Chapter XXIII

"That's the way Mummy surprises one," said Barney as he and Oldmeadow went together through the Coldbrooks woods. "One feels her, usually, such a darling goose and then, suddenly, she shows one that she can be a heroine."

Barney was going to France in two days' time and Oldmeadow within the fortnight, and the Coldbrooks good-byes had just been said. It had been poor Meg who had broken down and clung and cried. Mrs. Chadwick had, to the very last, talked with grave cheerfulness of Barney's next leave and given wise advice as if he had been merely leaving them for a rather perilous mountain-climbing feat. Oldmeadow could hardly believe her the same woman that he had seen ten days before.

He was staying at The Little House and had come up on this afternoon of Barney's departure to join him at Coldbrooks and walk down with him. Barney had not yet seen or said good-bye to Nancy and her mother, and Oldmeadow had seized this, his only chance, of a talk with him. But, as they left the woods and began to climb the bare hill-side, Barney went on:

"I've wanted a talk, too, Roger. I'm glad you managed this."

"It doesn't rob anyone of you, does it," said Oldmeadow. "We'll get to Chelford in time to give you a good half-hour with them before your car comes for you."

"That will be enough for Nancy," said Barney. "The less she sees of me, the better she's pleased. I've lots of things I want to say, Roger. Of course you understand that in every way it's a relief to be going out."

"It settles things; or seems to settle them," said Oldmeadow. "They take another place at all events."

"Yes; just that. They take another place. What difference does it make, after all, if a fellow has made a mess of his personal life when his personal life has ceased to count. I'm not talking mawkish sentiment when I say I hope I'll be killed--if I can be of some use first. I see no other way out of it. I'm sorry for Adrienne, after a fashion, for she's dished herself, too. We made a hopeless mistake in getting married and she knows it as well as I do; and when a man and woman don't love each other any longer it's the man's place to get out if he can."

"It was about Adrienne I wanted to talk to you, Barney." For the first time in their long friendship Oldmeadow felt that he spoke to an equal. Barney had at last ceased to be a boy. "I've seen her, since seeing you that last time in the train."

"Well?" Barney inquired, as Oldmeadow paused. "What have you got to say to me about Adrienne, Roger? You've not said very much, from the beginning; but everything you have said has been true and I've forgotten none of it. I'm the more inclined," and he smiled with a slight bitterness, "to listen to you now."

"That's just the trouble," Oldmeadow muttered. "You've forgotten nothing. That's what I feel, with remorse. That it was I who helped to spoil things for you both, from the beginning. You'd not have seen her defects as you did if I hadn't shown them to you; and if you hadn't seen them you'd have adjusted yourselves to each other and have found them out together. She'd not have resented your finding them out in the normal course of your shared lives. It's been my opinion of her, in the background of both your minds, that has envenomed everything."

Barney listened quietly. "Yes," he assented. "That's all true enough. As far as it goes. I mightn't have seen if you hadn't shown me. But I can't regret you did show me, for anything else would have been to have gone through life blind; as blind as Adrienne is herself. And it's because she can't stand being seen through that she revealed so much more; so much that you didn't see and that I had to find out for myself. What you saw was absurdity and inexperience; they're rather loveable defects; I think I accepted them from the beginning, because of all the other things I believed in her. You said, too, you remember, that she'd never know she was wrong. Well, it's worse than that. She'll never know she's wrong and she won't bear it that you should think her anything but right. She's rapacious. She's insatiable. Nothing but everything will satisfy her. You must be down on your knees, straight down, before her; and if you're not, she has no use for you. She turns to stone and you break your head and your heart against her. It's hatred Adrienne has felt for me, Roger, and I'm afraid I've felt it for her, too. She's done things and said things that I couldn't have believed her capable of; mean things; clever things; cruelly clever that get you right on the raw; things I can't forget. There's much more in her than you saw at the beginning. I was right rather than you about that; only they weren't the things I thought."

Oldmeadow walked, cutting at the withered way-side grasses with his cane. Barney's short, slow sentences seemed to sting him as they came. He had to adjust himself to their smart; to adjust himself to the thought of this malignant Adrienne. Yet what he felt was not all surprise; he had foreseen, suspected, even this. "I know," he said at last; "I mean, I can see that it would happen just like that."

