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 tumbledforth 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. “Youwillbe 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 whyshecould 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. Shewanted 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—youwillbelieve 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,isvery 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. Delafieldmoved 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 andChristopher 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.
SHEand 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 morethan 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.
DEARAUNTISABEL[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 RHODAP.S. Will you send nurse up with Jane Amoret within the week? Not at once, please; that would look rather foolish.
DEARAUNTISABEL[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!”
“You’ve done nothing that makes me like you less.”
“Oh—I can’t! I can’t!” said Christopher Darley. “How could I accept it from you? Already you’ve been unbelievably beautiful to me. It’s not as if you were a Bohemian sort of creature, like me. Appearances must count for you. And the appearance of being friends with your niece’s discarded lover—no—I can’t see it for you. I can imagine you being above the law, but I can’t imagine you being above appearances. I don’t think that I should want you to be. I care about appearances, too, when they are yours.”
It crossed her mind, with almost a mirthful sense of the sort of appearances she would have to dealwith, that Parton’s face would be worth watching. Poor Tim’s hovered more grievously in the background. But, after all, it would be a Tim with wounds well salved.
“It’s just because mine are so secure and recognized, don’t you see, that I can do what I like with them,” she said. “It’s not for me a question of appearances, but of realities. After all, my dear young man, what am I going to get out of it all? My roots have been torn up too, you know.”
“Because of me! Because of me!” Christopher groaned. “Do you think you need remind me of that? Shall I ever forgive myself for it? Get out of it? You’ll get nothing. You’ve been tormented between us all, and you lose Jane Amoret.”
“Then don’t let me lose you too,” said Mrs. Delafield.
Again, with the tears, his blush sprang to his face, and he stood there incredulous, looking down at her, almost as helpless in the shyness the unexpected gift brought upon him as he had been when he first came in to her.
“Really you mean it?” he murmured. “Really I can do something for you, too? Because, unless I can, I couldn’t accept it.”
“You can make me much less lonely, when she’s gone,” said Mrs. Delafield.
She knew that this was to give the gift in such a way as to ensure its acceptance; but he murmured, stung again intolerably by the thought of Jane Amoret, “Oh—I can’t bear it for you!”
“You can help me to bear it.”
Still he pressed upon her what he saw as her sacrifice.“You mean that I may see you when I like? I may always write and you’ll always answer? I can sometimes, even, come and stay, like any other friend? Please realize that if you let me come down on you like that, I may come hard. I’m frightfully lonely, too.”
“As hard as you like. I want you to come hard. Like any friend. Yes.”
She was smiling up at the young man, and, as she had promised herself years for Jane Amoret, she promised herself now years—though not so many would be needed—for Christopher Darley. It was in the thought of what she could do for Christopher Darley that she saw Rhoda’s punishment. Not for having left him, but for having taken him; for not having known what to do with him without taking him. And Rhoda would see it with her, if no one else did.
“Come, you must quite believe in me,” she said. “Give me your hand, dear Christopher, and tell me that you take this meddling, commanding old woman to be your friend.”
He had no words as he took the hand she gave him, but from his look it might have been as if he at last received into his keeping the great gift, the precious casket of the future; and his eyes, like those of a devout young knight, dedicated themselves to her service.
It was again gift and miracle; and though in her mind was the thought of all her mournings, and of the lost Jane Amoret, she felt, rooting itself in the darkness and sorrow, yet another flower.
“And now,” she said, for they must not both begin to cry,“please ring the bell for me. The time has not quite come for your first visit; but, before you go, we will have our first tea together.”
decorative bar
OTHER people’s sons were coming home for the three or four days' leave. The first gigantic struggle—furious onslaught and grim resistance—was over. Paris, pale, and slightly shuddering still, stood safe. Calais was not taken, and, dug into their trenches, it was evident that the opposing armies would lie face to face with no decisive encounter possible until the spring.
There was, with all their beauty and terror, an element of the facetious in these unexpected holidays, of the matter-of-factness, the freedom from strain or sentiment that was the English oddity and the English strength. Men who had known the horrors of the retreat from Mons or the carnage of Ypres, who had not taken off their clothes for ten days at a stretch or slept for four nights, came home from trenches knee-deep in mud, from battlefields heaped with unburied dead, and appeared immaculate and cheerful at breakfast; a little sober and preoccupied, perhaps; touched, perhaps, with strangeness; but ready for the valorous family jest, and alluding to the war as if, while something too solemn for adequate comment, it were yet something that lent itself to laughter. One did such funny things, and saw them; of the other thingsone did not speak; and there was the huge standing joke of an enemy who actually hated one. These grave and cheerful young men hated nobody; but they were very eager to go back again; and they were all ready, not only to die but to die good-humouredly. From the demeanour of mothers and wives and sisters it was evident that nothing would be said or done to make this readiness difficult; but Mrs. Bradley, who showed serenity to the world and did not even when alone allow herself to cry, suspected that the others, beneath their smiles, carried hearts as heavy with dread as her own.
