Ariane ma sœur! de quel amour blesséeVous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée!
Ariane ma sœur! de quel amour blesséeVous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée!
She taught Mother to recite Phèdre’s great speeches with such fire and passion. There could hardly be a better training for French,” said Miss Toner, repeating the lines with a curious placidity and perfection. “I preferred Mademoiselle Jouffert’s rendering to Bernhardt’s. Her Phèdre was, with all the fire, more tender and womanly.”
“Do you care about Racine?” Oldmeadow asked her, while the lines rang in his ears—rather as in his dream the rooks’ cawing had done—with an evocative sadness that hung, irrelevantly, about their speaker. “It’s not easy for our English ears to hear the fire and passion, is it; but they are there.”
“He is very perfect and accomplished,” said Miss Toner. “But I always feel him small beside our Shakespeare. He lacks heart, doesn’t he?”
“There’s heart in those lines you’ve just recited.”
“Yes,” said Miss Toner. “Those lines are certainly very beautiful. It’s the mere music of them, I think. They make me feel—” she paused. It was unlike her to pause and he wondered what she made of Ariane, off her own bat, without Mademoiselle Jouffert to help her.
“They make you feel?” he questioned.
“They are so sad—so terribly melancholy. The sound of them. They make me want to cry when I hear them. But I think it’s the sound; for their meaning makes me indignant. There is such weakness in them; such acceptance of destiny. I want to revolt and protest, too—for women. She should not have died.”
Oldmeadow involuntarily glanced across at Nancy. She was looking at Miss Toner and if she had been pale before, she was paler now. Nancy would never think of herself in connection with Ariane and tragic grief; yet something in the lines, something in Miss Toner’s disavowal of their applicability, had touched the hidden cut. And, once again, it was Meg’s eyes that met his, showing him that what he saw she saw, too. Barney saw nothing.All his solicitude was for Miss Toner in her imaginary plight. “I’m sure you never would!” he exclaimed. “Never die, I mean!”
“You think Miss Toner would have come to terms with Bacchus,” Oldmeadow suggested. He didn’t want to take it out of Barney, though he was vexed with him, nor to take it out of Miss Toner, either. He only wanted to toss and twist the theme and make it gay where Miss Toner made it solemn.
“Come to terms with Bacchus!” Barney quite stared, taken aback by the irreverence. “Why should she! She’d have found somebody more worth while than either of the ruffians.”
Miss Toner smiled over at him.
“I’m sure that if Bacchus had been fortunate enough to meet Miss Toner she’d have converted him to total abstinence in a jiffy and made a model husband of him. He was a fine, exhilarating fellow; no ruffian at all; quite worth reforming.” Oldmeadow, as he thus embroidered his theme, was indulging in his own peculiar form of mirth.
He saw Miss Toner laying her hand on the head of Bacchus; Miss Toner very picturesque on the rugged sea-shore in her white and pearls and roses, and Bacchus dazed and penitent, his very leopards tamed to a cat-like docility. His laugh was visible rather than audible and that Miss Toner had never before been the subject of such mirth was evident to him.
She met whatever she saw or guessed of irreverence, however, as composedly as she would have met Bacchus; perhaps already, he reflected, she was beginning to think of him in the light of an undesirable wine-bibber. Perhaps even, she was beginningto think of him as a ruffian. He didn’t mind in the least, so long as he succeeded in keeping off her solemnity.
“I should have been quite willing to try and reform him,” she said; “though it takes much longer than a jiffy to reform people, Mr. Oldmeadow; but I shouldn’t have been willing to marry him. There are other things in life, aren’t there, than love-stories—even for women.”
“Bravo!” said Oldmeadow. He felt as well as uttered it. She wasn’t being solemn, and she had returned his shuttlecock smartly. “But are there?” he went on. He had adjusted his eyeglass for a clearer confrontation of her.
Miss Toner’s large eyes, enlarged still further by the glass, met his, not solemnly, but with a considering gravity.
“You are a sceptic, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she observed. “A satirist. Do you find that satire and scepticism take you very far in reading human hearts?”
“There’s one for you, Roger!” cried Barney.
Oldmeadow kept his gaze fixed on Miss Toner. “You think that Ariane might prefer Infant Welfare work or Charity Organization to a love-story?”
“Not those necessarily.” She returned his gaze. “Though I have known very fine big people who did prefer them. But they are not the only alternatives to love-stories.”
“I am sceptical,” said Oldmeadow. “I am, if you like, satirical. I don’t believe there are any alternatives to love-stories; only palliatives to disappointment.”
Barney leaned forward: “Adrienne, you see, doesn’t accept that old-fashioned, sentimentalizing division of the sexes. She doesn’t accept the merely love-story, hearth-side rôle for women.”
“Oh, well,” Oldmeadow played with his fork, smiling with the wryness that accompanied his reluctant sincerities, “I don’t divide the sexes as far as love-stories are concerned. We are all in the same boat. For us, too, Barney, it’s love-story or palliative. You don’t agree? If you were disappointed in love? Hunting? Farming? Politics? Post-Impressionism? Would any of them fill the gap?”
It wasn’t at all the line he had intended the talk to take. He knew that as he glanced across at Nancy. Saying nothing, as if its subject could not concern her, and with a dim little smile, she listened, and he knew that for her, though she wouldn’t die of it, there would be only palliatives. If only Barney, confound him, hadn’t been so charming.
Barney did not know how to answer the last assault, and, boyishly, looked across at his beloved for succour. She gave it instantly.
“Sadness, sorrow, tragedy, even, isn’t despair,” she said. “Barney, I believe, if sorrow overtook him, would mould the rough clay of his occupation to some higher beauty than the beauty he’d lost. To lie down and die; to resign oneself to palliatives. Oh, no. That’s not the destiny of the human soul.”
