XXX
Anna Leath, three days later, sat in Miss Painter’s drawing-room in the
rue de Matignon.
Coming up precipitately that morning from the country, she had reached
Paris at one o’clock and Miss Painter’s landing some ten minutes later.
Miss Painter’s mouldy little man-servant, dissembling a napkin under his
arm, had mildly attempted to oppose her entrance; but Anna, insisting,
had gone straight to the dining-room and surprised her friend--who ate
as furtively as certain animals--over a strange meal of cold mutton and
lemonade. Ignoring the embarrassment she caused, she had set forth the
object of her journey, and Miss Painter, always hatted and booted for
action, had immediately hastened out, leaving her to the solitude of
the bare fireless drawing-room with its eternal slip-covers and “bowed”
shutters.
In this inhospitable obscurity Anna had sat alone for close upon two
hours. Both obscurity and solitude were acceptable to her, and impatient
as she was to hear the result of the errand on which she had despatched
her hostess, she desired still more to be alone. During her long
meditation in a white-swathed chair before the muffled hearth she had
been able for the first time to clear a way through the darkness and
confusion of her thoughts. The way did not go far, and her attempt to
trace it was as weak and spasmodic as a convalescent’s first efforts
to pick up the thread of living. She seemed to herself like some one
struggling to rise from a long sickness of which it would have been so
much easier to die. At Givre she had fallen into a kind of torpor, a
deadness of soul traversed by wild flashes of pain; but whether she
suffered or whether she was numb, she seemed equally remote from her
real living and doing self.
It was only the discovery--that very morning--of Owen’s unannounced
departure for Paris that had caught her out of her dream and forced her
back to action. The dread of what this flight might imply, and of the
consequences that might result from it, had roused her to the sense of
her responsibility, and from the moment when she had resolved to follow
her step-son, and had made her rapid preparations for pursuit, her mind
had begun to work again, feverishly, fitfully, but still with something
of its normal order. In the train she had been too agitated, too
preoccupied with what might next await her, to give her thoughts to
anything but the turning over of dread alternatives; but Miss Painter’s
imperviousness had steadied her, and while she waited for the sound of
the latch-key she resolutely returned upon herself.
With respect to her outward course she could at least tell herself that
she had held to her purpose. She had, as people said, “kept up” during
the twenty-four hours preceding George Darrow’s departure; had gone
with a calm face about her usual business, and even contrived not too
obviously to avoid him. Then, the next day before dawn, from behind
the closed shutters where she had kept for half the night her dry-eyed
vigil, she had heard him drive off to the train which brought its
passengers to Paris in time for the Calais express.
The fact of his taking that train, of his travelling so straight and
far away from her, gave to what had happened the implacable outline of
reality. He was gone; he would not come back; and her life had ended
just as she had dreamed it was beginning. She had no doubt, at first, as
to the absolute inevitability of this conclusion. The man who had driven
away from her house in the autumn dawn was not the man she had loved; he
was a stranger with whom she had not a single thought in common. It was
terrible, indeed, that he wore the face and spoke in the voice of her
friend, and that, as long as he was under one roof with her, the mere
way in which he moved and looked could bridge at a stroke the gulf
between them. That, no doubt, was the fault of her exaggerated
sensibility to outward things: she was frightened to see how it enslaved
her. A day or two before she had supposed the sense of honour was her
deepest sentiment: if she had smiled at the conventions of others it was
because they were too trivial, not because they were too grave. There
were certain dishonours with which she had never dreamed that any pact
could be made: she had had an incorruptible passion for good faith and
fairness.
She had supposed that, once Darrow was gone, once she was safe from the
danger of seeing and hearing him, this high devotion would sustain her.
She had believed it would be possible to separate the image of the man
she had thought him from that of the man he was. She had even foreseen
the hour when she might raise a mournful shrine to the memory of the
Darrow she had loved, without fear that his double’s shadow would
desecrate it. But now she had begun to understand that the two men were
really one. The Darrow she worshipped was inseparable from the Darrow
she abhorred; and the inevitable conclusion was that both must go, and
she be left in the desert of a sorrow without memories...
But if the future was thus void, the present was all too full. Never had
blow more complex repercussions; and to remember Owen was to cease to
think of herself. What impulse, what apprehension, had sent him suddenly
to Paris? And why had he thought it needful to conceal his going from
her? When Sophy Viner had left, it had been with the understanding that
he was to await her summons; and it seemed improbable that he would
break his pledge, and seek her without leave, unless his lover’s
intuition had warned him of some fresh danger. Anna recalled how
quickly he had read the alarm in her face when he had rushed back to her
sitting-room with the news that Miss Viner had promised to see him again
in Paris. To be so promptly roused, his suspicions must have been but
half-asleep; and since then, no doubt, if she and Darrow had dissembled,
so had he. To her proud directness it was degrading to think that
they had been living together like enemies who spy upon each other’s
movements: she felt a desperate longing for the days which had seemed so
dull and narrow, but in which she had walked with her head high and her
eyes unguarded.
She had come up to Paris hardly knowing what peril she feared, and still
less how she could avert it. If Owen meant to see Miss Viner--and what
other object could he have?--they must already be together, and it was
too late to interfere. It had indeed occurred to Anna that Paris might
not be his objective point: that his real purpose in leaving Givre
without her knowledge had been to follow Darrow to London and exact
the truth of him. But even to her alarmed imagination this seemed
improbable. She and Darrow, to the last, had kept up so complete a feint
of harmony that, whatever Owen had surmised, he could scarcely have
risked acting on his suspicions. If he still felt the need of an
explanation, it was almost certainly of Sophy Viner that he would ask
it; and it was in quest of Sophy Viner that Anna had despatched Miss
Painter.
She had found a blessed refuge from her perplexities in the stolid
Adelaide’s unawareness. One could so absolutely count on Miss Painter’s
guessing no more than one chose, and yet acting astutely on such hints
as one vouchsafed her! She was like a well-trained retriever whose
interest in his prey ceases when he lays it at his master’s feet. Anna,
on arriving, had explained that Owen’s unannounced flight had made her
fear some fresh misunderstanding between himself and Miss Viner. In
the interests of peace she had thought it best to follow him; but she
hastily added that she did not wish to see Sophy, but only, if possible,
to learn from her where Owen was. With these brief instructions Miss
Painter had started out; but she was a woman of many occupations, and
had given her visitor to understand that before returning she should
have to call on a friend who had just arrived from Boston, and afterward
despatch to another exiled compatriot a supply of cranberries and
brandied peaches from the American grocery in the Champs Elysees.
Gradually, as the moments passed, Anna began to feel the reaction which,
in moments of extreme nervous tension, follows on any effort of the
will. She seemed to have gone as far as her courage would carry her,
and she shrank more and more from the thought of Miss Painter’s return,
since whatever information the latter brought would necessitate some
fresh decision. What should she say to Owen if she found him? What could
she say that should not betray the one thing she would give her life
to hide from him? “Give her life”--how the phrase derided her! It was a
gift she would not have bestowed on her worst enemy. She would not have
had Sophy Viner live the hours she was living now... She tried again
to look steadily and calmly at the picture that the image of the girl
evoked. She had an idea that she ought to accustom herself to its
contemplation. If life was like that, why the sooner one got used to it
the better...But no! Life was not like that. Her adventure was a hideous
accident. She dreaded above all the temptation to generalise from her
own case, to doubt the high things she had lived by and seek a cheap
solace in belittling what fate had refused her. There was such love as
she had dreamed, and she meant to go on believing in it, and cherishing
the thought that she was worthy of it. What had happened to her was
grotesque and mean and miserable; but she herself was none of these
things, and never, never would she make of herself the mock that fate
had made of her...
She could not, as yet, bear to think deliberately of Darrow; but she
kept on repeating to herself “By and bye that will come too.” Even now
she was determined not to let his image be distorted by her suffering.
As soon as she could, she would try to single out for remembrance
the individual things she had liked in him before she had loved him
altogether. No “spiritual exercise” devised by the discipline of piety
could have been more torturing; but its very cruelty attracted her. She
wanted to wear herself out with new pains...
XXXI
The sound of Miss Painter’s latch-key made her start. She was still a
bundle of quivering fears to whom each coming moment seemed a menace.
There was a slight interval, and a sound of voices in the hall; then
Miss Painter’s vigorous hand was on the door.
Anna stood up as she came in. “You’ve found him?”
“I’ve found Sophy.”
“And Owen?--has she seen him? Is he here?”
“SHE’S here: in the hall. She wants to speak to you.”
“Here--NOW?” Anna found no voice for more.
“She drove back with me,” Miss Painter continued in the tone of
impartial narrative. “The cabman was impertinent. I’ve got his number.”
She fumbled in a stout black reticule.
“Oh, I can’t--” broke from Anna; but she collected herself, remembering
that to betray her unwillingness to see the girl was to risk revealing
much more.
“She thought you might be too tired to see her: she wouldn’t come in
till I’d found out.”
Anna drew a quick breath. An instant’s thought had told her that
Sophy Viner would hardly have taken such a step unless something more
important had happened. “Ask her to come, please,” she said.
Miss Painter, from the threshold, turned back to announce her intention
of going immediately to the police station to report the cabman’s
delinquency; then she passed out, and Sophy Viner entered.
The look in the girl’s face showed that she had indeed come unwillingly;
yet she seemed animated by an eager resoluteness that made Anna ashamed
of her tremors. For a moment they looked at each other in silence, as
if the thoughts between them were packed too thick for speech; then Anna
said, in a voice from which she strove to take the edge of hardness:
“You know where Owen is, Miss Painter tells me.”
“Yes; that was my reason for asking you to see me.” Sophy spoke simply,
without constraint or hesitation.
“I thought he’d promised you--” Anna interposed.
“He did; but he broke his promise. That’s what I thought I ought to tell
you.”
“Thank you.” Anna went on tentatively: “He left Givre this morning
without a word. I followed him because I was afraid...”
She broke off again and the girl took up her phrase. “You were afraid
he’d guessed? He HAS...”
“What do you mean--guessed what?”
“That you know something he doesn’t ... something that made you glad to
have me go.”
“Oh--” Anna moaned. If she had wanted more pain she had it now. “He’s
told you this?” she faltered.
“He hasn’t told me, because I haven’t seen him. I kept him off--I made
Mrs. Farlow get rid of him. But he’s written me what he came to say; and
that was it.”
“Oh, poor Owen!” broke from Anna. Through all the intricacies of her
suffering she felt the separate pang of his.
“And I want to ask you,” the girl continued, “to let me see him; for
of course,” she added in the same strange voice of energy, “I wouldn’t
unless you consented.”
“To see him?” Anna tried to gather together her startled thoughts. “What
use would it be? What could you tell him?”
“I want to tell him the truth,” said Sophy Viner.
The two women looked at each other, and a burning blush rose to Anna’s
forehead. “I don’t understand,” she faltered.
