Chapter VIII

He sat, for the first time, next Miss Toner that night at dinner and Nancy sat across from them next Barney. Nancy was pale, and now that he could scrutinize her he imagined that the walk had been more of an ordeal than a pleasure. Barney, no doubt, with the merciless blindness of his state, had talked to her all the time of Adrienne. But Nancy would not have minded that. She was of the type that hides its cut for ever and may become aunt and guardian-angel to the other woman's children. It had not been Barney's preoccupation that had so drained her of warmth and colour, but its character, its object. Her grey eyes had the considering look with which they might have measured the height of a difficult hedge in hunting, and, resting on Oldmeadow once or twice, seemed to tell him that the walk had shown her more clearly than ever that, if Barney married Miss Toner, they must lose him. He felt sure that she had lain down since tea with a headache to which had come no ministering angel.

She and Barney did not talk to each other now, for he had eyes and ears only for Miss Toner. At any former time they would have kept up the happiest interchange, and Oldmeadow would have seen Nancy's eyelashes close together as she smiled her loving smile. There was a dim family likeness between her face and Barney's, for both were long and narrow, and both had the singular sweetness in the very structure of the smile. But where Barney was clumsy, Nancy was clear, and her skin was as fair as his was brown. To the fond onlooker at both, they were destined mates and only an insufferable accident had parted them.

Nancy was as much a part of the Coldbrooks country as the primroses and the blackcaps in the woods. Her life had risen from the familiar soil to the familiar sky, as preordained to fitness, as ordered by instinct and condition as theirs, and from her security of type she had gained not lost in savour. The time that unfinished types must give to growing conscious roots and building conscious nests, Nancy had all free for spontaneities of flight and song. Beside her, to his hostile eye, Miss Toner was as a wide-spread water-weed, floating, rootless and scentless, upon chance currents: A creature of surfaces, of caprice and hazard. If the multiplicity of her information constituted mental wealth, its impersonality constituted mental poverty. She was as well furnished and as deadening as a catalogue, and as he listened to her, receiving an impression of continual, considered movings-on, earnest pursuits, across half the globe, of further experience, he saw her small, questing figure on a background of railways, giant lines stretching forth across plain and mountain, climbing, tunnelling, curving; stopping at great capitals, and passing on again to glitter on their endless way under the sun and moon. That was what he seemed to see as Miss Toner talked: and sleeping-berths and wardrobe-boxes and luxurious suites in vast hotels.

She wore again her white dress, contrasting in its richness of texture with the simplicity of her daytime blue, and, rather stupidly, an artificial white rose had been placed, in her braids, over each ear. Her pearls were her only other ornament, and her pearls, he supposed, were surprising.

Oldmeadow was aware, in his close proximity to her, while she ate beside him with a meticulous nicety that made the manners of the rest of them, by contrast, seem a little casual and slovenly, of the discomfort that had visited him in his dream. Yet the feeling she evoked was not all discomfort. It was as if from her mere physical presence he were subjected to some force that had in its compulsion a dim, conjectural charm. It was for this reason no doubt that he seemed to be aware of everything about her. Her hands were small and white, but had no beauty of form or gesture. She moved them slowly and without grace, rather like a young child handling unfamiliar objects in a kindergarten, and this in spite of the singular perfection of her table manners. She could have made little use of them, ever, in games of skill or in any art requiring swift accuracy and firmness. It was as if her mind, overtrained in receptivity and retentiveness, had only dull tentacles to spare for her finger-tips. He was aware of these hands beside him all through dinner and their fumbling deliberation brought to him, again and again, a mingled annoyance, and satisfaction. There was something positive and characteristic about her scentlessness, for if she smelt of anything it was of Fuller's Earth--a funny, chalky smell--and beside Meg, who foolishly washed liquid powder over her silvery skin, Miss Toner's colourlessness was sallow. She had hardly talked at all the night before, but to-night she talked continuously. It was Meg who questioned her, and Mrs. Chadwick, and Oldmeadow guessed that his ingenuous friend, still perplexed by his use of the word foolish, was drawing out and displaying her future daughter-in-law for his benefit.

Miss Toner and her mother had been to Russia, to India, to China and Japan. They had visited Stevenson's grave at Vailima and in describing it she quoted "Under the wide and starry sky." They had studied every temple in Greece and Sicily and talked of the higher education with ladies in Turkish harems. "But it was always Paris we came back to," she said, "when we were not at home. Home was, and is, a great many places: California and Chicago--where my father's people live, and New England. But Paris was, after it, closest to our hearts. Yes, we knew a great many French people; but it was for study rather than friendship we went there. It is such a treasure-house of culture. Mother worked very hard at French diction for several winters. She had lessons from Mademoiselle Jouffert--you know perhaps--though she has not acted for so many years now. Our friendship with her was a great privilege, for she was a rare and noble woman and had a glorious gift. Phèdre was her favourite rôle and I shall never forget her rendering of it:

Ariane ma soeur! de quel amour blessée
Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée!

