Two brown blurs emerging from the farther end of the wood-vista gradually defined themselves as her step-son and an attendant game-keeper. They grew slowly upon the bluish background, with occasional delays and re-effacements, and she sat still, waiting till they should reach the gate at the end of the drive, where the keeper would turn off to his cottage and Owen continue on to the house.
She watched his approach with a smile. From the first days of her marriage she had been drawn to the boy, but it was not until after Effie’s birth that she had really begun to know him. The eager observation of her own child had shown her how much she had still to learn about the slight fair boy whom the holidays periodically restored to Givre. Owen, even then, both physically and morally, furnished her with the oddest of commentaries on his father’s mien and mind. He would never, the family sighingly recognized, be nearly as handsome as Mr. Leath; but his rather charmingly unbalanced face, with its brooding forehead and petulant boyish smile, suggested to Anna what his father’s countenance might have been could one have pictured its neat features disordered by a rattling breeze. She even pushed the analogy farther, and descried in her step-son’s mind a quaintly-twisted reflection of her husband’s. With his bursts of door-slamming activity, his fits of bookish indolence, his crude revolutionary dogmatizing and his flashes of precocious irony, the boy was not unlike a boisterous embodiment of his father’s theories. It was as though Fraser Leath’s ideas, accustomed to hang like marionettes on their pegs, should suddenly come down and walk. There were moments, indeed, when Owen’s humours must have suggested to his progenitor the gambols of an infant Frankenstein; but to Anna they were the voice of her secret rebellions, and her tenderness to her step-son was partly based on her severity toward herself. As he had the courage she had lacked, so she meant him to have the chances she had missed; and every effort she made for him helped to keep her own hopes alive.
Her interest in Owen led her to think more often of his mother, and sometimes she would slip away and stand alone before her predecessor’s portrait. Since her arrival at Givre the picture—a “full-length” by a once fashionable artist—had undergone the successive displacements of an exiled consort removed farther and farther from the throne; and Anna could not help noting that these stages coincided with the gradual decline of the artist’s fame. She had a fancy that if his credit had been in the ascendant the first Mrs. Leath might have continued to throne over the drawing-room mantel-piece, even to the exclusion of her successor’s effigy. Instead of this, her peregrinations had finally landed her in the shrouded solitude of the billiard-room, an apartment which no one ever entered, but where it was understood that “the light was better,” or might have been if the shutters had not been always closed.
Here the poor lady, elegantly dressed, and seated in the middle of a large lonely canvas, in the blank contemplation of a gilt console, had always seemed to Anna to be waiting for visitors who never came.
“Of course they never came, you poor thing! I wonder how long it took you to find out that they never would?” Anna had more than once apostrophized her, with a derision addressed rather to herself than to the dead; but it was only after Effie’s birth that it occurred to her to study more closely the face in the picture, and speculate on the kind of visitors that Owen’s mother might have hoped for.
“She certainly doesn’t look as if they would have been the same kind as mine: but there’s no telling, from a portrait that was so obviously done ‘to please the family’, and that leaves Owen so unaccounted for. Well, they never came, the visitors; they never came; and she died of it. She died of it long before they buried her: I’m certain of that. Those are stone-dead eyes in the picture.... The loneliness must have been awful, if even Owen couldn’t keep her from dying of it. And to feel it so she must havehadfeelings—real live ones, the kind that twitch and tug. And all she had to look at all her life was a gilt console—yes, that’s it, a gilt console screwed to the wall! That’s exactly and absolutely what he is!”
She did not mean, if she could help it, that either Effie or Owen should know that loneliness, or let her know it again. They were three, now, to keep each other warm, and she embraced both children in the same passion of motherhood, as though one were not enough to shield her from her predecessor’s fate.
Sometimes she fancied that Owen Leath’s response was warmer than that of her own child. But then Effie was still hardly more than a baby, and Owen, from the first, had been almost “old enough to understand”: certainlydidunderstand now, in a tacit way that yet perpetually spoke to her. This sense of his understanding was the deepest element in their feeling for each other. There were so many things between them that were never spoken of, or even indirectly alluded to, yet that, even in their occasional discussions and differences, formed the unadduced arguments making for final agreement...
Musing on this, she continued to watch his approach; and her heart began to beat a little faster at the thought of what she had to say to him. But when he reached the gate she saw him pause, and after a moment he turned aside as if to gain a cross-road through the park.
