Chapter III

They never spoke of Coldbrooks, nor of Barney, nor of Palgrave; not once. Not once during all those nights that she sat beside him and made him sleep.

He had heard from Coldbrooks, of course; letters came often now. And the dark young nurse had written for him since he could not yet write for himself. He had said no word of seeing Adrienne. Nor had he let them know how near to death he had been and, perhaps, still was. He would have liked to have seen Lydia and Nancy if he were to die; but most of all he wanted to be sure of not losing Adrienne. And he knew that were he to tell them, were they to come, Adrienne would go.

She never spoke to him at all, he remembered--as getting stronger with every day, he pieced his memories of these nights together--unless he spoke to her; and she never smiled. And it came upon him one morning after he had read letters that brought so near the world from which she was now shut out, that she had, perhaps, never forgiven him. After all, though he could not see that he had been wrong, she had everything to forgive him and the thought made him restless. That night, for the first time, she volunteered a remark. His temperature had gone up a little. He must be very quiet and go to sleep directly.

"Yes; I know," he said. "It's because of you. Things I want to say. I'm really so much better. We can't go on like this, can we," he said, looking up at her as she sat beside him. "Why, you might slip out of my life any day, and I might never hear of you again."

She sat looking down at him, a little askance, though gentle still, if gentle was the word for her changed face. "That's what I mean to do," she said.

"Oh, but--" Oldmeadow actually, in his alarm and resentment, struggled up on an elbow--"that won't do. I want to see you, really see you, now that I'm myself again. I want to talk with you--now that I can talk coherently. I want to ask you; well, I won't ask it now." She had put out her hand, her small, potent hand, and quietly pressed him back, and down upon his pillow while her face took on its look of almost stern authority. "I'll be good. But promise me you'll not go without telling me. And haven't you questions to ask, too?"

Her face kept its severity, but, as he found this last appeal, her eyes widened, darkened, looked, for a moment, almost frightened.

"I know that Barney is safe," she said. "I have nothing to ask."

"Well; no; I see." He felt that he had been guilty of a blunder and it made him fretful. "For me, then. Not for you. Promise me. I won't be good unless you promise me. You can't go off and leave me like that."

With eyes still dilated, she contemplated this rebellion.

"You must promise me something, then," she said after a moment.

He felt proud, delighted, as if he had gained a victory over her.

"Done. If it's not too hard. What is it?"

"You won't write to anybody. You won't tell anybody that you've seen me. Only Lady Lumley knows that I am here. And she has promised not to tell. Probably, soon, I shall have left France for ever."

"I won't tell. I won't write. I can keep secrets as well as Lady Lumley. She does keep them, you know. So it's a compact."

"Yes. It's a compact. You'll never tell them; and I won't go without letting you know. I promise. Now go to sleep."

She laid her hand on his forehead, but, for a little while, he heard her breathing deeply and quickly and the sense of his blundering stayed with him so that sleep was longer in coming.

All the same he was much better next day. He was able to sit up and had the glory and excitement of a chop for his midday dinner. And when the pleasant hour of tea arrived it was Adrienne herself who came in carrying the little tray.

He had not seen her in daylight before and his first feeling was one of alarm, for, if she were afoot like this, in daylight, must it not mean that she was soon to leave the hospital? He felt shy of her, too, for, altered as she was by night, the day showed her as far more altered. Whether she seemed much older or much younger he could not have said. The coiffe, covering her forehead, and bound under her chin in a way peculiar to her, left only, as it were, the means of expression visible.

She sat down by the window and looked out, glancing round from time to time as he drank his tea and it was she who found the calm little sentences, about the latest news from the front, the crashing of Bulgaria, that carried them on until he had finished. When he had pushed down his tray she turned her chair and faced him, folding her hands together on her white apron, and she said, and he knew that she had come to say it, "What was it you wanted to ask me?"

He had had, while she sat at the window, her profile with the jutting nose, and her face, as it turned upon him now, made him think suddenly of a seagull. Questing, lonely, with vigilant eyes, it seemed to have great spaces before it; to be flying forth into empty spaces and to an unseen goal.

