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Updated: June 19, 2025
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.
For Rowcliffe's wife's mind was closed to this knowledge by a certain sensual assurance. When all was said and done, it was she and not Gwenda who was Rowcliffe's wife. And she had other grounds for complacency. Her sister, a solitary Miss Cartaret, stowed away in Garth Vicarage, was of no account. She didn't matter. And as Mary Cartaret Mary would have mattered even less.
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.
But this time she had hurt her head, and Essy had gone for the doctor and had met Miss Mary in the village and Mary had come with her to help. For by good luck better luck than the Widow Gale deserved it was a Wednesday. Rowcliffe had sent word that he would come at three. It was three now. And as he passed along the narrow path he saw Mary Cartaret in the doorway with the baby in her lap.
And in the girl's fear and blindness and defiance he saw the pride of her youth beaten and offended by that which it had seen. Out there, in the bridle path leading from the high road to the farm, the cart had stopped. The men were lifting the coffin out, shouldering it, carrying it along. He saw Gwenda Cartaret swerve out of their way. Presently he heard her running down the road.
It knew why Alice Cartaret had gone wrong with Greatorex. It knew what Gwenda Cartaret had gone for when she went away. It knew why and how Dr. Rowcliffe had married Mary Cartaret. And it knew why, night after night, he was to be seen coming and going on the Garthdale road. The village knew more about Rowcliffe and Gwenda Cartaret than Rowcliffe's wife knew.
"Shea does. T' kape yore baaby, Jim Greatorex." With that she left him. For the next three months Greatorex was more than ever uneasy in his soul. The Sunday after Maggie's outburst he had sat all morning and afternoon in his parlor with his father's Bible. He had not even tried to see Alice Cartaret.
Over and over again he had caught sight of it; it signaled, shining; he had been ready to seize it, when something happened, something obscured it, something put him off. He never knew what it was at the time, but when he looked back on these happenings he discovered that it was always something that Gwenda Cartaret did.
Cartaret as a woman of affectionate gaiety and a pleasing worldliness, so well surrounded by adorers of his own sex 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.
It was then Thursday night. She slipped out into the village about midnight to post the letter, though she knew that it couldn't go one minute before three o'clock on Friday afternoon. She had no conscious fear that her will would fail her, but her instinct was appeased by action. On Saturday morning Mrs. Cartaret wired: "Delighted. Expect you Friday. Mummy." Five intolerable days.
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