“Very well,” said Miss Toner, including Oldmeadow in her smile. “Except for a little while when I woke up and lay awake and couldn’t get thecawing of your rooks out of my mind. I seemed to hear them going on and on.”
“Oh, dear! How unfortunate! But surely they weren’t cawing in the night!” cried Mrs. Chadwick, and Miss Toner, laughing and holding her still by the hands, turned to tell Barney, who closely followed her, that his mother was really afraid, because she had thought of rooks in the night, that their Coldbrooks birds had actually been inhospitable enough to keep her awake with their cawings. Meg and Barbara and Nancy had all now emerged and there was much laughter and explanation.
“You see, Mummy thinks you might work miracles—even among the rooks,” said Barney, while Oldmeadow testily meditated on his own discomfort. It might have been mere coincidence, or it might—he must admit it—have been Miss Toner’s thoughts travelling into his dream or his dream troubling her thoughts; of the two last alternatives he didn’t know which he disliked the more.
“It’s time to get ready for church, children,” said Mrs. Chadwick, when, after much merriment at her expense, the rooks and their occult misdemeanours were disposed of. “Where is Palgrave? I do hope he won’t miss again. It does so hurt dear Mr. Bodman’s feelings. Are you coming with us, my dear?” she asked Miss Toner.
Miss Toner, smiling upon them all, her sunshade open on her shoulder, said that if they did not mind she did not think she would come. “I only go to church when friends get married or their babies christened,” she said, “or something of that sort. I was never brought up to it, you see. Mother never went.”
Mrs. Chadwick’s March Hare eyes dwelt on her. “You aren’t a Churchwoman?”
“Oh, dear, no!” said Miss Toner, and the very suggestion seemed to amuse her.
Mrs. Chadwick hesitated: “A Dissenter?” she ventured. “There are so many sects in America I’ve heard. Though I met a very charming American bishop once.”
“No—not a Dissenter; if you mean by that a Presbyterian or a Methodist or a Swedenborgian,” said Miss Toner, shaking her head.
Palgrave had now joined them and stood on the step above her. She smiled round and up at him.
Mrs. Chadwick, her distress alleviated yet her perplexity deepened, ventured further: “You are a Christian, I hope, dear?”
“Oh, not at all,” said Miss Toner gravely now and very kindly. “Not in any orthodox way, I mean. Not in any way that an American bishop or your Mr. Bodman would acknowledge. I recognize Christ as a great teacher, as a great human soul; one of the very greatest; gone on before. But I don’t divide the human from the divine in the way the churches do; creeds mean nothing to me, and I’d rather say my prayers out of doors on a day like this, in the sunlight, than in any church. I feel nearer God alone in His great world, than in any church built with human hands. But we must all follow our own light.” She spoke in her flat, soft voice, gravely but very simply; and she looked affectionately at her hostess as she added: “You wouldn’t want me to come with you from mere conformity.”
Poor Mrs. Chadwick, standing, her brood about her, in the sweet Sabbath sunlight, had to Oldmeadow’s eye an almost comically arrested air. How was a creedless, churchless mistress of Coldbrooks to be fitted in to her happy vision of Barney’s future? What would the village say to a squiress who never went to church and who said her prayers in the sunlight alone? “But, of course, better alone,” he seemed to hear her cogitate, “than that anyone should see her doing such a very curious thing.” And aloud she did murmur: “Of course not; of course not, dear. And if you go into the little arbour down by the lake no one will disturb you, I’m sure. Must it be quite in the open? Mere conformity is such a shallow thing. But all the same I should like the rector to come and talk things over with you. He’s such a good man and very, very broad-minded. He brings science so often into his sermons—sometimes I think the people don’t quite follow it all; and only the other day he said to me, about modern unrest and scepticism:
‘There is more faith in honest doubt,Believe me, than in half the creeds.’
‘There is more faith in honest doubt,Believe me, than in half the creeds.’
Mamma met Lord Tennyson once and felt him to be a deeply religious man—though rather ill-tempered; he was really very rude to her, I always thought, and I do so dislike rudeness.—And travelling about so much, dear, you probably had so little teaching.”
Miss Toner’s eyes were incapable of irony and they only deepened now in benevolence as they rested on her hostess. “But I haven’t any doubts,” she said, shaking her head and smiling: “No doubts at all. You reach the truth through your church and I reach it through nature and love and life. And the beautiful thing is that it’s the same truth, really;the same beautiful truth that God loves us all, and that we are all the children of God. I should be very pleased to meet your rector, of course, because I like meeting anyone who is good and true. But I was taught. My mother taught me always. And she was the freest, wisest soul I have ever known.”
“I’ll stay with you,” said Palgrave suddenly from his place on the step above her. His eyes, over her shoulder, had met Oldmeadow’s and perhaps what he saw in the old friend’s face determined his testimony. “Church means nothing to me, either; and less than nothing. I’m not so charitable as you are, and don’t think all roads lead to truth. Some lead away, I think. You know perfectly well, Mummy, that the dear old rector is a regular duffer and you slept all through the sermon the last time I went; you did, really! I was too amused to sleep. He was trying to explain original sin without mentioning Adam or Eve or the Garden of Eden. It was most endearing! Like some one trying to avoid the eye of an old acquaintance whom they’d come to the conclusion they really must cut! I do so like the idea of Adam and Eve becoming unsuitable acquaintances for the enlightened clergy!”
