“Dear Roger,” he read, and in his first glance he saw his presage fulfilled. “We are in great trouble. Aunt Eleanor has asked me to write because she is too ill and it is to me as well as to her that Meg has written and she wants you to see Barney at once. Here are Meg’s letters. She has gone away with Captain Hayward. Aunt Eleanor and Mother think that Barney may be able to persuade Adrienne to bring her back. No one else, we feel convinced, will have any influence with her. Do anything, anything you can, dear Roger. Mother and I are almost frightened for Aunt Eleanor. She walks about wringing her hands and crying, and she goes up to Meg’s room and opens the door and looks in—as if she could not believe she would not find her there. It is heart-breaking to see her. We depend on you, dear Roger.“Yours ever“Nancy.”
“Dear Roger,” he read, and in his first glance he saw his presage fulfilled. “We are in great trouble. Aunt Eleanor has asked me to write because she is too ill and it is to me as well as to her that Meg has written and she wants you to see Barney at once. Here are Meg’s letters. She has gone away with Captain Hayward. Aunt Eleanor and Mother think that Barney may be able to persuade Adrienne to bring her back. No one else, we feel convinced, will have any influence with her. Do anything, anything you can, dear Roger. Mother and I are almost frightened for Aunt Eleanor. She walks about wringing her hands and crying, and she goes up to Meg’s room and opens the door and looks in—as if she could not believe she would not find her there. It is heart-breaking to see her. We depend on you, dear Roger.
“Yours ever“Nancy.”
“Good Lord!” Oldmeadow muttered while, in lightning flashes, there passed across his mind the face of John the setter and a Pierrot’s face, whiteunder a low line of black velvet. He took up Meg’s letters, written from a Paris hotel.
“Darling Mother, I know it will make you frightfully miserable and I can’t forgive myself for that; but it had to be. Eric and I cared too much and it wasn’t life at all, going on as we were apart. Try, darling Mother, to see it as we do see things nowadays. Adrienne will explain it all—and you must believe her. You know what a saint she is and she has been with us in it all, understanding everything and helping us to be straight. Everything will come right. Iris Hayward will set Eric free, of course; she doesn’t care one bit for him and has made him frightfully unhappy ever since they married, and she wants to marry some one else herself—only of course she’d never be brave enough to do it this way. When Eric is free, we will marry at once and come home, and, you will see, there are so many sensible people nowadays; we shall not have a bad time at all. Everything will come right, I’m sure; and even if it didn’t, in that conventional way—I could not give him up. No one will ever love me as he does.“Your devoted child“Meg.”
“Darling Mother, I know it will make you frightfully miserable and I can’t forgive myself for that; but it had to be. Eric and I cared too much and it wasn’t life at all, going on as we were apart. Try, darling Mother, to see it as we do see things nowadays. Adrienne will explain it all—and you must believe her. You know what a saint she is and she has been with us in it all, understanding everything and helping us to be straight. Everything will come right. Iris Hayward will set Eric free, of course; she doesn’t care one bit for him and has made him frightfully unhappy ever since they married, and she wants to marry some one else herself—only of course she’d never be brave enough to do it this way. When Eric is free, we will marry at once and come home, and, you will see, there are so many sensible people nowadays; we shall not have a bad time at all. Everything will come right, I’m sure; and even if it didn’t, in that conventional way—I could not give him up. No one will ever love me as he does.
“Your devoted child“Meg.”
That was the first: the second ran:
“Dearest Nancy,—I know you’ll think it frightfully wrong; you are such an old-fashioned little dear and you told me often enough that I oughtn’t to see so much of Eric. Only of course that couldn’t have prepared you for this and I expect Aunt Monica won’t let you come and stay with us for ages. Never mind; when you marry, you’ll see, I’m sure.Love is theonlything, really. But I should hate to feel I’d lost you and I’m sure I haven’t. I want to ask you, Nancy dear, to do all you can to make Mothertakeit. I feel, just because you will think it so wrong, that you may be more good to her than Adrienne—who doesn’t think it wrong at all—at least not in Mother’s way. It would be frightfully unfair if Mother blamed Adrienne. She did all she could to show us where we stood and to make us play the game, and it would be pretty hard luck if people were to be down on her now because wehaveplayed it. We might have been really rotters if it hadn’t been for Adrienne; cheats and hypocrites, I mean; stealing our happiness. I know Adrienne can bring Barney round. It’s only Mother who troubles me, just because she is such a child that it’s almost impossible to make her see reason. She doesn’t recognize right and wrong unless they’re in the boxes she’s accustomed to. Everything is in a box for poor, darling old Mummy. But I mustn’t go on. Be the dear old pal you always have and help me out as well as you can.“Your loving“Meg.”
“Dearest Nancy,—I know you’ll think it frightfully wrong; you are such an old-fashioned little dear and you told me often enough that I oughtn’t to see so much of Eric. Only of course that couldn’t have prepared you for this and I expect Aunt Monica won’t let you come and stay with us for ages. Never mind; when you marry, you’ll see, I’m sure.Love is theonlything, really. But I should hate to feel I’d lost you and I’m sure I haven’t. I want to ask you, Nancy dear, to do all you can to make Mothertakeit. I feel, just because you will think it so wrong, that you may be more good to her than Adrienne—who doesn’t think it wrong at all—at least not in Mother’s way. It would be frightfully unfair if Mother blamed Adrienne. She did all she could to show us where we stood and to make us play the game, and it would be pretty hard luck if people were to be down on her now because wehaveplayed it. We might have been really rotters if it hadn’t been for Adrienne; cheats and hypocrites, I mean; stealing our happiness. I know Adrienne can bring Barney round. It’s only Mother who troubles me, just because she is such a child that it’s almost impossible to make her see reason. She doesn’t recognize right and wrong unless they’re in the boxes she’s accustomed to. Everything is in a box for poor, darling old Mummy. But I mustn’t go on. Be the dear old pal you always have and help me out as well as you can.
“Your loving“Meg.”
“Good Lord,” Oldmeadow muttered once more. He pushed back his chair and rose from the table in the bright spring sunlight. He had the feeling, almost paternal, of disgrace and a public stripping. He saw Eleanor Chadwick stopping at Meg’s door to look in at the forsaken room, distraught in her grief and incomprehension. He saw Nancy’s pale, troubled face and Monica Averil’s, pinched and dry in its sober dismay. And then again, lighted by aflare at once tawdry and menacing, the face of Adrienne Toner, the intruder, the insufferable meddler and destroyer, a Pierrot among fire-works that had, at last, set fire to the house. He found a taxi on the Embankment and drove to Connaught Square. Freshly decorated with window-boxes, the pleasant, spacious house had a specially smiling air of welcome, but the butler’s demeanour told him that something of the calamity had already penetrated. Adrienne, if she had not heard before, would have had her letters; Barney, who had been kept in the dark, would have been enlightened, and the irrepressible exclamations that must have passed between them seemed dimly reflected on the man’s formal countenance. Mrs. Chadwick, he told Oldmeadow, was breakfasting upstairs with Mr. Chadwick, and he ushered him into Barney’s study.
Oldmeadow waited for some time among the Post Impressionist pictures, one of which remained for ever afterwards vividly fixed in his memory of the moment; a chaotic yet determined picture; featureless yet, as it were, conveying through its unrecognizable elements the meaning of a grin. And, as he stood in the centre of the room and looked away from the derisive canvas, he saw on Barney’s desk photographs of Adrienne, three photographs of her; one as a child, a sickly looking but beaming child; one in early girlhood, singularly childlike still; and one in her bridal dress of only the other day, it seemed, mild and radiant in her unbecoming veil and wreath.
It was Barney who came to him. Poor Barney. He was more piteously boyish than ever before to his friend’s eye; so beautifully arrayed, all in readinessfor a happy London day with his angel, so pale, so haggard and perplexed. “Look here, Roger,” were his first words, “do you mind coming upstairs to Adrienne’s room? She’s not dressed yet; not very well, you know. You’ve heard, then, too?”
