Chapter 1

North of east, in the bottom, where the road drops from the High Moor, is the village of Garth in Garthdale.

It crouches there with a crook of the dale behind and before it, between half-shut doors of the west and south. Under the mystery and terror of its solitude it crouches, like a beaten thing, cowering from its topmost roof to the bowed back of its stone bridge.

It is the last village up Garthdale; a handful of gray houses, old and small and humble. The high road casts them off and they turn their backs to it in their fear and huddle together, humbly, down by the beck. Their stone roofs and walls are naked and blackened by wind and rain as if fire had passed over them.

They have the silence, the darkness and the secrecy of all ultimate habitations.

North, where the high road begins to rise again, the Vicarage stands all alone. It turns its face toward the village, old and gray and humble as any house there, and looks on the road sideways, through the small shy window of its gable end. It has a strip of garden in front and on its farther side and a strip of orchard at the back. The garden slopes down to the churchyard, and a lane, leading to the pastures, runs between.

And all these things of stone, the village, the Vicarage, the church, the churchyard and the gravestones of the dead are alike naked and black, blackened as if fire had passed over them. And in their grayness and their desolation they are one with each other and with the network of low walls that links them to the last solitary farm on the High Moor. And on the breast of the earth they show, one moment, solid as if hewn out of her heart, and another, slender and wind-blown as a tangle of gray thread on her green gown.

Through four of its five front windows the house gave back darkness to the dark. One, on the ground floor, showed a golden oblong, skirted with watery gray where the lamp-light thinned the solid blackness of the wall.

The three sisters, Mary, Gwendolen and Alice, daughters of James Cartaret, the Vicar of Garth, were sitting there in the dining-room behind the yellow blind, doing nothing. In their supine, motionless attitudes they seemed to be waiting for something to happen, to happen so soon that, if there had been anything to do, it was not worth their while doing it.

All three were alike in the small, broad faces that brooded, half sullen and half sad; in the wide eyes that watched vaguely; in the little tender noses, and in the mouths, tender and sullen, too; in the arch and sweep of the upper lips, the delicate fulness of the lower; in the way of the thick hair, parted and turned back over the brows in two wide and shallow waves.

Mary, the eldest, sat in a low chair by the fireside. Her hands were clasped loosely on the black woolen socks she had ceased to darn.

She was staring into the fire with her gray eyes, the thick gray eyes that never let you know what she was thinking. The firelight woke the flame in her reddish-tawny hair. The red of her lips was turned back and crushed against the white. Mary was shorter than her sisters, but she was the one that had the color. And with it she had a stillness that was not theirs. Mary's face brooded more deeply than their faces, but it was untroubled in its brooding.

She had learned to darn socks for her own amusement on her eleventh birthday, and she was twenty-seven now.

Alice, the youngest girl (she was twenty-three) lay stretched out on the sofa.

She departed in no way from her sister's type but that her body was slender and small boned, that her face was lightly finished, that her gray eyes were clear and her lips pale against the honey-white of her face, and that her hair was colorless as dust except where the edge of the wave showed a dull gold.

Alice had spent the whole evening lying on the sofa. And now she raised her arms and bent them, pressing the backs of her hands against her eyes. And now she lowered them and lifted one sleeve of her thin blouse, and turned up the milk-white under surface of her arm and lay staring at it and feeling its smooth texture with her fingers.

Gwendolen, the second sister, sat leaning over the table with her arms flung out on it as they had tossed from her the book she had been reading.

She was the tallest and the darkest of the three. Her face followed the type obscurely; and vividly and emphatically it left it. There was dusk in her honey-whiteness, and dark blue in the gray of her eyes. The bridge of her nose and the arch of her upper lip were higher, lifted as it were in a decided and defiant manner of their own. About Gwenda there was something alert and impatient. Her very supineness was alive. It had distinction, the savage grace of a creature utterly abandoned to a sane fatigue.

Gwenda had gone fifteen miles over the moors that evening. She had run and walked and run again in the riotous energy of her youth.

Now she was too tired to read.

Gwenda was the first to speak.

"Is it ten yet?"

"No." Mary smiled, but the word shuddered in her throat like a weary moan.

"How long?"

"Forty-three minutes."

"Oh, Lord----" Gwenda laughed the laugh of brave nerves tortured.

From her sofa beyond the table Alice sighed.

At ten o'clock Essy Gale, the maid-servant, would come in from the kitchen and the Vicar from the inner room. And Essy would put the Bible and Prayer-book on the table, and the Vicar would read Prayers.

That was all they were waiting for. It was all that could happen. It happened every night at ten o'clock.

III

Alice spoke next.

"What day of the month is it?"

"The thirtieth." Mary answered.

"Then we've been here exactly five months to-day."

