 CHAPTER IX The Light of the October Afternoon lay on an old high-roofed house which enclosed in its long expanse of brick and yellowish stone the breath of a grassy court filled with the shadow and sound of the limes. From the escutcheon piers at the entrance of the court, a level drive, also shaded by limes, extended to a white-barred gate beyond which an equally level avenue of grass cut through a wood dwindled to a blue-green blur against the sky bank with still white slopes of cloud. In the court, halfway between her house and drive, a lady stood. She held a parasol above her head, and looked now at the house front, with its double flight of steps meeting before a glazed door on the sculptured trophies, now down at the drive toward the grassy cutting through the wood. Her air was less of expectancy than of contemplation. She seemed not so much to be watching for anyone or listening for an approaching sound as letting the whole aspect of the place sink into her while she held herself open to its influence. Yet it was no less apparent that the scene was not new to her. There was no eagerness of investigation in her survey. She seemed rather to be looking about her with eyes to which, for some intimate inward reason, details long since familiar, had suddenly acquired an unwanted freshness. This was in fact the exact sensation of which Mrs. Leith was conscious as she came forth from the house and descended into the sunlit court. She had come to meet her stepson, who was likely to be returning at that hour from an afternoon shooting in one of the more distant plantations, and she carried in her hand the letter which had sent her in search of him, but with her first step out of the house all thought of him had been effaced by another series of impressions. The scene about her was known to satiety. She had seen G. Fridt all seasons of the year, and for the greater part of every year, since the far-off day of her marriage, the day when ostensibly driving through its gates at her husband's side, she had actually been carried there on a cloud of iris-swinged visions. The possibilities which the place had then represented were still vividly present to her. The mere phrase of French chateau had called up to her youthful fancy a throng of romantic associations, poetic, pictorial, and emotional, and the serene face of the old house seated in its park among the popular boarded meadows of middle France had seemed, on the first side of it, to hold out to her a fate as noble and dignified as its own mean. Though she could still call up that phase of feeling, it had long since passed, and the house had for a time become to her the very simple of narrowness and monotony. Then, with the passing of years, it had gradually acquired a less inimical character, had become, not again a castle of dreams, evoker of fair images and romantic legend. But the shell of a life slowly adjusted to its dwelling, the place one came back to, the place where one had one's duties, one's habits and one's books, the place one would naturally live in till one died, a dull house, an inconvenient house, of which one knew all the defects, the shabbinesses, the discomforts, but to which one was so used that one could hardly, after so long a time, think oneself away from it without suffering a certain loss of identity. Now, as it lay before her in the autumn mildness, its mistress was surprised at her own insensibility. She had been trying to see the house through the eyes of an old friend who, the next morning, would be driving up to it for the first time, and in so doing she seemed to be opening her own eyes upon it after a long interval of blindness. The court was very still, yet full of latent life, the wheeling and rustling of pigeons about the rectangular ews and across the sunny gravel, the sweep of rooks above the lustrous grayish-purple slates of the roof, and the stir of the treetops as they met the breeze, which every day, at that hour, came punctually up from the river. Just such latent animation glowed in Annalith. In every nerve and vein she was conscious of that equipoise of bliss which the fearful human heart scarce dares acknowledge. She was not used to strong or full emotions, but she had always known that she should not be afraid of them. She was not afraid now, but she felt a deep, inward stillness. The immediate effect of the feeling had been to send her forth in question of her snep son. She wanted to stroll back with him and have a quiet talk before they re-entered the house. It was always easy to talk to him, and at this moment he was the one person to whom she could have spoken without fear of disturbing her inner stillness. She was glad, for all sorts of reasons, that Madame Duchantelle and Effie were still at O'Shee with the governess, and that she and Owen had the house to themselves. And she was glad that even he was not yet in sight. She wanted to be alone a little longer, not to think, but to let the long, slow waves of joy break over her one by one. She walked out of the court and sat down on one of the benches at the border of the drive. From her seat she had a diagonal view of the long house-front and of the domed chapel terminating one of the wings. Beyond a gate in the courtyard wall the flower garden drew its dark green squares and raised its statues against the yellowing background of the park. In the borders only a few late pinks and crimson smoldered, but a peacock strutting in the sun seemed to have gathered into his outspread fan all the summer glories of the place. In Mrs. Leeds hand was a letter which had opened her eyes to these things, and a smile rose to her lips at the mere feeling of the paper between her fingers. The thrill it sent through her gave a keener edge to every sense. She felt, saw, breathed the shining world as though a thin impenetrable veil had suddenly been removed from it. Just such a veil, she now perceived, had always hung between herself and life. It had been like the stage gauze which gives an elusive air of reality to the painted scene behind it. It proves it, after all, to be no more than a painted scene. She had been hardly aware, in her girlhood, of differing from others in this respect. In the well-regulated, well-fed summer's world the unusual was regarded as either immoral or ill-bred, and people with emotions were not visited. Sometimes with a sense of groping in a topsy-turvy universe, Anna had wondered why everybody about her seemed to ignore all the passions and sensations which formed the stuff of great poetry and memorable action. In a community composed entirely of people like her parents and her parents' friends, she did not see how the magnificent things one read about could ever have happened. She was sure that if anything of the kind had occurred in her immediate circle, her mother would have consulted the family clergyman, and her father perhaps even rung up the police, and her sense of humor compelled her to own that, in the given conditions, these precautions might not have been unjustified. Little by little the conditions conquered her, and she learned to regard the substance of life as a mere canvas for the embroideries of poet and painter, and its little swept and fenced intended surface as its actual substance. It was in the visioned region of action and emotion that her fullest hours were spent, but it hardly occurred to her that they might be translated into experience, or connected with anything likely to happen to a young lady living in West 55th Street. She perceived indeed that other girls, leaning outwardly the same life as herself, and seemingly unaware of the world of hidden beauty, were yet possessed of some vital secret which escaped her. There seemed to be a kind of free masonry between them. They were wider awake than she, more alert and sure of their wants, if not of their opinions. She supposed they were cleverer, and accepted her in feriority good-humidly, half aware within herself of a reserve of unused power which the others gave no sign of possessing. This partly consoled her for missing so much of what made there good time, but the resulting sense of exclusion of being somehow laughingly but firmly devoured from a share of their privileges, threw her back on herself and deepened the reserve which made envious mothers cite her as a model of ladylike repression. Love, she told herself, would one day release her from the spell of unreality. She was persuaded that the sublime passion was the key to the enigma. But it was difficult to relate her conception of love to the forms that wore in her experience. Two or three of the girls she had envied for their superior acquaintance with the arts of life had contracted, in the course of time, what were variously described as romantic or foolish marriages. One even made a runaway match and languished for a while under a cloud of social reprobation. Here, then, was passion in action, romance converted to reality. Yet the heroines of these exploits returned from them untransfigured, and their husbands were dull as ever when one had to sit next to them at dinner. Her own case, of course, would be different. Some day she would find the magic bridge between West 55th Street and Life. Once or twice she had even fancied that the clue was in her hand. The first time was when she had met young Darrow. She recalled even now the stir of the encounter. But his passion swept over her like a wind that shakes the roof of the forest, without reaching it still glades, a rippling its hidden pools. He was extraordinarily intelligent and agreeable, and her heart beat faster when he was with her. He had a tall, fair, easy presence and a mind in which the lights of irony played pleasantly through the shades of feeling. She'd like to hear his voice almost as much to listen to what he was saying, and to listen to what he was saying almost as much as to feel that he was looking at her. But he wanted to kiss her, and she wanted to talk to him about books and pictures, and half him insinuate the eternal theme of their love into every subject they discussed. Whenever they were apart, a reaction set in. She wondered how she could have been so cold, called herself prude and an idiot question if any man could really care for her, and got up in the dead of night to try new ways of doing her hair. But as soon as he reappeared, her head straightened itself on her slim neck, and she sped her little shafts of irony, or flew her little kites of erudition, while hot and cold waves swept over her, and the things she really wanted to say choked in her throat and burned the palms of her hands. Often she told herself that any silly girl who had waltzed through a season would know better than she how to attract a man and hold him. But when she said a man, she did not really mean George Darrow. Then one day at dinner, she saw him sitting next to one of the silly girls in question, the heroine of the elopement which has shaken West 55th Street to its base. The young lady had come back from her adventure no less silly than when she went, and across the table the partner of her flight, a fat young man with eyeglasses, sat stolidly eating terrapin and talking about polo and investments. The young woman was undoubtedly silly as ever, yet after watching her for a few minutes, Miss Summers perceived that she had somehow grown luminous, perilous, obscurely menacing to nice girls and the young man they intended eventually to accept. Suddenly at the site, a rage of possessorship awoke in her. She must save Darrow, assert her right to him at any price. Pride and reticence went down in hurricane of jealousy. She heard him laugh, and there was something new in his laugh. She watched him talking, talking. He sat slightly sideways, a faint smile beneath his lids, lowering his voice as he lowered it when he talked to her. She caught the same inflections, but his eyes were different. He would have offended her once if he had looked at her like that. Now her one thought was that none but she had a right to be so looked at. And that girl of all others. What illusions could he have but a girl who hardly a year ago had made a fool of herself over the fat young man stolidly eating terrapin across the table? If that was where romance and passion ended, it was better to take to district visiting or algebra. All night she lay awake and wondered, what was she saying to him? How shall I learn to say such things? And she decided that her heart would tell her that the next time they were alone together the irresistible word would spring to her lips. He came the next day and they were alone and all she found was. I didn't know that you and Kitty Main were such friends. He answered with indifference that he didn't know it either, and in the reaction of relief she declared, she certainly ever so much prettier than she was. She's rather good fun, he admitted, as though he had not noticed her other advantages, and suddenly Anna saw in his eyes the look she had seen there the previous evening. She felt as if he were leagues and leagues away from her, all her hopes dissolved, and she was conscious of sitting rigidly with high head and straight lips, while the irresistible word fled with a last wing beat into the golden mist of her illusions. She was still quivering with the pain and bewilderment of this adventure when Fraser Leith appeared. She met him first in Italy, where she was traveling with her parents, and the following winter he came to New York. In Italy he had seemed interesting. In New York he became remarkable. He seldom spoke of his life in Europe, and let drop but the most incidental allusion to the friends, the tastes, the pursuits which filled his cosmopolitan days. But in the atmosphere of West 55th Street he seemed the embodiment of a storied past. He presented his summers with a pridly bound anthology of the old French poets, and when she showed a discriminating pleasure in the gift, observed with his grave smile, I didn't suppose I should find anyone here who would feel about these things as I do. On another occasion he asked her acceptance of a half effaced 18th century pastel which she had surprisingly picked up in a New York auction room. I know no one but you who would really appreciate it, he explained. He permitted himself no other comments, but these conveyed with sufficient directness that he thought her worthy of a different setting. That she should be so regarded by a man living in an atmosphere of art and beauty, and esteeming them the vital elements of life, made her feel for the first time she was understood. Here was someone whose scale of values was the same as hers, and who thought her opinion worth hearing on the very matters which they both considered of supreme importance. The discovery restored herself confidence, and she revealed herself to Mr. Leith that she had never known how to reveal herself to Darrow. As the courtship progressed, and they grew more confidential, her suitors surprised and delighted her by little explosions of revolutionary sentiment. He said, Shall you mind, I wonder, if