"Are you going away, then?" He had not dared, somehow, to ask her before. He felt now that he could not talk until he knew.

"Not yet," she said. "But I shall be going soon. The hospital is emptying and my nights on duty are very short. I have, really, only you and two others to take care of. That's why I am up so early to-day. And you are so much better that we can have a little talk; if you have anything to ask me."

"It's this, of course," said Oldmeadow. "It seems to me you ought to dislike me. I misunderstood you in many ways. And now I owe you my life. Before we part I want to thank you and to ask you to forgive me."

Her eyes, seen in daylight, were of the colour of distance, of arctic distances. That had always been their colour, though he had never before identified it.

"But there is nothing to thank me for," she said. "I am here to take care of people."

"Even people who misunderstood you. Even people you dislike. I know." He flushed, feeling that he had been duly snubbed. "But though you take care of everyone, anyone may thank you, too, mayn't they?"

"I don't dislike you, Mr. Oldmeadow," she said after a moment. "And you didn't misunderstand me."

"Oh," he murmured, more abashed than before. "I think so. Not, perhaps, what you did; but what you were. I didn't see you as you really were. That's what I mean."

The perplexity, which had grown, even, to amazement, had left her eyes and she was intently looking at him. "There is nothing for you to be sorry for," she said. "Nothing for me to forgive. You were always right."

"Always right? I can't take that, you know," said Oldmeadow, deeply discomposed. "You were blind, of course, and more sure of yourself than any of us can safely afford to be; but I wasn't always right."

"Always. Always," she repeated. "I was blinder than you knew. I was more sure of myself."

He lay looking at her and she looked back at him, but with a look that invited neither argument not protest. It remained remote and vigilant. She might have been the seagull looking down and noting, as she flew onward, that the small figure on the beach so far below had ceased to be that of an assailant in its attitude. How remote she was, white strange, fleeting creature! How near she had been once! The memory of how near rushed over his mind. He had, despite the delirious visions of her stricken face, hardly thought at all, since really seeing her again, of that last time. Everything had fitted itself on, rather, to his earliest memories of her, tinged all of them, it was true, with a deeper meaning, but not till this moment consciously admitting it. It rushed in now, poignant with the recovered smell of wet, dark ivy, the recovered sound of her stifled sobs as she had stumbled, broken, beside him in the rain. And with the memory came the desire that she should again be near.

"Tell me," he said, "what are you going to do? You said you might be leaving France for ever. Shall you go back to America?"

"I don't think so. Not for a long time," she answered. "There will be things to do over here, out of France, for a great many years I imagine."

He hesitated, then took a roundabout way. "And when I get home, if, owing to you, I ever get there, may I not tell them that you're safe and sound? It would be happier for them to know that, wouldn't it?"

Her vigilance still dwelt upon him as though she suspected in this sudden change of subject some craft of approach, but she answered quietly:

"No; I think it will be happier for them to forget me. They will be told if I die. I have arranged for that."

"They can't very well forget you," said Oldmeadow after a moment. "They must always wonder."

"I know." She glanced away and trouble came into her face. "I know. But as much as possible. You must not make me real again by telling them. You have promised. You care for them. You know what I mean."

"Yes; I've promised. And I see what you mean. But," said Oldmeadow suddenly, and this, of course, was what he had been coming to. "I don't want to forget. I want you to stay real. You must let me know what becomes of you, always, please."

Astonishment, now, effaced her trouble. "You? Why?" she asked.

He smiled a little. "Well, because, if you'll let me say it, I'm fond of you. I feel responsible for you. I've been too deeply in your life, you've been too deeply in mine, for us to disappear from each other. Don't you remember," he said, and he found it with a sense of achievement, ridiculous as it might sound, "how I held the tea-pot for you? That's what I mean. You must let me go on holding it."

But she could feel no amusement. She was pressing her hands tightly together in her lap, her eyes were wide and her astonishment, he seemed to see, almost brought tears to them. "Fond? You?" she said. "Of me? Oh, no, Mr. Oldmeadow, I can't believe that. You are sorry, I know. You are very sorry. But you can't be fond."