She started up and waved her sunshade, but he did not see her. No doubt he meant to go back with the gamekeeper, perhaps to the kennels, to see a retriever who had hurt his leg. Suddenly she was seized by the whim to overtake him. She threw down the parasol, thrust her letter into her bodice, and catching up her skirts began to run.
She was slight and light, with a natural ease and quickness of gait, but she could not recall having run a yard since she had romped with Owen in his school-days; nor did she know what impulse moved her now. She only knew that run she must, that no other motion, short of flight, would have been buoyant enough for her humour. She seemed to be keeping pace with some inward rhythm, seeking to give bodily expression to the lyric rush of her thoughts. The earth always felt elastic under her, and she had a conscious joy in treading it; but never had it been as soft and springy as today. It seemed actually to rise and meet her as she went, so that she had the feeling, which sometimes came to her in dreams, of skimming miraculously over short bright waves. The air, too, seemed to break in waves against her, sweeping by on its current all the slanted lights and moist sharp perfumes of the failing day. She panted to herself: “This is nonsense!” her blood hummed back: “But it’s glorious!” and she sped on till she saw that Owen had caught sight of her and was striding back in her direction.
Then she stopped and waited, flushed and laughing, her hands clasped against the letter in her breast.
“No, I’m not mad,” she called out; “but there’s something in the air today—don’t you feel it?—And I wanted to have a little talk with you,” she added as he came up to her, smiling at him and linking her arm in his.
He smiled back, but above the smile she saw the shade of anxiety which, for the last two months, had kept its fixed line between his handsome eyes.
“Owen, don’t look like that! I don’t want you to!” she said imperiously.
He laughed. “You said that exactly like Effie. What do you want me to do? To race with you as I do Effie? But I shouldn’t have a show!” he protested, still with the little frown between his eyes.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To the kennels. But there’s not the least need. The vet has seen Garry and he’s all right. If there’s anything you wanted to tell me——”
“Did I say there was? I just came out to meet you—I wanted to know if you’d had good sport.”
The shadow dropped on him again. “None at all. The fact is I didn’t try. Jean and I have just been knocking about in the woods. I wasn’t in a sanguinary mood.”
They walked on with the same light gait, so nearly of a height that keeping step came as naturally to them as breathing. Anna stole another look at the young face on a level with her own.
“Youdidsay there was something you wanted to tell me,” her step-son began after a pause.
“Well, there is.” She slackened her pace involuntarily, and they came to a pause and stood facing each other under the limes.
“Is Darrow coming?” he asked.
She seldom blushed, but at the question a sudden heat suffused her. She held her head high.
“Yes: he’s coming. I’ve just heard. He arrives to-morrow. But that’s not——” She saw her blunder and tried to rectify it. “Or rather, yes, in a way it is my reason for wanting to speak to you——”
“Because he’s coming?”
“Because he’s not yet here.”
“It’s about him, then?”
He looked at her kindly, half-humourously, an almost fraternal wisdom in his smile.
“About——? No, no: I meant that I wanted to speak today because it’s our last day alone together.”
“Oh, I see.” He had slipped his hands into the pockets of his tweed shooting jacket and lounged along at her side, his eyes bent on the moist ruts of the drive, as though the matter had lost all interest for him.
“Owen——”
He stopped again and faced her. “Look here, my dear, it’s no sort of use.”
“What’s no use?”
“Anything on earth you can any of you say.”
She challenged him: “Am I one of ‘any of you’?”
He did not yield. “Well, then—anything on earth that evenyoucan say.” “You don’t in the least know what I can say—or what I mean to.”
“Don’t I, generally?”
She gave him this point, but only to make another. “Yes; but this is particularly. I want to say.... Owen, you’ve been admirable all through.”
He broke into a laugh in which the odd elder-brotherly note was once more perceptible.
“Admirable,” she emphasized. “And so hasshe.”
“Oh, and so have you toher!” His voice broke down to boyishness. “I’ve never lost sight of that for a minute. It’s been altogether easier for her, though,” he threw off presently.
“On the whole, I suppose it has. Well——” she summed up with a laugh, “aren’t you all the better pleased to be told you’ve behaved as well as she?”
“Oh, you know, I’ve not done it for you,” he tossed back at her, without the least note of hostility in the affected lightness of his tone.
“Haven’t you, though, perhaps—the least bit? Because, after all, you knew I understood?”
“You’ve been awfully kind about pretending to.”
She laughed. “You don’t believe me? You must remember I had your grandmother to consider.”
“Yes: and my father—and Effie, I suppose—and the outraged shades of Givre!” He paused, as if to lay more stress on the boyish sneer: “Do you likewise include the late Monsieur de Chantelle?”