“I’ve just heard from Nancy. Why upstairs? I’d rather not. We’d better talk this over alone, Barney. All the more if your wife isn’t well.”
“Yes; yes; I know. I told her it would be better. But she insists.”
The effect of a general misery Barney gave was heightened now by his unhappy flush. “She doesn’t want us to talk it over without her, you see. She comes into it all too much. From Nancy, did you say? What’s Nancy got to do with this odious affair?”
“Only what Meg has put upon her—to interpret her as kindly as she can to your mother. Here are the letters. I’d really rather not go upstairs.”
“I know you’ll hold Adrienne responsible—partly at least. She expects that. She knows that I do, too; she’s quite prepared. I only heard half an hour ago and of course it knocked me up frightfully. Meg! My little sister! Why she’s hardly more than a child!”
“I’m afraid she’s a good deal more than a child. I’m afraid we can’t hold Meg to be not responsible, though, obviously, she’d never have taken such a step unaided and unabetted. Just read these letters, Barney; it won’t take a moment to decide what’s best to be done. I’ll go down to your mother and you must be off, at once, to Paris, and see if you can fetch Meg back.”
But after Barney, with a hesitating hand and anuncertain glance, had taken the letters and begun to read them, the door was opened with decorous deliberation and Adrienne’s French maid appeared, the tall, sallow, capable-looking woman whom Oldmeadow remembered having seen at Coldbrooks a year ago.
“Madame requests thatces Messieursshould come up at once; she awaits them,” Joséphine announced in unemphatic but curiously potent accents. Adrienne’s potency, indeed, was of a sort that flowed through all her agents and Oldmeadow thought that he detected, in the melancholy gaze bent upon Barney, reprobation for his failure to attain the standard set for him by a devotion wholehearted and reverential. Mrs. Chadwick, he remembered, had said that Adrienne’s maid adored her.
“Yes, yes. We’re coming at once, Joséphine,” said Barney. Reading the letters as he went, he moved to the door and Oldmeadow found himself, perforce, following.
He had not yet visited the morning-room and even before his eyes rested on Adrienne they saw, hanging above her head where she sat on a little sofa, a full-length portrait of Mrs. Toner; in white, standing against a stone balustrade and holding lilies; seagulls above her and a background of blue sea.
Adrienne was also in white, but she wore over her long, loose dress a little jacket of pink silk edged with swan’s down and the lace cap falling about her neck was rosetted with pink ribbon. It was curious to see her in this almost frivolous array, recalling the shepherdess, when her face expressed, for thefirst time in his experience of her, an anger and an agitation all the more apparent for its control. She was pale yet flushed, odd streaks of colour running up from her throat and dying in the pallor of her cheeks. Her condition had evidently much affected her complexion and her nose, through its layer of powder, showed a pinched and reddened tint. It made Oldmeadow uncomfortable to look at her; her mask of calm was held at such a cost; she was at once so determinedly herself and so helplessly altered; and it was not with an automatic courtesy only that he went up to her and held out his hand. An impulse of irrelevant yet irrepressible pity stirred him.
She had fixed her eyes on him as he entered, but now looking at her husband and not moving, she said: “I do not think you want to take my hand, Mr. Oldmeadow. You will think me a criminal too, as Barney does.”
“Darling! Don’t talk such nonsense!” Barney cried. “I haven’t blamed you, not by a word. I know you’ve done what you think right. Look, darling; Roger has had these letters. Just read them. You see what Meg writes—there—to Nancy—about your having done all you could to keep them straight. You haven’t been fair to yourself in talking to me just now.”
Adrienne, without speaking, took the letters and Oldmeadow moved away to the window and stood looking down at the little garden at the back of the house where a tall almond-tree delicately and vividly bloomed against the pale spring sky. He heard behind him the flicker of the fire in the grate, the pacing of Barney’s footsteps as he walked upand down, and the even turning of the pages in Adrienne’s hands. Then he heard her say: “Meg contradicts nothing that I have said to you, Barney. She writes bravely and truly; as I knew that she would write.”
Barney stopped in his pacing. “But darling; what she says about straightness?” It was feeble of Barney and he must know it. Feeble of him even to think that Adrienne might wish to avail herself of the loophole or that she considered herself in any need of a shield.
“You can’t misunderstand so much as that, Barney,” she said. “Meg and I mean but one thing by straightness; and that is truth. That was the way I tried to help them; it is the only way in which I can ever help people. I showed them the truth and kept it before their eyes when they were in danger of forgetting it. I said to them that if they were to be worthy of their love they must be brave enough to make sacrifices for it. I did not hide from them that there would be sacrifices—if that is what you mean.”
“It’s not what I mean, darling! Of course it’s not!” broke from poor Barney almost in a wail. “Didn’t you try at all to dissuade them? Didn’t you show them that it was desperate, and ruinous, and wrong? Didn’t you tell Meg that it would break Mother’s heart!”
The blue ribbon was again unrolled and Oldmeadow, listening with rising exasperation, heard that the sound of her own solemn cadences sustained her. “I don’t think anything in life is desperate or ruinous or wrong, Barney, except turning away from one’s own light. Meg met a reality andwas brave enough to face it. I regret, deeply, that it came to her tragically, not happily; but happiness can grow from tragedy if we are brave and true and Meg is brave and true in her love. It won’t break your mother’s heart. Hers is a small, but not such a feeble, heart as that. I believe that the experience may strengthen and ennoble her. She has led too sheltered a life.”
Oldmeadow at this turned from the window and met Barney’s miserable eyes. “There’s really no reason for my staying on, Barney,” he said, and his voice as well as his look excluded Adrienne from their interchange. “I’ll take the 1.45 to Coldbrooks. What shall I tell your mother? That you’ve gone to Paris this morning?”
“Yes, that I’ve gone to Paris. That I’ll do my best, you know. That I hope to bring Meg back. Tell her to keep up her courage. It’ll only be a day or two after all, and we may be able to hush it up.”
“Stop, Mr. Oldmeadow,” said Adrienne in a grave, commanding tone. It was impossible before it to march out of the room and shut the door, though that was what his forcibly arrested attitude showed that he wished to do. “You as well as Barney must hear my protest,” said Adrienne, and she fixed her sombre eyes upon him. “Meg is with the man she loves. In the eyes of heaven he is her husband. It would be real as contrasted with conventional disgrace were she to leave him now. She will not leave him. I know her better than you do. I ask you”—her gaze now turned on Barney—“I desire you, not to go to her on such an unworthy errand.”
“But, Adrienne,” Barney, flushed and hesitating,pleaded, “it’s for Mother’s sake. Mother’s too old to be enlarged like that—that’s really nonsense, you know, darling. You see what Nancy says. They are frightened about her. It’s not only convention. It’s a terrible mistake Meg’s made and she may be feeling it now and only too glad to have the way made easy for her to come back. I promise you to be as gentle as possible. I won’t reproach her in any way. I’ll tell her that we’re all only waiting to forgive her and take her back.”
“Forgive her, Barney? For what? It is only in the eyes of the world that she has done wrong and I have lifted her above that fear. Convention does not weigh for a moment with me beside the realities of the human heart; nor would it with you, Barney, if it were not for the influence of Mr. Oldmeadow. I have warned you before; it is easy to be worldly-wise and cynical and to keep to the broad road; it is easy to be safe. But withering lies that way: withering and imprisonment, and—”
“Come, come, Mrs. Barney,” Oldmeadow interposed, addressing her for the first time and acidly laughing. “Really we haven’t time for sermons. You oughtn’t to have obliged me to come up if you wanted to influence Barney all by yourself. He sees quite clearly for himself the rights and the wrongs of this affair, as it happens. If I were to preach for a moment in my turn I might ask you how it was that you didn’t see that it was your duty to tell Meg’s mother and brother how things were going and let them judge. You’re not as wise as you imagine—far from it. Some things you can’t judge at all. Meg and Hayward aren’t people of enough importance to have a right to break laws; that’s all that it comes to; there’s nothing to be gained by their breaking laws; not only for other people, but for themselves. They’re neither of them capable of being happy in the ambiguous sort of life they’d have to lead. There’s a reality you didn’t see at all in your haste to flout convention. Barney could have dealt with Hayward, and Meg could have been packed off to the country and kept there till she’d learned to think a little more about other people’s hearts and a little less about her own. What business had you, after all, to have secrets from your husband and to plot with the two young fools behind his back? Isn’t Meg his sister rather than yours?” His bitterness betrayed him and conscious hostility rose in him, answering the menace that measured him in her eyes. “What business had you, a new-comer among us, to think yourself capable of managing all their lives and to set yourself up above them all in wisdom? You take too much upon yourself”; his lips found the old phrase: “Really you do. It’s been your mistake from the beginning.”
