“She’s so charming? You can’t bear to lose her now you’ve seen her?” he asked.
“I don’t know about charming. No; I don’t think her charming. At least not if you mean something little by the word. She’s disturbing. She changes everything.”
“But if she stays she’ll be more disturbing. She’ll change more.”
“Oh, I shan’t mind that! I shan’t mind change,” Palgrave declared. “If it’s her change and she’s there to see it through.” And, relapsing to muteness, he bent to his brakes and they slid down among the woods of Coldbrooks.
For the life of him and with the best will in the world, he couldn’t make it out. That was Oldmeadow’s first impression as, among the familiar group gathered in the hall about the tea-table, Miss Toner was at last made manifest to him. She was, he felt sure, in his first shrewd glance at her, merely what Lydia Aldesey would have placed as a third-rate American girl, and her origins in commercial enterprise were eminently appropriate.
She got up to meet him, as if recognizing in him some special significance or, indeed, as it might be her ingenuous habit to do in meeting any older person. But he was not so much older if it came to that; for, after he had met the direct and dwelling gaze of her large, light eyes, the second impression was that she was by no means so young as Barney had led him to expect. She was certainly as old as Barney.
There were none of the obvious marks of wealth upon her. She wore a dark-blue dress tying on the breast over white. She was small in stature and, in manner, composed beyond anything he had ever encountered. With an irony, kindly enough, yet big, he knew, with unfavourable inferences, he even recognized, reconstructing the moment in the light of those that followed, that in rising to meet him as he was named to her, it had been, rather than in shyness or girlishness, in the wish to welcome him and draw him the more happily into a group she had already made her own.
They were all sitting round the plentiful table, set with home-made loaves and cakes, jams and butter, and a Leeds bowl of primroses; Miss Toner just across from him, Barney on one side of her—his was an air of tranquil ecstasy—and little Barbara on the other, and they all seemed to emanate a new radiance; almost, thought Oldmeadow, with an irritability that was still genial, like innocent savages on a remote seashore gathered with intent eyes and parted lips round the newly disembarked Christopher Columbus. Mrs. Chadwick, confused, as usual, among her tea-cups, sending hasty relays of sugar after the unsugared or recalling those sugared in error, specially suggested the simile. She could, indeed, hardly think of her tea. Her wide, startled gaze turned incessantly on the new-comer and to Oldmeadow, for all his nearly filial affection, the eyes of Eleanor Chadwick looked like nothing in the world so much as those of the March Hare in Tenniel’s evocation of the endearing creature. Unlike her children, she was fair, with a thin, high, ridiculously distinguished nose; but her mouth and chin had Barney’s irresolution and sweetness, and her untidy locks Meg’s beauty. Meg was a beauty in every way, rose, pearl and russet, a Romney touched with pride and daring, and the most sophisticated of all the Chadwicks; yet she, too, brooded, half merrily, half sombrely, on Miss Toner, her elbows on the table for the better contemplation. Palgrave’s absorption was manifest; but he did not brood. He held his head high, frowned and, for the most part, looked out of the window.
Oldmeadow sat between Palgrave and Nancy and it was with Nancy that the magic ended. Nancy did not share in the radiance. She smiled and was very busy cutting the bread and butter; but she was pale; not puzzled, but preoccupied. Poor darling Nancy; always his special pet; to him always the dearest and most loveable of girls. Not at all a Romney. With her pale, fresh face, dark hair and beautiful hands she suggested, rather, a country lady of the seventeenth century painted by Vandyck. A rural Vandyck who might have kept a devout and merry journal, surprising later generations by its mixture of ingenuousness and wisdom. Her lips were meditative, and her grey eyes nearly closed when she smiled in a way that gave to her gaiety and extraordinary sweetness and intimacy. Nancy always looked as if she loved you when she smiled at you; and indeed she did love you. She had spent her life among people she loved and if she could not be intimate she was remote and silent.
But there was no hope for Nancy. He saw that finally, as he drank his tea in silence and looked across the primroses at the marvel of the age.