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Adrienne Toner: A Novel

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick · English · Gutenberg #42428 · 581,886 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Adrienne Toner: A Novel

Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick


        
Release date: March 29, 2013 [eBook #42428]
                Most recently updated: November 27, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADRIENNE TONER: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)







ADRIENNE TONER




ADRIENNE TONER
_A Novel_

BY
ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
(Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt)

AUTHOR OF "CHRISTMAS ROSES, AND OTHER STORIES," "TANTE"
"FRANKLIN KANE," "THE ENCOUNTER," ETC.

[Illustration: colophon]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY ANNE DOUGLAS DE SÉLINCOURT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THIRD IMPRESSION, MAY, 1922

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U . S . A.





ADRIENNE TONER




PART I




CHAPTER I


"Come down to Coldbrooks next week-end, will you, Roger?" said Barney
Chadwick. He had been wandering around the room, pausing once to glance
at the César Franck on the piano and once at the window to look down at
the Thames, and his voice now, though desultory in intention, betrayed
to his friend preoccupation and even anxiety. "There is going to be an
interesting girl with us: American; very original and charming."

Roger Oldmeadow sat at his writing-bureau in the window, and his high
dark head was silhouetted against the sky. It had power and even beauty,
with moments of brooding melancholy; but the type to which it most
conformed was that of the clever, cantankerous London bachelor; and if
he sometimes looked what he was, the scholar who had taken a double
first at Balliol and gave brain and sinew to an eminent review, he
looked more often what he was not, a caustic, cautious solicitor,
clean-shaved and meticulously neat, with the crisp bow at his collar,
single eyeglass, and thin, wry smile.

There was a cogitative kindness in his eyes and a latent irony on his
lips as he now scrutinized Barney Chadwick, who had come finally to lean
against the mantelpiece, and it was difficult before Roger Oldmeadow's
gaze at such moments not to feel that you were giving yourself away.
This was evidently what Barney was trying not to feel, or, at all
events, not to show. He tapped his cigarette-end, fixing his eyes upon
it and frowning a little. He had ruffled his brown hair with the nervous
hand passed through it during his ramble, but ruffled or sleek Barney
could never look anything but perfection, just as, whether he smiled or
frowned, he could never look anything but charming. In his spring-tide
grey, with a streak of white inside his waistcoat and a tie of petunia
silk that matched his socks, he was a pleasant figure of fashion; and he
was more than that; more than the mere London youth of 1913, who danced
the tango and cultivated Post-Impressionism and the Russian ballet. He
was perhaps not much more; but his difference, if slight, made him
noticeable. It came back, no doubt, to the fact of charm. He was radiant
yet reserved; confident yet shy. He had a slight stammer, and his smile
seemed to ask you to help him out. His boyhood, at twenty-nine, still
survived in his narrow face, clumsy in feature and delicate in contour,
with long jaw, high temples and brown eyes, half sweet, half sleepy. The
red came easily to his brown cheek, and he had the sensitive, stubborn
lips of the little boy at the preparatory school whom Oldmeadow had met
and befriended now many years ago.

In Oldmeadow's eyes he had always remained the "little Barney" he had
then christened him--even Barney's mother had almost forgotten that his
real name was Eustace--and he could not but know that Barney depended
upon him more than upon anyone in the world. To Barney his negations
were more potent than other people's affirmations, and though he had
sometimes said indignantly, "You leave one nothing to agree about,
Roger, except Plato and Church-music," he was never really happy or
secure in his rebellions from what he felt or suspected to be
Oldmeadow's tastes and judgments. Oldmeadow had seen him through many
admirations, not only for books and pictures, but for original girls.
Barney thought that he liked the unusual. He was a devotee of the
ballet, and had in his rooms cushions and curtains from the Omega shop
and a drawing by Wyndham Lewis. But Oldmeadow knew that he really
preferred the photograph of a Burne-Jones, a survival from Oxford days,
that still bravely, and irrelevantly, hung opposite it, and he waited to
see the Wyndham Lewis replaced by a later portent. Barney could remain
stubbornly faithful to old devotions, but he was easily drawn into new
orbits; and it was a new star, evidently, that he had come to describe
and justify.

"What have I to do with charming American girls?" Oldmeadow inquired,
turning his eyes on the blurred prospect of factory-chimneys and
warehouses that the farther waterside of Chelsea affords. One had to go
to the window and look out to see the grey and silver river flowing, in
the placidity that revealed so little power. Oldmeadow lived in a flat
on the Embankment; but he was not an admirer of Chelsea, just as he was
not an admirer of Whistler nor--and Barney had always suspected it--of
Burne-Jones. His flat gave him, at a reasonable cost, fresh air,
boiling-hot water and a walk in Battersea Park; these, with his piano,
were his fundamental needs; though he owned, for the mean little stream
it was, that the Thames could look pretty enough by morning sunlight
and--like any river--magical under stars. After Plato and Bach,
Oldmeadow's passions were the rivers of France.

"She'll have something to do with you," said Barney, and he seemed
pleased with the retort. "I met her at the Lumleys. They think her the
marvel of the age."

"Well, that doesn't endear her to me," said Oldmeadow. "And I don't like
Americans."

"Come, you're not quite so hide-bound as all that," said Barney, vexed.
"What about Mrs. Aldesey? I've heard you say she's the most charming
woman you know."

"Except Nancy," Oldmeadow amended.

"No one could call Nancy a charming woman," said Barney, looking a
little more vexed. "She's a dear, of course; but she's a mere girl. What
do you know about Americans, anyway--except Mrs. Aldesey?"

"What she tells me about them--the ones she doesn't know," said
Oldmeadow, leaning back in his chair with a laugh. "But I own that I'm
merely prejudiced. Tell me about your young lady, and why you want her
to have something to do with me. Is she a reformer of some sort?"

"She's a wonderful person, really," said Barney, availing himself with
eagerness of his opportunity. "Not a reformer. Only a sort of mixture of
saint and fairy-princess. She cured Charlie Lumley of insomnia, three
years ago, at Saint Moritz. Nothing psychic or theatrical, you know.
Just sat by him and smiled--she's a most extraordinary smile--and laid
her hand on his head. He'd not slept for nights and went off like a
lamb. Lady Lumley almost cries when she tells about it. They thought
Charlie might lose his mind if he went on not sleeping."

"My word! She's a Christian Science lady? A medium? What?"

"Call her what you like. You'll see. She does believe in spiritual
forces. It's not only that. She's quite lovely. In every way. Nancy and
Meg will worship her. The Lumley girls do."

Oldmeadow's thoughts were already dwelling in rueful surmise on Nancy.
He had always thought her the nicest young creature he had ever known,
nicer even than Barney; and he had always wanted them to marry. She was
Barney's second cousin, and she and her mother lived near the Chadwicks
in Gloucestershire.

"Oh, Nancy will worship her, will she? She must be all right, then.
What's her name?" he asked.

Barney had given up trying to be desultory, and his conscious firmness
was now not lost upon his friend as he answered, stammering a little,
"Adrienne. Adrienne Toner."

"Why Adrienne?" Oldmeadow mildly inquired. "Has she French blood?"

"Not that I know of. It's a pretty name, I think, Adrienne. One hears
more inane names given to girls every day. Her mother loved France--just
as you do, Roger. Adrienne was born in Paris, I think."

"Oh, a very pretty name," said Oldmeadow, noting Barney's already
familiar use of it. "Though it sounds more like an actress's than a
saint's."

"There was something dramatic about the mother, I fancy," said Barney,
sustained, evidently, by his own detachment. "A romantic, rather absurd,
but very loveable person. Adrienne worshipped her and, naturally, can't
see the absurdity. She died out in California. On a boat," said Barney
stammering again, over the _b_.

"On a boat?"

"Yes. Awfully funny. But touching, too. That's what she wanted, when she
died: the sea and sky about her. They carried her on her yacht--doctors,
nurses, all the retinue--and sailed far out from shore. It's beautiful,
too, in a way you know, to be able to do that sort of thing quite simply
and unself-consciously. Adrienne sat beside her, and they smiled at each
other and held hands until the end."

Oldmeadow played with his penholder. He was disconcerted; and most of
all by the derivative emotion in Barney's voice. They had gone far,
then, already, the young people. Nancy could have not the ghost of a
chance. And the nature of what touched Barney left him singularly dry.
He was unable to credit so much simplicity or unself-consciousness. He
coughed shortly, and after a decently respectful interval inquired: "Is
Miss Toner very wealthy?"

"Yes, very," said Barney, relapsing now into a slight sulkiness. "At
least, perhaps not very, as rich Americans go. She gave away a lot of
her fortune, I know, when her mother died. She founded a place for
children--a convalescent home, or crèche--out in California. And she did
something in Chicago, too."

And Miss Toner had evidently done something in London at the Lumleys'.
It couldn't be helped about Nancy, and if the American girl was pretty
and, for all her nonsense, well-bred, it might not be a bad thing, since
there was so much money. The Chadwicks were not at all well off, and
Coldbrooks was only kept going by Mrs. Chadwick's economies and Barney's
labours at his uncle's stock-broking firm in the city. Oldmeadow could
see Eleanor Chadwick's so ingenuous yet so practical eye fixed on Miss
Toner's gold, and he, too, could fix his. Miss Toner sounded benevolent,
and it was probable that her presence as mistress of Coldbrooks would be
of benefit to all Barney's relatives. All the same, she sounded as
irrelevant in his life as the Wyndham Lewis.

"Adrienne Toner," he heard himself repeating aloud, for he had a trick,
caught, no doubt, from his long loneliness, of relapsing into
absent-minded and audible meditations. The cadence of it worried him. It
was an absurd name. "You know each other pretty well already, it seems,"
he said.

"Yes; it's extraordinary how one seems to know her. One doesn't have any
formalities to get through with her, as it were," said Barney. "Either
you are there, or you are not there."

"Either on the yacht, or not on the yacht, eh?" Oldmeadow reached out
for his pipe.

"Put it like that if you choose. It's awfully jolly to be on the yacht,
I can tell you. It _is_ like a voyage, a great adventure, to know her."

"And what's it like to be off the yacht? Suppose I'm not there? Suppose
she doesn't like me?" Oldmeadow suggested. "What am I to talk to her
about--of course I'll come, if you really want me. But she frightens me
a little, I confess. I'm not an adventurous person."

"But neither am I, you know!" Barney exclaimed, "and that's just what
she does to you: makes you adventurous. She'll be immensely interested
in you, of course. You can talk to her about anything. It was down at a
week-end at the Lumleys' I first met her, and there were some tremendous
big-wigs there, political, you know, and literary, and all that sort of
thing; and she had them all around her. She'd have frightened me, too,
if I hadn't seen at once that she took to me and wouldn't mind my being
just ordinary. She likes everybody; that's just it. She takes to
everybody, big and little. She's just like sunshine," Barney stammered a
little over his _s_'s. "That's what she makes one think of straight off;
shining on everything."

"On the clean and the unclean. I see," said Oldmeadow. "I feel it in my
bones that I shall come into the unclean category with her. But it'll do
me the more good to have her shine on me."




CHAPTER II


Roger Oldmeadow went to have tea with Mrs. Aldesey next afternoon. She
was, after the Chadwicks, his nearest friend, and his relation to the
Chadwicks was one of affection rather than affinity. They had been
extraordinarily kind to him since the time that he had befriended Barney
at the preparatory school, hiding, under his grim jocularities, the
bewilderment of a boy's first great bereavement. His love for his mother
had been an idolatry, and his childhood had been haunted by her
ill-health. She died when he was thirteen, and in some ways he knew
that, even now, he had never got over it. His unfortunate and frustrated
love-affair in early manhood had been, when all was said and done, a
trivial grief compared to it. Coldbrooks had become, after that, his
only home, for he had lost his father as a very little boy, and the
whole family had left the country parsonage and been thrown on the
mercies of an uncle and aunt who lived in a grim provincial town.
Oldmeadow's most vivid impression of home was the high back bedroom
where the worn carpet was cold to the feet and the fire a sulky spot of
red, and the windows looked out over smoky chimney-pots. Here his
stricken mother lay in bed with her cherished cat beside her and read
aloud to him. There was always a difficulty about feeding poor Effie,
Aunt Aggie declaring that cats should live below stairs and on mice; and
Roger, at midday dinner, became adroit at slipping bits of meat from
his plate into a paper held in his lap and carried triumphantly to his
mother's room afterwards. "Oh, darling, you _oughtn't_ to," she would
say with her loving, girlish smile, and he would reply, "But I went
without, Mummy; so it's quite all right." His two little sisters were
kept in the nursery, as they were noisy, high-spirited children, and
tired their mother too much. Roger was her companion, her comrade; her
only comrade in the world, really, beside Effie. It had been Mrs.
Chadwick who had saved Effie from the lethal chamber after her
mistress's death. Roger never spoke about his mother, but he did speak
about Effie when she was thus threatened, and he had never forgotten,
never, never, Mrs. Chadwick's eager cry of, "But bring her here, my dear
Roger. I _like_ idle cats! Bring her here, and I promise you that we'll
make her happy. Animals are _so_ happy at Coldbrooks." To see Effie
cherished, petted, occupying the best chairs during all the years that
followed, had been to see his mother, in this flickering little ghost,
remembered in the only way he could have borne to see her explicitly
remembered, and it was because of Effie that he had most deeply loved
Coldbrooks. It remained always his refuge during a cheerless and
harassed youth, when, with his two forceful, black-browed sisters to
settle in life, he had felt himself pant and strain under the harness.
He was fonder of them than they of him, for they were hard, cheerful
young women, inheriting harshness of feature and manner from their
father, with their father's black eyes. It was from his mother that
Oldmeadow had his melancholy blue ones, and he had never again met his
mother's tenderness.

Both sisters were now settled, one in India and one, very prosperously,
in London; but he seldom turned for tea into Cadogan Gardens and
Trixie's brisk Chippendale drawing-room; though Cadogan Gardens was
obviously more convenient than Somer's Place, where, on the other side
of the park, Mrs. Aldesey lived. He had whims, and did not know whether
it was because he more disliked her husband or her butler that he went
so seldom to see Trixie. Her husband was jovial and familiar, and the
butler had a face like a rancid ham and a surreptitious manner. One had
always to be encountered at the door, and the other was too often in the
drawing-room, and Trixie was vexatiously satisfied with both; Trixie
also had four turbulent, intelligent children, in whom complacent
parental theories of uncontrol manifested themselves unpleasantly, and
altogether she was too much hedged in by obstacles to be tempting; even
had she been tempting in herself. Intercourse with Trixie, when it did
take place, consisted usually of hard-hearted banter. She bantered him a
great deal about Mrs. Aldesey, who, she averred, snubbed her. Not that
Trixie minded being snubbed by anybody.

It was a pleasant walk across the park on this spring day when the
crocuses were fully out in the grass, white, purple and gold, and the
trees just scantly stitched with green, and, as always, it was with a
slight elation that he approached his friend. However dull or jaded
oneself or the day, the thought of her cheered one as did the thought of
tea. She made him think of her own China tea. She suggested delicate
ceremoniousness. Though familiar, there was always an aroma of
unexpectedness about her; a slight, sweet shock of oddity and surprise.

Mrs. Aldesey was unlike the traditional London American. She was neither
rich nor beautiful nor noticeably well-dressed. One became gradually
aware, after some time spent in her company, that her clothes,
soft-tinted and silken, were pleasing, as were her other appurtenances;
the narrow front of her little house, painted freshly in white and green
and barred by boxes of yellow wallflower; the serenely unfashionable
water-colours of Italy, painted by her mother, on the staircase; and her
drawing-room, grey-green and primrose-yellow, with eighteenth-century
fans, of which she had a collection, displayed in cabinets, and good old
glass.

Mrs. Aldesey herself, behind her tea-table, very faded, very thin, with
what the French term a _souffreteux_ little face--an air of just not
having taken drugs to make her sleep, but of having certainly taken
tabloids to make her digest--seemed already to belong to a passing order
of things; an order still sustained, if lightly, by stays, and keeping a
prayer-book as punctually in use as a card-case.

Oldmeadow owed her, if indirectly, to the Chadwicks, as he owed so much,
even if it was entirely on his own merits that he had won her regard.
They had met, years ago, in France; an entirely chance encounter, and
probably a futureless one, had it not been for the presence in the hotel
at Amboise of the Lumleys. They both slightly knew the Lumleys, and the
Lumleys and the Chadwicks were old friends. So it had come about; and if
he associated Mrs. Aldesey with tea, he associated her also with perfect
omelettes and the Loire. He had liked her at once so much, that, had it
not been for an always unseen yet never-repudiated husband in New York,
he would certainly, at the beginning, have fallen in love with her. But
the unrepudiated husband made as much a part of Mrs. Aldesey's
environment as her stays and her prayer-book. The barrier was so evident
that one did not even reflect on what one might have done had it not
been there; and indeed, Mrs. Aldesey, he now seemed, after many pleasant
years of friendship, to recognize, for all the sense of sweetness and
exhilaration she gave him, had not enough substance to rouse or sustain
his heart. She was, like the tea again, all savour.

