hair grew on her forehead and at the nape, her steady gaze when he spoke, the grave freedom of her gait and gestures. He recalled every detail of her face, the fine veinings of the temples, the bluish-brown shadows in her upper lids, and the way the reflections of two stars seemed to form and break up in her eyes when he held her close to him…
If he had had any doubt as to the nature of her feeling for him those dissolving stars would have allayed it. She was reserved, she was shy even, was what the shallow and effusive would call “cold”. She was like a picture so hung that it can be seen only at a certain angle: an angle known to no one but its possessor. The thought flattered his sense of possessorship…He felt that the smile on his lips would have been fatuous had it had a witness. He was thinking of her look when she had questioned him about his meeting with Owen at the theatre: less of her words than of her look, and of the effort the question cost her: the reddening of her cheek, the deepening of the strained line between her brows, the way her eyes sought shelter and then turned and drew on him. Pride and passion were in the conflict—magnificent qualities in a wife! The sight almost made up for his momentary embarrassment at the rousing of a memory which had no place in his present picture of himself.
Yes! It was worth a good deal to watch that fight between her instinct and her intelligence, and know one’s self the object of the struggle…
Mingled with these sensations were considerations of another order. He reflected with satisfaction that she was the kind of woman with whom one would like to be seen in public. It would be distinctly agreeable to follow her into drawing-rooms, to walk after her down the aisle of a theatre, to get in and out of trains with her, to say “my wife” of her to all sorts of people. He draped these details in the handsome phrase “She’s a woman to be proud of”, and felt that this fact somehow justified and ennobled his instinctive boyish satisfaction in loving her.
He stood up, rambled across the room and leaned out for a while into the starry night. Then he dropped again into his armchair with a sigh of deep content.
“Oh, hang it,” he suddenly exclaimed, “it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, anyhow!”
The next day was even better. He felt, and knew she felt, that they had reached a clearer understanding of each other. It was as if, after a swim through bright opposing waves, with a dazzle of sun in their eyes, they had gained an inlet in the shades of a cliff, where they could float on the still surface and gaze far down into the depths.
Now and then, as they walked and talked, he felt a thrill of youthful wonder at the coincidence of their views and their experiences, at the way their minds leapt to the same point in the same instant.
“The old delusion, I suppose,” he smiled to himself. “Will Nature never tire of the trick?”
But he knew it was more than that. There were moments in their talk when he felt, distinctly and unmistakably, the solid ground of friendship underneath the whirling dance of his sensations. “How I should like her if I didn’t love her!” he summed it up, wondering at the miracle of such a union.
In the course of the morning a telegram had come from Owen Leath, announcing that he, his grandmother and Effie would arrive from Dijon that afternoon at four. The station of the main line was eight or ten miles from Givre, and Anna, soon after three, left in the motor to meet the travellers.
When she had gone Darrow started for a walk, planning to get back late, in order that the reunited family might have the end of the afternoon to themselves. He roamed the country-side till long after dark, and the stable-clock of Givre was striking seven as he walked up the avenue to the court.
In the hall, coming down the stairs, he encountered Anna. Her face was serene, and his first glance showed him that Owen had kept his word and that none of her forebodings had been fulfilled.
She had just come down from the school-room, where Effie and the governess were having supper; the little girl, she told him, looked immensely better for her Swiss holiday, but was dropping with sleep after the journey, and too tired to make her habitual appearance in the drawing-room before being put to bed. Madame de Chantelle was resting, but would be down for dinner; and as for Owen, Anna supposed he was off somewhere in the park—he had a passion for prowling about the park at nightfall…
Darrow followed her into the brown room, where the tea-table had been left for him. He declined her offer of tea, but she lingered a moment to tell him that Owen had in fact kept his word, and that Madame de Chantelle had come back in the best of humours, and unsuspicious of the blow about to fall.
“She has enjoyed her month at Ouchy, and it has given her a lot to talk about—her symptoms, and the rival doctors, and the people at the hotel. It seems she met your Ambassadress there, and Lady Wantley, and some other London friends of yours, and she’s heard what she calls ‘delightful things’ about you: she told me to tell you so. She attaches great importance to the fact that your grandmother was an Everard of Albany. She’s prepared to open her arms to you. I don’t know whether it won’t make it harder for poor Owen…the contrast, I mean…There are no Ambassadresses or Everards to vouch for HIS choice! But you’ll help me, won’t you? You’ll help me to help him? Tomorrow I’ll tell you the rest. Now I must rush up and tuck in Effie…”
“Oh, you’ll see, we’ll pull it off for him!” he assured her; “together, we can’t fail to pull it off.”
He stood and watched her with a smile as she fled down the half-lit vista to the hall.
XIV
If Darrow, on entering the drawing-room before dinner, examined its new occupant with unusual interest, it was more on Owen Leath’s account than his own.
Anna’s hints had roused his interest in the lad’s love affair, and he wondered what manner of girl the heroine of the coming conflict might be. He had guessed that Owen’s rebellion symbolized for his step-mother her own long struggle against the Leath conventions, and he understood that if Anna so passionately abetted him it was partly because, as she owned, she wanted his liberation to coincide with hers.
The lady who was to represent, in the impending struggle, the forces of order and tradition was seated by the fire when Darrow entered. Among the flowers and old furniture of the large pale-panelled room, Madame de Chantelle had the inanimate elegance of a figure introduced into a “still-life” to give the scale. And this, Darrow reflected, was exactly what she doubtless regarded as her chief obligation: he was sure she thought a great deal of “measure”, and approved of most things only up to a certain point. She was a woman of sixty, with a figure at once young and old-fashioned. Her fair faded tints, her quaint corseting, the passementerie on her tight-waisted dress, the velvet band on her tapering arm, made her resemble a “carte de visite” photograph of the middle sixties. One saw her, younger but no less invincibly ladylike, leaning on a chair with a fringed back, a curl in her neck, a locket on her tuckered bosom, toward the end of an embossed morocco album beginning with The Beauties of the Second Empire.
She received her daughter-in-law’s suitor with an affability which implied her knowledge and approval of his suit. Darrow had already guessed her to be a person who would instinctively oppose any suggested changes, and then, after one had exhausted one’s main arguments, unexpectedly yield to some small incidental reason, and
