Anna stood in the middle of the room, her eyes on the door. Darrow’s questioning gaze was still on her, and she said to herself with a quick-drawn breath: “If only he doesn’t come near me!”
It seemed to her that she had been suddenly endowed with the fatal gift of reading the secret sense of every seemingly spontaneous look and movement, and that in his least gesture of affection she would detect a cold design.
For a moment longer he continued to look at her enquiringly; then he turned away and took up his habitual stand by the mantel-piece. She drew a deep breath of relief.
“Won’t you please explain?” he said.
“I can’t explain: I don’t know. I didn’t even know—till she told you—that she really meant to break her engagement. All I know is that she came to me just now and said she wished to leave Givre today; and that Owen, when he heard of it—for she hadn’t told him—at once accused her of going away with the secret intention of throwing him over.”
“And you think it’s a definite break?” She perceived, as she spoke, that his brow had cleared.
“How should I know? Perhaps you can tell me.”
“I?” She fancied his face clouded again, but he did not move from his tranquil attitude.
“As I told you,” she went on, “Owen has worked himself up to imagining that for some mysterious reason you’ve influenced Sophy against him.”
Darrow still visibly wondered. “It must indeed be a mysterious reason! He knows how slightly I know Miss Viner. Why should he imagine anything so wildly improbable?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“But he must have hinted at some reason.”
“No: he admits he doesn’t know your reason. He simply says that Sophy’s manner to him has changed since she came back to Givre and that he’s seen you together several times—in the park, the spring-house, I don’t know where—talking alone in a way that seemed confidential—almost secret; and he draws the preposterous conclusion that you’ve used your influence to turn her against him.”
“My influence? What kind of influence?”
“He doesn’t say.”
Darrow again seemed to turn over the facts she gave him. His face remained grave, but without the least trace of discomposure. “And what does Miss Viner say?”
“She says it’s perfectly natural that she should occasionally talk to my friends when she’s under my roof—and refuses to give him any other explanation.”
“That at least is perfectly natural!”
Anna felt her cheeks flush as she answered: “Yes—but there is something——”
“Something——?”
“Some reason for her sudden decision to break her engagement. I can understand Owen’s feeling, sorry as I am for his way of showing it. The girl owes him some sort of explanation, and as long as she refuses to give it his imagination is sure to run wild.”
“She would have given it, no doubt, if he’d asked it in a different tone.”
“I don’t defend Owen’s tone—but she knew what it was before she accepted him. She knows he’s excitable and undisciplined.”
“Well, she’s been disciplining him a little—probably the best thing that could happen. Why not let the matter rest there?”
“Leave Owen with the idea that youhavebeen the cause of the break?”
He met the question with his easy smile. “Oh, as to that—leave him with any idea of me he chooses! But leave him, at any rate, free.”
“Free?” she echoed in surprise.
“Simply let things be. You’ve surely done all you could for him and Miss Viner. If they don’t hit it off it’s their own affair. What possible motive can you have for trying to interfere now?”
Her gaze widened to a deeper wonder. “Why—naturally, what he says of you!”
“I don’t care a straw what he says of me! In such a situation a boy in love will snatch at the most far-fetched reason rather than face the mortifying fact that the lady may simply be tired of him.”
“You don’t quite understand Owen. Things go deep with him, and last long. It took him a long time to recover from his other unlucky love affair. He’s romantic and extravagant: he can’t live on the interest of his feelings. He worships Sophy and she seemed to be fond of him. If she’s changed it’s been very sudden. And if they part like this, angrily and inarticulately, it will hurt him horribly—hurt his very soul. But that, as you say, is between the two. What concerns me is his associating you with their quarrel. Owen’s like my own son—if you’d seen him when I first came here you’d know why. We were like two prisoners who talk to each other by tapping on the wall. He’s never forgotten it, nor I. Whether he breaks with Sophy, or whether they make it up, I can’t let him think you had anything to do with it.”
