"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.
Chapter XIX
H
e 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."
