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BOOK III: CHAPTER XXII
It was not until late that afternoon that Darrow could claim
his postponed hour with Anna. When at last he found her
alone in her sitting-room it was with a sense of liberation
so great that he sought no logical justification of it. He
simply felt that all their destinies were in Miss Painter's
grasp, and that, resistance being useless, he could only
enjoy the sweets of surrender.
Anna herself seemed as happy, and for more explicable
reasons. She had assisted, after luncheon, at another
debate between Madame de Chantelle and her confidant, and
had surmised, when she withdrew from it, that victory was
permanently perched on Miss Painter's banners.
"I don't know how she does it, unless it's by the dead
weight of her convictions. She detests the French so that
she'd back up Owen even if she knew nothing--or knew too
much--of Miss Viner. She somehow regards the match as a
protest against the corruption of European morals. I told
Owen that was his great chance, and he's made the most of
it."
"What a tactician you are! You make me feel that I hardly
know the rudiments of diplomacy," Darrow smiled at her,
abandoning himself to a perilous sense of well-being.
She gave him back his smile. "I'm afraid I think nothing
short of my own happiness is worth wasting any diplomacy
on!"
"That's why I mean to resign from the service of my
country," he rejoined with a laugh of deep content.
The feeling that both resistance and apprehension were vain
was working like wine in his veins. He had done what he
could to deflect the course of events: now he could only
stand aside and take his chance of safety. Underneath this
fatalistic feeling was the deep sense of relief that he had,
after all, said and done nothing that could in the least
degree affect the welfare of Sophy Viner. That fact took a
millstone off his neck.
Meanwhile he gave himself up once more to the joy of Anna's
presence. They had not been alone together for two long
days, and he had the lover's sense that he had forgotten, or
at least underestimated, the strength of the spell she cast.
Once more her eyes and her smile seemed to bound his world.
He felt that their light would always move with him as the
sunset moves before a ship at sea.
The next day his sense of security was increased by a
decisive incident. It became known to the expectant
household that Madame de Chantelle had yielded to the
tremendous impact of Miss Painter's determination and that
Sophy Viner had been "sent for" to the purple satin sitting-
room.
At luncheon, Owen's radiant countenance proclaimed the happy
sequel, and Darrow, when the party had moved back to the
oak-room for coffee, deemed it discreet to wander out alone
to the terrace with his cigar. The conclusion of Owen's
romance brought his own plans once more to the front. Anna
had promised that she would consider dates and settle
details as soon as Madame de Chantelle and her grandson had
been reconciled, and Darrow was eager to go into the
question at once, since it was necessary that the
preparations for his marriage should go forward as rapidly
as possible. Anna, he knew, would not seek any farther
pretext for delay; and he strolled up and down contentedly
in the sunshine, certain that she would come out and
reassure him as soon as the reunited family had claimed its
due share of her attention.
But when she finally joined him her first word was for the
younger lovers.
"I want to thank you for what you've done for Owen," she
began, with her happiest smile.
"Who--I?" he laughed. "Are you confusing me with Miss
Painter?"
"Perhaps I ought to say for ME," she corrected herself.
"You've been even more of a help to us than Adelaide."
"My dear child! What on earth have I done?"
"You've managed to hide from Madame de Chantelle that you
don't really like poor Sophy."
Darrow felt the pallour in his cheek. "Not like her? What
put such an idea into your head?"
"Oh, it's more than an idea--it's a feeling. But what
difference does it make, after all? You saw her in such a
different setting that it's natural you should be a little
doubtful. But when you know her better I'm sure you'll feel
about her as I do."
"It's going to be hard for me not to feel about everything
as you do."
"Well, then--please begin with my daughter-in-law!"
He gave her back in the same tone of banter: "Agreed: if you
ll agree to feel as I do about the pressing necessity of our
getting married."
"I want to talk to you about that too. You don't know what
a weight is off my mind! With Sophy here for good, I shall
feel so differently about leaving Effie. I've seen much
more accomplished governesses--to my cost!--but I've never
seen a young thing more gay and kind and human. You must
have noticed, though you've seen them so little together,
how Effie expands when she's with her. And that, you know,
is what I want. Madame de Chantelle will provide the
necessary restraint." She clasped her hands on his arm.
"Yes, I'm ready to go with you now. But first of all--this
very moment!--you must come with me to Effie. She knows, of
course, nothing of what's been happening; and I want her to
be told first about YOU."
