“I think you can trust Philippa,” she said. “There is not a touch of a flirt or coquette about her. If she had real grounds for believing that any man she felt she could care for, cared for her, she would behave with simplicity and straightforwardness, I am sure.”
“Perhaps she would,” rejoined Mrs Headfort, “but how about what you call ‘real grounds?’ Short of putting it into so many words, I doubt if she ever would believe it, and till she did, she would be tacitly discouraging without meaning it, and then the ‘so many words’ would never come! It is a vicious circle, when you have to deal with any one so fantastic as Phil.” And to herself she added, “And I do believe mamma rather encourages it in her. They are both too impracticable.”
Poor Evelyn, she was feeling put out. For she had, to tell the truth, been putting considerable restraint on herself not to cross-question her sister. And she had only refrained from doing so in the hope of being rewarded by a good comfortable “talk over” of the whole affair with her mother before leaving for Wyverston.
And Mrs Raynsworth understood her perfectly, and was sorry for her disappointment. But there was another motive for her own uncommunicativeness. Philippa had told her all that had happened—the last annoying “rencontre” with the maid, Bailey, as well as the first. And the mother’s heart was sore—sorer than she would for worlds have allowed Philippa to suspect. Was this miserable piece of girlish folly never to be forgotten? Was it to cloud her daughter’s life and prospects always? For Mrs Raynsworth knew the world and society much better than might have been supposed from her present quiet and almost isolated life. Her youth had been spent in a very different milieu from the simple though refined home which was all that her scholarly husband was able to give her. And she knew how the least breath of anything against a girl—any, even harmless, piece of fun or thoughtlessness may be magnified or distorted—above all, where there is any element of spite or jealousy present—into grotesque, but none the less fatally damaging proportions.
“I almost wish,” thought Philippa’s mother, “that I had not made her promise never to tell the story without first consulting me. Had she been free to confide in Maida Lermont, for instance, Maida might have found some way of telling it to Mr Gresham, simply and unexaggeratedly; if, that is to say, Maida has noticed anything on his side of what Evey suspects. Maida is very clever and tactful—could I write to her?” But this idea was dismissed as soon as it suggested itself. It was too repellent to all Mrs Raynsworth’s instincts—as if her child, her noble Philippa, needed “explaining,” apologising for!—not to speak of the, to such a woman as herself, inexpressible indelicacy of presupposing any special interest in her daughter, before the man in question had unmistakably declared it!
“No,” she decided, “I can do nothing. I could speak to Maida, possibly to her mother. But writing anything of the kind, putting it on paper, I cannot.”
Perhaps she was wrong. A great many things in this often crooked life of ours might be put straight if people were less timorous of speaking out, of their doing so being misunderstood. But for many, life-long suffering, death of every hope, seem preferable to even the shadow of indelicacy. And of such were Philippa and her mother.
And then again came a species of reaction to Mrs Raynsworth, much as had been the case that last evening at Cannes with Philippa.
“I am surely after all exaggerating it,” thought she, “I am letting myself get morbid; at the very worst there is nothing to be really ashamed of in what the foolish child did, and in the motives which led to her doing it there is much to be proud of. Any man who was worthy of Philippa, who could rise above conventional notions of propriety where higher feelings called for doing so, would understand and would scarcely blame her, though as we—as her father and I do—he might regret, bitterly regret, that she had been so rash. No; I will not let myself be unhappy about it, for there is no real reason, and Philippa would find out if I were so. Her intuitions are so quick and accurate. And, above all, she must not be allowed to grow morbid about it.”
It would have been an unspeakable comfort to the mother to have confided the whole story, with its sequence of anxieties and misgivings, to her eldest son. But this she had deliberately decided not to do. Charley was so proud of Philippa; he loved to guard her from every touch of roughness or coarseness, as if she were too good for common life at all; it might be exaggerated, but it was very sweet and tender all the same, and his mother could not face the thought of his pain and indignation did he ever come to know what his sister had done, and the detestable gossip and comments that even now might result from it. No, Charley must never know.