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THE REEF
instead of answering him she broke out: “There’s something
I’ve been wanting you to know. The other day in Paris I saw
Miss Viner.”
She saw him fl ush with the intensity of his surprise.
“You sent for her?”
“No; she heard from Adelaide that I was in Paris and she
came. She came because she wanted to urge me to marry you.
I thought you ought to know what she had done.”
Darrow stood up. “I’m glad you’ve told me.” He spoke with
a visible effort at composure. Her eyes followed him as he
moved away.
“Is that all?” he asked after an interval.
“It seems to me a great deal.”
“It’s what she’d already asked me.” His voice showed
her how deeply he was moved, and a throb of jealousy shot
through her.
“Oh, it was for your sake, I know!” He made no answer, and
she added: “She’s been exceedingly generous . . . Why shouldn’t
we speak of it?”
She had lowered her head, but through her dropped lids
she seemed to be watching the crowded scene of his face.
“I’ve not shrunk from speaking of it.”
“Speaking of her, then, I mean. It seems to me that if I could
talk to you about her I should know better — ”
She broke off, confused, and he questioned: “What is it you
want to know better?”
The colour rose to her forehead. How could she tell him
what she scarcely dared own to herself? There was nothing
she did not want to know, no fold or cranny of his secret that
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EDITH WHARTON
her awakened imagination did not strain to penetrate; but she
could not expose Sophy Viner to the base fi ngerings of a retrospective jealousy, nor Darrow to the temptation of belittling
her in the effort to better his own case. The girl had been magnifi cent, and the only worthy return that Anna could make
was to take Darrow from her without a question if she took
him at all . . .
She lifted her eyes to his face. “I think I only wanted to
speak her name. It’s not right that we should seem so afraid of
it. If I were really afraid of it I should have to give you up,”
she said.
He bent over her and caught her to him. “Ah, you can’t give
me up now!” he exclaimed.
She suffered him to hold her fast without speaking; but
the old dread was between them again, and it was on her lips to
cry out: “How can I help it, when I AM so afraid?”
CHAPTER XXXV
The next morning the dread was still there, and she understood that she must snatch herself out of the torpor of the will
into which she had been gradually sinking, and tell Darrow
that she could not be his wife.
The knowledge came to her in the watches of a sleepless
night, when, through the tears of disenchanted passion, she
stared back upon her past. There it lay before her, her sole
romance, in all its paltry poverty, the cheapest of cheap adventures, the most pitiful of sentimental blunders. She looked
about her room, the room where, for so many years, if her heart
had been quiescent her thoughts had been alive, and pictured
herself henceforth cowering before a throng of mean suspicions, of unavowed compromises and concessions. In that moment of self-searching she saw that Sophy Viner had chosen
the better part, and that certain renunciations might enrich
where possession would have left a desert.
Passionate reactions of instinct fought against these efforts of her will. Why should past or future coerce her, when
the present was so securely hers? Why insanely surrender
what the other would after all never have? Her sense of irony
whispered that if she sent away Darrow it would not be to Sophy Viner, but to the fi rst woman who crossed his path – as, in
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EDITH WHARTON
a similar hour, Sophy Viner herself had crossed it . . . But
the mere fact that she could think such things of him sent
her shuddering back to the opposite pole. She pictured herself
gradually subdued to such a conception of life and love, she
pictured Effi e growing up under the infl uence of the woman
she saw herself becoming – and she hid her eyes from the humiliation of the picture . . .
They were at luncheon when the summons that Darrow
expected was brought to him. He handed the telegram to Anna,
and she learned that his Ambassador, on the way to a German
cure, was to be in Paris the next evening and wished to confer
with him there before he went back to London. The idea that
the decisive moment was at hand was so agitating to her that
when luncheon was over she slipped away to the terrace and
thence went down alone to the garden. The day was grey but
mild, with the heaviness of decay in the air. She rambled on
aimlessly, following under the denuded boughs the path she
and Darrow had taken on their fi rst walk to the river. She was
sure he would not try to overtake her: sure he would guess
why she wished to be alone. There were moments when it
seemed to double her loneliness to be so certain of his reading
her heart while she was so desperately ignorant of his . . .