“There is no sin,” said Miss Toner. Barney was not quite comfortable; Oldmeadow saw that. He kicked about in the gravel, a little flushed, and when, once or twice, the old family friend met his eye, it was quickly averted. “God is Good; and everything else is mortal mind—mistake—illusion.”
“You are a sound Platonist, Miss Toner,” Oldmeadow observed, and his kindness hardly cloaked his irony.
“Am I?” she said. When she looked at one shenever averted her eyes. She looked until she had seen all that she wished to see. “I am not fond of metaphysics.”
“Socrates defined sin as ignorance, you know, and in a sense it may be. All the same,” said Oldmeadow, and he felt that they were all listening and that in the eyes of his old friends it was more than unlikely that he would get the better of Miss Toner—“there’s mortal mind to be accounted for, isn’t there, and why it gets us continually into such a mess. Whatever name you call it by, there is something that does get us into a mess and mightn’t it be a wholesome discipline to hear it denounced once a week?”
“Not by some one more ignorant than I am!” said Miss Toner, laughing gently. “I’ll go to church for love of Mrs. Chadwick, but not for the sake of the discipline!”
“Mr. Bodman never denounces. Roger is giving you quite a wrong idea,” said Mrs. Chadwick. She had stood looking from one to the other, distressed and bewildered, and she now prepared to leave them. “And Palgrave is very, very unjust. Of course you must not come, dear. It would make me quite unhappy. But Mr. Bodman is not a duffer. If Palgrave feels like that he must certainly stay away. Perhaps you can teach him to be more charitable. It’s easy to see the mote in our neighbour’s eye.” Mrs. Chadwick’s voice slightly trembled. She had been much moved by her son’s defection.
“Come, Mummy, you’re not going to sayI’ma duffer!” Palgrave passed an affectionately bantering arm round her shoulders. “Dufferism isn’tmybeam!”
But very sadly Mrs. Chadwick drew away, saying as she turned into the house: “No; that isn’t your beam. But pride may be, Palgrave. Spiritual pride.”
Oldmeadow remained standing in the sunlight with Miss Toner and the two young men. The girls had followed Mrs. Chadwick, Meg casting a laughing glance of appreciation at him as she went. Religious scruples would never keep Meg from church if she had a pretty spring dress to wear.
“After all,” he carried on, mildly, the altercation—if that was what it was between him and Miss Toner—“good Platonists as we may be, we haven’t reached the stage of Divine Contemplation yet and things do happen that are difficult to account for, if sin is nothing more positive than illusion and mistake. All the forms ofôte-toi que je m’y mette. All the forms of jealousy and malice. Deliberate cruelties. History is full of horrors, isn’t it? There’s a jealousy of goodness in the human heart, as well as a love. The betrayal of Christ by Judas is symbolic.”
He had screwed his eyeglass into his eye the better to see Miss Toner and looked very much like a solicitor trying to coax dry facts out of a romantic client. And in the transparent shadow of her hat Miss Toner, with her incomparable composure, gave him all her attention.
“I don’t account. I don’t account for anything. Do you?” she said. “I only feel and know. But even the dreadful things, the things that seem to us so dreadful—isn’t it always ignorance? Ignorance of what is really good and happy—and the illusion of a separate self? When we are all, really, one. All, really, together.” She held out her arms, her littlebasket hanging from her wrist. “And if we feel that at last, and know it, those dreadful things can’t happen any more.”
“Your ‘if’ is the standing problem of metaphysics and ethics. Why don’t we feel and know it? That’s the question? And since we most of us, for most of the time, don’t feel and know it, don’t we keep closer to the truth if we accept the traditional phraseology and admit that there’s something in the texture of life, something in ourselves, that tempts us, or impedes us, or crushes us, and call it sin—evil?”
He was looking at her, still with his latent irony though kindly enough indeed, and he had, as he looked, an intuition about her. She had never been tempted, she had never been impeded, she had never been crushed. That was her power. She was, in a fashion, sinless. It was as if she had been hypnotized in infancy to be good. And while the fact made her in one sense so savourless, it made her in another so significant. She would go much further than most people in any direction she wanted to go simply because she was not aware of obstacles and had no inhibitions.
“Call it what you like,” said Miss Toner. She still smiled—but more gravely. Barney had ceased to stroll and kick. He had come to a standstill beside them, and, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed on his beloved, showed himself as completely reassured. Palgrave still stood on the step above her and seemed to watch the snowy, piled-up clouds that adorned the tranquil sky. “I feel it a mistake to make unreal things seem real by giving them big names. We become afraid of them and fear is whatimpedes us most of all in life. For so many generations humanity has seen ghosts in the evening mists and taken its indigestion for the promptings of a demon. We’ve got away from all that now, Mr. Oldmeadow. We see that mists are mists and indigestion indigestion, and that there aren’t such things as ghosts and demons. We’ve come out, all together, hand in hand, on the Open Road and we don’t want, ever any more, to be reminded, even, of the Dark Ages.”
