Chapter XV

On a morning in early March Oldmeadow found, among the letters waiting for him on his breakfast-table, one from Nancy. Nancy and he, with all their fondness, seldom wrote to each other and he was aware, on seeing her writing, of the presage of something disagreeable that the unexpected often brings.

"Dear Roger," he read, and in his first glance he saw his presage
fulfilled. "We are in great trouble. Aunt Eleanor has asked me to
write because she is too ill and it is to me as well as to her that
Meg has written and she wants you to see Barney at once. Here are
Meg's letters. She has gone away with Captain Hayward. Aunt Eleanor
and Mother think that Barney may be able to persuade Adrienne to
bring her back. No one else, we feel convinced, will have any
influence with her. Do anything, anything you can, dear Roger.
Mother and I are almost frightened for Aunt Eleanor. She walks
about wringing her hands and crying, and she goes up to Meg's room
and opens the door and looks in--as if she could not believe she
would not find her there. It is heart-breaking to see her. We
depend on you, dear Roger.

"Yours ever

"NANCY."

"Good Lord!" Oldmeadow muttered while, in lightning flashes, there passed across his mind the face of John the setter and a Pierrot's face, white under a low line of black velvet. He took up Meg's letters, written from a Paris hotel.

"DARLING MOTHER, I know it will make you frightfully miserable and
I can't forgive myself for that; but it had to be. Eric and I cared
too much and it wasn't life at all, going on as we were apart. Try,
darling Mother, to see it as we do see things nowadays. Adrienne
will explain it all--and you must believe her. You know what a
saint she is and she has been with us in it all, understanding
everything and helping us to be straight. Everything will come
right. Iris Hayward will set Eric free, of course; she doesn't care
one bit for him and has made him frightfully unhappy ever since
they married, and she wants to marry some one else herself--only of
course she'd never be brave enough to do it this way. When Eric is
free, we will marry at once and come home, and, you will see, there
are so many sensible people nowadays; we shall not have a bad time
at all. Everything will come right, I'm sure; and even if it
didn't, in that conventional way--I could not give him up. No one
will ever love me as he does.

"Your devoted child

"MEG."

That was the first: the second ran:

"DEAREST NANCY,--I know you'll think it frightfully wrong; you are
such an old-fashioned little dear and you told me often enough that
I oughtn't to see so much of Eric. Only of course that couldn't
have prepared you for this and I expect Aunt Monica won't let you
come and stay with us for ages. Never mind; when you marry, you'll
see, I'm sure. Love is the _only_ thing, really. But I should hate
to feel I'd lost you and I'm sure I haven't. I want to ask you,
Nancy dear, to do all you can to make Mother _take_ it. I feel,
just because you will think it so wrong, that you may be more good
to her than Adrienne--who doesn't think it wrong at all--at least
not in Mother's way. It would be frightfully unfair if Mother
blamed Adrienne. She did all she could to show us where we stood
and to make us play the game, and it would be pretty hard luck if
people were to be down on her now because we _have_ played it. We
might have been really rotters if it hadn't been for Adrienne;
cheats and hypocrites, I mean; stealing our happiness. I know
Adrienne can bring Barney round. It's only Mother who troubles me,
just because she is such a child that it's almost impossible to
make her see reason. She doesn't recognize right and wrong unless
they're in the boxes she's accustomed to. Everything is in a box
for poor, darling old Mummy. But I mustn't go on. Be the dear old
pal you always have and help me out as well as you can.

"Your loving

"MEG."