He could not have believed that a face so framed for gentleness could show itself at once so calm and so convulsed. He knew that something had happened to her that had never happened to her before in her life. She kept her eyes steadily on him and he wondered if she were not reciting some incantation, some exorcism, derived from the seagulled lady above her: Power in Repose—Power in Love—Power in Light. Her mouth and eyes and nostrils were dark on her pallor and he felt that she held back all the natural currents of her being in order to face and quell him with the supernatural.
“Never mind all that, Roger,” Barney wassickly murmuring. “I don’t feel like that. I know Adrienne didn’t for a moment mean to deceive me.”
“We will mind it, Barney,” said Adrienne, breathing with difficulty. “I had, Mr. Oldmeadow, the business, first, of loyalty to another human soul who, in the crisis of its destiny, confided in me. I have been nearer Meg than any of you have guessed, from my first meeting with her. You were all blind. I saw at once that she was tossed and tormented. I am nearer, far nearer her, than her brother and mother. In them she would never have dreamed of confiding and she came to me because she felt that in me she would find reality and in them mere formulas. I do not look upon women as chattels to be handed about by their male relatives and locked up if they do not love according to rule and precedent. I look upon them as the equals of men in every respect, as free as men to shape their lives and to direct their destinies. You speak a mediæval language, Mr. Oldmeadow. The world, our great, modern, deep-hearted world, has outstripped you.”
“Darling,” Barney forestalled, breathlessly, as she paused, any reply that Oldmeadow might have been tempted to make, “don’t mind if Roger speaks harshly. He’s like that and no one cares for us more. He doesn’t mean conventionality at all, or anything mediæval. You don’t understand him. He puts his finger on the spot about Meg and Hayward. It’s exactly as he says; they’re not of enough importance to have a right to break laws. If you could have confided in me, it would have been better; you must own that. We’d have given Meg a chance to pull herself together. We’d have sent Hayward about his business. It’s a question, as Roger says, of yourwisdom; of your knowledge of the world. You didn’t understand them. They’re neither of them idealists like you. They can’t be happy doing what you might be big enough to do. Just because they’re not big. Try to take it in, darling. And we really needn’t go on talking about it any longer, need we? It isn’t a question of influence. All we have to decide on is what’s to be done. Roger must go to Mother and tell her I’m starting this morning to try and fetch Meg back. Imagine Mother with a divorce case on! It would kill her, simply. That’s all. Isn’t it, Roger?”
“Stop, Mr. Oldmeadow,” said Adrienne, again. She rose as she spoke. As he saw her stand before them, her approaching maternity dominated for a moment all his impressions of her. Veiled and masked adroitly as it was, its very uncouthness curiously became her. Her head, for once, looked small. Like an archaic statue, straight and short and thick, her altered form had dignity and amplitude and her face, heavy with its menace, hard with its control, might have been that of some austere and threatening priestess of fruitfulness.
“Barney, wait,” she said. Her arms hung straight beside her, but she slightly lifted a hand as she spoke and Oldmeadow noted that it was tightly clenched. “It is I, not your friend, whom you must question as to what it is right that you should do. I do not consent to his reading of my unwisdom and unworthiness. I ask you not to consent to it. I ask you again not to go. I ask you again to respect my judgment rather than his.”
“Darling,” the unfortunate husband supplicated; “it’s not because it’s Roger’s judgment. You knowit’s what I felt right myself—from the moment you told me what had happened. You say people must follow their own light. Itismy light. I must do what Mother asks and try to bring Meg back.”
“It is not your light, Barney. It is craft and caution and fear. More than that, do you not see, must I make plain to you what it is you do to me in going? You insult me. You treat what I have believed right for Meg to do as a crime from which she must be rescued. You drag me in the dust with her. Understand me, Barney”—the streaks of colour deepened on her neck, her breath came thickly—“if you go, you drag me in the dust.”
“How can it drag you in the dust, Mrs. Barney, if Meg wants to come back?” Oldmeadow interposed in the tone of a caustic doctor addressing a malingering patient. “We’re not talking of crimes; only of follies. Come; be reasonable. Don’t make it so painful for Barney to do what’s his plain duty. You’re not a child. You have, I hope, courage enough and humour enough to own that you can make mistakes—like other people.”
“Yes, yes, Adrienne, that’s just it,” broke painfully from Barney, and, as he seized the clue thus presented to him, Adrienne turned her head slowly, with an ominous stillness, and again rested her eyes upon him. “It’s childish, you know, darling. It’s not like you. And of course I understand why; and Roger does. You’re not yourself; you’re over-strained and off-balance and I’m so frightfully sorry all this has fallen upon you at such a time. I don’t want to oppose you in anything, darling—do try to believe me. Only you must give me the credit for my own convictions. I do feel I must go. I do feelRoger must take that message to Mother. After all, darling,” and now in no need of helping clues he found his own and the irrepressible note of grief vibrated in his voice, “you do owe me something, don’t you? You do owe us all something—to make up, I mean. Because, without you, Meg would never have behaved like this and disgraced us all. Oh—I don’t mean to reproach you!”
“Good-bye then, I’m off,” said Oldmeadow. “I’m very sorry you made me come up. Good-bye, Mrs. Barney.” She had not spoken, nor moved, nor turned her eyes from Barney’s face.
“Good-bye. Thanks so much, Roger.” Barney followed him, with a quickness to match his own, to the door. But Adrienne, this time, did not call him back. She remained standing stock-still in front of her sofa.
“Tell Mother I’m off,” said Barney, grasping his hand. “Tell her she’ll hear at once, as soon as I know anything. Thanks so awfully,” he repeated. “You’ve been a great help.”
It was unfortunate, perhaps, that Barney should say that, Oldmeadow reflected as he sped down the stairs. “But she’s met reality at last,” he muttered, wondering how she and Barney faced each other above and hearing again the words that must echo so strangely in her ears: “Disgraced us all.” And, mingled with his grim satisfaction, was, again, the sense of irrelevant and reluctant pity.
ITwas Saturday and he had to wire to Mrs. Aldesey that he could not go with her next day to the Queen’s Hall concert they had planned to hear together.
Nancy was waiting for him at the station in her own little pony-cart and as he got in she said: “Is Barney gone?”
“Yes; he’ll have gone by now,” said Oldmeadow and, as he said it, he felt a sudden sense of relief and clarity. The essential thing, he saw it as he answered Nancy’s question, was that he should be able to say that Barney had gone. And he knew that if he hadn’t been there to back him up, he wouldn’t have gone. So that was all right, wasn’t it?
As he had sped past the sun-swept country the reluctant pity had struggled in him, striving, unsuccessfully, to free itself from the implications of that horrid word: “Disgraced.” It was Adrienne who had disgraced them; that was what Barney’s phrase had really meant, though he hadn’t intended it to mean it. She, the stranger, the new-comer, had disgraced them. And it was true. Yet he wished Barney hadn’t stumbled on the phrase—just because she was a stranger and a new-comer. And Barney would never have found it had he not been there. But now came the sense of relief. If he hadn’t been there, Barney wouldn’t have gone.
