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."