The Three Sisters

The Three Sisters

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Three Sisters, by May Sinclair
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Three Sisters
Author: May Sinclair
Release Date: April 3, 2004 [eBook #11876]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THREE
SISTERS***
E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Leah Moser, and Project Gutenberg
Distributed Proofreaders

THE THREE SISTERS
BY
MAY SINCLAIR

1914

THE THREE SISTERS
I
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.

II
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