“Aunt Eleanor is longing to see you,” said Nancy. “Her one hope, you know, is that he may bring Meg back.” Nancy’s eyes had a strained look, as though she had lain awake all night.
“You think she may come back?”
He felt, himself, unable to form any conjectures as to what Meg was likely to do. What she had done was so strangely unlike her.
“Not if it means leaving Captain Hayward for good,” said Nancy. “But Aunt Eleanor and Mother both think that she may be willing to come till they can marry.”
“That’s better than nothing, isn’t it,” said Oldmeadow, and Nancy then surprised him by saying, as she looked round at him: “I don’t want her to come back.”
“Don’t want her to come back? But you wanted Barney to go?”
“Yes. He had to go. Just so that everything might be done. So that it might be put before her. And to satisfy Aunt Eleanor. But, don’t you see, Roger, it would really make it far more difficult for Aunt Eleanor to have her here. What would she do with her?—since she won’t give up Captain Hayward? She can love Meg and grieve and yearn over her now. But if she were here she couldn’t. It would be all grief and bitterness.”
Nancy had evidently been thinking to some purpose during her sleepless night and he owned that her conclusion was the sound one. What disconcerted him was her assurance that Meg would not leave her lover. After Adrienne, Nancy was likely to have the most authentic impressions of Meg’s attitude; and, as they drove towards Chelford, he was further disconcerted by hearing her murmur, half to herself: “It would be silly to leave him now, wouldn’t it.”
“Not if she’s sorry and frightened at what she’s done,” he protested. “After all the man’s got a wife who may be glad to have him back.”
But Nancy said: “I don’t think she would. I think she’ll be glad not to have him back. Meg may be frightened; but I don’t believe she’ll be sorry; yet.”
He meditated, somewhat gloomily, as they drove, on the unexpectedness of the younger generation. He had never thought of Nancy as belonging, in any but the chronological sense, to that category; yet here she was, accepting, if not condoning, the rebellion against law and morality.
Mrs. Averil had driven down to the Little House where she was to be picked up and, as they turned the corner to the Green, they saw her waiting at the gate, her furs turned up around her ears, her neat little face pinched and dry, as he had known that he would find it, and showing a secure if controlled indignation, rather than Nancy’s sad perplexity.
“Well, Roger, you find us in a pleasant predicament,” she observed as Oldmeadow settled the rug around her knees. “Somehow one never thinks of things like this happening in one’s own family. Village girls misbehave and people in the next county run away sometimes with other people’s wives; but one never expects such adventures to come walking in to one’s own breakfast-table.”
“Disagreeable things do have a way of happening at breakfast-time, don’t they,” Oldmeadow assented. The comfort of Mrs. Averil was that even on her death-bed she would treat her own funeral lightly: “I wonder it remains such a comfortable meal, all the same.”
“I suppose you’ve had lunch on the train,” said Mrs. Averil. “Will you believe it? Poor Eleanorwas worrying about that this morning. She’s got some coffee and sandwiches waiting for you, in case you haven’t. I’m so thankful you’ve come. It will help her. Poor dear. She’s begun to think of all the other things now. Of what people will say and how they will hear. Lady Cockerell is very much on her mind. You know what a meddlesome gossip she is, and only the other day Eleanor snubbed her when she was criticizing Barbara’s new school. The thought of her is disturbing her dreadfully now.”
“I suppose these leech-bites do help to alleviate the pain of the real wound,” said Oldmeadow.
“Not in the least. They envenom it,” Mrs. Averil replied. “I’d like to strangle Lady Cockerell myself before the news reaches her.”
Nancy drove on, her eyes fixed on the pony’s ears. “I don’t believe people will talk nearly as much as you and Aunt Eleanor imagine,” she now remarked. “I’ve told her so; and so must you, Mother.”
“You are admirable with her, Nancy. Far better than I am. I sit grimly swallowing my curses, or wringing my hands. Neither wringing nor cursing is much good, I suppose.”
“Not a bit of good. It’s better she should think of what people say than of Meg; but when it comes to agonizing over them I believe the truth is that people nowadaysdoget over it; far more than they used to; especially if Aunt Eleanor can show them thatshegets over it.”
“But she can’t get over it, my dear child!” said Mrs. Averil, gazing at her daughter in a certain alarm. “How can one get over disgrace like that or lift one’s head again—unless one is an Adrienne Toner! Oh, when I think of that woman and of whatshe’s done! For she is responsible for it all! Every bit of it. Meg was a good girl, at heart; always. In spite of that silly liquid powder. And so I tell Eleanor. Adrienne is responsible for it all.”
“I don’t, Mother; that’s not my line at all,” said Nancy. “I tell her that what Meg says is true.” Nancy touched the pony with the whip. “If it hadn’t been for Adrienne she might have done much worse.”
“Really, my dear!” Mrs. Averil murmured.
“Come, Nancy,” Oldmeadow protested; “that was a retrospective threat of Meg’s. Without Adrienne she’d never have considered such an adventure—or its worse alternative. Encourage your aunt to curse Adrienne. Your Mother’s instinct is sound there.”
But Nancy shook her head. “I don’t know, Roger,” she said. “Perhaps Meg would have considered the alternative. Girls do consider all sorts of things nowadays that Mother and Aunt Eleanor, in their girlhood, would have thought simply wicked. Theyarewicked; but not simply. That’s the difference between now and then. And don’t you think that it’s better for Meg and Captain Hayward to go away so that they can be married than to be, as she says, really rotters; than to be, as she says, cheats and hypocrites and steal their happiness?”
“My dear child!” Mrs. Averil again murmured, while Oldmeadow, finding it, after all, a comfort to have a grown-up Nancy to discuss it with, said, “My contention is that, left to herself, Meg would have thought them both wicked.”
“Perhaps,” Nancy said again; “but even old-fashioned girls did things they knew to be wickedsometimes. The difference Adrienne has made is that Meg doesn’t think herself wicked at all. She thinks herself rather noble. And that’s what I mean about Aunt Eleanor. It will comfort her if she can feel a little as Adrienne feels—that Meg isn’t one bit the worse, morally, for what she’s done.”
“Are you trying to persuade us that Meg isn’t guilty, my dear?” Mrs. Averil inquired dryly. “Are you trying to persuade us that Adrienne has done us all a service? You surely can’t deny that she’s behaved atrociously, and first and foremost, to Barney. Barney could have known nothing about it, and can you conceive a woman keeping such a thing from her husband?”
But Nancy was feeling the pressure of her own realizations and was not to be scolded out of them. “If Meg is guilty, and doesn’t know it, she will suffer dreadfully when she finds out, won’t she? It all depends on whether she has deceived herself or not, doesn’t it? I’m not justifying her or Adrienne, Mother; only trying to see the truth about them. How could Adrienne tell Barney when it was Meg’s secret? We may feel it wrong; but she thought she was justified.” The colour rose in Nancy’s cheek as she named Barney, but she kept her tired eyes on her mother and added, “I don’t believe it was easy for her to keep it from him.”
“My dear, anything is easy for her that flatters her self-importance!” cried Mrs. Averil impatiently. “I’ll own, if you like, that she’s more fool than knave—as Meg may be; though Meg never struck me as a fool. Things haven’t changed so much since my young days as all that; it’s mainly a matter of names. If girls who behave like Meg find it pleasanterto be called fools than knaves, they are welcome to the alternative. Noble they never were nor will be, whatever the fashion.”
Oldmeadow did not want the sandwiches, so, as soon as they reached Coldbrooks, he was led upstairs to Mrs. Chadwick’s room. He found his poor friend lying on the sofa, the blinds drawn down and a wet handkerchief on her forehead. She burst out crying as he entered. Oldmeadow sat down beside her and took her hand and, as he listened to her sobs, felt that he need not trouble to pity Adrienne.
