第50章

How he was to prevent it he did not know: to his tormented imagination every issue seemed closed.For a fantastic instant he was moved to follow Madame de Chantelle's suggestion and urge Anna to withdraw her approval.If his reticence, his efforts to avoid the subject, had not escaped her, she had doubtless set them down to the fact of his knowing more, and thinking less, of Sophy Viner than he had been willing to admit; and he might take advantage of this to turn her mind gradually from the project.Yet how do so without betraying his insincerity? If he had had nothing to hide he could easily have said: "It's one thing to know nothing against the girl, it's another to pretend that Ithink her a good match for Owen." But could he say even so much without betraying more? It was not Anna's questions, or his answers to them, that he feared, but what might cry aloud in the intervals between them.He understood now that ever since Sophy Viner's arrival at Givre he had felt in Anna the lurking sense of something unexpressed, and perhaps inexpressible, between the girl and himself...When at last he fell asleep he had fatalistically committed his next step to the chances of the morrow.

The first that offered itself was an encounter with Mrs.

Leath as he descended the stairs the next morning.She had come down already hatted and shod for a dash to the park lodge, where one of the gatekeeper's children had had an accident.In her compact dark dress she looked more than usually straight and slim, and her face wore the pale glow it took on at any call on her energy: a kind of warrior brightness that made her small head, with its strong chin and close-bound hair, like that of an amazon in a frieze.

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

Anna spoke with a smile of her "scene" with Madame de Chantelle, who belonged, poor dear, to a generation when "scenes" (in the ladylike and lachrymal sense of the term)were the tribute which sensibility was expected to pay to the unusual.Their conversation had been, in every detail, so exactly what Anna had foreseen that it had clearly not made much impression on her; but she was eager to know the result of Darrow's encounter with her mother-in-law.

"She told me she'd sent for you: she always 'sends for'

people in emergencies.That again, I suppose, is de l'epoque.And failing Adelaide Painter, who can't get here till this afternoon, there was no one but poor you to turn to."She put it all lightly, with a lightness that seemed to his tight-strung nerves slightly, undefinably over-done.But he was so aware of his own tension that he wondered, the next moment, whether anything would ever again seem to him quite usual and insignificant and in the common order of things.

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

"Do tell me just what you said," he heard Anna pleading; and with sudden resolution he affirmed: "I quite understand your mother-in-law's feeling as she does."The words, when uttered, seemed a good deal less significant than they had sounded to his inner ear; and Anna replied without surprise: "Of course.It's inevitable that she should.But we shall bring her round in time." Under the dripping dome she raised her face to his."Don't you remember what you said the day before yesterday? 'Together we can't fail to pull it off for him!' I've told Owen that, so you're pledged and there's no going back."The day before yesterday! Was it possible that, no longer ago, life had seemed a sufficiently simple business for a sane man to hazard such assurances?

"Anna," he questioned her abruptly, "why are you so anxious for this marriage?"She stopped short to face him."Why? But surely I've explained to you--or rather I've hardly had to, you seemed so in sympathy with my reasons!""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 to say----""Against Miss Viner?" The name, once uttered, sounded on and on in his ears."Of course not.But that doesn't necessarily imply that I think her a good match for Owen."Anna made no immediate answer.When she spoke it was to question: "Why don't you think her a good match for Owen?""Well--Madame de Chantelle's reasons seem to me not quite as negligible as you think.""You mean the fact that she's been Mrs.Murrett's secretary, and that the people who employed her before were called Hoke? For, as far as Owen and I can make out, these are the gravest charges against her.""Still, one can understand that the match is not what Madame de Chantelle had dreamed of.""Oh, perfectly--if that's all you mean."

The lodge was in sight, and she hastened her step.He strode on beside her in silence, but at the gate she 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 Madame de Chantelle, summon all the Everards to my aid!" She lifted to him the look of happy laughter that sometimes brushed her with a gleam of spring.

Darrow watched her hasten along the path between the dripping chrysanthemums and enter the lodge.After she had gone in he paced up and down outside in the drizzle, waiting to learn if she had any message to send back to the house;and after the lapse of a few minutes she came out again.