Chapter IX

The gilt clock on the mantelpiece pointed to nine, but when he went to Adrienne's door and listened there was no sound within her room, and his heart sank as he wondered if she might not sleep on, in her fatigue, sleep past all possible hour for their colloquy. Yet he did not feel that he could go in and wake her. The analogy of the cathedral loomed before him. It would be like waking Saint Theresa.

He walked up and down the empty, glittering salon; walked and walked until the clock struck ten. Desperation nerved him then and he went again to her door and knocked.

With hardly a pause her voice answered him; yet he knew that he had awakened her and it echoed for him with the pathos of so many past scenes of emergency when it must so have answered a summons from oblivion: "Coming, coming." Among bombings, he reflected; and sudden terrible influxes of dying men from the front.

"Coming," he heard her repeat, on a note of dismay. She had sprung up, turned on her light and seen the hour.

He was reminded vividly, as he saw her enter--and it was as if a great interval of time had separated them--of his first meeting with her. She was so changed; but now as then she was more composed than anyone he had ever met.

But it was of much more than the first meeting that the pale, still face reminded him. His dreams were in it; the dream where she had come to him along the terrace, lifting her hand in the moonlight; and the dream of horror when he had again and again pushed it down to drown.

"I'm so ashamed," she said, and he saw that it was with an effort she smiled. The traces of her weeping were now, after her sleep, far more visible, ageing her, yet making her, too, look younger; like a child with swollen lids and lips. "I didn't know I was so tired. I slept and slept. I didn't stir until I heard your knock. Never mind. We'll talk till midnight."

She was very sorry for him.

She sat down at the table and under the electric chandelier her braided hair showed itself all ruffled and disarranged. She had on her dark travelling dress and she had thrust her feet into the pale blue satin _mules_. The disparity of costume in one so accurate, her air of readiness for the morrow, made him feel her transitoriness almost more than her presence, though his sense of that pressed upon him with a stifling imminence. Even though she sat there the room kept its look of desolate, glittering emptiness and more than their shared life in it he remembered the far places from which she had come and to which she was going. It was as if she had just arrived and were pausing for the night _en route_.

As he had seen them years ago, so he saw again the monster engines crossing the prairies at night and flying illumined pennons of smoke against the sky as they bore her away from blue seas, golden sands, a land where the good and gifted lurked behind every bush; and before her stretched the shining rails, miles and miles of them, running through ruin and desolation, that were to bear her ever onwards into the darkness. This was what life had brought her to. She had been only a sojourner among them at Coldbrooks. The linked life of order and family affection had cast her forth and he saw her, for ever now, unless he could rescue her, with only hotels to live in and only the chaos she was to mould, to live for. She seemed already, as she sat there under the light with her ruffled hair, to be sitting in the train that was to bear her from him.

"I think you owe me till midnight, at least," he said. He had not sat down. He stood at some little distance from her leaning, his arms folded, against a gilded and inlaid console. "We've lots of things to talk about."

"Have we?" Adrienne asked, smiling gently, but as if she humoured an extravagance. "We'll be together, certainly, even if we don't talk much. But I have some things to say, too."

She had dropped her eyes to her hands which lay, lightly crossed, on the table before her, and she seemed to reflect how best to begin. "It's about Nancy and Barney," she said. "I wanted, before we part, to talk to you a little about them. There are things that trouble me and you are the only person with whom I can keep in touch. You will know how I shall be longing to hear, everything. You'll let me know at once, won't you?"

"At once," said Oldmeadow.

"There might be delays and difficulties," Adrienne went on. "I shall be very troubled until all that is clear. And then the money. You know about the money? Barney isn't well off and he was worse off after I'd come and gone. I tried to arrange that as best I could. Palgrave understood and entered into all my feelings."

"Yes; I'd heard. You arranged it all very cleverly," said Oldmeadow.

He moved away now and, at the other end of the room, his back to her, came to a standstill, while his eyes dwelt on a large gilt-framed engraving that hung there; some former Salon triumph; a festive, spring-tide scene where young women in bustles and bonnets offered sugar to race-horses in a meadow, admired by young men in silk hats.