I tell you that you live in a dreadfully conventional atmosphere? In seeing that she manifestly did not mind. Of course I shall say things now, and then that will horrify your dear delightful parents. I shall shock them awfully, I warn you. In confirmation of this warning he permitted himself an occasional playful fling at the regular church going of Mr. and Mrs. Summers, at the innocuous character of the literature in their library, and at their guileless appreciations in art. He even ventured to banter Mrs. Summers on her refusal to receive the irrepressible Kitty Main, who, after a rapid passage with George Darrow, was now involved in another and more flagrant adventure. In Europe, you know, the husband is regarded as the only judge in such matters. As long as he accepts the situation, Mr. Leith explained to Anna, who took his view the more emphatically in order to convince herself that, personally, she had none but the most tolerant sentiment toward the lady. The subversiveness of Mr. Leith's opinions was enhanced by the distinction of his appearance and the reserve of his manners. He was like the anarchist with a gardenia in his buttonhole who figures in the higher melodrama. Every word, every illusion, every note of his agreeably modulated voice gave Anna a glimpse of a society at once freer and finer, which observed the traditional forums but had discarded the underlying prejudices, whereas the world she knew had discarded many of the forums and kept almost all the prejudices. In such an atmosphere as this, an eager young woman, curious as to all the manifestations of life, yet instinctively desiring that they should come to her in terms of beauty and fine feeling, must surely find the largest scope for self-expression. Study, travel, the contact of the world, the comradeship of a polished and enlightened mind would combine to enrich her days and form her character, and it was only in the rare moments and Mr. Leeds' symmetrical, blond mask went over hers and his kiss dropped on her like a cold, smooth pebble that she questioned the completeness of the joys he offered. There had been a time when the walls on which her gaze now rested had shed a glare of irony on these early dreams. In the first years of her marriage, the sober symmetry of Jeeve had suggested only her husband's neatly balanced mind. It was a mind she soon learned, contentedly absorbed in formulating the conventions of the unconventional. West 55th Street was no more conscientiously concerned than Jeeve with the momentous question of what people did. It was only the type of deed investigated that was different. Mr. Leeds collected his social instances with the same seriousness and patience as his snuff boxes. He exacted a rigid conformity to his rules of non-conformity and his skepticism had the absolute accent of a dogma. He even cherished certain exceptions to his rules as the book collector prizes a defective first edition. The Protestant churchgoing of Anna's parents had provoked his gentle sarcasm, but he prided himself on his mother's devoutness, because Madame de Chantel, in embracing her second husband's creed, had become part of a society which still observes the outward rites of piety. Anna, in fact, had discovered in her amiable and elegant mother-in-law an unexpected embodiment of the West 55th Street ideal. Mrs. Summers and Madame de Chantel, however strongly they would have disagreed as to the authorized source of Christian dogma, would have found themselves completely in accord on all the momentous minutia of drawing-room conduct. Yet Mr. Leeds treated his mother's foibles with the respect which Anna's experience of him forbade her to attribute wholly to filial affection. In the early days, when she was still questioning the sphinx instead of trying to find an answer to it, she ventured to tax her husband with his inconsistency. You say your mother won't like it if I call on that amusing little woman who came here the other day and was let in by mistake. But Madame de Chantel tells me she lives with her husband, and when mother refused to visit Kitty May and you said, Mr. Leeds smiled the rest at her. My dear child, I don't pretend to apply the principles of logic to my poor mother's prejudices. But if you admit they ARE prejudices, there are prejudices and prejudices. My mother, of course, got hers from Bessir de Chantel, and they seemed to me as much in their place in this house as the potpourri in your hot-done jar. They preserve a social tradition of which I should be sorry to lose the least perfume. Of course, I don't expect you just at first to feel the difference, to see the nuance. In the case of little Madame de Villeville, for example, you point out that she's still under her husband's roof. Very true, and if she were merely a Paris acquaintance, especially if you admit her as one still might, in the right kind of house in Paris, I should be the last to object to your visiting her. But in the country, it's different. Even the best provincial society is what you would call narrow. I don't deny it. And if some of our friends met Madame de Villeville Gives, well, it would produce a bad impression. You're inclined to ridicule such considerations, but gradually you'll come to see their importance. And meanwhile, do trust me when I ask you to be guided by my mother. It is always well for a stranger in an old society to err a little on the side of what you call its prejudices, but I should rather describe as its traditions. After that she no longer tried to laugh or argue her husband out of his convictions. They work convictions, and therefore unassailable. Nor was any insincerity implied in the fact that they sometimes seemed to coincide with hers. They were occasions when he really did look at things as she did, but for reasons so different as to make the distance between them all the greater. Life, to Mr. Leith, was like a walk through a carefully classified museum, where in moments of doubt one had only to look at the number and refer to one's catalogue. To his wife it was like groping about in a huge, dark lumber room where the exploring ray of curiosity lit up now some shape of breathing beauty and now mummy's grin. In the first bewilderment of her new state these discoveries had the effect of dropping another layer of gauze between herself and reality. She seemed farther than ever removed from the strong joys and pangs for which she felt herself made. She did not adopt her husband's views, but insensibly she began to live his life. She tried to throw a compensating ardor into the secret excursions of her spirit, and thus the old vicious distinction between romance and reality was re-established for her. And she resigned herself again to the belief that real life was neither real nor alive. The birth of a little girl swept away this delusion. At last she felt herself in contact with the actual business of living. But even this impression was not enduring. Everything but the irreducible crude fact of childbearing assumed in the Leith household the same ghostly tinge of unreality. Her husband at the time was all that his own idea of a husband required. He was attentive, and even suitably moved. But as he sat by her bedside and thoughtfully proffered to her the list of people who had called to inquire, she looked first at him and at the child between them, and wondered at the blundering alchemy of nature. With the exception of the little girl herself, everything connected with that time had grown curiously remote and unimportant. The days that had moved so slowly as they passed seemed now to have plunged down headlong steeps of time. And as she sat in the autumn sun, with Darrow's letter in her hand, the history of Anna Leith appeared to its heroine like some gray, shadowy tale that she might have read in an old book one night as she was falling asleep. Two brown blurs emerging from the farther end of the wood vista gradually defined themselves as her stepson and attendant gamekeeper. They grew slowly upon the bluish background, with occasional delays and re-affasements, and she sat still, waiting till they should reach the gate at the end of the drive, where the keeper would turn after his cottage and Owen continue on to the house. She watched his approach with a smile. From the first days of her marriage she had been drawn to the boy, but it was not until after Effie's birth that she had really begun to know him. The eager observation of her own child had shown her how much she had still to learn about the slight, fair boy whom the holidays periodically restored to Jeeve. Owen, even then, both physically and morally, furnished her with the oddest of commentaries on his father's mean in mind. He would never, the family sighingly recognized, be nearly as handsome as Mr. Leith, but his rather charmingly unbalanced face, with his brooding forehead and petulant boyish smile, suggested to Anna what his father's countenance might have been, could one have pictured its neat features disordered by a rattling breeze. She even pushed the analogy farther, and described in her stepson's mind a quaintly twisted reflection of her husband's. With his bursts of door slamming activity, his fits of bookish indolence, his crude revolutionary dogmatizing, and his flashes of precocious irony, the boy was not unlike a boisterous embodiment of his father's theories. It was as though Frazier Leith's ideas, accustomed to hang like marionettes on their pegs, should suddenly come down and walk. There were moments, indeed, when Owen's humors must have suggested to his progenitor the gambles of an infant Frankenstein, but to Anna they were the voice of her secret rebellions, and her tenderness to her stepson was partly based on her severity toward herself. As he had the courage she had lacked, so she meant him to have the chances she had missed, and every effort she made for him helped to keep her own hopes alive. Her interest in Owen led her to think more often of his mother, and sometimes she would slip away and stand alone before her predecessors' portrait. Since her arrival at Giv, the picture, a full length by a once fashionable artist, had undergone the successive displacements of an exiled consort removed farther and farther from the throne, and Anna could not help noting that these stages coincide with the gradual decline of the artist's fame. She had a fancy that if his credit had been in the ascendant, the first Mrs. Leith might have continued to throne over the drawing room mental piece, even to the exclusion of her successor's effigy. Instead of this, her peregrinations had finally landed her in the shrouded solitude of the billiard room, an apartment which no one ever entered, but where it was understood that the light was better, or might have been if the shutters had not been always closed. Here the poor lady, elegantly dressed and seated in the middle of a large, lonely canvas in the black contemplation of a gilt console, had always seemed to Anna to be waiting for visitors who never came. Of course they never came, you poor thing. I wonder how long it took you to find out that they never would, and I had more than once apostrophised her, with a derision addressed rather to herself than to the dead. But it was only after Effie's birth that it occurred to her to study more closely the face in the picture, and speculate on the kind of visitors that Owen's mother might have hoped for. She certainly doesn't look as if they would have been the same kind as mine, but there's no telling from a portrait that was so obviously done to please the family, and that leaves Owen so unaccounted for. Well, they never came, the visitors, they never came, and she died of it. She died of it long before they buried her, I'm certain of that. Those are stone dead eyes in the picture. The loneliness must have been awful, if even Owen couldn't keep her from dying of it. And to feel it so, she must have had feelings, real live ones, the kind that twitch and tug. And all she had to look at life was a guilt consul. Yes, that's it, a guilt consul screwed to the wall. That's exactly and absolutely what he is. She did not mean if she could help it, that either Effie or Owen should know that loneliness, or let her know it again. They were three now to keep each other warm, and she embraced both children the same passion of motherhood, as though one were not enough to shield her from her predecessor's fate. Sometimes she fancied that Owen Leith's response was warmer than that of her own child. But then Effie was still hardly more than a baby, and Owen, from the first, had been almost old enough to understand, certainly did understand now, in a tacit way that yet perpetually spoke to her. This sense of his understanding was the deepest element in their feeling for each other. There were so many things between them that they were never spoken of, or even indirectly alluded to, yet that even in their occasional discussions and differences, formed the unaduced arguments making for final agreement. Musing on this, she continued to watch his approach, and her heart began to beat a little faster to the thought of what she had to say to him. But when he reached the gate she saw him pause, and after a moment he turned aside as if to gain a cross road to the park. She started up and waved her sunshade, but he did not see her. No doubt he meant to go back with the gamekeeper, perhaps the kennels, to see a retriever who had hurt his leg. Suddenly she was seized by the whim to overtake him. She threw down the parasol, thrust her letter into her bodice, and catching up her skirts began to run. She was slight and light, with a natural ease and quickness of gait, but she could not recall having run a yard since she had romped with Owen in his school days, nor did she know what impulse moved her now. She only knew that run she must, that no other motion short of flight would have emboyant enough for her humour. She seemed to be keeping pace with them inward with them, seeking to give bodily expression to the lyric rush of her thoughts. The earth always felt elastic under her, and she had a conscious joy in treading it, but never had it been as soft and springy as today. It seemed actually to rise and meet her as she went, so that she had the feeling, which sometimes came to her in dreams, of skimming miraculously over short, bright waves. The air, too, seemed to break in waves against her, sweeping by on its current all the slanted lights and moist sharp perfumes of the failing day. She panted to herself, this is nonsense, her blood hummed back, but it's glorious, and she sped on till she saw that Owen had caught sight of her and was striding back in her direction. Then she stopped and waited, flushed and laughing, her hands clasped against the letter in her breast. No, I'm not mad, she cried out, but there's something in the air today, don't you feel it? And I wanted to have a little talk with you, she added as he came up to her, smiling at him and linking her arm in his. He smiled back, but above the smile she saw the shade of