Before her fluency, Oldmeadow felt himself grow less kindly. “You grant there have been dark ages, then? I count that a concession. Things may not be evil now, but they were once.”
“Not a concession at all,” said Miss Toner. “Only an explanation of what has happened—an explanation of what you call the mess, Mr. Oldmeadow.”
“So that when we find ourselves misbehaving to one another as we march along the Open Road, we may know it’s only indigestion and take a pill.”
She didn’t like badinage. That, at all events, was evident to him, even in her imperturbability. She took it calmly—not lightly; and if she was not already beginning to dislike him, it was because disliking people was a reality she didn’t recognize. “We don’t misbehave if we are on the Open Road,” she said.
“Oh, but you’re falling back now on good old-fashioned theology,” Oldmeadow retorted. “The sheep, saved and well-behaved, keeping to the road, and the goats—all those who misbehave and stray—classed with the evening mists.”
“No,” said Miss Toner eyeing him, “I don’t classthem with the evening mists; I class them with the sick, whom we must be kind to and take care of.”
Mrs. Chadwick was now emerging in her new spring hat, which was not very successful and gave emphasis to her general air of strain. Meg’s hat was very successful, as Meg’s hats always were; and if Nancy’s did not shine beside it, it was, at all events, exceedingly becoming to her. Nancy’s eyes went to Barney. Barney, in the past, had been very appreciative of becoming hats. But he had no eyes for Nancy now. He had drawn Miss Toner aside and Oldmeadow heard their colloquy:
“Would you rather I didn’t go?”
“I’d rather, always, you followed your light, dear friend.”
“I do like going here, you know. It seems to belong with it all—and Mummy can’t bear our not going.”
“It makes your dear mother happy. It all means love to you.”
“Not only that”—Oldmeadow imagined that Barney blushed, and he heard his stammer: “I don’t know what I believe about everything; but the service goes much deeper than anything I could think for myself.” Their voices dropped. All that came further to Oldmeadow was from Miss Toner: “It makes you nearer than if you stayed.”
“Confound her ineffability!” he thought. “It rests with her, then, whether he should go or stay.”
It certainly did. Barney moved away with them all, leaving Palgrave to the more evident form of proximity.
“You know,” Mrs. Chadwick murmured to Oldmeadow as they went, between the primroses, downthe little path and through a wicket-gate that led to the village—“you know, Roger, it’squitepossible that they may say their prayers together. It’s like Quakers, isn’t it—or Moravians; or whoever those curious people are who are buried standing up—so dismal and uncomfortable, I always think. But it’s better that Palgrave should say his prayers with some one, and somewhere, isn’t it, than that he shouldn’t say them at all?”
“MOTHER’Sgot the most poisonous headache,” said Meg. “I don’t think she’ll be able to come down to tea.”
She had joined Oldmeadow on the rickety old bench where he sat reading and smoking in a sunny corner of the garden. A band of golden wallflowers behind them exhaled the deep fragrance that he always associated with spring and Sunday and Coldbrooks, and the old stone wall behind the flowers exhaled a warmth that was like a fragrance.
“Adrienne is with her,” Meg added. She had seated herself and put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands as though she intended a solid talk.
“Will that be likely to help her head?” Oldmeadow inquired. “I should say not, if she’s going to continue the discourse of this morning.”
“Did you think all that rather silly?” Meg inquired, tapping her smart toes on the ground and watching them. “You looked as if you did. But then you usually do look as though you thought most things and people silly. I didn’t—I mean, not in her. I quite saw what you did; at least I think so. But she can say things that would be silly in other people. Now Palgrave is silly. There’s just the difference. Is it because he always feels he’s scoring off somebody and she doesn’t?” Meg was evidently capable, for all her devotion, of dispassionate inquiry.
“She’s certainly more secure than Palgrave,” saidOldmeadow. “But I feel that’s only because she’s less intelligent. Palgrave is aware, keenly, of a critical and probably hostile world; and Miss Toner is unaware of everything except her own benevolence, and the need for it.”
Meg meditated. Then she laughed. “Youarespiteful, Roger. Oh—I don’t mean about Adrienne in particular. But you always see the weak spots in people, first go. It’s rather jolly, all the same, if you come to think it over, to be like that. Perhaps that’s all she is aware of; but it takes you a good way—wanting to help people and seeing how they can be helped.”
“Yes; it does take you a good way. I don’t deny that Miss Toner will go far.”
“And make us go too far, perhaps?” Meg mused. “Well, I’m quite ready for a move. I think we’re all rather stodgy, really, down here. And up in London, too, if it comes to that. I’m rather disappointed in London, you know, Roger, and what it does for one. Just a different kind of sheep, it seems to me, from the kind we are in the country; noisy skipping sheep instead of silent, slow ones. But they all follow each other about in just the same way. And what one likes is to see someone who isn’t following.”
