"Magnificent!" he echoed with his robust enthusiasm.
But what he thought was that it was magnificent of Mrs. Rowcliffe to
praise her sister.
And Rowcliffe smiled grimly at young Grierson and his Platonic
passion. He said to himself, "If I'd only known. If I'd only had the
sense to wait six months. Grierson would have done just as well for
Molly."
Still, though Grierson had come too late, he welcomed him and his
Platonic passion. It wasn't good for Grierson but it was good for
Molly. At least, he supposed it was better for her than nothing. And
for him it was infinitely better. It kept Grierson off Gwenda.
* * * * *
Young Grierson was right when he said that Gwenda didn't see that he
was there. He had been two years in Garthdale and she was as far
from seeing it as ever. He didn't mind; he was even amused by her
indifference, only he couldn't help thinking that it was rather odd of
her, considering that he _was_ there.
The village, as simple in its thinking as young Grierson, shared his
view. It thought that it was something more than odd. And it had a
suspicion that Mrs. Rowcliffe was at the bottom of it. She wouldn't
be happy if she didn't get that young man away from her sister. The
village hinted that it wouldn't be for the first time.
* * * * *
But in two years, with the gradual lifting of the pressure that had
numbed her, Gwenda had become aware. Not of young Grierson, but of
her own tragedy, of the slow life that dragged her, of its
relentless motion and its mass. Now that her father's need of her was
intermittent she was alive to the tightness of the tie. It had been
less intolerable when it had bound her tighter; when she hadn't had
a moment; when it had dragged her all the time. Its slackening was
torture. She pulled then, and was jerked on her chain.
It was not only that Rowcliffe's outburst had waked her and made
her cruelly aware. He had timed it badly, in her moment of revived
lucidity, the moment when she had become vulnerable again. She was the
more sensitive because of her previous apathy, as if she had died and
was new-born to suffering and virgin to pain.
What hurt her most was her father's gentleness. She could stand his
fits of irritation and obstinacy; they braced her, they called forth
her will. But she was defenseless against his pathos, and he knew it.
He had phrases that wrung her heart. "You're a good girl, Gwenda."
"I'm only an irritable old man, my dear. You mustn't mind what I say."
She suffered from the incessant drain on her pity; for she wanted all
her will if she was to stand against Rowcliffe. Pity was a dangerous
solvent in which her will sank and was melted away.
There were moments when she saw herself as two women. One had still
the passion and the memory of freedom. The other was a cowed and
captive creature who had forgotten; whose cramped motions guided her;
whose instinct of submission she abhorred.
* * * * *
Her isolation was now extreme. She had had nothing to give to any
friends she might have made. Rowcliffe had taken all that was left
of her. And now, when intercourse was possible, it was they who had
withdrawn. They shared Mr. Grierson's inability to make her out. They
had heard rumors; they imagined things; they remembered also. She was
the girl who had raced all over the country with Dr. Rowcliffe, the
girl whom Dr. Rowcliffe, for all their racing, had not cared to marry.
She was the girl who had run away from home to live with a dubious
step-mother; and she was the sister of that awful Mrs. Greatorex,
who--well, everybody knew what Mrs. Greatorex was.
Gwenda Cartaret, like her younger sister, had been talked about. Not
so much in the big houses of the Dale. The queer facts had been tossed
up and down a smokeroom for one season and then dropped. In the big
houses they didn't remember Gwenda Cartaret. They only remembered to
forget her.
But in the little shops and in the little houses in Morfe there had
been continual whispering. They said that even after Dr. Rowcliffe's
marriage to that nice wife of his, who was her own sister, the two
had been carrying on. If there wasn't any actual harm done, and maybe
there wasn't, the doctor had been running into danger. He was up at
Garthdale more than he need be now that the old Vicar was about again.
And they had been seen together. The head gamekeeper at Garthdale had
caught them more than once out on the moor, and after dark too. It was
said in the little houses that it wasn't the doctor's fault. (In the
big houses judgment had been more impartial, but Morfe was loyal
to its doctor.) It was hers, every bit, you might depend on it. Of
Rowcliffe it was said that maybe he'd been tempted, but he was a good
man, was Dr. Rowcliffe, and he'd stopped in time. Because they didn't
know what Gwenda Cartaret was capable of, they believed, like the
Vicar, that she was capable of anything.
It was only in her own village that they knew. The head gamekeeper had
never told his tale in Garth. It would have made him too unpopular.
* * * * *
Gwenda Cartaret remained unaware of what was said. Rumor protected her
by cutting her off from its own sources.
And she had other consolations besides her ignorance. So long as she
knew that Rowcliffe cared for her and always had cared, it did not
seem to matter to her so much that he had married Mary. She actually
considered that, of the two, Mary was the one to be pitied; it was so
infinitely worse to be married to a man who didn't care for you than
not to be married to a man who did.