"It did happen just like that," said Barney. "I don't claim to have been an angel or anything like one. I gave her as good as I got, or nearly, sometimes, no doubt. But I know that it wasn't my fault. I know it was Adrienne who spoiled everything."

They had come out now on the upland road. The country dropped away beneath them wrapped in the dull mole-colour, the distant, dull ultramarines of the November afternoon. The smell of burning weeds was in the air and, in the west, a long, melancholy sheet of advancing rain-cloud hid the sun. Oldmeadow wondered if he and Barney would ever walk there together again, and his mind plunged deep into the past, the many years of friendship to which this loved country had been a background.

"Barney," he said, "what I wanted to say is this: All that you feel is true; I'm sure of it. But other things are true, too. I've seen her and I've changed about her. If I was right before, I'm right now. She's been blind because she didn't know she could be broken. Well, she's beginning to break."

"Is she?" said Barney, and his quiet was implacable. "I can quite imagine that, you know. Everyone, except poor Palgrave--all the rest of us, have found out that she's not the beautiful benignant being she thought she was, and that bewilders her and makes her pretty wretched, no doubt."

Oldmeadow waited a moment. "I want you to see her," he said. "Don't be cruel. You are a little cruel, you know. It's because you are thinking of her abstractly; remembering only how she has hurt you. If you could see her, see how unhappy she is, you'd feel differently. That's what I want you to do. That's what I beg you to do, Barney."

"I can't," said Barney after a moment. "That I can't do, Roger. It's over. She might want me back if she could get me back adoring her. It's only so she'd want me. But it's over. It's more than over. There's something else." Barney's face showed no change from its sad fixity. "You were right about that, too. It's Nancy I ought to have married. It's Nancy I love. And Adrienne knows it."

At this there passed before Oldmeadow's mind the memory of the small, dark, hurrying figure, the memory of the words she had spoken: "Some things are like living creatures; and they can die. They can die."

He felt rather sick. "In that case, how can you blame your wife?" he muttered. "Doesn't that explain it all?"

"No, it doesn't explain it all." There was no fire of self-justification in Barney's voice. It was as fixed and sad as his face. "It was only after Adrienne made me so wretched I began to find it out. She was jealous of Nancy from the beginning, of course. But then she was jealous of everything that wasn't, every bit of it, hers. She had no reason for jealousy. No man was ever more in love than I was with Adrienne. Even now I don't feel for Nancy what I felt for her. It's something, I believe, one only feels once and if it burns out it burns out for ever. With Nancy, it's as if I had come home; and Adrienne and I were parted before I knew that I was turning to her."

They had begun the final descent into Chelford and the wind now brought a fine rain against their faces. Neither spoke again until the grey roofs of the village came into sight at a turning of the road. "About money matters, Roger," Barney said. "Mother and Meg and Barbara. If you get through, and I don't, will you see to them for me? I've appointed you my trustee. I told Adrienne last summer that I couldn't take any of her money any longer, so that, of course, with my having thrown up the city job and taken on the farms, my affairs are in a bit of a mess. But I hope they'll be able to go on at Coldbrooks all right. Palgrave will have Coldbrooks if I don't come back, and perhaps you'll be able to prevent him handing it over to his Socialist friends."

"Palgrave would be safely human if it came to taking care of his mother and sisters," said Oldmeadow.

"Would he?" said Barney. "I don't know."

Across the village green the lights of The Little House shone at them. The curtains were still undrawn and, as they waited at the door, they could see Nancy in the drawing-room, sitting by the fire alone.

"I want you to come in with me, please, Roger," said Barney. "Nancy hasn't felt it right to be very kind to me of late and she'll be able to be kinder if you are there. You'll know, you'll see if a chance comes for me to say what I want to say to her. You might leave us for a moment then."

"You have hardly more than a half-hour, you know," said Oldmeadow.

"One can say a good deal in a half-hour," Barney replied.

Nancy had risen and, as they entered, she came forward, trying to smile and holding out her hand to each. But Oldmeadow was staying there. He was not going in half an hour. There was no reason why Nancy should give him her hand and Barney, quietly, took both her hands in his. "It's good-bye, then, Nancy, isn't it?" he said.

