LI

There was no prayer time at the Vicarage any more.

* * * * *

There was no more time at all there as the world counts time.

The hours no longer passed in a procession marked by distinguishable

days. They rolled round and round in an interminable circle,

monotonously renewed, monotonously returning upon itself. The Vicar

was the center of the circle. The hours were sounded and measured by

his monotonously recurring needs. But the days were neither measured

nor marked. They were all of one shade. There was no difference

between Sunday and Monday in the Vicarage now. They talked of the

Vicar's good days and his bad days, that was all.

For in this house where time had ceased they talked incessantly of

time. But it was always _his_ time; the time for his early morning

cup of tea; the time for his medicine; the time for his breakfast;

the time for reading his chapter to him while he dozed; the time for

washing him, for dressing him, for taking him out (he went out now,

in a wheel-chair drawn by Peacock's pony); the time for his medicine

again; his dinner time; the time for his afternoon sleep; his

tea-time; the time for his last dose of medicine; his supper time and

his time for being undressed and put to bed. And there were several

times during the night which were his times also.

The Vicar had desired supremacy in his Vicarage and he was at last

supreme. He was supreme over his daughter Gwenda. The stubborn,

intractable creature was at his feet. She was his to bend or break

or utterly destroy. She who was capable of anything was capable of an

indestructible devotion. His times, the relentless, the monotonously

recurring, were her times too.

If it had not been for Steven Rowcliffe she would have had none to

call her own (except night time, when the Vicar slept). But Rowcliffe

had kept to his days for visiting the Vicarage. He came twice or

thrice a week; not counting Wednesdays. Only, though Mary did not know

it, he came as often as not in the evenings at dusk, just after the

Vicar had been put to bed. When it was wet he sat in the dining-room

with Gwenda. When it was fine he took her out on to the moor under

Karva.

They always went the same way, up the green sheep-track that they

knew; they always turned back at the same place, where the stream he

had seen her jumping ran from the hill; and they always took the same

time to go and turn. They never stopped and never lingered; but went

always at the same sharp pace, and kept the same distance from each

other. It was as if by saying to themselves, "Never any further than

the stream; never any longer than thirty-five minutes; never any

nearer than we are now," they defined the limits of their whole

relation. Sometimes they hardly spoke as they walked. They parted with

casual words and with no touching of their hands and with the same

thought unspoken--"Till the next time."

But these times which were theirs only did not count as time. They

belonged to another scale of feeling and another order of reality.

Their moments had another pulse, another rhythm and vibration. They

burned as they beat. While they lasted Gwenda's life was lived with an

intensity that left time outside its measure. Through this intensity

she drew the strength to go on, to endure the unendurable with joy.

* * * * *

But Rowcliffe could not endure the unendurable at all. He was savage

when he thought of it. That was her life and she would never get away

from it. She, who was born for the wild open air and for youth and

strength and freedom, would be shut up in that house and tied to that

half-paralyzed, half-imbecile old man forever. It was damnable. And

he, Rowcliffe, could have prevented it if he had only known. And if

Mary had not lied to him.

And when his common sense warned him of their danger, and his

conscience reproached him with leading her into it, he said to

himself, "I can't help it if it is dangerous. It's been taken out of

my hands. If somebody doesn't drag her out of doors, she'll get ill.

If somebody doesn't talk to her she'll grow morbid. And there's nobody

but me."

He sheltered himself in the immensity of her tragedy. Its darkness

covered them. Her sadness and her isolation sanctified them. Alice had

her husband and her child. Mary had--all she wanted. Gwenda had nobody

but him.

* * * * *

She had never had anybody but him. For in the beginning the Vicar and

his daughters had failed to make friends among their own sort. Up in

the Dale there had been few to make, and those few Mr. Cartaret had

contrived to alienate one after another by his deplorable legend and

by the austere unpleasantness of his personality. People had not been

prepared for intimacy with a Vicar separated so outrageously from his

third wife. Nobody knew whether it was he or his third wife who had

been outrageous, but the Vicar's manner was not such as to procure for

him the benefit of any doubt. The fact remained that the poor man

was handicapped by an outrageous daughter, and Alice's behavior was

obviously as much the Vicar's fault as his misfortune. And it had been

felt that Gwenda had not done anything to redeem her father's and her

sister's eccentricities, and that Mary, though she was a nice girl,

had hardly done enough. For the last eighteen months visits at the

Vicarage had been perfunctory and very brief, month by month they had

diminished, and before Mary's marriage they had almost ceased.

Still, Mary's marriage had appeased the parish. Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe

had atoned for the third Mrs. Cartaret's suspicious absence and for

Gwenda Cartaret's flight. Lady Frances Gilbey's large wing had further

protected Gwenda.