Sophy waited a moment; then she lowered her voice to say: “I don’t want
him to think worse of me than he need...”
“Worse?”
“Yes--to think such things as you’re thinking now...I want him to know
exactly what happened ... then I want to bid him good-bye.”
Anna tried to clear a way through her own wonder and confusion. She felt
herself obscurely moved.
“Wouldn’t it be worse for him?”
“To hear the truth? It would be better, at any rate, for you and Mr.
Darrow.”
At the sound of the name Anna lifted her head quickly. “I’ve only my
step-son to consider!”
The girl threw a startled look at her. “You don’t mean--you’re not going
to give him up?”
Anna felt her lips harden. “I don’t think it’s of any use to talk of
that.”
“Oh, I know! It’s my fault for not knowing how to say what I want you to
hear. Your words are different; you know how to choose them. Mine offend
you ... and the dread of it makes me blunder. That’s why, the other day, I
couldn’t say anything ... couldn’t make things clear to you. But now MUST,
even if you hate it!” She drew a step nearer, her slender figure swayed
forward in a passion of entreaty. “Do listen to me! What you’ve said is
dreadful. How can you speak of him in that voice? Don’t you see that I
went away so that he shouldn’t have to lose you?”
Anna looked at her coldly. “Are you speaking of Mr. Darrow? I don’t
know why you think your going or staying can in any way affect our
relations.”
“You mean that you HAVE given him up--because of me? Oh, how could you?
You can’t really love him!--And yet,” the girl suddenly added, “you
must, or you’d be more sorry for me!”
“I’m very sorry for you,” Anna said, feeling as if the iron band about
her heart pressed on it a little less inexorably.
“Then why won’t you hear me? Why won’t you try to understand? It’s all
so different from what you imagine!”
“I’ve never judged you.”
“I’m not thinking of myself. He loves you!”
“I thought you’d come to speak of Owen.”
Sophy Viner seemed not to hear her. “He’s never loved any one else. Even
those few days...I knew it all the while ... he never cared for me.”
“Please don’t say any more!” Anna said.
“I know it must seem strange to you that I should say so much. I shock
you, I offend you: you think me a creature without shame. So I am--but
not in the sense you think! I’m not ashamed of having loved him; no; and
I’m not ashamed of telling you so. It’s that that justifies me--and him
too...Oh, let me tell you how it happened! He was sorry for me: he saw I
cared. I KNEW that was all he ever felt. I could see he was thinking of
some one else. I knew it was only for a week...He never said a word to
mislead me...I wanted to be happy just once--and I didn’t dream of the
harm I might be doing him!”
Anna could not speak. She hardly knew, as yet, what the girl’s words
conveyed to her, save the sense of their tragic fervour; but she was
conscious of being in the presence of an intenser passion than she had
ever felt.
“I am sorry for you.” She paused. “But why do you say this to me?” After
another interval she exclaimed: “You’d no right to let Owen love you.”
“No; that was wrong. At least what’s happened since has made it so. If
things had been different I think I could have made Owen happy. You were
all so good to me--I wanted so to stay with you! I suppose you’ll say
that makes it worse: my daring to dream I had the right...But all that
doesn’t matter now. I won’t see Owen unless you’re willing. I should
have liked to tell him what I’ve tried to tell you; but you must know
better; you feel things in a finer way. Only you’ll have to help him if
I can’t. He cares a great deal ... it’s going to hurt him...”
Anna trembled. “Oh, I know! What can I do?”
“You can go straight back to Givre--now, at once! So that Owen shall
never know you’ve followed him.” Sophy’s clasped hands reached out
urgently. “And you can send for Mr. Darrow--bring him back. Owen must
be convinced that he’s mistaken, and nothing else will convince him.
Afterward I’ll find a pretext--oh, I promise you! But first he must see
for himself that nothing’s changed for you.”
Anna stood motionless, subdued and dominated. The girl’s ardour swept
her like a wind.
“Oh, can’t I move you? Some day you’ll know!” Sophy pleaded, her eyes
full of tears.
Anna saw them, and felt a fullness in her throat. Again the band about
her heart seemed loosened. She wanted to find a word, but could not:
all within her was too dark and violent. She gave the girl a speechless
look.
“I do believe you,” she said suddenly; then she turned and walked out of
the room.
XXXII
She drove from Miss Painter’s to her own apartment. The maid-servant who
had it in charge had been apprised of her coming, and had opened one or
two of the rooms, and prepared a fire in her bedroom. Anna shut herself
in, refusing the woman’s ministrations. She felt cold and faint, and
after she had taken off her hat and cloak she knelt down by the fire and
stretched her hands to it.
In one respect, at least, it was clear to her that she would do well
to follow Sophy Viner’s counsel. It had been an act of folly to follow
Owen, and her first business was to get back to Givre before him. But
the only train leaving that evening was a slow one, which did not reach
Francheuil till midnight, and she knew that her taking it would excite
Madame de Chantelle’s wonder and lead to interminable talk. She had come
up to Paris on the pretext of finding a new governess for Effie, and the
natural thing was to defer her return till the next morning. She knew
Owen well enough to be sure that he would make another attempt to see
Miss Viner, and failing that, would write again and await her answer:
so that there was no likelihood of his reaching Givre till the following
evening.
Her sense of relief at not having to start out at once showed her for
the first time how tired she was. The bonne had suggested a cup of tea,
but the dread of having any one about her had made Anna refuse, and she
had eaten nothing since morning but a sandwich bought at a buffet. She
was too tired to get up, but stretching out her arm she drew toward her
the arm-chair which stood beside the hearth and rested her head against
its cushions. Gradually the warmth of the fire stole into her veins and
her heaviness of soul was replaced by a dreamy buoyancy. She seemed to
be seated on the hearth in her sitting-room at Givre, and Darrow was
beside her, in the chair against which she leaned. He put his arms about
her shoulders and drawing her head back looked into her eyes. “Of all
the ways you do your hair, that’s the way I like best,” he said...
A log dropped, and she sat up with a start. There was a warmth in her
heart, and she was smiling. Then she looked about her, and saw where she
was, and the glory fell. She hid her face and sobbed.
Presently she perceived that it was growing dark, and getting up
stiffly she began to undo the things in her bag and spread them on the
dressing-table. She shrank from lighting the lights, and groped her way
about, trying to find what she needed. She seemed immeasurably far
off from every one, and most of all from herself. It was as if her
consciousness had been transmitted to some stranger whose thoughts and
gestures were indifferent to her...
Suddenly she heard a shrill tinkle, and with a beating heart she
stood still in the middle of the room. It was the telephone in her
dressing-room--a call, no doubt, from Adelaide Painter. Or could Owen
have learned she was in town? The thought alarmed her and she opened the
door and stumbled across the unlit room to the instrument. She held it
to her ear, and heard Darrow’s voice pronounce her name.
“Will you let me see you? I’ve come back--I had to come. Miss Painter
told me you were here.”
She began to tremble, and feared that he would guess it from her voice.
She did not know what she answered: she heard him say: “I can’t
hear.” She called “Yes!” and laid the telephone down, and caught it up
again--but he was gone. She wondered if her “Yes” had reached him.
She sat in her chair and listened. Why had she said that she would see
him? What did she mean to say to him when he came? Now and then, as she
sat there, the sense of his presence enveloped her as in her dream, and
she shut her eyes and felt his arms about her. Then she woke to reality
and shivered. A long time elapsed, and at length she said to herself:
“He isn’t coming.”
The door-bell rang as she said it, and she stood up, cold and trembling.
She thought: “Can he imagine there’s any use in coming?” and moved
forward to bid the servant say she could not see him.
The door opened and she saw him standing in the drawing-room. The room
was cold and fireless, and a hard glare fell from the wall-lights on the
shrouded furniture and the white slips covering the curtains. He looked
pale and stern, with a frown of fatigue between his eyes; and she
remembered that in three days he had travelled from Givre to London and
back. It seemed incredible that all that had befallen her should have
been compressed within the space of three days!
“Thank you,” he said as she came in.
She answered: “It’s better, I suppose----”
He came toward her and took her in his arms. She struggled a little,
afraid of yielding, but he pressed her to him, not bending to her but
holding her fast, as though he had found her after a long search: she
heard his hurried breathing. It seemed to come from her own breast, so
close he held her; and it was she who, at last, lifted up her face and
drew down his.
She freed herself and went and sat on a sofa at the other end of the
room. A mirror between the shrouded window-curtains showed her crumpled
travelling dress and the white face under her disordered hair.
She found her voice, and asked him how he had been able to leave London.
He answered that he had managed--he’d arranged it; and she saw he hardly
heard what she was saying.
“I had to see you,” he went on, and moved nearer, sitting down at her
side.
“Yes; we must think of Owen----”
“Oh, Owen--!”
Her mind had flown back to Sophy Viner’s plea that she should let Darrow
return to Givre in order that Owen might be persuaded of the folly of
his suspicions. The suggestion was absurd, of course. She could not ask
Darrow to lend himself to such a fraud, even had she had the inhuman
courage to play her part in it. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the
futility of every attempt to reconstruct her ruined world. No, it was
useless; and since it was useless, every moment with Darrow was pure
pain...
“I’ve come to talk of myself, not of Owen,” she heard him saying.
“When you sent me away the other day I understood that it couldn’t be
otherwise--then. But it’s not possible that you and I should part like
that. If I’m to lose you, it must be for a better reason.”
“A better reason?”
“Yes: a deeper one. One that means a fundamental disaccord between us.
This one doesn’t--in spite of everything it doesn’t. That’s what I want
you to see, and have the courage to acknowledge.”
“If I saw it I should have the courage!”
“Yes: courage was the wrong word. You have that. That’s why I’m here.”
“But I don’t see it,” she continued sadly. “So it’s useless, isn’t
it?--and so cruel...” He was about to speak, but she went on: “I shall
never understand it--never!”
He looked at her. “You will some day: you were made to feel everything”
“I should have thought this was a case of not feeling----”
“On my part, you mean?” He faced her resolutely. “Yes, it was: to my
shame...What I meant was that when you’ve lived a little longer
you’ll see what complex blunderers we all are: how we’re struck blind
sometimes, and mad sometimes--and then, when our sight and our senses
come back, how we have to set to work, and build up, little by little,
bit by bit, the precious things we’d smashed to atoms without knowing
it. Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.”
She looked up quickly. “That’s what I feel: that you ought to----”
He stood up, interrupting her with a gesture. “Oh, don’t--don’t say what
you’re going to! Men don’t give their lives away like that. If you won’t
have mine, it’s at least my own, to do the best I can with.”
“The best you can--that’s what I mean! How can there be a ‘best’ for you
that’s made of some one else’s worst?”
