第73章

"I want you to know that no one said anything...It was Iwho..."

Sophy looked at her."You mean that Mr.Darrow didn't tell you? Of course not: do you suppose I thought he did? You found it out, that's all--I knew you would.In your place Ishould have guessed it sooner."

The words were spoken simply, without irony or emphasis; but they went through Anna like a sword.Yes, the girl would have had divinations, promptings that she had not had! She felt half envious of such a sad precocity of wisdom.

"I'm so sorry...so sorry..." she murmured.

"Things happen that way.Now I'd better go.I'd like to say good-bye to Effie.""Oh----" it broke in a cry from Effie's mother."Not like this--you mustn't! I feel--you make me feel too horribly: as if I were driving you away..." The words had rushed up from the depths of her bewildered pity.

"No one is driving me away: I had to go," she heard the girl reply.

There was another silence, during which passionate impulses of magnanimity warred in Anna with her doubts and dreads.

At length, her eyes on Sophy's face: "Yes, you must go now,"she began; "but later on...after a while, when all this is over...if there's no reason why you shouldn't marry Owen----" she paused a moment on the words--" I shouldn't want you to think I stood between you...""You?" Sophy flushed again, and then grew pale.She seemed to try to speak, but no words came.

"Yes! It was not true when I said just now that I was thinking only of Owen.I'm sorry--oh, so sorry!--for you too.Your life--I know how hard it's been; and mine...mine's so full...Happy women understand best!" Anna drew near and touched the girl's hand; then she began again, pouring all her soul into the broken phrases: "It's terrible now...you see no future; but if, by and bye...you know best...but you're so young...and at your age things DOpass.If there's no reason, no real reason, why you shouldn't marry Owen, I WANT him to hope, I'll help him to hope...if you say so..."With the urgency of her pleading her clasp tightened on Sophy's hand, but it warmed to no responsive tremor: the girl seemed numb, and Anna was frightened by the stony silence of her look."I suppose I'm not more than half a woman," she mused, "for I don't want my happiness to hurt her;" and aloud she repeated: "If only you'll tell me there's no reason----"The girl did not speak; but suddenly, like a snapped branch, she bent, stooped down to the hand that clasped her, and laid her lips upon it in a stream of weeping.She cried silently, continuously, abundantly, as though Anna's touch had released the waters of some deep spring of pain; then, as Anna, moved and half afraid, leaned over her with a sound of pity, she stood up and turned away.

"You're going, then--for good--like this?" Anna moved toward her and stopped.Sophy stopped too, with eyes that shrank from her.

"Oh----" Anna cried, and hid her face.

The girl walked across the room and paused again in the doorway.From there she flung back: "I wanted it--I chose it.He was good to me--no one ever was so good!"The door-handle turned, and Anna heard her go.

XXIX

Her first thought was: "He's going too in a few hours--Ineedn't see him again before he leaves..." At that moment the possibility of having to look in Darrow's face and hear him speak seemed to her more unendurable than anything else she could imagine.Then, on the next wave of feeling, came the desire to confront him at once and wring from him she knew not what: avowal, denial, justification, anything that should open some channel of escape to the flood of her pent-up anguish.

She had told Owen she was tired, and this seemed a sufficient reason for remaining upstairs when the motor came to the door and Miss Painter and Sophy Viner were borne off in it; sufficient also for sending word to Madame de Chantelle that she would not come down till after luncheon.

Having despatched her maid with this message, she lay down on her sofa and stared before her into darkness...

She had been unhappy before, and the vision of old miseries flocked like hungry ghosts about her fresh pain: she recalled her youthful disappointment, the failure of her marriage, the wasted years that followed; but those were negative sorrows, denials and postponements of life.She seemed in no way related to their shadowy victim, she who was stretched on this fiery rack of the irreparable.She had suffered before--yes, but lucidly, reflectively, elegiacally: now she was suffering as a hurt animal must, blindly, furiously, with the single fierce animal longing that the awful pain should stop...

She heard her maid knock, and she hid her face and made no answer.The knocking continued, and the discipline of habit at length made her lift her head, compose her face and hold out her hand to the note the woman brought her.It was a word from Darrow--"May I see you?"--and she said at once, in a voice that sounded thin and empty: "Ask Mr.Darrow to come up."The maid enquired if she wished to have her hair smoothed first, and she answered that it didn't matter; but when the door had closed, the instinct of pride drew her to her feet and she looked at herself in the glass above the mantelpiece and passed her hands over her hair.Her eyes were burning and her face looked tired and thinner; otherwise she could see no change in her appearance, and she wondered that at such a moment her body should seem as unrelated to the self that writhed within her as if it had been a statue or a picture.

The maid reopened the door to show in Darrow, and he paused a moment on the threshold, as if waiting for Anna to speak.

He was extremely pale, but he looked neither ashamed nor uncertain, and she said to herself, with a perverse thrill of appreciation: "He's as proud as I am."Aloud she asked: "You wanted to see me?"

"Naturally," he replied in a grave voice.

"Don't! It's useless.I know everything.Nothing you can say will help."At the direct affirmation he turned even paler, and his eyes, which he kept resolutely fixed on her, confessed his misery.