“I’m so ashamed,” she said, and he saw that it was with an effort she smiled. The traces of her weeping were now, after her sleep, far more visible, ageing her, yet making her, too, look younger; like a child with swollen lids and lips. “I didn’t know I was so tired. I slept and slept. I didn’t stir until I heard your knock. Never mind. We’ll talk till midnight.”
She was very sorry for him.
She sat down at the table and under the electric chandelier her braided hair showed itself all ruffled and disarranged. She had on her dark travelling dress and she had thrust her feet into the pale blue satin mules. The disparity of costume in one so accurate, her air of readiness for the morrow, made him feel her transitoriness almost more than her presence, though his sense of that pressed upon him with a stifling imminence. Even though she sat there the room kept its look of desolate, glittering emptiness and more than their shared life in it he remembered the far places from which she had come and to which she was going. It was as if she had just arrived and were pausing for the night en route.
As he had seen them years ago, so he saw again the monster engines crossing the prairies at night and flying illumined pennons of smoke against the sky as they bore her away from blue seas, golden sands, a land where the good and gifted lurked behind every bush; and before her stretched the shining rails, miles and miles of them, running through ruin and desolation, that were to bear her ever onwards into the darkness. This was what life had brought her to. She had been only a sojourner among them at Coldbrooks. The linked life of order and family affection had cast her forth and he saw her, for ever now, unless he could rescue her, with only hotels to live in and only the chaos she was to mould, to live for. She seemed already, as she sat there under the light with her ruffled hair, to be sitting in the train that was to bear her from him.
“I think you owe me till midnight, at least,” he said. He had not sat down. He stood at some little distance from her leaning, his arms folded, against a gilded and inlaid console. “We’ve lots of things to talk about.”
“Have we?” Adrienne asked, smiling gently, but as if she humoured an extravagance. “We’ll be together, certainly, even if we don’t talk much. But I have some things to say, too.”
She had dropped her eyes to her hands which lay, lightly crossed, on the table before her, and she seemed to reflect how best to begin. “It’s about Nancy and Barney,” she said. “I wanted, before we part, to talk to you a little about them. There are things that trouble me and you are the only person with whom I can keep in touch. You will know how I shall be longing to hear, everything. You’ll let me know at once, won’t you?”
“At once,” said Oldmeadow.
“There might be delays and difficulties,” Adrienne went on. “I shall be very troubled until all that is clear. And then the money. You know about the money? Barney isn’t well off and he was worse off after I’d come and gone. I tried to arrange that as best I could. Palgrave understood and entered into all my feelings.”
“Yes; I’d heard. You arranged it all very cleverly,” said Oldmeadow.