"What about the shooters, Wilson? I suppose they'll be in directly?"
"They're just finishing the last beat, ma'am. Shall I bring in tea?"
Mrs. Gaddesden assented, and then leaving her seat by the fire she moved to the window to see if she could discover any signs in the wintry landscape outside of Philip and his shooting party. As she did so she heard a rattle of distant shots coming from a point to her right beyond the girdling trees of the garden. But she saw none of the shooters--only two persons, walking up and down the stone terrace outside, in the glow of the November sunset. One was Elizabeth, the other a tall, ungainly, yet remarkable figure, was a Canadian friend of Elizabeth's, who had only arrived that forenoon--M. Félix Mariette, of Quebec. According to Elizabeth, he had come over to attend a Catholic Congress in London. Mrs. Gaddesden understood that he was an Ultramontane, and that she was not to mention to him the word "Empire." She knew also that Elizabeth had made arrangements with a neighbouring landowner, who was also a Catholic, that he should be motored fifteen miles to Mass on the following morning, which was Sunday; and her own easy-going Anglican temper, which carried her to the parish church about twelve times a year, had been thereby a good deal impressed.
How well those furs became Elizabeth! It was a chill frosty evening, and Elizabeth's slight form was wrapped in the sables which had been one of poor Merton's earliest gifts to her. The mother's eye dwelt with an habitual pride on the daughter's grace of movement and carriage. "She is always so distinguished," she thought, and then checked herself by the remembrance that she was applying to Elizabeth an adjective that Elizabeth particularly disliked. Nevertheless, Mrs. Gaddesden knew very well what she herself meant by it. She meant something--some quality in Elizabeth, which was always provoking in her mother's mind despairing comparisons between what she might make of her life and what she was actually making, or threatening to make of it.
Alas, for that Canadian journey--that disastrous Canadian journey! Mrs. Gaddesden's thoughts, as she watched the two strollers outside, were carried back to the moment in early August when Arthur Delaine had reappeared in her drawing-room, three weeks before Elizabeth's return, and she had gathered from his cautious and stammering revelations what kind of man it was who seemed to have established this strange hold on her daughter. Delaine, she thought, had spoken most generously of Elizabeth and his own disappointment, and most kindly of this Mr. Anderson.
"I know nothing against him personally--nothing! No doubt a very estimable young fellow, with just the kind of ability that will help him in Canada. Lady Merton, I imagine, will have told you of the sad events in which we found him involved?"
Mrs. Gaddesden had replied that certainly Elizabeth had told her the whole story, so far as it concerned Mr. Anderson. She pointed to the letters beside her.
"But you cannot suppose," had been her further indignant remark, "that Elizabeth would ever dream of marrying him!"
"That, my dear old friend, is for her mother to find out," Delaine had replied, not without a touch of venom. "I can certainly assure you that Lady Merton is deeply interested in this young man, and he in her."
"Elizabeth--exiling herself in Canada--burying herself on the prairies--when she might have everything here--the best of everything--at her feet. It is inconceivable!"
Delaine had agreed that it was inconceivable, and they had mourned together over the grotesque possibilities of life. "But you will save her," he had said at last. "You will save her! You will point out to her all she would be giving up--the absurdity, the really criminal waste of it!"
On which he had gloomily taken his departure for an archæological congress at Berlin, and an autumn in Italy; and a few weeks later she had recovered her darling Elizabeth, paler and thinner than before--and quite, quite incomprehensible!
As for "saving" her, Mrs. Gaddesden had not been allowed to attempt it. In the first place, Elizabeth had stoutly denied that there was anything to save her from. "Don't believe anything at all, dear Mummy, that Arthur Delaine may have said to you! I have made a great friend--of a very interesting man; and I am going to correspond with him. He is coming to London in November, and I have asked him to stay here. And you must beverykind to him, darling--just as kind as you can be--for he has had a hard time--he saved Philip's life--and he is an uncommonly fine fellow!"
And with that--great readiness to talk about everything except just what Mrs. Gaddesden most wanted to know. Elizabeth sitting on her mother's bed at night, crooning about Canada--her soft brown hair over her shoulders, and her eyes sparkling with patriotic enthusiasm, was a charming figure. But let Mrs. Gaddesden attempt to probe and penetrate beyond a certain point, and the way was resolutely barred. Elizabeth would kiss her mother tenderly--it was as though her own reticence hurt her--but would say nothing. Mrs. Gaddesden could only feel sorely that a great change had come over the being she loved best in the world, and that she was not to know the whys and wherefores of it.
And Philip--alack! had been of very little use to her in the matter!
"Don't you bother your head, Mother! Anderson's an awfully good chap--but he's not going to marry Elizabeth. Told me he knew he wasn't the kind. And of course he isn't--must draw the line somewhere--hang it! But he's an awfully decent fellow. He's not going to push himself in where he isn't wanted. You let Elizabeth alone, Mummy--it'll work off. And of course we must be civil to him when he comes over--I should jolly well think we must--considering he saved my life!"
Certainly they must be civil! News of Anderson's sailing and arrival had been anxiously looked for. He had reached London three days before this date, had presented his credentials at the Board of Trade and the Colonial Office, and after various preliminary interviews with ministers, was now coming down to Martindale for a week-end before the assembling of the small conference of English and colonial representatives to which he had been sent.
Mrs. Gaddesden saw from the various notices of his arrival in the English papers that even in England, among the initiated he was understood to be a man of mark. She was all impatience to see him, and had shown it outwardly much more plainly than Elizabeth. How quiet Elizabeth had been these last days! moving about the house so silently, with vaguely smiling eyes, like one husbanding her strength before an ordeal.