Then, suddenly, the tale of Alice Cartaret and Greatorex went round,

and it was as if the Vicarage had opened and given up its secret.

At first, the sheer extremity of his disaster had sheltered the Vicar

from his own scandal. Through all Garthdale and Rathdale, in the

Manors and the Lodges and the Granges, in the farmhouses and the

cottages, in the inns and little shops, there was a stir of pity and

compassion. The people who had left off calling at the Vicarage called

again with sympathy and kind inquiries. They were inclined to forget

how impossible the Cartarets had been. They were sorry for Gwenda. But

they had been checked in their advances by Gwenda's palpable recoil.

She had no time to give to callers. Her father had taken all her time.

The callers considered themselves absolved from calling.

Slowly, month by month, the Vicarage was drawn back into its

silence and its loneliness. It assumed, more and more, its aspect of

half-sinister, half-sordid tragedy. The Vicar's calamity no longer

sheltered him. It took its place in the order of accepted and

irremediable events.

* * * * *

Only the village preserved its sympathy alive. The village, that

obscure congregated soul, long-suffering to calamity, welded together

by saner instincts and profound in memory, the soul that inhabited

the small huddled, humble houses, divided from the Vicarage by no more

than the graveyard of its dead, the village remembered and it knew.

It remembered how the Vicar had come and gone over its thresholds,

how no rain nor snow nor storm had stayed him in his obstinate and

punctual visiting. And whereas it had once looked grimly on its Vicar,

it looked kindly on him now. It endured him for his daughter Gwenda's

sake, in spite of what it knew.

For it knew why the Vicar's third wife had left him. It knew why Alice

Cartaret had gone wrong with Greatorex. It knew what Gwenda Cartaret

had gone for when she went away. It knew why and how Dr. Rowcliffe had

married Mary Cartaret. And it knew why, night after night, he was to

be seen coming and going on the Garthdale road.

* * * * *

The village knew more about Rowcliffe and Gwenda Cartaret than

Rowcliffe's wife knew.

For Rowcliffe's wife's mind was closed to this knowledge by a certain

sensual assurance. When all was said and done, it was she and not

Gwenda who was Rowcliffe's wife. And she had other grounds for

complacency. Her sister, a solitary Miss Cartaret, stowed away in

Garth Vicarage, was of no account. She didn't matter. And as Mary

Cartaret Mary would have mattered even less. But Steven Rowcliffe's

professional reputation served him well. He counted. People who had

begun by trusting him had ended by liking him, and in two years' time

his social value had become apparent. And as Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe

Mary had a social value too.

But while Steven, who had always had it, took it for granted and never

thought about it, Mary could think of nothing else. Her social value,

obscured by the terrible two years in Garthdale, had come to her as a

discovery and an acquisition. For all her complacency, she could not

regard it as a secure thing. She was sensitive to every breath that

threatened it; she was unable to forget that, if she was Steven

Rowcliffe's wife, she was Alice Greatorex's sister.

Even as Mary Cartaret she had been sensitive to Alice. But in those

days of obscurity and isolation it was not in her to cast Alice off.

She had felt bound to Alice, not as Gwenda was bound, but pitiably,

irrevocably, for better, for worse. The solidarity of the family had

held.

She had not had anything to lose by sticking to her sister. Now it

seemed to her that she had everything to lose. The thought of Alice

was a perpetual annoyance to her.

For the neighborhood that had received Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe had

barred her sister.

As long as Alice Greatorex lived at Upthorne Mary went in fear.

This fear was so intolerable to her that at last she spoke of it to

Rowcliffe.

They were sitting together in his study after dinner. The two

armchairs were always facing now, one on each side of the hearth.

"I wish I knew what to do about Alice," she said.

"What to _do_ about her?"

"Yes. Am I to have her at the house or not?"

He stared.

"Of course you're to have her at the house."

"I mean when we've got people here. I can't ask her to meet them."

"You must ask her. It's the very least you can do for her."

"People aren't going to like it, Steven."

"People have got to stick a great many things they aren't going to

like. I'm continually meeting people I'd rather not meet. Aren't you?"

"I'm afraid poor Alice is--"

"Is what?"

"Well, dear, a little impossible, to say the least of it. Isn't she?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't see anything impossible about 'poor Alice.' I never did."

"It's nice of you to say so."

He maintained himself in silence under her long gaze.

"Steven," she said, "you are awfully good to my people."

She saw that she could hardly have said anything that would have

annoyed him more.

He positively writhed with irritation.

"I'm not in the least good to your people."

The words stung her like a blow. She flushed, and he softened.