They stood there in the firelight together, his dear young people, both so pale, both so fixedly looking at each other, and Nancy still tried to smile as she said, "It's dear of you to have come." But her face betrayed her. It was sick with the fear that, in conquering her own heart, she should hurt Barney's; Barney's, whom she might never see again. Oldmeadow went on to the fire and stood, his back to them, looking down at it.

"Oh, no, it's not; not dear at all," Barney returned. "You knew I'd come to say good-bye, of course. Why haven't you been over to see me, you and Aunt Monica? I've asked you often enough."

"You mustn't scold me to-day, Barney, since it's good-bye. We couldn't come," said Nancy.

"It's never I who scold you. It's you who scold me. Not openly, I know," said Barney, "but by implication; punish me, by implication. I quite understood why you haven't come. Well, I want things to be clear now. Roger's here, and I want to say them before him, because he's been in it all since the beginning. It's because of Adrienne you've never come; and changed so much in every way towards me."

He had kept her hands till then, but Oldmeadow heard now that she drew away from him. For a moment she did not speak; and then it was not to answer him. "Have you said good-bye to her, Barney?"

"No; I haven't," Barney answered. "I'm not going to say good-bye to Adrienne, Nancy. It must be plain to you by this time that Adrienne and I have parted. What did it all mean but that?"

"It didn't mean that to her. She never dreamed it was meaning that," said Nancy.

"Well, she said it, often enough," Barney retorted.

"Barney, please listen to me," said Nancy. "You must let me speak. She never dreamed it was meaning that. If she was unkind to you it was because she could not believe it would ever mean parting. She had started wrong; by holding you to blame; after the baby; when you and Roger so hurt her pride. And then she wasn't able to go back. She wasn't able to see it all so differently--just to get you back. It would have seemed wrong to her; a weakness, just because she longed so. And then, most of all, she believed you loved her enough to come of yourself."

"I tried to," said Barney, in the sad, bitter voice of the hill-side talk with Oldmeadow. "You see, you don't know everything, Nancy, though you know so much. I tried to again and again."

"Yes. I know you did. But only on your own terms. And by then I had come in. Oh, yes, I had, Barney. You didn't know it. It was long, long before you knew. But I knew it; and so did she and it was more than she could bear. What woman could bear it? I couldn't have, in her place." Tears were in Nancy's voice.

"It's queer, Nancy," said Barney, "that--barring Palgrave, who doesn't count--you and Roger are the only two people she has left to stick up for her. Roger's just been saying all that to me, you know. The two she tried to crab whenever she got a chance. Well, say it's my fault, then. Say that I've been faithless to my wife and fallen in love with another woman. The fact is there, and you've said it now yourself. I don't love her any longer. I shall never love her again. And I love you. I love you, Nancy, and it's you I ought to have married; would have married, I believe, if I hadn't been a blinded fool. I love you, and I can say it now because this may be the end of everything. Don't let her spoil this, too. Nancy darling, look at me. Can't you consent to forget Adrienne for this one time, when we may never see each other again?"

"I can't forget her! I can't forget her!" Nancy sobbed. "I mustn't. She's miserable. She hasn't stopped loving you. And she's your wife."

"Do you want to make me hate her?"

"Oh, Barney--that is cruel of you."

There was a silence and in it Oldmeadow heard Barney's car draw up at the gate. He took out his watch. There were only a few more moments left them. Not turning to them he said. "It does her no good, you know, Nancy dear."

"No. It does her no good," Barney repeated. "But forgive me. I was cruel. I don't hate her. I'm sorry for her. It's simply that we ought never to have married. Forget it, Nancy, and forget her. Don't let it be, then, that I love you and don't love my wife. Let it be in the old way. As if she'd never come. As if I'd come to say good-bye to my cousin; to my dearest friend on earth. Look at me. Give me your hands. It's your face I want to take with me."

"Five minutes, Barney," Oldmeadow whispered, as he went past them. Nancy had given him her hands; she had lifted her face to his, and Barney's arms had closed around her.