Chapter XXII

"Isn't it becoming to him, Mother? And how tall he looks!" said Nancy, holding Oldmeadow off in his khaki for displayal.

He had only written a line of his failure and that he would come as soon as he could and see them all and tell in full of his interview with Palgrave. And he had motored over to The Little House this afternoon in early November.

Nancy was showing an unexpected gaiety. "What a nice grilled-salmon colour you are, too," she said.

He divined the self-protective instinct under the gaiety. Most of the women in England were being gayer and more talkative at this time, in order to keep up. Nancy was thin and white; but she was keeping up. And she had put on a charming dress to receive him in.

"I've been grilled all right; out on the downs," he said. "But it's more like cold storage just now, with these frosts at night. Yes; the big cup, please. I'm famished for tea. Ah! that's something like! It smells like your rose outside. I sniffed it as I waited at the door. Wonderful for such a late blooming."

"Isn't it," said Mrs. Averil. "And I only put it in last autumn. It's doing beautifully; but I've cherished it. And now tell us about Palgrave."

He felt reluctant to tell about Palgrave. The impression that remained with him of Palgrave was that impression of beauty and distortion and he did not want to have to disentangle his feelings or to seem to put Palgrave in the wrong. It was so sweet, too, after the long, chilly drive over the empty uplands, to sit here and forget the war, although it was for scenes like this, for girls like Nancy, women like Mrs. Averil--with so much else--that the war was so worth fighting. He turned his thoughts back to the realities that underlay the happy appearances and was aware, as he forced himself to tell, of what must seem a note of advocacy in his voice. "He can't think differently, I'm afraid," he said. "It's self-sacrifice, not selfishness, that is moving him."

"He can't think differently while Adrienne is living there," said Mrs. Averil. "He didn't tell you, I suppose, that she has now taken up her abode in Oxford in order to study philosophy with him?"

He was rather uncomfortably aware of the disingenuousness that must now be made apparent in his avoidance of all mention of Adrienne.

"I saw her," he said, and he knew that it was lamely. "She was there when I got there."

"You saw her!" Mrs. Averil exclaimed. "But then, of course you didn't convince him. I might have known it. Of course she would not let you see him alone."

"But she did let me see him alone. That was what she wanted. And she was there only in order to tell me what she wanted. She wants him to go."

Mrs. Averil was eyeing him with such astonishment that he turned to Nancy with his explanations. But Mrs. Averil would not leave him to Nancy's sympathy. "It's rather late in the day for her to want him to go," she said. "She may be sorry for what she's done; but it's her work."

"Well, she's sorry for her work. That's what it comes to. And I'm sorry for her," said Oldmeadow.

"Good heavens! The cleverness of that woman!" Mrs. Averil exclaimed. "If she can't be powerful, she'll be pitiful! She's worked on your feelings; I can see that, Roger. And I thought you, at least, were immune. Well; she does not work on mine. I am not in the least sorry for her."

"She's being unfairly treated," said Oldmeadow. "It's grotesque that Meg should have turned upon her."

"And Eleanor has, too, you know," said Mrs. Averil. "It's grotesque, if you like; but I see a grim justice in it. She made them do things and believe things that weren't natural to them and now she's lost her power and they see things as they are."

"It's because she's failed that they've turned against her," said Nancy. "If she'd succeeded they would have gone on accepting what she told them and making her their idol."

"Adrienne mustn't fail," said Mrs. Averil dryly. "The only justification for Adrienne is to be in the right. If the blood of Saint Januarius doesn't liquefy, why should you keep it in a shrine? She's a woman who has quarrelled with her husband and disgraced her sister and brother-in-law, and broken her mother-in-law's heart. You can't go on making an idol of a saint who behaves like that."

"She never claimed worldly success," said Nancy. "She never told Meg to go so that she could get married afterwards; she never told Palgrave that war was wrong because it was easier not to fight."

"Oh, yes, she did claim worldly success, really," said Mrs. Averil, while her eyes rested on her daughter with a tenderness that contrasted with her tone. "Her whole point was that if you were right spiritually--'poised' she called it, you remember--all those other things would be added unto you. I've heard her claim that if you were poised you could get anything you really wanted. I asked her once if I should find a ten-pound note under the sofa-cushion every morning after breakfast if I could get poised sufficiently!" Mrs. Averil laughed, still more dryly while she still maintained her tender gaze and Nancy said, smiling a little: "She might have put it there for you if she'd been sure you were poised."

