Mrs. Delafield kept her eyes fixed on the fire. Rhoda stood up and leaned her back against the mantelpiece. She could no longer control the manifestations of her impatience and her perplexity.
“That would be your view, of course; and father’s; and Niel’s. It’s not mine. I consider the responsibility to be Niel’s.” “Well, whosesoever the responsibility, the deed is done, isn’t it?” Mrs. Delafield observed. “I’m not arraigning you, you know. I’m merely stating the fact. You have left her.”
Rhoda’s impatience now visibly brushed past these definitions. “You say that Niel is ready to set me free. I took that for granted, of course. It’s only common decency. But that’s hardly what father could have meant in imploring me to come to—you. He told me nothing—only implored, and lamented. And, since I am here, I’d like some information, I confess.”
It was the first step away from pride, and it was a long one. And Mrs. Delafield knew that with it came her own final turning-point. Here, at this moment, she must be true to Tim and Niel, or betray their trust. And here no less—for so it seemed to her—she might, in betraying them, take the law into her own hands and promise herself, and them, that, in breaking it, she would make something better. Yet she did not feel these alternatives, now, at war within her mind. She knew that they were there, implicit, but she knew them already answered. Rhoda had answered for her; and Jane Amoret had answered. It took her, however, a moment to find her own answer, the verbal one, and while she looked for it, she kept her eyes on the fire.
“Your father wants you to go back,” she said at last. “Niel is willing to take you back. That is the information I had for you. Not for a moment because he would accept your interpretation of responsibility, and not for a moment because of any personal feeling for you; which must be a relief to you. Merely for your sake, and the child’s. But I don’t know how to plead such a cause with you, Rhoda. I understand you, I think, better than your father does. I’ve always seen your point of view as he could never see it, and I see it even now. So that I should feel that I asked you something outrageous in asking you to go back to your husband when you love another man. If you should want to go back, that would be a very different matter—if, by chance, you feel you’ve made a mistake and are tired, already, of Mr. Darley.”
She had time, in the pause that followed, the scales pulsing almost evenly—it was as if she saw them—between Rhoda’s pride and Rhoda’s urgency, to wonder at herself. And most of all to wonder that she regretted nothing. She kept her eyes on the fire, but she knew that Rhoda, very still, scrutinized her intently. The sharply drawn tension of the moment had resolved itself, to her imagination, into a series of tiny ticks, as if of the scales settling down to the choice, before Rhoda spoke. Then what she found to say was, “That’s hardly likely, is it?”
“I felt it impossible, you will be glad to hear,” said Mrs. Delafield. “No one who understands you could suspect you, whatever your faults, of two infidelities in the space of a fortnight.”
And now again there was a long silence, broken only by the lapping of the flames up the chimney and the soft movements of Jane Amoret among her blocks.
Rhoda turned away at last, facing the fire and looking down at it, her hands on the edge of the mantelpiece, her foot on the fender; and she presently lifted the foot and dealt the logs a kick.
It was all clear to Mrs. Delafield. She was tired of her poet, or, at all events, did not, in the new life, find compensations enough. She had come, hoping to have her way made clear for a reëntry, dignified, if not triumphant, into the old life. And here she was, in her corner, her head fairly fixed to the wall.