The Reef

Anna Leath, three days later, sat in Miss Painter’s drawing-room in the rue de Matignon.

Coming up precipitately that morning from the country, she had reached Paris at one o’clock and Miss Painter’s landing some ten minutes later.  Miss Painter’s mouldy little man-servant, dissembling a napkin under his arm, had mildly attempted to oppose her entrance; but Anna, insisting, had gone straight to the dining-room and surprised her friend—­ who ate as furtively as certain animals—­over a strange meal of cold mutton and lemonade.  Ignoring the embarrassment she caused, she had set forth the object of her journey, and Miss Painter, always hatted and booted for action, had immediately hastened out, leaving her to the solitude of the bare fireless drawing-room with its eternal slip-covers and “bowed” shutters.

In this inhospitable obscurity Anna had sat alone for close upon two hours.  Both obscurity and solitude were acceptable to her, and impatient as she was to hear the result of the errand on which she had despatched her hostess, she desired still more to be alone.  During her long meditation in a white-swathed chair before the muffled hearth she had been able for the first time to clear a way through the darkness and confusion of her thoughts.  The way did not go far, and her attempt to trace it was as weak and spasmodic as a convalescent’s first efforts to pick up the thread of living.  She seemed to herself like some one struggling to rise from a long sickness of which it would have been so much easier to die.  At Givre she had fallen into a kind of torpor, a deadness of soul traversed by wild flashes of pain; but whether she suffered or whether she was numb, she seemed equally remote from her real living and doing self.

It was only the discovery—­that very morning—­of Owen’s unannounced departure for Paris that had caught her out of her dream and forced her back to action.  The dread of what this flight might imply, and of the consequences that might result from it, had roused her to the sense of her responsibility, and from the moment when she had resolved to follow her step-son, and had made her rapid preparations for pursuit, her mind had begun to work again, feverishly, fitfully, but still with something of its normal order.  In the train she had been too agitated, too preoccupied with what might next await her, to give her thoughts to anything but the turning over of dread alternatives; but Miss Painter’s imperviousness had steadied her, and while she waited for the sound of the latch-key she resolutely returned upon herself.

With respect to her outward course she could at least tell herself that she had held to her purpose.  She had, as people said, “kept up” during the twenty-four hours preceding George Darrow’s departure; had gone with a calm face about her usual business, and even contrived not too obviously to avoid him.  Then, the next day before dawn, from behind the closed shutters where she had kept for half the night her dry-eyed vigil, she had heard him drive off to the train which brought its passengers to Paris in time for the Calais express.

The fact of his taking that train, of his travelling so straight and far away from her, gave to what had happened the implacable outline of reality.  He was gone; he would not come back; and her life had ended just as she had dreamed it was beginning.  She had no doubt, at first, as to the absolute inevitability of this conclusion.  The man who had driven away from her house in the autumn dawn was not the man she had loved; he was a stranger with whom she had not a single thought in common.  It was terrible, indeed, that he wore the face and spoke in the voice of her friend, and that, as long as he was under one roof with her, the mere way in which he moved and looked could bridge at a stroke the gulf between them.  That, no doubt, was the fault of her exaggerated sensibility to outward things:  she was frightened to see how it enslaved her.  A day or two before she had supposed the sense of honour was her deepest sentiment:  if she had smiled at the conventions of others it was because they were too trivial, not because they were too grave.  There were certain dishonours with which she had never dreamed that any pact could be made:  she had had an incorruptible passion for good faith and fairness.