"Well, let us bury Adrienne for the present," said Mrs. Averil. "Tell Roger about your nursing plans. She may go to London, Roger, this winter, and I'm to be left alone."

"You're to be left to take care of Aunt Eleanor, if I do go," said Nancy; and Mrs. Averil said that there must certainly be some one left to take care of poor Eleanor.

Oldmeadow went up to Coldbrooks next morning. The first person he saw was old Johnson at the door and he remembered Eleanor Chadwick's griefs on his account. Nothing, now, could have been kept from Johnson and his face bore the marks of the family calamities. He was aged and whitened and his voice had armed itself, since the downfall of his grave, vicarious complacency, with solemn cadences.

"Yes, sir. The ladies will be very glad to see you, sir. These are sad days for them--the family dispersed as it is."

Johnson defined the situation as he felt that it could be most fittingly defined and Oldmeadow inwardly applauded his "dispersed."

The drawing-room, into which Johnson ushered him, had, for the first time in his memory of it, a mournful air. It had always been shabby, and these were the same faded chintzes, the same worn rugs; but now, fireless and flowerless, it neither spoke nor smiled and, with the sense it gave of an outlived epoch, it was almost spectral. The photographs all looked like the photographs of dead people and the only similitude of life was the loud, silly ticking of the French clock on the mantelpiece; Mrs. Chadwick's cherished clock; one of her wedding-presents.

"I'm afraid it's rather chilly, sir," said Johnson. "No one has sat here of an evening now for a long time." He put a match to the ranged logs, drew the blinds up farther so that the autumnal sunlight might more freely enter, and left him.

Oldmeadow went to the window and turned over the magazines, a month old, that lay on a table there.

He was standing so when Meg entered, and she had half the length of the room to traverse before they met. She was in black, in deep black; but more beautiful than he had ever seen her; her tossed auburn locks bound low on her forehead with a black ribbon, her white throat upright, her eyes hard with their readiness, their resource. Beautiful and distressing. It distressed him terribly to see that hardness in her eyes.

"How do you do, Roger," she said, giving him her hand. "It's good to see you. Mother will be glad."

They seated themselves on one of the capacious sofas and she questioned him quickly, competently, while the hard eyes seemed to measure him lest he measure her. It was almost the look of the _déclassée_ woman who forestalls withdrawal in an interlocutor. But, as he answered her quietly, his fond regard upon her, her defences began to fall. "It's the only life, a soldier's, isn't it?" she said. "At all times, really. But, at a time like this, anything else seems despicable, doesn't it; contemptibly smug and safe. The uniform is so becoming to you. You look a soldier already. One feels that men will trust and follow you. Didn't you burn with rage and shame, too, when, for those four days, it seemed we might not come in?"

"I felt too sure we should come in, to burn with rage and shame," said Oldmeadow.

"Ah! but it was not so sure, I'm afraid," said Meg, and in her eyes, no longer hard, wild lights seemed to pass and repass. "I'm afraid that there are nearly enough fools and knaves in England to wreck us. Not quite enough, thank heaven! But, for those four days, Eric was terribly afraid. He was killed, you know, Roger, very splendidly, leading his men."

"I know, Meg. My dear Meg," Oldmeadow murmured.

"Oh! I don't regret it! I don't regret it!" Meg cried, while her colour rose and her young breast lifted. "It's the soldier's death! The consecrating, heroic death! He was ready. And deaths like that atone--for the others. He was not killed instantaneously, Roger."

"I didn't know," said Oldmeadow, looking at her with a pitying, troubled gaze.

"He lived for a day and night afterwards," said Meg, looking back, tearless. "They carried him to a barn. Only his man was with him. There was no one to dress his dreadful wound; no food. The man got him some water, at the risk of his own life. He was conscious until the end and he suffered terribly."

Oldmeadow dropped his eyes before her fierce stare while, strangely, dimly, there passed through his mind the memory of the embarrassed, empty, handsome young face in the brougham and, again, the memory of his dog John. He had seen John die and his eyes of wistful appeal. So Eric Hayward's eyes might have looked as he lay in the barn dying.