What was going to happen? Mrs. Gaddesden was conscious in her own mind of a strained hush of expectation. But she had never ventured to say a word to Elizabeth. In half an hour--or less--he would be here. A motor had been sent to meet the express train at the country town fifteen miles off. Mrs. Gaddesden looked round her in the warm dusk, as though trying to forecast how Martindale and its inmates would look to the new-comer. She saw a room of medium size, which from the end of the sixteenth century had been known as the Red Drawing Room--a room panelled in stamped Cordovan leather, and filled with rare and beautiful things; with ebony cabinets, and fine lacquer; with the rarest of oriental carpets, with carved chairs, and luxurious sofas. Set here and there, sparingly, among the shadows, as though in scorn of any vulgar profusion, the eye caught the gleam of old silver, or rock crystal, or agate;bibelotscollected a hundred and fifty years ago by a Gaddesden of taste, and still in their original places. Overhead, the uneven stucco ceiling showed a pattern of Tudor roses; opposite to Mrs. Gaddesden the wall was divided between a round mirror, in whose depths she saw herself reflected and a fine Holbein portrait of a man, in a flat velvet hat on a green background. Over the carved mantelpiece with its date of 1586, there reigned a Romney portrait--one of the most famous in existence--of a young girl in black. Elizabeth Merton bore a curious resemblance to it. Chrysanthemums, white, yellow and purple, gleamed amid the richness of the room; while the light of the solitary lamp beside which Mrs. Gaddesden had been sitting with her embroidery, blended with the orange glow from outside now streaming in through the unshuttered windows, to deepen a colour effect of extraordinary beauty, produced partly by time, partly by the conscious effort of a dozen generations.
And from the window, under the winter sunset, Mrs. Gaddesden could see, at right angles to her on either side, the northern and southern wings of the great house; the sloping lawns; the river winding through the park; the ivy-grown church among the trees; the distant woods and plantations; the purple outlines of the fells. Just as in the room within, so the scene without was fused into a perfect harmony and keeping by the mellowing light. There was in it not a jarring note, a ragged line--age and dignity, wealth and undisputed place: Martindale expressed them all. The Gaddesdens had twice refused a peerage; and with contempt. In their belief, to be Mr. Gaddesden of Martindale was enough; a dukedom could not have bettered it. And the whole country-side in which they had been rooted for centuries agreed with them. There had even been a certain disapproval of the financial successes of Philip Gaddesden's father. It was true that the Gaddesden rents had gone down. But the country, however commercialised itself, looked with jealousy on any intrusion of "commercialism" into the guarded and venerable precincts of Martindale.
The little lady who was now, till Philip's majority and marriage, mistress of Martindale, was a small, soft, tremulous person, without the intelligence of her daughter, but by no means without character. Secretly she had often felt oppressed by her surroundings. Whenever Philip married, she would find it no hardship at all to retire to the dower house at the edge of the park. Meanwhile she did her best to uphold the ancient ways. But ifshesometimes found Martindale oppressive--too old, too large, too rich, too perfect--how was it going to strike a young Canadian, fresh from the prairies, who had never been in England before?
A sudden sound of many footsteps in the hall. The drawing-room door was thrown open by Philip, and a troop of men entered. A fresh-coloured man with grizzled hair led the van.
"Well, Mrs. Gaddesden, here we all are. Philip has given us a capital day!"
A group of men followed him; the agent of the property, two small neighbouring squires, a broad-browed burly man in knickerbockers, who was apparently a clergyman, to judge from his white tie, the adjutant of the local regiment, and a couple of good-looking youths, Etonian friends of Philip. Elizabeth and Mariette came in from the garden, and a young cousin of the Gaddesdens, a Miss Lucas, slipped into the room under Elizabeth's wing. She was a pretty girl, dressed in an elaborate demi-toilette of white chiffon, and the younger men of the party in their shooting dress--with Philip at their head--were presently clustered thick about her, like bees after pollen. It was clear, indeed, that Philip was paying her considerable attention, and as he laughed and sparred with her, the transient colour that exercise had given him disappeared, and a pale look of excitement took its place.
Mariette glanced from one to another with a scarcely disguised curiosity. This was only his third visit to England and he felt himself in a foreign country. That was apasteurhe supposed, in the gaiters--grotesque! And why was the young lady in evening dress, while Lady Merton, now that she had thrown off her furs, appeared in the severest of tweed coats and skirts? The rosy old fellow beside Mrs. Gaddesden was, he understood from Lady Merton, the Lord Lieutenant of the county.
But at that moment his hostess laid hands upon him to present him to her neighbour. "Monsieur Mariette--Lord Waynflete."
"Delighted to see you," said the great man affably, holding out his hand. "What a fine place Canada is getting! I am thinking of sending my third son there."
Mariette bowed.
"There will be room for him."
"I am afraid he hasn't brains enough to do much here--but perhaps in a new country--"
"He will not require them? Yes, it is a common opinion," said Mariette, with composure. Lord Waynflete stared a little, and returned to his hostess. Mariette betook himself to Elizabeth for tea, and she introduced him to the girl in white, who looked at him with enthusiasm, and at once threw over her bevy of young men, in favour of the spectacled and lean-faced stranger.
"You are a Catholic, Monsieur?" she asked him, fervently. "How I envy you! Iadorethe Oratory! When we are in town I always go there to Benediction--unless Mamma wants me at home to pour out tea. Do you know Cardinal C----?"
She named a Cardinal Archbishop, then presiding over the diocese of Westminster.
"Yes, mademoiselle, I know him quite well. I have just been staying with him."
She clasped her hands eagerly.
"Howveryinteresting! I know him a little.Isn'the nice?"
"No," said Mariette resolutely. "He is magnificent--a saint--a scholar--everything--but not nice!"
The girl looked a little puzzled, then angry, and after a few minutes' more conversation she returned to her young men, conspicuously turning her back on Mariette.
He threw a deprecating, half-penitent look at Elizabeth, whose faced twitched with amusement, and sat down in a corner behind her that he might observe without talking. His quick intelligence sorted the people about him almost at once--the two yeoman-squires, who were not quite at home in Mrs. Gaddesden's drawing-room, were awkward with their tea-cups, and talked to each other in subdued voices, till Elizabeth found them out, summoned them to her side, and made them happy; the agent who was helping Lady Merton with tea, making himself generally useful; Philip and another gilded youth, the son, he understood, of a neighbouring peer, who were flirting with the girl in white; and yet a third fastidious Etonian, who was clearly bored by the ladies, and was amusing himself with the adjutant and a cigarette in a distant corner. His eyes came back at last to thepasteur. An able face after all; cool, shrewd, and not unspiritual. Very soon, he, the parson--whose name was Everett--and Elizabeth were drawn into conversation, and Marietta under Everett's good-humoured glance found himself observed as well as observer.
