When he had gone out of the room Anna stood where he had left her. “I must believe him! I must believe him!” she said.
A moment before, at the moment when she had lifted her arms to his neck, she had been wrapped in a sense of complete security. All the spirits of doubt had been exorcised, and her love was once more the clear habitation in which every thought and feeling could move in blissful freedom. And then, as she raised her face to Darrow’s and met his eyes, she had seemed to look into the very ruins of his soul. That was the only way she could express it. It was as though he and she had been looking at two sides of the same thing, and the side she had seen had been all light and life, and his a place of graves...
She didn’t now recall who had spoken first, or even, very clearly, what had been said. It seemed to her only a moment later that she had found herself standing at the other end of the room—the room which had suddenly grown so small that, even with its length between them, she felt as if he touched her—crying out to him “Itisbecause of you she’s going!” and reading the avowal in his face.
That was his secret, then,theirsecret: he had met the girl in Paris and helped her in her straits—lent her money, Anna vaguely conjectured—and she had fallen in love with him, and on meeting him again had been suddenly overmastered by her passion. Anna, dropping back into her sofa-corner, sat staring these facts in the face.
The girl had been in a desperate plight—frightened, penniless, outraged by what had happened, and not knowing (with a woman like Mrs. Murrett) what fresh injury might impend; and Darrow, meeting her in this distracted hour, had pitied, counselled, been kind to her, with the fatal, the inevitable result. There were the facts as Anna made them out: that, at least, was their external aspect, was as much of them as she had been suffered to see; and into the secret intricacies they might cover she dared not yet project her thoughts.
“I must believe him.... I must believe him...” She kept on repeating the words like a talisman. It was natural, after all, that he should have behaved as he had: defended the girl’s piteous secret to the last. She too began to feel the contagion of his pity—the stir, in her breast, of feelings deeper and more native to her than the pains of jealousy. From the security of her blessedness she longed to lean over with compassionate hands.... But Owen? What was Owen’s part to be? She owed herself first to him—she was bound to protect him not only from all knowledge of the secret she had surprised, but also—and chiefly!—from its consequences. Yes: the girl must go—there could be no doubt of it—Darrow himself had seen it from the first; and at the thought she had a wild revulsion of relief, as though she had been trying to create in her heart the delusion of a generosity she could not feel...
The one fact on which she could stay her mind was that Sophy was leaving immediately; would be out of the house within an hour. Once she was gone, it would be easier to bring Owen to the point of understanding that the break was final; if necessary, to work upon the girl to make him see it. But that, Anna was sure, would not be necessary. It was clear that Sophy Viner was leaving Givre with no thought of ever seeing it again...
Suddenly, as she tried to put some order in her thoughts, she heard Owen’s call at the door: “Mother!——” a name he seldom gave her. There was a new note in his voice: the note of a joyous impatience. It made her turn hastily to the glass to see what face she was about to show him; but before she had had time to compose it he was in the room and she was caught in a school-boy hug.
“It’s all right! It’s all right! And it’s all your doing! I want to do the worst kind of penance—bell and candle and the rest. I’ve been through it withher, and now she hands me on to you, and you’re to call me any names you please.” He freed her with his happy laugh. “I’m to be stood in the corner till next week, and then I’m to go up to see her. And she says I owe it all to you!”
“To me?” It was the first phrase she found to clutch at as she tried to steady herself in the eddies of his joy.
“Yes: you were so patient, and so dear to her; and you saw at once what a damned ass I’d been!” She tried a smile, and it seemed to pass muster with him, for he sent it back in a broad beam. “That’s not so difficult to see? No, I admit it doesn’t take a microscope. But you were so wise and wonderful—you always are. I’ve been mad these last days, simply mad—you and she might well have washed your hands of me! And instead, it’s all right—all right!”
She drew back a little, trying to keep the smile on her lips and not let him get the least glimpse of what it hid. Now if ever, indeed, it behoved her to be wise and wonderful!