He sat down again with a groan. “I don’t know! It seemed such a slight
thing--all on the surface--and I’ve gone aground on it because it was on
the surface. I see the horror of it just as you do. But I see, a little
more clearly, the extent, and the limits, of my wrong. It’s not as black
as you imagine.”
She lowered her voice to say: “I suppose I shall never understand; but
she seems to love you...”
“There’s my shame! That I didn’t guess it, didn’t fly from it. You say
you’ll never understand: but why shouldn’t you? Is it anything to be
proud of, to know so little of the strings that pull us? If you knew a
little more, I could tell you how such things happen without offending
you; and perhaps you’d listen without condemning me.”
“I don’t condemn you.” She was dizzy with struggling impulses. She
longed to cry out: “I DO understand! I’ve understood ever since you’ve
been here!” For she was aware, in her own bosom, of sensations so
separate from her romantic thoughts of him that she saw her body and
soul divided against themselves. She recalled having read somewhere that
in ancient Rome the slaves were not allowed to wear a distinctive dress
lest they should recognize each other and learn their numbers and their
power. So, in herself, she discerned for the first time instincts
and desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in the dim
passages of her mind, and now hailed each other with a cry of mutiny.
“Oh, I don’t know what to think!” she broke out. “You say you didn’t
know she loved you. But you know it now. Doesn’t that show you how you
can put the broken bits together?”
“Can you seriously think it would be doing so to marry one woman while I
care for another?”
“Oh, I don’t know...I don’t know...” The sense of her weakness made her
try to harden herself against his arguments.
“You do know! We’ve often talked of such things: of the monstrousness of
useless sacrifices. If I’m to expiate, it’s not in that way.” He added
abruptly: “It’s in having to say this to you now...”
She found no answer.
Through the silent apartment they heard the sudden peal of the
door-bell, and she rose to her feet. “Owen!” she instantly exclaimed.
“Is Owen in Paris?”
She explained in a rapid undertone what she had learned from Sophy
Viner.
“Shall I leave you?” Darrow asked.
“Yes ... no...” She moved to the dining-room door, with the half-formed
purpose of making him pass out, and then turned back. “It may be
Adelaide.”
They heard the outer door open, and a moment later Owen walked into the
room. He was pale, with excited eyes: as they fell on Darrow, Anna saw
his start of wonder. He made a slight sign of recognition, and then went
up to his step-mother with an air of exaggerated gaiety.
“You furtive person! I ran across the omniscient Adelaide and heard from
her that you’d rushed up suddenly and secretly.” He stood between Anna
and Darrow, strained, questioning, dangerously on edge.
“I came up to meet Mr. Darrow,” Anna answered. “His leave’s been
prolonged--he’s going back with me.”
The words seemed to have uttered themselves without her will, yet she
felt a great sense of freedom as she spoke them.
The hard tension of Owen’s face changed to incredulous surprise. He
looked at Darrow. “The merest luck ... a colleague whose wife was ill...I
came straight back,” she heard the latter tranquilly explaining. His
self-command helped to steady her, and she smiled at Owen.
“We’ll all go back together tomorrow morning,” she said as she slipped
her arm through his.
XXXIII
Owen Leath did not go back with his step-mother to Givre. In reply to
her suggestion he announced his intention of staying on a day or two
longer in Paris.
Anna left alone by the first train the next morning. Darrow was to
follow in the afternoon. When Owen had left them the evening before,
Darrow waited a moment for her to speak; then, as she said nothing, he
asked her if she really wished him to return to Givre. She made a mute
sign of assent, and he added: “For you know that, much as I’m ready to
do for Owen, I can’t do that for him--I can’t go back to be sent away
again.”
“No--no!”
He came nearer, and looked at her, and she went to him. All her fears
seemed to fall from her as he held her. It was a different feeling from
any she had known before: confused and turbid, as if secret shames and
rancours stirred in it, yet richer, deeper, more enslaving. She leaned
her head back and shut her eyes beneath his kisses. She knew now that
she could never give him up.
Nevertheless she asked him, the next morning, to let her go back alone
to Givre. She wanted time to think. She was convinced that what had
happened was inevitable, that she and Darrow belonged to each other, and
that he was right in saying no past folly could ever put them asunder.
If there was a shade of difference in her feeling for him it was that
of an added intensity. She felt restless, insecure out of his sight:
she had a sense of incompleteness, of passionate dependence, that was
somehow at variance with her own conception of her character.
It was partly the consciousness of this change in herself that made her
want to be alone. The solitude of her inner life had given her the habit
of these hours of self-examination, and she needed them as she needed
her morning plunge into cold water.
During the journey she tried to review what had happened in the light
of her new decision and of her sudden relief from pain. She seemed to
herself to have passed through some fiery initiation from which she
had emerged seared and quivering, but clutching to her breast a magic
talisman. Sophy Viner had cried out to her: “Some day you’ll know!” and
Darrow had used the same words. They meant, she supposed, that when
she had explored the intricacies and darknesses of her own heart her
judgment of others would be less absolute. Well, she knew now--knew
weaknesses and strengths she had not dreamed of, and the deep discord
and still deeper complicities between what thought in her and what
blindly wanted...
Her mind turned anxiously to Owen. At least the blow that was to fall on
him would not seem to have been inflicted by her hand. He would be left
with the impression that his breach with Sophy Viner was due to one of
the ordinary causes of such disruptions: though he must lose her, his
memory of her would not be poisoned. Anna never for a moment permitted
herself the delusion that she had renewed her promise to Darrow in order
to spare her step-son this last refinement of misery. She knew she had
been prompted by the irresistible impulse to hold fast to what was
most precious to her, and that Owen’s arrival on the scene had been
the pretext for her decision, and not its cause; yet she felt herself
fortified by the thought of what she had spared him. It was as though
a star she had been used to follow had shed its familiar ray on ways
unknown to her.
All through these meditations ran the undercurrent of an absolute trust
in Sophy Viner. She thought of the girl with a mingling of antipathy
and confidence. It was humiliating to her pride to recognize kindred
impulses in a character which she would have liked to feel completely
alien to her. But what indeed was the girl really like? She seemed to
have no scruples and a thousand delicacies. She had given herself to
Darrow, and concealed the episode from Owen Leath, with no more apparent
sense of debasement than the vulgarest of adventuresses; yet she had
instantly obeyed the voice of her heart when it bade her part from the
one and serve the other.
Anna tried to picture what the girl’s life must have been: what
experiences, what initiations, had formed her. But her own training had
been too different: there were veils she could not lift. She looked back
at her married life, and its colourless uniformity took on an air of
high restraint and order. Was it because she had been so incurious that
it had worn that look to her? It struck her with amazement that she had
never given a thought to her husband’s past, or wondered what he did and
where he went when he was away from her. If she had been asked what she
supposed he thought about when they were apart, she would instantly have
answered: his snuff-boxes. It had never occurred to her that he might
have passions, interests, preoccupations of which she was absolutely
ignorant. Yet he went up to Paris rather regularly: ostensibly to attend
sales and exhibitions, or to confer with dealers and collectors. She
tried to picture him, straight, trim, beautifully brushed and varnished,
walking furtively down a quiet street, and looking about him before he
slipped into a doorway. She understood now that she had been cold to
him: what more likely than that he had sought compensations? All men
were like that, she supposed--no doubt her simplicity had amused him.
In the act of transposing Fraser Leath into a Don Juan she was pulled up
by the ironic perception that she was simply trying to justify Darrow.
She wanted to think that all men were “like that” because Darrow
was “like that”: she wanted to justify her acceptance of the fact by
persuading herself that only through such concessions could women like
herself hope to keep what they could not give up. And suddenly she was
filled with anger at her blindness, and then at her disastrous attempt
to see. Why had she forced the truth out of Darrow? If only she had held
her tongue nothing need ever have been known. Sophy Viner would have
broken her engagement, Owen would have been sent around the world, and
her own dream would have been unshattered. But she had probed, insisted,
cross-examined, not rested till she had dragged the secret to the light.
She was one of the luckless women who always have the wrong audacities,
and who always know it...
Was it she, Anna Leath, who was picturing herself to herself in that
way? She recoiled from her thoughts as if with a sense of demoniac
possession, and there flashed through her the longing to return to her
old state of fearless ignorance. If at that moment she could have kept
Darrow from following her to Givre she would have done so...
But he came; and with the sight of him the turmoil fell and she felt
herself reassured, rehabilitated. He arrived toward dusk, and she
motored to Francheuil to meet him. She wanted to see him as soon as
possible, for she had divined, through the new insight that was in her,
that only his presence could restore her to a normal view of things.
In the motor, as they left the town and turned into the high-road, he
lifted her hand and kissed it, and she leaned against him, and felt
the currents flow between them. She was grateful to him for not saying
anything, and for not expecting her to speak. She said to herself: “He
never makes a mistake--he always knows what to do”; and then she thought
with a start that it was doubtless because he had so often been in such
situations. The idea that his tact was a kind of professional expertness
filled her with repugnance, and insensibly she drew away from him. He
made no motion to bring her nearer, and she instantly thought that
that was calculated too. She sat beside him in frozen misery, wondering
whether, henceforth, she would measure in this way his every look and
gesture. Neither of them spoke again till the motor turned under the
dark arch of the avenue, and they saw the lights of Givre twinkling at
its end. Then Darrow laid his hand on hers and said: “I know, dear--”
and the hardness in her melted. “He’s suffering as I am,” she thought;
and for a moment the baleful fact between them seemed to draw them
closer instead of walling them up in their separate wretchedness.
It was wonderful to be once more re-entering the doors of Givre with
him, and as the old house received them into its mellow silence she had
again the sense of passing out of a dreadful dream into the reassurance
of kindly and familiar things. It did not seem possible that these quiet
rooms, so full of the slowly-distilled accumulations of a fastidious
taste, should have been the scene of tragic dissensions. The memory of
them seemed to be shut out into the night with the closing and barring
of its doors.
At the tea-table in the oak-room they found Madame de Chantelle and
Effie. The little girl, catching sight of Darrow, raced down the
drawing-rooms to meet him, and returned in triumph on his shoulder. Anna
looked at them with a smile. Effie, for all her graces, was chary of
such favours, and her mother knew that in according them to Darrow she
had admitted him to the circle where Owen had hitherto ruled.
Over the tea-table Darrow gave Madame de Chantelle the explanation of
his sudden return from England. On reaching London, he told her, he had
found that the secretary he was to have replaced was detained there by
the illness of his wife. The Ambassador, knowing Darrow’s urgent reasons
for wishing to be in France, had immediately proposed his going back,
and awaiting at Givre the summons to relieve his colleague; and he had
jumped into the first train, without even waiting to telegraph the news
of his release. He spoke naturally, easily, in his usual quiet voice,
taking his tea from Effie, helping himself to the toast she handed, and
stooping now and then to stroke the dozing terrier. And suddenly, as
Anna listened to his explanation, she asked herself if it were true.
