CHAPTER XXII
THE illness of Elizabeth Burton proved tedious and perplexing to the specialists who traced its origin beyond the purely physical to some unconfessed thing gnawing at the peace of her brain. Accordingly they did what they could and, having effected a temporary repair, fell back on the customary prescription of change and travel.
During these weeks Mary had been constantly with her mother—and when she was even a short while away the elder woman anxiously called for her. Sometimes she and Hamilton had met, but at these times there was no syllable of surrender from the lips of either; only a tacit sort of truce such as might have existed where two armies drawn tensely in confronting battle-lines pause to care for the wounded in which both have interest. But when the mandate came that Elizabeth Burton must go abroad Mary Burton faced the sternest dilemma which had ever presented itself for her decision. The mother refused absolutely to obey the verdict unless her daughter accompanied her, and while Mary was abroad she could only guess what crises her lover might be meeting at home—because he was her lover.
She and Edwardes were walking together one afternoon as they discussed this new complication in their affairs. They had chosen for their tryst neither the smooth stretch of the avenue nor the paths of the park, but those tangled by-ways that thread the woods back of the Jersey Palisades.
It was a cold day with air as biting as a lash and as clear as crystal, and since these woods were wild and desolate in spots though skirted by smooth road-ways and flanked by handsome estates they had for the most part uninterrupted solitude. Ragged outcroppings of rock stood baldly etched against the brilliant sky and through the open spaces they occasionally saw the Hudson and the contour of upper New York. Twice they came upon rouged and powdered men and women with beaded lashes, but these men and women were too busy doing varied things before cameras to take notice of them, for their refuge was also the open-air workshop of moving-picture folk.
"Of course you must go," Edwardes seriously told her. "Your mother's health—her life itself—may depend on it. You aren't the sort who can hesitate to answer such a call and it won't be forever, you know."
"And while I'm—over there—with an ocean between us"—she broke off and her eyes darkened with terror—"you may be facing a decisive battle here—a battle decisive for both of us. If you have to fight, it's my right to be near you—to share your fortunes and your misfortunes. Our love didn't begin as little loves do. It sha'n't end that way."
"If I thought—" his voice was very deep in its earnestness—"that anything could mean an end of our love, I couldn't make a fight whether you were here or elsewhere. I think our love will outlast all battles. I want you to go."
"And if I do go," she demanded with a gaze of questioning which demanded a truthful answer, "will you swear, by whatever is holiest and means most to you, that you will cable me at the first intimation of storm?"
For a while he stood silent and his features were trouble-stamped; then he took both her hands and their eyes met. Slowly he bowed his assent. "I swear it," he told her, "by my love for you, but if I read the signs aright the time is not quite that close at hand."