The Reef

  XIX

  He left her at the door of Madame de Chantelle's sitting-room, andplunged out alone into the rain.

  The wind flung about the stripped tree-tops of the avenue and dashed thestinging streams into his face. He walked to the gate and then turnedinto the high-road and strode along in the open, buffeted by slantinggusts. The evenly ridged fields were a blurred waste of mud, andthe russet coverts which he and Owen had shot through the day beforeshivered desolately against a driving sky.

  Darrow walked on and on, indifferent to the direction he was taking. Histhoughts were tossing like the tree-tops. Anna's announcement had notcome to him as a complete surprise: that morning, as he strolled backto the house with Owen Leath and Miss Viner, he had had a momentaryintuition of the truth. But it had been no more than an intuition, themerest 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 madeno appreciable change. If he had been bound to silence before, he was noless bound to it now; the only difference lay in the fact that what hehad just learned had rendered his bondage more intolerable. Hithertohe had felt for Sophy Viner's defenseless state a sympathy profoundlytinged with compunction. But now he was half-conscious of an obscureindignation against her. Superior as he had fancied himself toready-made judgments, he was aware of cherishing the common doubt as tothe disinterestedness of the woman who tries to rise above her past. Nowonder she had been sick with fear on meeting him! It was in his powerto do her more harm than he had dreamed...

  Assuredly he did not want to harm her; but he did desperately want toprevent her marrying Owen Leath. He tried to get away from the feeling,to isolate and exteriorize it sufficiently to see what motives itwas made of; but it remained a mere blind motion of his blood, theinstinctive recoil from the thing that no amount of arguing can make"straight." His tramp, prolonged as it was, carried him no nearerto enlightenment; and after trudging through two or three sallowmud-stained villages he turned about and wearily made his way back toGivre. As he walked up the black avenue, making for the lights thattwinkled through its pitching branches, he had a sudden realisationof his utter helplessness. He might think and combine as he would; butthere was nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do...

  He dropped his wet coat in the vestibule and began to mount the stairsto his room. But on the landing he was overtaken by a sober-faced maidwho, in tones discreetly lowered, begged him to be so kind as to step,for a moment, into the Marquise's sitting-room. Somewhat disconcertedby the summons, he followed its bearer to the door at which, a couple ofhours earlier, he had taken leave of Mrs. Leath. It opened to admit himto a large lamp-lit room which he immediately perceived to be empty; andthe 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 satinupholstery, the Sevres jardinieres, the rosewood fire-screen, the littlevelvet tables edged with lace and crowded with silver knick-knacks andsimpering miniatures, reconstituted an almost perfect setting for theblonde beauty of the 'sixties. Darrow wondered that Fraser Leath'sfilial respect should have prevailed over his aesthetic scruples to theextent of permitting such an anachronism among the eighteenth centurygraces of Givre; but a moment's reflection made it clear that, to itslate owner, the attitude would have seemed exactly in the traditions ofthe place.

  Madame de Chantelle's emergence from an inner room snatched Darrow fromthese irrelevant musings. She was already beaded and bugled for theevening, and, save for a slight pinkness of the eye-lids, her elaborateappearance revealed no mark of agitation; but Darrow noticed that,in recognition of the solemnity of the occasion, she pinched a lacehandkerchief 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 rescueof her darling. She wasn't, she was sure, addressing herself in vain toone whose person, whose "tone," whose traditions so brilliantly declaredhis indebtedness to the principles she besought him to defend. Her ownreception of Darrow, the confidence she had at once accorded him,must have shown him that she had instinctively felt their unanimity ofsentiment on these fundamental questions. She had in fact recognized inhim the one person whom, without pain to her maternal piety, she couldwelcome as her son's successor; and it was almost as to Owen's fatherthat 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 considerher partly responsible for what's happened. Anna is 'modern'--I believethat's what it's called when you read unsettling books and admirehideous pictures. Indeed," Madame de Chantelle continued, leaningconfidentially forward, "I myself have always more or less lived in thatatmosphere: my son, you know, was very revolutionary. Only he didn't, ofcourse, apply his ideas: they were purely intellectual. That's what dearAnna has always failed to understand. And I'm afraid she's created thesame kind of confusion in Owen's mind--led him to mix up things you readabout with things you do...You know, of course, that she sides with himin this wretched business?"

