There was something abnormal about the Trench children. Nothing ever
went right with them. Sylvia was the college beauty, an exact replica
of her mother, and she had been forced in sheer desperation to marry,
at twenty-four, the baldheaded professor of chemistry and physics,
whom half the girls in town had refused. Larimore was a successful
architect, had taken honours at Cornell; but he detested girls and
boys. Had his nose in a book most of the time. He might have done
things for his sister, if he had not been so steeped in his own morbid
fancies. Bob would have brought eligible young men to the house, if he
had been the next one in age to Sylvia. Mrs. Trench shuddered when she
thought about Bob. It was the culminating tragedy of her badly ordered
life.
A good many things made her shudder ... horrible patches of the past,
that had been lived through, somehow. There were the first few years
of her married life at Olive Hill, when David worked as a carpenter,
and two babies invaded the three-room cottage before her second
anniversary. She had not considered the possibility of children when,
after an engagement lasting less than a month, she and David had been
married. A little daughter--three weeks older than Ellen’s first child!
Lavinia made it an occasion for rejoicing. Sent dainty announcements to
Bromfield, tied with blue ribbon. But when, after fourteen months, a
boy came, she began to question the leap she had made, that tempestuous
October day.
The boy was called Larimore, in protest against the unmistakable
lineaments of the Trenches that revealed themselves in his pathetic
baby face. He was an anaemic child, given to wailing softly when in
pain--a sharp contrast to Sylvia’s insistent screams. As he grew into
boyhood he was quiet and studious, as David had been. Seldom gave
his mother cause for anxiety, glutted her maternal pride with his
achievements at school, and yet she never quite overcame the feeling
that he was an interloper in her family. There were three years of
immunity, and then came Robert, the child whom everybody else regarded
as a stray. But Lavinia saw in his thick black hair and virile body
the materialization of her contempt for David’s softness, as it had
perpetuated itself in her first son.
There was nothing about Bob that was soft but his skin. And that was
another Trench anomaly. Between Lary’s curling blond locks and Bob’s
peach bloom complexion, Sylvia had a desperate time of it, before
the period of adolescence when her own sallow cheeks began to clear.
Those were the dim prehistoric days when, in Springdale, rouge and lip
sticks carried all the sinister implication which had attached, in the
Bromfield of Lavinia’s day, to the suggested idea that a “nice” girl
wanted to marry. There was implicit in each the stigma of the wanton,
and Lavinia had taught her children that, before all else, they must
be respectable. Her own powder box was closely guarded, its existence
denied with oaths that would have condemned a less righteous soul to
perdition.
After David removed to Springdale, as junior member of the firm that
had the contract for two new buildings on the college campus, and Vine
Cottage had been erected beyond the residence district of the town,
three other babies arrived--at perfectly decent intervals. They were
all girls. Isabel, like Lary, was given an unequivocal Larimore name,
because she was so exactly like her father. She was four years younger
than Bob, and the death of these two made a strange break in the family
continuity. Mrs. Ascott heard about the Trench children in a manner at
once vivid and enlightening.