"Isn't it becoming to him, Mother? And how tall he looks!" said Nancy,
holding Oldmeadow off in his khaki for displayal.
He had only written a line of his failure and that he would come as soon
as he could and see them all and tell in full of his interview with
Palgrave. And he had motored over to The Little House this afternoon in
early November.
Nancy was showing an unexpected gaiety. "What a nice grilled-salmon
colour you are, too," she said.
He divined the self-protective instinct under the gaiety. Most of the
women in England were being gayer and more talkative at this time, in
order to keep up. Nancy was thin and white; but she was keeping up. And
she had put on a charming dress to receive him in.
"I've been grilled all right; out on the downs," he said. "But it's more
like cold storage just now, with these frosts at night. Yes; the big
cup, please. I'm famished for tea. Ah! that's something like! It smells
like your rose outside. I sniffed it as I waited at the door. Wonderful
for such a late blooming."
"Isn't it," said Mrs. Averil. "And I only put it in last autumn. It's
doing beautifully; but I've cherished it. And now tell us about
Palgrave."
He felt reluctant to tell about Palgrave. The impression that remained
with him of Palgrave was that impression of beauty and distortion and he
did not want to have to disentangle his feelings or to seem to put
Palgrave in the wrong. It was so sweet, too, after the long, chilly
drive over the empty uplands, to sit here and forget the war, although
it was for scenes like this, for girls like Nancy, women like Mrs.
Averil--with so much else--that the war was so worth fighting. He turned
his thoughts back to the realities that underlay the happy appearances
and was aware, as he forced himself to tell, of what must seem a note of
advocacy in his voice. "He can't think differently, I'm afraid," he
said. "It's self-sacrifice, not selfishness, that is moving him."
"He can't think differently while Adrienne is living there," said Mrs.
Averil. "He didn't tell you, I suppose, that she has now taken up her
abode in Oxford in order to study philosophy with him?"
He was rather uncomfortably aware of the disingenuousness that must now
be made apparent in his avoidance of all mention of Adrienne.
"I saw her," he said, and he knew that it was lamely. "She was there
when I got there."
"You saw her!" Mrs. Averil exclaimed. "But then, of course you didn't
convince him. I might have known it. Of course she would not let you see
him alone."
"But she did let me see him alone. That was what she wanted. And she was
there only in order to tell me what she wanted. She wants him to go."
Mrs. Averil was eyeing him with such astonishment that he turned to
Nancy with his explanations. But Mrs. Averil would not leave him to
Nancy's sympathy. "It's rather late in the day for her to want him to
go," she said. "She may be sorry for what she's done; but it's her
work."
"Well, she's sorry for her work. That's what it comes to. And I'm sorry
for her," said Oldmeadow.
"Good heavens! The cleverness of that woman!" Mrs. Averil exclaimed. "If
she can't be powerful, she'll be pitiful! She's worked on your feelings;
I can see that, Roger. And I thought you, at least, were immune. Well;
she does not work on mine. I am not in the least sorry for her."
"She's being unfairly treated," said Oldmeadow. "It's grotesque that Meg
should have turned upon her."
"And Eleanor has, too, you know," said Mrs. Averil. "It's grotesque, if
you like; but I see a grim justice in it. She made them do things and
believe things that weren't natural to them and now she's lost her power
and they see things as they are."
"It's because she's failed that they've turned against her," said Nancy.
"If she'd succeeded they would have gone on accepting what she told them
and making her their idol."
"Adrienne mustn't fail," said Mrs. Averil dryly. "The only justification
for Adrienne is to be in the right. If the blood of Saint Januarius
doesn't liquefy, why should you keep it in a shrine? She's a woman who
has quarrelled with her husband and disgraced her sister and
brother-in-law, and broken her mother-in-law's heart. You can't go on
making an idol of a saint who behaves like that."
"She never claimed worldly success," said Nancy. "She never told Meg to
go so that she could get married afterwards; she never told Palgrave
that war was wrong because it was easier not to fight."
"Oh, yes, she did claim worldly success, really," said Mrs. Averil,
while her eyes rested on her daughter with a tenderness that contrasted
with her tone. "Her whole point was that if you were right
spiritually--'poised' she called it, you remember--all those other
things would be added unto you. I've heard her claim that if you were
poised you could get anything you really wanted. I asked her once if I
should find a ten-pound note under the sofa-cushion every morning after
breakfast if I could get poised sufficiently!" Mrs. Averil laughed,
still more dryly while she still maintained her tender gaze and Nancy
said, smiling a little: "She might have put it there for you if she'd
been sure you were poised."