“I’m so glad, dear; so glad. If only you’ll always feel like that about me...” She stopped, hardly knowing what she said, and aghast at the idea that her own hands should have retied the knot she imagined to be broken. But she saw he had something more to say; something hard to get out, but absolutely necessary to express. He caught her hands, pulled her close, and, with his forehead drawn into its whimsical smiling wrinkles, “Look here,” he cried, “if Darrow wants to call me a damned ass too you’re not to stop him!”
It brought her back to a sharper sense of her central peril: of the secret to be kept from him at whatever cost to her racked nerves.
“Oh, you know, he doesn’t always wait for orders!” On the whole it sounded better than she’d feared.
“You mean he’s called me one already?” He accepted the fact with his gayest laugh. “Well, that saves a lot of trouble; now we can pass to the order of the day——” he broke off and glanced at the clock—“which is, you know, dear, that she’s starting in about an hour; she and Adelaide must already be snatching a hasty sandwich. You’ll come down to bid them good-bye?”
“Yes—of course.”
There had, in fact, grown upon her while he spoke the urgency of seeing Sophy Viner again before she left. The thought was deeply distasteful: Anna shrank from encountering the girl till she had cleared a way through her own perplexities. But it was obvious that since they had separated, barely an hour earlier, the situation had taken a new shape. Sophy Viner had apparently reconsidered her decision to break amicably but definitely with Owen, and stood again in their path, a menace and a mystery; and confused impulses of resistance stirred in Anna’s mind. She felt Owen’s touch on her arm. “Are you coming?”
“Yes ... yes ... presently.”
“What’s the matter? You look so strange.”
“What do you mean by strange?”
“I don’t know: startled—surprised.” She read what her look must be by its sudden reflection in his face.
“Do I? No wonder! You’ve given us all an exciting morning.”
He held to his point. “You’re more excited now that there’s no cause for it. What on earth has happened since I saw you?”
He looked about the room, as if seeking the clue to her agitation, and in her dread of what he might guess she answered: “What has happened is simply that I’m rather tired. Will you ask Sophy to come up and see me here?”
While she waited she tried to think what she should say when the girl appeared; but she had never been more conscious of her inability to deal with the oblique and the tortuous. She had lacked the hard teachings of experience, and an instinctive disdain for whatever was less clear and open than her own conscience had kept her from learning anything of the intricacies and contradictions of other hearts. She said to herself: “I must find out——” yet everything in her recoiled from the means by which she felt it must be done...
Sophy Viner appeared almost immediately, dressed for departure, her little bag on her arm. She was still pale to the point of haggardness, but with a light upon her that struck Anna with surprise. Or was it, perhaps, that she was looking at the girl with new eyes: seeing her, for the first time, not as Effie’s governess, not as Owen’s bride, but as the embodiment of that unknown peril lurking in the background of every woman’s thoughts about her lover? Anna, at any rate, with a sudden sense of estrangement, noted in her graces and snares never before perceived. It was only the flash of a primitive instinct, but it lasted long enough to make her ashamed of the darknesses it lit up in her heart...
She signed to Sophy to sit down on the sofa beside her. “I asked you to come up to me because I wanted to say good-bye quietly,” she explained, feeling her lips tremble, but trying to speak in a tone of friendly naturalness.
The girl’s only answer was a faint smile of acquiescence, and Anna, disconcerted by her silence, went on: “You’ve decided, then, not to break your engagement?”
Sophy Viner raised her head with a look of surprise. Evidently the question, thus abruptly put, must have sounded strangely on the lips of so ardent a partisan as Mrs. Leath! “I thought that was what you wished,” she said.
“What I wished?” Anna’s heart shook against her side. “I wish, of course, whatever seems best for Owen.... It’s natural, you must understand, that that consideration should come first with me...”
Sophy was looking at her steadily. “I supposed it was the only one that counted with you.”
The curtness of retort roused Anna’s latent antagonism. “It is,” she said, in a hard voice that startled her as she heard it. Had she ever spoken so to any one before? She felt frightened, as though her very nature had changed without her knowing it.... Feeling the girl’s astonished gaze still on her, she continued: “The suddenness of the change has naturally surprised me. When I left you it was understood that you were to reserve your decision——”
“Yes.”
