“Painted lips? Dyed hair? Demi-mondaines?” Tim had wanly echoed. “Do you really mean, Isabel, that Rhoda paints and dyes?”
“Not her hair. It’s too lovely to be dyed. But her lips,—why, haven’t you seen it?—ever since she was eighteen. It is all, as I say, a pose; a formula. They are all afraid of nothing so much as of seeming respectable. I imagine that there’s just as much marital virtue at large in the world nowadays as when we were young.—Who is the young man?” she had, nevertheless, ended.
“My dear, don’t ask me!” Tim had moaned, blanched and battered in his invalid’s chair. (Why wouldn’t he come down and live with her? Why, indeed, except that, since Frances’s death, he had felt that he must stand by, in London, and watch over Rhoda.) “I only know what I’ve heard. Amy has talked and talked. And everybody else is talking, according to her.” Amy was Frances’s sister, a well-meaning, but disturbing woman, with a large family of well-conducted, well-married, unpainted, and unfashionable daughters. “She is here every day about it. They are always together. He is always there. The poet—the new young poet. He has a heart or a chest or a stomach—something that has sent him home and that keeps him safe at Whitehall, while poor Niel fights in France. Surely, Isabel, you’ve heard of Christopher Darley? Wasn’t he there? Young. Younger than Rhoda. Black hair. Big eyes. Silent.”
Silent.—Yes, there had been, beside Jane Amoret, one silent person in Rhoda’s drawing-room. And she had been aware of him constantly, though, till now, unconsciously. Very young; very pale; aloof, near a window, with an uncalculated aloofness. She reconstructed an impression that became deeper the further she went into it. Thick backward locks that had given his forehead a wind-blown look, and a gaze now and then directed on herself, a gaze grave, withdrawing, yet scrutinizing, too.
“Yes; I think, now that you describe him, I must have seen him,” she murmured; while a curious alarm mounted in her, an alarm that none of Rhoda’s more characteristic circle had aroused. “He wasn’t living by a formula of freedom,” she reflected. “And he wasn’t arid.” Aloud she said, “He looked a nice young creature, I remember.”
“He writes horrible poems, Amy says; blasphemous. There they are. I can’t understand them. He casts down everything; has no beliefs of any kind. Nice? I should think that’s the last adjective that would describe him.”
She had picked up the unobtrusive volume and found herself arrested; not as she had been by the memory of the young man’s gaze, nor yet in the manner that Tim’s account indicated; but still arrested. Very young—but austere, dignified, and strange, genuinely and effortlessly strange. So a young priest might have written, seeking in close-pressed metaphysical analogies to find expression for spiritual passion. She stood, puzzled and absorbed.
“No, it isn’t blasphemous,” she said presently. “And he has beliefs. But surely, Tim dear, surely this young man can’t care for Rhoda.”
How could a young man who wrote like that about the mystic vision care for Rhoda?
“Not care for Rhoda!” Tim’s voice had now the quaintest ring of paternal resentment. “The most beautiful young woman in London! Why, he’s head over heels in love with her. And the worst of it is that, from what Amy sees and hears, she cares for him.”