His step-mother did not appear to resent the thrust. She went on, in the same tone of affectionate persuasion: “Yes: I must have seemed to you too subject to Givre. Perhaps I have been. But you know that was not my real object in asking you to wait, to say nothing to your grandmother before her return.”
He considered. “Your real object, of course, was to gain time.”
“Yes—but for whom? Why not foryou?”
“For me?” He flushed up quickly. “You don’t mean——?”
She laid her hand on his arm and looked gravely into his handsome eyes.
“I mean that when your grandmother gets back from Ouchy I shall speak to her——” “You’ll speak to her...?”
“Yes; if only you’ll promise to give me time——”
“Time for her to send for Adelaide Painter?”
“Oh, she’ll undoubtedly send for Adelaide Painter!”
The allusion touched a spring of mirth in both their minds, and they exchanged a laughing look.
“Only you must promise not to rush things. You must give me time to prepare Adelaide too,” Mrs. Leath went on.
“Prepare her too?” He drew away for a better look at her. “Prepare her for what?”
“Why, to prepare your grandmother! For your marriage. Yes, that’s what I mean. I’m going to see you through, you know——”
His feint of indifference broke down and he caught her hand. “Oh, you dear divine thing! I didn’t dream——”
“I know you didn’t.” She dropped her gaze and began to walk on slowly. “I can’t say you’ve convinced me of the wisdom of the step. Only I seem to see that other things matter more—and that not missing things matters most. Perhaps I’ve changed—oryournot changing has convinced me. I’m certain now that you won’t budge. And that was really all I ever cared about.”
“Oh, as to not budging—I told you so months ago: you might have been sure of that! And how can you be any surer today than yesterday?”
“I don’t know. I suppose one learns something every day——”
“Not at Givre!” he laughed, and shot a half-ironic look at her. “But you haven’t reallybeenat Givre lately—not for months! Don’t you suppose I’ve noticed that, my dear?”
She echoed his laugh to merge it in an undenying sigh. “Poor Givre...”
“Poor empty Givre! With so many rooms full and yet not a soul in it—except of course my grandmother, who is its soul!”
They had reached the gateway of the court and stood looking with a common accord at the long soft-hued facade on which the autumn light was dying. “It looks so made to be happy in——” she murmured.
“Yes—today, today!” He pressed her arm a little. “Oh, you darling—to have given it that look for me!” He paused, and then went on in a lower voice: “Don’t you feel we owe it to the poor old place to do what we can to give it that look? You, too, I mean? Come, let’s make it grin from wing to wing! I’ve such a mad desire to say outrageous things to it—haven’t you? After all, in old times there must have been living people here!”
Loosening her arm from his she continued to gaze up at the house-front, which seemed, in the plaintive decline of light, to send her back the mute appeal of something doomed.
“Itisbeautiful,” she said.
“A beautiful memory! Quite perfect to take out and turn over when I’m grinding at the law in New York, and you’re——” He broke off and looked at her with a questioning smile. “Come! Tell me. You and I don’t have to say things to talk to each other. When you turn suddenly absentminded and mysterious I always feel like saying: ‘Come back. All is discovered’.”
She returned his smile. “You know as much as I know. I promise you that.”
He wavered, as if for the first time uncertain how far he might go. “I don’t know Darrow as much as you know him,” he presently risked.
She frowned a little. “You said just now we didn’t need to say things”
“Was I speaking? I thought it was your eyes——” He caught her by both elbows and spun her halfway round, so that the late sun shed a betraying gleam on her face. “They’re such awfully conversational eyes! Don’t you suppose they told me long ago why it’s just today you’ve made up your mind that people have got to live their own lives—even at Givre?”
“This is the south terrace,” Anna said. “Should you like to walk down to the river?”
She seemed to listen to herself speaking from a far-off airy height, and yet to be wholly gathered into the circle of consciousness which drew its glowing ring about herself and Darrow. To the aerial listener her words sounded flat and colourless, but to the self within the ring each one beat with a separate heart.
It was the day after Darrow’s arrival, and he had come down early, drawn by the sweetness of the light on the lawns and gardens below his window. Anna had heard the echo of his step on the stairs, his pause in the stone-flagged hall, his voice as he asked a servant where to find her. She was at the end of the house, in the brown-panelled sitting-room which she frequented at that season because it caught the sunlight first and kept it longest. She stood near the window, in the pale band of brightness, arranging some salmon-pink geraniums in a shallow porcelain bowl. Every sensation of touch and sight was thrice-alive in her. The grey-green fur of the geranium leaves caressed her fingers and the sunlight wavering across the irregular surface of the old parquet floor made it seem as bright and shifting as the brown bed of a stream.
