XVII
At dinner that evening Madame de Chantelle’s slender monologue was
thrown out over gulfs of silence. Owen was still in the same state of
moody abstraction as when Darrow had left him at the piano; and even
Anna’s face, to her friend’s vigilant eye, revealed not, perhaps, a
personal preoccupation, but a vague sense of impending disturbance.
She smiled, she bore a part in the talk, her eyes dwelt on Darrow’s with
their usual deep reliance; but beneath the surface of her serenity his
tense perceptions detected a hidden stir.
He was sufficiently self-possessed to tell himself that it was doubtless
due to causes with which he was not directly concerned. He knew the
question of Owen’s marriage was soon to be raised, and the abrupt
alteration in the young man’s mood made it seem probable that he was
himself the centre of the atmospheric disturbance. For a moment it
occurred to Darrow that Anna might have employed her afternoon in
preparing Madame de Chantelle for her grandson’s impending announcement;
but a glance at the elder lady’s unclouded brow showed that he must seek
elsewhere the clue to Owen’s taciturnity and his step-mother’s concern.
Possibly Anna had found reason to change her own attitude in the matter,
and had made the change known to Owen. But this, again, was negatived by
the fact that, during the afternoon’s shooting, young Leath had been in
a mood of almost extravagant expansiveness, and that, from the moment of
his late return to the house till just before dinner, there had been,
to Darrow’s certain knowledge, no possibility of a private talk between
himself and his step-mother.
This obscured, if it narrowed, the field of conjecture; and Darrow’s
gropings threw him back on the conclusion that he was probably reading
too much significance into the moods of a lad he hardly knew, and who
had been described to him as subject to sudden changes of humour. As to
Anna’s fancied perturbation, it might simply be due to the fact that she
had decided to plead Owen’s cause the next day, and had perhaps already
had a glimpse of the difficulties awaiting her. But Darrow knew that he
was too deep in his own perplexities to judge the mental state of those
about him. It might be, after all, that the variations he felt in the
currents of communication were caused by his own inward tremor.
Such, at any rate, was the conclusion he had reached when, shortly after
the two ladies left the drawing-room, he bade Owen good-night and went
up to his room. Ever since the rapid self-colloquy which had followed on
his first sight of Sophy Viner, he had known there were other questions
to be faced behind the one immediately confronting him. On the score
of that one, at least, his mind, if not easy, was relieved. He had
done what was possible to reassure the girl, and she had apparently
recognized the sincerity of his intention. He had patched up as decent a
conclusion as he could to an incident that should obviously have had
no sequel; but he had known all along that with the securing of Miss
Viner’s peace of mind only a part of his obligation was discharged, and
that with that part his remaining duty was in conflict. It had been his
first business to convince the girl that their secret was safe with
him; but it was far from easy to square this with the equally urgent
obligation of safe-guarding Anna’s responsibility toward her child.
Darrow was not much afraid of accidental disclosures. Both he and Sophy
Viner had too much at stake not to be on their guard. The fear that
beset him was of another kind, and had a profounder source. He wanted to
do all he could for the girl, but the fact of having had to urge Anna
to confide Effie to her was peculiarly repugnant to him. His own ideas
about Sophy Viner were too mixed and indeterminate for him not to feel
the risk of such an experiment; yet he found himself in the intolerable
position of appearing to press it on the woman he desired above all
others to protect...
Till late in the night his thoughts revolved in a turmoil of indecision.
His pride was humbled by the discrepancy between what Sophy Viner had
been to him and what he had thought of her. This discrepancy, which at
the time had seemed to simplify the incident, now turned out to be
its most galling complication. The bare truth, indeed, was that he had
hardly thought of her at all, either at the time or since, and that he
was ashamed to base his judgement of her on his meagre memory of their
adventure.
The essential cheapness of the whole affair--as far as his share in it
was concerned--came home to him with humiliating distinctness. He would
have liked to be able to feel that, at the time at least, he had
staked something more on it, and had somehow, in the sequel, had a more
palpable loss to show. But the plain fact was that he hadn’t spent a
penny on it; which was no doubt the reason of the prodigious score it
had since been rolling up. At any rate, beat about the case as he would,
it was clear that he owed it to Anna--and incidentally to his own peace
of mind--to find some way of securing Sophy Viner’s future without
leaving her installed at Givre when he and his wife should depart for
their new post.
The night brought no aid to the solving of this problem; but it gave
him, at any rate, the clear conviction that no time was to be lost. His
first step must be to obtain from Miss Viner the chance of another and
calmer talk; and he resolved to seek it at the earliest hour.
He had gathered that Effie’s lessons were preceded by an early scamper
in the park, and conjecturing that her governess might be with her he
betook himself the next morning to the terrace, whence he wandered on to
the gardens and the walks beyond.
The atmosphere was still and pale. The muffled sunlight gleamed like
gold tissue through grey gauze, and the beech alleys tapered away to a
blue haze blent of sky and forest. It was one of those elusive days
when the familiar forms of things seem about to dissolve in a prismatic
shimmer.
The stillness was presently broken by joyful barks, and Darrow, tracking
the sound, overtook Effie flying down one of the long alleys at the head
of her pack. Beyond her he saw Miss Viner seated near the stone-rimmed
basin beside which he and Anna had paused on their first walk to the
river.
The girl, coming forward at his approach, returned his greeting almost
gaily. His first glance showed him that she had regained her composure,
and the change in her appearance gave him the measure of her fears. For
the first time he saw in her again the sidelong grace that had charmed
his eyes in Paris; but he saw it now as in a painted picture.
“Shall we sit down a minute?” he asked, as Effie trotted off.
The girl looked away from him. “I’m afraid there’s not much time; we
must be back at lessons at half-past nine.”
“But it’s barely ten minutes past. Let’s at least walk a little way
toward the river.”
She glanced down the long walk ahead of them and then back in the
direction of the house. “If you like,” she said in a low voice, with one
of her quick fluctuations of colour; but instead of taking the way he
proposed she turned toward a narrow path which branched off obliquely
through the trees.
Darrow was struck, and vaguely troubled, by the change in her look
and tone. There was in them an undefinable appeal, whether for help or
forbearance he could not tell. Then it occurred to him that there might
have been something misleading in his so pointedly seeking her, and he
felt a momentary constraint. To ease it he made an abrupt dash at the
truth.
“I came out to look for you because our talk of yesterday was so
unsatisfactory. I want to hear more about you--about your plans and
prospects. I’ve been wondering ever since why you’ve so completely given
up the theatre.”
Her face instantly sharpened to distrust. “I had to live,” she said in
an off-hand tone.
“I understand perfectly that you should like it here--for a time.”
His glance strayed down the gold-roofed windings ahead of them. “It’s
delightful: you couldn’t be better placed. Only I wonder a little at
your having so completely given up any idea of a different future.”
She waited for a moment before answering: “I suppose I’m less restless
than I used to be.”
“It’s certainly natural that you should be less restless here than at
Mrs. Murrett’s; yet somehow I don’t seem to see you permanently given up
to forming the young.”
“What--exactly--DO you seem to see me permanently given up to? You know
you warned me rather emphatically against the theatre.” She threw
off the statement without impatience, as though they were discussing
together the fate of a third person in whom both were benevolently
interested. Darrow considered his reply. “If I did, it was because you
so emphatically refused to let me help you to a start.”
She stopped short and faced him “And you think I may let you now?”
Darrow felt the blood in his cheek. He could not understand her
attitude--if indeed she had consciously taken one, and her changes of
tone did not merely reflect the involuntary alternations of her mood. It
humbled him to perceive once more how little he had to guide him in his
judgment of her. He said to himself: “If I’d ever cared a straw for
her I should know how to avoid hurting her now”--and his insensibility
struck him as no better than a vulgar obtuseness. But he had a fixed
purpose ahead and could only push on to it.
“I hope, at any rate, you’ll listen to my reasons. There’s been time,
on both sides, to think them over since----” He caught himself back
and hung helpless on the “since”: whatever words he chose, he seemed to
stumble among reminders of their past.
She walked on beside him, her eyes on the ground. “Then I’m to
understand--definitely--that you DO renew your offer?” she asked
“With all my heart! If you’ll only let me----”
She raised a hand, as though to check him. “It’s extremely friendly of
you--I DO believe you mean it as a friend--but I don’t quite understand
why, finding me, as you say, so well placed here, you should show more
anxiety about my future than at a time when I was actually, and rather
desperately, adrift.”
“Oh, no, not more!”
“If you show any at all, it must, at any rate, be for different
reasons.--In fact, it can only be,” she went on, with one of her
disconcerting flashes of astuteness, “for one of two reasons; either
because you feel you ought to help me, or because, for some reason, you
think you owe it to Mrs. Leath to let her know what you know of me.”
Darrow stood still in the path. Behind him he heard Effie’s call, and at
the child’s voice he saw Sophy turn her head with the alertness of one
who is obscurely on the watch. The look was so fugitive that he could
not have said wherein it differed from her normal professional air of
having her pupil on her mind.
Effie sprang past them, and Darrow took up the girl’s challenge.
“What you suggest about Mrs. Leath is hardly worth answering. As to my
reasons for wanting to help you, a good deal depends on the words one
uses to define rather indefinite things. It’s true enough that I want to
help you; but the wish isn’t due to ... to any past kindness on your part,
but simply to my own interest in you. Why not put it that our friendship
gives me the right to intervene for what I believe to be your benefit?”
She took a few hesitating steps and then paused again. Darrow noticed
that she had grown pale and that there were rings of shade about her
eyes.
“You’ve known Mrs. Leath a long time?” she asked him suddenly.
He paused with a sense of approaching peril. “A long time--yes.”
“She told me you were friends--great friends”
“Yes,” he admitted, “we’re great friends.”
“Then you might naturally feel yourself justified in telling her that
you don’t think I’m the right person for Effie.” He uttered a sound of
protest, but she disregarded it. “I don’t say you’d LIKE to do it. You
wouldn’t: you’d hate it. And the natural alternative would be to try
to persuade me that I’d be better off somewhere else than here. But
supposing that failed, and you saw I was determined to stay? THEN you
might think it your duty to tell Mrs. Leath.”
She laid the case before him with a cold lucidity. “I should, in your
place, I believe,” she ended with a little laugh.