"You are trying to decipher us?" said Everett, at last, with a smile. "Well, we are not easy."
"Could you be a great nation if you were?"
"Perhaps not. England just now is a palimpsest--the new writing everywhere on top of the old. Yet it is the same parchment, and the old is there. Nowyouare writing on a fresh skin."
"But with the old ideas!" said Mariette, a flash in his dark eyes. "Church--State--family!--there is nothing else to write with."
The two men drew closer together, and plunged into conversation. Elizabeth was left solitary a moment, behind the tea-things. The buzz of the room, the hearty laugh of the Lord Lieutenant, reached the outer ear. But every deeper sense was strained to catch a voice--a step--that must soon be here. And presently across the room, her eyes met her mother's, and their two expectancies touched.
"Mother!--here is Mr. Anderson!"
Philip entered joyously, escorting his guest.
To Anderson's half-dazzled sight, the room, which was now fully lit by lamplight and fire, seemed crowded. He found himself greeted by a gentle grey-haired lady of fifty-five, with a strong likeness to a face he knew; and then his hand touched Elizabeth's. Various commonplaces passed between him and her, as to his journey, the new motor which had brought him to the house, the frosty evening. Mariette gave him a nod and smile, and he was introduced to various men who bowed without any change of expression, and to a girl, who smiled carelessly, and turned immediately towards Philip, hanging over the back of her chair.
Elizabeth pointed to a seat beside her, and gave him tea. They talked of London a little, and his first impressions. All the time he was trying to grasp the identity of the woman speaking with the woman he had parted from in Canada. Something surely had gone? This restrained and rather cold person was not the Elizabeth of the Rockies. He watched her when she turned from him to her other guests; her light impersonal manner towards the younger men, with its occasional touch of satire; the friendly relation between her and the parson; the kindly deference she showed the old Lord Lieutenant. Evidently she was mistress here, much more than her mother. Everything seemed to be referred to her, to circle round her.
Presently there was a stir in the room. Lord Waynflete asked for his carriage.
"Don't forget, my dear lady, that you open the new Town Hall next Wednesday," he said, as he made his way to Elizabeth.
She shrugged her shoulders.
"But you make the speech!"
"Not at all. They only want to hear you. And there'll be a great crowd."
"Elizabeth can't speak worth a cent!" said Philip, with brotherly candour. "Can you, Lisa?"
"I don't believe it," said Lord Waynflete, "but it don't matter. All they want is that a Gaddesden should say something. Ah, Mrs. Gaddesden--how glorious the Romney looks to-night!" He turned to the fireplace, admiring the illuminated picture, his hands on his sides.
"Is it an ancestress?" Mariette addressed the question to Elizabeth.
"Yes. She had three husbands, and is supposed to have murdered the fourth," said Elizabeth drily.
"All the same she's an extremely handsome woman," put in Lord Waynflete. "And as you're the image of her, Lady Merton, you'd better not run her down." Elizabeth joined in the laugh against herself and the speaker turned to Anderson.
"You'll find this place a perfect treasure-house, Mr. Anderson, and I advise you to study it--for the Radicals won't leave any of us anything, before many years are out. You're from Manitoba? Ah, you're not troubled with any of these Socialist fellows yet! But you'll get 'em--you'll get 'em--like rats in the corn. They'll pull the old flag down if they can. But you'll help us to keep it flying. The Colonies are our hope--we look to the Colonies!"
The handsome old man raised an oratorical hand, and looked round on his audience, like one to whom public speaking was second nature.
Anderson made a gesture of assent; he was not really expected to say anything. Mariette in the background observed the speaker with an amused and critical detachment.
"Your carriage will be round directly, Lord Waynflete," said Philip, "but I don't see why you should go."
"My dear fellow--I have to catch the night train. There is a most important debate in the House of Lords to-morrow." He turned to the Canadian politely. "Of course you know there is an autumn session on. With these Radical Governments we shall soon have one every year."
"What! the Education Bill again to-morrow?" said Everett. "What are you going to do with it?"
Lord Waynflete looked at the speaker with some distaste. He did not much approve of sporting parsons, and Everett's opinions were too Liberal to please him. But he let himself be drawn, and soon the whole room was in eager debate on some of the old hot issues between Church and Dissent. Lord Waynflete ceased to be merely fatuous and kindly. His talk became shrewd, statesmanlike even; he was the typical English aristocrat and Anglican Churchman, discussing topics with which he had been familiar from his cradle, and in a manner and tone which every man in the room--save the two Canadians--accepted without question. He was the natural leader of these men of the land-owning or military class; they liked to hear him harangue; and harangue he did, till the striking of a clock suddenly checked him.
"I must be off! Well, Mrs. Gaddesden, it's theChurch--the Church we have to think of!--the Church we have to fight for! What would England be without the Church--let's ask ourselves that. Good-bye--good-bye!"
"Is he talking of the Anglican establishment?" muttered Mariette. "Quel drôle de vieillard!"
The parson heard him, and, with a twinkle in his eyes, turned and proposed to show the French Canadian the famous library of the house.
The party melted away. Even Elizabeth had been summoned for some last word with Lord Waynflete on the subject of the opening of the Town Hall. Anderson was left alone.
He looked around him, at the room, the pictures, the panelled walls, and then moving to the window which was still unshuttered, he gazed out into the starlit dusk, and the dim, stately landscape. There were lights in the church showing the stained glass of the perpendicular windows, and a flight of rooks was circling round the old tower.
As he stood there, somebody came back into the room. It was the adjutant, looking for his hat.
"Jolly old place, isn't it?" said the young man civilly, seeing that the stranger was studying the view. "It's to be hoped that Philip will keep it up properly."
"He seems fond of it," said Anderson.
"Oh, yes! But you've got to be a big man to fill the position. However, there's money enough. They're all rich--and they marry money."