It had been heavy, with hope now as well as with dread, for the past week. It was a week since she had last heard from Jack. Mrs. Crawley over the hill, had had a wire, and her husband was now with her; and Lady Wrexham expected her boy to-morrow. There was no certainty at all as regarded herself; yet at any moment she might have her wire; and feeling to-day the stress of waiting too great to be borne in passivity, she left her books and letters and put on her gardening shoes and gloves and went out to her borders.
For weeks now the incessant rain had made the relief and solace of gardening almost an impossibility; but to-day was mild and clear. There was no radiance in the air; curtains of pearly mist shut out the sky; yet here and there a soft opening in the white showed a pale, far blue, gentle and remote as the gaze of a wandering goddess, and the hills seemed to smile quietly up at the unseen sun. Mrs. Bradley, as she went along the river-path, could look across at the hills; the river-path and the hills were the great feature of Dorrington,—the placid, comely red brick house to which she and Jack hadcome fifteen years ago, after the death of her husband in India. Enclosed by woods, and almost catching sight of the road,—from its upper windows and over its old brick wall,—the house would have seemed to her too commonplace and almost suburban, in spite of the indubitably old oak-panelling of the drawing-room, had it not been for the river and the hills. Stepping out on to the lawn from the windows of the drawing-room, she and Jack, on that April day, had found themselves confronting both—the limpid, rapid little stream, spanned near the house by its mossy bridge, and the hills, beyond the meadows, streaked with purple woodlands and rising, above the woods, to slopes russet, fawn, and azure. Jack, holding her by the hand, had pointed at once with an eager "Isn’t it pretty, mummy!"—even at eight he had cared almost as much as she, and extraordinarily in the same way, for the sights of the country; and if the hills hadn’t settled the question, it was settled, quite finally, ten minutes later, by the white hepaticas.
They had come upon them suddenly, after their tour of the walled kitchen garden and their survey of the lawn with its ugly shrubberies,—now long forgotten,—penetrating a thicket of hazels and finding themselves in an opening under trees where neighbouring woods looked at them over an old stone wall, and where, from an old stone bench, one could see the river. The ground was soft with the fallen leaves of many an autumn; a narrow path ran, half obliterated, down to the river; and among the faded brown, everywhere, rose the thick clusters, the dark leaves, and the snowy flowers,—poignant, amazing in their beauty.
She and Jack had stopped short to gaze. She had never before seen such white hepaticas, or so many, or so placed. And Jack, presently, lifting his dear nut-brown head and nut-brown eyes, had said, gazing up at her as he had gazed at the flowers, “They are just like you, mummy.”
She had felt at once that they were like her; more like than the little boy’s instinct could grasp. He had thought of the darkness and whiteness; her widow’s weeds and pale face had suggested that; but he could not know the sorrow, the longing, the earthly sense of irreparable loss, the heavenly sense of a possession unalterably hers, that the dark, melancholy leaves and celestial whiteness of the flowers expressed to her. Tears had risen to her eyes and she had stooped and kissed her child,—how like her husband’s that little face!—and had said, after a moment, “We must never leave them, Jack.”
They had never left them. Dorrington had been their home for fifteen years, and the hepaticas the heart of it. It had always seemed to them both the loveliest ritual of the year, that early spring one when, in the hazel copse, they would find the white hepaticas again in flower. And of all the garden labours none were sweeter than those that cherished and divided and protected the beloved flowers.
Mrs. Bradley, to-day, worked in her long border, weeding, forking, placing belated labels. She was dressed in black, her straw hat bound beneath her chin by a ribbon and her soft gardening gloves rolling back from her firm, white wrists. Her gestures expressed a calm energy, an accurate grace. She was tall, and when she raised herself to look over the meadows at the hills, she showed small,decisive features, all marked, in the pallor of her face, as if with the delicate, neutral emphasis of an etching: the grey, scrutinizing eyes, the charming yet ugly nose, the tranquil mouth that had, at the corners, a little fall, half sweet, half bitter, as if with tears repressed or a summoned smile. Squared at brow and chin, it would, but for the mildness of the gaze, have been an imperious face; and her head, its whitened hair drawn back and looped in wide braids behind, had an air at once majestic and unworldly.
