Chapter X: Book IV: XXIII (2)

Perhaps but for the rain it might never have happened; but what was the use of thinking of that now? He tried to turn his thoughts to more urgent issues; but, by a strange perversity of association, every detail of the day was forcing itself on his mind with an insistence from which there was no escape. Reluctantly he relived the long wet walk back to the hotel, after a tedious hour at a cinematograph show on the Boulevard. It was still raining when they withdrew from this stale spectacle, but she had obstinately refused to take a cab, had even, on the way, insisted on loitering under the dripping awnings of shop-windows and poking into draughty passages, and finally, when they had nearly reached their destination, had gone so far as to suggest that they should turn back to hunt up some show she had heard of in a theatre at the Batignolles. But at that he had somewhat irritably protested: he remembered that, for the first time, they were both rather irritable, and vaguely disposed to resist one another’s suggestions. His feet were wet, and he was tired of walking, and sick of the smell of stuffy unaired theatres, and he had said he must really get back to write some letters--and so they had kept on to the hotel...

XXVII

Darrow had no idea how long he had sat there when he heard Anna’s hand on the door. The effort of rising, and of composing his face to meet her, gave him a factitious sense of self-control. He said to himself: “I must decide on something----” and that lifted him a hair’s breadth above the whirling waters.

She came in with a lighter step, and he instantly perceived that something unforeseen and reassuring had happened.

“She’s been with me. She came and found me on the terrace. We’ve had a long talk and she’s explained everything. I feel as if I’d never known her before!”

Her voice was so moved and tender that it checked his start of apprehension.

“She’s explained----?”

“It’s natural, isn’t it, that she should have felt a little sore at the kind of inspection she’s been subjected to? Oh, not from you--I don’t mean that! But Madame de Chantelle’s opposition--and her sending for Adelaide Painter! She told me frankly she didn’t care to owe her husband to Adelaide Painter...She thinks now that her annoyance at feeling herself so talked over and scrutinized may have shown itself in her manner to Owen, and set him imagining the insane things he did...I understand all she must have felt, and I agree with her that it’s best she should go away for a while. She’s made me,” Anna summed up, “feel as if I’d been dreadfully thick-skinned and obtuse!”

“YOU?”

“Yes. As if I’d treated her like the bric-a-brac that used to be sent down here ‘on approval,’ to see if it would look well with the other pieces.” She added, with a sudden flush of enthusiasm: “I’m glad she’s got it in her to make one feel like that!”

She seemed to wait for Darrow to agree with her, or to put some other question, and he finally found voice to ask: “Then you think it’s not a final break?”

“I hope not--I’ve never hoped it more! I had a word with Owen, too, after I left her, and I think he understands that he must let her go without insisting on any positive promise. She’s excited ... he must let her calm down...”

Again she waited, and Darrow said: “Surely you can make him see that.”

“She’ll help me to--she’s to see him, of course, before she goes. She starts immediately, by the way, with Adelaide Painter, who is motoring over to Francheuil to catch the one o’clock express--and who, of course, knows nothing of all this, and is simply to be told that Sophy has been sent for by the Farlows.”

Darrow mutely signed his comprehension, and she went on: “Owen is particularly anxious that neither Adelaide nor his grandmother should have the least inkling of what’s happened. The need of shielding Sophy will help him to control himself. He’s coming to his senses, poor boy; he’s ashamed of his wild talk already. He asked me to tell you so; no doubt he’ll tell you so himself.”

Darrow made a movement of protest. “Oh, as to that--the thing’s not worth another word.”

“Or another thought, either?” She brightened. “Promise me you won’t even think of it--promise me you won’t be hard on him!”

He was finding it easier to smile back at her. “Why should you think it necessary to ask my indulgence for Owen?”

She hesitated a moment, her eyes wandering from him. Then they came back with a smile. “Perhaps because I need it for myself.”

“For yourself?”

“I mean, because I understand better how one can torture one’s self over unrealities.”

As Darrow listened, the tension of his nerves began to relax. Her gaze, so grave and yet so sweet, was like a deep pool into which he could plunge and hide himself from the hard glare of his misery. As this ecstatic sense enveloped him he found it more and more difficult to follow her words and to frame an answer; but what did anything matter, except that her voice should go on, and the syllables fall like soft touches on his tortured brain?

“Don’t you know,” she continued, “the bliss of waking from a bad dream in one’s own quiet room, and going slowly over all the horror without being afraid of it any more? That’s what I’m doing now. And that’s why I understand Owen...” She broke off, and he felt her touch on his arm. “BECAUSE I’D DREAMED THE HORROR TOO!”