anxiety, which for the last two months had kept its fixed line between his hands and eyes. Oh, and don't look like that, I don't want you to, she said imperiously. He laughed. You said that exactly like Effie. What do you want me to do, to race with you as I do Effie? But I wouldn't have a show, he protested, still with a little frown between his eyes. Where are you going? she asked. To the kennels, but there's not the least need, the better scene, Gary, and he's all right. If there's anything you want to tell me. Did I say there was? I just came out to meet you. I wanted to know if you'd had a good sport. The shadow dropped on him again. None at all. The fact is I didn't try. Jean and I have just been knocking about in the woods. I wasn't in a sanguinary mood. They walked on with the same light gate, so nearly of a height that keeping step came as naturally to them as breathing. Anna sold another look at the young face on a level with her own. You did say there was something you wanted to tell me, her stepson began after a pause. Well, there is. She slackened her pace involuntarily. They came to a pause and stood facing each other under the limes. Is Darrow coming? he asked. She seldom blushed, but at the question a sudden heat suffused her. She held her head high. Yes, he's coming. I've just heard he arrives tomorrow. But that's not. She saw her blunder and tried to rectify it. Or rather yes, in a way it is my reason for wanting to speak to you. Because he's coming? Because he's not yet here. It's about him then. He looked at her kindly, half humorously, in almost fraternal wisdom in his smile. About... No, no. I meant that I wanted to speak today because it's our last day alone together. Oh, I see. He had slipped his hands into the pockets of his tweed shooting jacket and lounged along at her side, his eyes bent on the moist ruts of the drive as though the matter had lost all interest for him. Oh, and? He stopped again, faced her. Look here, my dear, it's no sort of use. What's no use? Anything on earth you can any of you say. She challenged him. Am I one of any of you? He did not yield. Well then, anything on earth that even you can say. You don't know in the least what I can say, or what I mean to. Don't I generally? She gave him this point, but only to make another. Yes, but this is particularly. I want to say... Oh, and you've been admirable all the way through. He broke into a laugh in which the odd elder brotherly note was once more perceptible. Admirable, she emphasized. And so has she. Oh, and so have you to her. His voice broke down to boisiness. I've never lost sight of that for a minute. It's been altogether easier for her, though. He threw off presently. On the whole I suppose it has. Well, she summed up with a laugh. Aren't you all the better pleased to be told you've behaved as well as she? Oh, you know, I've not done it for you. He tossed back at her without the least note of hostility in the affected lightness of his tone. Haven't you, though, perhaps the least bit? Because, after all, you knew I understood. He would have been awfully kind about pretending to. She laughed. You don't believe me? You must remember I had your grandmother to consider. Yes, and my father, and Effie, I suppose, and the outraged shades of jive. He paused as if to lay more stress on the boyish sneer. Did you likewise include the late Monsieur de Chantel? His stepmother did not appear to resent the thrust. She went on, in the same tone of affectionate persuasion. Yes, I must have seemed to you too subject to jive. Perhaps I have been. But you know that was not my real object in asking you to wait, to say nothing to your grandmother before her return. He considered. Your real object, of course, was to gain time. Yes, but for whom? Why not for you? For me? He flushed up quickly. You don't mean— She laid her hand on his arm and looked gravely into his handsom eyes. I mean that when your grandmother gets back from Ushi, I shall speak to her. You will speak to her? Yes. If only you'll promise to give me time. Time for her to send for Adelaide Painter? Oh, she'll undoubtedly send for Adelaide Painter. The illusion touched the spring of mirth in both their minds, and they exchanged a laughing look. Only you must promise not to rush things. You must give me time to prepare Adelaide too, Mrs. Leith went on. Prepare her too? He drew away for a better look at her. Prepare her for what? Why to prepare your grandmother for your marriage? Yes, that's what I mean. I'm going to see you through, you know. His faint of indifference broke down, and he caught her hand. Oh, you dear divine thing, I didn't dream. I know you didn't. She dropped her gaze and began to walk on slowly. I can't say you convinced me of the wisdom of the step. Only I seem to see that other things matter more, and that not missing things matters most. Perhaps I've changed, or you're not changing as convinced me. I'm certain now that you won't budge, and that was really all I ever cared about. Oh, as to not budging, I told you some months ago. You might have been sure of that. And how can you be any sureer today than yesterday? I don't know. I suppose one learns something every day. Not at jeev, he laughed, and shot a half-ironic look at her. But you haven't really been at jeev lately, not for months. Don't you suppose I've noticed that, my dear? She echoed his laugh, emerged in an undenying sigh. Poor jeev. Poor empty jeev, with so many rooms full, and yet not a soul at it. Except, of course, my grandmother. Who is its soul? They had reached the gateway of the court, and stood looking with a common accord at the long, soft-hewed facade on which the autumn light was dying. It looked so made to be happy, and she murmured. Yes, today. Today. He pressed her arm a little. Oh, you darling, to have given it that look for me. He paused, and then went on in a lower voice. Don't you feel we owe it to the poor place to do what we can to give it that look? You, too, I mean. Come, let's make it grin from wing to wing. I've such a mad desire to say outrageous things to it, haven't you? After all, in old times, there must have been living people here. Loosening her arm from his, she continued to gaze up at the house-front, which seemed, in the plaintive decline of light, to send her back the mute appeal of something doomed. It is beautiful, she said. A beautiful memory. Quite perfect to take out and turn over when I'm grinding at the law in New York, and you're— He broke off and looked at her with a questioning smile. Come, tell me. You and I don't have to say things to talk to each other. When you turn suddenly absent-minded and mysterious, I always feel like saying, Come back, all is discovered. She returned a smile. You know as much as I know. I promise you that. He wavered, as if for the first time uncertain how far he might go. I don't know Dara as much as you know him. He presently wrist. She found Lul. You said just now we didn't need to say things. Was I speaking? I thought it was your eyes. He caught her by both elbows and spun her halfway round, so the late sun shed a betraying gleam on her face. There's such awfully conversational eyes. Don't you suppose they told me long ago why it's just today you've made up your mind that people have got to live their own lives, even at Jeeve? End of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 of The Reef This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Reef by Edith Wharton Chapter 11 This is the South Terrace, Anna said. Should you like to walk down to the river? She seemed to listen to herself speaking from a far off Aery height, and yet to be wholly gathered into the circle of consciousness which drew its glowing ring about herself and Darrow. To the aerial listener her words sounded flat and colorless, but to the self within the ring each one beat with a separate heart. It was the day after Darrow's arrival, and he had come down early, drawn by the sweetness of the light on the lawns and gardens below his window. Anna had heard the echo of his step on the stairs, his paws in the stone-flagged hall, his voice as he asked the servant where to find her. She was at the end of the house, in the brown panelled sitting-room which she frequented at that season because it caught the sunlight first and kept it longest. She stood near the window, in the pale brand of brightness, arranging some salmon-pink geraniums in a shallow porcelain bowl. Every sensation of touch and sight was thrice alive in her. The grey-green fur of the geranium leaves caressed her fingers, and the sunlight wavering across the irregular surface of the old parquet floor made it seem as bright and shifting as the brown bed of a stream. Darrow stood framed in the doorway of the farthest drawing-room, a light-grey figure against the black and white flagging of the hall. Then he began to move toward her, down the empty pale-panelled vista, crossing one after another the long reflections which a projecting cabinet or screen cast here and there on the shining floors. As he drew nearer, his figure was suddenly displaced by that of her husband, whom from the same point she had so often seen advancing down the same perspective. Straight, spare, erect, looking to right and left with quick, precise turns of the head, and stopping now and then to straighten a chair or alter the position of a vase, Frida Leith used to march toward her through the double file of furniture like a general reviewing a regiment drawn up for his inspection. At a certain point, midway across the second room, he always stopped before the mantle-piece of pinkish-yellow marble and looked at himself in the tall, galloping glass that surrounded it. She could not remember that he had ever found anything to straighten or alter in his own study to tire, but she had never known him to omit the inspection when he passed that particular mirror. When it was over, he continued more briskly on his way, and the resulting expression of satisfaction was still on his face when he entered the oak sitting-room to greet his wife. The spectral projection of this daily little scene hung out for a moment before Anna, but in that moment she had time to fling a wondering glance across the distance between her past and present. Then the footsteps of the present came close, and she had to drop the geraniums to give her hand to Darrow. Yes, let us walk down to the river. They had neither of them as yet found much to say to each other. Darrow had arrived late on the previous afternoon, and during the evening they had had between them Owen Leith and their own thoughts. Now they were alone for the first time, and the fact was enough in itself. Yet Anna was intensely aware that as soon as they began to talk more intimately, they would feel that they knew each other less well. They passed out onto the terrace and down the steps to the gravel walk below. The delicate frosting of dew gave the grass a bluish shimmer, and the sunlight, sliding in emerald streaks along the tree-bowls, gathered itself into great luminous blurs at the end of the woodwalks, and hung above the fields a watery glow like the ring about an autumn moon. It's good to be here, Darrow said. They took a turn to the left and stopped for a moment to look back at the long pink housefront, plainer, friendlier, less adorned than on the side toward the court. So prolonged yet delicate had been the friction of time upon its bricks that certain expanses had the bloom and texture of old red velvet, and the patches of gold lichens spreading over them looked like the last traces of a dim embroidery. The dome of the chapel, with its gilded cross, rose above one wing, and the other ended in a conical pigeon-house, above which the birds were flying lustrous and slady, their breasts merged in the blue of the roof when they dropped down on it. And this is where you've been all these years. They turned away and began to walk down a long tunnel of yellowing trees. Benches with mossy feet stood against the mossy edges of the bath, and at its farther end it widened into a circle about a basin rimmed with stone, in which the opaque water strewn with leaves looked like a slab of gold-flecked agate. The path, growing narrower, wound uncircuitously through the woods between slender, serried trunks twined with ivy. Patches of blue appeared above them through the dwindling leaves, and presently the trees drew back and showed the open fields along the river. They walked on across the fields of the towpath. In a curve of the wall some steps led up to a crumbling pavilion, with openings choked with ivy. Anna and Darrow seated themselves on the bench, projecting from the inner wall of the pavilion, and looked across the river at the slopes, divided into blocks of green and fawn color, and at the chalk-tinted village, lifting its squat church tower and gray roofs against the precisely drawn lines of the landscape. Anna sat silent, so intensely aware of Darrow's nearness that there was no surprise in the touch he laid on her hand. They looked at each other, and he smiled and said, There are to be no more obstacles now. Obstacles? The word startled her. What obstacles? Don't you remember the wording of that telegram that turned me back last May? Unforeseen obstacle, that was it. What was the earth-shaking problem, by the way? Finding a governess for Effie, wasn't it? But I gave you my reason. The reason why it was an obstacle. I wrote you fully about it. Yes, I know you did. He lifted her hand and kissed it. How far off it all seems, and how little it all matters today. She looked at him quickly. Do you feel that? I suppose I'm different. I want to draw all those wasted months into today, to make them a part of it. But they are, to me. You reach back and take everything back to the first days of all. She found a little, as if struggling with an inarticulate perplexity. It's curious how in those first days, too, something that I didn't understand came between us. Oh, in those days we neither of us understood, did we? It's part of what's called the bliss of being young. Yes, I thought that, too. Thought it, I mean, in looking back. But it couldn't, even then, have been as true of you as of me. And now? Now, he said. The only thing that matters is that we're sitting here together. He dismissed the rest with a lightness that might have seemed conclusive evidence of her power over him. But she took no pride in such triumphs. It seemed to her that she wanted his allegiance and his adoration, not so much for herself as for their mutual love, and that in treating lightly any past phase of their relation, he took something from its present beauty. The colour rose to her face. Between you and me, everything matters. Of course, she felt the unperceiving sweetness of his smile. That's why, he went on, everything, for me, is here now, on this bench, between you and me. She caught up the phrase. That's what I meant. It's here and now. We can't get away from it. Get away from it? Do you want to? Again? Her heart was beating unsteadily. Something in