“Come, come, Mrs. Barney,” Oldmeadow interposed, addressing her for the first time and acidly laughing. “Really we haven’t time for sermons. You oughtn’t to have obliged me to come up if you wanted to influence Barney all by yourself. He sees quite clearly for himself the rights and the wrongs of this affair, as it happens. If I were to preach for a moment in my turn I might ask you how it was that you didn’t see that it was your duty to tell Meg’s mother and brother how things were going and let them judge. You’re not as wise as you imagine—far from it. Some things you can’t judge at all. Meg and Hayward aren’t people of enough importance to have a right to break laws; that’s all that it comes to; there’s nothing to be gained by their breaking laws; not only for other people, but for themselves. They’re neither of them capable of being happy in the ambiguous sort of life they’d have to lead. There’s a reality you didn’t see at all in your haste to flout convention. Barney could have dealt with Hayward, and Meg could have been packed off to the country and kept there till she’d learned to think a little more about other people’s hearts and a little less about her own. What business had you, after all, to have secrets from your husband and to plot with the two young fools behind his back? Isn’t Meg his sister rather than yours?” His bitterness betrayed him and conscious hostility rose in him, answering the menace that measured him in her eyes. “What business had you, a new-comer among us, to think yourself capable of managing all their lives and to set yourself up above them all in wisdom? You take too much upon yourself”; his lips found the old phrase: “Really you do. It’s been your mistake from the beginning.”
He could not have believed that a face so framed for gentleness could show itself at once so calm and so convulsed. He knew that something had happened to her that had never happened to her before in her life. She kept her eyes steadily on him and he wondered if she were not reciting some incantation, some exorcism, derived from the seagulled lady above her: Power in Repose—Power in Love—Power in Light. Her mouth and eyes and nostrils were dark on her pallor and he felt that she held back all the natural currents of her being in order to face and quell him with the supernatural.
“Never mind all that, Roger,” Barney was sickly murmuring. “I don’t feel like that. I know Adrienne didn’t for a moment mean to deceive me.”
“We will mind it, Barney,” said Adrienne, breathing with difficulty. “I had, Mr. Oldmeadow, the business, first, of loyalty to another human soul who, in the crisis of its destiny, confided in me. I have been nearer Meg than any of you have guessed, from my first meeting with her. You were all blind. I saw at once that she was tossed and tormented. I am nearer, far nearer her, than her brother and mother. In them she would never have dreamed of confiding and she came to me because she felt that in me she would find reality and in them mere formulas. I do not look upon women as chattels to be handed about by their male relatives and locked up if they do not love according to rule and precedent. I look upon them as the equals of men in every respect, as free as men to shape their lives and to direct their destinies. You speak a mediæval language, Mr. Oldmeadow. The world, our great, modern, deep-hearted world, has outstripped you.”
“Darling,” Barney forestalled, breathlessly, as she paused, any reply that Oldmeadow might have been tempted to make, “don’t mind if Roger speaks harshly. He’s like that and no one cares for us more. He doesn’t mean conventionality at all, or anything mediæval. You don’t understand him. He puts his finger on the spot about Meg and Hayward. It’s exactly as he says; they’re not of enough importance to have a right to break laws. If you could have confided in me, it would have been better; you must own that. We’d have given Meg a chance to pull herself together. We’d have sent Hayward about his business. It’s a question, as Roger says, of your wisdom; of your knowledge of the world. You didn’t understand them. They’re neither of them idealists like you. They can’t be happy doing what you might be big enough to do. Just because they’re not big. Try to take it in, darling. And we really needn’t go on talking about it any longer, need we? It isn’t a question of influence. All we have to decide on is what’s to be done. Roger must go to Mother and tell her I’m starting this morning to try and fetch Meg back. Imagine Mother with a divorce case on! It would kill her, simply. That’s all. Isn’t it, Roger?”
“Stop, Mr. Oldmeadow,” said Adrienne, again. She rose as she spoke. As he saw her stand before them, her approaching maternity dominated for a moment all his impressions of her. Veiled and masked adroitly as it was, its very uncouthness curiously became her. Her head, for once, looked small. Like an archaic statue, straight and short and thick, her altered form had dignity and amplitude and her face, heavy with its menace, hard with its control, might have been that of some austere and threatening priestess of fruitfulness.
“Barney, wait,” she said. Her arms hung straight beside her, but she slightly lifted a hand as she spoke and Oldmeadow noted that it was tightly clenched. “It is I, not your friend, whom you must question as to what it is right that you should do. I do not consent to his reading of my unwisdom and unworthiness. I ask you not to consent to it. I ask you again not to go. I ask you again to respect my judgment rather than his.”
“Darling,” the unfortunate husband supplicated; “it’s not because it’s Roger’s judgment. You know it’s what I felt right myself—from the moment you told me what had happened. You say people must follow their own light. It is my light. I must do what Mother asks and try to bring Meg back.”
“It is not your light, Barney. It is craft and caution and fear. More than that, do you not see, must I make plain to you what it is you do to me in going? You insult me. You treat what I have believed right for Meg to do as a crime from which she must be rescued. You drag me in the dust with her. Understand me, Barney”—the streaks of colour deepened on her neck, her breath came thickly—“if you go, you drag me in the dust.”
“How can it drag you in the dust, Mrs. Barney, if Meg wants to come back?” Oldmeadow interposed in the tone of a caustic doctor addressing a malingering patient. “We’re not talking of crimes; only of follies. Come; be reasonable. Don’t make it so painful for Barney to do what’s his plain duty. You’re not a child. You have, I hope, courage enough and humour enough to own that you can make mistakes—like other people.”