She lifted to-day her attentive blue eyes--with age they would become
shrewd--and gave him her fine little hand, blue-veined and ornamented
with pearls and diamonds in old settings. She wore long earrings and a
high, transparent collar of net and lace. Her earrings and her
elaborately dressed hair, fair and faded, seemed as much a part of her
personality as her eyes, her delicate nose and her small, slightly
puckered mouth that dragged provocatively and prettily at one corner
when she smiled. Oldmeadow sometimes wondered if she were happy; but
never because of anything she said or did.

"I want to hear about some people called Toner," he said, dropping into
the easy-chair on the opposite side of the tea-table. It was almost
always thus that he and Mrs. Aldesey met. He rarely dined out. "I'm
rather perturbed. I think that Barney--you remember young Chadwick--is
going to marry a Miss Toner--a Miss Adrienne Toner. And I hope you'll
have something to her advantage to tell me. As you know, I'm devoted to
Barney and his family."

"I know. The Lumleys' Chadwicks. I remember perfectly. The dear boy with
the innocent eyes and sulky mouth. Why don't you bring him to see me?
He's dancing the tango in all his spare moments, I suppose, and doesn't
care about old ladies." Mrs. Aldesey was not much over forty, but always
thus alluded to herself. "Toner," she took up, pouring out his tea. "Why
perturbed? Do you know anything against them? Americans, you mean. We
poor expatriates are always seen as keepers to so many curious
brethren.--Toner. _Celà ne me dit rien_."

"I know nothing against them except that Mrs. Toner, the girl's mother,
died, by arrangement, out at sea, on her yacht--in sunlight. Does that
say anything? People don't do that in America, do they, as a rule? A
very opulent lady, I inferred."

"Oh, dear!" Mrs. Aldesey now ejaculated, as if enlightened. "Can it be?
Do you mean, I wonder, the preposterous Mrs. Toner, of whom, fifteen
years ago, I had a glimpse, and used to hear vague rumours? She wandered
about the world. She dressed in the Empire period: Queen Louise of
Prussia, white gauze bound beneath her chin. She had a harp, and warbled
to monarchs. She had an astral body, and a Yogi and a yacht and
everything handsome about her. The typical spiritual _cabotine_ of our
epoch--though I'm sure they must always have existed. Of course it must
be she. No one else could have died like that. Has she died, poor woman?
On a yacht. Out at sea. In sunlight. How uncomfortable!"

"Yes, she's dead," said Oldmeadow resignedly. "Yes; it's she, evidently.
And her daughter is coming down to Coldbrooks this week-end. I'm afraid
that unless Barney has too many rivals, he'll certainly marry her. But
what you say leads me to infer that he will have rivals and to hope they
may be successful. She will, no doubt, marry a prince."

"Something Italian, perhaps. Quite a small fortune will do that.
Certainly your nice Barney wouldn't have been at all Mrs. Toner's
_affaire_. The girl on her own may think differently, for your Barney
is, I remember, very engaging, and has a way with him. I don't know
anything about the girl. I didn't know there was one. There's no reason
why she may not be charming. Our wonderful people have the gift of
picking up experience in a generation and make excellent princesses."

"But she's that sort, you think. The sort that marries princes and has
no traditions. Where did they come from? Do you know that?"

"I haven't an idea. Yet, stay. Was it not tooth-paste?--Toner's Peerless
Tooth-Paste. Obsolete; yet I seem to see, reminiscently, in far-away
nursery days, the picture of a respectable old gentleman with
side-whiskers, on a tube. A pretty pink glazed tube with a gilt top to
it. Perhaps it's that. Since it was Toner's it would be the father's
side; not the warbling mother's. Well, many of us might wish for as
unambiguous an origin nowadays. And, in America, we did all sorts of
useful things when we first, all of us, came over in the Mayflower!"
said Mrs. Aldesey with her dragging smile.

Oldmeadow gazed upon his friend with an ironically receptive eye. "Have
they ever known anyone decent? Anyone like yourself? I don't mean over
here. I mean in America."

"No one like me, I imagine; if I'm decent. Mrs. Toner essayed a season
in New York one winter, and it was then I had my glimpse of her, at the
opera, in the Queen Louise dress. A pretty woman, dark, with a sort of
soulful and eminently respectable coquetry about her; surrounded by
swarms of devotees--all male, to me unknown; and with something in a
turban that I took to be a Yogi in the background. She only tried the
one winter. She knew what she wanted and where she couldn't get it. We
are very dry in New York--such of us as survive. Very little moved by
warblings or astral bodies or millions. As you intimate, she'll have
done much better over here. You _are_ a strange mixture of materialism
and ingenuousness, you know."

"It's only that we have fewer Mrs. Toners to amuse us and more to do
with millions than you have," said Oldmeadow; but Mrs. Aldesey, shaking
her head with a certain sadness, said that it wasn't as simple as all
that.

"Have you seen her? Have you seen Adrienne?" she took up presently,
making him his second cup of tea. "Is she pretty? Is he very much in
love?"

"I'm going down to Coldbrooks on Saturday to see her," said Oldmeadow,
"and I gather that it's not to subject her to any test that Barney wants
me; it's to subject me, rather. He's quite sure of her. He thinks she's
irresistible. He merely wants to make assurance doubly sure by seeing me
bowled over. I don't know whether she's pretty. She has powers,
apparently, that make her independent of physical attractions. She lays
her hands on people's heads and cures them. She cured Charlie Lumley of
insomnia at Saint Moritz three years ago."

Mrs. Aldesey, at this, looked at him for some moments in silence.
"Yes," she assented, and in her pause she seemed to have recognized and
placed a familiar object. "Yes. She would. That's just what Mrs. Toner's
daughter would do. I hope she doesn't warble, too. Laying on hands is
better than warbling."

"I see you think it hopeless," said Oldmeadow, pushing back his chair
and yielding, as he thrust his hands into his pockets and stretched out
his legs, to an avowed chagrin. "What a pity it is! A thousand pities.
They are such dear, good, simple people, and Barney, though he doesn't
know it, is as simple as any of them. What will become of them with this
overwhelming cuckoo in their nest."

At this Mrs. Aldesey became serious. "I don't think it hopeless at all.
You misunderstand me. Isn't the fact that he's in love with her
reassuring in itself? He may be simple, but he's a delicate, discerning
creature, and he couldn't fall in love with some one merely pretentious
and absurd. She may be charming. I can perfectly imagine her as
charming, and there's no harm in laying on hands; there may be good.
Don't be narrow, Roger. Don't go down there feeling dry."

"I am narrow, and I do feel dry; horribly dry," said Oldmeadow. "How
could the child of such a mother, and of tooth-paste, be charming? Don't
try specious consolation, now, after having more than justified all my
suspicions."

"I'm malicious, not specious; and I can't resist having my fling. But
you mustn't be narrow and take me _au pied de la lettre_. I assert that
she may be charming. I assert that I can see it all working out most
happily. She'll lay her hands on them and they'll love her. What I
really want to say is this: don't try to set Barney against her. He'll
marry her all the same and never forgive you."

"Ah; there we have the truth of it. But Barney would always forgive me,"
said Oldmeadow.

"Well then, she won't. And you'd lose him just as surely. And she'll
know. Let me warn you of that. She'll know perfectly."

"I'll keep my hands off her," said Oldmeadow, "if she doesn't try to lay
hers on me."




CHAPTER III


The Chadwicks all had a certain sulkiness in their charming looks, and
where in Barney it mingled with sweetness, in Palgrave, his younger
brother, it mingled with brilliancy. It was Palgrave who, at the
station, met the family friend and counsellor in the shabby, inexpensive
family car. He was still a mere boy, home from Marlborough for the
Easter holidays; fond of Oldmeadow, as all the Chadwicks were; but more
resentful of his predominance than Barney and more indifferent to his
brotherly solicitude. He had Barney's long, narrow face and Barney's
eyes and lips; but the former were proud and the latter petulant.
To-day, as he sat beside him in the car, Oldmeadow was aware of
something at once fixed and vibrating in his bearing. He wanted to say
something, and he had resolved to be silent. During their last encounter
at Coldbrooks, he and Oldmeadow had had a long, antagonistic political
discussion, and Palgrave's resentment still, no doubt, survived.

Coldbrooks lay among the lower Cotswolds, three miles from the station,
and near the station was the village of Chelford where Nancy Averil and
her mother lived. Nancy was at Coldbrooks; Aunt Monica--she was called
aunt by the Chadwick children, though she and Mrs. Chadwick were first
cousins--was away. So Palgrave informed him. But he did not speak again
until the chill, green curve of arable hill-side was climbed and a
stretch of wind-swept country lay before them. Then suddenly he
volunteered: "The American girl is at Coldbrooks."

"Oh! Is she? When did she come?" Somehow Oldmeadow had expected the
later train for Miss Toner.

"Yesterday. She and Barney came down together in her car."

"So you've welcomed her already," said Oldmeadow, curious of the
expression on the boy's face. "How does she fit into Coldbrooks? Does
she like you all and do you like her?"

For a moment Palgrave was silent. "You mean it makes a difference
whether we do or not?" he then inquired.

"I don't know that I meant that. Though if people come into your life it
does make a difference."

"And is she going to come into our lives?" Palgrave asked, and Oldmeadow
felt pressure of some sort behind the question. "That's what I mean. Has
Barney told you? He's said nothing to us. Not even to Mother."

"Has Barney told me he's going to marry her? No; he hasn't. But it's
evident he hopes to. Perhaps it depends on whether she likes Coldbrooks
and Coldbrooks likes her."

"Oh, no, it doesn't. It doesn't depend on anything at all except whether
she likes Barney," said Palgrave. "She's the sort of person who doesn't
depend on anything or anybody except herself. She cuts through
circumstance like a knife through cheese. And if she's not going to take
him I wish she'd never come," he added, frowning and turning, under the
peak of his cap, his jewel-like eyes upon his companion. "It's a case of
all or nothing with a person like that. It's too disturbing--just for a
glimpse."

Oldmeadow felt himself disconcerted. Oddly enough, for the boy was
capricious and extravagant, Palgrave's opinion had more weight with him
than Barney's. Barney, for one thing, was sexually susceptible and
Palgrave was not. Though so young, Oldmeadow felt him already of a
poetic temperament, passionate in mind and cold in blood.

"She's so charming? You can't bear to lose her now you've seen her?" he
asked.

"I don't know about charming. No; I don't think her charming. At least
not if you mean something little by the word. She's disturbing. She
changes everything."

"But if she stays she'll be more disturbing. She'll change more."

"Oh, I shan't mind that! I shan't mind change," Palgrave declared. "If
it's her change and she's there to see it through." And, relapsing to
muteness, he bent to his brakes and they slid down among the woods of
Coldbrooks.

For the life of him and with the best will in the world, he couldn't
make it out. That was Oldmeadow's first impression as, among the
familiar group gathered in the hall about the tea-table, Miss Toner was
at last made manifest to him. She was, he felt sure, in his first shrewd
glance at her, merely what Lydia Aldesey would have placed as a
third-rate American girl, and her origins in commercial enterprise were
eminently appropriate.

She got up to meet him, as if recognizing in him some special
significance or, indeed, as it might be her ingenuous habit to do in
meeting any older person. But he was not so much older if it came to
that; for, after he had met the direct and dwelling gaze of her large,
light eyes, the second impression was that she was by no means so young
as Barney had led him to expect. She was certainly as old as Barney.

There were none of the obvious marks of wealth upon her. She wore a
dark-blue dress tying on the breast over white. She was small in stature
and, in manner, composed beyond anything he had ever encountered. With
an irony, kindly enough, yet big, he knew, with unfavourable inferences,
he even recognized, reconstructing the moment in the light of those that
followed, that in rising to meet him as he was named to her, it had
been, rather than in shyness or girlishness, in the wish to welcome him
and draw him the more happily into a group she had already made her own.

They were all sitting round the plentiful table, set with home-made
loaves and cakes, jams and butter, and a Leeds bowl of primroses; Miss
Toner just across from him, Barney on one side of her--his was an air of
tranquil ecstasy--and little Barbara on the other, and they all seemed
to emanate a new radiance; almost, thought Oldmeadow, with an
irritability that was still genial, like innocent savages on a remote
seashore gathered with intent eyes and parted lips round the newly
disembarked Christopher Columbus. Mrs. Chadwick, confused, as usual,
among her tea-cups, sending hasty relays of sugar after the unsugared or
recalling those sugared in error, specially suggested the simile. She
could, indeed, hardly think of her tea. Her wide, startled gaze turned
incessantly on the new-comer and to Oldmeadow, for all his nearly filial
affection, the eyes of Eleanor Chadwick looked like nothing in the
world so much as those of the March Hare in Tenniel's evocation of the
endearing creature. Unlike her children, she was fair, with a thin,
high, ridiculously distinguished nose; but her mouth and chin had
Barney's irresolution and sweetness, and her untidy locks Meg's beauty.
Meg was a beauty in every way, rose, pearl and russet, a Romney touched
with pride and daring, and the most sophisticated of all the Chadwicks;
yet she, too, brooded, half merrily, half sombrely, on Miss Toner, her
elbows on the table for the better contemplation. Palgrave's absorption
was manifest; but he did not brood. He held his head high, frowned and,
for the most part, looked out of the window.

Oldmeadow sat between Palgrave and Nancy and it was with Nancy that the
magic ended. Nancy did not share in the radiance. She smiled and was
very busy cutting the bread and butter; but she was pale; not puzzled,
but preoccupied. Poor darling Nancy; always his special pet; to him
always the dearest and most loveable of girls. Not at all a Romney. With
her pale, fresh face, dark hair and beautiful hands she suggested,
rather, a country lady of the seventeenth century painted by Vandyck. A
rural Vandyck who might have kept a devout and merry journal, surprising
later generations by its mixture of ingenuousness and wisdom. Her lips
were meditative, and her grey eyes nearly closed when she smiled in a
way that gave to her gaiety and extraordinary sweetness and intimacy.
Nancy always looked as if she loved you when she smiled at you; and
indeed she did love you. She had spent her life among people she loved
and if she could not be intimate she was remote and silent.

But there was no hope for Nancy. He saw that finally, as he drank his
tea in silence and looked across the primroses at the marvel of the age.

Miss Toner's was an insignificant little head, if indeed it could be
called little, since it was too large for her body, and her way of
dressing her hair in wide braids, pinned round it and projecting over
the ears, added to the top-heavy effect. The hair was her only
indubitable beauty, fine and fair and sparkling like the palest, purest
metal. It was cut in a light fringe across a projecting forehead and her
mouth and chin projected, too; so that, as he termed it to himself, it
was a squashed-in face, ugly in structure, the small nose, from its
depressed bridge, jutting forward in profile, the lips, in profile, flat
yet prominent. Nevertheless he owned, studying her over his tea-cup,
that the features, ugly, even trivial in detail, had in their assemblage
something of unexpected force. Her tranquil smile had potency and he
suddenly became aware of her flat, gentle voice, infrequent, yet oddly
dominating. Sensitive as he was to voices, he saw it as a bland, blue
ribbon rolled out among broken counters of colour, and listened to its
sound before he listened to what it said. All the other voices went up
and down; all the others half said things and let them drop or trail.
She said things to the end: when the ribbon began it was unrolled; and
it seemed, always, to make a silence in which it could be watched.

"We went up high into the sunlight," she said, "and one saw nothing but
snow and sky. The bells were ringing on the mountains beneath; one heard
no other sound. I have never forgotten the moment. It seemed an
inspiration of joy and peace and strength."

"You've walked so much in the Alps, haven't you, Roger?" said Mrs.
Chadwick. "Miss Toner has motored over every pass."

"In the French Alps. I don't like Switzerland," said Oldmeadow.

"I think I love the mountains everywhere," said Miss Toner, "when they
go so high into the sky and have the sun and snow on their summits. But
I love the mountains of Savoy and Jura best."

It vexed him that she should. She was a person to stay in and prefer
Switzerland. "Joy and peace and strength," echoed in his ears and with
the words, rudely, and irrelevantly, the image of the pink glazed tube
with the gilt stopper. Miss Toner's teeth were as white as they were
benignant.

"I wish I could see those flowers," said Mrs. Chadwick. "I've only been
to Vevey in the summer; oh, years and years ago. So dull. Fields of
flowers. You've seen them, too, of course, Roger. All the things we grow
with such pains. My Saint Brigid anemones never really do--though what I
put in of leaf-mould!"

