"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.