Adrienne Toner. Anne Douglas Sedgwick
remember my American friend. She didn’t know her, but had seen her years ago in New York in that romantic costume.”
Mrs. Chadwick felt perhaps the slight irony in his voice, for she rejoined, though not at all provocatively: “Why shouldn’t people look romantic if they can? I should think Mrs. Toner had a much more romantic life than Mrs. Aldesey. She’s gone on just as we have, hasn’t she, seeing always the same people; and being conventional. Whereas Adrienne and her mother seem to have known everyone strange and interesting wherever they went; great scientists and thinkers, you know; and poets and pianists. Adrienne told me that her mother always seemed to her to have great wings and that’s just what I felt about her when I looked at her. She’d flown everywhere.” As she spoke Miss Toner appeared upon the doorstep.
Although it was Sunday she had not varied her dress, which was still the simple dress of dim, dark-blue; but over it she wore a silk jacket, and a straw hat trimmed with a lighter shade of blue was tied, in summer-like fashion, beneath her chin. She carried a sunshade and a small basket filled with letters.
Mrs. Chadwick, both hands outstretched, went to meet her. Oldmeadow had never before seen her kiss an acquaintance of two days’ standing. “I do hope you slept well, my dear,” she said.
“Very well,” said Miss Toner, including Oldmeadow in her smile. “Except for a little while when I woke up and lay awake and couldn’t get the cawing of your rooks out of my mind. I seemed to hear them going on and on.”
“Oh, dear! How unfortunate! But surely they weren’t cawing in the night!” cried Mrs. Chadwick, and Miss Toner, laughing and holding her still by the hands, turned to tell Barney, who closely followed her, that his mother was really afraid, because she had thought of rooks in the night, that their Coldbrooks birds had actually been inhospitable enough to keep her awake with their cawings. Meg and Barbara and Nancy had all now emerged and there was much laughter and explanation.
“You see, Mummy thinks you might work miracles—even among the rooks,” said Barney, while Oldmeadow testily meditated on his own discomfort. It might have been mere coincidence, or it might—he must admit it—have been Miss Toner’s thoughts travelling into his dream or his dream troubling her thoughts; of the two last alternatives he didn’t know which he disliked the more.
“It’s time to get ready for church, children,” said Mrs. Chadwick, when, after much merriment at her expense, the rooks and their occult misdemeanours were disposed of. “Where is Palgrave? I do hope he won’t miss again. It does so hurt dear Mr. Bodman’s feelings. Are you coming with us, my dear?” she asked Miss Toner.
Miss Toner, smiling upon them all, her sunshade open on her shoulder, said that if they did not mind she did not think she would come. “I only go to church when friends get married or their babies christened,” she said, “or something of that sort. I was never brought up to it, you see. Mother never went.”
Mrs. Chadwick’s March Hare eyes dwelt on her. “You aren’t a Churchwoman?”
“Oh, dear, no!” said Miss Toner, and the very suggestion seemed to amuse her.
Mrs. Chadwick hesitated: “A Dissenter?” she ventured. “There are so many sects in America I’ve heard. Though I met a very charming American bishop once.”
“No—not a Dissenter; if you mean by that a Presbyterian or a Methodist or a Swedenborgian,” said Miss Toner, shaking her head.
Palgrave had now joined them and stood on the step above her. She smiled round and up at him.
Mrs. Chadwick, her distress alleviated yet her perplexity deepened, ventured further: “You are a Christian, I hope, dear?”
“Oh, not at all,” said Miss Toner gravely now and very kindly. “Not in any orthodox way, I mean. Not in any way that an American bishop or your Mr. Bodman would acknowledge. I recognize Christ as a great teacher, as a great human soul; one of the very greatest; gone on before. But I don’t divide the human from the divine in the way the churches do; creeds mean nothing to me, and I’d rather say my prayers out of doors on a day like this, in the sunlight, than in any church. I feel nearer God alone in His great world, than in any church built with human hands. But we must all follow our own light.” She spoke in her flat, soft voice, gravely but very simply; and she looked affectionately at her hostess as she added: “You wouldn’t want me to come with you from mere conformity.”
Poor Mrs. Chadwick, standing, her brood about her, in the sweet Sabbath sunlight, had to Oldmeadow’s eye an almost comically arrested air. How was a creedless, churchless mistress of Coldbrooks to be fitted in to her happy vision of Barney’s future? What would the village say to a squiress who never went to church and who said her prayers in the sunlight alone? “But, of course, better alone,” he seemed to hear her cogitate, “than that anyone should see her doing such a very curious thing.” And aloud she did murmur: “Of course not; of course not, dear. And if you go into the little arbour down by the lake no one will disturb you, I’m sure. Must it be quite in the open? Mere conformity is such a shallow thing. But all the same I should like the rector to come and talk things over with you. He’s such a good man and very, very broad-minded. He brings science so often into his sermons—sometimes I think the people don’t quite follow it all; and only the other day he said to me, about modern unrest and scepticism:
‘There is more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.’
Mamma met Lord Tennyson once and felt him to be a deeply religious man—though rather ill-tempered; he was really very rude to her, I always thought, and I do so dislike rudeness.—And travelling about so much, dear, you probably had so little teaching.”
Miss Toner’s eyes were incapable of irony and they only deepened now in benevolence as they rested on her hostess. “But I haven’t any doubts,” she said, shaking her head and smiling: “No doubts at all. You reach the truth through your church and I reach it through nature and love and life. And the beautiful thing is that it’s the same truth, really; the same beautiful truth that God loves us all, and that we are all the children of God. I should be very pleased to meet your rector, of course, because I like meeting anyone who is good and true. But I was taught. My mother taught me always. And she was the freest, wisest soul I have ever known.”
“I’ll stay with you,” said Palgrave suddenly from his place on the step above her. His eyes, over her shoulder, had met Oldmeadow’s and perhaps what he saw in the old friend’s face determined his testimony. “Church means nothing to me, either; and less than nothing. I’m not so charitable as you are, and don’t think all roads lead to truth. Some lead away, I think. You know perfectly well, Mummy, that the dear old rector is a regular duffer and you slept all through the sermon the last time I went; you did, really! I was too amused to sleep. He was trying to explain original sin without mentioning Adam or Eve or the Garden of Eden. It was most endearing! Like some one trying to avoid the eye of an old acquaintance whom they’d come to the conclusion they really must cut! I do so like the idea of Adam and Eve becoming unsuitable acquaintances for the enlightened clergy!”
“There is no sin,” said Miss Toner. Barney was not quite comfortable; Oldmeadow saw that. He kicked about in the gravel, a little flushed, and when, once or twice, the old family friend met his eye, it was quickly averted. “God is Good; and everything else is mortal mind—mistake—illusion.”
“You are a sound Platonist, Miss Toner,” Oldmeadow observed, and his kindness hardly cloaked his irony.
“Am I?” she said. When she looked at one she never averted her eyes. She looked until she had seen all that she wished to see. “I am not fond of metaphysics.”
“Socrates defined sin as ignorance, you know, and in a sense it may be. All the same,” said Oldmeadow, and he felt that they were all listening and that in the eyes of his old friends it was more than unlikely that he would get the better of Miss Toner—“there’s mortal mind to be accounted for, isn’t there, and why it gets us continually into such a mess. Whatever name you call it by, there is something that