“Roger’s pulling your leg, Barney, as usual,” Palgrave put in scornfully. He had been listening with his elbows on the table, his eyes on the table-cloth. “He knows as well as I do that there’s only one love. The sort you’re all talking about—the Theseus and Ariane affair—is merely an ebullition of youth and as soon as nature has perpetuated thespecies by means of it, it settles down, if there’s any reality under the ebullition, to grow into the other—the divine love; the love of the soul for the Good, the True and the Beautiful,” Palgrave declared, growing very red as he said it.
“Really—my dear child!” Mrs. Chadwick murmured. She had never heard such themes broached at her table and glanced nervously up at old Johnson to see if he had followed. “That is a very, very materialistic view!”
Oldmeadow at this began to laugh, audibly as well as visibly, and Palgrave, as their eyes met in a glance of communicated comedy, could not withhold an answering smile. But Barney’s face showed that he preferred to see Palgrave’s interpretation as materialistic and even Miss Toner looked thoughtfully at her champion.
“But we need the symbol of youth and nature,” she suggested. “The divine love, yes, Palgrave, is the only real one; but then all love is divine and human love sometimes brings the deepest revelation of all. Browning saw that so wonderfully.”
“Browning, my dear!” Palgrave returned with a curious mingling of devotion, intimacy and aloofness, “Browning never got nearer God than a woman’s breast!”
At this, almost desperately, Mrs. Chadwick broke in: “Did you ever see our Ellen Terry act, Adrienne? I liked her much better than Madame Bernhardt who had such a very artificial face, I think. I can’t imagine her as Rosalind, can you? While Miss Terry was a perfect Rosalind. I met her once with Henry Irving at a garden-party in London and she was as charming off as on the stage and I’m sure I can’t seewhy anybody should wish to act Phèdre—poor, uncontrolled creature. Rhubarb-tart, dear, and custard? or wine-jelly and cream? How beautifully you speak French. How many languages do you speak?” Mrs. Chadwick earnestly inquired, still turning the helm firmly away from the unbecoming topic.
Miss Toner kept her head very creditably and, very tactfully, at once accepted her hostess’s hint. “Rhubarb-tart, please, dear Mrs. Chadwick. Not so very many, really. My German has never been good; though French and Italian I do know well, and enough Spanish for Don Quixote. But,” she went on, while Mrs. Chadwick looked gratefully at her, “Mother and I were always working. We never wasted any of our precious hours together. She couldn’t bear the thought ofmissinganything in life; and she missed very little, I think. Music, poetry, painting—all the treasure-houses of the human spirit—were open to her. And what she won and made her own, she gave out again with greater radiance. How I wish you could all have known her!” said Miss Toner, looking round at them with an unaccustomed touch of wistfulness. “She was radiance personified. She never let unhappinessreston her. I remember once, when she had had a cruel blow from a person she loved and trusted—in the middle of her sadness she looked at me and saw how sad she was making me; and she sprang up and seized my hands and cried: ‘Let’s dance! Let’s dance and dance and dance!’ And we did, up and down the terrace—it was at San Remo—she in her white dress, with the blue sky and sea and the orange-trees all in bloom. I can see her now. Andthen she rushed to get music, her harp, and flowers and fruit, to take to an invalid friend, and we spent the afternoon with her, mother surpassing herself in charm and witchery. She was always like that. She would have found something, oh, very beautiful, to make from her sorrow if Theseus had abandoned her! But no one,” said Miss Toner, looking round at Oldmeadow, now with a mild playfulness, “could ever have abandoned Mother.”
There was something to Oldmeadow appealing in her playfulness; her confidence, when it took on this final grace, was really touching. For Mrs. Toner the light-giver he knew that he had conceived a rooted aversion. And he wondered if she would go on, over the rhubarb-tart, to tell, after the dancing on the terrace, of the death at sea. But he was spared that.
“And your father died when you were very young, didn’t he, dear?” said Mrs. Chadwick, fearful of the reference to Theseus. “I think your mother must often have been so very lonely; away from home for such a great part of the time and with so few relatives.”
Miss Toner shook her head. “We were always together, she and I, so we could never, either of us, be lonely. And wherever we went she made friends. People were always so much more than mere people to her. She saw them always, at once, high and low, prince and peasant, as souls, and they felt it always, and opened to her. Then, until I was quite big, we had my lovely grandmother. Mother came from Maine and it was such a joy to go and stay there with Grandma. It was a very simple little home. It was always high thinking and plain living, with Grandma; and though, when she married and becamerich, Mother showered beautiful things upon her, Grandma stayed always in the little house, doing for her poor neighbours, as she had always done, and dusting her parlour—a real New England parlour—and making her own griddle cakes—such wonderful cakes she made! I was fifteen when she died; but the tie was so close and spiritual that she did not seem gone away from us.”
“RATHERnice to think that there are so many good and innocent people in the world, isn’t it,” Barney remarked, when he, Palgrave and Oldmeadow were left to their wine and cigars. It was evident that he would have preferred to omit the masculine interlude, but Oldmeadow was resolved on the respite. She had touched him because she was so unaware; but he was weary and disconcerted. How could Barney be unaware? And was he? Altogether? His comment seemed to suggest a suspicion that Miss Toner’s flow might have aroused irony or require justification.
“Miss Toner and her mother seem to have found the noble and the gifted under every bush,” he remarked, and he was not sure that he wished to avoid irony though he knew that he did wish to conceal it from Barney. “It’s very good and innocent to be able to do that; but one may keep one’s goodness at the risk of one’s discrimination. Not that Miss Toner is at all stupid.”