She raised her eyes entreatingly to Darrow’s, and read in them the forbearance of the man resigned to the discussion of non-existent problems.
“I’ll do whatever you want me to,” he said; “but I don’t yet know what it is.”
His smile seemed to charge her with inconsequence, and the prick to her pride made her continue: “After all, it’s not so unnatural that Owen, knowing you and Sophy to be almost strangers, should wonder what you were saying to each other when he saw you talking together.”
She felt a warning tremor as she spoke, as though some instinct deeper than reason surged up in defense of its treasure. But Darrow’s face was unstirred save by the flit of his half-amused smile.
“Well, my dear—and couldn’t you have told him?” “I?” she faltered out through her blush.
“You seem to forget, one and all of you, the position you put me in when I came down here: your appeal to me to see Owen through, your assurance to him that I would, Madame de Chantelle’s attempt to win me over; and most of all, my own sense of the fact you’ve just recalled to me: the importance, for both of us, that Owen should like me. It seemed to me that the first thing to do was to get as much light as I could on the whole situation; and the obvious way of doing it was to try to know Miss Viner better. Of course I’ve talked with her alone—I’ve talked with her as often as I could. I’ve tried my best to find out if you were right in encouraging Owen to marry her.”
She listened with a growing sense of reassurance, struggling to separate the abstract sense of his words from the persuasion in which his eyes and voice enveloped them.
“I see—I do see,” she murmured.
“You must see, also, that I could hardly say this to Owen without offending him still more, and perhaps increasing the breach between Miss Viner and himself. What sort of figure should I cut if I told him I’d been trying to find out if he’d made a proper choice? In any case, it’s none of my business to offer an explanation of what she justly says doesn’t need one. If she declines to speak, it’s obviously on the ground that Owen’s insinuations are absurd; and that surely pledges me to silence.”
“Yes, yes! I see,” Anna repeated. “But I don’t want you to explain anything to Owen.”
“You haven’t yet told me what you do want.”
She hesitated, conscious of the difficulty of justifying her request; then: “I want you to speak to Sophy,” she said.
Darrow broke into an incredulous laugh. “Considering what my previous attempts have resulted in——!”
She raised her eyes quickly. “They haven’t, at least, resulted in your liking her less, in your thinking less well of her than you’ve told me?”
She fancied he frowned a little. “I wonder why you go back to that?”
“I want to be sure—I owe it to Owen. Won’t you tell me the exact impression she’s produced on you?”
“I have told you—I like Miss Viner.”
“Do you still believe she’s in love with Owen?”
“There was nothing in our short talks to throw any particular light on that.”
“You still believe, though, that there’s no reason why he shouldn’t marry her?”
Again he betrayed a restrained impatience. “How can I answer that without knowing her reasons for breaking with him?”
“That’s just what I want you to find out from her.”
“And why in the world should she tell me?”
“Because, whatever grievance she has against Owen, she can certainly have none against me. She can’t want to have Owen connect me in his mind with this wretched quarrel; and she must see that he will until he’s convinced you’ve had no share in it.”
Darrow’s elbow dropped from the mantel-piece and he took a restless step or two across the room. Then he halted before her.
“Why can’t you tell her this yourself?”
“Don’t you see?”
He eyed her intently, and she pressed on: “You must have guessed that Owen’s jealous of you.”
“Jealous of me?” The blood flew up under his brown skin.
“Blind with it—what else would drive him to this folly? And I can’t have her think me jealous too! I’ve said all I could, short of making her think so; and she’s refused a word more to either of us. Our only chance now is that she should listen to you—that you should make her see the harm her silence may do.”
Darrow uttered a protesting exclamation. “It’s all too preposterous—what you suggest! I can’t, at any rate, appeal to her on such a ground as that!”
Anna laid her hand on his arm. “Appeal to her on the ground that I’m almost Owen’s mother, and that any estrangement between you and him would kill me. She knows what he is—she’ll understand. Tell her to say anything, do anything, she wishes; but not to go away without speaking, not to leavethatbetween us when she goes!”
