第87章

On the landing Darrow stopped; his room was the nearest to the stairs."Good night," he said, holding out his hand.

As Anna gave him hers the springs of grief broke loose in her.She struggled with her sobs, and subdued them; but her breath came unevenly, and to hide her agitation she leaned on him and pressed her face against his arm.

"Don't--don't," he whispered, soothing her.

Her troubled breathing sounded loudly in the silence of the sleeping house.She pressed her lips tight, but could not stop the nervous pulsations in her throat, and he put an arm about her and, opening his door, drew her across the threshold of his room.The door shut behind her and she sat down on the lounge at the foot of the bed.The pulsations in her throat had ceased, but she knew they would begin again if she tried to speak.

Darrow walked away and leaned against the mantelpiece.The red-veiled lamp shone on his books and papers, on the arm-chair by the fire, and the scattered objects on his dressing-table.A log glimmered on the hearth, and the room was warm and faintly smoke-scented.It was the first time she had ever been in a room he lived in, among his personal possessions and the traces of his daily usage.Every object about her seemed to contain a particle of himself: the whole air breathed of him, steeping her in the sense of his intimate presence.

Suddenly she thought: "This is what Sophy Viner knew"...and with a torturing precision she pictured them alone in such a scene...Had he taken the girl to an hotel...where did people go in such cases? Wherever they were, the silence of night had been around them, and the things he used had been strewn about the room...Anna, ashamed of dwelling on the detested vision, stood up with a confused impulse of flight; then a wave of contrary feeling arrested her and she paused with lowered head.

Darrow had come forward as she rose, and she perceived that he was waiting for her to bid him good night.It was clear that no other possibility had even brushed his mind; and the fact, for some dim reason, humiliated her."Why not...why not?" something whispered in her, as though his forbearance, his tacit recognition of her pride, were a slight on other qualities she wanted him to feel in her.

"In the morning, then?" she heard him say.

"Yes, in the morning," she repeated.

She continued to stand in the same place, looking vaguely about the room.For once before they parted--since part they must--she longed to be to him all that Sophy Viner had been; but she remained rooted to the floor, unable to find a word or imagine a gesture that should express her meaning.

Exasperated by her helplessness, she thought: "Don't I feel things as other women do?"Her eye fell on a note-case she had given him.It was worn at the corners with the friction of his pocket and distended with thickly packed papers.She wondered if he carried her letters in it, and she put her hand out and touched it.

All that he and she had ever felt or seen, their close encounters of word and look, and the closer contact of their silences, trembled through her at the touch.She remembered things he had said that had been like new skies above her head: ways he had that seemed a part of the air she breathed.The faint warmth of her girlish love came back to her, gathering heat as it passed through her thoughts; and her heart rocked like a boat on the surge of its long long memories."It's because I love him in too many ways," she thought; and slowly she turned to the door.

She was aware that Darrow was still silently watching her, but he neither stirred nor spoke till she had reached the threshold.Then he met her there and caught her in his arms.

"Not to-night--don't tell me to-night!" he whispered; and she leaned away from him, closing her eyes for an instant, and then slowly opening them to the flood of light in his.

XXXVII

Anna and Darrow, the next day, sat alone in a compartment of the Paris train.

Anna, when they entered it, had put herself in the farthest corner and placed her bag on the adjoining seat.She had decided suddenly to accompany Darrow to Paris, had even persuaded him to wait for a later train in order that they might travel together.She had an intense longing to be with him, an almost morbid terror of losing sight of him for a moment: when he jumped out of the train and ran back along the platform to buy a newspaper for her she felt as though she should never see him again, and shivered with the cold misery of her last journey to Paris, when she had thought herself parted from him forever.Yet she wanted to keep him at a distance, on the other side of the compartment, and as the train moved out of the station she drew from her bag the letters she had thrust in it as she left the house, and began to glance over them so that her lowered lids should hide her eyes from him.

She was his now, his for life: there could never again be any question of sacrificing herself to Effie's welfare, or to any other abstract conception of duty.Effie of course would not suffer; Anna would pay for her bliss as a wife by redoubled devotion as a mother.Her scruples were not overcome; but for the time their voices were drowned in the tumultuous rumour of her happiness.

As she opened her letters she was conscious that Darrow's gaze was fixed on her, and gradually it drew her eyes upward, and she drank deep of the passionate tenderness in his.Then the blood rose to her face and she felt again the desire to shield herself.She turned back to her letters and her glance lit on an envelope inscribed in Owen's hand.

Her heart began to beat oppressively: she was in a mood when the simplest things seemed ominous.What could Owen have to say to her? Only the first page was covered, and it contained simply the announcement that, in the company of a young compatriot who was studying at the Beaux Arts, he had planned to leave for Spain the following evening.