Christmas Roses and Other Stories. Anne Douglas Sedgwick

this little interchange, had remained near the door; but now, perceiving, perhaps, that she had come near to giving herself away, she cleared her brows of their perplexity and moved forward to the fire, where, leaning her velvet elbow on the mantelpiece, she answered, drily laughing; “Oh! Niel’s care! He wouldn’t know whether the child were fed on suet-pudding or cold ham! She’s not alone, with nurse. There’s no one who can take such care of her as nurse. I knew that.” And she went on immediately, putting the question of Jane Amoret’s presence behind her with decision, “Well, poor Aunt Isabel, what have you to say to me? Father wrote that you would consent to be the go-between. He absolutely implored me to come, and it’s to satisfy him I’m here, for I really can’t imagine what good it can do.”

      No; Mrs. Delafield had grasped her own security and her own danger. It had not been in remorse or tenderness that Rhoda’s eyes had fixed themselves upon her child, it had been in anxiety, lest Jane Amoret’s presence should be the signal of some final verdict against her. She had come because she hoped to be taken back; and if there was all the needed justification in Rhoda’s callousness, there was an undreamed-of danger in her expectation.

      “Well, we must see,” Mrs. Delafield remarked; and already she was measuring the necessities of Rhoda’s pride against the urgencies of Rhoda’s disenchantment. It was Rhoda’s pride that she must hold to. Rhoda, even if she had come, had only come to make her own terms.

      “Did you motor over?” she asked. “You are not very far from here, are you?”

      No train could have brought her at that hour.

      “Twenty miles or so away,” said Rhoda. “I was able to hire a motor, a horrible, open affair with torn flaps that let in all the air, so that I’m frozen.”

      Her loveliness did, indeed, look a little pinched and sharpened, and there was more than the cold drive to account for it. But she was still surpassingly lovely, with the loveliness that, once you were confronted with it, seemed to explain everything that might need explanation. That was Rhoda’s strongest card. She left her appearance to speak for her and made no explanations, as now, when, indeed, she had all the air of expecting other people to make them. But her aunt only said, while Jane Amoret, from her rug, kept her grave gaze upon her mother, “Won’t you have some hot milk?”

      “Thanks, yes, I should be glad of it,” said Rhoda. “How lucky you are to have it. We are given only condensed for our coffee at the hotel. It’s quite revolting.” And after Mrs. Delafield had rung, and since no initiative came from her, she was, in a manner, forced to open the conversation. “Niel has only himself to thank,” she said. “He’s been making himself too impossible for a long time.”

      “Really? In what way? Perhaps the hard life over there has affected his temper.”

      Mrs. Delafield allowed herself the irony. Rhoda, indeed, must expect that special flavour from her.

      “Something has certainly affected it,” said Rhoda, drawing a chair to the fire and spreading her beautiful hands before it. “I’m quite tired, I confess—horrid as I’m perfectly aware it sounds to say it—of hearing about the hard life. Life’s hard enough for all of us just now, heaven knows; and I think they haven’t had half a bad time over there, numbers of them—men like Niel, I mean, who’ve travelled comfortably about the world and never had the least little wound, nor been, ever, in any real danger, as far as I can make out; at least, not since he’s had the staff work. It’s very different from my poor Christopher, who rotted in the cold and mud until it nearly killed him. There would be some point in his talking of a hard life.”

      This was all very illuminating, and the bold advance of Christopher won Mrs. Delafield’s admiration for its manner; but she passed it over to inquire again, “In what way has Niel been making himself impossible?” The more impossible Rhoda depicted him, the easier to leave her there, shut out by his impossibility.

      “Why, his meanness,” said Rhoda, her cold, dark eyes, as she turned them upon her aunt, expressing, indeed, quite a righteous depth of reprobation. “For months and months it’s been the same wearisome cry. He’s written about nothing but economy, fussing, fuming, and preaching. It’s so ugly, at his time of life.”

      “Have you been a little extravagant, perhaps? Everything is so much more costly, isn’t it? He may well have been anxious about your future, and the child’s.”

      It was perfectly mild, and the irony Rhoda would expect from her.

      “Oh, no he wasn’t,” said Rhoda, now with her gloomy laugh. “He was anxious about his hunting. I don’t happen to care for that primitive form of amusement, and Niel doesn’t happen to care about anything else; certainly he doesn’t care about beauty, and that’s all I do care about. So in his view, since, precisely, life has become so costly, beauty had to go to the wall and I mustn’t dress decently or have a decently ordered house. I haven’t been in the least extravagant,” said Rhoda. "I’ve known what it is to be cold; I’ve known what it is to be hungry; it’s been, at times, literally impossible to get food and coal in London. Oh, you don’t know anything about it, Aunt Isabel, tucked away comfortably down here with logs and milk. And if Niel had had any appreciation of the position and had realized at all that I prefer being hungry to being ill-dressed, he would have turned his mind to cutting down his own extravagances and offered to allow me"—and now, for an instant, if velvet can show sharpness, Mrs. Delafield caught in the sliding velvet eye an evident edge of cogitation, even, of calculation—“at least two thousand a year for myself. Money buys absolutely nothing nowadays.”

      So there it was, and it amounted to an offer. Or, rather, it amounted to saying that it was the sum for which she would be willing to consider any offer of Niel’s. Mrs. Delafield, measuring still Rhoda’s pride against Rhoda’s urgency, mused on her velvet garments, the fur that broadly bordered her skirts, slipped from her shoulders, and framed her hands. Poor Tim had been able to give his daughter only a few hundred a year, and Niel’s hunting must indeed have been in danger. Rhoda’s pride, she knew, stood, as yet, between herself and any pressure from the urgency; she could safely leave the offer to lie and go on presently to question, “And you’ll be better off now?”

      Inevitably unsuspecting as she was, Rhoda, all the same, must feel an unexpectedness in her attitude, and at this it was with a full, frank sombreness that she turned her gaze upon her. Anything but a fool she had always been, and she answered, after the moment of gloomy scrutiny, “Don’t imagine, please, Aunt Isabel, that because I speak openly of practical matters I left Niel to get a better establishment. I left him because I didn’t love him. I was willing to sacrifice anything rather than stay. Because it is a sacrifice. I took the step I’ve taken under no illusion. We are too uncivilized yet for things to be anything but difficult for a woman who takes the step, and the brave people have to pay for the cowards and hypocrites.”

      This, somehow, was not at all Rhoda’s own note. Mrs. Delafield felt sure she caught an echo of Mr. Darley’s ministrations. She was glad that Rhoda should receive them: they would sustain her; and since she was determined—or almost—that Rhoda should stay with Mr. Darley, it was well that she should receive all the sustainment possible.

      “It certainly must require great love and great courage,” she assented.

      Rhoda’s eyes still sombrely scrutinized her. “I didn’t expect you to see it, I confess, Aunt, Isabel.”

      “Oh, but I do,” said Mrs. Delafield.

      The milk was now brought and Rhoda began to sip it.

      “As for my being better off, since you are kind enough to take an interest in that aspect of my situation,” she went back, “Christopher hasn’t, it’s true, as much money as Niel. But our tastes are the same, so that I shall certainly be very much better off. We shall live in London—after Niel sets me free.” And here again she just glanced at her aunt, who bowed assent, murmuring, "Yes; yes; he is quite willing to set you free; at once."—“And until then,” Rhoda went on, as if she hadn’t needed the assurance—second-rate assurance as, Mrs. Delafield felt sure, she found it—“and