"Good Lord," Oldmeadow muttered once more. He pushed back his chair and rose from the table in the bright spring sunlight. He had the feeling, almost paternal, of disgrace and a public stripping. He saw Eleanor Chadwick stopping at Meg's door to look in at the forsaken room, distraught in her grief and incomprehension. He saw Nancy's pale, troubled face and Monica Averil's, pinched and dry in its sober dismay. And then again, lighted by a flare at once tawdry and menacing, the face of Adrienne Toner, the intruder, the insufferable meddler and destroyer, a Pierrot among fire-works that had, at last, set fire to the house. He found a taxi on the Embankment and drove to Connaught Square. Freshly decorated with window-boxes, the pleasant, spacious house had a specially smiling air of welcome, but the butler's demeanour told him that something of the calamity had already penetrated. Adrienne, if she had not heard before, would have had her letters; Barney, who had been kept in the dark, would have been enlightened, and the irrepressible exclamations that must have passed between them seemed dimly reflected on the man's formal countenance. Mrs. Chadwick, he told Oldmeadow, was breakfasting upstairs with Mr. Chadwick, and he ushered him into Barney's study.

Oldmeadow waited for some time among the Post Impressionist pictures, one of which remained for ever afterwards vividly fixed in his memory of the moment; a chaotic yet determined picture; featureless yet, as it were, conveying through its unrecognizable elements the meaning of a grin. And, as he stood in the centre of the room and looked away from the derisive canvas, he saw on Barney's desk photographs of Adrienne, three photographs of her; one as a child, a sickly looking but beaming child; one in early girlhood, singularly childlike still; and one in her bridal dress of only the other day, it seemed, mild and radiant in her unbecoming veil and wreath.

It was Barney who came to him. Poor Barney. He was more piteously boyish than ever before to his friend's eye; so beautifully arrayed, all in readiness for a happy London day with his angel, so pale, so haggard and perplexed. "Look here, Roger," were his first words, "do you mind coming upstairs to Adrienne's room? She's not dressed yet; not very well, you know. You've heard, then, too?"

"I've just heard from Nancy. Why upstairs? I'd rather not. We'd better talk this over alone, Barney. All the more if your wife isn't well."

"Yes; yes; I know. I told her it would be better. But she insists."

The effect of a general misery Barney gave was heightened now by his unhappy flush. "She doesn't want us to talk it over without her, you see. She comes into it all too much. From Nancy, did you say? What's Nancy got to do with this odious affair?"

"Only what Meg has put upon her--to interpret her as kindly as she can to your mother. Here are the letters. I'd really rather not go upstairs."

"I know you'll hold Adrienne responsible--partly at least. She expects that. She knows that I do, too; she's quite prepared. I only heard half an hour ago and of course it knocked me up frightfully. Meg! My little sister! Why she's hardly more than a child!"

"I'm afraid she's a good deal more than a child. I'm afraid we can't hold Meg to be not responsible, though, obviously, she'd never have taken such a step unaided and unabetted. Just read these letters, Barney; it won't take a moment to decide what's best to be done. I'll go down to your mother and you must be off, at once, to Paris, and see if you can fetch Meg back."

But after Barney, with a hesitating hand and an uncertain glance, had taken the letters and begun to read them, the door was opened with decorous deliberation and Adrienne's French maid appeared, the tall, sallow, capable-looking woman whom Oldmeadow remembered having seen at Coldbrooks a year ago.

"Madame requests that _ces Messieurs_ should come up at once; she awaits them," Joséphine announced in unemphatic but curiously potent accents. Adrienne's potency, indeed, was of a sort that flowed through all her agents and Oldmeadow thought that he detected, in the melancholy gaze bent upon Barney, reprobation for his failure to attain the standard set for him by a devotion wholehearted and reverential. Mrs. Chadwick, he remembered, had said that Adrienne's maid adored her.

"Yes, yes. We're coming at once, Joséphine," said Barney. Reading the letters as he went, he moved to the door and Oldmeadow found himself, perforce, following.

He had not yet visited the morning-room and even before his eyes rested on Adrienne they saw, hanging above her head where she sat on a little sofa, a full-length portrait of Mrs. Toner; in white, standing against a stone balustrade and holding lilies; seagulls above her and a background of blue sea.