Anderson murmured something inaudible, and the young man departed.
A little later Anderson and Elizabeth were seated together in the Red Drawing Room. Mrs. Gaddesden, after a little perfunctory conversation with the new-comer, had disappeared on the plea of letters to write. The girl in white, the centre of a large party in the hall, was flirting to her heart's content. Philip would have dearly liked to stay and flirt with her himself; but his mother, terrified by his pallor and fatigue after the exertion of the shoot, had hurried him off to take a warm bath and rest before dinner. So that Anderson and Elizabeth were alone.
Conversation between them did not move easily. Elizabeth was conscious of an oppression against which it seemed vain to fight. Up to the moment of his sailing from Canada his letters had been frank and full, the letters of a deeply attached friend, though with no trace in them of the language of love. What change was it that the touch of English ground--the sight of Martindale--had wrought? He talked with some readiness of the early stages of his mission--of the kindness shown to him by English public men, and the impressions of a first night in the House of Commons. But his manner was constrained; anything that he said might have been heard by all the world; and as their talk progressed, Elizabeth felt a miserable paralysis descending on her own will. She grew whiter and whiter. This old house in which they sat, with its splendours and treasures, this environment of the past all about them seemed to engulf and entomb them both. She had looked forward with a girlish pleasure--and yet with a certain tremor--to showing Anderson her old home, the things she loved and had inherited. And now it was as though she were vulgarly conscious of wealth and ancestry as dividing her from him. The wildness within her which found its scope and its voice in Canada was here like an imprisoned stream, chafing in caverns underground. Ah! it had been easy to defy the Old World in Canada, its myriad voices and claims--the many-fingered magic with which an old society plays on those born into it!
"I shall be here perhaps a month," said Anderson, "but then I shall be wanted at Ottawa."
And he began to describe a new matter in which he had been lately engaged--a large development scheme applying to some of the great Peace River region north of Edmonton. And as he told her of his August journey through this noble country, with its superb rivers, its shining lakes and forests, and its scattered settlers, waiting for a Government which was their servant and not their tyrant, to come and help their first steps in ordered civilisation; to bring steamers to their waters, railways to link their settlements, and fresh settlers to let loose the fertile forces of their earth--she suddenly saw in him his old self--the Anderson who had sat beside her in the crossing of the prairies, who had looked into her eyes the day of Roger's Pass. He had grown older and thinner; his hair was even lightly touched with grey. But the traces in him of endurance and of pain were like the weathering of a fine building; mellowing had come, and strength had not been lost.
Yet still no word of feeling, of intimacy even. Her soul cried out within her, but there was no answer. Then, when it was time to dress, and she led him through the hall, to the inlaid staircase with its famous balustrading--early English ironwork of extraordinary delicacy--and through the endless corridors upstairs, old and dim, but crowded with portraits and fine furniture, Anderson looked round him in amazement.
"What a wonderful place!"
"It is too old!" cried Elizabeth, petulantly; then with a touch of repentance--"Yet of course we love it. We are not so stifled here as you would be."
He smiled and did not reply.
"Confess you have been stifled--ever since you came to England."
He drew a long breath, throwing back his head with a gesture which made Elizabeth smile. He smiled in return.
"It was you who warned me how small it would all seem. Such little fields--such little rivers--such tiny journeys! And these immense towns treading on each other's heels. Don't you feel crowded up?"
"You are home-sick already?"
He laughed--"No, no!" But the gleam in his eyes admitted it. And Elizabeth's heart sank--down and down.
A few more guests arrived for Sunday--a couple of politicians, a journalist, a poet, one or two agreeable women, a young Lord S., who had just succeeded to one of the oldest of English marquisates, and so on.
Elizabeth had chosen the party to give Anderson pleasure, and as a guest he did not disappoint her pride in him. He talked well and modestly, and the feeling towards Canada and the Canadians in English society had been of late years so friendly that although there was often colossal ignorance, there was no coolness in the atmosphere about him. Lord S. confused Lake Superior with Lake Ontario, and was of opinion that the Mackenzie River flowed into the Ottawa. But he was kind enough to say that he would far sooner go to Canada than any of "those beastly places abroad"--and as he was just a simple handsome youth, Anderson took to him, as he had taken to Philip at Lake Louise, and by the afternoon of Sunday was talking sport and big game in a manner to hold the smoking-room enthralled.
Only unfortunately Philip was not there to hear. He had been over-tired by the shoot, and had caught a chill beside. The doctor was in the house, and Mrs. Gaddesden had very little mind to give to her Sunday party. Elizabeth felt a thrill of something like comfort as she noticed how in the course of the day Anderson unconsciously slipped back into the old Canadian position; sitting with Philip, amusing him and "chaffing" him; inducing him to obey his doctor; cheering his mother, and in general producing in Martindale itself the same impression of masculine help and support which he had produced on Elizabeth, five months before, in a Canadian hotel.
By Sunday evening Mrs. Gaddesden, instead of a watchful enemy, had become his firm friend; and in her timid, confused way she asked him to come for a walk with her in the November dusk. Then, to his astonishment, she poured out her heart to him about her son, whose health, together with his recklessness, his determination to live like other and sound men, was making the two women who loved him more and more anxious. Anderson was very sorry for the little lady, and genuinely alarmed himself with regard to Philip, whose physical condition seemed to him to have changed considerably for the worse since the Canadian journey. His kindness, his real concern, melted Mrs. Gaddesden's heart.
"I hope we shall find you in town when we come up!" she said, eagerly, as they turned back to the house, forgetting, in her maternal egotism, everything but her boy. "Our man here wants a consultation. We shall go up next week for a short time before Christmas."
Anderson hesitated a moment.
"Yes," he said, slowly, but in a changed voice, "Yes, I shall still be there."
Whereupon, with perturbation, Mrs. Gaddesden at last remembered there were other lions in the path. They had not said a single word--however conventional--of Elizabeth. But she quickly consoled herself by the reflection that he must have seen by now, poor fellow, how hopeless it was; and that being so, what was there to be said against admitting him to their circle, as a real friend of all the family--Philip's friend, Elizabeth's, and her own?
