SHE had not seen the child for five months now, and her first glance at
her, for all its sweetness, brought something of a shock, revealing as
it did how deeply she cared for the little creature. She was not a
child-lover, not undiscriminatingly fond of all examples of the
undeveloped, though her kind solicitude might have given her that
appearance. Children had always affected her, from the cradle, as
personalities; and some, like the mature, were lovable and some the
reverse. Jane Amoret had already paid her more than one visit--she had
been more than willing that Rhoda should find her a convenience in this
respect; and she had, from the first, found her lovable. But the five
months had brought much more to the mere charm of babyhood. She was now
potent and arresting in her appeal and dignity. She sat in her nurse’s
arms, her eyes fixed on her great-aunt, and, as Mrs. Delafield held out
her hands to her, she unhesitatingly, if unsmilingly, answered, leaning
forward to be taken.
She was a pale, delicate baby, her narrow little face framed in
straightly cut dark hair, her mournful little lips only tinted with a
rosy mauve; and, under long, fine brows, her great eyes were full of
meditativeness. Rhoda, though now so richly a brunette, had, as a baby,
been ruddy-haired and rosy-cheeked, with eyes of a velvety, submerging
darkness. Jane Amoret’s grey iris rayed out from the expanded pupil like
the corolla of a flower. There was no likeness between the child and her
mother. Nor was there anything of Niel’s sleepy young countenance, with
its air of still waters running shallow.
Mrs. Delafield, something of a student of heredity, saw in the little
face an almost uncanny modern replica of her own paternal grandmother,
whose pensive gaze, under high-dressed powdered hair, had followed her
down the drawing-room in the home of her childhood. In Jane Amoret she
recovered the sense of that forgotten romance of her youth--the
wonderful, beautiful great-grandmother with the following eyes. Had they
not, even then, been asking something of her?
“It isn’t everyone she’ll go to, ma’am,” said the nurse, as they went up
the path to the house, Mrs. Delafield carrying Jane Amoret.
Nurse was a highly efficient example of her type--crisp, cheerful, a
little glib. Mrs. Delafield had never warmly liked her, and felt
convinced now, that in spite of her decorous veneer of reticence, the
servants' hall would be enlightened as to the whole story before many
hours were over. Well, it could not be helped.
They went up to the big nursery overlooking the walled garden at the
back of the house, where, since the morning’s post and its
announcements, a great fire of logs had been blazing. Nurse made but one
respectful, passing reference to Rhoda. The country air would do Lady
Quentyn good. She had, nurse thought, over-tired herself of late. What
else she thought, Parton and the others were soon to hear hinted. And as
Rhoda’s calculated maternity had chilled her aunt on that day five
months ago, so she was chilled now to think that Rhoda should have had
more taste in the choice of her drawing-room than in that of her baby’s
nurse.
While, in the next room, the unpleasing woman was unpacking her own and
Jane Amoret’s effects, Mrs. Delafield was left alone with the child. She
had found, on a shelf, a box of well-worn blocks, and seating herself in
the low, chintz-covered wicker chair beside the fire, she placed them,
one by one, before Jane Amoret, who, on her white wool rug, gave them a
gentle attention. She had been too young for blocks on her last visit.
The old chair, as Mrs. Delafield moved in it, leaning down, creaked
softly, and she remembered, a curious excitement stirring under all
these recoveries of the past, that it had been condemned as really too
decrepit when Peggy had been a baby. Yet the threat had never been
carried out. It had gone on through Peggy’s babyhood and through the
babyhood of Peggy’s children, and, unused for all these years, here it
gave forth again just the plaintive yet comfortable sounds which, even
more, it seemed, than another baby’s presence, evoked Peggy and her own
young maternity.
The chair, the blocks, the firelight playing on the happy walls, with
their framed Caldecotts and Cherry Ripes and Bubbles, all evoked that
past, filling her with the mingled acquiescence and yearning of old age.
And Jane Amoret evoked a past far, far more distant. Peggy had not been
like the great-grandmother. None of them had ever reincarnated that
vanished loveliness. But here, mysterious and appealing, it was before
her; and it seemed to brush across her very heartstrings every time
that, from the blocks, the child lifted the meditative grey of her eyes
to her great-aunt’s face.
Far too mysterious, far too lovely, far too gentle, this frail
potentiality, for any uses ever to be made of it by Rhoda, by Niel, or
by nurse. And the yearning became a yearning over Jane Amoret.
