Chapter VII: Book III: XVII (1)

At dinner that evening Madame de Chantelle’s slender monologue was thrown out over gulfs of silence. Owen was still in the same state of moody abstraction as when Darrow had left him at the piano; and even Anna’s face, to her friend’s vigilant eye, revealed not, perhaps, a personal preoccupation, but a vague sense of impending disturbance.

She smiled, she bore a part in the talk, her eyes dwelt on Darrow’s with their usual deep reliance; but beneath the surface of her serenity his tense perceptions detected a hidden stir.

He was sufficiently self-possessed to tell himself that it was doubtless due to causes with which he was not directly concerned. He knew the question of Owen’s marriage was soon to be raised, and the abrupt alteration in the young man’s mood made it seem probable that he was himself the centre of the atmospheric disturbance. For a moment it occurred to Darrow that Anna might have employed her afternoon in preparing Madame de Chantelle for her grandson’s impending announcement; but a glance at the elder lady’s unclouded brow showed that he must seek elsewhere the clue to Owen’s taciturnity and his step-mother’s concern. Possibly Anna had found reason to change her own attitude in the matter, and had made the change known to Owen. But this, again, was negatived by the fact that, during the afternoon’s shooting, young Leath had been in a mood of almost extravagant expansiveness, and that, from the moment of his late return to the house till just before dinner, there had been, to Darrow’s certain knowledge, no possibility of a private talk between himself and his step-mother.

This obscured, if it narrowed, the field of conjecture; and Darrow’s gropings threw him back on the conclusion that he was probably reading too much significance into the moods of a lad he hardly knew, and who had been described to him as subject to sudden changes of humour. As to Anna’s fancied perturbation, it might simply be due to the fact that she had decided to plead Owen’s cause the next day, and had perhaps already had a glimpse of the difficulties awaiting her. But Darrow knew that he was too deep in his own perplexities to judge the mental state of those about him. It might be, after all, that the variations he felt in the currents of communication were caused by his own inward tremor.

Such, at any rate, was the conclusion he had reached when, shortly after the two ladies left the drawing-room, he bade Owen good-night and went up to his room. Ever since the rapid self-colloquy which had followed on his first sight of Sophy Viner, he had known there were other questions to be faced behind the one immediately confronting him. On the score of that one, at least, his mind, if not easy, was relieved. He had done what was possible to reassure the girl, and she had apparently recognized the sincerity of his intention. He had patched up as decent a conclusion as he could to an incident that should obviously have had no sequel; but he had known all along that with the securing of Miss Viner’s peace of mind only a part of his obligation was discharged, and that with that part his remaining duty was in conflict. It had been his first business to convince the girl that their secret was safe with him; but it was far from easy to square this with the equally urgent obligation of safe-guarding Anna’s responsibility toward her child. Darrow was not much afraid of accidental disclosures. Both he and Sophy Viner had too much at stake not to be on their guard. The fear that beset him was of another kind, and had a profounder source. He wanted to do all he could for the girl, but the fact of having had to urge Anna to confide Effie to her was peculiarly repugnant to him. His own ideas about Sophy Viner were too mixed and indeterminate for him not to feel the risk of such an experiment; yet he found himself in the intolerable position of appearing to press it on the woman he desired above all others to protect...

Till late in the night his thoughts revolved in a turmoil of indecision. His pride was humbled by the discrepancy between what Sophy Viner had been to him and what he had thought of her. This discrepancy, which at the time had seemed to simplify the incident, now turned out to be its most galling complication. The bare truth, indeed, was that he had hardly thought of her at all, either at the time or since, and that he was ashamed to base his judgement of her on his meagre memory of their adventure.

The essential cheapness of the whole affair--as far as his share in it was concerned--came home to him with humiliating distinctness. He would have liked to be able to feel that, at the time at least, he had staked something more on it, and had somehow, in the sequel, had a more palpable loss to show. But the plain fact was that he hadn’t spent a penny on it; which was no doubt the reason of the prodigious score it had since been rolling up. At any rate, beat about the case as he would, it was clear that he owed it to Anna--and incidentally to his own peace of mind--to find some way of securing Sophy Viner’s future without leaving her installed at Givre when he and his wife should depart for their new post.

The night brought no aid to the solving of this problem; but it gave him, at any rate, the clear conviction that no time was to be lost. His first step must be to obtain from Miss Viner the chance of another and calmer talk; and he resolved to seek it at the earliest hour.

He had gathered that Effie’s lessons were preceded by an early scamper in the park, and conjecturing that her governess might be with her he betook himself the next morning to the terrace, whence he wandered on to the gardens and the walks beyond.

The atmosphere was still and pale. The muffled sunlight gleamed like gold tissue through grey gauze, and the beech alleys tapered away to a blue haze blent of sky and forest. It was one of those elusive days when the familiar forms of things seem about to dissolve in a prismatic shimmer.

The stillness was presently broken by joyful barks, and Darrow, tracking the sound, overtook Effie flying down one of the long alleys at the head of her pack. Beyond her he saw Miss Viner seated near the stone-rimmed basin beside which he and Anna had paused on their first walk to the river.

The girl, coming forward at his approach, returned his greeting almost gaily. His first glance showed him that she had regained her composure, and the change in her appearance gave him the measure of her fears. For the first time he saw in her again the sidelong grace that had charmed his eyes in Paris; but he saw it now as in a painted picture.