Palgrave neither smoked nor drank. He had again leaned his elbows on the table and his head on his fists, but, while Oldmeadow spoke, he lifted and kept his gaze on him. “You don’t like her,” he said suddenly. He and Oldmeadow had, irrepressibly, over Mrs. Chadwick’s conception of materialism, interchanged their smile at dinner; but since the morning Oldmeadow had known that Palgrave suspected him of indifference, perhaps even hostility, towards the new-comer. “Why don’t you like her?” the boy went on and with a growing resentment as his suspicions found voice. “Sheisn’tstupid; that’s just it. She’s good and noble and innocent; and gifted, too. Why should we pretend to be too sophisticated to recognize such beauty when we meet it? Why should we be ashamed of beauty—afraid of it?”
Barney, flushing deeply, looked down into his wine-glass.
“My dear Palgrave, I don’t understand you,” said Oldmeadow. But he did. He seemed to hear the loud beating of Palgrave’s heart. “I don’t dislike Miss Toner. How should I? I don’t know her.”
“You do know her. That’s an evasion. It’s all there. She can’t be seen without being known. It’s all there; at once. I don’t know why you don’t like her. It’s what I want to know.”
“Drop it, Palgrave,” Barney muttered. “Let Roger alone. He and Adrienne get on very well together. It’s no good forcing things.”
“I’m not forcing anything. It’s Roger who forces his scepticism and his satire on us,” Palgrave declared.
“I’m sorry to have displeased you,” said Oldmeadow with a slight severity. “I am unaware of having displayed my disagreeable qualities more than is usual with me.”
“Of course not. What rot, Palgrave! Roger is always disagreeable, bless him!” Barney declared with a forced laugh. “Adrienne understands him perfectly. As he says: she isn’t stupid.”
“Oh, all right. I’m sorry,” Palgrave rose, thrusting his hands in his pockets and looking down at the two as he stood above them. He hesitated and thenwent on: “All I know is that for the first time in my life—the very first time, mind you—all the things we are told about in religion, all the things we read about in poetry, the things we’re supposed to care for and live by, have been made real to me—outside of books and churches. What do we ever see of them at home here, with dear Mummy and the girls? What do we ever talk of, all of us—but the everlasting round—hunting, gardening, cricket, hay; village treats and village charities. A lot of chatter about people—What a rotter So-and-so is; and How perfectly sweet somebody else: and a little about politics—Why doesn’t somebody shoot Lloyd George?—and How wicked Home Rulers are. That’s about all it amounts to. Oh, I know we’re not as stupid as we sound.Shesees that. We can feel things and see things though we express ourselves like savages. But we’re too comfortable to think; that’s what’s the trouble with us. We don’t want to change; and thought means change. And we’re shy; idiotically shy; afraid to express anything as it really comes to us; so that I sometimes wonder if things will go on coming; if we shan’t become like the Chinese—a sort ofobjet d’artset of people, living by rote, in a rut. Well. That’s all I mean. With her one isn’t ashamed or afraid to know and say what one feels. With her one wants to feel more. And I, for one, reverence her and am grateful to her for having made beauty and goodness real to me.” Having so delivered himself, Palgrave, who had, after his deep flush, become pale, turned away and marched out of the room.
The older men sat silent for a moment, Oldmeadow continuing to smoke and Barney turningthe stem of his wine-glass in his fingers. “I’m awfully sorry,” he said at last. “I can’t think what’s got into the boy. He’s in rather a moil just now, I fancy.”
“He’s a dear boy,” said Oldmeadow. “There’s any amount of truth in what he says. He’s at an age when one sees these things, if one is ever going to see them. I hope he’ll run straight. He ought to amount to something.”
“That’s what Adrienne says,” said Barney. “She says he’s a poet. You think, too, then, that we’re all in such a rut; living Chinese lives; automata?”
“It’s the problem of civilization, isn’t it, to combine automatism with freedom. Without a rut to walk in you reach nowhere—if we’re to walk together. And yet we must manage to ramble, too; individuals must; that’s what it comes to, I suppose. Individuals must take the risk of rambling and alter the line of the rut for the others. Palgrave may be a rambler. But I hope he won’t go too far afield.”
“You do like her, Roger, don’t you?” said Barney suddenly.
It had had to come. Oldmeadow knew that, as the depth of silence fell about them. It was inevitable between them, of course. Yet he wished it might have been avoided, since now it must be too late. He pressed out the glow of his cigar and leaned his arms on the table, not looking at his friend while he meditated, and he said finally—and it might seem, he knew, another evasion—“Look here, Barney, I must tell you something. You know how much I care about Nancy. Well, that’s the trouble. It’s Nancy I wanted you to marry.”
Barney had held himself ready and a deep, involuntary sigh of relief, or of postponed suspense, now escaped him. “I see. I didn’t realize that,” he said. And how he hoped, poor Barney! it was all there was to realize! “Of course I’m very fond of Nancy.”
“You realize, of course, how fond she is of you.”
“Well; yes; of course. We’re both awfully good pals,” said Barney, confused.
“That’s what Palgrave would call speaking like a savage, Barney. Own to it that if Miss Toner hadn’t appeared upon the scene you could have hoped to make Nancy your wife. I don’t say you made love to her or misled her in any way. I’m sure you never meant to at any rate. But the fact remains that you were both so fond of each other that you would certainly have married. So you’ll understand that when I come down here and find Miss Toner installed as tutelary goddess over you all, what I’m mainly conscious of is grief for my dear little relegated nymph.”
Still deeply flushed, but still feeling his relief, Barney turned his wine-glass and murmured: “I see. I quite understand. Yes; I should have been in love with her, I own. I nearly was, last winter. As to her being in love with me, that’s a different matter. I’ve no reason to think she was in love. It would just be a difference of degree, with Nancy, wouldn’t it; she loves us all so much, and she’s really such a child, still. Of course that’s what she seems to me now, since Adrienne’s come; just a darling child.”
