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THE REEF
have thought that Darrow had already guessed his secret, and
what, after all, could be so disturbing to him in this not improbable contingency? At any rate, his doubt must have been
dispelled: there was nothing feigned about Darrow’s astonishment. When her eyes turned back to him he was already crossing to Owen with outstretched hand, and she had, through
an unaccountable faint fl utter of misgiving, a mere confused
sense of their exchanging the customary phrases. Her next
perception was of Owen’s tranquillized look, and of his smiling return of Darrow’s congratulatory grasp. She had the eerie
feeling of having been overswept by a shadow which there had
been no cloud to cast . . .
A moment later Owen had left the room and she and Darrow were alone. He had turned away to the window and stood
staring out into the down-pour.
“You’re surprised at Owen’s news?” she asked.
“Yes: I am surprised,” he answered.
“You hadn’t thought of its being Miss Viner?”
“Why should I have thought of Miss Viner?”
“You see now why I wanted so much to fi nd out what you
knew about her.” He made no comment, and she pursued:
“Now that you DO know it’s she, if there’s anything — ”
He moved back into the room and went up to her. His face
was serious, with a slight shade of annoyance. “What on earth
should there be? As I told you, I’ve never in my life heard any
one say two words about Miss Viner.”
Anna made no answer and they continued to face each other without moving. For the moment she had ceased to think
about Sophy Viner and Owen: the only thought in her mind
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EDITH WHARTON
was that Darrow was alone with her, close to her, and that, for
the fi rst time, their hands and lips had not met.
He glanced back doubtfully at the window. “It’s pouring.
Perhaps you’d rather not go out?”
She hesitated, as if waiting for him to urge her. “I suppose
I’d better not. I ought to go at once to my mother-in-law – Owen’s just been telling her,” she said.
“Ah.” Darrow hazarded a smile. “That accounts for
my having, on my way up, heard some one telephoning for
Miss Painter!”
At the allusion they laughed together, vaguely, and Anna
moved toward the door. He held it open for her and followed
her out.
CHAPTER XIX
He left her at the door of Madame de Chantelle’s sittingroom, and plunged out alone into the rain.
The wind fl ung about the stripped tree-tops of the avenue
and dashed the stinging streams into his face. He walked to
the gate and then turned into the high-road and strode along in
the open, buffeted by slanting gusts. The evenly ridged fi elds
were a blurred waste of mud, and the russet coverts which he
and Owen had shot through the day before shivered desolately against a driving sky.
Darrow walked on and on, indifferent to the direction he
was taking. His thoughts were tossing like the tree-tops. Anna’s
announcement had not come to him as a complete surprise:
that morning, as he strolled back to the house with Owen
Leath and Miss Viner, he had had a momentary intuition of
the truth. But it had been no more than an intuition, the merest faint cloud-puff of surmise; and now it was an attested fact,
darkening over the whole sky.
In respect of his own attitude, he saw at once that the discovery made no appreciable change. If he had been bound to
silence before, he was no less bound to it now; the only difference lay in the fact that what he had just learned had rendered
his bondage more intolerable. Hitherto he had felt for Sophy
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EDITH WHARTON
Viner’s defenseless state a sympathy profoundly tinged with
compunction. But now he was half-conscious of an obscure indignation against her. Superior as he had fancied himself to
ready-made judgments, he was aware of cherishing the common doubt as to the disinterestedness of the woman who
tries to rise above her past. No wonder she had been sick with
fear on meeting him! It was in his power to do her more harm
than he had dreamed . . .
Assuredly he did not want to harm her; but he did desperately want to prevent her marrying Owen Leath. He tried to
get away from the feeling, to isolate and exteriorize it suffi ciently to see what motives it was made of; but it remained
a mere blind motion of his blood, the instinctive recoil from
the thing that no amount of arguing can make “straight.”
His tramp, prolonged as it was, carried him no nearer to enlightenment; and after trudging through two or three sallow
mud-stained villages he turned about and wearily made his
way back to Givre. As he walked up the black avenue, making
for the lights that twinkled through its pitching branches, he
had a sudden realisation of his utter helplessness. He might
think and combine as he would; but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do . . .
He dropped his wet coat in the vestibule and began to mount
the stairs to his room. But on the landing he was overtaken
by a sober-faced maid who, in tones discreetly lowered, begged
him to be so kind as to step, for a moment, into the Marquise’s
sitting-room. Somewhat disconcerted by the summons, he followed its bearer to the door at which, a couple of hours earlier,
he had taken leave of Mrs. Leath. It opened to admit him to
194
THE REEF
a large lamp-lit room which he immediately perceived to be
empty; and the fact gave him time to note, even through his
disturbance of mind, the interesting degree to which Madame de Chantelle’s apartment “dated” and completed her.