She wandered on for more than an hour, and when she
returned to the house she saw, as she entered the hall, that
Darrow was seated at the desk in Owen’s study. He heard her
step, and looking up turned in his chair without rising. Their
eyes met, and she saw that his were clear and smiling. He had
a heap of papers at his elbow and was evidently engaged in
some offi cial correspondence. She wondered that he could ad-
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THE REEF
dress himself so composedly to his task, and then ironically
refl ected that such detachment was a sign of his superiority.
She crossed the threshold and went toward him; but as she advanced she had a sudden vision of Owen, standing outside in
the cold autumn dusk and watching Darrow and Sophy Viner
as they faced each other across the lamplit desk . . . The evocation was so vivid that it caught her breath like a blow, and she
sank down helplessly on the divan among the piled-up books.
Distinctly, at the moment, she understood that the end had
come. “When he speaks to me I will tell him!” she thought . . .
Darrow, laying aside his pen, looked at her for a moment in
silence; then he stood up and shut the door.
“I must go to-morrow early,” he said, sitting down beside her. His voice was grave, with a slight tinge of sadness.
She said to herself: “He knows what I am feeling . . . ” and now
the thought made her feel less alone. The expression of his
face was stern and yet tender: for the fi rst time she understood
what he had suffered.
She had no doubt as to the necessity of giving him up, but
it was impossible to tell him so then. She stood up and said:
“I’ll leave you to your letters.” He made no protest, but merely
answered: “You’ll come down presently for a walk?” and it occurred to her at once that she would walk down to the river
with him, and give herself for the last time the tragic luxury of
sitting at his side in the little pavilion. “Perhaps,” she thought,
“it will be easier to tell him there.”
It did not, on the way home from their walk, become any
easier to tell him; but her secret decision to do so before he
left gave her a kind of factitious calm and laid a melancholy
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EDITH WHARTON
ecstasy upon the hour. Still skirting the subject that fanned
their very faces with its fl ame, they clung persistently to other
topics, and it seemed to Anna that their minds had never been
nearer together than in this hour when their hearts were so
separate. In the glow of interchanged love she had grown less
conscious of that other glow of interchanged thought which
had once illumined her mind. She had forgotten how Darrow
had widened her world and lengthened out all her perspectives, and with a pang of double destitution she saw herself
alone among her shrunken thoughts.
For the fi rst time, then, she had a clear vision of what
her life would be without him. She imagined herself trying to take up the daily round, and all that had lightened
and animated it seemed equally lifeless and vain. She tried to
think of herself as wholly absorbed in her daughter’s development, like other mothers she had seen; but she supposed those mothers must have had stored memories of happiness to nourish them. She had had nothing, and all her
starved youth still claimed its due.
When she went up to dress for dinner she said to herself:
“I’ll have my last evening with him, and then, before we say
good night, I’ll tell him.”
This postponement did not seem unjustifi ed. Darrow had
shown her how he dreaded vain words, how resolved he was to
avoid all fruitless discussion. He must have been intensely
aware of what had been going on in her mind since his return, yet when she had attempted to reveal it to him he had
turned from the revelation. She was therefore merely follow-
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THE REEF
ing the line he had traced in behaving, till the fi nal moment
came, as though there were nothing more to say . . .
That moment seemed at last to be at hand when, at her
usual hour after dinner, Madame de Chantelle rose to go upstairs. She lingered a little to bid good-bye to Darrow, whom
she was not likely to see in the morning; and her affable
allusions to his prompt return sounded in Anna’s ear like
the note of destiny.