"Do you think this may make a difficulty?" Adrienne asked. "Make him more reluctant to take what is to come to him? It's Mrs. Chadwick's now, you know."

"You've arranged it all so well," said Oldmeadow, noting the gardenias in the young men's button-holes, "that I don't think they can get away from it."

"But will they hate it dreadfully?" she insisted, and he felt that her voice in its added urgency protested, though unconsciously, against his distance; "I seem to see that they might. If they can't take it as a sign of accepted love, won't they hate it?"

"Well," said Oldmeadow, trying to reflect, though his mind was far from Barney and Nancy, "dear Eleanor Chadwick doesn't mind taking it, whatever it's a sign of. And since it will come to Barney through her, I don't think there'll be enough personality left hanging about it to hurt much."

"I wish they could take it as a sign of accepted love," Adrienne murmured.

"Perhaps they will," he said. "I'll do my best that they shall, I promise you."

It was one thing to promise it and another to know his hope that it might be a promise never to be redeemed. The cross-currents in his own thought made him light-headed as he stood there, his back to her, and examined the glossy creatures in the meadow. "Do you think it will all take a long time?" Adrienne added, after a little pause. "Will they be able to marry in six or eight months, say?"

"It depends on how soon Barney takes action. Say about a year," he suggested. "They'd wait a little first, wouldn't they?"

"I hope not. They've waited so long already. I hope it will be as soon as possible. I shall feel so much more peaceful when I hear they're married. Could you, perhaps, make them see that, too?"

And again he promised. "I'll make them see everything I can."

He turned to her at last. She sat, her face still downcast in its shadow, while the light glittered on her wreaths of hair. Her hands still lay before her on the table, and the light fell on her wedding-ring. Perhaps she was looking at the ring.

"It all depends on something else," he heard himself say suddenly.

She turned her head and looked round at him. His attitude, his distance from her, drew her attention rather than his words, for she repeated mildly: "On something else?"

"Whether I can keep those promises, you know," said Oldmeadow. "Yes, it all depends on something else. That's what I want to talk to you about."

He hardly knew what he was saying as he approached the table and pushed the brocaded chair, companion to the one in which she sat, a little from its place. He leaned on its back and looked down at her hands and Adrienne kept her eyes on him, attentive rather than perplexed.

"May I talk to you about it now?" he asked. "It's something quite different."

"Oh, do," said Adrienne. She drew her hands into her lap and sat upright, in readiness. And, suddenly, as he was silent, she added: "About yourself? I've been forgetting that, haven't I? I've only been thinking of my side. You have quite other plans, perhaps. Perhaps you're not going back to England for ever so long. Is it an appointment?"

"No; not an appointment," he muttered, still looking down, at the table now, since her hands were no longer there. "But perhaps I shan't be going back for a long time. I hope not."

"Oh," she murmured. And now he had perplexed her. After what he had just promised her, his hope must perplex and even trouble her. "Do tell me," she said.

"It's something I want to ask you," said Oldmeadow--"And it will astonish you. You may find it hard to forgive; because I've meant to ask it from the beginning; from our deciding to go away together. As far back as the time in the hospital."

"But you may ask anything. Anything at all," she almost urged upon him. "After what I've asked you--you have every right. If there's anything I can do in the wide, wide world for you--oh! you know how glad and proud I should be. As for forgiveness"--he heard the smile in her voice, she was troubled, yet tranquil, too--"you're forgiven in advance."

"Am I? Wait and see." He, too, tried to smile, as he used the tag; but it was a mechanical smile and he felt his heart knocking against the chair-back as he went on: "Because I haven't done what you asked me to do as you asked me to do it. I haven't done it from the motive you supposed. It's been for Barney and for Nancy and for you; but it's been most of all for myself." He screwed his glass into his eye as he spoke with a gesture as mechanical as the smile had been and he looked at her at last, thus brought nearer. "I want you not to go on to-morrow." It was the first, the evident, the most palpable desire that rose to his lips. "I want you never to go on again, alone. If you can't stay with me, I want you to let me follow you. When the time comes I want you to marry me. I love you."

