The next morning the dread was still there, and she understood that she must snatch herself out of the torpor of the will into which she had been gradually sinking, and tell Darrow that she could not be his wife.
The knowledge came to her in the watches of a sleepless night, when, through the tears of disenchanted passion, she stared back upon her past. There it lay before her, her sole romance, in all its paltry poverty, the cheapest of cheap adventures, the most pitiful of sentimental blunders. She looked about her room, the room where, for so many years, if her heart had been quiescent her thoughts had been alive, and pictured herself henceforth cowering before a throng of mean suspicions, of unavowed compromises and concessions. In that moment of self-searching she saw that Sophy Viner had chosen the better part, and that certain renunciations might enrich where possession would have left a desert.
Passionate reactions of instinct fought against these efforts of her will. Why should past or future coerce her, when the present was so securely hers? Why insanely surrender what the other would after all never have? Her sense of irony whispered that if she sent away Darrow it would not be to Sophy Viner, but to the first woman who crossed his path—as, in a similar hour, Sophy Viner herself had crossed it.... But the mere fact that she could think such things of him sent her shuddering back to the opposite pole. She pictured herself gradually subdued to such a conception of life and love, she pictured Effie growing up under the influence of the woman she saw herself becoming—and she hid her eyes from the humiliation of the picture...
They were at luncheon when the summons that Darrow expected was brought to him. He handed the telegram to Anna, and she learned that his Ambassador, on the way to a German cure, was to be in Paris the next evening and wished to confer with him there before he went back to London. The idea that the decisive moment was at hand was so agitating to her that when luncheon was over she slipped away to the terrace and thence went down alone to the garden. The day was grey but mild, with the heaviness of decay in the air. She rambled on aimlessly, following under the denuded boughs the path she and Darrow had taken on their first walk to the river. She was sure he would not try to overtake her: sure he would guess why she wished to be alone. There were moments when it seemed to double her loneliness to be so certain of his reading her heart while she was so desperately ignorant of his...
She wandered on for more than an hour, and when she returned to the house she saw, as she entered the hall, that Darrow was seated at the desk in Owen’s study. He heard her step, and looking up turned in his chair without rising. Their eyes met, and she saw that his were clear and smiling. He had a heap of papers at his elbow and was evidently engaged in some official correspondence. She wondered that he could address himself so composedly to his task, and then ironically reflected that such detachment was a sign of his superiority. She crossed the threshold and went toward him; but as she advanced she had a sudden vision of Owen, standing outside in the cold autumn dusk and watching Darrow and Sophy Viner as they faced each other across the lamplit desk.... The evocation was so vivid that it caught her breath like a blow, and she sank down helplessly on the divan among the piled-up books. Distinctly, at the moment, she understood that the end had come. “When he speaks to me I will tell him!” she thought...
Darrow, laying aside his pen, looked at her for a moment in silence; then he stood up and shut the door.
“I must go to-morrow early,” he said, sitting down beside her. His voice was grave, with a slight tinge of sadness. She said to herself: “He knows what I am feeling...” and now the thought made her feel less alone. The expression of his face was stern and yet tender: for the first time she understood what he had suffered.
She had no doubt as to the necessity of giving him up, but it was impossible to tell him so then. She stood up and said: “I’ll leave you to your letters.” He made no protest, but merely answered: “You’ll come down presently for a walk?” and it occurred to her at once that she would walk down to the river with him, and give herself for the last time the tragic luxury of sitting at his side in the little pavilion. “Perhaps,” she thought, “it will be easier to tell him there.”
It did not, on the way home from their walk, become any easier to tell him; but her secret decision to do so before he left gave her a kind of factitious calm and laid a melancholy ecstasy upon the hour. Still skirting the subject that fanned their very faces with its flame, they clung persistently to other topics, and it seemed to Anna that their minds had never been nearer together than in this hour when their hearts were so separate. In the glow of interchanged love she had grown less conscious of that other glow of interchanged thought which had once illumined her mind. She had forgotten how Darrow had widened her world and lengthened out all her perspectives, and with a pang of double destitution she saw herself alone among her shrunken thoughts.