“I shouldn’t feel justified in telling her, behind your back, if
I thought you unsuited for the place; but I should certainly feel
justified,” he rejoined after a pause, “in telling YOU if I thought the
place unsuited to you.”
“And that’s what you’re trying to tell me now?”
“Yes; but not for the reasons you imagine.”
“What, then, are your reasons, if you please?”
“I’ve already implied them in advising you not to give up all idea
of the theatre. You’re too various, too gifted, too personal, to tie
yourself down, at your age, to the dismal drudgery of teaching.”
“And is THAT what you’ve told Mrs. Leath?”
She rushed the question out at him as if she expected to trip him up
over it. He was moved by the simplicity of the stratagem.
“I’ve told her exactly nothing,” he replied.
“And what--exactly--do you mean by ‘nothing’? You and she were talking
about me when I came into her sitting-room yesterday.”
Darrow felt his blood rise at the thrust.
“I’ve told her, simply, that I’d seen you once or twice at Mrs.
Murrett’s.”
“And not that you’ve ever seen me since?”
“And not that I’ve ever seen you since...”
“And she believes you--she completely believes you?”
He uttered a protesting exclamation, and his flush reflected itself in
the girl’s cheek.
“Oh, I beg your pardon! I didn’t mean to ask you that.” She halted, and
again cast a rapid glance behind and ahead of her. Then she held out her
hand. “Well, then, thank you--and let me relieve your fears. I sha’n’t
be Effie’s governess much longer.”
At the announcement, Darrow tried to merge his look of relief into the
expression of friendly interest with which he grasped her hand. “You
really do agree with me, then? And you’ll give me a chance to talk
things over with you?”
She shook her head with a faint smile. “I’m not thinking of the stage.
I’ve had another offer: that’s all.”
The relief was hardly less great. After all, his personal responsibility
ceased with her departure from Givre.
“You’ll tell me about that, then--won’t you?”
Her smile flickered up. “Oh, you’ll hear about it soon...I must catch
Effie now and drag her back to the blackboard.”
She walked on for a few yards, and then paused again and confronted him.
“I’ve been odious to you--and not quite honest,” she broke out suddenly.
“Not quite honest?” he repeated, caught in a fresh wave of wonder.
“I mean, in seeming not to trust you. It’s come over me again as we
talked that, at heart, I’ve always KNOWN I could...”
Her colour rose in a bright wave, and her eyes clung to his for a swift
instant of reminder and appeal. For the same space of time the past
surged up in him confusedly; then a veil dropped between them.
“Here’s Effie now!” she exclaimed.
He turned and saw the little girl trotting back to them, her hand in
Owen Leath’s. Even through the stir of his subsiding excitement Darrow
was at once aware of the change effected by the young man’s approach.
For a moment Sophy Viner’s cheeks burned redder; then they faded to
the paleness of white petals. She lost, however, nothing of the bright
bravery which it was her way to turn on the unexpected. Perhaps no one
less familiar with her face than Darrow would have discerned the
tension of the smile she transferred from himself to Owen Leath, or
have remarked that her eyes had hardened from misty grey to a shining
darkness. But her observer was less struck by this than by the
corresponding change in Owen Leath. The latter, when he came in sight,
had been laughing and talking unconcernedly with Effie; but as his eye
fell on Miss Viner his expression altered as suddenly as hers.
The change, for Darrow, was less definable; but, perhaps for that
reason, it struck him as more sharply significant. Only--just what did
it signify? Owen, like Sophy Viner, had the kind of face which seems
less the stage on which emotions move than the very stuff they work
in. In moments of excitement his odd irregular features seemed to grow
fluid, to unmake and remake themselves like the shadows of clouds on a
stream. Darrow, through the rapid flight of the shadows, could not seize
on any specific indication of feeling: he merely perceived that the
young man was unaccountably surprised at finding him with Miss
Viner, and that the extent of his surprise might cover all manner of
implications.
Darrow’s first idea was that Owen, if he suspected that the conversation
was not the result of an accidental encounter, might wonder at his
step-mother’s suitor being engaged, at such an hour, in private talk
with her little girl’s governess. The thought was so disturbing that,
as the three turned back to the house, he was on the point of saying to
Owen: “I came out to look for your mother.” But, in the contingency he
feared, even so simple a phrase might seem like an awkward attempt at
explanation; and he walked on in silence at Miss Viner’s side. Presently
he was struck by the fact that Owen Leath and the girl were silent also;
and this gave a new turn to his thoughts. Silence may be as variously
shaded as speech; and that which enfolded Darrow and his two companions
seemed to his watchful perceptions to be quivering with cross-threads of
communication. At first he was aware only of those that centred in
his own troubled consciousness; then it occurred to him that an equal
activity of intercourse was going on outside of it. Something was in
fact passing mutely and rapidly between young Leath and Sophy Viner; but
what it was, and whither it tended, Darrow, when they reached the house,
was but just beginning to divine...
XVIII
Anna Leath, from the terrace, watched the return of the little group.
She looked down on them, as they advanced across the garden, from the
serene height of her unassailable happiness. There they were, coming
toward her in the mild morning light, her child, her step-son, her
promised husband: the three beings who filled her life. She smiled a
little at the happy picture they presented, Effie’s gambols encircling
it in a moving frame within which the two men came slowly forward in the
silence of friendly understanding. It seemed part of the deep intimacy
of the scene that they should not be talking to each other, and it did
not till afterward strike her as odd that neither of them apparently
felt it necessary to address a word to Sophy Viner.
Anna herself, at the moment, was floating in the mid-current of
felicity, on a tide so bright and buoyant that she seemed to be one with
its warm waves. The first rush of bliss had stunned and dazzled her;
but now that, each morning, she woke to the calm certainty of its
recurrence, she was growing used to the sense of security it gave.
“I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown
out of me like wings.” So she phrased it to Darrow, as, later in the
morning, they paced the garden-paths together. His answering look gave
her the same assurance of safety. The evening before he had seemed
preoccupied, and the shadow of his mood had faintly encroached on the
great golden orb of their blessedness; but now it was uneclipsed again,
and hung above them high and bright as the sun at noon.
Upstairs in her sitting-room, that afternoon, she was thinking of
these things. The morning mists had turned to rain, compelling the
postponement of an excursion in which the whole party were to have
joined. Effie, with her governess, had been despatched in the motor to
do some shopping at Francheuil; and Anna had promised Darrow to join
him, later in the afternoon, for a quick walk in the rain.
He had gone to his room after luncheon to get some belated letters off
his conscience; and when he had left her she had continued to sit in the
same place, her hands crossed on her knees, her head slightly bent, in
an attitude of brooding retrospection. As she looked back at her past
life, it seemed to her to have consisted of one ceaseless effort to pack
into each hour enough to fill out its slack folds; but now each moment
was like a miser’s bag stretched to bursting with pure gold.
She was roused by the sound of Owen’s step in the gallery outside her
room. It paused at her door and in answer to his knock she called out
“Come in!”
As the door closed behind him she was struck by his look of pale
excitement, and an impulse of compunction made her say: “You’ve come to
ask me why I haven’t spoken to your grandmother!” He sent about him a
glance vaguely reminding her of the strange look with which Sophy Viner
had swept the room the night before; then his brilliant eyes came back
to her.
“I’ve spoken to her myself,” he said.
Anna started up, incredulous.
“You’ve spoken to her? When?”
“Just now. I left her to come here.”
Anna’s first feeling was one of annoyance. There was really something
comically incongruous in this boyish surrender to impulse on the part of
a young man so eager to assume the responsibilities of life. She looked
at him with a faintly veiled amusement.
“You asked me to help you and I promised you I would. It was hardly
worth while to work out such an elaborate plan of action if you intended
to take the matter out of my hands without telling me.”
“Oh, don’t take that tone with me!” he broke out, almost angrily.
“That tone? What tone?” She stared at his quivering face. “I might,” she
pursued, still half-laughing, “more properly make that request of YOU!”
Owen reddened and his vehemence suddenly subsided.
“I meant that I HAD to speak--that’s all. You don’t give me a chance to
explain...”
She looked at him gently, wondering a little at her own impatience.
“Owen! Don’t I always want to give you every chance? It’s because I DO
that I wanted to talk to your grandmother first--that I was waiting and
watching for the right moment...”
“The right moment? So was I. That’s why I’ve spoken.” His voice rose
again and took the sharp edge it had in moments of high pressure.
His step-mother turned away and seated herself in her sofa-corner. “Oh,
my dear, it’s not a privilege to quarrel over! You’ve taken a load off
my shoulders. Sit down and tell me all about it.”
He stood before her, irresolute. “I can’t sit down,” he said.
“Walk about, then. Only tell me: I’m impatient.”
His immediate response was to throw himself into the armchair at her
side, where he lounged for a moment without speaking, his legs stretched
out, his arms locked behind his thrown-back head. Anna, her eyes on his
face, waited quietly for him to speak.
“Well--of course it was just what one expected.”
“She takes it so badly, you mean?”
“All the heavy batteries were brought up: my father, Givre, Monsieur de
Chantelle, the throne and the altar. Even my poor mother was dragged out
of oblivion and armed with imaginary protests.”
Anna sighed out her sympathy. “Well--you were prepared for all that?”
“I thought I was, till I began to hear her say it. Then it sounded so
incredibly silly that I told her so.”
“Oh, Owen--Owen!”
“Yes: I know. I was a fool; but I couldn’t help it.”
“And you’ve mortally offended her, I suppose? That’s exactly what I
wanted to prevent.” She laid a hand on his shoulder. “You tiresome boy,
not to wait and let me speak for you!”
He moved slightly away, so that her hand slipped from its place. “You
don’t understand,” he said, frowning.
“I don’t see how I can, till you explain. If you thought the time had
come to tell your grandmother, why not have asked me to do it? I had my
reasons for waiting; but if you’d told me to speak I should have done
so, naturally.”
He evaded her appeal by a sudden turn. “What WERE your reasons for
waiting?”
Anna did not immediately answer. Her step-son’s eyes were on her face,
and under his gaze she felt a faint disquietude.
“I was feeling my way...I wanted to be absolutely sure...”
“Absolutely sure of what?”
She delayed again for a just perceptible instant. “Why, simply of OUR
side of the case.”
“But you told me you were, the other day, when we talked it over before
they came back from Ouchy.”
