Her fear had left her. It had served its purpose.
LI
There was no prayer time at the Vicarage any more.
* * * * *
There was no more time at all there as the world counts time.
The hours no longer passed in a procession marked by distinguishable days. They rolled round and round in an interminable circle, monotonously renewed, monotonously returning upon itself. The Vicar was the center of the circle. The hours were sounded and measured by his monotonously recurring needs. But the days were neither measured nor marked. They were all of one shade. There was no difference between Sunday and Monday in the Vicarage now. They talked of the Vicar's good days and his bad days, that was all.
For in this house where time had ceased they talked incessantly of time. But it was always his time; the time for his early morning cup of tea; the time for his medicine; the time for his breakfast; the time for reading his chapter to him while he dozed; the time for washing him, for dressing him, for taking him out (he went out now, in a wheel-chair drawn by Peacock's pony); the time for his medicine again; his dinner time; the time for his afternoon sleep; his tea-time; the time for his last dose of medicine; his supper time and his time for being undressed and put to bed. And there were several times during the night which were his times also.
The Vicar had desired supremacy in his Vicarage and he was at last supreme. He was supreme over his daughter Gwenda. The stubborn, intractable creature was at his feet. She was his to bend or break or utterly destroy. She who was capable of anything was capable of an indestructible devotion. His times, the relentless, the monotonously recurring, were her times too.
If it had not been for Steven Rowcliffe she would have had none to call her own (except night time, when the Vicar slept). But Rowcliffe had kept to his days for visiting the Vicarage. He came twice or thrice a week; not counting Wednesdays. Only, though Mary did not know it, he came as often as not in the evenings at dusk, just after the Vicar had been put to bed. When it was wet he sat in the dining-room with Gwenda. When it was fine he took her out on to the moor under Karva.
They always went the same way, up the green sheep-track that they knew; they always turned back at the same place, where the stream he had seen her jumping ran from the hill; and they always took the same time to go and turn. They never stopped and never lingered; but went always at the same sharp pace, and kept the same distance from each other. It was as if by saying to themselves, "Never any further than the stream; never any longer than thirty-five minutes; never any nearer than we are now," they defined the limits of their whole relation. Sometimes they hardly spoke as they walked. They parted with casual words and with no touching of their hands and with the same thought unspoken—"Till the next time."