The Three Sisters
May Sinclair
The Three Sisters 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.
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.
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, anotrhythm and vibration. They burned as they beat. While they lasted Gwenda's life was lived with an intensity 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 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 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.
* * * * *
The village knew more about Rowcliffe and Gwenda Cartaret than Rowcliffe's wife knew.
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 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?"
"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?"
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 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."
"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?"
"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."
"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.
* * * * *
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
He thought that Mary's turpitude accounted for and justified the exasperation of his nerves.
Mary opened her eyes, sighed, stretched herself, put out the light, and followed him.