She had worked for over an hour and the last label was set beside a precious clump of iris. The hazel copse lay near by; and gathering up her tools, drawing off her wet gloves, she followed the path under the leafless branches and among the hepatica leaves to the stone bench, where, sinking down, she knew that she was very tired. She could see, below the bank, the dark, quick stream; a pale, diffused light in the sky showed where the sun was dropping toward the hills.
Where was Jack at this moment, this quiet moment of a monotonous English winter day?—so like the days of all the other years that it was impossible to think of what was happening a few hours' journey away across the Channel. Impossible to think of it; yet the thick throb of her heart spoke to the full of its significance. She had told herself from the beginning—passionate, rebellious creature as, at bottom, she knew herself to be, always in need of discipline and only in these later years schooled to a control and submission that, in her youth, she would have believed impossible to her—she had told herself, when he had gone from her, that, as a soldier’s widow, she must see hersoldier son go to death. She must give him to that; be ready for it; and if he came back to her it would be as if he were born again, a gift, a grace, unexpected and unclaimed. She must feel, for herself as well as for her country, that these days of dread were also days of a splendour and beauty unmatched by any in England’s history, and that a soldier’s widow must ask for no more glorious fate for her son than death in such a cause. She had told herself all this many times; yet, as she sat there, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes on the stream below, she felt that she was now merely motherhood, tense, huddled, throbbing and longing, longing for its child.
Then, suddenly, she heard Jack’s footsteps. They came, quick and light, along the garden path; they entered the wood; they were near, but softened by the fallen leaves. And, half rising, afraid of her own joy, she hardly knew that she saw him before she was in his arms; and it was better to meet thus, in the blindness and darkness of their embrace, her cheek pressed against his hair, his head buried close between her neck and shoulder.
“Jack!—Jack!” she heard herself say.
He said nothing, holding her tightly to him, with quick breaths; and even after she had opened her eyes and could look down at him,—her own, her dear, beautiful Jack,—could see the nut-brown head, the smooth brown cheek, the firm brown hand which grasped her, he did not for a long time raise his head and look at her. When, at last, he did look up, she could not tell, through her tears, whether, like herself, he was trying to smile.
They sat down together on the bench. She did not ask him why he had not wired. That questionpressed too sharply on her heart; to ask might seem to reproach.
“Darling—you are so thin,—so much older,—but you look—strong and well.”
“We’re all of us extraordinarily fit, mummy. It’s wholesome, living in mud.”
“And wholesome living among bursting shells? I had your last letter telling of that miraculous escape.”
“There have been a lot more since then. Every day seems a miracle—that one’s alive at the end of it.”
“But you get used to it?”
“All except the noise. That always seems to daze me still. Some of our fellows are deaf from it.—You heard of Toppie, mother?” Jack asked.
Toppie was Alan Graham, Jack’s nearest friend. He had been killed ten days before.
“I heard it, Jack. Were you with him?”
“Yes. It was in a bayonet charge. He didn’t suffer. A bullet went right through him. He just gave a little cry and fell.” Jack’s voice had the mildness of a sorrow that has passed beyond the capacity for emotion. “We found him afterwards. He is buried out there.”
“You must tell Frances about it, Jack. I went to her at once.” Frances was Toppie’s sister. “She is bearing it so bravely.”
“I must write to her. She would be sure to be plucky.”
He answered all her questions, sitting closely against her, his arm around her; looking down, while he spoke, and twisting, as had always been his boyish way, a button on her coat. He was at that enchanting moment of young manhood whenthe child is still apparent in the man. His glance was shy yet candid; his small, firm lips had a child’s gravity. With his splendid shoulders, long legs, and noble little head, he was yet as endearing as he was impressive. His mother’s heart ached with love and pride and fear as she gazed at him.
And a question came, near the sharp one, yet hoping to evade it:—
“Jack, dearest, how long will you be with me? How long is the leave?”
He raised his eyes then and looked at her; a curious look. Something in it blurred her mind with a sense of some other sort of fear.
“Only till to-night,” he said.
It seemed confusion rather than pain that she felt. “Only till to-night, Jack? But Richard Crawley has been back for three days already. I thought they gave you longer?”