For the first time, then, she had a clear vision of what her life would be without him. She imagined herself trying to take up the daily round, and all that had lightened and animated it seemed equally lifeless and vain. She tried to think of herself as wholly absorbed in her daughter’s development, like other mothers she had seen; but she supposed those mothers must have had stored memories of happiness to nourish them. She had had nothing, and all her starved youth still claimed its due.
When she went up to dress for dinner she said to herself: “I’ll have my last evening with him, and then, before we say good night, I’ll tell him.”
This postponement did not seem unjustified. Darrow had shown her how he dreaded vain words, how resolved he was to avoid all fruitless discussion. He must have been intensely aware of what had been going on in her mind since his return, yet when she had attempted to reveal it to him he had turned from the revelation. She was therefore merely following the line he had traced in behaving, till the final moment came, as though there were nothing more to say...
That moment seemed at last to be at hand when, at her usual hour after dinner, Madame de Chantelle rose to go upstairs. She lingered a little to bid good-bye to Darrow, whom she was not likely to see in the morning; and her affable allusions to his prompt return sounded in Anna’s ear like the note of destiny.
A cold rain had fallen all day, and for greater warmth and intimacy they had gone after dinner to the oak-room, shutting out the chilly vista of the farther drawing-rooms. The autumn wind, coming up from the river, cried about the house with a voice of loss and separation; and Anna and Darrow sat silent, as if they feared to break the hush that shut them in. The solitude, the fire-light, the harmony of soft hangings and old dim pictures, wove about them a spell of security through which Anna felt, far down in her heart, the muffled beat of an inextinguishable bliss. How could she have thought that this last moment would be the moment to speak to him, when it seemed to have gathered up into its flight all the scattered splendours of her dream?
Darrow continued to stand by the door after it had closed. Anna felt that he was looking at her, and sat still, disdaining to seek refuge in any evasive word or movement. For the last time she wanted to let him take from her the fulness of what the sight of her could give.
He crossed over and sat down on the sofa. For a moment neither of them spoke; then he said: “To-night, dearest, I must have my answer.”
She straightened herself under the shock of his seeming to take the very words from her lips.
“To-night?” was all that she could falter.
“I must be off by the early train. There won’t be more than a moment in the morning.”
He had taken her hand, and she said to herself that she must free it before she could go on with what she had to say. Then she rejected this concession to a weakness she was resolved to defy. To the end she would leave her hand in his hand, her eyes in his eyes: she would not, in their final hour together, be afraid of any part of her love for him.
“You’ll tell me to-night, dear,” he insisted gently; and his insistence gave her the strength to speak.
“There’s something I must ask you,” she broke out, perceiving, as she heard her words, that they were not in the least what she had meant to say.
He sat still, waiting, and she pressed on: “Do such things happen to men often?”
The quiet room seemed to resound with the long reverberations of her question. She looked away from him, and he released her and stood up.
“I don’t know what happens to other men. Such a thing never happened to me...”
She turned her eyes back to his face. She felt like a traveller on a giddy path between a cliff and a precipice: there was nothing for it now but to go on.
“Had it ... had it begun ... before you met her in Paris?”
“No; a thousand times no! I’ve told you the facts as they were.”
“All the facts?”
He turned abruptly. “What do you mean?”
Her throat was dry and the loud pulses drummed in her temples.
“I mean—about her.... Perhaps you knew ... knew things about her ... beforehand.”
She stopped. The room had grown profoundly still. A log dropped to the hearth and broke there in a hissing shower.
Darrow spoke in a clear voice. “I knew nothing, absolutely nothing,” he said.
She had the answer to her inmost doubt—to her last shameful unavowed hope. She sat powerless under her woe.
He walked to the fireplace and pushed back the broken log with his foot. A flame shot out of it, and in the upward glare she saw his pale face, stern with misery.
“Is that all?” he asked.