her, fitfully and with reluctance, struggled to free itself. But the warmth of his nearness penetrated every sense as the sunlight steeped the landscape. Then suddenly, she felt that she wanted no less than the whole of her happiness. Again? But wasn't it you the last time? She paused, the tremor in her of Psyche holding out the lamp. But in the interrogative light of her pause, her companion's features underwent no change. The last time? Last spring? But it was you who, for the best of reasons, as you've told, turned me back from your very door last spring. She saw that he was good-humidly ready to threshold for her sentimental satisfaction, a question which, for his own, time had so conclusively dealt with, and the sense of his readiness reassured her. I wrote as soon as I could, she rejoined. I explained the delay and asked you to come. And you never even answered my letter. It was impossible to come then. I had to go back to my post. And impossible to write and tell me so? Your letter was a long time coming. I'd waited a week, ten days. I had some excuse for thinking, when it came, that you were in no great hurry for an answer. You saw that, really? After reading it? I thought it. Her heart leaped up to her throat. Then why are you here today? He turned on her with a quick look of wonder. God knows, if you can ask me that. You see, I was right to say I didn't understand. He stood up abruptly and stood facing her, blocking the view over the river and the checkered slopes. Perhaps I might say so too. No, no. We must neither of us have any reason for saying it again. She looked at him gravely. Surely you and I needn't arrange the lights before we show ourselves to each other. I want you to see me just as I am, with all my irrational doubts and scruples, the old ones and the new ones, too. He came back to his seat beside her. Never mind the old ones. They were justified. I'm willing to admit it. With the governess having suddenly to be packed off at Effie on your hands and your mother-in-law ill, I see the impossibility of your letting me come. I even see that, at the moment, it was difficult to write and explain. But what does all that matter now? The new scruples are the ones I want to tackle. Again her heart trembled. She felt her happiness so near, so sure, that to strain it closer might be like a child's crushing a pet bird in its caress. But her very security urged her on. For so long her doubts had been knife-edged, now they had turned into bright, harmless toys that she could toss and catch without peril. You didn't come, and you didn't answer my letter, and after waiting four months I've wrote another. And I answered that one. And I'm here. Yes, she held his eyes. But in my last letter I repeated exactly what I'd said in the first, the one I wrote to you last June. I told you then that I was ready to give you the answer to what you'd asked me in London. And in telling you that, I told you what the answer was. My dearest, my dearest Daryl murmured. You ignored that letter. All summer you made no sign. And all I ask now is that you should frankly tell me why. I can only repeat what I've just said. I was hurt and unhappy and I doubted you. I suppose if I'd cared less I should have been more confident. I cared so much that I couldn't risk another failure. For you'd made me feel that I'd miserably failed. So I shut my eyes and set my teeth and I turned my back. There's the whole pusillanimous truth of it. Oh, if it's the whole truth, she'd let him clasp her. There's my torment you see. I thought that was what your silence meant till I made you break it. Now I want to be sure that I was right. What can I tell you to make you sure? You can let me tell you everything first. She drew away, but without taking her hands from him. Owen saw you in Paris. She began. She looked at him and he faced her steadily. The light was full on his pleasantly brown face, his gray eyes, his frank white forehead. She noticed for the first time a seal ring in a setting of twisted silver on the hand he had kept on hers. In Paris? Oh yes, so he did. He came back and told me, I think you talked to him a moment in theater. I asked if you'd spoken of my having put you off, or if you'd sent me any message. He didn't remember that you had. It a crush and a Paris foyer? My dear. It was absurd of me. But Owen and I have always been on odd kind of brother and sister terms. I think he guessed about us when he saw you with me in London. So he teased me a little and tried to make me curious about you. And when he saw he'd succeeded, he told me he hadn't had time to say much to you, because you were in such a hurry to get back to the lady you were with. He still held her hands, but she felt no tremor in his, and the blood did not stir in his round cheek. He seemed to be honestly turning over his memories. Yes. And what else did he tell you? Oh, not much, except that she was awfully pretty. When I asked him to describe her, he said you had her tucked away in a benoir, and he hadn't actually seen her. But he saw the tail of her cloak, and somehow knew from that that she was pretty. One does, you know. I think he said the cloak was pink. Daryl broke into a laugh. Of course it was. They always are. So that was at the bottom of your doubts? Not at first. I only laughed. But afterward, when I wrote you and you didn't answer, oh, you do see, she appealed to him. He was looking at her gently. Yes, I see. It's not as if this were a light thing between us. I want you to know me as I am. If I thought that at that moment, when you were on your way here, almost... He dropped her hand and stood up. Yes, yes, I understand. But do you? Her look followed him. I'm not a goose of a girl, I know. Of course I know, but there are things a woman feels, and what she knows doesn't make any difference. It's not that I want you to explain, I mean about that particular evening. It's only that I want you to have the whole of my feeling. I didn't know what it was till I saw you again. I never dreamed I should say such things to you. I never dreamed I should be here to hear you say them. He turned back and lifting a floating end of her scarf, put his lips to it. But now that you have, I know. I know. He smiled at her. You know? That this is no light thing between us. Now you may ask me anything you please. That was all I wanted to ask you. For a long moment they looked at each other without speaking. She saw the dancing spirit in his eyes turn grave and darken to a passionate sternness. He stooped and kissed her, and she sat as if folded in wings. End of Chapter 11. Chapter 12 of the Reef This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Reef by Edith Wharton Chapter 12 It was in the natural order of things that, on the way back to the house, their talk should turn to the future. Anna was not eager to define it. She had an extraordinary sensitiveness to the impalpable elements of happiness. And as she walked at Darrowside, her imagination flew back and forth, spinning luminous webs of feeling between herself and the scene about her. Every heightening of emotion produced for her a new effusion of beauty and visible things, and with it the sense that such moments should be lingered over and absorbed like some unrenewable miracle. She understood Darrow's impatience to see their plans take shape. She knew it must be so. She would not have had it otherwise. But to reach a point where she could fix her mind on his appeal for dates and decisions was like trying to break her way through the silver tangle of an April wood. Darrow wished to use his diplomatic opportunities as a means of studying certain economic and social problems with which he presently hoped to deal in print. And with this in view he had asked for and obtained a South American appointment. Anna was ready to follow where he led, and not reluctant to put new sides as well as new thoughts between herself and her past. She had, in a direct way, only Effie and Effie's education to consider, and there seemed, after due reflection, no reason why the most anxious regard for these should not be conciliated with the demands of Darrow's career. Effie, it was evident, could be left to Madame de Chantel's care till the couple should have organized their life. And she might even, as long as her future stepfathers work, retain them in distant posts, continue to divide her year between Jeeve and the Antipodes. As for Owen, who had reached his legal majority two years before, and was soon to attain the age fixed for the taking over of his paternal inheritance, the arrival of this date would reduce his stepmother's responsibility to a friendly concern for his welfare. This made for the prop realization of Darrow's wishes, and there seemed no reason why the marriage should not take place within the six weeks that remained of his leave. They passed out of the woodwalk into the open brightness of the garden. The noon sunlight sheeded with gold the bronze flanks of the polygonal use. Chrysanthemums, russet, saffron, and orange, glowed like the efflorescence of an enchanted forest. Belts of red begonia, purpling to wine-color, ran like smoldering flame among the borders, and above this outspread tapestry the house extended its harmonious length, the soberness of its lines softened to grace in the luminous misty air. Darrow stood still, and Anna felt that his glance was traveling from her to the scene about them, and then back to her face. You're sure you're prepared to give up Jeeve? You look so made for each other. Oh, Jeeve. She broke off suddenly, feelings if her too careless stone had delivered all her past into his hands, and with one of her instinctive movements of her coil she added, when Owen marries I shall have to give it up. When Owen marries? That's looking some distance ahead. I want to be told that, meanwhile, you'll have no regrets. She hesitated. Why did you press her to uncover to him her poor starved past? A vague feeling of loyalty, a desire to spare what could no longer harm her, made her answer evasively. There will probably be no, meanwhile, Owen may marry before long. She had not meant to touch on the subject, for her stepson had sworn her to provisional secrecy. But since the shortness of Darrow's leave necessitated a prompt adjustment of their own plans, it was, after all, inevitable that she should give him at least a hint of owns. Owen marry? Why, he always seems like a fawn in flannels. I hope he's found a dryad. There might easily be one left in these blue and gold woods. I can't tell you yet where he found his dryad, but she is one, I believe. At any rate, she'll become the Jeeve woods better than I do. Only there may be difficulties. Well, at that age they're not to be wished away. She hesitated. Owen, at any rate, has made up his mind to overcome them, and I have promised to see him through. She went on, after women's consideration, to explain that her stepson's choice was for various reasons, not likely to commend itself to his grandmother. She must be prepared for it, and I have promised to the preparing. You know I always have seen him through things, and he rather counts on me now. She fancied that Darrow's exclamation had in a faint note of annoyance, and wondered if he again suspected her of seeking a pretext for postponement. But once Owen's future is settled, you won't surely, for the sake of what you call seeing him through, ask that I should go away again without you? He drew her closer as they walked. Owen will understand, if you don't, since he's in the same case himself. I'll throw myself on his mercy. He'll see that I have the first claim on you. He won't even want you not to see it. Owen sees everything. I'm not afraid of that. But his future isn't settled. He's very young to marry, too young his grandmother's shoulder thing, and the marriage he wants to make is not likely to convince her to the contrary. You don't mean that it's like his first choice. Oh no. But it's not what Madame de Chantel would call a good match. It's not even what I call a wise one. Yet you're backing him up. Yet I'm backing him up. She paused. I wonder if you'll understand. What I've most wanted for him, and she'll want for Effie, is that they shall always feel free to make their own mistakes, and never, if possible, be persuaded to make other peoples. Even if Owen's marriage is a mistake, and has to be paid for, I believe he'll learn and grow in the pain. Of course I can't make Madame de Chantel see this, but I can remind her that with his character, his big rushes of impulse, his odd intervals of ebb and apathy, she may drive him into some worst blunder if she thwarts him now. And you mean to break the news to her as soon as she comes back from Uchi? As soon as I see my way to it. She knows the girl and likes her. That's our hope. And yet it may, in the end, prove our danger, make it harder for us all, when she learns the truth, than if Owen had chosen a stranger. I can't tell you more till I've told her. I promise Owen not to tell anyone. All I ask you is to give me time, to give me a few days at any rate. She's been wonderfully nice, as she would call it about you, and about the fact of my having soon to leave Jeeve. But that, again, may make it harder for Owen. At any rate, you can see, can't you, how it makes me want to stand by him. You see, I couldn't bear it if the least fraction of my happiness seemed to be stolen from his, as if it were a little scrap of happiness that had to be pieced out with other peoples. She clasped her hands on Darrow's arm. I want our life to be like a house with all the windows lit. I'd like to string lanterns from the roof in chimneys. She ended with an inward tremor. All through her exposition and her appeal, she had told herself that the moment could hardly have been less well chosen. In Darrow's place, she would have felt, as he doubtless did, that her carefully developed argument was only the disguise of an habitual indecision. It was the hour of all others when she would have liked to affirm herself by brushing aside every obstacle to his wishes, yet it was only by opposing them that she could show the strength of character she wanted him to feel in her. But as she talked, she began to see that Darrow's face gave back no reflection of her words, that he continued to wear the abstracted look of a man who is not listening to what has said to him. It caused her a slight pank to discover that his thoughts could wander at such a moment. Then, with a flush of joy, she perceived the reason. In some undefined of a way, she had become aware, without turning her head, that he was steeped in the sense of her nearness, absorbed in contemplating the details of her face and dress, and the discovery made the words throng to her lips. She felt herself speak with ease, authority, conviction. She said to herself, He doesn't care what I say, it's enough that I say it, even if it's stupid he'd like to be better for it. She knew that every inflection of her voice, every gesture, every characteristic of a person, it's very defects, the fact