"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 s.e.x 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sage.
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 rea.s.sured 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."