She made a slight sign with her head and he came slowly back to her. “Then is this to be good-bye?”
Again she signed a faint assent, and he made no effort to touch her or draw nearer. “You understand that I sha’n’t come back?”
He was looking at her, and she tried to return his look, but her eyes were blind with tears, and in dread of his seeing them she got up and walked away. He did not follow her, and she stood with her back to him, staring at a bowl of carnations on a little table strewn with books. Her tears magnified everything she looked at, and the streaked petals of the carnations, their fringed edges and frail curled stamens, pressed upon her, huge and vivid. She noticed among the books a volume of verse he had sent her from England, and tried to remember whether it was before or after...
She felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and at last she turned to him. “I shall see you to-morrow before you go...”
He made no answer.
She moved toward the door and he held it open for her. She saw his hand on the door, and his seal ring in its setting of twisted silver; and the sense of the end of all things came to her.
They walked down the drawing-rooms, between the shadowy reflections of screens and cabinets, and mounted the stairs side by side. At the end of the gallery, a lamp brought out turbid gleams in the smoky battle-piece above it.
On the landing Darrow stopped; his room was the nearest to the stairs. “Good night,” he said, holding out his hand.
As Anna gave him hers the springs of grief broke loose in her. She struggled with her sobs, and subdued them; but her breath came unevenly, and to hide her agitation she leaned on him and pressed her face against his arm.
“Don’t—don’t,” he whispered, soothing her.
Her troubled breathing sounded loudly in the silence of the sleeping house. She pressed her lips tight, but could not stop the nervous pulsations in her throat, and he put an arm about her and, opening his door, drew her across the threshold of his room. The door shut behind her and she sat down on the lounge at the foot of the bed. The pulsations in her throat had ceased, but she knew they would begin again if she tried to speak.
Darrow walked away and leaned against the mantelpiece. The red-veiled lamp shone on his books and papers, on the arm-chair by the fire, and the scattered objects on his dressing-table. A log glimmered on the hearth, and the room was warm and faintly smoke-scented. It was the first time she had ever been in a room he lived in, among his personal possessions and the traces of his daily usage. Every object about her seemed to contain a particle of himself: the whole air breathed of him, steeping her in the sense of his intimate presence.
Suddenly she thought: “This is what Sophy Viner knew”...and with a torturing precision she pictured them alone in such a scene.... Had he taken the girl to an hotel ... where did people go in such cases? Wherever they were, the silence of night had been around them, and the things he used had been strewn about the room.... Anna, ashamed of dwelling on the detested vision, stood up with a confused impulse of flight; then a wave of contrary feeling arrested her and she paused with lowered head.
Darrow had come forward as she rose, and she perceived that he was waiting for her to bid him good night. It was clear that no other possibility had even brushed his mind; and the fact, for some dim reason, humiliated her. “Why not ... why not?” something whispered in her, as though his forbearance, his tacit recognition of her pride, were a slight on other qualities she wanted him to feel in her.
“In the morning, then?” she heard him say.
“Yes, in the morning,” she repeated.
She continued to stand in the same place, looking vaguely about the room. For once before they parted—since part they must—she longed to be to him all that Sophy Viner had been; but she remained rooted to the floor, unable to find a word or imagine a gesture that should express her meaning. Exasperated by her helplessness, she thought: “Don’t I feel things as other women do?”
Her eye fell on a note-case she had given him. It was worn at the corners with the friction of his pocket and distended with thickly packed papers. She wondered if he carried her letters in it, and she put her hand out and touched it.
All that he and she had ever felt or seen, their close encounters of word and look, and the closer contact of their silences, trembled through her at the touch. She remembered things he had said that had been like new skies above her head: ways he had that seemed a part of the air she breathed. The faint warmth of her girlish love came back to her, gathering heat as it passed through her thoughts; and her heart rocked like a boat on the surge of its long long memories. “It’s because I love him in too many ways,” she thought; and slowly she turned to the door.