“Shall we sit down a minute?” he asked, as Effie trotted off.

The girl looked away from him. “I’m afraid there’s not much time; we must be back at lessons at half-past nine.”

“But it’s barely ten minutes past. Let’s at least walk a little way toward the river.”

She glanced down the long walk ahead of them and then back in the direction of the house. “If you like,” she said in a low voice, with one of her quick fluctuations of colour; but instead of taking the way he proposed she turned toward a narrow path which branched off obliquely through the trees.

Darrow was struck, and vaguely troubled, by the change in her look and tone. There was in them an undefinable appeal, whether for help or forbearance he could not tell. Then it occurred to him that there might have been something misleading in his so pointedly seeking her, and he felt a momentary constraint. To ease it he made an abrupt dash at the truth.

“I came out to look for you because our talk of yesterday was so unsatisfactory. I want to hear more about you--about your plans and prospects. I’ve been wondering ever since why you’ve so completely given up the theatre.”

Her face instantly sharpened to distrust. “I had to live,” she said in an off-hand tone.

“I understand perfectly that you should like it here--for a time.” His glance strayed down the gold-roofed windings ahead of them. “It’s delightful: you couldn’t be better placed. Only I wonder a little at your having so completely given up any idea of a different future.”

She waited for a moment before answering: “I suppose I’m less restless than I used to be.”

“It’s certainly natural that you should be less restless here than at Mrs. Murrett’s; yet somehow I don’t seem to see you permanently given up to forming the young.”

“What--exactly--DO you seem to see me permanently given up to? You know you warned me rather emphatically against the theatre.” She threw off the statement without impatience, as though they were discussing together the fate of a third person in whom both were benevolently interested. Darrow considered his reply. “If I did, it was because you so emphatically refused to let me help you to a start.”

She stopped short and faced him “And you think I may let you now?”

Darrow felt the blood in his cheek. He could not understand her attitude--if indeed she had consciously taken one, and her changes of tone did not merely reflect the involuntary alternations of her mood. It humbled him to perceive once more how little he had to guide him in his judgment of her. He said to himself: “If I’d ever cared a straw for her I should know how to avoid hurting her now”--and his insensibility struck him as no better than a vulgar obtuseness. But he had a fixed purpose ahead and could only push on to it.

“I hope, at any rate, you’ll listen to my reasons. There’s been time, on both sides, to think them over since----” He caught himself back and hung helpless on the “since”: whatever words he chose, he seemed to stumble among reminders of their past.

She walked on beside him, her eyes on the ground. “Then I’m to understand--definitely--that you DO renew your offer?” she asked

“With all my heart! If you’ll only let me----”

She raised a hand, as though to check him. “It’s extremely friendly of you--I DO believe you mean it as a friend--but I don’t quite understand why, finding me, as you say, so well placed here, you should show more anxiety about my future than at a time when I was actually, and rather desperately, adrift.”

“Oh, no, not more!”

“If you show any at all, it must, at any rate, be for different reasons.--In fact, it can only be,” she went on, with one of her disconcerting flashes of astuteness, “for one of two reasons; either because you feel you ought to help me, or because, for some reason, you think you owe it to Mrs. Leath to let her know what you know of me.”

Darrow stood still in the path. Behind him he heard Effie’s call, and at the child’s voice he saw Sophy turn her head with the alertness of one who is obscurely on the watch. The look was so fugitive that he could not have said wherein it differed from her normal professional air of having her pupil on her mind.

Effie sprang past them, and Darrow took up the girl’s challenge.

“What you suggest about Mrs. Leath is hardly worth answering. As to my reasons for wanting to help you, a good deal depends on the words one uses to define rather indefinite things. It’s true enough that I want to help you; but the wish isn’t due to ... to any past kindness on your part, but simply to my own interest in you. Why not put it that our friendship gives me the right to intervene for what I believe to be your benefit?”

She took a few hesitating steps and then paused again. Darrow noticed that she had grown pale and that there were rings of shade about her eyes.

“You’ve known Mrs. Leath a long time?” she asked him suddenly.

He paused with a sense of approaching peril. “A long time--yes.”

“She told me you were friends--great friends”

“Yes,” he admitted, “we’re great friends.”

“Then you might naturally feel yourself justified in telling her that you don’t think I’m the right person for Effie.” He uttered a sound of protest, but she disregarded it. “I don’t say you’d LIKE to do it. You wouldn’t: you’d hate it. And the natural alternative would be to try to persuade me that I’d be better off somewhere else than here. But supposing that failed, and you saw I was determined to stay? THEN you might think it your duty to tell Mrs. Leath.”

She laid the case before him with a cold lucidity. “I should, in your place, I believe,” she ended with a little laugh.

“I shouldn’t feel justified in telling her, behind your back, if I thought you unsuited for the place; but I should certainly feel justified,” he rejoined after a pause, “in telling YOU if I thought the place unsuited to you.”

“And that’s what you’re trying to tell me now?”

“Yes; but not for the reasons you imagine.”

“What, then, are your reasons, if you please?”

“I’ve already implied them in advising you not to give up all idea of the theatre. You’re too various, too gifted, too personal, to tie yourself down, at your age, to the dismal drudgery of teaching.”

