SHE knew, as she waited for Rhoda to come up, that something she had
forgotten during this last half-hour--perhaps it was her
conscience--steeled her suddenly to the endurance of a test. Tim had
worded it, “Let her see the child. Let that be your appeal.” Would it
not appease her conscience to stand or fall by that? It should be her
appeal. But the only one.
Jane Amoret had waked, and now, dazed but unfretful, suffered herself to
be placed again on the rug among the blocks, one of which Mrs. Delafield
put into her hands, bidding her build a beautiful big house, as
great-aunt had done. The anguish of her own suspense was made manifest
to her in the restless gesture with which, after that, and while she
waited, she bent to put another log on the fire.
Rhoda’s soft, deliberate rustle was outside. In another moment she had
entered, and the effect that Mrs. Delafield dreaded seemed produced on
the spot; for, arrested at the very threshold, almost before her eyes
had sought her aunt’s, Rhoda stared down at the child with knotted, with
even incredulous brows.
“Oh! He’s sent her already, then!” she exclaimed.
What did the stare, the exclamation, portend?
“Yes. He sent her, of course, as soon as he came back.”
“But why?--until our interview is over?”
“Why not? She’d been alone for a week.” Mrs. Delafield spoke with the
mildness which, she determined, should not leave her. “Niel, of course,
wanted to have her cared for.”
Rhoda, during this little interchange, had remained near the door; but
now, perceiving, perhaps, that she had come near to giving herself away,
she cleared her brows of their perplexity and moved forward to the fire,
where, leaning her velvet elbow on the mantelpiece, she answered, drily
laughing; “Oh! Niel’s care! He wouldn’t know whether the child were fed
on suet-pudding or cold ham! She’s not alone, with nurse. There’s no one
who can take such care of her as nurse. I knew that.” And she went on
immediately, putting the question of Jane Amoret’s presence behind her
with decision, “Well, poor Aunt Isabel, what have you to say to me?
Father wrote that you would consent to be the go-between. He absolutely
implored me to come, and it’s to satisfy him I’m here, for I really
can’t imagine what good it can do.”
No; Mrs. Delafield had grasped her own security and her own danger. It
had not been in remorse or tenderness that Rhoda’s eyes had fixed
themselves upon her child, it had been in anxiety, lest Jane Amoret’s
presence should be the signal of some final verdict against her. She had
come because she hoped to be taken back; and if there was all the needed
justification in Rhoda’s callousness, there was an undreamed-of danger
in her expectation.
“Well, we must see,” Mrs. Delafield remarked; and already she was
measuring the necessities of Rhoda’s pride against the urgencies of
Rhoda’s disenchantment. It was Rhoda’s pride that she must hold to.
Rhoda, even if she had come, had only come to make her own terms.
“Did you motor over?” she asked. “You are not very far from here, are
you?”
No train could have brought her at that hour.
“Twenty miles or so away,” said Rhoda. “I was able to hire a motor, a
horrible, open affair with torn flaps that let in all the air, so that
I’m frozen.”
Her loveliness did, indeed, look a little pinched and sharpened, and
there was more than the cold drive to account for it. But she was still
surpassingly lovely, with the loveliness that, once you were confronted
with it, seemed to explain everything that might need explanation. That
was Rhoda’s strongest card. She left her appearance to speak for her and
made no explanations, as now, when, indeed, she had all the air of
expecting other people to make them. But her aunt only said, while Jane
Amoret, from her rug, kept her grave gaze upon her mother, “Won’t you
have some hot milk?”
“Thanks, yes, I should be glad of it,” said Rhoda. “How lucky you are to
have it. We are given only condensed for our coffee at the hotel. It’s
quite revolting.” And after Mrs. Delafield had rung, and since no
initiative came from her, she was, in a manner, forced to open the
conversation. “Niel has only himself to thank,” she said. “He’s been
making himself too impossible for a long time.”
“Really? In what way? Perhaps the hard life over there has affected his
temper.”
Mrs. Delafield allowed herself the irony. Rhoda, indeed, must expect
that special flavour from her.
“Something has certainly affected it,” said Rhoda, drawing a chair to
the fire and spreading her beautiful hands before it. “I’m quite tired,
I confess,--horrid as I’m perfectly aware it sounds to say it,--of
hearing about the hard life. Life’s hard enough for all of us just now,
heaven knows; and I think they haven’t had half a bad time over there,
numbers of them--men like Niel, I mean, who’ve travelled comfortably
about the world and never had the least little wound, nor been, ever, in
any real danger, as far as I can make out; at least, not since he’s had
the staff work. It’s very different from my poor Christopher, who rotted
in the cold and mud until it nearly killed him. There would be some
point in his talking of a hard life.”
This was all very illuminating, and the bold advance of Christopher won
Mrs. Delafield’s admiration for its manner; but she passed it over to
inquire again, “In what way has Niel been making himself impossible?”
The more impossible Rhoda depicted him, the easier to leave her there,
shut out by his impossibility.
“Why, his meanness,” said Rhoda, her cold, dark eyes, as she turned them
upon her aunt, expressing, indeed, quite a righteous depth of
reprobation. “For months and months it’s been the same wearisome cry.
He’s written about nothing but economy, fussing, fuming, and preaching.
It’s so ugly, at his time of life.”
“Have you been a little extravagant, perhaps? Everything is so much more
costly, isn’t it? He may well have been anxious about your future, and
the child’s.”
It was perfectly mild, and the irony Rhoda would expect from her.
“Oh, no he wasn’t,” said Rhoda, now with her gloomy laugh. “He was
anxious about his hunting. I don’t happen to care for that primitive
form of amusement, and Niel doesn’t happen to care about anything else;
certainly he doesn’t care about beauty, and that’s all I do care about.