“And now——?” Anna waited for a reply that did not come. She did not understand the girl’s attitude, the edge of irony in her short syllables, the plainly premeditated determination to lay the burden of proof on her interlocutor. Anna felt the sudden need to lift their intercourse above this mean level of defiance and distrust. She looked appealingly at Sophy.
“Isn’t it best that we should speak quite frankly? It’s this change on your part that perplexes me. You can hardly be surprised at that. It’s true, I asked you not to break with Owen too abruptly—and I asked it, believe me, as much for your sake as for his: I wanted you to take time to think over the difficulty that seems to have arisen between you. The fact that you felt it required thinking over seemed to show you wouldn’t take the final step lightly—wouldn’t, I mean, accept of Owen more than you could give him. But your change of mind obliges me to ask the question I thought you would have asked yourself. Is there any reason why you shouldn’t marry Owen?”
She stopped a little breathlessly, her eyes on Sophy Viner’s burning face. “Any reason——? What do you mean by a reason?”
Anna continued to look at her gravely. “Do you love some one else?” she asked.
Sophy’s first look was one of wonder and a faint relief; then she gave back the other’s scrutiny in a glance of indescribable reproach. “Ah, you might have waited!” she exclaimed.
“Waited?”
“Till I’d gone: till I was out of the house. You might have known ... you might have guessed...” She turned her eyes again on Anna. “I only meant to let him hope a little longer, so that he shouldn’t suspect anything; of course I can’t marry him,” she said.
Anna stood motionless, silenced by the shock of the avowal. She too was trembling, less with anger than with a confused compassion. But the feeling was so blent with others, less generous and more obscure, that she found no words to express it, and the two women faced each other without speaking.
“I’d better go,” Sophy murmured at length with lowered head.
The words roused in Anna a latent impulse of compunction. The girl looked so young, so exposed and desolate! And what thoughts must she be hiding in her heart! It was impossible that they should part in such a spirit.
“I want you to know that no one said anything.... It was I who...”
Sophy looked at her. “You mean that Mr. Darrow didn’t tell you? Of course not: do you suppose I thought he did? You found it out, that’s all—I knew you would. In your place I should have guessed it sooner.”
The words were spoken simply, without irony or emphasis; but they went through Anna like a sword. Yes, the girl would have had divinations, promptings that she had not had! She felt half envious of such a sad precocity of wisdom.
“I’m so sorry ... so sorry...” she murmured.
“Things happen that way. Now I’d better go. I’d like to say good-bye to Effie.”
“Oh——” it broke in a cry from Effie’s mother. “Not like this—you mustn’t! I feel—you make me feel too horribly: as if I were driving you away...” The words had rushed up from the depths of her bewildered pity.
“No one is driving me away: I had to go,” she heard the girl reply.
There was another silence, during which passionate impulses of magnanimity warred in Anna with her doubts and dreads. At length, her eyes on Sophy’s face: “Yes, you must go now,” she began; “but later on ... after a while, when all this is over ... if there’s no reason why you shouldn’t marry Owen——” she paused a moment on the words— “I shouldn’t want you to think I stood between you...”
“You?” Sophy flushed again, and then grew pale. She seemed to try to speak, but no words came. “Yes! It was not true when I said just now that I was thinking only of Owen. I’m sorry—oh, so sorry!—for you too. Your life—I know how hard it’s been; and mine ... mine’s so full.... Happy women understand best!” Anna drew near and touched the girl’s hand; then she began again, pouring all her soul into the broken phrases: “It’s terrible now ... you see no future; but if, by and bye ... you know best ... but you’re so young ... and at your age thingsdopass. If there’s no reason, no real reason, why you shouldn’t marry Owen, Iwanthim to hope, I’ll help him to hope ... if you say so....”