"You'll see anemones, fields of them, in the Alpine meadows; and violets
and lilies; the little lilies of Saint Bruno that look like freesias. I
love them best of all," the bland, blue ribbon unrolled. "You shall go
with me some day, Mrs. Chadwick. We'll go together." And, smiling at her
as if they had, already, a happy secret between them, Miss Toner
continued: "We'll go this very summer, if you will. We'll motor all the
way. I'll come and get you here. For a whole month you shall forget that
you've ever had a family to bring up or a house to take care of or
anemones that won't grow properly--even in leaf-mould."

Her eyes, as they rested on her hostess, seemed to impart more than her
words. They imparted something to Oldmeadow. He had not before
conjectured that Eleanor Chadwick might be bored or tired, nor realized
that since Barbara's birth, fourteen years ago, she had not left
Coldbrooks except to go to London for a week's shopping, or to stay with
friends in the English country. He had taken Eleanor Chadwick's life for
granted. It seemed Miss Toner's function not to take things that could
be changed for granted. It was easy to do that of course, when you had a
large banking account behind you; and yet he felt that Miss Toner would
have had the faculty of altering accepted standards, even had she been
materially unequipped. She and Mrs. Chadwick continued to look at each
other for a moment and the older woman, half bashfully, seemed, with
what softness, compelled to a tacit confession. She'd never known before
that she was tired. Springs of adventure and girlishness within her were
perhaps unsealed by Miss Toner's gaze.

"And where do the rest of us come in!" Barney ejaculated. He was so
happy in the triumph of his beloved that his eyes, their sleepiness
banished, were almost as brilliant as Palgrave's.

"But you're always coming in with Mrs. Chadwick," said Miss Toner. She
looked at him, if with a touch of tender humour, exactly as she looked
at his mother; but then she looked at them both as if they were precious
to her. "I don't want you to come in at all for that month. I want her
to forget you ever existed. There ought to be waters of Lethe for
everyone every now and then, even in this life. We come out, after the
plunge into forgetfulness, far brighter and stronger and with a
renovated self to love the better with. Afterwards--after she's had her
dip--you'll all come in, if you want to, with me. I'll get a car big
enough. You, too, Miss Averil; and Mr. Oldmeadow; though he and Barney
and Palgrave may have to take turns sitting on the portmanteaus."

"Barney" and "Palgrave" already. Her unpretentious mastery alarmed
almost as much as it amused him. He thanked her, with his dry smile,
saying that he really preferred to see the Alps on his legs and asked,
to temper the possible acerbity, "Do you drive yourself?" for it seemed
in keeping with his picture of her as an invading providence that she
should with her own hand conduct the car of fate. He could see her,
somehow, taking the hairpin curves on the Galibier.

But Miss Toner said she did not drive. "One can't see flowers if one
drives oneself; and it would hurt dear Macfarlane's feelings so.
Macfarlane is my chauffeur and he's been with me for years; from the
time we first began to have motors, my mother and I, out in California.
Apart from that, I should like it, I think, with the sense of risk and
venture it must give. I like the sense of high adventure--of 'Childe
Roland to the dark tower came'; don't you, Palgrave? It's life, isn't
it? The pulse of life. Danger and venture and conquest. And then
resting, on the heights, while one hears the bells beneath one."

This, thought Oldmeadow, as he adjusted his glass the better to examine
Miss Toner, must prove itself too much, even for Palgrave to swallow.
But Palgrave swallowed it without a tremor. His eyes on hers he
answered: "Yes, I feel life like that, too."

"Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Chadwick, and Oldmeadow blessed her antidote to
the suffocating sweetness: "I'm afraid I don't! I don't think I know
anything about risks and dangers; or about conquest either. I'm sure
I've never conquered anything; though I have been dreadfully afraid of
ill-tempered servants--if that counts, and never let them see it.
Barbara had such an odious nurse. She tried, simply, to keep me out of
the nursery; but she didn't succeed. And there was a Scotch cook once,
with red hair--that so often goes with a bad temper, doesn't it? Do you
remember, Barney?--your dear father had to go down to the kitchen when
she was found lying quite, quite drunk under the table. But cooks and
nurses can't be called risks--and I've never cared for hunting."

Miss Toner was quietly laughing, and indeed everybody laughed.

"Dear Mrs. Chadwick," she said. And then she added: "How can a mother
say she has not known risks and dangers? I think you've thought only of
other people for all your life and never seen yourself at all. Alpine
passes aren't needed to prove people's courage and endurance."

Oldmeadow now saw, from the sudden alarm and perplexity of Mrs.
Chadwick's expression, that she was wondering if the marvellous guest
alluded to the perils of child-birth. Perhaps she did. She was ready, he
imagined, to allude to anything.

"You're right about her never having seen herself," said Palgrave,
nodding across at Miss Toner. "She never has. She's incapable of
self-analysis."

"But she's precious sharp when it comes to analysing other people,
aren't you, Mummy dear!" said Barney.

"I don't think she is," said Meg. "I think Mummy sees people rather as
she sees flowers; things to be fed and staked and protected."

"You're always crabbing Mummy, Meg. It's a shame!--Isn't it a shame,
Mummy dear!" Barbara protested, and Barney tempered the apparent
criticism--peacemaker as he usually was--with: "But you have to
understand flowers jolly well to make them grow. And we do her credit,
don't we!"

Miss Toner looked from one to the other as they spoke, with her clear,
benignant, comprehending gaze, and Mrs. Chadwick stared with her March
Hare ingenuousness that had its full share, too, of March Hare
shrewdness. She undertook no self-justification, commenting merely, in
the pause that followed Barney's contribution: "I don't know what you
mean by self-analysis unless it's thinking about yourself and mothers
certainly haven't much time for that. You're quite right there, my
dear," she nodded at Miss Toner, adding in a tone intended specially for
her: "But young people often exaggerate things that are quite, quite
simple when they come."




CHAPTER IV


"Come out and have a stroll," said Oldmeadow to Nancy. Tea was over and
a primrose-coloured sunset filled the sky. They walked up and down the
gravelled terrace before the house.

Coldbrooks stood high, yet encircled by still higher stretches of bare
or wooded upland. Its walled garden, where vegetable beds and lines of
cordon apple-trees were pleasingly diversified by the herbaceous borders
that ran beneath the walls, lay behind it; most of the bedroom windows
looked down into the garden. Before it, to the south, lawns and meadows
dropped to a lake fed by the brooks that gave the place its name. Beyond
the lake were lower copses, tinkling now with the musical run of water
and climbing softly on either side, so that from the terrace one had a
vast curved space of sky before one. The sun was setting over the woods.

It was Barney's grandfather, enriched by large shipping enterprises in
Liverpool, who had bought the pleasant old house, half farm, half manor,
and Barney's father had married the daughter of a local squire. But the
family fortunes were much dwindled, and though Barney still nursed the
project of returning one day to farm his own land there was little
prospect of such a happy restoration. In spite of the Russian ballet and
London portents, he was fonder, far, of Coldbrooks than of all of them
put together. But he could afford neither time nor money for hunting,
and his home was his only for week-ends and holidays. It was the most
loveable of homes, more stately without than within, built of grey-gold
Cotswold stone with beautiful stone chimneys and mullioned windows and
three gables facing the southern sky. Within, everything was rather bare
and shabby. There was no central heating, and no bathrooms. The
tiger-skin that lay on the stone flags of the hall had lost all its
hair. The piano rattled and wheezed in many of its notes. The patterns
of the drawing-room chintzes were faded to a mere dim rosy riot, and
stuffing protruded from the angles of the leather arm-chairs in the
smoking-room. But it was, all the same, a delightful house to stay in.
Eleanor Chadwick's shrewdness showed itself in her housekeeping. She
knew what were the essentials. There was always a blazing fire in one's
bedroom in the evening and the hottest of water with one's bath in the
morning. Under the faded chintz, every chair in the drawing-room was
comfortable. The toast was always crisp; the tea always made with
boiling water; the servants cheerful. Mrs. Chadwick had a great gift
with servants. She could reprove with extreme plaintiveness, yet never
wound a susceptibility, and the servants' hall, as she often remarked
with justice, was smarter and prettier than the drawing-room. Johnson,
the old butler, had been at Coldbrooks since before her marriage, and
the grey-haired parlourmaid had come with her when she had come as a
bride. These familiar faces added depth to the sense of intimacy that
was the gift of Coldbrooks. Oldmeadow loved the place as much as any of
the Chadwicks did, and was as much at home in it.

"There is a blackcap," said Nancy, "down in the copse. I felt sure I
heard one this morning."

"So it is," said Oldmeadow. They paused to listen.

"It's the happiest of all," said Nancy.

He had been wondering about Nancy ever since he had come. It was not her
voice, gentle and meditative, that told him now she was unhappy. It was
rather in contrast to the bird's clear ecstasy that he felt the
heaviness of her heart.

"It's wilder than the thrush and blackbird, isn't it?" he said. "Less
conscious. The thrush is always listening to himself, I feel. Do you
want to go to the Alps with Miss Toner, Nancy?"

Nancy would not see Miss Toner as an angelic being and he wanted to know
how she did see her. The others, it was evident, thought her angelic by
a sort of group suggestion. She thought herself so, to begin with; snow,
flowers, bells and all the rest of it; and they, ingenuous creatures,
saw the mango-tree rising to heaven as the calm-eyed Yogi willed they
should. But Nancy did not see the mango-tree. She was outside the group
consciousness--with him.

"Oh, no!" she now said quickly; and she added: "I don't mean that I
don't like her. It's only that I don't know her. How can she want us?
She came only yesterday."

"But, you see, she means you to know her. And when she's known she
couldn't imagine that anyone wouldn't like her."

"I don't think she's conceited, if you mean that, Roger."

"Conceit," he rejoined, "may be of an order so monstrous that it loses
all pettiness. You've seen more of her than I have, of course."

"I think she's good. She wants to do good. She wants to make people
happy; and she does," said Nancy.

"By taking them about in motors, you mean."

"In every way. She's always thinking about pleasing them. In big and
little ways. Aunt Eleanor loves her already. They had a long talk last
night in Aunt Eleanor's room. She's given Meg the most beautiful little
pendant--pearl and amethyst, an old Italian setting. She had it on last
night and Meg said how lovely it was and she simply lifted it off her
own neck and put it around Meg's. Meg had to keep it. She gave it in
such a way that one would have to keep it."

"Rather useful, mustn't it be, to have pendants so plentifully about you
that you can hand them out to the first young lady who takes a fancy to
them? Has she given you anything, Nancy?"

"I'm sure she would. But I shall be more careful than Meg was."

"Perhaps Meg will practise carelessness, since it's so remunerative.
What has she given Palgrave? He seems absorbed."

"Isn't it wonderful," said Nancy. "It's wonderful for Palgrave, you
know, Roger, because he is rather sad and bitter, really, just now; and
I think she will make him much happier. They went off to the woods
together directly after breakfast."

"What's he sad and bitter about? You mean his socialism and all the rest
of it?"

"Yes; and religion. You remember; when you were here at Christmas."

"I remember that he was very foolish and made me lose my temper. Is
there a chance of Miss Toner turning him into a good capitalist and
churchman?"

Nancy smiled, but very faintly. "It's serious, you know, Roger."

"What she's done to them already, you mean?"

"Yes. What she's done already. She had Meg, after lunch, in her room.
Meg looked quite different when she came out. It's very strange, Roger.
It's as if she'd changed them all. I almost feel," Nancy looked round at
the happy house and up at the tranquil elms where the rooks were noisily
preparing for bed, "as if nothing could be the same again, since she's
come." Her clear profile revealed little of the trouble in her heart.
They had not named Barney; but he must be named.

"It's white magic," said Oldmeadow. "You and I will keep our heads, my
dear. We don't want to be changed, do we? What has she done to Barney?
He is in love with her, of course."

"Of course," said Nancy.

He had never been sure before that she was in love with Barney. She was
nine years younger and had been a child during years of his manhood.
Oldmeadow had thought it in his own fond imagination only that the link
between them was so close. But now he knew what Nancy herself, perhaps,
had hardly known till then. The colour did not rise in her cheek, but
through her voice, through her bearing, went a subtle steadying of
herself. "Of course he is in love with her," she repeated and he felt
that she forced herself to face the truth.

They stopped at the end of the terrace. A little path turned aside
towards the copse and the grass beneath the trees was scattered with the
pale radiance of primroses. Nancy seemed to look at the flowers, but she
sought no refuge in comment on them; and as they looked in silence,
while the rooks, circling and cawing above, settled on their nests, a
sense of arrested time came to Oldmeadow, and a phrase of music,
blissful in its sadness, where gentle German words went to a gentle
German strain, passed through his mind. Something of Schubert's--Young
Love--First Grief. It seemed to pierce to him from the young girl's
heart and he knew that he would never forget and that Nancy would never
forget the moment; the rooks; the primroses; the limpid sky. The
blackcap's flitting melody had ceased.

"Do you think she may make him happy?" he asked. It was sweet to him to
know that she had no need of a refuge from him. She could take counsel
with him as candidly as if there had been no tacit avowal between them.
She looked round at him as they went on walking and he saw pain and
perplexity in her eyes.

"What do you think, Roger?" she said. "Can she?"

"Well, might she, if Barney is stupid enough?"

"I don't feel he would have to be stupid to be happy with her, Roger.
You are not fair to her. What I wonder is whether he will be strong
enough not to be quite swept away."

"You think she'll overpower him? Leave him with no mind of his own?"

"Something like that perhaps. Because she's very strong. And she is so
different. Everything in her is different. She has nothing--nothing with
us, or we with her. We haven't done the same things or seen the same
sights or thought the same thoughts. I hardly feel as if the trees could
look the same to her as they do to us or the birds sound the same. And
she'll want such different things."

"Perhaps she'll want his things," Oldmeadow mused. "She seems to like
them quite immensely already."

"Ah, but only because she's going to do something to them," said Nancy.
"Only because she's going to change them. I don't think she'd like
anything she could do nothing for."

Nancy had quite grown up. She had seen further than he had. He felt her
quiet comment big with intuitive wisdom.

"You see deep, my dear," he said. "There's something portentous in your
picture, you know."

"There is something portentous about her, Roger. That is just what I
feel. That is just what troubles me."

"She may be portentous, in relation to us, and what she may do to us,"
said Oldmeadow, "but I'm convinced, for all her marvels, that she's a
very ordinary young person. Don't let us magnify her. If she's not
magnified she won't work so many marvels. They're largely an affair, I'm
sure of it, of motors and pendants. She's ordinary. That's what I take
my stand on."

"If she's ordinary, why do you feel, too, that she'll sweep Barney
away?" Nancy was not at all convinced by his demonstration.

"Why, because he's in love with her. That's all. Her only menace is in
her difference; her complacency. What it comes to, I suppose, is that we
must hope, if they're to be happy, that he'll like her things."

"Yes; but what it comes to then, Roger, is that we shall lose Barney,"
Nancy said.




CHAPTER V


Miss Toner did not come down to breakfast next morning and Oldmeadow was
conscious of a feeling of disproportionate relief at not finding her in
the big, bare, panelled dining-room where a portrait of Mrs. Chadwick in
court dress presided over one wall and Meg and Barney played with
rabbits, against an imitation Gainsborough background, on another. Both
pictures were an affliction to Barney; but to Mrs. Chadwick's eye they
left nothing to be desired in beauty, and, when Barney was not there to
protest, she would still fondly point out the length of eyelash that the
artist had so faithfully captured in the two children.

The sense of change and foreboding that he and Nancy, with differences,
had recognized in their talk, must have haunted Oldmeadow's slumbers,
for he had dreamed of Miss Toner, coming towards him along the terrace,
in white, as she had been at dinner, with the beautiful pearls she had
worn, lifting her hand and saying as the rooks cawed overhead--for the
rooks cawed though the moon was brightly shining: "I can hear them,
too."

There had been nothing to suggest such a dream in her demeanour at
dinner; nothing portentous, that is. Simple for all her competence,
girlish for all the splendour of her white array, she had spoken little,
looking at them all, and listening, gravely sometimes, but with a
pervading gentleness; and once or twice he had found her eyes on his;
those large, light eyes, dispassionately and impersonally benignant,
giving him, with their suggestion of seeing around but also very far
beyond you, a curious sense of space. Once or twice he had felt himself
a little at a loss as he met their gaze--it had endeared her to him the
less that she should almost discompose him--and he had felt anew the
presence of power in her ugly little face and even of beauty in her
colourless skin, her colourless yet so living eyes, and her crown of
wondrous gold. It had been, no doubt, this element of aesthetic
significance, merging with Nancy's words, that had built up the figure
of his dream; for so he had seen her, grey and white and gold in the
unearthly light, while the rooks cawed overhead.