“Yes; that’s true, certainly,” Oldmeadow conceded. “Miss Toner isn’t a sheep. She’s the sort of person who sets the sheep moving. I’m not so sure that she knows where she is going, all the same.”
“You mean—Be careful; don’t you?” said Meg, looking up at him sideways with her handsome eyes. “I’m not such a sheep myself, when it comes to that, you know, Roger. I look before I leap—even after Adrienne,” she laughed; and Oldmeadow, lookingback at her, laughed too—pleased with her, yet a little disconcerted by what she revealed of experience.
“The reason I like her so awfully,” Meg went on—while he reflected that, after all, she was now twenty-five—“and it’s a good thing I do, isn’t it, since it’s evident she’s going to take Barney; but the reason is that she’s so interested in one. More than anyone I ever knew—far and far away. Of course Mother’s interested; but it’sforone;aboutone; notinone, as it were. And then darling old Mummy isn’t exactly intelligent, is she; or only in such unexpected spots that it’s never much good to one; one can never count on it beforehand. Whereas Adrienne is so interested in you that she makes you feel more interested in yourself than you ever dreamed you could feel. Do you know what I mean? Is it because she’s American, do you think? English people aren’t interested in themselves, off their own bat, perhaps; or in other people either! I don’t mean we’re not selfish all right!” Meg laughed.
“Selfish and yet impersonal,” Oldmeadow mused. “With less of our social consciousness in use, with more of it locked up in automatism, possibly.”
“There’s nothing locked up in Adrienne; absolutely nothing,” Meg declared. “It’s all there—out in the shop-window. And it’s a big window too, even though some of the hats and scarves, so to speak, may strike us as funny. But, seriously, what is it about her, do you think? How can she care so much?—about everybody?”
He remembered Nancy’s diagnosis. “Not about everybody. Only about people she can do something for. You’ll find she won’t care about me.”
“Why should she? You don’t care for her. Why should she waste herself on people who don’t need her?” Meg’s friendliness of glance did not preclude a certain hardness.
“Why indeed? It could never occur to her, of course, that she might need somebody. I don’t mean that spitefully. She is strong. She doesn’t need.”
“Exactly. Like you,” said Meg. “She’s quite right to pay no attention to the other strong people. For of course you are very strong, Roger, and frightfully clever; and good, too. Only one has to be cleverer, no doubt, than we are to see your goodness as easily as Adrienne’s. It’s the shop-window again. She shows her goodness all the time; and you don’t.”’
Oldmeadow knocked the ashes out of his pipe and felt for his tobacco-pouch. “I show my spite. No; you mustn’t count me among the good. I suppose your mother’s headache came on this morning after she found out that Miss Toner doesn’t go to church.”
“Of course it was that. You saw that she was thinking about it all through the service, didn’t you?” said Meg. “And once, poor lamb, she said, ‘Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners’ instead of Amen. Did you notice? It will bother her frightfully, of course. But after all it’s not so bad as if Adrienne were a Dissenter and wanted to go to chapel! Mummy in her heart of hearts would much rather you were a pagan than a Dissenter. I don’t think it will make a bit of difference really. So long as she gives money to the church, and is nice to the village people. Mother will get over it,” said Meg.
He thought so too. His own jocose phrase returned to him. As long as the money was there itdidn’t make any difference. But Meg’s security on that score interested him. With all her devotion to the new friend she struck him, fundamentally, as less kind than Nancy, who had none. But that, no doubt, was because Meg, fundamentally, was hard and Nancy loving. It was because of Miss Toner’s interest in herself that Meg was devoted. “You’re so sure, then, that she’s going to take Barney?” he asked.
“Quite sure,” said Meg. “Surer than he is. Surer than she is. She’s in love with him all right; more than she knows herself, poor dear. No doubt she thinks she’s making up her mind and choosing. Weighing Barney in the balance and counting up his virtues. But it’s all decided already; and not by his virtues; it never is,” said Meg, again with her air of unexpected experience. “It’s something much more important than virtues; it’s the thickness of his eyelashes and the way his teeth show when he smiles, and all his pretty ways and habits. Things like that. She loves looking at him and more than that, even, she loves having him look at her. I have an idea that she’s not had people very much in love with her before; not people with eyelashes and teeth like Barney. In spite of all her money. And she’s getting on, too. She’s as old as Barney, you know. It’s the one, real romance that’s ever come to her, poor dear. Funny you don’t see it. Men don’t see that sort of thing I suppose. But shecouldn’tgive Barney up now, simply. It’s because of that, you know”—Meg glanced behind them and lowered her voice—“that she doesn’t like Nancy.”
“Doesn’t like Nancy!” Oldmeadow’s instant indignation was in his voice. “What has Nancy to do with it?”
“She might have had a great deal, poor darling little Nancy; and it’s that Adrienne feels. She felt it at once. I saw she did; that Nancy and Barney had been very near each other; that there was an affinity, a sympathy, call it what you like, that would have led to something more. It wouldn’t have done at all, of course; at least I suppose not. They knew each other too well; and, until the last year or two, she’s been too young for him. And then, above all, she’s hardly any money. But all the same, if he hadn’t come across Adrienne and been bowled over like this, Barney would have fallen in love with Nancy. She’s getting to be so lovely looking, for one thing, isn’t she? And Barney’s so susceptible to looks. He was falling in love with her last winter and she knew it as well as I did. It’s rather rotten luck for Nancy because I’m afraid she cares; but then women do have rotten luck about love affairs,” said Meg, now sombrely. “The dice are loaded against them every time.”
