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.
IV
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
