CHAPTER XIII
“ROGER, see here, I’ve only come to say one word—about the absurd little-matter of last night. Only one; and then we’ll never speak of it again,” said poor Barney.
He had come as soon as the very next day—to exonerate, not to apologize; that was evident at once. Oldmeadow had not long to wait before learning what she had said to him when she got him to herself, nor long to wait before realizing that if Barney had been unhappy last night he thought himself happy to-day.
“Really, my dear boy,” he said, “it’s not worth talking about.”
“Oh, but we must talk about it,” said Barney. He was red and spoke quickly. “It upset her frightfully; it made her perfectly miserable. She cried for hours, Roger,” Barney’s voice dropped to a haggard note. “You know, though she bears up so marvellously, she’s ill. She doesn’t admit illness and that makes it harder for her, because it simply bewilders her when she finds herself on edge like this and her body refusing to obey her. The baby is coming in May, you know.”
“I know, my dear Barney. The evening was very fatiguing for her. I saw it all I think. I noticed from the beginning how tired she looked.”
“Horribly tired. Horribly fatiguing. I’m glad you saw it. For that’s really what I came to explain. She was tired to begin with and Mrs. Aldesey put her on edge. I think I saw that myself at dinner—and, oh, before that; on the day we had tea with her, when we first came up, in November—Adrienne felt then that Mrs. Aldesey didn’t understand or care for her. You know she is so full of love and sympathy for everybody herself that she is literally sickened when she is treated in that artificial, worldly way. And you know, Roger, Mrs. Aldesey is artificial and worldly.”
That was how she had put it to Barney, of course. But Oldmeadow saw further than Mrs. Aldesey and her artificiality. He saw a dishevelled and weeping Adrienne stricken to the heart by the sense of threatened foundations, aghast by what she had seen in her husband’s eyes; and he was aware, even while he resented having it put upon Lydia, of a curious, reluctant pity for the pale, weeping figure. Lydia had, obviously, displeased her; but Lydia had been the mere occasion; she could have dealt easily enough with Lydia. It had been the revelation that Barney could oppose her, could almost, for a moment, dislike her, that had set her universe rocking. Her first taste of reality, then. The thought came rather grimly, with the pity. After all it was their best chance of happiness; that she should learn to accept herself as a person who could be opposed, even disliked, in flashes, while still loved. He had sat silent while he thought, one of his silences which, when he emerged from them, he often recognized as over-long. Barney must have felt the weight of all he did not say when all that he found to say was: “What it comes to, doesn’t it, is that they neither of them take much to each other. Lydia is certainly conventional.”
“Ah, but Lady Lumley is conventional, too,” said Barney with an irrepressible air of checkmate. “Hordes of conventional people adore Adrienne. It’s a question of the heart. There are people who are conventional without being worldly. It’s worldliness that stifles Adrienne. It’s what she was saying last night: ‘They have only ceilings; I must have the sky.’ Not that she thinks you worldly, dear old boy.”
“I hope you try to interpret me to her kindly,” said Oldmeadow, smiling. Even at the moment when Barney, all innocently, was revealing to him Adrienne’s tactics, the fragments of her vocabulary imbedded in his speech were affording him amusement. “You must try and persuade her that I’ve quite a fondness for the sky myself, and even published a volume of verse in my youth.”