happy in each other and absorbed.
The pain was no longer inside her heart but under it. It was dull
rather than sharp, yet it moved there like a sharp sickle, a sickle
that gathered and ground the live flesh it turned in and twisted. A
sensation of deadly sickness made her draw farther yet into the corner
of the arcade, feeling her way in the darkness with her hand on the
wall. She stumbled on a block of stone, sank on it and cowered there,
sobbing and shivering.
Down in Garth village the church clock struck the half hour and the
quarter and the hour.
At the half hour Blenkiron, the blacksmith, put Rowcliffe's horse into
the trap. The sound of the clanking hoofs came up the hill. Rowcliffe
heard them first.
"There's something wrong down there," he said. "They're coming for
me."
In his heart he cursed them. For it was there, at the turn of the
road, below the arches, that he had meant to say what he had not said
the other night. There was no moon. The moment was propitious. And
there (just like his cursed luck) was Blenkiron with the trap.
They met above the schoolhouse as the clock struck the quarter.
"You're wanted, sir," said the blacksmith, "at Mrs. Gale's."
"Is it Essy?"
"Ay, it's Assy."
* * * * *
In the cottage down by the beck Essy groaned and cried in her agony.
And on the road to Upthorne, under the arches by the sinister towers,
Alice Cartaret, crouching on her stone, sobbed and shivered.
Not long after seven Essy's child was born.
* * * * *
Just before ten the three sisters sat waiting, as they had always
waited, bored and motionless, for the imminent catastrophe of Prayers.
"I wonder how Essy's getting on," said Gwenda.
"Poor little Essy!" Mary said.
"She's as pleased as Punch," said Gwenda. "It's a boy. Ally--did you
know that Essy's had a baby?"
"I don't care if she has," said Ally violently. "It's got nothing to
do with me. I wish you wouldn't talk about her beastly baby."
As the Vicar came out of his study into the dining-room, he fixed his
eyes upon his youngest daughter.
"What's the matter with you?" he said.
"Nothing's the matter," said Alice defiantly. "Why?"
"You look," he said, "as if somebody was murdering you."