The question, of course, was absurd. There was no possible reason why he
should invent a false account of his return, and every probability that
the version he gave was the real one. But he had looked and spoken in
the same way when he had answered her probing questions about Sophy
Viner, and she reflected with a chill of fear that she would never again
know if he were speaking the truth or not. She was sure he loved her,
and she did not fear his insincerity as much as her own distrust of him.
For a moment it seemed to her that this must corrupt the very source of
love; then she said to herself: “By and bye, when I am altogether his,
we shall be so near each other that there will be no room for any
doubts between us.” But the doubts were there now, one moment lulled to
quiescence, the next more torturingly alert. When the nurse appeared to
summon Effie, the little girl, after kissing her grandmother, entrenched
herself on Darrow’s knee with the imperious demand to be carried up to
bed; and Anna, while she laughingly protested, said to herself with a
pang: “Can I give her a father about whom I think such things?”
The thought of Effie, and of what she owed to Effie, had been the
fundamental reason for her delays and hesitations when she and Darrow
had come together again in England. Her own feeling was so clear that
but for that scruple she would have put her hand in his at once. But
till she had seen him again she had never considered the possibility
of re-marriage, and when it suddenly confronted her it seemed, for the
moment, to disorganize the life she had planned for herself and her
child. She had not spoken of this to Darrow because it appeared to her a
subject to be debated within her own conscience. The question, then, was
not as to his fitness to become the guide and guardian of her child;
nor did she fear that her love for him would deprive Effie of the least
fraction of her tenderness, since she did not think of love as something
measured and exhaustible but as a treasure perpetually renewed. What she
questioned was her right to introduce into her life any interests
and duties which might rob Effie of a part of her time, or lessen the
closeness of their daily intercourse.
She had decided this question as it was inevitable that she should; but
now another was before her. Assuredly, at her age, there was no possible
reason why she should cloister herself to bring up her daughter; but
there was every reason for not marrying a man in whom her own faith was
not complete...
XXXIV
When she woke the next morning she felt a great lightness of heart. She
recalled her last awakening at Givre, three days before, when it had
seemed as though all her life had gone down in darkness. Now Darrow
was once more under the same roof with her, and once more his nearness
sufficed to make the looming horror drop away. She could almost have
smiled at her scruples of the night before: as she looked back on them
they seemed to belong to the old ignorant timorous time when she had
feared to look life in the face, and had been blind to the mysteries and
contradictions of the human heart because her own had not been revealed
to her. Darrow had said: “You were made to feel everything”; and to feel
was surely better than to judge.
When she came downstairs he was already in the oak-room with Effie and
Madame de Chantelle, and the sense of reassurance which his presence
gave her was merged in the relief of not being able to speak of what was
between them. But there it was, inevitably, and whenever they looked at
each other they saw it. In her dread of giving it a more tangible shape
she tried to devise means of keeping the little girl with her, and,
when the latter had been called away by the nurse, found an excuse for
following Madame de Chantelle upstairs to the purple sitting-room. But
a confidential talk with Madame de Chantelle implied the detailed
discussion of plans of which Anna could hardly yet bear to consider the
vaguest outline: the date of her marriage, the relative advantages of
sailing from London or Lisbon, the possibility of hiring a habitable
house at their new post; and, when these problems were exhausted, the
application of the same method to the subject of Owen’s future.
His grandmother, having no suspicion of the real reason of Sophy Viner’s
departure, had thought it “extremely suitable” of the young girl to
withdraw to the shelter of her old friends’ roof in the hour of bridal
preparation. This maidenly retreat had in fact impressed Madame de
Chantelle so favourably that she was disposed for the first time to talk
over Owen’s projects; and as every human event translated itself for her
into terms of social and domestic detail, Anna had perforce to travel
the same round again. She felt a momentary relief when Darrow presently
joined them; but his coming served only to draw the conversation back to
the question of their own future, and Anna felt a new pang as she heard
him calmly and lucidly discussing it. Did such self-possession imply
indifference or insincerity? In that problem her mind perpetually
revolved; and she dreaded the one answer as much as the other.
She was resolved to keep on her course as though nothing had happened:
to marry Darrow and never let the consciousness of the past intrude
itself between them; but she was beginning to feel that the only way of
attaining to this state of detachment from the irreparable was once for
all to turn back with him to its contemplation. As soon as this desire
had germinated it became so strong in her that she regretted having
promised Effie to take her out for the afternoon. But she could think
of no pretext for disappointing the little girl, and soon after luncheon
the three set forth in the motor to show Darrow a chateau famous in the
annals of the region. During their excursion Anna found it impossible to
guess from his demeanour if Effie’s presence between them was as much
of a strain to his composure as to hers. He remained imperturbably
good-humoured and appreciative while they went the round of the
monument, and she remarked only that when he thought himself unnoticed
his face grew grave and his answers came less promptly.
On the way back, two or three miles from Givre, she suddenly proposed
that they should walk home through the forest which skirted that side of
the park. Darrow acquiesced, and they got out and sent Effie on in the
motor. Their way led through a bit of sober French woodland, flat as a
faded tapestry, but with gleams of live emerald lingering here and there
among its browns and ochres. The luminous grey air gave vividness to its
dying colours, and veiled the distant glimpses of the landscape in soft
uncertainty. In such a solitude Anna had fancied it would be easier to
speak; but as she walked beside Darrow over the deep soundless flooring
of brown moss the words on her lips took flight again. It seemed
impossible to break the spell of quiet joy which his presence laid on
her, and when he began to talk of the place they had just visited she
answered his questions and then waited for what he should say next...No,
decidedly she could not speak; she no longer even knew what she had
meant to say...
The same experience repeated itself several times that day and the
next. When she and Darrow were apart she exhausted herself in appeal and
interrogation, she formulated with a fervent lucidity every point in
her imaginary argument. But as soon as she was alone with him something
deeper than reason and subtler than shyness laid its benumbing touch
upon her, and the desire to speak became merely a dim disquietude,
through which his looks, his words, his touch, reached her as through
a mist of bodily pain. Yet this inertia was torn by wild flashes of
resistance, and when they were apart she began to prepare again what she
meant to say to him.
She knew he could not be with her without being aware of this inner
turmoil, and she hoped he would break the spell by some releasing word.
But she presently understood that he recognized the futility of words,
and was resolutely bent on holding her to her own purpose of behaving
as if nothing had happened. Once more she inwardly accused him of
insensibility, and her imagination was beset by tormenting visions of
his past...Had such things happened to him before? If the episode had
been an isolated accident--“a moment of folly and madness”, as he had
called it--she could understand, or at least begin to understand (for
at a certain point her imagination always turned back); but if it were
a mere link in a chain of similar experiments, the thought of it
dishonoured her whole past...
Effie, in the interregnum between governesses, had been given leave to
dine downstairs; and Anna, on the evening of Darrow’s return, kept the
little girl with her till long after the nurse had signalled from
the drawing-room door. When at length she had been carried off, Anna
proposed a game of cards, and after this diversion had drawn to its
languid close she said good-night to Darrow and followed Madame de
Chantelle upstairs. But Madame de Chantelle never sat up late, and the
second evening, with the amiably implied intention of leaving Anna and
Darrow to themselves, she took an earlier leave of them than usual.
Anna sat silent, listening to her small stiff steps as they minced down
the hall and died out in the distance. Madame de Chantelle had broken
her wooden embroidery frame, and Darrow, having offered to repair it,
had drawn his chair up to a table that held a lamp. Anna watched him
as he sat with bent head and knitted brows, trying to fit together
the disjoined pieces. The sight of him, so tranquilly absorbed in
this trifling business, seemed to give to the quiet room a perfume of
intimacy, to fill it with a sense of sweet familiar habit; and it came
over her again that she knew nothing of the inner thoughts of this man
who was sitting by her as a husband might. The lamplight fell on his
white forehead, on the healthy brown of his cheek, the backs of his thin
sunburnt hands. As she watched the hands her sense of them became as
vivid as a touch, and she said to herself: “That other woman has sat
and watched him as I am doing. She has known him as I have never known
him...Perhaps he is thinking of that now. Or perhaps he has forgotten
it all as completely as I have forgotten everything that happened to me
before he came...”
He looked young, active, stored with strength and energy; not the man
for vain repinings or long memories. She wondered what she had to hold
or satisfy him. He loved her now; she had no doubt of that; but how
could she hope to keep him? They were so nearly of an age that already
she felt herself his senior. As yet the difference was not visible;
outwardly at least they were matched; but ill-health or unhappiness
would soon do away with this equality. She thought with a pang of
bitterness: “He won’t grow any older because he doesn’t feel things; and
because he doesn’t, I SHALL...”
And when she ceased to please him, what then? Had he the tradition of
faith to the spoken vow, or the deeper piety of the unspoken dedication?
What was his theory, what his inner conviction in such matters? But what
did she care for his convictions or his theories? No doubt he loved her
now, and believed he would always go on loving her, and was persuaded
that, if he ceased to, his loyalty would be proof against the change.
What she wanted to know was not what he thought about it in advance, but
what would impel or restrain him at the crucial hour. She put no faith
in her own arts: she was too sure of having none! And if some beneficent
enchanter had bestowed them on her, she knew now that she would have
rejected the gift. She could hardly conceive of wanting the kind of love
that was a state one could be cozened into...
Darrow, putting away the frame, walked across the room and sat down
beside her; and she felt he had something special to say.
“They’re sure to send for me in a day or two now,” he began.
She made no answer, and he continued: “You’ll tell me before I go what
day I’m to come back and get you?”
It was the first time since his return to Givre that he had made any
direct allusion to the date of their marriage; and instead of answering
him she broke out: “There’s something I’ve been wanting you to know. The
other day in Paris I saw Miss Viner.”
She saw him flush with the intensity of his surprise.
“You sent for her?”
“No; she heard from Adelaide that I was in Paris and she came. She came
because she wanted to urge me to marry you. I thought you ought to know
what she had done.”
Darrow stood up. “I’m glad you’ve told me.” He spoke with a visible
effort at composure. Her eyes followed him as he moved away.
“Is that all?” he asked after an interval.
“It seems to me a great deal.”
“It’s what she’d already asked me.” His voice showed her how deeply he
was moved, and a throb of jealousy shot through her.
“Oh, it was for your sake, I know!” He made no answer, and she added:
“She’s been exceedingly generous...Why shouldn’t we speak of it?”
She had lowered her head, but through her dropped lids she seemed to be
watching the crowded scene of his face.
“I’ve not shrunk from speaking of it.”
“Speaking of her, then, I mean. It seems to me that if I could talk to
you about her I should know better----”
She broke off, confused, and he questioned: “What is it you want to know
better?”
