第48章

"You hadn't thought of its being Miss Viner?""Why should I have thought of Miss Viner?""You see now why I wanted so much to find out what you knew about her." He made no comment, and she pursued: "Now that you DO know it's she, if there's anything----"He moved back into the room and went up to her.His face was serious, with a slight shade of annoyance."What on earth should there be? As I told you, I've never in my life heard any one say two words about Miss Viner."Anna made no answer and they continued to face each other without moving.For the moment she had ceased to think about Sophy Viner and Owen: the only thought in her mind was that Darrow was alone with her, close to her, and that, for the first time, their hands and lips had not met.

He glanced back doubtfully at the window."It's pouring.

Perhaps you'd rather not go out?"

She hesitated, as if waiting for him to urge her."Isuppose I'd better not.I ought to go at once to my mother-in-law--Owen's just been telling her," she said.

"Ah." Darrow hazarded a smile."That accounts for my having, on my way up, heard some one telephoning for Miss Painter!"At the allusion they laughed together, vaguely, and Anna moved toward the door.He held it open for her and followed her out.

XIX

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

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

Darrow walked on and on, indifferent to the direction he was taking.His thoughts were tossing like the tree-tops.

Anna's announcement had not come to him as a complete surprise: that morning, as he strolled back to the house with Owen Leath and Miss Viner, he had had a momentary intuition of the truth.But it had been no more than an intuition, the merest 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 made no appreciable change.If he had been bound to silence before, he was no less bound to it now; the only difference lay in the fact that what he had just learned had rendered his bondage more intolerable.Hitherto he had felt for Sophy Viner's defenseless state a sympathy profoundly tinged with compunction.But now he was half-conscious of an obscure indignation against her.Superior as he had fancied himself to ready-made judgments, he was aware of cherishing the common doubt as to the disinterestedness of the woman who tries to rise above her past.No wonder she had been sick with fear on meeting him! It was in his power to do her more harm than he had dreamed...

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

He dropped his wet coat in the vestibule and began to mount the stairs to his room.But on the landing he was overtaken by a sober-faced maid who, in tones discreetly lowered, begged him to be so kind as to step, for a moment, into the Marquise's sitting-room.Somewhat disconcerted by the summons, he followed its bearer to the door at which, a couple of hours earlier, he had taken leave of Mrs.Leath.

It opened to admit him to a large lamp-lit room which he immediately perceived to be empty; and the 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 satin upholstery, the Sevres jardinieres, the rosewood fire-screen, the little velvet tables edged with lace and crowded with silver knick-knacks and simpering miniatures, reconstituted an almost perfect setting for the blonde beauty of the 'sixties.Darrow wondered that Fraser Leath's filial respect should have prevailed over his aesthetic scruples to the extent of permitting such an anachronism among the eighteenth century graces of Givre;but a moment's reflection made it clear that, to its late owner, the attitude would have seemed exactly in the traditions of the place.

Madame de Chantelle's emergence from an inner room snatched Darrow from these irrelevant musings.She was already beaded and bugled for the evening, and, save for a slight pinkness of the eye-lids, her elaborate appearance revealed no mark of agitation; but Darrow noticed that, in recognition of the solemnity of the occasion, she pinched a lace handkerchief between her thumb and forefinger.