That night Mrs. Gaddesden was awakened by her maid between twelve and one. Mr. Gaddesden wanted a certain medicine that he thought was in his mother's room. Mrs. Gaddesden threw on her dressing-gown and looked for it anxiously in vain. Perhaps Elizabeth might remember where it was last seen. She hurried to her. Elizabeth had a sitting-room and bedroom at the end of the corridor, and Mrs. Gaddesden went into the sitting-room first, as quietly as possible, so as not to startle her daughter.
She had hardly entered and closed the door behind her, guided by the light of a still flickering fire, when a sound from the inner room arrested her.
Elizabeth--Elizabeth in distress?
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.
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!"
Such seemed to be the voice of this queer, kindly, satiric personality. London generally falls into the arms of those who flout her; and Mariette, with his militant Catholicism, and his contempt for our governing ideals, became the fashion. As for Anderson, the contact with English Ministers and men of affairs had but carried on the generous process of development that Nature had designed for a strong man. Whereas in Mariette the vigorous, self-confident English world--based on the Protestant idea--produced a bitter and profound irritation, Anderson seemed to find in that world something ripening and favouring that brought out all the powers--the intellectual powers at least--of his nature. He did his work admirably; left the impression of a "coming man" on a great many leading persons interested in the relations between England and Canada; and when as often happened Elizabeth and he found themselves at the same dinner-table, she would watch the changes in him that a larger experience was bringing about, with a heart half proud, half miserable. As for his story, which was very commonly known, in general society, it only added to his attractions. Mothers who were under no anxieties lest he might want to marry their daughters, murmured the facts of his unluckyprovenanceto each other, and then the more eagerly asked him to dinner.
Meanwhile, for Elizabeth life was one long debate, which left her often at night exhausted and spiritless. The shock of their first meeting at Martindale, when all her pent-up yearning and vague expectation had been met and crushed by the silent force of the man's unaltered will, had passed away. She understood him better. The woman who is beloved penetrates to the fact through all the disguises that a lover may attempt. Elizabeth knew well that Anderson had tones and expressions for her that no other woman could win from him; and looking back to their conversation at the Glacier House, she realised, night after night, in the silence of wakeful hours, the fulness of his confession, together with the strength of his recoil from any pretension to marry her.
Yes, he loved her, and his mere anxiety--now, and as things stood--to avoid any extension or even repetition of their short-lived intimacy, only betrayed the fact the more eloquently. Moreover, he had reason, good reason, to think, as she often passionately reminded herself, that he had touched her heart, and that had the course been clear, he might have won her.
But--the course was not clear. From many signs, she understood how deeply the humiliation of the scene at Sicamous had entered into a proud man's blood. Others might forget; he remembered. Moreover, that sense of responsibility--partial responsibility at least--for his father's guilt and degradation, of which he had spoken to her at Glacier, had, she perceived, gone deep with him. It had strengthened a stern and melancholy view of life, inclining him to turn away from personal joy, to an exclusive concern with public duties and responsibilities.
And this whole temper had no doubt been increased by his perception of the Gaddesdens' place in English society. He dared not--he would not--ask a woman so reared in the best that England had to give, now that he understood what that best might be, to renounce it all in favour of what he had to offer. He realised that there was a generous weakness in her own heart on which he might have played. But he would not play; his fixed intention was to disappear as soon as possible from her life; and it was his honest hope that she would marry in her own world and forget him. In fact he was the prey of a kind of moral terror that here also, as in the case of his father, he might make some ghastly mistake, pursuing his own will under the guise of love, as he had once pursued it under the guise of retribution--to Elizabeth's hurt and his own remorse.
All this Elizabeth understood, more or less plainly. Then came the question--granted the situation, how was she to deal with it? Just as he surmised that he could win her if he would, she too believed that were she merely to set herself to prove her own love and evoke his, she could probably break down his resistance. A woman knows her own power. Feverishly, Elizabeth was sometimes on the point of putting it out, of so provoking and appealing to the passion she divined, as to bring him, whether he would or no, to her feet.
But she hesitated. She too felt the responsibility of his life, as of hers. Could she really do this thing--not only begin it, but carry it through without repentance, and without recoil?
She made herself look steadily at this English spectacle with its luxurious complexity, its concentration within a small space of all the delicacies of sense and soul, its command of a rich European tradition, in which art and literature are living streams springing from fathomless depths of life. Could she, whose every fibre responded so perfectly to the stimulus of this environment, who up till now--but for moments of revolt--had been so happy and at ease in it, could she wrench herself from it--put it behind her--and adapt herself to quite another, without, so to speak, losing herself, and half her value, whatever that might be, as a human being?
As we know, she had already asked herself the question in some fashion, under the shadow of the Rockies. But to handle it in London was a more pressing and poignant affair. It was partly the characteristic question of the modern woman, jealous, as women have never been before in the world's history, on behalf of her own individuality. But Elizabeth put it still more in the interests of her pure and passionate feeling for Anderson. He must not--he should not--run any risks in loving her!
On a certain night early in December, Elizabeth had been dining at one of the great houses of London. Anderson too had been there. The dinner party, held in a famous room panelled with full-length Vandycks, had been of the kind that only London can show; since only in England is society at once homogeneous enough and open enough to provide it. In this house, also, the best traditions of an older regime still prevailed, and its gatherings recalled--not without some conscious effort on the part of the hostess--the days of Holland House, and Lady Palmerston. To its smaller dinner parties, which were the object of so many social ambitions, nobody was admitted who could not bring a personal contribution. Dukes had no more claim than other people, but as most of the twenty-eight were blood-relations of the house, and some Dukes are agreeable, they took their turn. Cabinet Ministers, Viceroys, Ambassadors, mingled with the men of letters and affairs. There was indeed a certain old-fashioned measure in it all. To be merely notorious--even though you were amusing--was not passport enough. The hostess--a beautiful tall woman, with the brow of a child, a quick intellect, and an amazing experience of life--created round her an atmosphere that was really the expression of her own personality; fastidious, and yet eager; cold, and yet steeped in intellectual curiosities and passions. Under the mingled stimulus and restraint of it, men and women brought out the best that was in them. The talk was good, and nothing--neither the last violinist, nor the latestdanseuse--was allowed to interfere with it. And while the dress and jewels of the women were generally what a luxurious capital expects and provides, you might often find some little girl in a dyed frock--with courage, charm and breeding--the centre of the scene.
