The village knew all about Jim Greatorex and Alice Cartaret now. Where
their names had been whispered by two or three in the bar of the Red
Lion, over the post office counter, in the schoolhouse, in the smithy,
and on the open road, the loud scandal of them burst with horror.
For the first time in his life Jim Greatorex was made aware that
public opinion was against him. Wherever he showed himself the men
slunk from him and the women stared. He set his teeth and held his
chin up and passed them as if he had not seen them. He was determined
to defy public opinion.
Standing in the door of his kinsman's smithy, he defied it.
It was the day before his wedding. He had been riding home from Morfe
Market and his mare Daisy had cast a shoe coming down the hill. He
rode her up to the smithy and called for Blenkiron, shouting his need.
Blenkiron came out and looked at him sulkily.
"I'll shoe t' maare," he said, "but yo'll stand outside t' smithy, Jim
Greatorex."
For answer Jim rode the mare into the smithy and dismounted there.
Then Blenkiron spoke.
"You'd best 'ave staayed where yo' were. But yo've coom in an' yo'
s'all 'ave a bit o' my toongue. To-morra's yore weddin' day, I 'ear?"
Jim intimated that if it was his wedding day it was no business of
Blenkiron's.
"Wall," said the blacksmith, "ef they dawn't gie yo' soom roough music
to-morra night, it'll bae better loock than yo' desarve--t' two o'
yo'."
Greatorex scowled at his kinsman.
"Look yo' 'ere, John Blenkiron, I warn yo'. Any man in t' Daale thot
speaaks woon word agen my wife 'e s'all 'ave 'is nack wroong."
"An' 'ow 'bout t' women, Jimmy? There'll bae a sight o' nacks fer yo'
t' wring, I rackon. They'll 'ave soomat t' saay to 'er, yore laady."
"T' women? T' women? Domned sight she'll keer for what they saay.
There is n' woon o' they bitches as is fit t' kneel in t' mood to 'er
t' tooch t' sawle of 'er boots."
Blenkiron peered up at him from the crook of the mare's hind leg.
"Nat Assy Gaale?" he said.
"Assy Gaale? 'Oo's she to mook _'er_ naame with 'er dirty toongue?"
"Yo'll not goa far thot road, Jimmy. 'Tis wi' t' womenfawlk yo'll
'aave t' racken."
He knew it.
The first he had to reckon with was Maggie.
Maggie, being given notice, had refused to take it.
"Yo' can please yoresel, Mr. Greatorex. I can goa. I can goa. But ef I
goa yo'll nat find anoother woman as'll coom to yo'. There's nat woon
as'll keer mooch t' work for _yore_ laady."
"Wull yo' wark for 'er, Maaggie?" he had said.
And Maggie, with a sullen look and hitching her coarse apron, had
replied remarkably:
"Ef Assy Gaale can wash fer er I rackon _I_ can shift to baake an'
clane."
"Wull yo' waait on 'er?" he had persisted.
Maggie had turned away her face from him.
"Ay, I'll waait on 'er," she said.
And Maggie had stayed to bake and clean. Rough and sullen, without a
smile, she had waited on young Mrs. Greatorex.
* * * * *
But Alice was not afraid of Maggie. She was not going to admit for a
moment that she was afraid of her. She was not going to admit that she
was afraid of anything but one thing--that her father would die.
If he died she would have killed him.
Or, rather, she and Greatorex would have killed him between them.
This statement Ally held to and reiterated and refused to qualify.
For Alice at Upthorne had become a creature matchless in cunning and
of subtle and marvelous resource. She had been terrified and tortured,
shamed and cowed. She had been hounded to her marriage and conveyed
with an appalling suddenness to Upthorne, that place of sinister and
terrible suggestion, and the bed in which John Greatorex had died had
been her marriage bed. Her mind, like a thing pursued and in deadly
peril, took instantaneously a line. It doubled and dodged; it hid
itself; its instinct was expert in disguises, in subterfuges and
shifts.
In her soul she knew that she was done for if she once admitted and
gave in to her fear of Upthorne and of her husband's house, or if
she were ever to feel again her fear of Greatorex, which was the most
intolerable of all her fears. It was as if Nature itself were aware
that, if Ally were not dispossessed of that terror before Greatorex's
child was born her own purpose would be insecure; as if the unborn
child, the flesh and blood of the Greatorexes that had entered into
her, protested against her disastrous cowardice.
So, without Ally being in the least aware of it, Ally's mind,
struggling toward sanity, fabricated one enormous fear, the fear of
her father's death, a fear that she could own and face, and set it up
in place of that secret and dangerous thing which was the fear of life
itself.
Ally, insisting a dozen times a day that she had killed poor Papa,
was completely taken in by this play of her surreptitiously
self-preserving soul. Even Rowcliffe was taken in by it. He called
it a morbid obsession. And he began to wonder whether he had not been
mistaken about Ally after all, whether her nature was not more subtle
and sensitive than he had guessed, more intricately and dangerously
mixed.