Darrow stood framed in the door-way of the farthest drawing-room, a light-grey figure against the black and white flagging of the hall; then he began to move toward her down the empty pale-panelled vista, crossing one after another the long reflections which a projecting cabinet or screen cast here and there upon the shining floors.
As he drew nearer, his figure was suddenly displaced by that of her husband, whom, from the same point, she had so often seen advancing down the same perspective. Straight, spare, erect, looking to right and left with quick precise turns of the head, and stopping now and then to straighten a chair or alter the position of a vase, Fraser Leath used to march toward her through the double file of furniture like a general reviewing a regiment drawn up for his inspection. At a certain point, midway across the second room, he always stopped before the mantel-piece of pinkish-yellow marble and looked at himself in the tall garlanded glass that surmounted it. She could not remember that he had ever found anything to straighten or alter in his own studied attire, but she had never known him to omit the inspection when he passed that particular mirror.
When it was over he continued more briskly on his way, and the resulting expression of satisfaction was still on his face when he entered the oak sitting-room to greet his wife...
The spectral projection of this little daily scene hung but for a moment before Anna, but in that moment she had time to fling a wondering glance across the distance between her past and present. Then the footsteps of the present came close, and she had to drop the geraniums to give her hand to Darrow...
“Yes, let us walk down to the river.”
They had neither of them, as yet, found much to say to each other. Darrow had arrived late on the previous afternoon, and during the evening they had had between them Owen Leath and their own thoughts. Now they were alone for the first time and the fact was enough in itself. Yet Anna was intensely aware that as soon as they began to talk more intimately they would feel that they knew each other less well.
They passed out onto the terrace and down the steps to the gravel walk below. The delicate frosting of dew gave the grass a bluish shimmer, and the sunlight, sliding in emerald streaks along the tree-boles, gathered itself into great luminous blurs at the end of the wood-walks, and hung above the fields a watery glory like the ring about an autumn moon.
“It’s good to be here,” Darrow said.
They took a turn to the left and stopped for a moment to look back at the long pink house-front, plainer, friendlier, less adorned than on the side toward the court. So prolonged yet delicate had been the friction of time upon its bricks that certain expanses had the bloom and texture of old red velvet, and the patches of gold lichen spreading over them looked like the last traces of a dim embroidery. The dome of the chapel, with its gilded cross, rose above one wing, and the other ended in a conical pigeon-house, above which the birds were flying, lustrous and slatey, their breasts merged in the blue of the roof when they dropped down on it.
“And this is where you’ve been all these years.”
They turned away and began to walk down a long tunnel of yellowing trees. Benches with mossy feet stood against the mossy edges of the path, and at its farther end it widened into a circle about a basin rimmed with stone, in which the opaque water strewn with leaves looked like a slab of gold-flecked agate. The path, growing narrower, wound on circuitously through the woods, between slender serried trunks twined with ivy. Patches of blue appeared above them through the dwindling leaves, and presently the trees drew back and showed the open fields along the river.
They walked on across the fields to the tow-path. In a curve of the wall some steps led up to a crumbling pavilion with openings choked with ivy. Anna and Darrow seated themselves on the bench projecting from the inner wall of the pavilion and looked across the river at the slopes divided into blocks of green and fawn-colour, and at the chalk-tinted village lifting its squat church-tower and grey roofs against the precisely drawn lines of the landscape. Anna sat silent, so intensely aware of Darrow’s nearness that there was no surprise in the touch he laid on her hand. They looked at each other, and he smiled and said: “There are to be no more obstacles now.”
“Obstacles?” The word startled her. “What obstacles?”
“Don’t you remember the wording of the telegram that turned me back last May? ‘Unforeseen obstacle’: that was it. What was the earth-shaking problem, by the way? Finding a governess for Effie, wasn’t it?”
“But I gave you my reason: the reason why it was an obstacle. I wrote you fully about it.”
“Yes, I know you did.” He lifted her hand and kissed it. “How far off it all seems, and how little it all matters today!”
She looked at him quickly. “Do you feel that? I suppose I’m different. I want to draw all those wasted months into today—to make them a part of it.”
“But they are, to me. You reach back and take everything—back to the first days of all.”
She frowned a little, as if struggling with an inarticulate perplexity. “It’s curious how, in those first days, too, something that I didn’t understand came between us.”
