Chapter IV

He did not see her again for two days; and she did not even come at night. But he now kept possession of his new strength and slept without her help. The sense of happiness brooded upon him. He did not remember ever having felt so happy. His life was irradiated and enhanced as if by some supreme experience.

It was already late afternoon when, on the second day, she appeared; but in this month of August his room was still filled with the reflection of the sunlight and the warm colour bathed her as she entered. She wore a blue cloak over her white linen dress and she had perhaps been walking, for there was a slight flush on her cheeks and a look almost of excitement in her eyes.

She unfastened her cloak and put it aside and then, taking the chair near the window, clasping her hands, as before, in her lap, she said, without preamble and with a peculiar vehemence: "You hear often from Barney, don't you?"

Oldmeadow felt himself colouring. "Only once, directly. It rather tires him to sit up, you know. But he's getting on wonderfully and the doctors think he'll soon be able to walk a little--with a crutch, of course."

"But you do hear, constantly, from Nancy, don't you," said Adrienne, clasping and unclasping her hands but speaking with a steadiness he felt to be rehearsed. "He is at Coldbrooks, I know, and Nancy is with him, and his mother and Mrs. Averil. It all seems almost happy, doesn't it? as happy as it can be, now, with Palgrave dead and Barney shackled."

Startled as he was by her directness Oldmeadow managed to meet it.

"Yes; almost happy," he said. "I was with them before I came out this last time and felt that about them. Poor Mrs. Chadwick is a good deal changed; but even she is reviving."

"She has had too much to bear," said Adrienne. "I saw her again, too, at the end, when she came to Palgrave. She can never forgive me. Meg is happy now, but she will never forgive me either. I wrought havoc in their lives, didn't I?"

"Well, you or fate. I don't blame you for any of that, you know," said Oldmeadow.

"I don't say that I blame myself for it," said Adrienne. "I may have been right or I may have been wrong. I don't know. It is not in things like that that I was bad. But what we must face is that I wrought havoc; that if it hadn't been for me they might all, now, be really happy. Completely happy. If I had not been there Palgrave would not have been so sure of himself. And if I had not been there Nancy and Barney would have married."

"I don't know," said Oldmeadow. "If Barney hadn't fallen in love with you he might very probably have fallen in love with some one else, not Nancy."

"Perhaps, not probably," said Adrienne. "And if he had he would have stayed in love with her, for Barney is a faithful person. And it may have been because I was so completely the wrong person for him that he came to know so quickly that Nancy was completely the right one. What I feel is that anybody but Nancy would always have been, really, wrong. And now that he loves her but is shackled, there's only one thing more that can be done. I have often thought of it; I needn't tell you that. But, till now, I could never see my way. It's you who have shown it to me. In what you said the other day. It's wonderful the way you come into my life, Mr. Oldmeadow. You made me feel that I had a friend in you; a true, true friend. And I know what a friend Nancy and Barney have. So the way opens. We must set Barney free, Mr. Oldmeadow. He and Nancy must be free to marry. You and I can do it for them and only you and I."

"What do you mean?" Oldmeadow murmured as, after her words, the silence had grown deep between them. He repeated, using now the name inevitably and forgetting the other day. "What do you mean, Mrs. Barney?"

To-day she did not flush, but to-day there was a reason for her acceptance. It was, he saw in her next words, only as Barney's wife that she could help him.

"He must divorce me," she said. "You and I could go away together and he could divorce me. Oh, I know, it's a dreadful thing to ask of you, his friend. I've thought of all that. Wait. Let me finish. I've thought of nothing else since the other day. It came to me in the night after you had been so wonderful to me; after that wonderful thing had happened to us. You felt it, too, I know. It was as if we had taken a sacrament together. I'm not a Christian. You know what I mean. We felt the deepest things together, didn't we. And it's because of that that I can ask this of you. No one else would understand. No one else would care for me enough, or for him. And then, you could explain it all to him and no one else could do that. You could explain that it had been to set him free. To set _me_ free. Because they'd have to think and believe it was for my sake, too, that you did it, wouldn't they? so as to have it really happy for them; so that it shouldn't hurt. When it was all over you could go and explain why you had done it. All we have to do, you know, is to stay in a hotel together; I bearing your name. It's very simple, really."

He lay staring at her, overwhelmed. The tears had risen to his eyes as her beauty and her absurdity were thus revealed to him, and as she spoke of their sacrament; but amazement blurred all his faculties. He had never in his life been so amazed. And when he began to emerge, to take possession of himself again, it was only of her he could think; not of himself or Nancy and Barney. Only of her and of her beauty and absurdity.

