They passed and Oldmeadow pursued his way, filled with a disagreeable astonishment though, absurdly, his mind was at first occupied only in an attempt to recover a submerged memory that Captain Hayward’s demeanour suggested. It came at last in an emancipating flash and he saw again, after how many years, the golden-brown head of his rather silly setter, John, turned aside in shy yet dignified repudiation, that still, by a dim, sick smile, attempted to conceal distress and to enter into the spirit of the game—as a kitten was held up for his contemplation. A kitten was a very inadequate analogy, no doubt, for the theme of Adrienne’s discourse; yet Captain Hayward’s reaction to a situation for which he found himself entirely unprepared was markedly like John’s. And he, like John, had known that the game was meant to be at his expense. John and Captain Hayward got Oldmeadow out of the park before he had taken full possession of his astonishment and could ask himself why, if Adrienne were engaged in rescuing Meg from her illicit attachment, she should do it in the company of the young man. Yet, strangely enough, he felt, as he walked, a growing sense of reassurance. For an emergency like this, after all, given amenable subjects, Adrienne was the right person. He hadn’t dreamed it to be such an emergency; but since it was, Adrienne would pull them through. As she would have laid her hand on the head of Bacchus and reformed him, so she would lay it on the head of Captain Hayward.
CHAPTER XIV
THE incident put Mrs. Aldesey quite out of his mind, and it was not till he stood on her doorstep and rang her bell that he remembered his grievance against her and realized that it had been made more definite by this glimpse of Adrienne’s significance. That his friend was prepared for him was evident at his first glance; she had even, he saw, been expecting him, for she broke out at once with: “Oh, my dear Roger—what are you going to do with her?”
He was actually pleased to find himself putting her, with some grimness, in her place. “What is she going to do with us? you mean. You underrate Mrs. Barney’s capacity, let me tell you, my dear friend.”
But Mrs. Aldesey was not easily quelled. “Underrate her! Not I! She’s a Juggernaut if ever there was one. Her capacity is immense. She’ll roll on and she’ll crush flat. That poor Barney! She is as blind as a Juggernaut, but he will come to see—alas! he is seeing already—though you and I danced round him with veils and cymbals—that people won’t stand being pelted with platitudes from soup to dessert. The Lumleys will, of course; it’s their natural diet; though even they like their platitudes served with a touch of sauce piquante; but Rosamund Pope told me that she felt black and blue all over and Cuthbert Haviland—malicious toad—imitates her already to perfection: dreadful little voice, dreadful little smile, dreadful little quotations and all. It will be one of his London gags. That shepherdess! My dear Roger, don’t pretend to me that you don’t see it!”
Oldmeadow, sunken in the chair opposite her, surveyed her over his clasped hands with an air of discouragement.
“What I’m most seeing at the moment is that she’s made you angry,” he remarked. “If what you say were all the truth, why should she make you angry? She’s not as blind as a Juggernaut. That’s where you made your mistake. She’ll only crush the people who don’t lie down before her. She knows perfectly well where she is going—and over whom. So be careful, that is my advice, and keep out of her way; unless you want to lose a toe or a finger.”
Mrs. Aldesey showed, at this, that he had arrested her. In spite of the element of truth in Adrienne’s verdict upon her he knew her to be, when veils and cymbals were cast aside, a sincere and gallant creature. She did not attempt to hide from him now and, after a moment of mutual contemplation, she laughed a little, with not unreal mirth and said: “I suppose I am angry. I suppose I’m even spiteful. It’s her patronage, you know. Her suffocating superiority. To have to stand there, for his sake, and take it! You overrate her, Roger. No woman not abysmally stupid could say the things she says.”
“Your mistake again. She’s able to say them because she’s never met irony or criticism. She’s not stupid,” he found his old verdict. “Only absurd. You know, you gave yourself away to her. You showed her what you thought of her. You patronized her.”
“Is no retaliation permitted?” Mrs. Aldesey moaned. “Must one accept it all? Be scourged with the stars and Browning and then bow one’s head to her caresses? After all, Barney is your friend, not mine, and it’s as your friend that I’ve tried to be decent to his wife. But she hates me like poison. She gave herself away, too, you know. I liked the way she excluded me from her prospects for your welfare. And of course she knew my marriage wasn’t a happy one.”