"That's nothing," said Mary, "to the months and years we shall be here."

"I can't think what possessed Papa to come and bury us all in this rotten place."

"Can't you?" Mary's eyes turned from their brooding. Her voice was very quiet, barely perceptible the significant stress.

"Oh, if you mean it's _me_ he wants to bury----. You needn't rub that in."

"I'm not rubbing it in."

"You are. You're rubbing it in every time you look like that. That's the beastly part of it. Supposing he does want to get back on me, why should he go and punish you two?"

"If he thinks he's punishing me he's sold," said Gwenda.

"He couldn't have stuck you in a rottener hole."

Gwenda raised her head.

"A hole? Why, there's no end to it. You can go for miles and miles without meeting anybody, unless some darling mountain sheep gets up and looks at you. It's--it's a divine place, Ally."

"Wait till you've been another five months in it. You'll be as sick as I am."

"I don't think so. You haven't seen the moon get up over Greffington Edge. If you had--if you knew what this place was like, you wouldn't lie there grizzling. You wouldn't talk about punishing. You'd wonder what you'd done to be allowed to look at it--to live in it a day. Of course I'm not going to let on to Papa that I'm in love with it."

Mary smiled again.

"It's all very well for you," she said. "As long as you've got a moor to walk on _you're_ all right."

"Yes. I'm all right," Gwenda said.

Her head had sunk again and rested in the hollow of her arms. Her voice, muffled in her sleeve, came soft and thick. It died for drowsiness.

In the extreme immobility and stillness of the three the still house stirred and became audible to them, as if it breathed. They heard the delicate fall of the ashes on the hearth, and the flame of the lamp jerking as the oil sputtered in the burnt wick. Their nerves shook to the creeping, crackling sounds that came from the wainscot, infinitely minute. A tongue of fire shot hissing from the coal. It seemed to them a violent and terrifying thing. The breath of the house passed over them in thick smells of earth and must, as the fire's heat sucked at its damp.

The church clock struck the half hour. Once, twice; two dolorous notes that beat on the still house and died.

Somewhere out at the back a door opened and shut, and it was as if the house drew in its breath at the shock of the sound.

Presently a tremor crept through Gwenda's young body as her heart shook it.

She rose and went to the window.

She was slow and rapt in her going like one walking in her sleep, moved by some impulse profounder than her sleep.

She pulled up the blind. The darkness was up against the house, thick and close to the pane. She threw open the window, and the night entered palpably like slow water, black and sweet and cool.

From the unseen road came the noise of wheels and of a horse that in trotting clanked forever one shoe against another.

It was young Rowcliffe, the new doctor, driving over from Morthe to Upthorne on the Moor, where John Greatorex lay dying.

The pale light of his lamps swept over the low garden wall.

Suddenly the four hoofs screamed, grinding together in the slide of their halt. The doctor had jerked his horse up by the Vicarage gate.

The door at the back opened and shut again, suddenly, sharply, as if in fear.

A voice swung out like a mournful bell into the night. A dalesman's voice; such a voice as the lonely land fashions sometimes for its own delight, drawling and tender, hushed by the hills and charged with the infinite, mysterious sadness of their beauty.

It belonged to young Greatorex and it came from the doorway of the Vicarage yard.

"That yo, Dr. Rawcliffe? I wuss joost gawn oop t'road t' see ef yo wuss coomin'."

"Of course I was coming."

The new doctor was short and stern with young Greatorex.

The two voices, the soft and the stern, spoke together for a moment, low, inaudible. Then young Greatorex's voice was heard again, and in its softness there was the furtive note of shame.

"I joost looked in to Vicarage to leave woord with Paason."

The noise of the wheels and hoofs began again, the iron shoes clanked together and struck out the rhythm that the sisters knew.

And with the first beat of it, and with the sound of the two voices in the road, life, secret and silent, stirred in their blood and nerves. It quivered like a hunting thing held on the leash.

V

Their stillness, their immobility were now intense. And not one spoke a word to the other.

All three of them were thinking.

Mary thought, "Wednesday is his day. On Wednesday I will go into the village and see all my sick people. Then I shall see him. And he will see me. He will see that I am kind and sweet and womanly." She thought, "That is the sort of woman that a man wants." But she did not know what she was thinking.

Gwenda thought, "I will go out on to the moor again. I don't care if I _am_ late for Prayers. He will see me when he drives back and he will wonder who is that wild, strong girl who walks by herself on the moor at night and isn't afraid. He has seen me three times, and every time he has looked at me as if he wondered. In five minutes I shall go." She thought (for she knew what she was thinking), "I shall do nothing of the sort. I don't care whether he sees me or not. I don't care if I never see him again. I don't care."

Alice thought, "I will make myself ill. So ill that they'll _have_ to send for him. I shall see him that way."