So in his view, since, precisely, life has become so costly, beauty had
to go to the wall and I mustn’t dress decently or have a decently
ordered house. I haven’t been in the least extravagant,” said Rhoda.
"I’ve known what it is to be cold; I’ve known what it is to be hungry;
it’s been, at times, literally impossible to get food and coal in
London. Oh, you don’t know anything about it, Aunt Isabel, tucked away
comfortably down here with logs and milk. And if Niel had had any
appreciation of the position and had realized at all that I prefer being
hungry to being ill-dressed, he would have turned his mind to cutting
down his own extravagances and offered to allow me"--and now, for an
instant, if velvet can show sharpness, Mrs. Delafield caught in the
sliding velvet eye an evident edge of cogitation, even, of
calculation--“at least two thousand a year for myself. Money buys
absolutely nothing nowadays.”
So there it was, and it amounted to an offer. Or, rather, it amounted to
saying that it was the sum for which she would be willing to consider
any offer of Niel’s. Mrs. Delafield, measuring still Rhoda’s pride
against Rhoda’s urgency, mused on her velvet garments, the fur that
broadly bordered her skirts, slipped from her shoulders, and framed her
hands. Poor Tim had been able to give his daughter only a few hundred a
year, and Niel’s hunting must indeed have been in danger. Rhoda’s pride,
she knew, stood, as yet, between herself and any pressure from the
urgency; she could safely leave the offer to lie and go on presently to
question, “And you’ll be better off now?”
Inevitably unsuspecting as she was, Rhoda, all the same, must feel an
unexpectedness in her attitude, and at this it was with a full, frank
sombreness that she turned her gaze upon her. Anything but a fool she
had always been, and she answered, after the moment of gloomy scrutiny,
“Don’t imagine, please, Aunt Isabel, that because I speak openly of
practical matters I left Niel to get a better establishment. I left him
because I didn’t love him. I was willing to sacrifice anything rather
than stay. Because it is a sacrifice. I took the step I’ve taken under
no illusion. We are too uncivilized yet for things to be anything but
difficult for a woman who takes the step, and the brave people have to
pay for the cowards and hypocrites.”
This, somehow, was not at all Rhoda’s own note. Mrs. Delafield felt sure
she caught an echo of Mr. Darley’s ministrations. She was glad that
Rhoda should receive them: they would sustain her; and since she was
determined--or almost--that Rhoda should stay with Mr. Darley, it was
well that she should receive all the sustainment possible.
“It certainly must require great love and great courage,” she assented.
Rhoda’s eyes still sombrely scrutinized her. “I didn’t expect you to see
it, I confess, Aunt, Isabel.”
“Oh, but I do,” said Mrs. Delafield.
The milk was now brought and Rhoda began to sip it.
“As for my being better off, since you are kind enough to take an
interest in that aspect of my situation,” she went back, “Christopher
hasn’t, it’s true, as much money as Niel. But our tastes are the same,
so that I shall certainly be very much better off. We shall live in
London--after Niel sets me free.” And here again she just glanced at her
aunt, who bowed assent, murmuring, "Yes; yes; he is quite willing to set
you free; at once."--“And until then,” Rhoda went on, as if she hadn’t
needed the assurance,--second-rate assurance as, Mrs. Delafield felt
sure, she found it,--“and until then I shall stay in the country.
Christopher has his post still at the Censor’s office, and won’t, I’m
afraid, get his demobilization for some time. He translates things, you
know. So we are going to find a little old house, for me,--we are
looking for one now,--and I shall see a few friends there, quite
quietly, and Christopher can come up and down, until everything is
settled. I think that’s the best plan.”
Rhoda spoke with a dignity that had even a savour of conscious
sweetness, and, as Mrs. Delafield reflected, was running herself very
completely into her corner.
There was silence now for a little while. Rhoda finished her milk, and
Jane Amoret, gently and unobtrusively moving among her blocks,
succeeded, at length, in balancing the last one on her edifice and
looked up at her great-aunt for approbation.
“Very good, darling. A beautiful house,” said Mrs. Delafield, leaning
over her, but with a guarded tenderness. What a serpent she had become!
There was Rhoda’s jealousy to look out for. She might imagine herself
fond of Jane Amoret, if she saw that some one else adored her.
“She’s quite used to you already, isn’t she?” said Rhoda, watching them.
“I wonder what you’ll make of her. She strikes me as rather a dull
little thing, though she’s certainly very pretty. She’s rather like
Niel, isn’t she? Though she certainly isn’t as dull as Niel!” She
laughed slightly. "All the same,"--and Mrs. Delafield now, in Rhoda’s
voice, scented the close approach of danger, and was aware, though she
did not look up to meet it, that Rhoda’s eyes took on a new
watchfulness,--“All the same I must consider the poor little thing’s
future. That is, of course, my one real difficulty.”
“Was it? In going away? In having left her, you mean?” Mrs Delafield
prayed that her mildness might gloss, to Rhoda’s ear, the transition to
conscious combat that her instinctive change of tense revealed to her
own. “Oh, but you need not do that. Don’t let that trouble you for a
moment, Rhoda. I will take charge of her--complete charge. I can do it
easily. My house is empty, and the child will be a companion to me. I
don’t find her dull. She is a dear little thing, so good and gentle. You
need really have no anxiety.”
“Oh, I see.” Rhoda was gazing at her earnestly. “Thanks. That’s
certainly a relief. Though all the same I don’t suppose you’d claim that
you could replace the child’s mother.”
“Yes. I think so, Rhoda. A mother who had left her for a lover.”
