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.

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.

[PART I]
[CHAPTER: I, ] [II, ]
[III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII, ] [XIII, ] [XIV, ] [XV, ] [XVI, ] [XVII, ] [XVIII, ] [XIX, ] [XX, ] [XXI, ] [XXII, ] [XXIII, ] [XXIV, ]
[PART II]
[CHAPTER: I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX]

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.”