Chapter XIII

"Roger, see here, I've only come to say one word--about the absurd little-matter of last night. Only one; and then we'll never speak of it again," said poor Barney.

He had come as soon as the very next day--to exonerate, not to apologize; that was evident at once. Oldmeadow had not long to wait before learning what she had said to him when she got him to herself, nor long to wait before realizing that if Barney had been unhappy last night he thought himself happy to-day.

"Really, my dear boy," he said, "it's not worth talking about."

"Oh, but we must talk about it," said Barney. He was red and spoke quickly. "It upset her frightfully; it made her perfectly miserable. She cried for hours, Roger," Barney's voice dropped to a haggard note. "You know, though she bears up so marvellously, she's ill. She doesn't admit illness and that makes it harder for her, because it simply bewilders her when she finds herself on edge like this and her body refusing to obey her. The baby is coming in May, you know."

"I know, my dear Barney. The evening was very fatiguing for her. I saw it all I think. I noticed from the beginning how tired she looked."

"Horribly tired. Horribly fatiguing. I'm glad you saw it. For that's really what I came to explain. She was tired to begin with and Mrs. Aldesey put her on edge. I think I saw that myself at dinner--and, oh, before that; on the day we had tea with her, when we first came up, in November--Adrienne felt then that Mrs. Aldesey didn't understand or care for her. You know she is so full of love and sympathy for everybody herself that she is literally sickened when she is treated in that artificial, worldly way. And you know, Roger, Mrs. Aldesey _is_ artificial and worldly."

That was how she had put it to Barney, of course. But Oldmeadow saw further than Mrs. Aldesey and her artificiality. He saw a dishevelled and weeping Adrienne stricken to the heart by the sense of threatened foundations, aghast by what she had seen in her husband's eyes; and he was aware, even while he resented having it put upon Lydia, of a curious, reluctant pity for the pale, weeping figure. Lydia had, obviously, displeased her; but Lydia had been the mere occasion; she could have dealt easily enough with Lydia. It had been the revelation that Barney could oppose her, could almost, for a moment, dislike her, that had set her universe rocking. Her first taste of reality, then. The thought came rather grimly, with the pity. After all it was their best chance of happiness; that she should learn to accept herself as a person who could be opposed, even disliked, in flashes, while still loved. He had sat silent while he thought, one of his silences which, when he emerged from them, he often recognized as over-long. Barney must have felt the weight of all he did not say when all that he found to say was: "What it comes to, doesn't it, is that they neither of them take much to each other. Lydia is certainly conventional."

"Ah, but Lady Lumley is conventional, too," said Barney with an irrepressible air of checkmate. "Hordes of conventional people adore Adrienne. It's a question of the heart. There are people who are conventional without being worldly. It's worldliness that stifles Adrienne. It's what she was saying last night: 'They have only ceilings; I must have the sky.' Not that she thinks _you_ worldly, dear old boy."

"I hope you try to interpret me to her kindly," said Oldmeadow, smiling. Even at the moment when Barney, all innocently, was revealing to him Adrienne's tactics, the fragments of her vocabulary imbedded in his speech were affording him amusement. "You must try and persuade her that I've quite a fondness for the sky myself, and even published a volume of verse in my youth."

"I do. Of course I do," said Barney eagerly. "And I gave her your poems, long ago. She loved them. It's your sardonic pessimism she doesn't understand--in anyone who could have written like that when they were young. She never met anything like it before in her life. And the way you never seem to take anything seriously. It makes her dreadfully sorry for you, even while she finds it so hard to accept in anyone she cares for--because she really does so care for you, Roger"--there was a note of appeal in Barney's voice--"and does so long to find a way out for you. It was a joke, of course; but all the same we've often wished you could find the right woman to marry."

Barney, as he had done last night, grew very red again, so that it was apparent to Oldmeadow that not only the marriage but the woman--the rare, gifted girl--had been discussed between him and his wife.

"Adrienne thinks everyone ought to be married, you see," he tried to pass it off. "Since we are so happy ourselves."

"I see," said Oldmeadow. "There's another thing you must try to persuade her of: that I'm not at all _un jeune homme à marier_, and that if I ever seek a companion it will probably be some one like myself, some one sardonic and pessimistic. If I fixed my affections on the lovely girl, you see, it isn't likely they'd be reciprocated."

