“It will be the best thing for them all,” Oldmeadow murmured to Mrs. Averil, as, taking Joséphine’s arm, Mrs. Chadwick hurried her along the path. “And I’ll go with them.”
A little later, while Mrs. Chadwick made ready above and Joséphine, in the hall, ate the meal that Johnson had brought for her, Oldmeadow and Nancy stood outside near the empty waiting car.
“I’ll wire to you at once, of course, how she is,” he said. Adrienne had put Meg out of all their thoughts. “But it’s rather grotesque,” he added, “if poor Barney is to be blamed.”
Nancy stood and looked before her, wrapped, as she had been the day before, in her woollen scarf. “Roger,” she said after a moment, “no one can be blamed; yet, if she dies, I shall feel that we have killed her.”
“Killed her! What nonsense, my dear! What do you mean?” He spoke angrily because something in his heart, shaken by his dream, echoed her. The dreaming had now revealed itself as definitely uncanny. What had he to do with Adrienne Toner that his sub-consciousness should be aware of her extremity?
“I can’t explain,” said Nancy. “We couldn’t help it. It’s even all her fault. But she never asked to come to us. She never sought us out. She had her life and we had ours. It was we who sought her and drew her in and worshipped her. She never hid what she was; never in the least little way. It was for what she was, because she was so different and believed so in herself, that Barney loved her. And now because she has gone on believing in herself, we have struck her down.”
The rooks were cawing overhead and Oldmeadow was remembering his dream of a year ago, how Adrienne had come to him along the terrace saying, as she lifted her hand: “I can hear them, too.” They had drawn her in. Yet she had loved their life. She had wanted to understand it and to be part of it. He wished he could get the pale, streaked, drowning face out of his mind. “It’s generous of you, my dear child,” he said, “to say ‘we.’ You mean ‘you.’ If anyone struck her down it was I.”
“You spoke for us all, Roger. And you only spoke for us. You were always outside. I count myself with them. I can’t separate myself from them. I received her love—with them all.”
“Did you?” he looked at her. “I don’t think so, Nancy.”
Nancy did not pretend not to understand. “I know,” she said. “But I’m part of it. And she tried to love me.”