"And why not?" said Oldmeadow, and he raised himself on his elbow the more directly to challenge her. "Why shouldn't I be fond of you, pray? You must swallow it, for it's the truth and I've a right to my own feelings, I hope."

She put aside the playfulness in which his grim earnest veiled itself. "Because you saw. Because you know. All about me. From the first."

"Well?" he questioned after a moment, still raised on his elbow but now with the grimness unalloyed. "What of it?"

"You remember what I was. You remember what you saw. You would have saved them from me if you could; and you couldn't. How can you be fond of a person who has ruined all their lives?"

"Upon my soul," said Oldmeadow laughing, his eyes on hers, "you talk as though you'd been a Lucrezia Borgia! What were you worse than an exalted, stubborn, rather conceited girl? Things went wrong, I know, and partly because of me. But it wasn't all your fault, I'll swear it. And if it was, it was your mistake; not your crime."

"Oh, no, no, no," said Adrienne, and the compulsion of his feeling had brought a note of anguish to her voice. "It wasn't that. It was worse than that. Don't forget. Don't think you are fond of me because I can make you sleep. It's always been so; I see it now--the power I've had over people; the horrible power. For power is horrible unless one is good; unless one is using it for goodness."

"Well, so you were," Oldmeadow muttered, falling back on his pillow, her vehemence, her strange passion, almost daunting him. "It's not because you make me go to sleep that I'm fond of you. What utter rubbish!"

"It is! it is!" she repeated. "I've seen it happen too often. It always happens. It binds people to me. It makes them cling to me as if I could give them life. It makes them believe me to be a sort of saint!"

"Well, if you can help them with it? You have helped them. The war's your great chance in that, you'll admit. No one can accuse you of trying to get power over people now."

"Perhaps not. I'm not thinking of what I may be accused of, but of what happens."

"It doesn't happen with me. I was fond of you--well, we won't go back to that. And you did use it for goodness. Power came by the way and you took it. Of course."

"I thought I was using it for goodness. I thought I was good. That was the foundation of everything. We must go back, Mr. Oldmeadow. You don't see as I thought you did. You don't understand. I didn't mean to set myself up above other people. I thought they were good, too. I was happy in my goodness, and when they weren't happy it seemed to me they missed something I had and that it was a mistake that I could set right for them. I'm going back to the very beginning. Long before you ever knew me. Everything fell into my hand. I loved people, or thought I did, and if they didn't love me I thought it their mistake. That was the way it looked to me, for my whole life long, until you came. I couldn't understand at first, when you came. I couldn't see what you thought. I believed that I could make you love me, too, and when I saw, for you made it plain, that you disliked me, it seemed to me worse than mistake. I thought that you must be against goodness; dangerous; the way you pushed me back--back--and showed me always something I had not thought I meant at the bottom of everything I did. I felt that I wanted to turn away from you and to turn people who loved me away from you, lest you should infect them. And all the while, all the while I was trying to escape--the truth that you saw and that I didn't." She stopped for a moment while, sunken on his pillows, Oldmeadow stared at her. Her breath seemed to fail her, and she leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees and bent her forehead on her joined hands. "It came at last. You remember how it came," she said, and the passion of protest had fallen from her voice. She spoke with difficulty. "Partly through you, and, partly, through my failure; I had never failed before. My failure with Barney. My failure to keep him and to get him back. I couldn't believe it at first. I struggled and struggled. You saw me. Everything turned against me. It was as if the world had changed its shape and colour when I struggled against it. Everything went down. And when I felt I wasn't loved, when I felt myself going down, with all the rest, I became bad. Bad, bad," she repeated, and her voice, heavy with its slow reiteration, was like a clenched hand of penitence beating on a breast: "really bad at last, for I had not known before what I was and the truth was there, staring me in the face. I did dreadful things, then. Mean things; cruel, hateful things, shutting my eyes, stopping my ears, so that I should not see what I was doing. I ran about and crouched and hid--from myself; do you follow my meaning?--from God. And then at last, when I was stripped bare, I had to look at Him."