He understood her then, and stammered: “You?”

“Forgive me! And let me tell you!... It will help you to understand Owen...There WERE little things ... little signs ... once I had begun to watch for them: your reluctance to speak about her ... her reserve with you ... a sort of constraint we’d never seen in her before...”

She laughed up at him, and with her hands in his he contrived to say: “NOW you understand why?”

“Oh, I understand; of course I understand; and I want you to laugh at me--with me! Because there were other things too ... crazier things still...There was even--last night on the terrace--her pink cloak...”

“Her pink cloak?” Now he honestly wondered, and as she saw it she blushed.

“You’ve forgotten about the cloak? The pink cloak that Owen saw you with at the play in Paris? Yes ... yes...I was mad enough for that!... It does me good to laugh about it now! But you ought to know that I’m going to be a jealous woman ... a ridiculously jealous woman ... you ought to be warned of it in time...”

He had dropped her hands, and she leaned close and lifted her arms to his neck with one of her rare gestures of surrender.

“I don’t know why it is; but it makes me happier now to have been so foolish!”

Her lips were parted in a noiseless laugh and the tremor of her lashes made their shadow move on her cheek. He looked at her through a mist of pain and saw all her offered beauty held up like a cup to his lips; but as he stooped to it a darkness seemed to fall between them, her arms slipped from his shoulders and she drew away from him abruptly.

“But she WAS with you, then?” she exclaimed; and then, as he stared at her: “Oh, don’t say no! Only go and look at your eyes!”

He stood speechless, and she pressed on: “Don’t deny it--oh, don’t deny it! What will be left for me to imagine if you do? Don’t you see how every single thing cries it out? Owen sees it--he saw it again just now! When I told him she’d relented, and would see him, he said: ‘Is that Darrow’s doing too?’”

Darrow took the onslaught in silence. He might have spoken, have summoned up the usual phrases of banter and denial; he was not even certain that they might not, for the moment, have served their purpose if he could have uttered them without being seen. But he was as conscious of what had happened to his face as if he had obeyed Anna’s bidding and looked at himself in the glass. He knew he could no more hide from her what was written there than he could efface from his soul the fiery record of what he had just lived through. There before him, staring him in the eyes, and reflecting itself in all his lineaments, was the overwhelming fact of Sophy Viner’s passion and of the act by which she had attested it.

Anna was talking again, hurriedly, feverishly, and his soul was wrung by the anguish in her voice. “Do speak at last--you must speak! I don’t want to ask you to harm the girl; but you must see that your silence is doing her more harm than your answering my questions could. You’re leaving me only the worst things to think of her ... she’d see that herself if she were here. What worse injury can you do her than to make me hate her--to make me feel she’s plotted with you to deceive us?”

“Oh, not that!” Darrow heard his own voice before he was aware that he meant to speak. “Yes; I did see her in Paris,” he went on after a pause; “but I was bound to respect her reason for not wanting it known.”

Anna paled. “It was she at the theatre that night?”

“I was with her at the theatre one night.”

“Why should she have asked you not to say so?”

“She didn’t wish it known that I’d met her.”

“Why shouldn’t she have wished it known?”

“She had quarrelled with Mrs. Murrett and come over suddenly to Paris, and she didn’t want the Farlows to hear of it. I came across her by accident, and she asked me not to speak of having seen her.”

“Because of her quarrel? Because she was ashamed of her part in it?”

“Oh, no. There was nothing for her to be ashamed of. But the Farlows had found the place for her, and she didn’t want them to know how suddenly she’d had to leave, and how badly Mrs. Murrett had behaved. She was in a terrible plight--the woman had even kept back her month’s salary. She knew the Farlows would be awfully upset, and she wanted more time to prepare them.”

Darrow heard himself speak as though the words had proceeded from other lips. His explanation sounded plausible enough, and he half-fancied Anna’s look grew lighter. She waited a moment, as though to be sure he had no more to add; then she said: “But the Farlows DID know; they told me all about it when they sent her to me.”

He flushed as if she had laid a deliberate trap for him. “They may know NOW; they didn’t then----”

“That’s no reason for her continuing now to make a mystery of having met you.”

“It’s the only reason I can give you.”

“Then I’ll go and ask her for one myself.” She turned and took a few steps toward the door.

“Anna!” He started to follow her, and then checked himself. “Don’t do that!”

“Why not?”

“It’s not like you ... not generous...”

She stood before him straight and pale, but under her rigid face he saw the tumult of her doubt and misery.

