Mrs. Trenchard smiled. “Dear Tim. You are fond of her, I know.... There’s the luncheon-bell.”
“Wait a minute.” He stood over her now. “Just listen. I believe you’re wrong about Katherine, Harriet. She’s old-fashioned and slow compared with the modern girl—we’re an old-fashioned family altogether, I suppose. It’s the first time she’s been in love in her life, and, as I said just now, she’s faithful as death—but she’ll be faithful to him as well as to you. Let him have his fling, let him marry her and carry her off, go where he likes, develop himself, be a man she can be proud of! It’s the crisis of his life and of hers too—perhaps of yours. You won’t lose her by letting her go off with him. She’ll stick to you all the more firmly if she knows that you’ve trusted him. But to keep him here, to break his spirit, to govern him through his fear of losing her—I tell you, Harriet, you’ll regret it all your life. He’ll either run away and break Katie’s heart or he’ll stay and turn into a characterless, spiritless young country bumpkin, like thousands of other young fellows in this county. It isn’t even as though he had the money to be a first-class squire—just enough to grow fat (he’s rather fat now) and rotten on. Worse than dear George, who at least has his books.
“And he isn’t a stupid fool neither ... he’ll always know he might have been something decent. If I thought I had any influence over him I’d tell him to kidnap Katie to-morrow, carry her up north, and keep her there.”
Mrs. Trenchard had listened to him with great attention; her eyes had never left his face, nor had her body moved. She rose, now, very slowly from her chair, gathered her notes together carefully, walked to the door, turned to him, saying:
“How you do despise us all, Tim!” then left the room.
After luncheon they started off. Philip, sitting next to Katherine in the waggonette, was very silent during the drive; he was silent because he was determined that it was on this afternoon that he would tell Katherine about Anna.
Without turning directly round to her he could see her profile, her dark hair a little loose and untidy, her cheek flushed with pleasure, her eyes smiling. “No, she’s not pretty,” he thought. “But she’s better than that. I can’t see what she’s like—it’s as though she were something so close to me and so precious that I could never see it, only feel that it was there. And yet, although I feel that she’s unattainable too—she’s something I can never hold completely, because I shall always be a little frightened of her.”
He made this discovery, that he was frightened, quite suddenly, sitting there on that lovely afternoon; he saw the shadows from the clouds, swooping, like black birds, down over the valley beneath him: far beyond him he saw a thread of yellow running beside the water of the stream that was now blue in the sunshine and now dark under the hill; there were hosts of primroses down there, and the hedges that now closed the carriage were sheeted with gold: when the hedges broke the meadows beyond them flowed, through the mist, like green clouds, to the hazy sea; the world throbbed with a rhythm that he could hear quite clearly behind the clap-clap of the horses’ hoofs—‘hum—hum—hum—hum’—The air was warm, with a little breath of cold in it; the dark soil in the ditches glistened as though, very lately, it had been frozen.
Riding there through this beautiful day he was frightened. He was aware that he did not know what Katherine would do when he told her. During his years in Russia he had grown accustomed to a world, inevitably, recklessly, voluble. Russians spoke, on any and ever occasion, exactly what was in their mind; they thought nothing of consequences whether to themselves or any other; their interest in the ideas that they were pursuing, the character that they were discussing, the situation that they were unravelling, was always so intense, so eager, so vital that they would talk for days or weeks, if necessary, and lose all sense of time, private feelings, restraint and even veracity. Philip had become used to this. Had Katherine been a member of a Russian family he would, two days after his engagement, have had everything out with them all—he would have known exactly where he stood. With the Trenchards he did not know anything at all; from the moment of his engagement he had been blindfolded, and now he felt as though in a monstrous game of “Blind Man’s Buff” he were pushed against, knocked on the elbows, laughed at, bumped against furniture, always in black, grim darkness. Since he had come down to Garth he had lost even Katherine. He felt that she was disappointed in some way, that she had never been quite happy since their journey together in the train. Well, he would put everything straight this afternoon. He would tell her about Moscow, Anna, all his life—tell her that he could not, after their marriage, live at Garth, that it would stifle him, make him worthless and useless, that she must show him that she definitely cared for him more than for her family....