“Oh, my dear--if you think that, in such a complicated matter, every
day, every hour, doesn’t more or less modify one’s surest sureness!”
“That’s just what I’m driving at. I want to know what has modified
yours.”
She made a slight gesture of impatience. “What does it matter, now the
thing’s done? I don’t know that I could give any clear reason...”
He got to his feet and stood looking down on her with a tormented brow.
“But it’s absolutely necessary that you should.”
At his tone her impatience flared up. “It’s not necessary that I should
give you any explanation whatever, since you’ve taken the matter out of
my hands. All I can say is that I was trying to help you: that no other
thought ever entered my mind.” She paused a moment and then added: “If
you doubted it, you were right to do what you’ve done.”
“Oh, I never doubted YOU!” he retorted, with a fugitive stress on
the pronoun. His face had cleared to its old look of trust. “Don’t be
offended if I’ve seemed to,” he went on. “I can’t quite explain myself,
either ... it’s all a kind of tangle, isn’t it? That’s why I thought I’d
better speak at once; or rather why I didn’t think at all, but just
suddenly blurted the thing out----”
Anna gave him back his look of conciliation. “Well, the how and why
don’t much matter now. The point is how to deal with your grandmother.
You’ve not told me what she means to do.”
“Oh, she means to send for Adelaide Painter.”
The name drew a faint note of mirth from him and relaxed both their
faces to a smile.
“Perhaps,” Anna added, “it’s really the best thing for us all.”
Owen shrugged his shoulders. “It’s too preposterous and humiliating.
Dragging that woman into our secrets----!”
“This could hardly be a secret much longer.”
He had moved to the hearth, where he stood pushing about the small
ornaments on the mantel-shelf; but at her answer he turned back to her.
“You haven’t, of course, spoken of it to any one?”
“No; but I intend to now.”
She paused for his reply, and as it did not come she continued: “If
Adelaide Painter’s to be told there’s no possible reason why I shouldn’t
tell Mr. Darrow.” Owen abruptly set down the little statuette between
his fingers. “None whatever: I want every one to know.”
She smiled a little at his over-emphasis, and was about to meet it with
a word of banter when he continued, facing her: “You haven’t, as yet,
said a word to him?”
“I’ve told him nothing, except what the discussion of our own plans--his
and mine--obliged me to: that you were thinking of marrying, and that
I wasn’t willing to leave France till I’d done what I could to see you
through.”
At her first words the colour had rushed to his forehead; but as she
continued she saw his face compose itself and his blood subside.
“You’re a brick, my dear!” he exclaimed.
“You had my word, you know.”
“Yes; yes--I know.” His face had clouded again. “And that’s
all--positively all--you’ve ever said to him?”
“Positively all. But why do you ask?”
He had a moment’s embarrassed hesitation. “It was understood, wasn’t it,
that my grandmother was to be the first to know?”
“Well--and so she has been, hasn’t she, since you’ve told her?”
He turned back to his restless shifting of the knick-knacks.
“And you’re sure that nothing you’ve said to Darrow could possibly have
given him a hint----?”
“Nothing I’ve said to him--certainly.”
He swung about on her. “Why do you put it in that way?”
“In what way?”
“Why--as if you thought some one else might have spoken...”
“Some one else? Who else?” She rose to her feet. “What on earth, my dear
boy, can you be driving at?”
“I’m trying to find out whether you think he knows anything definite.”
“Why should I think so? Do YOU?”
“I don’t know. I want to find out.”
She laughed at his obstinate insistence. “To test my veracity, I
suppose?” At the sound of a step in the gallery she added: “Here he
is--you can ask him yourself.”
She met Darrow’s knock with an invitation to enter, and he came into the
room and paused between herself and Owen. She was struck, as he stood
there, by the contrast between his happy careless good-looks and her
step-son’s frowning agitation.
Darrow met her eyes with a smile. “Am I too soon? Or is our walk given
up?”
“No; I was just going to get ready.” She continued to linger between
the two, looking slowly from one to the other. “But there’s something we
want to tell you first: Owen is engaged to Miss Viner.”
The sense of an indefinable interrogation in Owen’s mind made her, as
she spoke, fix her eyes steadily on Darrow.
He had paused just opposite the window, so that, even in the rainy
afternoon light, his face was clearly open to her scrutiny. For a
second, immense surprise was alone visible on it: so visible that
she half turned to her step-son, with a faint smile for his refuted
suspicions. Why, she wondered, should Owen have thought that Darrow had
already guessed his secret, and what, after all, could be so disturbing
to him in this not improbable contingency? At any rate, his doubt
must have been dispelled: there was nothing feigned about Darrow’s
astonishment. When her eyes turned back to him he was already crossing
to Owen with outstretched hand, and she had, through an unaccountable
faint flutter of misgiving, a mere confused sense of their exchanging
the customary phrases. Her next perception was of Owen’s tranquillized
look, and of his smiling return of Darrow’s congratulatory grasp. She
had the eerie feeling of having been overswept by a shadow which there
had been no cloud to cast...
A moment later Owen had left the room and she and Darrow were alone. He
had turned away to the window and stood staring out into the down-pour.
“You’re surprised at Owen’s news?” she asked.
“Yes: I am surprised,” he answered.
“You hadn’t thought of its being Miss Viner?”
“Why should I have thought of Miss Viner?”
“You see now why I wanted so much to find out what you knew about her.”
He made no comment, and she pursued: “Now that you DO know it’s she, if
there’s anything----”
He moved back into the room and went up to her. His face was serious,
with a slight shade of annoyance. “What on earth should there be? As I
told you, I’ve never in my life heard any one say two words about Miss
Viner.”
Anna made no answer and they continued to face each other without
moving. For the moment she had ceased to think about Sophy Viner and
Owen: the only thought in her mind was that Darrow was alone with her,
close to her, and that, for the first time, their hands and lips had not
met.
He glanced back doubtfully at the window. “It’s pouring. Perhaps you’d
rather not go out?”
She hesitated, as if waiting for him to urge her. “I suppose I’d better
not. I ought to go at once to my mother-in-law--Owen’s just been telling
her,” she said.
“Ah.” Darrow hazarded a smile. “That accounts for my having, on my way
up, heard some one telephoning for Miss Painter!”
At the allusion they laughed together, vaguely, and Anna moved toward
the door. He held it open for her and followed her out.
XIX
He left her at the door of Madame de Chantelle’s sitting-room, and
plunged out alone into the rain.
The wind flung about the stripped tree-tops of the avenue and dashed the
stinging streams into his face. He walked to the gate and then turned
into the high-road and strode along in the open, buffeted by slanting
gusts. The evenly ridged fields were a blurred waste of mud, and
the russet coverts which he and Owen had shot through the day before
shivered desolately against a driving sky.
Darrow walked on and on, indifferent to the direction he was taking. His
thoughts were tossing like the tree-tops. Anna’s announcement had not
come to him as a complete surprise: that morning, as he strolled back
to the house with Owen Leath and Miss Viner, he had had a momentary
intuition of the truth. But it had been no more than an intuition, the
merest faint cloud-puff of surmise; and now it was an attested fact,
darkening over the whole sky.
In respect of his own attitude, he saw at once that the discovery made
no appreciable change. If he had been bound to silence before, he was no
less bound to it now; the only difference lay in the fact that what he
had just learned had rendered his bondage more intolerable. Hitherto
he had felt for Sophy Viner’s defenseless state a sympathy profoundly
tinged with compunction. But now he was half-conscious of an obscure
indignation against her. Superior as he had fancied himself to
ready-made judgments, he was aware of cherishing the common doubt as to
the disinterestedness of the woman who tries to rise above her past. No
wonder she had been sick with fear on meeting him! It was in his power
to do her more harm than he had dreamed...
Assuredly he did not want to harm her; but he did desperately want to
prevent her marrying Owen Leath. He tried to get away from the feeling,
to isolate and exteriorize it sufficiently to see what motives it
was made of; but it remained a mere blind motion of his blood, the
instinctive recoil from the thing that no amount of arguing can make
“straight.” His tramp, prolonged as it was, carried him no nearer
to enlightenment; and after trudging through two or three sallow
mud-stained villages he turned about and wearily made his way back to
Givre. As he walked up the black avenue, making for the lights that
twinkled through its pitching branches, he had a sudden realisation
of his utter helplessness. He might think and combine as he would; but
there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do...
He dropped his wet coat in the vestibule and began to mount the stairs
to his room. But on the landing he was overtaken by a sober-faced maid
who, in tones discreetly lowered, begged him to be so kind as to step,
for a moment, into the Marquise’s sitting-room. Somewhat disconcerted
by the summons, he followed its bearer to the door at which, a couple of
hours earlier, he had taken leave of Mrs. Leath. It opened to admit him
to a large lamp-lit room which he immediately perceived to be empty; and
the fact gave him time to note, even through his disturbance of mind,
the interesting degree to which Madame de Chantelle’s apartment “dated”
and completed her. Its looped and corded curtains, its purple satin
upholstery, the Sevres jardinieres, the rosewood fire-screen, the little
velvet tables edged with lace and crowded with silver knick-knacks and
simpering miniatures, reconstituted an almost perfect setting for the
blonde beauty of the ’sixties. Darrow wondered that Fraser Leath’s
filial respect should have prevailed over his aesthetic scruples to the
extent of permitting such an anachronism among the eighteenth century
graces of Givre; but a moment’s reflection made it clear that, to its
late owner, the attitude would have seemed exactly in the traditions of
the place.
Madame de Chantelle’s emergence from an inner room snatched Darrow from
these irrelevant musings. She was already beaded and bugled for the
evening, and, save for a slight pinkness of the eye-lids, her elaborate
appearance revealed no mark of agitation; but Darrow noticed that,
in recognition of the solemnity of the occasion, she pinched a lace
handkerchief between her thumb and forefinger.
She plunged at once into the centre of the difficulty, appealing to him,
in the name of all the Everards, to descend there with her to the rescue
of her darling. She wasn’t, she was sure, addressing herself in vain to
one whose person, whose “tone,” whose traditions so brilliantly declared
his indebtedness to the principles she besought him to defend. Her own
reception of Darrow, the confidence she had at once accorded him,
must have shown him that she had instinctively felt their unanimity of
sentiment on these fundamental questions. She had in fact recognized in
him the one person whom, without pain to her maternal piety, she could
welcome as her son’s successor; and it was almost as to Owen’s father
that she now appealed to Darrow to aid in rescuing the wretched boy.
