Part 4 (2/2)

”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.

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