“And is THAT what you’ve told Mrs. Leath?”

She rushed the question out at him as if she expected to trip him up over it. He was moved by the simplicity of the stratagem.

“I’ve told her exactly nothing,” he replied.

“And what--exactly--do you mean by ‘nothing’? You and she were talking about me when I came into her sitting-room yesterday.”

Darrow felt his blood rise at the thrust.

“I’ve told her, simply, that I’d seen you once or twice at Mrs. Murrett’s.”

“And not that you’ve ever seen me since?”

“And not that I’ve ever seen you since...”

“And she believes you--she completely believes you?”

He uttered a protesting exclamation, and his flush reflected itself in the girl’s cheek.

“Oh, I beg your pardon! I didn’t mean to ask you that.” She halted, and again cast a rapid glance behind and ahead of her. Then she held out her hand. “Well, then, thank you--and let me relieve your fears. I sha’n’t be Effie’s governess much longer.”

At the announcement, Darrow tried to merge his look of relief into the expression of friendly interest with which he grasped her hand. “You really do agree with me, then? And you’ll give me a chance to talk things over with you?”

She shook her head with a faint smile. “I’m not thinking of the stage. I’ve had another offer: that’s all.”

The relief was hardly less great. After all, his personal responsibility ceased with her departure from Givre.

“You’ll tell me about that, then--won’t you?”

Her smile flickered up. “Oh, you’ll hear about it soon...I must catch Effie now and drag her back to the blackboard.”

She walked on for a few yards, and then paused again and confronted him. “I’ve been odious to you--and not quite honest,” she broke out suddenly.

“Not quite honest?” he repeated, caught in a fresh wave of wonder.

“I mean, in seeming not to trust you. It’s come over me again as we talked that, at heart, I’ve always KNOWN I could...”

Her colour rose in a bright wave, and her eyes clung to his for a swift instant of reminder and appeal. For the same space of time the past surged up in him confusedly; then a veil dropped between them.

“Here’s Effie now!” she exclaimed.

He turned and saw the little girl trotting back to them, her hand in Owen Leath’s. Even through the stir of his subsiding excitement Darrow was at once aware of the change effected by the young man’s approach. For a moment Sophy Viner’s cheeks burned redder; then they faded to the paleness of white petals. She lost, however, nothing of the bright bravery which it was her way to turn on the unexpected. Perhaps no one less familiar with her face than Darrow would have discerned the tension of the smile she transferred from himself to Owen Leath, or have remarked that her eyes had hardened from misty grey to a shining darkness. But her observer was less struck by this than by the corresponding change in Owen Leath. The latter, when he came in sight, had been laughing and talking unconcernedly with Effie; but as his eye fell on Miss Viner his expression altered as suddenly as hers.

The change, for Darrow, was less definable; but, perhaps for that reason, it struck him as more sharply significant. Only--just what did it signify? Owen, like Sophy Viner, had the kind of face which seems less the stage on which emotions move than the very stuff they work in. In moments of excitement his odd irregular features seemed to grow fluid, to unmake and remake themselves like the shadows of clouds on a stream. Darrow, through the rapid flight of the shadows, could not seize on any specific indication of feeling: he merely perceived that the young man was unaccountably surprised at finding him with Miss Viner, and that the extent of his surprise might cover all manner of implications.

Darrow’s first idea was that Owen, if he suspected that the conversation was not the result of an accidental encounter, might wonder at his step-mother’s suitor being engaged, at such an hour, in private talk with her little girl’s governess. The thought was so disturbing that, as the three turned back to the house, he was on the point of saying to Owen: “I came out to look for your mother.” But, in the contingency he feared, even so simple a phrase might seem like an awkward attempt at explanation; and he walked on in silence at Miss Viner’s side. Presently he was struck by the fact that Owen Leath and the girl were silent also; and this gave a new turn to his thoughts. Silence may be as variously shaded as speech; and that which enfolded Darrow and his two companions seemed to his watchful perceptions to be quivering with cross-threads of communication. At first he was aware only of those that centred in his own troubled consciousness; then it occurred to him that an equal activity of intercourse was going on outside of it. Something was in fact passing mutely and rapidly between young Leath and Sophy Viner; but what it was, and whither it tended, Darrow, when they reached the house, was but just beginning to divine...

XVIII

Anna Leath, from the terrace, watched the return of the little group.

She looked down on them, as they advanced across the garden, from the serene height of her unassailable happiness. There they were, coming toward her in the mild morning light, her child, her step-son, her promised husband: the three beings who filled her life. She smiled a little at the happy picture they presented, Effie’s gambols encircling it in a moving frame within which the two men came slowly forward in the silence of friendly understanding. It seemed part of the deep intimacy of the scene that they should not be talking to each other, and it did not till afterward strike her as odd that neither of them apparently felt it necessary to address a word to Sophy Viner.

Anna herself, at the moment, was floating in the mid-current of felicity, on a tide so bright and buoyant that she seemed to be one with its warm waves. The first rush of bliss had stunned and dazzled her; but now that, each morning, she woke to the calm certainty of its recurrence, she was growing used to the sense of security it gave.

