At the sudden hostility in Katherine’s voice Mrs. Trenchard started. Then, quite timidly, as though she were asking some great favour, she said:
“You mustn’t be angry with me for that. I only care about your happiness. I’m older—If I think that you are not going to be happy I’m worried and distressed of course. What can he be to me compared with you? And lately you yourself have been different—different to all of us ... Yes ... You know that if I thought that he would make you happy....” Her voice was quickly sharp sounding on a trembling, quivering note. “Katie—give him up. Give him up. There’ll be somebody much better. There are all of us. Give him up, darling. Tell him that you don’t love him as you thought you did.”
“No, I don’t,” said Katherine, her voice low. “I love him more than ever I thought I could love anything or anyone. I love him more every day of my life. Why you—all of you—” She broke away from her fierceness. She was gentle, putting her hand against her mother’s cheek, then bending forward and kissing her.
“You don’t understand, mother. I don’t understand myself, I think. But it will be all right. I know that it will.... You must be patient with me. It’s hard for him as well as for you. But nothing—nothing—can change me. If I loved him before, I have twice as much reason to love him now.”
Mrs. Trenchard looked once more at Katherine, as though she were seeing her for the last time, then, with a little sigh, she went out, very carefully closing the door behind her.
Meanwhile, another member of the Trenchard family, namely Henry, had found this especial Sunday very difficult. He always hated Sunday because, having very little to do on ordinary days of the week, he had nothing at all to do on Sunday. Never, moreover, in all his life before had the passing of time been so intolerably slow as it had during these last weeks. The matter with him, quite simply, was that his imagination, which had been first stirred on that afternoon of Philip’s appearance, was now as lively and hungry as a starved beast in a jungle. Henry simply didn’t know what to do with himself. Miserably uncertain as to his right conduct in the matter of Philip and Katherine, speculating now continually about adventures and experiences in that wider world of which he had had a tiny glimpse, needing desperately some definite business of preparation for business that would fill his hours, and having nothing of the sort, he was left to read old novels, moon about the fields and roads, quarrel with Millie, gaze forebodingly at Katherine, scowl at Philip, have some moments of clumsy sentiment towards his mother, bite his nails and neglect his appearance. He began to write a novel, a romantic novel with three men asleep in a dark inn and a woman stealing up the ricketty stairs with a knife in her hand. That was all that he saw of the novel. He knew nothing at all about its time nor place, its continuation nor conclusion. But he heard the men breathing in their sleep, saw the moonshine on the stairs, smelt the close, nasty, beery smell of the tap-room below, saw the high cheek-bones and large nose of the woman and the gleaming shine of the knife in her hand.
He walked for many miles, to Rafiel, to St. Lowe, to Dumin Head, inland beyond Rasselas, to Pendennis Woods, to Polchester, to the further side of Pelynt—and always, as he walked with his head in the air, his Imagination ran before him like a leaping, towering flame. The visions before his soul were great visions, but he could do nothing with them. He thought that he would go forth and deliver the world, would love all men, prostitutes, lepers, debauchers (like Philip); he flung his arms about, tumbled over his untidy boot laces, saw life as a gorgeous-tinted plain, with fame and glory awaiting him—then returned to Garth, quarrelled with Millie, sulked and bit his nails.
This was a hard time for Henry.
He had determined that he would not present himself in the drawing-room at tea-time, but when half-past four arrived, the afternoon had already stretched to such ghastly lengths that something had to be done. He came slipping, stumbling downstairs, and found Philip, with a waterproof turned up over his ears and every sign of the challenger of wild weather, standing in the hall. Henry would have passed him in silence, but Philip stopped him.