XLIV
It was the last week in June.
Mary Cartaret sat in the door of the cottage by the beck. And in her lap she held Essy's baby. Essy had run in to the last cottage in the row to look after her great aunt, the Widow Gale, who had fallen out of bed in the night.
The Widow Gale, in her solitude, had formed the habit of falling out of bed. But this time she had hurt her head, and Essy had gone for the doctor and had met Miss Mary in the village and Mary had come with her to help.
For by good luck—better luck than the Widow Gale deserved—it was a
Wednesday. Rowcliffe had sent word that he would come at three.
It was three now.
And as he passed along the narrow path he saw Mary Cartaret in the doorway with the baby in her lap.
She smiled at him as he went by.
"I'm making myself useful," she said.
"Oh, more than that!"
His impression was that Mary had made herself beautiful. He looked back over his shoulder and laughed as he hurried on.
Up till now it hadn't occurred to him that Mary could be beautiful. But it didn't puzzle him. He knew how she had achieved that momentary effect.
He knew and he was to remember. For the effect repeated itself.
As he came back Mary was standing in the path, holding the baby in her arms. She was looking, she said, for Essy. Would Essy be coming soon?
Rowcliffe did not answer all at once. He stood contemplating the picture. It wasn't all Mary. The baby did his part. He had been "short-coated" that month, and his thighs, crushed and delicately creased, showed rose red against the white rose of Mary's arm. She leaned her head, brooding tenderly, to his, and his head (he was a dark baby) was dusk to her flame.
Rowcliffe smiled. "Why?" he said. "Do you want to get rid of him?"
As if unconsciously she pressed the child closer to her. As if unconsciously she held his head against her breast. And when his fingers worked there, in their way, she covered them with her hand.
"No," she said. "He's a nice baby. (Aren't you a nice baby? There!)
Essy's unhappy because he's going to have blue eyes and dark hair. But
I think they're the prettiest, don't you?"
"Yes," said Rowcliffe.
He was grave and curt.
And Mary remembered that that was what Gwenda had—blue eyes and dark hair.
It was what Gwenda's children might have had, too. She felt that she had made him think of Gwenda.
Then Essy came and took the baby from her.
"'E's too 'eavy fer yo', Miss," she said. She laughed as she took him; she gazed at him with pride and affection unabashed. His one fault, for Essy, was that, though he had got Greatorex's eyes, he had not got Greatorex's hair.
Mary and Rowcliffe went back together.
"You're coming in to tea, aren't you?" she said.
"Rather." He had got into the habit again of looking in at the Vicarage for tea every Wednesday. They were having tea in the orchard now. And in June the Vicarage orchard was a pleasanter place than the surgery.
It was in fact a very pleasant place. Pleasanter than the gray and amber drawing-room.
When Rowcliffe came to think of it, he owed the Cartarets many pleasant things. So he had formed another habit of asking them back to tea in his orchard. He had had no idea what a pleasant place his orchard could be too.
Now, though Rowcliffe nearly always had tea alone with Mary at the Vicarage, Mary never came to tea at Rowcliffe's house alone. She always brought Alice with her. And Rowcliffe found that a nuisance. For one thing, Alice had the air of being dragged there against her will, so completely had she recovered from him. For another, he couldn't talk to Mary quite so well. He didn't know that he wanted to talk to Mary. He didn't know that he particularly wanted to be alone with her, but somehow Alice's being there made him want it.
He was to be alone with Mary to-day, in the orchard.
* * * * *
The window of the Vicar's study raked the orchard. But that didn't matter, for the Vicar was not at home this Wednesday.
The orchard waited for them. Two wicker-work armchairs and the little round tea-table were set out under the trees. Mary's knitting lay in one of the chairs. She had the habit of knitting while she talked, or while Rowcliffe talked and she listened. The act of knitting disposed her to long silences. It also occupied her, so that Rowcliffe, when he liked, could be silent too.
But generally he talked and Mary listened.
They hadn't many subjects. But Mary made the most of what they had. And she always knew the precise moment when Rowcliffe had ceased to be interested in any one of them. She knew, as if by instinct, all his moments.
They were talking now, at tea-time, about the Widow Gale. Mary wanted to know how the poor thing was getting on. The Widow Gale had been rather badly shaken and she had bruised her poor old head and one hip. But she wouldn't fall out of bed again to-night. Rowcliffe had barricaded the bed with a chest of drawers. Afterward there must be a rail or something.