  Developing at length upon this theme, she finally narrowed down tothe point of Darrow's intervention. "My grandson, Mr. Darrow, calls meillogical and uncharitable because my feelings toward Miss Viner havechanged 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 acompanion, 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 meif you think a girl who has had to knock about the world in that kindof position, and at the orders of all kinds of people, is fitted to beOwen'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 marrymy grandson. If I'd been looking for a wife for Owen, I shouldn'thave applied to the Farlows to find me one. That's what Anna won'tunderstand; and what you must help me to make her see."

  Darrow, to this appeal, could oppose only the repeated assurance of hisinability to interfere. He tried to make Madame de Chantelle seethat the very position he hoped to take in the household made hisintervention the more hazardous. He brought up the usual arguments, andsounded the expected note of sympathy; but Madame de Chantelle's alarmhad dispelled her habitual imprecision, and, though she had not manyreasons to advance, her argument clung to its point like a frightenedsharp-clawed animal.

  "Well, then," she summed up, in response to his repeated assertions thathe saw no way of helping her, "you can, at least, even if you won'tsay a word to the others, tell me frankly and fairly--and quite betweenourselves--your personal opinion of Miss Viner, since you've known herso much longer than we have."

  He protested that, if he had known her longer, he had known her muchless well, and that he had already, on this point, convinced Anna of hisinability to pronounce an opinion.

  Madame de Chantelle drew a deep sigh of intelligence. "Your opinion ofMrs. Murrett is enough! I don't suppose you pretend to conceal THAT? Andheaven knows what other unspeakable people she's been mixed up with. Theonly friends she can produce are called Hoke...Don't try to reason withme, Mr. Darrow. There are feelings that go deeper than facts...AndI KNOW she thought of studying for the stage..." Madame de Chantelleraised the corner of her lace handkerchief to her eyes. "I'mold-fashioned--like my furniture," she murmured. "And I thought I couldcount on you, Mr. Darrow..."

  When Darrow, that night, regained his room, he reflected with a flashof irony that each time he entered it he brought a fresh troop ofperplexities to trouble its serene seclusion. Since the day after hisarrival, only forty-eight hours before, when he had set his windowopen to the night, and his hopes had seemed as many as its stars,each evening had brought its new problem and its renewed distress. Butnothing, as yet, had approached the blank misery of mind with which henow set himself to face the
fresh questions confronting him.

  Sophy Viner had not shown herself at dinner, so that he had had noglimpse of her in her new character, and no means of divining the realnature of the tie between herself and Owen Leath. One thing, however,was clear: whatever her real feelings were, and however much or littleshe had at stake, if she had made up her mind to marry Owen she had morethan enough skill and tenacity to defeat any arts that poor Madame deChantelle could oppose to her.

  Darrow himself was in fact the only person who might possibly turn herfrom her purpose: Madame de Chantelle, at haphazard, had hit on thesurest means of saving Owen--if to prevent his marriage were to savehim! Darrow, on this point, did not pretend to any fixed opinion; onefeeling alone was clear and insistent in him: he did not mean, if hecould help it, to let the marriage take place.

  How he was to prevent it he did not know: to his tormented imaginationevery issue seemed closed. For a fantastic instant he was moved tofollow Madame de Chantelle's suggestion and urge Anna to withdraw herapproval. If his reticence, his efforts to avoid the subject, had notescaped her, she had doubtless set them down to the fact of his knowingmore, and thinking less, of Sophy Viner than he had been willing toadmit; and he might take advantage of this to turn her mind graduallyfrom the project. Yet how do so without betraying his insincerity? Ifhe had had nothing to hide he could easily have said: "It's one thing toknow nothing against the girl, it's another to pretend that I think hera good match for Owen." But could he say even so much without betrayingmore? It was not Anna's questions, or his answers to them, that hefeared, but what might cry aloud in the intervals between them. Heunderstood now that ever since Sophy Viner's arrival at Givre he hadfelt in Anna the lurking sense of something unexpressed, and perhapsinexpressible, between the girl and himself...When at last he fellasleep he had fatalistically committed his next step to the chances ofthe morrow.

  The first that offered itself was an encounter with Mrs. Leath as hedescended the stairs the next morning. She had come down already hattedand shod for a dash to the park lodge, where one of the gatekeeper'schildren had had an accident. In her compact dark dress she looked morethan usually straight and slim, and her face wore the pale glow it tookon at any call on her energy: a kind of warrior brightness that made hersmall head, with its strong chin and close-bound hair, like that of anamazon in a frieze.