that her forehead was too high, that her eyes were not large enough, that her hands, though slender, were not small, and that the fingers did not taper. She knew that these deficiencies were so many channels through which her influence streamed to him, that she pleased him in spite of them, perhaps because of them, that he wanted her as she was, and not as she would have liked to be, and for the first time she felt in her veins the security and lightness of happy love. They reached the court and walked under the limes toward the house. The hall door stood wide, and through the windows opening on the terrace the sun slanted across the black and white floor, the faded tapestry chairs, and Darrow's travelling coat and cap, which lay among the cloaks and rugs piled on a bench against the wall. The sight of these garments, lying among her own wraps, gave her a sense of homely intimacy. It was as if her happiness came down from the skies and took on the plain dress of daily things. At last she seemed to hold it in her hand. As they entered the hall her eye lit on an unstamped note conspicuously placed on the table. From Owen he must have rushed off somewhere in the motor. She felt the secret stir of pleasure at the immediate inference that she and Darrow would probably lunge alone. Then she opened the note and stared at it in wonder. Dear, Owen wrote, After what you said yesterday I can't wait another hour, and I'm off to Franchet to catch the Dijon Express and travel back with them. Don't be frightened, I won't speak unless it's safe to. Trust me for that, but I had to go. She looked up slowly. He's gone to Dijon to meet his grandmother. Oh, I hope I haven't made a mistake. You? What have you got to do with his going to Dijon? She hesitated. The day before yesterday I told him for the first time that I meant to see him through no matter what happened, and I'm afraid he's lost his head, and will be imprudent and spoil things. You see, I hadn't meant to say a word to him till I'd had time to prepare Madame de Chantel. She felt that Darrow was looking at her and reading her thoughts and the colour flew to her face. Yes, it was when I heard you were coming that I told him. I wanted him to feel as I felt. It seemed too unkind to make him wait. Her hand was in his, and his arm rested for a moment on her shoulder. It would have been too unkind to make him wait. They moved side by side towards the stairs. Through the haze of bliss enveloping her, Owen's affair seemed curiously unimportant and remote. Nothing really mattered but this torrent of light in her veins. She put her foot on the lowest step, saying, It's nearly luncheon time. I must take off my hat. And as she started up the stairs, Darrow stood below in the hall and watched her. But the distance between them did not make him seem less near. It was as if his thoughts moved with her and touched her like endearing hands. In her bedroom she shut the door and stood still, looking about her in a fit of dreamy wonder. Her feelings were unlike any she had ever known, richer, deeper, more complete. For the first time everything in her, from head to foot, seemed to be feeding the same full current of sensation. She took off her hat and went to the dressing table to smooth her hair. The pressure of the hat had flattened the dark strands on her forehead. Her face was paler than usual, with shadows about the eyes. She felt a pang of regret for the wasted years. If I look like this today, she said to herself, What will you think of me when I'm ill or worried? She began to run her fingers through her hair, rejoicing in its thickness. Then she desisted and sat still, resting her chin on her hands. I want him to see me as I am, she thought. Deeper than the deepest fiber of her vanity was the triumphant sense that as she was, with her flattened hair, her tired paler, her thin sleeves a little tumbled by the weight of her jacket, he would like her even better, feel her nearer, dearer, more desirable than in all the splendors she might put on for him. In the light of this discovery she studied her face on the new intentness, seeing its defects as she has never seen them, yet seeing them through a kind of radiance, as though love were a luminous medium into which she had been bodily plunged. She was glad now that she had confessed her doubts and her jealousy. She divined that a man in love may be flattered by such involuntary betrayals, that there are moments when respect for his liberty appeals to him less than the inability to respect it. Moments so propitious that a woman's very mistakes and indiscretions may help to establish her dominion. The sense of power she had been aware of in talking to Darrow came back with tenfold force. She felt like testing him by the most fantastic exactions, and at the same moment she longed to humble herself before him, to make herself the shadow and echo of his mood. She wanted to linger with him in a world of fancy, and yet to walk it aside in the world of fact. She wanted him to feel her power, and yet to love her for her ignorance and humility. She felt like a slave, and a goddess, and a girl in her teens. End of Chapter 12 Chapter 13 OF THE REAF This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org THE REAF by Edith Wharton Chapter 13 Darrow, late that evening, threw himself into an armchair before his fire and muesed. The room was propitious to meditation. The red veiled lamp, the corners of shadow, the splashes of firelight on the curves of old, full-bodied wardrobes and cabinets, gave it an air of intimacy increased by its faded hangings, its slightly frayed and threadbare rugs. Everything in it was harmoniously shabby, with a subtle sought-for shabbiness in which Darrow fancied he discerned the touch of Fraser Leith. But Fraser Leith had grown so unimportant to factor in the scheme of things that these marks of his presence caused the young man no emotion beyond that of a faint retrospective amusement. The afternoon and evening had been perfect. After a moment of concern over her stepson's departure, Anna had surrendered herself to her happiness with an impetuosity that Darrow had never suspected in her. Early in the afternoon they had gone out in the motor, traversing miles of sober-tinted landscape in which, here and there, a scarlet vineyard flamed, clattering through the streets of stony villages, coming out on low slopes of the river, or winding through the pale gold of narrow wood-roads with the blue of clear-cut hills at their end. Over everything lay a faint sunshine that seemed dissolved in the still air, and the smell of wet roots and decaying leaves was merged in the pungent scent of burning underbrush. Once, at the turn of a wall, they stopped the motor before a ruined gateway, and, stumbling along a road full of rats, stood before a little old deserted house, fantastically carved in chimneyed, which lay in a moat under the shade of ancient trees. They paced the paths between the trees, found a moldy temple of lube and islet among reeds and plantains, and, sitting on a bench in the stable-yard, watched the pigeons circling against the sunset over their cot of patterned brick. Then the motor flew on into the dusk. When they came in, they sat beside the fire in the oak drawing-room, and there were noticed how delicately her head stood out against the somber paneling, and mused on the enjoyment there would always be in the mere fact of watching her hands as they moved about among the tea-things. They dined late, and, facing her across the table, with its low lights and flowers, he felt an extraordinary pleasure in seeing her again in evening-dress, and in letting his eyes dwell on the proud shy set of her head, the way her dark hair clasped it, and the girlish thinness of her neck above the slight swell of the breast. His imagination was struck by the quality of reticence in her beauty. She suggested a fine portrait kept down to a few tones, or a weak vase on which the play of light is the only pattern. After dinner they went out on the terrace for a look at the moon-misted park. Through the corpuscular whiteness the trees hung in blotted masses. Below the terrace the garden drew its dark diagrams between statues that stood like muffled conspirators on the edge of the shadow. Farther off the meadows unrolled a silver-shot tissue to the mantling of mist above the river, and the autumn stars trembled overhead, like their own reflections seen in dim water. He lit his cigar, and they walked slowly up and down the flags in the languid air, till he put an arm about her, saying, you mustn't stay till you're chilled. Then they went back into the room and drew up their chairs to the fire. It seemed only a moment later that she said, it must be after eleven, and stood up and looked down on him, smiling faintly. He sat still, absorbing the look, and thinking about the evenings and evenings, till she came nearer, bent over him, and with a hand on his shoulder said, good night. He got to his feet and put his arms about her. Good night, he answered, and held her fast, and they gave each other a long kiss of promise and communion. The memory of it glowed at him still as he sat over his crumbling fire, but beneath his physical exaltation he felt a certain gravity of mist on his shoulder, and he felt a certain gravity of mood. His happiness was in some sort the rallying point of many scattered purposes. He summed up vaguely by saying to himself that to be loved by a woman like that made all the difference. He was a little tired of experimenting on life. He wanted to take a line, to follow things up, to centralize and concentrate and produce results. Two or three more years of diplomacy, with her beside him, and then their real life would begin. Study, travel, and bookmaking for him, and for her, well, the joy at any rate of getting out of an atmosphere of bric-a-brac and card-leaving into the open air of competing activities. The desire of change had for some time been latent in him, and his meeting with Mrs. Leith the previous spring had given it a definite direction. With such a comrade to focus and stimulate his energies, he felt modestly but agreeably sure of doing something. And under this assurance was the lurking sense that he was somehow worthy of his opportunity. His life on the whole had been a creditable affair. Out of modest chances and riddling talents, he had built himself a fairly marked personality, known some exceptional people, done a number of interesting and few rather difficult things, and found himself, at thirty-seven, possessed of an intellectual ambition sufficient to occupy the passage to a robust and energetic old age. As for the private and personal side of his life, it had come up to the current standards, and if it had dropped now and then, below a more ideal measure, even these declines have been brief, parenthetic, incidental. In the recognized essentials he had always remained strictly within the limit of his scruples. From this reassuring survey of his case, he came back to the contemplation of its crowning felicity. His mind turned again to his first meeting with Anna Summers and took up one by one the threads of their faintly sketched romance. He dwelt, with pardonable pride, on the fact that fate had so early marked him for the high privilege of possessing her. It seemed to mean that they had really, in the truest sense of the ill-used phrase, been made for each other. Deeper still than all these satisfactions was the mere elemental sense of well-being in her presence. That, after all, was what proved her to be the woman for him. The pleasure he took in the set of her head, the way her hair grew on her forehead and at the nape, her steady gaze when he spoke, the grave freedom of her gate and gestures. He recalled every detail of her face, the fine veining of the temples, the bluish-brown shadows in the harbour lids, and the way the reflections of two stars seemed to form and break up in her eyes when he held her close to him. If he had had any doubts as to the nature of her feeling for him, those dissolving stars would have elated. She was reserved, she was shy even, was what the shallow and diffusive would call cold. She was like a picture so hung that it can only be seen at a certain angle, an angle known to none but its possessor. The thought flattered his sense of possessorship. He felt that the smile on his lips would have infatuous had had a witness. He was thinking of her look when she had questioned him about his meeting with Owen at the theatre. Less of her words than of her look, and of the effort the question cost her, the reddening of her cheek, the deepening of the strained line between her brows, the way her eyes sought shelter and then turned and drew on him. Pride and passion were in conflict, magnificent qualities in a wife. The sight almost made up for his momentary embarrassment at the rousing of a memory which had no place in this present picture of himself. Yes, it was worth a good deal to watch that fight between her instinct and her intelligence, and no one's self the object of the struggle. Mingled with these sensations were considerations of another order. He reflected with satisfaction that she was the kind of woman with whom one would like to be seen in public. It would be distinctly agreeable to follow her into drawing rooms, to walk after her down the aisle of a theatre, to get in and out of trains with her, to say, by wife of her, to all sorts of people. He draped these details in the handsome phrase, she is a woman to be proud of, and felt that this fact somehow justified and ennobled his instinctive boyish satisfaction in loving her. He stood up, rambled across the room, and leaned out for a while into the starry night. Then he dropped again into his armchair with a sigh of deep content. Oh, hang it, he suddenly exclaimed. It's the best thing that's ever happened to me anyhow. The next day was even better. He felt and knew she felt that they had reached a clear understanding of each other. It was as if, after a swim through bright opposing waves, with a dazzle of sun in their eyes, they had gained an inlet in the shades of a cliff where they could float on the still surface and gaze far down into the depths. Now and then, as they walked and talked, he felt a thrill of youthful wonder at the coincidence of their views and their experiences, at the way their minds leapt to the same point of the same instance. The old delusion, I suppose, he smiled to himself. Will nature never tire of the trick. But he knew it was more than that. There were moments in their talk when he felt, distinctly and unmistakably, the solid ground of friendship underneath the whirling dance of his sensations. How I should like her if I didn't love her, he summed it up, wondering at the miracle of such a union. In the course of the morning, a telegram had come from Owen Leith, announcing that he, his grandmother, and Effie would arrive from Dijon that afternoon at four. Station of the main line was eight or ten miles from Jeeve, and Anna, soon after