“I know, mummy.” His eyes were dropped again and his hand at the button—did it tremble?—twisted and untwisted. “I’ve been back for three days already.—I’ve been in London.”
“In London?” Her breath failed her. The sense of alien fear became a fog, horrible, suffocating. “But—Jack—why?”
“I didn’t wire, mummy, because I knew I’d have to be there for most of my time. I felt I couldn’t wire and tell you. I felt I had to see you when I told you. Mother—I’m married.—I came back to get married.—I was married this morning.—Oh, mother, can you ever forgive me?”
His shaking hands held her and his eyes could not meet hers.
She felt the blood rush, as if her heart had been divided with a sword, to her throat, to her eyes,choking her, burning her; and as if from far away she heard her own voice saying, after a little time had passed, “There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive you, Jack. Tell me. Don’t be afraid of hurting me.”
He held her tightly, still looking down as he said, "She is a dancer, mother, a little dancer. It was in London, last summer. A lot of us came up from Aldershot together. She was in the chorus of one of those musical comedies. Mother, you can never understand. But it wasn’t just low and vulgar. She was so lovely,—so very young,—with the most wonderful golden hair and the sweetest eyes.—I don’t know.—I simply went off my head when I saw her. We all had supper together afterwards. Toppie knew one of the other girls, and Dollie was there. That’s her name—Dollie Vaughan—her stage name. Her real name was Watson. Her people, I think, were little tradespeople, and she’d lost her father and mother, and an aunt had been very unkind. She told me all about it that night. Mother, please believe just this: it wasn’t only the obvious thing.—I know I can’t explain. But you remember, when we readWar and Peace"—his broken voice groped for the analogy—“You remember Natacha, when she falls in love with Anatole, and nothing that was real before seems real, and she is ready for anything.—It was like that. It was all fairyland, like that. No one thought it wrong. It didn’t seem wrong. Everything went together.”
She had gathered his hand closely in hers and she sat there, quiet, looking at her hopes lying slain before her. Her Jack. The wife who was, perhaps, to have been his. The children that she, perhaps,should have seen. All dead. The future blotted out. Only this wraith-like present; only this moment of decision; Jack and his desperate need the only real things left.
And after a moment, for his labouring breath had failed, she said, “Yes, dear?” and smiled at him.
He covered his face with his hands. “Mother, I’ve ruined your life.”
He had, of course, in ruining his own; yet even at that moment of wreckage she was able to remember, if not to feel, that life could mend from terrible wounds, could marvellously grow from compromises and defeats. “No, dearest, no,” she said. “While I have you, nothing is ruined. We shall see what can be done. Go on. Tell me the rest.”
He put out his hand to hers again and sat now a little turned away from her, speaking on in his deadened, bitter voice.
“There wasn’t any glamour after that first time. I only saw her once or twice again. I was awfully sorry and ashamed over the whole thing. Her company left London, on tour, and then the war came, and I simply forgot all about her. And the other day, over there, I had a letter from her. She was in terrible trouble. She was ill and had no money, and no work. And she was going to have a child—my child; and she begged me to send her a little money to help her through, or she didn’t know what would become of her.”
The fog, the horrible confusion, even the despair, had passed now. The sense of ruin, of wreckage almost irreparable, was there; yet with it, too, was the strangest sense of gladness. He was her own Jack, completely hers, for she saw now why he haddone it; she could be glad that he had done it. “Go on, dear,” she said. “I understand; I understand perfectly.”
“O mother, bless you!” He put her hand to his lips, bowing his head upon it for a moment. “I was afraid you couldn’t. I was afraid you couldn’t forgive me. But I had to do it. I thought it all over—out there. Everything had become so different after what one had been through. One saw everything differently. Some things didn’t matter at all, and other things mattered tremendously. This was one of them. I knew I couldn’t just send her money. I knew I couldn’t bear to have the poor child born without a name and with only that foolish little mother to take care of it. And when I found I could get this leave, I knew I must marry her. That was why I didn’t wire. I thought I might not have time to come to you at all.”
“Where is she, Jack?” Her voice, her eyes, her smile at him, showed him that, indeed, she understood perfectly.
“In lodgings that I found for her; nice and quiet, with a kind landlady. She was in such an awful place in Ealing. She is so changed, poor little thing. I should hardly have known her. Mother, darling, I wonder, could you just go and see her once or twice? She’s frightfully lonely; and so very young.—If you could.—If you would just help things along a little till the baby comes, I should be so grateful. And, then, if I don’t come back, will you, for my sake, see that they are safe?”