“What I cannot, cannot understand, Roger,” she was at last able to say, and he realized that it was of Adrienne, not Meg, that she was speaking, “is how she can bear to treat us so. We all loved and trusted her. You know how I loved her, Roger. I felt Meg as safe in her hands as in my own. Oh, that wicked, wicked man! I hardly know him by sight. That makes it all so much more dreadful. All I do know is that his wife is a daughter of poor Evelyn Madderley, who broke her back out hunting.”
“I don’t believe there’s much harm in him, you know,” Oldmeadow suggested. “And I believe that he is sincerely devoted to Meg.”
“Harm, Roger!” poor Mrs. Chadwick wailed, “when he is a married man and Meg only a girl! Oh, if there is harm in anything there is in that! Running away with a girl and ruining her life! Barney will make him feel what he has done. Barneyhasgone?”
“Yes, he’s gone, and I am sure we can rely on him to speak his mind to Hayward.”
“And don’t you think he may bring Meg back, Roger? Nancy says I must not set my mind on it;but don’t you think she may be repenting already? My poor little Meg! She was hot-tempered and could speak very crossly if she was thwarted; but I think of her incessantly as she was when she was a tiny child. Self-willed; but so sweet and coaxing in her ways, with beautiful golden hair and those dark eyes. I always thought of Meg, with her beauty, as sure to marry happily; near us, I hoped”—Mrs. Chadwick began to sob again. “And now!—Will he find them in Paris? Will they not have moved on?”
“In any case he’ll be able to follow them up. I don’t imagine they’ll think of hiding.”
“No; I’m afraid they won’t. That is the worst of it! They won’t hide and every one will come to know and then what good will there be in her coming back! If only I’d had her presented last year, Roger! She can never go to court now,” Mrs. Chadwick wept, none the less piteously for her triviality. “To think that Francis’s daughter cannot go to court! She would have looked so beautiful, with my pearls and the feathers. The feathers are becoming to so few girls. Nancy could not wear them nearly so well. Nancy can go and my daughter can’t!”
“I don’t think the lack of feathers will weigh seriously upon Meg’s future, my dear friend.”
“Oh, but it’s what they stand for, Roger, that will weigh!” Mrs. Chadwick, even in her grief, retained her shrewdness. “It’s easy to laugh at the feathers, but you might really as well laugh at wedding-rings! To think that Francis’s daughter is travelling about with a man and without a wedding-ring! Or do you suppose they’ll have thought of it and bought one? It would be a lie, of course; but don’t you think that a lie would be justifiable under the circumstances?”
“I don’t think it really makes any difference, until they can come home and be married.”
“I suppose she must marry him now—if they won’t hide—and will be proud of what they’ve done; she seems quite proud of it!—everyone will hear, so that they will have to marry. Oh—I don’t know what to hope or what to fear! How can you expect me to have tea, Nancy!” she wept, as Nancy entered carrying the little tray. “It’s so good of you, my dear, but how can I eat?—I can hardly face the servants, Roger. They will all hear. And Meg was always such a pet of Johnson’s; his favourite of all my children. He used to give her very rich, unwholesome things in the pantry and once, when her father punished her for disobeying him and put her in the corner, in the drawing-room, one day, after lunch, Johnson nearly dropped the coffee, when he came in. It upset him dreadfully and he would hardly speak to Francis for a week afterwards. I know he will think it all our fault, when he hears, now. And so it is, for having trusted to a stranger. I can’t drink tea, Nancy.”
“Yes, you can, for Meg’s sake, Aunt Eleanor, and eat some tea-cake, too,” said Nancy. “If you aren’t brave for her, who will be. And you can’t be brave unless you eat. I remember so well, when I was little, Uncle Francis saying that when it came to the pinch you were the bravest woman he knew. You’ll see, darling; it will all come out better than you fear. Johnson and all of us will help you to make it come out better.”
“She is such a comfort to me, Roger,” said Mrs. Chadwick with a summoned smile. “Somehow, when I see her, I feel that thingswillcome out better.Youwill have to go to court, dear, next spring. We can’t have none of our girls going. And you shall wear my pearls.” Mrs. Chadwick’s tears fell, but she took up the tea-cup.
Nancy more and more was striking Oldmeadow as the wisest person in the house. He walked with her on the terrace after tea; it was an old custom of his and Nancy’s to step outside then, whatever the weather, and have a few turns. This was a clear, chill evening and Nancy had wrapped a woollen scarf closely round her neck and shoulders. Her chin was sunken in its folds as she held it together on her breast, and with her dropped profile, her sad, meditative eyes, it was as if she saw a clue and, far more clearly than he did, knew where they all stood.
“Adrienne was bitterly opposed to Barney’s going,” he said. “She seemed unable to grasp the fact that she herself had been in error.”
Nancy turned her eyes on him. “Did Barney tell you she was bitterly opposed?”
“He didn’t tell me. I was with them. It was most unfortunate. She insisted on my coming up.”
“Oh, dear,” said Nancy. She even stopped for a moment to face him with her dismay. “Yes, I see,” she then said, walking on, “she would.”
“Why would she? Unless she was sure of getting her own way? The only point in having me up was to show me that she could always get her own way with Barney.”
“Of course. And to make it quite clear to herself, too. She’s not afraid of you, Roger. She’s not afraid of anything but Barney.”
“I don’t think she had any reason to be afraid ofhim this morning. He was badly upset, of course. But if I hadn’t gone up, I imagine she’d have kept him from going. And you own that that would have been a pity, don’t you?”
“Yes. Oh, yes. He had to go,” said Nancy, absently. And she added. “Were you very rough and scornful?”
“Rough and scornful? I don’t think so. I think I kept my temper very well, considering all things. I showed her pretty clearly, I suppose, that I considered her a meddling ass. I don’t suppose she’ll forgive me easily for that.”
“Well, you can’t wonder at it, can you?” said Nancy. “Especially if she suspects that you made Barney consider her one, too.”
“But it’s necessary, isn’t it, that she should be made to suspect it herself? I don’t wonder at her not forgiving me for showing her up before Barney, and upholding him against her, but I do wonder that one can never make her see she’s wrong. It’s that that’s so really monstrous about her.”
“Do you think that anyone can ever make us see we are wrong unless they love us?” Nancy asked.
“Well, Barney loves her,” said Oldmeadow after a moment.
“Yes; but he’s afraid of her, too, isn’t he? He’d never have quite the courage to try and make her see, would he?—off his own bat I mean. He’d never really have quite the courage to see, himself, how wrong she was, unless he were angry. And to have anyone who is angry with you trying to make you see, only pushes you further and further back into yourself, doesn’t it, and away from seeing?”
“You’ve grown very wise in the secrets of thehuman heart, my dear,” Oldmeadow observed. “It’s true. He hasn’t courage with her—unless some one is there to give it to him. But, you know, I don’t think she’d forgive him if he had. I don’t think she’d forgive anyone who made her see.”
“I don’t know,” Nancy pondered. “I don’t love her, yet I feel as if I understood her; better, perhaps, than you do. I think she’s good, you know. I mean, I think she might be good, if she could ever see.”
“She’s too stupid ever, really, to see,” said Oldmeadow, and it was with impatience. “She’s encased in self-love like a rhinoceros in its hide. One can’t penetrate anywhere. You say she’s afraid of Barney and I can’t imagine what you mean by that. It’s true, when I’m by, she’s afraid of losing his admiration. But that’s not being afraid of him.”
Nancy still pondered; but not, now, in any perplexity. “She’s afraid because she cares so much. She’s afraid because shecancare so much. It’s difficult to explain; but I feel as if I understood her. She’s never cared so much before for just one other person. It’s always been for people altogether; and because she was doing something for them. But Barney does something for her. He makes her happy. Perhaps she never knew before what it was to be really happy. You know, she didn’t give me the feeling of a really happy person. It’s something quite, quite new for her. It makes her feel uncertain of herself and almost bewildered sometimes. Oh, I’m sure of it the more I think of it. And you know, sometimes,” Nancy turned her deep, sweet eyes on him, “I feel very sorry for her, Roger. I can’t help it; although I don’t love her at all.”