Oldmeadow sat smoking in silence for some moments, making no effort to master his strong resentment; taking, rather, full possession of its implications. “Somewhat of a flaw in your angel you must admit,” he said presently. “She doesn’t like people who are as strong as she is and she doesn’t like people who might have been loved instead of herself. It narrows the scale of her benevolence, you know. It makes her look perilously like a jealous prig, and a prig without any excuse for jealousy into the bargain.”
“Temper, Roger,” Meg observed, casting her hard, friendly glance round at him; “I know you think there’s no one quite to match Nancy; and Ithink you’re not far wrong. She’s the straightest, sweetest-tempered girl who ever stepped on two feet. But all the same Adrienne isn’t a prig, and if she’s jealous she can’t help herself. Shewantsto love Nancy; she thinks she does love her; she’ll always be heavenly to her. She can do a lot for Nancy, you know. She will do a lot for her, even if Nancy holds her off. But she wishes frightfully that she was old and ugly. She wishes that Barney weren’t so fond of her without thinking about her. She’s jealous and she can’t help herself—like all the rest of us!” Meg laughed grimly. “When it comes to that we’re none of us angels.”
It was tea-time and the dear old gong sounded balmily from the house. As they went along the path the rooks again were cawing overhead and dimly, like the hint of evening in the air, he remembered his dream and the sense of menace. “You know, it’s not like all the rest of you,” he said. “It’s not like Nancy, for instance. Nancy wouldn’t dislike a person because she was jealous of them. In fact I don’t believe Nancy could be jealous. She’d only be hurt.”
“It’s rather a question of degree, that, isn’t it?” said Meg. “In one form of it you’re poisoned and in the other you’re cut with a knife; and the latter is the prettier way of suffering; doesn’t make you come out in a rash and feel sick. Nancy is cut with the knife; and if she’s not jealous in the ugly sense, she dislikes Adrienne all right.”
“Why should she like her?” Oldmeadow retorted, and Meg’s simile seemed to cut into him, too. “She doesn’t need her money or her interest or her love. She doesn’t dislike her. She merely wishes she were somewhere else—as I do.”
The garden path led straight into the house. One entered a sort of lobby, where coats and hats and rackets and gardening baskets were kept, and from the lobby went into the hall. Tea was, as always, laid there and Mrs. Chadwick, as Meg and Oldmeadow came in, was descending the staircase at the further end, leaning on Adrienne Toner’s arm.
“You see. She’s done it!” Meg murmured. She seemed to bear him no ill-will for his expressed aversion. “I never knew one of Mother’s headaches go so quickly.”
“I expect she’d rather have stayed quietly upstairs,” said Oldmeadow; “she looks puzzled. As if she didn’t know what had happened to her.”
“Like a rabbit when it comes out of the conjuror’s hat,” said the irreverent daughter.
That was precisely what poor Eleanor Chadwick did look like and for the moment his mind was diverted by amusement at her appearance from its bitter preoccupation. Mrs. Chadwick was the rabbit and Miss Toner was the conjuror indeed; bland and secure and holding her trophy in a firm but gentle grasp. Not until they were all seated did Barney and Nancy appear and then it was evident to him that if Miss Toner were jealous of Nancy she did not fear her, for it was she who had arranged the walk from which the young couple had just returned.
“Was it lovely?” she asked Barney, as he took the place beside her. “Oh, I do wish I could have come; but I knew your Mother needed me.”
“The primroses are simply ripping in the wood,” said Barney.
Nancy carried a large bunch of primroses.
“Ripping,” said Miss Toner, laughing gently.
“How absurd of you, Barney. Could anything be less ripping than primroses? How beautiful they are and what a lovely bunch. One sees that Miss Averil loves them from the way she has picked them.” If she did not call Nancy by her Christian name it was, Oldmeadow knew, not her but Nancy’s fault.
Nancy still stood beside the table and from the fact of standing, while all the rest of them were seated, from the fact of being called Miss Averil, she seemed, for the moment, oddly an outsider; as if she hardly belonged to the circle of which Miss Toner was the centre. “Do come and sit near us,” said Miss Toner. “For I had to miss you, too, you see, as well as the primroses.”
“I’d crowd you there,” said Nancy, smiling. “I’ll sit here near Aunt Eleanor.” From something in her eyes Oldmeadow felt suddenly sure that not till now had she realized that it had not, really, been her and Barney’s walk. She offered the primroses to Mrs. Chadwick as she took the chair beside her, saying, “They’ll fill your white bowl in the morning-room, Aunt Eleanor.”
“Oh, I say; but I meant those for Adrienne, Nancy!” Barney exclaimed, and as he did so Meg’s eyes met Oldmeadow’s over the household loaf. “She didn’t see them in the wood, so she ought to have them. Mummy is suffocated with primroses already.”
