You'd better let me take her to see him."
L
The Vicar had solved his problem by his stroke, but not quite as he
had anticipated.
Nothing had ever turned out as he had planned or thought or willed. He
had planned to leave the parish. He had thought that in his wisdom he
had saved Alice by shutting her up in Garthdale. He had thought that
she was safe at choir-practice with Jim Greatorex. He had thought
that Mary was devoted to him and that Gwenda was capable of all
disobedience and all iniquity. She had gone away and he had forbidden
her to come back again. He had also forbidden Greatorex to enter his
house.
And Greatorex was entering it every day, for news of him to take to
Alice at Upthorne. Gwenda had come back and would never go again, and
it was she and not Mary who had proved herself devoted. And it was not
his wisdom but Greatorex's scandalous passion for her that had saved
Alice. As for leaving the parish because of the scandal, the Vicar
would never leave it now. He was tied there in his Vicarage by his
stroke.
It left him with a paralysis of the right side and an utter confusion
and enfeeblement of intellect.
In three months he recovered partially from the paralysis. But the
flooding of his brain had submerged or carried away whole tracts
of recent memory, and the last vivid, violent impression--Alice's
affair--was wiped out.
There was no reason why he should not stay on.
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