The light as it fell on her seemed suddenly strange, almost portentous in its brilliancy. Or was it her stillness, as she sat and gazed at him after he had spoken the words, that was strange and portentous? It was as if they arrested the currents of her being and she sat tranced, frozen into the fixed shape of an astonishment too deep for emotion. Her eyes did not alter in their gentleness; but the gentleness became tragic and pitiful, like the inappropriate calm on the mask of a dead face at Pompeii, fixed in an eternal unreadiness by the engulfing lava.

She put up her hand at last and pushed back her hair. With her forehead bared she became more like the photograph of her father. When she spoke her voice was slow and feeble, like the voice of a person dangerously ill. "I don't understand you."

"Try to," said Oldmeadow. "You must begin far back."

She still kept her hand pressed upon her hair. "You don't mean that it's the conventionally honourable thing to do? Oh, no; you don't mean that?" Her face in its effort to understand was appalled.

"No; I don't mean anything conventional," he returned. "I'm thinking only of you. Of my love. I'll come with you to Serbia to-morrow--if you'll let me. I could kneel and worship you as you sit there."

"Oh," she more feebly murmured. She sank back in her chair.

"My darling, my saint," said Oldmeadow, gazing at her; "if you must leave me, you'll take that with you; that the man who destroyed you is your lover; that you are dearer to him than anything on earth."

"Oh," she murmured again, and she put her hands before her face. Her eyes were hidden; she had spoken no word of reproach and he could not keep himself from her. He knelt beside her, grasping the chair across, behind her. She was so near that he could have laid his head upon her breast. "Don't leave me," he heard his pleading voice, but she seemed so much nearer than his own voice; "or let me come. Everything shall be as you wish and when you wish. Tell me that you care, too; or that you can come to care. Tell me that you can think of me as your husband."

She was there, with her hidden eyes, within his arms, and inevitably they closed around her, and though he heard her murmur, "Please, please, please," he could not relinquish her. She was free and he was free. They had cut themselves off from the world. They were alone in the strange city; in the strange, bright, hallucinated room; and he knew from the ache and rapture of her nearness how he had craved it.

But, gently, he heard her say again, "Please," and gently she put him from her and he saw her face, and her eyes full of grief and gentleness. "Forgive me," she said.

"My darling. For what?" he almost groaned. "Don't say you're going to break my heart."

She kept her hand on his breast, holding him from her while she looked into his eyes. "It is so beautiful to be loved," she said, and her voice was still the slow, feeble voice of exhaustion. "Even when one has no right to be. Don't misunderstand. Even when one may not love back; not in that way. Forgive me; not in that way; my dearest friend."

"Why mayn't you love back? Why not in that way? If it's beautiful, why mayn't you?"

"Sit there, will you? Yes; keep my hand. How weak I've been, and cruel. It can't be. Don't you know? Haven't you seen? It has always been for him. He must be free; but I can never be free."

"Oh, no. No. That's impossible," Oldmeadow said, leaning towards her across the table and keeping her hand in both of his. "I can't stand that. I could stand your work, your vocation, better. But not Barney, who loves another woman. That's impossible."

"But it is so," she said, softly, looking at him. "Really it is so."

"No, no," Oldmeadow repeated, and he raised her hand to his lips and kept it there, a talisman against the menace of her words. "He lost you. He's gone. I've found you and you care for me. You can't hide from me that you care for me. Just now. For those moments. You were mine."

"No," she repeated. "I was weak and cruel, but I was not yours."

She had been incredibly near so short a time ago before. Now, looking at him, with her difficult breaths and gentle, inflexible eyes, she was incredibly remote. "I am his, only his," she said. "I love him and I shall always love him. It makes no difference. He loves Nancy, but it makes no difference. He is my husband. The father of my baby."

She tried to speak on steadily while she thus gave him the truth that ended all his hope; but the desperate emotion with which he received it made real and overpowering to her her outlived yet living sorrow. With all that she must relinquish laid bare to her in the passion of his eyes she could measure all that she had lost, as she had, perhaps, till then, never measured it. "Don't you know?" she said. "Don't you see? My heart is broken, broken, broken."