With the urgency of her pleading her clasp tightened on Sophy’s hand, but it warmed to no responsive tremor: the girl seemed numb, and Anna was frightened by the stony silence of her look. “I suppose I’m not more than half a woman,” she mused, “for I don’t want my happiness to hurt her;” and aloud she repeated: “If only you’ll tell me there’s no reason——”
The girl did not speak; but suddenly, like a snapped branch, she bent, stooped down to the hand that clasped her, and laid her lips upon it in a stream of weeping. She cried silently, continuously, abundantly, as though Anna’s touch had released the waters of some deep spring of pain; then, as Anna, moved and half afraid, leaned over her with a sound of pity, she stood up and turned away.
“You’re going, then—for good—like this?” Anna moved toward her and stopped. Sophy stopped too, with eyes that shrank from her.
“Oh——” Anna cried, and hid her face.
The girl walked across the room and paused again in the doorway. From there she flung back: “I wanted it—I chose it. He was good to me—no one ever was so good!”
The door-handle turned, and Anna heard her go.
Her first thought was: “He’s going too in a few hours—I needn’t see him again before he leaves...” At that moment the possibility of having to look in Darrow’s face and hear him speak seemed to her more unendurable than anything else she could imagine. Then, on the next wave of feeling, came the desire to confront him at once and wring from him she knew not what: avowal, denial, justification, anything that should open some channel of escape to the flood of her pent-up anguish.
She had told Owen she was tired, and this seemed a sufficient reason for remaining upstairs when the motor came to the door and Miss Painter and Sophy Viner were borne off in it; sufficient also for sending word to Madame de Chantelle that she would not come down till after luncheon. Having despatched her maid with this message, she lay down on her sofa and stared before her into darkness...
She had been unhappy before, and the vision of old miseries flocked like hungry ghosts about her fresh pain: she recalled her youthful disappointment, the failure of her marriage, the wasted years that followed; but those were negative sorrows, denials and postponements of life. She seemed in no way related to their shadowy victim, she who was stretched on this fiery rack of the irreparable. She had suffered before—yes, but lucidly, reflectively, elegiacally: now she was suffering as a hurt animal must, blindly, furiously, with the single fierce animal longing that the awful pain should stop...
She heard her maid knock, and she hid her face and made no answer. The knocking continued, and the discipline of habit at length made her lift her head, compose her face and hold out her hand to the note the woman brought her. It was a word from Darrow—“May I see you?”—and she said at once, in a voice that sounded thin and empty: “Ask Mr. Darrow to come up.”
The maid enquired if she wished to have her hair smoothed first, and she answered that it didn’t matter; but when the door had closed, the instinct of pride drew her to her feet and she looked at herself in the glass above the mantelpiece and passed her hands over her hair. Her eyes were burning and her face looked tired and thinner; otherwise she could see no change in her appearance, and she wondered that at such a moment her body should seem as unrelated to the self that writhed within her as if it had been a statue or a picture.
The maid reopened the door to show in Darrow, and he paused a moment on the threshold, as if waiting for Anna to speak. He was extremely pale, but he looked neither ashamed nor uncertain, and she said to herself, with a perverse thrill of appreciation: “He’s as proud as I am.”
Aloud she asked: “You wanted to see me?”
“Naturally,” he replied in a grave voice.
“Don’t! It’s useless. I know everything. Nothing you can say will help.”
At the direct affirmation he turned even paler, and his eyes, which he kept resolutely fixed on her, confessed his misery.
“You allow me no voice in deciding that?”
“Deciding what?”
“That there’s nothing more to be said?” He waited for her to answer, and then went on: “I don’t even know what you mean by ‘everything’.”
“Oh, I don’t know what more there is! I know enough. I implored her to deny it, and she couldn’t.... What can you and I have to say to each other?” Her voice broke into a sob. The animal anguish was upon her again—just a blind cry against her pain!
Darrow kept his head high and his eyes steady. “It must be as you wish; and yet it’s not like you to be afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“To talk things out—to face them.”
“It’s foryouto face this—not me!”
“All I ask is to face it—but with you.” Once more he paused. “Won’t you tell me what Miss Viner told you?”
“Oh, she’s generous—to the utmost!” The pain caught her like a physical throe. It suddenly came to her how the girl must have loved him to be so generous—what memories there must be between them!