“I suppose so. But you understand what I feel, too. I feel her much more than a darling child, and it’s difficult for me to like anybody who has dispossessedher. I perfectly recognize Miss Toner’s remarkable qualities and hope to count myself among her friends one day; but, being a satirist and a sceptic, I rebel instinctively against goddesses of whatever brand. Nymphs are good enough for me; and I can’t help wishing, irrepressibly, that nymphs had remained good enough for you, my dear boy.”
“It isn’t a question of nymphs; it isn’t a question of goddesses,” Barney said, glancing up now at his friend. “I’m awfully sorry about Nancy; but of course she’ll find some one far better than I am; she’s such a dear. You’re not quite straight with me, Roger. I don’t see Adrienne as a goddess at all; I’m not like Palgrave, a silly boy, bowled over. It’s something quite different she does to me. She makes me feel safe; safe and happy in a way I never imagined possible. It’s like having the sunlight fall about one; it’s like life, new life, to be with her. She’s not a goddess; but she’s the woman it would break my heart to part with. I never met such loveliness.”
“My dear boy,” Oldmeadow murmured. He still leaned on the table and he still looked down. “I do wish you every happiness, as you know.” He was deeply touched and Barney’s quiet words troubled him as he had not before been troubled.
“Thanks. I know you do. I know you care for my happiness. And I can’t imagine anything coming into my life that would make a difference to us. That’s just it.” Barney paused. “It won’t, will it, Roger?”
The crisis was again upon them. Oldmeadow did not look up as he said: “That depends on her, doesn’t it?”
“No; it depends on you,” Barney quickly replied.
“She likes you, quite immensely, already. She says you make her think of one of Meredith’s dry, deep-hearted heroes,” Barney gave a slightly awkward laugh, deprecating the homage as he offered it. “She says you are the soul of truth. There’s no reason, none whatever, why you shouldn’t be the best of friends, as far as she is concerned. It’s all she asks.”
“It’s all I ask, of course.”
“Yes, I know. But if you don’t meet her half-way? Sometimes I do see what Palgrave means. Sometimes you misunderstand her.”
“Very likely. It takes time really to understand people, doesn’t it.”
But poor Barney was embarked and could not but push on. “As just now, you know, about finding nobility behind every bush and paying for one’s goodness by losing one’s discrimination. There are deep realities and superficial realities, aren’t there, and she sees the deep ones first. It’s more than that. Palgrave says she makes reality. He didn’t say it to me, because I don’t think he feels me to be worthy of her. He said it to Mother, and puzzled her by it. But I know what he means. It’s because of that he feels her to be a sort of saint. Do be straight with me, Roger. Say what you really think. I’d rather know; much. You’ve never kept things from me before,” Barney added in a sudden burst of boyish distress.
“My dear Barney,” Oldmeadow murmured.
It had to come, then. He pushed back his chair and turned in it, resting an arm on the table; and he passed his hand over his head and kept it there while he stared for a moment hard at the ceiling.
“I think you’ve made a mistake,” he then said.
“A mistake?” Barney faltered blushing. It was not anger; it was pain, simple, boyish pain that thus confessed itself.
“Yes; a mistake,” Oldmeadow repeated, not looking at him, “and since I fear it’s gone too far to be mended, I think it would have been better if you’d not pressed me, my dear boy.”
“How do you mean? I’d rather know, you see,” Barney murmured, after a moment.
“I don’t mean about the goodness, or the power,” said Oldmeadow. “She is good, and she has power; but that’s in part, I feel, because she has no inhibitions—no doubts. To know reality we must do more than blow soap-bubbles with it. It must break us to be known. She’s never been broken. Perhaps she never will be. And in that case she’ll go on blind.”
Barney was silent for a moment, and that it was not as bad as he had feared it might be was apparent from the attempted calm with which he asked, presently: “Why shouldn’t you be blind to evil and absurdity if you can see much further than most people into goodness? Perhaps one must be one-sided to go far.”
“Perhaps. But it’s dangerous to be one-sided—to oneself and others. And does she see further? That’s the question. Doesn’t she tend, rather, to accept as first-rate what you incline to find second? You’re less strong than she is, Barney, and less good, no doubt. But you can’t deny that you’re less blind. So what you must ask yourself is whether you can be sure of being happy with a wife who’ll never doubt herself and who’ll not see absurdity where yousee it. Put it at that. Will you be happy with her?”
He was, he knew, justified of Miss Toner’s commendation, for truth between friends could go no further and, in the silence, while he sickened for his friend, he felt it searching Barney’s heart. How it searched, how many echoes it found awaiting it, was proved by the prolongation of the silence.
“I think you exaggerate,” said Barney at length, and in the words Oldmeadow read his refusal to examine further the truths revealed to him. “You see all the defects and none of the beauty. It can’t be a mistake if I can see both. She’ll learn a little from me, that’s what it comes to, for all the lot I’ll have to learn from her. I’ll be happy with her if I’m worthy of her. What it comes to, you see, as I said at the beginning, is that I can’t be happy without her.” He rose and Oldmeadow, rising also, knew that they closed upon an unresolved discord. Yet these final words of Barney’s pleased him so much that he could not leave it quite at that.
“Mine may be the mistake, after all,” he said. “Only you must give me time to find it out. I began by telling you I couldn’t be really dispassionate; and I feel much better for our talk, if that’s any satisfaction to you. If you can learn from each other and see the truth together, you’ll be happy. You’re right there, Barney. That is what it comes to.” They moved towards the door. “Try not to dislike me for my truth too much,” he added.
“My dear old fellow,” Barney muttered. He laid his hand for a moment on his friend’s shoulder, standing back for him to pass first. “Nothing can ever alter things between you and me.”
But things were altered already.