“Oh, in those days we neither of us understood, did we? It’s part of what’s called the bliss of being young.”
“Yes, I thought that, too: thought it, I mean, in looking back. But it couldn’t, even then, have been as true of you as of me; and now——”
“Now,” he said, “the only thing that matters is that we’re sitting here together.”
He dismissed the rest with a lightness that might have seemed conclusive evidence of her power over him. But she took no pride in such triumphs. It seemed to her that she wanted his allegiance and his adoration not so much for herself as for their mutual love, and that in treating lightly any past phase of their relation he took something from its present beauty. The colour rose to her face.
“Between you and me everything matters.”
“Of course!” She felt the unperceiving sweetness of his smile. “That’s why,” he went on, “‘everything,’ for me, is here and now: on this bench, between you and me.”
She caught at the phrase. “That’s what I meant: it’s here and now; we can’t get away from it.”
“Get away from it? Do you want to?again?”
Her heart was beating unsteadily. Something in her, fitfully and with reluctance, struggled to free itself, but the warmth of his nearness penetrated every sense as the sunlight steeped the landscape. Then, suddenly, she felt that she wanted no less than the whole of her happiness.
“‘Again’? But wasn’t ityou, the last time——?”
She paused, the tremor in her of Psyche holding up the lamp. But in the interrogative light of her pause her companion’s features underwent no change.
“The last time? Last spring? But it was you who—for the best of reasons, as you’ve told me—turned me back from your very door last spring!”
She saw that he was good-humouredly ready to “thresh out,” for her sentimental satisfaction, a question which, for his own, Time had so conclusively dealt with; and the sense of his readiness reassured her.
“I wrote as soon as I could,” she rejoined. “I explained the delay and asked you to come. And you never even answered my letter.”
“It was impossible to come then. I had to go back to my post.”
“And impossible to write and tell me so?”
“Your letter was a long time coming. I had waited a week—ten days. I had some excuse for thinking, when it came, that you were in no great hurry for an answer.”
“You thought that—really—after reading it?”
“I thought it.”
Her heart leaped up to her throat. “Then why are you here today?”
He turned on her with a quick look of wonder. “God knows—if you can ask me that!”
“You see I was right to say I didn’t understand.”
He stood up abruptly and stood facing her, blocking the view over the river and the checkered slopes. “Perhaps I might say so too.”
“No, no: we must neither of us have any reason for saying it again.” She looked at him gravely. “Surely you and I needn’t arrange the lights before we show ourselves to each other. I want you to see me just as I am, with all my irrational doubts and scruples; the old ones and the new ones too.”
He came back to his seat beside her. “Never mind the old ones. They were justified—I’m willing to admit it. With the governess having suddenly to be packed off, and Effie on your hands, and your mother-in-law ill, I see the impossibility of your letting me come. I even see that, at the moment, it was difficult to write and explain. But what does all that matter now? The new scruples are the ones I want to tackle.”
Again her heart trembled. She felt her happiness so near, so sure, that to strain it closer might be like a child’s crushing a pet bird in its caress. But her very security urged her on. For so long her doubts had been knife-edged: now they had turned into bright harmless toys that she could toss and catch without peril!
“You didn’t come, and you didn’t answer my letter; and after waiting four months I wrote another.” “And I answered that one; and I’m here.”
“Yes.” She held his eyes. “But in my last letter I repeated exactly what I’d said in the first—the one I wrote you last June. I told you then that I was ready to give you the answer to what you’d asked me in London; and in telling you that, I told you what the answer was.”
“My dearest! My dearest!” Darrow murmured.
“You ignored that letter. All summer you made no sign. And all I ask now is, that you should frankly tell me why.”
“I can only repeat what I’ve just said. I was hurt and unhappy and I doubted you. I suppose if I’d cared less I should have been more confident. I cared so much that I couldn’t risk another failure. For you’d made me feel that I’d miserably failed. So I shut my eyes and set my teeth and turned my back. There’s the whole pusillanimous truth of it!”
“Oh, if it’s thewholetruth!——” She let him clasp her. “There’s my torment, you see. I thought that was what your silence meant till I made you break it. Now I want to be sure that I was right.”
“What can I tell you to make you sure?”
“You can let me tellyoueverything first.” She drew away, but without taking her hands from him. “Owen saw you in Paris,” she began.
She looked at him and he faced her steadily. The light was full on his pleasantly-browned face, his grey eyes, his frank white forehead. She noticed for the first time a seal-ring in a setting of twisted silver on the hand he had kept on hers.
“In Paris? Oh, yes.... So he did.”