“Don’t think, please, that I’m casting the least reflection on Anna,
or showing any want of sympathy for her, when I say that I consider
her partly responsible for what’s happened. Anna is ‘modern’--I believe
that’s what it’s called when you read unsettling books and admire
hideous pictures. Indeed,” Madame de Chantelle continued, leaning
confidentially forward, “I myself have always more or less lived in that
atmosphere: my son, you know, was very revolutionary. Only he didn’t, of
course, apply his ideas: they were purely intellectual. That’s what dear
Anna has always failed to understand. And I’m afraid she’s created the
same kind of confusion in Owen’s mind--led him to mix up things you read
about with things you do...You know, of course, that she sides with him
in this wretched business?”
Developing at length upon this theme, she finally narrowed down to
the point of Darrow’s intervention. “My grandson, Mr. Darrow, calls me
illogical and uncharitable because my feelings toward Miss Viner have
changed since I’ve heard this news. Well! You’ve known her, it appears,
for some years: Anna tells me you used to see her when she was a
companion, or secretary or something, to a dreadfully vulgar Mrs.
Murrett. And I ask you as a friend, I ask you as one of US, to tell me
if you think a girl who has had to knock about the world in that kind
of position, and at the orders of all kinds of people, is fitted to be
Owen’s wife. I’m not implying anything against her! I LIKED the girl, Mr.
Darrow...But what’s that got to do with it? I don’t want her to marry
my grandson. If I’d been looking for a wife for Owen, I shouldn’t
have applied to the Farlows to find me one. That’s what Anna won’t
understand; and what you must help me to make her see.”
Darrow, to this appeal, could oppose only the repeated assurance of his
inability to interfere. He tried to make Madame de Chantelle see
that the very position he hoped to take in the household made his
intervention the more hazardous. He brought up the usual arguments, and
sounded the expected note of sympathy; but Madame de Chantelle’s alarm
had dispelled her habitual imprecision, and, though she had not many
reasons to advance, her argument clung to its point like a frightened
sharp-clawed animal.
“Well, then,” she summed up, in response to his repeated assertions that
he saw no way of helping her, “you can, at least, even if you won’t
say a word to the others, tell me frankly and fairly--and quite between
ourselves--your personal opinion of Miss Viner, since you’ve known her
so much longer than we have.”
He protested that, if he had known her longer, he had known her much
less well, and that he had already, on this point, convinced Anna of his
inability to pronounce an opinion.
Madame de Chantelle drew a deep sigh of intelligence. “Your opinion of
Mrs. Murrett is enough! I don’t suppose you pretend to conceal THAT? And
heaven knows what other unspeakable people she’s been mixed up with. The
only friends she can produce are called Hoke...Don’t try to reason with
me, Mr. Darrow. There are feelings that go deeper than facts...And
I KNOW she thought of studying for the stage...” Madame de Chantelle
raised the corner of her lace handkerchief to her eyes. “I’m
old-fashioned--like my furniture,” she murmured. “And I thought I could
count on you, Mr. Darrow...”
When Darrow, that night, regained his room, he reflected with a flash
of irony that each time he entered it he brought a fresh troop of
perplexities to trouble its serene seclusion. Since the day after his
arrival, only forty-eight hours before, when he had set his window
open to the night, and his hopes had seemed as many as its stars,
each evening had brought its new problem and its renewed distress. But
nothing, as yet, had approached the blank misery of mind with which he
now set himself to face the fresh questions confronting him.
Sophy Viner had not shown herself at dinner, so that he had had no
glimpse of her in her new character, and no means of divining the real
nature of the tie between herself and Owen Leath. One thing, however,
was clear: whatever her real feelings were, and however much or little
she had at stake, if she had made up her mind to marry Owen she had more
than enough skill and tenacity to defeat any arts that poor Madame de
Chantelle could oppose to her.
Darrow himself was in fact the only person who might possibly turn her
from her purpose: Madame de Chantelle, at haphazard, had hit on the
surest means of saving Owen--if to prevent his marriage were to save
him! Darrow, on this point, did not pretend to any fixed opinion; one
feeling alone was clear and insistent in him: he did not mean, if he
could help it, to let the marriage take place.
How he was to prevent it he did not know: to his tormented imagination
every issue seemed closed. For a fantastic instant he was moved to
follow Madame de Chantelle’s suggestion and urge Anna to withdraw her
approval. If his reticence, his efforts to avoid the subject, had not
escaped her, she had doubtless set them down to the fact of his knowing
more, and thinking less, of Sophy Viner than he had been willing to
admit; and he might take advantage of this to turn her mind gradually
from the project. Yet how do so without betraying his insincerity? If
he had had nothing to hide he could easily have said: “It’s one thing to
know nothing against the girl, it’s another to pretend that I think her
a good match for Owen.” But could he say even so much without betraying
more? It was not Anna’s questions, or his answers to them, that he
feared, but what might cry aloud in the intervals between them. He
understood now that ever since Sophy Viner’s arrival at Givre he had
felt in Anna the lurking sense of something unexpressed, and perhaps
inexpressible, between the girl and himself...When at last he fell
asleep he had fatalistically committed his next step to the chances of
the morrow.
The first that offered itself was an encounter with Mrs. Leath as he
descended the stairs the next morning. She had come down already hatted
and shod for a dash to the park lodge, where one of the gatekeeper’s
children had had an accident. In her compact dark dress she looked more
than usually straight and slim, and her face wore the pale glow it took
on at any call on her energy: a kind of warrior brightness that made her
small head, with its strong chin and close-bound hair, like that of an
amazon in a frieze.
It was their first moment alone since she had left him, the afternoon
before, at her mother-in-law’s door; and after a few words about the
injured child their talk inevitably reverted to Owen.
Anna spoke with a smile of her “scene” with Madame de Chantelle, who
belonged, poor dear, to a generation when “scenes” (in the ladylike
and lachrymal sense of the term) were the tribute which sensibility was
expected to pay to the unusual. Their conversation had been, in every
detail, so exactly what Anna had foreseen that it had clearly not made
much impression on her; but she was eager to know the result of Darrow’s
encounter with her mother-in-law.
“She told me she’d sent for you: she always ‘sends for’ people in
emergencies. That again, I suppose, is DE L’EPOQUE. And failing Adelaide
Painter, who can’t get here till this afternoon, there was no one but
poor you to turn to.”
She put it all lightly, with a lightness that seemed to his tight-strung
nerves slightly, undefinably over-done. But he was so aware of his own
tension that he wondered, the next moment, whether anything would ever
again seem to him quite usual and insignificant and in the common order
of things.
As they hastened on through the drizzle in which the storm of the night
was weeping itself out, Anna drew close under his umbrella, and at the
pressure of her arm against his he recalled his walk up the Dover
pier with Sophy Viner. The memory gave him a startled vision of the
inevitable occasions of contact, confidence, familiarity, which his
future relationship to the girl would entail, and the countless chances
of betrayal that every one of them involved.
“Do tell me just what you said,” he heard Anna pleading; and with sudden
resolution he affirmed: “I quite understand your mother-in-law’s feeling
as she does.”
The words, when uttered, seemed a good deal less significant than they
had sounded to his inner ear; and Anna replied without surprise: “Of
course. It’s inevitable that she should. But we shall bring her round
in time.” Under the dripping dome she raised her face to his. “Don’t you
remember what you said the day before yesterday? ‘Together we can’t
fail to pull it off for him!’ I’ve told Owen that, so you’re pledged and
there’s no going back.”
The day before yesterday! Was it possible that, no longer ago, life
had seemed a sufficiently simple business for a sane man to hazard such
assurances?
“Anna,” he questioned her abruptly, “why are you so anxious for this
marriage?”
She stopped short to face him. “Why? But surely I’ve explained to
you--or rather I’ve hardly had to, you seemed so in sympathy with my
reasons!”
“I didn’t know, then, who it was that Owen wanted to marry.”
The words were out with a spring and he felt a clearer air in his brain.
But her logic hemmed him in.
“You knew yesterday; and you assured me then that you hadn’t a word to
say----”
“Against Miss Viner?” The name, once uttered, sounded on and on in his
ears. “Of course not. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that I think
her a good match for Owen.”
Anna made no immediate answer. When she spoke it was to question: “Why
don’t you think her a good match for Owen?”
“Well--Madame de Chantelle’s reasons seem to me not quite as negligible
as you think.”
“You mean the fact that she’s been Mrs. Murrett’s secretary, and that
the people who employed her before were called Hoke? For, as far as Owen
and I can make out, these are the gravest charges against her.”
“Still, one can understand that the match is not what Madame de
Chantelle had dreamed of.”
“Oh, perfectly--if that’s all you mean.” The lodge was in sight, and she
hastened her step. He strode on beside her in silence, but at the gate
she checked him with the question: “Is it really all you mean?”
“Of course,” he heard himself declare.
“Oh, then I think I shall convince you--even if I can’t, like Madame
de Chantelle, summon all the Everards to my aid!” She lifted to him
the look of happy laughter that sometimes brushed her with a gleam of
spring.
Darrow watched her hasten along the path between the dripping
chrysanthemums and enter the lodge. After she had gone in he paced up
and down outside in the drizzle, waiting to learn if she had any message
to send back to the house; and after the lapse of a few minutes she came
out again.
The child, she said, was badly, though not dangerously, hurt, and the
village doctor, who was already on hand, had asked that the surgeon,
already summoned from Francheuil, should be told to bring with him
certain needful appliances. Owen had started by motor to fetch the
surgeon, but there was still time to communicate with the latter by
telephone. The doctor furthermore begged for an immediate provision of
such bandages and disinfectants as Givre itself could furnish, and Anna
bade Darrow address himself to Miss Viner, who would know where to find
the necessary things, and would direct one of the servants to bicycle
with them to the lodge.
Darrow, as he hurried off on this errand, had at once perceived the
opportunity it offered of a word with Sophy Viner. What that word was to
be he did not know; but now, if ever, was the moment to make it urgent
and conclusive. It was unlikely that he would again have such a chance
of unobserved talk with her.
