Christmas gold, p.634
Christmas Gold, page 634
Mrs. Delafield saw herself so accurately as Rhoda must see her. The terse, old-fashioned aunt in the country residence—yes, dear Fernleigh, square and mid-Victorian, with its name, and its creepers, its conservatory, and its shrubberies, was so eminently a residence; and she had never wanted to alter it into anything else, for it was so that she had found it when, on her mother-in-law’s death, she and the young husband of so many years ago had first gone there to live. Rhoda must see her, her hair so smooth under its cap of snowy net, her black gowns—stuff for morning wear, silk for evening—so invariable, with the frills at neck and wrists, thick gold chains and the dim old brooches that went with them, as belonging almost to an epoch of albums on centre-tables, of Mendelssohn’s sacred songs, and archery tournaments; an epoch of morning family-prayers and moral categories, where some people still believed in hell and everybody believed in sin. She didn’t think that Rhoda had ever seen through all these alienating appearances to the reality she herself knew to be so different; but it had always been evident that she felt it through them; that she was at ease with her aunt, candid, even if angry, and willing, even when most silent and recalcitrant, to come down to Fernleigh, when her distracted parents could deal with her no longer, and to “think things over,” as they put it to her, imploringly.
Mrs. Delafield could see Rhoda thinking things over from a very early age, from the earliest age at which recalcitrancy could count as practically alarming. She could see her walking slowly past this very border at the time that she had determined to go on the stage,—she had only just left the hands of her devastated governesses,—pausing now and then to examine unseeingly a plant, her hands clasped behind her, her dark, gloomy, lovely, young head brooding on the sense of wrong, and, even more, no doubt, on plots and stratagems. Her aunt had always watched her, while seeming, in the most comfortable manner possible, to give her no attention; noting everything about her,—and everything counted against poor Tim’s and Frances’s peace of mind,—from the slender, silken ankles to the tall column of the proud young throat; all of it, every bit of Rhoda, so determined by an insatiable vanity, which was the worst of her, and by a sardonic pride, which was the best.
Rhoda, to do her further justice, was even more wonderful in the eyes of her admirers than in her own. Her consciousness was not occupied so much with her own significance as with all the things due to it; and it was upon these things, and the methods of obtaining them, that she brooded as she walked. “Naughty girl,” had been her aunt’s unexpressed comment; and perhaps one reason why Rhoda had found it comfortable, or, at least, composing, to be with her, was that it was a relief to be seen as a naughty girl rather than as a terrifying portent.
Mrs. Delafield had determined at once that Rhoda should not go on the stage, though not, really, because Tim and Frances had begged her to dissuade the child. She could perfectly imagine having wished to go on the stage herself in her young days; and it was this consciousness, perhaps, that made her so fair to Rhoda’s desire. She had taken her stand on no conventional objection; she had not even argued with Rhoda; she had simply been able to make her feel, bit by bit, that she hadn’t one little atom of talent.
It had been the same thing, really, when Rhoda had announced her intention of marrying a dreadful young man, a bad young man,—Mrs. Delafield knew where to apply her categories,—who had a large studio where he gave teas and painted small, disagreeable pictures. They were clever pictures; Mrs. Delafield was aware of this, though Tim and Frances saw them only as disagreeable; and the young man, if bad, was clever. Mrs. Delafield had travelled up to town several times in this emergency, and had even accompanied Rhoda to the studio, where a young lady with bare legs and feet was dancing, with more concentration than spontaneity, before a cigaretted audience. Oddly enough, after this visit, it had been much easier to make Rhoda give up Mr. Austin Dell than it had been to make her give up the stage. Mrs. Delafield had merely talked him over, very mildly, him and his friends, asking here and there a kindly question about one or a slightly perplexed question about another. It had been Rhoda herself who had expressed awareness of the second-rate flavour that had brooded so heavily over dancer and audience, not leaving Mr. Dell himself untouched. On the point of Mr. Dell’s income Mrs. Delafield soon felt that Rhoda knew misgivings—misgivings as to her own fitness to be a needy artist’s wife. She made no overt recantation, but over her tea, presently, agreed with her aunt that it was a pity to dance with bare feet unless the feet were flawlessly well-shaped. “She is such a little fool, that Miss Matthews!” Rhoda had remarked. And after this there was no more talk of Mr. Dell.
II
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WHEN, in the second year of the war, poor Tim and Frances, dusty, jaded, nearly shattered, but appeased at last, were able to announce the engagement of their daughter Rhoda to the unexceptionable Niel Quentyn, Mrs. Delafield’s special function seemed ended; but, looking back over her long intercourse with her niece, she knew that Rhoda had felt her a relief rather than an influence; that she had made things easier rather than more difficult to her; that, in short, she had always successfully appealed to the girl’s intelligence rather than to what poor Tim and Frances called her better self; and it was of Rhoda’s intelligence, and of what possible pressure she might be able to bring to bear upon it, that she thought finally, as she worked at her border and waited for the fly that was to bring Rhoda’s baby and its nurse from the station.