For the sadness of the desolate land, of the naked hillsides, of the
moor marshes with their ghostly mists; the brooding of the watchful,
solitary house, the horror of haunted twilights, of nightfall and of
midnights now and then when Greatorex was abroad looking after his
cattle and she lay alone under the white ceiling that sagged above her
bed and heard the weak wind picking at the pane; her fear of Maggie
and of what Maggie had been to Greatorex and might be again; her fear
of the savage, violent and repulsive elements in the man who was
her god; her fear of her own repulsion; the tremor of her recoiling
nerves; premonitions of her alien blood, the vague melancholy of her
secret motherhood; they were all mingled together and hidden from her
in the vast gloom of her one fear.
And once the dominant terror was set up, her instinct found a thousand
ways of strengthening it. Through her adoration of her lover her mind
had become saturated with his mournful consciousness of sin. In their
moments of contrition they were both convinced that they would be
punished. But Ally had borne her sin superbly; she had declared that
it was hers and hers only, and that she and not Greatorex would be
punished. And now the punishment had come. She persuaded herself that
her father's death was the retribution Heaven required.
* * * * *
And all the time, through the perilous months, Nature, mindful of her
own, tightened her hold on Ally through Ally's fear. Ally was afraid
to be left alone with it. Therefore she never let Greatorex out of her
sight if she could help it. She followed him from room to room of the
sad house where he was painting and papering and whitewashing to make
it fine for her. Where he was she had to be. Stowed away in some swept
corner, she would sit with her sweet and sorrowful eyes fixed on him
as he labored. She trotted after him through the house and out into
the mistal and up the Three Fields. She would crouch on a heap of
corn-sacks, wrapped in a fur coat, and watch him at his work in the
stable and the cow-byre. In her need to immortalise this passion she
could not have done better. Her utter dependence on him flattered and
softened the distrustful, violent and headstrong man. Her one chance,
and Ally knew it, was to cling. If she had once shamed him by her
fastidious shrinking she would have lost him; for, as Mrs. Gale had
told her long ago, you could do nothing with Jimmy when he was shamed.
Maggie, for all her coarseness, had contrived to shame him; so had
Essy in her freedom and her pride. Ally's clinging, so far from
irritating or obstructing him, drew out the infinite pity and
tenderness he had for all sick and helpless things. He could no more
have pushed little Ally from him than he could have kicked a mothering
ewe, or stamped on a new dropped lamb. He would call to her if she
failed to come. He would hold out his big hand to her as he would
have held it to a child. Her smallness, her fineness and fragility
enchanted him. The palms of her hands had the smoothness and softness
of silk, and they made a sound like silk as they withdrew themselves
with a lingering, stroking touch from his. He still felt, with a
fearful and admiring wonder, the difference of her flesh from his.
To be sure Jim's tenderness was partly penitential. Only it was Ally
alone who had moved him to a perfect and unbearable contrition. For
the two women whom he had loved and left Greatorex had felt nothing
but a passing pang. For the woman he had made his wife he would go
always with a wound in his soul.
And with Ally, too, the supernatural came to Nature's aid. Her fear
had a profound strain of the uncanny in it, and Jim's bodily presence
was her shelter from her fear. And as it bound them flesh to flesh,
closer and closer, it wedded them in one memory, one consolation and
one soul.
* * * * *
One day she had followed him into the stable, and on the window-sill,
among all the cobwebs where it had been put away and forgotten, she
found the little bottle of chlorodyne.
She took it up, and Jim scolded her gently as if she had been a child.
"Yore lil haands is always maddlin'. Yo' put thot down."
"What is it?"
"It's poison, is thot. There's enoof there t' kill a maan. Yo' put it
down whan I tall yo'."
She put it down obediently in its place on the window-sill among the
cobwebs.
He made a nest for her of clean hay, where she sat and watched him
as he gave Daisy her feed of corn. She watched every movement of him,
every gesture, thoughtful and intent.
"I can't think, Jim, why I ever was afraid of you. _Was_ I afraid of
you?"
Greatorex grinned.
"Yo' used t' saay yo' were."
"How silly of me. And I used to be afraid of Maggie."
"_I_'ve been afraaid of Maaggie afore now. She's got a roough side t'
'er toongue and she can use it. But she'll nat use it on yo'. Yo've
naw call to be afraaid ef annybody. There isn't woon would hoort a lil
thing like yo'."
"They say things about me. I know they do."
"And yo' dawn't keer what they saay, do yo'?"
"I don't care a rap. But I think it's cruel of them, all the same."
"But yo're happy enoof, aren't yo'--all the same?"
"I'm very happy. At least I would be if it wasn't for poor Papa. It
wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for what we did."
Wherever they started, whatever round they fetched, it was to this
that they returned.
And always Jim met it with the same answer:
"'Tisn' what we doon; 'tis what 'e doon. An' annyhow it had to bae."
Every week Rowcliffe came to see her and every week Jim said to him:
"She's at it still and I caan't move 'er."