Effie, sought throughout the house, was presently traced to
the school-room, and thither Darrow mounted with Anna. He
had never seen her so alight with happiness, and he had
caught her buoyancy of mood. He kept repeating to himself:
"It's over--it's over," as if some monstrous midnight
hallucination had been routed by the return of day.
As they approached the school-room door the terrier's barks
came to them through laughing remonstrances.
"She's giving him his dinner," Anna whispered, her hand in
Darrow's.
"Don't forget the gold-fish!" they heard another voice call
out.
Darrow halted on the threshold. "Oh--not now!"
"Not now?"
"I mean--she'd rather have you tell her first. I'll wait
for you both downstairs."
He was aware that she glanced at him intently. "As you
please. I'll bring her down at once."
She opened the door, and as she went in he heard her say:
"No, Sophy, don't go! I want you both."
The rest of Darrow's day was a succession of empty and
agitating scenes. On his way down to Givre, before he had
seen Effie Leath, he had pictured somewhat sentimentally the
joy of the moment when he should take her in his arms and
receive her first filial kiss. Everything in him that
egotistically craved for rest, stability, a comfortably
organized middle-age, all the home-building instincts of the
man who has sufficiently wooed and wandered, combined to
throw a charm about the figure of the child who might--who
should--have been his. Effie came to him trailing the cloud
of glory of his first romance, giving him back the magic
hour he had missed and mourned. And how different the
realization of his dream had been! The child's radiant
welcome, her unquestioning acceptance of, this new figure in
the family group, had been all that he had hoped and
fancied. If Mother was so awfully happy about it, and Owen
and Granny, too, how nice and cosy and comfortable it was
going to be for all of them, her beaming look seemed to say;
and then, suddenly, the small pink fingers he had been
kissing were laid on the one flaw in the circle, on the one
point which must be settled before Effie could, with
complete unqualified assurance, admit the new-comer to full
equality with the other gods of her Olympus.
"And is Sophy awfully happy about it too?" she had asked,
loosening her hold on Darrow's neck to tilt back her head
and include her mother in her questioning look.
"Why, dearest, didn't you see she was?" Anna had exclaimed,
leaning to the group with radiant eyes.
"I think I should like to ask her," the child rejoined,
after a minute's shy consideration; and as Darrow set her
down her mother laughed: "Do, darling, do! Run off at once,
and tell her we expect her to be awfully happy too."
The scene had been succeeded by others less poignant but
almost as trying. Darrow cursed his luck in having, at such
a moment, to run the gauntlet of a houseful of interested
observers. The state of being "engaged", in itself an
absurd enough predicament, even to a man only intermittently
exposed, became intolerable under the continuous scrutiny of
a small circle quivering with participation. Darrow was
furthermore aware that, though the case of the other couple
ought to have made his own less conspicuous, it was rather
they who found a refuge in the shadow of his prominence.
Madame de Chantelle, though she had consented to Owen's
engagement and formally welcomed his betrothed, was
nevertheless not sorry to show, by her reception of Darrow,
of what finely-shaded degrees of cordiality she was capable.
Miss Painter, having won the day for Owen, was also free to
turn her attention to the newer candidate for her sympathy;
and Darrow and Anna found themselves immersed in a warm bath
of sentimental curiosity.
It was a relief to Darrow that he was under a positive
obligation to end his visit within the next forty-eight
hours. When he left London, his Ambassador had accorded him
a ten days' leave. His fate being definitely settled and
openly published he had no reason for asking to have the
time prolonged, and when it was over he was to return to his
post till the time fixed for taking up his new duties. Anna
and he had therefore decided to be married, in Paris, a day
or two before the departure of the steamer which was to take
them to South America; and Anna, shortly after his return to
England, was to go up to Paris and begin her own
preparations.
In honour of the double betrothal Effie and Miss Viner were
to appear that evening at dinner; and Darrow, on leaving his
room, met the little girl springing down the stairs, her
white ruffles and coral-coloured bows making her look like a
daisy with her yellow hair for its centre. Sophy Viner was
behind her pupil, and as she came into the light Darrow
noticed a change in her appearance and wondered vaguely why
she looked suddenly younger, more vivid, more like the
little luminous ghost of his Paris memories. Then it
occurred to him that it was the first time she had appeared
at dinner since his arrival at Givre, and the first time,
consequently, that he had seen her in evening dress. She
was still at the age when the least adornment embellishes;
and no doubt the mere uncovering of her young throat and
neck had given her back her former brightness. But a second
glance showed a more precise reason for his impression.