His friends this morning, though they were all talking of her, possessed
in their gaiety and lightness of heart an exorcising quality. So much
gaiety and lightness couldn't be quenched or quelled--if that was what
Miss Toner's influence menaced. Between them all they would manage to
quench and quell Miss Toner, rather, and he recovered his sense of her
fundamental absurdity as he felt anew their instinctive and
unself-conscious wisdom.

"Isn't it odd, Roger, she hardly knows England at all," said Mrs.
Chadwick, as he finished his porridge, made his tea at the side-table,
and took his place beside her. "She's been so little here, although she
seems to have travelled everywhere and lived everywhere."

"Except in her own country," Oldmeadow ventured the surmise, but
urbanely, for Barney sat opposite him.

"Oh, but she's travelled there, too, immensely," said Barney. "She's
really spent most of her life in America, I think, Mother. She has a
little sort of bungalow on the coast in California, orange-trees and
roses and all the rest of it; a fairy-tale place; and a house in the
mountains in New England, high up among the pine-woods."

"And a private train, I suppose, to carry her from one to the other.
What splendid pearls," said Oldmeadow, buttering his toast. "Haven't you
asked for them yet, Meg?"

Meg was not easily embarrassed. "Not yet," she said. "I'm waiting for
them, though. Meanwhile this is pretty, isn't it?" The pendant hung on
her breast.

"I believe she would give Meg her pearls, or any of us. I believe she'd
give _anything_ to _anyone_," sighed Mrs. Chadwick. "She doesn't seem to
think about money or things of that sort, material things you know, at
all. I do wish I could get the map of America straight. All being in
those uneven squares, like Turkish Delight, makes it so difficult. One
can't remember which lump is which--though Texas, in my geography, was
pale green. The nice tinned things come from California, don't they? And
New England is near Boston--the hub of the universe, that dear, droll
Oliver Wendell Holmes used to call it. I suppose they _are_ very clever
there. She has been wonderfully educated. There's nothing she doesn't
seem to have learned. And her maid adores her, Roger. I was talking to
her just now. Such a nice French woman with quite beautiful dark eyes,
but very melancholy; we make a mistake, I believe, in imagining that the
French are a gay people. I always think that's such a good sign. So kind
about my dreadful accent."

"A good sign to have your maid like you, Mummy, or to have melancholy
eyes?" Meg inquired. "I think she's a rather ill-tempered looking woman.
But of course anybody would adore Adrienne. She's an angel of patience,
I'm sure. I never met such an angel. We don't grow them here," said Meg,
while Barney's triumphant eyes said: "I told you so," to Oldmeadow
across the table.

After breakfast, in the sunlight on the terrace, Mrs. Chadwick confided
her hopes to him. "She really is an angel, Roger. I never met anyone in
the least like her. So good, and gifted, too, and all that money. Only
think what it would mean for dear Barney. He could take back the farm;
the lease falls in next year, and come back here to live."

"You think she cares for him?"

"Yes; indeed I do. She cares for us all, already, as you can see. But I
believe it's because she's adopting us all, as her family. And she said
to me yesterday that she disapproved so much of our English way of
turning out mothers and thought families ought to love each other and
live together, young and old. That's from being so much in France,
perhaps. I told her _I_ shouldn't have liked it at all if old Mrs.
Chadwick had wanted to come and live with Francis and me. She was such a
masterful old lady, Roger, very Low Church, and quite dreadfully jealous
of Francis. And eldest sons should inherit, of course, or what would
become of estates? My dear father used always to say that the greatness
of England was founded on landed estates. I told her that. But she
looked at me quite gravely as if she hardly understood when I tried to
explain--it all goes in with Waterloo being won on the fields of Eton,
doesn't it? It's quite curious the feeling of restfulness she gives me,
about Barney--a sort of Nunc Dimittis feeling, you know."

"Only she doesn't want you to depart. Well, that's certainly all to the
good and let's hope England's greatness won't suffer from the
irregularity. Has she told you much about her life? her people?"
Oldmeadow asked. He could not find it in his heart to shadow such
ingenuous contentment. And after all what was there to say against Miss
Toner, except that she would change things?

"Oh, a great deal. Everything I asked; for I thought it best, quite
casually you know, to find out what I could. Not people of any position,
you know, Roger, though I think her mother was better in that way than
her father; for _his_ father made tooth-paste. It's from the tooth-paste
all the money comes. But it's always puzzling about Americans, isn't it?
And it doesn't really make any difference, once they're over here, does
it?"

"Not if they've got the money," he could not suppress; it was for his
own personal enjoyment and Mrs. Chadwick cloudlessly concurred: "No, not
if they have the money. And she has, you see. And besides that she's
good and gifted and has had such a wonderful education. Her mother died
five years ago. She showed me two pictures of her. A beautiful woman;
very artistic-looking. Rather one's idea of Corinne, though Corinne was
really Madame de Staël, I believe; and she was very plain."

"Was she dressed like Queen Louise of Prussia; coming down the steps,
you know, in the Empire dress with white bound round her head?"

"Yes; she was. How did you know, Roger? Extremely picturesque; but quite
a lady, too. At least"--Mrs. Chadwick hesitated, perplexed between
kindliness and candour--"almost."

"I heard about her from Mrs. Aldesey. You remember my American friend.
She didn't know her, but had seen her years ago in New York in that
romantic costume."

Mrs. Chadwick felt perhaps the slight irony in his voice, for she
rejoined, though not at all provocatively: "Why shouldn't people look
romantic if they can? I should think Mrs. Toner had a much more romantic
life than Mrs. Aldesey. _She's_ gone on just as we have, hasn't she,
seeing always the same people; and being conventional. Whereas Adrienne
and her mother seem to have known everyone strange and interesting
wherever they went; great scientists and thinkers, you know; and poets
and pianists. Adrienne told me that her mother always seemed to her to
have great wings and that's just what I felt about her when I looked at
her. She'd flown everywhere." As she spoke Miss Toner appeared upon the
doorstep.

Although it was Sunday she had not varied her dress, which was still the
simple dress of dim, dark-blue; but over it she wore a silk jacket, and
a straw hat trimmed with a lighter shade of blue was tied, in
summer-like fashion, beneath her chin. She carried a sunshade and a
small basket filled with letters.

Mrs. Chadwick, both hands outstretched, went to meet her. Oldmeadow had
never before seen her kiss an acquaintance of two days' standing. "I do
hope you slept well, my dear," she said.

"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 the
cawing 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.'

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 she never 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 say _I'm_ a duffer!" Palgrave passed
an affectionately bantering arm round her shoulders. "Dufferism isn't
_my_ beam!"

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 of _ôte-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
little basket 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 what impedes 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 class them 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, down the little path and through a wicket-gate that led
to the village--"you know, Roger, it's _quite_ possible 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?"




CHAPTER VI


"Mother's got 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," said Oldmeadow. "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. "You _are_ spiteful, 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, looking back 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's _for_ one; _about_
one; not _in_ one, 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 it didn'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 she _couldn't_ give 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 I
think 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. She _wants_ to 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."




CHAPTER VII


"I do so 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 begun
_somewhere_, 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 another word. 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. She _is_ beautiful. 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 count _her_, 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 I suppose 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 money or 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."




CHAPTER VIII


He sat, 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 was clumsy, 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 white rose 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:

    Ariane ma soeur! de quel amour blessée
    Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée!

She taught Mother to recite Phèdre's great speeches with such fire and
passion. There could hardly be a better training for French," said Miss
Toner, repeating the lines with a curious placidity and perfection. "I
preferred Mademoiselle Jouffert's rendering to Bernhardt's. Her Phèdre
was, with all the fire, more tender and womanly."

"Do you care about Racine?" Oldmeadow asked her, while the lines rang in
his ears--rather as in his dream the rooks' cawing had done--with an
evocative sadness that hung, irrelevantly, about their speaker. "It's
not easy for our English ears to hear the fire and passion, is it; but
they are there."

"He is very perfect and accomplished," said Miss Toner. "But I always
feel him small beside our Shakespeare. He lacks heart, doesn't he?"

"There's heart in those lines you've just recited."

"Yes," said Miss Toner. "Those lines are certainly very beautiful. It's
the mere music of them, I think. They make me feel--" she paused. It was
unlike her to pause and he wondered what she made of Ariane, off her own
bat, without Mademoiselle Jouffert to help her.

"They make you feel?" he questioned.

"They are so sad--so terribly melancholy. The sound of them. They make
me want to cry when I hear them. But I think it's the sound; for their
meaning makes me indignant. There is such weakness in them; such
acceptance of destiny. I want to revolt and protest, too--for women. She
should not have died."

Oldmeadow involuntarily glanced across at Nancy. She was looking at Miss
Toner and if she had been pale before, she was paler now. Nancy would
never think of herself in connection with Ariane and tragic grief; yet
something in the lines, something in Miss Toner's disavowal of their
applicability, had touched the hidden cut. And, once again, it was Meg's
eyes that met his, showing him that what he saw she saw, too. Barney saw
nothing. All his solicitude was for Miss Toner in her imaginary plight.
"I'm sure you never would!" he exclaimed. "Never die, I mean!"

"You think Miss Toner would have come to terms with Bacchus," Oldmeadow
suggested. He didn't want to take it out of Barney, though he was vexed
with him, nor to take it out of Miss Toner, either. He only wanted to
toss and twist the theme and make it gay where Miss Toner made it
solemn.

"Come to terms with Bacchus!" Barney quite stared, taken aback by the
irreverence. "Why should she! She'd have found somebody more worth while
than either of the ruffians."

Miss Toner smiled over at him.

"I'm sure that if Bacchus had been fortunate enough to meet Miss Toner
she'd have converted him to total abstinence in a jiffy and made a model
husband of him. He was a fine, exhilarating fellow; no ruffian at all;
quite worth reforming." Oldmeadow, as he thus embroidered his theme, was
indulging in his own peculiar form of mirth.

He saw Miss Toner laying her hand on the head of Bacchus; Miss Toner
very picturesque on the rugged sea-shore in her white and pearls and
roses, and Bacchus dazed and penitent, his very leopards tamed to a
cat-like docility. His laugh was visible rather than audible and that
Miss Toner had never before been the subject of such mirth was evident
to him.

She met whatever she saw or guessed of irreverence, however, as
composedly as she would have met Bacchus; perhaps already, he reflected,
she was beginning to think of him in the light of an undesirable
wine-bibber. Perhaps even, she was beginning to think of him as a
ruffian. He didn't mind in the least, so long as he succeeded in keeping
off her solemnity.

"I should have been quite willing to try and reform him," she said;
"though it takes much longer than a jiffy to reform people, Mr.
Oldmeadow; but I shouldn't have been willing to marry him. There are
other things in life, aren't there, than love-stories--even for women."

"Bravo!" said Oldmeadow. He felt as well as uttered it. She wasn't being
solemn, and she had returned his shuttlecock smartly. "But are there?"
he went on. He had adjusted his eyeglass for a clearer confrontation of
her.

Miss Toner's large eyes, enlarged still further by the glass, met his,
not solemnly, but with a considering gravity.

"You are a sceptic, Mr. Oldmeadow," she observed. "A satirist. Do you
find that satire and scepticism take you very far in reading human
hearts?"

"There's one for you, Roger!" cried Barney.

Oldmeadow kept his gaze fixed on Miss Toner. "You think that Ariane
might prefer Infant Welfare work or Charity Organization to a
love-story?"

"Not those necessarily." She returned his gaze. "Though I have known
very fine big people who did prefer them. But they are not the only
alternatives to love-stories."

"I am sceptical," said Oldmeadow. "I am, if you like, satirical. I don't
believe there are any alternatives to love-stories; only palliatives to
disappointment."

Barney leaned forward: "Adrienne, you see, doesn't accept that
old-fashioned, sentimentalizing division of the sexes. She doesn't
accept the merely love-story, hearth-side rôle for women."

"Oh, well," Oldmeadow played with his fork, smiling with the wryness
that accompanied his reluctant sincerities, "I don't divide the sexes as
far as love-stories are concerned. We are all in the same boat. For us,
too, Barney, it's love-story or palliative. You don't agree? If you were
disappointed in love? Hunting? Farming? Politics? Post-Impressionism?
Would any of them fill the gap?"

It wasn't at all the line he had intended the talk to take. He knew that
as he glanced across at Nancy. Saying nothing, as if its subject could
not concern her, and with a dim little smile, she listened, and he knew
that for her, though she wouldn't die of it, there would be only
palliatives. If only Barney, confound him, hadn't been so charming.

Barney did not know how to answer the last assault, and, boyishly,
looked across at his beloved for succour. She gave it instantly.

"Sadness, sorrow, tragedy, even, isn't despair," she said. "Barney, I
believe, if sorrow overtook him, would mould the rough clay of his
occupation to some higher beauty than the beauty he'd lost. To lie down
and die; to resign oneself to palliatives. Oh, no. That's not the
destiny of the human soul."

"Roger's pulling your leg, Barney, as usual," Palgrave put in
scornfully. He had been listening with his elbows on the table, his eyes
on the table-cloth. "He knows as well as I do that there's only one
love. The sort you're all talking about--the Theseus and Ariane
affair--is merely an ebullition of youth and as soon as nature has
perpetuated the species by means of it, it settles down, if there's any
reality under the ebullition, to grow into the other--the divine love;
the love of the soul for the Good, the True and the Beautiful," Palgrave
declared, growing very red as he said it.

"Really--my dear child!" Mrs. Chadwick murmured. She had never heard
such themes broached at her table and glanced nervously up at old
Johnson to see if he had followed. "That is a very, very materialistic
view!"

Oldmeadow at this began to laugh, audibly as well as visibly, and
Palgrave, as their eyes met in a glance of communicated comedy, could
not withhold an answering smile. But Barney's face showed that he
preferred to see Palgrave's interpretation as materialistic and even
Miss Toner looked thoughtfully at her champion.

"But we need the symbol of youth and nature," she suggested. "The divine
love, yes, Palgrave, is the only real one; but then all love is divine
and human love sometimes brings the deepest revelation of all. Browning
saw that so wonderfully."

"Browning, my dear!" Palgrave returned with a curious mingling of
devotion, intimacy and aloofness, "Browning never got nearer God than a
woman's breast!"

At this, almost desperately, Mrs. Chadwick broke in: "Did you ever see
our Ellen Terry act, Adrienne? I liked her much better than Madame
Bernhardt who had such a very artificial face, I think. I can't imagine
her as Rosalind, can you? While Miss Terry was a perfect Rosalind. I met
her once with Henry Irving at a garden-party in London and she was as
charming off as on the stage and I'm sure I can't see why anybody
should wish to act Phèdre--poor, uncontrolled creature. Rhubarb-tart,
dear, and custard? or wine-jelly and cream? How beautifully you speak
French. How many languages do you speak?" Mrs. Chadwick earnestly
inquired, still turning the helm firmly away from the unbecoming topic.

Miss Toner kept her head very creditably and, very tactfully, at once
accepted her hostess's hint. "Rhubarb-tart, please, dear Mrs. Chadwick.
Not so very many, really. My German has never been good; though French
and Italian I do know well, and enough Spanish for Don Quixote. But,"
she went on, while Mrs. Chadwick looked gratefully at her, "Mother and I
were always working. We never wasted any of our precious hours together.
She couldn't bear the thought of _missing_ anything in life; and she
missed very little, I think. Music, poetry, painting--all the
treasure-houses of the human spirit--were open to her. And what she won
and made her own, she gave out again with greater radiance. How I wish
you could all have known her!" said Miss Toner, looking round at them
with an unaccustomed touch of wistfulness. "She was radiance
personified. She never let unhappiness _rest_ on her. I remember once,
when she had had a cruel blow from a person she loved and trusted--in
the middle of her sadness she looked at me and saw how sad she was
making me; and she sprang up and seized my hands and cried: 'Let's
dance! Let's dance and dance and dance!' And we did, up and down the
terrace--it was at San Remo--she in her white dress, with the blue sky
and sea and the orange-trees all in bloom. I can see her now. And then
she rushed to get music, her harp, and flowers and fruit, to take to an
invalid friend, and we spent the afternoon with her, mother surpassing
herself in charm and witchery. She was always like that. She would have
found something, oh, very beautiful, to make from her sorrow if Theseus
had abandoned her! But no one," said Miss Toner, looking round at
Oldmeadow, now with a mild playfulness, "could ever have abandoned
Mother."

There was something to Oldmeadow appealing in her playfulness; her
confidence, when it took on this final grace, was really touching. For
Mrs. Toner the light-giver he knew that he had conceived a rooted
aversion. And he wondered if she would go on, over the rhubarb-tart, to
tell, after the dancing on the terrace, of the death at sea. But he was
spared that.

"And your father died when you were very young, didn't he, dear?" said
Mrs. Chadwick, fearful of the reference to Theseus. "I think your mother
must often have been so very lonely; away from home for such a great
part of the time and with so few relatives."

