GRACE
Not in a day and not in a night did Maggie find a key to that strange confusion of fears, superstitions, and self-satisfactions that was known to the world as Grace Trenchard.Perhaps she never found it, and through all the struggle and conflict in which she was now to be involved she was fighting, desperately, in the dark.Fight she did, and it was this same conflict, bitter and tragic enough at the time, that transformed her into the woman that she became...
and through all that conflict it may be truly said of her that she never knew a moment's bitterness--anger, dismay, loneliness, even despair-bitterness never.
It was not strange that Maggie did not understand Grace; Grace never understood herself nor did she make the slightest attempt to do so.
It would be easy enough to cover the ground at once by saying that she had no imagination, that she never went behind the thing that she saw, and that she found the grasping of external things quite as much as she could manage.But that is not enough.Very early indeed, when she had been a stolid-faced little girl with a hot desire for the doll possessed by her neighbour, she had had for nurse a woman who rejoiced in supernatural events.With ghost stories of the most terrifying kind she besieged Grace's young heart and mind.The child had never imagination enough to visualise these stories in the true essence, but she seized upon external detail-the blue lights, the white shimmering garments, the moon and the church clock, the clanking chain and the stain of blood upon the board.
These things were not for her, and indeed did she allow her fancy to dwell, for a moment, upon them she was besieged at once by so horrid a panic that she lost all control and self-possession.She therefore very quickly put those things from her and thenceforth lived in the world as in a castle surrounded by a dark moat filled with horrible and slimy creatures who would raise a head at her did she so much as glance their way.
She decided then never to look, and from a very early age those quarters of life became to her "queer," indecent, and dangerous.All the more she fastened her grip upon the things that she could see and hold, and these things repaid her devotion by never deceiving her or pretending to be what they were not.She believed intensely in forms and repetitions; she liked everything to be where she expected it to be, people to say the things that she expected them to say, clocks to strike at the right time, and trains to be up to the minute.With all this she could never be called an accurate or careful woman.She was radically stupid, stupid in the real sense of the word, so that her mind did not grasp a new thought or fact until it had been repeated to her again and again, so that she had no power of expressing herself, and a deep inaccuracy about everything and every one which she endeavoured to cover by a stream of aimless lies that deceived no one.She would of course have been very indignant had any one told her that she was stupid.She hated what she called "clever people" and never had them near her if she could help it.She was instantly suspicious of any one who liked ideas or wanted anything changed.With all this she was of an extreme obstinacy and a deep, deep jealousy.She clung to what she had with the tenacity of a mollusc.What she had was in the main Paul, and her affection for him was a very real human quality in her.
He was exactly what she would have chosen had she been allowed at the beginning a free choice.He was lazy and good-tempered so that he yielded to her on every possible point, he was absolutely orthodox and never shocked her by a thought or a word out of the ordinary, he really loved her and believed in her and said, quite truly, that he would not have known what to do without her.
It seems strange then that it should have been in the main her urgency that led to the acquisition of Maggie.During the last year she had begun to be seriously uneasy.Things were not what they had been.Mrs.Constantine and others in the parish were challenging her authority, even the Choir boys were scarcely so subservient as they had been, and, worst of all, Paul himself was strangely restive and unquiet.He talked at times of getting married, wondered whether she, Grace, wouldn't like some one to help her in the house, and even, on one terrifying occasion, suggested leaving Skeaton altogether.A momentary vision of what it would be to live without Paul, to give up her kingdom in Skeaton, to have to start all over again to acquire dominion in some new place, was enough for Grace.
She must find Paul a wife, and she must find some one who would depend upon her, look up to her, obey her, who would, incidentally, take some of the tiresome and monotonous drudgery off her shoulders.
The moment she saw Maggie she was resolved; here was just the creature, a mouse of a girl, no parents, no money, no appearance, nothing to make her proud or above herself, some one to be moulded and trained in the way she should go.To her great surprise she discovered that Paul was at once attracted by Maggie: had she ever wondered at anything she would have wondered at this, but she decided that it was because she herself had made the suggestion.
Dear Paul, he was always so eager to fall in with any of her proposals.
Her mind misgave her a little when she saw that he was really in love.What could he see in that plain, gauche, uncharming creature?
See something he undoubtedly did.However, that would wear off very quickly.The Skeaton atmosphere was against romance and Paul was too lazy to be in love very long.Once or twice in the weeks before the wedding Grace's suspicions were aroused.
Maggie seemed to be an utter little heathen; also it appeared that she had had some strange love affair that she had taken so seriously as actually to be ill over it.That was odd and a little alarming, but the child was very young, and once married-there she'd be, so to speak!