Yes. It must be true. Though he had seen Adrienne’s vanity rather than her love. Nancy and Meg were united in their assurance and that must be, he saw, because they both, in their so different ways, knew what it was to care; to care so much that you were frightened. It was strange that the pang of pity that came with his new perception should be for Adrienne rather than for his dear little Nancy herself. Nancy had suffered, he knew, and her life was perhaps permanently scarred; yet, clear-eyed and unduped, he saw her as mistress of the very fate that had maimed her. Whereas Adrienne was blindfolded; a creature swayed and surrounded by forces of which she was unaware.
Nancy had deepened his sense of perplexity, his sense of taking refuge from something, and what it was came fully upon him that night when he was at last alone. Meg and her misdemeanour sank into a mere background for the image of the cold, convulsed face that he had seen that morning. Almost angrily he felt himself pushing it back, pushing it down, as if he pushed it down to drown, and again and again it re-emerged to look at him.
He fell asleep at last; but as, a year ago, on the first night of his meeting with her, he had dreamed of her, so to-night he dreamed again.
He did not see her, but she was in some dreadful plight and the sense of her panic and bewilderment broke upon him in shocks of suffering. He could not see her, but he was aware of her, horribly aware. All remained a broken, baffled confusion, but it was as though, unable to shape and assert itself, he yet felt her very being wrestling with extinction.
The sharpness had gone out of the sunlight nextday and Mrs. Chadwick consented to come and sit with them in the warmest corner of the garden, the corner where, a year ago, Oldmeadow remembered, Meg had sat with him and explained to him the secret of Adrienne’s power. Pitifully, with swollen eyes and trembling fingers, Mrs. Chadwick resumed her interrupted stocking while Oldmeadow read aloud from a Sunday paper the leading article on the critical situation in Ireland. “I suppose every one in London will be talking about Ulster and Sir Edward Carson, won’t they?” said Mrs. Chadwick, and it was evident that she derived a dim comfort from the thought. The situation in Ireland, Oldmeadow reflected, had, at all events, been of so much service.
Upon this quiet scene there broke suddenly the sound of a motor’s horn and a motor’s wheels turned into the front entrance.
Mrs. Chadwick dropped her stocking and laid her hand on Nancy’s arm. “Dear Aunt Eleanor—you know he couldn’t possibly be back yet,” said Nancy. “And if it’s anyone to call, Johnson knows you’re not at home.”
“Lady Cockerell is capable of anything. She might sit down in the hall and wait. She must have heard by now,” poor Mrs. Chadwick murmured. “That married girl of hers in London must have written. With the projecting teeth.”
“I’ll soon get rid of her, if it’s really she,” said Mrs. Averil; but she had hardly risen when the door at the back of the house opened and they saw Johnson usher forth a hurrying female figure, obviously not Lady Cockerell’s; a figure so encumbered by its motoring wraps, so swathed in veils, that only Mrs.Chadwick’s ejaculation enlightened Oldmeadow as to its identity.
“Joséphine!” cried Mrs. Chadwick and then, between the narrow framing of purple gauze, he recognized the dramatic, melancholy eyes and pale, pinched lips of Adrienne’s maid.
“Oh, Madame! Madame!” Joséphine was exclaiming as she came towards them down the path. Her face wore the terrible intensity of expression so alien to the British countenance. “Oh, Madame! Madame!” she repeated. They had all risen and stood to await her. “He is dead! The little child is dead! And she is alone. Monsieur left her yesterday. Quite, quite alone, and her child born dead.”
Mrs. Chadwick faced her in pallid stupefaction.
“The baby, Aunt Eleanor,” said Nancy, for she looked indeed as if she had not understood. “Barney’s baby. It has been born and it is dead. Oh—poor Barney. And poor, poor Adrienne.”
“Yes, dead!” Joséphine, regardless of all but her exhaustion and her grief, dropped down into one of the garden-chairs and put her hands before her face. “Born dead last night. A beautiful little boy. The doctors could not save it and fear for her life. They will not let me stay with her. Only the doctors and the nurses—strangers—are with her.” Joséphine was sobbing. “Ah, it was not right to leave her so. Already she was ill. It could be seen that already she was very ill when Monsieur left her. I came to her when he was gone. She did not say a word to me. She tried to smile.Mais j’ai bien vu qu’elle avait la mort dans l’âme.”
“Good heavens,” Mrs. Chadwick murmured, while Joséphine, now, let her tears flow unchecked.“She is alone and Barney has left her! Oh, this is terrible! At such a time!”
“He had to go, Aunt Eleanor. You know he had to go. We will send for him at once,” said Nancy, and Joséphine, catching the words, sobbed on in her woe and her resentment: “But where to send for him? No one knows where to send. The doctors sent a wire yesterday, at once, when she was taken ill; to the Paris hotel. But no answer came. He must have left Paris. That is why I have come. No telegrams for Sunday. No trains in time. I took the car. The doctor said, Yes, it was well that I should come. Some one who cares for Madame should return with me. If she is to die she must not die alone.”
“But she shall not die!” cried Mrs. Chadwick with sudden and surprising energy. “Oh, the poor baby! It might have lived had I been there. No doctor, no nurse, can understand like a mother. And I shall be able to help with Adrienne. I must go. I must go at once. Mademoiselle will see that you have something to eat and drink, my poor Joséphine, and then you and I will return together. It will not take me a moment to get ready.”
“It will be the best thing for them all,” Oldmeadow murmured to Mrs. Averil, as, taking Joséphine’s arm, Mrs. Chadwick hurried her along the path. “And I’ll go with them.”
A little later, while Mrs. Chadwick made ready above and Joséphine, in the hall, ate the meal that Johnson had brought for her, Oldmeadow and Nancy stood outside near the empty waiting car.
“I’ll wire to you at once, of course, how she is,” he said. Adrienne had put Meg out of all theirthoughts. “But it’s rather grotesque,” he added, “if poor Barney is to be blamed.”
Nancy stood and looked before her, wrapped, as she had been the day before, in her woollen scarf. “Roger,” she said after a moment, “no one can be blamed; yet, if she dies, I shall feel that we have killed her.”
“Killed her! What nonsense, my dear! What do you mean?” He spoke angrily because something in his heart, shaken by his dream, echoed her. The dreaming had now revealed itself as definitely uncanny. What had he to do with Adrienne Toner that his sub-consciousness should be aware of her extremity?
“I can’t explain,” said Nancy. “We couldn’t help it. It’s even all her fault. But she never asked to come to us. She never sought us out. She had her life and we had ours. It was we who sought her and drew her in and worshipped her. She never hid what she was; never in the least little way. It was for what she was, because she was so different and believed so in herself, that Barney loved her. And now because she has gone on believing in herself, we have struck her down.”
The rooks were cawing overhead and Oldmeadow was remembering his dream of a year ago, how Adrienne had come to him along the terrace saying, as she lifted her hand: “I can hear them, too.” They had drawn her in. Yet she had loved their life. She had wanted to understand it and to be part of it. He wished he could get the pale, streaked, drowning face out of his mind. “It’s generous of you, my dear child,” he said, “to say ‘we.’ You mean ‘you.’ If anyone struck her down it was I.”
“You spoke for us all, Roger. And you only spoke for us. You were always outside. I count myself with them. I can’t separate myself from them. I received her love—with them all.”
“Did you?” he looked at her. “I don’t think so, Nancy.”
Nancy did not pretend not to understand. “I know,” she said. “But I’m part of it. And she tried to love me.”
OLDMEADOWsat in Barney’s study, Mrs. Chadwick beside him. It was Tuesday and the only news of Barney had been a letter to his mother, from Paris, where he had not found Meg, and two wires from the South of France, one to Oldmeadow and one to his wife, saying that he had found Meg and was returning alone. He had not, it was evident, received the doctor’s messages.
