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THE REEF
Darrow instantly perceived what dread suspicion again
possessed her, and the sense that it was not wholly unjustifi ed
caused him a passing pang of shame. But it did not turn him
from his purpose.
“I’m an old friend of Mrs. Leath’s. It’s not unnatural that
Madame de Chantelle should talk to me.”
She dropped the screen on the table and stood up, turning on him the same small mask of wrath and scorn which
had glared at him, in Paris, when he had confessed to his suppression of her letter. She walked away a step or two and then
came back.
“May I ask what Madame de Chantelle said to you?”
“She made it clear that she should not encourage
the marriage.”
“And what was her object in making that clear to YOU?”
Darrow hesitated. “I suppose she thought — ”
“That she could persuade you to turn Mrs. Leath
against me?”
He was silent, and she pressed him: “Was that it?”
“That was it.”
“But if you don’t – if you keep your promise — ”
“My promise?”
“To say nothing . . . nothing whatever . . . ” Her strained look
threw a haggard light along the pause.
As she spoke, the whole odiousness of the scene rushed
over him. “Of course I shall say nothing . . . you know that
. . . ” He leaned to her and laid his hand on hers. “You know
I wouldn’t for the world . . . ”
211
EDITH WHARTON
She drew back and hid her face with a sob. Then she sank
again into her seat, stretched her arms across the table and laid
her face upon them. He sat still, overwhelmed with compunction. After a long interval, in which he had painfully measured
the seconds by her hard-drawn breathing, she looked up at
him with a face washed clear of bitterness.
“Don’t suppose I don’t know what you must have
thought of me!”
The cry struck him down to a lower depth of self-abasement. “My poor child,” he felt like answering, “the shame of
it is that I’ve never thought of you at all!” But he could only
uselessly repeat: “I’ll do anything I can to help you.”
She sat silent, drumming the table with her hand. He saw
that her doubt of him was allayed, and the perception made
him more ashamed, as if her trust had fi rst revealed to him
how near he had come to not deserving it. Suddenly she began to speak.
“You think, then, I’ve no right to marry him?”
“No right? God forbid! I only meant — ”
“That you’d rather I didn’t marry any friend of yours.”
She brought it out deliberately, not as a question, but as a mere
dispassionate statement of fact.
Darrow in turn stood up and wandered away helplessly to the window. He stood staring out through its small discoloured panes at the dim brown distances; then he moved
back to the table.
“I’ll tell you exactly what I meant. You’ll be wretched if you
marry a man you’re not in love with.”
212
THE REEF
He knew the risk of misapprehension that he ran, but he
estimated his chances of success as precisely in proportion to
his peril. If certain signs meant what he thought they did, he
might yet – at what cost he would not stop to think – make
his past pay for his future.
The girl, at his words, had lifted her head with a movement of surprise. Her eyes slowly reached his face and rested
there in a gaze of deep interrogation. He held the look for
a moment; then his own eyes dropped and he waited.
At length she began to speak. “You’re mistaken – you’re
quite mistaken.”
He waited a moment longer. “Mistaken — ?”
“In thinking what you think. I’m as happy as if I deserved
it!” she suddenly proclaimed with a laugh.
She stood up and moved toward the door. “NOW are you
satisfi ed?” she asked, turning her vividest face to him from
the threshold.
CHAPTER XXI
Down the avenue there came to them, with the opening of
the door, the voice of Owen’s motor. It was the signal which
had interrupted their fi rst talk, and again, instinctively, they
drew apart at the sound. Without a word Darrow turned back
into the room, while Sophy Viner went down the steps and
walked back alone toward the court.
At luncheon the presence of the surgeon, and the nonappearance of Madame de Chantelle – who had excused herself on the plea of a headache – combined to shift the conversational centre of gravity; and Darrow, under shelter of
the necessarily impersonal talk, had time to adjust his disguise
and to perceive that the others were engaged in the same rearrangement. It was the fi rst time that he had seen young
Leath and Sophy Viner together since he had learned of their
engagement; but neither revealed more emotion than befi tted the occasion. It was evident that Owen was deeply under
the girl’s charm, and that at the least sign from her his bliss
would have broken bounds; but her reticence was justifi ed by
the tacitly recognized fact of Madame de Chantelle’s disapproval. This also visibly weighed on Anna’s mind, making her
manner to Sophy, if no less kind, yet a trifl e more constrained
than if the moment of fi nal understanding had been reached.