She was aware that Darrow was still silently watching her, but he neither stirred nor spoke till she had reached the threshold. Then he met her there and caught her in his arms.
“Not to-night—don’t tell me to-night!” he whispered; and she leaned away from him, closing her eyes for an instant, and then slowly opening them to the flood of light in his.
Anna and Darrow, the next day, sat alone in a compartment of the Paris train.
Anna, when they entered it, had put herself in the farthest corner and placed her bag on the adjoining seat. She had decided suddenly to accompany Darrow to Paris, had even persuaded him to wait for a later train in order that they might travel together. She had an intense longing to be with him, an almost morbid terror of losing sight of him for a moment: when he jumped out of the train and ran back along the platform to buy a newspaper for her she felt as though she should never see him again, and shivered with the cold misery of her last journey to Paris, when she had thought herself parted from him forever. Yet she wanted to keep him at a distance, on the other side of the compartment, and as the train moved out of the station she drew from her bag the letters she had thrust in it as she left the house, and began to glance over them so that her lowered lids should hide her eyes from him.
She was his now, his for life: there could never again be any question of sacrificing herself to Effie’s welfare, or to any other abstract conception of duty. Effie of course would not suffer; Anna would pay for her bliss as a wife by redoubled devotion as a mother. Her scruples were not overcome; but for the time their voices were drowned in the tumultuous rumour of her happiness.
As she opened her letters she was conscious that Darrow’s gaze was fixed on her, and gradually it drew her eyes upward, and she drank deep of the passionate tenderness in his. Then the blood rose to her face and she felt again the desire to shield herself. She turned back to her letters and her glance lit on an envelope inscribed in Owen’s hand.
Her heart began to beat oppressively: she was in a mood when the simplest things seemed ominous. What could Owen have to say to her? Only the first page was covered, and it contained simply the announcement that, in the company of a young compatriot who was studying at the Beaux Arts, he had planned to leave for Spain the following evening.
“He hasn’t seen her, then!” was Anna’s instant thought; and her feeling was a strange compound of humiliation and relief. The girl had kept her word, lived up to the line of conduct she had set herself; and Anna had failed in the same attempt. She did not reproach herself with her failure; but she would have been happier if there had been less discrepancy between her words to Sophy Viner and the act which had followed them. It irritated her obscurely that the girl should have been so much surer of her power to carry out her purpose...
Anna looked up and saw that Darrow’s eyes were on the newspaper. He seemed calm and secure, almost indifferent to her presence. “Will it become a matter of course to him so soon?” she wondered with a twinge of jealousy. She sat motionless, her eyes fixed on him, trying to make him feel the attraction of her gaze as she felt his. It surprised and shamed her to detect a new element in her love for him: a sort of suspicious tyrannical tenderness that seemed to deprive it of all serenity. Finally he looked up, his smile enveloped her, and she felt herself his in every fibre, his so completely and inseparably that she saw the vanity of imagining any other fate for herself.
To give herself a countenance she held out Owen’s letter. He took it and glanced down the page, his face grown grave. She waited nervously till he looked up.
“That’s a good plan; the best thing that could happen,” he said, a just perceptible shade of constraint in his tone.
“Oh, yes,” she hastily assented. She was aware of a faint current of relief silently circulating between them. They were both glad that Owen was going, that for a while he would be out of their way; and it seemed to her horrible that so much of the stuff of their happiness should be made of such unavowed feelings...
“I shall see him this evening,” she said, wishing Darrow to feel that she was not afraid of meeting her step-son.
“Yes, of course; perhaps he might dine with you.”
The words struck her as strangely obtuse. Darrow was to meet his Ambassador at the station on the latter’s arrival, and would in all probability have to spend the evening with him, and Anna knew he had been concerned at the thought of having to leave her alone. But how could he speak in that careless tone of her dining with Owen? She lowered her voice to say: “I’m afraid he’s desperately unhappy.”
He answered, with a tinge of impatience: “It’s much the best thing that he should travel.”