Miss Toner shook her head. "We were always together, she and I, so we
could never, either of us, be lonely. And wherever we went she made
friends. People were always so much more than mere people to her. She
saw them always, at once, high and low, prince and peasant, as souls,
and they felt it always, and opened to her. Then, until I was quite big,
we had my lovely grandmother. Mother came from Maine and it was such a
joy to go and stay there with Grandma. It was a very simple little home.
It was always high thinking and plain living, with Grandma; and though,
when she married and became rich, Mother showered beautiful things upon
her, Grandma stayed always in the little house, doing for her poor
neighbours, as she had always done, and dusting her parlour--a real New
England parlour--and making her own griddle cakes--such wonderful cakes
she made! I was fifteen when she died; but the tie was so close and
spiritual that she did not seem gone away from us."




CHAPTER IX


"Rather nice to think that there are so many good and innocent people in
the world, isn't it," Barney remarked, when he, Palgrave and Oldmeadow
were left to their wine and cigars. It was evident that he would have
preferred to omit the masculine interlude, but Oldmeadow was resolved on
the respite. She had touched him because she was so unaware; but he was
weary and disconcerted. How could Barney be unaware? And was he?
Altogether? His comment seemed to suggest a suspicion that Miss Toner's
flow might have aroused irony or require justification.

"Miss Toner and her mother seem to have found the noble and the gifted
under every bush," he remarked, and he was not sure that he wished to
avoid irony though he knew that he did wish to conceal it from Barney.
"It's very good and innocent to be able to do that; but one may keep
one's goodness at the risk of one's discrimination. Not that Miss Toner
is at all stupid."

Palgrave neither smoked nor drank. He had again leaned his elbows on the
table and his head on his fists, but, while Oldmeadow spoke, he lifted
and kept his gaze on him. "You don't like her," he said suddenly. He and
Oldmeadow had, irrepressibly, over Mrs. Chadwick's conception of
materialism, interchanged their smile at dinner; but since the morning
Oldmeadow had known that Palgrave suspected him of indifference, perhaps
even hostility, towards the new-comer. "Why don't you like her?" the
boy went on and with a growing resentment as his suspicions found voice.
"She _isn't_ stupid; that's just it. She's good and noble and innocent;
and gifted, too. Why should we pretend to be too sophisticated to
recognize such beauty when we meet it? Why should we be ashamed of
beauty--afraid of it?"

Barney, flushing deeply, looked down into his wine-glass.

"My dear Palgrave, I don't understand you," said Oldmeadow. But he did.
He seemed to hear the loud beating of Palgrave's heart. "I don't dislike
Miss Toner. How should I? I don't know her."

"You do know her. That's an evasion. It's all there. She can't be seen
without being known. It's all there; at once. I don't know why you don't
like her. It's what I want to know."

"Drop it, Palgrave," Barney muttered. "Let Roger alone. He and Adrienne
get on very well together. It's no good forcing things."

"I'm not forcing anything. It's Roger who forces his scepticism and his
satire on us," Palgrave declared.

"I'm sorry to have displeased you," said Oldmeadow with a slight
severity. "I am unaware of having displayed my disagreeable qualities
more than is usual with me."

"Of course not. What rot, Palgrave! Roger is always disagreeable, bless
him!" Barney declared with a forced laugh. "Adrienne understands him
perfectly. As he says: she isn't stupid."

"Oh, all right. I'm sorry," Palgrave rose, thrusting his hands in his
pockets and looking down at the two as he stood above them. He hesitated
and then went on: "All I know is that for the first time in my
life--the very first time, mind you--all the things we are told about in
religion, all the things we read about in poetry, the things we're
supposed to care for and live by, have been made real to me--outside of
books and churches. What do we ever see of them at home here, with dear
Mummy and the girls? What do we ever talk of, all of us--but the
everlasting round--hunting, gardening, cricket, hay; village treats and
village charities. A lot of chatter about people--What a rotter
So-and-so is; and How perfectly sweet somebody else: and a little about
politics--Why doesn't somebody shoot Lloyd George?--and How wicked Home
Rulers are. That's about all it amounts to. Oh, I know we're not as
stupid as we sound. _She_ sees that. We can feel things and see things
though we express ourselves like savages. But we're too comfortable to
think; that's what's the trouble with us. We don't want to change; and
thought means change. And we're shy; idiotically shy; afraid to express
anything as it really comes to us; so that I sometimes wonder if things
will go on coming; if we shan't become like the Chinese--a sort of
_objet d'art_ set of people, living by rote, in a rut. Well. That's all
I mean. With her one isn't ashamed or afraid to know and say what one
feels. With her one wants to feel more. And I, for one, reverence her
and am grateful to her for having made beauty and goodness real to me."
Having so delivered himself, Palgrave, who had, after his deep flush,
become pale, turned away and marched out of the room.

The older men sat silent for a moment, Oldmeadow continuing to smoke and
Barney turning the stem of his wine-glass in his fingers. "I'm awfully
sorry," he said at last. "I can't think what's got into the boy. He's in
rather a moil just now, I fancy."

"He's a dear boy," said Oldmeadow. "There's any amount of truth in what
he says. He's at an age when one sees these things, if one is ever going
to see them. I hope he'll run straight. He ought to amount to
something."

"That's what Adrienne says," said Barney. "She says he's a poet. You
think, too, then, that we're all in such a rut; living Chinese lives;
automata?"

"It's the problem of civilization, isn't it, to combine automatism with
freedom. Without a rut to walk in you reach nowhere--if we're to walk
together. And yet we must manage to ramble, too; individuals must;
that's what it comes to, I suppose. Individuals must take the risk of
rambling and alter the line of the rut for the others. Palgrave may be a
rambler. But I hope he won't go too far afield."

"You do like her, Roger, don't you?" said Barney suddenly.

It had had to come. Oldmeadow knew that, as the depth of silence fell
about them. It was inevitable between them, of course. Yet he wished it
might have been avoided, since now it must be too late. He pressed out
the glow of his cigar and leaned his arms on the table, not looking at
his friend while he meditated, and he said finally--and it might seem,
he knew, another evasion--"Look here, Barney, I must tell you something.
You know how much I care about Nancy. Well, that's the trouble. It's
Nancy I wanted you to marry."

Barney had held himself ready and a deep, involuntary sigh of relief, or
of postponed suspense, now escaped him. "I see. I didn't realize that,"
he said. And how he hoped, poor Barney! it was all there was to realize!
"Of course I'm very fond of Nancy."

"You realize, of course, how fond she is of you."

"Well; yes; of course. We're both awfully good pals," said Barney,
confused.

"That's what Palgrave would call speaking like a savage, Barney. Own to
it that if Miss Toner hadn't appeared upon the scene you could have
hoped to make Nancy your wife. I don't say you made love to her or
misled her in any way. I'm sure you never meant to at any rate. But the
fact remains that you were both so fond of each other that you would
certainly have married. So you'll understand that when I come down here
and find Miss Toner installed as tutelary goddess over you all, what I'm
mainly conscious of is grief for my dear little relegated nymph."

Still deeply flushed, but still feeling his relief, Barney turned his
wine-glass and murmured: "I see. I quite understand. Yes; I should have
been in love with her, I own. I nearly was, last winter. As to her being
in love with me, that's a different matter. I've no reason to think she
was in love. It would just be a difference of degree, with Nancy,
wouldn't it; she loves us all so much, and she's really such a child,
still. Of course that's what she seems to me now, since Adrienne's come;
just a darling child."

"I suppose so. But you understand what I feel, too. I feel her much more
than a darling child, and it's difficult for me to like anybody who has
dispossessed her. I perfectly recognize Miss Toner's remarkable
qualities and hope to count myself among her friends one day; but, being
a satirist and a sceptic, I rebel instinctively against goddesses of
whatever brand. Nymphs are good enough for me; and I can't help wishing,
irrepressibly, that nymphs had remained good enough for you, my dear
boy."

"It isn't a question of nymphs; it isn't a question of goddesses,"
Barney said, glancing up now at his friend. "I'm awfully sorry about
Nancy; but of course she'll find some one far better than I am; she's
such a dear. You're not quite straight with me, Roger. I don't see
Adrienne as a goddess at all; I'm not like Palgrave, a silly boy, bowled
over. It's something quite different she does to me. She makes me feel
safe; safe and happy in a way I never imagined possible. It's like
having the sunlight fall about one; it's like life, new life, to be with
her. She's not a goddess; but she's the woman it would break my heart to
part with. I never met such loveliness."

"My dear boy," Oldmeadow murmured. He still leaned on the table and he
still looked down. "I do wish you every happiness, as you know." He was
deeply touched and Barney's quiet words troubled him as he had not
before been troubled.

"Thanks. I know you do. I know you care for my happiness. And I can't
imagine anything coming into my life that would make a difference to us.
That's just it." Barney paused. "It won't, will it, Roger?"

The crisis was again upon them. Oldmeadow did not look up as he said:
"That depends on her, doesn't it?"

"No; it depends on you," Barney quickly replied.

"She likes you, quite immensely, already. She says you make her think of
one of Meredith's dry, deep-hearted heroes," Barney gave a slightly
awkward laugh, deprecating the homage as he offered it. "She says you
are the soul of truth. There's no reason, none whatever, why you
shouldn't be the best of friends, as far as she is concerned. It's all
she asks."

"It's all I ask, of course."

"Yes, I know. But if you don't meet her half-way? Sometimes I do see
what Palgrave means. Sometimes you misunderstand her."

"Very likely. It takes time really to understand people, doesn't it."

But poor Barney was embarked and could not but push on. "As just now,
you know, about finding nobility behind every bush and paying for one's
goodness by losing one's discrimination. There are deep realities and
superficial realities, aren't there, and she sees the deep ones first.
It's more than that. Palgrave says she makes reality. He didn't say it
to me, because I don't think he feels me to be worthy of her. He said it
to Mother, and puzzled her by it. But I know what he means. It's because
of that he feels her to be a sort of saint. Do be straight with me,
Roger. Say what you really think. I'd rather know; much. You've never
kept things from me before," Barney added in a sudden burst of boyish
distress.

"My dear Barney," Oldmeadow murmured.

It had to come, then. He pushed back his chair and turned in it, resting
an arm on the table; and he passed his hand over his head and kept it
there while he stared for a moment hard at the ceiling.

"I think you've made a mistake," he then said.

"A mistake?" Barney faltered blushing. It was not anger; it was pain,
simple, boyish pain that thus confessed itself.

"Yes; a mistake," Oldmeadow repeated, not looking at him, "and since I
fear it's gone too far to be mended, I think it would have been better
if you'd not pressed me, my dear boy."

"How do you mean? I'd rather know, you see," Barney murmured, after a
moment.

"I don't mean about the goodness, or the power," said Oldmeadow. "She is
good, and she has power; but that's in part, I feel, because she has no
inhibitions--no doubts. To know reality we must do more than blow
soap-bubbles with it. It must break us to be known. She's never been
broken. Perhaps she never will be. And in that case she'll go on blind."

Barney was silent for a moment, and that it was not as bad as he had
feared it might be was apparent from the attempted calm with which he
asked, presently: "Why shouldn't you be blind to evil and absurdity if
you can see much further than most people into goodness? Perhaps one
must be one-sided to go far."

"Perhaps. But it's dangerous to be one-sided--to oneself and others. And
does she see further? That's the question. Doesn't she tend, rather, to
accept as first-rate what you incline to find second? You're less strong
than she is, Barney, and less good, no doubt. But you can't deny that
you're less blind. So what you must ask yourself is whether you can be
sure of being happy with a wife who'll never doubt herself and who'll
not see absurdity where you see it. Put it at that. Will you be happy
with her?"

He was, he knew, justified of Miss Toner's commendation, for truth
between friends could go no further and, in the silence, while he
sickened for his friend, he felt it searching Barney's heart. How it
searched, how many echoes it found awaiting it, was proved by the
prolongation of the silence.

"I think you exaggerate," said Barney at length, and in the words
Oldmeadow read his refusal to examine further the truths revealed to
him. "You see all the defects and none of the beauty. It can't be a
mistake if I can see both. She'll learn a little from me, that's what it
comes to, for all the lot I'll have to learn from her. I'll be happy
with her if I'm worthy of her. What it comes to, you see, as I said at
the beginning, is that I can't be happy without her." He rose and
Oldmeadow, rising also, knew that they closed upon an unresolved
discord. Yet these final words of Barney's pleased him so much that he
could not leave it quite at that.

"Mine may be the mistake, after all," he said. "Only you must give me
time to find it out. I began by telling you I couldn't be really
dispassionate; and I feel much better for our talk, if that's any
satisfaction to you. If you can learn from each other and see the truth
together, you'll be happy. You're right there, Barney. That is what it
comes to." They moved towards the door. "Try not to dislike me for my
truth too much," he added.

"My dear old fellow," Barney muttered. He laid his hand for a moment on
his friend's shoulder, standing back for him to pass first. "Nothing can
ever alter things between you and me."

But things were altered already.




CHAPTER X


Palgrave had not gone to the drawing-room, and that, at all events, was
a comfort. A wood fire burned on the hearth and near it Nancy was
holding wool for Mrs. Chadwick to wind. Barbara had been sent to bed and
Meg and Miss Toner sat on the sofa hand in hand. Even in the pressure of
his distress and anxiety Oldmeadow could but be aware of amusement at
seeing Meg thus. It had, of course, been Miss Toner who had taken her
hand. But no one else could have taken it. No one else could have been
allowed to go on holding it placidly before on-lookers of whose mirthful
impressions Meg must be well aware. She didn't mind in the least. That
was what Miss Toner had done to her. She enjoyed having her hand held by
anyone so much interested in her.

Barney walked to the fireplace and stood before it. He had no faculty
for concealing his emotions and the painful ones through which he had
just passed were visible on his sensitive face.

"Give us a song, Meg," Oldmeadow suggested. He did not care for Meg's
singing, which conveyed, in a rich, sweet medium, a mingled fervour and
shallowness of feeling. But to hear her sing would be better than to see
her holding Miss Toner's hand.

Barney crossed at once to the seat Meg vacated and dropped down into it,
no doubt thanking his friend for what he imagined to be a display of
tact, and Oldmeadow saw the quiet, firm look that flowed over and took
possession of him. Miss Toner knew, of course, that Barney had been
having painful emotions; and she probably knew that they had been caused
by the dry, deep-hearted Meredithian hero. But after the long look she
did not speak to him. She sat in her pearls and whiteness and gave
careful attention to the music.

Oldmeadow accompanied Meg, tolerantly, and a trifle humorously, throwing
a touch of mockery into his part. Meg's preference to-night seemed to be
for gardens; Gardens of Sleep; Gardens of Love; God's Gardens. "What a
wretch you are, Roger," she said, when she had finished. "You despise
feeling."

"I thought I was wallowing in it," Oldmeadow returned. "Did I stint
you?"

"No; you helped me to wallow. That's why you're such a wretch. Always
showing one that one is wallowing when one thinks one's soaring. It's
your turn, now, Adrienne. Let's see if he'll manage to make fun of you."

"Does Miss Toner sing, too? Now do you know, Meg," said Oldmeadow,
keeping up the friendly banter, "I'm sure she doesn't sing the sort of
rubbish you do."

"I think they're beautiful songs," Mrs. Chadwick murmured from her wool,
"and I think Roger played them most beautifully. Why should you say he
is making fun of you, Meg?"

"Because he makes you think something's beautiful that he thinks
rubbish, Mummy. Come along, Adrienne. You will, won't you? I expect my
voice sounds all wrong to you. I've had no proper training."

"It's a very lovely voice, Meg, used in a poor cause," said Miss Toner
smiling. "And it is badly placed. I think I could help you there. I've
no voice at all, but I have been taught how to sing. It would be more to
the point, though, if Mr. Oldmeadow were to play to us, for I hear that
he is an accomplished musician."

"I'm really anything but accomplished," said Oldmeadow; "but I can play
accompaniments cleverly. Do sing to us. I know you'll give us something
worth accompanying."

Miss Toner rose and came to the piano with her complete and unassuming
confidence. She turned the pages of the music piled there and asked him
if he cared for Schubert's songs. Yes; she was a watch wound to go
accurately and she could rely on herself, always, to the last tick. Even
if she knew--and he was sure she knew--that he had been undermining her,
she would never show a shadow or a tremor; and she would always know
what was the best music. Only, as she selected "Litanei" and placed it
before him, he felt that over him, also, flowed the quiet, firm look.

"Litanei" was one of his favourites in a composer he loved, and, as she
sang there above him, he found the song emerging unharmed from her
interpretation. It was as she had said--no voice to speak of; the
dryest, flattest little thread of sound; and no feeling, either (what a
relief after Meg!), except the feeling for scrupulous accuracy. Yet her
singing was what he found in her to like best. It was disciplined; it
accepted its own limits; it fulfilled an order. There was no desecration
of the heavenly song, for, intelligently after all, she made no attempt
upon its heart.