She drew back a step and lifted her face to his, trying to look into his eyes more deeply than she had ever looked; but before she could discern what they expressed he had taken hold of her hands and bent his head to kiss them.
“You’ll see her? You’ll see her?” she entreated; and he answered: “I’ll do anything in the world you want me to.”
Darrow waited alone in the sitting-room.
No place could have been more distasteful as the scene of the talk that lay before him; but he had acceded to Anna’s suggestion that it would seem more natural for her to summon Sophy Viner than for him to go in search of her. As his troubled pacings carried him back and forth a relentless hand seemed to be tearing away all the tender fibres of association that bound him to the peaceful room. Here, in this very place, he had drunk his deepest draughts of happiness, had had his lips at the fountain-head of its overflowing rivers; but now that source was poisoned and he would taste no more of an untainted cup.
For a moment he felt an actual physical anguish; then his nerves hardened for the coming struggle. He had no notion of what awaited him; but after the first instinctive recoil he had seen in a flash the urgent need of another word with Sophy Viner. He had been insincere in letting Anna think that he had consented to speak because she asked it. In reality he had been feverishly casting about for the pretext she had given him; and for some reason this trivial hypocrisy weighed on him more than all his heavy burden of deceit.
At length he heard a step behind him and Sophy Viner entered. When she saw him she paused on the threshold and half drew back.
“I was told that Mrs. Leath had sent for me.”
“Mrs. Leathdidsend for you. She’ll be here presently; but I asked her to let me see you first.”
He spoke very gently, and there was no insincerity in his gentleness. He was profoundly moved by the change in the girl’s appearance. At sight of him she had forced a smile; but it lit up her wretchedness like a candle-flame held to a dead face.
She made no reply, and Darrow went on: “You must understand my wanting to speak to you, after what I was told just now.”
She interposed, with a gesture of protest: “I’m not responsible for Owen’s ravings!”
“Of course——”. He broke off and they stood facing each other. She lifted a hand and pushed back her loose lock with the gesture that was burnt into his memory; then she looked about her and dropped into the nearest chair.
“Well, you’ve got what you wanted,” she said.
“What do you mean by what I wanted?”
“My engagement’s broken—you heard me say so.”
“Why do you say that’s what I wanted? All I wished, from the beginning, was to advise you, to help you as best I could——”
“That’s what you’ve done,” she rejoined. “You’ve convinced me that it’s best I shouldn’t marry him.”
Darrow broke into a despairing laugh. “At the very moment when you’d convinced me to the contrary!”
“Had I?” Her smile flickered up. “Well, I really believed it till you showed me ... warned me...”
“Warned you?”
“That I’d be miserable if I married a man I didn’t love.”
“Don’t you love him?”
She made no answer, and Darrow started up and walked away to the other end of the room. He stopped before the writing-table, where his photograph, well-dressed, handsome, self-sufficient—the portrait of a man of the world, confident of his ability to deal adequately with the most delicate situations—offered its huge fatuity to his gaze. He turned back to her. “It’s rather hard on Owen, isn’t it, that you should have waited until now to tell him?”
She reflected a moment before answering. “I told him as soon as I knew.”
“Knew that you couldn’t marry him?”
“Knew that I could never live here with him.” She looked about the room, as though the very walls must speak for her.
For a moment Darrow continued to search her face perplexedly; then their eyes met in a long disastrous gaze.
“Yes——” she said, and stood up.
Below the window they heard Effie whistling for her dogs, and then, from the terrace, her mother calling her.
“There—thatfor instance,” Sophy Viner said.
Darrow broke out: “It’s I who ought to go!”
She kept her small pale smile. “What good would that do any of us—now?”
He covered his face with his hands. “Good God!” he groaned. “How could I tell?”
“You couldn’t tell. We neither of us could.” She seemed to turn the problem over critically. “After all, it might have beenyouinstead of me!”