“Yes—but don’t you feel...” She broke off. She knew how he disliked these idle returns on the irrevocable, and her fear of doing or saying what he disliked was tinged by a new instinct of subserviency against which her pride revolted. She thought to herself: “He will see the change, and grow indifferent to me as he did toher...” and for a moment it seemed to her that she was reliving the experience of Sophy Viner.
Darrow made no attempt to learn the end of her unfinished sentence. He handed back Owen’s letter and returned to his newspaper; and when he looked up from it a few minutes later it was with a clear brow and a smile that irresistibly drew her back to happier thoughts.
The train was just entering a station, and a moment later their compartment was invaded by a commonplace couple preoccupied with the bestowal of bulging packages. Anna, at their approach, felt the possessive pride of the woman in love when strangers are between herself and the man she loves. She asked Darrow to open the window, to place her bag in the net, to roll her rug into a cushion for her feet; and while he was thus busied with her she was conscious of a new devotion in his tone, in his way of bending over her and meeting her eyes. He went back to his seat, and they looked at each other like lovers smiling at a happy secret.
Anna, before going back to Givre, had suggested Owen’s moving into her apartment, but he had preferred to remain at the hotel to which he had sent his luggage, and on arriving in Paris she decided to drive there at once. She was impatient to have the meeting over, and glad that Darrow was obliged to leave her at the station in order to look up a colleague at the Embassy. She dreaded his seeing Owen again, and yet dared not tell him so, and to ensure his remaining away she mentioned an urgent engagement with her dress-maker and a long list of commissions to be executed for Madame de Chantelle.
“I shall see you to-morrow morning,” she said; but he replied with a smile that he would certainly find time to come to her for a moment on his way back from meeting the Ambassador; and when he had put her in a cab he leaned through the window to press his lips to hers.
She blushed like a girl, thinking, half vexed, half happy: “Yesterday he would not have done it...” and a dozen scarcely definable differences in his look and manner seemed all at once to be summed up in the boyish act. “After all, I’m engaged to him,” she reflected, and then smiled at the absurdity of the word. The next instant, with a pang of self-reproach, she remembered Sophy Viner’s cry: “I knew all the while he didn’t care...” “Poor thing, oh poor thing!” Anna murmured...
At Owen’s hotel she waited in a tremor while the porter went in search of him. Word was presently brought back that he was in his room and begged her to come up, and as she crossed the hall she caught sight of his portmanteaux lying on the floor, already labelled for departure.
Owen sat at a table writing, his back to the door; and when he stood up the window was behind him, so that, in the rainy afternoon light, his features were barely discernible.
“Dearest—so you’re really off?” she said, hesitating a moment on the threshold.
He pushed a chair forward, and they sat down, each waiting for the other to speak. Finally she put some random question about his travelling-companion, a slow shy meditative youth whom he had once or twice brought down to Givre. She reflected that it was natural he should have given this uncommunicative comrade the preference over his livelier acquaintances, and aloud she said: “I’m so glad Fred Rempson can go with you.”
Owen answered in the same tone, and for a few minutes their talk dragged itself on over a dry waste of common-places. Anna noticed that, though ready enough to impart his own plans, Owen studiously abstained from putting any questions about hers. It was evident from his allusions that he meant to be away for some time, and he presently asked her if she would give instructions about packing and sending after him some winter clothes he had left at Givre. This gave her the opportunity to say that she expected to go back within a day or two and would attend to the matter as soon as she returned. She added: “I came up this morning with George, who is going on to London to-morrow,” intending, by the use of Darrow’s Christian name, to give Owen the chance to speak of her marriage. But he made no comment, and she continued to hear the name sounding on unfamiliarly between them.
The room was almost dark, and she finally stood up and glanced about for the light-switch, saying: “I can’t see you, dear.”
“Oh, don’t—I hate the light!” Owen exclaimed, catching her by the wrist and pushing her back into her seat. He gave a nervous laugh and added: “I’m half-blind with neuralgia. I suppose it’s this beastly rain.”
“Yes; it will do you good to get down to Spain.”
