“Ah yes,” he answered; “but I didn’t know till to-day, till just now when you raised your arms. And all these years you haven’t let me know.”
“How did you know?” she asked. “How did you know that I felt it? But, of course, you understand me even when I don’t speak.”
“It’s heaven,” he said, “to know that you’ve grown out of it. It has been hell to bear the thought....”
“Oh, my dear! ...” she said.
“Such loneliness,” he said. “Do you know,” he continued suddenly, “I came back from Athens? I’m supposed to be a strong-minded man—I suppose I am a strong-minded man—but I turned back the moment I reached Greece because I couldn’t bear—I could not bear the thought that you might still shudder at my touch. Now I know you don’t, and ...”
“Ellida will be here soon,” Katya said. “Can’t you hear her train coming down the valley ... there...? And I want to tell you what I’ve found out about mother. I’ve found it out, I’ve made it out, remembering what she said from day to day. I’ll tell you what it was—it was trustfulness. I remember it now. It was the mainspring of her life. I think I know how the very idea came into her mind. I’ve got it down to little details. I’ve been inquiring even about the Orthodox priests there were in England at the time. There wasn’t a single one! One had just died suddenly, and there did not come a successor for six months. And mother was there. And when she was a young thing, mother, I know, had a supreme contempt—a bitter contempt—for all English ideas. She got over it. When we children were born she became the gentlest being. You know, that was what she always was to me—she was a being, not a woman. When she came into the room she spread soothing around her. I might be in paroxysms of temper, but it died out when she opened the door. It’s so strong upon me that I hardly remember what she looked like. I can’t remember her any more than I can conceive of the looks of a saint. A saint!—well, she was that. She had been hot-tempered, she had been contemptuous. She became what you remember after we were born. You may say she got religion.”
Katya, her eyes full of light, paused; she began again with less of exultation.
“I dare say,” she said, “she began to live with father without the rites of the Church because there was no Church she acknowledged to administer them; but later, she didn’t want them remember how she always told us, ‘Trust each other, trust each other; then you will become perfectly to be trusted.’ And again, she would never let us make promises one to another. Don’t you remember? She always said to us: ‘Say that you will do a thing. Never promise—never. Your word must be your bond.’ You remember?”
Grimshaw slowly nodded his head. “I remember.”
“So that I am certain,” she said, “that that was why she never married father. I think she regarded marriage—the formality, the vows—as a desecration. Don’t you see, she wanted to be my father’s chattel, and to trust him absolutely—to trust, to trust! Isn’t that the perfect relationship?”