He took another distracted turn about the room and coming back to her sat down in a chair at her side. A mocking hand seemed to dash the words from his lips. There was nothing on earth that he could say to her that wasn’t foolish or cruel or contemptible...
“My dear,” he began at last, “oughtn’t you, at any rate, to try?”
Her gaze grew grave. “Try to forget you?”
He flushed to the forehead. “I meant, try to give Owen more time; to give him a chance. He’s madly in love with you; all the good that’s in him is in your hands. His step-mother felt that from the first. And she thought—she believed——”
“She thought I could make him happy. Would she think so now?”
“Now...? I don’t say now. But later? Time modifies ... rubs out ... more quickly than you think.... Go away, but let him hope.... I’m going too—we’regoing—” he stumbled on the plural—“in a very few weeks: going for a long time, probably. What you’re thinking of now may never happen. We may not all be here together again for years.”
She heard him out in silence, her hands clasped on her knee, her eyes bent on them. “For me,” she said, “you’ll always be here.”
“Don’t say that—oh, don’t! Things change ... people change.... You’ll see!”
“You don’t understand. I don’t want anything to change. I don’t want to forget—to rub out. At first I imagined I did; but that was a foolish mistake. As soon as I saw you again I knew it.... It’s not being here with you that I’m afraid of—in the sense you think. It’s being here, or anywhere, with Owen.” She stood up and bent her tragic smile on him. “I want to keep you all to myself.”
The only words that came to him were futile denunciations of his folly; but the sense of their futility checked them on his lips. “Poor child—you poor child!” he heard himself vainly repeating.
Suddenly he felt the strong reaction of reality and its impetus brought him to his feet. “Whatever happens, I intend to go—to go for good,” he exclaimed. “I want you to understand that. Oh, don’t be afraid—I’ll find a reason. But it’s perfectly clear that I must go.”
She uttered a protesting cry. “Go away? You? Don’t you see that that would tell everything—drag everybody into the horror?”
He found no answer, and her voice dropped back to its calmer note. “What good would your going do? Do you suppose it would change anything for me?” She looked at him with a musing wistfulness. “I wonder what your feeling for me was? It seems queer that I’ve never really known—I suppose wedon’tknow much about that kind of feeling. Is it like taking a drink when you’re thirsty?... I used to feel as if all of me was in the palm of your hand...”
He bowed his humbled head, but she went on almost exultantly: “Don’t for a minute think I’m sorry! It was worth every penny it cost. My mistake was in being ashamed, just at first, of its having cost such a lot. I tried to carry it off as a joke—to talk of it to myself as an ‘adventure’. I’d always wanted adventures, and you’d given me one, and I tried to take your attitude about it, to ‘play the game’ and convince myself that I hadn’t risked any more on it than you. Then, when I met you again, I suddenly saw that Ihadrisked more, but that I’d won more, too—such worlds! I’d been trying all the while to put everything I could between us; now I want to sweep everything away. I’d been trying to forget how you looked; now I want to remember you always. I’d been trying not to hear your voice; now I never want to hear any other. I’ve made my choice—that’s all: I’ve had you and I mean to keep you.” Her face was shining like her eyes. “To keep you hidden away here,” she ended, and put her hand upon her breast.
After she had left him, Darrow continued to sit motionless, staring back into their past. Hitherto it had lingered on the edge of his mind in a vague pink blur, like one of the little rose-leaf clouds that a setting sun drops from its disk. Now it was a huge looming darkness, through which his eyes vainly strained. The whole episode was still obscure to him, save where here and there, as they talked, some phrase or gesture or intonation of the girl’s had lit up a little spot in the night.