"Well, let us bury Adrienne for the present," said Mrs. Averil. "Tell
Roger about your nursing plans. She may go to London, Roger, this
winter, and I'm to be left alone."
"You're to be left to take care of Aunt Eleanor, if I do go," said
Nancy; and Mrs. Averil said that there must certainly be some one left
to take care of poor Eleanor.
Oldmeadow went up to Coldbrooks next morning. The first person he saw
was old Johnson at the door and he remembered Eleanor Chadwick's griefs
on his account. Nothing, now, could have been kept from Johnson and his
face bore the marks of the family calamities. He was aged and whitened
and his voice had armed itself, since the downfall of his grave,
vicarious complacency, with solemn cadences.
"Yes, sir. The ladies will be very glad to see you, sir. These are sad
days for them--the family dispersed as it is."
Johnson defined the situation as he felt that it could be most fittingly
defined and Oldmeadow inwardly applauded his "dispersed."
The drawing-room, into which Johnson ushered him, had, for the first
time in his memory of it, a mournful air. It had always been shabby, and
these were the same faded chintzes, the same worn rugs; but now,
fireless and flowerless, it neither spoke nor smiled and, with the sense
it gave of an outlived epoch, it was almost spectral. The photographs
all looked like the photographs of dead people and the only similitude
of life was the loud, silly ticking of the French clock on the
mantelpiece; Mrs. Chadwick's cherished clock; one of her
wedding-presents.
"I'm afraid it's rather chilly, sir," said Johnson. "No one has sat here
of an evening now for a long time." He put a match to the ranged logs,
drew the blinds up farther so that the autumnal sunlight might more
freely enter, and left him.
Oldmeadow went to the window and turned over the magazines, a month old,
that lay on a table there.
He was standing so when Meg entered, and she had half the length of the
room to traverse before they met. She was in black, in deep black; but
more beautiful than he had ever seen her; her tossed auburn locks bound
low on her forehead with a black ribbon, her white throat upright, her
eyes hard with their readiness, their resource. Beautiful and
distressing. It distressed him terribly to see that hardness in her
eyes.
"How do you do, Roger," she said, giving him her hand. "It's good to see
you. Mother will be glad."
They seated themselves on one of the capacious sofas and she questioned
him quickly, competently, while the hard eyes seemed to measure him lest
he measure her. It was almost the look of the _déclassée_ woman who
forestalls withdrawal in an interlocutor. But, as he answered her
quietly, his fond regard upon her, her defences began to fall. "It's the
only life, a soldier's, isn't it?" she said. "At all times, really. But,
at a time like this, anything else seems despicable, doesn't it;
contemptibly smug and safe. The uniform is so becoming to you. You look
a soldier already. One feels that men will trust and follow you. Didn't
you burn with rage and shame, too, when, for those four days, it seemed
we might not come in?"
"I felt too sure we should come in, to burn with rage and shame," said
Oldmeadow.
"Ah! but it was not so sure, I'm afraid," said Meg, and in her eyes, no
longer hard, wild lights seemed to pass and repass. "I'm afraid that
there are nearly enough fools and knaves in England to wreck us. Not
quite enough, thank heaven! But, for those four days, Eric was terribly
afraid. He was killed, you know, Roger, very splendidly, leading his
men."
"I know, Meg. My dear Meg," Oldmeadow murmured.
"Oh! I don't regret it! I don't regret it!" Meg cried, while her colour
rose and her young breast lifted. "It's the soldier's death! The
consecrating, heroic death! He was ready. And deaths like that
atone--for the others. He was not killed instantaneously, Roger."
"I didn't know," said Oldmeadow, looking at her with a pitying, troubled
gaze.
"He lived for a day and night afterwards," said Meg, looking back,
tearless. "They carried him to a barn. Only his man was with him. There
was no one to dress his dreadful wound; no food. The man got him some
water, at the risk of his own life. He was conscious until the end and
he suffered terribly."
Oldmeadow dropped his eyes before her fierce stare while, strangely,
dimly, there passed through his mind the memory of the embarrassed,
empty, handsome young face in the brougham and, again, the memory of his
dog John. He had seen John die and his eyes of wistful appeal. So Eric
Hayward's eyes might have looked as he lay in the barn dying.