She raised herself and leaned back in her chair. Her voice had trembled more and more with the intensity of the feeling that upheld her and she put her handkerchief to her lips and pressed it to them, looking across at him. And, sunken on his pillows, Oldmeadow looked back at her, motionless and silent.

Was it sympathy, pity or tenderness that almost overwhelmed him as he gazed at her? He could not have said, though knowing that the unity that was in them both, the share of the eternal that upheld their lives, flowed out from his eyes into hers as he looked and from hers to his. They were near at last; near as it is rarely given to human beings to experience nearness, and the awe of such a partaking was perhaps the ground of all he felt.

"You see," he said, and a long time had passed, "I was mistaken."

She did not answer him. Perhaps she did not understand.

"I never knew you were a person who could come to the truth like that," he said.

Still holding her handkerchief to her lips, she slightly shook her head.

"Even you never thought that I was bad."

"I thought everybody was bad," said Oldmeadow, "until they came to know that goodness doesn't lie in themselves. The reason you angered me so was that you didn't see you were like the rest of us. And only people capable of great goodness can know such an agony of self-recognition."

"No," she repeated. "Everyone is not bad like me. You know that's not true. You know that some people, people you love--are not like that. They need no agony of recognition, for nothing could ever make them mean and cruel."

He thought for a moment. "That's because you expected so much more of yourself; because you'd believed so much more, and were, of course, more wrong. Your crash was so much greater because your spiritual pride was so great. And I thought you were a person a crash would do for; that there'd be nothing left of you if you came a crash. That was my mistake; for see what there is left."

She rose to her feet. His words seemed to press her too far. "You are kind," she said in a hurried voice. "I understand. You are so sorry. I've talked and talked. It's very thoughtless of me. I must go now."

She came and took the tray, but he put his hand on her arm, detaining her. "You'll own you're not bad now? You'll own there's something real for me to be fond of? Wait. I want you to acknowledge it, to accept it--my fondness. Don't try to run away."

She stood above him, holding the tray, while he kept his hold on her arm. "All I need to know," she said, after a moment, and she did not look at him, "is that no one is ever safe--unless they always remember."

"That's it, of course," said Oldmeadow gravely, "and that you must die to live; and you did die. But you live now, really, and life comes through you again. Your gift, you know, of which you were so much afraid just now, lest it had enveigled me. Don't you see it? How can I put it for you? You had a sort of wholeness before. There must be wholeness of a sort if life is to come through; harmony of a sort, and faith. It wasn't an illusion even then. When you were shattered you lost your gift. The light can't shine through shattered things; and that was when you recognized that without God we are a nothingness; a nothingness and a restlessness mingled. You know. There are no words for it, though so many people have found it and tried to say it. I know, too, after a fashion. I've had crashes, too. But now your gift has come back, for you are whole again; built up on an entirely new principle. You see, it's another you I am fond of. You must believe in her, too. You do believe in her. If you didn't you could not have found your gift."

She had stood quite still while he spoke, looking down, not at him but at the little tray between her hands, and he saw that she was near tears. Her voice was scarcely audible as she said: "Thank you." And she made an effort over herself to add: "What you say is true."

"We must talk," said Oldmeadow. He felt extraordinarily happy. "There are so many things I want to ask you about." And he went on, his hand still on her arm, seeing that she struggled not to cry and helping her to recover: "You're not going away for some time, yet, I hope. Please don't. There'll soon be no need of hospitals of this sort, anywhere, will there? and you must manage to stay on here a little longer. I shan't get on if you go. You won't leave me just as you've saved me, will you, Mrs. Barney?"

At the name, over-taxed as she was already, a pitiful colour flooded her face and before his blunder made visible his own blood answered hers, mounting hotly to his forehead. "Oh, I'm so sorry," he murmured, helpless and hating himself, while his hand dropped. She stood over him, holding herself there so as not to hurt him by the aspect of flight. She even, in a moment, forced herself to smile. It was the first smile he had seen on her face. "You've nothing to be sorry for, Mr. Oldmeadow," she said, as she had said before. "You're very kind to me. I wish I could tell you how kind I feel you are." And as she turned away, carrying the tray, she added: "No; I won't go yet."