“I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.” So she phrased it to Darrow, as, later in the morning, they paced the garden-paths together. His answering look gave her the same assurance of safety. The evening before he had seemed preoccupied, and the shadow of his mood had faintly encroached on the great golden orb of their blessedness; but now it was uneclipsed again, and hung above them high and bright as the sun at noon.

Upstairs in her sitting-room, that afternoon, she was thinking of these things. The morning mists had turned to rain, compelling the postponement of an excursion in which the whole party were to have joined. Effie, with her governess, had been despatched in the motor to do some shopping at Francheuil; and Anna had promised Darrow to join him, later in the afternoon, for a quick walk in the rain.

He had gone to his room after luncheon to get some belated letters off his conscience; and when he had left her she had continued to sit in the same place, her hands crossed on her knees, her head slightly bent, in an attitude of brooding retrospection. As she looked back at her past life, it seemed to her to have consisted of one ceaseless effort to pack into each hour enough to fill out its slack folds; but now each moment was like a miser’s bag stretched to bursting with pure gold.

She was roused by the sound of Owen’s step in the gallery outside her room. It paused at her door and in answer to his knock she called out “Come in!”

As the door closed behind him she was struck by his look of pale excitement, and an impulse of compunction made her say: “You’ve come to ask me why I haven’t spoken to your grandmother!” He sent about him a glance vaguely reminding her of the strange look with which Sophy Viner had swept the room the night before; then his brilliant eyes came back to her.

“I’ve spoken to her myself,” he said.

Anna started up, incredulous.

“You’ve spoken to her? When?”

“Just now. I left her to come here.”

Anna’s first feeling was one of annoyance. There was really something comically incongruous in this boyish surrender to impulse on the part of a young man so eager to assume the responsibilities of life. She looked at him with a faintly veiled amusement.

“You asked me to help you and I promised you I would. It was hardly worth while to work out such an elaborate plan of action if you intended to take the matter out of my hands without telling me.”

“Oh, don’t take that tone with me!” he broke out, almost angrily.

“That tone? What tone?” She stared at his quivering face. “I might,” she pursued, still half-laughing, “more properly make that request of YOU!”

Owen reddened and his vehemence suddenly subsided.

“I meant that I HAD to speak--that’s all. You don’t give me a chance to explain...”

She looked at him gently, wondering a little at her own impatience.

“Owen! Don’t I always want to give you every chance? It’s because I DO that I wanted to talk to your grandmother first--that I was waiting and watching for the right moment...”

“The right moment? So was I. That’s why I’ve spoken.” His voice rose again and took the sharp edge it had in moments of high pressure.

His step-mother turned away and seated herself in her sofa-corner. “Oh, my dear, it’s not a privilege to quarrel over! You’ve taken a load off my shoulders. Sit down and tell me all about it.”

He stood before her, irresolute. “I can’t sit down,” he said.

“Walk about, then. Only tell me: I’m impatient.”

His immediate response was to throw himself into the armchair at her side, where he lounged for a moment without speaking, his legs stretched out, his arms locked behind his thrown-back head. Anna, her eyes on his face, waited quietly for him to speak.

“Well--of course it was just what one expected.”

“She takes it so badly, you mean?”

“All the heavy batteries were brought up: my father, Givre, Monsieur de Chantelle, the throne and the altar. Even my poor mother was dragged out of oblivion and armed with imaginary protests.”

Anna sighed out her sympathy. “Well--you were prepared for all that?”

“I thought I was, till I began to hear her say it. Then it sounded so incredibly silly that I told her so.”

“Oh, Owen--Owen!”

“Yes: I know. I was a fool; but I couldn’t help it.”

“And you’ve mortally offended her, I suppose? That’s exactly what I wanted to prevent.” She laid a hand on his shoulder. “You tiresome boy, not to wait and let me speak for you!”

He moved slightly away, so that her hand slipped from its place. “You don’t understand,” he said, frowning.

“I don’t see how I can, till you explain. If you thought the time had come to tell your grandmother, why not have asked me to do it? I had my reasons for waiting; but if you’d told me to speak I should have done so, naturally.”

He evaded her appeal by a sudden turn. “What WERE your reasons for waiting?”

Anna did not immediately answer. Her step-son’s eyes were on her face, and under his gaze she felt a faint disquietude.

“I was feeling my way...I wanted to be absolutely sure...”

“Absolutely sure of what?”

She delayed again for a just perceptible instant. “Why, simply of OUR side of the case.”

“But you told me you were, the other day, when we talked it over before they came back from Ouchy.”

“Oh, my dear--if you think that, in such a complicated matter, every day, every hour, doesn’t more or less modify one’s surest sureness!”

“That’s just what I’m driving at. I want to know what has modified yours.”

She made a slight gesture of impatience. “What does it matter, now the thing’s done? I don’t know that I could give any clear reason...”

He got to his feet and stood looking down on her with a tormented brow. “But it’s absolutely necessary that you should.”

At his tone her impatience flared up. “It’s not necessary that I should give you any explanation whatever, since you’ve taken the matter out of my hands. All I can say is that I was trying to help you: that no other thought ever entered my mind.” She paused a moment and then added: “If you doubted it, you were right to do what you’ve done.”