“But, Jack,” she said, smiling at him,“she is coming here, of course. I shall go and get her to-morrow.”
He stared at her and his colour rose. “Get her? Bring her here, to stay?”
“Of course, darling. And if you don’t come back, I will take care of them, always.”
“But, mother,” said Jack, and there were tears in his eyes, “you don’t know, you don’t realize. I mean—she’s; a dear little thing—but you couldn’t be happy with her. She’d get most frightfully on your nerves. She’s just—just a silly little dancer who has got into trouble.”
Jack was clear-sighted. Every vestige of fairyland had vanished. And she was deeply thankful that they should see alike, while she answered, “It’s not exactly a time for considering one’s nerves, is it, Jack? I hope I shan’t get on hers. I must just try and make her as happy as I can.”
She made it all seem natural and almost sweet. The tears were in his eyes, yet he had to smile back at her when she said, “You know that I am good at managing people. I’ll manage her. And perhaps when you come back, my darling, she won’t be a silly little dancer.”
They sat now for a little while in silence. While they had talked, a golden sunset, slowly, had illuminated the western sky. The river below them was golden, and the wintry woodlands bathed in light. Jack held her hands and gazed at her. Love could say no more than his eyes, in their trust and sorrow, said to her; she could never more completely possess her son. Sitting there with him, hand in hand, while the light slowly ebbed and twilight fell about them, she felt it to be, in its accepted sorrow, the culminating and transfiguring moment of her maternity.
When they at last rose to go it was the hour forJack’s departure, and it had become almost dark. Far away, through the trees, they could see the lighted windows of the house that waited for them, but to which she must return alone. With his arms around her shoulders, Jack paused a moment, looking about him. “Do you remember that day—when we first came here, mummy?” he asked.
She felt in him suddenly a sadness deeper than any he had yet shown her. The burden of the past she had lifted from him; but he must bear now the burden of what he had done to her, to their life, to all the future. And, protesting against his pain, her mother’s heart strove still to shelter him while she answered, as if she did not feel his sadness, “Yes, dear, and do you remember the hepaticas on that day?”
“Like you,” said Jack in a gentle voice. “I can hardly see the plants. Are they all right?”
“They are doing beautifully.”
“I wish the flowers were out,” said Jack. “I wish it were the time for the flowers to be out, so that I could have seen you and them together, like that first day.” And then, putting his head down on her shoulder, he murmured, “It will never be the same again. I’ve spoiled everything for you.”
But he was not to go from her uncomforted. She found the firmest voice in which to answer him, stroking his hair and pressing him to her with the full reassurance of her resolution.“Nothing is spoiled, Jack, nothing. You have never been so near me—so how can anything be spoiled? And when you come back, darling, you’ll find your son, perhaps; and the hepaticas may be in flower, waiting for you.”
MRS. BRADLEYand her daughter-in-law sat together in the drawing-room. They sat opposite each other on the two chintz chesterfields placed at right angles to the pleasantly blazing fire, the chintz curtains drawn against a rainy evening. It was a long, low room, with panelled walls; and, like Mrs. Bradley’s head, it had an air at once majestic, decorated, and old-fashioned. It was a rather crowded room, with many deep chairs and large couches, many tables with lamps and books and photographs upon them, many porcelains, prints, and pots of growing flowers. Mrs. Bradley, her tea-table before her, was in her evening black silk; lace ruffles rose about her throat; she wore her accustomed necklace of old enamel, blue, black, and white, set with small diamonds, and the enamel locket that had within it Jack’s face on one side and his father’s on the other; her white hands, moving gently among the teacups, showed an ancient cluster of diamonds above the slender wedding-ring. From time to time she lifted her eyes and smiled quietly over at her daughter-in-law. It was the first time that she had really seen Dollie, that is, in any sense that meant contemplative observation. Dollie had spent her first week at Dorrington in bed, sodden with fatigue rather than ill. “What you need,” Mrs. Bradley had said, “is to go to sleep for a fortnight”; and Dollie had almost literally carried out the prescription.
Stealing carefully into the darkened room, with its flowers and open windows and steadily glowing fire, Mrs. Bradley had stood and looked for longmoments at all that she could see of her daughter-in-law,—a flushed, almost babyish face lying on the pillow between thick golden braids, sleeping so deeply, so unconsciously,—her sleep making her mother-in-law think of a little boat gliding slowly yet steadily on and on, between new shores; so that, when she was to awake and look about her, it would be as if, with no bewilderment or readjustment, she found herself transformed, a denizen of an altered world. That was what Mrs. Bradley wanted, that Dollie should become an inmate of Dorrington with as little effort or consciousness for any of them as possible, and the drowsy days and nights of infantine slumbers seemed indeed to have brought her very near.