She had said: “I wonder what your feeling for me was?” and he found himself wondering too.... He remembered distinctly enough that he had not meant the perilous passion—even in its most transient form—to play a part in their relation. In that respect his attitude had been above reproach. She was an unusually original and attractive creature, to whom he had wanted to give a few days of harmless pleasuring, and who was alert and expert enough to understand his intention and spare him the boredom of hesitations and misinterpretations. That had been his first impression, and her subsequent demeanour had justified it. She had been, from the outset, just the frank and easy comrade he had expected to find her. Was it he, then, who, in the sequel, had grown impatient of the bounds he had set himself? Was it his wounded vanity that, seeking balm for its hurt, yearned to dip deeper into the healing pool of her compassion? In his confused memory of the situation he seemed not to have been guiltless of such yearnings.... Yet for the first few days the experiment had been perfectly successful. Her enjoyment had been unclouded and his pleasure in it undisturbed. It was very gradually—he seemed to see—that a shade of lassitude had crept over their intercourse. Perhaps it was because, when her light chatter about people failed, he found she had no other fund to draw on, or perhaps simply because of the sweetness of her laugh, or of the charm of the gesture with which, one day in the woods of Marly, she had tossed off her hat and tilted back her head at the call of a cuckoo; or because, whenever he looked at her unexpectedly, he found that she was looking at him and did not want him to know it; or perhaps, in varying degrees, because of all these things, that there had come a moment when no word seemed to fly high enough or dive deep enough to utter the sense of well-being each gave to the other, and the natural substitute for speech had been a kiss.
The kiss, at all events, had come at the precise moment to save their venture from disaster. They had reached the point when her amazing reminiscences had begun to flag, when her future had been exhaustively discussed, her theatrical prospects minutely studied, her quarrel with Mrs. Murrett retold with the last amplification of detail, and when, perhaps conscious of her exhausted resources and his dwindling interest, she had committed the fatal error of saying that she could see he was unhappy, and entreating him to tell her why...
From the brink of estranging confidences, and from the risk of unfavourable comparisons, his gesture had snatched her back to safety; and as soon as he had kissed her he felt that she would never bore him again. She was one of the elemental creatures whose emotion is all in their pulses, and who become inexpressive or sentimental when they try to turn sensation into speech. His caress had restored her to her natural place in the scheme of things, and Darrow felt as if he had clasped a tree and a nymph had bloomed from it...
The mere fact of not having to listen to her any longer added immensely to her charm. She continued, of course, to talk to him, but it didn’t matter, because he no longer made any effort to follow her words, but let her voice run on as a musical undercurrent to his thoughts.
She hadn’t a drop of poetry in her, but she had some of the qualities that create it in others; and in moments of heat the imagination does not always feel the difference...
Lying beside her in the shade, Darrow felt her presence as a part of the charmed stillness of the summer woods, as the element of vague well-being that suffused his senses and lulled to sleep the ache of wounded pride. All he asked of her, as yet, was a touch on the hand or on the lips—and that she should let him go on lying there through the long warm hours, while a black-bird’s song throbbed like a fountain, and the summer wind stirred in the trees, and close by, between the nearest branches and the brim of his tilted hat, a slight white figure gathered up all the floating threads of joy...
He recalled, too, having noticed, as he lay staring at a break in the tree-tops, a stream of mares’-tails coming up the sky. He had said to himself: “It will rain to-morrow,” and the thought had made the air seem warmer and the sun more vivid on her hair.... Perhaps if the mares’-tails had not come up the sky their adventure might have had no sequel. But the cloud brought rain, and next morning he looked out of his window into a cold grey blur. They had planned an all-day excursion down the Seine, to the two Andelys and Rouen, and now, with the long hours on their hands, they were both a little at a loss.... There was the Louvre, of course, and the Luxembourg; but he had tried looking at pictures with her, she had first so persistently admired the worst things, and then so frankly lapsed into indifference, that he had no wish to repeat the experiment. So they went out, aimlessly, and took a cold wet walk, turning at length into the deserted arcades of the Palais Royal, and finally drifting into one of its equally deserted restaurants, where they lunched alone and somewhat dolefully, served by a wan old waiter with the look of a castaway who has given up watching for a sail.... It was odd how the waiter’s face came back to him...