Oldmeadow had not seen his old friend since the Sunday night when he had left her and Joséphine in Connaught Square, and in his first glance at her this morning he saw that for her, too, Adrienne’s peril had actually effaced Meg’s predicament. It had done more. Faint and feeble as she must be, scarcely able to take possession of her returning life and, as Mrs. Chadwick told him, not yet out of danger, Adrienne had already drawn her mother-in-law back into the circle of her influence.
“You see, Roger,” she said, sitting there on the absurdly incongruous background of the Post Impressionist pictures and tightly squeezing her handkerchief first in one hand and then in the other, “You see, when one is with her onehasto trust her. I don’t know why it is, but almost at once I felt all my bitterness against her die quite away. I knew, whatever she had done, that she believed it to be right; to be reallybestfor Meg, you know. And oh, Roger, Barney has hurt her so terribly! She can’t speak of him without crying. I never saw her cry before. I never imagined Adrienne crying. Shefeels, she can’t help feeling, that it is because of that they have lost their baby.”
Oldmeadow ordered with difficulty his astonished and indignant thoughts. “That is absolutely unfair to Barney,” he said. “I was with them. No one could have been gentler or more patient.”
“I know you were with them. It would seem like that to you, Roger, because you are a man and men still think of women as a sort of chattel. That’s how it looks to Adrienne. So much more independence, you know, than we ever had.—Oh, I don’t say it’s a good thing! I feel that we are weaker and need guidance.”
“Chattels? Where do chattels come in here? She said that to you. Barney merely pleaded with her so that he could do what you wanted him to do.”
“I know—I know, Roger. Don’t get angry. But if I had been here and seen her I should have known that he must not go. I should have seen that she was in danger. A woman would have understood. No; you didn’t treat Adrienne like a chattel; no one could treat Adrienne like one. It was poor little Meg I meant. I see now how wrong it was to think of taking her from the man she loves; when shehasgone, you know, so that everyone must know and there can be no good in it. And they probablyhavebought a wedding-ring. Oh, Roger, she does comfort me about Meg. She makes me feel the deeper things, the things conventions blind us to. She makes me feel that the great thing, the only thing, is to follow one’s own light and that Meg did do that. And after all, you know, Roger, Jowett had George Eliot and Lewes to breakfast and they were never married.”
“Ha! ha! ha!” Oldmeadow laughed. He could not repress his bitter mirth. “Follow your light if there’s breakfast with a clergyman at the end of it!” he cruelly suggested. Yet he was too much amused, while so incensed, for there to be much cruelty, and Mrs. Chadwick, gazing at him as if from under her twisted straw, murmured: “Hewasa sort of clergyman, Roger; and if people do whatseemsto them right, why should they be punished?”
He saw it all. He heard it all, in her echoes. The potent influence had been poured through her, all the more irresistible for the appeal of Adrienne’s peril. Adrienne, bereaved and dying; yet magnanimous, gentle and assured; always assured. How could Mrs. Chadwick’s feathers and wedding-rings stand a chance against her? They had been swept away, or nearly away, and what Nancy had seen as a possible hope was now an accomplished fact. Mrs. Chadwick had been brought to feel about Meg as Adrienne felt about her, and Oldmeadow, for his part, was not sure that the game was worth the candle. There was something more than absurd in his poor friend’s attempts to adjust herself to the new standards. They were pitiable and even a little unseemly. She began presently softly to weep. “Such a pretty baby it was, Roger. A lovely little creature—that was the first thing she said to me—‘Oh, Mother Nell, it was such a pretty baby.’ And all that she said this morning—when it was taken away—was: ‘I wish Barney could have been in time to see our baby.’ Oh, it is terrible, terrible, Roger, that he is not here! Her heart is broken by it. How can she ever forget that he left her alone at such a time. And she begged him not to go. She told me that she almost knelt to him.”
The tears, irrepressibly, had risen to Oldmeadow’s eyes; but as Mrs. Chadwick’s sentence meandered on, his thoughts were roughly jolted from their pity. “But I tell you that that is absolutely unfair!” he repeated, fixing his glass to look his protest the more firmly at her. “I tell you that I was there and saw it all. It wasn’t for the baby. She was thinking of the baby as little as Barney was; less than he was. What she was thinking of was her power over Barney. She was determined that she should not seem to be put in the wrong by his going.”
Like the March Hare Mrs. Chadwick was wild yet imperturbable. “Of course she was determined. How could she be anything else? It did put her in the wrong. And it put Meg in the wrong. That’s where we were so blind. Oh, I blame myself as much as anybody. But Barney is her husband; and he was with her and should have seen and felt. How could she beg him to stay for her danger when he would not stay for her love?”
Yes; Adrienne had her very firmly. She had even imparted to her, when it came to the issue, something of coherency. She was building up, in Barney’s absence, strange ramparts against him. Barney had dragged her in the dust and there she intended to drag him. Wasn’t that it? Oldmeadow asked himself as he eyed his altered friend, muttering finally: “I’m every bit as responsible as Barney, if it comes to that. I upheld him, completely, in his decision. I do still. Adrienne may turn you all upside down; but she won’t turn me; and I hope she won’t turn Barney.”
“I think, Roger, that you might at all events remember that she’s not out of danger,” said Mrs.Chadwick. “She may die yet and give you no more trouble. You have never cared for her; I know that, and so does she; and I do think it’s unfeeling of you to speak as you do when she’s lying there above us. And she looks so lovely in bed,” Mrs. Chadwick began to weep again. “I never saw such thick braids; like Marguerite in Faust. Her hands on the sheets so thin and white and her eyes enormous. I don’t think even you could have the heart to jibe and laugh if you saw her.”
“I didn’t laugh at Adrienne, you know,” Oldmeadow reminded her, rising and buttoning his overcoat. “I laughed at you and Jowett. No; Adrienne is no laughing matter. But she won’t die. I can assure you of that now. She’s too much life in her to die. And though I’m very sorry for her—difficult as you may find it to believe—I shall reserve my pity for Barney.”
Barney needed all his pity and the sight of him on the following Sunday evening, as he appeared on his threshold, would have exorcised for Oldmeadow, if Mrs. Chadwick had not already done so, the memory of the pale, drowning face. He looked like a dog that has been beaten for a fault it cannot recognize. There was bewilderment in his eyes and acceptance, and a watchful humility. To see them there made Oldmeadow angry.
Barney had sent a line to say that he was back; but his friend had been prepared not to see him. Once engulfed in the house of mourning it was but too likely that he would not emerge for many days. And besides, what would Barney have to say to him now? But here he was, with his hollow eyes and faded cheeks, and it was with an echo of his old boyishmanner of dropping in when beset by some perplexity that, without speaking, he crossed the room and sank on the sofa by the fireplace. But he had not come to seek counsel or sustainment. Oldmeadow saw that, as, after he had offered cigarettes, which Barney refused, and lighted his own pipe, he walked to and fro and watched him while Barney watched the flames. He had not come with a purpose at all. It was, again, precisely like the unhappy dog who wanders forth aimlessly, guided merely by a dim yearning towards warmth and kindliness. Barney had come where he would be understood. But it was not because he believed himself to be misunderstood that he came.
“I went to Coldbrooks, first, you know,” he said presently, and with an effect of irrelevance. “I thought I’d find Mother there. So it was only on that Thursday night I got back here. None of the wires caught me.”
“I know,” said Oldmeadow. “It was most unfortunate. But you couldn’t have got back sooner, could you, once you’d gone on from Paris.”
“Not possibly. I went on from Paris that very night, you see. I caught the night express to the Riviera. They’d left Cannes as an address, but when I got there I found they’d moved on to San Remo. It was Tuesday before I found them. My one idea was to find them as soon as possible, of course. No; I suppose it couldn’t be helped; once I’d gone.”
“And it was quite useless? You’d no chance with Meg at all?”
“None whatever. Quite useless. Never was such a wild-goose chase. It was exactly as Adrienne had said.”
“Still it couldn’t have been foreseen so securely by anyone but Adrienne. Many girls would have jumped at the chance.”