Mrs. Delafield kept her eyes fixed on the fire. Rhoda stood up and
leaned her back against the mantelpiece. She could no longer control the
manifestations of her impatience and her perplexity.
“That would be your view, of course; and father’s; and Niel’s. It’s not
mine. I consider the responsibility to be Niel’s.”
“Well, whosesoever the responsibility, the deed is done, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Delafield observed. “I’m not arraigning you, you know. I’m merely
stating the fact. You have left her.”
Rhoda’s impatience now visibly brushed past these definitions. “You say
that Niel is ready to set me free. I took that for granted, of course.
It’s only common decency. But that’s hardly what father could have meant
in imploring me to come to--you. He told me nothing--only implored, and
lamented. And, since I am here, I’d like some information, I confess.”
It was the first step away from pride, and it was a long one. And Mrs.
Delafield knew that with it came her own final turning-point. Here, at
this moment, she must be true to Tim and Niel, or betray their trust.
And here no less--for so it seemed to her--she might, in betraying them,
take the law into her own hands and promise herself, and them, that, in
breaking it, she would make something better. Yet she did not feel these
alternatives, now, at war within her mind. She knew that they were
there, implicit, but she knew them already answered. Rhoda had answered
for her; and Jane Amoret had answered. It took her, however, a moment to
find her own answer, the verbal one, and while she looked for it, she
kept her eyes on the fire.
“Your father wants you to go back,” she said at last. “Niel is willing
to take you back. That is the information I had for you. Not for a
moment because he would accept your interpretation of responsibility,
and not for a moment because of any personal feeling for you; which must
be a relief to you. Merely for your sake, and the child’s. But I don’t
know how to plead such a cause with you, Rhoda. I understand you, I
think, better than your father does. I’ve always seen your point of view
as he could never see it, and I see it even now. So that I should feel
that I asked you something outrageous in asking you to go back to your
husband when you love another man. If you should want to go back, that
would be a very different matter--if, by chance, you feel you’ve made a
mistake and are tired, already, of Mr. Darley.”
She had time, in the pause that followed, the scales pulsing almost
evenly--it was as if she saw them--between Rhoda’s pride and Rhoda’s
urgency, to wonder at herself. And most of all to wonder that she
regretted nothing. She kept her eyes on the fire, but she knew that
Rhoda, very still, scrutinized her intently. The sharply drawn tension
of the moment had resolved itself, to her imagination, into a series of
tiny ticks, as if of the scales settling down to the choice, before
Rhoda spoke. Then what she found to say was, “That’s hardly likely, is
it?”
“I felt it impossible, you will be glad to hear,” said Mrs. Delafield.
“No one who understands you could suspect you, whatever your faults, of
two infidelities in the space of a fortnight.”
And now again there was a long silence, broken only by the lapping of
the flames up the chimney and the soft movements of Jane Amoret among
her blocks.
Rhoda turned away at last, facing the fire and looking down at it, her
hands on the edge of the mantelpiece, her foot on the fender; and she
presently lifted the foot and dealt the logs a kick.
It was all clear to Mrs. Delafield. She was tired of her poet, or, at
all events, did not, in the new life, find compensations enough. She
had come, hoping to have her way made clear for a reëntry, dignified, if
not triumphant, into the old life. And here she was, in her corner, her
head fairly fixed to the wall.
Meanwhile, what had become of the mid-Victorian conscience? What had,
indeed, become of any conscience at all, since she continued to regret
nothing? She even found excuses, perfidious, no doubt, yet satisfactory.
It had been the truth she had given Rhoda--the real truth, her own, if
not the truth she owed her, not the truth as Tim and Niel had placed it,
all confidently, in her hands. But since it was preëminently not the
truth that Rhoda had come to seize, she was willing, now that she had
fixed her so firmly, to give her something else, and she really rejoiced
to find it ready, going on presently and with a note of relief that
Rhoda’s ear could not fail to catch:--
“Not only from the point of view of dignity one couldn’t suspect it of
you, Rhoda, but--I want to say it to you, having had my glimpse of Mr.
Darley--from the point of view of taste. If you were going to do
anything of this sort,--and I don’t need to tell you how deeply I
deplore it nor how wrong I think you,--but if you were going to do it,
you couldn’t have chosen better. He is gifted; he is charming; he is
good. I saw it all at once.”
There was her further truth, and really it was due to Rhoda. Rhoda, at
this, faced her again and, highly civilized creature that she was, it
was with her genuine grim mirth.
“Upon my word, Aunt Isabel!” she commented. “You are astonishing.”
“Am I? Why?” asked Mrs. Delafield, though she knew quite well.
“Why, my dear? Because you are over sixty years old and you wear caps. I
expected to find dismay, reproach, and lamentations--all the strains of
poor old father’s harmonium; to have you down on your knees begging me
to return to the paths of virtue. And here you are, cool and unperturbed
and, positively, patting us on the back; positively giving us your
blessing. Well, well, wonders will never cease! Yes, he is charming, no
one can deny that; and good and gifted, too. But to think of your having
spotted it so quickly! Why, you only saw him once, if I remember, and I
don’t remember that you talked at all.”
“We didn’t. I only saw him once.”
“And it was enough! To make you understand! To make you condone!--Come,
out with it, Aunt Isabel, you wicked old lady! I see now why I’ve always
got on so well with you. You _are_ wicked.”
“To make me understand. I won’t say condone.”
“You needn’t say it. You’ve said enough. And certainly it is a feather
in Christopher’s cap. But he is the sort of person one falls in love
with at first sight.”
“So I see.”