He had supposed he should find her with her pupil in the school-room;
but he learned from a servant that Effie had gone to Francheuil with her
step-brother, and that Miss Viner was still in her room. Darrow sent her
word that he was the bearer of a message from the lodge, and a moment
later he heard her coming down the stairs.
XX
For a second, as she approached him, the quick tremor of her glance
showed her all intent on the same thought as himself. He transmitted
his instructions with mechanical precision, and she answered in the same
tone, repeating his words with the intensity of attention of a child not
quite sure of understanding. Then she disappeared up the stairs.
Darrow lingered on in the hall, not knowing if she meant to return, yet
inwardly sure she would. At length he saw her coming down in her hat and
jacket. The rain still streaked the window panes, and, in order to say
something, he said: “You’re not going to the lodge yourself?”
“I’ve sent one of the men ahead with the things; but I thought Mrs.
Leath might need me.”
“She didn’t ask for you,” he returned, wondering how he could detain
her; but she answered decidedly: “I’d better go.”
He held open the door, picked up his umbrella and followed her out. As
they went down the steps she glanced back at him. “You’ve forgotten your
mackintosh.”
“I sha’n’t need it.”
She had no umbrella, and he opened his and held it out to her. She
rejected it with a murmur of thanks and walked on through the thin
drizzle, and he kept the umbrella over his own head, without offering to
shelter her.
Rapidly and in silence they crossed the court and began to walk down
the avenue. They had traversed a third of its length before Darrow
said abruptly: “Wouldn’t it have been fairer, when we talked together
yesterday, to tell me what I’ve just heard from Mrs. Leath?”
“Fairer----?” She stopped short with a startled look.
“If I’d known that your future was already settled I should have spared
you my gratuitous suggestions.”
She walked on, more slowly, for a yard or two. “I couldn’t speak
yesterday. I meant to have told you today.”
“Oh, I’m not reproaching you for your lack of confidence. Only, if you
HAD told me, I should have been more sure of your really meaning what
you said to me yesterday.”
She did not ask him to what he referred, and he saw that her parting
words to him lived as vividly in her memory as in his.
“Is it so important that you should be sure?” she finally questioned.
“Not to you, naturally,” he returned with involuntary asperity. It was
incredible, yet it was a fact, that for the moment his immediate purpose
in seeking to speak to her was lost under a rush of resentment at
counting for so little in her fate. Of what stuff, then, was his feeling
for her made? A few hours earlier she had touched his thoughts as little
as his senses; but now he felt old sleeping instincts stir in him...
A rush of rain dashed against his face, and, catching Sophy’s hat,
strained it back from her loosened hair. She put her hands to her head
with a familiar gesture...He came closer and held his umbrella over
her...
At the lodge he waited while she went in. The rain continued to stream
down on him and he shivered in the dampness and stamped his feet on the
flags. It seemed to him that a long time elapsed before the door opened
and she reappeared. He glanced into the house for a glimpse of Anna, but
obtained none; yet the mere sense of her nearness had completely altered
his mood.
The child, Sophy told him, was doing well; but Mrs. Leath had decided to
wait till the surgeon came. Darrow, as they turned away, looked through
the gates, and saw the doctor’s old-fashioned carriage by the roadside.
“Let me tell the doctor’s boy to drive you back,” he suggested; but
Sophy answered: “No; I’ll walk,” and he moved on toward the house at her
side. She expressed no surprise at his not remaining at the lodge, and
again they walked on in silence through the rain. She had accepted
the shelter of his umbrella, but she kept herself at such a carefully
measured distance that even the slight swaying movements produced by
their quick pace did not once bring her arm in touch with his; and,
noticing this, he perceived that every drop of her blood must be alive
to his nearness.
“What I meant just now,” he began, “was that you ought to have been sure
of my good wishes.”
She seemed to weigh the words. “Sure enough for what?”
“To trust me a little farther than you did.”
“I’ve told you that yesterday I wasn’t free to speak.”
“Well, since you are now, may I say a word to you?”
She paused perceptibly, and when she spoke it was in so low a tone that
he had to bend his head to catch her answer. “I can’t think what you can
have to say.”
“It’s not easy to say here, at any rate. And indoors I sha’n’t know
where to say it.” He glanced about him in the rain. “Let’s walk over to
the spring-house for a minute.”
To the right of the drive, under a clump of trees, a little stucco
pavilion crowned by a balustrade rose on arches of mouldering brick over
a flight of steps that led down to a spring. Other steps curved up to a
door above. Darrow mounted these, and opening the door entered a
small circular room hung with loosened strips of painted paper whereon
spectrally faded Mandarins executed elongated gestures. Some black and
gold chairs with straw seats and an unsteady table of cracked lacquer
stood on the floor of red-glazed tile.
Sophy had followed him without comment. He closed the door after her,
and she stood motionless, as though waiting for him to speak.
“Now we can talk quietly,” he said, looking at her with a smile into
which he tried to put an intention of the frankest friendliness.
She merely repeated: “I can’t think what you can have to say.”
Her voice had lost the note of half-wistful confidence on which their
talk of the previous day had closed, and she looked at him with a kind
of pale hostility. Her tone made it evident that his task would be
difficult, but it did not shake his resolve to go on. He sat down, and
mechanically she followed his example. The table was between them and
she rested her arms on its cracked edge and her chin on her interlocked
hands. He looked at her and she gave him back his look.
“Have you nothing to say to ME?” he asked at length.
A faint smile lifted, in the remembered way, the left corner of her
narrowed lips.
“About my marriage?”
“About your marriage.”
She continued to consider him between half-drawn lids. “What can I say
that Mrs. Leath has not already told you?”
“Mrs. Leath has told me nothing whatever but the fact--and her pleasure
in it.”
“Well; aren’t those the two essential points?”
“The essential points to YOU? I should have thought----”
“Oh, to YOU, I meant,” she put in keenly.
He flushed at the retort, but steadied himself and rejoined: “The
essential point to me is, of course, that you should be doing what’s
really best for you.”
She sat silent, with lowered lashes. At length she stretched out her arm
and took up from the table a little threadbare Chinese hand-screen. She
turned its ebony stem once or twice between her fingers, and as she did
so Darrow was whimsically struck by the way in which their evanescent
slight romance was symbolized by the fading lines on the frail silk.
“Do you think my engagement to Mr. Leath not really best for me?” she
asked at length.
Darrow, before answering, waited long enough to get his words into the
tersest shape--not without a sense, as he did so, of his likeness to the
surgeon deliberately poising his lancet for a clean incision. “I’m not
sure,” he replied, “of its being the best thing for either of you.”
She took the stroke steadily, but a faint red swept her face like the
reflection of a blush. She continued to keep her lowered eyes on the
screen.
“From whose point of view do you speak?”
“Naturally, that of the persons most concerned.”
“From Owen’s, then, of course? You don’t think me a good match for him?”
“From yours, first of all. I don’t think him a good match for you.”
He brought the answer out abruptly, his eyes on her face. It had grown
extremely pale, but as the meaning of his words shaped itself in her
mind he saw a curious inner light dawn through her set look. She lifted
her lids just far enough for a veiled glance at him, and a smile slipped
through them to her trembling lips. For a moment the change merely
bewildered him; then it pulled him up with a sharp jerk of apprehension.
“I don’t think him a good match for you,” he stammered, groping for the
lost thread of his words.
She threw a vague look about the chilly rain-dimmed room. “And you’ve
brought me here to tell me why?”
The question roused him to the sense that their minutes were numbered,
and that if he did not immediately get to his point there might be no
other chance of making it.
“My chief reason is that I believe he’s too young and inexperienced to
give you the kind of support you need.”
At his words her face changed again, freezing to a tragic coldness. She
stared straight ahead of her, perceptibly struggling with the tremor of
her muscles; and when she had controlled it she flung out a pale-lipped
pleasantry. “But you see I’ve always had to support myself!”
“He’s a boy,” Darrow pushed on, “a charming, wonderful boy; but with
no more notion than a boy how to deal with the inevitable daily
problems ... the trivial stupid unimportant things that life is chiefly
made up of.” “I’ll deal with them for him,” she rejoined.
“They’ll be more than ordinarily difficult.”
She shot a challenging glance at him. “You must have some special reason
for saying so.”
“Only my clear perception of the facts.”
“What facts do you mean?”
Darrow hesitated. “You must know better than I,” he returned at length,
“that the way won’t be made easy to you.”
“Mrs. Leath, at any rate, has made it so.”
“Madame de Chantelle will not.”
“How do YOU know that?” she flung back.
He paused again, not sure how far it was prudent to reveal himself
in the confidence of the household. Then, to avoid involving Anna, he
answered: “Madame de Chantelle sent for me yesterday.”
“Sent for you--to talk to you about me?” The colour rose to her forehead
and her eyes burned black under lowered brows. “By what right, I should
like to know? What have you to do with me, or with anything in the world
that concerns me?”
Darrow instantly perceived what dread suspicion again possessed her, and
the sense that it was not wholly unjustified caused him a passing pang
of shame. But it did not turn him from his purpose.
“I’m an old friend of Mrs. Leath’s. It’s not unnatural that Madame de
Chantelle should talk to me.”
She dropped the screen on the table and stood up, turning on him the
same small mask of wrath and scorn which had glared at him, in Paris,
when he had confessed to his suppression of her letter. She walked away
a step or two and then came back.
“May I ask what Madame de Chantelle said to you?”
“She made it clear that she should not encourage the marriage.”
“And what was her object in making that clear to YOU?”
Darrow hesitated. “I suppose she thought----”
“That she could persuade you to turn Mrs. Leath against me?”
He was silent, and she pressed him: “Was that it?” “That was it.”
“But if you don’t--if you keep your promise----”
“My promise?”
“To say nothing ... nothing whatever...” Her strained look threw a haggard
light along the pause.
As she spoke, the whole odiousness of the scene rushed over him. “Of
course I shall say nothing ... you know that...” He leaned to her and laid
his hand on hers. “You know I wouldn’t for the world...”
She drew back and hid her face with a sob. Then she sank again into her
seat, stretched her arms across the table and laid her face upon them.
He sat still, overwhelmed with compunction. After a long interval, in
which he had painfully measured the seconds by her hard-drawn breathing,
she looked up at him with a face washed clear of bitterness.
“Don’t suppose I don’t know what you must have thought of me!”