“He came back and told me. I think you talked to him a moment in a theatre. I asked if you’d spoken of my having put you off—or if you’d sent me any message. He didn’t remember that you had.”
“In a crush—in a Paris foyer? My dear!”
“It was absurd of me! But Owen and I have always been on odd kind of brother-and-sister terms. I think he guessed about us when he saw you with me in London. So he teased me a little and tried to make me curious about you; and when he saw he’d succeeded he told me he hadn’t had time to say much to you because you were in such a hurry to get back to the lady you were with.”
He still held her hands, but she felt no tremor in his, and the blood did not stir in his brown cheek. He seemed to be honestly turning over his memories. “Yes: and what else did he tell you?”
“Oh, not much, except that she was awfully pretty. When I asked him to describe her he said you had her tucked away in abaignoireand he hadn’t actually seen her; but he saw the tail of her cloak, and somehow knew from that that she was pretty. Onedoes, you know.... I think he said the cloak was pink.”
Darrow broke into a laugh. “Of course it was—they always are! So that was at the bottom of your doubts?”
“Not at first. I only laughed. But afterward, when I wrote you and you didn’t answer——Oh, youdosee?” she appealed to him.
He was looking at her gently. “Yes: I see.”
“It’s not as if this were a light thing between us. I want you to know me as I am. If I thought that at that moment ... when you were on your way here, almost——”
He dropped her hand and stood up. “Yes, yes—I understand.”
“But do you?” Her look followed him. “I’m not a goose of a girl. I know ... of course Iknow...but there are things a woman feels ... when what she knows doesn’t make any difference. It’s not that I want you to explain—I mean about that particular evening. It’s only that I want you to have the whole of my feeling. I didn’t know what it was till I saw you again. I never dreamed I should say such things to you!”
“I never dreamed I should be here to hear you say them!” He turned back and lifting a floating end of her scarf put his lips to it. “But now that you have, I know—I know,” he smiled down at her.
“You know?”
“That this is no light thing between us. Now you may ask me anything you please! That was all I wanted to askyou.”
For a long moment they looked at each other without speaking. She saw the dancing spirit in his eyes turn grave and darken to a passionate sternness. He stooped and kissed her, and she sat as if folded in wings.
It was in the natural order of things that, on the way back to the house, their talk should have turned to the future.
Anna was not eager to define it. She had an extraordinary sensitiveness to the impalpable elements of happiness, and as she walked at Darrow’s side her imagination flew back and forth, spinning luminous webs of feeling between herself and the scene about her. Every heightening of emotion produced for her a new effusion of beauty in visible things, and with it the sense that such moments should be lingered over and absorbed like some unrenewable miracle. She understood Darrow’s impatience to see their plans take shape. She knew it must be so, she would not have had it otherwise; but to reach a point where she could fix her mind on his appeal for dates and decisions was like trying to break her way through the silver tangle of an April wood.
Darrow wished to use his diplomatic opportunities as a means of studying certain economic and social problems with which he presently hoped to deal in print; and with this in view he had asked for, and obtained, a South American appointment. Anna was ready to follow where he led, and not reluctant to put new sights as well as new thoughts between herself and her past. She had, in a direct way, only Effie and Effie’s education to consider; and there seemed, after due reflection, no reason why the most anxious regard for these should not be conciliated with the demands of Darrow’s career. Effie, it was evident, could be left to Madame de Chantelle’s care till the couple should have organized their life; and she might even, as long as her future step-father’s work retained him in distant posts, continue to divide her year between Givre and the antipodes.
As for Owen, who had reached his legal majority two years before, and was soon to attain the age fixed for the taking over of his paternal inheritance, the arrival of this date would reduce his step-mother’s responsibility to a friendly concern for his welfare. This made for the prompt realization of Darrow’s wishes, and there seemed no reason why the marriage should not take place within the six weeks that remained of his leave.
They passed out of the wood-walk into the open brightness of the garden. The noon sunlight sheeted with gold the bronze flanks of the polygonal yews. Chrysanthemums, russet, saffron and orange, glowed like the efflorescence of an enchanted forest; belts of red begonia purpling to wine-colour ran like smouldering flame among the borders; and above this outspread tapestry the house extended its harmonious length, the soberness of its lines softened to grace in the luminous misty air.
Darrow stood still, and Anna felt that his glance was travelling from her to the scene about them and then back to her face.
“You’re sure you’re prepared to give up Givre? You look so made for each other!”