Of course, there was the tie. Her sister had outward and visible
possession of him. But she said to herself "I wouldn't give what I
have for _that,_ if I can't have both."
And of course there was Steven, and Steven's misery which was more
unbearable to her than her own. At least she thought it was more
unbearable. She didn't ask herself how bearable it would have been if
Steven's marriage had brought him a satisfaction that denied her and
cast her out.
For she was persuaded that Steven also had his consolation. He knew
that she cared for him. She conceived this knowledge of theirs as
constituting an immaterial and immutable possession of each other.
And it did not strike her that this knowledge might be less richly
compensating to Steven than to her.
* * * * *
Her woman's passion, forced inward, sustained her with an inward
peace, an inward exaltation. And in this peace, this exaltation, it
became one with her passion for the place.
She was unaware of what was happening in her. She did not know that
her soul had joined the two beyond its own power to put asunder. She
still looked on her joy in the earth as a solitary emotion untouched
by any other. She still said to herself "Nothing can take this away
from me."
For she had hours, now and again, when she shook off the slave-woman
who held her down. In those hours her inner life moved with the large
rhythm of the seasons and was soaked in the dyes of the visible
world; and the visible world, passing into her inner life, took on its
radiance and intensity. Everything that happened and that was great
and significant in its happening, happened there.
Outside nothing happened; nothing stood out; nothing moved. No
procession of events trod down or blurred her perfect impressions of
the earth and sky. They eternalised themselves in memory. They became
her memory.
The days were carved for her in the lines of the hills and painted
for her in their colors; days that were dim green and gray, when
the dreaming land was withdrawn under a veil so fine that it had the
transparency of water, or when the stone walls, the humble houses and
the high ramparts, drenched with mist and with secret sunlight, became
insubstantial; days when all the hills were hewn out of one opal; days
that had the form of Karva under snow, and the thin blues and violets
of the snow. She remembered purely, without thinking, "It was in April
that I went away from Steven," or, "It was in November that he married
Mary," or "It was in February that we knew about Ally, and Father had
his stroke."
Her nature was sound and sane; it refused to brood over suffering. She
was not like Alice and in her unlikeness she lacked some of Alice's
resources. She couldn't fling herself on to a Polonaise of a Sonata
any more than she could lie on a couch all day and look at her own
white hands and dream. Her passion found no outlet in creating violent
and voluptuous sounds. It was passive, rather, and attentive. Cut
off from all contacts of the flesh, it turned to the distant and the
undreamed. Its very senses became infinitely subtle; they discerned
the hidden soul of the land that had entranced her.
There were no words for this experience. She had no sense of self
in it and needed none. It seemed to her that she _was_ what she
contemplated, as if all her senses were fused together in the sense of
seeing and what her eyes saw they heard and touched and felt.
But when she came to and saw herself seeing, she said, "At least this
is mine. Nobody, not even Steven, can take it away from me."
* * * * *
She also reminded herself that she had Alice.
She meant Alice Greatorex. Alice Cartaret, oppressed by her own
"awfulness," had loved her with a sullen selfish love, the love of
a frustrated and unhappy child. But there was no awfulness in Alice
Greatorex. In the fine sanity of happiness she showed herself as good
as gold.
Marriage, that had made Mary hard, made Alice tender. Mary was wrapped
up in her husband and her house, and in her social relations and young
Grierson's Platonic passion, so tightly wrapped that these things
formed round her an impenetrable shell. They hid a secret and
inaccessible Mary.
Alice was wrapped up in her husband and children, in the boy of
three who was so like Gwenda, and in the baby girl who was so like
Greatorex. But through them she had become approachable. She had the
ways of some happy household animal, its quick rushes of affection,
and its gaze, the long, spiritual gaze of its maternity, mysterious
and appealing. She loved Gwenda with a sad-eyed, remorseful love. She
said to herself, "If I hadn't been so awful, Gwenda might have married
Steven." She saw the appalling extent of Gwenda's sacrifice. She saw
it as it was, monstrous, absurd, altogether futile.
It was the futility of it that troubled Alice most. Even if Gwenda
had been capable of sacrificing herself for Mary, which had been by
no means her intention, that would have been futile too. Alice was of
Rowcliffe's opinion that young Grierson would have done every bit as
well for Mary.
Better, for Mary had no children.
"And how," said Alice, "could she expect to have them?"
She saw in Mary's childlessness not only God's but Nature's justice.
* * * * *
There were moments when Mary saw it too. But she left God out of it
and called it Nature's cruelty.
If it was not really Gwenda. For in flashes of extreme lucidity Mary
put it down to Rowcliffe's coldness.
And she had come to know that Gwenda was responsible for that.