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Rowcliffe was annoyed because it was two Wednesdays running that he had found himself alone with the eldest and the youngest Miss Cartaret. The second one had gone off heaven knew where. They did the work and saved him the expenses of a second servant, a housekeeper, an under-gardener, an organist and two curates.
He couldn't have done it or anything like it twice. It was one of those deeds, supremeful sacrificial, that strain a man's moral energies to breaking point and render him incapable of further sacrifice; if, indeed, it did not render further sacrifice superfluous. Mr. Cartaret honestly felt that even an exacting deity could require no more of him.
Then the storm burst. She turned her tormented face to him. "A clane breast, yo' call it? I s'all mak' naw clane breasts, Mr. Cartaret, to yo' or anybody. I'll 'ave nawbody meddlin' between him an' mae!" "Then," said the Vicar, "I wash my hands of you." But he said it to an empty room. Essy had left him. In the outer room the three sisters sat silent and motionless.
'E's not takken off 'is breeches for tree daas. 'E caaun't sleap; 'e wunna eat and 'e wunna drink. There's work to be doon and 'e wunna lay haand to it. Wull yo goa oop t' 'im, Dr. Rawcliffe?" Rowcliffe went up. In the low lighted room the thing that Gwenda Cartaret had seen lay stretched in the middle of the great bed, covered with a sheet.
Cartaret had the air of a man who might indeed have suffered through his outrageous family, but for whom suffering was passed, a man without any trouble or anxiety. And serenity without the memory of suffering was in Mary's good and happy face. The house was very still, it seemed the stillness of life that ran evenly and with no sound.
T' think that 'is poor feyther's not in 'is graave aboove a moonth, an' 'e singin' fit t' eave barn roof off! They should tak' an' shoot 'im oop in t' owd powder magazine," said Mrs. Gale. "Well but it's a wonderful voice," said Gwenda Cartaret. "I've never heard another like it, and I know something about voices," Alice said. They had gone up to Upthorne to ask Mrs.
He wanted to see her. She was the intelligent one of the three sisters, and she was honest. He had said to her quite plainly that he would want her. Why, on earth, he wondered, had she gone away and left him with this sweet and good, this quite exasperatingly sweet and good woman who had told him nothing but lies? He was aware that Mary Cartaret was sweet and good.
Cartaret, "you had better go to bed." Alice went, raising her white arms and rubbing her eyes along the backs of her hands, like a child dropping with sleep. One after another, they rose and followed her. At the half-landing five steep steps in a recess of the wall led aside to the door of Essy's bedroom. There Gwenda stopped and listened. A sound of stifled crying came from the room.
Rowcliffe had seen women made bitter, made morbid, driven into lunatic asylums by fathers who were as funny as Mr. Cartaret. "You wouldn't, you wouldn't," she said. "He's funnier than you've any idea of." "Is he ever ill?" "Never." "That of course makes it difficult." "Except colds in his head. But he wouldn't have you for a cold in his head. He wouldn't have you for anything if he could help it."
Of Rowcliffe it was said that maybe he'd been tempted, but he was a good man, was Dr. Rowcliffe, and he'd stopped in time. Because they didn't know what Gwenda Cartaret was capable of, they believed, like the Vicar, that she was capable of anything. It was only in her own village that they knew. The head gamekeeper had never told his tale in Garth. It would have made him too unpopular.
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