She and Pickering, the admirable woman who filled so skilfully the combined positions of lady’s maid and parlourmaid in her little establishment, had braided Dollie’s thick tresses, one on either side,—Mrs. Bradley laughing a little and both older women touched, almost happy in their sense of something so young and helpless to take care of. Pickering understood, nearly as well as Jack’s mother, that Master Jack, as he had remained to her, had married very much beneath him; but at this time of tragic issues and primitive values, she, nearly as much as Jack’s mother, felt only the claim, the pathos of youth and helplessness. It was as if they had a singularly appealing case of a refugee to take care of; social and even moral appraisals were inapplicable to such a case, and Mrs. Bradley felt that she had never so admired Pickering as when seeing that for her, too, they were in abeyance. It was a comfort to feel so fond of Pickering at a time when one was in need of anycomfort one could get; and to feel that, creature of codes and discriminations as she was, to a degree that had made her mistress sometimes think of her as a sort of Samurai of service, a function rather than a person, she was even more fundamentally a kind and Christian woman. Between them, cook intelligently sustaining them from below and the housemaids helpful in their degree, they fed and tended and nursed Dollie, and by that eighth day she was more than ready to get up and go down and investigate her new surroundings.
She sat there now, in the pretty tea-gown her mother-in-law had bought for her, leaning back against her cushions, one arm lying along the back of the couch and one foot in its patent-leather shoe, with its sparkling buckle and alarming heel, thrusting forward a carefully arched instep. The attitude made one realize, however completely tenderer preoccupations held the foreground of one’s consciousness, how often and successfully she must have sat to theatrical photographers. Her way of smiling, too, very softly, yet with the effect of a calculated and dazzling display of pearly teeth, was impersonal, and directed, as it were, to the publicviathe camera rather than to any individual interlocutor. Mrs. Bradley even imagined, unversed as she was in the methods of Dollie’s world, that of allurement in its conscious and determined sense she was almost innocent. She placed herself, she adjusted her arm and her foot, and she smiled gently; intention hardly went further than that wish to look her best.
Pink and white and gold as she was, and draped there on the chesterfield in a profusion of youth and a frivolity that was yet all passivity, she made hermother-in-law think, and with a certain sinking of the heart, of a Dorothy Perkins rose, a flower she had never cared for; and Dollie carried on the analogy in the sense she gave that there were such myriads more just like her. On almost every page of every illustrated weekly paper, one saw the ingenuous, limpid eyes, the display of eyelash, the lips, their outline emphasized by just that touch of rouge, those copious waves of hair. Like the Dorothy Perkins roses on their pergolas, so these pretty faces seemed—looped, draped, festooned—to climb over all the available spaces of the modern press.
But this, Mrs. Bradley told herself, was to see Dollie with a dry, hard eye, was to see her superficially, from the social rather than from the human point of view. Under the photographic creature must lie the young, young girl,—so young, so harmless that it would be very possible to mould her, with all discretion, all tenderness, into some suitability as Jack’s wife. Dollie, from the moment that she had found her, a sodden, battered rose indeed, in the London lodging-house, had shown herself grateful, even humble, and endlessly acquiescent. She had not shown herself at all abashed or apologetic, and that had been a relief; had counted for her, indeed, in her mother-in-law’s eyes, as a sort of innocence, a sort of dignity. But if Dollie were contented with her new mother-in-law, and very grateful to her, she was also contented with herself; Mrs. Bradley had been aware of this at once; and she knew now that if she were being carefully and commendingly watched while she poured out the tea, this concentration did not imply unqualified approval. Dollie was the type ofyoung woman to whom she herself stood as the type of the “perfect lady”; but with the appreciation went the proviso of the sharp little London mind,—versed in the whole ritual of smartness as it displayed itself at theatre or restaurant,—that she was a rather dowdy one. She was a lady, perfect but not smart, while, at the same time, the quality of her defect was, she imagined, a little bewildering and therefore a little impressive. Actually to awe Dollie and to make her shy, it would be necessary to be smart; but it was far more pleasant and perhaps as efficacious merely to impress her, and it was as well that Dollie should be impressed; for anything in the nature of an advantage that she could recognize would make it easier to direct, protect, and mould her.