“Not if they’d had Adrienne to help them. We might have realized that. That’s what armed Meg. I heard Adrienne in everything she said. Even Mother thinks Adrienne was right, now, you know, Roger. And it was all for Mother, wasn’t it? that I went. That makes it all so particularly ironic. Only dear Mummy was never very strong at logic. She takes the line now that we’re narrow-minded conventionalists, you and I, for thinking that a girl oughtn’t to go off with a married man. I can’t feel that, you know, Roger,” said Barney in his listless tone. “I can’t help feeling that Meg has done something shameful. You ought to have seen her! Positively smug! sitting there with that ass of a fellow in that damned Riviera hotel! I had the horridest feeling, too, that Meg had brought him rather than he her. I don’t mean he doesn’t care for her—he does; I’ll say that for him. He’s a stupid fellow, but honest; and he came outside and tried to tell me what he felt and how it would be all right and that he was going to devote his life to her. But I think he feels pretty sick, really. While Meg treated me as if I were a silly little boy. If anyone can carry the thing through, Meg will.”
“It won’t prove her right because she carries it through, you know,” Oldmeadow observed.
“No,” said Barney, “but it will make us seem more wrong. Not that you have any responsibility in it, dear old boy. I did what I felt I must do and mine was the mistake. It’s not only Mother who thinks I’ve wronged Adrienne,” he went on after amoment, lifting his arms as though he felt a weight upon them and clasping them behind his head. “Even Nancy, though she was so sorry for me, made me feel that I’d done something very dreadful.”
“Nancy? How did you come to see Nancy?”
“Why, at Coldbrooks. She’s still there with Aunt Monica. That was just it. It was my going there first, seeing her first, that upset her so. She couldn’t understand, till I could explain, how it came about. She was thinking of Adrienne, you see. And I, knowing nothing, had been thinking of Mother all the time. It was too late, then, to go back at once. The next train wasn’t for three hours. So I had to stay.”
“And it was Nancy who had to tell you everything?”
“Yes; Nancy,” said Barney, staring at the ceiling. There was a note, now, of control in his voice and Oldmeadow knew that if he had said no word of what must be foremost in both their thoughts it was because he could not trust himself to speak of it. And he went on quickly, taking refuge from his invading emotion, “Aunt Monica wasn’t there. I didn’t even see Johnson. I went right through the house and into the garden and there was Nancy, planting something in the border. Everything looked so natural. I just went up to her and said ‘Hello, Nancy,’ and then, when she looked up at me, I thought she was going to faint. Poor little Nancy. I knew something terrible had happened from the way she looked at me.”
“Poor little Nancy. But I’m glad it was she who told you, Barney.”
“No one could have been sweeter,” said Barney,talking on quickly. “She kept saying, ‘Oh, you oughtn’t to be here, Barney. You oughtn’t to be here.’ But no one could have been sweeter. We sat down on the old bench, you know, and she told me. That Adrienne had nearly died. That the baby was dead. I could hardly believe her, at first. I stared at her, I know, and I kept saying, ‘What do you mean, Nancy?—what do you mean?’ And she began to cry and I cried, too. Men do feel, Roger, all the same, even though they haven’t the mother’s claim to feel. I thought about our baby so much. I loved it, too. And now—to think it’s dead; and that I never saw it; and that it’s my fault”—his voice had shaken more and more; he had put his hand before his eyes, and, then, suddenly, he leaned forward and buried his head on the arm of the sofa.
“My poor Barney! My dear boy!” Oldmeadow muttered. He came and sat down beside him; he laid his arm around his shoulders. “It’s not your fault,” he said.
“Oh, don’t say that, Roger!” sobbed Barney. “It’s no good trying to comfort me. I’ve broken her heart. She doesn’t say so. She’s too angelic to say it; but she lies there and looks it. My poor darling! My poor, courageous darling; what she has been through! It can’t be helped. I must face it. I’m her husband. I ought to have understood. She supplicated me, and I rejected her, and the child is dead.”
“The child’s death is a calamity for which no one can be held responsible unless it is Adrienne herself,” said Oldmeadow. While Barney sobbed he was thinking intently, for this was a turning-point in Barney’s destiny. He would remain in subjugationto Adrienne’s conception of the wrong done her or he must be enabled to regain the sense of innocence to which he had every right. “She forced the situation on you. She chose to break rather than bend,” he said. “Listen to me, Barney. I don’t speak in any enmity to your wife; but listen to me and try to think it out. Don’t you remember how you once said that your marriage couldn’t be a mistake if you were able to see the defects as well as the beauty of the woman you love. Don’t you remember that you said she’d have to learn a little from you for the much you’d have to learn from her. Nothing more reassured me than what you said that night. And I was reassured the other day by your firmness. It implies no disloyalty in you to see the defects now. It was power over you she wanted the other day and to see herself put in the right, before me; and to see me worsted, before you. You know it, Barney; you know it in your heart. And she knows it too. There was no failure of love in what you said. There was only failure of homage. You were right in opposing her. She was wrong in the issue she made. She was wrong from the first of the miserable affair in having concealed it from you. If you’d stayed behind as she wanted you to do, you’d have shown yourself a weakling and she’d have been further than ever from knowing herself in error. There is the truth; and the sooner you see it, the sooner she will.”
For some time after his friend had ended, Barney lay silent, his face still hidden. But his sobs had ceased. And his silence, at last, grew too long for any disclaimer to be possible to him. He had been brought, Oldmeadow knew it from the very rhythmof his breathing, to the passionless contemplation where alone truth is visible. And what he said at last was: “She’ll never see it like that.”
“Oh, yes, she will,” said Oldmeadow. And he remembered Nancy’s wisdom. “If you hold to it firmly and tenderly and make her feel you love her while you make her feel you think her wrong.”
“She’ll never see it,” Barney repeated, and Oldmeadow now suspected, and with a deep uneasiness, that Barney might be seeing further than himself. “She can’t.”
“You mean that she’s incapable of thinking herself wrong?”
“Yes, incapable,” said Barney. “Because all she’s conscious of is the wish to do right. And she is right so often, she is so good and beautiful, that it must be like that with her. She can break; but she can’t bend.”
Oldmeadow was silent for a moment and Barney, on the arm of the sofa, was silent. “Of course,” Oldmeadow then said, “the less you say about it the better. Things will take their place gradually.”
“I’ve not said anything about it,” said Barney. “I’ve only thought of comforting and cherishing her. But it’s not enough. I’ll never say anything; but she’ll know I’m keeping something back. She knows it already. I see that now. And I didn’t know it till you put it to me.”
“She’ll have to accept it; or to live with it unaccepted, then. You can’t consider yourself a criminal to give her moral ease.”
“No,” said Barney after a pause. “No; I can’t do that. Though that’s what Mummy wants me to do. But I can be horribly sorry.”
“Horribly sorry. Let the rest sink into the unspoken. When people love each other they can, I’m sure, live over any amount of unspoken things.”
“It hasn’t been unspoken between you and me, though, has it, Roger?” said Barney, and he raised himself and got upon his feet as he said it. “There’s the trouble. There’s where Iamwrong. For she’d feel it an intolerable wrong if she knew that it hadn’t been unspoken between you and me. And she’d be right. When people love each other such reticences and exclusions wrong their love.”
“But since you say she knows,” Oldmeadow suggested after another moment.
Barney stood staring out of the twilight window.
“She doesn’t know that I tell you,” he said.
“You’ve told me nothing,” said Oldmeadow.
“Well, she doesn’t know what I listen to, then,” said Barney.
Oldmeadow was again conscious of the deep uneasiness. “It’s quite true I’ve no call to meddle in your affairs,” he said. “The essential thing is that you love each other. Let rights and wrongs go hang.”
“You haven’t meddled, Roger.” Barney moved towards the door. “You’ve been in my affairs, and haven’t been allowed to keep out. Yes. We love each other. But rights and wrongs never go hang with Adrienne.”