Had it been written in compunction for Ariane aux bords laissée? or, rather, in a happy reversion to sheer spontaneity, a turning, without any self-consciousness, to the comrade of the bird-walks who would, after all, best feel with him about snow-buntings and redstarts? Oldmeadow paused for the surmise, not looking up, before he went on from Barney’s neat, firm script to his wife’s large, clear clumsy hand.
“Dearest Nancy,” ran the postscript, and it had been at the postscript, Oldmeadow now could gauge, that Nancy had first found herself unprepared. “I, too, am thinking of you, with Barney. It is a great joy to feel that where, he says, I’ve given him golden eagles and snow-buntings he’s given me—among so many other dear, wonderful people—a Nancy. I get the best of the bargain, don’t I? I can’t see much of the birds for looking at the peaks—my peaks, so familiar yet, always, so new again. ‘Stern daughters of the voice of God’ that they are. Radiantly white against a cloudless sky we find them to-day. Barney’s profile is beautiful against them—but his nose is badly sun-burned! All our noses are sun-burned! That’s what one pays for flying among the Alps.
“Mother Nell—we’ve decided that that’s what I’m to call her—looks ten years younger all the same, as I knew she would. We talk of you all so often—of you and Meg and Palgrave and Barbara, and half a dozen times a day Barney wishes that one or the other of you were with us to see this or that. It’s specially you for the birds I notice. You must take me for some bird-walks at dawn some day and teach me to know all your lovely English songsters.... Dear little Cousin-Sister, I send you my love with his and, with him, hold you warmly in my heart. Will ‘Aunt Monica’ accept my affectionate and admiring homages?
“Yours ever
“Adrienne”
Oldmeadow had not expected that she could write such a human letter; yet it explained Nancy’s blush. Barney’s spontaneous affection she could have faced, but she had not been able to face his wife’s determined tenderness. Adrienne had meant it well, no doubt—Oldmeadow gazed on after he had finished, but she had no business to mean so well, no business to thrust herself, in this community of intimacy, into what was Barney’s place alone. There was more in it, he knew, with Meg and Mrs. Averil to help him, than the quite successful playfulness. She was to be more intimate than Barney, that was what it came to; more, much more tender if Barney was to be allowed intimacy and tenderness. That was really what she intended Nancy to see, and that Barney had no place at all where she, Adrienne, did not also belong.
“Very sweet; very sweet and pretty,” Mrs. Averil’s voice broke in, and he realized that he had allowed himself to drop into a grim and tactless reverie; “I didn’t know she had such a sense of humour. Sun-burned noses and ‘Stern daughters of the voice of God.’ Well done. I didn’t think Adrienne would ever look as low as noses. They must be having a delightful tour. I know black redstarts. There was one that used to wake me every morning at four, one summer, in Normandy, with the most foolish, creaking song; just outside my window. Give Barney my love when you write and return my niece’s affectionate and admiring homages. Mother Nell. I shouldn’t care to be called Mother Nell somehow.”
So Mrs. Averil’s vexation expressed itself and so she floated Nancy along. But Nancy, long since, had pulled herself together and was able to look at Oldmeadow, while her lashes closed together in her own smile, and to say that she’d almost be willing to lose her nose for the sake of hearing the new warblers. Mrs. Averil opened her “Times” and over marmalade Nancy and Oldmeadow planned the trip that they would take some day, when their ship came in, the three of them, a bird-trip to the French Alps.
CHAPTER XII
OLDMEADOW sat beside Adrienne Chadwick and knew that from the other end of the room, where he talked to Mrs. Aldesey, Barney’s eyes were on them, though he tried to keep them off. It was the first dinner-party the young couple had given since they had come up to town, for though they were established at Coldbrooks in the communal family life Adrienne seemed to find to her taste, and though Barney had at once immersed himself in country pursuits, they had taken and furnished this large house in Connaught Square and it was, apparently, settled that the winter months were to be spent in London. How that was to be combined with farming at Coldbrooks, or whether Barney intended to take a header into politics and felt a London house, big enough for entertaining, part of the programme, Oldmeadow hadn’t an idea, and for the rather sinister reason that he had hardly laid his eyes on Barney since his return from his wedding-journey. Even though asked to tea once or twice, while, established in an hotel, they were finding and furnishing the house, he had never found them alone and either Barney had made no opportunity, or his wife had seen to it that none should be made, for having a tête-à-tête with his old friend.
Oldmeadow could not associate Barney with ambitions, either social or political, nor, he was bound to say, as he looked round the dinner-table, where Adrienne sat at one end with Lord Lumley and Barney at the other with Lady Lumley, could one infer from its disparate and irrelevant elements any such ambitions in Adrienne. He had taken Mrs. Aldesey down and had felt her at moments to be almost too resourceful, her air of graceful skill in keeping the ball rolling seeming too much to emphasize its tendency to drop. Without Mrs. Aldesey, without Meg—vividly engaged at one corner with a fair young American—without himself, for he had aided and abetted Lydia to the best of his ability, the dinner would have been a dull one and he was not sure that even their enterprise had redeemed it. Adrienne had not any air of fearing dullness or of being in need of assistance. Oldmeadow saw that the blue ribbon was frequently unrolled and that, as always, it made a silence in which it could be watched. Lord Lumley, his handsome, official head bent in an attitude of chivalrous devotion, watched earnestly, and the fair young American paused in the midst of whatever he might be saying to Meg to take almost reverent note; but Oldmeadow fancied more than once that he caught startled eyes fixed upon it, especially when there emerged a lustrous loop of quotation:—