“I don’t want to be ungenerous; I don’t want to pry into her secrets. But things can’t be left like this. Wouldn’t it be better for me to go to her? Surely she’ll understand--she’ll explain... It may be some mere trifle she’s concealing: something that would horrify the Farlows, but that I shouldn’t see any harm in...” She paused, her eyes searching his face. “A love affair, I suppose ... that’s it? You met her with some man at the theatre--and she was frightened and begged you to fib about it? Those poor young things that have to go about among us like machines--oh, if you knew how I pity them!”

“If you pity her, why not let her go?”

She stared. “Let her go--go for good, you mean? Is that the best you can say for her?”

“Let things take their course. After all, it’s between herself and Owen.”

“And you and me--and Effie, if Owen marries her, and I leave my child with them! Don’t you see the impossibility of what you’re asking? We’re all bound together in this coil.”

Darrow turned away with a groan. “Oh, let her go--let her go.”

“Then there IS something--something really bad? She WAS with some one when you met her? Some one with whom she was----” She broke off, and he saw her struggling with new thoughts. “If it’s THAT, of course...Oh, don’t you see,” she desperately appealed to him, “that I must find out, and that it’s too late now for you not to speak? Don’t be afraid that I’ll betray you...I’ll never, never let a soul suspect. But I must know the truth, and surely it’s best for her that I should find it out from you.”

Darrow waited a moment; then he said slowly: “What you imagine’s mere madness. She was at the theatre with me.”

“With you?” He saw a tremor pass through her, but she controlled it instantly and faced him straight and motionless as a wounded creature in the moment before it feels its wound. “Why should you both have made a mystery of that?”

“I’ve told you the idea was not mine.” He cast about. “She may have been afraid that Owen----”

“But that was not a reason for her asking you to tell me that you hardly knew her--that you hadn’t even seen her for years.” She broke off and the blood rose to her face and forehead. “Even if SHE had other reasons, there could be only one reason for your obeying her----” Silence fell between them, a silence in which the room seemed to become suddenly resonant with voices. Darrow’s gaze wandered to the window and he noticed that the gale of two days before had nearly stripped the tops of the lime-trees in the court. Anna had moved away and was resting her elbows against the mantel-piece, her head in her hands. As she stood there he took in with a new intensity of vision little details of her appearance that his eyes had often cherished: the branching blue veins in the backs of her hands, the warm shadow that her hair cast on her ear, and the colour of the hair itself, dull black with a tawny under-surface, like the wings of certain birds. He felt it to be useless to speak.

After a while she lifted her head and said: “I shall not see her again before she goes.”

He made no answer, and turning to him she added: “That is why she’s going, I suppose? Because she loves you and won’t give you up?”

Darrow waited. The paltriness of conventional denial was so apparent to him that even if it could have delayed discovery he could no longer have resorted to it. Under all his other fears was the dread of dishonouring the hour.

“She HAS given me up,” he said at last.

XXVIII

When he had gone out of the room Anna stood where he had left her. “I must believe him! I must believe him!” she said.

A moment before, at the moment when she had lifted her arms to his neck, she had been wrapped in a sense of complete security. All the spirits of doubt had been exorcised, and her love was once more the clear habitation in which every thought and feeling could move in blissful freedom. And then, as she raised her face to Darrow’s and met his eyes, she had seemed to look into the very ruins of his soul. That was the only way she could express it. It was as though he and she had been looking at two sides of the same thing, and the side she had seen had been all light and life, and his a place of graves...

She didn’t now recall who had spoken first, or even, very clearly, what had been said. It seemed to her only a moment later that she had found herself standing at the other end of the room--the room which had suddenly grown so small that, even with its length between them, she felt as if he touched her--crying out to him “It IS because of you she’s going!” and reading the avowal in his face.

That was his secret, then, THEIR secret: he had met the girl in Paris and helped her in her straits--lent her money, Anna vaguely conjectured--and she had fallen in love with him, and on meeting him again had been suddenly overmastered by her passion. Anna, dropping back into her sofa-corner, sat staring these facts in the face.

The girl had been in a desperate plight--frightened, penniless, outraged by what had happened, and not knowing (with a woman like Mrs. Murrett) what fresh injury might impend; and Darrow, meeting her in this distracted hour, had pitied, counselled, been kind to her, with the fatal, the inevitable result. There were the facts as Anna made them out: that, at least, was their external aspect, was as much of them as she had been suffered to see; and into the secret intricacies they might cover she dared not yet project her thoughts.

