The Three Sisters

by May Sinclair

LV

Two years passed.

Life stirred again in the Vicarage, feebly and slowly, with the slow and feeble stirring of the Vicar's brain.

Ten o'clock was prayer time again.

Twice every Sunday the Vicar appeared in his seat in the chancel. Twice he pronounced the Absolution. Twice he tottered to the altar rails, turned, shifted his stick from his left hand to his right, and, with his one good arm raised, he gave the Benediction. These were the supreme moments of his life.

Once a month, kneeling at the same altar rails, he received the bread and wine from the hands of his ritualistic curate, Mr. Grierson.

It was his uttermost abasement.

But, whether he was abased or exalted, the parish was proud of its Vicar. He had shown grit. His parishioners respected the indestructible instinct that had made him hold on.

* * * * *

For Mr. Cartaret was better, incredibly better. He could creep about the house and the village without any help but his stick. He could wash and feed and dress himself. He had no longer any use for his wheel-chair. Once a week, on a Wednesday, he was driven over his parish in an ancient pony carriage of Peacock's. It was low enough for him to haul himself in and out.

And he had recovered large tracts of memory, all, apparently, but the one spot submerged in the catastrophe that had brought about his stroke. He was aware of events and of their couplings and of their sequences in time, though the origin of some things was not clear to him. Thus he knew that Alice was married and living at Upthorne, though he had forgotten why. That she should have married Greatorex was a strange thing, and he couldn't think how it had happened. He supposed it must have happened when he was laid aside, for he would never have permitted it if he had known. Mary's marriage also puzzled him, for he had a most distinct idea that it was Gwenda who was to have married Rowcliffe, and he said so. But he would own humbly that he might be mistaken, his memory not being what it was.

He had settled more or less into his state of gentleness and submission, broken from time to time by fits of violent irritation and relieved by pride, pride in his feats of independence, his comings and goings, his washing, his dressing and undressing of himself. Sometimes this pride was stubborn and insistent; sometimes it was sweet and joyous as a child's. His mouth, relaxed forever by his stroke, had acquired a smile of piteous and appealing innocence. It smiled upon the just and upon the unjust. It smiled even on Greatorex, whom socially he disapproved of (he took care to let it be known that he disapproved of Greatorex socially), though he tolerated him.

He tolerated all persons except one. And that one was the ritualistic curate, Mr. Grierson.

He had every reason for not tolerating him. Not only was Mr. Grierson a ritualist, which was only less abominable than being a non-conformist, but he had been foisted on him without his knowledge or will. The Vicar had simply waked up one day out of his confused twilight to a state of fearful lucidity and found the young man there. Worse than all it was through the third Mrs. Cartaret that he had got there.

For the Vicar of Greffington had applied to the Additional Curates Aid Society for a grant on behalf of his afflicted brother, the Vicar of Garthdale, and he had applied in vain. There was a prejudice against the Vicar of Garthdale. But the Vicar of Greffington did not relax his efforts. He applied to young Mrs. Rowcliffe, and young Mrs. Rowcliffe applied to her step-mother, and not in vain. Robina, answering by return of post, offered to pay half the curate's salary. Rowcliffe made himself responsible for the other half.

Robina, in her compact little house in St. John's Wood, had become the prey of remorse. Her conscience had begun to bother her by suggesting that she ought to go back to her husband now that he was helpless and utterly inoffensive. She ought not to leave him on poor Gwenda's hands. She ought, at any rate, to take her turn.

But Robina couldn't face it. She couldn't leave her compact little house and go back to her husband. She couldn't even take her turn. Flesh and blood shrank from the awful sacrifice. It would be a living death. Your conscience has no business to send you to a living death.

Robina's heart ached for poor Gwenda. She wrote and said so. She said she knew she was a brute for not going back to Gwenda's father. She would do it if she could, but she simply couldn't. She hadn't got the nerve.

And Robina did more. She pulled wires and found the curate. That he was a ritualist was no drawback in Robina's eyes. In fact, she declared it was a positive advantage. Mr. Grierson's practices would wake them up in Garthdale. They needed waking. She had added that Mr. Grierson was well connected, well behaved and extremely good-looking.

Even charity couldn't subdue the merry devil in Robina.

"I can't see," said Mary reading Robina's letter, "what Mr. Grierson's good looks have got to do with it."

Rowcliffe's face darkened. He thought he could see.

* * * * *

But Mr. Grierson did not wake Garthdale up. It opened one astonished eye on his practices and turned over in its sleep again. Mr. Grierson was young, and the village regarded all he did as the folly of his youth. It saw no harm in Mr. Grierson; not even when he conceived a Platonic passion for Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe, and spent all his spare time in her drawing-room and on his way to and from it.

The curate lodged in the village at the Blenkirons' over Rowcliffe's surgery, and from that vantage ground he lay in wait for Rowcliffe. He watched his movements. He was ready at any moment to fling open his door and spring upon Rowcliffe with ardor and enthusiasm. It was as if he wanted to prove to him how heartily he forgave him for being Mrs. Rowcliffe's husband. There was a robust innocence about him that ignored the doctor's irony.

Mary had her own use for Mr. Grierson. His handsome figure, assiduous but restrained, the perfect image of integrity in adoration, was the very thing she wanted for her drawing-room. She knew that its presence there had the effect of heightening her own sensual attraction. It served as a reminder to Rowcliffe that his wife was a woman of charm, a fact which for some time he appeared to have forgotten. She could play off her adorer against her husband, while the candid purity of young Grierson's homage renewed her exquisite sense of her own goodness.

And then the Curate really was a cousin of Lord Northfleet's and Mrs. Rowcliffe had calculated that to have him in her pocket would increase prodigiously her social value. And it did. And Mrs. Rowcliffe's social value, when observed by Grierson, increased his adoration.

And when Rowcliffe told her that young Grierson's Platonic friendship wasn't good for him, she made wide eyes at him and said, "Poor boy! He must have some amusement."

She didn't suppose the curate could be much amused by calling at the Vicarage. Young Grierson had confided to her that he couldn't "make her sister out."

"I never knew anybody who could," she said, and gave him a subtle look that disturbed him horribly.

"I only meant—" He stammered and stopped, for he wasn't quite sure what he did mean. His fair, fresh face was strained with the effort to express himself.

He meditated.

"You know, she's really rather fascinating. You can't help looking at her. Only—she doesn't seem to see that you're there. I suppose that's what puts you off."

"I know. It does, dreadfully," said Mary.

She summoned a flash and let him have it. "But she's magnificent."

"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.