She had supposed that, once Darrow was gone, once she was safe from the danger of seeing and hearing him, this high devotion would sustain her.  She had believed it would be possible to separate the image of the man she had thought him from that of the man he was.  She had even foreseen the hour when she might raise a mournful shrine to the memory of the Darrow she had loved, without fear that his double’s shadow would desecrate it.  But now she had begun to understand that the two men were really one.  The Darrow she worshipped was inseparable from the Darrow she abhorred; and the inevitable conclusion was that both must go, and she be left in the desert of a sorrow without memories…

But if the future was thus void, the present was all too full.  Never had blow more complex repercussions; and to remember Owen was to cease to think of herself.  What impulse, what apprehension, had sent him suddenly to Paris?  And why had he thought it needful to conceal his going from her?  When Sophy Viner had left, it had been with the understanding that he was to await her summons; and it seemed improbable that he would break his pledge, and seek her without leave, unless his lover’s intuition had warned him of some fresh danger.  Anna recalled how quickly he had read the alarm in her face when he had rushed back to her sitting-room with the news that Miss Viner had promised to see him again in Paris.  To be so promptly roused, his suspicions must have been but half-asleep; and since then, no doubt, if she and Darrow had dissembled, so had he.  To her proud directness it was degrading to think that they had been living together like enemies who spy upon each other’s movements:  she felt a desperate longing for the days which had seemed so dull and narrow, but in which she had walked with her head high and her eyes unguarded.

She had come up to Paris hardly knowing what peril she feared, and still less how she could avert it.  If Owen meant to see Miss Viner—­and what other object could he have?—­they must already be together, and it was too late to interfere.  It had indeed occurred to Anna that Paris might not be his objective point:  that his real purpose in leaving Givre without her knowledge had been to follow Darrow to London and exact the truth of him.  But even to her alarmed imagination this seemed improbable.  She and Darrow, to the last, had kept up so complete a feint of harmony that, whatever Owen had surmised, he could scarcely have risked acting on his suspicions.  If he still felt the need of an explanation, it was almost certainly of Sophy Viner that he would ask it; and it was in quest of Sophy Viner that Anna had despatched Miss Painter.

She had found a blessed refuge from her perplexities in the stolid Adelaide’s unawareness.  One could so absolutely count on Miss Painter’s guessing no more than one chose, and yet acting astutely on such hints as one vouchsafed her!  She was like a well-trained retriever whose interest in his prey ceases when he lays it at his master’s feet.  Anna, on arriving, had explained that Owen’s unannounced flight had made her fear some fresh misunderstanding between himself and Miss Viner.  In the interests of peace she had thought it best to follow him; but she hastily added that she did not wish to see Sophy, but only, if possible, to learn from her where Owen was.  With these brief instructions Miss Painter had started out; but she was a woman of many occupations, and had given her visitor to understand that before returning she should have to call on a friend who had just arrived from Boston, and afterward despatch to another exiled compatriot a supply of cranberries and brandied peaches from the American grocery in the Champs Elysees.

Gradually, as the moments passed, Anna began to feel the reaction which, in moments of extreme nervous tension, follows on any effort of the will.  She seemed to have gone as far as her courage would carry her, and she shrank more and more from the thought of Miss Painter’s return, since whatever information the latter brought would necessitate some fresh decision.  What should she say to Owen if she found him?  What could she say that should not betray the one thing she would give her life to hide from him?  “Give her life”—­how the phrase derided her!  It was a gift she would not have bestowed on her worst enemy.  She would not have had Sophy Viner live the hours she was living now…  She tried again to look steadily and calmly at the picture that the image of the girl evoked.  She had an idea that she ought to accustom herself to its contemplation.  If life was like that, why the sooner one got used to it the better…But no!  Life was not like that.  Her adventure was a hideous accident.  She dreaded above all the temptation to generalise from her own case, to doubt the high things she had lived by and seek a cheap solace in belittling what fate had refused her.  There was such love as she had dreamed, and she meant to go on believing in it, and cherishing the thought that she was worthy of it.  What had happened to her was grotesque and mean and miserable; but she herself was none of these things, and never, never would she make of herself the mock that fate had made of her…

She could not, as yet, bear to think deliberately of Darrow; but she kept on repeating to herself “By and bye that will come too.”  Even now she was determined not to let his image be distorted by her suffering.  As soon as she could, she would try to single out for remembrance the individual things she had liked in him before she had loved him altogether.  No “spiritual exercise” devised by the discipline of piety could have been more torturing; but its very cruelty attracted her.  She wanted to wear herself out with new pains…