In spite of myself I had a little movement of impatience.
“How self-centred the man is! As though his case were at all peculiar! Wants shaking up and knocking about.”
He seemed to know my thought.
“You must think me self-centred! I was. For thirteen whole years I thought of nothing but myself, my miserable self, all shut up in that little town. I talked to no one. I did not even read—I used to sit in the dark of the cathedral nave and listen to the organ. I’d walk in the orchards and the woods. I would wonder, wonder, wonder about people and I grew more and more frightened of talking, of meeting people, of little local dinner-parties. It was as though I were on one side of the river and they were all on the other. I would think sometimes how splendid it would be if I could cross—but I couldn’t cross. Every year it became more impossible!”
“You wanted someone to take you out of yourself,” I said, and then shuddered at my own banality. But he took me very seriously.
“I did. Of course,” he answered. “But who would bother? They all thought me impossible. The girls all laughed at me—my own cousins. Sometimes people tried to help me. They never went far enough. They gave me up too soon.”
He evidently thinks he was worth a lot of trouble,
I thought irritably. But suddenly he laughed.
“That same doctor one day spoke of me, not knowing that I was near him; or perhaps he knew and thought it would be good for me. ‘Oh, Trenchard,’ he said. ‘He ought to be in a nunnery … and he’d be quite safe, too. He’d never cause a scandal!’ They thought of me as something not quite human. My father was very old now. Just before he died, he said: ‘I’d like to have had a son!’ He never noticed me at his bedside when he died. I was a great disappointment to him.”
“Well,” I said at last to break a long pause that followed his last words, “what did you think about all that time you were alone?”
“I used to think always about two things,” he said very solemnly. “One was love. I used to think how splendid it would be if only there would be someone to whom I could dedicate my devotion. I didn’t care if I got much in return or no, but they must be willing to have it ready for me to devote myself altogether. I used to watch the ladies in our town and select them, one after another. Of course they never knew and they would only have laughed had they known. But I felt quite desperate sometimes. I had so much in me to give to someone and the years were all slipping by and it became, every day, more difficult. There was a girl … something seemed to begin between us. She was the daughter of one of the canons, dark-haired, and she used to wear a lilac-coloured dress. She was very kind; once when we were walking through the town I began to talk to her. I believe she understood, because she was very, very young—only about eighteen—and hadn’t begun to laugh at me yet. She had a dimple in one cheek, very charming—but some man from London came to stay at the Castle and she was engaged to him. Then there were Katherine and Millie Trenchard, of whom we were talking. Katherine never laughed at me; she was serious and helped her mother about all the household things and the village where they lived. Afterwards she ran away with a young man and was married in London—very strange because she was so serious. There was a great deal of talk about it at the time. Millie too was charming. She laughed at me, of course, but she laughed at everyone. At any rate she was only cousinly to me; she would not have cared for my devotion.”
As he spoke I had a picture in my mind of poor Trenchard searching the countryside for someone to whom he might be devoted, tongue-tied, clumsy, stumbling and stuttering, a village Don Quixote with a stammer and without a Dulcinea.
“They must have been difficult years,” I said, and again cursed myself for my banality.
“They were,” he answered very gravely. “Very difficult.”
“And your other thoughts?” I asked him.
“They were about death,” he replied. “I had, from my very earliest years, a great terror of death. You might think that my life was not so pleasant that I should mind, very greatly, leaving it. But I was always thinking—hoping that I should live to be very old, even though I lost all my limbs and faculties. I believed that there was life of some sort after death, but just as I would hesitate outside a house a quarter of an hour from terror of meeting new faces so I felt about another life—I couldn’t bear all the introductions and the clumsy mistakes that I should be sure to make. But it was more personal than that. I had a horrible old uncle who died when I was a boy. He was
