第86章

For the first time, then, she had a clear vision of what her life would be without him.She imagined herself trying to take up the daily round, and all that had lightened and animated it seemed equally lifeless and vain.She tried to think of herself as wholly absorbed in her daughter's development, like other mothers she had seen; but she supposed those mothers must have had stored memories of happiness to nourish them.She had had nothing, and all her starved youth still claimed its due.

When she went up to dress for dinner she said to herself:

"I'll have my last evening with him, and then, before we say good night, I'll tell him."This postponement did not seem unjustified.Darrow had shown her how he dreaded vain words, how resolved he was to avoid all fruitless discussion.He must have been intensely aware of what had been going on in her mind since his return, yet when she had attempted to reveal it to him he had turned from the revelation.She was therefore merely following the line he had traced in behaving, till the final moment came, as though there were nothing more to say...

That moment seemed at last to be at hand when, at her usual hour after dinner, Madame de Chantelle rose to go upstairs.

She lingered a little to bid good-bye to Darrow, whom she was not likely to see in the morning; and her affable allusions to his prompt return sounded in Anna's ear like the note of destiny.

A cold rain had fallen all day, and for greater warmth and intimacy they had gone after dinner to the oak-room, shutting out the chilly vista of the farther drawing-rooms.

The autumn wind, coming up from the river, cried about the house with a voice of loss and separation; and Anna and Darrow sat silent, as if they feared to break the hush that shut them in.The solitude, the fire-light, the harmony of soft hangings and old dim pictures, wove about them a spell of security through which Anna felt, far down in her heart, the muffled beat of an inextinguishable bliss.How could she have thought that this last moment would be the moment to speak to him, when it seemed to have gathered up into its flight all the scattered splendours of her dream?

XXXVI

Darrow continued to stand by the door after it had closed.

Anna felt that he was looking at her, and sat still, disdaining to seek refuge in any evasive word or movement.

For the last time she wanted to let him take from her the fulness of what the sight of her could give.

He crossed over and sat down on the sofa.For a moment neither of them spoke; then he said: "To-night, dearest, Imust have my answer."

She straightened herself under the shock of his seeming to take the very words from her lips.

"To-night?" was all that she could falter.

"I must be off by the early train.There won't be more than a moment in the morning."He had taken her hand, and she said to herself that she must free it before she could go on with what she had to say.

Then she rejected this concession to a weakness she was resolved to defy.To the end she would leave her hand in his hand, her eyes in his eyes: she would not, in their final hour together, be afraid of any part of her love for him.

"You'll tell me to-night, dear," he insisted gently; and his insistence gave her the strength to speak.

"There's something I must ask you," she broke out, perceiving, as she heard her words, that they were not in the least what she had meant to say.

He sat still, waiting, and she pressed on: "Do such things happen to men often?"The quiet room seemed to resound with the long reverberations of her question.She looked away from him, and he released her and stood up.

"I don't know what happens to other men.Such a thing never happened to me..."She turned her eyes back to his face.She felt like a traveller on a giddy path between a cliff and a precipice:

there was nothing for it now but to go on.

"Had it...had it begun...before you met her in Paris?""No; a thousand times no! I've told you the facts as they were.""All the facts?"

He turned abruptly."What do you mean?"

Her throat was dry and the loud pulses drummed in her temples.

"I mean--about her...Perhaps you knew...knew things about her...beforehand."She stopped.The room had grown profoundly still.A log dropped to the hearth and broke there in a hissing shower.

Darrow spoke in a clear voice."I knew nothing, absolutely nothing," he said.

She had the answer to her inmost doubt--to her last shameful unavowed hope.She sat powerless under her woe.

He walked to the fireplace and pushed back the broken log with his foot.A flame shot out of it, and in the upward glare she saw his pale face, stern with misery.

"Is that all?" he asked.

She made a slight sign with her head and he came slowly back to her."Then is this to be good-bye?"Again she signed a faint assent, and he made no effort to touch her or draw nearer."You understand that I sha'n't come back?"He was looking at her, and she tried to return his look, but her eyes were blind with tears, and in dread of his seeing them she got up and walked away.He did not follow her, and she stood with her back to him, staring at a bowl of carnations on a little table strewn with books.Her tears magnified everything she looked at, and the streaked petals of the carnations, their fringed edges and frail curled stamens, pressed upon her, huge and vivid.She noticed among the books a volume of verse he had sent her from England, and tried to remember whether it was before or after...

She felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and at last she turned to him."I shall see you to-morrow before you go..."He made no answer.

She moved toward the door and he held it open for her.She saw his hand on the door, and his seal ring in its setting of twisted silver; and the sense of the end of all things came to her.

They walked down the drawing-rooms, between the shadowy reflections of screens and cabinets, and mounted the stairs side by side.At the end of the gallery, a lamp brought out turbid gleams in the smoky battle-piece above it.