The sound of Miss Painter’s latch-key made her start. She was still a bundle of quivering fears to whom each coming moment seemed a menace.
There was a slight interval, and a sound of voices in the hall; then Miss Painter’s vigorous hand was on the door.
Anna stood up as she came in. “You’ve found him?”
“I’ve found Sophy.”
“And Owen?—has she seen him? Is he here?”
“She’shere: in the hall. She wants to speak to you.”
“Here—now?” Anna found no voice for more.
“She drove back with me,” Miss Painter continued in the tone of impartial narrative. “The cabman was impertinent. I’ve got his number.” She fumbled in a stout black reticule.
“Oh, I can’t—” broke from Anna; but she collected herself, remembering that to betray her unwillingness to see the girl was to risk revealing much more.
“She thought you might be too tired to see her: she wouldn’t come in till I’d found out.”
Anna drew a quick breath. An instant’s thought had told her that Sophy Viner would hardly have taken such a step unless something more important had happened. “Ask her to come, please,” she said.
Miss Painter, from the threshold, turned back to announce her intention of going immediately to the police station to report the cabman’s delinquency; then she passed out, and Sophy Viner entered.
The look in the girl’s face showed that she had indeed come unwillingly; yet she seemed animated by an eager resoluteness that made Anna ashamed of her tremors. For a moment they looked at each other in silence, as if the thoughts between them were packed too thick for speech; then Anna said, in a voice from which she strove to take the edge of hardness: “You know where Owen is, Miss Painter tells me.”
“Yes; that was my reason for asking you to see me.” Sophy spoke simply, without constraint or hesitation.
“I thought he’d promised you—” Anna interposed.
“He did; but he broke his promise. That’s what I thought I ought to tell you.”
“Thank you.” Anna went on tentatively: “He left Givre this morning without a word. I followed him because I was afraid...”
She broke off again and the girl took up her phrase. “You were afraid he’d guessed? Hehas...”
“What do you mean—guessed what?”
“That you know something he doesn’t ... something that made you glad to have me go.”
“Oh—” Anna moaned. If she had wanted more pain she had it now. “He’s told you this?” she faltered.
“He hasn’t told me, because I haven’t seen him. I kept him off—I made Mrs. Farlow get rid of him. But he’s written me what he came to say; and that was it.”
“Oh, poor Owen!” broke from Anna. Through all the intricacies of her suffering she felt the separate pang of his.
“And I want to ask you,” the girl continued, “to let me see him; for of course,” she added in the same strange voice of energy, “I wouldn’t unless you consented.”
“To see him?” Anna tried to gather together her startled thoughts. “What use would it be? What could you tell him?”
“I want to tell him the truth,” said Sophy Viner.
The two women looked at each other, and a burning blush rose to Anna’s forehead. “I don’t understand,” she faltered.
Sophy waited a moment; then she lowered her voice to say: “I don’t want him to think worse of me than he need...”
“Worse?”
“Yes—to think such things as you’re thinking now.... I want him to know exactly what happened ... then I want to bid him good-bye.”
Anna tried to clear a way through her own wonder and confusion. She felt herself obscurely moved.
“Wouldn’t it be worse for him?”
“To hear the truth? It would be better, at any rate, for you and Mr. Darrow.”
At the sound of the name Anna lifted her head quickly. “I’ve only my step-son to consider!”
The girl threw a startled look at her. “You don’t mean—you’re not going to give him up?”
Anna felt her lips harden. “I don’t think it’s of any use to talk of that.”
“Oh, I know! It’s my fault for not knowing how to say what I want you to hear. Your words are different; you know how to choose them. Mine offend you ... and the dread of it makes me blunder. That’s why, the other day, I couldn’t say anything ... couldn’t make things clear to you. But nowmust, even if you hate it!” She drew a step nearer, her slender figure swayed forward in a passion of entreaty. “Do listen to me! What you’ve said is dreadful. How can you speak of him in that voice? Don’t you see that I went away so that he shouldn’t have to lose you?”
Anna looked at her coldly. “Are you speaking of Mr. Darrow? I don’t know why you think your going or staying can in any way affect our relations.”
“You mean that youhavegiven him up—because of me? Oh, how could you? You can’t really love him!—And yet,” the girl suddenly added, “you must, or you’d be more sorry for me!”
“I’m very sorry for you,” Anna said, feeling as if the iron band about her heart pressed on it a little less inexorably.
