The Three Sisters

by May Sinclair

XXXVI

That night, about nine o'clock, Gwenda came for the third time to
Rowcliffe at his house.

She was shown into his study, where Rowcliffe was reading.

Though the servant had prepared him for her, he showed signs of agitation.

Gwenda's eyes were ominously somber and she had the white face of a ghost, a face that to Rowcliffe, as he looked at it, recalled the white face of Alice. He disliked Alice's face, he always had disliked it, he disliked it more than ever at that moment; yet the sight of this face that was so like it carried him away in an ecstasy of tenderness. He adored it because of that likeness, because of all that the likeness revealed to him and signified. And it increased, quite unendurably, his agitation.

Gwenda was supernaturally calm.

In another instant the illusion that her presence had given him passed. He saw what she had come for.

"Has anything gone wrong?" he asked.

She drew in her breath sharply.

"It's Alice."

"Yes, I know it's Alice. Is anything wrong?" he said. "What is it?"

"I don't know. I want you to tell me. That's what I've come for. I'm frightened."

"D'you mean, is she worse?"

She did not answer him. She looked at him as if she were trying to read in his eyes something that he was trying not to tell her.

"Yes," he said, "she is worse."

"I know that," she said impatiently. "I can see it. You've got to tell me more."

"But I have told you. You know I have," he pleaded.

"I know you tried to tell me."

"Didn't I succeed?"

"You told me why she was ill—I know all that——"

"Do sit down." He turned from her and dragged the armchair forward.
"There." He put a cushion at her back. "That's better."

As she obeyed him she kept her eyes on him. The book he had been reading lay where he had put it down, on the hearthrug at her feet. Its title, "État mental des hystériques;" Janet, stared at him. He picked it up and flung it out of sight as if it had offended him. With all his movements her head lifted and turned so that her eyes followed him.

He sat down and gazed at her quietly.

"Well," he said, "and what didn't I tell you?"

"You didn't tell me how it would end."

He was silent.

"Is that what you told father?"

"Hasn't he said anything?"

"He hasn't said a word. And you went away without saying anything."

"There isn't much to say that you don't know——"

"I know why she was ill. You told me. But I don't know why she's worse. She was better. She was quite well. She was running about doing things and looking so pretty—only the other day. And look at her now."

"It's like that," said Rowcliffe. "It comes and goes."

He said it quietly. But the blood rose into his face and forehead in a painful flush.

"But why? Why?" she persisted. "It's so horribly sudden."

"It's like that, too," said Rowcliffe.

"If it's like that now what is it going to be? How is it going to end?
That's what you won't tell me."

"It's difficult——" he began.

"I don't care how difficult it is or how you hate it. You've got to."

All he said to that was "You're very fond of her?"

Her upper lip trembled. "Yes. But I don't think I knew it until now."

"That's what makes it difficult."

"My not knowing it?"

"No. Your being so fond of her."

"Isn't that just the reason why I ought to know?"

"Yes. I think it is. Only——"

She held him to it.

"Is she going to die?"

"I don't say she's going to die. But—in the state she's in—she might get anything and die of it if something isn't done to make her happy."

"Happy——"

"I mean of course—to get her married. After all, you know, you've got to face the facts."

"You think she's dying now, and you're afraid to tell me."

"No—I'm afraid I think—she's not so likely to die as to go out of her mind."

"Did you tell my father that?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"He said she was out of her mind already."

"She isn't!"

"Of course she isn't. No more than you and I. He talks about putting the poor child under restraint——"

"Oh——"

"It's preposterous. But he'll make it necessary if he continues his present system. What I tried to impress on him is that she will go out of her mind if she's kept shut up in that old Vicarage much longer. And that she'd be all right—perfectly all right—if she was married. As far as I can make out he seems to be doing his best to prevent it. Well—in her case—that's simply criminal. The worse of it is I can't make him see it. He's annoyed with me."

"He never will see anything he doesn't like."

"There's no reason why he should dislike it so much—I mean her illness. There's nothing awful about it."

"There's nothing awful about Ally. She's as good as gold."

"I know she's as good as gold. And she'd be as strong as iron if she was married and had children. I've seen no end of women like that, and I'm not sure they don't make the best wives and mothers. I told your father that. But it's no good trying to tell him the truth."

"No. It's the one thing he can't stand."

"He seems," said Rowcliffe, "to have such an extraordinary distaste for the subject. He approaches it from an impossible point of view—as if it was sin or crime or something. He talks about her controlling herself, as if she could help it. Why, she's no more responsible for being like that than I am for the shape of my nose. I'm afraid I told him that if anybody was responsible he was, for bringing her to the worst place imaginable."

"He did that on purpose."

"I know. And I told him he might as well have put her in a lunatic asylum at once."

He meditated.

"It's not as if he hadn't anybody but himself to think of."

"That's no good. He never does think of anybody but himself. And yet he'd be awfully sorry, you know, if Ally died."

