第36章

After dinner Owen Leath wandered into the next room, where the piano stood, and began to play among the shadows.His step-mother presently joined him, and Darrow sat alone with Madame de Chantelle.

She took up the thread of her mild chat and carried it on at the same pace as her knitting.Her conversation resembled the large loose-stranded web between her fingers: now and then she dropped a stitch, and went on regardless of the gap in the pattern.

Darrow listened with a lazy sense of well-being.In the mental lull of the after-dinner hour, with harmonious memories murmuring through his mind, and the soft tints and shadowy spaces of the fine old room charming his eyes to indolence, Madame de Chantelle's discourse seemed not out of place.He could understand that, in the long run, the atmosphere of Givre might be suffocating; but in his present mood its very limitations had a grace.

Presently he found the chance to say a word in his own behalf; and thereupon measured the advantage, never before particularly apparent to him, of being related to the Everards of Albany.Madame de Chantelle's conception of her native country--to which she had not returned since her twentieth year--reminded him of an ancient geographer's map of the Hyperborean regions.It was all a foggy blank, from which only one or two fixed outlines emerged; and one of these belonged to the Everards of Albany.

The fact that they offered such firm footing--formed, so to speak, a friendly territory on which the opposing powers could meet and treat--helped him through the task of explaining and justifying himself as the successor of Fraser Leath.Madame de Chantelle could not resist such incontestable claims.She seemed to feel her son's hovering and discriminating presence, and she gave Darrow the sense that he was being tested and approved as a last addition to the Leath Collection.

She also made him aware of the immense advantage he possessed in belonging to the diplomatic profession.She spoke of this humdrum calling as a Career, and gave Darrow to understand that she supposed him to have been seducing Duchesses when he was not negotiating Treaties.He heard again quaint phrases which romantic old ladies had used in his youth: "Brilliant diplomatic society...social advantages...the entree everywhere...nothing else FORMS a young man in the same way..." and she sighingly added that she could have wished her grandson had chosen the same path to glory.

Darrow prudently suppressed his own view of the profession, as well as the fact that he had adopted it provisionally, and for reasons less social than sociological; and the talk presently passed on to the subject of his future plans.

Here again, Madame de Chantelle's awe of the Career made her admit the necessity of Anna's consenting to an early marriage.The fact that Darrow was "ordered" to South America seemed to put him in the romantic light of a young soldier charged to lead a forlorn hope: she sighed and said:

"At such moments a wife's duty is at her husband's side."The problem of Effie's future might have disturbed her, she added; but since Anna, for a time, consented to leave the little girl with her, that problem was at any rate deferred.

She spoke plaintively of the responsibility of looking after her granddaughter, but Darrow divined that she enjoyed the flavour of the word more than she felt the weight of the fact.

"Effie's a perfect child.She's more like my son, perhaps, than dear Owen.She'll never intentionally give me the least trouble.But of course the responsibility will be great...I'm not sure I should dare to undertake it if it were not for her having such a treasure of a governess.Has Anna told you about our little governess? After all the worry we had last year, with one impossible creature after another, it seems providential, just now, to have found her.

At first we were afraid she was too young; but now we've the greatest confidence in her.So clever and amusing--and SUCH a lady! I don't say her education's all it might be...no drawing or singing...but one can't have everything;and she speaks Italian..."

Madame de Chantelle's fond insistence on the likeness between Effie Leath and her father, if not particularly gratifying to Darrow, had at least increased his desire to see the little girl.It gave him an odd feeling of discomfort to think that she should have any of the characteristics of the late Fraser Leath: he had, somehow, fantastically pictured her as the mystical offspring of the early tenderness between himself and Anna Summers.

His encounter with Effie took place the next morning, on the lawn below the terrace, where he found her, in the early sunshine, knocking about golf balls with her brother.

Almost at once, and with infinite relief, he saw that the resemblance of which Madame de Chantelle boasted was mainly external.Even that discovery was slightly distasteful, though Darrow was forced to own that Fraser Leath's straight-featured fairness had lent itself to the production of a peculiarly finished image of childish purity.But it was evident that other elements had also gone to the making of Effie, and that another spirit sat in her eyes.Her serious handshake, her "pretty" greeting, were worthy of the Leath tradition, and he guessed her to be more malleable than Owen, more subject to the influences of Givre; but the shout with which she returned to her romp had in it the note of her mother's emancipation.

He had begged a holiday for her, and when Mrs.Leath appeared he and she and the little girl went off for a ramble.Anna wished her daughter to have time to make friends with Darrow before learning in what relation he was to stand to her; and the three roamed the woods and fields till the distant chime of the stable-clock made them turn back for luncheon.

Effie, who was attended by a shaggy terrier, had picked up two or three subordinate dogs at the stable; and as she trotted on ahead with her yapping escort, Anna hung back to throw a look at Darrow.