“And so do I,” said Rhoda, still laughing. But her slightly avenging
gaiety dropped from her after the last sally, and turning again to the
fire, and again kicking her log, she said, almost sombrely, “He
absolutely worships me.”
Was not this everybody’s justification? Mrs. Delafield seized it,
rising, as on a satisfying close.
“Will you stay to lunch?” she asked.
“Dear me, no!” Rhoda laughed. “I must get back to Christopher. And the
motor is there waiting. So you’ll write to father and tell him that I
came here and that you advised me to stick to Christopher.”
"Advised? Have I seemed to advise, Rhoda? Do you mean"--it was, Mrs.
Delafield knew, the final peril--“that you had considered not sticking
to him?”
Rhoda continued to laugh a little, drawing up her furs.
“Rather not! It couldn’t have entered my head, could it, either from the
point of view of dignity or of taste--as you’ve been telling me? You
have been very wonderful, you know! Tell father, then, if you like, that
you gave us your blessing.”
“I’ll tell him,” said Mrs. Delafield, “that I’m convinced you ought not
to go back to Niel.”
"I see,"--Rhoda nodded, and their eyes sounded each other,
curiously,--“though father thinks I ought.”
“Of course. That’s why you’re here.”
“Father would have gone down on his knees to beg me.”
“Yes. Down on his knees. Poor Tim!”
She was horribly frightened, but she faced Rhoda’s grim mirth deliberate
with gravity. And Rhoda, whatever she might have seen or guessed,
accepted her defeat; accepted the dignity and taste thrust upon her.
“Father, in other words, isn’t a wicked old gentleman as you are a
wicked old lady. I see it all, and it’s all a feather in Christopher’s
cap. Well, Aunt Isabel, good-bye. Shall I see you again? Will you come
and call when I’m Mrs. Darley? I don’t see how, with a clear conscience,
you can chuck us, you know.”
“Nor do I,” Mrs. Delafield conceded, after only a pause. “I don’t often
go to London, but, when I do, I shall look in upon you, if you want me
to.”
“Rather!” Rhoda, now gloved and muffled, had fallen back on her normal
rich economy of speech. “You’ll be useful as well as pleasant. And
Christopher will adore you, I’m sure. I’ll tell him that you think him
charming.”
“Do,” said Mrs. Delafield, following her to the door.
She had forgotten even to kiss Jane Amoret good-bye.
V
Still Mrs. Delafield knew no remorse. Rather, a wine-like elation filled
her. She thought of her state of consciousness in terms of wine, and
ordered up from her modest cellar a special old port, hardly tasted
since her husband’s death, and, all alone, drank at lunch a little glass
in honour of Jane Amoret’s advent. Also, though elated, she was
conscious of needing a stimulant. The scene with Rhoda had cost her more
than could, at the moment, be quite computed.
What it had won for her she was able to compute when, after lunch, she
went upstairs to look at Jane Amoret asleep in her white cot. She did
not feel like a robber brooding in guilty joy over ill-gotten booty. She
could not feel herself that, nor Jane Amoret booty. Jane Amoret was
treasure, pure heaven-sent treasure, her flower of miracle. Christmas
roses had been in her mind since morning, and the darkness, the
whiteness of the child, as well as her beautiful unexpectedness, made
her think of them anew; her gravity, too; something of melancholy that
the flowers embodied; for they were not smiling flowers--gazing rather
at the wintry sky in earnest meditation.
Jane Amoret’s black lashes lay upon her cheek, ever so slightly turned
up at the tips, and her great-aunt, leaning over her, felt herself
doting upon them and upon the little softly breathing profile embedded
in the pillow, a bud-like, folded hand beside it.
“Little darling, we will make each other happy,” she whispered.
Rhoda had passed from their lives like a storm-cloud.
Jane Amoret was still sleeping, and she had gone downstairs to the
little morning-room where, since the war, she had really lived, to
settle with herself what she must say to Tim, when there came a ringing
at the front-door bell. The morning-room, at the back of the house, like
the nursery, overlooked the southern lawn and the walls of the
kitchen-garden; but she could usually hear if a motor drove up, and, in
her still concentration upon the empty sheet lying before her on the
desk, she was aware that there had been no sound. It was too early for a
visitor, too early for the post, and she looked up with some curiosity
as Parton came in.
“It’s a gentleman, ma’am, to see you,” said Parton; and her young,
trained visage showed signs of a discomfiture deeper than that Rhoda’s
coming had evoked. “Mr. Darley, ma’am; and he hopes very much you are
disengaged.”
Mrs. Delafield had, as a first sensation, that of sympathy with Parton.
Parton evidently knew all about it and was evidently in distress lest
her face betrayed her knowledge. In her effort to maintain her own
standards of impassivity she suddenly blushed crimson, and Mrs.
Delafield then felt that she was very old and Parton very young, and
that in that fact alone was a bond, even if there had been no other. She
had many bonds with Parton, and now, seeing her so soft, uncertain, and
dismayed, she would have liked to pat her on the shoulder and say,
“There, my dear, it doesn’t make any difference. I assure you I’m not
disturbed.” And since she could not say it, she looked it, replying with
the utmost equability, “Mr. Darley? By all means. Show him in at once,
Parton.”
There was, after Parton had gone, a short interval, while Mr. Darley
doubtless was taking off his coat, and during which she felt herself
mainly engaged in maintaining her equability. But, after her encounter
with Rhoda, wasn’t she equable enough for any situation? Besides, Mr.
Darley could in no fashion menace Jane Amoret, and under all her
conjectures and amazements there lay a certain satisfaction. She knew,
from her encounter with Parton, that she was interested in all young
creatures when they were nice, and she was not sorry to have another
look at Mr. Darley.
