“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 stepson’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 stepson, 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…