“I must believe him...I must believe him...” She kept on repeating the words like a talisman. It was natural, after all, that he should have behaved as he had: defended the girl’s piteous secret to the last. She too began to feel the contagion of his pity--the stir, in her breast, of feelings deeper and more native to her than the pains of jealousy. From the security of her blessedness she longed to lean over with compassionate hands...But Owen? What was Owen’s part to be? She owed herself first to him--she was bound to protect him not only from all knowledge of the secret she had surprised, but also--and chiefly!--from its consequences. Yes: the girl must go--there could be no doubt of it--Darrow himself had seen it from the first; and at the thought she had a wild revulsion of relief, as though she had been trying to create in her heart the delusion of a generosity she could not feel...

The one fact on which she could stay her mind was that Sophy was leaving immediately; would be out of the house within an hour. Once she was gone, it would be easier to bring Owen to the point of understanding that the break was final; if necessary, to work upon the girl to make him see it. But that, Anna was sure, would not be necessary. It was clear that Sophy Viner was leaving Givre with no thought of ever seeing it again...

Suddenly, as she tried to put some order in her thoughts, she heard Owen’s call at the door: “Mother!----” a name he seldom gave her. There was a new note in his voice: the note of a joyous impatience. It made her turn hastily to the glass to see what face she was about to show him; but before she had had time to compose it he was in the room and she was caught in a school-boy hug.

“It’s all right! It’s all right! And it’s all your doing! I want to do the worst kind of penance--bell and candle and the rest. I’ve been through it with HER, and now she hands me on to you, and you’re to call me any names you please.” He freed her with his happy laugh. “I’m to be stood in the corner till next week, and then I’m to go up to see her. And she says I owe it all to you!”

“To me?” It was the first phrase she found to clutch at as she tried to steady herself in the eddies of his joy.

“Yes: you were so patient, and so dear to her; and you saw at once what a damned ass I’d been!” She tried a smile, and it seemed to pass muster with him, for he sent it back in a broad beam. “That’s not so difficult to see? No, I admit it doesn’t take a microscope. But you were so wise and wonderful--you always are. I’ve been mad these last days, simply mad--you and she might well have washed your hands of me! And instead, it’s all right--all right!”

She drew back a little, trying to keep the smile on her lips and not let him get the least glimpse of what it hid. Now if ever, indeed, it behoved her to be wise and wonderful!

“I’m so glad, dear; so glad. If only you’ll always feel like that about me...” She stopped, hardly knowing what she said, and aghast at the idea that her own hands should have retied the knot she imagined to be broken. But she saw he had something more to say; something hard to get out, but absolutely necessary to express. He caught her hands, pulled her close, and, with his forehead drawn into its whimsical smiling wrinkles, “Look here,” he cried, “if Darrow wants to call me a damned ass too you’re not to stop him!”

It brought her back to a sharper sense of her central peril: of the secret to be kept from him at whatever cost to her racked nerves.

“Oh, you know, he doesn’t always wait for orders!” On the whole it sounded better than she’d feared.

“You mean he’s called me one already?” He accepted the fact with his gayest laugh. “Well, that saves a lot of trouble; now we can pass to the order of the day----” he broke off and glanced at the clock--“which is, you know, dear, that she’s starting in about an hour; she and Adelaide must already be snatching a hasty sandwich. You’ll come down to bid them good-bye?”

“Yes--of course.”

There had, in fact, grown upon her while he spoke the urgency of seeing Sophy Viner again before she left. The thought was deeply distasteful: Anna shrank from encountering the girl till she had cleared a way through her own perplexities. But it was obvious that since they had separated, barely an hour earlier, the situation had taken a new shape. Sophy Viner had apparently reconsidered her decision to break amicably but definitely with Owen, and stood again in their path, a menace and a mystery; and confused impulses of resistance stirred in Anna’s mind. She felt Owen’s touch on her arm. “Are you coming?”

“Yes ... yes ... presently.”

“What’s the matter? You look so strange.”

“What do you mean by strange?”

“I don’t know: startled--surprised.” She read what her look must be by its sudden reflection in his face.

“Do I? No wonder! You’ve given us all an exciting morning.”

He held to his point. “You’re more excited now that there’s no cause for it. What on earth has happened since I saw you?”

He looked about the room, as if seeking the clue to her agitation, and in her dread of what he might guess she answered: “What has happened is simply that I’m rather tired. Will you ask Sophy to come up and see me here?”

While she waited she tried to think what she should say when the girl appeared; but she had never been more conscious of her inability to deal with the oblique and the tortuous. She had lacked the hard teachings of experience, and an instinctive disdain for whatever was less clear and open than her own conscience had kept her from learning anything of the intricacies and contradictions of other hearts. She said to herself: “I must find out----” yet everything in her recoiled from the means by which she felt it must be done...