"Oh, Roger!" Meg said suddenly, seizing his hand. "Kill them! Kill them! Oh, revenge him! I was not with him! Think of it! I would have had no right to have been with him--had it been possible. I did not know till a week later. He was buried there. His man buried him."

"My poor, poor child," said Oldmeadow, clasping her hands.

But, at once, taking refuge from his pity and from her own desperate pain: "So you've seen Palgrave," she said. "And he isn't going. I knew it was useless. I told Mother it was useless--with that stranger--that American, with him. She has disgraced us all.--Wretched boy! Hateful woman!"

"Meg, Meg; be soldierly. He wouldn't have spoken like that."

"He never liked her! Never!" she cried. "I knew he didn't, even at the time she was flattering and cajoling us. I saw that she bewildered him and that he accepted her only because she was mine. How I loathe myself for having listened to her! How I loathe her! All that she ever wanted was power! Power over other people's lives! She'd commit any crime for that!"

"You seem to me cruelly unfair," he said.

"No! no! I'm not unfair! You know I'm not!" she cried. "You always saw the truth about her--from the very beginning. You never fell down and worshipped her, like the rest of us. And she knew that you were her enemy and warned us against you. Oh--why did Barney marry her!"

"I never worshipped her; but I never thought her base and hateful."

"You never knew her as I did; that was all. And I never knew her until I came back and found her doing to Palgrave what she had done to us. Paladin! Did you hear her call him Paladin? Always flattery! Always to make one think one was wonderful, important, mysterious! She forced us to go away, Roger. Sometimes I think it was hypnotism; that she uses her will-power consciously. We did not want to go. We did not want the divorce and the scandal."

"What did you want, then, Meg?"

She felt the gravity of his tone but, like a fierce Maenad, she snatched at the torch, not caring how it revealed her. "What of it! What if we had been secret lovers! Who would have known! Who would have been harmed! Some people go on for years and years. His wife loved another man. He had no one. Why should we have been pushed--such pitiful fools we were--into displaying our love to the world and being crushed by it! Oh, he was so loyal, so brave; but it made him very, very unhappy. Oh, I was cruel to him sometimes! I used to reproach him sometimes! Oh, Roger! Roger!--" She broke into wild tears and stumbled to her feet.

As she reached the door, covering her face with her hands, her mother opened it and, meeting her on the threshold, Meg, with almost the effect of beating her aside with the other impediments to her rage and grief, pushed past her so that the knitting Mrs. Chadwick held was flung to the floor, the ball of khaki wool running rapidly away under a sofa and the socks and needles dangling at her feet.

She stood looking down at them with a curious apathy and, as Oldmeadow went to help and greet her, he saw that as much as Meg was wild she was dulled and quiet.

"Meg is so very, very violent," she said, as he disentangled the wool and restored her sock and ball to her. She spoke with listlessness rather than sympathy.

"Poor child," said Oldmeadow. "One can hardly wonder at it. But it makes a wretched existence for you, I'm afraid. You and she oughtn't to be alone together."

He drew her to a chair and, seating herself, her faded face and eyes that had lost their old look of surprise turned to the light, Mrs. Chadwick assented, "It's very fatiguing to live with, certainly. Sometimes I really think I must go away for a little while and have a change. Nancy would come and stay with Meg, you know. But I can't miss Barney's last weeks. He comes to us, now, again. And it might not be right to leave Meg. One must not think of oneself at a time like this, must one?" The knitting lay in her lap and she was twisting and untwisting her handkerchief after her old fashion; but her fingers moved slowly and without agitation and Oldmeadow saw that some spring of life in her had been broken.

"The best plan would be that Meg should, as soon as possible, take up some work," he said, "and that you and Nancy should go away. Work is the only thing for Meg now. She'll dash herself to pieces down here; and you with her. There'll soon be plenty to do. Nursing and driving ambulances."

"Nancy is going to nurse, you know," said Mrs. Chadwick. "But she won't go as long as we need her here. She has promised me that. I don't know what I should do without Nancy. I shouldn't care to be nursed by Meg myself, if I were a wounded soldier. She is so very restless and would probably forget quite simple things like giving one a handkerchief or seeing that hot-water-bottles were wrapped up before she put them to one's feet. A friend of mine--Amy Hatchard--such a pretty woman, though her hair was bright, bright red--and I never cared for that--had the soles of her feet nearly scorched off once by a careless nurse. Dear Nancy. I often think of Nancy now, Roger. I believe, you know, that if Adrienne had not come Nancy and Barney might have married. How happy we should all have been; though she has so little money."