“Then why won’t you hear me? Why won’t you try to understand? It’s all so different from what you imagine!”
“I’ve never judged you.”
“I’m not thinking of myself. He loves you!”
“I thought you’d come to speak of Owen.”
Sophy Viner seemed not to hear her. “He’s never loved any one else. Even those few days.... I knew it all the while ... he never cared for me.”
“Please don’t say any more!” Anna said.
“I know it must seem strange to you that I should say so much. I shock you, I offend you: you think me a creature without shame. So I am—but not in the sense you think! I’m not ashamed of having loved him; no; and I’m not ashamed of telling you so. It’s that that justifies me—and him too.... Oh, let me tell you how it happened! He was sorry for me: he saw I cared. Iknewthat was all he ever felt. I could see he was thinking of some one else. I knew it was only for a week.... He never said a word to mislead me.... I wanted to be happy just once—and I didn’t dream of the harm I might be doing him!”
Anna could not speak. She hardly knew, as yet, what the girl’s words conveyed to her, save the sense of their tragic fervour; but she was conscious of being in the presence of an intenser passion than she had ever felt.
“I am sorry for you.” She paused. “But why do you say this to me?” After another interval she exclaimed: “You’d no right to let Owen love you.”
“No; that was wrong. At least what’s happened since has made it so. If things had been different I think I could have made Owen happy. You were all so good to me—I wanted so to stay with you! I suppose you’ll say that makes it worse: my daring to dream I had the right.... But all that doesn’t matter now. I won’t see Owen unless you’re willing. I should have liked to tell him what I’ve tried to tell you; but you must know better; you feel things in a finer way. Only you’ll have to help him if I can’t. He cares a great deal ... it’s going to hurt him...”
Anna trembled. “Oh, I know! What can I do?”
“You can go straight back to Givre—now, at once! So that Owen shall never know you’ve followed him.” Sophy’s clasped hands reached out urgently. “And you can send for Mr. Darrow—bring him back. Owen must be convinced that he’s mistaken, and nothing else will convince him. Afterward I’ll find a pretext—oh, I promise you! But first he must see for himself that nothing’s changed for you.”
Anna stood motionless, subdued and dominated. The girl’s ardour swept her like a wind.
“Oh, can’t I move you? Some day you’ll know!” Sophy pleaded, her eyes full of tears.
Anna saw them, and felt a fullness in her throat. Again the band about her heart seemed loosened. She wanted to find a word, but could not: all within her was too dark and violent. She gave the girl a speechless look.
“I do believe you,” she said suddenly; then she turned and walked out of the room.
She drove from Miss Painter’s to her own apartment. The maid-servant who had it in charge had been apprised of her coming, and had opened one or two of the rooms, and prepared a fire in her bedroom. Anna shut herself in, refusing the woman’s ministrations. She felt cold and faint, and after she had taken off her hat and cloak she knelt down by the fire and stretched her hands to it.
In one respect, at least, it was clear to her that she would do well to follow Sophy Viner’s counsel. It had been an act of folly to follow Owen, and her first business was to get back to Givre before him. But the only train leaving that evening was a slow one, which did not reach Francheuil till midnight, and she knew that her taking it would excite Madame de Chantelle’s wonder and lead to interminable talk. She had come up to Paris on the pretext of finding a new governess for Effie, and the natural thing was to defer her return till the next morning. She knew Owen well enough to be sure that he would make another attempt to see Miss Viner, and failing that, would write again and await her answer: so that there was no likelihood of his reaching Givre till the following evening.
Her sense of relief at not having to start out at once showed her for the first time how tired she was. Thebonnehad suggested a cup of tea, but the dread of having any one about her had made Anna refuse, and she had eaten nothing since morning but a sandwich bought at a buffet. She was too tired to get up, but stretching out her arm she drew toward her the arm-chair which stood beside the hearth and rested her head against its cushions. Gradually the warmth of the fire stole into her veins and her heaviness of soul was replaced by a dreamy buoyancy. She seemed to be seated on the hearth in her sitting-room at Givre, and Darrow was beside her, in the chair against which she leaned. He put his arms about her shoulders and drawing her head back looked into her eyes. “Of all the ways you do your hair, that’s the way I like best,” he said...
A log dropped, and she sat up with a start. There was a warmth in her heart, and she was smiling. Then she looked about her, and saw where she was, and the glory fell. She hid her face and sobbed.