Adrienne was also in white, but she wore over her long, loose dress a little jacket of pink silk edged with swan's down and the lace cap falling about her neck was rosetted with pink ribbon. It was curious to see her in this almost frivolous array, recalling the shepherdess, when her face expressed, for the first time in his experience of her, an anger and an agitation all the more apparent for its control. She was pale yet flushed, odd streaks of colour running up from her throat and dying in the pallor of her cheeks. Her condition had evidently much affected her complexion and her nose, through its layer of powder, showed a pinched and reddened tint. It made Oldmeadow uncomfortable to look at her; her mask of calm was held at such a cost; she was at once so determinedly herself and so helplessly altered; and it was not with an automatic courtesy only that he went up to her and held out his hand. An impulse of irrelevant yet irrepressible pity stirred him.

She had fixed her eyes on him as he entered, but now looking at her husband and not moving, she said: "I do not think you want to take my hand, Mr. Oldmeadow. You will think me a criminal too, as Barney does."

"Darling! Don't talk such nonsense!" Barney cried. "I haven't blamed you, not by a word. I know you've done what you think right. Look, darling; Roger has had these letters. Just read them. You see what Meg writes--there--to Nancy--about your having done all you could to keep them straight. You haven't been fair to yourself in talking to me just now."

Adrienne, without speaking, took the letters and Oldmeadow moved away to the window and stood looking down at the little garden at the back of the house where a tall almond-tree delicately and vividly bloomed against the pale spring sky. He heard behind him the flicker of the fire in the grate, the pacing of Barney's footsteps as he walked up and down, and the even turning of the pages in Adrienne's hands. Then he heard her say: "Meg contradicts nothing that I have said to you, Barney. She writes bravely and truly; as I knew that she would write."

Barney stopped in his pacing. "But darling; what she says about straightness?" It was feeble of Barney and he must know it. Feeble of him even to think that Adrienne might wish to avail herself of the loophole or that she considered herself in any need of a shield.

"You can't misunderstand so much as that, Barney," she said. "Meg and I mean but one thing by straightness; and that is truth. That was the way I tried to help them; it is the only way in which I can ever help people. I showed them the truth and kept it before their eyes when they were in danger of forgetting it. I said to them that if they were to be worthy of their love they must be brave enough to make sacrifices for it. I did not hide from them that there would be sacrifices--if that is what you mean."

"It's not what I mean, darling! Of course it's not!" broke from poor Barney almost in a wail. "Didn't you try at all to dissuade them? Didn't you show them that it was desperate, and ruinous, and wrong? Didn't you tell Meg that it would break Mother's heart!"

The blue ribbon was again unrolled and Oldmeadow, listening with rising exasperation, heard that the sound of her own solemn cadences sustained her. "I don't think anything in life is desperate or ruinous or wrong, Barney, except turning away from one's own light. Meg met a reality and was brave enough to face it. I regret, deeply, that it came to her tragically, not happily; but happiness can grow from tragedy if we are brave and true and Meg is brave and true in her love. It won't break your mother's heart. Hers is a small, but not such a feeble, heart as that. I believe that the experience may strengthen and ennoble her. She has led too sheltered a life."

Oldmeadow at this turned from the window and met Barney's miserable eyes. "There's really no reason for my staying on, Barney," he said, and his voice as well as his look excluded Adrienne from their interchange. "I'll take the 1.45 to Coldbrooks. What shall I tell your mother? That you've gone to Paris this morning?"

"Yes, that I've gone to Paris. That I'll do my best, you know. That I hope to bring Meg back. Tell her to keep up her courage. It'll only be a day or two after all, and we may be able to hush it up."

"Stop, Mr. Oldmeadow," said Adrienne in a grave, commanding tone. It was impossible before it to march out of the room and shut the door, though that was what his forcibly arrested attitude showed that he wished to do. "You as well as Barney must hear my protest," said Adrienne, and she fixed her sombre eyes upon him. "Meg is with the man she loves. In the eyes of heaven he is her husband. It would be real as contrasted with conventional disgrace were she to leave him now. She will not leave him. I know her better than you do. I ask you"--her gaze now turned on Barney--"I desire you, not to go to her on such an unworthy errand."

