The Reef, Edith Wharton [guided reading books .txt] 📗

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 DO pass. 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--I needn'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.

"You allow me no voice in deciding that?"

"Deciding what?"

"That there's nothing more to be said?" He waited for her to answer, and then went on: "I don't even know what you mean by 'everything'."

"Oh, I don't know what more there is! I know enough. I implored her to deny it, and she couldn't...What can you and I have to say to each other?" Her voice broke into a sob. The animal anguish was upon her again--just a blind cry against her pain!

Darrow kept his head high and his eyes steady. "It must be as you wish; and yet it's not like you to be afraid."

"Afraid?"

"To talk things out--to face them."

"It's for YOU to face this--not me!"

"All I ask is to face it--but with you." Once more he paused. "Won't you tell me what Miss Viner told you?"

"Oh, she's generous--to the utmost!" The pain caught her like a physical throe. It suddenly came to her how the girl must have loved him to be so generous--what memories there must be between them!

"Oh, go, please go. It's too horrible. Why should I have to see you?" she stammered, lifting her hands to her eyes.

With her face hidden she waited to hear him move away, to hear the door open and close again, as, a few hours earlier, it had opened and closed on Sophy Viner. But Darrow made no sound or movement: he too was waiting. Anna felt a thrill of resentment: his presence was an outrage on her sorrow, a humiliation to her pride. It was strange that he should wait for her to tell him so!

"You want me to leave Givre?" he asked at length. She made no answer, and he went on: "Of course I'll do as you wish; but if I go now am I not to see you again?"

His voice was firm: his pride was answering her pride!

She faltered: "You must see it's useless----"

"I might remind you that you're dismissing me without a hearing----"

"Without a hearing? I've heard you both!"

----"but I won't," he continued, "remind you of that, or of anything or any one but Owen."

"Owen?"

"Yes; if we could somehow spare him----"

She had dropped her hands and turned her startled eyes on him. It seemed to her an age since she had thought of Owen!

"You see, don't you," Darrow continued, "that if you send me away now----"

She interrupted: "Yes, I see----" and there was a long silence between them. At length she said, very low: "I don't want any one else to suffer as I'm suffering..."

"Owen knows I meant to leave tomorrow," Darrow went on. "Any sudden change of plan may make him think..."

Oh, she saw his inevitable logic: the horror of it was on every side of her! It had seemed possible to control her grief and face Darrow calmly while she was upheld by the belief that this was their last hour together, that after he had passed out of the room there would be no fear of seeing him again, no fear that his nearness, his look, his voice, and all the unseen influences that flowed from him, would dissolve her soul to weakness. But her courage failed at the idea of having to conspire with him to shield Owen, of keeping up with him, for Owen's sake, a feint of union and felicity. To live at Darrow's side in seeming intimacy and harmony for another twenty-four hours seemed harder than to live without him for all the rest of her days. Her strength failed her, and she threw herself down and buried her sobs in the cushions where she had so often hidden a face aglow with happiness. "Anna----" His voice was close to her. "Let me talk to you quietly. It's not worthy of either of us to be afraid."

Words of endearment would have offended her; but her heart rose at the call to her courage.

"I've no defense to make," he went on. "The facts are miserable enough; but at least I want you to see them as they are. Above all, I want you to know the truth about Miss Viner----"

The name sent the blood to Anna's forehead. She raised her head and faced him. "Why should I know more of her than what she's told me? I never wish to hear her name again!"

"It's because you feel about her in that way that I ask you--in the name of common charity--to let me give you the facts as they are, and not as you've probably imagined them."

"I've told you I don't think uncharitably of her. I don't want to think of her at all!"

"That's why I tell you you're afraid."

"Afraid?"

"Yes. You've always said you wanted, above all, to look at life, at the human problem, as it is, without fear and without hypocrisy; and it's not always a pleasant thing to look at." He broke off, and then began again: "Don't think this a plea for myself! I don't want to say a word to lessen my offense. I don't want to talk of myself at all. Even if I did, I probably couldn't make you understand--I don't, myself, as I look back. Be just to me--it's your right; all I ask you is to be generous to Miss Viner..."

She stood up trembling. "You're free to be as generous to her as you please!"

"Yes: you've made it clear to me that I'm free. But there's nothing I can do for her that will help her half as much as your understanding her would."

"Nothing you can do for her? You can marry her!"

His face hardened. "You certainly couldn't wish her a worse fate!"

"It must have been what she expected...relied on..." He was silent, and she broke out: "Or what is she? What are you? It's too horrible! On your way here...to ME..." She felt the tears in her throat and stopped.

"That was it," he said bluntly. She stared at him.

"I was on my way to you--after repeated