214
THE REEF
So Darrow interpreted the tension perceptible under the fl uent exchange of commonplaces in which he was diligently
sharing. But he was more and more aware of his inability to
test the moral atmosphere about him: he was like a man in fever testing another’s temperature by the touch.
After luncheon Anna, who was to motor the surgeon home,
suggested to Darrow that he should accompany them. Effi e was
also of the party; and Darrow inferred that Anna wished to
give her step-son a chance to be alone with his betrothed.
On the way back, after the surgeon had been left at his door,
the little girl sat between her mother and Darrow, and her
presence kept their talk from taking a personal turn. Darrow
knew that Mrs. Leath had not yet told Effi e of the relation in
which he was to stand to her. The premature divulging of
Owen’s plans had thrown their own into the background, and
by common consent they continued, in the little girl’s presence, on terms of an informal friendliness.
The sky had cleared after luncheon, and to prolong their
excursion they returned by way of the ivy-mantled ruin
which was to have been the scene of the projected picnic.
This circuit brought them back to the park gates not long
before sunset, and as Anna wished to stop at the lodge for
news of the injured child Darrow left her there with Effi e
and walked on alone to the house. He had the impression
that she was slightly surprised at his not waiting for her; but
his inner restlessness vented itself in an intense desire for
bodily movement. He would have liked to walk himself into
a state of torpor; to tramp on for hours through the moist
winds and the healing darkness and come back staggering
215
EDITH WHARTON
with fatigue and sleep. But he had no pretext for such a fl ight,
and he feared that, at such a moment, his prolonged absence
might seem singular to Anna.
As he approached the house, the thought of her nearness
produced a swift reaction of mood. It was as if an intenser vision of her had scattered his perplexities like morning mists.
At this moment, wherever she was, he knew he was safely shut
away in her thoughts, and the knowledge made every other fact
dwindle away to a shadow. He and she loved each other, and
their love arched over them open and ample as the day: in all
its sunlit spaces there was no cranny for a fear to lurk. In a few
minutes he would be in her presence and would read his reassurance in her eyes. And presently, before dinner, she would
contrive that they should have an hour by themselves in her
sitting-room, and he would sit by the hearth and watch her
quiet movements, and the way the bluish lustre on her hair
purpled a little as she bent above the fi re.
A carriage drove out of the court as he entered it, and in
the hall his vision was dispelled by the exceedingly substantial
presence of a lady in a waterproof and a tweed hat, who stood
fi rmly planted in the centre of a pile of luggage, as to which
she was giving involved but lucid directions to the footman
who had just admitted her. She went on with these directions
regardless of Darrow’s entrance, merely fi xing her small pale
eyes on him while she proceeded, in a deep contralto voice,
and a fl uent French pronounced with the purest Boston accent, to specify the destination of her bags; and this enabled
Darrow to give her back a gaze protracted enough to take in
all the details of her plain thick-set person, from the square
216
THE REEF
sallow face beneath bands of grey hair to the blunt boot-toes
protruding under her wide walking skirt.
She submitted to this scrutiny with no more evidence of
surprise than a monument examined by a tourist; but when
the fate of her luggage had been settled she turned suddenly to Darrow and, dropping her eyes from his face to his
feet, asked in trenchant accents: “What sort of boots have
you got on?”
Before he could summon his wits to the consideration of
this question she continued in a tone of suppressed indignation: “Until Americans get used to the fact that France is under water for half the year they’re perpetually risking their
lives by not being properly protected. I suppose you’ve been
tramping through all this nasty clammy mud as if you’d been
taking a stroll on Boston Common.”
Darrow, with a laugh, affi rmed his previous experience of
French dampness, and the degree to which he was on his guard
against it; but the lady, with a contemptuous snort, rejoined:
“You young men are all alike — ”; to which she appended,
after another hard look at him: “I suppose you’re George Darrow? I used to know one of your mother’s cousins, who married a Tunstall of Mount Vernon Street. My name is Adelaide
Painter. Have you been in Boston lately? No? I’m sorry for that.
I hear there have been several new houses built at the lower
end of Commonwealth Avenue and I hoped you could tell me
about them. I haven’t been there for thirty years myself.”