But Nancy showed no rash and only an acute Meg could have guessed a cut as she answered: “I’ll pick another bunch to-morrow for Miss Toner, Barney. They’ll be fresher to take to London. These are really Aunt Eleanor’s. I always fill that bowl for her.”
“IDOso want a talk with you, Roger,” Mrs. Chadwick murmured to him when tea was over. The dining-room opened at one end of the hall and the drawing-room at the other and the morning-room, Mrs. Chadwick’s special retreat, into which she now drew him, was tucked in behind the dining-room and looked out at an angle of the garden wall and at the dove-cot that stood there. Mrs. Chadwick’s doves were usually fluttering about the window and even, when it was open, entering the room, where she sometimes fondly fed them, causing thereby much distress of mind to Turner, the good old parlourmaid. A pleasant little fire was burning there and, after placing her primroses in the white bowl, Mrs. Chadwick drew her chair to it, casting a glance, as she did so, up at the large portrait of her husband in hunting dress that hung above the mantelpiece. It was painted with the same glib unintelligence as the dining-room portraits, but the painter had been unable to miss entirely the whimsical daring of the eyes or to bring into conformity with his own standard of good looks the charm of the irregular and narrow face. Francis Chadwick had been an impulsive, idle, endearing man, and, remaining always in love with his wife, had fondly cherished all her absurdities. Since his death poor Mrs. Chadwick had been perplexed by her effort to associate with gravity and inspiration one who had always been a laughing incentive to inconsequence. Oldmeadow reflected, as he, too, looked up at him, that Francis Chadwick would neither have needed nor have liked Miss Toner.
“It’s so very, very strange, Roger, I really must tell you,” Mrs. Chadwick said. Her hair, still bright and abundant, was very untidy. She had evidently not brushed it since rising from her sofa. “I had one of my dreadful headaches, you know. It came on at church this morning and I really couldn’t attend to Mr. Bodman at all. Perhaps you saw.”
“I heard. Yes. Miss Toner had disturbed you a good deal.”
“I did feel so bewildered and unhappy about it all,” said Mrs. Chadwick, fixing her blue eyes upon the family friend. Eleanor Chadwick’s eyes could show the uncanny ingenuousness and the uncanny wisdom of a baby’s. “Nothing so innocent or so sharp was ever seen outside a perambulator,” her husband had once said of them. “About her, you know, Roger,” she continued, “and Barney and Palgrave. The influence. I could not bear them to lose their faith in the church of their fathers.”
“No,” said Oldmeadow. “But you must be prepared to see it shift a good deal. Faiths have to shift nowadays if they’re to stand.”
“Well. Yes. I know what you mean, Roger. But it isn’t a question of shifting, is it? I’m very broad. I’ve always been all for breadth. And the broader you are the firmer you ought to be, oughtn’t you?”
“Well, Miss Toner’s broad and firm,” Oldmeadow suggested. “I never saw anyone more so.”
“But in such a queer way, Roger. Like saying one’s prayers out of doors and thinking oneself as good as Christ. Oh, it all made me perfectly wretched and after lunch my head was so bad that I went and lay down in the dark; and it raged, simply. Oh, dear, I thought; this means a day and night of misery.They go on like that once they begin. Mamma used to have them in precisely the same way. Absolutely incapacitating. I can never see how anybody can deny heredity. That’s another point, Roger. I’ve always accepted evolution. I gave up Adam and Eve long ago; gave them up as white and good-looking, I mean; because we must have begunsomewhere, mustn’t we? And Darwin was such a good man; though you remember he came not to care anything at all about music. That may mean a great deal, if one could think it all out; it’s the most religious of the arts, isn’t it? But there’s no end to thinking things out!” Mrs. Chadwick pressed her hand against her forehead, closing her eyes for a moment. “And Adrienne is very musical.”
“You were at your headache,” Oldmeadow reminded her. It was customary in the family circle thus to shepherd Mrs. Chadwick’s straying thoughts.
“Yes, I know. But it all hangs together. Heredity and Mamma and my headaches; and Adrienne’s mother, who was musical, too, and played on a harp. Well, it was raging and I was lying there, when there came a little rap at the door. I knew at once who it was and she asked in such a gentle voice if she might come in. It’s a very soothing voice, isn’t it? But do you know I felt for a moment quite frightened, as if I simply couldn’t see her. But I had to say yes, and she came in so softly and sat down beside me and said: ‘I used to help Mother, sometimes, with her headaches. May I help you?’ She didn’t want to talk about things, as I’d feared. Such a relief it was. So I said: ‘Oh, do my dear,’ and she laid her hand on my forehead and said: ‘You will soon feel better. It will soon quite pass away.’ And then not anotherword. Only sitting there in the dark, with her hand on my forehead. And do you know, Roger, almost at once the pain began to melt away. You know how a dish of junket melts after you cut into it. It was like that. ‘Junket, junket,’ I seemed to hear myself saying; and such a feeling of peace and contentment. And before I knew anything more I fell into the most delicious sleep and slept till now, just before tea. She was sitting there still, in the dark beside me and I said: ‘Oh, my dear, to think of your having stayed in on this lovely afternoon!’ But she went to pull up the blinds and said that she loved sitting quietly in the dark with some one she cared for, sleeping. ‘I think souls come very close together, then,’ she said. Wasn’t it beautiful of her, Roger? Like astral bodies, you know, and auras and things of that sort. Sheisbeautiful. I made up my mind to that, then. She gives me such a feeling of trust. How can one help it? It’s like what one reads of Roman Catholic saints and people in the Bible. The gift of healing. The laying on of hands. We don’t seem to have any of them and we can’t counther, since she doesn’t believe in the church. But if only they’d give up the Pope, I don’t see why we shouldn’t accept their saints; such dear, good people, most of them. And the Pope is quite an excellent man just now, I believe. But isn’t it very strange, Roger? For a person who can do that to one can’t be irreligious, can they?”