Perhaps but for the rain it might never have happened; but what was the use of thinking of that now? He tried to turn his thoughts to more urgent issues; but, by a strange perversity of association, every detail of the day was forcing itself on his mind with an insistence from which there was no escape. Reluctantly he relived the long wet walk back to the hotel, after a tedious hour at a cinematograph show on the Boulevard. It was still raining when they withdrew from this stale spectacle, but she had obstinately refused to take a cab, had even, on the way, insisted on loitering under the dripping awnings of shop-windows and poking into draughty passages, and finally, when they had nearly reached their destination, had gone so far as to suggest that they should turn back to hunt up some show she had heard of in a theatre at the Batignolles. But at that he had somewhat irritably protested: he remembered that, for the first time, they were both rather irritable, and vaguely disposed to resist one another’s suggestions. His feet were wet, and he was tired of walking, and sick of the smell of stuffy unaired theatres, and he had said he must really get back to write some letters—and so they had kept on to the hotel...
Darrow had no idea how long he had sat there when he heard Anna’s hand on the door. The effort of rising, and of composing his face to meet her, gave him a factitious sense of self-control. He said to himself: “I must decide on something——” and that lifted him a hair’s breadth above the whirling waters.
She came in with a lighter step, and he instantly perceived that something unforeseen and reassuring had happened.
“She’s been with me. She came and found me on the terrace. We’ve had a long talk and she’s explained everything. I feel as if I’d never known her before!”
Her voice was so moved and tender that it checked his start of apprehension.
“She’s explained——?”
“It’s natural, isn’t it, that she should have felt a little sore at the kind of inspection she’s been subjected to? Oh, not from you—I don’t mean that! But Madame de Chantelle’s opposition—and her sending for Adelaide Painter! She told me frankly she didn’t care to owe her husband to Adelaide Painter.... She thinks now that her annoyance at feeling herself so talked over and scrutinized may have shown itself in her manner to Owen, and set him imagining the insane things he did.... I understand all she must have felt, and I agree with her that it’s best she should go away for a while. She’s made me,” Anna summed up, “feel as if I’d been dreadfully thick-skinned and obtuse!”
“You?”
“Yes. As if I’d treated her like the bric-a-brac that used to be sent down here ‘on approval,’ to see if it would look well with the other pieces.” She added, with a sudden flush of enthusiasm: “I’m glad she’s got it in her to make one feel like that!”
She seemed to wait for Darrow to agree with her, or to put some other question, and he finally found voice to ask: “Then you think it’s not a final break?”
“I hope not—I’ve never hoped it more! I had a word with Owen, too, after I left her, and I think he understands that he must let her go without insisting on any positive promise. She’s excited ... he must let her calm down...”
Again she waited, and Darrow said: “Surely you can make him see that.”
“She’ll help me to—she’s to see him, of course, before she goes. She starts immediately, by the way, with Adelaide Painter, who is motoring over to Francheuil to catch the one o’clock express—and who, of course, knows nothing of all this, and is simply to be told that Sophy has been sent for by the Farlows.”
Darrow mutely signed his comprehension, and she went on: “Owen is particularly anxious that neither Adelaide nor his grandmother should have the least inkling of what’s happened. The need of shielding Sophy will help him to control himself. He’s coming to his senses, poor boy; he’s ashamed of his wild talk already. He asked me to tell you so; no doubt he’ll tell you so himself.”
Darrow made a movement of protest. “Oh, as to that—the thing’s not worth another word.”
“Or another thought, either?” She brightened. “Promise me you won’t even think of it—promise me you won’t be hard on him!”
He was finding it easier to smile back at her. “Why should you think it necessary to ask my indulgence for Owen?”
She hesitated a moment, her eyes wandering from him. Then they came back with a smile. “Perhaps because I need it for myself.”
“For yourself?”
“I mean, because I understand better how one can torture one’s self over unrealities.”