When she had finished, she looked down at him. They were removed by half
the length of the room from the fireside group. The lamps were behind
them. Only the candles set in the piano-rack illumined Miss Toner; and
while the white roses over her ears struck him anew as foolish, her eyes
anew struck him as powerful.

"Thank you. That was a pleasure," he said.

It was a pleasure. It was almost a link. He had found a ground to meet
her on. He saw himself in the future accompanying Barney's wife. He
need, then, so seldom talk to her. But, alas! she stepped at once from
the safe frame of art.

"If we can rise from loss to feel like that, if we can lift our sorrows
like that, we need never turn to palliatives, need we, Mr. Oldmeadow?"
she said.

Stupidity, complacency, or power, whatever it was, it completely
disenchanted him. It left him also bereft of repartee. What he fell back
upon, as he looked up at her and then down at the keys again, was a mere
schoolboy mutter of "Come now!"

After all a schoolboy mutter best expressed what he felt. She was not
accustomed to having her ministrations met with such mutters and she did
not like it. That was apparent to him as she turned away and went back
to the sofa and Barney. She had again tried him and again found him
wanting.

       *       *       *       *       *

Barney and Miss Toner left in her motor next morning shortly after
breakfast, and though with his friend Oldmeadow had no further exchange,
he had, with Miss Toner, a curious encounter that was, he felt sure, a
direct result of her impressions of the night before. They met in the
dining-room a few moments before breakfast, and as she entered, wearing
already her motoring hat, closely bound round her face with a veil, he
was aware that she looked, if that were possible, more composed than he
had ever seen her. He felt sure that she had waited for her opportunity,
and had followed him downstairs, knowing that she would find him alone;
and he realized then that she was more composed, because she had an
intention or, rather, since it was more definite, a determination.
Determination in her involved no effort: it imparted, merely, the added
calm of an assured aim.

She gave him her hand and said good morning with the same air of
scrupulous accuracy that she had given to the rendering of "Litanei" and
then, standing before the fire, her hands clasped behind her, her eyes
raised to his, she said: "Mr. Oldmeadow, I want to say something to
you."

It was the gentle little voice, unaltered, yet he knew that he was in
for something he would very much rather have avoided; something with
anybody else unimaginable, but with her, he saw it now, quite
inevitable. Yet he tried, even at this last moment, to avoid it and
said, adjusting his eyeglass and moving to the sideboard: "But not
before we've had our tea, surely. Can't I get you some? Will you trust
me to pour it out?"

"Thanks; I take coffee--not tea," said Miss Toner from her place at the
fire, "and neither has been brought in yet."

He had just perceived, to his discomfiture, that they had not. There was
nothing for it but to turn from the ungarnished sideboard and face her
again.

"It's about Barney, Mr. Oldmeadow," Miss Toner said, unmoved by his
patent evasion. "It's because I know you love Barney and care for his
happiness. And it's because I hope that you and I are to be friends, and
friendship can only be built on truth. Try to trust more; will you?
That's all I want to say. Try to trust. You will be happier if you do
and make other people happier."

Oldmeadow had never experienced such an assault upon his personality,
and he met it gagged and bound, for, assuredly, this was to be Barney's
wife. A slow flush mounted to his face.

"I'm afraid I seem very strange and unconventional to you," Adrienne
Toner went on. "You've lived in a world where people don't care enough
for each other to say the real things. They must be felt if they've to
be said, mustn't they? Yet you do care for people. I have seen that,
watching you here; and you care for real things. It's a crust of caution
and convention that is about you. You are afraid of expression. You are
afraid of feeling. You are afraid of being taken in and of wasting
yourself. Don't be afraid, Mr. Oldmeadow. We never lose ourselves by
trusting. We never lose ourselves by giving. It's a realer self that
comes. And with you, I see it clearly, if you let the crust grow
thicker, it will shut life and light and joy away from you; and when
light cannot visit our hearts, they wither within us. That is your
danger. I want to be your friend, so I must say the truth to you."

He knew, though he had to struggle not to laugh, that he was very angry
and that he must not show anger; though it would really be better to
show that than his intense amusement; and it took him a moment, during
which they confronted each other, to find words; dry, donnish words;
words of caution and convention. They were the only ones he had
available for the situation. "My dear young lady," he said, "you take
too much upon yourself."

She was not in the least disconcerted. She met his eyes steadily. "You
mean that I am presumptuous, Mr. Oldmeadow?"

"You take too much upon yourself," he repeated. "As you say, I hope we
may be friends."

"Is that really all, Mr. Oldmeadow?" she said, looking at him with such
a depth of thoughtfulness that he could not for the life of him make out
whether she found him odious or merely pitiful.

"Yes; that's really all," he returned.

The dining-room was very bright and the little blue figure before the
fire was very still. The moment fixed itself deep in his consciousness
with that impression of stillness and brightness. It was an
uncomfortable impression. Her little face, uplifted to his, absurd, yet
not uncharming, was, in its still force, almost ominous.

"I'm sorry," was all she said, and she turned and went forward to greet
Mrs. Chadwick.




CHAPTER XI


It was a soft June day and Oldmeadow was strolling about Mrs. Averil's
garden admiring her herbaceous borders. It was a day that smelt of
ripening strawberries, of warm grass and roses, and the air was full of
a medley of bird voices, thrushes and blackbirds, sweet as grass and
strawberries, and the bubbling rattle of the chaffinch as happy as the
sunlight.

Adrienne Toner was Mrs. Chadwick now, and she and Eleanor Chadwick and
Barney were motoring together in the French Alps. Coldbrooks was empty,
and he had come to stay with Nancy and her mother.

They lived in a small stone house with a Jacobean front that looked,
over a stone wall, at Chelford Green, and had behind it a delightfully
unexpected length of lawn and orchard and kitchen-garden, all enclosed
by higher walls and presided over by a noble cedar. Seen from the garden
The Little House was merely mid-Victorian, but the modern additions were
masked by climbing roses and a great magnolia-tree opened its
lemon-scented cups at the highest bedroom windows. The morning-room was
in the modern part, and from one of its windows, presently, Mrs. Averil
emerged, opening her sunshade as she crossed the grass to join her
guest. She wore a white straw garden hat, tipping over her eyes and
tying, behind, over her thick knot of hair, in a manner that always
recalled to Oldmeadow a lady out of Trollope. Her face was pale, like
Nancy's, and her eyes grey; but rather than blackcaps and primroses she
suggested lace tippets and porcelain tea-sets, and though it was from
her Nancy had her pretty trick of closing her eyes when she smiled, Mrs.
Averil's smile was cogitative and impersonal, and in her always
temperate mirth there was an edge of grimness.

"Well, Roger, I want to hear what you thought about the wedding," she
said. She had not gone to church that morning with Nancy and it was, he
knew, because she wanted an interchange of frank impressions. She had
been prevented from attending Miss Toner's London nuptials by a touch of
influenza and, as she now went on to say, she had got little from Nancy,
who had no eye for pageants and performances. "Eleanor was so absorbed,"
she went on, "in the fact that the Bishop had indigestion and had, at
her suggestion, taken magnesia with his breakfast, that I could not get
much else out of her. She seemed to have seen the Bishop's symptoms
rather than Adrienne and Barney. Now from you I expect all the relevant
details."

"Well, if you call it a detail, Nancy was lovely," said Oldmeadow. "She
looked like a silver-birch in her white and green."

"And pearls," said Mrs. Averil. "You noticed, of course, the necklaces
Adrienne gave them; quite the gift of a princess, yet so innocent and
unobtrusive looking, too. She has great taste in such matters. Did she
look well? Eleanor did say that she, like the Bishop, was very pale."

"She was pale; but not a bit nervous. She rather looked as if she had
been married every day of her life. Nothing ever puts her out, you know.
She was very grave and benign; but she wasn't an imposing bride and the
wreath of orange-blossoms aged her. Nancy and Meg and Barbara and the
Lumley girl aged her, too. She must be older than Barney."

"Yes; she is. A year older. But she's the sort of woman who will wear,"
said Mrs. Averil, pausing before a bed of rose-trees to snip off a
fading flower. "She'll not look very differently at fifty, you know; and
her hair is the sort that may never turn grey. I can see her at seventy
with those big golden braids and all her teeth. There's something very
indestructible about her. Like a doll made of white leather compared to
one made of porcelain. She'll last and last," said Mrs. Averil. "She'll
outlast us all. Barney was radiant, of course."

"Yes. But he _was_ nervous; like a little boy frightened by the
splendour of his Christmas-tree. He looked as though he were arm in arm
with the Christmas-tree itself as he came down the nave. A rather dumpy
little Christmas-tree, but exquisitely lighted and garnished."

"Well, he ought to be radiant," Mrs. Averil observed. "With all that
money, it's an extremely good match for him. The fact of her being
nobody in particular makes no difference, really, since she's an
American. And she has, I gather, no tiresome relations to come
bothering."

"She's very unencumbered, certainly. There's something altogether very
solitary about her," Oldmeadow agreed, watching Mrs. Averil snip off the
withered roses. "I felt that even as she came down the nave on Barney's
arm. It's not a bit about the money he's radiant," he added.

"Oh, I know. Of course not. That was only my own gross satisfaction
expressing itself. He's as in love as it's possible to be. And with
every good reason."

"You took to her as much as they all did, then?"

"That would be rather difficult, wouldn't it? And Barney's reasons would
hardly be those of a dry old aunt. She was very nice and kind to Nancy
and me and she's evidently going to do everything for them. Barbara's
already, you know, been sent to that admirable school that was too
expensive for Eleanor; riding and singing and all the rest of it. And
Meg's been given a perfect trousseau of fine clothes for her London
season. Naturally I don't feel very critically towards her."

"Don't you? Well, if she weren't a princess distributing largess,
wouldn't you? After all, she's not given Nancy a trousseau. So why be
mute with an old friend?"

"Ah, but she's given her the pearls," said Mrs. Averil. "Nancy couldn't
but accept a bridesmaid's gift. And she would give her a trousseau if
she wanted it and would take it. However, I'll own, though decency
should keep me mute, that I should find myself a little bored if I had
to see too much of her. I'm an everyday person and I like to talk about
everyday things."

"I can hear her asking you, in answer to that, if there is anything more
everyday than the human soul. I wish I could have seen you _aux prises_
with her," Oldmeadow remarked. "Did she come down here? Did she like
your drawing-room and garden?"

Mrs. Averil's drawing-room and garden lay very near her heart. Eleanor
Chadwick sometimes accused her of caring more about her china and her
roses than about anything else in the world except Nancy.

"I don't think she saw them; not what I call see," Mrs. Averil now said.
"Oh, yes; she came several times and recognized, very appreciatively,
the periods of my Queen Anne furniture and my Lowestoft. Beyond their
period I don't think she went. She said the garden was old-world," Mrs.
Averil added, looking about her and twirling her parasol on her
shoulder.

"She would," Oldmeadow agreed. "That's just what she would call it. And
she'd call you a true, deep-hearted woman and Nancy a gifted girl. How
do she and Nancy hit it off? It's that I want most of all to hear
about."

"They haven't much in common, have they?" said Mrs. Averil. "She's never
hunted and doesn't, I imagine, know a wren from a hedge-sparrow. She
_does_ know a skylark when she hears one, for she said 'Hail to thee,
blithe spirit' while one was singing. But I felt, somehow, it was like
the Queen Anne and the Lowestoft--a question of the label."

Oldmeadow at this began to laugh with an open and indulged mirth. He and
Mrs. Averil, at all events, saw eye to eye. "If you'd tie the correct
label to the hedge-sparrow she'd know that, too," he said. "Poor girl.
The trouble with her isn't that she doesn't know the birds, but that she
wouldn't know the poets, either, without their labels. It's a mind made
up of labels. No; I don't think it likely that Nancy, who hasn't a label
about her, will get much out of her--beyond necklaces."

"I wish Nancy _had_ a few labels," said Mrs. Averil. "I wish she could
have travelled and studied as Miss Toner--Adrienne that is--has done.
She is such a little ignoramus. Adrienne may bore you and me, but Nancy
will never interest anyone--except you and me."

It was always amusing to Oldmeadow, if a little sardonically so, to note
that any conception of himself as a possible suitor for Nancy had never
entered Mrs. Averil's mind. As a friend he was everything a mother could
desire; as a match for Nancy almost unimaginable. Well, he could not
give a wife even one hunter and he never had had any intention of
falling in love with his dear nymph; yet that other people might not do
so was a suggestion he repudiated with warmth.

"Oh; in love, yes," Mrs. Averil agreed. "I don't deny that she's very
loveable and I hope she may marry well. But that's not the same thing as
being interesting, is it? A man may be in love with a woman who doesn't
interest him."

"I dispute that statement."

"I'm sure dear Eleanor never interested her husband--devoted to the day
of his death as he was. There's something in my idea. To be interesting
one must offer something new. If Nancy had been interesting to Barney
she would now, I think, have been in Adrienne's place. Not that it would
have been a marriage to be desired for either of them."

So he and Mrs. Averil had been thinking the same thoughts.

"And you contend that if Nancy had been to China and read Goethe and
Dante in the originals he'd have been interested? I think he was quite
sufficiently interested and that if Miss Toner hadn't come barging into
our lives he'd have known he was in love."

"Going to China is a figure of speech and stands for all the things she
hasn't got and doesn't know. My poor little Nancy. All the same, _she_
isn't a bore!" said Mrs. Averil with as near an approach to acerbity as
she could show.

"No; she isn't a bore. The things she knows have to be found out, by
degrees, through living with her. Barney hasn't been to China, either,
so, according to your theory, Nancy didn't find him interesting."

At this Mrs. Averil's eyes met his and, after a moment of contemplation,
they yielded up to him the secret they saw to be shared. "If only it
were the same for women! But they don't need the new. She's young.
She'll get over it. I don't believe in broken hearts. All the same,"
Mrs. Averil stopped in their walk, ostensibly to examine the growth of a
fine pink lupin, "it hasn't endeared Adrienne to me. I'm too
_terre-à-terre_, about that, too, not to feel vexation, on Nancy's
account. And what I'm afraid of is that she knows she's not endeared to
me. That she guesses. She's a bore; but she's not a bit stupid, you
know."

"You don't think she's spiteful?" Oldmeadow suggested after a moment,
while Mrs. Averil still examined her lupin.

"Dear me, no! I wish she could be! It's that smooth surface of hers
that's so tiresome. She's not spiteful. But she's human. She'll want to
keep Barney away and Nancy will be hurt."

"Want to keep him away when she's got him so completely?"

"Something of that sort. I felt it once or twice."

"My first instinct about her was right, then," said Oldmeadow. "She's a
bore and an interloper, and she'll spoil things."

"Oh, perhaps not. She'll mend some things. Have you heard about Captain
Hayward?"

"Do you mean that stupid, big, tawny fellow? What about him?"

"You may well ask. I've been spoken to about him and Meg by more than
one person. They are making themselves conspicuous, and it's been going
on for some time."

"You don't mean that Meg's in love with him?"

"He's in love with her, at all events, and, as you know, he's a married
man. I questioned Nancy, who was with Meg for a few weeks in London, and
she owns that Meg's unhappy."

"And they're seeing each other in London now?" Oldmeadow was deeply
discomposed.

"No. He's away just now. And Meg is going to meet the bridal party in
Paris at the end of July. Nancy feels that when Meg gets back under
Adrienne's influence there'll be nothing to fear."

"We depend on her, then, so much, already," he murmured. He was
reviewing, hastily, his last impressions of Meg and they were not
reassuring. The only thing that was reassuring was to reflect on his
impressions of Adrienne. "Grandma's parlour" returned to him with its
assurance of deep security. Above everything else Adrienne was
respectable.

"Yes. That's just it," Mrs. Averil agreed. "We depend on her. And I feel
we're going to depend more and more. She's the sort of person who mends
things. So we mustn't think of what she spoils."

What Adrienne Toner had spoiled was, however, to be made very plain next
morning both to Nancy's old friend and to her mother. Beside her plate
at breakfast was a letter addressed in Barney's evident hand, a letter
in a narrow envelope stamped with the name of a French hotel and
showing, over the address, an engraving of peaks against the sky. Nancy
met the occasion with perfect readiness, saying as she looked at the
letter, waiting to open it till she had made the tea--Nancy always made
the tea in the morning while her mother sat behind the bacon and eggs at
the other end of the table--"How nice; from Barney. Now we shall have
news of them."