“Oh, go, please go. It’s too horrible. Why should I have to see you?” she stammered, lifting her hands to her eyes.
With her face hidden she waited to hear him move away, to hear the door open and close again, as, a few hours earlier, it had opened and closed on Sophy Viner. But Darrow made no sound or movement: he too was waiting. Anna felt a thrill of resentment: his presence was an outrage on her sorrow, a humiliation to her pride. It was strange that he should wait for her to tell him so!
“You want me to leave Givre?” he asked at length. She made no answer, and he went on: “Of course I’ll do as you wish; but if I go now am I not to see you again?”
His voice was firm: his pride was answering her pride!
She faltered: “You must see it’s useless——”
“I might remind you that you’re dismissing me without a hearing——”
“Without a hearing? I’ve heard you both!”
——“but I won’t,” he continued, “remind you of that, or of anything or any one but Owen.”
“Owen?”
“Yes; if we could somehow spare him——”
She had dropped her hands and turned her startled eyes on him. It seemed to her an age since she had thought of Owen!
“You see, don’t you,” Darrow continued, “that if you send me away now——”
She interrupted: “Yes, I see——” and there was a long silence between them. At length she said, very low: “I don’t want any one else to suffer as I’m suffering...”
“Owen knows I meant to leave tomorrow,” Darrow went on. “Any sudden change of plan may make him think...”
Oh, she saw his inevitable logic: the horror of it was on every side of her! It had seemed possible to control her grief and face Darrow calmly while she was upheld by the belief that this was their last hour together, that after he had passed out of the room there would be no fear of seeing him again, no fear that his nearness, his look, his voice, and all the unseen influences that flowed from him, would dissolve her soul to weakness. But her courage failed at the idea of having to conspire with him to shield Owen, of keeping up with him, for Owen’s sake, a feint of union and felicity. To live at Darrow’s side in seeming intimacy and harmony for another twenty-four hours seemed harder than to live without him for all the rest of her days. Her strength failed her, and she threw herself down and buried her sobs in the cushions where she had so often hidden a face aglow with happiness.
“Anna——” His voice was close to her. “Let me talk to you quietly. It’s not worthy of either of us to be afraid.”
Words of endearment would have offended her; but her heart rose at the call to her courage.
“I’ve no defense to make,” he went on. “The facts are miserable enough; but at least I want you to see them as they are. Above all, I want you to know the truth about Miss Viner——”
The name sent the blood to Anna’s forehead. She raised her head and faced him. “Why should I know more of her than what she’s told me? I never wish to hear her name again!”
“It’s because you feel about her in that way that I ask you—in the name of common charity—to let me give you the facts as they are, and not as you’ve probably imagined them.”
“I’ve told you I don’t think uncharitably of her. I don’t want to think of her at all!”
“That’s why I tell you you’re afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Yes. You’ve always said you wanted, above all, to look at life, at the human problem, as it is, without fear and without hypocrisy; and it’s not always a pleasant thing to look at.” He broke off, and then began again: “Don’t think this a plea for myself! I don’t want to say a word to lessen my offense. I don’t want to talk of myself at all. Even if I did, I probably couldn’t make you understand—I don’t, myself, as I look back. Be just to me—it’s your right; all I ask you is to be generous to Miss Viner...”
She stood up trembling. “You’re free to be as generous to her as you please!”
“Yes: you’ve made it clear to me that I’m free. But there’s nothing I can do for her that will help her half as much as your understanding her would.”
“Nothing you can do for her? You can marry her!”
His face hardened. “You certainly couldn’t wish her a worse fate!”
“It must have been what she expected ... relied on...” He was silent, and she broke out: “Or what is she? What are you? It’s too horrible! On your way here ... tome...” She felt the tears in her throat and stopped.
“That was it,” he said bluntly. She stared at him.
“I was on my way to you—after repeated delays and postponements of your own making. At the very last you turned me back with a mere word—and without explanation. I waited for a letter; and none came. I’m not saying this to justify myself. I’m simply trying to make you understand. I felt hurt and bitter and bewildered. I thought you meant to give me up. And suddenly, in my way, I found some one to be sorry for, to be of use to. That, I swear to you, was the way it began. The rest was a moment’s folly ... a flash of madness ... as such things are. We’ve never seen each other since...”