The cry struck him down to a lower depth of self-abasement. “My poor
child,” he felt like answering, “the shame of it is that I’ve never
thought of you at all!” But he could only uselessly repeat: “I’ll do
anything I can to help you.”
She sat silent, drumming the table with her hand. He saw that her doubt
of him was allayed, and the perception made him more ashamed, as if her
trust had first revealed to him how near he had come to not deserving
it. Suddenly she began to speak.
“You think, then, I’ve no right to marry him?”
“No right? God forbid! I only meant----”
“That you’d rather I didn’t marry any friend of yours.” She brought
it out deliberately, not as a question, but as a mere dispassionate
statement of fact.
Darrow in turn stood up and wandered away helplessly to the window. He
stood staring out through its small discoloured panes at the dim brown
distances; then he moved back to the table.
“I’ll tell you exactly what I meant. You’ll be wretched if you marry a
man you’re not in love with.”
He knew the risk of misapprehension that he ran, but he estimated his
chances of success as precisely in proportion to his peril. If certain
signs meant what he thought they did, he might yet--at what cost he
would not stop to think--make his past pay for his future.
The girl, at his words, had lifted her head with a movement of surprise.
Her eyes slowly reached his face and rested there in a gaze of deep
interrogation. He held the look for a moment; then his own eyes dropped
and he waited.
At length she began to speak. “You’re mistaken--you’re quite mistaken.”
He waited a moment longer. “Mistaken----?”
“In thinking what you think. I’m as happy as if I deserved it!” she
suddenly proclaimed with a laugh.
She stood up and moved toward the door. “NOW are you satisfied?” she
asked, turning her vividest face to him from the threshold.
XXI
Down the avenue there came to them, with the opening of the door, the
voice of Owen’s motor. It was the signal which had interrupted their
first talk, and again, instinctively, they drew apart at the sound.
Without a word Darrow turned back into the room, while Sophy Viner went
down the steps and walked back alone toward the court.
At luncheon the presence of the surgeon, and the non-appearance
of Madame de Chantelle--who had excused herself on the plea of a
headache--combined to shift the conversational centre of gravity; and
Darrow, under shelter of the necessarily impersonal talk, had time to
adjust his disguise and to perceive that the others were engaged in the
same re-arrangement. It was the first time that he had seen young Leath
and Sophy Viner together since he had learned of their engagement; but
neither revealed more emotion than befitted the occasion. It was evident
that Owen was deeply under the girl’s charm, and that at the least
sign from her his bliss would have broken bounds; but her reticence
was justified by the tacitly recognized fact of Madame de Chantelle’s
disapproval. This also visibly weighed on Anna’s mind, making her manner
to Sophy, if no less kind, yet a trifle more constrained than if the
moment of final understanding had been reached. So Darrow interpreted
the tension perceptible under the fluent exchange of commonplaces in
which he was diligently sharing. But he was more and more aware of his
inability to test the moral atmosphere about him: he was like a man in
fever testing another’s temperature by the touch.
After luncheon Anna, who was to motor the surgeon home, suggested to
Darrow that he should accompany them. Effie was also of the party; and
Darrow inferred that Anna wished to give her step-son a chance to be
alone with his betrothed. On the way back, after the surgeon had been
left at his door, the little girl sat between her mother and Darrow, and
her presence kept their talk from taking a personal turn. Darrow knew
that Mrs. Leath had not yet told Effie of the relation in which he was
to stand to her. The premature divulging of Owen’s plans had thrown
their own into the background, and by common consent they continued, in
the little girl’s presence, on terms of an informal friendliness.
The sky had cleared after luncheon, and to prolong their excursion they
returned by way of the ivy-mantled ruin which was to have been the scene
of the projected picnic. This circuit brought them back to the park
gates not long before sunset, and as Anna wished to stop at the lodge
for news of the injured child Darrow left her there with Effie and
walked on alone to the house. He had the impression that she
was slightly surprised at his not waiting for her; but his inner
restlessness vented itself in an intense desire for bodily movement. He
would have liked to walk himself into a state of torpor; to tramp on
for hours through the moist winds and the healing darkness and come
back staggering with fatigue and sleep. But he had no pretext for such
a flight, and he feared that, at such a moment, his prolonged absence
might seem singular to Anna.
As he approached the house, the thought of her nearness produced a swift
reaction of mood. It was as if an intenser vision of her had scattered
his perplexities like morning mists. At this moment, wherever she was,
he knew he was safely shut away in her thoughts, and the knowledge made
every other fact dwindle away to a shadow. He and she loved each other,
and their love arched over them open and ample as the day: in all its
sunlit spaces there was no cranny for a fear to lurk. In a few minutes
he would be in her presence and would read his reassurance in her eyes.
And presently, before dinner, she would contrive that they should have
an hour by themselves in her sitting-room, and he would sit by the
hearth and watch her quiet movements, and the way the bluish lustre on
her hair purpled a little as she bent above the fire.
A carriage drove out of the court as he entered it, and in the hall his
vision was dispelled by the exceedingly substantial presence of a lady
in a waterproof and a tweed hat, who stood firmly planted in the centre
of a pile of luggage, as to which she was giving involved but lucid
directions to the footman who had just admitted her. She went on with
these directions regardless of Darrow’s entrance, merely fixing her
small pale eyes on him while she proceeded, in a deep contralto voice,
and a fluent French pronounced with the purest Boston accent, to specify
the destination of her bags; and this enabled Darrow to give her back a
gaze protracted enough to take in all the details of her plain thick-set
person, from the square sallow face beneath bands of grey hair to the
blunt boot-toes protruding under her wide walking skirt.
She submitted to this scrutiny with no more evidence of surprise than
a monument examined by a tourist; but when the fate of her luggage had
been settled she turned suddenly to Darrow and, dropping her eyes from
his face to his feet, asked in trenchant accents: “What sort of boots
have you got on?”
Before he could summon his wits to the consideration of this question
she continued in a tone of suppressed indignation: “Until Americans get
used to the fact that France is under water for half the year they’re
perpetually risking their lives by not being properly protected. I
suppose you’ve been tramping through all this nasty clammy mud as if
you’d been taking a stroll on Boston Common.”
Darrow, with a laugh, affirmed his previous experience of French
dampness, and the degree to which he was on his guard against it; but
the lady, with a contemptuous snort, rejoined: “You young men are all
alike----“; to which she appended, after another hard look at him:
“I suppose you’re George Darrow? I used to know one of your mother’s
cousins, who married a Tunstall of Mount Vernon Street. My name is
Adelaide Painter. Have you been in Boston lately? No? I’m sorry for
that. I hear there have been several new houses built at the lower
end of Commonwealth Avenue and I hoped you could tell me about them. I
haven’t been there for thirty years myself.”
Miss Painter’s arrival at Givre produced the same effect as the wind’s
hauling around to the north after days of languid weather. When Darrow
joined the group about the tea-table she had already given a tingle to
the air. Madame de Chantelle still remained invisible above stairs;
but Darrow had the impression that even through her drawn curtains and
bolted doors a stimulating whiff must have entered.
Anna was in her usual seat behind the tea-tray, and Sophy Viner
presently led in her pupil. Owen was also there, seated, as usual,
a little apart from the others, and following Miss Painter’s massive
movements and equally substantial utterances with a smile of secret
intelligence which gave Darrow the idea of his having been in
clandestine parley with the enemy. Darrow further took note that the
girl and her suitor perceptibly avoided each other; but this might be a
natural result of the tension Miss Painter had been summoned to relieve.
Sophy Viner would evidently permit no recognition of the situation save
that which it lay with Madame de Chantelle to accord; but meanwhile Miss
Painter had proclaimed her tacit sense of it by summoning the girl to a
seat at her side.
Darrow, as he continued to observe the newcomer, who was perched on her
arm-chair like a granite image on the edge of a cliff, was aware
that, in a more detached frame of mind, he would have found an extreme
interest in studying and classifying Miss Painter. It was not that she
said anything remarkable, or betrayed any of those unspoken perceptions
which give significance to the most commonplace utterances. She talked
of the lateness of her train, of an impending crisis in international
politics, of the difficulty of buying English tea in Paris and of the
enormities of which French servants were capable; and her views on these
subjects were enunciated with a uniformity of emphasis implying complete
unconsciousness of any difference in their interest and importance. She
always applied to the French race the distant epithet of “those people”,
but she betrayed an intimate acquaintance with many of its members,
and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the domestic habits, financial
difficulties and private complications of various persons of social
importance. Yet, as she evidently felt no incongruity in her
attitude, so she revealed no desire to parade her familiarity with the
fashionable, or indeed any sense of it as a fact to be paraded. It was
evident that the titled ladies whom she spoke of as Mimi or Simone or
Odette were as much “those people” to her as the bonne who tampered with
her tea and steamed the stamps off her letters (“when, by a miracle,
I don’t put them in the box myself.”) Her whole attitude was of a vast
grim tolerance of things-as-they-came, as though she had been some
wonderful automatic machine which recorded facts but had not yet been
perfected to the point of sorting or labelling them.
All this, as Darrow was aware, still fell short of accounting for the
influence she obviously exerted on the persons in contact with her.
It brought a slight relief to his state of tension to go on wondering,
while he watched and listened, just where the mystery lurked.
Perhaps, after all, it was in the fact of her blank insensibility,
an insensibility so devoid of egotism that it had no hardness and no
grimaces, but rather the freshness of a simpler mental state. After
living, as he had, as they all had, for the last few days, in an
atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it was
restful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank area of Miss
Painter’s mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so echoless
for all its vacuity.
His hope of a word with Anna before dinner was dispelled by her rising
to take Miss Painter up to Madame de Chantelle; and he wandered away
to his own room, leaving Owen and Miss Viner engaged in working out a
picture-puzzle for Effie.
Madame de Chantelle--possibly as the result of her friend’s
ministrations--was able to appear at the dinner-table, rather pale and
pink-nosed, and casting tenderly reproachful glances at her grandson,
who faced them with impervious serenity; and the situation was relieved
by the fact that Miss Viner, as usual, had remained in the school-room
with her pupil.
Darrow conjectured that the real clash of arms would not take place till
the morrow; and wishing to leave the field open to the contestants he
set out early on a solitary walk. It was nearly luncheon-time when he
returned from it and came upon Anna just emerging from the house. She
had on her hat and jacket and was apparently coming forth to seek him,
for she said at once: “Madame de Chantelle wants you to go up to her.”