PALGRAVEhad not gone to the drawing-room, and that, at all events, was a comfort. A wood fire burned on the hearth and near it Nancy was holding wool for Mrs. Chadwick to wind. Barbara had been sent to bed and Meg and Miss Toner sat on the sofa hand in hand. Even in the pressure of his distress and anxiety Oldmeadow could but be aware of amusement at seeing Meg thus. It had, of course, been Miss Toner who had taken her hand. But no one else could have taken it. No one else could have been allowed to go on holding it placidly before on-lookers of whose mirthful impressions Meg must be well aware. She didn’t mind in the least. That was what Miss Toner had done to her. She enjoyed having her hand held by anyone so much interested in her.
Barney walked to the fireplace and stood before it. He had no faculty for concealing his emotions and the painful ones through which he had just passed were visible on his sensitive face.
“Give us a song, Meg,” Oldmeadow suggested. He did not care for Meg’s singing, which conveyed, in a rich, sweet medium, a mingled fervour and shallowness of feeling. But to hear her sing would be better than to see her holding Miss Toner’s hand.
Barney crossed at once to the seat Meg vacated and dropped down into it, no doubt thanking his friend for what he imagined to be a display of tact, and Oldmeadow saw the quiet, firm look that flowed over and took possession of him. Miss Toner knew,of course, that Barney had been having painful emotions; and she probably knew that they had been caused by the dry, deep-hearted Meredithian hero. But after the long look she did not speak to him. She sat in her pearls and whiteness and gave careful attention to the music.
Oldmeadow accompanied Meg, tolerantly, and a trifle humorously, throwing a touch of mockery into his part. Meg’s preference to-night seemed to be for gardens; Gardens of Sleep; Gardens of Love; God’s Gardens. “What a wretch you are, Roger,” she said, when she had finished. “You despise feeling.”
“I thought I was wallowing in it,” Oldmeadow returned. “Did I stint you?”
“No; you helped me to wallow. That’s why you’re such a wretch. Always showing one that one is wallowing when one thinks one’s soaring. It’s your turn, now, Adrienne. Let’s see if he’ll manage to make fun of you.”
“Does Miss Toner sing, too? Now do you know, Meg,” said Oldmeadow, keeping up the friendly banter, “I’m sure she doesn’t sing the sort of rubbish you do.”
“I think they’re beautiful songs,” Mrs. Chadwick murmured from her wool, “and I think Roger played them most beautifully. Why should you say he is making fun of you, Meg?”
“Because he makes you think something’s beautiful that he thinks rubbish, Mummy. Come along, Adrienne. You will, won’t you? I expect my voice sounds all wrong to you. I’ve had no proper training.”
“It’s a very lovely voice, Meg, used in a poorcause,” said Miss Toner smiling. “And it is badly placed. I think I could help you there. I’ve no voice at all, but I have been taught how to sing. It would be more to the point, though, if Mr. Oldmeadow were to play to us, for I hear that he is an accomplished musician.”
“I’m really anything but accomplished,” said Oldmeadow; “but I can play accompaniments cleverly. Do sing to us. I know you’ll give us something worth accompanying.”
Miss Toner rose and came to the piano with her complete and unassuming confidence. She turned the pages of the music piled there and asked him if he cared for Schubert’s songs. Yes; she was a watch wound to go accurately and she could rely on herself, always, to the last tick. Even if she knew—and he was sure she knew—that he had been undermining her, she would never show a shadow or a tremor; and she would always know what was the best music. Only, as she selected “Litanei” and placed it before him, he felt that over him, also, flowed the quiet, firm look.
“Litanei” was one of his favourites in a composer he loved, and, as she sang there above him, he found the song emerging unharmed from her interpretation. It was as she had said—no voice to speak of; the dryest, flattest little thread of sound; and no feeling, either (what a relief after Meg!), except the feeling for scrupulous accuracy. Yet her singing was what he found in her to like best. It was disciplined; it accepted its own limits; it fulfilled an order. There was no desecration of the heavenly song, for, intelligently after all, she made no attempt upon its heart.
When she had finished, she looked down at him. They were removed by half the length of the room from the fireside group. The lamps were behind them. Only the candles set in the piano-rack illumined Miss Toner; and while the white roses over her ears struck him anew as foolish, her eyes anew struck him as powerful.
“Thank you. That was a pleasure,” he said.
It was a pleasure. It was almost a link. He had found a ground to meet her on. He saw himself in the future accompanying Barney’s wife. He need, then, so seldom talk to her. But, alas! she stepped at once from the safe frame of art.
“If we can rise from loss to feel like that, if we can lift our sorrows like that, we need never turn to palliatives, need we, Mr. Oldmeadow?” she said.
Stupidity, complacency, or power, whatever it was, it completely disenchanted him. It left him also bereft of repartee. What he fell back upon, as he looked up at her and then down at the keys again, was a mere schoolboy mutter of “Come now!”
After all a schoolboy mutter best expressed what he felt. She was not accustomed to having her ministrations met with such mutters and she did not like it. That was apparent to him as she turned away and went back to the sofa and Barney. She had again tried him and again found him wanting.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Barney and Miss Toner left in her motor next morning shortly after breakfast, and though with his friend Oldmeadow had no further exchange, he had, with Miss Toner, a curious encounter that was, he felt sure, a direct result of her impressions of the night before. They met in the dining-room a fewmoments before breakfast, and as she entered, wearing already her motoring hat, closely bound round her face with a veil, he was aware that she looked, if that were possible, more composed than he had ever seen her. He felt sure that she had waited for her opportunity, and had followed him downstairs, knowing that she would find him alone; and he realized then that she was more composed, because she had an intention or, rather, since it was more definite, a determination. Determination in her involved no effort: it imparted, merely, the added calm of an assured aim.
She gave him her hand and said good morning with the same air of scrupulous accuracy that she had given to the rendering of “Litanei” and then, standing before the fire, her hands clasped behind her, her eyes raised to his, she said: “Mr. Oldmeadow, I want to say something to you.”
