The Three Sisters

by May Sinclair

Then April came and the long spring twilights. The sick people had got well. Rowcliffe had whole hours on his hands that he could have spent with Gwenda now, if he had known.

And as yet he did not altogether know.

There was something about Gwenda Cartaret for which Rowcliffe with all his sureness and all his experience was unprepared. Their whole communion rested and proceeded on undeclared, unacknowledged, unrealised assumptions, and it was somehow its very secrecy that made it so secure. Rather than put it to the test he was content to leave their meetings to luck and his own imperfect ingenuity. He knew where and at what times he would have the best chance of finding her. Sometimes, returning from his northerly rounds, he would send the trap on, and walk back to Morfe by Karva, on the chance. Once, when the moon was up, he sighted her on the farther moors beyond Upthorne, when he got down and walked with her for miles, while his man and the trap waited for him in Garth.

Once, and only once, driving by himself on the Rathdale moors beyond Morfe, he overtook her, picked her up and drove her through Morfe (to the consternation of its inhabitants) all the way to Garth and to the very gate of the Vicarage.

But that was reckless.

* * * * *

And in all those hours, for his opportunities counted by hours now, he had never found his moment. There was plenty of time, and their isolation (his and hers) in Garthdale left him dangerously secure. All the same, by April Rowcliffe was definitely looking for the moment, the one shining moment, that must sooner or later come.

It was, indeed, always coming. Over and over again he had caught sight of it; it signaled, shining; he had been ready to seize it, when something happened, something obscured it, something put him off.

He never knew what it was at the time, but when he looked back on these happenings he discovered that it was always something that Gwenda Cartaret did. You would have said that no scene on earth could have been more favorable to a lover's enterprise than these long, deserted roads and the vast, twilit moors; and that a young woman could have found nothing to distract her from her lover there.

But it was not so. On the open moors, as often as not, they had to go single file through the heather, along a narrow sheep track, Rowcliffe leading; and it is difficult, not to say impossible, to command the attention of a young woman walking in your rear. And a thousand things distracted Gwenda: the cry of a mountain sheep, the sound and sight of a stream, the whirr of dark wings and the sudden "Krenk-er-renk-errenk!" of the grouse shooting up from the heather. And on the high roads where they went abreast she was apt to be carried away by the pageant of earth and sky; the solid darkness that came up from the moor; the gray, aerial abysses of the dale; the awful, blank withdrawal of Greffington Edge into the night. She was off, Heaven knew where, at the lighting of a star in the thin blue; the movement of a cloud excited her; or she was held enchanted by the pale aura of moonrise along the rampart of Greffington Edge. She shared the earth's silence and the throbbing passion of the earth as the orbed moon swung free.