Elizabeth in white, and wearing some fine jewels which had been her mother's, had found herself placed on the left of her host, with an ex-Viceroy of India on her other hand. Anderson, who was on the opposite side of the table, watched her animation, and the homage that was eagerly paid her by the men around her. Those indeed who had known her of old were of opinion that whereas she had always been an agreeable companion, Lady Merton had now for some mysterious reason blossomed into a beauty. Some kindling change had passed over the small features. Delicacy and reserve were still there, but interfused now with a shimmering and transforming brightness, as though some flame within leapt intermittently to sight.
Elizabeth more than held her own with the ex-Viceroy, who was a person of brilliant parts, accustomed to be flattered by women. She did not flatter him, and he was reduced in the end to making those efforts for himself, which he generally expected other people to make for him. Elizabeth's success with him drew the attention of several other persons at the table besides Anderson. The ex-Viceroy was a bachelor, and one of the greatpartisof the day. What could be more fitting than that Elizabeth Merton should carry him off, to the discomfiture of innumerable intriguers?
After dinner, Elizabeth waited for Anderson in the magnificent gallery upstairs where the guests of the evening party were beginning to gather, and the musicians were arriving. When he came she played her usual fairy godmother's part; introducing him to this person and that, creating an interest in him and in his work, wherever it might be useful to him. It was understood that she had met him in Canada, and that he had been useful to the poor delicate brother. No other idea entered in. That she could have any interest in him for herself would have seemed incredible to this world looking on.
"I must slip away," said Anderson, presently, in her ear; "I promised to look in on Philip if possible. And to-morrow I fear I shall be too busy."
And he went on to tell her his own news of the day--that the Conference would be over sooner than he supposed, and that he must get back to Ottawa without delay to report to the Canadian Ministry. That afternoon he had written to take his passage for the following week.
It seemed to her that he faltered in telling her; and, as for her, the crowd of uniformed or jewelled figures around them became to her, as he spoke, a mere meaningless confusion. She was only conscious of him, and of the emotion which at last he could not hide.
She quietly said that she would soon follow him to Portman Square, and he went away. A few minutes afterwards, Elizabeth said good-night to her hostess, and emerged upon the gallery running round the fine Italianate hall which occupied the centre of the house. Hundreds of people were hanging over the balustrading of the gallery, watching the guests coming and going on the marble staircase which occupied the centre of the hall.
Elizabeth's slight figure slowly descended.
"Pretty creature!" said one old General, looking down upon her. "You remember--she was a Gaddesden of Martindale. She has been a widow a long time now. Why doesn't someone carry her off?"
Meanwhile Elizabeth, as she went down, dreamily, from step to step, her eyes bent apparrently upon the crowd which filled all the spaces of the great pictorial house, was conscious of one of those transforming impressions which represent the sudden uprush and consummation in the mind of some obscure and long-continued process.
One moment, she saw the restless scene below her, the diamonds, the uniforms, the blaze of electric light, the tapestries on the walls, the handsome faces of men and women; the next, it had been wiped out; the prairies unrolled before her; she beheld a green, boundless land invaded by a mirage of sunny water; scattered through it, the white farms; above it, a vast dome of sky, with summer clouds in glistening ranks climbing the steep of blue; and at the horizon's edge, a line of snow-peaks. Her soul leapt within her. It was as though she felt the freshness of the prairie wind upon her cheek, while the call of that distant land--Anderson's country--its simpler life, its undetermined fates, beat through her heart.
And as she answered to it, there was no sense of renunciation. She was denying no old affection, deserting no ancient loyalty. Old and new; she seemed to be the child of both--gathering them both to her breast.
Yet, practically, what was going to happen to her, she did not know. She did not say to herself, "It is all clear, and I am going to marry George Anderson!" But what she knew at last was that there was no dull hindrance in herself, no cowardice in her own will; she was ready, when life and Anderson should call her.
At the foot of the stairs Mariette's gaunt and spectacled face broke in upon her trance. He had just arrived as she was departing.
"You are off--so early?" he asked her, reproachfully.
"I want to see Philip before he settles for the night."
"Anderson, too, meant to look in upon your brother."
"Yes?" said Elizabeth vaguely, conscious of her own reddening, and of Mariette's glance.
"You have heard his news?" He drew her a little apart into the shelter of a stand of flowers. "We both go next week. You--Lady Merton--have been our good angel--our providence. Has he been saying that to you? All the same--ma collégue--I am disappointed in you!"
Elizabeth's eye wavered under his.
"We agreed, did we not--at Glacier--on what was to be done next to our friend? Oh! don't dispute! I laid it down--and you accepted it. As for me, I have done nothing but pursue that object ever since--in my own way. And you, Madam?"
As he stood over her, a lean Don Quixotish figure, his long arms akimbo, Elizabeth's fluttering laugh broke out.
"Inquisitor! Good night!"
"Good night--but--just a word! Anderson has done well here. Your public men say agreeable things of him. He will play your English game--your English Imperialist game--which I can't play. But only, if he is happy--if the fire in him is fed. Consider! Is it not a patriotic duty to feed it?"
And grasping her hand, he looked at her with a gentle mockery that passed immediately into that sudden seriousness--that unconscious air of command--of which the man of interior life holds the secret. In his jests even, he is still, by natural gift, the confessor, the director, since he sees everything as the mystic sees it,sub specie æternitatis.
Elizabeth's soft colour came and went. But she made no reply--except it were through an imperceptible pressure of the hand holding her own.
At that moment the ex-Viceroy, resplendent in his ribbon of the Garter, who was passing through the hall, perceived her, pounced upon her, and insisted on seeing her to her carriage. Mariette, as he mounted the staircase, watched the two figures disappear--smiling to himself.