Sophy Viner appeared almost immediately, dressed for departure, her little bag on her arm. She was still pale to the point of haggardness, but with a light upon her that struck Anna with surprise. Or was it, perhaps, that she was looking at the girl with new eyes: seeing her, for the first time, not as Effie’s governess, not as Owen’s bride, but as the embodiment of that unknown peril lurking in the background of every woman’s thoughts about her lover? Anna, at any rate, with a sudden sense of estrangement, noted in her graces and snares never before perceived. It was only the flash of a primitive instinct, but it lasted long enough to make her ashamed of the darknesses it lit up in her heart...

She signed to Sophy to sit down on the sofa beside her. “I asked you to come up to me because I wanted to say good-bye quietly,” she explained, feeling her lips tremble, but trying to speak in a tone of friendly naturalness.

The girl’s only answer was a faint smile of acquiescence, and Anna, disconcerted by her silence, went on: “You’ve decided, then, not to break your engagement?”

Sophy Viner raised her head with a look of surprise. Evidently the question, thus abruptly put, must have sounded strangely on the lips of so ardent a partisan as Mrs. Leath! “I thought that was what you wished,” she said.

“What I wished?” Anna’s heart shook against her side. “I wish, of course, whatever seems best for Owen... It’s natural, you must understand, that that consideration should come first with me...”

Sophy was looking at her steadily. “I supposed it was the only one that counted with you.”

The curtness of retort roused Anna’s latent antagonism. “It is,” she said, in a hard voice that startled her as she heard it. Had she ever spoken so to any one before? She felt frightened, as though her very nature had changed without her knowing it...Feeling the girl’s astonished gaze still on her, she continued: “The suddenness of the change has naturally surprised me. When I left you it was understood that you were to reserve your decision----”

“Yes.”

“And now----?” Anna waited for a reply that did not come. She did not understand the girl’s attitude, the edge of irony in her short syllables, the plainly premeditated determination to lay the burden of proof on her interlocutor. Anna felt the sudden need to lift their intercourse above this mean level of defiance and distrust. She looked appealingly at Sophy.

“Isn’t it best that we should speak quite frankly? It’s this change on your part that perplexes me. You can hardly be surprised at that. It’s true, I asked you not to break with Owen too abruptly--and I asked it, believe me, as much for your sake as for his: I wanted you to take time to think over the difficulty that seems to have arisen between you. The fact that you felt it required thinking over seemed to show you wouldn’t take the final step lightly--wouldn’t, I mean, accept of Owen more than you could give him. But your change of mind obliges me to ask the question I thought you would have asked yourself. Is there any reason why you shouldn’t marry Owen?”

She stopped a little breathlessly, her eyes on Sophy Viner’s burning face. “Any reason----? What do you mean by a reason?”

Anna continued to look at her gravely. “Do you love some one else?” she asked.

Sophy’s first look was one of wonder and a faint relief; then she gave back the other’s scrutiny in a glance of indescribable reproach. “Ah, you might have waited!” she exclaimed.

“Waited?”

“Till I’d gone: till I was out of the house. You might have known ... you might have guessed...” She turned her eyes again on Anna. “I only meant to let him hope a little longer, so that he shouldn’t suspect anything; of course I can’t marry him,” she said.

Anna stood motionless, silenced by the shock of the avowal. She too was trembling, less with anger than with a confused compassion. But the feeling was so blent with others, less generous and more obscure, that she found no words to express it, and the two women faced each other without speaking.

“I’d better go,” Sophy murmured at length with lowered head.

The words roused in Anna a latent impulse of compunction. The girl looked so young, so exposed and desolate! And what thoughts must she be hiding in her heart! It was impossible that they should part in such a spirit.

“I want you to know that no one said anything... It was I who...”

Sophy looked at her. “You mean that Mr. Darrow didn’t tell you? Of course not: do you suppose I thought he did? You found it out, that’s all--I knew you would. In your place I should have guessed it sooner.”

The words were spoken simply, without irony or emphasis; but they went through Anna like a sword. Yes, the girl would have had divinations, promptings that she had not had! She felt half envious of such a sad precocity of wisdom.

“I’m so sorry ... so sorry...” she murmured.

“Things happen that way. Now I’d better go. I’d like to say good-bye to Effie.”

“Oh----” it broke in a cry from Effie’s mother. “Not like this--you mustn’t! I feel--you make me feel too horribly: as if I were driving you away...” The words had rushed up from the depths of her bewildered pity.