Mary was interested in the Widow Gale as long as Rowcliffe liked to talk about her. But the Widow Gale didn't carry them very far.
What would have carried them far was Rowcliffe himself. But Rowcliffe never wanted to talk about himself to Mary. When Mary tried to lead gently up to him, Rowcliffe shied. He wouldn't talk about himself any more than he would talk about Gwenda.
But Mary didn't want to talk about Gwenda either now. So that her face showed the faintest flicker of dismay when Rowcliffe suddenly began to talk about her.
"Have you any idea," he said, "when your sister's coming back?"
"She won't be long," said Mary. "She's only gone to Upthorne village."
"I meant your other sister."
"Oh, Gwenda——"
Mary brooded. And the impression her brooding made on Rowcliffe was that Mary knew something about Gwenda she did not want to tell.
"I don't think," said Mary gravely, "that Gwenda ever will come back again. At least not if she can help it. I thought you knew that."
"I suppose I must have known."
He left it there.
Mary took up her knitting. She was making a little vest for Essy's baby. Rowcliffe watched it growing under her hands.
"As I can't knit, do you mind my smoking?"
She didn't.
"If more women knitted," he said, "it would be a good thing. They wouldn't be bothered so much with nerves."
"I don't do it for nerves. I haven't any," said Mary.
He laughed. "No, I don't think you have."
She fell into one of her gentle silences. A silence not of her own brooding, he judged. It had no dreams behind it and no imagination that carried her away. A silence, rather, that brought her nearer to him, that waited on his mood.
His eyes watched under half-closed lids the movements of her hands and the pretty droop of her head. And he said to himself, "How sweet she is. And how innocent. And good."
Their chairs were set near together in the small plot of grass. The little trees of the orchard shut them in. He began to notice things about her that he had not noticed before, the shape and color of her finger nails, the modeling of her supple wrists, the way her ears were curved and laid close to her rather broad head. He saw that her skin was milk-white at the throat, and honey-white at her ears, and green-white, the white of an elder flower, at the roots of her red hair.
And as she unwound her ball of wool it rolled out of her lap and fell between her feet.
She stooped suddenly, bringing under Rowcliffe's eyes the nape of her neck, shining with golden down, and her shoulders, sun-warmed and rosy under the thin muslin of her blouse.
They dived at the same moment, and as their heads came up again their faces would have touched but that Rowcliffe suddenly drew back his own.
"I say, I do beg your pardon!"
It was odd, but in the moment of his recoil from that imminent contact Rowcliffe remembered the little red-haired nurse. Not that there was much resemblance; for, though the little nurse was sweet, she was not altogether innocent, neither was she what good people like Mary Cartaret would call good. And Mary, leaning back in her chair with the recovered ball in her lap, was smiling at his confusion with an innocence and goodness of which he could have no doubt.
When he tried to account to himself for the remembrance he supposed it must have been the red hair that did it.
And up to the end and to the end of the end Rowcliffe never knew that, though he had been made subject to a sequence of relentless inhibitions and of suggestions overpowering in their nature and persistently sustained, it was ultimately by aid of that one incongruous and irresistible association that Mary Cartaret had cast her spell.
He had never really come under it until that moment.
* * * * *
July passed. It was the end of August. To the west Karva and Morfe High Moor were purple. To the east the bare hillsides with their limestone ramparts smouldered in mist and sun, or shimmered, burning like any hillside of the south. The light even soaked into the gray walls of Garth in its pastures. The little plum-trees in the Vicarage orchard might have been olive trees twinkling in the sun.
Mary was in the Vicar's bedroom, looking now at the door, and now at her own image in the wardrobe glass. It was seven o'clock in the evening and she had chosen a perilous moment for the glass. She wore a childlike frock of rough green silk; it had no collar but was cut square at the neck showing her white throat. The square was bordered with an embroidered design of peacock's eyes. The parted waves of her red hair were burnished with hard brushing; its coils lay close, and smooth as a thick round cap. It needed neither comb nor any ornament.
Mary had dressed, for Rowcliffe was coming to dinner. Such a thing had never been heard of at the Vicarage; but it had come to pass. And as Mary thought of how she had accomplished it, she wondered what Alice could possibly have meant when she said to her "There are moments when I hate you," as she hooked her up the back.
For it never could have happened if she had not persuaded the Vicar (and herself as well) that she was asking Rowcliffe on Alice's account.
