Adrienne Toner. Anne Douglas Sedgwick
in leaf-mould.”
Her eyes, as they rested on her hostess, seemed to impart more than her words. They imparted something to Oldmeadow. He had not before conjectured that Eleanor Chadwick might be bored or tired, nor realized that since Barbara’s birth, fourteen years ago, she had not left Coldbrooks except to go to London for a week’s shopping, or to stay with friends in the English country. He had taken Eleanor Chadwick’s life for granted. It seemed Miss Toner’s function not to take things that could be changed for granted. It was easy to do that of course, when you had a large banking account behind you; and yet he felt that Miss Toner would have had the faculty of altering accepted standards, even had she been materially unequipped. She and Mrs. Chadwick continued to look at each other for a moment and the older woman, half bashfully, seemed, with what softness, compelled to a tacit confession. She’d never known before that she was tired. Springs of adventure and girlishness within her were perhaps unsealed by Miss Toner’s gaze.
“And where do the rest of us come in!” Barney ejaculated. He was so happy in the triumph of his beloved that his eyes, their sleepiness banished, were almost as brilliant as Palgrave’s.
“But you’re always coming in with Mrs. Chadwick,” said Miss Toner. She looked at him, if with a touch of tender humour, exactly as she looked at his mother; but then she looked at them both as if they were precious to her. “I don’t want you to come in at all for that month. I want her to forget you ever existed. There ought to be waters of Lethe for everyone every now and then, even in this life. We come out, after the plunge into forgetfulness, far brighter and stronger and with a renovated self to love the better with. Afterwards—after she’s had her dip—you’ll all come in, if you want to, with me. I’ll get a car big enough. You, too, Miss Averil; and Mr. Oldmeadow; though he and Barney and Palgrave may have to take turns sitting on the portmanteaus.”
“Barney” and “Palgrave” already. Her unpretentious mastery alarmed almost as much as it amused him. He thanked her, with his dry smile, saying that he really preferred to see the Alps on his legs and asked, to temper the possible acerbity, “Do you drive yourself?” for it seemed in keeping with his picture of her as an invading providence that she should with her own hand conduct the car of fate. He could see her, somehow, taking the hairpin curves on the Galibier.
But Miss Toner said she did not drive. “One can’t see flowers if one drives oneself; and it would hurt dear Macfarlane’s feelings so. Macfarlane is my chauffeur and he’s been with me for years; from the time we first began to have motors, my mother and I, out in California. Apart from that, I should like it, I think, with the sense of risk and venture it must give. I like the sense of high adventure—of ‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came’; don’t you, Palgrave? It’s life, isn’t it? The pulse of life. Danger and venture and conquest. And then resting, on the heights, while one hears the bells beneath one.”
This, thought Oldmeadow, as he adjusted his glass the better to examine Miss Toner, must prove itself too much, even for Palgrave to swallow. But Palgrave swallowed it without a tremor. His eyes on hers he answered: “Yes, I feel life like that, too.”
“Oh, dear!” sighed Mrs. Chadwick, and Oldmeadow blessed her antidote to the suffocating sweetness: “I’m afraid I don’t! I don’t think I know anything about risks and dangers; or about conquest either. I’m sure I’ve never conquered anything; though I have been dreadfully afraid of ill-tempered servants—if that counts, and never let them see it. Barbara had such an odious nurse. She tried, simply, to keep me out of the nursery; but she didn’t succeed. And there was a Scotch cook once, with red hair—that so often goes with a bad temper, doesn’t it? Do you remember, Barney?—your dear father had to go down to the kitchen when she was found lying quite, quite drunk under the table. But cooks and nurses can’t be called risks—and I’ve never cared for hunting.”
Miss Toner was quietly laughing, and indeed everybody laughed.
“Dear Mrs. Chadwick,” she said. And then she added: “How can a mother say she has not known risks and dangers? I think you’ve thought only of other people for all your life and never seen yourself at all. Alpine passes aren’t needed to prove people’s courage and endurance.”
Oldmeadow now saw, from the sudden alarm and perplexity of Mrs. Chadwick’s expression, that she was wondering if the marvellous guest alluded to the perils of child-birth. Perhaps she did. She was ready, he imagined, to allude to anything.
“You’re right about her never having seen herself,” said Palgrave, nodding across at Miss Toner. “She never has. She’s incapable of self-analysis.”
“But she’s precious sharp when it comes to analysing other people, aren’t you, Mummy dear!” said Barney.
“I don’t think she is,” said Meg. “I think Mummy sees people rather as she sees flowers; things to be fed and staked and protected.”
“You’re always crabbing Mummy, Meg. It’s a shame!—Isn’t it a shame, Mummy dear!” Barbara protested, and Barney tempered the apparent criticism—peacemaker as he usually was—with: “But you have to understand flowers jolly well to make them grow. And we do her credit, don’t we!”
Miss Toner looked from one to the other as they spoke, with her clear, benignant, comprehending gaze, and Mrs. Chadwick stared with her March Hare ingenuousness that had its full share, too, of March Hare shrewdness. She undertook no self-justification, commenting merely, in the pause that followed Barney’s contribution: “I don’t know what you mean by self-analysis unless it’s thinking about yourself and mothers certainly haven’t much time for that. You’re quite right there, my dear,” she nodded at Miss Toner, adding in a tone intended specially for her: “But young people often exaggerate things that are quite, quite simple when they come.”
CHAPTER IV
“COME out and have a stroll,” said Oldmeadow to Nancy. Tea was over and a primrose-coloured sunset filled the sky. They walked up and down the gravelled terrace before the house.
Coldbrooks stood high, yet encircled by still higher stretches of bare or wooded upland. Its walled garden, where vegetable beds and lines of cordon apple-trees were pleasingly diversified by the herbaceous borders that ran beneath the walls, lay behind it; most of the bedroom windows looked down into the garden. Before it, to the south, lawns and meadows dropped to a lake fed by the brooks that gave the place its name. Beyond the lake were lower copses, tinkling now with the musical run of water and climbing softly on either side, so that from the terrace one had a vast curved space of sky before one. The sun was setting over the woods.
It was Barney’s grandfather, enriched by large shipping enterprises in Liverpool, who had bought the pleasant old house, half farm, half manor, and Barney’s father had married the daughter of a local squire. But the family fortunes were much dwindled, and though Barney still nursed the project of returning one day to farm his own land there was little prospect of such a happy restoration. In spite of the Russian ballet and London portents, he was fonder, far, of Coldbrooks than of all of them put together. But he could afford neither time nor money for hunting, and his home was his only for week-ends and holidays. It was the most loveable of homes, more stately without than within, built of grey-gold Cotswold stone with beautiful stone chimneys and mullioned windows and three gables facing the southern sky. Within, everything was rather bare and shabby. There was no central heating, and no bathrooms. The tiger-skin that lay on the stone flags of the hall had lost all its hair. The piano rattled and wheezed in many of its notes. The patterns of the drawing-room chintzes were faded to a mere dim rosy riot, and stuffing protruded from the angles of the leather arm-chairs in the smoking-room. But it was, all the same, a delightful house to stay in. Eleanor Chadwick’s shrewdness showed itself in her housekeeping. She knew what were the essentials. There was always a blazing fire in one’s bedroom in the evening and the hottest of water with one’s bath in the morning. Under the faded chintz, every chair in the drawing-room was comfortable.