It was the gentle little voice, unaltered, yet he knew that he was in for something he would very much rather have avoided; something with anybody else unimaginable, but with her, he saw it now, quite inevitable. Yet he tried, even at this last moment, to avoid it and said, adjusting his eyeglass and moving to the sideboard: “But not before we’ve had our tea, surely. Can’t I get you some? Will you trust me to pour it out?”
“Thanks; I take coffee—not tea,” said Miss Toner from her place at the fire, “and neither has been brought in yet.”
He had just perceived, to his discomfiture, that they had not. There was nothing for it but to turn from the ungarnished sideboard and face her again.
“It’s about Barney, Mr. Oldmeadow,” Miss Tonersaid, unmoved by his patent evasion. “It’s because I know you love Barney and care for his happiness. And it’s because I hope that you and I are to be friends, and friendship can only be built on truth. Try to trust more; will you? That’s all I want to say. Try to trust. You will be happier if you do and make other people happier.”
Oldmeadow had never experienced such an assault upon his personality, and he met it gagged and bound, for, assuredly, this was to be Barney’s wife. A slow flush mounted to his face.
“I’m afraid I seem very strange and unconventional to you,” Adrienne Toner went on. “You’ve lived in a world where people don’t care enough for each other to say the real things. They must be felt if they’ve to be said, mustn’t they? Yet you do care for people. I have seen that, watching you here; and you care for real things. It’s a crust of caution and convention that is about you. You are afraid of expression. You are afraid of feeling. You are afraid of being taken in and of wasting yourself. Don’t be afraid, Mr. Oldmeadow. We never lose ourselves by trusting. We never lose ourselves by giving. It’s a realer self that comes. And with you, I see it clearly, if you let the crust grow thicker, it will shut life and light and joy away from you; and when light cannot visit our hearts, they wither within us. That is your danger. I want to be your friend, so I must say the truth to you.”
He knew, though he had to struggle not to laugh, that he was very angry and that he must not show anger; though it would really be better to show that than his intense amusement; and it took him a moment, during which they confronted each other, tofind words; dry, donnish words; words of caution and convention. They were the only ones he had available for the situation. “My dear young lady,” he said, “you take too much upon yourself.”
She was not in the least disconcerted. She met his eyes steadily. “You mean that I am presumptuous, Mr. Oldmeadow?”
“You take too much upon yourself,” he repeated. “As you say, I hope we may be friends.”
“Is that really all, Mr. Oldmeadow?” she said, looking at him with such a depth of thoughtfulness that he could not for the life of him make out whether she found him odious or merely pitiful.
“Yes; that’s really all,” he returned.
The dining-room was very bright and the little blue figure before the fire was very still. The moment fixed itself deep in his consciousness with that impression of stillness and brightness. It was an uncomfortable impression. Her little face, uplifted to his, absurd, yet not uncharming, was, in its still force, almost ominous.
“I’m sorry,” was all she said, and she turned and went forward to greet Mrs. Chadwick.
ITwas a soft June day and Oldmeadow was strolling about Mrs. Averil’s garden admiring her herbaceous borders. It was a day that smelt of ripening strawberries, of warm grass and roses, and the air was full of a medley of bird voices, thrushes and blackbirds, sweet as grass and strawberries, and the bubbling rattle of the chaffinch as happy as the sunlight.
Adrienne Toner was Mrs. Chadwick now, and she and Eleanor Chadwick and Barney were motoring together in the French Alps. Coldbrooks was empty, and he had come to stay with Nancy and her mother.
They lived in a small stone house with a Jacobean front that looked, over a stone wall, at Chelford Green, and had behind it a delightfully unexpected length of lawn and orchard and kitchen-garden, all enclosed by higher walls and presided over by a noble cedar. Seen from the garden The Little House was merely mid-Victorian, but the modern additions were masked by climbing roses and a great magnolia-tree opened its lemon-scented cups at the highest bedroom windows. The morning-room was in the modern part, and from one of its windows, presently, Mrs. Averil emerged, opening her sunshade as she crossed the grass to join her guest. She wore a white straw garden hat, tipping over her eyes and tying, behind, over her thick knot of hair, in a manner that always recalled to Oldmeadow a lady out of Trollope. Her face was pale, like Nancy’s, and her eyes grey; but rather than blackcaps and primroses shesuggested lace tippets and porcelain tea-sets, and though it was from her Nancy had her pretty trick of closing her eyes when she smiled, Mrs. Averil’s smile was cogitative and impersonal, and in her always temperate mirth there was an edge of grimness.
“Well, Roger, I want to hear what you thought about the wedding,” she said. She had not gone to church that morning with Nancy and it was, he knew, because she wanted an interchange of frank impressions. She had been prevented from attending Miss Toner’s London nuptials by a touch of influenza and, as she now went on to say, she had got little from Nancy, who had no eye for pageants and performances. “Eleanor was so absorbed,” she went on, “in the fact that the Bishop had indigestion and had, at her suggestion, taken magnesia with his breakfast, that I could not get much else out of her. She seemed to have seen the Bishop’s symptoms rather than Adrienne and Barney. Now from you I expect all the relevant details.”
“Well, if you call it a detail, Nancy was lovely,” said Oldmeadow. “She looked like a silver-birch in her white and green.”
“And pearls,” said Mrs. Averil. “You noticed, of course, the necklaces Adrienne gave them; quite the gift of a princess, yet so innocent and unobtrusive looking, too. She has great taste in such matters. Did she look well? Eleanor did say that she, like the Bishop, was very pale.”
“She was pale; but not a bit nervous. She rather looked as if she had been married every day of her life. Nothing ever puts her out, you know. She was very grave and benign; but she wasn’t an imposingbride and the wreath of orange-blossoms aged her. Nancy and Meg and Barbara and the Lumley girl aged her, too. She must be older than Barney.”
