Adrienne Toner: A Novel

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“Poor little Nancy. But I’m glad it was she who told you, Barney.”

“No one could have been sweeter,” said Barney, talking on quickly. “She kept saying, ‘Oh, you oughtn’t to be here, Barney. You oughtn’t to be here.’ But no one could have been sweeter. We sat down on the old bench, you know, and she told me. That Adrienne had nearly died. That the baby was dead. I could hardly believe her, at first. I stared at her, I know, and I kept saying, ‘What do you mean, Nancy?—what do you mean?’ And she began to cry and I cried, too. Men do feel, Roger, all the same, even though they haven’t the mother’s claim to feel. I thought about our baby so much. I loved it, too. And now—to think it’s dead; and that I never saw it; and that it’s my fault”—his voice had shaken more and more; he had put his hand before his eyes, and, then, suddenly, he leaned forward and buried his head on the arm of the sofa.

“My poor Barney! My dear boy!” Oldmeadow muttered. He came and sat down beside him; he laid his arm around his shoulders. “It’s not your fault,” he said.

“Oh, don’t say that, Roger!” sobbed Barney. “It’s no good trying to comfort me. I’ve broken her heart. She doesn’t say so. She’s too angelic to say it; but she lies there and looks it. My poor darling! My poor, courageous darling; what she has been through! It can’t be helped. I must face it. I’m her husband. I ought to have understood. She supplicated me, and I rejected her, and the child is dead.”

“The child’s death is a calamity for which no one can be held responsible unless it is Adrienne herself,” said Oldmeadow. While Barney sobbed he was thinking intently, for this was a turning-point in Barney’s destiny. He would remain in subjugation to Adrienne’s conception of the wrong done her or he must be enabled to regain the sense of innocence to which he had every right. “She forced the situation on you. She chose to break rather than bend,” he said. “Listen to me, Barney. I don’t speak in any enmity to your wife; but listen to me and try to think it out. Don’t you remember how you once said that your marriage couldn’t be a mistake if you were able to see the defects as well as the beauty of the woman you love. Don’t you remember that you said she’d have to learn a little from you for the much you’d have to learn from her. Nothing more reassured me than what you said that night. And I was reassured the other day by your firmness. It implies no disloyalty in you to see the defects now. It was power over you she wanted the other day and to see herself put in the right, before me; and to see me worsted, before you. You know it, Barney; you know it in your heart. And she knows it too. There was no failure of love in what you said. There was only failure of homage. You were right in opposing her. She was wrong in the issue she made. She was wrong from the first of the miserable affair in having concealed it from you. If you’d stayed behind as she wanted you to do, you’d have shown yourself a weakling and she’d have been further than ever from knowing herself in error. There is the truth; and the sooner you see it, the sooner she will.”

For some time after his friend had ended, Barney lay silent, his face still hidden. But his sobs had ceased. And his silence, at last, grew too long for any disclaimer to be possible to him. He had been brought, Oldmeadow knew it from the very rhythm of his breathing, to the passionless contemplation where alone truth is visible. And what he said at last was: “She’ll never see it like that.”

“Oh, yes, she will,” said Oldmeadow. And he remembered Nancy’s wisdom. “If you hold to it firmly and tenderly and make her feel you love her while you make her feel you think her wrong.”

“She’ll never see it,” Barney repeated, and Oldmeadow now suspected, and with a deep uneasiness, that Barney might be seeing further than himself. “She can’t.”

“You mean that she’s incapable of thinking herself wrong?”

“Yes, incapable,” said Barney. “Because all she’s conscious of is the wish to do right. And she is right so often, she is so good and beautiful, that it must be like that with her. She can break; but she can’t bend.”