"But, Adrienne," Barney, flushed and hesitating, pleaded, "it's for Mother's sake. Mother's too old to be enlarged like that--that's really nonsense, you know, darling. You see what Nancy says. They are frightened about her. It's not only convention. It's a terrible mistake Meg's made and she may be feeling it now and only too glad to have the way made easy for her to come back. I promise you to be as gentle as possible. I won't reproach her in any way. I'll tell her that we're all only waiting to forgive her and take her back."

"Forgive her, Barney? For what? It is only in the eyes of the world that she has done wrong and I have lifted her above that fear. Convention does not weigh for a moment with me beside the realities of the human heart; nor would it with you, Barney, if it were not for the influence of Mr. Oldmeadow. I have warned you before; it is easy to be worldly-wise and cynical and to keep to the broad road; it is easy to be safe. But withering lies that way: withering and imprisonment, and--"

"Come, come, Mrs. Barney," Oldmeadow interposed, addressing her for the first time and acidly laughing. "Really we haven't time for sermons. You oughtn't to have obliged me to come up if you wanted to influence Barney all by yourself. He sees quite clearly for himself the rights and the wrongs of this affair, as it happens. If I were to preach for a moment in my turn I might ask you how it was that you didn't see that it was your duty to tell Meg's mother and brother how things were going and let them judge. You're not as wise as you imagine--far from it. Some things you can't judge at all. Meg and Hayward aren't people of enough importance to have a right to break laws; that's all that it comes to; there's nothing to be gained by their breaking laws; not only for other people, but for themselves. They're neither of them capable of being happy in the ambiguous sort of life they'd have to lead. There's a reality you didn't see at all in your haste to flout convention. Barney could have dealt with Hayward, and Meg could have been packed off to the country and kept there till she'd learned to think a little more about other people's hearts and a little less about her own. What business had you, after all, to have secrets from your husband and to plot with the two young fools behind his back? Isn't Meg his sister rather than yours?" His bitterness betrayed him and conscious hostility rose in him, answering the menace that measured him in her eyes. "What business had you, a new-comer among us, to think yourself capable of managing all their lives and to set yourself up above them all in wisdom? You take too much upon yourself"; his lips found the old phrase: "Really you do. It's been your mistake from the beginning."

He could not have believed that a face so framed for gentleness could show itself at once so calm and so convulsed. He knew that something had happened to her that had never happened to her before in her life. She kept her eyes steadily on him and he wondered if she were not reciting some incantation, some exorcism, derived from the seagulled lady above her: Power in Repose--Power in Love--Power in Light. Her mouth and eyes and nostrils were dark on her pallor and he felt that she held back all the natural currents of her being in order to face and quell him with the supernatural.

"Never mind all that, Roger," Barney was sickly murmuring. "I don't feel like that. I know Adrienne didn't for a moment mean to deceive me."

"We will mind it, Barney," said Adrienne, breathing with difficulty. "I had, Mr. Oldmeadow, the business, first, of loyalty to another human soul who, in the crisis of its destiny, confided in me. I have been nearer Meg than any of you have guessed, from my first meeting with her. You were all blind. I saw at once that she was tossed and tormented. I am nearer, far nearer her, than her brother and mother. In them she would never have dreamed of confiding and she came to me because she felt that in me she would find reality and in them mere formulas. I do not look upon women as chattels to be handed about by their male relatives and locked up if they do not love according to rule and precedent. I look upon them as the equals of men in every respect, as free as men to shape their lives and to direct their destinies. You speak a mediæval language, Mr. Oldmeadow. The world, our great, modern, deep-hearted world, has outstripped you."

"Darling," Barney forestalled, breathlessly, as she paused, any reply that Oldmeadow might have been tempted to make, "don't mind if Roger speaks harshly. He's like that and no one cares for us more. He doesn't mean conventionality at all, or anything mediæval. You don't understand him. He puts his finger on the spot about Meg and Hayward. It's exactly as he says; they're not of enough importance to have a right to break laws. If you could have confided in me, it would have been better; you must own that. We'd have given Meg a chance to pull herself together. We'd have sent Hayward about his business. It's a question, as Roger says, of your wisdom; of your knowledge of the world. You didn't understand them. They're neither of them idealists like you. They can't be happy doing what you might be big enough to do. Just because they're not big. Try to take it in, darling. And we really needn't go on talking about it any longer, need we? It isn't a question of influence. All we have to decide on is what's to be done. Roger must go to Mother and tell her I'm starting this morning to try and fetch Meg back. Imagine Mother with a divorce case on! It would kill her, simply. That's all. Isn't it, Roger?"

