Yet, in the end, she did him good. It is a pathetic fact that from that day Mr. Trimblerigg left off biting his nails, hoping, perhaps, that as they grew an instinct for truth would be born in him. Eventually he even developed a habit of letting them grow quite long: securing, to that extent, a sense of escape from the supervision of Davidina.
I wish I could add that that little addition of grey growth made him become more truthful. But when in later years all his hair turned grey and he wore it long, almost like a woman’s, even that did not alter the fundamentals of his character.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Where there’s a Will, there’s a Way
ON his return from college for the summer vacation, his course almost completed, Mr. Trimblerigg found Uncle Phineas with his feet gathered up for death, though not immediately. He was confined to the house and did not go out; presently did not even come downstairs. Caroline, of course, was still with him, somewhat colourless as a companion, but efficient as a housekeeper.
It would be difficult to say whether she was also a True Believer, in the doctrinal sense, because to her doctrine meant nothing. She was one of those comfortable characters who, in matters of faith, can believe anything, and never actively disbelieve anything they are told by those whom they respect and look up to. Otherwise, in worldly affairs, she was quite sensible.
When she opened the door to Mr. Trimblerigg she showed pleasure in his arrival. He called her ‘cousin,’ and kissed her, thereby committing himself to nothing but a more open acceptance of the kinship which had existed before intimacy began. Still it prepared the ground provisionally, and the blush with which she accepted the salutation made her look almost pretty: in her large cream-coloured way, with under-edges of pink, she was personable though she lacked personality; and she was very pleasant to touch, a point which with Mr. Trimblerigg mattered on the whole more than good looks, and very much more than intellect.
In the balm of her smile she said, ‘Uncle has been expecting you.’
‘So have you,’ said Mr. Trimblerigg; ‘and I’ve been expecting myself.’ Thus, footing it easily, he came into the house of his expectations, and went up to his uncle’s room.
It was a momentous interview. The old man’s beard had whitened and was beginning to slope from the horizontal to the perpendicular: voice and hand were tremulous; but his eyes, whether he saw well or ill with them, retained their keen look: and Jonathan still felt, in a lesser degree, as he did with Davidina, that he was being examined as to his character. For in spite of submissive hours in the past, he suspected that as yet Uncle Phineas had never quite trusted him; that there was something missing which all his art and solicitude could not supply.
Indeed it was so; temperamentally Mr. Trimblerigg was not cut to the pattern of True Belief; whereas, for Uncle Phineas to be outside True Belief, was to be spiritually in chaos; and the small ugly chapel which he had built for his own ministry of the Word was to him a veritable city of light. And now he knew that he was leaving it.