Part 4

“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.

VI

She and Mr. Darley, Mrs. Delafield was aware, presented precisely the abstracted, alienated air that Parton would expect. The young man moved away to the window while she took from the salver the note Parton presented. Then, her hand arrested in the very act by a recognition,

“Is there an answer?” she asked.

“No answer, ma’am.”

“Who brought it?”

“A man from the station, ma’am.”

“Very well, Parton.”

Parton was gone. Mr. Darley kept his back turned. She held the note in her hand and stared at it. The writing was Rhoda’s; the envelope one of the station-master’s. She had been at the station, then, when she wrote, four miles away. The London train, for which she had been waiting, had gone long since; it had gone before the arrival of Mr. Darley’s.

An almost overpowering presage rose in her mind; she could hardly, for a moment, summon the decision with which to open the envelope. Then, reading as she stood, she felt the blood flow up to her face.

For it was almost too much, although it was, through Rhoda’s act, she who had won finally. Even she, then, had not yet correctly measured Rhoda’s irony or Rhoda’s sardonic assurance. Rhoda, after all, did not care to keep up appearances with her, and, after all, why should she? Here was fact, and it had been fact all through. She wanted most to go back. She wanted it more than to be dignified in her aunt’s eyes, or, really, in anybody else’s. Once back Rhoda would take care of her dignity. In a flash Mrs. Delafield saw how little, when all was said and done, Rhoda would pay.

DEAR AUNT ISABEL [she wrote, in her ample, tranquil hand]: I’ve been thinking over all you said and have come to the conclusion that you are considering me too much. I feel that I must consider my child. I have made a grave mistake and am not too proud to own it. Christopher and I are not at all fitted to make each other happy. So I have wired to father that I arrive this afternoon, and to Niel that I will see him to-morrow. I have written too, of course, to my poor Christopher. But he will understand me. Thank you so much, dear Aunt Isabel, for your kindness and helpfulness.

Your affectionate RHODA

P.S. Will you send nurse up with Jane Amoret within the week? Not at once, please; that would look rather foolish.

With the accumulated weight of absurdity, relief, dismay, she had sunk down into her chair, still gazing at the letter, and it was dismay that grew. As if with a violent jolt back to earth, Rhoda seemed to show her that life was not docile to nobilities. She hated to think that he must feel with her that shattering fall. There was nothing for them to do now for each other; no contest and no sacrifice. Rhoda had settled everything.

She spoke to him at last, and, as he came to her, not looking around at him, she held out the note. He stood behind her to read it; and after that he did not speak.

She heard him move presently, vaguely, and then, vaguely, he drifted to and fro. He walked here and there; he paused, no doubt to feel his bones and to count how many had been broken, and then, with a start, he went on again.

“Please come where I can see you,” she said at last.

He came at once, obediently, standing as he had stood a little while ago before the fire, his hands locked behind him, but now with face bent down, fixed in its effort to see clearly what had happened to them.

“You see, it was over. You see, you couldn’t have made anything of it.” It was almost with tears that she besought him not to suffer too much. “You have nothing to regret, except having believed in her. Tell me that you are not too unhappy.”

“I don’t know what I am,” Christopher said. “But I know I’ve more to regret than having believed in her. I’ve all the folly and mischief I’ve made.” He had thought it out and she could not deny what he had seen, not even when he went on, "If it could have been in our way,--yours and mine, or, at least, what was yours this morning, when you thought you had kept her with me,--everything might have been atoned for. It might have meant a certain kind of beauty, and a certain kind of happiness, even, perhaps. But in this way, the way she’s chosen, it only means just that--folly, mischief,"--he turned to the fire and looked down into it,--“sin,” he finished.

She could not deny it, even to give him comfort; but she could find something else. “It was Rhoda who chose. You, whatever your mistakes, chose very differently. I'm not trying to shift responsibility; to make mistakes is to be foolish and mischievous. But can’t even sin be atoned for? Doesn’t it all now depend on you? That you should make yourself worth it. You are the only one of us who can do that.”

He turned to her and his eyes studied her with an unaccepting gentleness.

“You mean because I’m a poet? It isn’t like you, really, to say that. You don’t believe in poets and their mission in that sense. It’s too facile.”

“Not only because you are a poet. I wasn’t thinking so much of that, although your gift helps. But simply because you are young and good.”

“I’m not good enough,” said Christopher. “And I’m too young. You’ve shown me that. I am afraid of myself. I see what one can do while meaning the best.”

She watched him with grave tenderness, feeling again, in his dispassionate capacity for accepted experience, his strange maturity. And knowing all that might be difficult, yet knowing that it would be, after all, to a decision like her own, the merest gossamers of convention that she must brave, she said,--and as she looked up at him his face seemed to blend with the face of her little, sleeping, lost Jane Amoret,--“Don’t you think I, perhaps, could be of help, while you are so young?”

He did not understand her at all. He, too, was absorbed in his inner image of loss, yet he, too, was almost as aware of her as she of him, and his eyes, with their austere gentleness, dwelt on her, as if treasuring, of this last encounter, his completed vision of her.

“Yes, you will be. I shall never forget you and what you’ve been to me. I’ll do my best,” he promised her. “But I seem to have lost everything. I could be strong for her; I don’t know that I can be strong enough for myself.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Mrs. Delafield. “It takes years to be strong enough for one’s self, and even when one’s old one hasn’t sometimes learned how to be. I’m not sure, after this morning, that I’ve learned yet. But I know that I could be strong for you. Will you let me try? Will you let me take care of you a little and guard you from the Rhodas until the right person comes?”

“What do you mean?” he asked; and, answering the look in her face, tears sprang to his eyes.

“We belong to each other. Didn’t you say it?” she smiled. “We are friends. We ought not to lose each other now.”

“Oh! But--” He gazed at her. “How could you! After what I’ve done!”