“To go up to her? Now?”
“That’s the message she sent. She appears to rely on you to do
something.” She added with a smile: “Whatever it is, let’s have it
over!”
Darrow, through his rising sense of apprehension, wondered why, instead
of merely going for a walk, he had not jumped into the first train and
got out of the way till Owen’s affairs were finally settled.
“But what in the name of goodness can I do?” he protested, following
Anna back into the hall.
“I don’t know. But Owen seems so to rely on you, too----”
“Owen! Is HE to be there?”
“No. But you know I told him he could count on you.”
“But I’ve said to your mother-in-law all I could.”
“Well, then you can only repeat it.”
This did not seem to Darrow to simplify his case as much as she appeared
to think; and once more he had a movement of recoil. “There’s no
possible reason for my being mixed up in this affair!”
Anna gave him a reproachful glance. “Not the fact that I am?” she
reminded him; but even this only stiffened his resistance.
“Why should you be, either--to this extent?”
The question made her pause. She glanced about the hall, as if to be
sure they had it to themselves; and then, in a lowered voice: “I don’t
know,” she suddenly confessed; “but, somehow, if THEY’RE not happy I
feel as if we shouldn’t be.”
“Oh, well--” Darrow acquiesced, in the tone of the man who perforce
yields to so lovely an unreasonableness. Escape was, after all,
impossible, and he could only resign himself to being led to Madame de
Chantelle’s door.
Within, among the bric-a-brac and furbelows, he found Miss Painter
seated in a redundant purple armchair with the incongruous air of a
horseman bestriding a heavy mount. Madame de Chantelle sat opposite,
still a little wan and disordered under her elaborate hair, and clasping
the handkerchief whose visibility symbolized her distress. On the
young man’s entrance she sighed out a plaintive welcome, to which she
immediately appended: “Mr. Darrow, I can’t help feeling that at heart
you’re with me!”
The directness of the challenge made it easier for Darrow to protest,
and he reiterated his inability to give an opinion on either side.
“But Anna declares you have--on hers!”
He could not restrain a smile at this faint flaw in an impartiality so
scrupulous. Every evidence of feminine inconsequence in Anna seemed to
attest her deeper subjection to the most inconsequent of passions. He
had certainly promised her his help--but before he knew what he was
promising.
He met Madame de Chantelle’s appeal by replying: “If there were anything
I could possibly say I should want it to be in Miss Viner’s favour.”
“You’d want it to be--yes! But could you make it so?”
“As far as facts go, I don’t see how I can make it either for or against
her. I’ve already said that I know nothing of her except that she’s
charming.”
“As if that weren’t enough--weren’t all there OUGHT to be!” Miss Painter
put in impatiently. She seemed to address herself to Darrow, though her
small eyes were fixed on her friend.
“Madame de Chantelle seems to imagine,” she pursued, “that a young
American girl ought to have a dossier--a police-record, or whatever you
call it: what those awful women in the streets have here. In our country
it’s enough to know that a young girl’s pure and lovely: people don’t
immediately ask her to show her bank-account and her visiting-list.”
Madame de Chantelle looked plaintively at her sturdy monitress. “You
don’t expect me not to ask if she’s got a family?”
“No; nor to think the worse of her if she hasn’t. The fact that she’s an
orphan ought, with your ideas, to be a merit. You won’t have to invite
her father and mother to Givre!”
“Adelaide--Adelaide!” the mistress of Givre lamented.
“Lucretia Mary,” the other returned--and Darrow spared an instant’s
amusement to the quaint incongruity of the name--“you know you sent for
Mr. Darrow to refute me; and how can he, till he knows what I think?”
“You think it’s perfectly simple to let Owen marry a girl we know
nothing about?”
“No; but I don’t think it’s perfectly simple to prevent him.”
The shrewdness of the answer increased Darrow’s interest in Miss
Painter. She had not hitherto struck him as being a person of much
penetration, but he now felt sure that her gimlet gaze might bore to the
heart of any practical problem.
Madame de Chantelle sighed out her recognition of the difficulty.
“I haven’t a word to say against Miss Viner; but she’s knocked about
so, as it’s called, that she must have been mixed up with some rather
dreadful people. If only Owen could be made to see that--if one could
get at a few facts, I mean. She says, for instance, that she has a
sister; but it seems she doesn’t even know her address!”
“If she does, she may not want to give it to you. I daresay the sister’s
one of the dreadful people. I’ve no doubt that with a little time you
could rake up dozens of them: have her ‘traced’, as they call it in
detective stories. I don’t think you’d frighten Owen, but you might:
it’s natural enough he should have been corrupted by those foreign
ideas. You might even manage to part him from the girl; but you couldn’t
keep him from being in love with her. I saw that when I looked them
over last evening. I said to myself: ‘It’s a real old-fashioned American
case, as sweet and sound as home-made bread.’ Well, if you take his loaf
away from him, what are you going to feed him with instead? Which of
your nasty Paris poisons do you think he’ll turn to? Supposing you
succeed in keeping him out of a really bad mess--and, knowing the young
man as I do, I rather think that, at this crisis, the only way to do it
would be to marry him slap off to somebody else--well, then, who, may I
ask, would you pick out? One of your sweet French ingenues, I suppose?
With as much mind as a minnow and as much snap as a soft-boiled egg. You
might hustle him into that kind of marriage; I daresay you could--but
if I know Owen, the natural thing would happen before the first baby was
weaned.”
“I don’t know why you insinuate such odious things against Owen!”
“Do you think it would be odious of him to return to his real love when
he’d been forcibly parted from her? At any rate, it’s what your French
friends do, every one of them! Only they don’t generally have the grace
to go back to an old love; and I believe, upon my word, Owen would!”
Madame de Chantelle looked at her with a mixture of awe and exultation.
“Of course you realize, Adelaide, that in suggesting this you’re
insinuating the most shocking things against Miss Viner?”
“When I say that if you part two young things who are dying to be happy
in the lawful way it’s ten to one they’ll come together in an unlawful
one? I’m insinuating shocking things against YOU, Lucretia Mary, in
suggesting for a moment that you’ll care to assume such a responsibility
before your Maker. And you wouldn’t, if you talked things straight out
with him, instead of merely sending him messages through a miserable
sinner like yourself!”
Darrow expected this assault on her adopted creed to provoke in Madame
de Chantelle an explosion of pious indignation; but to his surprise she
merely murmured: “I don’t know what Mr. Darrow’ll think of you!”
“Mr. Darrow probably knows his Bible as well as I do,” Miss Painter
calmly rejoined; adding a moment later, without the least perceptible
change of voice or expression: “I suppose you’ve heard that Gisele
de Folembray’s husband accuses her of being mixed up with the Duc
d’Arcachon in that business of trying to sell a lot of imitation pearls
to Mrs. Homer Pond, the Chicago woman the Duke’s engaged to? It seems
the jeweller says Gisele brought Mrs. Pond there, and got twenty-five
per cent--which of course she passed on to d’Arcachon. The poor old
Duchess is in a fearful state--so afraid her son’ll lose Mrs. Pond!
When I think that Gisele is old Bradford Wagstaff’s grand-daughter, I’m
thankful he’s safe in Mount Auburn!”
XXII
It was not until late that afternoon that Darrow could claim his
postponed hour with Anna. When at last he found her alone in her
sitting-room it was with a sense of liberation so great that he sought
no logical justification of it. He simply felt that all their destinies
were in Miss Painter’s grasp, and that, resistance being useless, he
could only enjoy the sweets of surrender.
Anna herself seemed as happy, and for more explicable reasons. She had
assisted, after luncheon, at another debate between Madame de Chantelle
and her confidant, and had surmised, when she withdrew from it, that
victory was permanently perched on Miss Painter’s banners.
“I don’t know how she does it, unless it’s by the dead weight of her
convictions. She detests the French so that she’d back up Owen even if
she knew nothing--or knew too much--of Miss Viner. She somehow regards
the match as a protest against the corruption of European morals. I told
Owen that was his great chance, and he’s made the most of it.”
“What a tactician you are! You make me feel that I hardly know the
rudiments of diplomacy,” Darrow smiled at her, abandoning himself to a
perilous sense of well-being.
She gave him back his smile. “I’m afraid I think nothing short of my own
happiness is worth wasting any diplomacy on!”
“That’s why I mean to resign from the service of my country,” he
rejoined with a laugh of deep content.
The feeling that both resistance and apprehension were vain was working
like wine in his veins. He had done what he could to deflect the course
of events: now he could only stand aside and take his chance of safety.
Underneath this fatalistic feeling was the deep sense of relief that
he had, after all, said and done nothing that could in the least degree
affect the welfare of Sophy Viner. That fact took a millstone off his
neck.
Meanwhile he gave himself up once more to the joy of Anna’s presence.
They had not been alone together for two long days, and he had the
lover’s sense that he had forgotten, or at least underestimated, the
strength of the spell she cast. Once more her eyes and her smile seemed
to bound his world. He felt that their light would always move with him
as the sunset moves before a ship at sea.
The next day his sense of security was increased by a decisive incident.
It became known to the expectant household that Madame de Chantelle had
yielded to the tremendous impact of Miss Painter’s determination and
that Sophy Viner had been “sent for” to the purple satin sitting-room.
At luncheon, Owen’s radiant countenance proclaimed the happy sequel, and
Darrow, when the party had moved back to the oak-room for coffee, deemed
it discreet to wander out alone to the terrace with his cigar. The
conclusion of Owen’s romance brought his own plans once more to the
front. Anna had promised that she would consider dates and settle
details as soon as Madame de Chantelle and her grandson had been
reconciled, and Darrow was eager to go into the question at once,
since it was necessary that the preparations for his marriage should
go forward as rapidly as possible. Anna, he knew, would not seek any
farther pretext for delay; and he strolled up and down contentedly in
the sunshine, certain that she would come out and reassure him as soon
as the reunited family had claimed its due share of her attention.
But when she finally joined him her first word was for the younger
lovers.
“I want to thank you for what you’ve done for Owen,” she began, with her
happiest smile.
“Who--I?” he laughed. “Are you confusing me with Miss Painter?”
“Perhaps I ought to say for ME,” she corrected herself. “You’ve been
even more of a help to us than Adelaide.”
