E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Leah Moser, and Project Gutenberg
Distributed Proofreaders
1914
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 andterror of its solitude it crouches, like a beaten thing, cowering fromits topmost roof to the bowed back of its stone bridge.
It is the last village up Garthdale; a handful of gray houses, oldand small and humble. The high road casts them off and they turn theirbacks to it in their fear and huddle together, humbly, down by thebeck. Their stone roofs and walls are naked and blackened by wind andrain as if fire had passed over them.
They have the silence, the darkness and the secrecy of all ultimatehabitations.
North, where the high road begins to rise again, the Vicarage standsall alone. It turns its face toward the village, old and gray andhumble as any house there, and looks on the road sideways, through thesmall shy window of its gable end. It has a strip of garden in frontand on its farther side and a strip of orchard at the back. The gardenslopes 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 nakedand black, blackened as if fire had passed over them. And in theirgrayness and their desolation they are one with each other and withthe network of low walls that links them to the last solitary farm onthe 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-blownas a tangle of gray thread on her green gown.
Through four of its five front windows the house gave back darknessto the dark. One, on the ground floor, showed a golden oblong, skirtedwith watery gray where the lamp-light thinned the solid blackness ofthe wall.
The three sisters, Mary, Gwendolen and Alice, daughters of JamesCartaret, the Vicar of Garth, were sitting there in the dining-roombehind the yellow blind, doing nothing. In their supine, motionlessattitudes they seemed to be waiting for something to happen, to happenso soon that, if there had been anything to do, it was not worth theirwhile doing it.
All three were alike in the small, broad faces that brooded, halfsullen and half sad; in the wide eyes that watched vaguely; in thelittle tender noses, and in the mouths, tender and sullen, too; in thearch 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 intwo wide and shallow waves.
Mary, the eldest, sat in a low chair by the fireside. Her hands wereclasped loosely on the black woolen socks she had ceased to darn.
She was staring into the fire with her gray eyes, the thick gray eyesthat never let you know what she was thinking. The firelight woke theflame in her reddish-tawny hair. The red of her lips was turned backand crushed against the white. Mary was shorter than her sisters, butshe was the one that had the color. And with it she had a stillnessthat was not theirs. Mary's face brooded more de