When he entered and she saw him,--not in khaki as that first time, but
in a gray tweed suit,--when Parton had softly and securely closed the
door and left them together, she found herself borne along on a curious
deepening of the current of sympathy for mere youth. She had not
remembered how young he was; she had not had that as her dominant
impression at Rhoda’s tea, as she had it now. He must be several years
younger than Rhoda; hardly more than twenty-two or three, she thought;
and it must have been as a mere child that the war had swept him out
into maturing initiations. Something of an experience, shattering yet
solidifying, was in his face, fragile, wasted, yet more final and
finished than one would have expected at his time of life; and also, in
curious contrast to his boyish, beardless look, a deep line was engraved
across his forehead; whether by suffering or by the trick she soon
discovered in him of raising his eyebrows in an effort of intense
concentration, she could not tell.
She gave him her hand simply, and said, “Do sit down.”
But Mr. Darley, though he looked at the chair she indicated, did not
take it. He remained standing on the hearthrug, facing the windows, his
hands clasped behind him, and she then became aware that he was enduring
a veritable agony of shyness. It did not take the form of
blushes,--though his was a girlish skin that would display them
instantly,--or of awkward gestures or faltering speech. It was a shyness
wild, still, and bereft of all appeal, like that of a bird,--the simile
came sharply to her,--a bird that had followed some swift impulse and
that now, caught in a sudden hand, relapsed into utter immobility. His
large eyes were on hers--fixed. His expression was like a throbbing
heart. She knew that all she wanted, for the moment, was to show him
that the hand was gentle.
“I’m afraid you came hoping to find Rhoda,” she said, looking away from
him and giving her chair, as a pretext, sundry little adjustments before
drawing it to the fire. “But she left this morning, after seeing me, and
you must have crossed her on the road. At least--have you motored?”
The large eyes, she found, were still fixed on her as, with the
question, she glanced up at him; but he answered immediately--rather as
if with a croaking cry from the blackbird when one pressed it,--
“No; I came by train. I left a little after Rhoda did.”
“By train?” she marvelled kindly. “But we are four miles from the
station here. Aren’t you, at your end, as far? And such roads!” She saw
now that his boots and upturned trousers were, indeed, deeply mired.
“Oh--I didn’t mind the walk,” said Mr. Darley. “It wasn’t far.”
She was sure he hadn’t found it far. His whole demeanour expressed the
overmastering impulse that had, till then, sustained him.
“Have you had any lunch?” she went on. “I can’t think where you can have
lunched. There’s nothing at the station. Do let me send for something.
I’ve only just finished.”
It seemed strangely indicated that she should, to-day, feed Rhoda and
her lover.
But the caught blackbird was in no state for feeding. More wildly, yet
more faintly than before he gave forth the croaking cry with, “Oh, no.
Thanks so much. Yes. At our station. I found something at our station.
Sandwiches; no, a bun. I had a cup of Bovril.”
And now, curiously, poignantly to her, he began to blush as though
suddenly and overwhelmingly aware of himself and of how idiotically he
must be behaving. Poor child! How young he was! And how ill he had been
in the trenches; and how beautiful it was to remember--as she did
suddenly, and not irrelevantly, she knew, though she could not trace the
relevance--that, in the little volume, written since his return, there
had not been a shadow of the ugly rancour, revengeful and provocative,
one met in some other soldier-poets whom one might have fancied to be of
his kind. For how he must have hated it! And, at the same time,--memory
brought back a line, a stanza here and there, from her snatched
reading--how holy he had found it; seeing so much more than error,
death, and suffering.
Her eyes dwelt on him with something beyond the kindly wish to spare him
as she said, “Please sit down. You must be very tired and you are not
strong, Rhoda told me. Don’t be afraid of me. I am an old lady who can
listen to anything and, I think, understand a great deal. I’ve already
heard a great deal from Rhoda. I’m anything but unfriendly to you, I
assure you.”
It was--she was aware of it when it had crossed her lips--a curious
thing to say to her niece’s lover, to the man who had destroyed Tim’s
happiness and wrecked Niel’s home; but it was too true not to be said.
And she was perfectly sure now that it was not Mr. Darley who had
wrecked and destroyed. It was Rhoda who had taken him, of course; not he
Rhoda. He would never take anybody. He would stand and gaze at them as
he now gazed at her, and only when they threw out appealing arms would
he move towards them. Rhoda had thrown out appealing arms--after she
discovered that alluring arms had no effect. Mrs. Delafield’s
impressions and intuitions tumbled forth in positive clusters as she
took in her companion. Allurements, Russian-ballet back-grounds, snowy
throats and velvet eyes, would have no effect upon him at all; he cared
as little about them at one end of the scale of sensations as about rats
and corpses at the other. He would not even see them. It was something
else he had seen in Rhoda; something she had found herself driven to
display. And if she were getting tired of him already, it was simply
because, having trapped him with the artifice, she now found herself
shut up with him in a cage, which, while it was of her own making, was
extremely uncongenial to her.
Mr. Darley was far too absorbed in what she had just said to him to
think of taking the chair. It had helped him incalculably--that was
quite apparent; for though the blush stayed, and though he was still
wild and shy, they had already, indubitably, begun to understand each
other.
“Do you mean,” he asked, “not unfriendly to me or not unfriendly to
Rhoda?”
This was an unexpected question, and for a moment, not knowing what it
portended, she hardly knew how to meet it. But the understanding that
seemed to deepen with every moment made truth the most essential thing,
and she replied after only a hesitation, “To you.”
Mr. Darley looked all his astonishment. “But why? Do you feel that you
like me, too? Because, of course, I’ve never forgotten you. That’s why I
felt it possible to come to-day.”