“Oh, Givre——” She broke off suddenly, feeling as if her too careless tone had delivered all her past into his hands; and with one of her instinctive movements of recoil she added: “When Owen marries I shall have to give it up.”
“When Owen marries? That’s looking some distance ahead! I want to be told that meanwhile you’ll have no regrets.”
She hesitated. Why did he press her to uncover to him her poor starved past? A vague feeling of loyalty, a desire to spare what could no longer harm her, made her answer evasively: “There will probably be no ‘meanwhile.’ Owen may marry before long.”
She had not meant to touch on the subject, for her step-son had sworn her to provisional secrecy; but since the shortness of Darrow’s leave necessitated a prompt adjustment of their own plans, it was, after all, inevitable that she should give him at least a hint of Owen’s.
“Owen marry? Why, he always seems like a faun in flannels! I hope he’s found a dryad. There might easily be one left in these blue-and-gold woods.”
“I can’t tell you yet where he found his dryad, but sheisone, I believe: at any rate she’ll become the Givre woods better than I do. Only there may be difficulties——”
“Well! At that age they’re not always to be wished away.”
She hesitated. “Owen, at any rate, has made up his mind to overcome them; and I’ve promised to see him through.”
She went on, after a moment’s consideration, to explain that her step-son’s choice was, for various reasons, not likely to commend itself to his grandmother. “She must be prepared for it, and I’ve promised to do the preparing. You know I alwayshaveseen him through things, and he rather counts on me now.”
She fancied that Darrow’s exclamation had in it a faint note of annoyance, and wondered if he again suspected her of seeking a pretext for postponement.
“But once Owen’s future is settled, you won’t, surely, for the sake of what you call seeing him through, ask that I should go away again without you?” He drew her closer as they walked. “Owen will understand, if you don’t. Since he’s in the same case himself I’ll throw myself on his mercy. He’ll see that I have the first claim on you; he won’t even want you not to see it.”
“Owen sees everything: I’m not afraid of that. But his future isn’t settled. He’s very young to marry—too young, his grandmother is sure to think—and the marriage he wants to make is not likely to convince her to the contrary.”
“You don’t mean that it’s like his first choice?”
“Oh, no! But it’s not what Madame de Chantelle would call a good match; it’s not even what I call a wise one.”
“Yet you’re backing him up?”
“Yet I’m backing him up.” She paused. “I wonder if you’ll understand? What I’ve most wanted for him, and shall want for Effie, is that they shall always feel free to make their own mistakes, and never, if possible, be persuaded to make other people’s. Even if Owen’s marriage is a mistake, and has to be paid for, I believe he’ll learn and grow in the paying. Of course I can’t make Madame de Chantelle see this; but I can remind her that, with his character—his big rushes of impulse, his odd intervals of ebb and apathy—she may drive him into some worse blunder if she thwarts him now.”
“And you mean to break the news to her as soon as she comes back from Ouchy?”
“As soon as I see my way to it. She knows the girl and likes her: that’s our hope. And yet it may, in the end, prove our danger, make it harder for us all, when she learns the truth, than if Owen had chosen a stranger. I can’t tell you more till I’ve told her: I’ve promised Owen not to tell any one. All I ask you is to give me time, to give me a few days at any rate She’s been wonderfully ‘nice,’ as she would call it, about you, and about the fact of my having soon to leave Givre; but that, again, may make it harder for Owen. At any rate, you can see, can’t you, how it makes me want to stand by him? You see, I couldn’t bear it if the least fraction of my happiness seemed to be stolen from his—as if it were a little scrap of happiness that had to be pieced out with other people’s!” She clasped her hands on Darrow’s arm. “I want our life to be like a house with all the windows lit: I’d like to string lanterns from the roof and chimneys!”
She ended with an inward tremor. All through her exposition and her appeal she had told herself that the moment could hardly have been less well chosen. In Darrow’s place she would have felt, as he doubtless did, that her carefully developed argument was only the disguise of an habitual indecision. It was the hour of all others when she would have liked to affirm herself by brushing aside every obstacle to his wishes; yet it was only by opposing them that she could show the strength of character she wanted him to feel in her.
But as she talked she began to see that Darrow’s face gave back no reflection of her words, that he continued to wear the abstracted look of a man who is not listening to what is said to him. It caused her a slight pang to discover that his thoughts could wander at such a moment; then, with a flush of joy she perceived the reason.