She taught Mother to recite Phèdre's great speeches with such fire and passion. There could hardly be a better training for French," said Miss Toner, repeating the lines with a curious placidity and perfection. "I preferred Mademoiselle Jouffert's rendering to Bernhardt's. Her Phèdre was, with all the fire, more tender and womanly."

"Do you care about Racine?" Oldmeadow asked her, while the lines rang in his ears--rather as in his dream the rooks' cawing had done--with an evocative sadness that hung, irrelevantly, about their speaker. "It's not easy for our English ears to hear the fire and passion, is it; but they are there."

"He is very perfect and accomplished," said Miss Toner. "But I always feel him small beside our Shakespeare. He lacks heart, doesn't he?"

"There's heart in those lines you've just recited."

"Yes," said Miss Toner. "Those lines are certainly very beautiful. It's the mere music of them, I think. They make me feel--" she paused. It was unlike her to pause and he wondered what she made of Ariane, off her own bat, without Mademoiselle Jouffert to help her.

"They make you feel?" he questioned.

"They are so sad--so terribly melancholy. The sound of them. They make me want to cry when I hear them. But I think it's the sound; for their meaning makes me indignant. There is such weakness in them; such acceptance of destiny. I want to revolt and protest, too--for women. She should not have died."

Oldmeadow involuntarily glanced across at Nancy. She was looking at Miss Toner and if she had been pale before, she was paler now. Nancy would never think of herself in connection with Ariane and tragic grief; yet something in the lines, something in Miss Toner's disavowal of their applicability, had touched the hidden cut. And, once again, it was Meg's eyes that met his, showing him that what he saw she saw, too. Barney saw nothing. All his solicitude was for Miss Toner in her imaginary plight. "I'm sure you never would!" he exclaimed. "Never die, I mean!"

"You think Miss Toner would have come to terms with Bacchus," Oldmeadow suggested. He didn't want to take it out of Barney, though he was vexed with him, nor to take it out of Miss Toner, either. He only wanted to toss and twist the theme and make it gay where Miss Toner made it solemn.

"Come to terms with Bacchus!" Barney quite stared, taken aback by the irreverence. "Why should she! She'd have found somebody more worth while than either of the ruffians."

Miss Toner smiled over at him.

"I'm sure that if Bacchus had been fortunate enough to meet Miss Toner she'd have converted him to total abstinence in a jiffy and made a model husband of him. He was a fine, exhilarating fellow; no ruffian at all; quite worth reforming." Oldmeadow, as he thus embroidered his theme, was indulging in his own peculiar form of mirth.

He saw Miss Toner laying her hand on the head of Bacchus; Miss Toner very picturesque on the rugged sea-shore in her white and pearls and roses, and Bacchus dazed and penitent, his very leopards tamed to a cat-like docility. His laugh was visible rather than audible and that Miss Toner had never before been the subject of such mirth was evident to him.

She met whatever she saw or guessed of irreverence, however, as composedly as she would have met Bacchus; perhaps already, he reflected, she was beginning to think of him in the light of an undesirable wine-bibber. Perhaps even, she was beginning to think of him as a ruffian. He didn't mind in the least, so long as he succeeded in keeping off her solemnity.

"I should have been quite willing to try and reform him," she said; "though it takes much longer than a jiffy to reform people, Mr. Oldmeadow; but I shouldn't have been willing to marry him. There are other things in life, aren't there, than love-stories--even for women."

"Bravo!" said Oldmeadow. He felt as well as uttered it. She wasn't being solemn, and she had returned his shuttlecock smartly. "But are there?" he went on. He had adjusted his eyeglass for a clearer confrontation of her.

Miss Toner's large eyes, enlarged still further by the glass, met his, not solemnly, but with a considering gravity.

"You are a sceptic, Mr. Oldmeadow," she observed. "A satirist. Do you find that satire and scepticism take you very far in reading human hearts?"

"There's one for you, Roger!" cried Barney.

Oldmeadow kept his gaze fixed on Miss Toner. "You think that Ariane might prefer Infant Welfare work or Charity Organization to a love-story?"

"Not those necessarily." She returned his gaze. "Though I have known very fine big people who did prefer them. But they are not the only alternatives to love-stories."

"I am sceptical," said Oldmeadow. "I am, if you like, satirical. I don't believe there are any alternatives to love-stories; only palliatives to disappointment."

Barney leaned forward: "Adrienne, you see, doesn't accept that old-fashioned, sentimentalizing division of the sexes. She doesn't accept the merely love-story, hearth-side rôle for women."

"Oh, well," Oldmeadow played with his fork, smiling with the wryness that accompanied his reluctant sincerities, "I don't divide the sexes as far as love-stories are concerned. We are all in the same boat. For us, too, Barney, it's love-story or palliative. You don't agree? If you were disappointed in love? Hunting? Farming? Politics? Post-Impressionism? Would any of them fill the gap?"

It wasn't at all the line he had intended the talk to take. He knew that as he glanced across at Nancy. Saying nothing, as if its subject could not concern her, and with a dim little smile, she listened, and he knew that for her, though she wouldn't die of it, there would be only palliatives. If only Barney, confound him, hadn't been so charming.