She asked if he had the remedies the doctor had given him for a previous attack, and on his replying that he didn’t know what he’d done with the stuff, she sprang up, offering to go to the chemist’s. It was a relief to have something to do for him, and she knew from his “Oh, thanks—would you?” that it was a relief to him to have a pretext for not detaining her. His natural impulse would have been to declare that he didn’t want any drugs, and would be all right in no time; and his acquiescence showed her how profoundly he felt the uselessness of their trying to prolong their talk. His face was now no more than a white blur in the dusk, but she felt its indistinctness as a veil drawn over aching intensities of expression. “He knows ... he knows...” she said to herself, and wondered whether the truth had been revealed to him by some corroborative fact or by the sheer force of divination.
He had risen also, and was clearly waiting for her to go, and she turned to the door, saying: “I’ll be back in a moment.”
“Oh, don’t come up again, please!” He paused, embarrassed. “I mean—I may not be here. I’ve got to go and pick up Rempson, and see about some final things with him.” She stopped on the threshold with a sinking heart. He meant this to be their leave-taking, then—and he had not even asked her when she was to be married, or spoken of seeing her again before she set out for the other side of the world.
“Owen!” she cried, and turned back.
He stood mutely before her in the dimness.
“You haven’t told me how long you’re to be gone.”
“How long? Oh, you see ... that’s rather vague.... I hate definite dates, you know...”
He paused and she saw he did not mean to help her out. She tried to say: “You’ll be here for my wedding?” but could not bring the words to her lips. Instead she murmured: “In six weeks I shall be going too...” and he rejoined, as if he had expected the announcement and prepared his answer: “Oh, by that time, very likely...”
“At any rate, I won’t say good-bye,” she stammered, feeling the tears beneath her veil.
“No, no; rather not!” he declared; but he made no movement, and she went up and threw her arms about him. “You’ll write me, won’t you?”
“Of course, of course——”
Her hands slipped down into his, and for a minute they held each other dumbly in the darkness; then he gave a vague laugh and said: “It’s really time to light up.” He pressed the electric button with one hand while with the other he opened the door; and she passed out without daring to turn back, lest the light on his face should show her what she feared to see.
Anna drove to the chemist’s for Owen’s remedy. On the way she stopped her cab at a book-shop, and emerged from it laden with literature. She knew what would interest Owen, and what he was likely to have read, and she had made her choice among the newest publications with the promptness of a discriminating reader. But on the way back to the hotel she was overcome by the irony of adding this mental panacea to the other. There was something grotesque and almost mocking in the idea of offering a judicious selection of literature to a man setting out on such a journey. “He knows ... he knows...” she kept on repeating; and giving the porter the parcel from the chemist’s she drove away without leaving the books. She went to her apartment, whither her maid had preceded her. There was a fire in the drawing-room and the tea-table stood ready by the hearth. The stormy rain beat against the uncurtained windows, and she thought of Owen, who would soon be driving through it to the station, alone with his bitter thoughts. She had been proud of the fact that he had always sought her help in difficult hours; and now, in the most difficult of all, she was the one being to whom he could not turn. Between them, henceforth, there would always be the wall of an insurmountable silence.... She strained her aching thoughts to guess how the truth had come to him. Had he seen the girl, and had she told him? Instinctively, Anna rejected this conjecture. But what need was there of assuming an explicit statement, when every breath they had drawn for the last weeks had been charged with the immanent secret? As she looked back over the days since Darrow’s first arrival at Givre she perceived that at no time had any one deliberately spoken, or anything been accidentally disclosed. The truth had come to light by the force of its irresistible pressure; and the perception gave her a startled sense of hidden powers, of a chaos of attractions and repulsions far beneath the ordered surfaces of intercourse. She looked back with melancholy derision on her old conception of life, as a kind of well-lit and well policed suburb to dark places one need never know about. Here they were, these dark places, in her own bosom, and henceforth she would always have to traverse them to reach the beings she loved best!