But on the way home the cloud of sisterly grief descended on Elizabeth. How could she think of herself--when Philip was ill--suffering--threatened? And how would he bear the news of Anderson's hastened departure?
As soon as she reached home, she was told by the sleepy butler that Mrs. Gaddesden was in the drawing-room, and that Mr. Anderson was still upstairs with Philip.
As she entered the drawing-room, her mother came running towards her with a stifled cry:
"Oh, Lisa, Lisa!"
In terror, Elizabeth caught her mother in her arms.
"Mother--is he worse?"
"No! At least Barnett declares to me there is no real change. But he has made up his mind, to-day, that he will never get better. He told me so this evening, just after you had gone; and Barnett could not satisfy him. He has sent for Mr. Robson." Robson was the family lawyer.
The two women looked at one another in a pale despair. They had reached the moment when, in dealing with a sick man, the fictions of love drop away, and the inexorable appears.
"And now he'll break his heart over Mr. Anderson's going!" murmured the mother, in an anguish. "I didn't want him to see Philip to-night--but Philip heard his ring--and sent down for him."
They sat looking at each other, hand in hand--waiting--and listening. Mrs. Gaddesden murmured a broken report of the few words of conversation which rose now, like a blank wall, between all the past, and this present; and Elizabeth listened, the diamonds in her hair and the folds of her satin dress glistening among the shadows of the half-lit room, the slow tears on her cheeks.
At last a step descended. Anderson entered the room.
"He wants you," he said, to Elizabeth, as the two women rose. "I am afraid you must go to him."
The electric light immediately above him showed his frowning, shaken look.
"He is so distressed by your going?" asked Elizabeth, trembling.
Anderson did not answer, except to repeat insistently--
"You must go to him. I don't myself think he is any worse--but--"
Elizabeth hurried away. Anderson sat down beside Mrs. Gaddesden, and began to talk to her.
When his sister entered his room, Philip was sitting up in an arm-chair near the fire; looking so hectic, so death-doomed, so young, that his sister ran to him in an agony--"Darling Philip--my precious Philip--why did you want me? Why aren't you asleep?"
She bent over him and kissed his forehead, and then taking his hand she laid it against her cheek, caressing it tenderly.
"I'm not asleep--because I've had to think of a great many things," said the boy in a firm tone. "Sit down, please, Elizabeth. For a few days past, I've been pretty certain about myself--and to-night I screwed it out of Barnett. I haven't said anything to you and mother, but--well, the long and short of it is, Lisa, I'm not going to recover--that's all nonsense--my heart's too dicky--I'm going to die."
She protested with tears, but he impatiently asked her to be calm. "I've got to say something--something important--and don't you make it harder, Elizabeth! I'm not going to get well, I tell you--and though I'm not of age--legally--yet I do represent father--I am the head of the family--and I have a right to think for you and mother. Haven't I?"
The contrast between the authoritative voice, the echo of things in him, ancestral and instinctive, and the poor lad's tremulous fragility, was moving indeed. But he would not let her caress him.
"Well, these last weeks, I've been thinking a great deal, I can tell you, and I wasn't going to say anything to you and mother till I'd got it straight. But now, all of a sudden, Anderson comes and says that he's going back. Look here, Elizabeth--I've just been speaking to Anderson. You know that he's in love with you--of course you do!"
With a great effort, Elizabeth controlled herself. She lifted her face to her brother's as she sat on a low chair beside him. "Yes, dear Philip, I know."
"And did you know too that he had promised me not to ask you to marry him?"
Elizabeth started.
"No--not exactly. But perhaps--I guessed."
"He did then!" said Philip, wearily. "Of course I told him what I thought of his wanting to marry you, in the Rockies; and he behaved awfully decently. He'd never have said a word, I think, without my leave. Well--now I've changed my mind!"
Elizabeth could not help smiling through her tears. With what merry scorn would she have met this assertion of thepatria potestasfrom the mouth of a sound brother! Her poor Philip!
"Dear old boy!--what have you been saying to Mr. Anderson?"
"Well!"--the boy choked a little--"I've been telling him that--well, never mind!--he knows what I think about him. Perhaps if I'd known him years ago--I'd have been different. That don't matter. But I want to settle things up for you and him. Because you know, Elizabeth, you're pretty gone on him, too!"
Elizabeth hid her face against his knee--without speaking. The boy resumed:
"And so I've been telling him that now I thought differently--I hoped he would ask you to marry him--and I knew that you cared for him--but that he mustn't dream of taking you to Canada. That was all nonsense--couldn't be thought of! He must settle here. You've lots of money--and--well, when I'm gone--you'll have more. Of course Martindale will go away from us, and I know he will look after mother as well as you."
There was silence--till Elizabeth murmured--"And what did he say?"
The lad drew himself away from her with an angry movement.
"He refused!"
Elizabeth lifted herself, a gleam of something splendid and passionate lighting up her small face.
"And what else, dear Philip, did you expect?"
"I expected him to look at it reasonably!" cried the boy. "How can he ask a woman like you to go and live with him on the prairies? It's ridiculous! He can go into English politics, if he wants politics. Why shouldn't he live on your money? Everybody does it!"
"Did you really understand what you were asking him to do, Philip?"
"Of course I did! Why, what's Canada compared to England? Jolly good thing for him. Why he might be anything here! And as if I wouldn't rather be a dustman in England than a--"
"Philip, my dear boy! do rest--do go to bed," cried his mother imploringly, coming into the room with her soft hurrying step. "It's going on for one o'clock. Elizabeth mustn't keep you talking like this!"
She smiled at him with uplifted finger, trying to hide from him all traces of emotion.
But her son looked at her steadily.
"Mother, is Anderson gone?"
"No," said Mrs. Gaddesden, with hesitation. "But he doesn't want you to talk any more to-night--he begs you not. Please--Philip!"
"Ask him to come here!" said Philip, peremptorily. "I want to talk to him and Elizabeth."
Mrs. Gaddesden protested in vain. The mother and daughter looked at each other with flushed faces, holding a kind of mute dialogue. Then Elizabeth rose from her seat by the fire.
