Three years passed and six months. The Cartarets had been in Garthdale
nine years.
Gwenda Cartaret sat in the dining-room at the Vicarage alone with her
father.
It was nearly ten o'clock of the March evening. They waited for the
striking of the clock. It would be prayer time then, and after prayers
the Vicar would drag himself upstairs to bed, and in the peace
that slid into the room when he left it Gwenda would go on with her
reading.
She had her sewing in her lap and her book, Bergson's _Évolution
créatrice_ propped open before her on the table. She sewed as she
read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that
reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and
when she read he talked. Toward ten his silence would be broken by a
continual sighing and yearning. The Vicar longed for prayer time to
come and end his day. But he had decreed that prayer time was ten
o'clock and he would not have permitted it to come a minute sooner.
He nursed a book on his knees, but he made no pretence of reading
it. He had taken off his glasses and sat with his hands folded, in an
attitude of utter resignation to his own will.
In the kitchen Essy Gale sat by the dying fire and waited for the
stroke of ten. And as she waited she stitched at the torn breeches of
her little son.
Essy had come back to the house where she had been turned away. For
her mother was wanted by Mrs. Greatorex at Upthorne and what Mrs.
Greatorex wanted she got. There were two more children now at the Farm
and work enough for three women in the house. And Essy, with all her
pride, had not been too proud to come back. She had no feeling but
pity for the old man, her master, who had bullied her and put her to
shame. If it pleased God to afflict him that was God's affair, and,
even as a devout Wesleyan, Essy considered that God had about done
enough.
As Essy sat and stitched, she smiled, thinking of Greatorex's son who
lay in her bed in the little room over the kitchen. Miss Gwenda let
her have him with her on the nights when Mrs. Gale slept up at the
Farm.
It was quiet in the Vicarage kitchen. The door into the back yard was
shut, the door that Essy used to keep open when she listened for a
footstep and a whisper. That door had betrayed her many a time when
the wind slammed it to.
Essy's heart was quiet as the heart of her sleeping child. She had
forgotten how madly it had leaped to her lover's footsteps, how it
had staggered at the slamming of the door. She had forgotten the tears
that she had shed when Alice's wild music had rocked the house, and
what the Vicar had said to her that night when she spilled the glass
of water in the study.
But she remembered that Gwenda had given her son his first little
Sunday suit; and that, before Jimmy came, when Essy was in bed, crying
with the face-ache, she had knocked at her door and said, "What is it,
Essy? Can I do anything for you?" She could hear her saying it now.
Essy's memory was like that.
She had thought of Gwenda just then because she heard the sound of Dr.
Rowcliffe's motor car tearing up the Dale.
* * * * *
The woman in the other room heard it too. She had heard its horn
hooting on the moor road nearly a mile away.
She raised her hand and listened. It hooted again, once, twice,
placably, at the turning of the road, under Karva. She shivered at the
sound.
It hooted irritably, furiously, as the car tore through the village.
Its lamps swung a shaft of light over the low garden wall.
At the garden gate the car made a shuddering pause.
Gwenda's face and all her body listened. A little unborn, undying hope
quivered in her heart always at that pausing of the car at her gate.
It hardly gave her time for one heart-beat before she heard the
grinding of the gear as the car took the steep hill to Upthorne.
But she was always taken in by it. She had always that insane hope
that the course of things had changed and that Steven had really
stopped at the gate and was coming to her.
* * * * *
It _was_ insanity, for she knew that Rowcliffe would never come to see
her in the evening now. After his outburst, more than five years ago,
there was no use pretending to each other that they were safe. He had
told her plainly that, if she wanted him to hold out, he must never be
long alone with her at any time, and he must give up coming to see her
late at night. It was much too risky.
"When I can come and see you _that_ way," he had said, "it'll mean
that I've left off caring. But I'll look in every Wednesday if I can.
Every Wednesday as long as I live."
He _had_ come now and then, not on a Wednesday, but "that way." He had
not been able to help it. But he had left longer and longer intervals
between. And he had never come ("that way") since last year, when his
second child was born.
Nothing but life or death would bring Rowcliffe out in his car after
nightfall. Yet the thing had her every time. And it was as if her
heart was ground with the grinding and torn with the tearing of the
car.
Then she said to herself, "I must end it somehow. It's horrible to go
on caring like this. He was right. It would be better not to see him
at all."
And she began counting the days and the hours till Wednesday when she
would see him.