“Oh, I never doubted YOU!” he retorted, with a fugitive stress on the pronoun. His face had cleared to its old look of trust. “Don’t be offended if I’ve seemed to,” he went on. “I can’t quite explain myself, either ... it’s all a kind of tangle, isn’t it? That’s why I thought I’d better speak at once; or rather why I didn’t think at all, but just suddenly blurted the thing out----”

Anna gave him back his look of conciliation. “Well, the how and why don’t much matter now. The point is how to deal with your grandmother. You’ve not told me what she means to do.”

“Oh, she means to send for Adelaide Painter.”

The name drew a faint note of mirth from him and relaxed both their faces to a smile.

“Perhaps,” Anna added, “it’s really the best thing for us all.”

Owen shrugged his shoulders. “It’s too preposterous and humiliating. Dragging that woman into our secrets----!”

“This could hardly be a secret much longer.”

He had moved to the hearth, where he stood pushing about the small ornaments on the mantel-shelf; but at her answer he turned back to her.

“You haven’t, of course, spoken of it to any one?”

“No; but I intend to now.”

She paused for his reply, and as it did not come she continued: “If Adelaide Painter’s to be told there’s no possible reason why I shouldn’t tell Mr. Darrow.” Owen abruptly set down the little statuette between his fingers. “None whatever: I want every one to know.”

She smiled a little at his over-emphasis, and was about to meet it with a word of banter when he continued, facing her: “You haven’t, as yet, said a word to him?”

“I’ve told him nothing, except what the discussion of our own plans--his and mine--obliged me to: that you were thinking of marrying, and that I wasn’t willing to leave France till I’d done what I could to see you through.”

At her first words the colour had rushed to his forehead; but as she continued she saw his face compose itself and his blood subside.

“You’re a brick, my dear!” he exclaimed.

“You had my word, you know.”

“Yes; yes--I know.” His face had clouded again. “And that’s all--positively all--you’ve ever said to him?”

“Positively all. But why do you ask?”

He had a moment’s embarrassed hesitation. “It was understood, wasn’t it, that my grandmother was to be the first to know?”

“Well--and so she has been, hasn’t she, since you’ve told her?”

He turned back to his restless shifting of the knick-knacks.

“And you’re sure that nothing you’ve said to Darrow could possibly have given him a hint----?”

“Nothing I’ve said to him--certainly.”

He swung about on her. “Why do you put it in that way?”

“In what way?”

“Why--as if you thought some one else might have spoken...”

“Some one else? Who else?” She rose to her feet. “What on earth, my dear boy, can you be driving at?”

“I’m trying to find out whether you think he knows anything definite.”

“Why should I think so? Do YOU?”

“I don’t know. I want to find out.”

She laughed at his obstinate insistence. “To test my veracity, I suppose?” At the sound of a step in the gallery she added: “Here he is--you can ask him yourself.”

She met Darrow’s knock with an invitation to enter, and he came into the room and paused between herself and Owen. She was struck, as he stood there, by the contrast between his happy careless good-looks and her step-son’s frowning agitation.

Darrow met her eyes with a smile. “Am I too soon? Or is our walk given up?”

“No; I was just going to get ready.” She continued to linger between the two, looking slowly from one to the other. “But there’s something we want to tell you first: Owen is engaged to Miss Viner.”

The sense of an indefinable interrogation in Owen’s mind made her, as she spoke, fix her eyes steadily on Darrow.

He had paused just opposite the window, so that, even in the rainy afternoon light, his face was clearly open to her scrutiny. For a second, immense surprise was alone visible on it: so visible that she half turned to her step-son, with a faint smile for his refuted suspicions. Why, she wondered, should Owen have thought that Darrow had already guessed his secret, and what, after all, could be so disturbing to him in this not improbable contingency? At any rate, his doubt must have been dispelled: there was nothing feigned about Darrow’s astonishment. When her eyes turned back to him he was already crossing to Owen with outstretched hand, and she had, through an unaccountable faint flutter of misgiving, a mere confused sense of their exchanging the customary phrases. Her next perception was of Owen’s tranquillized look, and of his smiling return of Darrow’s congratulatory grasp. She had the eerie feeling of having been overswept by a shadow which there had been no cloud to cast...

A moment later Owen had left the room and she and Darrow were alone. He had turned away to the window and stood staring out into the down-pour.

“You’re surprised at Owen’s news?” she asked.

“Yes: I am surprised,” he answered.

“You hadn’t thought of its being Miss Viner?”

“Why should I have thought of Miss Viner?”

“You see now why I wanted so much to find out what you knew about her.” He made no comment, and she pursued: “Now that you DO know it’s she, if there’s anything----”

He moved back into the room and went up to her. His face was serious, with a slight shade of annoyance. “What on earth should there be? As I told you, I’ve never in my life heard any one say two words about Miss Viner.”

Anna made no answer and they continued to face each other without moving. For the moment she had ceased to think about Sophy Viner and Owen: the only thought in her mind was that Darrow was alone with her, close to her, and that, for the first time, their hands and lips had not met.

He glanced back doubtfully at the window. “It’s pouring. Perhaps you’d rather not go out?”

She hesitated, as if waiting for him to urge her. “I suppose I’d better not. I ought to go at once to my mother-in-law--Owen’s just been telling her,” she said.

“Ah.” Darrow hazarded a smile. “That accounts for my having, on my way up, heard some one telephoning for Miss Painter!”

At the allusion they laughed together, vaguely, and Anna moved toward the door. He held it open for her and followed her out.

