And Jim waited.
He waited till one afternoon in February, when they were again in the
stable together. He had turned his back on her for a moment.
When he looked round she was gone from her seat on the cornsacks. She
was standing by the window-sill with the bottle of chlorodyne in her
hand and at her lips. He thought she was smelling it.
She tilted her head back. Her eyes slewed sidelong toward him. They
quivered as he leaped to her.
She had not drunk a drop and he knew it, but she clutched her bottle
with a febrile obstinacy. He had to loosen her little fingers one by
one.
He poured the liquid into the stable gutter and flung the bottle on to
the dung heap in the mistal.
"What were you doing wi' thot stoof?" he said.
"I don't know. I was thinking of Papa."
After that he never left her until Rowcliffe came.
Rowcliffe said: "She's got it into her head he's going to die, and she
thinks she's killed him. You'd better let me take her to see him."
L
The Vicar had solved his problem by his stroke, but not quite as he
had anticipated.
Nothing had ever turned out as he had planned or thought or willed. He
had planned to leave the parish. He had thought that in his wisdom he
had saved Alice by shutting her up in Garthdale. He had thought that
she was safe at choir-practice with Jim Greatorex. He had thought
that Mary was devoted to him and that Gwenda was capable of all
disobedience and all iniquity. She had gone away and he had forbidden
her to come back again. He had also forbidden Greatorex to enter his
house.
And Greatorex was entering it every day, for news of him to take to
Alice at Upthorne. Gwenda had come back and would never go again, and
it was she and not Mary who had proved herself devoted. And it was not
his wisdom but Greatorex's scandalous passion for her that had saved
Alice. As for leaving the parish because of the scandal, the Vicar
would never leave it now. He was tied there in his Vicarage by his
stroke.
It left him with a paralysis of the right side and an utter confusion
and enfeeblement of intellect.
In three months he recovered partially from the paralysis. But the
flooding of his brain had submerged or carried away whole tracts
of recent memory, and the last vivid, violent impression--Alice's
affair--was wiped out.
There was no reason why he should not stay on. What was left of his
memory told him that Alice was at the Vicarage, and he was worried
because he never saw her about.
He did not know that the small gray house above the churchyard had
become a place of sinister and scandalous tragedy; that his name and
his youngest daughter's name were bywords in three parishes; and that
Alice had been married in conspicuous haste by the horrified Vicar
of Greffington to a man whom only charitable people regarded as her
seducer.
And the order of time had ceased for him with this breach in the
sequence of events. He had a dim but enduring impression that it
was always prayer time. No hours marked the long stretches of blank
darkness and of confused and crowded twilight. Only, now and then, a
little light pulsed feebly in his brain, a flash that renewed itself
day by day; and day by day, in a fresh experience, he was aware that
he was ill.
It was as if the world stood still and his mind moved. It "wandered,"
as they said. And in its wanderings it came upon strange gaps and
hollows and fantastic dislocations, landslips where a whole foreground
had given way. It looked at these things with a serene and dreamlike
wonder and passed on.
And in the background, on some half-lit, isolated tract of memory,
raised above ruin, and infinitely remote, he saw the figure of his
youngest daughter. It was a girlish, innocent figure, and though,
because of the whiteness of its face, he confused it now and then with
the figure of Alice's dead mother, his first wife, he was aware that
it was really Alice.
This figure of Alice moved him with a vague and tender yearning.
What puzzled and worried him was that in his flashes of luminous
experience he didn't see her there. And it was then that the Vicar
would make himself wonderful and piteous by asking, a dozen times a
day, "Where's Ally?"
For by the stroke that made him wonderful and piteous the Vicar's
character and his temperament were changed. Nothing was left of Ally's
tyrant and Robina's victim, the middle-aged celibate, filled with the
fury of frustration and profoundly sorry for himself. His place was
taken by a gentle old man, an old man of an appealing and childlike
innocence, pure from all lust, from all self-pity, enjoying, actually
enjoying, the consideration that his stroke had brought him.