Anna was looking at him coldly. “You sufficiently describe her in saying that!”
“Yes, if you measure her by conventional standards—which is what you always declare you never do.”
“Conventional standards? A girl who——” She was checked by a sudden rush of almost physical repugnance. Suddenly she broke out: “I always thought her an adventuress!”
“Always?”
“I don’t mean always ... but after you came...”
“She’s not an adventuress.”
“You mean that she professes to act on the new theories? The stuff that awful women rave about on platforms?”
“Oh, I don’t think she pretended to have a theory——”
“She hadn’t even that excuse?”
“She had the excuse of her loneliness, her unhappiness—of miseries and humiliations that a woman like you can’t even guess. She had nothing to look back to but indifference or unkindness—nothing to look forward to but anxiety. She saw I was sorry for her and it touched her. She made too much of it—she exaggerated it. I ought to have seen the danger, but I didn’t. There’s no possible excuse for what I did.”
Anna listened to him in speechless misery. Every word he spoke threw back a disintegrating light on their own past. He had come to her with an open face and a clear conscience—come to her from this! If his security was the security of falsehood it was horrible; if it meant that he had forgotten, it was worse. She would have liked to stop her ears, to close her eyes, to shut out every sight and sound and suggestion of a world in which such things could be; and at the same time she was tormented by the desire to know more, to understand better, to feel herself less ignorant and inexpert in matters which made so much of the stuff of human experience. What did he mean by “a moment’s folly, a flash of madness”? How did people enter on such adventures, how pass out of them without more visible traces of their havoc? Her imagination recoiled from the vision of a sudden debasing familiarity: it seemed to her that her thoughts would never again be pure...
“I swear to you,” she heard Darrow saying, “it was simply that, and nothing more.”
She wondered at his composure, his competence, at his knowing so exactly what to say. No doubt men often had to make such explanations: they had the formulas by heart.... A leaden lassitude descended on her. She passed from flame and torment into a colourless cold world where everything surrounding her seemed equally indifferent and remote. For a moment she simply ceased to feel.
She became aware that Darrow was waiting for her to speak, and she made an effort to represent to herself the meaning of what he had just said; but her mind was as blank as a blurred mirror. Finally she brought out: “I don’t think I understand what you’ve told me.”
“No; you don’t understand,” he returned with sudden bitterness; and on his lips the charge of incomprehension seemed an offense to her.
“I don’t want to—about such things!”
He answered almost harshly: “Don’t be afraid ... you never will...” and for an instant they faced each other like enemies. Then the tears swelled in her throat at his reproach.
“You mean I don’t feel things—I’m too hard?”
“No: you’re too high ... too fine ... such things are too far from you.”
He paused, as if conscious of the futility of going on with whatever he had meant to say, and again, for a short space, they confronted each other, no longer as enemies—so it seemed to her—but as beings of different language who had forgotten the few words they had learned of each other’s speech.
Darrow broke the silence. “It’s best, on all accounts, that I should stay till tomorrow; but I needn’t intrude on you; we needn’t meet again alone. I only want to be sure I know your wishes.” He spoke the short sentences in a level voice, as though he were summing up the results of a business conference.
Anna looked at him vaguely. “My wishes?”
“As to Owen——”
At that she started. “They must never meet again!”
“It’s not likely they will. What I meant was, that it depends on you to spare him...”
She answered steadily: “He shall never know,” and after another interval Darrow said: “This is good-bye, then.”
At the word she seemed to understand for the first time whither the flying moments had been leading them. Resentment and indignation died down, and all her consciousness resolved itself into the mere visual sense that he was there before her, near enough for her to lift her hand and touch him, and that in another instant the place where he stood would be empty.
She felt a mortal weakness, a craven impulse to cry out to him to stay, a longing to throw herself into his arms, and take refuge there from the unendurable anguish he had caused her. Then the vision called up another thought: “I shall never know what that girl has known...” and the recoil of pride flung her back on the sharp edges of her anguish.