Presently she perceived that it was growing dark, and getting up stiffly she began to undo the things in her bag and spread them on the dressing-table. She shrank from lighting the lights, and groped her way about, trying to find what she needed. She seemed immeasurably far off from every one, and most of all from herself. It was as if her consciousness had been transmitted to some stranger whose thoughts and gestures were indifferent to her...
Suddenly she heard a shrill tinkle, and with a beating heart she stood still in the middle of the room. It was the telephone in her dressing-room—a call, no doubt, from Adelaide Painter. Or could Owen have learned she was in town? The thought alarmed her and she opened the door and stumbled across the unlit room to the instrument. She held it to her ear, and heard Darrow’s voice pronounce her name.
“Will you let me see you? I’ve come back—I had to come. Miss Painter told me you were here.”
She began to tremble, and feared that he would guess it from her voice. She did not know what she answered: she heard him say: “I can’t hear.” She called “Yes!” and laid the telephone down, and caught it up again—but he was gone. She wondered if her “Yes” had reached him.
She sat in her chair and listened. Why had she said that she would see him? What did she mean to say to him when he came? Now and then, as she sat there, the sense of his presence enveloped her as in her dream, and she shut her eyes and felt his arms about her. Then she woke to reality and shivered. A long time elapsed, and at length she said to herself: “He isn’t coming.”
The door-bell rang as she said it, and she stood up, cold and trembling. She thought: “Can he imagine there’s any use in coming?” and moved forward to bid the servant say she could not see him.
The door opened and she saw him standing in the drawing-room. The room was cold and fireless, and a hard glare fell from the wall-lights on the shrouded furniture and the white slips covering the curtains. He looked pale and stern, with a frown of fatigue between his eyes; and she remembered that in three days he had travelled from Givre to London and back. It seemed incredible that all that had befallen her should have been compressed within the space of three days!
“Thank you,” he said as she came in.
She answered: “It’s better, I suppose——”
He came toward her and took her in his arms. She struggled a little, afraid of yielding, but he pressed her to him, not bending to her but holding her fast, as though he had found her after a long search: she heard his hurried breathing. It seemed to come from her own breast, so close he held her; and it was she who, at last, lifted up her face and drew down his.
She freed herself and went and sat on a sofa at the other end of the room. A mirror between the shrouded window-curtains showed her crumpled travelling dress and the white face under her disordered hair.
She found her voice, and asked him how he had been able to leave London. He answered that he had managed—he’d arranged it; and she saw he hardly heard what she was saying.
“I had to see you,” he went on, and moved nearer, sitting down at her side.
“Yes; we must think of Owen——”
“Oh, Owen—!”
Her mind had flown back to Sophy Viner’s plea that she should let Darrow return to Givre in order that Owen might be persuaded of the folly of his suspicions. The suggestion was absurd, of course. She could not ask Darrow to lend himself to such a fraud, even had she had the inhuman courage to play her part in it. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the futility of every attempt to reconstruct her ruined world. No, it was useless; and since it was useless, every moment with Darrow was pure pain...
“I’ve come to talk of myself, not of Owen,” she heard him saying. “When you sent me away the other day I understood that it couldn’t be otherwise—then. But it’s not possible that you and I should part like that. If I’m to lose you, it must be for a better reason.”
“A better reason?”
“Yes: a deeper one. One that means a fundamental disaccord between us. This one doesn’t—in spite of everything it doesn’t. That’s what I want you to see, and have the courage to acknowledge.”
“If I saw it I should have the courage!”
“Yes: courage was the wrong word. You have that. That’s why I’m here.”
“But I don’t see it,” she continued sadly. “So it’s useless, isn’t it?—and so cruel...” He was about to speak, but she went on: “I shall never understand it—never!”
He looked at her. “You will some day: you were made to feel everything”
“I should have thought this was a case of not feeling——”
“On my part, you mean?” He faced her resolutely. “Yes, it was: to my shame.... What I meant was that when you’ve lived a little longer you’ll see what complex blunderers we all are: how we’re struck blind sometimes, and mad sometimes—and then, when our sight and our senses come back, how we have to set to work, and build up, little by little, bit by bit, the precious things we’d smashed to atoms without knowing it. Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.”
She looked up quickly. “That’s what I feel: that you ought to——”
He stood up, interrupting her with a gesture. “Oh, don’t—don’t say what you’re going to! Men don’t give their lives away like that. If you won’t have mine, it’s at least my own, to do the best I can with.”