"Oh, but"--Barney's eagerness again out-stepped his discretion--"wouldn't the question of money count there, Roger? If she had plenty of money, you know, or you had; enough for both; and a place in the country? Of course, it's all fairy-tale; but Adrienne is a fairy-tale person; material things don't count with her at all. She waves them away and wants other people to wave them away, too. What she always says is: 'What does my money _mean_ unless it's to open doors for people I love?' She's starting that young Besley, you know, just because of Palgrave; setting him up as editor of a little review--rotten it is, I think--but Adrienne says people must follow their own lights. And it's just that; she'd love to open doors for you, if it could make you happy."

Oldmeadow at this, after a moment of receptivity, began to laugh softly; but the humour of the situation grew upon him until he at last threw back his head and indulged in open and prolonged mirth. Barney watched him bashfully. "You're not angry, I see," he ventured. "You don't think it most awful cheek, I mean?"

"I think it is most awful cheek; but I'm not angry; not a bit," said Oldmeadow. "Fairy-godmothers are nothing if not cheeky; are they? Oh, I know you meant your, not her, cheek. But it's the fault of the fairy-godmother, all the same, and you must convince her that I'm not in love with anybody, and that if ever I am she'll have to content herself with my small earnings and a flat in Chelsea."

So he jested; but, when his friend was gone, he realized that he was a little angry all the same and he feared that his mirth had not been able to conceal from Barney that what he really found it was confounded impudence. Barney's face had worn, as he departed, the look of mingled gratitude and worry and Barney must feel, as well as he felt, that their interview hadn't really cleared up anything--except his own readiness to overlook the absurdities of Barney's wife. What became more and more clear to himself was that unless he could enable Adrienne to enroll his name on her banner she would part him from Barney and that her very benevolence was a method. The more he thought of it the more uncomfortable he felt, and his inner restlessness became at length an impulse urging him out to take counsel or, rather, seek solace, with the friend from whom Adrienne could never part him. He would go and have tea with Lydia Aldesey and with the more eagerness from the fact that he was aware of a slight dissatisfaction in regard to Lydia. She had not altogether pleased him last night. She had put herself in the wrong; she had blundered; she hadn't behaved with the skill and tact requisite; and to elicit from her a confession of ineptitude would make his sense of solace the more secure.

The day was a very different day from the one in April when he had first gone to ask Mrs. Aldesey for information about people called Toner. It was early February, dull and cold and damp. No rain was falling, but the trees were thick with moisture and Oldmeadow had his hands deep in his pockets and the collar of his coat turned up about his ears. As he crossed the Serpentine, an electric brougham passed him, going slowly, and he had a glimpse within it, short but very vivid, of Adrienne, Meg, and Captain Hayward.

Adrienne, wearing a small arrangement of black velvet that came down over her brows, was holding Meg's hand and, while she spoke, was looking steadily at her, her face as white as that of a Pierrot. Meg listened, gloomily it seemed, and Captain Hayward's handsome countenance, turned for refuge towards the window, showed an extreme embarrassment.

They passed and Oldmeadow pursued his way, filled with a disagreeable astonishment though, absurdly, his mind was at first occupied only in an attempt to recover a submerged memory that Captain Hayward's demeanour suggested. It came at last in an emancipating flash and he saw again, after how many years, the golden-brown head of his rather silly setter, John, turned aside in shy yet dignified repudiation, that still, by a dim, sick smile, attempted to conceal distress and to enter into the spirit of the game--as a kitten was held up for his contemplation. A kitten was a very inadequate analogy, no doubt, for the theme of Adrienne's discourse; yet Captain Hayward's reaction to a situation for which he found himself entirely unprepared was markedly like John's. And he, like John, had known that the game was meant to be at his expense. John and Captain Hayward got Oldmeadow out of the park before he had taken full possession of his astonishment and could ask himself why, if Adrienne were engaged in rescuing Meg from her illicit attachment, she should do it in the company of the young man. Yet, strangely enough, he felt, as he walked, a growing sense of reassurance. For an emergency like this, after all, given amenable subjects, Adrienne was the right person. He hadn't dreamed it to be such an emergency; but since it was, Adrienne would pull them through. As she would have laid her hand on the head of Bacchus and reformed him, so she would lay it on the head of Captain Hayward.