In some undefinable way she had become aware, without turning her head, that he was steeped in the sense of her nearness, absorbed in contemplating the details of her face and dress; and the discovery made the words throng to her lips. She felt herself speak with ease, authority, conviction. She said to herself: “He doesn’t care what I say—it’s enough that I say it—even if it’s stupid he’ll like me better for it...” She knew that every inflexion of her voice, every gesture, every characteristic of her person—its very defects, the fact that her forehead was too high, that her eyes were not large enough, that her hands, though slender, were not small, and that the fingers did not taper—she knew that these deficiencies were so many channels through which her influence streamed to him; that she pleased him in spite of them, perhaps because of them; that he wanted her as she was, and not as she would have liked to be; and for the first time she felt in her veins the security and lightness of happy love.
They reached the court and walked under the limes toward the house. The hall door stood wide, and through the windows opening on the terrace the sun slanted across the black and white floor, the faded tapestry chairs, and Darrow’s travelling coat and cap, which lay among the cloaks and rugs piled on a bench against the wall.
The sight of these garments, lying among her own wraps, gave her a sense of homely intimacy. It was as if her happiness came down from the skies and took on the plain dress of daily things. At last she seemed to hold it in her hand.
As they entered the hall her eye lit on an unstamped note conspicuously placed on the table.
“From Owen! He must have rushed off somewhere in the motor.”
She felt a secret stir of pleasure at the immediate inference that she and Darrow would probably lunch alone. Then she opened the note and stared at it in wonder.
“Dear,” Owen wrote, “after what you said yesterday I can’t wait another hour, and I’m off to Francheuil, to catch the Dijon express and travel back with them. Don’t be frightened; I won’t speak unless it’s safe to. Trust me for that—but I had to go.”
She looked up slowly.
“He’s gone to Dijon to meet his grandmother. Oh, I hope I haven’t made a mistake!”
“You? Why, what have you to do with his going to Dijon?”
She hesitated. “The day before yesterday I told him, for the first time, that I meant to see him through, no matter what happened. And I’m afraid he’s lost his head, and will be imprudent and spoil things. You see, I hadn’t meant to say a word to him till I’d had time to prepare Madame de Chantelle.”
She felt that Darrow was looking at her and reading her thoughts, and the colour flew to her face. “Yes: it was when I heard you were coming that I told him. I wanted him to feel as I felt ... it seemed too unkind to make him wait!” Her hand was in his, and his arm rested for a moment on her shoulder.
“Itwouldhave been too unkind to make him wait.”
They moved side by side toward the stairs. Through the haze of bliss enveloping her, Owen’s affairs seemed curiously unimportant and remote. Nothing really mattered but this torrent of light in her veins. She put her foot on the lowest step, saying: “It’s nearly luncheon time—I must take off my hat...” and as she started up the stairs Darrow stood below in the hall and watched her. But the distance between them did not make him seem less near: it was as if his thoughts moved with her and touched her like endearing hands.
In her bedroom she shut the door and stood still, looking about her in a fit of dreamy wonder. Her feelings were unlike any she had ever known: richer, deeper, more complete. For the first time everything in her, from head to foot, seemed to be feeding the same full current of sensation.
She took off her hat and went to the dressing-table to smooth her hair. The pressure of the hat had flattened the dark strands on her forehead; her face was paler than usual, with shadows about the eyes. She felt a pang of regret for the wasted years. “If I look like this today,” she said to herself, “what will he think of me when I’m ill or worried?” She began to run her fingers through her hair, rejoicing in its thickness; then she desisted and sat still, resting her chin on her hands.
“I want him to see me as I am,” she thought.
Deeper than the deepest fibre of her vanity was the triumphant sense thatas she was, with her flattened hair, her tired pallor, her thin sleeves a little tumbled by the weight of her jacket, he would like her even better, feel her nearer, dearer, more desirable, than in all the splendours she might put on for him. In the light of this discovery she studied her face with a new intentness, seeing its defects as she had never seen them, yet seeing them through a kind of radiance, as though love were a luminous medium into which she had been bodily plunged.
She was glad now that she had confessed her doubts and her jealousy. She divined that a man in love may be flattered by such involuntary betrayals, that there are moments when respect for his liberty appeals to him less than the inability to respect it: moments so propitious that a woman’s very mistakes and indiscretions may help to establish her dominion. The sense of power she had been aware of in talking to Darrow came back with ten-fold force. She felt like testing him by the most fantastic exactions, and at the same moment she longed to humble herself before him, to make herself the shadow and echo of his mood. She wanted to linger with him in a world of fancy and yet to walk at his side in the world of fact. She wanted him to feel her power and yet to love her for her ignorance and humility. She felt like a slave, and a goddess, and a girl in her teens...