“Only what Meg has put upon her—to interpret her as kindly as she can to your mother. Here are the letters. I’d really rather not go upstairs.”
“I know you’ll hold Adrienne responsible—partly at least. She expects that. She knows that I do, too; she’s quite prepared. I only heard half an hour ago and of course it knocked me up frightfully. Meg! My little sister! Why she’s hardly more than a child!”
“I’m afraid she’s a good deal more than a child. I’m afraid we can’t hold Meg to be not responsible, though, obviously, she’d never have taken such a step unaided and unabetted. Just read these letters, Barney; it won’t take a moment to decide what’s best to be done. I’ll go down to your mother and you must be off, at once, to Paris, and see if you can fetch Meg back.”
But after Barney, with a hesitating hand and an uncertain glance, had taken the letters and begun to read them, the door was opened with decorous deliberation and Adrienne’s French maid appeared, the tall, sallow, capable-looking woman whom Oldmeadow remembered having seen at Coldbrooks a year ago.
“Madame requests that ces Messieurs should come up at once; she awaits them,” Joséphine announced in unemphatic but curiously potent accents. Adrienne’s potency, indeed, was of a sort that flowed through all her agents and Oldmeadow thought that he detected, in the melancholy gaze bent upon Barney, reprobation for his failure to attain the standard set for him by a devotion wholehearted and reverential. Mrs. Chadwick, he remembered, had said that Adrienne’s maid adored her.
“Yes, yes. We’re coming at once, Joséphine,” said Barney. Reading the letters as he went, he moved to the door and Oldmeadow found himself, perforce, following.
He had not yet visited the morning-room and even before his eyes rested on Adrienne they saw, hanging above her head where she sat on a little sofa, a full-length portrait of Mrs. Toner; in white, standing against a stone balustrade and holding lilies; seagulls above her and a background of blue sea.
Adrienne was also in white, but she wore over her long, loose dress a little jacket of pink silk edged with swan’s down and the lace cap falling about her neck was rosetted with pink ribbon. It was curious to see her in this almost frivolous array, recalling the shepherdess, when her face expressed, for the first time in his experience of her, an anger and an agitation all the more apparent for its control. She was pale yet flushed, odd streaks of colour running up from her throat and dying in the pallor of her cheeks. Her condition had evidently much affected her complexion and her nose, through its layer of powder, showed a pinched and reddened tint. It made Oldmeadow uncomfortable to look at her; her mask of calm was held at such a cost; she was at once so determinedly herself and so helplessly altered; and it was not with an automatic courtesy only that he went up to her and held out his hand. An impulse of irrelevant yet irrepressible pity stirred him.
She had fixed her eyes on him as he entered, but now looking at her husband and not moving, she said: “I do not think you want to take my hand, Mr. Oldmeadow. You will think me a criminal too, as Barney does.”
“Darling! Don’t talk such nonsense!” Barney cried. “I haven’t blamed you, not by a word. I know you’ve done what you think right. Look, darling; Roger has had these letters. Just read them. You see what Meg writes—there—to Nancy—about your having done all you could to keep them straight. You haven’t been fair to yourself in talking to me just now.”