"I wish you could all think a little more kindly of Adrienne," said Oldmeadow after a silence. Mrs. Chadwick had begun to knit. "I must tell you that I myself feel differently about her."

"Do you, Roger?" said Mrs. Chadwick, without surprise. "You have a very judicious and balanced mind, I know; even when you were hardly more than a boy Francis noticed it and said that he'd rather go by your opinion than by that of most of the men he knew. I always remembered that, afterwards. Till she came. And then I believed in her rather than in you. You thought us all far too fond of her from the very first. And now we have certainly changed. Meg is certainly very violent; much more violent than I could ever be.... I am sorry for Adrienne. I don't think she meant to do us any harm--as Meg believes."

"She only meant to do you good, I am sure of it. I saw her in Oxford, let me tell you about it, when I went in to see Palgrave. She is very unhappy. She wants Palgrave to go. She wants him to feel it right to go. It's not she, really, who is keeping him back now."

"My poor Palgrave. Meg is very unkind about him; very bitter and unkind; her own brother. But it was very wrong of Adrienne to go and set up housekeeping in Oxford near him. You must own that, Roger. She may not be keeping him back; but she is aiding and abetting him always. It made Barney even more miserable and disgusted than he was before. And it looks so very odd. Though I don't think that anyone could ever gossip about Adrienne. There is something about her that makes that impossible."

"There certainly is. I am glad she is with Palgrave, poor boy."

"I am glad you are sorry for him, Roger"--Mrs. Chadwick dropped a needle. "How clumsy I am. My fingers seem all to have turned to thumbs. Thank you so much. I try to make as many socks as I can for our poor men; fingering wool; not wheeling, which is so much rougher to the feet. I'm sure I'd rather march, and, if it came to that, die in fingering than in wheeling. Just as I've always felt, foolish as it may sound, that if I had to be drowned I'd rather it were in warm, soapy water than in cold salt. Not that one is very likely, ever, to drown in one's bath. But tell me about Adrienne and Palgrave, Roger, and what they said."

Mrs. Chadwick's discourse seemed, beforehand, to make anything he might have to tell irrelevant and, even while he tried to make her see what he had seen, he felt it to be a fruitless effort.

There was indeed no enmity to plead against. Only a deep exhaustion. Adrienne had pressed too heavily on the spring and it was broken.

"I'm sure she is very sorry to have made so much mischief, but she isn't what I thought her, Roger," she said, shaking her head, when he had finished. "I'm sorry for her, but I used to believe her to be a sort of saint and now I know that she is very far indeed from being one."

"The mere fact of failure doesn't deprive you of sainthood," said Oldmeadow, remembering Nancy's plea. "You haven't less reason now than you had then for believing her one."

But even with her broken spring Mrs. Chadwick had not lost all her shrewdness. It flickered in the sad eyes she lifted from the khaki sock. "Some kinds of failure do, Roger. That gift of healing, you remember; all she could do for people in that way; she has quite, quite lost it. That is a reason. It's that more than anything that has made me feel differently about her."

"Lost it?" He felt strangely discomposed, little as the gift of healing had ever impressed him.

"Quite," Mrs. Chadwick repeated. "I think it distressed her dreadfully herself. I think she counted upon it more than upon anything, perhaps without knowing she did. It must have made her seem so sure to herself, mustn't it? The first time was before the war, just a little after you were here that day in the summer--dear me, how long ago it seems; and I had one of my headaches, one of the worst I ever had. I was so dreadfully troubled, you know, about Barbara and Meg. And Adrienne came and sat by me as she used to and put her hand on my forehead; and I know it wasn't my lack of faith, for I quite believed it would get well; but instead of the peaceful feeling, it grew much worse; oh, _much_. As if red hot needles were darting through my eyes and an iron weight pressing down on my head. And such tumult and distress. I had to tell her. I had to ask her to take away her hand. Oh, she felt it very much, poor thing, and grew very white and said it must be because she was still not strong; not quite herself. But I knew then that it was because she was not _right_; not what I had thought her. I began to suspect, from that very moment, that I had been mistaken; because hypnotizing people isn't the same as being a saint, is it, Roger? and--I think you said so once, long ago; and that was all that she had done; hypnotized us all to think her good and wonderful. Later on, after Meg had come, I let her try once more, though it quite frightened me; she looked so strange. And!--oh, dear--it was dreadful. It distressed me dreadfully. She suddenly put her hands before her face and sat quite still and then she burst into tears and got up and ran out of the room, crying. It made me feel quite ill. And of course I knew there could be nothing saintly about a person who made you feel like that--who could feel like that themselves, and break down."