“The best you can—that’s what I mean! How can there be a ‘best’ for you that’s made of some one else’s worst?”
He sat down again with a groan. “I don’t know! It seemed such a slight thing—all on the surface—and I’ve gone aground on it because it was on the surface. I see the horror of it just as you do. But I see, a little more clearly, the extent, and the limits, of my wrong. It’s not as black as you imagine.”
She lowered her voice to say: “I suppose I shall never understand; but she seems to love you...”
“There’s my shame! That I didn’t guess it, didn’t fly from it. You say you’ll never understand: but why shouldn’t you? Is it anything to be proud of, to know so little of the strings that pull us? If you knew a little more, I could tell you how such things happen without offending you; and perhaps you’d listen without condemning me.”
“I don’t condemn you.” She was dizzy with struggling impulses. She longed to cry out: “Idounderstand! I’ve understood ever since you’ve been here!” For she was aware, in her own bosom, of sensations so separate from her romantic thoughts of him that she saw her body and soul divided against themselves. She recalled having read somewhere that in ancient Rome the slaves were not allowed to wear a distinctive dress lest they should recognize each other and learn their numbers and their power. So, in herself, she discerned for the first time instincts and desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in the dim passages of her mind, and now hailed each other with a cry of mutiny.
“Oh, I don’t know what to think!” she broke out. “You say you didn’t know she loved you. But you know it now. Doesn’t that show you how you can put the broken bits together?”
“Can you seriously think it would be doing so to marry one woman while I care for another?”
“Oh, I don’t know.... I don’t know...” The sense of her weakness made her try to harden herself against his arguments.
“You do know! We’ve often talked of such things: of the monstrousness of useless sacrifices. If I’m to expiate, it’s not in that way.” He added abruptly: “It’s in having to say this to you now...”
She found no answer.
Through the silent apartment they heard the sudden peal of the door-bell, and she rose to her feet. “Owen!” she instantly exclaimed.
“Is Owen in Paris?”
She explained in a rapid undertone what she had learned from Sophy Viner.
“Shall I leave you?” Darrow asked.
“Yes ... no...” She moved to the dining-room door, with the half-formed purpose of making him pass out, and then turned back. “It may be Adelaide.”
They heard the outer door open, and a moment later Owen walked into the room. He was pale, with excited eyes: as they fell on Darrow, Anna saw his start of wonder. He made a slight sign of recognition, and then went up to his step-mother with an air of exaggerated gaiety.
“You furtive person! I ran across the omniscient Adelaide and heard from her that you’d rushed up suddenly and secretly.” He stood between Anna and Darrow, strained, questioning, dangerously on edge.
“I came up to meet Mr. Darrow,” Anna answered. “His leave’s been prolonged—he’s going back with me.”
The words seemed to have uttered themselves without her will, yet she felt a great sense of freedom as she spoke them.
The hard tension of Owen’s face changed to incredulous surprise. He looked at Darrow. “The merest luck ... a colleague whose wife was ill.... I came straight back,” she heard the latter tranquilly explaining. His self-command helped to steady her, and she smiled at Owen.
“We’ll all go back together tomorrow morning,” she said as she slipped her arm through his.
Owen Leath did not go back with his step-mother to Givre. In reply to her suggestion he announced his intention of staying on a day or two longer in Paris.
Anna left alone by the first train the next morning. Darrow was to follow in the afternoon. When Owen had left them the evening before, Darrow waited a moment for her to speak; then, as she said nothing, he asked her if she really wished him to return to Givre. She made a mute sign of assent, and he added: “For you know that, much as I’m ready to do for Owen, I can’t do that for him—I can’t go back to be sent away again.”
“No—no!”
He came nearer, and looked at her, and she went to him. All her fears seemed to fall from her as he held her. It was a different feeling from any she had known before: confused and turbid, as if secret shames and rancours stirred in it, yet richer, deeper, more enslaving. She leaned her head back and shut her eyes beneath his kisses. She knew now that she could never give him up.
Nevertheless she asked him, the next morning, to let her go back alone to Givre. She wanted time to think. She was convinced that what had happened was inevitable, that she and Darrow belonged to each other, and that he was right in saying no past folly could ever put them asunder. If there was a shade of difference in her feeling for him it was that of an added intensity. She felt restless, insecure out of his sight: she had a sense of incompleteness, of passionate dependence, that was somehow at variance with her own conception of her character.