The Vicar had come gradually to see that if Alice must be married she had better marry Rowcliffe and have done with it. He had got used to Rowcliffe and he rather liked him; so he had only held out against the idea for a fortnight or so. He had even found a certain austere satisfaction in the thought that he, the doctor, who had tried to terrify him about Ally's insanity, having thrown that bomb into the peaceful Vicarage, should be blown up, as it were, with his own explosion.
The Vicar never doubted that it was Ally that Rowcliffe wanted. For the idea of his wanting Gwenda was so unpleasant to him that he had dismissed it as preposterous; as for Mary, he had made up his mind that Mary would never dream of marrying and leaving him, and that, if she did, he would put his foot down.
There had been changes in the Vicarage in the last two months. The shabby gray and amber drawing-room was not all shabbiness and not all gray and amber now. There were new cretonne covers on the chairs and sofa, and pure white muslin curtains at the windows, and the lamp had a new frilled petticoat. Every afternoon Mrs. Gale was arrayed in a tight black gown and irreproachable cap and apron.
All day long Mary and Mrs. Gale had worked like galley slaves over the preparations for dinner, and between them they had achieved perfection. What was more they had produced an effect of achieving it every day, clear soup, mayonnaise salad and cheese straws and all.
And the black coffee made by Mary and served in the orchard afterward was perfection too.
And the impression made on Rowcliffe by the Vicarage was that of a house and a household rehabilitated after a long period of devastation, by the untiring, selfless labor of a woman who was good and sweet.
After they had drunk Mary's coffee the Vicar strolled away to his study so as to leave Rowcliffe alone with Mary, and Alice strolled away heaven knew where so as to leave Mary alone with Rowcliffe. And the Vicar said to himself, "Mary is really doing it very well. Ally ought to be grateful to her."
But Ally wasn't a bit grateful. She said to herself, "I've half a mind to tell him; only Gwenda would hate me." And she called over her shoulder as she strolled away, "You'd better not stay out too long, you two. It's going to rain."
Morfe High Moor hangs over Garth and a hot and swollen cloud was hanging over Morfe High Moor. Above the gray ramparts the very east was sultry. In the orchard under the low plum-trees it was as airless as in a tent.
Rowcliffe didn't want to stay out too long in the orchard. He knew that the window of the Vicar's study raked it. So he asked Mary if she would come with him for a stroll. (His only criticism of Mary was that she didn't walk enough.)
Mary thought, "My nice frock will be ruined if the rain comes." But she went.
"Shall it be the moor or the fields?" he said.
Mary thought again, and said, "The fields."
He was glad she hadn't said "The moor."
They strolled past the village and turned into the pasture that lay between the high road and the beck. The narrow paths led up a slope from field to field through the gaps in the stone walls. The fields turned with the turning of the dale and with that turning of the road that Rowcliffe knew, under Karva. Instinctively, with a hand on her arm he steered her, away from the high road and its turning, toward the beck, so that they had their backs to the thunder storm as it came up over Karva and the High Moor.
It was when they were down in the bottom that it burst.
There was shelter on the further side of the last field. They ran to it, climbed, and crouched together under the stone wall.
Rowcliffe took off the light overcoat he wore and tried to put it on her. But Mary wouldn't let him. She looked at his clothes, at the round dinner jacket with its silk collar and at the beautiful evening trousers with their braided seams. He insisted. She refused. He insisted still, and compromised by laying the overcoat round both of them.
And they crouched together under the wall, sitting closer so that the coat might cover them.
It thundered and lightened. The rain pelted them from the high batteries of Karva. And Rowcliffe drew Mary closer. She laughed like a happy child.
Rowcliffe sighed.
It was after he had sighed that he kissed her under the cover of the coat.
* * * * *
They sat there for half an hour; three-quarters; till the storm ceased with the rising of the moon.
* * * * *
"I'm afraid the pretty frock's spoiled," he said.
"That doesn't matter. Your poor suit's ruined."
He laughed.
"Whatever's been ruined," he said, "it was worth it."
Hand in hand they went back together through the drenched fields.
At the first gap he stopped.
"It's settled?" he said. "You won't go back on it? You do care for me? And you will marry me?"
"Yes."
"Soon?"
"Yes; soon."
At the last gap he stopped again.
"Mary," he said, "I suppose you knew about Gwenda?"
"I knew there was something. What was it?"
He had said to himself, "I shall have to tell her. I shall have to say
I cared for her."
What he did say was, "There was nothing in it. It's all over. It was all over long ago."
"I knew," she said, "it was all over."
And the solemn white moon came up, the moon that Gwenda loved; it came up over Greffington Edge and looked at them.