three, left in the motor to meet the travellers. When she had gone, Darrow started for a walk, planning to get back late, in order that the reunited family might have the end of the afternoon to themselves. He roamed the countryside till long after dark, and the stable clock of Jeeve was striking seven as he walked up the avenue to the court. In the hall, coming down the stairs, he encountered Anna. Her face was serene, and his first glance showed him that Owen kept his word, and that none of her forebodings had been fulfilled. She had just come down from the school room, where Effie and the governess were having supper. The little girl, she told him, looked immensely better first this holiday, but was dropping the sleep after the journey, and too tired to make her habitual appearance in the drawing-room before being put to bed. Madame de Chantel was resting, but would be down for dinner, and as for Owen, Anna supposed he was off somewhere in the park. He had a passion for prowling about the park at nightfall. Darrow followed her into the brown room, where the tea-table had been left for him. He declined her offer of tea, but she lingered a moment to tell him that Owen had in fact kept his word, and that Madame de Chantel had come back in the best of humours, and unsuspicious of the blow about the fall. She has enjoyed her month at Ooshie, and has given her a lot to talk about— her symptoms, and the rival doctors, and the people at the hotel. It seems she met your ambassadress there, and Lady Watley, and some other London friends of yours, and she has heard what she calls delightful things about you. She told me to tell you so. She attaches great importance to the fact that your grandmother was an Everett of Albany. She is prepared to open her arms to you. I don't know whether it would make it harder for poor Owen, the contrast, I mean. There are no ambassadresses, or Everett's devouts, for his choice. But you'll help me, won't you? You'll help me to help him? Tomorrow I'll tell you the rest. Now I must rush up and tuck in Effie. Well, you'll see. We'll pull it off for him, he assured her. Together we can't fail to pull it off. He stood and watched her with a smile, as she fled down the half-lit mist after the hall. End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of The Reef This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Reef by Edith Wharton Chapter 14 If Darrow, on entering the drawing-room before dinner, examined its new occupant with unusual interest, it was more on Owen Leitz's account than his own. Anna's hints had roused its interest in the lad's love affair, and he wondered what manner of girl the hero in the comic conflict might be. He had guessed that Owen's rebellion symbolized for his stepmother, her own long struggle against the Leith conventions, and he understood that if Anna so passionately abetted him, it was partly because, as she owned, she wanted his liberation to coincide with hers. The lady who was to represent, in the impending struggle, the forces of order and tradition, was seated by the fire when Darrow entered. Among the flowers and old furniture of the large pale-paneled room, Madame de Chantel had the inanimate elegance of a figure introduced into a still-life to give the scale. And this, Darrow reflected, was exactly what she doubtless regarded as her chief obligation. He was sure she thought that a great deal of measure, and she proved most things only up to a certain point. She was a woman of sixty, with a figure at once young and old-fashioned. Her fair-fated tints, her queen's corsetting, the posthumantry on her tight-waisted dress, the velvet band on her tapering arm, made her resemble a cart-de-visite photograph of the middle sixties. One saw her younger, but no less invincibly ladylike, leaning her chair with a fringed back, a curl in her neck, a locket on her tuckered bosom, toward the end of an embossed Morocco album, beginning with the beauties of the Second Empire. She received her daughter-in-law's suitor with an affability which implied her knowledge and approval of his suit. Darrow had already guessed her to be a person who would instinctively oppose any suggested changes, and then, after one had exhausted one's main arguments, unexpectedly yield to some small incidental reason and adhered doggedly to her new position. She boasted of her old-fashioned prejudices, talked a good deal of being a grandmother, and made a show of reaching up to Tapo and Sholder, though his height was little more than hers. She was full of a small, pale prattle about the people she had seen at Uschi, as to whom she had the minute statistical information of a gazetteer, without any apparent sense of personal differences. She said to Darrow, They tell me things are very much changed in America. Of course, in my youth there was a society. She had no desire to return there. She was sure the standards must be so different. There are charming people everywhere, and one must always look on the best side. But when one has lived among traditions, it's difficult to adapt oneself to the new ideas, these dreadful views of marriage. It's so hard to explain them to my French relations. I'm thankful to say I don't pretend to understand them myself. But you're an evered! I told that last spring in London that one sees that instantly. She wandered off to the cooking and the service of the hotel at Uschi. She attached great importance to gastronomic details, and to the manners of hotel service. There, too, there was a falling off, she said. I don't know, of course. But people say it's owing to the Americans. Certainly my waiter had a way of slapping down the dishes. They tell me that many of them are anarchists. They belong to unions, you know. She appealed to Dero's reported knowledge of economic conditions to confirm this ominous rumor. After dinner, Owen Leith wandered into the next room, where the piano stood, and began to play among the shadows. His stepmother presently joined him, and Dero sat alone with Madame de Chantel. She took up the thought of her mild chat, and carried it on at the same pace as her knitting. Her conversation resembled the large, loose-stranded web between her fingers. Now and then she dropped a stitch, and went on regardless of the gap in the pattern. Dero listened with a lazy sense of well-being. In the mental lull of the after-dinner hour, with harmonious memories murmuring through his mind, and the soft tints and shattery spaces of the fine old room charming his eyes to indolence, Madame de Chantel's discourse seemed not out of place. He could understand that, in the long run, the atmosphere she might be suffocating, but in his present mood its very limitations had a grace. Presently he found the chance to say a word in his own behalf, and thereupon measured the advantage, never before particularly apparent to him, of being related to the Everards of Albany. Madame de Chantel's conception of her native country, to which she had not returned since her twentieth year, reminded him of an ancient geographer's map of the Hyperborean regions. It was all a foggy blank, from which only one or two fixed outlines emerged, and one of these belonged to the Everards of Albany. The fact that they offered such firm footing, formed, so to speak, a friendly territory on which the opposing powers could meet and treat, helped him through the task of explaining and justifying himself as a successor of Fraser Leith. Madame de Chantel could not resist such incontestable claims. She seemed to feel her son's hovering and discriminating presence, and she gave Dero the sense that he was being tested and approved as a last addition to the Leith collection. She also made him aware of the immense advantage he possessed in belonging to the diplomatic profession. She spoke of this humdrum calling as a career, and gave Dero to understand that she supposed him to have been seducing duchesses when he was not negotiating treaties. He heard again quaint phrases which romantic old ladies had used in his youth, brilliant diplomatic society, social advantages, the entree everywhere, nothing else forms a young man in the same way. And she sighingly added that she could have wished her grandson had chosen the same path to glory. Dero prudently suppressed his own view of the profession, as well as the fact that he adopted it provisionally, and for reasons less social than sociological, and the talk presently passed on to the subject of his future plans. Here again, Madame Duchantel's awe of the career made her admit the necessity of Anna's consenting to an early marriage. The fact that Dero was ordered to South America seemed to put him in the romantic light of a young soldier charged to lead a furlorn hope. She sighed and said, At such moments a wife's duties at her husband's side. The problem of Effie's future might have disturbed her, she added, but since Anna, for a time, consented to leave the little girl with her, that problem's at any rate deferred. She spoke plaintively of the responsibility of looking after her granddaughter, but Dero divine that she enjoyed the flavour of the word more than she felt the weight of the fact. Effie's a perfect child. She's more like my son, perhaps, than dear Owen. She'll never intentionally give me the least trouble, but of course the responsibility will be great. I'm not sure I should dare to undertake it if it were not for her having such a treasure of a governess. Has Anna told you about our little governess? After all the worry we had last year with one impossible creature after another, it seems providential just now to have found her. At first we were afraid she was too young, but now we have the greatest confidence in her. So clever and amusing. And such a lady. I don't say her education's all it might be, no drawing or singing, for one can't have everything, and she speaks Italian. Madame Duchantel's fond insistence on the likeness between Effie, Leith, and her father, if not particularly gratifying to Dero, had at least increased his desire to see the little girl. It gave him an odd feeling of discomfort to think that she should have any of the characteristics of the late Fraser Leith. He had somehow fantastically pictured her as the mystical offspring of the early tenderness between himself and Anna Summer. His encounter with Effie took place the next morning on the lawn below the terrace, where he found her, in the early sunshine, knocking about golf balls with her brother. Almost at once, and with infinite relief, he saw that the resemblance of which Madame Duchantel boasted was mainly external. Even that discovery was slightly distasteful, though Dero was forced to own that Fraser Leith's straight-featured fairness had lent itself to the production of a peculiarly finished image of childish purity. But it was evident that other elements had also gone to the making of Effie, and that another spirit sat in her eyes. Her serious handshake, her pretty greeting, were worthy of the Leith tradition, and he guessed her to be more malleable than Owen, more subject to the influences of Jeeve, but the shout with which she returned to a romp had in it the note of her mother's emancipation. He had begged a holiday for her, and when Visily the Peered, he and she and the little girl went off for a ramble. Anna wished her daughter to have time to make friends with Dero before learning in what relation he was to stand to her, and the three roamed the woods and fields so the distant chime of the stable clock made them turn back for luncheon. Effie, who was attended by a shaggy terrier, had picked up two or three subordinate dogs at the stable, and as she trotted on ahead with her yapping escort, Anna hung back to throw a look at Dero. Yes, he answered it. She's exquisite. Oh, I see what I'm asking of you. But she'll be quite happy here, won't she? And you must remember, it won't be for long. Anna sighed her acquiescence. Oh, she'll be happy here. It's her nature to be happy. She'll apply herself to it conscientiously, and she does to her lessons and to what she calls being good. In a way, you see, that's just what worries me. Her idea of being good is to please the person she's with. She puts her whole dear little mind on it. And so, if ever she's with the wrong person, but surely there's no danger of that just now, Madame de Chantel tells me that you've at last put your hand on a perfect governess. Anna, without answering, glanced away from in toward the daughter. It's lucky at any rate, Dero continued, that Madame de Chantel thinks her so. Oh, I think very highly of her, too. Highly enough to feel quite satisfied to leave her with Effie. Yes, she's just the person for Effie. Only, of course, one never knows. She's young, and she might take it into her head to leave us. After a pause, she added, I'm naturally anxious to know what you think of her. When they entered the house, the hands of the hall clocks stood within a few minutes of the luncheon hour. Anna let Effie off to have her hair smoothed, and Dero wandered into the oak-sitting room, which he found untenanted. The sun lay pleasantly on its brown walls, on the scattered books and the flowers and old porcelain vases. In his eyes lingered the vision of the dark-haired mother mounting the stairs with her little fair daughter. The contrast between them seemed a last touch of grace and the complex harmony of things. He stood in the window, looking out at the park, and brooding inwardly upon his happiness. He was roused by Effie's voice and the scamper of her feet down the long floors behind him. Here he is! Here he is! she cried, flying over the threshold. He turned and stooped to her with a smile, and as she caught his hand, he perceived that she was trying to draw him toward someone who had paused behind her in the doorway and whom he's supposed to be her mother. Here he is! Effie repeated with her sweet impatience. The figure in the doorway came forward, and Darrow, looking up, found himself face to face with Sophie Voyner. They stood still, a yard or two apart, and looked at each other without speaking. As they paused there, a shadow fell across one of the terrace windows, and Owen Leith stepped whistling into the room. In his rough shooting clothes, with the glow of exercise under his fair skin, he looked extraordinarily lighthearted and happy. Darrow, with a quick side glance, noticed this, and perceived also that the glow on the youth's cheek had deepened suddenly to red. He too stopped short, and the three stood there motionless for a barely perceptible beat of time. During its laps, Darrow's eyes had turned back from Owen's face to that of the girl between them. He had the sense that whatever was done, it was he who must do it, and that it must be done immediately. He went forward and held out his hand. How do you do, Miss Voyner? She answered, How do you do? In a voice that sounded clear and natural. In the next moment he again became aware of steps behind him, and he knew that Mrs. Leith was in the room. To his strange senses there seemed to be another just