And since truth was essential, it was she, now, who looked, with her
surprise, something that she felt to be a recognition, as she replied,
“I suppose it must be that. I suppose we liked each other at first
sight. I certainly didn’t know the feeling was reciprocal.”
“Nor did I!” Mr. Darley exclaimed. He took the chair at the other end of
the hearthrug, facing her, his knees crossed, his arms clutched tightly
across his chest; and now he was able to reach his journey’s goal. As
all, on Rhoda’s side, had been made clear to her that morning, so on
his, all was clear, as he said, with a solemnity so young, so genuine
that it almost brought tears to her eyes, “Then since you do like me,
please don’t let her leave me!”
The situation was before her, definite and overpowering; but how it
could have come about remained veiled like the misty approaches to a
mountain.
“Does Rhoda want to leave you?” she questioned.
“Why--didn’t you know?” Mr. Darley’s face flashed with a sort of stupor.
“Didn’t she come for that?”
“You answer my questions first,” Mrs. Delafield said after a moment.
He was obedient and full of trust. “It’s because of the child, you know,
that lovely little creature in London. From the first--you can’t think
how long ago it already seems, though we have hardly been a week
together--I’ve seen it growing, that feeling in her that she couldn’t
bear it. Other things, too; but that more than all. At least,” he was
truthful to the last point of scruple, “I think so. And though she did
not tell me that she was saying good-bye this morning, I knew--I
knew--that she was coming to you because she wanted her child, and would
accept anything, endure anything, to be with it again.”
“What do you think Rhoda had to endure?” Mrs. Delafield inquired.
“Oh--you can’t ask me that! I saw you in it and you saw me!” Mr. Darley
exclaimed. “You _will_ be straight with me? You saw that soulless life
of hers, with that selfish figurehead of a husband for all guide. She
was suffocating in it. She didn’t need to tell me. I saw it in her face
before she told me. How can a woman live with a man she doesn’t love?
When you said not unfriendly to me, did you mean to make a difference?
Did you mean that you don’t care for Rhoda? Yet she’s always loved and
trusted you, she told me, more than any one. You were the one reality
she clung to. That’s why _she_ could come to you to-day.”
“What I mean is that I’m on your side, not on Rhoda’s,” said Mrs.
Delafield, and at the moment her charming old white face expressed,
perhaps as never before in her life, the quality of decisiveness. “I am
on your side. But I have to see what that is.”
He was feeling her face even more than her words. He was gazing at her
with a rapt scrutiny which, she reflected, exonerating Rhoda to that
extent, would make it difficult for a woman receiving such a tribute not
to wish to retain it permanently. It enriched and sustained one
and--although it was strange that she should feel this--troubled and
moved one, too. A sense of pain stirred in her, and of wonder about
herself and her fitness to receive such gazes. One really couldn’t, at
sixty-three, have growing pains; yet Mr. Darley’s gaze filled her with
that troubled consciousness of expanding life. He wanted Rhoda. She
wanted Jane Amoret. So, wasn’t it all right? Wasn’t she all right? His
side was her side. They wanted the same thing. But the troubled sap of
the new consciousness was rising in her.
“My side is really Rhoda’s side,” said Mr. Darley, as if answering her
thought. He held his knee in gripped hands and spoke with rapid
security. He was still shy, but he now knew exactly what he wished to
say, and how to say it. “It’s Rhoda’s side, if only she’d see it. That’s
why I was not disloyal in asking my question when you said you weren’t
unfriendly. Really--really--you _will_ believe me--it’s for her, too. I
wouldn’t have let her come with me if it hadn’t been. I’m not so selfish
as I seem. I know it’s dreadful about the child. But--this is my secret;
Rhoda does not guess it and I could never tell her--she doesn’t love the
child as she thinks she does. Not really. In spite of her longing. She
longs to love it, of course; but she isn’t a mother; not to that child.
That’s another reason. It was all false. The whole thing. The whole of
her life. The real truth is,” said Christopher Darley, gazing large-eyed
at her, “that Rhoda is frightened and wants to go back. She’s not as
brave as she thought she was. Not quite as brave as I thought. But if
she yields to her fear and leaves me,--she hasn’t yet, I know, I see
that in your face--but if she goes back to her old life, it will mean
dust, humiliation, imprisonment forever.”
“That’s what I told her,” Mrs. Delafield said, her eyes on his.
“I knew! I knew!” cried the young man. “I knew you’d done something
beautiful for me--for us. Because you see the truth. And you were able
to succeed where I failed! You were able to convince her! You’ve saved
us both! Oh, how I thank you!”
“It wasn’t quite like that,” said Mrs. Delafield. "It wasn’t to save
either of you. I don’t think it right for a woman to leave her husband
with another man because she has ceased to love her husband. But I made
her go back. I wouldn’t even let her tell me that she wanted to leave
you. I didn’t convince her. I merely made it impossible for her. She
left me reluctant and bewildered. You haven’t found out yet,"--Mrs.
Delafield leaned forward and picked up the little poker; the fire needed
no poking and the movement expressed only her inner restlessness,--“you
haven’t found out that Rhoda, at all events, _is_ very selfish?”
Christopher Darley at that stopped short. “Oh, yes, I have,” he answered
then; but the frightened croak was in his voice as he said it.
“And have you found out, too,” said Mrs. Delafield, eyeing her poker,
sparing him, giving him time, “that she’s unscrupulous and cold-hearted?
Do you see the sort of life she’ll make for you, if she is faithful to
you and stays with you, not because she’s faithful, not because she
wants to stay, but gagged and baulked by me? Haven’t you
already--yourself, been a little frightened sometimes?” she finished.