Its looped and corded curtains, its purple satin upholstery,
the Sevres jardinieres, the rosewood fi re-screen, the little
velvet tables edged with lace and crowded with silver knickknacks and simpering miniatures, reconstituted an almost
perfect setting for the blonde beauty of the ‘sixties. Darrow
wondered that Fraser Leath’s fi lial respect should have prevailed over his aesthetic scruples to the extent of permitting
such an anachronism among the eighteenth century graces of
Givre; but a moment’s refl ection made it clear that, to its late
owner, the attitude would have seemed exactly in the traditions of the place.
Madame de Chantelle’s emergence from an inner room
snatched Darrow from these irrelevant musings. She was already beaded and bugled for the evening, and, save for a slight
pinkness of the eye-lids, her elaborate appearance revealed no
mark of agitation; but Darrow noticed that, in recognition of
the solemnity of the occasion, she pinched a lace handkerchief
between her thumb and forefi nger.
She plunged at once into the centre of the diffi culty, appealing to him, in the name of all the Everards, to descend
there with her to the rescue of her darling. She wasn’t, she was
sure, addressing herself in vain to one whose person, whose
“tone,” whose traditions so brilliantly declared his indebtedness to the principles she besought him to defend. Her own
reception of Darrow, the confi dence she had at once accord-
195
EDITH WHARTON
ed him, must have shown him that she had instinctively felt
their unanimity of sentiment on these fundamental questions.
She had in fact recognized in him the one person whom, without pain to her maternal piety, she could welcome as her son’s
successor; and it was almost as to Owen’s father that she now
appealed to Darrow to aid in rescuing the wretched boy.
“Don’t think, please, that I’m casting the least refl ection on
Anna, or showing any want of sympathy for her, when I say
that I consider her partly responsible for what’s happened.
Anna is ‘modern’ – I believe that’s what it’s called when you
read unsettling books and admire hideous pictures. Indeed,”
Madame de Chantelle continued, leaning confi dentially forward, “I myself have always more or less lived in that atmosphere: my son, you know, was very revolutionary. Only he
didn’t, of course, apply his ideas: they were purely intellectual.
That’s what dear Anna has always failed to understand. And
I’m afraid she’s created the same kind of confusion in Owen’s
mind – led him to mix up things you read about with things
you do . . . You know, of course, that she sides with him in this
wretched business?”
Developing at length upon this theme, she fi nally narrowed down to the point of Darrow’s intervention. “My grandson, Mr. Darrow, calls me illogical and uncharitable because
my feelings toward Miss Viner have changed since I’ve heard
this news. Well! You’ve known her, it appears, for some years:
Anna tells me you used to see her when she was a companion,
or secretary or something, to a dreadfully vulgar Mrs. Murrett.
And I ask you as a friend, I ask you as one of US, to tell me if
you think a girl who has had to knock about the world in that
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THE REEF
kind of position, and at the orders of all kinds of people, is fi tted to be Owen’s wife I’m not implying anything against her!
I LIKED the girl, Mr. Darrow . . . But what’s that got to do with
it? I don’t want her to marry my grandson. If I’d been looking
for a wife for Owen, I shouldn’t have applied to the Farlows to
fi nd me one. That’s what Anna won’t understand; and what
you must help me to make her see.”
Darrow, to this appeal, could oppose only the repeated assurance of his inability to interfere. He tried to make Madame
de Chantelle see that the very position he hoped to take in
the household made his intervention the more hazardous.
He brought up the usual arguments, and sounded the expected note of sympathy; but Madame de Chantelle’s alarm had
dispelled her habitual imprecision, and, though she had not
many reasons to advance, her argument clung to its point like
a frightened sharp-clawed animal.
“Well, then,” she summed up, in response to his repeated
assertions that he saw no way of helping her, “you can, at least,
even if you won’t say a word to the others, tell me frankly and
fairly – and quite between ourselves – your personal opinion of Miss Viner, since you’ve known her so much longer
than we have.”
He protested that, if he had known her longer, he
had known her much less well, and that he had already, on
this point, convinced Anna of his inability to pronounce
an opinion.
Madame de Chantelle drew a deep sigh of intelligence.