Mrs. Chadwick’s eye was now fixed upon him, less wistfully and more intently, and he knew that something was expected of him.
“Hypnotic doctors can do it, you know. You needn’t be a saint to do it,” he said. “Though Isuppose you must have some power of concentration that implies faith. However,” he had to say all his thought, though most of it would be wasted upon poor Eleanor Chadwick, “Miss Toner is anything but irreligious. You may be sure of that.”
“You feel it, too, Roger. I’m so, so glad.”
“But her religion is not as your religion,” he had to warn her, “nor her ways your ways. You must be prepared to have the children unsettled; everyone of them; because she has great power and is far more religious than most people. She believes in her creed and acts on it. You must give the children their heads. It’s no good trying to circumvent or oppose them.”
“But they mustn’t do wrong things, Roger. How can I give them their heads if it’s to do wrong things? I don’t know what Mamma would have said to their not going to church—especially in the country. She would have thought it very wrong, simply. Sinful and dangerous.”
“Hardly that,” Oldmeadow smiled. “Even in the country. You don’t think Miss Toner does wrong things. If they take up Miss Toner’s creed instead of going to church, they won’t come to much harm. The principal thing is that there should be something to take up. After all,” he was reassuring himself as well as Mrs. Chadwick, “it hasn’t hurt her. It’s made her a little foolish; but it hasn’t hurt her. And your children will never be foolish. They’ll get all the good of it and, perhaps, be able to combine it with going to church.
“Foolish, Roger?” Mrs. Chadwick, relieved of her headache, but not of her perplexity, gazed wanly at him. “You think Adrienne foolish?”
“A little. Now and then. You mustn’t accept anything she says to you just because she can cure you of a headache.”
“But how can you say foolish, Roger? She’s had a most wonderful education?”
“Everything that makes her surer of herself and makes other people surer of her puts her in more danger of being foolish. One can be too sure of oneself. Unless one is a saint—and even then. And though I don’t think she’s irreligious I don’t think she’s a saint. Not by any means.”
“I don’t see how anyone can be more of one, nowadays, Roger. She heals people and she says prayers, and she is always good and gentle and never thinks of herself. I’m sure I can’t think what you want more.”
A touch of plaintiveness and even of protest had come into Mrs. Chadwick’s voice.
“Perhaps what I want is less,” he laughed. “Perhaps she’s too much of a saint for my taste. I think she’s a little too much of one for your taste, really—if you were to be quite candid with yourself. Has she spoken to you at all about Barney? Are you quite sure you’ll have to reckon with her for yourself and the children?”
At this Mrs. Chadwick showed a frank alarm. “Oh, quite, quite sure!” she said. “She couldn’t be so lovely to us all if she didn’t mean to take him! Why do you ask, Roger? You haven’t any reason for thinking she won’t?”
“None whatever. Quite the contrary.” He didn’t want to put poor Mrs. Chadwick to the cruel test of declaring whether she would rather have the children go to church and lose Miss Toner and all her moneyor have them stay away and keep Miss Toner. After all such a test was not to be asked of her. Miss Toner wanted people to follow their own light. “I only wondered if she talked to you about him. Asked any girlish leading questions.”
“None, none whatever,” said Mrs. Chadwick. “But I feel that’s because she thinks she knows him far better than I do and that he’s told her everything already. It’s rather hard to be a mother, Roger. For of course, though she is so much better and cleverer than I am, I feel sure that no one understands Barney as I do.”
“She’d be a little cleverer still if she could see that, wouldn’t she?”
“Well, I don’t know. Girls never do. I was just the same when I was engaged to Francis. Even now I can’t think that old Mrs. Chadwick really understood him as I did. It’s very puzzling, isn’t it? Very difficult to see things from other people’s point of view. When she pulled up the blind this afternoon, she told me that Nancy and Barney were down in the copse and she seemed pleased.”
“Oh, did she?”
“I told her that they’d always been like brother and sister, for I was just a little afraid, you know, that she might imagine Barney had ever cared about Nancy.”
“I see. You think she wouldn’t like that?”