Vaguely though he retained such details, he felt sure she
was wearing the dress he had seen her in every evening in
Paris. It was a simple enough dress, black, and transparent
on the arms and shoulders, and he would probably not have
recognized it if she had not called his attention to it in
Paris by confessing that she hadn't any other. "The same
dress? That proves that she's forgotten!" was his first
half-ironic thought; but the next moment, with a pang of
compunction, he said to himself that she had probably put it
on for the same reason as before: simply because she hadn't
any other.
He looked at her in silence, and for an instant, above
Effie's bobbing head, she gave him back his look in a full
bright gaze.
"Oh, there's Owen!" Effie cried, and whirled away down the
gallery to the door from which her step-brother was
emerging. As Owen bent to catch her, Sophy Viner turned
abruptly back to Darrow.
"You, too?" she said with a quick laugh. "I didn't know----
" And as Owen came up to them she added, in a tone that
might have been meant to reach his ear: "I wish you all the
luck that we can spare!"
About the dinner-table, which Effie, with Miss Viner's aid,
had lavishly garlanded, the little party had an air of
somewhat self-conscious festivity. In spite of flowers,
champagne and a unanimous attempt at ease, there were
frequent lapses in the talk, and moments of nervous groping
for new subjects. Miss Painter alone seemed not only
unaffected by the general perturbation but as tightly sealed
up in her unconsciousness of it as a diver in his bell. To
Darrow's strained attention even Owen's gusts of gaiety
seemed to betray an inward sense of insecurity. After
dinner, however, at the piano, he broke into a mood of
extravagant hilarity and flooded the room with the splash
and ripple of his music.
Darrow, sunk in a sofa corner in the lee of Miss Painter's
granite bulk, smoked and listened in silence, his eyes
moving from one figure to another. Madame de Chantelle, in
her armchair near the fire, clasped her little granddaughter
to her with the gesture of a drawing-room Niobe, and Anna,
seated near them, had fallen into one of the attitudes of
vivid calm which seemed to Darrow to express her inmost
quality. Sophy Viner, after moving uncertainly about the
room, had placed herself beyond Mrs. Leath, in a chair near
the piano, where she sat with head thrown back and eyes
attached to the musician, in the same rapt fixity of
attention with which she had followed the players at the
Francais. The accident of her having fallen into the same
attitude, and of her wearing the same dress, gave Darrow, as
he watched her, a strange sense of double consciousness. To
escape from it, his glance turned back to Anna; but from the
point at which he was placed his eyes could not take in the
one face without the other, and that renewed the disturbing
duality of the impression. Suddenly Owen broke off with a
crash of chords and jumped to his feet.
"What's the use of this, with such a moon to say it for us?"
Behind the uncurtained window a low golden orb hung like a
ripe fruit against the glass.
"Yes--let's go out and listen," Anna answered. Owen threw
open the window, and with his gesture a fold of the heavy
star-sprinkled sky seemed to droop into the room like a
drawn-in curtain. The air that entered with it had a frosty
edge, and Anna bade Effie run to the hall for wraps.
Darrow said: "You must have one too," and started toward the
door; but Sophy, following her pupil, cried back: "We'll
bring things for everybody."
Owen had followed her, and in a moment the three reappeared,
and the party went out on the terrace. The deep blue purity
of the night was unveiled by mist, and the moonlight rimmed
the edges of the trees with a silver blur and blanched to
unnatural whiteness the statues against their walls of
shade.
Darrow and Anna, with Effie between them, strolled to the
farther corner of the terrace. Below them, between the
fringes of the park, the lawn sloped dimly to the fields
above the river. For a few minutes they stood silently side
by side, touched to peace beneath the trembling beauty of
the sky. When they turned back, Darrow saw that Owen and
Sophy Viner, who had gone down the steps to the garden, were
also walking in the direction of the house. As they
advanced, Sophy paused in a patch of moonlight, between the
sharp shadows of the yews, and Darrow noticed that she had
thrown over her shoulders a long cloak of some light colour,
which suddenly evoked her image as she had entered the
restaurant at his side on the night of their first dinner in
Paris. A moment later they were all together again on the
terrace, and when they re-entered the drawing-room the older
ladies were on their way to bed.
Effie, emboldened by the privileges of the evening, was for
coaxing Owen to round it off with a game of forfeits or some
such reckless climax; but Sophy, resuming her professional
role, sounded the summons to bed. In her pupil's wake she
made her round of good-nights; but when she proffered her
hand to Anna, the latter ignoring the gesture held out both
arms.
"Good-night, dear child," she said impulsively, and drew the
girl to her kiss.
Content of BOOK III: CHAPTER XXII [Edith Wharton's novel: The Reef]
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