Adrienne Toner: A Novel

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

They lived in a small stone house with a Jacobean front that looked, over a stone wall, at Chelford Green, and had behind it a delightfully unexpected length of lawn and orchard and kitchen-garden, all enclosed by higher walls and presided over by a noble cedar. Seen from the garden The Little House was merely mid-Victorian, but the modern additions were masked by climbing roses and a great magnolia-tree opened its lemon-scented cups at the highest bedroom windows. The morning-room was in the modern part, and from one of its windows, presently, Mrs. Averil emerged, opening her sunshade as she crossed the grass to join her guest. She wore a white straw garden hat, tipping over her eyes and tying, behind, over her thick knot of hair, in a manner that always recalled to Oldmeadow a lady out of Trollope. Her face was pale, like Nancy’s, and her eyes grey; but rather than blackcaps and primroses she suggested lace tippets and porcelain tea-sets, and though it was from her Nancy had her pretty trick of closing her eyes when she smiled, Mrs. Averil’s smile was cogitative and impersonal, and in her always temperate mirth there was an edge of grimness.

“Well, Roger, I want to hear what you thought about the wedding,” she said. She had not gone to church that morning with Nancy and it was, he knew, because she wanted an interchange of frank impressions. She had been prevented from attending Miss Toner’s London nuptials by a touch of influenza and, as she now went on to say, she had got little from Nancy, who had no eye for pageants and performances. “Eleanor was so absorbed,” she went on, “in the fact that the Bishop had indigestion and had, at her suggestion, taken magnesia with his breakfast, that I could not get much else out of her. She seemed to have seen the Bishop’s symptoms rather than Adrienne and Barney. Now from you I expect all the relevant details.”

“Well, if you call it a detail, Nancy was lovely,” said Oldmeadow. “She looked like a silver-birch in her white and green.”

“And pearls,” said Mrs. Averil. “You noticed, of course, the necklaces Adrienne gave them; quite the gift of a princess, yet so innocent and unobtrusive looking, too. She has great taste in such matters. Did she look well? Eleanor did say that she, like the Bishop, was very pale.”

“She was pale; but not a bit nervous. She rather looked as if she had been married every day of her life. Nothing ever puts her out, you know. She was very grave and benign; but she wasn’t an imposing bride and the wreath of orange-blossoms aged her. Nancy and Meg and Barbara and the Lumley girl aged her, too. She must be older than Barney.”

“Yes; she is. A year older. But she’s the sort of woman who will wear,” said Mrs. Averil, pausing before a bed of rose-trees to snip off a fading flower. “She’ll not look very differently at fifty, you know; and her hair is the sort that may never turn grey. I can see her at seventy with those big golden braids and all her teeth. There’s something very indestructible about her. Like a doll made of white leather compared to one made of porcelain. She’ll last and last,” said Mrs. Averil. “She’ll outlast us all. Barney was radiant, of course.”

“Yes. But he was nervous; like a little boy frightened by the splendour of his Christmas-tree. He looked as though he were arm in arm with the Christmas-tree itself as he came down the nave. A rather dumpy little Christmas-tree, but exquisitely lighted and garnished.”

“Well, he ought to be radiant,” Mrs. Averil observed. “With all that money, it’s an extremely good match for him. The fact of her being nobody in particular makes no difference, really, since she’s an American. And she has, I gather, no tiresome relations to come bothering.”

“She’s very unencumbered, certainly. There’s something altogether very solitary about her,” Oldmeadow agreed, watching Mrs. Averil snip off the withered roses. “I felt that even as she came down the nave on Barney’s arm. It’s not a bit about the money he’s radiant,” he added.

“Oh, I know. Of course not. That was only my own gross satisfaction expressing itself. He’s as in love as it’s possible to be. And with every good reason.”