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Updated: June 5, 2025
The long streaming net shivered with the trembling of her hands. The wedding was at two o'clock. The church was crowded, so were the churchyard and the road beside the Vicarage and the bridge over the beck. Morfe and Greffington had emptied themselves into Garthdale. It was only when it was all over that somebody noticed that Jim Greatorex was not there with the village choir.
She would have stretched the way out indefinitely if she could; she would have piled Garthdale Moor on Greffington Edge and Karva on the top of them and put them between Garth and Morfe, so violent was her fear of Steven Rowcliffe. She had no longer any desire to see him or to be seen by him. He had seen her twice too often, and too early and too late.
The mare had slaked her thirst for the wind of her going and Greatorex's fury was appeased. At the risk of pitching forward over the step he succeeded in gathering up the reins as they neared the dangerous descent to Garthdale.
Roddy and Mary were going up the Garthdale road. At the first turn they saw Mrs. Waugh and her son coming towards them. Rodney groaned. "He's here again. I say, let's go back." "We can't. They've seen us." "Everybody sees us," Roddy said. He began to walk with a queer, defiant, self-conscious jerk. Mrs. Waugh came on, buoyantly, as if the hoop of a crinoline still held her up.
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.
The Cartarets had been in Garthdale nine years. Gwenda Cartaret sat in the dining-room at the Vicarage alone with her father. It was nearly ten o'clock of the March evening. They waited for the striking of the clock.
He had thought that in his wisdom he had saved Alice by shutting her up in Garthdale. He had thought that she was safe at choir-practice with Jim Greatorex. He had thought that Mary was devoted to him and that Gwenda was capable of all disobedience and all iniquity. She had gone away and he had forbidden her to come back again. He had also forbidden Greatorex to enter his house.
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.
The grey curve of the high road glimmered alongside the moor. From the point where her track joined it she could see three lights, two moving, one still. The still light at the turn came from the Aldersons' house. The moving lights went with the klomp-klomp of hoofs on the road. Down in the darkness beyond the fields Garthdale lay like a ditch under the immense wall of Greffington Edge.
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. And, even if she hadn't been, as long as they stayed in Garthdale there was nobody but Rowcliffe whom she could marry. It was her one chance. And there were three of them there. Three women to one man.
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