“Well?” Barney inquired, as Oldmeadow paused. “What have you got to say to me about Adrienne, Roger? You’ve not said very much, from the beginning; but everything you have said has been true and I’ve forgotten none of it. I’m the more inclined,” and he smiled with a slight bitterness, “to listen to you now.”
“That’s just the trouble,” Oldmeadow muttered. “You’ve forgotten nothing. That’s what I feel, with remorse. That it was I who helped to spoil things for you both, from the beginning. You’d not have seen her defects as you did if I hadn’t shown them to you; and if you hadn’t seen them you’d have adjusted yourselves to each other and have found them out together. She’d not have resented your finding them out in the normal course of your shared lives. It’s been my opinion of her, in the background of both your minds, that has envenomed everything.”
Barney listened quietly. “Yes,” he assented. “That’s all true enough. As far as it goes. I mightn’t have seen if you hadn’t shown me. But I can’t regret you did show me, for anything else would have been to have gone through life blind; as blind as Adrienne is herself. And it’s because she can’t stand being seen through that she revealed so much more; so much that you didn’t see and that I had to find out for myself. What you saw was absurdity and inexperience; they’re rather loveable defects; I think I accepted them from the beginning, because of all the other things I believed in her. You said, too, you remember, that she’d never know she was wrong. Well, it’s worse than that. She’ll never know she’s wrong and she won’t bear it that you should think her anything but right. She’s rapacious. She’s insatiable. Nothing but everything will satisfy her. You must be down on your knees, straight down, before her; and if you’re not, she has no use for you. She turns to stone and you break your head and your heart against her. It’s hatred Adrienne has felt for me, Roger, and I’m afraid I’ve felt it for her, too. She’s done things and said things that I couldn’t have believed her capable of; mean things; clever things; cruelly clever that get you right on the raw; things I can’t forget. There’s much more in her than you saw at the beginning. I was right rather than you about that; only they weren’t the things I thought.”
Oldmeadow walked, cutting at the withered way-side grasses with his cane. Barney’s short, slow sentences seemed to sting him as they came. He had to adjust himself to their smart; to adjust himself to the thought of this malignant Adrienne. Yet what he felt was not all surprise; he had foreseen, suspected, even this. “I know,” he said at last; “I mean, I can see that it would happen just like that.”
“It did happen just like that,” said Barney. “I don’t claim to have been an angel or anything like one. I gave her as good as I got, or nearly, sometimes, no doubt. But I know that it wasn’t my fault. I know it was Adrienne who spoiled everything.”
They had come out now on the upland road. The country dropped away beneath them wrapped in the dull mole-colour, the distant, dull ultramarines of the November afternoon. The smell of burning weeds was in the air and, in the west, a long, melancholy sheet of advancing rain-cloud hid the sun. Oldmeadow wondered if he and Barney would ever walk there together again, and his mind plunged deep into the past, the many years of friendship to which this loved country had been a background.
“Barney,” he said, “what I wanted to say is this: All that you feel is true; I’m sure of it. But other things are true, too. I’ve seen her and I’ve changed about her. If I was right before, I’m right now. She’s been blind because she didn’t know she could be broken. Well, she’s beginning to break.”
“Is she?” said Barney, and his quiet was implacable. “I can quite imagine that, you know. Everyone, except poor Palgrave—all the rest of us, have found out that she’s not the beautiful benignant being she thought she was, and that bewilders her and makes her pretty wretched, no doubt.”
Oldmeadow waited a moment. “I want you to see her,” he said. “Don’t be cruel. You are a little cruel, you know. It’s because you are thinking of her abstractly; remembering only how she has hurt you. If you could see her, see how unhappy she is, you’d feel differently. That’s what I want you to do. That’s what I beg you to do, Barney.”
“I can’t,” said Barney after a moment. “That I can’t do, Roger. It’s over. She might want me back if she could get me back adoring her. It’s only so she’d want me. But it’s over. It’s more than over. There’s something else.” Barney’s face showed no change from its sad fixity. “You were right about that, too. It’s Nancy I ought to have married. It’s Nancy I love. And Adrienne knows it.”