She had not been able to rejoice with her brother and his wife over Rhoda’s match. She who had measured, during her years of acquaintanceship with her, her niece’s force, had measured accurately, in her first glance at him, Niel’s insignificance. He was good-looking, good-tempered, and very much in love; but caste, clothes, code, and the emotion of his age and situation summed him up. He had money, too, and could give Rhoda, together with a little handle to her name, the dim, rich, startling drawing-room in which her taste at once expressed itself, and a pleasant country house, where, as he confided to Mrs. Delafield, he hoped to inspire her, when the war was over, with his own ardour for hunting.
Rhoda was far too clever to quarrel with such excellent bread and butter; but what could he give her more? for Rhoda would want more than bread and butter; what food for excitement and adventure could he offer her indolent yet eager mind and her nature, at once so greedy and so fastidious? Mrs. Delafield asked herself the question, even while she watched Rhoda’s wonderful white form move up the nave at her splendid, martial wedding; even while poor Frances wept for joy and “The Voice that breathed o’er Eden” surged from the organ; and she feared that Niel was getting far more than he had bargained for and Rhoda far less.
The first year, it was true, passed successfully. Poor Frances, who had, fortunately, died at the end of it, had known no reason for abated rejoicing. She lived long enough to see the baby, little Jane Amoret, as Rhoda persisted in calling the child; and she had welcomed Niel home once on leave—Niel as much infatuated as ever and trying to take an intelligent interest in Picasso. It was since then, during the past year, that Tim’s letters had expressed a growing presage and appeal. Moved by the latter, and only a short time before her own grief had overtaken her, she had gone up to London and stayed with him for a few days, and had taken tea with Rhoda.
At Rhoda’s it had been exactly as she expected. The drawing-room was worthy of its fame; so worthy that Mrs. Delafield wondered how Niel afforded it—and in war-time, too. Rhoda, as she often announced, was clever at picking up things, and many of the objects with which she had surrounded herself were undoubted trophies of her resource and knowledge. But all the taste and skill in the world didn’t give one that air of pervading splendour, as of the setting for a Russian ballet, in which the red lacquer and the Chinese screens, the blacks and golds and rich, dim whites were, like Rhoda herself, sunken with her customary air of gloomy mirth in the deepest cushions and surpassingly dressed, merged in the soft, unstressed, yet magnificent atmosphere. It was the practical side of matters—the depth of good, dull Niel’s purse measured against the depth of Rhoda’s atmosphere—that alarmed Mrs. Delafield, rather than Rhoda herself and Rhoda’s friends, of whom poor Tim had so distressingly written.
There were many suave and merry young men, mainly in khaki, and various ladies, acute or languorous, who had the air of being as carefully selected as the chairs and china. There were tea and cigarettes, and an abundance of wonderful talk that showed no sign of mitigation on account of her mid-Victorian presence; though, as Mrs. Delafield reflected, musing on the young people about her, no one could say, except their clever selves, how much mitigation there might not be. Like Rhoda, no doubt, they felt her reality through her mid-Victorianism. Her small black bonnet with its velvet strings, and her long, loose jacket trimmed with fringe, would not restrain them beyond a certain point. Yet she suspected that they had a point, and she wondered, though the question did not alarm her, where it could be placed.
They talked, at all events, and she listened; at times she even smiled; and since by no possibility could her smiles be taken as complicities, she was willing that they should be taken as comprehensions. Rhoda’s friends, though so young, were chill and arid, and the enthusiasms they allowed themselves had the ring of provocation rather than of ardour. Yet she did not dislike them; they were none of them like Mr. Dell; and, though so withered by sophistication, they had at moments flashes of an uncanny, almost an ingenuous wisdom.
The occasion had not alarmed her, and she had found but one moment oppressive, that of the appearance—the displayal, as of a Chinese idol, indeed, or a Pekinese spaniel (Rhoda had three of these)—of poor little Jane Amoret. She rarely disliked her niece, even when feeling her most naughty; but she found herself disliking her calculated maternity, with its kisses, embraces and reiterated “darlings.” Jane Amoret had eyed her gravely and, as gravely, had held out her arms to her nurse to be taken back when the spectacle was over. Jane Amoret’s attire was quite as strange as her mother’s drawing-room, and Rhoda had contrived to make her look like a cross between an Aubrey Beardsley and a gorgeous, dressed-up doll Madonna in a Spanish cathedral.
On returning to Tim, Mrs. Delafield found that she could not completely reassure him, but she laid stress, knowing it would be, comparatively, a comfort, on Rhoda’s extravagance, eliciting from him a groan of “I know!—I know!—Poor Niel’s been writing to me about it!—Dances; dinners; gowns. One would say she had no conscience at all—and at a time like this!” But he went on, “That’s nothing, though. That can be managed when Niel gets back—if he ever does, poor fellow!—and can put his foot down on the spot. You didn’t see him, then? He wasn’t there—the young man?”
Tim had never before spoken definitely of a young man.
“The young man?” she questioned. “There were a dozen of them. Of course, she’ll have a special one: that’s part of the convention. Rhoda may cultivate—like all the rest of them—every appearance of lawless attachment; but you may be sure, dear Tim, that it’s only a pose, a formula, like the painted lips and dyed hair, which doesn’t in the least mean they are demi-mondaines.”
“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.”
“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.
III
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