She put her head down on her arms as she said the words and he heard her bitter weeping.

He knew, as he listened, that it was all over with him. Dimly, in the terrible suffering that wrenched at him, he received his further revelation of the nature already nearer him than any in the world. Her strength would be in all she did and felt. She had loved Barney and she would always love him. Her marriage had been to her an ultimate and indissoluble experience. That was why she had been so blind. She could not have thought of herself as a woman to be again loved and wooed.

Her hair lay against his hands, still holding hers, and he found himself stroking it, without tenderness or solicitude it seemed. It seemed to be only automatically that his fingers passed across it, while he noted its warmth and fineness and bright, lovely colour, remembering that he had thought it at the first her one indubitable beauty.

They sat there thus for a long time. The gilt clock paused, choked, then in a voice of hurrying, hoarsened silver rang out eleven strokes. Footsteps passed and faded up the corridor; doors closed. A tramway on the quai clashed and clanged, came to a noisy standstill, and moved on again with a rattling of cables and raucous blasts from a horn; and in the profound silence that followed he seemed to hear the deep old river flowing.

"Really, you see, it's broken," said Adrienne. She had ceased to weep, but she still leaned forward, her head upon her folded arms. "You saw it happen," she said. "That night when you found me in the rain."

"I've seen everything happen to you, haven't I?" said Oldmeadow.

"Yes," she assented. "Everything. And I've made you suffer, too. Isn't that strange; everybody who comes near me I make suffer."

"Well, in different ways," he said. "Some because you are near and others because you won't be."

His voice was colourless. His hand still passed across her hair.

"Don't you see," she said, after a moment, "that it couldn't have been. Try to see that and to accept it. Not you and me. Not Barney's friend and Barney's wife. In every way it couldn't have done, really. It makes no difference for me. I'm a _déracinée_, as I said. A wanderer. But what would have become of you, all full of roots as you are? You can live it down without me. You never could have with. And how could you have wandered with me? For that must be my life."

"You know, it's no good trying to comfort me," said Oldmeadow. "What I feel is that any roots I have are in you."

"They will grow again. The others will grow again."

"I don't want others, darling," said Oldmeadow. "You see, my heart is broken, too."

She lifted her head at last and he saw her marred and ravaged face.

"It can't be helped," he tried to smile at her. "You weren't there to be recognized when I first met you and now that you are there, I've come too late. I believe that if I'd come before Barney, you'd have loved me. It's my only comfort."

"Who can say," said Adrienne. Her gaze, as she looked at him, was deep with the mystery of her acceptance. "Perhaps. It seems to me all this was needed to bring us where we are--enmity and bitterness and grief. And my love for Barney, too. Let me tell you. It's in the past that I think of him. As if he were dead. It's something over; done with for ever; yet something always there. How can one be a mother and forget? Even when he is Nancy's husband and when she is a mother, I shall not cease to feel myself his wife. Perhaps you think that strange, after Meg and what I believed right for her. But it is quite clear to me, and simple. It isn't a thing of laws and commandments; only of our own hearts. If we can love again, we may. But for me it would be impossible. With me everything was involved. I couldn't, ever, be twice a wife."

Silence fell between them.

"I'll see about the little girl's grave," said Oldmeadow suddenly. He did not know what had made him think of it. Perhaps something that had gone on echoing in him after she had spoken of her maternity. "I'll go to Evian to-morrow. It will spare Joséphine the journey and give me something to do. You'll tell me the name and give me the directions before you go."

Tears filled her eyes as she looked at him; but they did not fall. They could need no controlling. The springs of weeping must be nearly drained. "Thank you," she said, and she looked away, seeming to think intently.

It was now too late for the tramways. They had ceased to crash and rattle by, but a sound of belated singing passed along the quais, melancholy in its induced and extravagant mirth.

