The Three Sisters | Page 2

hands against her eyes. And now she lowered them and lifted one sleeve of her thin blouse, and turned up the milk-white under surface of her arm and lay staring at it and feeling its smooth texture with her fingers.
Gwendolen, the second sister, sat leaning over the table with her arms flung out on it as they had tossed from her the book she had been reading.
She was the tallest and the darkest of the three. Her face followed the type obscurely; and vividly and emphatically it left it. There was dusk in her honey-whiteness, and dark blue in the gray of her eyes. The bridge of her nose and the arch of her upper lip were higher, lifted as it were in a decided and defiant manner of their own. About Gwenda there was something alert and impatient. Her very supineness was alive. It had distinction, the savage grace of a creature utterly abandoned to a sane fatigue.
Gwenda had gone fifteen miles over the moors that evening. She had run and walked and run again in the riotous energy of her youth.
Now she was too tired to read.
Gwenda was the first to speak.
"Is it ten yet?"
"No." Mary smiled, but the word shuddered in her throat like a weary moan.
"How long?"
"Forty-three minutes."
"Oh, Lord----" Gwenda laughed the laugh of brave nerves tortured.
From her sofa beyond the table Alice sighed.
At ten o'clock Essy Gale, the maid-servant, would come in from the kitchen and the Vicar from the inner room. And Essy would put the Bible and Prayer-book on the table, and the Vicar would read Prayers.
That was all they were waiting for. It was all that could happen. It happened every night at ten o'clock.

III
Alice spoke next.
"What day of the month is it?"
"The thirtieth." Mary answered.
"Then we've been here exactly five months to-day."
"That's nothing," said Mary, "to the months and years we shall be here."
"I can't think what possessed Papa to come and bury us all in this rotten place."
"Can't you?" Mary's eyes turned from their brooding. Her voice was very quiet, barely perceptible the significant stress.
"Oh, if you mean it's me he wants to bury----. You needn't rub that in."
"I'm not rubbing it in."
"You are. You're rubbing it in every time you look like that. That's the beastly part of it. Supposing he does want to get back on me, why should he go and punish you two?"
"If he thinks he's punishing me he's sold," said Gwenda.
"He couldn't have stuck you in a rottener hole."
Gwenda raised her head.
"A hole? Why, there's no end to it. You can go for miles and miles without meeting anybody, unless some darling mountain sheep gets up and looks at you. It's--it's a divine place, Ally."
"Wait till you've been another five months in it. You'll be as sick as I am."
"I don't think so. You haven't seen the moon get up over Greffington Edge. If you had--if you knew what this place was like, you wouldn't lie there grizzling. You wouldn't talk about punishing. You'd wonder what you'd done to be allowed to look at it--to live in it a day. Of course I'm not going to let on to Papa that I'm in love with it."
Mary smiled again.
"It's all very well for you," she said. "As long as you've got a moor to walk on _you're_ all right."
"Yes. I'm all right," Gwenda said.
Her head had sunk again and rested in the hollow of her arms. Her voice, muffled in her sleeve, came soft and thick. It died for drowsiness.
In the extreme immobility and stillness of the three the still house stirred and became audible to them, as if it breathed. They heard the delicate fall of the ashes on the hearth, and the flame of the lamp jerking as the oil sputtered in the burnt wick. Their nerves shook to the creeping, crackling sounds that came from the wainscot, infinitely minute. A tongue of fire shot hissing from the coal. It seemed to them a violent and terrifying thing. The breath of the house passed over them in thick smells of earth and must, as the fire's heat sucked at its damp.
The church clock struck the half hour. Once, twice; two dolorous notes that beat on the still house and died.
Somewhere out at the back a door opened and shut, and it was as if the house drew in its breath at the shock of the sound.
Presently a tremor crept through Gwenda's young body as her heart shook it.
She rose and went to the window.

IV
She was slow and rapt in her going like one walking in her sleep, moved by some impulse profounder than her sleep.
She pulled up the blind. The darkness was up against the house, thick and close to the pane. She threw open the window, and the night entered palpably like slow