measurable pause before Anna said, looking gaily about the little group. Has Owen introduced you? This is Effie's friend, Miss Voyner. Effie, still hanging on her governess's arm, pressed herself closer with a little gesture of appropriation, and Miss Voyner laid her hand on her pupil's hair. Darrow felt that Anna's eyes had turned to him. I think Miss Voyner and I have met already, several years ago in London. I remember, said Sophie Voyner, in the same clear voice. How charming! Then we're all friends, but luncheon must be ready, said Mrs. Leith. She turned back to the door, and a little procession moved down the two long drawing-rooms with Effie waltzing on ahead. End of Chapter 14 Chapter 15 of the Reef This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Reef by Edith Wharton Chapter 15 Madame de Chantelle and Anna had planned, for the afternoon, a visit to a remotely situated acquaintance whom the introduction of the motor had transformed into a neighbour. Effie was to pay for her morning's holiday by an hour or two in the school room, and Owen suggested that he and Darrow should but take themselves to a distant covert in the desultory quest for pheasants. Darrow was not an ardent sportsman, but any pretext for physical activity would have been acceptable at the moment, and he was glad both to get away from the house and not to be left to himself. When he came downstairs, the motor was at the door, then Anna stood before the hall mirror, swathing her hat in veils. She turned at the sound of his step and smiled at him for a long, full moment. I had no idea you knew Miss Viner, she said, as he helped her into a long coat. It came back to me luckily that I'd seen her two or three times in London several years ago. She was secretary or something of the sort, in the background of a house where I used to dine. He loathed the sliding indifference of the phrase, but he had uttered it deliberately, had been secretly practising it all through the interminable hour at the luncheon table. Now that it was spoken, he shivered at its note of condescension. In such cases one was almost sure to ever do, but Anna seemed to notice nothing unusual. Was she really? You must tell me all about it. Tell me exactly how she struck you. I'm so glad it turns out that you know her. No, he's rather exaggerated. We used to pass each other on the stairs. Madame Duchantelle and Owen appeared together as he spoke, then Anna, gathering up her wrap, said, You'll tell me about that, then. Try and remember everything you can. As he tramped through the woods at his young host's side, Darrow felt the partial relief from thought produced by exercise and the obligation to talk. Little as he cared for shooting, he had a habit of concentration which makes it natural for a man to throw himself wholly into whatever business he has in hand, and there were moments of the afternoon when a sudden war in the undergrowth, a vivider gleam against the hazy browns and greys of the woods, was enough to fill the foreground of his attention. But all the while, behind these voluntarily emphasised sensations, his secret consciousness continued to evolve on a loud wheel of thought. For a time it seemed to be seeping him through deep gulfs of darkness. His sensations were too swift and swarming to be disentangled. He had an almost physical sense of struggling for air, of battling helplessly with material obstructions, as though the russet covert through which he trud were the heart of a maleficent jungle. Snatches of his companion's talk drifted to him intermittently through the confusion of his thoughts. He caught eager self-revealing phrases, and understood that Owen was saying things about himself, perhaps hinting indirectly at the hopes for which Darrow had been prepared by Anna's confidences. He had already become aware that the lad liked him, and had meant to take the first opportunity of showing that he reciprocated the feeling. But the effort of fixing his attention on Owen's words was so great that it left no power for more than briefest and most inexpressive replies. Young Leith, it appeared, felt that he had reached a turning point in his career, a height from which he could impartially survey his past progress and projected endeavor. At one time he had had musical and literary yearnings, visions of disultory artistic indulgence, but these had of late been superseded by the resolute determination to plunge into practical life. I don't want, you see, there are heard him explaining, to drift into what my grandmother, poor dear, is trying to make of me, an adjunct of jeep. I don't want, hang it all, to slip into collecting sensations as my father collected snuff boxes. I want Effie to have jeep. It's my grandmother's, you know, to do as she likes with, and I've understood lately that if it belonged to me, it would gradually gobble me up. I want to get out of it, into a life that's big and ugly and struggling. If I can extract beauty out of that, so much the better, that'll prove my vocation. But I want to make beauty, not be drowned in the ready-made, like a bee in a pot of honey. Darrow knew that he was being appealed to for corroboration of these views and for encouragement in the course to which they pointed. To his own ears his answers sounded now curt, now irrelevant. At one moment he seemed chillingly indifferent. At another he heard himself launching out on a flood of hazy discursiveness. He dared not look at Owen for fear of detecting the lad's surprise at these senseless transitions. And through the confusion of his inward struggles and outward lequacity, he heard the ceaseless chip hammer beat of the question, What in God's name shall I do? To get back to the house before Anna's return seemed his most pressing necessity. He did not clearly know why. He simply felt that he ought to be there. At one moment it occurred to him that Miss Weiner might want to speak to him alone, and again in the same flash, that it would probably be the last thing she would want. At any rate, he felt he ought to try to speak to her, or at least be prepared to do so, if the chance should occur. Finally, toward four, he told his companion that he had some letters on his mind and must get back to the house and dispatch them before the ladies returned. He left Owen with the beater and walked on to the edge of the covert. At the park gates he struck obliquely through the trees, following a grass avenue at the end of which he had caught a glimpse of the roof of the chapel. A gray haze had blotted out the sun, and the still air clung about him tepidly. At length the house front raised before him its expanse of damp silvered brick, and he was struck afresh by the high decorum of its calm lines and soberly masked surfaces. It made him feel, in the turbid coil of his fears and passions, like a muddy tramp forcing his way into some pure sequestered shrine. By and by he knew he should have to think the complex horror out, slowly, systematically, bit by bit, but for the moment it was whirling about so fast that he could only just clutch at his sharp spikes and be tossed off again. Only one definite immediate fact stuck in his quiver and grasp. He must give the girl every chance, must hold himself passive till she had taken them. In the court Effie ran up to him with her leaping tear. I was coming out to meet you, you and Owen. Miss Viner was coming too, and then she couldn't because she's got such a headache. I'm afraid I gave it to her because I did my division so disgracefully. It's too bad, isn't it? But won't you walk back with me? Nurse won't mind the least bit. She'd so much rather go into tea. Dara excused himself laughingly, on the plea that he had led us to write, which was much worse than having a headache, and not infrequently resulted in one. Well then you can go and write them an Owen study. That's where gentlemen always write their letters. She flew on with her dog and Dara pursued his way to the house. Effie's suggestion struck him as useful. He had pictured himself as vaguely drifting about the drawing rooms and had perceived the difficulty of Miss Viner as having to seek him there. But the study, a small room on the right of the hall, was an easy sight from the staircase, and so situated there would be nothing marked in his being found there in talk with her. He went in, leaving the door open, and sat down at the writing table. The room was a friendly, heterogeneous place, the one repository in the well-ordered and amply-servanted house of all its unclassified odds and ends. Effie's croquet box and fishing rods, Owen's guns and golf sticks and rackets, his stepmother's flower baskets and gardening implements, even Madame de Chantel's embroidery frame, and the back numbers of the Catholic weekly. The early twilight had begun to fall, and presently a slanting ray across the desk showed Darrow that a servant was coming across the hall with a lamp. He pulled out a sheet of note paper and began to write it random, while the man, entering, put the lamp at his elbow and vaguely straightened the heap of newspapers tossed on the divan. Then his steps died away, and Darrow sat, leaning his head on his locked hands. Presently, another step sounded on the stairs, wavered a moment, and then moved past the threshold in study. Darrow got up and walked into the hall, which was still unlighted. In the dimness he saw Sophie Weiner standing by the hall door in her hat and jacket. She stopped at sight of him, her hand on the door-bolt, and they stood for a second without speaking. Have you seen Effie? she suddenly asked. She went out to meet you. She did meet me, just now, in the court. She's gone on to join her brother. Darrow spoke as naturally as he could, but his voice sounded to his own ears like an amateur actor's in a light part. Miss Weiner, without answering, drew back the bolt. He watched her in silence as the door swung open, then he said, She has her nurse with her. She won't be long. She stood a resolute and he added, I was writing in there. Won't you come and have a little talk? Everyone's out. The last words struck him as not well chosen, but there was no time to choose. She paused a second longer and then crossed the threshold of the study. At luncheon she had sat with her back to the window, and beyond noting that she had grown a little thinner and had less color and vivacity, he had seen no change in her, but now, as the lamplight fell on her face, its whiteness startled him. Poor thing, poor thing, what in Heaven's name can she suppose? He wondered. Do sit down. I want to talk to you, he said, and pushed a chair towards her. She did not seem to see it, or if she did, she deliberately chose another seat. He came back to his own chair and leaned his elbows on the blotter. She faced him from the far the side of the table. You promised to let me hear from you now and then. He began awkwardly and with a sharp sense of his awkwardness. A faint smile made her face more tragic. Did I? There was nothing to tell. I've had no history. Like the happy countries. He waited a moment before asking, you are happy here. I was, she said with a faint emphasis. Why do you say was? You were surely not thinking of going. There can't be kinder people anywhere. Daryl hardly knew what he was saying, but her answer came to him with a deadly definiteness. I suppose it depends on you whether I go or stay. On me? He stared at her across Owen's scattered papers. Could God? What can you think of me to say that? The mockery of the question flashed back at him from her wretched face. She stood up, wandered away, and leaned an instant in the darkening window frame. From there she turned to fling back at him. Don't imagine I'm the least bit sorry for anything. He stared at his elbows on the table and hid his face in his hands. It was harder, oh, damnably harder than he had expected. Arguments, expedience, palliations, evasions, all seemed to be slipping away from him. He was left face to face with the mere graceless fact of his inferiority. He lifted his head to ask it random. You've been here, then, ever since? Since June, yes. It turned out that the Farlows were hunting for me, all the while, for this. She stood facing him, her back to the window, evidently impatient to be gone, yet with something still to say or that she expected him to say, the sense of her expectancy benumbed him. What in heaven's name could he say to her that was not an offence or a mockery? Your idea of the theatre. You gave that up at once, then? Oh, the theatre! She gave a little out. I couldn't wait for the theatre. I had to take the first thing that offered. I took this. He pushed on haltingly. I'm glad. Extremely glad. You're happy here. I've counted on your letting me know if there was anything I could do. The theatre now. If you still regret it. If you're not contented here. I know people in that line in London. I'm certain I can manage it for you when I get back. She moved up to the table and leaned over it to ask, in a voice that was hardly above a whisper. Then you do want me to leave. Is that it? He dropped his arms to the ground. Good heavens! How can you think such things? At the time, you know, I begged you to let me do what I could, but you wouldn't hear of it. And ever since I've been wanting to be of use to do something, anything, to help you. She heard him through, motionless, without a quiver of the clasped hands she rested on the edge of the table. If you want to help me then, you can help me to stay here. She brought out with low-toned intensity. Through the stillness of the pause which followed, the bray of a motor horn sounded far down the drive. Instantly she turned, with a last white look at him, and fled from the room and up the stairs. He stood motionless, benumb by the shock of her last words. She was afraid then, afraid of him, sick with fear of him. The discovery beat him down to a lower depth. The motor horn sounded again, close at hand, and he turned and went up to his room. His letter writing was a sufficient pretext for not immediately joining the party about the tea-table, and he wanted to be alone and try to put a little order into his tumultuous thinking. Upstairs, the room held out the intimate welcome of its lamp and fire. Everything in it exhaled the same sense of peace and stability, which, two evenings before, had lulled him to complacent meditation. His armchair again invited him from the hearth, but he was too agitated to sit still, and with sunk head and hands clasped behind his back, he began to wander up and down the room. His five minutes with Sophie Weiner had flashed strange lights into the shadowy corners of his consciousness. The girl's absolute candor, her hard ardent honesty, was for the moment the vividest point in his thoughts. He wondered anew, as he had wondered before, at the way in which the harsh discipline of life had stripped her of false sentiment without laying the least touch on pride. When they had parted five months before, she'd quietly but decidedly rejected all his offers of help, even to the suggestion