She walked among them in silence, unable to feel sardonic long, and telling herself that it wasn’t really true that Virginia was tired of her, for it wasn’t Virginia at all,—it was Stephen. Virginia, being so completely one with him, had caught it from him as one catches a disease. The disease wasn’t part of Virginia; it would go, and she would be as she was before. Catherine, however, would not stay a minute longer than Monday morning. She would have liked to go away the very next day, but to alter her announced intention now might make Virginia afraid her mother had noticed something, and then she would be so unhappy, poor little thing, thinking she had hurt her. For, after that one look of relief, she had blushed painfully, and what she was feeling had opened out before Catherine like a book: she was glad her mother was going, and was unhappy that she should be glad.
No; Catherine would stay till Monday, so that Virginia shouldn’t be hurt by the knowledge that she had hurt her mother. Oh, these family tangles and tendernesses, these unexpected inflamed places that mustn’t be touched, these complicated emotions, and hurtings, and avoidances and concealments, these loving intentions and these wretched results! It wasn’t easy to be a mother successfully, and she began to perceive it was difficult successfully to be a daughter. The position of mother-in-law, which she had taken on so lightly as a natural one, not giving it a thought, wasn’t at all easy to fill either, being evidently a highly complicated and artificial affair. She thought she saw, too, that sons-in-law might have their difficulties; and she ended, as the party approached the churchyard, by thinking it extraordinarily difficult successfully to be a human being at all. She felt very old. She missed George.
Mr. Lambton opened the gate for the ladies, and, with his Rector, stood aside. Mrs. Colquhoun was prepared to persuade Catherine to pass through first, but Catherine, in deep abstraction, and seeing an open gate in her path, passed through it without persuasion.
‘Absent-minded,’ thought Mrs. Colquhoun, explaining this otherwise ruffling lapse from manners. ‘Ageing,’ she added, explaining the absent-mindedness; and there was something dragging about Catherine’s walk which really did look rather old.
The others caught her up. ‘A penny, dear Mrs. Cumfrit,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun, rallying her, ‘for your thoughts.’
They happened to be passing George’s tomb—George, the unfailingly good, the unvaryingly kind, the steadfastly loving, George who had been so devoted to her, and never, never got tired of her—and Catherine, roused thus suddenly, said absently, ‘I miss George.’
It spread a chill, this answer of hers. It was so unexpected. Mr. Lambton, though unaware of the cause, for he didn’t know, being new in the parish, what George was being missed, felt the drop in the temperature and immediately dropped with it into silence. Neither Mrs. Colquhoun nor Stephen could think for a moment of anything to say. Poor Mr. Cumfrit had been dead twelve years, and to be missed out loud after twelve solid years of death seemed to them uncalled for. It put them in an awkward position. It was almost an expression of dissatisfaction with the present situation. And, in any case, after twelve years it was difficult to condole with reasonable freshness.
Something had to be done, however, if only because of Mr. Lambton; and Stephen spoke first.
‘Ah,’ he said; and then, because he couldn’t think of anything else, said it again more thoughtfully. ‘Ah,’ said Stephen a second time.
And Mrs. Colquhoun, taking Catherine’s arm, and walking thus with her the rest of the way to the porch, said, ‘Dear Mrs. Cumfrit, I do so understand. Haven’t I been through it all too?’