It was partly the consciousness of this change in herself that made her want to be alone. The solitude of her inner life had given her the habit of these hours of self-examination, and she needed them as she needed her morning plunge into cold water.
During the journey she tried to review what had happened in the light of her new decision and of her sudden relief from pain. She seemed to herself to have passed through some fiery initiation from which she had emerged seared and quivering, but clutching to her breast a magic talisman. Sophy Viner had cried out to her: “Some day you’ll know!” and Darrow had used the same words. They meant, she supposed, that when she had explored the intricacies and darknesses of her own heart her judgment of others would be less absolute. Well, she knew now—knew weaknesses and strengths she had not dreamed of, and the deep discord and still deeper complicities between what thought in her and what blindly wanted...
Her mind turned anxiously to Owen. At least the blow that was to fall on him would not seem to have been inflicted by her hand. He would be left with the impression that his breach with Sophy Viner was due to one of the ordinary causes of such disruptions: though he must lose her, his memory of her would not be poisoned. Anna never for a moment permitted herself the delusion that she had renewed her promise to Darrow in order to spare her step-son this last refinement of misery. She knew she had been prompted by the irresistible impulse to hold fast to what was most precious to her, and that Owen’s arrival on the scene had been the pretext for her decision, and not its cause; yet she felt herself fortified by the thought of what she had spared him. It was as though a star she had been used to follow had shed its familiar ray on ways unknown to her.
All through these meditations ran the undercurrent of an absolute trust in Sophy Viner. She thought of the girl with a mingling of antipathy and confidence. It was humiliating to her pride to recognize kindred impulses in a character which she would have liked to feel completely alien to her. But what indeed was the girl really like? She seemed to have no scruples and a thousand delicacies. She had given herself to Darrow, and concealed the episode from Owen Leath, with no more apparent sense of debasement than the vulgarest of adventuresses; yet she had instantly obeyed the voice of her heart when it bade her part from the one and serve the other.
Anna tried to picture what the girl’s life must have been: what experiences, what initiations, had formed her. But her own training had been too different: there were veils she could not lift. She looked back at her married life, and its colourless uniformity took on an air of high restraint and order. Was it because she had been so incurious that it had worn that look to her? It struck her with amazement that she had never given a thought to her husband’s past, or wondered what he did and where he went when he was away from her. If she had been asked what she supposed he thought about when they were apart, she would instantly have answered: his snuff-boxes. It had never occurred to her that he might have passions, interests, preoccupations of which she was absolutely ignorant. Yet he went up to Paris rather regularly: ostensibly to attend sales and exhibitions, or to confer with dealers and collectors. She tried to picture him, straight, trim, beautifully brushed and varnished, walking furtively down a quiet street, and looking about him before he slipped into a doorway. She understood now that she had been cold to him: what more likely than that he had sought compensations? All men were like that, she supposed—no doubt her simplicity had amused him.
In the act of transposing Fraser Leath into a Don Juan she was pulled up by the ironic perception that she was simply trying to justify Darrow. She wanted to think that all men were “like that” because Darrow was “like that”: she wanted to justify her acceptance of the fact by persuading herself that only through such concessions could women like herself hope to keep what they could not give up. And suddenly she was filled with anger at her blindness, and then at her disastrous attempt to see. Why had she forced the truth out of Darrow? If only she had held her tongue nothing need ever have been known. Sophy Viner would have broken her engagement, Owen would have been sent around the world, and her own dream would have been unshattered. But she had probed, insisted, cross-examined, not rested till she had dragged the secret to the light. She was one of the luckless women who always have the wrong audacities, and who always know it...
Was it she, Anna Leath, who was picturing herself to herself in that way? She recoiled from her thoughts as if with a sense of demoniac possession, and there flashed through her the longing to return to her old state of fearless ignorance. If at that moment she could have kept Darrow from following her to Givre she would have done so...
But he came; and with the sight of him the turmoil fell and she felt herself reassured, rehabilitated. He arrived toward dusk, and she motored to Francheuil to meet him. She wanted to see him as soon as possible, for she had divined, through the new insight that was in her, that only his presence could restore her to a normal view of things. In the motor, as they left the town and turned into the high-road, he lifted her hand and kissed it, and she leaned against him, and felt the currents flow between them. She was grateful to him for not saying anything, and for not expecting her to speak. She said to herself: “He never makes a mistake—he always knows what to do”; and then she thought with a start that it was doubtless because he had so often been in such situations. The idea that his tact was a kind of professional expertness filled her with repugnance, and insensibly she drew away from him. He made no motion to bring her nearer, and she instantly thought that that was calculated too. She sat beside him in frozen misery, wondering whether, henceforth, she would measure in this way his every look and gesture. Neither of them spoke again till the motor turned under the dark arch of the avenue, and they saw the lights of Givre twinkling at its end. Then Darrow laid his hand on hers and said: “I know, dear—” and the hardness in her melted. “He’s suffering as I am,” she thought; and for a moment the baleful fact between them seemed to draw them closer instead of walling them up in their separate wretchedness.