"Dear Mrs. Barney," he said at last, and he did not know what to say; "it's you who are wonderful, you alone. I'd do anything, anything for you that I could. Anything but this. Because, truly, this is impossible."

"Why impossible?" she asked, and her voice was almost stern.

"You can't smirch yourself like that." It was only one reason; but it was the first that came to him.

"I?" she stared. "I don't think it is to be smirched. I shall know why I do it."

"Other people won't know. Other people will think you smirched."

"No one I care for. Everyone I care for will understand."

"But to the world at large? Your name? Your reputation?" Oldmeadow protested. "Do they mean nothing to you?"

A faintly bitter humour touched her lips. "You've always taken the side of the world in all our controversies, haven't you, Mr. Oldmeadow? and you were probably right and I was probably wrong; but not because of what the world would think. I know I'm right now, and those words: name: reputation--mean nothing to me. The world and I haven't much to do with each other. A divorced wife can run soup-kitchens and fever hospitals just as well as the most unsmirched woman of the world. I'm not likely to want to be presented at courts, am I? Don't think of me, please. It's not a question of me. Only of you. Will you do it?"

"I couldn't possibly do it," said Oldmeadow, and he was still hardly taking her monstrous proposal seriously.

"Why not?" she asked, scrutinizing him. "It's not that you mind about your name and reputation, is it?"

"Not much. Perhaps not much," said Oldmeadow; "but about theirs. That's what you don't see. That it would be impossible for them. You don't see how unique you are; how unlike other people. Nancy and Barney couldn't marry on a fake. The only way out," said Oldmeadow, looking at her with an edge of ironic grimness in his contemplation, "if one were really to consider it, would be for you to marry me afterwards and for us to disappear."

She gazed at him and he saw that she weighed the idea. "But you'd be shackled then," she said, and her thoughts were evidently clear. "It would mean, besides, that you would lose them."

"As to being shackled," Oldmeadow, still grimly, met the difficulty, "that's of no moment. I'm the snuffy, snappy bachelor type, you remember, and I don't suppose I'd ever have married. As to losing them, I certainly should."

"We mustn't think of it then," said Adrienne. "You and Barney and Nancy mustn't lose each other."

"But we should in either way. I could hardly take up my friendship with them again after Barney had divorced you on account of me, even if you and I didn't marry. It would give the whole thing away, if it were possible for them to meet me again. As I say, they'd feel they had no right to their freedom on such a fake as that."

"They couldn't feel really free unless some one had really committed adultery for their sakes?" Again Adrienne smiled with her faint bitterness and he wondered if a man and woman had ever before had a more astonishing conversation. "That seems to me to be asking for a little too much icing on your cake. Of course it couldn't be a nice, new, snowy wedding-cake; poor Mrs. Chadwick wouldn't like it at all, nor Mrs. Averil; but it would be the best we could do for them; and I should think that when people love each other and are the right people for each other they'd be thankful for any kind of cake. Even if it were a good deal burned around the edges," Adrienne finished, her slight bitterness evidently finding satisfaction in the simile.

"But they wouldn't see it at all like that," said Oldmeadow, now with unalloyed gravity. "They'd see it as a cake they had stolen; a cake they had no right to. It's a question of the laws we live under. Not of personal, but of public integrity. They couldn't profit by a hoodwinked law. It's that that would spoil things for them. According to the law they'd have no right to their freedom. And, now that I am speaking seriously, it's that I feel, too. What you are asking of me, my dear friend, is no more nor less than a felony."

She meditated, unmoved, still almost sternly, turning her eyes from him and leaning her elbow on the window-sill, her head upon her hand. "I see," she said at last. "For people who mind about the law, I see that it would spoil it. I don't mind. I think the law's there to force us to be kind and just to each other if we won't be by ourselves. If the law gets tied up in such a foolish knot as to say that people may sin to set other people free, but mayn't pretend to sin, I think we have a right to help it out and to make it do good against its own will. I don't mind the law; luckily for them. Because I won't go back from it now. I won't leave them there, loving each other but never knowing the fullness of love. I won't give up a thing I feel right because other people feel it wrong. So I must find somebody else."

Oldmeadow looked at her in a culminated and wholly unpleasant astonishment. "Somebody else? Who could there be?"