"Stop, Mr. Oldmeadow," said Adrienne, again. She rose as she spoke. As he saw her stand before them, her approaching maternity dominated for a moment all his impressions of her. Veiled and masked adroitly as it was, its very uncouthness curiously became her. Her head, for once, looked small. Like an archaic statue, straight and short and thick, her altered form had dignity and amplitude and her face, heavy with its menace, hard with its control, might have been that of some austere and threatening priestess of fruitfulness.

"Barney, wait," she said. Her arms hung straight beside her, but she slightly lifted a hand as she spoke and Oldmeadow noted that it was tightly clenched. "It is I, not your friend, whom you must question as to what it is right that you should do. I do not consent to his reading of my unwisdom and unworthiness. I ask you not to consent to it. I ask you again not to go. I ask you again to respect my judgment rather than his."

"Darling," the unfortunate husband supplicated; "it's not because it's Roger's judgment. You know it's what I felt right myself--from the moment you told me what had happened. You say people must follow their own light. It _is_ my light. I must do what Mother asks and try to bring Meg back."

"It is not your light, Barney. It is craft and caution and fear. More than that, do you not see, must I make plain to you what it is you do to me in going? You insult me. You treat what I have believed right for Meg to do as a crime from which she must be rescued. You drag me in the dust with her. Understand me, Barney"--the streaks of colour deepened on her neck, her breath came thickly--"if you go, you drag me in the dust."

"How can it drag you in the dust, Mrs. Barney, if Meg wants to come back?" Oldmeadow interposed in the tone of a caustic doctor addressing a malingering patient. "We're not talking of crimes; only of follies. Come; be reasonable. Don't make it so painful for Barney to do what's his plain duty. You're not a child. You have, I hope, courage enough and humour enough to own that you can make mistakes--like other people."

"Yes, yes, Adrienne, that's just it," broke painfully from Barney, and, as he seized the clue thus presented to him, Adrienne turned her head slowly, with an ominous stillness, and again rested her eyes upon him. "It's childish, you know, darling. It's not like you. And of course I understand why; and Roger does. You're not yourself; you're over-strained and off-balance and I'm so frightfully sorry all this has fallen upon you at such a time. I don't want to oppose you in anything, darling--do try to believe me. Only you must give me the credit for my own convictions. I do feel I must go. I do feel Roger must take that message to Mother. After all, darling," and now in no need of helping clues he found his own and the irrepressible note of grief vibrated in his voice, "you do owe me something, don't you? You do owe us all something--to make up, I mean. Because, without you, Meg would never have behaved like this and disgraced us all. Oh--I don't mean to reproach you!"

"Good-bye then, I'm off," said Oldmeadow. "I'm very sorry you made me come up. Good-bye, Mrs. Barney." She had not spoken, nor moved, nor turned her eyes from Barney's face.

"Good-bye. Thanks so much, Roger." Barney followed him, with a quickness to match his own, to the door. But Adrienne, this time, did not call him back. She remained standing stock-still in front of her sofa.

"Tell Mother I'm off," said Barney, grasping his hand. "Tell her she'll hear at once, as soon as I know anything. Thanks so awfully," he repeated. "You've been a great help."

It was unfortunate, perhaps, that Barney should say that, Oldmeadow reflected as he sped down the stairs. "But she's met reality at last," he muttered, wondering how she and Barney faced each other above and hearing again the words that must echo so strangely in her ears: "Disgraced us all." And, mingled with his grim satisfaction, was, again, the sense of irrelevant and reluctant pity.