"Oh, Roger!" Meg said suddenly, seizing his hand. "Kill them! Kill them!
Oh, revenge him! I was not with him! Think of it! I would have had no
right to have been with him--had it been possible. I did not know till a
week later. He was buried there. His man buried him."
"My poor, poor child," said Oldmeadow, clasping her hands.
But, at once, taking refuge from his pity and from her own desperate
pain: "So you've seen Palgrave," she said. "And he isn't going. I knew
it was useless. I told Mother it was useless--with that stranger--that
American, with him. She has disgraced us all.--Wretched boy! Hateful
woman!"
"Meg, Meg; be soldierly. He wouldn't have spoken like that."
"He never liked her! Never!" she cried. "I knew he didn't, even at the
time she was flattering and cajoling us. I saw that she bewildered him
and that he accepted her only because she was mine. How I loathe myself
for having listened to her! How I loathe her! All that she ever wanted
was power! Power over other people's lives! She'd commit any crime for
that!"
"You seem to me cruelly unfair," he said.
"No! no! I'm not unfair! You know I'm not!" she cried. "You always saw
the truth about her--from the very beginning. You never fell down and
worshipped her, like the rest of us. And she knew that you were her
enemy and warned us against you. Oh--why did Barney marry her!"
"I never worshipped her; but I never thought her base and hateful."
"You never knew her as I did; that was all. And I never knew her until I
came back and found her doing to Palgrave what she had done to us.
Paladin! Did you hear her call him Paladin? Always flattery! Always to
make one think one was wonderful, important, mysterious! She forced us
to go away, Roger. Sometimes I think it was hypnotism; that she uses her
will-power consciously. We did not want to go. We did not want the
divorce and the scandal."
"What did you want, then, Meg?"
She felt the gravity of his tone but, like a fierce Maenad, she snatched
at the torch, not caring how it revealed her. "What of it! What if we
had been secret lovers! Who would have known! Who would have been
harmed! Some people go on for years and years. His wife loved another
man. He had no one. Why should we have been pushed--such pitiful fools
we were--into displaying our love to the world and being crushed by it!
Oh, he was so loyal, so brave; but it made him very, very unhappy. Oh, I
was cruel to him sometimes! I used to reproach him sometimes! Oh, Roger!
Roger!--" She broke into wild tears and stumbled to her feet.
As she reached the door, covering her face with her hands, her mother
opened it and, meeting her on the threshold, Meg, with almost the effect
of beating her aside with the other impediments to her rage and grief,
pushed past her so that the knitting Mrs. Chadwick held was flung to the
floor, the ball of khaki wool running rapidly away under a sofa and the
socks and needles dangling at her feet.
She stood looking down at them with a curious apathy and, as Oldmeadow
went to help and greet her, he saw that as much as Meg was wild she was
dulled and quiet.
"Meg is so very, very violent," she said, as he disentangled the wool
and restored her sock and ball to her. She spoke with listlessness
rather than sympathy.
"Poor child," said Oldmeadow. "One can hardly wonder at it. But it makes
a wretched existence for you, I'm afraid. You and she oughtn't to be
alone together."
He drew her to a chair and, seating herself, her faded face and eyes
that had lost their old look of surprise turned to the light, Mrs.
Chadwick assented, "It's very fatiguing to live with, certainly.
Sometimes I really think I must go away for a little while and have a
change. Nancy would come and stay with Meg, you know. But I can't miss
Barney's last weeks. He comes to us, now, again. And it might not be
right to leave Meg. One must not think of oneself at a time like this,
must one?" The knitting lay in her lap and she was twisting and
untwisting her handkerchief after her old fashion; but her fingers
moved slowly and without agitation and Oldmeadow saw that some spring of
life in her had been broken.
"The best plan would be that Meg should, as soon as possible, take up
some work," he said, "and that you and Nancy should go away. Work is the
only thing for Meg now. She'll dash herself to pieces down here; and you
with her. There'll soon be plenty to do. Nursing and driving
ambulances."
"Nancy is going to nurse, you know," said Mrs. Chadwick. "But she won't
go as long as we need her here. She has promised me that. I don't know
what I should do without Nancy. I shouldn't care to be nursed by Meg
myself, if I were a wounded soldier. She is so very restless and would
probably forget quite simple things like giving one a handkerchief or
seeing that hot-water-bottles were wrapped up before she put them to
one's feet. A friend of mine--Amy Hatchard--such a pretty woman, though
her hair was bright, bright red--and I never cared for that--had the
soles of her feet nearly scorched off once by a careless nurse. Dear
Nancy. I often think of Nancy now, Roger. I believe, you know, that if
Adrienne had not come Nancy and Barney might have married. How happy we
should all have been; though she has so little money."
