The mother stood rooted to the spot, in a sudden anguish. Elizabeth--sobbing? Only once in her life had Mrs. Gaddesden heard that sound before--the night that the news of Francis Merton's death reached Martindale, and Elizabeth had wept, as her mother believed, more for what her young husband might have been to her, than for what he had been. Elizabeth's eyes filled readily with tears answering to pity or high feeling; but this fierce stifled emotion--this abandonment of pain!
Mrs. Gaddesden stood trembling and motionless, the tears on her own cheeks. Conjecture hurried through her mind. She seemed to be learning her daughter, her gay and tender Elizabeth, afresh. At last she turned and crept out of the room, noiselessly shutting the door. After lingering a while in the passage, she knocked, with an uncertain hand, and waited till Elizabeth came--Elizabeth, hardly visible in the firelight, her brown hair falling like a veil round her face.
CHAPTER XIV
A few days later the Gaddesdens were in town, settled in a house in Portman Square. Philip was increasingly ill, and moreover shrouded in a bitterness of spirit which wrung his mother's heart. She suspected a new cause for it in the fancy that he had lately taken for Alice Lucas, the girl in the white chiffon, who had piped to Mariette in vain. Not that he ever now wanted to see her. He had passed into a phase indeed of refusing all society--except that of George Anderson. A floor of the Portman Square house was given up to him. Various treatments were being tried, and as soon as he was strong enough his mother was to take him to the South. Meanwhile his only pleasure seemed to lie in Anderson's visits, which however could not be frequent, for the business of the Conference was heavy, and after the daily sittings were over, the interviews and correspondence connected with them took much time.
On these occasions, whether early in the morning before the business of the day began, or in the hour before dinner--sometimes even late at night--Anderson after his chat with the invalid would descend from Philip's room to the drawing-room below, only allowing himself a few minutes, and glancing always with a quickening of the pulse through the shadows of the large room, to see whether it held two persons or one. Mrs. Gaddesden was invariably there; a small, faded woman in trailing lace dresses, who would sit waiting for him, her embroidery on her knee, and when he appeared would hurry across the floor to meet him, dropping silks, scissors, handkerchief on the way. This dropping of all her incidental possessions--a performance repeated night after night, and followed always by her soft fluttering apologies--soon came to be symbolic, in Anderson's eyes. She moved on the impulse of the moment, without thinking what she might scatter by the way. Yet the impulse was always a loving impulse--and the regrets were sincere.
As to the relation to Anderson, Philip was here the pivot of the situation exactly as he had been in Canada. Just as his physical weakness, and the demands he founded upon it had bound the Canadian to their chariot wheels in the Rockies, so now--mutatis mutandis--in London. Mrs. Gaddesden before a week was over had become pitifully dependent upon him, simply because Philip was pleased to desire his society, and showed a flicker of cheerfulness whenever he appeared. She was torn indeed between her memory of Elizabeth's sobbing, and her hunger to give Philip the moon out of the sky, should he happen to want it. Sons must come first, daughters second; such has been the philosophy of mothers from the beginning. She feared--desperately feared--that Elizabeth had given her heart away. And as she agreed with Philip that it would not be a seemly or tolerable marriage for Elizabeth, she would, in the natural course of things, both for Elizabeth's sake and the family's, have tried to keep the unseemly suitor at a distance. But here he was, planted somehow in the very midst of their life, and she, making feeble efforts day after day to induce him to root himself there still more firmly. Sometimes indeed she would try to press alternatives on Philip. But Philip would not have them. What with the physical and moral force that seemed to radiate from Anderson, and bring stimulus with them to the weaker life--and what with the lad's sick alienation for the moment from his ordinary friends and occupations, Anderson reigned supreme, often clearly to his own trouble and embarrassment. Had it not been for Philip, Portman Square would have seen him but seldom. That Elizabeth knew with a sharp certainty, dim though it might be to her mother. But as it was, the boy's tragic clinging to his new friend governed all else, simply because at the bottom of each heart, unrecognised and unexpressed, lurked the same foreboding, the same fear of fears.
The tragic clinging was also, alack, a tragic selfishness. Philip had a substantial share of that quick perception which in Elizabeth became something exquisite and impersonal, the source of all high emotions. When Delaine had first suggested to him "an attachment" between Anderson and his sister, a hundred impressions of his own had emerged to verify the statement and aggravate his wrath; and when Anderson had said "a man of my history is not going to ask your sister to marry him," Philip perfectly understood that but for the history the attempt would have been made. Anderson was therefore--most unreasonably and presumptuously--in love with Elizabeth; and as to Elizabeth, the indications here also were not lost upon Philip. It was all very amazing, and he wished, to use his phrase to his mother, that it would "work off." But whether or no, he could not do without Anderson--if Anderson was to be had. He threw him and Elizabeth together, recklessly; trusting to Anderson's word, and unable to resist his own craving for comfort and distraction.
The days passed on, days so charged with feeling for Elizabeth that they could only be met at all by a kind of resolute stillness and self-control. Philip was very dependent on the gossip his mother and sister brought him from the world outside. Elizabeth therefore, to please him, went into society as usual, and forgot her heartaches, for her brother and for herself, as best she could. Outwardly she was much occupied in doing all that could be done--socially and even politically--for Anderson and Mariette. She had power and she used it. The two friends found themselves the object of one of those sudden cordialities that open all doors, even the most difficult, and run like a warm wave through London society. Mariette remained throughout the ironic spectator--friendly on his own terms, but entirely rejecting, often, the terms offered him tacitly or openly, by his English acquaintance.
"Your ways are not mine--your ideals are not mine, God forbid they should be!"--he seemed to be constantly saying. "But we happen to be oxen bound under the same yoke, and dragging the same plough. No gush, please--but at the same time no ill-will! Loyal?--to your loyalties? Oh yes--quite sufficiently--so long as you don't ask us to let it interfere with our loyalty to our own! Don't be such fools as to expect us to take much interest in your Imperial orgies. But we're all right! Only let us alone--we're all right!"