LX
She went on a Tuesday.
She had had tea with her father first. Meal-time had become sacred to the Vicar and he hated her to be away for any one of them.
She walked the four miles, going across the moor under Karva and loitering by the way, and it was past six before she reached Morfe.
She was shown into the room that was once Rowcliffe's study. It had been Mary's drawing-room ever since last year when the second child was born and they turned the big room over the dining-room into a day nursery. Mary had made it snug and gay with cushions and shining, florid chintzes. There were a great many things in rosewood and brass; a piano took the place of Rowcliffe's writing table; a bureau and a cabinet stood against the wall where his bookcases had been; and a tall palm-tree in a pot filled the little window that looked on to the orchard.
She had only to close her eyes and shut out these objects and she saw the room as it used to be. She closed them now and instantly she opened them again, for the vision hurt her.
She went restlessly about the room, picking up things and looking at them without seeing them.
In the room upstairs she heard the cries of Rowcliffe's children, bumping and the scampering of feet. She stood still then and clenched her hands. The pain at her heart was like no other pain. It was as if she hated Rowcliffe's children.
Presently she would have to go up and see them.
She waited. Mary was taking her own time.
Upstairs the doors opened and shut on the sharp grief of little children carried unwillingly to bed.
Gwenda's heart melted and grew tender at the sound. But its tenderness was more unbearable to her than its pain.
The maid-servant came to the door.
"Mrs. Rowcliffe says will you please go upstairs to the night nursery,
Miss Gwenda. She can't leave the children."
That was the message Mary invariably sent. She left the children for hours together when other visitors were there. She could never leave them for a minute when her sister came. Unless Steven happened to be in. Then Mary would abandon whatever she was doing and hurry to the two. In the last year Gwenda had never found herself alone with Steven for ten minutes in his house. If Mary couldn't come at once she sent the nurse in with the children.
Upstairs in the night nursery Mary sat in the nurse's low chair. Her year-old baby sprawled naked in her lap. The elder infant stood whining under the nurse's hands.
Mary had changed a little in three and a half years. She was broader and stouter; the tender rose had hardened over her high cheek bones. Her face still kept its tranquil brooding, but her slow gray eyes had a secret tremor, they were almost alert, as if she were on the watch.
And Mary's mouth, with its wide, turned back lips, had lost its subtlety, it had coarsened slightly and loosened, under her senses' continual content.
Gwenda brushed Mary's mouth lightly with the winged arch of her upper lip. Mary laughed.
"You don't know how to kiss," she said. "If you're going to treat Baby that way, and Molly too—"
Gwenda stooped over the soft red down of the baby's head. To Gwenda it was as if her heart kept her hands off Rowcliffe's children, as if her flesh shrank from their flesh while her lips brushed theirs in tenderness and repulsion.
But seeing them was always worse in anticipation than reality.
For there was no trace of Rowcliffe in his children. The little red-haired, white-faced things were all Cartaret. Molly, the elder, had a look of Ally, sullen and sickly, as if some innermost reluctance had held back the impulse that had given it being. Even the younger child showed fragile as if implacable memory had come between it and perfect life.
Gwenda did not know why her fierceness was appeased by this unlikeness, nor why she wanted to see Mary and nothing but Mary in Rowcliffe's children, nor why she refused to think of them as his; she only knew that to see Rowcliffe in Mary's children would have been more than her flesh and blood could bear.
"You've come just in time to see Baby in her bath," said Mary.
"I seem to be always in time for that."
"Well, you're not in time to see Steven. He won't be home till nine at least."
"I didn't expect to see him. He told me he'd be out."
She saw the hidden watcher in Mary's eyes looking out at her.
"When did he tell you that?"
"Last Wednesday."
The watcher hid again, suddenly appeased.
Mary busied herself with the washing of her babies. She did it thoroughly and efficiently, with no sentimental tendernesses, but with soft, sensual pattings and strokings of the white, satin-smooth skins.
And when they were tucked into their cots and disposed of for the night Mary turned to Gwenda.
"Come into my room a minute," she said.
Mary's joy was to take her sister into her room and watch her to see if she would flinch before the signs of Steven's occupation. She drew her attention to these if Gwenda seemed likely to miss any of them.
"We've had the beds turned," she said. "The light hurt Steven's eyes. I can't say I like sleeping with my head out in the middle of the room."
"Why don't you lie the other way then?"
"My dear, Steven wouldn't like that. Oh, what a mess my hair's in!"
She turned to the glass and smoothed her disordered waves and coils, while she kept her eyes fixed on Gwenda's image there, appraising her clothes, her slenderness and straightness, the set of her head on her shoulders, the air that she kept up of almost insolent adolescence. She noted the delicate lines on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes; she saw that her small defiant face was still white and firm, and that her eyes looked violet blue with the dark shadows under them.
Time was the only power that had been good to Gwenda.
"She ought to look more battered," Mary thought. "She does carry it off well. And she's only two years younger than I am.
"It's her figure, really, not her face. She's got more lines than I have. But if I wore that long straight coat I should look awful in it."
"It's all very well for you," she said. "You haven't had two children."
"No. I haven't. But what's all very well?"
"The good looks you contrive to keep, my dear. Nobody would know you were thirty-three."
"I shouldn't, Molly, if you didn't remind me every time."
Mary flushed.
"You'll say next that's why you don't come."
"Why—I—don't come?"
"Yes. It's ages since you've been here."
That was always Mary's cry.
"I haven't much time, Molly, for coming on the off-chance."
"The off chance! As if I'd never asked you! You can go to Alice."
"Poor Ally wouldn't have anybody to show the baby to if I didn't. You haven't seen one of Ally's babies."
"I can't, Gwenda. I must think of the children. I can't let them grow up with little Greatorexes. There are three of them, aren't there?"
"Didn't you know there's been another?"
"Steven did tell me. She had rather a bad time, hadn't she?"
"She had. Molly—it wouldn't do you any harm now to go and see her. I think it's horrid of you not to. It's such rotten humbug. Why, you used to say I was ten times more awful than poor little Ally."
"There are moments, Gwenda, when I think you are."
"Moments? You always did think it. You think it still. And yet you'll have me here but you won't have her. Just because she's gone a technical howler and I haven't."
"You haven't. But you'd have gone a worse one if you'd had the chance."
Gwenda raised her head.
"You know, Molly, that that isn't true."
"I said if. I suppose you think you had your chance, then?"
"I don't think anything. Except that I've got to go."
"You haven't. You're going to stay for dinner now you're here."
"I can't, really, Mary."
But Mary was obstinate. Whether her sister stayed or went she made it hard for her. She kept it up on the stairs and at the door and at the garden gate.
"Perhaps you'll come some night when Steven's here. You know he's always glad to see you."
The sting of it was in Mary's watching eyes. For, when you came to think of it, there was nothing else she could very well have said.