CHAPTER II
ROGER OLDMEADOW went to have tea with Mrs. Aldesey next afternoon. She was, after the Chadwicks, his nearest friend, and his relation to the Chadwicks was one of affection rather than affinity. They had been extraordinarily kind to him since the time that he had befriended Barney at the preparatory school, hiding, under his grim jocularities, the bewilderment of a boy’s first great bereavement. His love for his mother had been an idolatry, and his childhood had been haunted by her ill-health. She died when he was thirteen, and in some ways he knew that, even now, he had never got over it. His unfortunate and frustrated love-affair in early manhood had been, when all was said and done, a trivial grief compared to it. Coldbrooks had become, after that, his only home, for he had lost his father as a very little boy, and the whole family had left the country parsonage and been thrown on the mercies of an uncle and aunt who lived in a grim provincial town. Oldmeadow’s most vivid impression of home was the high back bedroom where the worn carpet was cold to the feet and the fire a sulky spot of red, and the windows looked out over smoky chimney-pots. Here his stricken mother lay in bed with her cherished cat beside her and read aloud to him. There was always a difficulty about feeding poor Effie, Aunt Aggie declaring that cats should live below stairs and on mice; and Roger, at midday dinner, became adroit at slipping bits of meat from his plate into a paper held in his lap and carried triumphantly to his mother’s room afterwards. “Oh, darling, you oughtn’t to,” she would say with her loving, girlish smile, and he would reply, “But I went without, Mummy; so it’s quite all right.” His two little sisters were kept in the nursery, as they were noisy, high-spirited children, and tired their mother too much. Roger was her companion, her comrade; her only comrade in the world, really, beside Effie. It had been Mrs. Chadwick who had saved Effie from the lethal chamber after her mistress’s death. Roger never spoke about his mother, but he did speak about Effie when she was thus threatened, and he had never forgotten, never, never, Mrs. Chadwick’s eager cry of, “But bring her here, my dear Roger. I like idle cats! Bring her here, and I promise you that we’ll make her happy. Animals are so happy at Coldbrooks.” To see Effie cherished, petted, occupying the best chairs during all the years that followed, had been to see his mother, in this flickering little ghost, remembered in the only way he could have borne to see her explicitly remembered, and it was because of Effie that he had most deeply loved Coldbrooks. It remained always his refuge during a cheerless and harassed youth, when, with his two forceful, black-browed sisters to settle in life, he had felt himself pant and strain under the harness. He was fonder of them than they of him, for they were hard, cheerful young women, inheriting harshness of feature and manner from their father, with their father’s black eyes. It was from his mother that Oldmeadow had his melancholy blue ones, and he had never again met his mother’s tenderness.
Both sisters were now settled, one in India and one, very prosperously, in London; but he seldom turned for tea into Cadogan Gardens and Trixie’s brisk Chippendale drawing-room; though Cadogan Gardens was obviously more convenient than Somer’s Place, where, on the other side of the park, Mrs. Aldesey lived. He had whims, and did not know whether it was because he more disliked her husband or her butler that he went so seldom to see Trixie. Her husband was jovial and familiar, and the butler had a face like a rancid ham and a surreptitious manner. One had always to be encountered at the door, and the other was too often in the drawing-room, and Trixie was vexatiously satisfied with both; Trixie also had four turbulent, intelligent children, in whom complacent parental theories of uncontrol manifested themselves unpleasantly, and altogether she was too much hedged in by obstacles to be tempting; even had she been tempting in herself. Intercourse with Trixie, when it did take place, consisted usually of hard-hearted banter. She bantered him a great deal about Mrs. Aldesey, who, she averred, snubbed her. Not that Trixie minded being snubbed by anybody.
It was a pleasant walk across the park on this spring day when the crocuses were fully out in the grass, white, purple and gold, and the trees just scantly stitched with green, and, as always, it was with a slight elation that he approached his friend. However dull or jaded oneself or the day, the thought of her cheered one as did the thought of tea. She made him think of her own China tea. She suggested delicate ceremoniousness. Though familiar, there was always an aroma of unexpectedness about her; a slight, sweet shock of oddity and surprise.
Mrs. Aldesey was unlike the traditional London American. She was neither rich nor beautiful nor noticeably well-dressed. One became gradually aware, after some time spent in her company, that her clothes, soft-tinted and silken, were pleasing, as were her other appurtenances; the narrow front of her little house, painted freshly in white and green and barred by boxes of yellow wallflower; the serenely unfashionable water-colours of Italy, painted by her mother, on the staircase; and her drawing-room, grey-green and primrose-yellow, with eighteenth-century fans, of which she had a collection, displayed in cabinets, and good old glass.
Mrs. Aldesey herself, behind her tea-table, very faded, very thin, with what the French term a souffreteux little face—an air of just not having taken drugs to make her sleep, but of having certainly taken tabloids to make her digest—seemed already to belong to a passing order of things; an order still sustained, if lightly, by stays, and keeping a prayer-book as punctually in use as a card-case.
Oldmeadow owed her, if indirectly, to the Chadwicks, as he owed so much, even if it was entirely on his own merits that he had won her regard. They had met, years ago, in France; an entirely chance encounter, and probably a futureless one, had it not been for the presence in the hotel at Amboise of the Lumleys. They both slightly knew the Lumleys, and the Lumleys and the Chadwicks were old friends. So it had come about; and if he associated Mrs. Aldesey with tea, he associated her also with perfect omelettes and the Loire. He had liked her at once so much, that, had it not been for an always unseen yet never-repudiated husband in New York, he would certainly, at the beginning, have fallen in love with her. But the unrepudiated husband made as much a part of Mrs. Aldesey’s environment as her stays and her prayer-book. The barrier was so evident that one did not even reflect on what one might have done had it not been there; and indeed, Mrs. Aldesey, he now seemed, after many pleasant years of friendship, to recognize, for all the sense of sweetness and exhilaration she gave him, had not enough substance to rouse or sustain his heart. She was, like the tea again, all savour.
She lifted to-day her attentive blue eyes—with age they would become shrewd—and gave him her fine little hand, blue-veined and ornamented with pearls and diamonds in old settings. She wore long earrings and a high, transparent collar of net and lace. Her earrings and her elaborately dressed hair, fair and faded, seemed as much a part of her personality as her eyes, her delicate nose and her small, slightly puckered mouth that dragged provocatively and prettily at one corner when she smiled. Oldmeadow sometimes wondered if she were happy; but never because of anything she said or did.
“I want to hear about some people called Toner,” he said, dropping into the easy-chair on the opposite side of the tea-table. It was almost always thus that he and Mrs. Aldesey met. He rarely dined out. “I’m rather perturbed. I think that Barney—you remember young Chadwick—is going to marry a Miss Toner—a Miss Adrienne Toner. And I hope you’ll have something to her advantage to tell me. As you know, I’m devoted to Barney and his family.”
“I know. The Lumleys’ Chadwicks. I remember perfectly. The dear boy with the innocent eyes and sulky mouth. Why don’t you bring him to see me? He’s dancing the tango in all his spare moments, I suppose, and doesn’t care about old ladies.” Mrs. Aldesey was not much over forty, but always thus alluded to herself. “Toner,” she took up, pouring out his tea. “Why perturbed? Do you know anything against them? Americans, you mean. We poor expatriates are always seen as keepers to so many curious brethren.—Toner. Celà ne me dit rien.”
“I know nothing against them except that Mrs. Toner, the girl’s mother, died, by arrangement, out at sea, on her yacht—in sunlight. Does that say anything? People don’t do that in America, do they, as a rule? A very opulent lady, I inferred.”
“Oh,