As Darrow listened, the tension of his nerves began to relax. Her gaze, so grave and yet so sweet, was like a deep pool into which he could plunge and hide himself from the hard glare of his misery. As this ecstatic sense enveloped him he found it more and more difficult to follow her words and to frame an answer; but what did anything matter, except that her voice should go on, and the syllables fall like soft touches on his tortured brain?
“Don’t you know,” she continued, “the bliss of waking from a bad dream in one’s own quiet room, and going slowly over all the horror without being afraid of it any more? That’s what I’m doing now. And that’s why I understand Owen...” She broke off, and he felt her touch on his arm. “Because I’d dreamed the horror too!”
He understood her then, and stammered: “You?”
“Forgive me! And let me tell you!... It will help you to understand Owen.... Therewerelittle things ... little signs ... once I had begun to watch for them: your reluctance to speak about her ... her reserve with you ... a sort of constraint we’d never seen in her before...”
She laughed up at him, and with her hands in his he contrived to say: “Nowyou understand why?”
“Oh, I understand; of course I understand; and I want you to laugh at me—with me! Because there were other things too ... crazier things still.... There was even—last night on the terrace—her pink cloak...”
“Her pink cloak?” Now he honestly wondered, and as she saw it she blushed.
“You’ve forgotten about the cloak? The pink cloak that Owen saw you with at the play in Paris? Yes ... yes.... I was mad enough for that!... It does me good to laugh about it now! But you ought to know that I’m going to be a jealous woman ... a ridiculously jealous woman ... you ought to be warned of it in time...”
He had dropped her hands, and she leaned close and lifted her arms to his neck with one of her rare gestures of surrender.
“I don’t know why it is; but it makes me happier now to have been so foolish!”
Her lips were parted in a noiseless laugh and the tremor of her lashes made their shadow move on her cheek. He looked at her through a mist of pain and saw all her offered beauty held up like a cup to his lips; but as he stooped to it a darkness seemed to fall between them, her arms slipped from his shoulders and she drew away from him abruptly.
“But shewaswith you, then?” she exclaimed; and then, as he stared at her: “Oh, don’t say no! Only go and look at your eyes!”
He stood speechless, and she pressed on: “Don’t deny it—oh, don’t deny it! What will be left for me to imagine if you do? Don’t you see how every single thing cries it out? Owen sees it—he saw it again just now! When I told him she’d relented, and would see him, he said: ‘Is that Darrow’s doing too?’”
Darrow took the onslaught in silence. He might have spoken, have summoned up the usual phrases of banter and denial; he was not even certain that they might not, for the moment, have served their purpose if he could have uttered them without being seen. But he was as conscious of what had happened to his face as if he had obeyed Anna’s bidding and looked at himself in the glass. He knew he could no more hide from her what was written there than he could efface from his soul the fiery record of what he had just lived through. There before him, staring him in the eyes, and reflecting itself in all his lineaments, was the overwhelming fact of Sophy Viner’s passion and of the act by which she had attested it.
Anna was talking again, hurriedly, feverishly, and his soul was wrung by the anguish in her voice. “Do speak at last—you must speak! I don’t want to ask you to harm the girl; but you must see that your silence is doing her more harm than your answering my questions could. You’re leaving me only the worst things to think of her ... she’d see that herself if she were here. What worse injury can you do her than to make me hate her—to make me feel she’s plotted with you to deceive us?”
“Oh, not that!” Darrow heard his own voice before he was aware that he meant to speak. “Yes; I did see her in Paris,” he went on after a pause; “but I was bound to respect her reason for not wanting it known.”
Anna paled. “It was she at the theatre that night?”
“I was with her at the theatre one night.”
“Why should she have asked you not to say so?”
“She didn’t wish it known that I’d met her.”
“Why shouldn’t she have wished it known?”
“She had quarrelled with Mrs. Murrett and come over suddenly to Paris, and she didn’t want the Farlows to hear of it. I came across her by accident, and she asked me not to speak of having seen her.”
“Because of her quarrel? Because she was ashamed of her part in it?”