Nothing less like an Ariane could be imagined than Nancy as she stood
there in her pink dress above the pink, white and gold tea-cups. One
might have supposed from her demeanour that a letter from Barney was but
a happy incident in a happy day. But, when she dropped into her chair
and read, it was evident that she was not prepared for what she found.
She read steadily, in silence, while Oldmeadow cut bread at the
sideboard and Mrs. Averil distributed her viands, and, when the last
page was reached, they both could not fail to see that Nancy was
blushing, blushing so deeply that, as she thus felt herself betray her
emotion, tears came thickly into her downcast eyes.

"I'll have my tea now, dear," said Mrs. Averil. "Will you wait a little
longer, Roger?" She tided Nancy over.

But Nancy was soon afloat. "The letter is for us all," she said. "Do
read it aloud, Roger, while I have my breakfast."

Barney's letters, in the past, had, probably, always been shared and
Nancy was evidently determined that her own discomposure was not to
introduce a new precedent. Oldmeadow took up the sheets and read.

       *       *       *       *       *

"DEAREST NANCY,--How I wish you were with us up here. It's the most
fantastically lovely place. One feels as if one could sail off into it.
I dug up some roots of saxifrage for your wall yesterday, such pretty
pink stuff. It's gone off in a box wrapped in damp moss and I hope will
reach you safely. A horrid, vandal thing to do; but for you and Aunt
Monica I felt it justified, and there are such masses of it. I saw a
snow-bunting yesterday, much higher up than the saxifrage; such a jolly,
composed little fellow on a field of snow. The birds would drive you
absolutely mad, except that you're such a sensible young person you'd no
doubt keep your head even when you saw a pair of golden eagles, as we
did, floating over a ravine. I walked around the Lac d'Annecy this
morning, before breakfast, and did wish you were with me. I thought of
our bird-walks at dawn last summer. There were two or three darling
warblers singing, kinds we haven't got at home; and black redstarts and
a peregrine falcon high in the air. I could write all day if I'd the
time, about the birds and flowers. You remember Adrienne telling us that
afternoon when she first came to Coldbrooks about the flowers. But I
mustn't go on now. We're stopping for tea in a little valley among the
mountains with flowers thick all around us and I've only time to give
our news to you and Aunt Monica and to send our love. Mother is
extremely fit and jolly, though rather scared at the hairpin curves;
Adrienne has to hold her hand. I'm too happy for words and feel as if
I'd grown wings. How is Chummie's foot? Did the liniment help? Those
traps are beastly things. I feel just as you do about the rabbits.
Adrienne reads aloud to us in the evenings; a man called Claudel;
awfully stiff French to follow but rather beautiful. I think you'd like
him. Not a bit like Racine! Best love to you and Aunt Monica. Here's
Adrienne, who wants to have her say."

Had it been written in compunction for _Ariane aux bords laissée_? or,
rather, in a happy reversion to sheer spontaneity, a turning, without
any self-consciousness, to the comrade of the bird-walks who would,
after all, best feel with him about snow-buntings and redstarts?
Oldmeadow paused for the surmise, not looking up, before he went on from
Barney's neat, firm script to his wife's large, clear clumsy hand.

     "DEAREST NANCY," ran the postscript, and it had been at the
     postscript, Oldmeadow now could gauge, that Nancy had first found
     herself unprepared. "I, too, am thinking of you, with Barney. It is
     a great joy to feel that where, he says, I've given him golden
     eagles and snow-buntings he's given me--among so many other dear,
     wonderful people--a Nancy. I get the best of the bargain, don't I?
     I can't see much of the birds for looking at the peaks--_my_ peaks,
     so familiar yet, always, so new again. 'Stern daughters of the
     voice of God' that they are. Radiantly white against a cloudless
     sky we find them to-day. Barney's profile is beautiful against
     them--but his nose is badly sun-burned! _All_ our noses are
     sun-burned! That's what one pays for flying among the Alps.

     "Mother Nell--we've decided that that's what I'm to call
     her--looks ten years younger all the same, as I knew she would. We
     talk of you all so often--of you and Meg and Palgrave and Barbara,
     and half a dozen times a day Barney wishes that one or the other of
     you were with us to see this or that. It's specially you for the
     birds I notice. You must take me for some bird-walks at dawn some
     day and teach me to know all your lovely English songsters.... Dear
     little Cousin-Sister, I send you my love with his and, with him,
     hold you warmly in my heart. Will 'Aunt Monica' accept my
     affectionate and admiring homages?

     "Yours ever

     "ADRIENNE"



Oldmeadow had not expected that she could write such a human letter; yet
it explained Nancy's blush. Barney's spontaneous affection she could
have faced, but she had not been able to face his wife's determined
tenderness. Adrienne had meant it well, no doubt--Oldmeadow gazed on
after he had finished, but she had no business to mean so well, no
business to thrust herself, in this community of intimacy, into what was
Barney's place alone. There was more in it, he knew, with Meg and Mrs.
Averil to help him, than the quite successful playfulness. She was to be
more intimate than Barney, that was what it came to; more, much more
tender if Barney was to be allowed intimacy and tenderness. That was
really what she intended Nancy to see, and that Barney had no place at
all where she, Adrienne, did not also belong.

"Very sweet; very sweet and pretty," Mrs. Averil's voice broke in, and
he realized that he had allowed himself to drop into a grim and
tactless reverie; "I didn't know she had such a sense of humour.
Sun-burned noses and 'Stern daughters of the voice of God.' Well done. I
didn't think Adrienne would ever look as low as noses. They must be
having a delightful tour. I know black redstarts. There was one that
used to wake me every morning at four, one summer, in Normandy, with the
most foolish, creaking song; just outside my window. Give Barney my love
when you write and return my niece's affectionate and admiring homages.
Mother Nell. I shouldn't care to be called Mother Nell somehow."

So Mrs. Averil's vexation expressed itself and so she floated Nancy
along. But Nancy, long since, had pulled herself together and was able
to look at Oldmeadow, while her lashes closed together in her own smile,
and to say that she'd almost be willing to lose her nose for the sake of
hearing the new warblers. Mrs. Averil opened her "Times" and over
marmalade Nancy and Oldmeadow planned the trip that they would take some
day, when their ship came in, the three of them, a bird-trip to the
French Alps.




CHAPTER XII


Oldmeadow sat beside Adrienne Chadwick and knew that from the other end
of the room, where he talked to Mrs. Aldesey, Barney's eyes were on
them, though he tried to keep them off. It was the first dinner-party
the young couple had given since they had come up to town, for though
they were established at Coldbrooks in the communal family life Adrienne
seemed to find to her taste, and though Barney had at once immersed
himself in country pursuits, they had taken and furnished this large
house in Connaught Square and it was, apparently, settled that the
winter months were to be spent in London. How that was to be combined
with farming at Coldbrooks, or whether Barney intended to take a header
into politics and felt a London house, big enough for entertaining, part
of the programme, Oldmeadow hadn't an idea, and for the rather sinister
reason that he had hardly laid his eyes on Barney since his return from
his wedding-journey. Even though asked to tea once or twice, while,
established in an hotel, they were finding and furnishing the house, he
had never found them alone and either Barney had made no opportunity, or
his wife had seen to it that none should be made, for having a
_tête-à-tête_ with his old friend.

Oldmeadow could not associate Barney with ambitions, either social or
political, nor, he was bound to say, as he looked round the
dinner-table, where Adrienne sat at one end with Lord Lumley and Barney
at the other with Lady Lumley, could one infer from its disparate and
irrelevant elements any such ambitions in Adrienne. He had taken Mrs.
Aldesey down and had felt her at moments to be almost too resourceful,
her air of graceful skill in keeping the ball rolling seeming too much
to emphasize its tendency to drop. Without Mrs. Aldesey, without
Meg--vividly engaged at one corner with a fair young American--without
himself, for he had aided and abetted Lydia to the best of his ability,
the dinner would have been a dull one and he was not sure that even
their enterprise had redeemed it. Adrienne had not any air of fearing
dullness or of being in need of assistance. Oldmeadow saw that the blue
ribbon was frequently unrolled and that, as always, it made a silence in
which it could be watched. Lord Lumley, his handsome, official head bent
in an attitude of chivalrous devotion, watched earnestly, and the fair
young American paused in the midst of whatever he might be saying to Meg
to take almost reverent note; but Oldmeadow fancied more than once that
he caught startled eyes fixed upon it, especially when there emerged a
lustrous loop of quotation:--

    "One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
     Never doubted clouds would break,--"

The silence for that had been so general that even Barney, far away, and
protected by Mrs. Aldesey, was aware of it.

"How wonderfully he _wears_, doesn't he, dear old Browning," said Mrs.
Aldesey, and in the glance that Barney cast upon her was an oddly
mingled gratitude and worry. The fair young American, he was very fair
and had clear, charming eyes, finished the verse in a low voice to Meg
and Meg looked at him affectionately the while. He was evidently one of
Adrienne's appurtenances.

It was a dull dinner. Pretty, festive Mrs. Pope and young Mr. Haviland,
reputed to be a wit and one of Meg's young men as Mrs. Pope was one of
Barney's young women, would not with any eagerness again attend a board
where the hostess quoted Browning and didn't know better than to send
you down, the first with a stern young socialist who sat silent for the
most part and frowned when addressed, and the second with a jocular,
middle-aged lady from California, the mother, Oldmeadow gathered, of the
clear-eyed youth, from whose ample bosom Mr. Haviland's subtle arrows
glanced aside leaving him helplessly exposed to the stout bludgeonings
of her humour. Adrienne paused once or twice in her conversation to
smile approval upon her compatriot and to draw Lord Lumley's attention
to her special brand of merriment, good Lord Lumley adjusting his
glasses obediently to take it in.

And now they were all assembled in the drawing-room. Like everything
about Adrienne, it was simple and rather splendid. Barney had wisely
kept his modernities for his own study and it was a pity, Oldmeadow
reflected, that Adrienne had not kept for her own boudoir the large
portrait of herself that hung over the mantelpiece, since it was a note
more irrelevant than any Post Impressionist could have been and cast a
shade of surmise over the taste displayed in the Chippendale furniture
and the Chinese screens.

"Rather sweet, isn't it; pastoral and girlish, you know," Barney had
suggested tentatively as Mrs. Aldesey had placed herself before it.
"Done in Paris a good many years ago; the man was very much the fashion
then. Adrienne was only sixteen. It's an extraordinarily perfect
likeness still, isn't it?"

To which Mrs. Aldesey, all old lace and exquisite evasion, had murmured,
her lorgnette uplifted: "Quite dear and ingenuous. Such a relief after
your arid Cubists. What would they make of Mrs. Barney _en bergère_, I'd
like to know? A jumble of packing-cases with something twisted in a
corner to signify a bleat."

For the picture, painted with glib assurance and abounding in pink and
azure, portrayed Adrienne dressed as a shepherdess and carrying a
flower-wreathed crook.

Adrienne, to-night at all events, was looking very unlike the
shepherdess, but that might be because of the approaches of her
maternity. Mrs. Chadwick, when he had last been at Coldbrooks, had told
him that the baby was expected in May and that Adrienne was wonderful
about it, dedicating herself to its perfection in thought and deed with
every conscious hour.

"If only I'd thought about my babies before they came like that, who
knows what they might have turned out!" she had surmised. "But I was
very silly, I'm afraid, and the only thing I really did think of was how
I should dress them. I've always loved butcher's-blue linen for children
and I must say that mine did look very nice in it. For everyday, you
know."

Oldmeadow found it extremely difficult to think of Adrienne as a mother;
it was much easier to think of her as a shepherdess. Such solidities of
experience gave her even a certain pathos in his eyes, though he was in
no whit dislodged from his hostility to her. She was as mild, as
satisfied, apparently, with herself and with existence, as ever, yet her
eyes and lips expressed fatigue and a purely physical sadness that was
uncharacteristic, and it was uncharacteristic that she should be rather
thickly powdered.

They had not really met since the morning of her adjuration to him at
Coldbrooks and he wondered if she remembered that little scene as
vividly as he did. She would be very magnanimous did she not remember it
unpleasantly; and he could imagine her as very magnanimous; yet from the
fact that she had kept Barney from him he could not believe that she was
feeling magnanimously.

She watched Barney and Mrs. Aldesey now, as they stood before her
portrait, and he fancied that the sadness in her eyes, whatever might be
its cause, deepened a little. When she turned them on him it was with an
effect of being patiently ready for him. Perhaps, really, she had been
more patient than pleased all evening.

"So you are settled here for the winter?" he said. "Have you and Barney
any plans? I've hardly seen anything of him of late."

"We have been so very, very busy, you know," said Adrienne, as if quite
accepting his right to an explanation.

She was dressed in pale blue and wore, with her pearl necklace, a little
wreath of pearls in her hair. In her hands she turned, as they talked, a
small eighteenth-century fan painted in pink and grey and blue, and he
was aware, as he had been at Coldbrooks, of those slow and rather
fumbling movements.

"We couldn't well ask friends," she went on, "even the dearest, to come
and sit on rolls of carpet with us while we drank our tea, could we?
We've kept our squalor for the family circle. Meg's been with us; so
dear and helpful; but only Meg and a flying visit once or twice from
Mother Nell. Nancy couldn't come. But nothing, it seems, will tear Nancy
from hunting. I feel that strange and rather sad; the absorption of a
fine young life in such primitiveness."

"Oh, well; it's not her only interest, you know," said Oldmeadow, very
determined not to allow himself vexation. "Nancy is a creature of such
deep country roots. Not the kind that grow in London."

"I know," said Adrienne. "And it is just those roots that I want to
prevent my Barney's growing. Roots like that tie people to routine;
convention; acceptance. I want Barney to find a wider, freer life. I
hope he will go into politics. If we have left Coldbrooks and the dear
people there for these winter months it's because I feel he will be
better able to form opinions here than in the country. I saw quite well,
there, that people didn't form opinions; only accepted traditions. I
want Barney to be free of tradition and to form opinions for himself. He
has none now," she smiled.

She had been clear before, and secure; but he felt now the added weight
of her matronly authority. He felt, too, that, while ready for him and,
perhaps, benevolently disposed, she was far more indifferent to his
impressions than she had been at Coldbrooks. She had possessed Barney
before; but how much more deeply she possessed him now and how much
more definitely she saw what she intended to do with him.

"You must equip him with your opinions," said Oldmeadow, and his voice
was a good match for hers in benevolence. "I know that you have so many
well-formed ones."

"Oh, no; never that," said Adrienne. "That's how country vegetables are
grown; first in frames and then in plots; all guided and controlled. He
must find his own opinions; quite for himself; quite freely of
influence. That is the rock upon which Democracy is founded. Nothing is
more arresting to development than living by other people's opinions."

"But we must get our opinions from somebody and somewhere. The danger of
democracy is that we don't grow them at all; merely catch them, like
influenza, from a mob. Not that I disbelieve in democracy."

"Don't you, Mr. Oldmeadow?" She turned her little fan and smiled on him.
"You believe in liberty, equality, fraternity? That surprises me."

"Democracy isn't incompatible with recognizing that other people are
wiser than oneself and letting them guide us; quite the contrary. Why
surprised? Have I seemed so autocratic?"

"It would surprise me very much to learn that you believed in equality,
to start with that alone"; Adrienne smiled on.

"Well, I own that I don't believe in people who have no capacity for
opinions being impowered to act as if they had. That's the fallacy
that's playing the mischief with us, all over the world."

"They never will have opinions worth having unless they are given the
liberty to look for them. You don't believe in liberty, either, when you
say that."

"No; not for everybody. Some of our brothers are too young and others
too stupid to be trusted with it."

"They'll take it for themselves if you don't trust them with it," said
Adrienne, and he was again aware that though she might be absurd she, at
all events, was not stupid. "All that we can do in life is to trust, and
help, and open doors. Only experience teaches. People must follow their
own lights."

He moved forward another pawn, and though he did not find her stupid he
was not taking her seriously. "Most people have no lights to follow.
It's a choice for them between following other people's or resenting and
trampling on them. That, again, is what we can see happening all over
the world."

"So it is, you must own, just as I thought; you don't even believe in
fraternity," said Adrienne, and she continued to smile her weary,
tranquil smile upon him; "for we cannot feel towards men as towards
brothers, and trust them, unless we believe that the light shines into
each human soul."

He saw now that unless they went much deeper, deeper than he could be
willing, ever, to go with Adrienne Toner, he must submit to letting
himself appear as worsted. He knew where he believed the roots of trust
to grow and he did not intend, no never, to say to Adrienne Toner that
only through the love of God could one at once distrust and love the
species to which one belonged. He could have shuddered at the thought of
what she would certainly have found to say about God.

"You've got all sorts of brothers here to-night, haven't you," he
remarked, putting aside the abstract theme and adjusting his glass.
"Some of them look as though they didn't recognize the relationship.
Where did you find our young socialist over there in the corner? He
looks very menacing. Most of the socialists I've known have been the
mildest of men."