"I wish you could all think a little more kindly of Adrienne," said
Oldmeadow after a silence. Mrs. Chadwick had begun to knit. "I must tell
you that I myself feel differently about her."
"Do you, Roger?" said Mrs. Chadwick, without surprise. "You have a very
judicious and balanced mind, I know; even when you were hardly more
than a boy Francis noticed it and said that he'd rather go by your
opinion than by that of most of the men he knew. I always remembered
that, afterwards. Till she came. And then I believed in her rather than
in you. You thought us all far too fond of her from the very first. And
now we have certainly changed. Meg is certainly very violent; much more
violent than I could ever be.... I am sorry for Adrienne. I don't think
she meant to do us any harm--as Meg believes."
"She only meant to do you good, I am sure of it. I saw her in Oxford,
let me tell you about it, when I went in to see Palgrave. She is very
unhappy. She wants Palgrave to go. She wants him to feel it right to go.
It's not she, really, who is keeping him back now."
"My poor Palgrave. Meg is very unkind about him; very bitter and unkind;
her own brother. But it was very wrong of Adrienne to go and set up
housekeeping in Oxford near him. You must own that, Roger. She may not
be keeping him back; but she is aiding and abetting him always. It made
Barney even more miserable and disgusted than he was before. And it
looks so very odd. Though I don't think that anyone could ever gossip
about Adrienne. There is something about her that makes that
impossible."
"There certainly is. I am glad she is with Palgrave, poor boy."
"I am glad you are sorry for him, Roger"--Mrs. Chadwick dropped a
needle. "How clumsy I am. My fingers seem all to have turned to thumbs.
Thank you so much. I try to make as many socks as I can for our poor
men; fingering wool; not wheeling, which is so much rougher to the
feet. I'm sure I'd rather march, and, if it came to that, die in
fingering than in wheeling. Just as I've always felt, foolish as it may
sound, that if I had to be drowned I'd rather it were in warm, soapy
water than in cold salt. Not that one is very likely, ever, to drown in
one's bath. But tell me about Adrienne and Palgrave, Roger, and what
they said."
Mrs. Chadwick's discourse seemed, beforehand, to make anything he might
have to tell irrelevant and, even while he tried to make her see what he
had seen, he felt it to be a fruitless effort.
There was indeed no enmity to plead against. Only a deep exhaustion.
Adrienne had pressed too heavily on the spring and it was broken.
"I'm sure she is very sorry to have made so much mischief, but she isn't
what I thought her, Roger," she said, shaking her head, when he had
finished. "I'm sorry for her, but I used to believe her to be a sort of
saint and now I know that she is very far indeed from being one."
"The mere fact of failure doesn't deprive you of sainthood," said
Oldmeadow, remembering Nancy's plea. "You haven't less reason now than
you had then for believing her one."
But even with her broken spring Mrs. Chadwick had not lost all her
shrewdness. It flickered in the sad eyes she lifted from the khaki sock.
"Some kinds of failure do, Roger. That gift of healing, you remember;
all she could do for people in that way; she has quite, quite lost it.
That is a reason. It's that more than anything that has made me feel
differently about her."
"Lost it?" He felt strangely discomposed, little as the gift of healing
had ever impressed him.
"Quite," Mrs. Chadwick repeated. "I think it distressed her dreadfully
herself. I think she counted upon it more than upon anything, perhaps
without knowing she did. It must have made her seem so sure to herself,
mustn't it? The first time was before the war, just a little after you
were here that day in the summer--dear me, how long ago it seems; and I
had one of my headaches, one of the worst I ever had. I was so
dreadfully troubled, you know, about Barbara and Meg. And Adrienne came
and sat by me as she used to and put her hand on my forehead; and I know
it wasn't my lack of faith, for I quite believed it would get well; but
instead of the peaceful feeling, it grew much worse; oh, _much_. As if
red hot needles were darting through my eyes and an iron weight pressing
down on my head. And such tumult and distress. I had to tell her. I had
to ask her to take away her hand. Oh, she felt it very much, poor thing,
and grew very white and said it must be because she was still not
strong; not quite herself. But I knew then that it was because she was
not _right_; not what I had thought her. I began to suspect, from that
very moment, that I had been mistaken; because hypnotizing people isn't
the same as being a saint, is it, Roger? and--I think you said so once,
long ago; and that was all that she had done; hypnotized us all to think
her good and wonderful. Later on, after Meg had come, I let her try once
more, though it quite frightened me; she looked so strange. And!--oh,
dear--it was dreadful. It distressed me dreadfully. She suddenly put her
hands before her face and sat quite still and then she burst into tears
and got up and ran out of the room, crying. It made me feel quite ill.
