“Yes: courage was the wrong word. You have that. That’s why I’m here.”
“But I don’t see it,” she continued sadly. “So it’s useless, isn’t it?—and so cruel…” He was about to speak, but she went on: “I shall never understand it—never!”
He looked at her. “You will some day: you were made to feel everything”
“I should have thought this was a case of not feeling–-“
“On my part, you mean?” He faced her resolutely. “Yes, it was: to my shame…What I meant was that when you’ve lived a little longer you’ll see what complex blunderers we all are: how we’re struck blind sometimes, and mad sometimes—and then, when our sight and our senses come back, how we have to set to work, and build up, little by little, bit by bit, the precious things we’d smashed to atoms without knowing it. Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.”
She looked up quickly. “That’s what I feeclass="underline" that you ought to–-“
He stood up, interrupting her with a gesture. “Oh, don’t—don’t say what you’re going to! Men don’t give their lives away like that. If you won’t have mine, it’s at least my own, to do the best I can with.”
“The best you can—that’s what I mean! How can there be a ‘best’ for you that’s made of some one else’s worst?”
He sat down again with a groan. “I don’t know! It seemed such a slight thing—all on the surface—and I’ve gone aground on it because it was on the surface. I see the horror of it just as you do. But I see, a little more clearly, the extent, and the limits, of my wrong. It’s not as black as you imagine.”
She lowered her voice to say: “I suppose I shall never understand; but she seems to love you…”
“There’s my shame! That I didn’t guess it, didn’t fly from it. You say you’ll never understand: but why shouldn’t you? Is it anything to be proud of, to know so little of the strings that pull us? If you knew a little more, I could tell you how such things happen without offending you; and perhaps you’d listen without condemning me.”
“I don’t condemn you.” She was dizzy with struggling impulses. She longed to cry out: “I DO understand! I’ve understood ever since you’ve been here!” For she was aware, in her own bosom, of sensations so separate from her romantic thoughts of him that she saw her body and soul divided against themselves. She recalled having read somewhere that in ancient Rome the slaves were not allowed to wear a distinctive dress lest they should recognize each other and learn their numbers and their power. So, in herself, she discerned for the first time instincts and desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in the dim passages of her mind, and now hailed each other with a cry of mutiny.
“Oh, I don’t know what to think!” she broke out. “You say you didn’t know she loved you. But you know it now. Doesn’t that show you how you can put the broken bits together?”
“Can you seriously think it would be doing so to marry one woman while I care for another?”
“Oh, I don’t know…I don’t know…” The sense of her weakness made her try to harden herself against his arguments.
“You do know! We’ve often talked of such things: of the monstrousness of useless sacrifices. If I’m to expiate, it’s not in that way.” He added abruptly: “It’s in having to say this to you now…”
She found no answer.
Through the silent apartment they heard the sudden peal of the door-bell, and she rose to her feet. “Owen!” she instantly exclaimed.
“Is Owen in Paris?”
She explained in a rapid undertone what she had learned from Sophy Viner.
“Shall I leave you?” Darrow asked.
“Yes…no…” She moved to the dining-room door, with the half-formed purpose of making him pass out, and then turned back. “It may be Adelaide.”
They heard the outer door open, and a moment later Owen walked into the room. He was pale, with excited eyes: as they fell on Darrow, Anna saw his start of wonder. He made a slight sign of recognition, and then went up to his step-mother with an air of exaggerated gaiety.
“You furtive person! I ran across the omniscient Adelaide and heard from her that you’d rushed up suddenly and secretly.” He stood between Anna and Darrow, strained, questioning, dangerously on edge.
“I came up to meet Mr. Darrow,” Anna answered. “His leave’s been prolonged—he’s going back with me.”
The words seemed to have uttered themselves without her will, yet she felt a great sense of freedom as she spoke them.
The hard tension of Owen’s face changed to incredulous surprise. He looked at Darrow. “The merest luck…a colleague whose wife was ill…I came straight back,” she heard the latter tranquilly explaining. His self-command helped to steady her, and she smiled at Owen.
“We’ll all go back together tomorrow morning,” she said as she slipped her arm through his.
XXXIII
Owen Leath did not go back with his step-mother to Givre. In reply to her suggestion he announced his intention of staying on a day or two longer in Paris.
Anna left alone by the first train the next morning. Darrow was to follow in the afternoon. When Owen had left them the evening before, Darrow waited a moment for her to speak; then, as she said nothing, he asked her if she really wished him to return to Givre. She made a mute sign of assent, and he added: “For you know that, much as I’m ready to do for Owen, I can’t do that for him—I can’t go back to be sent away again.”
“No—no!”
He came nearer, and looked at her, and she went to him. All her fears seemed to fall from her as he held her. It was a different feeling from any she had known before: confused and turbid, as if secret shames and rancours stirred in it, yet richer, deeper, more enslaving. She leaned her head back and shut her eyes beneath his kisses. She knew now that she could never give him up.
Nevertheless she asked him, the next morning, to let her go back alone to Givre. She wanted time to think. She was convinced that what had happened was inevitable, that she and Darrow belonged to each other, and that he was right in saying no past folly could ever put them asunder. If there was a shade of difference in her feeling for him it was that of an added intensity. She felt restless, insecure out of his sight: she had a sense of incompleteness, of passionate dependence, that was somehow at variance with her own conception of her character.
It was partly the consciousness of this change in herself that made her want to be alone. The solitude of her inner life had given her the habit of these hours of self-examination, and she needed them as she needed her morning plunge into cold water.
During the journey she tried to review what had happened in the light of her new decision and of her sudden relief from pain. She seemed to herself to have passed through some fiery initiation from which she had emerged seared and quivering, but clutching to her breast a magic talisman. Sophy Viner had cried out to her: “Some day you’ll know!” and Darrow had used the same words. They meant, she supposed, that when she had explored the intricacies and darknesses of her own heart her judgment of others would be less absolute. Well, she knew now—knew weaknesses and strengths she had not dreamed of, and the deep discord and still deeper complicities between what thought in her and what blindly wanted…
Her mind turned anxiously to Owen. At least the blow that was to fall on him would not seem to have been inflicted by her hand. He would be left with the impression that his breach with Sophy Viner was due to one of the ordinary causes of such disruptions: though he must lose her, his memory of her would not be poisoned. Anna never for a moment permitted herself the delusion that she had renewed her promise to Darrow in order to spare her stepson this last refinement of misery. She knew she had been prompted by the irresistible impulse to hold fast to what was most precious to her, and that Owen’s arrival on the scene had been the pretext for her decision, and not its cause; yet she felt herself fortified by the thought of what she had spared him. It was as though a star she had been used to follow had shed its familiar ray on ways unknown to her.