Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 4

"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 wors.h.i.+p 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.