“It’s curious,” Mrs. Delafield said, laying down the book. “I shouldn’t have thought he’d care about beautiful young women.”
And now Tim’s letter, on this December morning, announced that Rhoda had gone off with Christopher Darley; and Mrs. Delafield could find it in her heart, as she worked and pondered, to wish that her dear Tim had followed Frances before this catastrophe overtook him.
“Good heavens!” she heard herself muttering, “if only she’d been meaner, more cowardly, and stayed and lied—as women of her kind are supposed to do. If only she’d let him die in peace; he can’t have many years.”
But no: it had been done with le beau geste. Tim had known nothing, and poor Niel, home for his first peace leave, had come to him, bewildered and aghast, with the news. He had found a letter waiting for him, sent from the country. Tim copied the letter for her:—
DEAR NIEL:
I’m sure you felt, too, that our life couldn’t go on. It had become too unsatisfactory for both of us. Luckily we are sensible people nowadays, and such mistakes can be remedied. You must mend your life as I am mending mine. I am leaving you, with Christopher Darley. I am so sorry if it seems sudden; but I felt it better that we should not meet again.
Yours affectionately
RHODA
“If only the poet hadn’t had money, too!” Mrs. Delafield had thought. For this fact she had learned about Mr. Darley in London. Rhoda would never have abandoned that drawing-room had she not been secure of another as good.
Tim wrote that nothing could have been manlier, more generous, than Niel’s behaviour. He was willing, for the sake of the child, to take Rhoda back, reinstate her, and protect her from the consequences of her act; and what Tim now begged of his sister was that she should see Rhoda, see if, confronting her, she could not induce her to return to her husband. Meanwhile Jane Amoret would be dispatched at once with her nurse to Fernleigh. Tim had written to his child in her retreat, and had implored her to go to her aunt. “I told her that you would receive her, Isabel,” so Tim’s letter ended; “and I trust you now to save us—as far as we can be saved. Tell her that her husband will forgive, and that I forgive, if she will return. Let her see the child. Let that be your appeal.”
Poor, darling Tim! Very mid-Victorian. “Forgive.” Would “receive” her. The words had an antediluvian ring. With what battledore and shuttle-cock of mirth and repartee they would be sent sailing and spinning in Rhoda’s world. All the same, she, who was mid-Victorian in seeming rather than in reality, would make other appeals, if Rhoda came. Already she could almost count the steady heads of her intentions thrusting up as if through the ground. Even in Rhoda’s world repartee and mirth might be displayed rather than acted upon, and Rhoda might find herself, as a result of le beau geste, less favourably placed for the creation of another drawing-room than she imagined. That, of course, was the line to take with Rhoda; and as she reflected, carefully now, on what she would say to her,—as she determined that Rhoda should not leave her until she had turned her face firmly homeward,—the sound of wheels came up the road, and outside the high walls she heard the station fly drawing up at her gates. In another moment she was welcoming Jane Amoret and her nurse.