She kept her eyes on her poker and gave Mr. Darley his time, and indeed
he needed it.
“If you’ve been so wonderful,” he said at last, with the slow care of
one who threads his way among swords; “if, though you think we’re
lawbreakers, you think, too, that we’ve made ourselves another law and
are bound to stand by it; if you’ve sent her back to me--why do you ask
me that? But no,” he went on, “I’m not frightened. You see--I love her.”
“She doesn’t love you,” said Mrs. Delafield.
"She will! She will!"--It made Mrs. Delafield think of the shaking
heart-throbs of the blackbird.--“All that you see,--yes, yes, I won’t
pretend to you, because I trust you as I’ve never before trusted any
human being, because you are truer than any one I’ve ever met,--it’s all
true. She is all that. But don’t you see further? Don’t you see it’s the
life? She’s never known anything else. She’s never had a chance.”
“She’s known me. She’s had me.”
Mrs. Delafield’s eyes did not leave the poker. But under the quiet
statement the struggle in her reached its bitter close. She had lost
Jane Amoret. She must give her up. Not for her sake; nor for
Rhoda’s,--oh, in no sense for Rhoda’s,--but for his. She could not let
him pay the price. She must save him from Rhoda.
“What do you mean?” he asked; and it was as if crumbling before her
secure strength, almost with tears.
"I mean that you’ll never make anything different of her. I never have,
and I’ve known her since she was born. You won’t make her, and she’ll
unmake you. She is disintegrating. She has always been like that.
Nothing has spoiled her. From the first she’s been selfish and untender.
I don’t mean to say that she hasn’t good points. She has a sense of
humour; and she’s honest with herself: she knows what she wants and why
she wants it--although she may take care that you don’t. She isn’t petty
or spiteful or revengeful. No,"--Mrs. Delafield moved her poker slowly
up and down as she carved it out for him, and it seemed to be into her
own heart she was cutting,--“there is a largeness and a dignity about
Rhoda. But she feels no beauty and no tragedy in life, only irony and
opportunity. You’ll no more change her than you’ll change a flower, a
fish, or a stone.”
Holding his knee in the strained grasp, Christopher Darley kept his eyes
on her, breathing quickly.
“Why did she come with me, then?” he asked, after the silence between
them had grown long. (Strange, she thought, so near they were, that he
could not know her heart was breaking, too. All the time it was Jane
Amoret’s sleeping eyelashes she saw.) “Why did she love me? I am not
irony or opportunity.”
“Do you think she ever loved you?” said Mrs. Delafield. “Was it not only
that she wanted you to love her? Wasn’t it because you were different,
and difficult, and new? I think so. I think you found her at a bored,
antagonistic moment; money-quarrels with her husband,--he is a good
young fellow, Niel, and he used to worship her,--the war over and life
to take up again on terms already stale. She is calculating; but she is
adventurous and reckless, too. So she went. And of course she was in
love with you then. That goes without saying, and you’ll know what I
mean by it. But Rhoda gets through things quickly. She has no soil in
her in which roots can grow; perhaps that’s what I mean by saying she
can’t change. One can’t, if one can’t grow roots. But now you are no
longer new or difficult. You are easy and old--already old; and she’s
tired of you. You bore her. You constrain and baffle her--if she’s to
keep up appearances with you at all; and she’d like to do that, because
she admires you exceedingly. So she wants to go back to Niel. I know,”
said Mrs. Delafield, slightly shaking her poker, “that if I’d given her
a loophole this morning, she’d be on her way to London now.”
“And why didn’t you?” asked Christopher Darley.
Ah, why? Again she brooded over the softly breathing little profile,
again met the upward gaze of Jane Amoret’s grey eyes. Well might he ask
why. But there was the one truth she could not give him. There was
another that she could, and she had it ready. “I hadn’t seen you,” she
said.
“You thought it right for her to come back to me, until you saw me?”
“I thought it beneath her dignity--as I said to her--to be unfaithful to
two men within a fortnight.”
“But why should you care for her dignity?” Mr. Darley strangely pressed.
“Why shouldn’t you care more for your brother’s dignity, and her
husband’s, and her child’s--all the things she said you’d care for?”
He had brought her eyes to his now, and, for the first time since they
met, it was he who had the advantage. Frowning, yet clear, he bent his
great young eyes upon her and she knew, dismayingly, that her thoughts
were scattered.
“I have always cared for Rhoda.” She seized the first one.
“Is it a future for Rhoda to disintegrate the life of the man who loves
her and to get no good of him? Isn’t it better for a woman like Rhoda to
go back to the apparent dignity, since she has no feeling for the real?
Isn’t that what you would have felt, if you’d been feeling for Rhoda? It
wasn’t because you felt for her,” said Christopher Darley. “You had some
other reason. You are keeping another reason from me. You know,” he
urged upon her with a strange, still austerity, “you know you can’t do
that. You know we must say the truth to each other. You know that we
simply belong to each other, you and I.”
“My dear Mr. Darley--my dear young man!”
She was, indeed, bereft of all resource. She laid down her poker and, as
she did so, felt herself disarming before him. His eyes, following her
retreat, challenged her, almost with fierceness.
“I know--I know that you are giving up something because of me,” he
said. “You want her to go back to her husband now, so that I may be
free. It wasn’t of me you thought this morning; nor of your brother, nor
of Rhoda. Everything changed for you after you saw me. What is it? What
is it that made you send Rhoda back to me and that makes you now want to
free me? You are beautiful--but you are terrible. You do beautiful and
terrible things. And you must let me share. You must let me decide, too,
if you do them for me!”
