She had let go the outer world, but within herself she was unbroken and unimpaired.She only sat in her room like a moping, dishevelled hawk, motionless, mindless.Her children, for whom she had been so fierce in her youth, now meant scarcely anything to her.She had lost all that, she was quite by herself.Only Gerald, the gleaming, had some existence for her.But of late years, since he had become head of the business, he too was forgotten.Whereas the father, now he was dying, turned for compassion to Gerald.There had always been opposition between the two of them.Gerald had feared and despised his father, and to a great extent had avoided him all through boyhood and young manhood.And the father had felt very often a real dislike of his eldest son, which, never wanting to give way to, he had refused to acknowledge.He had ignored Gerald as much as possible, leaving him alone.
Since, however, Gerald had come home and assumed responsibility in the firm, and had proved such a wonderful director, the father, tired and weary of all outside concerns, had put all his trust of these things in his son, implicitly, leaving everything to him, and assuming a rather touching dependence on the young enemy.This immediately roused a poignant pity and allegiance in Gerald's heart, always shadowed by contempt and by unadmitted enmity.
For Gerald was in reaction against Charity; and yet he was dominated by it, it assumed supremacy in the inner life, and he could not confute it.
So he was partly subject to that which his father stood for, but he was in reaction against it.Now he could not save himself.A certain pity and grief and tenderness for his father overcame him, in spite of the deeper, more sullen hostility.
The father won shelter from Gerald through compassion.But for love he had Winifred.She was his youngest child, she was the only one of his children whom he had ever closely loved.And her he loved with all the great, overweening, sheltering love of a dying man.He wanted to shelter her infinitely, infinitely, to wrap her in warmth and love and shelter, perfectly.If he could save her she should never know one pain, one grief, one hurt.He had been so right all his life, so constant in his kindness and his goodness.And this was his last passionate righteousness, his love for the child Winifred.Some things troubled him yet.The world had passed away from him, as his strength ebbed.There were no more poor and injured and humble to protect and succour.These were all lost to him.There were no more sons and daughters to trouble him, and to weigh on him as an unnatural responsibility.These too had faded out of reality All these things had fallen out of his hands, and left him free.
There remained the covert fear and horror of his wife, as she sat mindless and strange in her room, or as she came forth with slow, prowling step, her head bent forward.But this he put away.Even his life-long righteousness, however, would not quite deliver him from the inner horror.Still, he could keep it sufficiently at bay.It would never break forth openly.Death would come first.
Then there was Winifred! If only he could be sure about her, if only he could be sure.Since the death of Diana, and the development of his illness, his craving for surety with regard to Winifred amounted almost to obsession.It was as if, even dying, he must have some anxiety, some responsibility of love, of Charity, upon his heart.
She was an odd, sensitive, inflammable child, having her father's dark hair and quiet bearing, but being quite detached, momentaneous.She was like a changeling indeed, as if her feelings did not matter to her, really.
She often seemed to be talking and playing like the gayest and most childish of children, she was full of the warmest, most delightful affection for a few things -- for her father, and for her animals in particular.But if she heard that her beloved kitten Leo had been run over by the motor-car she put her head on one side, and replied, with a faint contraction like resentment on her face: `Has he?' Then she took no more notice.She only disliked the servant who would force bad news on her, and wanted her to be sorry.She wished not to know, and that seemed her chief motive.She avoided her mother, and most of the members of her family.She loved her Daddy, because he wanted her always to be happy, and because he seemed to become young again, and irresponsible in her presence.She liked Gerald, because he was so self-contained.She loved people who would make life a game for her.She had an amazing instinctive critical faculty, and was a pure anarchist, a pure aristocrat at once.For she accepted her equals wherever she found them, and she ignored with blithe indifference her inferiors, whether they were her brothers and sisters, or whether they were wealthy guests of the house, or whether they were the common people or the servants.
She was quite single and by herself, deriving from nobody.It was as if she were cut off from all purpose or continuity, and existed simply moment by moment.
The father, as by some strange final illusion, felt as if all his fate depended on his ensuring to Winifred her happiness.She who could never suffer, because she never formed vital connections, she who could lose the dearest things of her life and be just the same the next day, the whole memory dropped out, as if deliberately, she whose will was so strangely and easily free, anarchistic, almost nihilistic, who like a soulless bird flits on its own will, without attachment or responsibility beyond the moment, who in her every motion snapped the threads of serious relationship with blithe, free hands, really nihilistic, because never troubled, she must be the object of her father's final passionate solicitude.
When Mr Crich heard that Gudrun Brangwen might come to help Winifred with her drawing and modelling he saw a road to salvation for his child.