  It was their first moment alone since she had left him, the afternoonbefore, at her mother-in-law's door; and after a few words about theinjured child their talk inevitably reverted to Owen.

  Anna spoke with a smile of her "scene" with Madame de Chantelle, whobelonged, poor dear, to a generation when "scenes" (in the ladylikeand lachrymal sense of the term) were the tribute which sensibility wasexpected to pay to the unusual. Their conversation had been, in everydetail, so exactly what Anna had foreseen that it had clearly not mademuch impression on her; but she was eager to know the result of Darrow'sencounter with her mother-in-law.

  "She told me she'd sent for you: she always 'sends for' people inemergencies. That again, I suppose, is de l'epoque. And failing AdelaidePainter, who can't get here till this afternoon, there was no one butpoor you to turn to."

  She put it all lightly, with a lightness that seemed to his tight-strungnerves slightly, undefinably over-done. But he was so aware of his owntension that he wondered, the next moment, whether anything would everagain seem to him quite usual and insignificant and in the common orderof things.

  As they hastened on through the drizzle in which the storm of the nightwas weeping itself out, Anna drew close under his umbrella, and at thepressure of her arm against his he recalled his walk up the Doverpier with Sophy Viner. The memory gave him a startled vision of theinevitable occasions of contact, confidence, familiarity, which hisfuture relationship to the girl would entail, and the countless chancesof betrayal that every one of them involved.

  "Do tell me just what you said," he heard Anna pleading; and with suddenresolution he affirmed: "I quite understand your mother-in-law's feelingas she does."

  The words, when uttered, seemed a good deal less significant than theyhad sounded to his inner ear; and Anna replied without surprise: "Ofcourse. It's inevitable that she should. But we shall bring her roundin time." Under the dripping dome she raised her face to his. "Don't youremember what you said the day before yesterday? 'Together we can'tfail to pull it off for him!' I've told Owen that, so you're pledged andthere's no going back."

  The day before yesterday! Was it possible that, no longer ago, lifehad seemed a sufficiently simple business for a sane man to hazard suchassurances?

  "Anna," he questioned her abruptly, "why are you so anxious for thismarriage?"

  She stopped short to face him. "Why? But surely I've explained toyou--or rather I've hardly had to, you seemed so in sympathy with myreasons!"

  "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 tosay----"

  "Against Miss Viner?" The name, once uttered, sounded on and on in hisears. "Of course not. But that doesn't necessarily imply that I thinkher a good match for Owen."

  Anna made no immediate answer. When she spoke it was to question: "Whydon't you think her a good match for Owen?"

  "Well--Madame de Chantelle's reasons seem to me not quite as negligibleas you think."

  "You mean the fact that she's been Mrs. Murrett's secretary, and thatthe people who employed her before were called Hoke? For, as far as Owenand I can make out, these are the gravest charges against her."

  "Still, one can understand that the match is not what Madame deChantelle had dreamed of."

  "Oh, perfectly--if that's all you mean." The lodge was in sight, and shehastened her step. He strode on beside her in silence, but at the gateshe 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 Madamede Chantelle, summon all the Everards to my aid!" She lifted to himthe look of happy laughter that sometimes brushed her with a gleam ofspring.

  Darrow watched her hasten along the path between the drippingchrysanthemums and enter the lodge. After she had gone in he paced upand down outside in the drizzle, waiting to learn if she had any messageto send back to the house; and after the lapse of a few minutes she cameout again.

  The child, she said, was badly, though not dangerously, hurt, and thevillage doctor, who was already on hand, had asked that the surgeon,already summoned from Francheuil, should be told to bring with himcertain needful appliances. Owen had started by motor to fetch thesurgeon, but there was still time to communicate with the latter bytelephone. The doctor furthermore begged for an immediate provision ofsuch bandages and disinfectants as Givre itself could furnish, and Annabade Darrow address himself to Miss Viner, who would know where to findthe necessary things, and would direct one of the servants to bicyclewith them to the lodge.

  Darrow, as he hurried off on this errand, had at once perceived theopportunity it offered of a word with Sophy Viner. What that word was tobe he did not know; but now, if ever, was the moment to make it urgentand conclusive. It was unlikely that he would again have such a chanceof 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 herstep-brother, and that Miss Viner was still in her room. Darrow sent herword that he was the bearer of a message from the lodge, and a momentlater he heard her coming down the stairs.