The Reef Part 10

"Haven't you, though, perhaps--the least bit? Because, after all, you knew I understood?"

"You've 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 Givre!" He paused, as if to lay more stress on the boyish sneer: "Do you likewise include the late Monsieur de Chantelle?"

His step-mother 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 Givre. 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 handsome eyes.

"I mean that when your grandmother gets back from Ouchy I shall speak to her----" "You'll 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 allusion touched a 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. Leath 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 feint 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've 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 YOUR not changing has 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 so months ago: you might have been sure of that! And how can you be any surer today than yesterday?"

"I don't know. I suppose one learns something every day----"

"Not at Givre!" he laughed, and shot a half-ironic look at her. "But you haven't really BEEN at Givre lately--not for months! Don't you suppose I've noticed that, my dear?"

She echoed his laugh to merge it in an undenying sigh. "Poor Givre..."

"Poor empty Givre! With so many rooms full and yet not a soul in 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-hued facade on which the autumn light was dying. "It looks so made to be happy in----" 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 old 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 absentminded and mysterious I always feel like saying: 'Come back. All is discovered'."

She returned his 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 Darrow as much as you know him," he presently risked.

She frowned a little. "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 that the late sun shed a betraying gleam on her face. "They're 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 Givre?"

XI

"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 airy 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 colourless, 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 pause in the stone-flagged hall, his voice as he asked a 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 band 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 s.h.i.+fting as the brown bed of a stream.

Darrow stood framed in the door-way 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 upon the s.h.i.+ning 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, Fraser Leath 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 mantel-piece of pinkish-yellow marble and looked at himself in the tall garlanded gla.s.s that surmounted it. She could not remember that he had ever found anything to straighten or alter in his own studied attire, but she had never known him to omit the inspection when he pa.s.sed 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 little daily scene hung but 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 Leath 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 pa.s.sed out onto the terrace and down the steps to the gravel walk below. The delicate frosting of dew gave the gra.s.s a bluish s.h.i.+mmer, and the sunlight, sliding in emerald streaks along the tree-boles, gathered itself into great luminous blurs at the end of the wood-walks, and hung above the fields a watery glory like the ring about an autumn moon.

"It's good to be here," Darrow said.