"You see, it was over. You see, you couldn"t have made anything of it."
It was almost with tears that she besought him not to suffer too much.
"You have nothing to regret, except having believed in her. Tell me that you are not too unhappy."
"I don"t know what I am," Christopher said. "But I know I"ve more to regret than having believed in her. I"ve all the folly and mischief I"ve made." He had thought it out and she could not deny what he had seen, not even when he went on, "If it could have been in our way,--yours and mine, or, at least, what was yours this morning, when you thought you had kept her with me,--everything might have been atoned for. It might have meant a certain kind of beauty, and a certain kind of happiness, even, perhaps. But in this way, the way she"s chosen, it only means just that--folly, mischief,"--he turned to the fire and looked down into it,--"sin," he finished.
She could not deny it, even to give him comfort; but she could find something else. "It was Rhoda who chose. You, whatever your mistakes, chose very differently. I"m not trying to shift responsibility; to make mistakes is to be foolish and mischievous. But can"t even sin be atoned for? Doesn"t it all now depend on you? That you should make yourself worth it. You are the only one of us who can do that."
He turned to her and his eyes studied her with an unaccepting gentleness.
"You mean because I"m a poet? It isn"t like you, really, to say that.
You don"t believe in poets and their mission in that sense. It"s too facile."
"Not only because you are a poet. I wasn"t thinking so much of that, although your gift helps. But simply because you are young and good."
"I"m not good enough," said Christopher. "And I"m too young. You"ve shown me that. I am afraid of myself. I see what one can do while meaning the best."
She watched him with grave tenderness, feeling again, in his dispa.s.sionate capacity for accepted experience, his strange maturity.
And knowing all that might be difficult, yet knowing that it would be, after all, to a decision like her own, the merest gossamers of convention that she must brave, she said,--and as she looked up at him his face seemed to blend with the face of her little, sleeping, lost Jane Amoret,--"Don"t you think I, perhaps, could be of help, while you are so young?"
He did not understand her at all. He, too, was absorbed in his inner image of loss, yet he, too, was almost as aware of her as she of him, and his eyes, with their austere gentleness, dwelt on her, as if treasuring, of this last encounter, his completed vision of her.
"Yes, you will be. I shall never forget you and what you"ve been to me.
I"ll do my best," he promised her. "But I seem to have lost everything.
I could be strong for her; I don"t know that I can be strong enough for myself."
"That"s what I mean," said Mrs. Delafield. "It takes years to be strong enough for one"s self, and even when one"s old one hasn"t sometimes learned how to be. I"m not sure, after this morning, that I"ve learned yet. But I know that I could be strong for you. Will you let me try?
Will you let me take care of you a little and guard you from the Rhodas until the right person comes?"
"What do you mean?" he asked; and, answering the look in her face, tears sprang to his eyes.
"We belong to each other. Didn"t you say it?" she smiled. "We are friends. We ought not to lose each other now."
"Oh! But--" He gazed at her. "How could you! After what I"ve done!"
"You"ve done nothing that makes me like you less."
"Oh--I can"t! I can"t!" said Christopher Darley. "How could I accept it from you? Already you"ve been unbelievably beautiful to me. It"s not as if you were a Bohemian sort of creature, like me. Appearances must count for you. And the appearance of being friends with your niece"s discarded lover--no--I can"t see it for you. I can imagine you being above the law, but I can"t imagine you being above appearances. I don"t think that I should want you to be. I care about appearances, too, when they are yours."
It crossed her mind, with almost a mirthful sense of the sort of appearances she would have to deal with, that Parton"s face would be worth watching. Poor Tim"s hovered more grievously in the background.
But, after all, it would be a Tim with wounds well salved.
"It"s just because mine are so secure and recognized, don"t you see, that I can do what I like with them," she said. "It"s not for me a question of appearances, but of realities. After all, my dear young man, what am I going to get out of it all? My roots have been torn up too, you know."
"Because of me! Because of me!" Christopher groaned. "Do you think you need remind me of that? Shall I ever forgive myself for it? Get out of it? You"ll get nothing. You"ve been tormented between us all, and you lose Jane Amoret."
"Then don"t let me lose you too," said Mrs. Delafield.
Again, with the tears, his blush sprang to his face, and he stood there incredulous, looking down at her, almost as helpless in the shyness the unexpected gift brought upon him as he had been when he first came in to her.
"Really you mean it?" he murmured. "Really I can do something for you, too? Because, unless I can, I couldn"t accept it."
"You can make me much less lonely, when she"s gone," said Mrs.
Delafield.
She knew that this was to give the gift in such a way as to ensure its acceptance; but he murmured, stung again intolerably by the thought of Jane Amoret, "Oh--I can"t bear it for you!"
"You can help me to bear it."
Still he pressed upon her what he saw as her sacrifice.
"You mean that I may see you when I like? I may always write and you"ll always answer? I can sometimes, even, come and stay, like any other friend? Please realize that if you let me come down on you like that, I may come hard. I"m frightfully lonely, too."
"As hard as you like. I want you to come hard. Like any friend. Yes."
