At the prospect of Anne's going her resentment died down as suddenly as it had risen. She forgot that Anne had taken her sons' affection and her place beside her husband's deathbed. And though she couldn't help feeling rather glad that Jerrold had gone to India without Anne, she was sorry for her. She loved her and she meant to keep her. She said she simply could not bear it if Anne left her, and was it the time to choose when she wanted her as she had never wanted her before? She had nobody to turn to, as Anne knew. Corbetts and Hawtreys and Markhams and people were all very well; but they were outsiders.
"It's the inside people that I want now, Anne. You're deep inside, dear."
Yes, of course she had relations. But relations were no use. They were all wrapped up in their own tiresome affairs, and there wasn't one of them she cared for as she cared for Anne.
"I couldn't care more if you were my own daughter. Darling Robert felt about you just the same. You can't leave me."
And Anne didn't. She never could resist unhappiness. She thought: "I was glad enough to stop with her through all the happy times. I'd be a perfect beast to go and leave her now when she's miserable and hasn't got anybody."
It would have been better for Anne if she could have gone. Robert Fielding's death and Jerrold's absence were two griefs that inflamed each other; they came together to make one immense, intolerable wound. And here at Wyck, she couldn't move without coming upon something that touched it and stung it to fresh pain. But Anne was not like Jerrold, to turn from what she loved because it hurt her. For as long as she could remember all her happiness had come to her at Wyck. If unhappiness came now, she had got, as Eliot said, "to take it."
And so she stayed on through the autumn, then over Christmas to the New Year; this time because of Colin who was suffering from depression. Colin had never got over his father's death and Jerrold's going; and the last thing Jerrold had said to her before he went was; "You'll look after Col-Col, won't you? Don't let him go grousing about by himself."
Jerrold had always expected her to look after Colin. At seventeen there was still something piteous and breakable about him, something that clung to you for help. Eliot said that if Colin didn't look out he'd be a regular neurotic. But he owned that Anne was good for him.
"I don't know what you do to him, but he's better when you're there."
Eliot was the one who appeared to have recovered first. He met the shock of his father's death with a defiant energy and will.