She was still sitting beside the untouched tea-table when she heard Darrow’s voice in the hall. She started up, saying to herself: “I must tell him that Owen knows...” but when the door opened and she saw his face, still lit by the same smile of boyish triumph, she felt anew the uselessness of speaking.... Had he ever supposed that Owen would not know? Probably, from the height of his greater experience, he had seen long since that all that happened was inevitable; and the thought of it, at any rate, was clearly not weighing on him now.
He was already dressed for the evening, and as he came toward her he said: “The Ambassador’s booked for an official dinner and I’m free after all. Where shall we dine?”
Anna had pictured herself sitting alone all the evening with her wretched thoughts, and the fact of having to put them out of her mind for the next few hours gave her an immediate sensation of relief. Already her pulses were dancing to the tune of Darrow’s, and as they smiled at each other she thought: “Nothing can ever change the fact that I belong to him.”
“Where shall we dine?” he repeated gaily, and she named a well-known restaurant for which she had once heard him express a preference. But as she did so she fancied she saw a shadow on his face, and instantly she said to herself: “It wastherehe went with her!”
“Oh, no, not there, after all!” she interrupted herself; and now she was sure his colour deepened.
“Where shall it be, then?”
She noticed that he did not ask the reason of her change, and this convinced her that she had guessed the truth, and that he knew she had guessed it. “He will always know what I am thinking, and he will never dare to ask me,” she thought; and she saw between them the same insurmountable wall of silence as between herself and Owen, a wall of glass through which they could watch each other’s faintest motions but which no sound could ever traverse...
They drove to a restaurant on the Boulevard, and there, in their intimate corner of the serried scene, the sense of what was unspoken between them gradually ceased to oppress her. He looked so light-hearted and handsome, so ingenuously proud of her, so openly happy at being with her, that no other fact could seem real in his presence. He had learned that the Ambassador was to spend two days in Paris, and he had reason to hope that in consequence his own departure for London would be deferred. He was exhilarated by the prospect of being with Anna for a few hours longer, and she did not ask herself if his exhilaration were a sign of insensibility, for she was too conscious of his power of swaying her moods not to be secretly proud of affecting his.
They lingered for some time over the fruit and coffee, and when they rose to go Darrow suggested that, if she felt disposed for the play, they were not too late for the second part of the programme at one of the smaller theatres.
His mention of the hour recalled Owen to her thoughts. She saw his train rushing southward through the storm, and, in a corner of the swaying compartment, his face, white and indistinct as it had loomed on her in the rainy twilight. It was horrible to be thus perpetually paying for her happiness!
Darrow had called for a theatrical journal, and he presently looked up from it to say: “I hear the second play at the Athénée is amusing.”
It was on Anna’s lips to acquiesce; but as she was about to speak she wondered if it were not at the Athénée that Owen had seen Darrow with Sophy Viner. She was not sure he had even mentioned the theatre, but the mere possibility was enough to darken her sky. It was hateful to her to think of accompanying Darrow to places where the girl had been with him. She tried to reason away this scruple, she even reminded herself with a bitter irony that whenever she was in Darrow’s arms she was where the girl had been before her—but she could not shake off her superstitious dread of being with him in any of the scenes of the Parisian episode. She replied that she was too tired for the play, and they drove back to her apartment. At the foot of the stairs she half-turned to wish him good night, but he appeared not to notice her gesture and followed her up to her door.
“This is ever so much better than the theatre,” he said as they entered the drawing-room.
She had crossed the room and was bending over the hearth to light the fire. She knew he was approaching her, and that in a moment he would have drawn the cloak from her shoulders and laid his lips on her neck, just below the gathered-up hair. These privileges were his and, however deferently and tenderly he claimed them, the joyous ease of his manner marked a difference and proclaimed a right.
“After the theatre they came home like this,” she thought; and at the same instant she felt his hands on her shoulders and shrank back.
“Don’t—oh, don’t!” she cried, drawing her cloak about her. She saw from his astonished stare that her face must be quivering with pain.
“Anna! What on earth is the matter?”