The colour rose to her forehead. How could she tell him what she
scarcely dared own to herself? There was nothing she did not want to
know, no fold or cranny of his secret that her awakened imagination did
not strain to penetrate; but she could not expose Sophy Viner to
the base fingerings of a retrospective jealousy, nor Darrow to the
temptation of belittling her in the effort to better his own case. The
girl had been magnificent, and the only worthy return that Anna could
make was to take Darrow from her without a question if she took him at
all...
She lifted her eyes to his face. “I think I only wanted to speak her
name. It’s not right that we should seem so afraid of it. If I were
really afraid of it I should have to give you up,” she said.
He bent over her and caught her to him. “Ah, you can’t give me up now!”
he exclaimed.
She suffered him to hold her fast without speaking; but the old dread
was between them again, and it was on her lips to cry out: “How can I
help it, when I AM so afraid?”
XXXV
The next morning the dread was still there, and she understood that she
must snatch herself out of the torpor of the will into which she had
been gradually sinking, and tell Darrow that she could not be his wife.
The knowledge came to her in the watches of a sleepless night, when,
through the tears of disenchanted passion, she stared back upon her
past. There it lay before her, her sole romance, in all its paltry
poverty, the cheapest of cheap adventures, the most pitiful of
sentimental blunders. She looked about her room, the room where, for so
many years, if her heart had been quiescent her thoughts had been
alive, and pictured herself henceforth cowering before a throng of mean
suspicions, of unavowed compromises and concessions. In that moment of
self-searching she saw that Sophy Viner had chosen the better part, and
that certain renunciations might enrich where possession would have left
a desert.
Passionate reactions of instinct fought against these efforts of her
will. Why should past or future coerce her, when the present was so
securely hers? Why insanely surrender what the other would after all
never have? Her sense of irony whispered that if she sent away Darrow
it would not be to Sophy Viner, but to the first woman who crossed his
path--as, in a similar hour, Sophy Viner herself had crossed it...But
the mere fact that she could think such things of him sent her
shuddering back to the opposite pole. She pictured herself gradually
subdued to such a conception of life and love, she pictured
Effie growing up under the influence of the woman she saw herself
becoming--and she hid her eyes from the humiliation of the picture...
They were at luncheon when the summons that Darrow expected was brought
to him. He handed the telegram to Anna, and she learned that his
Ambassador, on the way to a German cure, was to be in Paris the next
evening and wished to confer with him there before he went back to
London. The idea that the decisive moment was at hand was so agitating
to her that when luncheon was over she slipped away to the terrace and
thence went down alone to the garden. The day was grey but mild, with
the heaviness of decay in the air. She rambled on aimlessly, following
under the denuded boughs the path she and Darrow had taken on their
first walk to the river. She was sure he would not try to overtake her:
sure he would guess why she wished to be alone. There were moments when
it seemed to double her loneliness to be so certain of his reading her
heart while she was so desperately ignorant of his...
She wandered on for more than an hour, and when she returned to the
house she saw, as she entered the hall, that Darrow was seated at the
desk in Owen’s study. He heard her step, and looking up turned in his
chair without rising. Their eyes met, and she saw that his were clear
and smiling. He had a heap of papers at his elbow and was evidently
engaged in some official correspondence. She wondered that he could
address himself so composedly to his task, and then ironically reflected
that such detachment was a sign of his superiority. She crossed the
threshold and went toward him; but as she advanced she had a sudden
vision of Owen, standing outside in the cold autumn dusk and watching
Darrow and Sophy Viner as they faced each other across the lamplit
desk...The evocation was so vivid that it caught her breath like a blow,
and she sank down helplessly on the divan among the piled-up books.
Distinctly, at the moment, she understood that the end had come. “When
he speaks to me I will tell him!” she thought...
Darrow, laying aside his pen, looked at her for a moment in silence;
then he stood up and shut the door.
“I must go to-morrow early,” he said, sitting down beside her. His voice
was grave, with a slight tinge of sadness. She said to herself: “He
knows what I am feeling...” and now the thought made her feel less
alone. The expression of his face was stern and yet tender: for the
first time she understood what he had suffered.
She had no doubt as to the necessity of giving him up, but it was
impossible to tell him so then. She stood up and said: “I’ll leave you
to your letters.” He made no protest, but merely answered: “You’ll come
down presently for a walk?” and it occurred to her at once that she
would walk down to the river with him, and give herself for the last
time the tragic luxury of sitting at his side in the little pavilion.
“Perhaps,” she thought, “it will be easier to tell him there.”
It did not, on the way home from their walk, become any easier to tell
him; but her secret decision to do so before he left gave her a kind
of factitious calm and laid a melancholy ecstasy upon the hour. Still
skirting the subject that fanned their very faces with its flame, they
clung persistently to other topics, and it seemed to Anna that their
minds had never been nearer together than in this hour when their hearts
were so separate. In the glow of interchanged love she had grown less
conscious of that other glow of interchanged thought which had once
illumined her mind. She had forgotten how Darrow had widened her world
and lengthened out all her perspectives, and with a pang of double
destitution she saw herself alone among her shrunken thoughts.
For the first time, then, she had a clear vision of what her life would
be without him. She imagined herself trying to take up the daily round,
and all that had lightened and animated it seemed equally lifeless and
vain. She tried to think of herself as wholly absorbed in her daughter’s
development, like other mothers she had seen; but she supposed those
mothers must have had stored memories of happiness to nourish them. She
had had nothing, and all her starved youth still claimed its due.
When she went up to dress for dinner she said to herself: “I’ll have
my last evening with him, and then, before we say good night, I’ll tell
him.”
This postponement did not seem unjustified. Darrow had shown her how
he dreaded vain words, how resolved he was to avoid all fruitless
discussion. He must have been intensely aware of what had been going on
in her mind since his return, yet when she had attempted to reveal it
to him he had turned from the revelation. She was therefore merely
following the line he had traced in behaving, till the final moment
came, as though there were nothing more to say...
That moment seemed at last to be at hand when, at her usual hour after
dinner, Madame de Chantelle rose to go upstairs. She lingered a little
to bid good-bye to Darrow, whom she was not likely to see in the
morning; and her affable allusions to his prompt return sounded in
Anna’s ear like the note of destiny.
A cold rain had fallen all day, and for greater warmth and intimacy they
had gone after dinner to the oak-room, shutting out the chilly vista of
the farther drawing-rooms. The autumn wind, coming up from the river,
cried about the house with a voice of loss and separation; and Anna and
Darrow sat silent, as if they feared to break the hush that shut them
in. The solitude, the fire-light, the harmony of soft hangings and old
dim pictures, wove about them a spell of security through which Anna
felt, far down in her heart, the muffled beat of an inextinguishable
bliss. How could she have thought that this last moment would be the
moment to speak to him, when it seemed to have gathered up into its
flight all the scattered splendours of her dream?
XXXVI
Darrow continued to stand by the door after it had closed. Anna felt
that he was looking at her, and sat still, disdaining to seek refuge in
any evasive word or movement. For the last time she wanted to let him
take from her the fulness of what the sight of her could give.
He crossed over and sat down on the sofa. For a moment neither of them
spoke; then he said: “To-night, dearest, I must have my answer.”
She straightened herself under the shock of his seeming to take the very
words from her lips.
“To-night?” was all that she could falter.
“I must be off by the early train. There won’t be more than a moment in
the morning.”
He had taken her hand, and she said to herself that she must free it
before she could go on with what she had to say. Then she rejected this
concession to a weakness she was resolved to defy. To the end she would
leave her hand in his hand, her eyes in his eyes: she would not, in
their final hour together, be afraid of any part of her love for him.
“You’ll tell me to-night, dear,” he insisted gently; and his insistence
gave her the strength to speak.
“There’s something I must ask you,” she broke out, perceiving, as she
heard her words, that they were not in the least what she had meant to
say.
He sat still, waiting, and she pressed on: “Do such things happen to men
often?”
The quiet room seemed to resound with the long reverberations of her
question. She looked away from him, and he released her and stood up.
“I don’t know what happens to other men. Such a thing never happened to
me...”
She turned her eyes back to his face. She felt like a traveller on a
giddy path between a cliff and a precipice: there was nothing for it now
but to go on.
“Had it ... had it begun ... before you met her in Paris?”
“No; a thousand times no! I’ve told you the facts as they were.”
“All the facts?”
He turned abruptly. “What do you mean?”
Her throat was dry and the loud pulses drummed in her temples.
“I mean--about her...Perhaps you knew ... knew things about
her ... beforehand.”
She stopped. The room had grown profoundly still. A log dropped to the
hearth and broke there in a hissing shower.
Darrow spoke in a clear voice. “I knew nothing, absolutely nothing,” he
said.
She had the answer to her inmost doubt--to her last shameful unavowed
hope. She sat powerless under her woe.
He walked to the fireplace and pushed back the broken log with his foot.
A flame shot out of it, and in the upward glare she saw his pale face,
stern with misery.
“Is that all?” he asked.
She made a slight sign with her head and he came slowly back to her.
“Then is this to be good-bye?”
Again she signed a faint assent, and he made no effort to touch her or
draw nearer. “You understand that I sha’n’t come back?”
He was looking at her, and she tried to return his look, but her eyes
were blind with tears, and in dread of his seeing them she got up and
walked away. He did not follow her, and she stood with her back to him,
staring at a bowl of carnations on a little table strewn with books. Her
tears magnified everything she looked at, and the streaked petals of the
carnations, their fringed edges and frail curled stamens, pressed upon
her, huge and vivid. She noticed among the books a volume of verse he
had sent her from England, and tried to remember whether it was before
or after...
She felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and at last she turned to
him. “I shall see you to-morrow before you go...”
He made no answer.
She moved toward the door and he held it open for her. She saw his hand
on the door, and his seal ring in its setting of twisted silver; and the
sense of the end of all things came to her.
They walked down the drawing-rooms, between the shadowy reflections of
screens and cabinets, and mounted the stairs side by side. At the end of
the gallery, a lamp brought out turbid gleams in the smoky battle-piece
above it.
On the landing Darrow stopped; his room was the nearest to the stairs.
“Good night,” he said, holding out his hand.
As Anna gave him hers the springs of grief broke loose in her. She
struggled with her sobs, and subdued them; but her breath came unevenly,
and to hide her agitation she leaned on him and pressed her face against
his arm.
“Don’t--don’t,” he whispered, soothing her.
Her troubled breathing sounded loudly in the silence of the sleeping
house. She pressed her lips tight, but could not stop the nervous
pulsations in her throat, and he put an arm about her and, opening his
door, drew her across the threshold of his room. The door shut
behind her and she sat down on the lounge at the foot of the bed. The
pulsations in her throat had ceased, but she knew they would begin again
if she tried to speak.
Darrow walked away and leaned against the mantelpiece. The red-veiled
lamp shone on his books and papers, on the arm-chair by the fire, and
the scattered objects on his dressing-table. A log glimmered on the
hearth, and the room was warm and faintly smoke-scented. It was the
first time she had ever been in a room he lived in, among his personal
possessions and the traces of his daily usage. Every object about her
seemed to contain a particle of himself: the whole air breathed of him,
steeping her in the sense of his intimate presence.
