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.
He believed that Winifred had talent, he had seen Gudrun, he knew that she was an exceptional person.
He could give Winifred into her hands as into the hands of a right being.
Here was a direction and a positive force to be lent to his child, he need not leave her directionless and defenceless.
If he could but graft the girl on to some tree of utterance before he died, he would have fulfilled his responsibility.
And here it could be done.
He did not hesitate to appeal to Gudrun.
Meanwhile, as the father drifted more and more out of life, Gerald experienced more and more a sense of exposure.
His father after all had stood for the living world to him.
Whilst his father lived Gerald was not responsible for the world.
But now his father was passing away, Gerald found himself left exposed and unready before the storm of living, like the mutinous first mate of a ship that has lost his captain, and who sees only a terrible chaos in front of him.
He did not inherit an established order and a living idea.
The whole unifying idea of mankind seemed to be dying with his father, the centralising force that had held the whole together seemed to collapse with his father, the parts were ready to go asunder in terrible disintegration.
Gerald was as if left on board of a ship that was going asunder beneath his feet, he was in charge of a vessel whose timbers were all coming apart.
He knew that all his life he had been wrenching at the frame of life to break it apart. And now, with something of the terror of a destructive child, he saw himself on the point of inheriting his own destruction.