“No one is driving me away: I had to go,” she heard the girl reply.

There was another silence, during which passionate impulses of magnanimity warred in Anna with her doubts and dreads. At length, her eyes on Sophy’s face: “Yes, you must go now,” she began; “but later on ... after a while, when all this is over ... if there’s no reason why you shouldn’t marry Owen----” she paused a moment on the words-- “I shouldn’t want you to think I stood between you...”

“You?” Sophy flushed again, and then grew pale. She seemed to try to speak, but no words came. “Yes! It was not true when I said just now that I was thinking only of Owen. I’m sorry--oh, so sorry!--for you too. Your life--I know how hard it’s been; and mine ... mine’s so full...Happy women understand best!” Anna drew near and touched the girl’s hand; then she began again, pouring all her soul into the broken phrases: “It’s terrible now ... you see no future; but if, by and bye ... you know best ... but you’re so young ... and at your age things DO pass. If there’s no reason, no real reason, why you shouldn’t marry Owen, I WANT him to hope, I’ll help him to hope ... if you say so....”

With the urgency of her pleading her clasp tightened on Sophy’s hand, but it warmed to no responsive tremor: the girl seemed numb, and Anna was frightened by the stony silence of her look. “I suppose I’m not more than half a woman,” she mused, “for I don’t want my happiness to hurt her;” and aloud she repeated: “If only you’ll tell me there’s no reason----”

The girl did not speak; but suddenly, like a snapped branch, she bent, stooped down to the hand that clasped her, and laid her lips upon it in a stream of weeping. She cried silently, continuously, abundantly, as though Anna’s touch had released the waters of some deep spring of pain; then, as Anna, moved and half afraid, leaned over her with a sound of pity, she stood up and turned away.

“You’re going, then--for good--like this?” Anna moved toward her and stopped. Sophy stopped too, with eyes that shrank from her.

“Oh----” Anna cried, and hid her face.

The girl walked across the room and paused again in the doorway. From there she flung back: “I wanted it--I chose it. He was good to me--no one ever was so good!”

The door-handle turned, and Anna heard her go.

XXIX

Her first thought was: “He’s going too in a few hours--I needn’t see him again before he leaves...” At that moment the possibility of having to look in Darrow’s face and hear him speak seemed to her more unendurable than anything else she could imagine. Then, on the next wave of feeling, came the desire to confront him at once and wring from him she knew not what: avowal, denial, justification, anything that should open some channel of escape to the flood of her pent-up anguish.

She had told Owen she was tired, and this seemed a sufficient reason for remaining upstairs when the motor came to the door and Miss Painter and Sophy Viner were borne off in it; sufficient also for sending word to Madame de Chantelle that she would not come down till after luncheon. Having despatched her maid with this message, she lay down on her sofa and stared before her into darkness...

She had been unhappy before, and the vision of old miseries flocked like hungry ghosts about her fresh pain: she recalled her youthful disappointment, the failure of her marriage, the wasted years that followed; but those were negative sorrows, denials and postponements of life. She seemed in no way related to their shadowy victim, she who was stretched on this fiery rack of the irreparable. She had suffered before--yes, but lucidly, reflectively, elegiacally: now she was suffering as a hurt animal must, blindly, furiously, with the single fierce animal longing that the awful pain should stop...

She heard her maid knock, and she hid her face and made no answer. The knocking continued, and the discipline of habit at length made her lift her head, compose her face and hold out her hand to the note the woman brought her. It was a word from Darrow--“May I see you?”--and she said at once, in a voice that sounded thin and empty: “Ask Mr. Darrow to come up.”

The maid enquired if she wished to have her hair smoothed first, and she answered that it didn’t matter; but when the door had closed, the instinct of pride drew her to her feet and she looked at herself in the glass above the mantelpiece and passed her hands over her hair. Her eyes were burning and her face looked tired and thinner; otherwise she could see no change in her appearance, and she wondered that at such a moment her body should seem as unrelated to the self that writhed within her as if it had been a statue or a picture.

The maid reopened the door to show in Darrow, and he paused a moment on the threshold, as if waiting for Anna to speak. He was extremely pale, but he looked neither ashamed nor uncertain, and she said to herself, with a perverse thrill of appreciation: “He’s as proud as I am.”

Aloud she asked: “You wanted to see me?”

“Naturally,” he replied in a grave voice.

“Don’t! It’s useless. I know everything. Nothing you can say will help.”

At the direct affirmation he turned even paler, and his eyes, which he kept resolutely fixed on her, confessed his misery.

“You allow me no voice in deciding that?”