It was wonderful to be once more re-entering the doors of Givre with him, and as the old house received them into its mellow silence she had again the sense of passing out of a dreadful dream into the reassurance of kindly and familiar things. It did not seem possible that these quiet rooms, so full of the slowly-distilled accumulations of a fastidious taste, should have been the scene of tragic dissensions. The memory of them seemed to be shut out into the night with the closing and barring of its doors.
At the tea-table in the oak-room they found Madame de Chantelle and Effie. The little girl, catching sight of Darrow, raced down the drawing-rooms to meet him, and returned in triumph on his shoulder. Anna looked at them with a smile. Effie, for all her graces, was chary of such favours, and her mother knew that in according them to Darrow she had admitted him to the circle where Owen had hitherto ruled.
Over the tea-table Darrow gave Madame de Chantelle the explanation of his sudden return from England. On reaching London, he told her, he had found that the secretary he was to have replaced was detained there by the illness of his wife. The Ambassador, knowing Darrow’s urgent reasons for wishing to be in France, had immediately proposed his going back, and awaiting at Givre the summons to relieve his colleague; and he had jumped into the first train, without even waiting to telegraph the news of his release. He spoke naturally, easily, in his usual quiet voice, taking his tea from Effie, helping himself to the toast she handed, and stooping now and then to stroke the dozing terrier. And suddenly, as Anna listened to his explanation, she asked herself if it were true.
The question, of course, was absurd. There was no possible reason why he should invent a false account of his return, and every probability that the version he gave was the real one. But he had looked and spoken in the same way when he had answered her probing questions about Sophy Viner, and she reflected with a chill of fear that she would never again know if he were speaking the truth or not. She was sure he loved her, and she did not fear his insincerity as much as her own distrust of him. For a moment it seemed to her that this must corrupt the very source of love; then she said to herself: “By and bye, when I am altogether his, we shall be so near each other that there will be no room for any doubts between us.” But the doubts were there now, one moment lulled to quiescence, the next more torturingly alert. When the nurse appeared to summon Effie, the little girl, after kissing her grandmother, entrenched herself on Darrow’s knee with the imperious demand to be carried up to bed; and Anna, while she laughingly protested, said to herself with a pang: “Can I give her a father about whom I think such things?”
The thought of Effie, and of what she owed to Effie, had been the fundamental reason for her delays and hesitations when she and Darrow had come together again in England. Her own feeling was so clear that but for that scruple she would have put her hand in his at once. But till she had seen him again she had never considered the possibility of re-marriage, and when it suddenly confronted her it seemed, for the moment, to disorganize the life she had planned for herself and her child. She had not spoken of this to Darrow because it appeared to her a subject to be debated within her own conscience. The question, then, was not as to his fitness to become the guide and guardian of her child; nor did she fear that her love for him would deprive Effie of the least fraction of her tenderness, since she did not think of love as something measured and exhaustible but as a treasure perpetually renewed. What she questioned was her right to introduce into her life any interests and duties which might rob Effie of a part of her time, or lessen the closeness of their daily intercourse.
She had decided this question as it was inevitable that she should; but now another was before her. Assuredly, at her age, there was no possible reason why she should cloister herself to bring up her daughter; but there was every reason for not marrying a man in whom her own faith was not complete...
When she woke the next morning she felt a great lightness of heart. She recalled her last awakening at Givre, three days before, when it had seemed as though all her life had gone down in darkness. Now Darrow was once more under the same roof with her, and once more his nearness sufficed to make the looming horror drop away. She could almost have smiled at her scruples of the night before: as she looked back on them they seemed to belong to the old ignorant timorous time when she had feared to look life in the face, and had been blind to the mysteries and contradictions of the human heart because her own had not been revealed to her. Darrow had said: “You were made to feel everything”; and to feel was surely better than to judge.
