Now Timothy had said that she would lose them—well, Timothy should see. With other children, with other mothers, it might be so. God Himself should not take them from her.
Nevertheless, as the children grew, the shadows of his words ever pursued her and hemmed her in. She watched, with close attention, other families, and saw that Timothy’s warning was justified often enough, but always she was able to find for herself some reason. The weakness of selfishness or carelessness of the parent. Not weak, nor selfish, nor careless could any watching Powers, waiting to pounce, accuse her of being!
When the children grew older she discovered certain things about them. Henry often annoyed her with his untidiness and strangely unjustified egotism. He always thought about himself, and yet never did anything. She liked Henry least of her children.
Mildred was delightful, clever, the “show child”, but for that very reason would in all probability be, afterwards, the most restless of them. As the two girls grew Mrs. Trenchard told herself that, perhaps, Millie would have to be sacrificed, and in telling herself this she implied that if she would only, when the time came, allow Millie without a murmur to depart, the Gods would be satisfied with that and Katherine would remain.
It came to this, that by the time that Katherine was twelve she was the centre of her mother’s existence. Mildred and Henry would be held as long as it was possible to hold them, but, if the worst came, they should go. Katherine would always remain....
It seemed indeed that she would. She loved her home, her parents, her relations, Glebeshire, the whole of the Trenchard inheritance. She placed her mother first in her life, and she was able to satisfy the love in her mother’s heart without saying anything about it or drawing anyone’s attention towards it. She had all the qualities that her mother admired—sincerity, trust, common-sense, practical punctuality, moral as well as physical: above all, she took things for granted without asking endless questions, as was Henry’s unfortunate habit. There grew then in the lives both of Mrs. Trenchard and Katherine a passionate affection, which was never allowed by either of them to find outward expression. This became, behind the commonplace matter-of-fact of all their days, a kind of romantic conspiracy. Even when Katherine was still a child Mrs. Trenchard knew that the hours that they spent alone together had some strange almost incoherent quality, something that was mixed, inextricably, with the high lanes, the grassy lawns, the distant strip of sea beyond the fields, the rooks in the high trees, the smell of the village shop, boot-laces, liquorice, tallow, cheese and cotton, the dark attic bedroom of Katherine’s, the cries of village children beyond the garden wall, afternoon Sunday school upon hard benches under glazed lamps to the accompaniment of the harmonium; all the things that belonged to Garth belonged also to the love between Mrs. Trenchard and Katherine. Katherine had been first taken to the sea when she had been a very little girl; she had been shown Rafiel and the Pirates’ Cove with its cave (too small for any but very thin pirates), and the village with the cottages cut out of the rock and the sea advancing and retreating as a lazy cat stretches and withdraws its paws upon the pebbled beach. Driving home through the twilight in the high dog-cart behind the fat and beloved family pony, Katherine had been besieged with questions. What had she thought of it all? What had she liked best? Had it been wonderful? She had said nothing. She was obstinately silent. At last, persecuted beyond bearing, she looked, imploringly, at her mother. Her eyes had met her mother’s, and, as complete understanding passed between them, it seemed that they made, there and then, a compact of mutual help and protection that was never afterwards to be broken. Mrs. Trenchard had never, never been known to mention scenery, sunsets or buildings, except for strictly practical reasons. She would say: “Come in, children, you’ll catch cold, the sun’s setting”, or “I don’t think we’ll have rain to-day. There’s not a cloud”, or “It’s so hot, there’s quite a mist. I hope there’ll be enough strawberries and cream for everyone.” That was her attitude, and yet she loved Glebeshire, every stone and tree, with an unfaltering and unarguing devotion. She never said “Glebeshire is the loveliest spot in the world”. But only: “Oh! you’ve never been to Glebeshire? You don’t know the Clarence Faunders then? They’re only five miles from us”, or “Yes. We live in Glebeshire—a little village not far from Polchester. We’re very lucky in our clergyman, a Mr. Smart, one of the Smarts, etc.” Moreover, she never when she was quite alone said to herself: “Oh! what a heavenly day!” or “How lovely the new leaves are”, or “Look at the primroses!” She only said to herself: “Lucy Cartwright’s Annie has got to have that ointment”, or “I must tell Rebekah about the poor Curtises. She could take them the things.”
Nevertheless, when she discovered that Katherine cared for Glebeshire with a love as deep as her own, how happy she was! How firmly that discovery bound them together! For them both that journey twice a year from London to Garth was as exciting as though they had never taken it before. The stations, whose names were like the successive wrappers that enclose a splendid present, Rasselas, the little windy station where they changed from the London Express into the halting, stumbling little train that carried them towards the sea; then Stoep in Roselands, tiniest station of all, with the sea smell blowing across the dark fields, the carriage with its lights and Jacob, the coachman, the drive through the twilight lanes, the gleaming white gates, the house itself and old Rebekah on the doorstep ... yes, of all these things was the love between Mrs. Trenchard and her daughter made.
Most wonderful of all was it that, with Katherine, Mrs. Trenchard never knew a moment’s awkwardness or embarrassment. With everyone else in the world and, perhaps especially with her own family, Mrs. Trenchard was often awkward and embarrassed, although no one but herself was aware of it. Of this embarrassment Mrs. Trenchard had a horrible dread: it was to her as though she were suddenly lifted off her feet by a giant hand and held dangling: she felt that all the world must see how her skirts blew in the wind. With Katherine she was always safe: she grew, most urgently, to depend upon this safety. Then, as the years passed she felt that she might, with justice, consider Katherine secure. Katherine seemed to have no interest in young men: already she adopted a rather motherly attitude towards them and, perhaps because Henry was the young man immediately before her, considered them rather helpless, rather clumsy, rather unwieldy and ungainly. She was always kind but a little satirical in her relations to the other sex: young men were, perhaps, afraid of her.
Mrs. Trenchard did, of course, consider the possibility of Katherine’s marriage, but, if that ever occurred, it would be, she knew, with someone in the family, someone like themselves, who would live near by, who would worship Katherine but never interfere with her, who would give her children, to whom Mrs. Trenchard could be a delightful grandmother. This surrender the Gods might demand—it would need more than such a marriage to separate, now, Katherine from her mother. Mrs. Trenchard, like all unimaginative people, relied very strongly upon little facts and well-accustomed places and familiar family relations. She did not believe that Victoria Street would walk away or that the old woman (Mrs. Pengello, an ancient widow with a pension, two granddaughters and a cast in her eye) at the Garth post office would appear one morning as a radiant young beauty, or that her brother Timothy would go on to the music halls. Her world was thus a place of security, and Katherine was one of the most secure things in it. “Ah! Timothy, you’re wrong after all,” she would sometimes, in the watches of the night, think to herself. “Nothing can take Katherine from me now. You may be as right as you like about Millie and Henry. Katherine is enough....”
She had, during these last years, been wrapped in with a strange, placid content: Millie had been at school in Paris: there was nothing inside the Trenchard fortress that spoke of the outside world. No secret spirit ever whispered to Mrs. Trenchard: “Are you not being selfish in keeping your daughter? You will die some day, and then she will have a lonely old maid’s life when she might have been so happy. The children’s lives are their own. What right have you to Katherine’s life and ambitions and love? Would you, in your youth, have given up your future for your parents? Why should she?”