“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.