“Owen knows!” she broke out, with a confused desire to justify herself.
Darrow’s countenance changed. “Did he tell you so? What did he say?”
“Nothing! I knew it from the things he didn’t say.”
“You had a talk with him this afternoon?”
“Yes: for a few minutes. I could see he didn’t want me to stay.”
She had dropped into a chair, and sat there huddled, still holding her cloak about her shoulders.
Darrow did not dispute her assumption, and she noticed that he expressed no surprise. He sat down at a little distance from her, turning about in his fingers the cigar-case he had drawn out as they came in. At length he said: “Had he seen Miss Viner?”
She shrank from the sound of the name. “No.... I don’t think so.... I’m sure he hadn’t...”
They remained silent, looking away from one another. Finally Darrow stood up and took a few steps across the room. He came back and paused before her, his eyes on her face.
“I think you ought to tell me what you mean to do.” She raised her head and gave him back his look. “Nothing I do can help Owen!”
“No; but things can’t go on like this.” He paused, as if to measure his words. “I fill you with aversion,” he exclaimed.
She started up, half-sobbing. “No—oh, no!”
“Poor child—you can’t see your face!”
She lifted her hands as if to hide it, and turning away from him bowed her head upon the mantel-shelf. She felt that he was standing a little way behind her, but he made no attempt to touch her or come nearer.
“I know you’ve felt as I’ve felt,” he said in a low voice—“that we belong to each other and that nothing can alter that. But other thoughts come, and you can’t banish them. Whenever you see me you remember ... you associate me with things you abhor.... You’ve been generous—immeasurably. You’ve given me all the chances a woman could; but if it’s only made you suffer, what’s the use?”
She turned to him with a tear-stained face. “It hasn’t only done that.”
“Oh, no! I know.... There’ve been moments...” He took her hand and raised it to his lips. “They’ll be with me as long as I live. But I can’t see you paying such a price for them. I’m not worth what I’m costing you.”
She continued to gaze at him through tear-dilated eyes; and suddenly she flung out the question: “Wasn’t it the Athénée you took her to that evening?”
“Anna—Anna!”
“Yes; I want to know now: to know everything. Perhaps that will make me forget. I ought to have made you tell me before. Wherever we go, I imagine you’ve been there with her.... I see you together. I want to know how it began, where you went, why you left her.... I can’t go on in this darkness any longer!”
She did not know what had prompted her passionate outburst, but already she felt lighter, freer, as if at last the evil spell were broken. “I want to know everything,” she repeated. “It’s the only way to make me forget.”
After she had ceased speaking Darrow remained where he was, his arms folded, his eyes lowered, immovable. She waited, her gaze on his face.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“No.” The blood rushed to her temples. “You won’t? Why not?”
“If I did, do you suppose you’d forgetthat?”
“Oh—” she moaned, and turned away from him.
“You see it’s impossible,” he went on. “I’ve done a thing I loathe, and to atone for it you ask me to do another. What sort of satisfaction would that give you? It would put something irremediable between us.”
She leaned her elbow against the mantel-shelf and hid her face in her hands. She had the sense that she was vainly throwing away her last hope of happiness, yet she could do nothing, think of nothing, to save it. The conjecture flashed through her: “Should I be at peace if I gave him up?” and she remembered the desolation of the days after she had sent him away, and understood that that hope was vain. The tears welled through her lids and ran slowly down between her fingers.
“Good-bye,” she heard him say, and his footsteps turned to the door.
She tried to raise her head, but the weight of her despair bowed it down. She said to herself: “This is the end ... he won’t try to appeal to me again...” and she remained in a sort of tranced rigidity, perceiving without feeling the fateful lapse of the seconds. Then the cords that bound her seemed to snap, and she lifted her head and saw him going.
“Why, he’s mine—he’s mine! He’s no one else’s!” His face was turned to her and the look in his eyes swept away all her terrors. She no longer understood what had prompted her senseless outcry; and the mortal sweetness of loving him became again the one real fact in the world.