She was smiling up at the young man, and, as she had promised herself years for Jane Amoret, she promised herself now years--though not so many would be needed--for Christopher Darley. It was in the thought of what she could do for Christopher Darley that she saw Rhoda"s punishment. Not for having left him, but for having taken him; for not having known what to do with him without taking him. And Rhoda would see it with her, if no one else did.
"Come, you must quite believe in me," she said. "Give me your hand, dear Christopher, and tell me that you take this meddling, commanding old woman to be your friend."
He had no words as he took the hand she gave him, but from his look it might have been as if he at last received into his keeping the great gift, the precious casket of the future; and his eyes, like those of a devout young knight, dedicated themselves to her service.
It was again gift and miracle; and though in her mind was the thought of all her mournings, and of the lost Jane Amoret, she felt, rooting itself in the darkness and sorrow, yet another flower.
"And now," she said, for they must not both begin to cry, "please ring the bell for me. The time has not quite come for your first visit; but, before you go, we will have our first tea together."
[Ill.u.s.tration: decorative bar]
HEPATICAS
I
OTHER people"s sons were coming home for the three or four days" leave.
The first gigantic struggle--furious onslaught and grim resistance--was over. Paris, pale, and slightly shuddering still, stood safe. Calais was not taken, and, dug into their trenches, it was evident that the opposing armies would lie face to face with no decisive encounter possible until the spring.
There was, with all their beauty and terror, an element of the facetious in these unexpected holidays, of the matter-of-factness, the freedom from strain or sentiment that was the English oddity and the English strength. Men who had known the horrors of the retreat from Mons or the carnage of Ypres, who had not taken off their clothes for ten days at a stretch or slept for four nights, came home from trenches knee-deep in mud, from battlefields heaped with unburied dead, and appeared immaculate and cheerful at breakfast; a little sober and preoccupied, perhaps; touched, perhaps, with strangeness; but ready for the valorous family jest, and alluding to the war as if, while something too solemn for adequate comment, it were yet something that lent itself to laughter. One did such funny things, and saw them; of the other things one did not speak; and there was the huge standing joke of an enemy who actually hated one. These grave and cheerful young men hated n.o.body; but they were very eager to go back again; and they were all ready, not only to die but to die good-humouredly. From the demeanour of mothers and wives and sisters it was evident that nothing would be said or done to make this readiness difficult; but Mrs. Bradley, who showed serenity to the world and did not even when alone allow herself to cry, suspected that the others, beneath their smiles, carried hearts as heavy with dread as her own.
It had been heavy, with hope now as well as with dread, for the past week. It was a week since she had last heard from Jack. Mrs. Crawley over the hill, had had a wire, and her husband was now with her; and Lady Wrexham expected her boy to-morrow. There was no certainty at all as regarded herself; yet at any moment she might have her wire; and feeling to-day the stress of waiting too great to be borne in pa.s.sivity, she left her books and letters and put on her gardening shoes and gloves and went out to her borders.
For weeks now the incessant rain had made the relief and solace of gardening almost an impossibility; but to-day was mild and clear. There was no radiance in the air; curtains of pearly mist shut out the sky; yet here and there a soft opening in the white showed a pale, far blue, gentle and remote as the gaze of a wandering G.o.ddess, and the hills seemed to smile quietly up at the unseen sun. Mrs. Bradley, as she went along the river-path, could look across at the hills; the river-path and the hills were the great feature of Dorrington,--the placid, comely red brick house to which she and Jack had come fifteen years ago, after the death of her husband in India. Enclosed by woods, and almost catching sight of the road,--from its upper windows and over its old brick wall,--the house would have seemed to her too commonplace and almost suburban, in spite of the indubitably old oak-panelling of the drawing-room, had it not been for the river and the hills. Stepping out on to the lawn from the windows of the drawing-room, she and Jack, on that April day, had found themselves confronting both--the limpid, rapid little stream, spanned near the house by its mossy bridge, and the hills, beyond the meadows, streaked with purple woodlands and rising, above the woods, to slopes russet, fawn, and azure. Jack, holding her by the hand, had pointed at once with an eager "Isn"t it pretty, mummy!"--even at eight he had cared almost as much as she, and extraordinarily in the same way, for the sights of the country; and if the hills hadn"t settled the question, it was settled, quite finally, ten minutes later, by the white hepaticas.
They had come upon them suddenly, after their tour of the walled kitchen garden and their survey of the lawn with its ugly shrubberies,--now long forgotten,--penetrating a thicket of hazels and finding themselves in an opening under trees where neighbouring woods looked at them over an old stone wall, and where, from an old stone bench, one could see the river.
The ground was soft with the fallen leaves of many an autumn; a narrow path ran, half obliterated, down to the river; and among the faded brown, everywhere, rose the thick cl.u.s.ters, the dark leaves, and the snowy flowers,--poignant, amazing in their beauty.
She and Jack had stopped short to gaze. She had never before seen such white hepaticas, or so many, or so placed. And Jack, presently, lifting his dear nut-brown head and nut-brown eyes, had said, gazing up at her as he had gazed at the flowers, "They are just like you, mummy."