of his trying to further her theatrical aims. She had made it clear that she wished their brief alliance to leave no trace on their lives, save that of its own smiling memory. But now that they were unexpectedly confronted in a situation which seemed to her terrified fancy to put her at his mercy, her first impulse was to defend her right to the place she had won, and to learn as quickly as possible if he meant to dispute it. While he had pictured her shrinking away from him in a tremor of self-effacement, she had watched his movements, made sure of her opportunity, and come straight down to have it out with him. He was so struck by the frankness and energy of the proceeding that for a moment he lost sight of the view of his own character, implied in it. Poor thing. Poor thing, he could only go on saying, and with the repetition of the words the picture of himself as she must see him pitiably took shape again. He understood then, for the first time, how vague in comparison with hers had been his own vision of the part he had played in the brief episode of their relation. The incident had left him a sense of exasperation as self-contempt, but that, as he now perceived, was chiefly, even on altogether, as it borne his preconceived idealist attitude toward another woman. He had fallen below his own standard of sentimental loyalty, and if he thought of Sophie Weiner it was mainly as the chance instrument of his laps. These considerations were not agreeable to his pride, but they were forced on him by the example of her valiant common sense. If he had cut a sorry figure in the business, he owed it to her not to close his eyes to the fact any longer. But when he opened them, what did he see? The situation, detestable at best, would yet have been relatively simple if protecting Sophie Weiner had been the only duty involved in it. The fact that that duty was paramount did not do away with the contingent obligations. It was Dara's instinct, in difficult moments, to go straight to the bottom of the difficulty, but he had never before had to take so dark a dive as this, and for the minute he shivered on the brink. Well, his first duty at any rate was to the girl. He must let her see that he meant to fulfill it to the last jot, and then try to find out how to square the fulfillment with the other problems already in his path. End of Chapter 15 Chapter 16 of The Reef This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Reef by Edith Wharton Chapter 16 In the oak room he found Mrs. Leith, her mother-in-law, and Effie. The group, as he came toward it down the long drawing-rooms, composed itself prettily about the tea-table. The lamps and the fire crossed their gleams on silver and porcelain, on the bright haze of Effie's hair, and on the whiteness of Anna's forehead, as she leaned back in her chair behind the tea-burn. She did not move at Dara's approach, but lifted to him a deep gaze of peace and confidence. The Luke seemed to throw about him a spell of divine security. He felt the joy of a convalescent, suddenly waking to find the sunlight on his face. Madame de Chantel, across her knitting, discoursed of their afternoon's excursion, for the occasional pauses induced by the hypnotic effect of the fresh air, and Effie, kneeling on the hearth, softly but insistently sought to implant in her terrier's mind some notion of the relation between a vertical attitude and sugar. Dara took a chair behind the little girl, so that he might look across at her mother. It was almost a necessity for him, at the moment, to let his eyes rest on Anna's face, and to meet, now and then, the proud shyness of her gaze. Madame de Chantel presently inquired what had become of own, and a moment later the window behind her opened, and her grandson, gun in hand, came in from the terrace. As he stood there in the lamp-light, with dead leaves and bits of ramble clinging to his mud-spattered clothes, the scent of the night about him and its chill on his pale bright face, he really had the look of a young fawn straight in from the forest. Effie abandoned the terrier to fly to him. Oh, Owen, where in the world have you been? I walked miles and miles with nurse, and I couldn't find you, and we met Jean, and he said he didn't know where you'd gone. Nobody knows where I'd go, or what I see when I get there. That's the beauty of it, he laughed back at her. But if you're good, he added, I'll tell you about it one of these days. Oh, now, Owen, now! I don't really believe I'll ever be much better than I am now. Let Owen have his tea first, her mother suggested, but the young man, declining the offer, propped his gun against the wall, and lighting a cigarette began to pace up and down the room in a way that reminded Darrow of his own caged wanderings. Effie pursued him with her blandishments, and for a while he poured out to her a low-voiced stream of nonsense, and then he sat down beside his stepmother and leaned over to help himself to tea. Where's Miss Viner, he asked, as Effie climbed up on him. Why isn't she here to chain up this ungovernable infant? Poor Miss Viner has a headache. Effie says she went to her room as soon as lessons were over, and said more that she wouldn't be down for tea. Ah, said Owen, abruptly setting down his cup. He stood up, lit another cigarette, and wandered away to the piano in the room beyond. From the twilight where he sat, a lonely music, worn on fantastic cords, floated to the group about the tea table. Under its influence, Van Damme de Chantel's meditative pauses increased in length and frequency, and Effie stretched herself on the hearth, her drowsy head against the dog. Presently her nurse appeared, and Anna rose at the same time. Stop a minute in my sitting-room on your way up. She passed to say to Darrow she went. A few hours earlier her request would have barred him instantly into his feet. She had given him, on the day of his arrival, an inviting glimpse of the spacious book-lined room above stairs in which she had gathered together all the tokens of her personal tastes, the retreat in which, as one might fancy, Anna Leith had hidden the restless ghost of Anna Summers, and the thought of talk with her there had been in his mind ever since. But now he sat motionless, as if spellbound by the play of Van Damme de Chantel's needles and the pulsations of Owen's fitful music. She will want to ask me about the girl, he repeated to himself, with a fresh sense of the insidious taint that embittered all his thoughts. The hand of the slender-column clock on the mantelpiece had spent half-hour before Sheyma at his own indecision finally drew him to his feet. From her writing-table, where she sat over a pile of letters, Anna lifted her happy smile. The impulse to press his lips to it made him come close and draw her upward. She threw her head back, as if surprised at the abruptness of the gesture. Then her face leaned to his with a slow droop of a flower. He felt again the sleep of the secret tides, and all his fears went down in them. She sat down in the sofa-corner by the fire, and he drew an armchair close to her. His gaze roamed peacefully about the quiet room. It's just like you. It is you, he said, as his eyes came back to her. It's a good place to be alone in. I don't think I've ever before cared to talk with anyone here. Let's be quiet, then. It's the best way of talking. Yes, but we must save it up till later. There are things I want to say to you now. He leaned back in his chair. Say them then, and I'll listen. Oh no, I want you to tell me about Miss Finer. About Miss Finer, he summoned up a look of faint interrogation. He thought she seemed surprised at his surprise. It's important, naturally, she explained, that I should find out all I can about her before I leave. Important on Effie's account? On Effie's account, of course. Of course, but you've ever reasoned to be satisfied, haven't you? Every apparent reason. We all like her. Effie's very fond of her, and she seems to have a delightful influence on the child. But we know so little, after all, about her antecedents, I mean, in her past history. That's why I want you to try and recall everything you heard about her when you used this year in London. Oh, on that score, I'm afraid I shat you of much use. As I told you, she was a mere shadow in the background of the house I saw her in, and that was four or five years ago. When she was with that Mrs. Merritt? Yes, an appalling woman who runs a roaring dinner factory that used now and then to catch me in its wheels. I escaped from them long ago, but in my time there used to be a half a dozen fagged hands to tend the machine, and Miss Viner was one of them. I'm glad she's out of it, poor girl. Then you never really saw anything of her there? I never had the chance. Mrs. Merritt discouraged any competition on the part of her subordinates. Especially such pretty ones, I suppose. Darrow made no comment, and she continued. And Mrs. Merritt's own opinion, if she'd offered you one, probably wouldn't have been of much value. Only insofar as her disapproval would on general principles have been a good mark for Miss Viner. But surely, he went on after a pause. You could have found out about her from the people through whom you first hurt her. And I smiled. Oh, we heard of her through Adelaide Painter. An in-reply to her glance of interrogation, she explained that the lady in question was a spinster of South Braintree, Massachusetts, who, having come to Paris some thirty years earlier, turned her subbrother through an illness, had ever since, protestingly and provisionally camped there in a state of contemptuous protestation, oddly manifested by her never taking the slip-cupers off her drawing-room chairs. Her long residence on Golic soil had not mitigated her hostility toward the creed and customs of the race. But though she always referred to the Catholic Church as the Scarlet Woman, and took the darkest views of French private life, Madame de Chantelle placed great reliance on her judgment and experience, that in every domestic crisis the irreducible Adelaide was immediately summoned to jeep. It's all the order, because my mother-in-law, since her second marriage, has lived so much in the country that she's practically lost sight of all her other American friends. Besides which, you can see how completely she's identified herself with Monsieur de Chantelle's nationality and adopted French habits and prejudices. Yet when anything goes wrong, she always sets for Adelaide Painter, who's more American than stars and stripes, than might have left South Braintree yesterday if she hadn't, rather brought it over with her in her trunk. There are left. Well then, if South Braintree vouches for Miss Weiner. Oh, but only indirectly! When we had that odious adventure with Mademoiselle Grumot, who'd been so highly recommended by Monsieur de Chantelle's aunt, the Chandonese, Adelaide was of course sent for, and she said it once, I'm not the least bit surprised. I've always told you that what you wanted for if he was a sweet American girl, and not one of these nasty foreigners. Unluckily, she couldn't at the moment put her hand on a sweet American, but she presently heard of Miss Weiner through the farlows, an excellent couple who lived in a courtier latin, and read about French life for the American papers. I was only too thankful to find anyone who was vouched for by decent people, and so far I've had no cause to forget my choice. But I know, after all, very little about Miss Weiner, and there are all kinds of reasons why I want, as soon as possible, to find out more, to find out all I can. Since you've got to leave FV, I understand you're feeling it that way. But is there in such a case any recommendation worth half as much as your own direct experience? No, and it's been so favourable that I was ready to accept it as conclusive. Only naturally, when I found you'd known her in London, I was in hopes you'd give me some more specific reasons for liking her as much as I do. I'm afraid I could give you nothing more specific than my general vague impression that she seems very plucky and extremely nice. You don't, at any rate, know anything specific to the contrary. To the contrary? How should I? I'm not conscious of ever having heard anyone say two words about her. I only infer that she must have plucked in character to have stuck it out so long in Mrs. Merritt's. Yes, poor thing, she has plucked certainly in pride, too, which must have made it all the harder. Anna rose to her feet. You don't know how glad I am that your impressions on the whole so good. I particularly wanted you to like her. He drew her to him with a smile. On that condition I'm prepared to love even Adelaide Painter. I almost hope you won't have the chance to, poor Adelaide. Her appearance here always coincides with a catastrophe. Oh, that I must manage to meet her elsewhere. He held Anna closer, saying to himself, as he smoothed back the hair from her forehead. What does anything matter but just this? Masago now? He added aloud. She answered absently. It must be time to dress. And she drew back a little and laid her hands on his shoulders. My love. Oh, my dear love, she said. It had come to him that they were the first words of endearment he had heard her speak, and their veriness gave him a magic quality of reassurance as though no danger could strike through such a shield. A knock on the door made them draw apart. Anna lifted her hand to her hair, and Dario stooped to examine a photograph of Effie on the writing table. Come in, Anna said. The door opened, and Sophie Viner entered. Seeing Dario, she drew back. But do come in, Miss Viner, Anna repeated, looking at her kindly. The girl, a quick red in her cheek, still hesitated on the threshold. I'm so sorry, but Effie has mislabeled her Latin grammar, and I thought she might have left to hear. I needed to prepare for tomorrow's lesson. Is this it? Dario asked, picking up a book from the table. Oh, thank you. He held it out to her, and she took it and moved to the door. Wait a minute, please, Miss Viner, Anna said, and as the girl turned back, she went on with a quiet smile. Effie told us you'd gone to your room with a headache. You mustn't set up over tomorrow's lessons if you don't feel well. Sophie's blushed deepened. But you see, I have to. Latin's one of my weak points, and there's generally only one page of this book between me and Effie. She threw the words off with a half-ironic smile. Do excuse my disturbing you, she added. You didn't disturb me, Anna answered. There were a proceed that she was looking intently at the girl, as though struck by something tense and tremulous in her face, her voice, her whole mean and attitude. You do look tired. You'd much better go straight to bed, Effie won't be sorry to skip her Latin. Thank you, but I'm really all right, remember, Sophie Viner. Her glance, making a swift circuit of the room, dwelt for an appreciable instant on the intimate propinquity of an armchair in Sophie's corner, then she turned back to the door. End of book two.