She asked her a good many leisurely and unstressed questions on this first evening, and drew Dollie to ask her others in return; and she saw herself stooping thoughtfully over a flourishing young plant that yet needed transplanting, softly moving the soil about its roots, softly finding out if there were any very deep tap-root that would have to be dealt with. But Dollie, so far as tastes and ideas went, hardly seemed to have any roots at all; so few that it was a question if any change of soil could affect a creature so shallow. She smiled, she was at ease; she showed her complete assurance that a young lady so lavishly endowed with all the most significant gifts, need not occupy herself with mental adornments.
“You’re a great one for books, I see,” she commented, looking about the room; “I suppose you do a great deal of reading down here to keep from feeling too dull”; and she added that she herself,if there was “nothing doing,” liked a good novel, especially if she had a box of sweets to eat while she read it.
“You shall have a box of sweets to-morrow,” Mrs. Bradley told her, “with or without the novel, as you like.”
And Dollie thanked her, watching her cut the cake, and, as the rain lashed against the windows, remarking on the bad weather and cheerfully hoping that “poor old Jack” wasn’t in those horrid trenches. “I think war’s a wicked thing, don’t you, Mrs. Bradley?” she added.
When Dollie talked in this conventionally solicitous tone of Jack, her mother-in-law could but wish her upstairs again, merely young, merely the tired and battered refugee. She had not much tenderness for Jack, that was evident, nor much imaginativeness in regard to the feelings of Jack’s mother. But she soon passed from the theme of Jack and his danger. Her tea was finished and she got up and went to the piano, remarking that there was one thing shecoulddo. “Poor mother used to always say I was made of music. From the time I was a mere tot I could pick out anything on the piano.” And placing herself, pressing down the patent-leather shoe on the loud pedal, she surged into a waltz as foolish and as conventionally alluring as her own eyes. Her inaccuracy was equalled only by her facility. Smiling, swaying over the keys with alternate speed and languor, she addressed her audience with altogether the easy mastery of a music-hallartiste:“It’s a lovely thing—one of my favourites. I’ll often play, Mrs. Bradley, and cheer us up. There is nothing like music for that, is there? it speaks so to the heart.” And, whole-heartedly, indeed, she accompanied the melody by a passionate humming.
The piano was Jack’s and it was poor Jack who was made of music. How was he to bear it, his mother asked herself, as she sat listening. Dollie, after that initiation, spent many hours at the piano every day,—so many and such noisy hours, that her mother-in-law, unnoticed, could shut herself in the little morning-room that overlooked the brick wall at the front of the house and had the morning sun.
It was difficult to devise other occupations for Dollie. She earnestly disclaimed any wish to have proper music lessons, and when her mother-in-law, patiently persistent, arranged for a skilful mistress to come down twice a week from London, Dollie showed such apathy and dulness that any hope of developing such musical ability as she possessed had to be abandoned. She did not like walking, and the sober pageant of the winter days was a blank book to her. Sewing, she said, had always given her frightful fidgets; and it was with the strangest sense of a privilege, a joy, unhoped-for and now thrust upon her, that Mrs. Bradley sat alone working at the little garments that meant all her future and all Jack’s. The baby seemed already more hers than Dollie’s.
Sometimes, on a warm afternoon, Dollie, wrapped in her fur cloak, would emerge for a little while and watch her mother-in-law at work in her borders. The sight amused and surprised but hardly interested her, and she soon went tottering back to the house on the preposterous heels that Mrs. Bradley had, as yet, found no means of tactfully banishing. And sometimes, when the piano againresounded, Mrs. Bradley would leave her borders and retreat to the hazel-copse, where, as she sat on the stone bench, she could hear, through the soft sound of the running water, hardly more than the distant beat and hum of Dollie’s waltzes; and where, with more and more the sense of escape and safety, she could find a refuge from the sight and sound and scent of Dollie,—the thick, sweet, penetrating scent that was always to be indelibly associated in her mind with this winter of foreboding, of hope, and of growing hopelessness.
In her letters to Jack, she found herself, involuntarily at first, and then deliberately, altering, suppressing, even falsifying. While Dollie had been in bed, when so much hope had been possible of a creature so unrevealed, she had written very tenderly, and she continued, now, to write tenderly, and it was not false to do that; she could feel no hardness or antagonism against poor Dollie. But she continued to write hopefully, as every day hope grew less.
