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 Effie.
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 field 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 first train and got out of the way till Owen’s affairs were finally settled.
“But what in the name of goodness can I do?” he protested, following Anna back into the hall.
“I don’t know. But Owen seems so to rely on you, too–-“
“Owen! Is HE to be there?”
“No. But you know I told him he could count on you.”
“But I’ve said to your mother-in-law all I could.”
“Well, then you can only repeat it.”
This did not seem to Darrow to simplify his case as much as she appeared to think; and once more he had a movement of recoil. “There’s no possible reason for my being mixed up in this affair!”
Anna gave him a reproachful glance. “Not the fact that I am?” she reminded him; but even this only stiffened his resistance.
“Why should you be, either—to this extent?”
The question made her pause. She glanced about the hall, as if to be sure they had it to themselves; and then, in a lowered voice: “I don’t know,” she suddenly confessed; “but, somehow, if THEY’RE not happy I feel as if we shouldn’t be.”
“Oh, well—” Darrow acquiesced, in the tone of the man who perforce yields to so lovely an unreasonableness. Escape was, after all, impossible, and he could only resign himself to being led to Madame de Chantelle’s door.
Within, among the bric-a-brac and furbelows, he found Miss Painter seated in a redundant purple armchair with the incongruous air of a horseman bestriding a heavy mount. Madame de Chantelle sat opposite, still a little wan and disordered under her elaborate hair, and clasping the handkerchief whose visibility symbolized her distress. On the young man’s entrance she sighed out a plaintive welcome, to which she immediately appended: “Mr. Darrow, I can’t help feeling that at heart you’re with me!”
The directness of the challenge made it easier for Darrow to protest, and he reiterated his inability to give an opinion on either side.
“But Anna declares you have—on hers!”
He could not restrain a smile at this faint flaw in an impartiality so scrupulous. Every evidence of feminine inconsequence in Anna seemed to attest her deeper subjection to the most inconsequent of passions. He had certainly promised her his help—but before he knew what he was promising.
He met Madame de Chantelle’s appeal by replying: “If there were anything I could possibly say I should want it to be in Miss Viner’s favour.”
“You’d want it to be—yes! But could you make it so?”
“As far as facts go, I don’t see how I can make it either for or against her. I’ve already said that I know nothing of her except that she’s charming.”
“As if that weren’t enough—weren’t all there OUGHT to be!” Miss Painter put in impatiently. She seemed to address herself to Darrow, though her small eyes were fixed on her friend.
“Madame de Chantelle seems to imagine,” she pursued, “that a young American girl ought to have a dossier—a police-record, or whatever you call it: what those awful women in the streets have here. In our country it’s enough to know that a young girl’s pure and lovely: people don’t immediately ask her to show her bank-account and her visiting-list.”
Madame de Chantelle looked plaintively at her sturdy monitress. “You don’t expect me not to ask if she’s got a family?”
“No; nor to think the worse of her if she hasn’t. The fact that she’s an orphan ought, with your ideas, to be a merit. You won’t have to invite her father and mother to Givre!”
“Adelaide—Adelaide!” the mistress of Givre lamented.
“Lucretia Mary,” the other returned—and Darrow spared an instant’s amusement to the quaint incongruity of the name—“you know you sent for Mr. Darrow to refute me; and how can he, till he knows what I think?”
“You think it’s perfectly simple to let Owen marry a girl we know nothing about?”
“No; but I don’t think it’s perfectly simple to prevent him.”
The shrewdness of the answer increased Darrow’s interest in Miss Painter. She had not hitherto struck him as being a person of much penetration, but he now felt sure that her gimlet gaze might bore to the heart of any practical problem.
Madame de Chantelle sighed out her recognition of the difficulty.
“I haven’t a word to say against Miss Viner; but she’s knocked about so, as it’s called, that she must have been mixed up with some rather dreadful people. If only Owen could be made to see that—if one could get at a few facts, I mean. She says, for instance, that she has a sister; but it seems she doesn’t even know her address!”
“If she does, she may not want to give it to you. I daresay the sister’s one of the dreadful people. I’ve no doubt that with a little time you could rake up dozens of them: have her ‘traced’, as they call it in detective stories. I don’t think you’d frighten Owen, but you might: it’s natural enough he should have been corrupted by those foreign ideas. You might even manage to part him from the girl; but you couldn’t keep him from being in love with her. I saw that when I looked them over last evening. I said to myself: ‘It’s a real old-fashioned American case, as sweet and sound as home-made bread.’ Well, if you take his loaf away from him, what are you going to feed him with instead? Which of your nasty Paris poisons do you think he’ll turn to? Supposing you succeed in keeping him out of a really bad mess—and, knowing the young man as I do, I rather think that, at this crisis, the only way to do it would be to marry him slap off to somebody else—well, then, who, may I ask, would you pick out? One of your sweet French ingenues, I suppose? With as much mind as a minnow and as much snap as a soft-boiled egg. You might hustle him into that kind of marriage; I daresay you could—but if I know Owen, the natural thing would happen before the first baby was weaned.”
“I don’t know why you insinuate such odious things against Owen!”
“Do you think it would be odious of him to return to his real love when he’d been forcibly parted from her? At any rate, it’s what your French friends do, every one of them! Only they don’t generally have the grace to go back to an old love; and I believe, upon my word, Owen would!”