When she came downstairs he was already in the oak-room with Effie and Madame de Chantelle, and the sense of reassurance which his presence gave her was merged in the relief of not being able to speak of what was between them. But there it was, inevitably, and whenever they looked at each other they saw it. In her dread of giving it a more tangible shape she tried to devise means of keeping the little girl with her, and, when the latter had been called away by the nurse, found an excuse for following Madame de Chantelle upstairs to the purple sitting-room. But a confidential talk with Madame de Chantelle implied the detailed discussion of plans of which Anna could hardly yet bear to consider the vaguest outline: the date of her marriage, the relative advantages of sailing from London or Lisbon, the possibility of hiring a habitable house at their new post; and, when these problems were exhausted, the application of the same method to the subject of Owen’s future.
His grandmother, having no suspicion of the real reason of Sophy Viner’s departure, had thought it “extremely suitable” of the young girl to withdraw to the shelter of her old friends’ roof in the hour of bridal preparation. This maidenly retreat had in fact impressed Madame de Chantelle so favourably that she was disposed for the first time to talk over Owen’s projects; and as every human event translated itself for her into terms of social and domestic detail, Anna had perforce to travel the same round again. She felt a momentary relief when Darrow presently joined them; but his coming served only to draw the conversation back to the question of their own future, and Anna felt a new pang as she heard him calmly and lucidly discussing it. Did such self-possession imply indifference or insincerity? In that problem her mind perpetually revolved; and she dreaded the one answer as much as the other.
She was resolved to keep on her course as though nothing had happened: to marry Darrow and never let the consciousness of the past intrude itself between them; but she was beginning to feel that the only way of attaining to this state of detachment from the irreparable was once for all to turn back with him to its contemplation. As soon as this desire had germinated it became so strong in her that she regretted having promised Effie to take her out for the afternoon. But she could think of no pretext for disappointing the little girl, and soon after luncheon the three set forth in the motor to show Darrow a chateau famous in the annals of the region. During their excursion Anna found it impossible to guess from his demeanour if Effie’s presence between them was as much of a strain to his composure as to hers. He remained imperturbably good-humoured and appreciative while they went the round of the monument, and she remarked only that when he thought himself unnoticed his face grew grave and his answers came less promptly.
On the way back, two or three miles from Givre, she suddenly proposed that they should walk home through the forest which skirted that side of the park. Darrow acquiesced, and they got out and sent Effie on in the motor. Their way led through a bit of sober French woodland, flat as a faded tapestry, but with gleams of live emerald lingering here and there among its browns and ochres. The luminous grey air gave vividness to its dying colours, and veiled the distant glimpses of the landscape in soft uncertainty. In such a solitude Anna had fancied it would be easier to speak; but as she walked beside Darrow over the deep soundless flooring of brown moss the words on her lips took flight again. It seemed impossible to break the spell of quiet joy which his presence laid on her, and when he began to talk of the place they had just visited she answered his questions and then waited for what he should say next.... No, decidedly she could not speak; she no longer even knew what she had meant to say...
The same experience repeated itself several times that day and the next. When she and Darrow were apart she exhausted herself in appeal and interrogation, she formulated with a fervent lucidity every point in her imaginary argument. But as soon as she was alone with him something deeper than reason and subtler than shyness laid its benumbing touch upon her, and the desire to speak became merely a dim disquietude, through which his looks, his words, his touch, reached her as through a mist of bodily pain. Yet this inertia was torn by wild flashes of resistance, and when they were apart she began to prepare again what she meant to say to him.
She knew he could not be with her without being aware of this inner turmoil, and she hoped he would break the spell by some releasing word. But she presently understood that he recognized the futility of words, and was resolutely bent on holding her to her own purpose of behaving as if nothing had happened. Once more she inwardly accused him of insensibility, and her imagination was beset by tormenting visions of his past.... Had such things happened to him before? If the episode had been an isolated accident—“a moment of folly and madness”, as he had called it—she could understand, or at least begin to understand (for at a certain point her imagination always turned back); but if it were a mere link in a chain of similar experiments, the thought of it dishonoured her whole past...
Effie, in the interregnum between governesses, had been given leave to dine downstairs; and Anna, on the evening of Darrow’s return, kept the little girl with her till long after the nurse had signalled from the drawing-room door. When at length she had been carried off, Anna proposed a game of cards, and after this diversion had drawn to its languid close she said good-night to Darrow and followed Madame de Chantelle upstairs. But Madame de Chantelle never sat up late, and the second evening, with the amiably implied intention of leaving Anna and Darrow to themselves, she took an earlier leave of them than usual.
