And now, curiously, poignantly to her, he began to blush as though suddenly and overwhelmingly aware of himself and of how idiotically he must be behaving. Poor child! How young he was! And how ill he had been in the trenches; and how beautiful it was to remember—as she did suddenly, and not irrelevantly, she knew, though she could not trace the relevance—that, in the little volume, written since his return, there had not been a shadow of the ugly rancour, revengeful and provocative, one met in some other soldier-poets whom one might have fancied to be of his kind. For how he must have hated it! And, at the same time,—memory brought back a line, a stanza here and there, from her snatched reading—how holy he had found it; seeing so much more than error, death, and suffering.
Her eyes dwelt on him with something beyond the kindly wish to spare him as she said, “Please sit down. You must be very tired and you are not strong, Rhoda told me. Don’t be afraid of me. I am an old lady who can listen to anything and, I think, understand a great deal. I’ve already heard a great deal from Rhoda. I’m anything but unfriendly to you, I assure you.”
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 tumbled forth 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.