"Can't you see, Molly, that I hate the infernal humbug and the cruelty

of it all? That poor child had a dog's life before she married. She

did the only sane thing that was open to her. You've only got to look

at her now to see that she couldn't have done much better for herself

even if she hadn't been driven to it. What's more, she's done the best

thing for Greatorex. There isn't another woman in the world who could

have made that chap chuck drinking. You mayn't like the connection. I

don't suppose any of us like it."

"My dear Steven, it isn't only the connection. I could get over that.

It's--the other thing."

His blank stare compelled her to precision.

"I mean what happened."

"Well--if Gwenda can get over 'the other thing', I should think _you_

might. She has to see more of her."

"It's different for Gwenda."

"How is it different for Gwenda?"

She hesitated. She had meant that Gwenda hadn't anything to lose.

What she said was, "Gwenda hasn't anybody but herself to think of. She

hasn't let you in for Alice."

"No more have you."

He smiled. Mary did not understand either his answer or his smile.

He was saying to himself, "Oh, hasn't she? It was Gwenda all the time

who let me in."

Mary had a little rush of affection.

"My dear--I think I've let you in for everything. I wouldn't mind--I

wouldn't really--if it wasn't for you."

"You needn't bother about me," he said. "I'd rather you bothered about

your sister."

"Which sister?"

For the life of her she could not tell what had made her say that. The

words seemed to leap out suddenly from her mind to her tongue.

"Alice," he said.

"Was it Alice we were talking about?"

"It was Alice I was thinking about."

"Was it?"

Again her mind took its insane possession of her tongue.

* * * * *

The evening dragged on. The two chairs still faced each other, pushed

forward in their attitude of polite attention and expectancy.

But the persons in the chairs leaned back as if each withdrew as far

as possible from the other. They made themselves stiff and upright as

if they braced themselves, each against the other in the unconscious

tension of hostility. And they were silent, each thinking an

intolerable thought.

Rowcliffe had taken up a book and was pretending to read it. Mary's

hands were busy with her knitting. Her needles went with a rapid jerk,

driven by the vibration of her irritated nerves. From time to time she

glanced at Rowcliffe under her bent brows. She saw the same blocks of

print, a deep block at the top, a short line under it, then a narrower

block. She saw them as vague, meaningless blurs of gray stippled on

white. She saw that Rowcliffe's eyes never moved from the deep top

paragraph on the left-hand page. She noted the light pressure of his

thumbs on the margins.

He wasn't reading at all; he was only pretending to read. He had set

up his book as a barrier between them, and he was holding on to it for

dear life.

Rowcliffe moved irritably under Mary's eyes. She lowered them and

waited for the silken sound that should have told her that he had

turned a page.

And all the time she kept on saying to herself, "He _was_ thinking

about Gwenda. He's sorry for Alice because of Gwenda, not because of

me. It isn't _my_ people that he's good to."

The thought went round and round in Mary's mind, troubling its

tranquillity.

She knew that something followed from it, but she refused to see it.

Her mind thrust from it the conclusion. "Then it's Gwenda that he

cares for." She said to herself, "After all I'm married to him." And

as she said it she thrust up her chin in a gesture of assurance and

defiance.

In the chair that faced her Rowcliffe shifted his position. He crossed

his legs and the tilted foot kicked out, urged by a hidden savagery.

The clicking of Mary's needles maddened him.

He glanced at her. She was knitting a silk tie for his birthday.

She saw the glance. The fierceness of the small fingers slackened;

they knitted off a row or two, then ceased. Her hands lay quiet in her

lap.

She leaned her head against the back of the chair. Her grieved eyes

let down their lids before the smouldering hostility in his.

Her stillness and her shut eyes moved him to compunction. They

appeased him with reminiscence, with suggestion of her smooth and

innocent sleep.

He had been thinking of what she had done to him; of how she had lied

to him about Gwenda; of the abominable thing that Alice had cried out

to him in her agony. The thought of Mary's turpitude had consoled him

mysteriously. Instead of putting it from him he had dwelt on it, he

had wallowed in it; he had let it soak into him till he was poisoned

with it.

For the sting of it and the violence of his own resentment were more

tolerable to Rowcliffe than the stale, dull realisation of the fact

that Mary bored him. It had come to that. He had nothing to say to

Mary now that he had married her. His romantic youth still moved

uneasily within him; it found no peace in an armchair, facing Mary.

He dreaded these evenings that he was compelled to spend with her. He

dreaded her speech. He dreaded her silences ten times more. They no

longer soothed him. They were pervading, menacing, significant.

He thought that Mary's turpitude accounted for and justified the

exasperation of his nerves.

Now as he looked at her, lying back in the limp pose reminiscent of

her sleep, he thought, "Poor thing. Poor Molly." He put down his book.

He stood over her a moment, sighed a long sigh like a yawn, turned

from her and went to bed.

Mary opened her eyes, sighed, stretched herself, put out the light,

and followed him.