With the darkness, the pungent smell of the wet ivy closed thickly, ominously about them. It was as if he and Adrienne Toner were buried there together. He heard a maid laugh far away and a boy passed on the green stridently whistling “Tipperary.” It was like hearing, in the grave, the sounds of the upper world.
Adrienne leaned against the wall. The ivy closing round her, nearly obliterated her, but he could dimly see the grey disk of her face, showing the unexpectedness of contour that reveals itself in the faces of the dead. The trivial features were erased and only a shape of grief remained, strangely august and emotionless.
An eternity seemed to pass before the front door opened and Mrs. Averil’s voice, steadied to a galvanized cheerfulness, came, half obliterated to a wordless rhythm. Barney’s voice answered her, and his steps echoed on the flagged path. “Say good-bye to Roger for me if I don’t see him on the road!” he called out from the gate. Then the car coughed, panted; the horn croaked out its cry and, above them, a shaft of light across the ivy, of which he had till then been unaware, flitted suddenly away, leaving the darkness more visible.
He heard then that she was weeping.
Putting his arm behind her, for the rain fell heavily and the ivy was drenched with it, he drew her forward and for a little while it was almost against his breast that she lay while her very heart dissolved itself in tears.
She had come, he knew it all, with a breakdown of her pride, with a last wild hope and, perhaps, a longing to atone, believing that she might snatch a word somewhere with her husband, and find her way, at this last moment, back to the heart she had so alienated. She had seen all. She had heard all. He was sure of it. It had been as an outcast that he had found her leaning there. He understood her through and through and the tender heaviness that had already so often visited his heart flooded it to suffocation.
Among her sobs, he heard her, at last, speaking to him. “Even Palgrave doesn’t know. He told me—only this afternoon—that Barney was here. I thought I might find him. I was going to wait in the road. And when I got here there was no car and I was afraid that there was a mistake. That I had missed him. And I went up to the house; to the open window; and looked in; to see if he was there. It was not jealousy: not now. I did not mean to be an eavesdropper. But, when I saw them, I stayed and listened. It was not jealousy,” she repeated. “It was because I had to know that there was no more hope.”
“Yes,” said Oldmeadow gently, while, with long pauses, she spoke on and on; to the impartial judge, to the one sure refuge; and he said “Yes” again, gently, after she had finished; a long time after. She still half lay against his breast. He had never felt such an infinite tenderness towards any creature; not since his boyhood and his mother’s death.
She drew away from him at last. “Take me,” she said. “There is a train; back to Oxford.” She had ceased to weep. Her voice was hoarse and faint.
“Did you walk up from the station? You’re not fit to walk back. I can get a trap. There’s a man just across the green.”