Anna sat silent, listening to her small stiff steps as they minced down the hall and died out in the distance. Madame de Chantelle had broken her wooden embroidery frame, and Darrow, having offered to repair it, had drawn his chair up to a table that held a lamp. Anna watched him as he sat with bent head and knitted brows, trying to fit together the disjoined pieces. The sight of him, so tranquilly absorbed in this trifling business, seemed to give to the quiet room a perfume of intimacy, to fill it with a sense of sweet familiar habit; and it came over her again that she knew nothing of the inner thoughts of this man who was sitting by her as a husband might. The lamplight fell on his white forehead, on the healthy brown of his cheek, the backs of his thin sunburnt hands. As she watched the hands her sense of them became as vivid as a touch, and she said to herself: “That other woman has sat and watched him as I am doing. She has known him as I have never known him.... Perhaps he is thinking of that now. Or perhaps he has forgotten it all as completely as I have forgotten everything that happened to me before he came...”
He looked young, active, stored with strength and energy; not the man for vain repinings or long memories. She wondered what she had to hold or satisfy him. He loved her now; she had no doubt of that; but how could she hope to keep him? They were so nearly of an age that already she felt herself his senior. As yet the difference was not visible; outwardly at least they were matched; but ill-health or unhappiness would soon do away with this equality. She thought with a pang of bitterness: “He won’t grow any older because he doesn’t feel things; and because he doesn’t, Ishall...”
And when she ceased to please him, what then? Had he the tradition of faith to the spoken vow, or the deeper piety of the unspoken dedication? What was his theory, what his inner conviction in such matters? But what did she care for his convictions or his theories? No doubt he loved her now, and believed he would always go on loving her, and was persuaded that, if he ceased to, his loyalty would be proof against the change. What she wanted to know was not what he thought about it in advance, but what would impel or restrain him at the crucial hour. She put no faith in her own arts: she was too sure of having none! And if some beneficent enchanter had bestowed them on her, she knew now that she would have rejected the gift. She could hardly conceive of wanting the kind of love that was a state one could be cozened into...
Darrow, putting away the frame, walked across the room and sat down beside her; and she felt he had something special to say.
“They’re sure to send for me in a day or two now,” he began.
She made no answer, and he continued: “You’ll tell me before I go what day I’m to come back and get you?”
It was the first time since his return to Givre that he had made any direct allusion to the date of their marriage; and instead of answering him she broke out: “There’s something I’ve been wanting you to know. The other day in Paris I saw Miss Viner.”
She saw him flush with the intensity of his surprise.
“You sent for her?”
“No; she heard from Adelaide that I was in Paris and she came. She came because she wanted to urge me to marry you. I thought you ought to know what she had done.”
Darrow stood up. “I’m glad you’ve told me.” He spoke with a visible effort at composure. Her eyes followed him as he moved away.
“Is that all?” he asked after an interval.
“It seems to me a great deal.”
“It’s what she’d already asked me.” His voice showed her how deeply he was moved, and a throb of jealousy shot through her.
“Oh, it was for your sake, I know!” He made no answer, and she added: “She’s been exceedingly generous.... Why shouldn’t we speak of it?”
She had lowered her head, but through her dropped lids she seemed to be watching the crowded scene of his face.
“I’ve not shrunk from speaking of it.”
“Speaking of her, then, I mean. It seems to me that if I could talk to you about her I should know better——”
She broke off, confused, and he questioned: “What is it you want to know better?”
The colour rose to her forehead. How could she tell him what she scarcely dared own to herself? There was nothing she did not want to know, no fold or cranny of his secret that her awakened imagination did not strain to penetrate; but she could not expose Sophy Viner to the base fingerings of a retrospective jealousy, nor Darrow to the temptation of belittling her in the effort to better his own case. The girl had been magnificent, and the only worthy return that Anna could make was to take Darrow from her without a question if she took him at all...
She lifted her eyes to his face. “I think I only wanted to speak her name. It’s not right that we should seem so afraid of it. If I were really afraid of it I should have to give you up,” she said.
He bent over her and caught her to him. “Ah, you can’t give me up now!” he exclaimed.
She suffered him to hold her fast without speaking; but the old dread was between them again, and it was on her lips to cry out: “How can I help it, when Iamso afraid?”