Adrienne Toner: A Novel

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

CHAPTER XVII

OLDMEADOW sat in Barney’s study, Mrs. Chadwick beside him. It was Tuesday and the only news of Barney had been a letter to his mother, from Paris, where he had not found Meg, and two wires from the South of France, one to Oldmeadow and one to his wife, saying that he had found Meg and was returning alone. He had not, it was evident, received the doctor’s messages.

Oldmeadow had not seen his old friend since the Sunday night when he had left her and Joséphine in Connaught Square, and in his first glance at her this morning he saw that for her, too, Adrienne’s peril had actually effaced Meg’s predicament. It had done more. Faint and feeble as she must be, scarcely able to take possession of her returning life and, as Mrs. Chadwick told him, not yet out of danger, Adrienne had already drawn her mother-in-law back into the circle of her influence.

“You see, Roger,” she said, sitting there on the absurdly incongruous background of the Post Impressionist pictures and tightly squeezing her handkerchief first in one hand and then in the other, “You see, when one is with her one has to trust her. I don’t know why it is, but almost at once I felt all my bitterness against her die quite away. I knew, whatever she had done, that she believed it to be right; to be really best for Meg, you know. And oh, Roger, Barney has hurt her so terribly! She can’t speak of him without crying. I never saw her cry before. I never imagined Adrienne crying. She feels, she can’t help feeling, that it is because of that they have lost their baby.”

Oldmeadow ordered with difficulty his astonished and indignant thoughts. “That is absolutely unfair to Barney,” he said. “I was with them. No one could have been gentler or more patient.”

“I know you were with them. It would seem like that to you, Roger, because you are a man and men still think of women as a sort of chattel. That’s how it looks to Adrienne. So much more independence, you know, than we ever had.—Oh, I don’t say it’s a good thing! I feel that we are weaker and need guidance.”

“Chattels? Where do chattels come in here? She said that to you. Barney merely pleaded with her so that he could do what you wanted him to do.”

“I know—I know, Roger. Don’t get angry. But if I had been here and seen her I should have known that he must not go. I should have seen that she was in danger. A woman would have understood. No; you didn’t treat Adrienne like a chattel; no one could treat Adrienne like one. It was poor little Meg I meant. I see now how wrong it was to think of taking her from the man she loves; when she has gone, you know, so that everyone must know and there can be no good in it. And they probably have bought a wedding-ring. Oh, Roger, she does comfort me about Meg. She makes me feel the deeper things, the things conventions blind us to. She makes me feel that the great thing, the only thing, is to follow one’s own light and that Meg did do that. And after all, you know, Roger, Jowett had George Eliot and Lewes to breakfast and they were never married.”

“Ha! ha! ha!” Oldmeadow laughed. He could not repress his bitter mirth. “Follow your light if there’s breakfast with a clergyman at the end of it!” he cruelly suggested. Yet he was too much amused, while so incensed, for there to be much cruelty, and Mrs. Chadwick, gazing at him as if from under her twisted straw, murmured: “He was a sort of clergyman, Roger; and if people do what seems to them right, why should they be punished?”

He saw it all. He heard it all, in her echoes. The potent influence had been poured through her, all the more irresistible for the appeal of Adrienne’s peril. Adrienne, bereaved and dying; yet magnanimous, gentle and assured; always assured. How could Mrs. Chadwick’s feathers and wedding-rings stand a chance against her? They had been swept away, or nearly away, and what Nancy had seen as a possible hope was now an accomplished fact. Mrs. Chadwick had been brought to feel about Meg as Adrienne felt about her, and Oldmeadow, for his part, was not sure that the game was worth the candle. There was something more than absurd in his poor friend’s attempts to adjust herself to the new standards. They were pitiable and even a little unseemly. She began presently softly to weep. “Such a pretty baby it was, Roger. A lovely little creature—that was the first thing she said to me—‘Oh, Mother Nell, it was such a pretty baby.’ And all that she said this morning—when it was taken away—was: ‘I wish Barney could have been in time to see our baby.’ Oh, it is terrible, terrible, Roger, that he is not here! Her heart is broken by it. How can she ever forget that he left her alone at such a time. And she begged him not to go. She told me that she almost knelt to him.”