"He is a friend of Palgrave's. Palgrave brought him to see me. Oh, I'm
so glad--Gertrude is going to take care of him. She always sees at once
if anyone looks lonely. That's all right, then."

Oldmeadow was not so sure it was as he observed the eye with which Mr.
Besley measured the beaming advance of the lady from California.

"I wonder if you would like my dear old friend, Mrs. Prentiss," Adrienne
continued, watching her method with Mr. Besley. "The Laughing
Philosopher, Mother used to call her. She is a very rare, strong soul.
That is her son, talking to Lady Lumley. He's been studying architecture
in Paris for the past three years. A radiant person. Mrs. Prentiss runs
a settlement in San Francisco and has a brilliant literary and artistic
salon. She is a real force in the life of our country."

"Why should you question my appreciation of rarity and strength? I can
see that she is very kind and that if anybody can melt Mr. Besley she
will."

"Gertrude would have melted Diogenes," said Adrienne with a fond
assurance that, though it took the form of playfulness, lacked its
substance. "I hope they will find each other, for he is rare and strong,
too. What he needs is warmth and happiness. He makes me think of Shelley
when he talks."

"He's too well up in statistics to make me think of Shelley," Oldmeadow
commented. Barney, he saw, from his place beside Mrs. Aldesey at the
other end of the room, was still watching them, pleased now, it was
evident, by the appearance of friendly, drifting converse they
presented. "He's not altogether unknown to me for we often, in our
review, get our windows broken by his stones; well-thrown, too. He's
very able. So you thought it might do the British Empire good to face
him? Well, I suppose it may."

"Which are the British Empire?" asked Adrienne. "You. To begin with."

"Oh, no. Count me out. I'm only a snappy, snuffy scribbler. Good old
Lord Lumley, of course, with all his vast, well-governed provinces
shimmering in the Indian sun behind him. And Sir Archibald, who talks so
loudly in the House. Palgrave didn't bring him, I'll be bound."

"No. Lady Lumley brought him. He and Lord Lumley are certainly more than
odds and ends." She had an air of making no attempt to meet his
badinage, if it was that, but of mildly walking past it. "They are, both
of them, rather splendid people, in spite of their limitations. They've
accepted tradition, you see, instead of growing opinion. That is their
only trouble. I was afraid you were going to say Mr. Haviland. He is
certainly an odd and end."

Mr. Haviland and Mrs. Pope had found each other and were indulging in
mirthful repartee in the back drawing-room. "I feel safe with Lord
Lumley and Sir Archibald," Adrienne added.

"I'd certainly rather trust myself in their hands than in Mr. Besley's.
I'd almost rather trust myself in the hands of Mr. Haviland."

"You mean that they would, at least, keep you comfortable and that Mr.
Besley wouldn't." She, too, had her forms of repartee.

"I expect it's just what I do mean," he assented. "If Mr. Besley and his
friends had their way, I for instance, and workers of my type, would
soon, I suspect, have to forego our tobacco and our chamber-music. We're
only marketable in a comfortable world. And there are more comfortable
people, I maintain, under Lord Lumley, than there would be under Mr.
Besley."

"'Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive,'" said Adrienne.
"All revolutions must begin by burning away the evil and the refuse. Not
that I am a revolutionist, or even a socialist."

"You can't separate good from evil by burning," he said. "You burn them
both. That's what the French did in their lamentable bonfire, for which
they've been paying in poorer brains and poorer blood ever since. We
don't want revolutions. All we want is slow, good-tempered reform.
Revolutions are always ill-tempered, aren't they, and nothing worth
doing was ever done in an ill-temper. You are making me very didactic."

"Oh, but I prefer that so much to persiflage," said Adrienne, with her
tranquillity. "And I am glad to hear what you really believe. But it is
sad to me that you should see no ardour or glory in anything. With all
its excesses and errors, I have always felt the French Revolution to be
a sublime expression of the human spirit."

"It might have been; if they could only have kept their
heads--metaphorically as well as literally. But the glory and ardour
were too mixed with hatred and ignorance. I'm afraid I do tend to
distrust those states of feeling. They tend so easily to
self-deception."

She was looking at him, quietly and attentively, and he was, for the
first time since their initial meeting, perhaps, feeling quite
benevolently towards her; quite as the British Empire might feel towards
a subject race. It was, therefore, the more difficult to feel anything
but exasperation when she said, having, evidently, summed up her
impressions and found her verdict: "Yes. You distrust them. We always
come back to that, don't we? You distrust yourself, too. So that, when
you tell me what you believe, you can only do it in the form of making
fun of my beliefs. I feel about you, Mr. Oldmeadow, what I felt that
morning when I tried to come near you and you wouldn't let me. I feel it
more the more I see you; and it makes me sad. It isn't only that you
distrust ardour and glory, all the sunlight and splendour of life; but
you are afraid of them; afraid to open your heart to trust. You shut
your door upon the sunlight and take up your caustic pen; and you don't
see how the shadows fall about you."

It was indeed a dusty tumble from the quite civilized pavement of their
interchange, and it was unfortunate that upon his moment of
discomfiture, when he saw himself as trying to clap the dust off his
knees and shoulders in time to be presentable, Barney and Mrs. Aldesey
should have chosen to approach them. Barney, no doubt, imagined it a
propitious moment in which to display to Mrs. Aldesey his wife's and his
friend's amity.

Adrienne was perfectly composed. She had borne her testimony and, again,
done her best for him, pointing out to him that the first step towards
enfranchisement was to open his door to the sunlight that she could so
bountifully supply. She turned a clear, competent eye upon her husband
and his companion.

"Well, dear, and what have you and Roger been so deep in?" Barney
inquired, looking down at her with a fondness in which, all the same,
Oldmeadow detected the anxiety that had hovered in his eye all evening.
"You've seemed frightfully deep."

"We have been," said Adrienne, looking up at him. "In liberty, equality
and fraternity; all the things I believe in and that Mr. Oldmeadow
doesn't. I can't imagine how he gets on at all, he believes in so few
things. It must be such a sad, dim, groping world to live in when there
are no stars above to look at and no hands below to hold."

"Oh, well, you see," said Mrs. Aldesey with her dragging smile, "his
ancestors didn't sign the Declaration of Independence."

"We don't need ancestors to do that," Adrienne smiled back. "All of us
sign it for ourselves--all of us who have accepted our birthright and
taken the gifts that our great, modern, deep-hearted world hold out to
us. You are an American, Mrs. Aldesey, so you find it easy to believe in
freedom, don't you?"

"Very easy; for myself; but not for other people," Mrs. Aldesey replied
and Oldmeadow saw at once, with an added discomfort, that she
underestimated, because of Adrienne's absurdity, Adrienne's
intelligence. "But then the very name of any abstraction--freedom,
humanity, what you will--has always made me feel, at once, dreadfully
sleepy. It's not ever having had my mind trained, Mrs. Barney. Now
yours was, beautifully, I can see."

Adrienne looked up at her, for Mrs. Aldesey, her lace about her
shoulders, her lorgnette in her hands, had not seated herself, and it
was further evident to Oldmeadow that she weighed Mrs. Aldesey more
correctly than Mrs. Aldesey weighed her. "Very carefully, if not
beautifully," she said. "Have I made you sleepy already? But I don't
want to go on talking about abstractions. I want to talk about Mr.
Oldmeadow. The truth is, Barney," and her voice, as she again turned her
eyes on her husband, had again the form but not the substance of gaiety,
"the truth is that he's a lonely, lonely bachelor and that we ought to
arrange a marriage for him, you and I. Since he doesn't believe in
freedom, he won't mind having a marriage arranged, will he?--if we can
find a rare, sweet, gifted girl."

Barney had become red. "Roger's been teasing you, darling. Nobody
believes in freedom more. Don't let him take you in. He's an awful old
humbug with his Socratic method. He upsets you before you know where you
are. He's always been like that."

"Yes; hasn't he," Mrs. Aldesey murmured.

"But he hasn't upset me at all," said Adrienne. "I grant that he was
trying to, that he was doing his very best to give me a tumble; but I
quite see through him and he doesn't conceal himself from me in the very
least. He doesn't really believe in freedom, however much he may have
taken _you_ in, Barney; he'd think it wholesome, of course, that you
should believe in it. That's his idea, you see; to give people what he
thinks wholesome; to choose for them. It's the lack of faith all
through. But the reason is that he's lonely; dreadfully lonely, and
because of that he's grown to be, as he says, snappy and snuffy; so that
we must borrow a page from his book and find what is wholesome for him.
I know all the symptoms so well. I've had friends just like that. It's a
starved heart and having nobody to be fonder of than anyone else; no one
near at all. He must be happily married as soon as possible. A happy
marriage is the best gift of life, isn't it, Mrs. Aldesey? If we haven't
known that we haven't known our best selves, have we?"

"It may be; we mayn't have," said Mrs. Aldesey, cheerfully; but she was
not liking it. "I can't say. Am I to have a hand in choosing his bride?
I know his tastes, I think. We're quite old friends, you see."

"No one who doesn't believe in freedom for other people may help to
choose her," said Adrienne, with a curious blitheness. "That's why he
mayn't choose her himself. We must go quite away to find her; away from
ceilings and conventions and out into the sunlight. I don't believe
happiness is found under ceilings. And it's what we all need more than
anything else. Even tobacco and chamber-music don't make you a bit
happy, do they, Mr. Oldmeadow? and if one isn't happy one can't know
anything about anything. Not really."

"Alas!" sighed Mrs. Aldesey, keeping up her end, but not very
successfully, while Barney fixed his eyes upon his wife. "And I thought
I'd found it this evening, under this ceiling. Well, I shall cherish my
illusion, since you tell me it's only that, and thank you for it, Mrs.
Barney. The Lumleys are going to give me a lift and I see that their car
has been announced."

"Stay on a bit, Roger," Barney murmured, as the Lumleys approached.
"I've seen nothing of you for ages."

Adrienne rose to greet her parting guests.

"Darling Adrienne, good-night. It's been perfectly delightful, your
little party," said Lady Lumley, who was large, light and easily
pleased; an English equivalent of the lady from California, but without
the sprightliness. "Your dear young Mr. Prentiss is a treasure. He's
been telling me about Sicilian temples. We _must_ get there one day.
Mrs. Prentiss says they will come to us for a week-end before they go.
How extraordinarily interesting she is. Don't forget that you are coming
on the fifteenth."

"I shall get up a headache, first thing!" Lord Lumley stated in a loud,
jocular whisper, reverting to a favourite jest on Adrienne's powers.
"That's the thing to go in for, eh? I won't let Charlie cut me out this
time. Not a night's sleep till you come!"

"Go in for as many as you like, dear Lord Lumley," said Adrienne,
smiling her assurance of being able to deal with a series.

"Good-night, Mrs. Barney," said Mrs. Aldesey. "Leave me a little
standing-room under the stars, won't you."

"There's always standing-room under the stars," said Adrienne. "We don't
exclude each other there."

The party showed no other signs of breaking up. The Laughing Philosopher
had melted, or, at all events, mastered Mr. Besley, and talked to him
with, now and again, a maternal hand laid on his knee. Mr. Haviland and
Mrs. Pope still laughed in the back drawing-room, Meg and Mr. Prentiss
had come together again and Sir Archibald was engaged with a pretty
girl. After looking around upon them all, Adrienne, with the appearance
of a deeper fatigue, sank back upon her sofa.

"You know, darling," Barney smiled candidly upon his wife, "you rather
put your foot in it just now. Mrs. Aldesey's marriage isn't happy. I
ought to have warned you."

"How do you mean not happy, Barney?" Adrienne looked up at him. "Isn't
Mr. Aldesey dead?"

"Not at all dead. She left him some years ago, didn't she, Roger? He
lives in New York. It's altogether a failure."

Adrienne looked down at her fan. "I didn't know. But one can't avoid
speaking of success sometimes, even to failures."

"Of course not. Another time you will know."

Adrienne seemed to meditate, but without compunction. "That was what she
meant, then, by saying she believed in freedom for herself but not for
other people."

"Meant? How do you mean? She was joking."

"If she left him. It was she who left him?"

"I don't know anything about it," Barney spoke now with definite
vexation and Oldmeadow, in his corner of the sofa, his arms folded, his
eyes on the cornice, gave him no help. "Except that, yes, certainly;
it's she who left him. She's not a deserted wife. Anything but."

"It's only Mr. Aldesey who is the deserted husband," Adrienne turned her
fan and kept her eyes on it. "It's only he who can't be free. Forgive me
if she's a special friend of yours, Mr. Oldmeadow; but it explains. I
felt something so brittle, so unreal in her, charming and gracious as
she is. It is so very wrong for a woman to do that, I think."

"Wrong?" Barney echoed, staring at Oldmeadow while this firm hand was
laid upon his Egeria. "What the dickens do you mean, darling? She is a
special friend of Roger's. You don't surely mean to say a woman must,
under all circumstances, stick to a man she doesn't love?"

"Anything but that, Barney. I think that she should leave him and set
him free. It's quite plain to me that if a wife will not live with her
husband it is her duty to divorce him. Then, at any rate, he can try for
happiness again."

"Divorce him, my dear child!" Barney was trying to keep up appearances
but the note of marital severity came through and as it sounded Adrienne
raised her eyes to his: "It's not so easy as all that! Aldesey, whatever
his faults, may have given her no cause to divorce him, and I take it
you'll not suggest that Mrs. Aldesey should give him cause to divorce
her."

On her sofa, more pallid under her powder, more sunken than before, and
with the queer squashed-in look emphasized, Adrienne kept steady eyes
uplifted to her husband. "Not at all, dear Barney," she returned and
Oldmeadow, though hardened against the pathos of her physical
disability, saw that she spoke with difficulty, "but I think that you
confuse the real with the conventional wrong. Mrs. Aldesey would not
care to face any unconventionality; that is quite apparent. She would
draw her skirts aside from any conventional wrong-doing. But the real
wrong she would be blind to; the wrong of keeping anyone bound in the
emptiness you have made for them. Setting free is not so strange and
terrible a matter as you seem to imagine. It's quite easy for brave,
unshackled people."

"Well, I must really be off," Oldmeadow now seized the occasion to
declare. "I believe, as a matter of fact, that Mr. Aldesey lives very
contentedly in New York, collecting French prints and giving excellent
dinners. Anything open and scandalous would be as distasteful to him as
to his wife. They are, both of them, happier apart; that's all it comes
to. So you must read your lessons, even by proxy, to more authentic
misdemeanants, Mrs. Barney. All right, Barney. Don't come down. I'll
hope to see you both again quite soon."

So he got away, concealing as best he might, his sense of tingling
anger. But it died away to a sense of chill as he walked down Park Lane.
Was not Barney unhappy, already? What did she say to him when she got
him to herself? He felt sure that she had never bargained for a husband
who could look at her with ill-temper.




CHAPTER XIII


"Roger, see here, I've only come to say one word--about the absurd
little-matter of last night. Only one; and then we'll never speak of it
again," said poor Barney.

He had come as soon as the very next day--to exonerate, not to
apologize; that was evident at once. Oldmeadow had not long to wait
before learning what she had said to him when she got him to herself,
nor long to wait before realizing that if Barney had been unhappy last
night he thought himself happy to-day.

"Really, my dear boy," he said, "it's not worth talking about."

"Oh, but we must talk about it," said Barney. He was red and spoke
quickly. "It upset her frightfully; it made her perfectly miserable. She
cried for hours, Roger," Barney's voice dropped to a haggard note. "You
know, though she bears up so marvellously, she's ill. She doesn't admit
illness and that makes it harder for her, because it simply bewilders
her when she finds herself on edge like this and her body refusing to
obey her. The baby is coming in May, you know."

"I know, my dear Barney. The evening was very fatiguing for her. I saw
it all I think. I noticed from the beginning how tired she looked."

"Horribly tired. Horribly fatiguing. I'm glad you saw it. For that's
really what I came to explain. She was tired to begin with and Mrs.
Aldesey put her on edge. I think I saw that myself at dinner--and, oh,
before that; on the day we had tea with her, when we first came up, in
November--Adrienne felt then that Mrs. Aldesey didn't understand or care
for her. You know she is so full of love and sympathy for everybody
herself that she is literally sickened when she is treated in that
artificial, worldly way. And you know, Roger, Mrs. Aldesey _is_
artificial and worldly."

That was how she had put it to Barney, of course. But Oldmeadow saw
further than Mrs. Aldesey and her artificiality. He saw a dishevelled
and weeping Adrienne stricken to the heart by the sense of threatened
foundations, aghast by what she had seen in her husband's eyes; and he
was aware, even while he resented having it put upon Lydia, of a
curious, reluctant pity for the pale, weeping figure. Lydia had,
obviously, displeased her; but Lydia had been the mere occasion; she
could have de

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