They sat silent, not looking at each other, until Gwenda spoke again.

"Dr. Rowcliffe—"

He smiled as if it amused him to be addressed so formally.

"Do you really mean it, or are you frightening us? Will Ally really die—or go mad—if she isn't—happy?"

He was grave again.

"I really mean it. It's a rather serious case. But it's only 'if.' As
I told you, there are scores of women—"

But she waived them all away.

"I only wanted to know."

Her voice stopped suddenly, and he thought that she was going to break down.

"You mustn't take it so hard," he said. "It's not as if it wasn't absolutely curable. You must take her away."

Suddenly he remembered that he didn't particularly want Gwenda to go away. He couldn't, in fact, bear the thought of it.

"Better still," he said, "send her away. Is there anybody you could send her to?"

"Only Mummy—my stepmother." She smiled through her tears. "Papa would never let Ally go to her."

"Why not?"

"Because she ran away from him."

He tried not to laugh.

"She's really quite decent, though you mightn't think it." Rowcliffe smiled. "And she's fond of Ally. She's fond of all of us—except Papa. And," she added, "she knows a lot of people."

He smiled again. He pictured the third Mrs. Cartaret as a woman of affectionate gaiety and a pleasing worldliness, so well surrounded by adorers of his own sex that she could probably furnish forth her three stepdaughters from the numbers of those she had no use for. He was more than ever disgusted with the Vicar who had driven from him a woman so admirably fitted to play a mother's part.

"She sounds," he said, "as if she'd be the very one."

"She would be. It's an awful pity."

"Well," he said, "we won't talk any more about it now. We'll think of something. We simply must get her away."

He was thinking that he knew of somebody—a doctor's widow—who also would be fitted. If they could afford to pay her. And if they couldn't, he would very soon have the right——

That was what his "we" meant.

Presently he excused himself and went out to see, he said, about getting her some tea. He judged that if she were left alone for a moment she would pull herself together and be as ready as ever for their walk back to Garthdale.

* * * * *

It was in that moment when he left her that she made her choice. Not that when her idea had come to her she had known a second's hesitation. She didn't know when it had come. It seemed to her that it had been with her all through their awful interview.

It was she and not Ally who would have to go away.

She could see it now.

It had been approaching her, her idea, from the very instant that she had come into the room and had begun to speak to him. And with every word that he had said it had come closer. But not until her final appeal to him had she really faced it. Then it became clear. It crystallised. There was no escaping from the facts.

Ally would die or go mad if she didn't marry.

Ally (though Rowcliffe didn't know it) was in love with him.

And, even if she hadn't been, as long as they stayed in Garthdale there was nobody but Rowcliffe whom she could marry. It was her one chance.

And there were three of them there. Three women to one man.

And since she was the one—she knew it—who stood between him and
Ally, it was she who would have to go away.

It seemed to her that long ago—all the time, in fact, ever since she had known Rowcliffe—she had known that this was what she would have to face.

She faced it now with a strange courage and a sort of spiritual exaltation, as she would have faced any terrible truth that Rowcliffe had told her, if, for instance, he had told her that she was going to die.

That, of course, was what it felt like. She had known that it would feel like that.

And, as sometimes happens to people who are going to die and know it, there came to her a peculiar vivid and poignant sense of her surroundings. Of Rowcliffe's room and the things in it,—the chair he had sat in, the pipe he had laid aside, the book he had been reading and that he had flung away. Outside the open window the trees of the little orchard, whitened by the moonlight, stood as if fixed in a tender, pure and supernatural beauty. She could see the flags on the path and the stones in the gray walls. They stood out with a strange significance and importance. As if near and yet horribly far away, she could hear Rowcliffe's footsteps in the passage.

It came over her that she was sitting in Rowcliffe's room—like this—for the last time.

Then her heart dragged and tore at her, as if it fought against her will to die. But it never occurred to her that this dying of hers was willed by her. It seemed foredoomed, inevitable.

* * * * *

And now she was looking up in Rowcliffe's face and smiling at him as he brought her her tea.

"That's right," he said.

He was entirely reassured by her appearance.

"Look here, shall I drive you back or do you feel like another four-mile walk?"

She hesitated.

"It's late," he said. "But no matter. Let's be reckless."

"There's no need. I've got my bicycle."

"Then I'll get mine."

She rose. "Don't. I'm going back alone."

"You're not. I'm coming with you. I want to come."

"If you don't mind, I'd rather you didn't—to-night."

"I'll drive you, then. I can't let you go alone."

"But I want," she said, "to be alone."

He stood looking at her with a sort of sullen tenderness.

"You're not going to worry about what I told you?"

"You didn't tell me. I knew."

"Then——"

But she persisted.

"No. I shall be all right," she said. "There's a moon."

In the end he let her have her way.

Moon or no moon he saw that it was not his moment.