Barney did not know how to answer the last assault, and, boyishly, looked across at his beloved for succour. She gave it instantly.

"Sadness, sorrow, tragedy, even, isn't despair," she said. "Barney, I believe, if sorrow overtook him, would mould the rough clay of his occupation to some higher beauty than the beauty he'd lost. To lie down and die; to resign oneself to palliatives. Oh, no. That's not the destiny of the human soul."

"Roger's pulling your leg, Barney, as usual," Palgrave put in scornfully. He had been listening with his elbows on the table, his eyes on the table-cloth. "He knows as well as I do that there's only one love. The sort you're all talking about--the Theseus and Ariane affair--is merely an ebullition of youth and as soon as nature has perpetuated the species by means of it, it settles down, if there's any reality under the ebullition, to grow into the other--the divine love; the love of the soul for the Good, the True and the Beautiful," Palgrave declared, growing very red as he said it.

"Really--my dear child!" Mrs. Chadwick murmured. She had never heard such themes broached at her table and glanced nervously up at old Johnson to see if he had followed. "That is a very, very materialistic view!"

Oldmeadow at this began to laugh, audibly as well as visibly, and Palgrave, as their eyes met in a glance of communicated comedy, could not withhold an answering smile. But Barney's face showed that he preferred to see Palgrave's interpretation as materialistic and even Miss Toner looked thoughtfully at her champion.

"But we need the symbol of youth and nature," she suggested. "The divine love, yes, Palgrave, is the only real one; but then all love is divine and human love sometimes brings the deepest revelation of all. Browning saw that so wonderfully."

"Browning, my dear!" Palgrave returned with a curious mingling of devotion, intimacy and aloofness, "Browning never got nearer God than a woman's breast!"

At this, almost desperately, Mrs. Chadwick broke in: "Did you ever see our Ellen Terry act, Adrienne? I liked her much better than Madame Bernhardt who had such a very artificial face, I think. I can't imagine her as Rosalind, can you? While Miss Terry was a perfect Rosalind. I met her once with Henry Irving at a garden-party in London and she was as charming off as on the stage and I'm sure I can't see why anybody should wish to act Phèdre--poor, uncontrolled creature. Rhubarb-tart, dear, and custard? or wine-jelly and cream? How beautifully you speak French. How many languages do you speak?" Mrs. Chadwick earnestly inquired, still turning the helm firmly away from the unbecoming topic.

Miss Toner kept her head very creditably and, very tactfully, at once accepted her hostess's hint. "Rhubarb-tart, please, dear Mrs. Chadwick. Not so very many, really. My German has never been good; though French and Italian I do know well, and enough Spanish for Don Quixote. But," she went on, while Mrs. Chadwick looked gratefully at her, "Mother and I were always working. We never wasted any of our precious hours together. She couldn't bear the thought of _missing_ anything in life; and she missed very little, I think. Music, poetry, painting--all the treasure-houses of the human spirit--were open to her. And what she won and made her own, she gave out again with greater radiance. How I wish you could all have known her!" said Miss Toner, looking round at them with an unaccustomed touch of wistfulness. "She was radiance personified. She never let unhappiness _rest_ on her. I remember once, when she had had a cruel blow from a person she loved and trusted--in the middle of her sadness she looked at me and saw how sad she was making me; and she sprang up and seized my hands and cried: 'Let's dance! Let's dance and dance and dance!' And we did, up and down the terrace--it was at San Remo--she in her white dress, with the blue sky and sea and the orange-trees all in bloom. I can see her now. And then she rushed to get music, her harp, and flowers and fruit, to take to an invalid friend, and we spent the afternoon with her, mother surpassing herself in charm and witchery. She was always like that. She would have found something, oh, very beautiful, to make from her sorrow if Theseus had abandoned her! But no one," said Miss Toner, looking round at Oldmeadow, now with a mild playfulness, "could ever have abandoned Mother."

There was something to Oldmeadow appealing in her playfulness; her confidence, when it took on this final grace, was really touching. For Mrs. Toner the light-giver he knew that he had conceived a rooted aversion. And he wondered if she would go on, over the rhubarb-tart, to tell, after the dancing on the terrace, of the death at sea. But he was spared that.

"And your father died when you were very young, didn't he, dear?" said Mrs. Chadwick, fearful of the reference to Theseus. "I think your mother must often have been so very lonely; away from home for such a great part of the time and with so few relatives."

Miss Toner shook her head. "We were always together, she and I, so we could never, either of us, be lonely. And wherever we went she made friends. People were always so much more than mere people to her. She saw them always, at once, high and low, prince and peasant, as souls, and they felt it always, and opened to her. Then, until I was quite big, we had my lovely grandmother. Mother came from Maine and it was such a joy to go and stay there with Grandma. It was a very simple little home. It was always high thinking and plain living, with Grandma; and though, when she married and became rich, Mother showered beautiful things upon her, Grandma stayed always in the little house, doing for her poor neighbours, as she had always done, and dusting her parlour--a real New England parlour--and making her own griddle cakes--such wonderful cakes she made! I was fifteen when she died; but the tie was so close and spiritual that she did not seem gone away from us."