“Oh, no. There was nothing for her to be ashamed of. But the Farlows had found the place for her, and she didn’t want them to know how suddenly she’d had to leave, and how badly Mrs. Murrett had behaved. She was in a terrible plight—the woman had even kept back her month’s salary. She knew the Farlows would be awfully upset, and she wanted more time to prepare them.”
Darrow heard himself speak as though the words had proceeded from other lips. His explanation sounded plausible enough, and he half-fancied Anna’s look grew lighter. She waited a moment, as though to be sure he had no more to add; then she said: “But the Farlowsdidknow; they told me all about it when they sent her to me.”
He flushed as if she had laid a deliberate trap for him. “They may knownow; they didn’t then——”
“That’s no reason for her continuing now to make a mystery of having met you.”
“It’s the only reason I can give you.”
“Then I’ll go and ask her for one myself.” She turned and took a few steps toward the door.
“Anna!” He started to follow her, and then checked himself. “Don’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“It’s not like you ... not generous...”
She stood before him straight and pale, but under her rigid face he saw the tumult of her doubt and misery.
“I don’t want to be ungenerous; I don’t want to pry into her secrets. But things can’t be left like this. Wouldn’t it be better for me to go to her? Surely she’ll understand—she’ll explain.... It may be some mere trifle she’s concealing: something that would horrify the Farlows, but that I shouldn’t see any harm in...” She paused, her eyes searching his face. “A love affair, I suppose ... that’s it? You met her with some man at the theatre—and she was frightened and begged you to fib about it? Those poor young things that have to go about among us like machines—oh, if you knew how I pity them!”
“If you pity her, why not let her go?”
She stared. “Let her go—go for good, you mean? Is that the best you can say for her?”
“Let things take their course. After all, it’s between herself and Owen.”
“And you and me—and Effie, if Owen marries her, and I leave my child with them! Don’t you see the impossibility of what you’re asking? We’re all bound together in this coil.”
Darrow turned away with a groan. “Oh, let her go—let her go.”
“Then thereissomething—something really bad? Shewaswith some one when you met her? Some one with whom she was——” She broke off, and he saw her struggling with new thoughts. “If it’sthat, of course.... Oh, don’t you see,” she desperately appealed to him, “that I must find out, and that it’s too late now for you not to speak? Don’t be afraid that I’ll betray you.... I’ll never, never let a soul suspect. But I must know the truth, and surely it’s best for her that I should find it out from you.”
Darrow waited a moment; then he said slowly: “What you imagine’s mere madness. She was at the theatre with me.”
“With you?” He saw a tremor pass through her, but she controlled it instantly and faced him straight and motionless as a wounded creature in the moment before it feels its wound. “Why should you both have made a mystery of that?”
“I’ve told you the idea was not mine.” He cast about. “She may have been afraid that Owen——”
“But that was not a reason for her asking you to tell me that you hardly knew her—that you hadn’t even seen her for years.” She broke off and the blood rose to her face and forehead. “Even ifshehad other reasons, there could be only one reason for your obeying her——” Silence fell between them, a silence in which the room seemed to become suddenly resonant with voices. Darrow’s gaze wandered to the window and he noticed that the gale of two days before had nearly stripped the tops of the lime-trees in the court. Anna had moved away and was resting her elbows against the mantel-piece, her head in her hands. As she stood there he took in with a new intensity of vision little details of her appearance that his eyes had often cherished: the branching blue veins in the backs of her hands, the warm shadow that her hair cast on her ear, and the colour of the hair itself, dull black with a tawny under-surface, like the wings of certain birds. He felt it to be useless to speak.
After a while she lifted her head and said: “I shall not see her again before she goes.”
He made no answer, and turning to him she added: “That is why she’s going, I suppose? Because she loves you and won’t give you up?”
Darrow waited. The paltriness of conventional denial was so apparent to him that even if it could have delayed discovery he could no longer have resorted to it. Under all his other fears was the dread of dishonouring the hour.
“Shehasgiven me up,” he said at last.