XIX

He left her at the door of Madame de Chantelle’s sitting-room, and plunged out alone into the rain.

The wind flung about the stripped tree-tops of the avenue and dashed the stinging streams into his face. He walked to the gate and then turned into the high-road and strode along in the open, buffeted by slanting gusts. The evenly ridged fields were a blurred waste of mud, and the russet coverts which he and Owen had shot through the day before shivered desolately against a driving sky.

Darrow walked on and on, indifferent to the direction he was taking. His thoughts were tossing like the tree-tops. Anna’s announcement had not come to him as a complete surprise: that morning, as he strolled back to the house with Owen Leath and Miss Viner, he had had a momentary intuition of the truth. But it had been no more than an intuition, the merest faint cloud-puff of surmise; and now it was an attested fact, darkening over the whole sky.

In respect of his own attitude, he saw at once that the discovery made no appreciable change. If he had been bound to silence before, he was no less bound to it now; the only difference lay in the fact that what he had just learned had rendered his bondage more intolerable. Hitherto he had felt for Sophy Viner’s defenseless state a sympathy profoundly tinged with compunction. But now he was half-conscious of an obscure indignation against her. Superior as he had fancied himself to ready-made judgments, he was aware of cherishing the common doubt as to the disinterestedness of the woman who tries to rise above her past. No wonder she had been sick with fear on meeting him! It was in his power to do her more harm than he had dreamed...

Assuredly he did not want to harm her; but he did desperately want to prevent her marrying Owen Leath. He tried to get away from the feeling, to isolate and exteriorize it sufficiently to see what motives it was made of; but it remained a mere blind motion of his blood, the instinctive recoil from the thing that no amount of arguing can make “straight.” His tramp, prolonged as it was, carried him no nearer to enlightenment; and after trudging through two or three sallow mud-stained villages he turned about and wearily made his way back to Givre. As he walked up the black avenue, making for the lights that twinkled through its pitching branches, he had a sudden realisation of his utter helplessness. He might think and combine as he would; but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do...

He dropped his wet coat in the vestibule and began to mount the stairs to his room. But on the landing he was overtaken by a sober-faced maid who, in tones discreetly lowered, begged him to be so kind as to step, for a moment, into the Marquise’s sitting-room. Somewhat disconcerted by the summons, he followed its bearer to the door at which, a couple of hours earlier, he had taken leave of Mrs. Leath. It opened to admit him to a large lamp-lit room which he immediately perceived to be empty; and the fact gave him time to note, even through his disturbance of mind, the interesting degree to which Madame de Chantelle’s apartment “dated” and completed her. Its looped and corded curtains, its purple satin upholstery, the Sevres jardinieres, the rosewood fire-screen, the little velvet tables edged with lace and crowded with silver knick-knacks and simpering miniatures, reconstituted an almost perfect setting for the blonde beauty of the ’sixties. Darrow wondered that Fraser Leath’s filial respect should have prevailed over his aesthetic scruples to the extent of permitting such an anachronism among the eighteenth century graces of Givre; but a moment’s reflection made it clear that, to its late owner, the attitude would have seemed exactly in the traditions of the place.

Madame de Chantelle’s emergence from an inner room snatched Darrow from these irrelevant musings. She was already beaded and bugled for the evening, and, save for a slight pinkness of the eye-lids, her elaborate appearance revealed no mark of agitation; but Darrow noticed that, in recognition of the solemnity of the occasion, she pinched a lace handkerchief between her thumb and forefinger.

She plunged at once into the centre of the difficulty, appealing to him, in the name of all the Everards, to descend there with her to the rescue of her darling. She wasn’t, she was sure, addressing herself in vain to one whose person, whose “tone,” whose traditions so brilliantly declared his indebtedness to the principles she besought him to defend. Her own reception of Darrow, the confidence she had at once accorded him, must have shown him that she had instinctively felt their unanimity of sentiment on these fundamental questions. She had in fact recognized in him the one person whom, without pain to her maternal piety, she could welcome as her son’s successor; and it was almost as to Owen’s father that she now appealed to Darrow to aid in rescuing the wretched boy.

“Don’t think, please, that I’m casting the least reflection on Anna, or showing any want of sympathy for her, when I say that I consider her partly responsible for what’s happened. Anna is ‘modern’--I believe that’s what it’s called when you read unsettling books and admire hideous pictures. Indeed,” Madame de Chantelle continued, leaning confidentially forward, “I myself have always more or less lived in that atmosphere: my son, you know, was very revolutionary. Only he didn’t, of course, apply his ideas: they were purely intellectual. That’s what dear Anna has always failed to understand. And I’m afraid she’s created the same kind of confusion in Owen’s mind--led him to mix up things you read about with things you do...You know, of course, that she sides with him in this wretched business?”

Developing at length upon this theme, she finally narrowed down to the point of Darrow’s intervention. “My grandson, Mr. Darrow, calls me illogical and uncharitable because my feelings toward Miss Viner have changed since I’ve heard this news. Well! You’ve known her, it appears, for some years: Anna tells me you used to see her when she was a companion, or secretary or something, to a dreadfully vulgar Mrs. Murrett. And I ask you as a friend, I ask you as one of US, to tell me if you think a girl who has had to knock about the world in that kind of position, and at the orders of all kinds of people, is fitted to be Owen’s wife. I’m not implying anything against her! I LIKED the girl, Mr. Darrow...But what’s that got to do with it? I don’t want her to marry my grandson. If I’d been looking for a wife for Owen, I shouldn’t have applied to the Farlows to find me one. That’s what Anna won’t understand; and what you must help me to make her see.”