The horrible sense of human suffering that had beaten in upon him at the hospital, pressed again upon his heart. He saw himself departing next day to find the abandoned grave and he saw himself standing beside her train and measuring along the shining rails the vast distances that were to bear her away for ever.

"That's the worst," he said. "You're suffering too. I must see you go away and know that you are unhappy. I must think of you as unhappy. With a broken heart."

Her eyes, after she had thanked him, had been fixed in the intent reverie. She, too, perhaps, had been seeing those tides of misery, the sea of which she had spoken, breaking in tragic waves for ever; so unchanged by all the alleviations that love or mercy could bring; and it was perhaps with despair that she saw herself as one with it. Her eyes as she turned them on him were full of distance and of depth and, with sickening grief, he felt that a woman with a broken heart could do nothing more for herself or for him.

But her thought, whatever the voids of darkness it had visited, drew nearer and nearer to his need as she looked at him. Something of her own strong vigilance was in the look, bringing the seagull to his mind. The seagull caught and battered by the waves, with sodden wings, half dragged down, yet summoning its strength to rise from the submerging sea.

"But you can be happy with a broken heart," she said. Their hands had fallen apart long since. She stretched out hers now and took his in her small, firm grasp.

"Can you?" he asked.

"You mustn't think of me like this," she said, and it was as if she read his thoughts and their imagery. "I went down, I know; like drowning. Sometimes the waves break over you and pull you down, and there seems nothing else in all the world but yourself and what you've suffered. But it doesn't last. Something brings you up again."

Something had brought her up again now. His darkness. His misery. It was as if he saw her spread her wings and saw her eyes measuring, for them both, the spaces of sea and sky.

He remembered a picture in a book he had loved as a little boy: little Diamond held to the breast of the North Wind as she flies forth in her streaming hair against a sky of stars. So he felt himself lying on her breast and lifted with her.

"I've told you how happy I can be. It's all true," she said. "It's all there. The light, the peace, the strength. I shall find them. And so will you."

"Shall I?" he questioned gently. "Without you?"

"Yes. Without me. You will find them. But you won't be without me," said Adrienne.

Already she was finding them. He knew that, for, as she looked at him, he felt an influence passing from her to him like the laying of her hand upon his brow. But it was closer than that. It was to her breast that her eyes held him while, in a long silence, the compulsion of her faith flowed into him. First quietness; then peace; then a lifting radiance.

"Promise me," he heard her say.

He did not know what it was he must promise, but he seemed to feel it all without knowing and he said: "I promise."

She rose and stood above him. "You mustn't regret. You mustn't want."

She laid her hands upon his shoulders as she spoke and looked down at him, so austere, so radiant. "Anything else would have spoiled it. We were only meant to find each other like this and then to part."

"I'll be good," said Oldmeadow. It was like saying one's prayers at one's mother's knees and his lips found the child-like formula.

"We must part," said Adrienne. "I have my life and you have yours and they take different ways. But you won't be without me, I won't be without you. How can we be, when we will never, never forget each other and our love?"

He looked up at her. He had put out his hands and they grasped her dress as a donor in a votive altarpiece grasps the Madonna's healing garment. It was not, he knew, to keep her. It was rather in an accepting relinquishment that he held her thus for their last communion, receiving through touch and sight and hearing her final benison.

"I will think of you every day, until I die," she said. "I will pray for you every day. Dear friend--dearest friend--God bless and keep you."

She had stooped to him and for a transcending moment he was taken into her strong, life-giving embrace. The climax of his life was come as he felt her arms close round him and her kiss upon his forehead. And as she held him thus he believed all that she had said and all for which she could have found no words. That he should find the light and more and more feel their unity in it: that the thought of her would be strength to him always; as the thought of him and of his love would be strength to her.

After she had gone, he sat for a long time bathed in the sense of her life, and tasting, for that span of time, her own security of eternal goodness.

THE END

Typographical error was corrected by the etext transcriber:

"Adriennes mustn't fail," said Mrs. Averil dryly. "The only justification for Adriennes is to be in the right. => "Adrienne mustn't fail," said Mrs. Averil dryly. "The only justification for Adrienne is to be in the right. {pg 241}