"Even saints have their times of darkness and dryness," Oldmeadow found after a little time had passed. The picture she put before him hurt him. "It was an error of judgment to have believed her a saint because she could hypnotize you--if that was what it was; but the fact that she can't hypnotize you any longer--that she's too unhappy to have any power of that sort--doesn't prove she's not a saint. Of course she's not. Why should she be?"

"I'm sure I don't know why she should be; but she used to behave as if she were one, didn't she? And when I saw that she wasn't one in that way I began to see that she wasn't in other ways, too. It was she who made me so unjust, so unkind to poor Barney. _She_ was so unjust and so unkind; and I never saw it till then. I was blind till then; though you saw very well, that day you came to Connaught Square, that it was a sort of spell she cast. It was a spell, Roger. The moment I saw her, after the baby's death, I forgot everything she'd done and felt I loved her again. She willed me to. So as to get power over me. Everything, always, with her, was to get power over other people's lives," said Mrs. Chadwick, and as he had, in the past, heard echoes of Adrienne in all she said, now he heard echoes of Meg, "It's by willing it, you know. Some people practise it like five-finger exercises. You have to sit quite still and shut your eyes and concentrate. Meg has heard how it's done. I don't pretend to understand; but that must have been her way. And she made poor Barney miserable and set me against him at once; you said so yourself, Roger, and blinded me to all the cruel things she did. It was to punish him, you know. To make him feel he was dreadfully wrong and she quite right; about Meg, and everything else; for you came in, too. It used to be so dreadful at Torquay. I knew it would be sad there; but I never guessed how sad it would be--with that horrid blue, blue sea. She used to sit, day after day, on the terrace of the house, and gaze and gaze at the sea and if Barney would come, so lovingly, and ask her what he could do for her and take her hand, oh, it was more and more mournful, the way she would look at him; that dreadful, loving look that didn't mean love at all, but only trying to break him down and make him _say_ that he was down. I begged Barney's pardon, Roger, for having treated him as I did. We treated him dreadfully, all of us; because she put him, always, in the wrong. Oh, no, Roger, I'm sorry for her, but she's a dangerous woman; or _was_ dangerous. For now she has lost it all and has become like everybody else; quite ordinary and unhappy."

He felt, in the little silence that, again, followed, that he could hardly better this summing-up. That was precisely what poor Adrienne Toner had become; ordinary and unhappy. The two things she would have believed herself least capable of becoming. There was nothing to be gained in urging extenuating circumstances, especially since he was not sure that there were any. Mrs. Chadwick, at bottom, saw as clearly as he did. He asked her presently, leaving the theme of Adrienne, whether she would not seriously consider going away for a little while with Nancy. "Meg could go down to The Little House," he said.

"Oh, no, she couldn't, Roger," said Mrs. Chadwick, "she won't go anywhere. She'll hardly speak to Monica. She just sits out-of-doors, all day, wrapped in a cloak, in the corner of the garden, staring in front of her, and she pays not the slightest attention to anything I say. And at night, in her room, I hear her sobbing, sobbing, as if her heart would break. I can't think hardly of Eric any longer, Roger. Isn't it strange; but it's almost as if he were my son that had been killed. And Barney may be killed," the poor mother's lip and chin began to tremble. "And you, too, Roger. I don't know how we shall live through all that we must bear and I keep thinking of the foolish little things, like your having cold feet and wearing the same clothes day after day in those horrible trenches. He suffered it all, poor Eric. No, I can't think hardly of him. All the same," she sobbed, "my heart is broken when I remember that they can never be married now."