“Deciding what?”

“That there’s nothing more to be said?” He waited for her to answer, and then went on: “I don’t even know what you mean by ‘everything’.”

“Oh, I don’t know what more there is! I know enough. I implored her to deny it, and she couldn’t...What can you and I have to say to each other?” Her voice broke into a sob. The animal anguish was upon her again--just a blind cry against her pain!

Darrow kept his head high and his eyes steady. “It must be as you wish; and yet it’s not like you to be afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“To talk things out--to face them.”

“It’s for YOU to face this--not me!”

“All I ask is to face it--but with you.” Once more he paused. “Won’t you tell me what Miss Viner told you?”

“Oh, she’s generous--to the utmost!” The pain caught her like a physical throe. It suddenly came to her how the girl must have loved him to be so generous--what memories there must be between them!

“Oh, go, please go. It’s too horrible. Why should I have to see you?” she stammered, lifting her hands to her eyes.

With her face hidden she waited to hear him move away, to hear the door open and close again, as, a few hours earlier, it had opened and closed on Sophy Viner. But Darrow made no sound or movement: he too was waiting. Anna felt a thrill of resentment: his presence was an outrage on her sorrow, a humiliation to her pride. It was strange that he should wait for her to tell him so!

“You want me to leave Givre?” he asked at length. She made no answer, and he went on: “Of course I’ll do as you wish; but if I go now am I not to see you again?”

His voice was firm: his pride was answering her pride!

She faltered: “You must see it’s useless----”

“I might remind you that you’re dismissing me without a hearing----”

“Without a hearing? I’ve heard you both!”

----“but I won’t,” he continued, “remind you of that, or of anything or any one but Owen.”

“Owen?”

“Yes; if we could somehow spare him----”

She had dropped her hands and turned her startled eyes on him. It seemed to her an age since she had thought of Owen!

“You see, don’t you,” Darrow continued, “that if you send me away now----”

She interrupted: “Yes, I see----” and there was a long silence between them. At length she said, very low: “I don’t want any one else to suffer as I’m suffering...”

“Owen knows I meant to leave tomorrow,” Darrow went on. “Any sudden change of plan may make him think...”

Oh, she saw his inevitable logic: the horror of it was on every side of her! It had seemed possible to control her grief and face Darrow calmly while she was upheld by the belief that this was their last hour together, that after he had passed out of the room there would be no fear of seeing him again, no fear that his nearness, his look, his voice, and all the unseen influences that flowed from him, would dissolve her soul to weakness. But her courage failed at the idea of having to conspire with him to shield Owen, of keeping up with him, for Owen’s sake, a feint of union and felicity. To live at Darrow’s side in seeming intimacy and harmony for another twenty-four hours seemed harder than to live without him for all the rest of her days. Her strength failed her, and she threw herself down and buried her sobs in the cushions where she had so often hidden a face aglow with happiness.

“Anna----” His voice was close to her. “Let me talk to you quietly. It’s not worthy of either of us to be afraid.”

Words of endearment would have offended her; but her heart rose at the call to her courage.

“I’ve no defense to make,” he went on. “The facts are miserable enough; but at least I want you to see them as they are. Above all, I want you to know the truth about Miss Viner----”

The name sent the blood to Anna’s forehead. She raised her head and faced him. “Why should I know more of her than what she’s told me? I never wish to hear her name again!”

“It’s because you feel about her in that way that I ask you--in the name of common charity--to let me give you the facts as they are, and not as you’ve probably imagined them.”

“I’ve told you I don’t think uncharitably of her. I don’t want to think of her at all!”

“That’s why I tell you you’re afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Yes. You’ve always said you wanted, above all, to look at life, at the human problem, as it is, without fear and without hypocrisy; and it’s not always a pleasant thing to look at.” He broke off, and then began again: “Don’t think this a plea for myself! I don’t want to say a word to lessen my offense. I don’t want to talk of myself at all. Even if I did, I probably couldn’t make you understand--I don’t, myself, as I look back. Be just to me--it’s your right; all I ask you is to be generous to Miss Viner...”

She stood up trembling. “You’re free to be as generous to her as you please!”

“Yes: you’ve made it clear to me that I’m free. But there’s nothing I can do for her that will help her half as much as your understanding her would.”

“Nothing you can do for her? You can marry her!”

His face hardened. “You certainly couldn’t wish her a worse fate!”

“It must have been what she expected ... relied on...” He was silent, and she broke out: “Or what is she? What are you? It’s too horrible! On your way here ... to ME...” She felt the tears in her throat and stopped.

