The old chair, as Mrs. Delafield moved in it, leaning down, creaked softly, and she remembered, a curious excitement stirring under all these recoveries of the past, that it had been condemned as really too decrepit when Peggy had been a baby. Yet the threat had never been carried out. It had gone on through Peggy’s babyhood and through the babyhood of Peggy’s children, and, unused for all these years, here it gave forth again just the plaintive yet comfortable sounds which, even more, it seemed, than another baby’s presence, evoked Peggy and her own young maternity.
The chair, the blocks, the firelight playing on the happy walls, with their framed Caldecotts and Cherry Ripes and Bubbles, all evoked that past, filling her with the mingled acquiescence and yearning of old age. And Jane Amoret evoked a past far, far more distant. Peggy had not been like the great-grandmother. None of them had ever reincarnated that vanished loveliness. But here, mysterious and appealing, it was before her; and it seemed to brush across her very heartstrings every time that, from the blocks, the child lifted the meditative grey of her eyes to her great-aunt’s face.
Far too mysterious, far too lovely, far too gentle, this frail potentiality, for any uses ever to be made of it by Rhoda, by Niel, or by nurse. And the yearning became a yearning over Jane Amoret.
Yes, there the edifice rose, block by block—her deft, deliberate fingers placed them one after the other, under Jane Amoret’s eyes, absorbed in this towering achievement. The miniature Alhambra finished, she sat and gazed, and her little chest lifted in a great sigh of wonder and appeasement. Then, her baby interest dropping, she looked round at the flames, and, for a little time, gazed at them, while her great-aunt’s hand moved softly to rest upon her head. It seemed then, as if in answer to the rapt and tender look bent above her, that Jane Amoret’s eyes were again raised and that she stretched up her arms to be taken.
“She really loves me,” said Mrs. Delafield, as touched and trembling as a young lover. She lifted her, pressing the little body against her breast; and, as Jane Amoret gave herself to the enfolding, a thought that was as sharp and as sudden as a pang flashed through her great-aunt’s mind. “I can never give her up.”
What came to her first, as she sat there, Jane Amoret’s head leaning against her, was the thought of Christmas roses. It was a gift, a miracle. And to what depths of loneliness the gift had been given; with what depths of life she answered it! But she was breathless while she tried to think, knowing something terrible in her own swift acceptance; seeing for the first time something lawless and perilous in her own nature. Never in her life had she betrayed a trust; never broken a law. Yet often, through the years, she had paused, contemplative and questioning, to gaze at something her mirror showed her, an implication that only she could see, a capacity never realized. And what she saw sometimes, with discomfort and shrinking, in those freaked eyes, those firm lips, was an untamed wildness that had come to her from much further back than a great-grandmother; something predatory and reckless, perhaps from the days of border robbers, and Highland chiefs whose only law was their own will.
She knew now what were the faces waiting to seize upon her accusingly. Not Rhoda’s. She swept Rhoda and her forfeited claim aside. Let her stay with her poet, since that was what she had chosen. It was Niel and poor Tim who looked at her aghast. But another face hovered softly and effacingly before them; a pale young face with rosy-mauve lips and following eyes that said, “They will never understand me. This is what I was trying to tell you, always. I knew that I was coming back. This is what I was asking you to do.”
It was superstition; it did not deceive her for a moment. Desire dressing itself in a supernatural appeal. Absurd and discreditable. But, in all truth and honour, wasn’t there something in it? Wasn’t there a time, once in a blue moon, for lawlessness, when it came as a miracle? Whom would she harm, really? What could his paternity mean, really, to drowsy young Niel? And could she not salve Tim’s wounds?
The only thing that could count—she came to that at last, feeling the child, with sleeping, drooping head and little hands held within her hand, already so profoundly her own—the only thing was Jane Amoret herself. Had she a right to keep her from what was, perhaps, her chance of the normal, even if the defective, life? Wasn’t even a bad and foolish mother better than no mother at all, and an untarnished name supremely desirable? She struggled, her eyes fixed on the fire, her hand unconsciously closing fast on the little intertwined hands within it. And with the face of the great-grandmother came again the thought of the Christmas roses, of the gift, the miracle.
She had not sought anything. She had not even chosen. It was rather as if Jane Amoret had chosen her. She need not make an effort to keep the gift. She need merely make no effort to give it back. If Rhoda came (oh, she could but pray that Rhoda would not come!), she need not find the right words for her. She had only to remain the passive spectator of Rhoda’s enterprise and not put out a hand to withdraw her from it. And, thrusting, feverishly, final decisions from her, her mind sprang out into far projects and promises. She could, with a will, live for twenty more years yet and fill them full for Jane Amoret. Niel must not lose his child, evidently. She would arrange with Niel. He had always liked her and turned to her. Let this be his home, and welcome. But of course, he would marry again. She could persuade him not to take Jane Amoret from her to give to a step-mother. Niel would be easy.
And Tim, now, must come, of course. Tim should, with her, enjoy Jane Amoret to the full. What a happy childhood she could make it! It was, to begin with, quite the happiest nursery she knew, this long-empty nursery of hers. In a few years' time Jane Amoret would be old enough to have her own little plot in the garden—Peggy’s plot; and a pony like Peggy’s should come to the empty stables. She saw already the merry, instructed girl she would choose as Jane Amoret’s governess: some one young enough to play out of lesson hours; some one who would teach her to know birds and flowers as well as history and Latin. She would keep Jane Amoret’s hair cut like this—it was the only point in the child’s array in which her taste was Rhoda’s—straight across the forehead and straight across the neck, until she was fifteen, and she should wear smocked blue linen for morning and white for afternoon, as her own children had done. With good luck, she might even see Jane Amoret married.
Actually, she was thinking about Jane Amoret’s marriage, actually wondering about the nice little eldest boy at the manor—while her arms tightened in instinctive maternal anxiety around the sleeping baby—when Parton, doing her best not to look round-eyed, announced Lady Quentyn.
IV
SHE knew, as she waited for Rhoda to come up, that something she had forgotten during this last half-hour—perhaps it was her conscience—steeled her suddenly to the endurance of a test. Tim had worded it, “Let her see the child. Let that be your appeal.” Would it not appease her conscience to stand or fall by that? It should be her appeal. But the only one.
Jane Amoret had waked, and now, dazed but unfretful, suffered herself to be placed again on the rug among the blocks, one of which Mrs. Delafield put into her hands, bidding her build a beautiful big house, as great-aunt had done. The anguish of her own suspense was made manifest to her in the restless gesture with which, after that, and while she waited, she bent to put another log on the fire.
Rhoda’s soft, deliberate rustle was outside. In another moment she had entered, and the effect that Mrs. Delafield dreaded seemed produced on the spot; for, arrested at the very threshold, almost before her eyes had sought her aunt’s, Rhoda stared down at the child with knotted, with even incredulous brows.
“Oh! He’s sent her already, then!” she exclaimed.
What did the stare, the exclamation, portend?
“Yes. He sent her, of course, as soon as he came back.”
“But why?—until our interview is over?”
“Why