"You may well ask," Adrienne remarked, glancing round at him with a touch of mild asperity. "You are the only completely right person, because only you and I feel enough for them to do it for them. What I must do now is to find some one who would feel enough, just for me, to do it for me. It makes it more unfair for him, doesn't it. He'll have only the one friend to help. But on the other hand it will leave them without a scruple. They'd know from the beginning that with you and me it was a fake; but with him it might seem quite probable. Yes; it's strange; I had a letter from him only yesterday. I shouldn't have thought of him otherwise. I might have had to give up. But the more I think," Adrienne meditated intently, her head on her hand, her eyes turned on the prospect outside, "the more I seem to see that Hamilton Prentiss is the only other chance."

"Hamilton Prentiss?" Oldmeadow echoed faintly.

"You met him once," said Adrienne, looking round at him again. "But you've probably forgotten. At the dinner we gave, Barney and I, in London, so long ago. Tall, fair, distinguished looking. The son of my Californian friend; the one you and Mrs. Aldesey thought so tiresome."

He felt himself colouring, but he could give little thought to the minor discomfiture, so deeply was his mind engaged with the major one.

"Did we?" he said.

"And you thought I didn't see it," said Adrienne. "It made me dreadfully angry with you both, though I didn't know I was angry; I thought I was only grieved. I behaved spitefully to Mrs. Aldesey that night, you will remember, though I didn't know I was spiteful. I did know, however, that she was separated from her husband"--again Adrienne looked, calmly, round at him--"and it was a lie I told Barney when I said I didn't. Sometimes I think that lie was the beginning of everything; that it was when I told it that I began to hide from myself. However--" She passed from the personal theme. "Yes; Hamilton is, I believe, big enough and beautiful and generous enough to do it."

"Oh, he is, is he?" said Oldmeadow. "And I'm not, I take it. You're horribly unkind. But I don't want to talk about myself. What I want to talk about is you. You must drop this preposterous idea of yours. Really you must. You've had ideas like it before. Remember Meg; what a mess you made there. I told you then that you were wrong and I tell you you're wrong now. You must give it up. Do you see? We're always quarrelling, aren't we?"

"But I don't at all know that I was wrong about Meg, Mr. Oldmeadow," said Adrienne. "And if I was, it was because I didn't understand her. I do understand myself, and I don't agree that I'm wrong or that my plan is preposterous. You won't call it preposterous, I suppose, if it succeeds and makes Barney and Nancy happy. No; I'm not going to drop it. Nothing you could say could make me drop it. As for Hamilton, I don't set him above you; not in any way. It's only that you and he have different lights. I know why you can't do this. You've shown me why. And I wouldn't for anything not have you follow your own light."

"And you seriously mean," cried Oldmeadow, "that you'd ask this young fellow--I remember him perfectly and I'm sure he's capable of any degree of ingenuousness--you'd ask him to go about with you as though he were your husband? Why, for one thing, he'd be sure to fall head over heels in love with you, and where would you be then?"

Adrienne examined him. "But from the point of view of hoodwinking, that would be all to the good, wouldn't it?" she inquired; "though unfortunate for Hamilton. He won't, however," she went on, her dreadful lucidity revealing to him the hopelessness of any protest he might still have found to make. "There's a very lovely girl out in California he's devoted to; a young poetess. He'll have to write to her about it first, of course; Hamilton's at the front now, you see; and I must write to his mother. She and Carola Brown are very near each other and will talk it out together and I feel sure they will see it as I do. They'll see it as something big I'm asking them to do for me--to set me free. I'm sure I can count on Gertrude and I'm sure Hamilton can count on Carola. She's a very rare, strong spirit."

Oldmeadow, suddenly, was feeling exhausted, and a clutch of hysterical laughter, as she spoke these last words, held his throat for a moment. He laid his head back on his pillow and closed his eyes, while he saw Adrienne and Hamilton Prentiss wandering by the banks of a French river where poplars stood against a silver sky. He knew that he had accepted nothing when he said at last: "Shall we talk about it another time? To-morrow? I mean, don't take any steps, will you, until we've talked. Don't write to your beautiful, big friend."

"You always make fun of me a little, don't you," said Adrienne tranquilly. She seemed aware of some further deep discomposure in him and willing, though not comprehending it, to meet it with friendly tolerance. "If he is big and beautiful, why shouldn't I say it? But I won't write until we've talked again. It can't be, anyway, until the war is over. And I've had already to wait for four years."