Was it she, Anna Leath, who was picturing herself to herself in that way? She recoiled from her thoughts as if with a sense of demoniac possession, and there flashed through her the longing to return to her old state of fearless ignorance.If at that moment she could have kept Darrow from following her to Givre she would have done so...
But he came; and with the sight of him the turmoil fell and she felt herself reassured, rehabilitated.He arrived toward dusk, and she motored to Francheuil to meet him.She wanted to see him as soon as possible, for she had divined, through the new insight that was in her, that only his presence could restore her to a normal view of things.In the motor, as they left the town and turned into the high-road, he lifted her hand and kissed it, and she leaned against him, and felt the currents flow between them.She was grateful to him for not saying anything, and for not expecting her to speak.She said to herself: "He never makes a mistake--he always knows what to do"; and then she thought with a start that it was doubtless because he had so often been in such situations.The idea that his tact was a kind of professional expertness filled her with repugnance, and insensibly she drew away from him.He made no motion to bring her nearer, and she instantly thought that that was calculated too.She sat beside him in frozen misery, wondering whether, henceforth, she would measure in this way his every look and gesture.Neither of them spoke again till the motor turned under the dark arch of the avenue, and they saw the lights of Givre twinkling at its end.Then Darrow laid his hand on hers and said: "I know, dear--" and the hardness in her melted."He's suffering as I am," she thought; and for a moment the baleful fact between them seemed to draw them closer instead of walling them up in their separate wretchedness.
It was wonderful to be once more re-entering the doors of Givre with him, and as the old house received them into its mellow silence she had again the sense of passing out of a dreadful dream into the reassurance of kindly and familiar things.It did not seem possible that these quiet rooms, so full of the slowly-distilled accumulations of a fastidious taste, should have been the scene of tragic dissensions.
The memory of them seemed to be shut out into the night with the closing and barring of its doors.
At the tea-table in the oak-room they found Madame de Chantelle and Effie.The little girl, catching sight of Darrow, raced down the drawing-rooms to meet him, and returned in triumph on his shoulder.Anna looked at them with a smile.Effie, for all her graces, was chary of such favours, and her mother knew that in according them to Darrow she had admitted him to the circle where Owen had hitherto ruled.
Over the tea-table Darrow gave Madame de Chantelle the explanation of his sudden return from England.On reaching London, he told her, he had found that the secretary he was to have replaced was detained there by the illness of his wife.The Ambassador, knowing Darrow's urgent reasons for wishing to be in France, had immediately proposed his going back, and awaiting at Givre the summons to relieve his colleague; and he had jumped into the first train, without even waiting to telegraph the news of his release.He spoke naturally, easily, in his usual quiet voice, taking his tea from Effie, helping himself to the toast she handed, and stooping now and then to stroke the dozing terrier.And suddenly, as Anna listened to his explanation, she asked herself if it were true.
The question, of course, was absurd.There was no possible reason why he should invent a false account of his return, and every probability that the version he gave was the real one.But he had looked and spoken in the same way when he had answered her probing questions about Sophy Viner, and she reflected with a chill of fear that she would never again know if he were speaking the truth or not.She was sure he loved her, and she did not fear his insincerity as much as her own distrust of him.For a moment it seemed to her that this must corrupt the very source of love; then she said to herself: "By and bye, when I am altogether his, we shall be so near each other that there will be no room for any doubts between us." But the doubts were there now, one moment lulled to quiescence, the next more torturingly alert.When the nurse appeared to summon Effie, the little girl, after kissing her grandmother, entrenched herself on Darrow's knee with the imperious demand to be carried up to bed; and Anna, while she laughingly protested, said to herself with a pang: "Can I give her a father about whom Ithink such things?"
The thought of Effie, and of what she owed to Effie, had been the fundamental reason for her delays and hesitations when she and Darrow had come together again in England.Her own feeling was so clear that but for that scruple she would have put her hand in his at once.But till she had seen him again she had never considered the possibility of re-marriage, and when it suddenly confronted her it seemed, for the moment, to disorganize the life she had planned for herself and her child.She had not spoken of this to Darrow because it appeared to her a subject to be debated within her own conscience.The question, then, was not as to his fitness to become the guide and guardian of her child; nor did she fear that her love for him would deprive Effie of the least fraction of her tenderness, since she did not think of love as something measured and exhaustible but as a treasure perpetually renewed.What she questioned was her right to introduce into her life any interests and duties which might rob Effie of a part of her time, or lessen the closeness of their daily intercourse.
She had decided this question as it was inevitable that she should; but now another was before her.Assuredly, at her age, there was no possible reason why she should cloister herself to bring up her daughter; but there was every reason for not marrying a man in whom her own faith was not complete...
XXXIV
