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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.
They bulged, they toppled, yet they stood firm, holding the wild country in their mesh, knitting the grey villages to the grey farms, and the farms to the grey byres. Where you thought the net had ended it flung out a grey rope over the purple back of Renton, the green shoulder of Greffington.
Sutcliffe," he said, "is very kind." She saw it now. He had been at the Sutcliffes that evening. He had seen Papa. He was trying to say, "Your father was drunk at Greffington Hall. He will never be asked there again. He will not be particularly welcome at the Vicarage. But you are very young. We do not wish you to suffer. This is our kindness to you. Take it. You are not in a position to refuse."
She went through the door on the right and found a short, narrow passage. Another French window opening from it on to the balcony. A bathroom on the other side; a small white panelled bedroom at the end. She had no new gown. She had worn it at Greffington that evening when she dined with him. It had a long, pointed train.
Waugh, and Miss Frewin in the drawing-room with Mamma. They had brought her the news. The Sutcliffes were going. They were trying to let Greffington Hall. The agent, Mr. Oldshaw, had told Mr. Horn. Mr. Frank, the Major, would be back from India in April. He was going to be married. He would live in the London house and Mr. and Mrs. Sutcliffe would live abroad.
He did not know that the small gray house above the churchyard had become a place of sinister and scandalous tragedy; that his name and his youngest daughter's name were bywords in three parishes; and that Alice had been married in conspicuous haste by the horrified Vicar of Greffington to a man whom only charitable people regarded as her seducer.
She slipped through the gap by Morfe Bridge and went up the fields to the road on Greffington Edge. She lay down among the bracken in the place where Roddy and she had sat two years ago when they had met Mr. Sutcliffe coming down the road. The bracken hid her. It made a green sunshade above her head. She shut her eyes. "Kikerikueh! sie glaubten Es waere Hahnen geschrei." That was all nonsense.
She didn't want to believe there was anything the matter with him. If you went that would look as though he was all right. "What do you suppose the Sutcliffes will think? And your Uncle Victor? With all those new clothes and that new trunk?" "He'll understand." "Will he!" "Mr. Sutcliffe, I mean." She went down to Greffington Hall that night and told him. He understood.
There was the queer shock of recognition that came with your own real things. It wasn't remembering though it felt like it. Shelley "The pale purple even." Not pearl-purple. Pearl-purple was what you saw. The sky to the east after sunset above Greffington Edge. Take out "pale," and "pearl-purple evening" was your own. The poem was coming by bits at a time.
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