Darrow, to this appeal, could oppose only the repeated assurance of his inability to interfere. He tried to make Madame de Chantelle see that the very position he hoped to take in the household made his intervention the more hazardous. He brought up the usual arguments, and sounded the expected note of sympathy; but Madame de Chantelle’s alarm had dispelled her habitual imprecision, and, though she had not many reasons to advance, her argument clung to its point like a frightened sharp-clawed animal.

“Well, then,” she summed up, in response to his repeated assertions that he saw no way of helping her, “you can, at least, even if you won’t say a word to the others, tell me frankly and fairly--and quite between ourselves--your personal opinion of Miss Viner, since you’ve known her so much longer than we have.”

He protested that, if he had known her longer, he had known her much less well, and that he had already, on this point, convinced Anna of his inability to pronounce an opinion.

Madame de Chantelle drew a deep sigh of intelligence. “Your opinion of Mrs. Murrett is enough! I don’t suppose you pretend to conceal THAT? And heaven knows what other unspeakable people she’s been mixed up with. The only friends she can produce are called Hoke...Don’t try to reason with me, Mr. Darrow. There are feelings that go deeper than facts...And I KNOW she thought of studying for the stage...” Madame de Chantelle raised the corner of her lace handkerchief to her eyes. “I’m old-fashioned--like my furniture,” she murmured. “And I thought I could count on you, Mr. Darrow...”

When Darrow, that night, regained his room, he reflected with a flash of irony that each time he entered it he brought a fresh troop of perplexities to trouble its serene seclusion. Since the day after his arrival, only forty-eight hours before, when he had set his window open to the night, and his hopes had seemed as many as its stars, each evening had brought its new problem and its renewed distress. But nothing, as yet, had approached the blank misery of mind with which he now set himself to face the fresh questions confronting him.

Sophy Viner had not shown herself at dinner, so that he had had no glimpse of her in her new character, and no means of divining the real nature of the tie between herself and Owen Leath. One thing, however, was clear: whatever her real feelings were, and however much or little she had at stake, if she had made up her mind to marry Owen she had more than enough skill and tenacity to defeat any arts that poor Madame de Chantelle could oppose to her.

Darrow himself was in fact the only person who might possibly turn her from her purpose: Madame de Chantelle, at haphazard, had hit on the surest means of saving Owen--if to prevent his marriage were to save him! Darrow, on this point, did not pretend to any fixed opinion; one feeling alone was clear and insistent in him: he did not mean, if he could help it, to let the marriage take place.

How he was to prevent it he did not know: to his tormented imagination every issue seemed closed. For a fantastic instant he was moved to follow Madame de Chantelle’s suggestion and urge Anna to withdraw her approval. If his reticence, his efforts to avoid the subject, had not escaped her, she had doubtless set them down to the fact of his knowing more, and thinking less, of Sophy Viner than he had been willing to admit; and he might take advantage of this to turn her mind gradually from the project. Yet how do so without betraying his insincerity? If he had had nothing to hide he could easily have said: “It’s one thing to know nothing against the girl, it’s another to pretend that I think her a good match for Owen.” But could he say even so much without betraying more? It was not Anna’s questions, or his answers to them, that he feared, but what might cry aloud in the intervals between them. He understood now that ever since Sophy Viner’s arrival at Givre he had felt in Anna the lurking sense of something unexpressed, and perhaps inexpressible, between the girl and himself...When at last he fell asleep he had fatalistically committed his next step to the chances of the morrow.

The first that offered itself was an encounter with Mrs. Leath as he descended the stairs the next morning. She had come down already hatted and shod for a dash to the park lodge, where one of the gatekeeper’s children had had an accident. In her compact dark dress she looked more than usually straight and slim, and her face wore the pale glow it took on at any call on her energy: a kind of warrior brightness that made her small head, with its strong chin and close-bound hair, like that of an amazon in a frieze.

It was their first moment alone since she had left him, the afternoon before, at her mother-in-law’s door; and after a few words about the injured child their talk inevitably reverted to Owen.

Anna spoke with a smile of her “scene” with Madame de Chantelle, who belonged, poor dear, to a generation when “scenes” (in the ladylike and lachrymal sense of the term) were the tribute which sensibility was expected to pay to the unusual. Their conversation had been, in every detail, so exactly what Anna had foreseen that it had clearly not made much impression on her; but she was eager to know the result of Darrow’s encounter with her mother-in-law.

“She told me she’d sent for you: she always ‘sends for’ people in emergencies. That again, I suppose, is DE L’EPOQUE. And failing Adelaide Painter, who can’t get here till this afternoon, there was no one but poor you to turn to.”

She put it all lightly, with a lightness that seemed to his tight-strung nerves slightly, undefinably over-done. But he was so aware of his own tension that he wondered, the next moment, whether anything would ever again seem to him quite usual and insignificant and in the common order of things.

