“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, is very 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.