“No; but things can’t go on like this.” He paused, as if to measure his words. “I fill you with aversion,” he exclaimed.
She started up, half-sobbing. “No—oh, no!”
“Poor child—you can’t see your face!”
She lifted her hands as if to hide it, and turning away from him bowed her head upon the mantel-shelf. She felt that he was standing a little way behind her, but he made no attempt to touch her or come nearer.
“I know you’ve felt as I’ve felt,” he said in a low voice—“that we belong to each other and that nothing can alter that. But other thoughts come, and you can’t banish them. Whenever you see me you remember…you associate me with things you abhor…You’ve been generous—immeasurably. You’ve given me all the chances a woman could; but if it’s only made you suffer, what’s the use?”
She turned to him with a tear-stained face. “It hasn’t only done that.”
“Oh, no! I know…There’ve been moments…” He took her hand and raised it to his lips. “They’ll be with me as long as I live. But I can’t see you paying such a price for them. I’m not worth what I’m costing you.”
She continued to gaze at him through tear-dilated eyes; and suddenly she flung out the question: “Wasn’t it the Athenee you took her to that evening?”
“Anna—Anna!”
“Yes; I want to know now: to know everything. Perhaps that will make me forget. I ought to have made you tell me before. Wherever we go, I imagine you’ve been there with her…I see you together. I want to know how it began, where you went, why you left her…I can’t go on in this darkness any longer!”
She did not know what had prompted her passionate outburst, but already she felt lighter, freer, as if at last the evil spell were broken. “I want to know everything,” she repeated. “It’s the only way to make me forget.”
After she had ceased speaking Darrow remained where he was, his arms folded, his eyes lowered, immovable. She waited, her gaze on his face.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“No.” The blood rushed to her temples. “You won’t? Why not?”
“If I did, do you suppose you’d forget THAT?”
“Oh—” she moaned, and turned away from him.
“You see it’s impossible,” he went on. “I’ve done a thing I loathe, and to atone for it you ask me to do another. What sort of satisfaction would that give you? It would put something irremediable between us.”
She leaned her elbow against the mantel-shelf and hid her face in her hands. She had the sense that she was vainly throwing away her last hope of happiness, yet she could do nothing, think of nothing, to save it. The conjecture flashed through her: “Should I be at peace if I gave him up?” and she remembered the desolation of the days after she had sent him away, and understood that that hope was vain. The tears welled through her lids and ran slowly down between her fingers.
“Good-bye,” she heard him say, and his footsteps turned to the door.
She tried to raise her head, but the weight of her despair bowed it down. She said to herself: “This is the end…he won’t try to appeal to me again…” and she remained in a sort of tranced rigidity, perceiving without feeling the fateful lapse of the seconds. Then the cords that bound her seemed to snap, and she lifted her head and saw him going.
“Why, he’s mine—he’s mine! He’s no one else’s!” His face was turned to her and the look in his eyes swept away all her terrors. She no longer understood what had prompted her senseless outcry; and the mortal sweetness of loving him became again the one real fact in the world.
XXXIX
Anna, the next day, woke to a humiliated memory of the previous evening.
Darrow had been right in saying that their sacrifice would benefit no one; yet she seemed dimly to discern that there were obligations not to be tested by that standard. She owed it, at any rate, as much to his pride as to hers to abstain from the repetition of such scenes; and she had learned that it was beyond her power to do so while they were together. Yet when he had given her the chance to free herself, everything had vanished from her mind but the blind fear of losing him; and she saw that he and she were as profoundly and inextricably bound together as two trees with interwoven roots. For a long time she brooded on her plight, vaguely conscious that the only escape from it must come from some external chance. And slowly the occasion shaped itself in her mind. It was Sophy Viner only who could save her—Sophy Viner only who could give her back her lost serenity. She would seek the girl out and tell her that she had given Darrow up; and that step once taken there would be no retracing it, and she would perforce have to go forward alone.
Any pretext for action was a kind of anodyne, and she despatched her maid to the Farlows’ with a note asking if Miss Viner would receive her. There was a long delay before the maid returned, and when at last she appeared it was with a slip of paper on which an address was written, and a verbal message to the effect that Miss Viner had left some days previously, and was staying with her sister in a hotel near the Place de l’Etoile. The maid added that Mrs. Farlow, on the plea that Miss Viner’s plans were uncertain, had at first made some difficulty about giving this information; and Anna guessed that the girl had left her friends’ roof, and instructed them to withhold her address, with the object of avoiding Owen. “She’s kept faith with herself and I haven’t,” Anna mused; and the thought was a fresh incentive to action.
Darrow had announced his intention of coming soon after luncheon, and the morning was already so far advanced that Anna, still mistrustful of her strength, decided to drive immediately to the address Mrs. Farlow had given. On the way there she tried to recall what she had heard of Sophy Viner’s sister, but beyond the girl’s enthusiastic report of the absent Laura’s loveliness she could remember only certain vague allusions of Mrs. Farlow’s to her artistic endowments and matrimonial vicissitudes. Darrow had mentioned her but once, and in the briefest terms, as having apparently very little concern for Sophy’s welfare, and being, at any rate, too geographically remote to give her any practical support; and Anna wondered what chance had brought her to her sister’s side at this conjunction. Mrs. Farlow had spoken of her as a celebrity (in what line Anna failed to recall); but Mrs. Farlow’s celebrities were legion, and the name on the slip of paper—Mrs. McTarvie-Birch—did not seem to have any definite association with fame.
While Anna waited in the dingy vestibule of the Hotel Chicago she had so distinct a vision of what she meant to say to Sophy Viner that the girl seemed already to be before her; and her heart dropped from all the height of its courage when the porter, after a long delay, returned with the announcement that Miss Viner was no longer in the hotel. Anna, doubtful if she understood, asked if he merely meant that the young lady was out at the moment; but he replied that she had gone away the day before. Beyond this he had no information to impart, and after a moment’s hesitation Anna sent him back to enquire if Mrs. McTarvie-Birch would receive her. She reflected that Sophy had probably pledged her sister to the same secrecy as Mrs. Farlow, and that a personal appeal to Mrs. Birch might lead to less negative results.
There was another long interval of suspense before the porter reappeared with an affirmative answer; and a third while an exiguous and hesitating lift bore her up past a succession of shabby landings.
When the last was reached, and her guide had directed her down a winding passage that smelt of sea-going luggage, she found herself before a door through which a strong odour of tobacco reached her simultaneously with the sounds of a suppressed altercation. Her knock was followed by a silence, and after a minute or two the door was opened by a handsome young man whose ruffled hair and general air of creased disorder led her to conclude that he had just risen from a long-limbed sprawl on a sofa strewn with tumbled cushions. This sofa, and a grand piano bearing a basket of faded roses, a biscuit-tin and a devastated breakfast tray, almost filled the narrow sitting-room, in the remaining corner of which another man, short, swarthy and humble, sat examining the lining of his hat.