Miss Painter’s arrival at Givre produced the same effect as
the wind’s hauling around to the north after days of languid
weather. When Darrow joined the group about the tea-table
217
EDITH WHARTON
she had already given a tingle to the air. Madame de Chantelle
still remained invisible above stairs; but Darrow had the impression that even through her drawn curtains and bolted
doors a stimulating whiff must have entered.
Anna was in her usual seat behind the tea-tray, and Sophy Viner presently led in her pupil. Owen was also there,
seated, as usual, a little apart from the others, and following
Miss Painter’s massive movements and equally substantial utterances with a smile of secret intelligence which gave Darrow
the idea of his having been in clandestine parley with the enemy. Darrow further took note that the girl and her suitor
perceptibly avoided each other; but this might be a natural result of the tension Miss Painter had been summoned to relieve.
Sophy Viner would evidently permit no recognition of
the situation save that which it lay with Madame de Chantelle to accord; but meanwhile Miss Painter had proclaimed
her tacit sense of it by summoning the girl to a seat at her side.
Darrow, as he continued to observe the newcomer,
who was perched on her arm-chair like a granite image on
the edge of a cliff, was aware that, in a more detached frame of
mind, he would have found an extreme interest in studying
and classifying Miss Painter. It was not that she said anything
remarkable, or betrayed any of those unspoken perceptions
which give signifi cance to the most commonplace utterances.
She talked of the lateness of her train, of an impending crisis in international politics, of the diffi culty of buying English
tea in Paris and of the enormities of which French servants
were capable; and her views on these subjects were enunciated with a uniformity of emphasis implying complete uncon-
218
THE REEF
sciousness of any difference in their interest and importance.
She always applied to the French race the distant epithet of
“those people”, but she betrayed an intimate acquaintance
with many of its members, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of
the domestic habits, fi nancial diffi culties and private complications of various persons of social importance. Yet, as she
evidently felt no incongruity in her attitude, so she revealed
no desire to parade her familiarity with the fashionable, or
indeed any sense of it as a fact to be paraded. It was evident
that the titled ladies whom she spoke of as Mimi or Simone or
Odette were as much “those people” to her as the bonne who
tampered with her tea and steamed the stamps off her letters
(“when, by a miracle, I don’t put them in the box myself.”)
Her whole attitude was of a vast grim tolerance of thingsas-they-came, as though she had been some wonderful automatic machine which recorded facts but had not yet been
perfected to the point of sorting or labelling them.
All this, as Darrow was aware, still fell short of accounting for the infl uence she obviously exerted on the persons in
contact with her. It brought a slight relief to his state of tension to go on wondering, while he watched and listened,
just where the mystery lurked. Perhaps, after all, it was in
the fact of her blank insensibility, an insensibility so devoid of egotism that it had no hardness and no grimaces, but
rather the freshness of a simpler mental state. After living,
as he had, as they all had, for the last few days, in an atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications,
it was restful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank
219
EDITH WHARTON
area of Miss Painter’s mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated
items, so echoless for all its vacuity.
His hope of a word with Anna before dinner was dispelled
by her rising to take Miss Painter up to Madame de Chantelle;
and he wandered away to his own room, leaving Owen and
Miss Viner engaged in working out a picture-puzzle for Effi e.
Madame de Chantelle – possibly as the result of her friend’s
ministrations – was able to appear at the dinner-table, rather
pale and pink-nosed, and casting tenderly reproachful glances at her grandson, who faced them with impervious serenity;
and the situation was relieved by the fact that Miss Viner, as
usual, had remained in the school-room with her pupil.
Darrow conjectured that the real clash of arms would
not take place till the morrow; and wishing to leave the fi eld
open to the contestants he set out early on a solitary walk.
It was nearly luncheon-time when he returned from it and
came upon Anna just emerging from the house. She had on
her hat and jacket and was apparently coming forth to seek
him, for she said at once: “Madame de Chantelle wants
you to go up to her.”
“To go up to her? Now?”
“That’s the message she sent. She appears to rely on you to
do something.” She added with a smile: “Whatever it is, let’s
have it over!”
Darrow, through his rising sense of apprehension, wondered why, instead of merely going for a walk, he had not
jumped into the fi rst train and got out of the way till Owen’s
affairs were fi nally settled.
220
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