“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.