He was changed no less remarkably in his affections. He was utterly
indifferent to Mary, whom he had been fond of. He yearned for Alice,
whom he had hated. And he clung incessantly to Gwenda, whom he had
feared.
When he looked round in his strange and awful gentleness and said,
"Where's Ally?" his voice was the voice of a mother calling for her
child. And when he said, "Where's Gwenda?" it was the voice of a child
calling for its mother.
And as he continually thought that Alice was at the Vicarage when she
was at Upthorne, so he was convinced that Gwenda had left him when she
was there.
* * * * *
Rowcliffe judged that this confusion of the Vicar's would be favorable
to his experiment.
And it was.
When Mr. Cartaret saw his youngest daughter for the first time since
their violent rupture he gazed at her tranquilly and said, "And where
have _you_ been all this time?"
"Not very far, Papa."
He smiled sweetly.
"I thought you'd run away from your poor old father. Let me see--was
it Ally? My memory's going. No. It was Gwenda who ran away. Wasn't it
Gwenda?"
"Yes, Papa."
"Well--she must come back again. I can't do without Gwenda."
"She has come back, Papa."
"She's always coming hack. But she'll go away again. Where is she?"
"I'm here, Papa dear."
"Here one minute," said the Vicar, "and gone the next."
"No--no. I'm not going. I shall never go away and leave you."
"So you say," said the Vicar. "So you say."
He looked round uneasily.
"It's time for Ally to go to bed. Has Essy brought her milk?"
His head bowed to his breast. He fell into a doze. Ally watched.
And in the outer room Gwenda and Steven Rowcliffe talked together.
"Steven--he's always going on like that. It breaks my heart."
"I know, dear, I know."
"Do you think he'll ever remember?"
"I don't know. I don't think so."
Then they sat together without speaking. She was thinking: "How good
he is. Surely I may love him for his goodness?" And he that the old
man in there had solved _his_ problem, but that his own had been taken
out of his hands.
And he saw no solution.
If the Vicar had gone away and taken Gwenda with him, that would have
solved it. God knew he had been willing enough to solve it that way.
But here they were, flung together, thrust toward each other when they
should have torn themselves apart; tied, both of them, to a place they
could not leave. Week in, week out, he would be obliged to see her
whether he would or no. And when her tired face rebuked his senses,
she drew him by her tenderness; she held him by her goodness. There
was only one thing for him to do--to clear out. It was his plain and
simple duty. If it hadn't been for Alice and for that old man he
would have done it. But, because of them, it was his still plainer
and simpler duty to stay where he was, to stick to her and see her
through.
He couldn't help it if his problem was taken out of his hands.
They started. They looked at each other and smiled their strained and
tragic smile.
In the inner room the Vicar was calling for Gwenda.
It was prayer time, he said.
* * * * *
Rowcliffe had to drive Alice back that night to Upthorne.
"Well," he said, as they left the Vicarage behind them, "you see he
isn't going to die."
"No," said Alice. "But he's out of his mind. I haven't killed him.
I've done worse. I've driven him mad."
And she stuck to it. She couldn't afford to part with her fear--yet.
Rowcliffe was distressed at the failure of his experiment. He told
Greatorex that there was nothing to be done but to wait patiently till
June. Then--perhaps--they would see.
In his own mind he had very little hope. He said to himself that he
didn't like the turn Ally's obsession had taken. It was _too_ morbid.
But when May came Alice lay in the big bed under the sagging ceiling
with a lamentably small baby in her arms, and Greatorex sat beside her
by the hour together, with his eyes fixed on her white face. Rowcliffe
had told him to be on the lookout for some new thing or for some more
violent sign of the old obsession. But nine days had passed and he had
seen no sign. Her eyes looked at him and at her child with the same
lucid, drowsy ecstasy.
And in nine days she had only asked him once if he knew how poor Papa
was?
Her fear had left her. It had served its purpose.