Jack, himself, did not say much of Dollie, though there was always the affectionate message and the affectionate inquiry. But what was difficult to deal with were the hints of his anxiety and fear that stole among the terse, cheerful descriptions of his precarious days. What was she doing with herself? How were she and Dollie getting on? Did Dollie care about any of the things she cared about?
She told him that they got on excellently well, that Dollie spent a good deal of time at the piano, and that when they went out to tea people were perfectly nice and understanding. She knew, indeed, that she could depend on her friends to be that. They accepted Dollie on the terms she askedfor her. From friends so near as Mrs. Crawley and Lady Wrexham she had not concealed the fact that Dollie was a misfortune; but if others thought so they were not to show it. She still hoped, by degrees, to make Dollie a figure easier to deal with at such neighbourly gatherings. She had abandoned any hope that Dollie would grow; anything so feeble and so foolish could not grow; there was no other girl under the little dancer; she was simply no more and no less than she showed herself to be; but, at this later stage of their relationship, Mrs. Bradley essayed, now and then, a deliberate if kindly severity,—as to heels, as to scents, as to touches of rouge.
“Oh, but I’m as careful, just as careful, Mrs. Bradley!” Dollie protested. “I can’t walk in lower heels. They hurt my instep. I’ve a very high instep and it needs support.” She was genuinely amazed that any one could dislike her scent and that any one could think the rouge unbecoming. She seemed to acquiesce, but the acquiescence was followed by moods of mournfulness and even by tears. There was no capacity in her for temper or rebellion, and she was all unconscious of giving a warning as she sobbed, “It’s nothing—really nothing, Mrs. Bradley. I’m sure you mean to be kind. Only—it’s rather quiet and lonely here. I’ve always been used to so many people,—to having everything so bright and jolly.”
She was not rapacious; she was not dissolute; she could be kept respectable and even contented if she were not made too aware of the contrast between her past existence and her present lot. With an air only of pensive pride she would sometimes point out to Mrs. Bradley, in the pages of those sameillustrated weeklies with which her mother-in-law associated her, the face of some former companion. One of these young ladies had recently married the son of a peer. “Sheisin luck, Floss,” said Dollie. “We always thought it would come to that. He’s been gone on her for ages, but his people were horrid.”
Mrs. Bradley felt that, at all events, Dollie had no ground for thinking her “horrid”; yet she imagined that there lay drowsing at the back of her mind a plaintive little sense of being caught and imprisoned. Floss had stepped, triumphant, from the footlights to the registrar’s office, and apparently had succeeded in uniting the radiance of her past and present status. No, Dollie could be kept respectable and contented only if the pressure were of the lightest. She could not change, she could only shift; and although Mrs. Bradley felt that for herself, her life behind her, her story told, she could manage to put up with a merely shifted Dollie, she could not see how Jack was to manage it. What was Jack to do with her? was the thought that pressed with a growing weight on her heart. She could never be of Jack’s life; yet here she was, in it, planted there by his own generous yet inevitable act, and by hers,—in its very centre, and not to be evaded or forgotten.
And the contrast between what Jack’s life might have been and what it now must be was made more poignantly apparent to her when Frances Graham came down to stay from a Saturday to Monday; Frances in her black, tired and thin from Red-Cross work in London; bereaved in more, her old friend knew, than dear Toppie’s death; yet with her leisurely, unstressed cheerfulness almost unaltered,the lightness that went with so much tenderness, the drollery that went with so much depth. Dearest, most charming of girls—but for Jack’s wretched stumble into “fairyland” last summer, destined obviously to be his wife,—could any presence have shown more disastrously, in its contrast with poor Dollie, how Jack had done for himself? She watched the two together that evening, Frances with her thick crinkled hair and clearly curved brow and her merry, steady eyes, leaning, elbow on knee, to talk and listen to Dollie; and Dollie, poor Dollie, flushed, touched with an unbecoming sulkiness, aware, swiftly and unerringly, of a rival type. Frances was of the type that young men married when they did not “do for themselves.” There was now no gulf of age or habit to veil from Dollie her disadvantage. She answered shortly, with now and then a dry, ironic little laugh; and, getting up at last, she went to the piano and loudly played.
“He couldn’t have done differently. It was the only thing he could do,” Frances said that night before her bedroom fire. She did not hide her recognition of Jack’s plight, but she was staunch.
“I wouldn’t have had him do differently. But it will ruin his life,” said the mother. “If he comes back it will ruin his life.”
“No, no,” said Frances, looking at the flames. “Why should it? A man doesn’t depend on his marriage like that. He has his career.”