“Good-bye,” she said, in dread lest he should read her face; and she stood motionless, her head high, while he walked to the door and went out.
Anna Leath, three days later, sat in Miss Painter’s drawing-room in the rue de Matignon.
Coming up precipitately that morning from the country, she had reached Paris at one o’clock and Miss Painter’s landing some ten minutes later. Miss Painter’s mouldy little man-servant, dissembling a napkin under his arm, had mildly attempted to oppose her entrance; but Anna, insisting, had gone straight to the dining-room and surprised her friend—who ate as furtively as certain animals—over a strange meal of cold mutton and lemonade. Ignoring the embarrassment she caused, she had set forth the object of her journey, and Miss Painter, always hatted and booted for action, had immediately hastened out, leaving her to the solitude of the bare fireless drawing-room with its eternal slip-covers and “bowed” shutters.
In this inhospitable obscurity Anna had sat alone for close upon two hours. Both obscurity and solitude were acceptable to her, and impatient as she was to hear the result of the errand on which she had despatched her hostess, she desired still more to be alone. During her long meditation in a white-swathed chair before the muffled hearth she had been able for the first time to clear a way through the darkness and confusion of her thoughts. The way did not go far, and her attempt to trace it was as weak and spasmodic as a convalescent’s first efforts to pick up the thread of living. She seemed to herself like some one struggling to rise from a long sickness of which it would have been so much easier to die. At Givre she had fallen into a kind of torpor, a deadness of soul traversed by wild flashes of pain; but whether she suffered or whether she was numb, she seemed equally remote from her real living and doing self.
It was only the discovery—that very morning—of Owen’s unannounced departure for Paris that had caught her out of her dream and forced her back to action. The dread of what this flight might imply, and of the consequences that might result from it, had roused her to the sense of her responsibility, and from the moment when she had resolved to follow her step-son, and had made her rapid preparations for pursuit, her mind had begun to work again, feverishly, fitfully, but still with something of its normal order. In the train she had been too agitated, too preoccupied with what might next await her, to give her thoughts to anything but the turning over of dread alternatives; but Miss Painter’s imperviousness had steadied her, and while she waited for the sound of the latch-key she resolutely returned upon herself.
With respect to her outward course she could at least tell herself that she had held to her purpose. She had, as people said, “kept up” during the twenty-four hours preceding George Darrow’s departure; had gone with a calm face about her usual business, and even contrived not too obviously to avoid him. Then, the next day before dawn, from behind the closed shutters where she had kept for half the night her dry-eyed vigil, she had heard him drive off to the train which brought its passengers to Paris in time for the Calais express.
The fact of his taking that train, of his travelling so straight and far away from her, gave to what had happened the implacable outline of reality. He was gone; he would not come back; and her life had ended just as she had dreamed it was beginning. She had no doubt, at first, as to the absolute inevitability of this conclusion. The man who had driven away from her house in the autumn dawn was not the man she had loved; he was a stranger with whom she had not a single thought in common. It was terrible, indeed, that he wore the face and spoke in the voice of her friend, and that, as long as he was under one roof with her, the mere way in which he moved and looked could bridge at a stroke the gulf between them. That, no doubt, was the fault of her exaggerated sensibility to outward things: she was frightened to see how it enslaved her. A day or two before she had supposed the sense of honour was her deepest sentiment: if she had smiled at the conventions of others it was because they were too trivial, not because they were too grave. There were certain dishonours with which she had never dreamed that any pact could be made: she had had an incorruptible passion for good faith and fairness.
She had supposed that, once Darrow was gone, once she was safe from the danger of seeing and hearing him, this high devotion would sustain her. She had believed it would be possible to separate the image of the man she had thought him from that of the man he was. She had even foreseen the hour when she might raise a mournful shrine to the memory of the Darrow she had loved, without fear that his double’s shadow would desecrate it. But now she had begun to understand that the two men were really one. The Darrow she worshipped was inseparable from the Darrow she abhorred; and the inevitable conclusion was that both must go, and she be left in the desert of a sorrow without memories...