“My dear child! What on earth have I done?”
“You’ve managed to hide from Madame de Chantelle that you don’t really
like poor Sophy.”
Darrow felt the pallour in his cheek. “Not like her? What put such an
idea into your head?”
“Oh, it’s more than an idea--it’s a feeling. But what difference does
it make, after all? You saw her in such a different setting that it’s
natural you should be a little doubtful. But when you know her better
I’m sure you’ll feel about her as I do.”
“It’s going to be hard for me not to feel about everything as you do.”
“Well, then--please begin with my daughter-in-law!”
He gave her back in the same tone of banter: “Agreed: if you ll agree to
feel as I do about the pressing necessity of our getting married.”
“I want to talk to you about that too. You don’t know what a weight is
off my mind! With Sophy here for good, I shall feel so differently
about leaving Effie. I’ve seen much more accomplished governesses--to
my cost!--but I’ve never seen a young thing more gay and kind and human.
You must have noticed, though you’ve seen them so little together, how
Effie expands when she’s with her. And that, you know, is what I want.
Madame de Chantelle will provide the necessary restraint.” She clasped
her hands on his arm. “Yes, I’m ready to go with you now. But first of
all--this very moment!--you must come with me to Effie. She knows, of
course, nothing of what’s been happening; and I want her to be told
first about YOU.”
Effie, sought throughout the house, was presently traced to the
school-room, and thither Darrow mounted with Anna. He had never seen
her so alight with happiness, and he had caught her buoyancy of mood. He
kept repeating to himself: “It’s over--it’s over,” as if some monstrous
midnight hallucination had been routed by the return of day.
As they approached the school-room door the terrier’s barks came to them
through laughing remonstrances.
“She’s giving him his dinner,” Anna whispered, her hand in Darrow’s.
“Don’t forget the gold-fish!” they heard another voice call out.
Darrow halted on the threshold. “Oh--not now!”
“Not now?”
“I mean--she’d rather have you tell her first. I’ll wait for you both
downstairs.”
He was aware that she glanced at him intently. “As you please. I’ll
bring her down at once.”
She opened the door, and as she went in he heard her say: “No, Sophy,
don’t go! I want you both.”
The rest of Darrow’s day was a succession of empty and agitating
scenes. On his way down to Givre, before he had seen Effie Leath, he
had pictured somewhat sentimentally the joy of the moment when he should
take her in his arms and receive her first filial kiss. Everything
in him that egotistically craved for rest, stability, a comfortably
organized middle-age, all the home-building instincts of the man who
has sufficiently wooed and wandered, combined to throw a charm about the
figure of the child who might--who should--have been his. Effie came to
him trailing the cloud of glory of his first romance, giving him
back the magic hour he had missed and mourned. And how different the
realization of his dream had been! The child’s radiant welcome, her
unquestioning acceptance of, this new figure in the family group, had
been all that he had hoped and fancied. If Mother was so awfully happy
about it, and Owen and Granny, too, how nice and cosy and comfortable
it was going to be for all of them, her beaming look seemed to say; and
then, suddenly, the small pink fingers he had been kissing were laid
on the one flaw in the circle, on the one point which must be settled
before Effie could, with complete unqualified assurance, admit the
new-comer to full equality with the other gods of her Olympus.
“And is Sophy awfully happy about it too?” she had asked, loosening her
hold on Darrow’s neck to tilt back her head and include her mother in
her questioning look.
“Why, dearest, didn’t you see she was?” Anna had exclaimed, leaning to
the group with radiant eyes.
“I think I should like to ask her,” the child rejoined, after a minute’s
shy consideration; and as Darrow set her down her mother laughed: “Do,
darling, do! Run off at once, and tell her we expect her to be awfully
happy too.”
The scene had been succeeded by others less poignant but almost as
trying. Darrow cursed his luck in having, at such a moment, to run
the gauntlet of a houseful of interested observers. The state of being
“engaged”, in itself an absurd enough predicament, even to a man only
intermittently exposed, became intolerable under the continuous scrutiny
of a small circle quivering with participation. Darrow was furthermore
aware that, though the case of the other couple ought to have made
his own less conspicuous, it was rather they who found a refuge in the
shadow of his prominence. Madame de Chantelle, though she had
consented to Owen’s engagement and formally welcomed his betrothed,
was nevertheless not sorry to show, by her reception of Darrow, of
what finely-shaded degrees of cordiality she was capable. Miss Painter,
having won the day for Owen, was also free to turn her attention to the
newer candidate for her sympathy; and Darrow and Anna found themselves
immersed in a warm bath of sentimental curiosity.
It was a relief to Darrow that he was under a positive obligation to end
his visit within the next forty-eight hours. When he left London, his
Ambassador had accorded him a ten days’ leave. His fate being definitely
settled and openly published he had no reason for asking to have the
time prolonged, and when it was over he was to return to his post till
the time fixed for taking up his new duties. Anna and he had therefore
decided to be married, in Paris, a day or two before the departure of
the steamer which was to take them to South America; and Anna, shortly
after his return to England, was to go up to Paris and begin her own
preparations.
In honour of the double betrothal Effie and Miss Viner were to appear
that evening at dinner; and Darrow, on leaving his room, met the little
girl springing down the stairs, her white ruffles and coral-coloured
bows making her look like a daisy with her yellow hair for its centre.
Sophy Viner was behind her pupil, and as she came into the light Darrow
noticed a change in her appearance and wondered vaguely why she looked
suddenly younger, more vivid, more like the little luminous ghost of his
Paris memories. Then it occurred to him that it was the first time she
had appeared at dinner since his arrival at Givre, and the first time,
consequently, that he had seen her in evening dress. She was still at
the age when the least adornment embellishes; and no doubt the mere
uncovering of her young throat and neck had given her back her former
brightness. But a second glance showed a more precise reason for his
impression. Vaguely though he retained such details, he felt sure she
was wearing the dress he had seen her in every evening in Paris. It was
a simple enough dress, black, and transparent on the arms and shoulders,
and he would probably not have recognized it if she had not called his
attention to it in Paris by confessing that she hadn’t any other. “The
same dress? That proves that she’s forgotten!” was his first half-ironic
thought; but the next moment, with a pang of compunction, he said to
himself that she had probably put it on for the same reason as before:
simply because she hadn’t any other.
He looked at her in silence, and for an instant, above Effie’s bobbing
head, she gave him back his look in a full bright gaze.
“Oh, there’s Owen!” Effie cried, and whirled away down the gallery to
the door from which her step-brother was emerging. As Owen bent to catch
her, Sophy Viner turned abruptly back to Darrow.
“You, too?” she said with a quick laugh. “I didn’t know----” And as Owen
came up to them she added, in a tone that might have been meant to reach
his ear: “I wish you all the luck that we can spare!”
About the dinner-table, which Effie, with Miss Viner’s aid, had lavishly
garlanded, the little party had an air of somewhat self-conscious
festivity. In spite of flowers, champagne and a unanimous attempt at
ease, there were frequent lapses in the talk, and moments of nervous
groping for new subjects. Miss Painter alone seemed not only
unaffected by the general perturbation but as tightly sealed up in
her unconsciousness of it as a diver in his bell. To Darrow’s strained
attention even Owen’s gusts of gaiety seemed to betray an inward sense
of insecurity. After dinner, however, at the piano, he broke into a mood
of extravagant hilarity and flooded the room with the splash and ripple
of his music.
Darrow, sunk in a sofa corner in the lee of Miss Painter’s granite
bulk, smoked and listened in silence, his eyes moving from one figure to
another. Madame de Chantelle, in her armchair near the fire, clasped her
little granddaughter to her with the gesture of a drawing-room Niobe,
and Anna, seated near them, had fallen into one of the attitudes of
vivid calm which seemed to Darrow to express her inmost quality. Sophy
Viner, after moving uncertainly about the room, had placed herself
beyond Mrs. Leath, in a chair near the piano, where she sat with head
thrown back and eyes attached to the musician, in the same rapt fixity
of attention with which she had followed the players at the Francais.
The accident of her having fallen into the same attitude, and of her
wearing the same dress, gave Darrow, as he watched her, a strange sense
of double consciousness. To escape from it, his glance turned back to
Anna; but from the point at which he was placed his eyes could not
take in the one face without the other, and that renewed the disturbing
duality of the impression. Suddenly Owen broke off with a crash of
chords and jumped to his feet.
“What’s the use of this, with such a moon to say it for us?”
Behind the uncurtained window a low golden orb hung like a ripe fruit
against the glass.
“Yes--let’s go out and listen,” Anna answered. Owen threw open the
window, and with his gesture a fold of the heavy star-sprinkled sky
seemed to droop into the room like a drawn-in curtain. The air that
entered with it had a frosty edge, and Anna bade Effie run to the hall
for wraps.
Darrow said: “You must have one too,” and started toward the door;
but Sophy, following her pupil, cried back: “We’ll bring things for
everybody.”
Owen had followed her, and in a moment the three reappeared, and the
party went out on the terrace. The deep blue purity of the night was
unveiled by mist, and the moonlight rimmed the edges of the trees with
a silver blur and blanched to unnatural whiteness the statues against
their walls of shade.
Darrow and Anna, with Effie between them, strolled to the farther corner
of the terrace. Below them, between the fringes of the park, the lawn
sloped dimly to the fields above the river. For a few minutes they stood
silently side by side, touched to peace beneath the trembling beauty of
the sky. When they turned back, Darrow saw that Owen and Sophy Viner,
who had gone down the steps to the garden, were also walking in the
direction of the house. As they advanced, Sophy paused in a patch of
moonlight, between the sharp shadows of the yews, and Darrow noticed
that she had thrown over her shoulders a long cloak of some light
colour, which suddenly evoked her image as she had entered the
restaurant at his side on the night of their first dinner in Paris. A
moment later they were all together again on the terrace, and when they
re-entered the drawing-room the older ladies were on their way to bed.
Effie, emboldened by the privileges of the evening, was for coaxing Owen
to round it off with a game of forfeits or some such reckless climax;
but Sophy, resuming her professional role, sounded the summons to bed.
In her pupil’s wake she made her round of good-nights; but when she
proffered her hand to Anna, the latter ignoring the gesture held out
both arms.
“Good-night, dear child,” she said impulsively, and drew the girl to her
kiss.