A cold rain had fallen all day, and for greater warmth and
intimacy they had gone after dinner to the oak-room, shutting out the chilly vista of the farther drawing-rooms. The autumn wind, coming up from the river, cried about the house
with a voice of loss and separation; and Anna and Darrow sat
silent, as if they feared to break the hush that shut them in.
The solitude, the fi re-light, the harmony of soft hangings and
old dim pictures, wove about them a spell of security through
which Anna felt, far down in her heart, the muffl ed beat of
an inextinguishable bliss. How could she have thought that
this last moment would be the moment to speak to him, when
it seemed to have gathered up into its fl ight all the scattered
splendours of her dream?
CHAPTER XXXVI
Darrow continued to stand by the door after it had closed.
Anna felt that he was looking at her, and sat still, disdaining to
seek refuge in any evasive word or movement. For the last
time she wanted to let him take from her the fulness of what
the sight of her could give.
He crossed over and sat down on the sofa. For a moment
neither of them spoke; then he said: “To-night, dearest, I must
have my answer.”
She straightened herself under the shock of his seeming to
take the very words from her lips.
“To-night?” was all that she could falter.
“I must be off by the early train. There won’t be more than
a moment in the morning.”
He had taken her hand, and she said to herself that she
must free it before she could go on with what she had to say.
Then she rejected this concession to a weakness she was resolved to defy. To the end she would leave her hand in his
hand, her eyes in his eyes: she would not, in their fi nal hour
together, be afraid of any part of her love for him.
“You’ll tell me to-night, dear,” he insisted gently; and his
insistence gave her the strength to speak.
348
THE REEF
“There’s something I must ask you,” she broke out, perceiving, as she heard her words, that they were not in the least
what she had meant to say.
He sat still, waiting, and she pressed on: “Do such things
happen to men often?”
The quiet room seemed to resound with the long reverberations of her question. She looked away from him, and he
released her and stood up.
“I don’t know what happens to other men. Such a thing
never happened to me . . . ”
She turned her eyes back to his face. She felt like a traveller on a giddy path between a cliff and a precipice: there was
nothing for it now but to go on.
“Had it . . . had it begun . . . before you met her in Paris?”
“No; a thousand times no! I’ve told you the facts as
they were.”
“All the facts?”
He turned abruptly. “What do you mean?”
Her throat was dry and the loud pulses drummed in
her temples.
“I mean – about her . . . Perhaps you knew . . . knew things
about her . . . beforehand.”
She stopped. The room had grown profoundly still. A log
dropped to the hearth and broke there in a hissing shower.
Darrow spoke in a clear voice. “I knew nothing, absolutely
nothing,” he said.
She had the answer to her inmost doubt – to her last
shameful unavowed hope. She sat powerless under her woe.
349
EDITH WHARTON
He walked to the fi replace and pushed back the broken log
with his foot. A fl ame shot out of it, and in the upward glare
she saw his pale face, stern with misery.
“Is that all?” he asked.
She made a slight sign with her head and he came slowly
back to her. “Then is this to be good-bye?”
Again she signed a faint assent, and he made no effort to
touch her or draw nearer. “You understand that I sha’n’t
come back?”
He was looking at her, and she tried to return his look, but
her eyes were blind with tears, and in dread of his seeing them
she got up and walked away. He did not follow her, and she
stood with her back to him, staring at a bowl of carnations on
a little table strewn with books. Her tears magnifi ed everything
she looked at, and the streaked petals of the carnations, their
fringed edges and frail curled stamens, pressed upon her, huge
and vivid. She noticed among the books a volume of verse he
had sent her from England, and tried to remember whether it
was before or after . . .
She felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and at last she
turned to him. “I shall see you to-morrow before you go . . . ”
He made no answer.
She moved toward the door and he held it open for her.
She saw his hand on the door, and his seal ring in its setting of twisted silver; and the sense of the end of all things
came to her.
They walked down the drawing-rooms, between the shadowy refl ections of screens and cabinets, and mounted the stairs
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