第26章

With the exception of the little girl herself, everything connected with that time had grown curiously remote and unimportant.The days that had moved so slowly as they passed seemed now to have plunged down head-long steeps of time; and as she sat in the autumn sun, with Darrow's letter in her hand, the history of Anna Leath appeared to its heroine like some grey shadowy tale that she might have read in an old book, one night as she was falling asleep...

X

Two brown blurs emerging from the farther end of the wood-vista gradually defined themselves as her step-son and an attendant game-keeper.They grew slowly upon the bluish background, with occasional delays and re-effacements, and she sat still, waiting till they should reach the gate at the end of the drive, where the keeper would turn off to his cottage and Owen continue on to the house.

She watched his approach with a smile.From the first days of her marriage she had been drawn to the boy, but it was not until after Effie's birth that she had really begun to know him.The eager observation of her own child had shown her how much she had still to learn about the slight fair boy whom the holidays periodically restored to Givre.Owen, even then, both physically and morally, furnished her with the oddest of commentaries on his father's mien and mind.

He would never, the family sighingly recognized, be nearly as handsome as Mr.Leath; but his rather charmingly unbalanced face, with its brooding forehead and petulant boyish smile, suggested to Anna what his father's countenance might have been could one have pictured its neat features disordered by a rattling breeze.She even pushed the analogy farther, and descried in her step-son's mind a quaintly-twisted reflection of her husband's.With his bursts of door-slamming activity, his fits of bookish indolence, his crude revolutionary dogmatizing and his flashes of precocious irony, the boy was not unlike a boisterous embodiment of his father's theories.It was as though Fraser Leath's ideas, accustomed to hang like marionettes on their pegs, should suddenly come down and walk.There were moments, indeed, when Owen's humours must have suggested to his progenitor the gambols of an infant Frankenstein; but to Anna they were the voice of her secret rebellions, and her tenderness to her step-son was partly based on her severity toward herself.As he had the courage she had lacked, so she meant him to have the chances she had missed; and every effort she made for him helped to keep her own hopes alive.

Her interest in Owen led her to think more often of his mother, and sometimes she would slip away and stand alone before her predecessor's portrait.Since her arrival at Givre the picture--a "full-length" by a once fashionable artist--had undergone the successive displacements of an exiled consort removed farther and farther from the throne;and Anna could not help noting that these stages coincided with the gradual decline of the artist's fame.She had a fancy that if his credit had been in the ascendant the first Mrs.Leath might have continued to throne over the drawing-room mantel- piece, even to the exclusion of her successor's effigy.Instead of this, her peregrinations had finally landed her in the shrouded solitude of the billiard-room, an apartment which no one ever entered, but where it was understood that "the light was better," or might have been if the shutters had not been always closed.

Here the poor lady, elegantly dressed, and seated in the middle of a large lonely canvas, in the blank contemplation of a gilt console, had always seemed to Anna to be waiting for visitors who never came.

"Of course they never came, you poor thing! I wonder how long it took you to find out that they never would?" Anna had more than once apostrophized her, with a derision addressed rather to herself than to the dead; but it was only after Effie's birth that it occurred to her to study more closely the face in the picture, and speculate on the kind of visitors that Owen's mother might have hoped for.

"She certainly doesn't look as if they would have been the same kind as mine: but there's no telling, from a portrait that was so obviously done 'to please the family', and that leaves Owen so unaccounted for.Well, they never came, the visitors; they never came; and she died of it.She died of it long before they buried her: I'm certain of that.Those are stone-dead eyes in the picture...The loneliness must have been awful, if even Owen couldn't keep her from dying of it.And to feel it so she must have HAD feelings--real live ones, the kind that twitch and tug.And all she had to look at all her life was a gilt console--yes, that's it, a gilt console screwed to the wall! That's exactly and absolutely what he is!"She did not mean, if she could help it, that either Effie or Owen should know that loneliness, or let her know it again.

They were three, now, to keep each other warm, and she embraced both children in the same passion of motherhood, as though one were not enough to shield her from her predecessor's fate.

Sometimes she fancied that Owen Leath's response was warmer than that of her own child.But then Effie was still hardly more than a baby, and Owen, from the first, had been almost "old enough to understand": certainly DID understand now, in a tacit way that yet perpetually spoke to her.This sense of his understanding was the deepest element in their feeling for each other.There were so many things between them that were never spoken of, or even indirectly alluded to, yet that, even in their occasional discussions and differences, formed the unadduced arguments making for final agreement...

Musing on this, she continued to watch his approach; and her heart began to beat a little faster at the thought of what she had to say to him.But when he reached the gate she saw him pause, and after a moment he turned aside as if to gain a cross-road through the park.