She spoke, not really thinking of him, he saw, absorbed still in the suffering she had just left, measuring her power against such problems and the worse ones to which she was travelling to-morrow.
"Joséphine will be with them, I hope," she went on presently, "in three or four days. She will help them to get home and then she will come back and go to see about the grave at Evian. Joséphine is a tower of strength for me."
Her eyes were raised to him now, and, as they rested, he saw the compunction, the solicitude, with which they had met him on her entrance, return to them. "I'm not so very late, am I?" she said, rising. "I'll take off my hat and be ready in a moment."
She was tired, more tired than she knew. During dinner she hardly spoke, and, finding the resolve suddenly, he said, as they came back to their salon: "Do you know what you must do now. Go and lie down and rest for an hour. Until nine. It's not unselfishness. I'd rather have half of you to talk to for our last talk, than none of you at all."
"How dear of you," she said. She looked at him with gratitude and, still, with the compunction. "It would be a great rest. It would be better for our talk. I can go to sleep at once, you know. Like Napoleon," she added with a flicker of her playfulness.
When she had gone into her room Oldmeadow went out and walked along the quai. The night was dark and dimmed with fog, but there was a moon and as he walked he watched it glimmer on the windows of St. Jean. He seemed to see the august form of the cathedral through a watery element and the grey and silver patterns of the glass were like the scales of some vast fish. A sort of whale waiting to swallow up the Jonah that was himself, he reflected, and, leaning his elbows on the parapet of the quai, the analogy carried him further and he saw the cathedral like a symbol of Adrienne's life--her "big, big" life--looming there before him, becoming, as the moon rose higher, more and more visible in its austere and menacing majesty. What was his love to measure itself against such a vocation?--for that was what it came to, as she had said. She was as involved, as harnessed, as passionately preoccupied as a Saint Theresa. How could he be fitted in with Serbia and all the hordes of human need and wretchedness that he saw her sailing forward to succour? He knew a discouragement deeper than any he had felt, for he was not a doctor and his physical strength was crippled by his wounds; and, shaking his shoulders in the chilly November air, he turned his back on the cathedral and leaned against the parapet to look up through leafless branches where the plane tassels still hung, at the lighted windows of the hotel; their hotel, where the room, still theirs, waited for them. He felt himself take refuge in the banal lights. After all, she wasn't really a Saint Theresa. There was human misery everywhere to succour. Couldn't she, after a winter in Serbia, found crêches and visit slums in London? The masculine scepticism she had detected in him had its justification. Women weren't meant to go on, once the world's crisis past, doing feats of heroism; they weren't meant for austere careers that gave no leisure and no home. The trivial yet radiant vision of intimacy rose again before him. She slept there above him and he was guarding her slumber. He would always watch over her and guard her. He would follow her round the world, if need be, and brush her hair for her in Serbia or California.