Well, no, to be perfectly accurate, not everything.
There was one thing he had not spoiled, because he
had never suspected its existence—her singular
passion for the place. Of course, if he had suspected
it, he would have stamped on it. It was his business
to stamp on other people’s passions. Luckily,
it wasn’t in him to conceive a passion for a
place.
It had come upon her at first sight as they drove
between twilight and night from Reyburn through Rathdale
into Garthdale. It was when they had left the
wooded land behind them and the moors lifted up their
naked shoulders, one after another, darker than dark,
into a sky already whitening above the hidden moon.
And she saw Morfe, gray as iron, on its hill, bearing
the square crown and the triple pendants of its lights;
she saw the long straight line of Greffington Edge,
hiding the secret moon, and Karva with the ashen west
behind it. There was something in their form
and in their gesture that called to her as if they
knew her, as if they waited for her; they struck her
with the shock of recognition, as if she had known
them and had waited too.
And close beside her own wonder and excitement she
had felt the deep and sullen repulsion of her companions.
The Vicar sat huddled in his overcoat. His nostrils,
pinched with repugnance, sniffed as they drank in
the cold, clean air. From time to time he shuddered,
and a hoarse muttering came from under the gray woolen
scarf he had wound round his mouth and beard.
He was the righteous man, sent into uttermost abominable
exile for his daughter’s sin. Behind him,
on the back seat of the trap, Alice and Mary cowed
under their capes and rugs. They had turned their
shoulders to each other, hostile in their misery.
Gwenda was sorry for them.
The gray road dipped and turned and plunged them to
the bottom of Garthdale. The small, scattering
lights of the village waited for her in the hollow,
with something humble and sad and familiar in their
setting. They too stung her with that poignant
and secret sense of recognition.
“This is the place,” the Vicar had said.
He had addressed himself to Alice; and it had been
as if he had said, This the place, the infernal, the
damnable place, you’ve brought us to with your
behavior.
Their hatred of it had made Gwenda love it. “You
can have your old Garthdale all to yourself,”
Alice had said. “Nobody else wants it.”
That, to Gwenda, was the charm of it. The adorable
place was her own. Nobody else wanted it.
She loved it for itself. It had nothing but itself
to offer her. And that was enough. It was
almost, as she had said, too much. Her questing
youth conceived no more rapturous adventure than to
follow the sheep over Karva, to set out at twilight
and see the immense night come down on the high moors
above Upthorne; to get up when Alice was asleep and
slip out and watch the dawn turning from gray to rose,
and from rose to gold above Greffington Edge.