“Yes; she is. A year older. But she’s the sort of woman who will wear,” said Mrs. Averil, pausing before a bed of rose-trees to snip off a fading flower. “She’ll not look very differently at fifty, you know; and her hair is the sort that may never turn grey. I can see her at seventy with those big golden braids and all her teeth. There’s something very indestructible about her. Like a doll made of white leather compared to one made of porcelain. She’ll last and last,” said Mrs. Averil. “She’ll outlast us all. Barney was radiant, of course.”
“Yes. But hewasnervous; like a little boy frightened by the splendour of his Christmas-tree. He looked as though he were arm in arm with the Christmas-tree itself as he came down the nave. A rather dumpy little Christmas-tree, but exquisitely lighted and garnished.”
“Well, he ought to be radiant,” Mrs. Averil observed. “With all that money, it’s an extremely good match for him. The fact of her being nobody in particular makes no difference, really, since she’s an American. And she has, I gather, no tiresome relations to come bothering.”
“She’s very unencumbered, certainly. There’s something altogether very solitary about her,” Oldmeadow agreed, watching Mrs. Averil snip off the withered roses. “I felt that even as she came down the nave on Barney’s arm. It’s not a bit about the money he’s radiant,” he added.
“Oh, I know. Of course not. That was only my own gross satisfaction expressing itself. He’s as inlove as it’s possible to be. And with every good reason.”
“You took to her as much as they all did, then?”
“That would be rather difficult, wouldn’t it? And Barney’s reasons would hardly be those of a dry old aunt. She was very nice and kind to Nancy and me and she’s evidently going to do everything for them. Barbara’s already, you know, been sent to that admirable school that was too expensive for Eleanor; riding and singing and all the rest of it. And Meg’s been given a perfect trousseau of fine clothes for her London season. Naturally I don’t feel very critically towards her.”
“Don’t you? Well, if she weren’t a princess distributing largess, wouldn’t you? After all, she’s not given Nancy a trousseau. So why be mute with an old friend?”
“Ah, but she’s given her the pearls,” said Mrs. Averil. “Nancy couldn’t but accept a bridesmaid’s gift. And she would give her a trousseau if she wanted it and would take it. However, I’ll own, though decency should keep me mute, that I should find myself a little bored if I had to see too much of her. I’m an everyday person and I like to talk about everyday things.”
“I can hear her asking you, in answer to that, if there is anything more everyday than the human soul. I wish I could have seen youaux priseswith her,” Oldmeadow remarked. “Did she come down here? Did she like your drawing-room and garden?”
Mrs. Averil’s drawing-room and garden lay very near her heart. Eleanor Chadwick sometimes accused her of caring more about her china and herroses than about anything else in the world except Nancy.
“I don’t think she saw them; not what I call see,” Mrs. Averil now said. “Oh, yes; she came several times and recognized, very appreciatively, the periods of my Queen Anne furniture and my Lowestoft. Beyond their period I don’t think she went. She said the garden was old-world,” Mrs. Averil added, looking about her and twirling her parasol on her shoulder.
“She would,” Oldmeadow agreed. “That’s just what she would call it. And she’d call you a true, deep-hearted woman and Nancy a gifted girl. How do she and Nancy hit it off? It’s that I want most of all to hear about.”
“They haven’t much in common, have they?” said Mrs. Averil. “She’s never hunted and doesn’t, I imagine, know a wren from a hedge-sparrow. Shedoesknow a skylark when she hears one, for she said ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit’ while one was singing. But I felt, somehow, it was like the Queen Anne and the Lowestoft—a question of the label.”
Oldmeadow at this began to laugh with an open and indulged mirth. He and Mrs. Averil, at all events, saw eye to eye. “If you’d tie the correct label to the hedge-sparrow she’d know that, too,” he said. “Poor girl. The trouble with her isn’t that she doesn’t know the birds, but that she wouldn’t know the poets, either, without their labels. It’s a mind made up of labels. No; I don’t think it likely that Nancy, who hasn’t a label about her, will get much out of her—beyond necklaces.”
“I wish Nancyhada few labels,” said Mrs. Averil. “I wish she could have travelled and studied as MissToner—Adrienne that is—has done. She is such a little ignoramus. Adrienne may bore you and me, but Nancy will never interest anyone—except you and me.”
It was always amusing to Oldmeadow, if a little sardonically so, to note that any conception of himself as a possible suitor for Nancy had never entered Mrs. Averil’s mind. As a friend he was everything a mother could desire; as a match for Nancy almost unimaginable. Well, he could not give a wife even one hunter and he never had had any intention of falling in love with his dear nymph; yet that other people might not do so was a suggestion he repudiated with warmth.
“Oh; in love, yes,” Mrs. Averil agreed. “I don’t deny that she’s very loveable and I hope she may marry well. But that’s not the same thing as being interesting, is it? A man may be in love with a woman who doesn’t interest him.”
“I dispute that statement.”
“I’m sure dear Eleanor never interested her husband—devoted to the day of his death as he was. There’s something in my idea. To be interesting one must offer something new. If Nancy had been interesting to Barney she would now, I think, have been in Adrienne’s place. Not that it would have been a marriage to be desired for either of them.”
So he and Mrs. Averil had been thinking the same thoughts.
“And you contend that if Nancy had been to China and read Goethe and Dante in the originals he’d have been interested? I think he was quite sufficiently interested and that if Miss Toner hadn’t come barging into our lives he’d have known he was in love.”
“Going to China is a figure of speech and stands for all the things she hasn’t got and doesn’t know. My poor little Nancy. All the same,sheisn’t a bore!” said Mrs. Averil with as near an approach to acerbity as she could show.
“No; she isn’t a bore. The things she knows have to be found out, by degrees, through living with her. Barney hasn’t been to China, either, so, according to your theory, Nancy didn’t find him interesting.”