“Your opinion of Mrs. Murrett is enough! I don’t suppose you
pretend to conceal THAT? And heaven knows what other un-
197
EDITH WHARTON
speakable people she’s been mixed up with. The only friends
she can produce are called Hoke . . . Don’t try to reason with
me, Mr. Darrow. There are feelings that go deeper than facts . . .
And I KNOW she thought of studying for the stage . . . ” Madame
de Chantelle raised the corner of her lace handkerchief to her
eyes. “I’m old-fashioned – like my furniture,” she murmured.
“And I thought I could count on you, Mr. Darrow . . . ”
When Darrow, that night, regained his room, he refl ected
with a fl ash of irony that each time he entered it he brought
a fresh troop of perplexities to trouble its serene seclusion.
Since the day after his arrival, only forty-eight hours before,
when he had set his window open to the night, and his hopes
had seemed as many as its stars, each evening had brought its
new problem and its renewed distress. But nothing, as yet, had
approached the blank misery of mind with which he now set
himself to face the fresh questions confronting him.
Sophy Viner had not shown herself at dinner, so that
he had had no glimpse of her in her new character, and no
means of divining the real nature of the tie between herself
and Owen Leath. One thing, however, was clear: whatever her
real feelings were, and however much or little she had at stake,
if she had made up her mind to marry Owen she had more
than enough skill and tenacity to defeat any arts that poor Madame de Chantelle could oppose to her.
Darrow himself was in fact the only person who might
possibly turn her from her purpose: Madame de Chantelle, at
haphazard, had hit on the surest means of saving Owen – if to
prevent his marriage were to save him! Darrow, on this point,
did not pretend to any fi xed opinion; one feeling alone was
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THE REEF
clear and insistent in him: he did not mean, if he could help
it, to let the marriage take place.
How he was to prevent it he did not know: to his tormented imagination every issue seemed closed. For a fantastic
instant he was moved to follow Madame de Chantelle’s suggestion and urge Anna to withdraw her approval. If his reticence, his efforts to avoid the subject, had not escaped her, she
had doubtless set them down to the fact of his knowing more,
and thinking less, of Sophy Viner than he had been willing to
admit; and he might take advantage of this to turn her mind
gradually from the project. Yet how do so without betraying his
insincerity? If he had had nothing to hide he could easily have
said: “It’s one thing to know nothing against the girl, it’s another to pretend that I think her a good match for Owen.” But
could he say even so much without betraying more? It was not
Anna’s questions, or his answers to them, that he feared, but
what might cry aloud in the intervals between them. He understood now that ever since Sophy Viner’s arrival at Givre he
had felt in Anna the lurking sense of something unexpressed,
and perhaps inexpressible, between the girl and himself . . .
When at last he fell asleep he had fatalistically committed his
next step to the chances of the morrow.
The fi rst that offered itself was an encounter with Mrs.
Leath as he descended the stairs the next morning. She had
come down already hatted and shod for a dash to the park
lodge, where one of the gatekeeper’s children had had an accident. In her compact dark dress she looked more than usually
straight and slim, and her face wore the pale glow it took on at
any call on her energy: a kind of warrior brightness that made
199
EDITH WHARTON
her small head, with its strong chin and close-bound hair, like
that of an amazon in a frieze.
It was their fi rst moment alone since she had left him,
the afternoon before, at her mother-in-law’s door; and after
a few words about the injured child their talk inevitably reverted to Owen.
Anna spoke with a smile of her “scene” with Madame de
Chantelle, who belonged, poor dear, to a generation when
“scenes” (in the ladylike and lachrymal sense of the term) were
the tribute which sensibility was expected to pay to the unusual. Their conversation had been, in every detail, so exactly
what Anna had foreseen that it had clearly not made much
impression on her; but she was eager to know the result of
Darrow’s encounter with her mother-in-law.
“She told me she’d sent for you: she always ‘sends for’ people in emergencies. That again, I suppose, is de l’epoque. And
failing Adelaide Painter, who can’t get here till this afternoon,
there was no one but poor you to turn to.”
She put it all lightly, with a lightness that seemed to his
tight-strung nerves slightly, undefi nably over-done. But he was
so aware of his own tension that he wondered, the next moment, whether anything would ever again seem to him quite
usual and insignifi cant and in the common order of things.
As they hastened on through the drizzle in which
the storm of the night was weeping itself out, Anna drew close
under his umbrella, and at the pressure of her arm against
his he recalled his walk up the Dover pier with Sophy Viner.
The memory gave him a startled vision of the inevitable occasions of contact, confi dence, familiarity, which his future rela-
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