The Three Sisters

She pa.s.sed the schoolhouse with its beckoning ash-tree. The schoolhouse stirred the pain under her heart. She remembered the s.h.i.+ning night when she had shown herself there and triumphed.

The pain then was so intolerable that her mind revolted from it as from a thing that simply could not be. The idea by which she lived a.s.serted itself against the menace of destruction. It was not so much an idea as an instinct, blind, obstinate, immovable. It had behind it the wisdom and the persistence of life. It refused to believe where belief meant death to it.

She said to herself, "He's lying. He's lying. He's made it all up. He never met them."

She had pa.s.sed the turn of the hill. She had come to the high towers, sinister and indistinct, to the hollow walls and haunted arcades of the dead mining station. Upthorne was hidden by the shoulder of the hill.

She stopped suddenly, there where the road skirted the arcades. She was struck by a shock of premonition, an instinct older and profounder than that wisdom of the blood. She had the sense that what was happening now, her coming, like this, to the towers and the arcades, had happened before, and was so related to what was about to happen that she knew this also and with the same shock of recognition.

It would happen when she had come to the last arch of the colonnade.

It was happening now. She had come to the last arch.

That instant she was aware of Rowcliffe and Gwenda coming toward her down the hill.

Their figures were almost indiscernible in the twilight. It was by their voices that she knew them.

Before they could see her she had slipped out of their path behind the shelter of the arch.

She knew them by their voices. Yet their voices had something in them that she did not know, something that told her that they had been with each other many times before; that they understood each other; that they were happy in each other and absorbed.

The pain was no longer inside her heart but under it. It was dull rather than sharp, yet it moved there like a sharp sickle, a sickle that gathered and ground the live flesh it turned in and twisted. A sensation of deadly sickness

Down in Garth village the church clock struck the half hour and the quarter and the hour.

At the half hour Blenkiron, the blacksmith, put Rowcliffe's horse into the trap. The sound of the clanking hoofs came up the hill. Rowcliffe heard them first.

"There's something wrong down there," he said. "They're coming for me."

In his heart he cursed them. For it was there, at the turn of the road, below the arches, that he had meant to say what he had not said the other night. There was no moon. The moment was propitious. And there (just like his cursed luck) was Blenkiron with the trap.

They met above the schoolhouse as the clock struck the quarter.

"You're wanted, sir," said the blacksmith, "at Mrs. Gale's."

"Is it Essy?"

"Ay, it's a.s.sy."

In the cottage down by the beck Essy groaned and cried in her agony.

And on the road to Upthorne, under the arches by the sinister towers, Alice Cartaret, crouching on her stone, sobbed and s.h.i.+vered.

Not long after seven Essy's child was born.

Just before ten the three sisters sat waiting, as they had always waited, bored and motionless, for the imminent catastrophe of Prayers.

"I wonder how Essy's getting on," said Gwenda.

"Poor little Essy!" Mary said.

"She's as pleased as Punch," said Gwenda. "It's a boy. Ally--did you know that Essy's had a baby?"

"I don't care if she has," said Ally violently. "It's got nothing to do with me. I wish you wouldn't talk about her beastly baby."

As the Vicar came out of his study into the dining-room, he fixed his eyes upon his youngest daughter.

"What's the matter with you?" he said.

"Nothing's the matter," said Alice defiantly. "Why?"

"You look," he said, "as if somebody was murdering you."

x.x.xV

Ally was ill; so ill this time that even the Vicar softened to her.

He led her upstairs himself and made her go to bed and stay there. He would have sent for Rowcliffe but that Ally refused to see him.

Her mortal apathy pa.s.sed for submission. She took her milk from her father's hand without a murmur. "There's a good girl," he said, as she drank it down.

But it didn't do her any good. Nothing did. The illness itself was no good to her, considering that she didn't want to be ill this time. She wanted to die. And of course she couldn't die. It would have been too much happiness and they wouldn't let her have it.

At first she resented what she called their interference. She declared, as she had declared before, that there was nothing the matter with her. She was only tired. Couldn't they see that she was tired? That _they_ tired her?

"Why can't you leave me alone? If only you'd go away," she moaned, "--all of you--and leave me alone."

But very soon she was too tired even to be irritable. She lay quiet, sunk in the hollow of her bed, and kept her eyes shut, so that she never knew, she said, whether they were there or not. And it didn't matter. Nothing mattered so long as she could just lie there.

It was only when they talked of sending for Rowcliffe that they roused her. Then she sat up and became, first vehement, then violent.

"You shan't send for him," she cried. "I won't see him. If he comes into the house I'll crawl out of it."

One day (it was the last Wednesday in April) Gwenda came to her and told her that Rowcliffe was there and had asked to see her.