At this Mrs. Averil’s eyes met his and, after a moment of contemplation, they yielded up to him the secret they saw to be shared. “If only it were the same for women! But they don’t need the new. She’s young. She’ll get over it. I don’t believe in broken hearts. All the same,” Mrs. Averil stopped in their walk, ostensibly to examine the growth of a fine pink lupin, “it hasn’t endeared Adrienne to me. I’m tooterre-à-terre, about that, too, not to feel vexation, on Nancy’s account. And what I’m afraid of is that she knows she’s not endeared to me. That she guesses. She’s a bore; but she’s not a bit stupid, you know.”
“You don’t think she’s spiteful?” Oldmeadow suggested after a moment, while Mrs. Averil still examined her lupin.
“Dear me, no! I wish she could be! It’s that smooth surface of hers that’s so tiresome. She’s not spiteful. But she’s human. She’ll want to keep Barney away and Nancy will be hurt.”
“Want to keep him away when she’s got him so completely?”
“Something of that sort. I felt it once or twice.”
“My first instinct about her was right, then,” saidOldmeadow. “She’s a bore and an interloper, and she’ll spoil things.”
“Oh, perhaps not. She’ll mend some things. Have you heard about Captain Hayward?”
“Do you mean that stupid, big, tawny fellow? What about him?”
“You may well ask. I’ve been spoken to about him and Meg by more than one person. They are making themselves conspicuous, and it’s been going on for some time.”
“You don’t mean that Meg’s in love with him?”
“He’s in love with her, at all events, and, as you know, he’s a married man. I questioned Nancy, who was with Meg for a few weeks in London, and she owns that Meg’s unhappy.”
“And they’re seeing each other in London now?” Oldmeadow was deeply discomposed.
“No. He’s away just now. And Meg is going to meet the bridal party in Paris at the end of July. Nancy feels that when Meg gets back under Adrienne’s influence there’ll be nothing to fear.”
“We depend on her, then, so much, already,” he murmured. He was reviewing, hastily, his last impressions of Meg and they were not reassuring. The only thing that was reassuring was to reflect on his impressions of Adrienne. “Grandma’s parlour” returned to him with its assurance of deep security. Above everything else Adrienne was respectable.
“Yes. That’s just it,” Mrs. Averil agreed. “We depend on her. And I feel we’re going to depend more and more. She’s the sort of person who mends things. So we mustn’t think of what she spoils.”
What Adrienne Toner had spoiled was, however, to be made very plain next morning both to Nancy’s old friend and to her mother. Beside her plate at breakfast was a letter addressed in Barney’s evident hand, a letter in a narrow envelope stamped with the name of a French hotel and showing, over the address, an engraving of peaks against the sky. Nancy met the occasion with perfect readiness, saying as she looked at the letter, waiting to open it till she had made the tea—Nancy always made the tea in the morning while her mother sat behind the bacon and eggs at the other end of the table—“How nice; from Barney. Now we shall have news of them.”
Nothing less like an Ariane could be imagined than Nancy as she stood there in her pink dress above the pink, white and gold tea-cups. One might have supposed from her demeanour that a letter from Barney was but a happy incident in a happy day. But, when she dropped into her chair and read, it was evident that she was not prepared for what she found. She read steadily, in silence, while Oldmeadow cut bread at the sideboard and Mrs. Averil distributed her viands, and, when the last page was reached, they both could not fail to see that Nancy was blushing, blushing so deeply that, as she thus felt herself betray her emotion, tears came thickly into her downcast eyes.
“I’ll have my tea now, dear,” said Mrs. Averil. “Will you wait a little longer, Roger?” She tided Nancy over.
But Nancy was soon afloat. “The letter is for us all,” she said. “Do read it aloud, Roger, while I have my breakfast.”
Barney’s letters, in the past, had, probably, always been shared and Nancy was evidently determined that her own discomposure was not to introducea new precedent. Oldmeadow took up the sheets and read.
“Dearest Nancy,—How I wish you were with us up here. It’s the most fantastically lovely place. One feels as if one could sail off into it. I dug up some roots of saxifrage for your wall yesterday, such pretty pink stuff. It’s gone off in a box wrapped in damp moss and I hope will reach you safely. A horrid, vandal thing to do; but for you and Aunt Monica I felt it justified, and there are such masses of it. I saw a snow-bunting yesterday, much higher up than the saxifrage; such a jolly, composed little fellow on a field of snow. The birds would drive you absolutely mad, except that you’re such a sensible young person you’d no doubt keep your head even when you saw a pair of golden eagles, as we did, floating over a ravine. I walked around the Lac d’Annecy this morning, before breakfast, and did wish you were with me. I thought of our bird-walks at dawn last summer. There were two or three darling warblers singing, kinds we haven’t got at home; and black redstarts and a peregrine falcon high in the air. I could write all day if I’d the time, about the birds and flowers. You remember Adrienne telling us that afternoon when she first came to Coldbrooks about the flowers. But I mustn’t go on now. We’re stopping for tea in a little valley among the mountains with flowers thick all around us and I’ve only time to give our news to you and Aunt Monica and to send our love. Mother is extremely fit and jolly, though rather scared at the hairpin curves; Adrienne has to hold her hand. I’m too happy for words and feel as if I’d grown wings. How is Chummie’s foot? Did the liniment help? Those traps are beastly things. I feel just as you do about the rabbits. Adrienne reads aloud to us in the evenings; a man called Claudel; awfully stiff French to follow but rather beautiful. I think you’d like him. Not a bit like Racine! Best love to you and Aunt Monica. Here’s Adrienne, who wants to have her say.”
Had it been written in compunction forAriane aux bords laissée? or, rather, in a happy reversion to sheer spontaneity, a turning, without any self-consciousness, to the comrade of the bird-walks who would, after all, best feel with him about snow-buntings and redstarts? Oldmeadow paused for the surmise, not looking up, before he went on from Barney’s neat, firm script to his wife’s large, clear clumsy hand.