But if the future was thus void, the present was all too full. Never had blow more complex repercussions; and to remember Owen was to cease to think of herself. What impulse, what apprehension, had sent him suddenly to Paris? And why had he thought it needful to conceal his going from her? When Sophy Viner had left, it had been with the understanding that he was to await her summons; and it seemed improbable that he would break his pledge, and seek her without leave, unless his lover’s intuition had warned him of some fresh danger. Anna recalled how quickly he had read the alarm in her face when he had rushed back to her sitting-room with the news that Miss Viner had promised to see him again in Paris. To be so promptly roused, his suspicions must have been but half-asleep; and since then, no doubt, if she and Darrow had dissembled, so had he. To her proud directness it was degrading to think that they had been living together like enemies who spy upon each other’s movements: she felt a desperate longing for the days which had seemed so dull and narrow, but in which she had walked with her head high and her eyes unguarded.
She had come up to Paris hardly knowing what peril she feared, and still less how she could avert it. If Owen meant to see Miss Viner—and what other object could he have?—they must already be together, and it was too late to interfere. It had indeed occurred to Anna that Paris might not be his objective point: that his real purpose in leaving Givre without her knowledge had been to follow Darrow to London and exact the truth of him. But even to her alarmed imagination this seemed improbable. She and Darrow, to the last, had kept up so complete a feint of harmony that, whatever Owen had surmised, he could scarcely have risked acting on his suspicions. If he still felt the need of an explanation, it was almost certainly of Sophy Viner that he would ask it; and it was in quest of Sophy Viner that Anna had despatched Miss Painter.
She had found a blessed refuge from her perplexities in the stolid Adelaide’s unawareness. One could so absolutely count on Miss Painter’s guessing no more than one chose, and yet acting astutely on such hints as one vouchsafed her! She was like a well-trained retriever whose interest in his prey ceases when he lays it at his master’s feet. Anna, on arriving, had explained that Owen’s unannounced flight had made her fear some fresh misunderstanding between himself and Miss Viner. In the interests of peace she had thought it best to follow him; but she hastily added that she did not wish to see Sophy, but only, if possible, to learn from her where Owen was. With these brief instructions Miss Painter had started out; but she was a woman of many occupations, and had given her visitor to understand that before returning she should have to call on a friend who had just arrived from Boston, and afterward despatch to another exiled compatriot a supply of cranberries and brandied peaches from the American grocery in the Champs Elysees.
Gradually, as the moments passed, Anna began to feel the reaction which, in moments of extreme nervous tension, follows on any effort of the will. She seemed to have gone as far as her courage would carry her, and she shrank more and more from the thought of Miss Painter’s return, since whatever information the latter brought would necessitate some fresh decision. What should she say to Owen if she found him? What could she say that should not betray the one thing she would give her life to hide from him? “Give her life”—how the phrase derided her! It was a gift she would not have bestowed on her worst enemy. She would not have had Sophy Viner live the hours she was living now... She tried again to look steadily and calmly at the picture that the image of the girl evoked. She had an idea that she ought to accustom herself to its contemplation. If life was like that, why the sooner one got used to it the better.... But no! Life was not like that. Her adventure was a hideous accident. She dreaded above all the temptation to generalise from her own case, to doubt the high things she had lived by and seek a cheap solace in belittling what fate had refused her. There was such love as she had dreamed, and she meant to go on believing in it, and cherishing the thought that she was worthy of it. What had happened to her was grotesque and mean and miserable; but she herself was none of these things, and never, never would she make of herself the mock that fate had made of her...
She could not, as yet, bear to think deliberately of Darrow; but she kept on repeating to herself “By and bye that will come too.” Even now she was determined not to let his image be distorted by her suffering. As soon as she could, she would try to single out for remembrance the individual things she had liked in him before she had loved him altogether. No “spiritual exercise” devised by the discipline of piety could have been more torturing; but its very cruelty attracted her. She wanted to wear herself out with new pains...