Suddenly she thought: “This is what Sophy Viner knew”...and with a
torturing precision she pictured them alone in such a scene...Had he
taken the girl to an hotel ... where did people go in such cases? Wherever
they were, the silence of night had been around them, and the things he
used had been strewn about the room...Anna, ashamed of dwelling on the
detested vision, stood up with a confused impulse of flight; then a wave
of contrary feeling arrested her and she paused with lowered head.
Darrow had come forward as she rose, and she perceived that he was
waiting for her to bid him good night. It was clear that no other
possibility had even brushed his mind; and the fact, for some dim
reason, humiliated her. “Why not ... why not?” something whispered in her,
as though his forbearance, his tacit recognition of her pride, were a
slight on other qualities she wanted him to feel in her.
“In the morning, then?” she heard him say.
“Yes, in the morning,” she repeated.
She continued to stand in the same place, looking vaguely about the
room. For once before they parted--since part they must--she longed to
be to him all that Sophy Viner had been; but she remained rooted to the
floor, unable to find a word or imagine a gesture that should express
her meaning. Exasperated by her helplessness, she thought: “Don’t I feel
things as other women do?”
Her eye fell on a note-case she had given him. It was worn at the
corners with the friction of his pocket and distended with thickly
packed papers. She wondered if he carried her letters in it, and she put
her hand out and touched it.
All that he and she had ever felt or seen, their close encounters
of word and look, and the closer contact of their silences, trembled
through her at the touch. She remembered things he had said that had
been like new skies above her head: ways he had that seemed a part of
the air she breathed. The faint warmth of her girlish love came back
to her, gathering heat as it passed through her thoughts; and her heart
rocked like a boat on the surge of its long long memories. “It’s because
I love him in too many ways,” she thought; and slowly she turned to the
door.
She was aware that Darrow was still silently watching her, but he
neither stirred nor spoke till she had reached the threshold. Then he
met her there and caught her in his arms.
“Not to-night--don’t tell me to-night!” he whispered; and she leaned
away from him, closing her eyes for an instant, and then slowly opening
them to the flood of light in his.
XXXVII
Anna and Darrow, the next day, sat alone in a compartment of the Paris
train.
Anna, when they entered it, had put herself in the farthest corner
and placed her bag on the adjoining seat. She had decided suddenly to
accompany Darrow to Paris, had even persuaded him to wait for a later
train in order that they might travel together. She had an intense
longing to be with him, an almost morbid terror of losing sight of him
for a moment: when he jumped out of the train and ran back along the
platform to buy a newspaper for her she felt as though she should never
see him again, and shivered with the cold misery of her last journey
to Paris, when she had thought herself parted from him forever. Yet she
wanted to keep him at a distance, on the other side of the compartment,
and as the train moved out of the station she drew from her bag the
letters she had thrust in it as she left the house, and began to glance
over them so that her lowered lids should hide her eyes from him.
She was his now, his for life: there could never again be any question
of sacrificing herself to Effie’s welfare, or to any other abstract
conception of duty. Effie of course would not suffer; Anna would pay for
her bliss as a wife by redoubled devotion as a mother. Her scruples
were not overcome; but for the time their voices were drowned in the
tumultuous rumour of her happiness.
As she opened her letters she was conscious that Darrow’s gaze was fixed
on her, and gradually it drew her eyes upward, and she drank deep of the
passionate tenderness in his. Then the blood rose to her face and she
felt again the desire to shield herself. She turned back to her letters
and her glance lit on an envelope inscribed in Owen’s hand.
Her heart began to beat oppressively: she was in a mood when the
simplest things seemed ominous. What could Owen have to say to her? Only
the first page was covered, and it contained simply the announcement
that, in the company of a young compatriot who was studying at the Beaux
Arts, he had planned to leave for Spain the following evening.
“He hasn’t seen her, then!” was Anna’s instant thought; and her feeling
was a strange compound of humiliation and relief. The girl had kept her
word, lived up to the line of conduct she had set herself; and Anna
had failed in the same attempt. She did not reproach herself with
her failure; but she would have been happier if there had been less
discrepancy between her words to Sophy Viner and the act which had
followed them. It irritated her obscurely that the girl should have been
so much surer of her power to carry out her purpose...
Anna looked up and saw that Darrow’s eyes were on the newspaper. He
seemed calm and secure, almost indifferent to her presence. “Will it
become a matter of course to him so soon?” she wondered with a twinge of
jealousy. She sat motionless, her eyes fixed on him, trying to make him
feel the attraction of her gaze as she felt his. It surprised and shamed
her to detect a new element in her love for him: a sort of suspicious
tyrannical tenderness that seemed to deprive it of all serenity. Finally
he looked up, his smile enveloped her, and she felt herself his in every
fibre, his so completely and inseparably that she saw the vanity of
imagining any other fate for herself.
To give herself a countenance she held out Owen’s letter. He took it and
glanced down the page, his face grown grave. She waited nervously till
he looked up.
“That’s a good plan; the best thing that could happen,” he said, a just
perceptible shade of constraint in his tone.
“Oh, yes,” she hastily assented. She was aware of a faint current of
relief silently circulating between them. They were both glad that Owen
was going, that for a while he would be out of their way; and it seemed
to her horrible that so much of the stuff of their happiness should be
made of such unavowed feelings...
“I shall see him this evening,” she said, wishing Darrow to feel that
she was not afraid of meeting her step-son.
“Yes, of course; perhaps he might dine with you.”
The words struck her as strangely obtuse. Darrow was to meet his
Ambassador at the station on the latter’s arrival, and would in all
probability have to spend the evening with him, and Anna knew he had
been concerned at the thought of having to leave her alone. But how
could he speak in that careless tone of her dining with Owen? She
lowered her voice to say: “I’m afraid he’s desperately unhappy.”
He answered, with a tinge of impatience: “It’s much the best thing that
he should travel.”
“Yes--but don’t you feel...” She broke off. She knew how he disliked
these idle returns on the irrevocable, and her fear of doing or saying
what he disliked was tinged by a new instinct of subserviency against
which her pride revolted. She thought to herself: “He will see the
change, and grow indifferent to me as he did to HER...” and for a moment
it seemed to her that she was reliving the experience of Sophy Viner.
Darrow made no attempt to learn the end of her unfinished sentence. He
handed back Owen’s letter and returned to his newspaper; and when he
looked up from it a few minutes later it was with a clear brow and a
smile that irresistibly drew her back to happier thoughts.
The train was just entering a station, and a moment later their
compartment was invaded by a commonplace couple preoccupied with
the bestowal of bulging packages. Anna, at their approach, felt the
possessive pride of the woman in love when strangers are between herself
and the man she loves. She asked Darrow to open the window, to place her
bag in the net, to roll her rug into a cushion for her feet; and while
he was thus busied with her she was conscious of a new devotion in his
tone, in his way of bending over her and meeting her eyes. He went back
to his seat, and they looked at each other like lovers smiling at a
happy secret.
Anna, before going back to Givre, had suggested Owen’s moving into her
apartment, but he had preferred to remain at the hotel to which he had
sent his luggage, and on arriving in Paris she decided to drive there at
once. She was impatient to have the meeting over, and glad that Darrow
was obliged to leave her at the station in order to look up a colleague
at the Embassy. She dreaded his seeing Owen again, and yet dared not
tell him so, and to ensure his remaining away she mentioned an urgent
engagement with her dress-maker and a long list of commissions to be
executed for Madame de Chantelle.
“I shall see you to-morrow morning,” she said; but he replied with a
smile that he would certainly find time to come to her for a moment on
his way back from meeting the Ambassador; and when he had put her in a
cab he leaned through the window to press his lips to hers.
She blushed like a girl, thinking, half vexed, half happy: “Yesterday he
would not have done it...” and a dozen scarcely definable differences
in his look and manner seemed all at once to be summed up in the boyish
act. “After all, I’m engaged to him,” she reflected, and then smiled
at the absurdity of the word. The next instant, with a pang of
self-reproach, she remembered Sophy Viner’s cry: “I knew all the while
he didn’t care...” “Poor thing, oh poor thing!” Anna murmured...
At Owen’s hotel she waited in a tremor while the porter went in search
of him. Word was presently brought back that he was in his room and
begged her to come up, and as she crossed the hall she caught sight of
his portmanteaux lying on the floor, already labelled for departure.
Owen sat at a table writing, his back to the door; and when he stood up
the window was behind him, so that, in the rainy afternoon light, his
features were barely discernible.
“Dearest--so you’re really off?” she said, hesitating a moment on the
threshold.
He pushed a chair forward, and they sat down, each waiting for the
other to speak. Finally she put some random question about his
travelling-companion, a slow shy meditative youth whom he had once or
twice brought down to Givre. She reflected that it was natural he should
have given this uncommunicative comrade the preference over his livelier
acquaintances, and aloud she said: “I’m so glad Fred Rempson can go with
you.”
Owen answered in the same tone, and for a few minutes their talk dragged
itself on over a dry waste of common-places. Anna noticed that, though
ready enough to impart his own plans, Owen studiously abstained from
putting any questions about hers. It was evident from his allusions that
he meant to be away for some time, and he presently asked her if she
would give instructions about packing and sending after him some winter
clothes he had left at Givre. This gave her the opportunity to say that
she expected to go back within a day or two and would attend to the
matter as soon as she returned. She added: “I came up this morning with
George, who is going on to London to-morrow,” intending, by the use
of Darrow’s Christian name, to give Owen the chance to speak of her
marriage. But he made no comment, and she continued to hear the name
sounding on unfamiliarly between them.
The room was almost dark, and she finally stood up and glanced about for
the light-switch, saying: “I can’t see you, dear.”
“Oh, don’t--I hate the light!” Owen exclaimed, catching her by the wrist
and pushing her back into her seat. He gave a nervous laugh and added:
“I’m half-blind with neuralgia. I suppose it’s this beastly rain.”
“Yes; it will do you good to get down to Spain.”
She asked if he had the remedies the doctor had given him for a previous
attack, and on his replying that he didn’t know what he’d done with the
stuff, she sprang up, offering to go to the chemist’s. It was a
relief to have something to do for him, and she knew from his “Oh,
thanks--would you?” that it was a relief to him to have a pretext for
not detaining her. His natural impulse would have been to declare that
he didn’t want any drugs, and would be all right in no time; and his
acquiescence showed her how profoundly he felt the uselessness of their
trying to prolong their talk. His face was now no more than a white blur
in the dusk, but she felt its indistinctness as a veil drawn over aching
intensities of expression. “He knows ... he knows...” she said to
herself, and wondered whether the truth had been revealed to him by some
corroborative fact or by the sheer force of divination.
He had risen also, and was clearly waiting for her to go, and she turned
to the door, saying: “I’ll be back in a moment.”