And of course I knew there could be nothing saintly about a person who
made you feel like that--who could feel like that themselves, and break
down."
"Even saints have their times of darkness and dryness," Oldmeadow found
after a little time had passed. The picture she put before him hurt him.
"It was an error of judgment to have believed her a saint because she
could hypnotize you--if that was what it was; but the fact that she
can't hypnotize you any longer--that she's too unhappy to have any power
of that sort--doesn't prove she's not a saint. Of course she's not. Why
should she be?"
"I'm sure I don't know why she should be; but she used to behave as if
she were one, didn't she? And when I saw that she wasn't one in that way
I began to see that she wasn't in other ways, too. It was she who made
me so unjust, so unkind to poor Barney. _She_ was so unjust and so
unkind; and I never saw it till then. I was blind till then; though you
saw very well, that day you came to Connaught Square, that it was a sort
of spell she cast. It was a spell, Roger. The moment I saw her, after
the baby's death, I forgot everything she'd done and felt I loved her
again. She willed me to. So as to get power over me. Everything, always,
with her, was to get power over other people's lives," said Mrs.
Chadwick, and as he had, in the past, heard echoes of Adrienne in all
she said, now he heard echoes of Meg, "It's by willing it, you know.
Some people practise it like five-finger exercises. You have to sit
quite still and shut your eyes and concentrate. Meg has heard how it's
done. I don't pretend to understand; but that must have been her way.
And she made poor Barney miserable and set me against him at once; you
said so yourself, Roger, and blinded me to all the cruel things she did.
It was to punish him, you know. To make him feel he was dreadfully wrong
and she quite right; about Meg, and everything else; for you came in,
too. It used to be so dreadful at Torquay. I knew it would be sad there;
but I never guessed how sad it would be--with that horrid blue, blue
sea. She used to sit, day after day, on the terrace of the house, and
gaze and gaze at the sea and if Barney would come, so lovingly, and ask
her what he could do for her and take her hand, oh, it was more and more
mournful, the way she would look at him; that dreadful, loving look that
didn't mean love at all, but only trying to break him down and make him
_say_ that he was down. I begged Barney's pardon, Roger, for having
treated him as I did. We treated him dreadfully, all of us; because she
put him, always, in the wrong. Oh, no, Roger, I'm sorry for her, but
she's a dangerous woman; or _was_ dangerous. For now she has lost it all
and has become like everybody else; quite ordinary and unhappy."
He felt, in the little silence that, again, followed, that he could
hardly better this summing-up. That was precisely what poor Adrienne
Toner had become; ordinary and unhappy. The two things she would have
believed herself least capable of becoming. There was nothing to be
gained in urging extenuating circumstances, especially since he was not
sure that there were any. Mrs. Chadwick, at bottom, saw as clearly as he
did. He asked her presently, leaving the theme of Adrienne, whether she
would not seriously consider going away for a little while with Nancy.
"Meg could go down to The Little House," he said.
"Oh, no, she couldn't, Roger," said Mrs. Chadwick, "she won't go
anywhere. She'll hardly speak to Monica. She just sits out-of-doors, all
day, wrapped in a cloak, in the corner of the garden, staring in front
of her, and she pays not the slightest attention to anything I say. And
at night, in her room, I hear her sobbing, sobbing, as if her heart
would break. I can't think hardly of Eric any longer, Roger. Isn't it
strange; but it's almost as if he were my son that had been killed. And
Barney may be killed," the poor mother's lip and chin began to tremble.
"And you, too, Roger. I don't know how we shall live through all that we
must bear and I keep thinking of the foolish little things, like your
having cold feet and wearing the same clothes day after day in those
horrible trenches. He suffered it all, poor Eric. No, I can't think
hardly of him. All the same," she sobbed, "my heart is broken when I
remember that they can never be married now."