As they hastened on through the drizzle in which the storm of the night was weeping itself out, Anna drew close under his umbrella, and at the pressure of her arm against his he recalled his walk up the Dover pier with Sophy Viner. The memory gave him a startled vision of the inevitable occasions of contact, confidence, familiarity, which his future relationship to the girl would entail, and the countless chances of betrayal that every one of them involved.

“Do tell me just what you said,” he heard Anna pleading; and with sudden resolution he affirmed: “I quite understand your mother-in-law’s feeling as she does.”

The words, when uttered, seemed a good deal less significant than they had sounded to his inner ear; and Anna replied without surprise: “Of course. It’s inevitable that she should. But we shall bring her round in time.” Under the dripping dome she raised her face to his. “Don’t you remember what you said the day before yesterday? ‘Together we can’t fail to pull it off for him!’ I’ve told Owen that, so you’re pledged and there’s no going back.”

The day before yesterday! Was it possible that, no longer ago, life had seemed a sufficiently simple business for a sane man to hazard such assurances?

“Anna,” he questioned her abruptly, “why are you so anxious for this marriage?”

She stopped short to face him. “Why? But surely I’ve explained to you--or rather I’ve hardly had to, you seemed so in sympathy with my reasons!”

“I didn’t know, then, who it was that Owen wanted to marry.”

The words were out with a spring and he felt a clearer air in his brain. But her logic hemmed him in.

“You knew yesterday; and you assured me then that you hadn’t a word to say----”

“Against Miss Viner?” The name, once uttered, sounded on and on in his ears. “Of course not. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that I think her a good match for Owen.”

Anna made no immediate answer. When she spoke it was to question: “Why don’t you think her a good match for Owen?”

“Well--Madame de Chantelle’s reasons seem to me not quite as negligible as you think.”

“You mean the fact that she’s been Mrs. Murrett’s secretary, and that the people who employed her before were called Hoke? For, as far as Owen and I can make out, these are the gravest charges against her.”

“Still, one can understand that the match is not what Madame de Chantelle had dreamed of.”

“Oh, perfectly--if that’s all you mean.” The lodge was in sight, and she hastened her step. He strode on beside her in silence, but at the gate she checked him with the question: “Is it really all you mean?”

“Of course,” he heard himself declare.

“Oh, then I think I shall convince you--even if I can’t, like Madame de Chantelle, summon all the Everards to my aid!” She lifted to him the look of happy laughter that sometimes brushed her with a gleam of spring.

Darrow watched her hasten along the path between the dripping chrysanthemums and enter the lodge. After she had gone in he paced up and down outside in the drizzle, waiting to learn if she had any message to send back to the house; and after the lapse of a few minutes she came out again.

The child, she said, was badly, though not dangerously, hurt, and the village doctor, who was already on hand, had asked that the surgeon, already summoned from Francheuil, should be told to bring with him certain needful appliances. Owen had started by motor to fetch the surgeon, but there was still time to communicate with the latter by telephone. The doctor furthermore begged for an immediate provision of such bandages and disinfectants as Givre itself could furnish, and Anna bade Darrow address himself to Miss Viner, who would know where to find the necessary things, and would direct one of the servants to bicycle with them to the lodge.

Darrow, as he hurried off on this errand, had at once perceived the opportunity it offered of a word with Sophy Viner. What that word was to be he did not know; but now, if ever, was the moment to make it urgent and conclusive. It was unlikely that he would again have such a chance of unobserved talk with her.

He had supposed he should find her with her pupil in the school-room; but he learned from a servant that Effie had gone to Francheuil with her step-brother, and that Miss Viner was still in her room. Darrow sent her word that he was the bearer of a message from the lodge, and a moment later he heard her coming down the stairs.

XX

For a second, as she approached him, the quick tremor of her glance showed her all intent on the same thought as himself. He transmitted his instructions with mechanical precision, and she answered in the same tone, repeating his words with the intensity of attention of a child not quite sure of understanding. Then she disappeared up the stairs.

Darrow lingered on in the hall, not knowing if she meant to return, yet inwardly sure she would. At length he saw her coming down in her hat and jacket. The rain still streaked the window panes, and, in order to say something, he said: “You’re not going to the lodge yourself?”

“I’ve sent one of the men ahead with the things; but I thought Mrs. Leath might need me.”

“She didn’t ask for you,” he returned, wondering how he could detain her; but she answered decidedly: “I’d better go.”

He held open the door, picked up his umbrella and followed her out. As they went down the steps she glanced back at him. “You’ve forgotten your mackintosh.”

“I sha’n’t need it.”

She had no umbrella, and he opened his and held it out to her. She rejected it with a murmur of thanks and walked on through the thin drizzle, and he kept the umbrella over his own head, without offering to shelter her.

Rapidly and in silence they crossed the court and began to walk down the avenue. They had traversed a third of its length before Darrow said abruptly: “Wouldn’t it have been fairer, when we talked together yesterday, to tell me what I’ve just heard from Mrs. Leath?”

“Fairer----?” She stopped short with a startled look.

“If I’d known that your future was already settled I should have spared you my gratuitous suggestions.”

She walked on, more slowly, for a yard or two. “I couldn’t speak yesterday. I meant to have told you today.”

“Oh, I’m not reproaching you for your lack of confidence. Only, if you HAD told me, I should have been more sure of your really meaning what you said to me yesterday.”