He had started up, but not to come nearer in his appeal and his demand.
Cut to the heart as he was,--for she knew how she had pierced,--it was
rather the probing of some more intolerable pain that moved him. And
looking down at her with eyes intolerant of her mercy, he embodied to
her her sense of a new life and a new conscience. Absurd though his
words might seem, they were true. Though never, perhaps, again to meet,
she and Christopher Darley recognized in each other some final affinity
and owed each other final truth.
She no longer felt old and wise, but young and helpless before the
compulsion of the kindred soul. She owed him the truth, and in giving it
she must risk his freedom and his happiness. Looking up at him, that
sense of compulsion upon her, she said, “It was because of Jane Amoret.
It was because I loved her and wanted to keep her.”
Christopher Darley grew paler than before. “She is here?”
“Yes. She came this morning. She is upstairs, sleeping.”
“Rhoda saw her?”
“Yes.”
“And left her? To you?”
“Yes. Left her to me.”
He raised his head with a backward jerk and stared out of the window
before him. She kept her eyes on his face, measuring its strength
against hers. He was not measuring. He seemed to be seeing the beautiful
and terrible things of which, he had told her, she was capable. She
felt, when his eyes came back to her, that he had judged her.
“You see you can’t,” he said gently.
“Can’t what? Can’t keep her, you mean, of course.”
“Anything but that. You can’t abandon her--even for my sake.”
So that had been the judgment. He saw only beauty.
“I shan’t abandon her. I shall always be able to see as much of her as I
did of Rhoda, and more. And she is different from Rhoda. I shan’t have
the special joy of her, but I shall have the good.”
“Moreover,” he went on, with perfect gentleness, putting her words
aside, “I can’t abandon Rhoda. All that you have said is true. But it
doesn’t go far enough. You yourself, you know, see life too much in
terms of irony, of fact rather than faith. You’ve owned that Rhoda is
adventurous and honest; you’ve owned that she doesn’t lie to herself.
Then she has growth in her. No human being can be like a flower or a
fish or a stone. It was mere literature, your saying that. Every human
being has futures and futures within it. You know it really. Why you
yourself, though you are so old and fixed, are different now from what
you were an hour ago. I am different, of course. And Rhoda will be
different, too. She won’t disintegrate me. She’ll make me very
miserable, doubtless; she has already. And I shall make her angry. But I
shall hold her, and she’ll change. You shall see. I promise you. And you
will keep Jane Amoret, and she will be eternally different because of
you.”
Mrs. Delafield, while he spoke, had risen. She stood before him,
grasping her gold chain on either side, her eyes very nearly level with
his, and she summoned all her will, her strength, her wisdom to meet
him. Yes, they had come to that, she and this boy.
“I accept all your faith,” she said. “Only you must help me to make my
world, and not yours, with it. Don’t be afraid for Jane Amoret. I shall
be firmly in her life. Rhoda shan’t keep me out. She won’t want to keep
me out. Rhoda has far more chance of changing, of learning something
from this experience, as a disconcerted and forgiven wife than as a
sullen adventuress; and you--you will not be miserable; not with Rhoda,
at all events; and you will be free. I am going to send a wire to Rhoda,
at once, and tell her that I have reconsidered my advice to her. That,
in itself, will show her how I managed her this morning. I shall tell
her that she must go to London to-night, to her father. And to-morrow
I’ll take Jane Amoret up and bring Rhoda and Niel together.”
He took it all in, wide-eyed, he too now measuring the threat.
“You can’t,” he said; “I won’t let you!”
“You’ll have to let me. I have the fact on my side as well as the faith.
She wants to leave you. She wants only the excuse of being asked. You
can’t stop my giving her the excuse.” Yes, after all, her fact against
his faith, she must have her way. What could his love for Rhoda and his
feeling for herself do against the ironic fact that Rhoda, simply, was
tired of him? “You must see that you can’t force her to stay,” she said.
“You couldn’t even prevent her coming to me this morning.”
She looked at him with all the force of her advantage and saw that
before the cruel fact, and her determination, he knew his helplessness.
It was, again, the bird arrested in its impulse; and a veil seemed to
fall across his face, a shyness, almost a wildness to shut them out from
each other. He dropped his eyes before her.
“Dear Mr. Darley, my dear young friend, see that it’s best. See that
it’s best all round. See it with me,” she begged. “I was wrong this
morning; wrong from the very first. Let it come to that only. Count
yourself out. It was of myself, of my own delight in the child that I
was thinking. No, not even thinking; I tried to think it was for her;
but it was my own feeling that decided. If you had never come, it would
still have been right to give her up--though I should never have seen it
unless you’d come. It was almost a crime that I committed. They had
asked me to implore her to go back; they trusted me. And I prevented the
message coming to her. I did not believe the things I said to her--not
as she thought I believed them. I did not care a rap about her dignity;
you saw the falsity at once. I cared only about keeping Jane Amoret.”
He stood there before her, remote, unmoved, with downcast, unanswering
eyes.
“Are you angry? Don’t you see it, too?” she pleaded.
“No.” He shook his head. “You had a right to keep the child.”
“Against all those other reasons? Against my own conscience?”
“Yes. Because you were strong enough. You were right, because you were
strong enough. I believe in law, too, you see--unless one is strong
enough to break it for something better. You were. It was a beautiful
thing to do.”
“But then, if you think me so strong, why not trust me now? This, now,
is the thing I want to do.”
“Because of me. It isn’t against the law you are acting now; it’s
against your own life. I am not angry. But it crushes me.”
They stood there then, she deeply meditating, he fixed in his unyielding
grief, for how long she could not have said. Parton’s step outside broke
in upon their mute opposition.