a pose; a formula. They are all afraid of nothing so much as of seeming respectable. I imagine that there’s just as much marital virtue at large in the world nowadays as when we were young.—Who is the young man?” she had, nevertheless, ended.
“My dear, don’t ask me!” Tim had moaned, blanched and battered in his invalid’s chair. (Why wouldn’t he come down and live with her? Why, indeed, except that, since Frances’s death, he had felt that he must stand by, in London, and watch over Rhoda.) “I only know what I’ve heard. Amy has talked and talked. And everybody else is talking, according to her.” Amy was Frances’s sister, a well-meaning, but disturbing woman, with a large family of well-conducted, well-married, unpainted, and unfashionable daughters. “She is here every day about it. They are always together. He is always there. The poet—the new young poet. He has a heart or a chest or a stomach—something that has sent him home and that keeps him safe at Whitehall, while poor Niel fights in France. Surely, Isabel, you’ve heard of Christopher Darley? Wasn’t he there? Young. Younger than Rhoda. Black hair. Big eyes. Silent.”
Silent.—Yes, there had been, beside Jane Amoret, one silent person in Rhoda’s drawing-room. And she had been aware of him constantly, though, till now, unconsciously. Very young; very pale; aloof, near a window, with an uncalculated aloofness. She reconstructed an impression that became deeper the further she went into it. Thick backward locks that had given his forehead a wind-blown look, and a gaze now and then directed on herself, a gaze grave, withdrawing, yet scrutinizing, too.
“Yes; I think, now that you describe him, I must have seen him,” she murmured; while a curious alarm mounted in her, an alarm that none of Rhoda’s more characteristic circle had aroused. “He wasn’t living by a formula of freedom,” she reflected. “And he wasn’t arid.” Aloud she said, “He looked a nice young creature, I remember.”
“He writes horrible poems, Amy says; blasphemous. There they are. I can’t understand them. He casts down everything; has no beliefs of any kind. Nice? I should think that’s the last adjective that would describe him.”
She had picked up the unobtrusive volume and found herself arrested; not as she had been by the memory of the young man’s gaze, nor yet in the manner that Tim’s account indicated; but still arrested. Very young—but austere, dignified, and strange, genuinely and effortlessly strange. So a young priest might have written, seeking in close-pressed metaphysical analogies to find expression for spiritual passion. She stood, puzzled and absorbed.
“No, it isn’t blasphemous,” she said presently. “And he has beliefs. But surely, Tim dear, surely this young man can’t care for Rhoda.”
How could a young man who wrote like that about the mystic vision care for Rhoda?
“Not care for Rhoda!” Tim’s voice had now the quaintest ring of paternal resentment. “The most beautiful young woman in London! Why, he’s head over heels in love with her. And the worst of it is that, from what Amy sees and hears, she cares for him.”
“It’s curious,” Mrs. Delafield said, laying down the book. “I shouldn’t have thought he’d care about beautiful young women.”
And now Tim’s letter, on this December morning, announced that Rhoda had gone off with Christopher Darley; and Mrs. Delafield could find it in her heart, as she worked and pondered, to wish that her dear Tim had followed Frances before this catastrophe overtook him.
“Good heavens!” she heard herself muttering, “if only she’d been meaner, more cowardly, and stayed and lied—as women of her kind are supposed to do. If only she’d let him die in peace; he can’t have many years.”
But no: it had been done with le beau geste. Tim had known nothing, and poor Niel, home for his first peace leave, had come to him, bewildered and aghast, with the news. He had found a letter waiting for him, sent from the country. Tim copied the letter for her:—
DEAR NIEL:
I’m sure you felt, too, that our life couldn’t go on. It had become too unsatisfactory for both of us. Luckily we are sensible people nowadays, and such mistakes can be remedied. You must mend your life as I am mending mine. I am leaving you, with Christopher Darley. I am so sorry if it seems sudden; but I felt it better that we should not meet again.
Yours affectionately
RHODA
“If only the poet hadn’t had money, too!” Mrs. Delafield had thought. For this fact she had learned about Mr. Darley in London. Rhoda would never have abandoned that drawing-room had she not been secure of another as good.
Tim wrote that nothing could have been manlier, more generous, than Niel’s behaviour. He was willing, for the sake of the child, to take Rhoda back, reinstate her, and protect her from the consequences of her act; and what Tim now begged of his sister was that she should see Rhoda, see if, confronting her, she could not induce her to return to her husband. Meanwhile Jane Amoret would be dispatched at once with her nurse to Fernleigh. Tim had written to his child in her retreat, and had implored her to go to her aunt. “I told her that you would receive her, Isabel,” so Tim’s letter ended; “and I trust you now to save us—as far as we can be saved. Tell her that her husband will forgive, and that I forgive, if she will return. Let her see the child. Let that be your appeal.”
Poor, darling Tim! Very mid-Victorian. “Forgive.” Would “receive” her. The words had an antediluvian ring. With what battledore and shuttle-cock of mirth and repartee they would be sent sailing and spinning in Rhoda’s world. All the same, she, who was mid-Victorian in seeming rather than in reality, would make other appeals, if Rhoda came. Already she could almost count the steady heads of her intentions thrusting up as if through the ground. Even in Rhoda’s world repartee and mirth might be displayed rather than acted upon, and Rhoda might find herself, as a result of le beau geste, less favourably placed for the creation of another drawing-room than she imagined. That, of course, was the line to take with Rhoda; and as she reflected, carefully now, on what she would say to her—as she determined that Rhoda should not leave her until she had turned her face firmly homeward—the sound of wheels came up the road, and outside the high walls she heard the station fly drawing up at her gates. In another moment she was welcoming Jane Amoret and her nurse.
III
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.