“What woman would, Roger?” And he imagined that Mrs. Chadwick, for all her folly, was cleverer than Miss Toner guessed, as she added: “And then she told me that she’d made Barney go without her. She wanted me to see, you know, that it depended on her. That’s another reason why I feel sure she is going to take him.”
HEsat, for the first time, next Miss Toner that night at dinner and Nancy sat across from them next Barney. Nancy was pale, and now that he could scrutinize her he imagined that the walk had been more of an ordeal than a pleasure. Barney, no doubt, with the merciless blindness of his state, had talked to her all the time of Adrienne. But Nancy would not have minded that. She was of the type that hides its cut for ever and may become aunt and guardian-angel to the other woman’s children. It had not been Barney’s preoccupation that had so drained her of warmth and colour, but its character, its object. Her grey eyes had the considering look with which they might have measured the height of a difficult hedge in hunting, and, resting on Oldmeadow once or twice, seemed to tell him that the walk had shown her more clearly than ever that, if Barney married Miss Toner, they must lose him. He felt sure that she had lain down since tea with a headache to which had come no ministering angel.
She and Barney did not talk to each other now, for he had eyes and ears only for Miss Toner. At any former time they would have kept up the happiest interchange, and Oldmeadow would have seen Nancy’s eyelashes close together as she smiled her loving smile. There was a dim family likeness between her face and Barney’s, for both were long and narrow, and both had the singular sweetness in the very structure of the smile. But where Barney wasclumsy, Nancy was clear, and her skin was as fair as his was brown. To the fond onlooker at both, they were destined mates and only an insufferable accident had parted them.
Nancy was as much a part of the Coldbrooks country as the primroses and the blackcaps in the woods. Her life had risen from the familiar soil to the familiar sky, as preordained to fitness, as ordered by instinct and condition as theirs, and from her security of type she had gained not lost in savour. The time that unfinished types must give to growing conscious roots and building conscious nests, Nancy had all free for spontaneities of flight and song. Beside her, to his hostile eye, Miss Toner was as a wide-spread water-weed, floating, rootless and scentless, upon chance currents: A creature of surfaces, of caprice and hazard. If the multiplicity of her information constituted mental wealth, its impersonality constituted mental poverty. She was as well furnished and as deadening as a catalogue, and as he listened to her, receiving an impression of continual, considered movings-on, earnest pursuits, across half the globe, of further experience, he saw her small, questing figure on a background of railways, giant lines stretching forth across plain and mountain, climbing, tunnelling, curving; stopping at great capitals, and passing on again to glitter on their endless way under the sun and moon. That was what he seemed to see as Miss Toner talked: and sleeping-berths and wardrobe-boxes and luxurious suites in vast hotels.
She wore again her white dress, contrasting in its richness of texture with the simplicity of her daytime blue, and, rather stupidly, an artificial whiterose had been placed, in her braids, over each ear. Her pearls were her only other ornament, and her pearls, he supposed, were surprising.
Oldmeadow was aware, in his close proximity to her, while she ate beside him with a meticulous nicety that made the manners of the rest of them, by contrast, seem a little casual and slovenly, of the discomfort that had visited him in his dream. Yet the feeling she evoked was not all discomfort. It was as if from her mere physical presence he were subjected to some force that had in its compulsion a dim, conjectural charm. It was for this reason no doubt that he seemed to be aware of everything about her. Her hands were small and white, but had no beauty of form or gesture. She moved them slowly and without grace, rather like a young child handling unfamiliar objects in a kindergarten, and this in spite of the singular perfection of her table manners. She could have made little use of them, ever, in games of skill or in any art requiring swift accuracy and firmness. It was as if her mind, overtrained in receptivity and retentiveness, had only dull tentacles to spare for her finger-tips. He was aware of these hands beside him all through dinner and their fumbling deliberation brought to him, again and again, a mingled annoyance, and satisfaction. There was something positive and characteristic about her scentlessness, for if she smelt of anything it was of Fuller’s Earth—a funny, chalky smell—and beside Meg, who foolishly washed liquid powder over her silvery skin, Miss Toner’s colourlessness was sallow. She had hardly talked at all the night before, but to-night she talked continuously. It was Meg who questioned her, and Mrs.Chadwick, and Oldmeadow guessed that his ingenuous friend, still perplexed by his use of the word foolish, was drawing out and displaying her future daughter-in-law for his benefit.
Miss Toner and her mother had been to Russia, to India, to China and Japan. They had visited Stevenson’s grave at Vailima and in describing it she quoted “Under the wide and starry sky.” They had studied every temple in Greece and Sicily and talked of the higher education with ladies in Turkish harems. “But it was always Paris we came back to,” she said, “when we were not at home. Home was, and is, a great many places: California and Chicago—where my father’s people live, and New England. But Paris was, after it, closest to our hearts. Yes, we knew a great many French people; but it was for study rather than friendship we went there. It is such a treasure-house of culture. Mother worked very hard at French diction for several winters. She had lessons from Mademoiselle Jouffert—you know perhaps—though she has not acted for so many years now. Our friendship with her was a great privilege, for she was a rare and noble woman and had a glorious gift. Phèdre was her favourite rôle and I shall never forget her rendering of it: