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BOOK III: CHAPTER 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.
Content of BOOK III: CHAPTER XIX [Edith Wharton's novel: The Reef]
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