“Oh, don’t come up again, please!” He paused, embarrassed. “I mean--I
may not be here. I’ve got to go and pick up Rempson, and see about some
final things with him.” She stopped on the threshold with a sinking
heart. He meant this to be their leave-taking, then--and he had not
even asked her when she was to be married, or spoken of seeing her again
before she set out for the other side of the world.
“Owen!” she cried, and turned back.
He stood mutely before her in the dimness.
“You haven’t told me how long you’re to be gone.”
“How long? Oh, you see ... that’s rather vague...I hate definite dates,
you know...”
He paused and she saw he did not mean to help her out. She tried to say:
“You’ll be here for my wedding?” but could not bring the words to her
lips. Instead she murmured: “In six weeks I shall be going too...” and
he rejoined, as if he had expected the announcement and prepared his
answer: “Oh, by that time, very likely...”
“At any rate, I won’t say good-bye,” she stammered, feeling the tears
beneath her veil.
“No, no; rather not!” he declared; but he made no movement, and she went
up and threw her arms about him. “You’ll write me, won’t you?”
“Of course, of course----”
Her hands slipped down into his, and for a minute they held each other
dumbly in the darkness; then he gave a vague laugh and said: “It’s
really time to light up.” He pressed the electric button with one hand
while with the other he opened the door; and she passed out without
daring to turn back, lest the light on his face should show her what she
feared to see.
XXXVIII
Anna drove to the chemist’s for Owen’s remedy. On the way she stopped
her cab at a book-shop, and emerged from it laden with literature. She
knew what would interest Owen, and what he was likely to have read,
and she had made her choice among the newest publications with the
promptness of a discriminating reader. But on the way back to the hotel
she was overcome by the irony of adding this mental panacea to the
other. There was something grotesque and almost mocking in the idea of
offering a judicious selection of literature to a man setting out on
such a journey. “He knows ... he knows...” she kept on repeating; and
giving the porter the parcel from the chemist’s she drove away without
leaving the books. She went to her apartment, whither her maid had
preceded her. There was a fire in the drawing-room and the tea-table
stood ready by the hearth. The stormy rain beat against the uncurtained
windows, and she thought of Owen, who would soon be driving through it
to the station, alone with his bitter thoughts. She had been proud of
the fact that he had always sought her help in difficult hours; and now,
in the most difficult of all, she was the one being to whom he could
not turn. Between them, henceforth, there would always be the wall of an
insurmountable silence...She strained her aching thoughts to guess how
the truth had come to him. Had he seen the girl, and had she told him?
Instinctively, Anna rejected this conjecture. But what need was there of
assuming an explicit statement, when every breath they had drawn for the
last weeks had been charged with the immanent secret? As she looked back
over the days since Darrow’s first arrival at Givre she perceived
that at no time had any one deliberately spoken, or anything been
accidentally disclosed. The truth had come to light by the force of its
irresistible pressure; and the perception gave her a startled sense of
hidden powers, of a chaos of attractions and repulsions far beneath
the ordered surfaces of intercourse. She looked back with melancholy
derision on her old conception of life, as a kind of well-lit and well
policed suburb to dark places one need never know about. Here they were,
these dark places, in her own bosom, and henceforth she would always
have to traverse them to reach the beings she loved best!
She was still sitting beside the untouched tea-table when she heard
Darrow’s voice in the hall. She started up, saying to herself: “I must
tell him that Owen knows...” but when the door opened and she saw his
face, still lit by the same smile of boyish triumph, she felt anew the
uselessness of speaking...Had he ever supposed that Owen would not know?
Probably, from the height of his greater experience, he had seen long
since that all that happened was inevitable; and the thought of it, at
any rate, was clearly not weighing on him now.
He was already dressed for the evening, and as he came toward her he
said: “The Ambassador’s booked for an official dinner and I’m free after
all. Where shall we dine?”
Anna had pictured herself sitting alone all the evening with her
wretched thoughts, and the fact of having to put them out of her mind
for the next few hours gave her an immediate sensation of relief.
Already her pulses were dancing to the tune of Darrow’s, and as they
smiled at each other she thought: “Nothing can ever change the fact that
I belong to him.”
“Where shall we dine?” he repeated gaily, and she named a well-known
restaurant for which she had once heard him express a preference. But as
she did so she fancied she saw a shadow on his face, and instantly she
said to herself: “It was THERE he went with her!”
“Oh, no, not there, after all!” she interrupted herself; and now she was
sure his colour deepened.
“Where shall it be, then?”
She noticed that he did not ask the reason of her change, and this
convinced her that she had guessed the truth, and that he knew she had
guessed it. “He will always know what I am thinking, and he will
never dare to ask me,” she thought; and she saw between them the same
insurmountable wall of silence as between herself and Owen, a wall of
glass through which they could watch each other’s faintest motions but
which no sound could ever traverse...
They drove to a restaurant on the Boulevard, and there, in their
intimate corner of the serried scene, the sense of what was unspoken
between them gradually ceased to oppress her. He looked so light-hearted
and handsome, so ingenuously proud of her, so openly happy at being with
her, that no other fact could seem real in his presence. He had learned
that the Ambassador was to spend two days in Paris, and he had reason to
hope that in consequence his own departure for London would be deferred.
He was exhilarated by the prospect of being with Anna for a few hours
longer, and she did not ask herself if his exhilaration were a sign of
insensibility, for she was too conscious of his power of swaying her
moods not to be secretly proud of affecting his.
They lingered for some time over the fruit and coffee, and when they
rose to go Darrow suggested that, if she felt disposed for the play,
they were not too late for the second part of the programme at one of
the smaller theatres.
His mention of the hour recalled Owen to her thoughts. She saw his train
rushing southward through the storm, and, in a corner of the swaying
compartment, his face, white and indistinct as it had loomed on her in
the rainy twilight. It was horrible to be thus perpetually paying for
her happiness!
Darrow had called for a theatrical journal, and he presently looked up
from it to say: “I hear the second play at the Athenee is amusing.”
It was on Anna’s lips to acquiesce; but as she was about to speak she
wondered if it were not at the Athenee that Owen had seen Darrow with
Sophy Viner. She was not sure he had even mentioned the theatre, but the
mere possibility was enough to darken her sky. It was hateful to her to
think of accompanying Darrow to places where the girl had been with him.
She tried to reason away this scruple, she even reminded herself with
a bitter irony that whenever she was in Darrow’s arms she was where the
girl had been before her--but she could not shake off her superstitious
dread of being with him in any of the scenes of the Parisian episode.
She replied that she was too tired for the play, and they drove back
to her apartment. At the foot of the stairs she half-turned to wish him
good night, but he appeared not to notice her gesture and followed her
up to her door.
“This is ever so much better than the theatre,” he said as they entered
the drawing-room.
She had crossed the room and was bending over the hearth to light the
fire. She knew he was approaching her, and that in a moment he would
have drawn the cloak from her shoulders and laid his lips on her neck,
just below the gathered-up hair. These privileges were his and, however
deferently and tenderly he claimed them, the joyous ease of his manner
marked a difference and proclaimed a right.
“After the theatre they came home like this,” she thought; and at the
same instant she felt his hands on her shoulders and shrank back.
“Don’t--oh, don’t!” she cried, drawing her cloak about her. She saw from
his astonished stare that her face must be quivering with pain.
“Anna! What on earth is the matter?”
“Owen knows!” she broke out, with a confused desire to justify herself.
Darrow’s countenance changed. “Did he tell you so? What did he say?”
“Nothing! I knew it from the things he didn’t say.”
“You had a talk with him this afternoon?”
“Yes: for a few minutes. I could see he didn’t want me to stay.”
She had dropped into a chair, and sat there huddled, still holding her
cloak about her shoulders.
Darrow did not dispute her assumption, and she noticed that he expressed
no surprise. He sat down at a little distance from her, turning about in
his fingers the cigar-case he had drawn out as they came in. At length
he said: “Had he seen Miss Viner?”
She shrank from the sound of the name. “No...I don’t think so...I’m sure
he hadn’t...”
They remained silent, looking away from one another. Finally Darrow
stood up and took a few steps across the room. He came back and paused
before her, his eyes on her face.
“I think you ought to tell me what you mean to do.” She raised her head
and gave him back his look. “Nothing I do can help Owen!”
“No; but things can’t go on like this.” He paused, as if to measure his
words. “I fill you with aversion,” he exclaimed.
She started up, half-sobbing. “No--oh, no!”
“Poor child--you can’t see your face!”
She lifted her hands as if to hide it, and turning away from him bowed
her head upon the mantel-shelf. She felt that he was standing a little
way behind her, but he made no attempt to touch her or come nearer.
“I know you’ve felt as I’ve felt,” he said in a low voice--“that we
belong to each other and that nothing can alter that. But other thoughts
come, and you can’t banish them. Whenever you see me you remember ... you
associate me with things you abhor...You’ve been generous--immeasurably.
You’ve given me all the chances a woman could; but if it’s only made you
suffer, what’s the use?”
She turned to him with a tear-stained face. “It hasn’t only done that.”
“Oh, no! I know...There’ve been moments...” He took her hand and raised
it to his lips. “They’ll be with me as long as I live. But I can’t see
you paying such a price for them. I’m not worth what I’m costing you.”
She continued to gaze at him through tear-dilated eyes; and suddenly
she flung out the question: “Wasn’t it the Athenee you took her to that
evening?”
“Anna--Anna!”
“Yes; I want to know now: to know everything. Perhaps that will make
me forget. I ought to have made you tell me before. Wherever we go, I
imagine you’ve been there with her...I see you together. I want to know
how it began, where you went, why you left her...I can’t go on in this
darkness any longer!”
She did not know what had prompted her passionate outburst, but already
she felt lighter, freer, as if at last the evil spell were broken. “I
want to know everything,” she repeated. “It’s the only way to make me
forget.”
After she had ceased speaking Darrow remained where he was, his arms
folded, his eyes lowered, immovable. She waited, her gaze on his face.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“No.” The blood rushed to her temples. “You won’t? Why not?”
“If I did, do you suppose you’d forget THAT?”
“Oh--” she moaned, and turned away from him.
“You see it’s impossible,” he went on. “I’ve done a thing I loathe,
and to atone for it you ask me to do another. What sort of satisfaction
would that give you? It would put something irremediable between us.”
She leaned her elbow against the mantel-shelf and hid her face in her
hands. She had the sense that she was vainly throwing away her last hope
of happiness, yet she could do nothing, think of nothing, to save it.
The conjecture flashed through her: “Should I be at peace if I gave him
up?” and she remembered the desolation of the days after she had sent
him away, and understood that that hope was vain. The tears welled
through her lids and ran slowly down between her fingers.
“Good-bye,” she heard him say, and his footsteps turned to the door.
