“Your devoted child
“Meg.”
That was the first: the second ran:
“Dearest Nancy,—I know you’ll think it frightfully wrong; you are such an old-fashioned little dear and you told me often enough that I oughtn’t to see so much of Eric. Only of course that couldn’t have prepared you for this and I expect Aunt Monica won’t let you come and stay with us for ages. Never mind; when you marry, you’ll see, I’m sure. Love is the only thing, really. But I should hate to feel I’d lost you and I’m sure I haven’t. I want to ask you, Nancy dear, to do all you can to make Mother take it. I feel, just because you will think it so wrong, that you may be more good to her than Adrienne—who doesn’t think it wrong at all—at least not in Mother’s way. It would be frightfully unfair if Mother blamed Adrienne. She did all she could to show us where we stood and to make us play the game, and it would be pretty hard luck if people were to be down on her now because we have played it. We might have been really rotters if it hadn’t been for Adrienne; cheats and hypocrites, I mean; stealing our happiness. I know Adrienne can bring Barney round. It’s only Mother who troubles me, just because she is such a child that it’s almost impossible to make her see reason. She doesn’t recognize right and wrong unless they’re in the boxes she’s accustomed to. Everything is in a box for poor, darling old Mummy. But I mustn’t go on. Be the dear old pal you always have and help me out as well as you can.
“Your loving
“Meg.”
“Good Lord,” Oldmeadow muttered once more. He pushed back his chair and rose from the table in the bright spring sunlight. He had the feeling, almost paternal, of disgrace and a public stripping. He saw Eleanor Chadwick stopping at Meg’s door to look in at the forsaken room, distraught in her grief and incomprehension. He saw Nancy’s pale, troubled face and Monica Averil’s, pinched and dry in its sober dismay. And then again, lighted by a flare at once tawdry and menacing, the face of Adrienne Toner, the intruder, the insufferable meddler and destroyer, a Pierrot among fire-works that had, at last, set fire to the house. He found a taxi on the Embankment and drove to Connaught Square. Freshly decorated with window-boxes, the pleasant, spacious house had a specially smiling air of welcome, but the butler’s demeanour told him that something of the calamity had already penetrated. Adrienne, if she had not heard before, would have had her letters; Barney, who had been kept in the dark, would have been enlightened, and the irrepressible exclamations that must have passed between them seemed dimly reflected on the man’s formal countenance. Mrs. Chadwick, he told Oldmeadow, was breakfasting upstairs with Mr. Chadwick, and he ushered him into Barney’s study.
Oldmeadow waited for some time among the Post Impressionist pictures, one of which remained for ever afterwards vividly fixed in his memory of the moment; a chaotic yet determined picture; featureless yet, as it were, conveying through its unrecognizable elements the meaning of a grin. And, as he stood in the centre of the room and looked away from the derisive canvas, he saw on Barney’s desk photographs of Adrienne, three photographs of her; one as a child, a sickly looking but beaming child; one in early girlhood, singularly childlike still; and one in her bridal dress of only the other day, it seemed, mild and radiant in her unbecoming veil and wreath.
It was Barney who came to him. Poor Barney. He was more piteously boyish than ever before to his friend’s eye; so beautifully arrayed, all in readiness for a happy London day with his angel, so pale, so haggard and perplexed. “Look here, Roger,” were his first words, “do you mind coming upstairs to Adrienne’s room? She’s not dressed yet; not very well, you know. You’ve heard, then, too?”
“I’ve just heard from Nancy. Why upstairs? I’d rather not. We’d better talk this over alone, Barney. All the more if your wife isn’t well.”
“Yes; yes; I know. I told her it would be better. But she insists.”
The effect of a general misery Barney gave was heightened now by his unhappy flush. “She doesn’t want us to talk it over without her, you see. She comes into it all too much. From Nancy, did you say? What’s Nancy got to do with this odious affair?”