“That was it,” he said bluntly. She stared at him.

“I was on my way to you--after repeated delays and postponements of your own making. At the very last you turned me back with a mere word--and without explanation. I waited for a letter; and none came. I’m not saying this to justify myself. I’m simply trying to make you understand. I felt hurt and bitter and bewildered. I thought you meant to give me up. And suddenly, in my way, I found some one to be sorry for, to be of use to. That, I swear to you, was the way it began. The rest was a moment’s folly ... a flash of madness ... as such things are. We’ve never seen each other since...”

Anna was looking at him coldly. “You sufficiently describe her in saying that!”

“Yes, if you measure her by conventional standards--which is what you always declare you never do.”

“Conventional standards? A girl who----” She was checked by a sudden rush of almost physical repugnance. Suddenly she broke out: “I always thought her an adventuress!”

“Always?”

“I don’t mean always ... but after you came...”

“She’s not an adventuress.”

“You mean that she professes to act on the new theories? The stuff that awful women rave about on platforms?”

“Oh, I don’t think she pretended to have a theory----”

“She hadn’t even that excuse?”

“She had the excuse of her loneliness, her unhappiness--of miseries and humiliations that a woman like you can’t even guess. She had nothing to look back to but indifference or unkindness--nothing to look forward to but anxiety. She saw I was sorry for her and it touched her. She made too much of it--she exaggerated it. I ought to have seen the danger, but I didn’t. There’s no possible excuse for what I did.”

Anna listened to him in speechless misery. Every word he spoke threw back a disintegrating light on their own past. He had come to her with an open face and a clear conscience--come to her from this! If his security was the security of falsehood it was horrible; if it meant that he had forgotten, it was worse. She would have liked to stop her ears, to close her eyes, to shut out every sight and sound and suggestion of a world in which such things could be; and at the same time she was tormented by the desire to know more, to understand better, to feel herself less ignorant and inexpert in matters which made so much of the stuff of human experience. What did he mean by “a moment’s folly, a flash of madness”? How did people enter on such adventures, how pass out of them without more visible traces of their havoc? Her imagination recoiled from the vision of a sudden debasing familiarity: it seemed to her that her thoughts would never again be pure...

“I swear to you,” she heard Darrow saying, “it was simply that, and nothing more.”

She wondered at his composure, his competence, at his knowing so exactly what to say. No doubt men often had to make such explanations: they had the formulas by heart...A leaden lassitude descended on her. She passed from flame and torment into a colourless cold world where everything surrounding her seemed equally indifferent and remote. For a moment she simply ceased to feel.

She became aware that Darrow was waiting for her to speak, and she made an effort to represent to herself the meaning of what he had just said; but her mind was as blank as a blurred mirror. Finally she brought out: “I don’t think I understand what you’ve told me.”

“No; you don’t understand,” he returned with sudden bitterness; and on his lips the charge of incomprehension seemed an offense to her.

“I don’t want to--about such things!”

He answered almost harshly: “Don’t be afraid ... you never will...” and for an instant they faced each other like enemies. Then the tears swelled in her throat at his reproach.

“You mean I don’t feel things--I’m too hard?”

“No: you’re too high ... too fine ... such things are too far from you.”

He paused, as if conscious of the futility of going on with whatever he had meant to say, and again, for a short space, they confronted each other, no longer as enemies--so it seemed to her--but as beings of different language who had forgotten the few words they had learned of each other’s speech.

Darrow broke the silence. “It’s best, on all accounts, that I should stay till tomorrow; but I needn’t intrude on you; we needn’t meet again alone. I only want to be sure I know your wishes.” He spoke the short sentences in a level voice, as though he were summing up the results of a business conference.

Anna looked at him vaguely. “My wishes?”

“As to Owen----”

At that she started. “They must never meet again!”

“It’s not likely they will. What I meant was, that it depends on you to spare him...”

She answered steadily: “He shall never know,” and after another interval Darrow said: “This is good-bye, then.”

At the word she seemed to understand for the first time whither the flying moments had been leading them. Resentment and indignation died down, and all her consciousness resolved itself into the mere visual sense that he was there before her, near enough for her to lift her hand and touch him, and that in another instant the place where he stood would be empty.

She felt a mortal weakness, a craven impulse to cry out to him to stay, a longing to throw herself into his arms, and take refuge there from the unendurable anguish he had caused her. Then the vision called up another thought: “I shall never know what that girl has known...” and the recoil of pride flung her back on the sharp edges of her anguish.

“Good-bye,” she said, in dread lest he should read her face; and she stood motionless, her head high, while he walked to the door and went out.