She tried to raise her head, but the weight of her despair bowed it
down. She said to herself: “This is the end ... he won’t try to appeal to
me again...” and she remained in a sort of tranced rigidity, perceiving
without feeling the fateful lapse of the seconds. Then the cords that
bound her seemed to snap, and she lifted her head and saw him going.
“Why, he’s mine--he’s mine! He’s no one else’s!” His face was turned to
her and the look in his eyes swept away all her terrors. She no longer
understood what had prompted her senseless outcry; and the mortal
sweetness of loving him became again the one real fact in the world.
XXXIX
Anna, the next day, woke to a humiliated memory of the previous evening.
Darrow had been right in saying that their sacrifice would benefit no
one; yet she seemed dimly to discern that there were obligations not
to be tested by that standard. She owed it, at any rate, as much to his
pride as to hers to abstain from the repetition of such scenes; and
she had learned that it was beyond her power to do so while they
were together. Yet when he had given her the chance to free herself,
everything had vanished from her mind but the blind fear of losing him;
and she saw that he and she were as profoundly and inextricably bound
together as two trees with interwoven roots. For a long time she brooded
on her plight, vaguely conscious that the only escape from it must come
from some external chance. And slowly the occasion shaped itself in her
mind. It was Sophy Viner only who could save her--Sophy Viner only who
could give her back her lost serenity. She would seek the girl out and
tell her that she had given Darrow up; and that step once taken there
would be no retracing it, and she would perforce have to go forward
alone.
Any pretext for action was a kind of anodyne, and she despatched her
maid to the Farlows’ with a note asking if Miss Viner would receive her.
There was a long delay before the maid returned, and when at last she
appeared it was with a slip of paper on which an address was written,
and a verbal message to the effect that Miss Viner had left some days
previously, and was staying with her sister in a hotel near the Place de
l’Etoile. The maid added that Mrs. Farlow, on the plea that Miss Viner’s
plans were uncertain, had at first made some difficulty about giving
this information; and Anna guessed that the girl had left her friends’
roof, and instructed them to withhold her address, with the object
of avoiding Owen. “She’s kept faith with herself and I haven’t,” Anna
mused; and the thought was a fresh incentive to action.
Darrow had announced his intention of coming soon after luncheon, and
the morning was already so far advanced that Anna, still mistrustful of
her strength, decided to drive immediately to the address Mrs. Farlow
had given. On the way there she tried to recall what she had heard of
Sophy Viner’s sister, but beyond the girl’s enthusiastic report of
the absent Laura’s loveliness she could remember only certain vague
allusions of Mrs. Farlow’s to her artistic endowments and matrimonial
vicissitudes. Darrow had mentioned her but once, and in the briefest
terms, as having apparently very little concern for Sophy’s welfare, and
being, at any rate, too geographically remote to give her any practical
support; and Anna wondered what chance had brought her to her sister’s
side at this conjunction. Mrs. Farlow had spoken of her as a celebrity
(in what line Anna failed to recall); but Mrs. Farlow’s celebrities were
legion, and the name on the slip of paper--Mrs. McTarvie-Birch--did not
seem to have any definite association with fame.
While Anna waited in the dingy vestibule of the Hotel Chicago she had so
distinct a vision of what she meant to say to Sophy Viner that the girl
seemed already to be before her; and her heart dropped from all the
height of its courage when the porter, after a long delay, returned
with the announcement that Miss Viner was no longer in the hotel. Anna,
doubtful if she understood, asked if he merely meant that the young lady
was out at the moment; but he replied that she had gone away the
day before. Beyond this he had no information to impart, and after a
moment’s hesitation Anna sent him back to enquire if Mrs. McTarvie-Birch
would receive her. She reflected that Sophy had probably pledged her
sister to the same secrecy as Mrs. Farlow, and that a personal appeal to
Mrs. Birch might lead to less negative results.
There was another long interval of suspense before the porter reappeared
with an affirmative answer; and a third while an exiguous and hesitating
lift bore her up past a succession of shabby landings.
When the last was reached, and her guide had directed her down a winding
passage that smelt of sea-going luggage, she found herself before a door
through which a strong odour of tobacco reached her simultaneously with
the sounds of a suppressed altercation. Her knock was followed by a
silence, and after a minute or two the door was opened by a handsome
young man whose ruffled hair and general air of creased disorder led her
to conclude that he had just risen from a long-limbed sprawl on a sofa
strewn with tumbled cushions. This sofa, and a grand piano bearing a
basket of faded roses, a biscuit-tin and a devastated breakfast tray,
almost filled the narrow sitting-room, in the remaining corner of which
another man, short, swarthy and humble, sat examining the lining of his
hat.
Anna paused in doubt; but on her naming Mrs. Birch the young man
politely invited her to enter, at the same time casting an impatient
glance at the mute spectator in the background.
The latter, raising his eyes, which were round and bulging, fixed them,
not on the young man but on Anna, whom, for a moment, he scrutinized as
searchingly as the interior of his hat. Under his gaze she had the sense
of being minutely catalogued and valued; and the impression, when he
finally rose and moved toward the door, of having been accepted as
a better guarantee than he had had any reason to hope for. On the
threshold his glance crossed that of the young man in an exchange of
intelligence as full as it was rapid; and this brief scene left Anna so
oddly enlightened that she felt no surprise when her companion,
pushing an arm-chair forward, sociably asked her if she wouldn’t have
a cigarette. Her polite refusal provoked the remark that he would,
if she’d no objection; and while he groped for matches in his loose
pockets, and behind the photographs and letters crowding the narrow
mantel-shelf, she ventured another enquiry for Mrs. Birch.
“Just a minute,” he smiled; “I think the masseur’s with her.” He
spoke in a smooth denationalized English, which, like the look in his
long-lashed eyes and the promptness of his charming smile, suggested a
long training in all the arts of expediency. Having finally discovered a
match-box on the floor beside the sofa, he lit his cigarette and dropped
back among the cushions; and on Anna’s remarking that she was sorry
to disturb Mrs. Birch he replied that that was all right, and that she
always kept everybody waiting.
After this, through the haze of his perpetually renewed cigarettes, they
continued to chat for some time of indifferent topics; but when at last
Anna again suggested the possibility of her seeing Mrs. Birch he rose
from his corner with a slight shrug, and murmuring: “She’s perfectly
hopeless,” lounged off through an inner door.
Anna was still wondering when and in what conjunction of circumstances
the much-married Laura had acquired a partner so conspicuous for his
personal charms, when the young man returned to announce: “She says it’s
all right, if you don’t mind seeing her in bed.”
He drew aside to let Anna pass, and she found herself in a dim untidy
scented room, with a pink curtain pinned across its single window, and
a lady with a great deal of fair hair and uncovered neck smiling at her
from a pink bed on which an immense powder-puff trailed.
“You don’t mind, do you? He costs such a frightful lot that I
can’t afford to send him off,” Mrs. Birch explained, extending a
thickly-ringed hand to Anna, and leaving her in doubt as to whether the
person alluded to were her masseur or her husband. Before a reply was
possible there was a convulsive stir beneath the pink expanse, and
something that resembled another powder-puff hurled itself at Anna with
a volley of sounds like the popping of Lilliputian champagne corks. Mrs.
Birch, flinging herself forward, gasped out: “If you’d just give him
a caramel ... there, in that box on the dressing-table ... it’s the only
earthly thing to stop him...” and when Anna had proffered this sop to
her assailant, and he had withdrawn with it beneath the bedspread, his
mistress sank back with a laugh.
“Isn’t he a beauty? The Prince gave him to me down at Nice the other
day--but he’s perfectly awful,” she confessed, beaming intimately on her
visitor. In the roseate penumbra of the bed-curtains she presented to
Anna’s startled gaze an odd chromo-like resemblance to Sophy Viner, or
a suggestion, rather, of what Sophy Viner might, with the years and in
spite of the powder-puff, become. Larger, blonder, heavier-featured,
she yet had glances and movements that disturbingly suggested what was
freshest and most engaging in the girl; and as she stretched her bare
plump arm across the bed she seemed to be pulling back the veil from
dingy distances of family history.
“Do sit down, if there’s a place to sit on,” she cordially advised;
adding, as Anna took the edge of a chair hung with miscellaneous
raiment: “My singing takes so much time that I don’t get a chance to
walk the fat off--that’s the worst of being an artist.”
Anna murmured an assent. “I hope it hasn’t inconvenienced you to see me;
I told Mr. Birch--”
“Mr. WHO?” the recumbent beauty asked; and then: “Oh, JIMMY!” she
faintly laughed, as if more for her own enlightenment than Anna’s.
The latter continued eagerly: “I understand from Mrs. Farlow that your
sister was with you, and I ventured to come up because I wanted to ask
you when I should have a chance of finding her.”
Mrs. McTarvie-Birch threw back her head with a long stare. “Do you
mean to say the idiot at the door didn’t tell you? Sophy went away last
night.”
“Last night?” Anna echoed. A sudden terror had possessed her. Could it
be that the girl had tricked them all and gone with Owen? The idea was
incredible, yet it took such hold of her that she could hardly steady
her lips to say: “The porter did tell me, but I thought perhaps he was
mistaken. Mrs. Farlow seemed to think that I should find her here.”
“It was all so sudden that I don’t suppose she had time to let the
Farlows know. She didn’t get Mrs. Murrett’s wire till yesterday, and she
just pitched her things into a trunk and rushed----”
“Mrs. Murrett?”
“Why, yes. Sophy’s gone to India with Mrs. Murrett; they’re to meet at
Brindisi,” Sophy’s sister said with a calm smile.
Anna sat motionless, gazing at the disordered room, the pink bed, the
trivial face among the pillows.
Mrs. McTarvie-Birch pursued: “They had a fearful kick-up last spring--I
daresay you knew about it--but I told Sophy she’d better lump it, as
long as the old woman was willing to...As an artist, of course, it’s
perfectly impossible for me to have her with me...”
“Of course,” Anna mechanically assented.
Through the confused pain of her thoughts she was hardly aware that
Mrs. Birch’s explanations were still continuing. “Naturally I didn’t
altogether approve of her going back to that beast of a woman. I said
all I could...I told her she was a fool to chuck up such a place as
yours. But Sophy’s restless--always was--and she’s taken it into her
head she’d rather travel...”
Anna rose from her seat, groping for some formula of leave-taking. The
pushing back of her chair roused the white dog’s smouldering animosity,
and he drowned his mistress’s further confidences in another outburst
of hysterics. Through the tumult Anna signed an inaudible farewell, and
Mrs. Birch, having momentarily succeeded in suppressing her pet under a
pillow, called out: “Do come again! I’d love to sing to you.”
Anna murmured a word of thanks and turned to the door. As she opened it
she heard her hostess crying after her: “Jimmy! Do you hear me? Jimmy
BRANCE!” and then, there being no response from the person summoned: “DO
tell him he must go and call the lift for you!”