"I will call Mr. Anderson, Philip. But if we convince you that what you ask is quite impossible, will you promise to go quietly to bed and try to sleep? It breaks mother's heart, you know, to see you straining yourself like this."
Philip nodded--a crimson spot in each cheek, his frail hands twining and untwining as he tried to compose himself.
Elizabeth went half-way down the stairs and called. Anderson hurried out of the drawing-room, and saw her bending to him from the shadows, very white and calm.
"Will you come back to Philip a moment?" she said, gently. "Philip has told me what he proposed to you."
Anderson could not find a word to say. In a blind tumult of feeling he caught her hand, and pressed his lips to it, as though appealing to her dumbly to understand him.
She smiled at him.
"It will be all right," she whispered. "My poor Philip!" and she led him back to the sick room.
"George--I wanted you to come back, to talk this thing out," said Philip, turning to him as he entered, with the tyranny of weakness. "There's no time to waste. You know--everybody knows--I may get worse--and there'll be nothing settled. It's my duty to settle--"
Elizabeth interrupted him.
"Philip darling!--"
She was hanging over his chair, while Anderson stood a few feet away, leaning against the mantelpiece, his face turned from the brother and sister. The intimacy--solemnity almost--of the sick-room, the midnight hour, seemed to strike through Elizabeth's being, deepening and yet liberating emotion.
"Dear Philip! It is not for Mr. Anderson to answer you--it is for me. If he could give up his country--for happiness--even for love--I should never marry him--for--I should not love him any more."
Anderson turned to look at her. She had moved, and was now standing in front of Philip, her head thrown back a little, her hands lightly clasped in front of her. Her youth, her dress, her diamonds, combined strangely with the touch of high passion in her shining eyes, her resolute voice.
"You see, dear Philip, I love George Anderson--"
Anderson gave a low cry--and, moving to her side, he grasped her hand. She gave it to him, smiling--and went on:
"I love him--partly--because he is so true to his own people--because I saw him first--and knew him first--among them. No! dear Philip, he has his work to do in Canada--in that great, great nation that is to be. He has been trained for it--no one else can do it but he--and neither you nor I must tempt him from it."
The eyes of the brother and sister met. Elizabeth tried for a lighter tone.
"But as neither of uscouldtempt him from it--it is no use talking--is it?"
Philip looked from her to Anderson in a frowning silence. No one spoke for a little while. Then it seemed to them as though the young man recognised that his effort had failed, and his physical weakness shrank from renewing it. But he still resisted his mother's attempt to put an end to the scene.
"That's all very well, Lisa," he said at last, "but what are you going to do?"
Elizabeth withdrew her hand from Anderson's.
"What am I going to do?Wait--just that!"
But her lip trembled. And to hide it she sank down again in the low chair in front of her brother, propping her face in both hands.
"Wait?" repeated Philip, scornfully--"and what for?"
"Till you and mother--come to my way of thinking--and"--she faltered--"till Mr. Anderson--"
Her voice failed her a moment. Anderson stood motionless, bending towards her, hanging upon her every gesture and tone.
"Till Mr. Anderson--" she resumed, "is--well!--is brave enough to--trust a woman! and--oh! good Heavens!"--she dashed the tears from her eyes, half laughing, as her self-control broke down--"clever enough to save her from proposing to him in this abominable way!"
She sprang to her feet impatiently. Anderson would have caught her in his arms; but with a flashing look, she put him aside. A wail broke from Mrs. Gaddesden:
"Lisa--you won't leave us!"
"Never, darling--unless you send me!--or come with me! And now, don't you think, Philip dearest, you might let us all go to bed? You are really not worse, you know; and Mother and I are going to carry you off south--very, very soon."
She bent to him and kissed his brow. Philip's face gradually changed beneath her look, from the tension and gloom with which he had begun the scene to a kind of boyish relief--a touch of pleasure--of mischief even. His high, majestical pretensions vanished away; a light and volatile mind thought no more of them; and he turned eagerly to another idea.
"Elizabeth, do you know that you have proposed to Anderson?"
"If I have, it was your fault."
"He hasn't said Yes?"
Elizabeth was silent. Anderson came forward--but Philip stopped him with a gesture.
"He can't say Yes--till I give him back his promise," said the boy, triumphantly. "Well, George, I do give it you back--on one condition--that you put off going for a week, and that you come back as soon as you can. By Jove, I think you owe me that!"
Anderson's difficult smile answered him.
"And now you've got rid of your beastly Conference, you can come in, and talk business with me to-morrow--next day--every day!" Philip resumed, "can't he, Elizabeth? If you're going to be my brother, I'll jolly well get you to tackle the lawyers instead of me--boring old idiots! I say--I'm going to take it easy now!"
He settled himself in his chair with a long breath, and his eyelids fell. He was speaking, as they all knew, of the making of his will. Mrs. Gaddesden stooped piteously and kissed him. Elizabeth's face quivered. She put her arm round her mother and led her away. Anderson went to summon Philip's servant.
A little later Anderson again descended the dark staircase, leaving Philip in high spirits and apparently much better.
In the doorway of the drawing-room, stood a white form. Then the man's passion, so long dyked and barriered, had its way. He sprang towards her. She retreated, catching her breath; and in the shadows of the empty room she sank into his arms. In the crucible of that embrace all things melted and changed. His hesitations and doubts, all that hampered his free will and purpose, whether it were the sorrows and humiliations of the past--or the compunctions and demurs of the present--dropped away from him, as unworthy not of himself, but of Elizabeth. She had made him master of herself, and her fate; and he boldly and loyally took up the part. He had refused to become the mere appanage of her life, because he was already pledged to that great idea he called his country. She loved him the more for it; and now he had only to abound in the same sense, in order to hold and keep the nature which had answered so finely to his own. He had so borne himself as to wipe out all the social and external inequalities between them. What she had given him, she had had to sue him to take. But now that he had taken it, she knew herself a weak woman on his breast, and she realised with a happy tremor that he would make her no more apologies for his love, or for his story. Rather, he stood upon that dignity she herself had given him--her lover, and the captain of her life!