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."