Yes, there the edifice rose, block by block--her deft, deliberate
fingers placed them one after the other, under Jane Amoret’s eyes,
absorbed in this towering achievement. The miniature Alhambra finished,
she sat and gazed, and her little chest lifted in a great sigh of wonder
and appeasement. Then, her baby interest dropping, she looked round at
the flames, and, for a little time, gazed at them, while her
great-aunt’s hand moved softly to rest upon her head. It seemed then, as
if in answer to the rapt and tender look bent above her, that Jane
Amoret’s eyes were again raised and that she stretched up her arms to be
taken.
“She really loves me,” said Mrs. Delafield, as touched and trembling as
a young lover. She lifted her, pressing the little body against her
breast; and, as Jane Amoret gave herself to the enfolding, a thought
that was as sharp and as sudden as a pang flashed through her
great-aunt’s mind. “I can never give her up.”
What came to her first, as she sat there, Jane Amoret’s head leaning
against her, was the thought of Christmas roses. It was a gift, a
miracle. And to what depths of loneliness the gift had been given; with
what depths of life she answered it! But she was breathless while she
tried to think, knowing something terrible in her own swift acceptance;
seeing for the first time something lawless and perilous in her own
nature. Never in her life had she betrayed a trust; never broken a law.
Yet often, through the years, she had paused, contemplative and
questioning, to gaze at something her mirror showed her, an implication
that only she could see, a capacity never realized. And what she saw
sometimes, with discomfort and shrinking, in those freaked eyes, those
firm lips, was an untamed wildness that had come to her from much
further back than a great-grandmother; something predatory and reckless,
perhaps from the days of border robbers, and Highland chiefs whose only
law was their own will.
She knew now what were the faces waiting to seize upon her accusingly.
Not Rhoda’s. She swept Rhoda and her forfeited claim aside. Let her stay
with her poet, since that was what she had chosen. It was Niel and poor
Tim who looked at her aghast. But another face hovered softly and
effacingly before them; a pale young face with rosy-mauve lips and
following eyes that said, “They will never understand me. This is what I
was trying to tell you, always. I knew that I was coming back. This is
what I was asking you to do.”
It was superstition; it did not deceive her for a moment. Desire
dressing itself in a supernatural appeal. Absurd and discreditable. But,
in all truth and honour, wasn’t there something in it? Wasn’t there a
time, once in a blue moon, for lawlessness, when it came as a miracle?
Whom would she harm, really? What could his paternity mean, really, to
drowsy young Niel? And could she not salve Tim’s wounds?
The only thing that could count,--she came to that at last, feeling the
child, with sleeping, drooping head and little hands held within her
hand, already so profoundly her own,--the only thing was Jane Amoret
herself. Had she a right to keep her from what was, perhaps, her chance
of the normal, even if the defective, life? Wasn’t even a bad and
foolish mother better than no mother at all, and an untarnished name
supremely desirable? She struggled, her eyes fixed on the fire, her hand
unconsciously closing fast on the little intertwined hands within it.
And with the face of the great-grandmother came again the thought of the
Christmas roses, of the gift, the miracle.
She had not sought anything. She had not even chosen. It was rather as
if Jane Amoret had chosen her. She need not make an effort to keep the
gift. She need merely make no effort to give it back. If Rhoda came (oh,
she could but pray that Rhoda would not come!), she need not find the
right words for her. She had only to remain the passive spectator of
Rhoda’s enterprise and not put out a hand to withdraw her from it. And,
thrusting, feverishly, final decisions from her, her mind sprang out
into far projects and promises. She could, with a will, live for twenty
more years yet and fill them full for Jane Amoret. Niel must not lose
his child, evidently. She would arrange with Niel. He had always liked
her and turned to her. Let this be his home, and welcome. But of course,
he would marry again. She could persuade him not to take Jane Amoret
from her to give to a step-mother. Niel would be easy.
And Tim, now, must come, of course. Tim should, with her, enjoy Jane
Amoret to the full. What a happy childhood she could make it! It was, to
begin with, quite the happiest nursery she knew, this long-empty nursery
of hers. In a few years' time Jane Amoret would be old enough to have
her own little plot in the garden--Peggy’s plot; and a pony like Peggy’s
should come to the empty stables. She saw already the merry, instructed
girl she would choose as Jane Amoret’s governess: some one young enough
to play out of lesson hours; some one who would teach her to know birds
and flowers as well as history and Latin. She would keep Jane Amoret’s
hair cut like this,--it was the only point in the child’s array in which
her taste was Rhoda’s,--straight across the forehead and straight across
the neck, until she was fifteen, and she should wear smocked blue linen
for morning and white for afternoon, as her own children had done. With
good luck, she might even see Jane Amoret married.
Actually, she was thinking about Jane Amoret’s marriage, actually
wondering about the nice little eldest boy at the manor,--while her arms
tightened in instinctive maternal anxiety around the sleeping
baby,--when Parton, doing her best not to look round-eyed, announced
Lady Quentyn.