“Well, you’ve got what you wanted,” she said.
“What do you mean by what I wanted?”
“My engagement’s broken—you heard me say so.”
“Why do you say that’s what I wanted? All I wished, from the beginning, was to advise you, to help you as best I could–-“
“That’s what you’ve done,” she rejoined. “You’ve convinced me that it’s best I shouldn’t marry him.”
Darrow broke into a despairing laugh. “At the very moment when you’d convinced me to the contrary!”
“Had I?” Her smile flickered up. “Well, I really believed it till you showed me…warned me…”
“Warned you?”
“That I’d be miserable if I married a man I didn’t love.”
“Don’t you love him?”
She made no answer, and Darrow started up and walked away to the other end of the room. He stopped before the writing-table, where his photograph, well-dressed, handsome, self-sufficient—the portrait of a man of the world, confident of his ability to deal adequately with the most delicate situations—offered its huge fatuity to his gaze. He turned back to her. “It’s rather hard on Owen, isn’t it, that you should have waited until now to tell him?”
She reflected a moment before answering. “I told him as soon as I knew.”
“Knew that you couldn’t marry him?”
“Knew that I could never live here with him.” She looked about the room, as though the very walls must speak for her.
For a moment Darrow continued to search her face perplexedly; then their eyes met in a long disastrous gaze.
“Yes–-” she said, and stood up.
Below the window they heard Effie whistling for her dogs, and then, from the terrace, her mother calling her.
“There—THAT for instance,” Sophy Viner said.
Darrow broke out: “It’s I who ought to go!”
She kept her small pale smile. “What good would that do any of us—now?”
He covered his face with his hands. “Good God!” he groaned. “How could I tell?”
“You couldn’t tell. We neither of us could.” She seemed to turn the problem over critically. “After all, it might have been YOU instead of me!”
He took another distracted turn about the room and coming back to her sat down in a chair at her side. A mocking hand seemed to dash the words from his lips. There was nothing on earth that he could say to her that wasn’t foolish or cruel or contemptible…
“My dear,” he began at last, “oughtn’t you, at any rate, to try?”
Her gaze grew grave. “Try to forget you?”
He flushed to the forehead. “I meant, try to give Owen more time; to give him a chance. He’s madly in love with you; all the good that’s in him is in your hands. His step-mother felt that from the first. And she thought—she believed–-“
“She thought I could make him happy. Would she think so now?”
“Now…? I don’t say now. But later? Time modifies…rubs out…more quickly than you think…Go away, but let him hope…I’m going too—WE’RE going—” he stumbled on the plural—“in a very few weeks: going for a long time, probably. What you’re thinking of now may never happen. We may not all be here together again for years.”
She heard him out in silence, her hands clasped on her knee, her eyes bent on them. “For me,” she said, “you’ll always be here.”
“Don’t say that—oh, don’t! Things change…people change…You’ll see!”
“You don’t understand. I don’t want anything to change. I don’t want to forget—to rub out. At first I imagined I did; but that was a foolish mistake. As soon as I saw you again I knew it…It’s not being here with you that I’m afraid of—in the sense you think. It’s being here, or anywhere, with Owen.” She stood up and bent her tragic smile on him. “I want to keep you all to myself.”
The only words that came to him were futile denunciations of his folly; but the sense of their futility checked them on his lips. “Poor child—you poor child!” he heard himself vainly repeating.
Suddenly he felt the strong reaction of reality and its impetus brought him to his feet. “Whatever happens, I intend to go—to go for good,” he exclaimed. “I want you to understand that. Oh, don’t be afraid—I’ll find a reason. But it’s perfectly clear that I must go.”
She uttered a protesting cry. “Go away? You? Don’t you see that that would tell everything—drag everybody into the horror?”
He found no answer, and her voice dropped back to its calmer note. “What good would your going do? Do you suppose it would change anything for me?” She looked at him with a musing wistfulness. “I wonder what your feeling for me was? It seems queer that I’ve never really known—I suppose we DON’T know much about that kind of feeling. Is it like taking a drink when you’re thirsty?…I used to feel as if all of me was in the palm of your hand…”
He bowed his humbled head, but she went on almost exultantly: “Don’t for a minute think I’m sorry! It was worth every penny it cost. My mistake was in being ashamed, just at first, of its having cost such a lot. I tried to carry it off as a joke—to talk of it to myself as an ‘adventure’. I’d always wanted adventures, and you’d given me one, and I tried to take your attitude about it, to ‘play the game’ and convince myself that I hadn’t risked any more on it than you. Then, when I met you again, I suddenly saw that I HAD risked more, but that I’d won more, too—such worlds! I’d been trying all the while to put everything I could between us; now I want to sweep everything away. I’d been trying to forget how you looked; now I want to remember you always. I’d been trying not to hear your voice; now I never want to hear any other. I’ve made my choice—that’s alclass="underline" I’ve had you and I mean to keep you.” Her face was shining like her eyes. “To keep you hidden away here,” she ended, and put her hand upon her breast.
After she had left him, Darrow continued to sit motionless, staring back into their past. Hitherto it had lingered on the edge of his mind in a vague pink blur, like one of the little rose-leaf clouds that a setting sun drops from its disk. Now it was a huge looming darkness, through which his eyes vainly strained. The whole episode was still obscure to him, save where here and there, as they talked, some phrase or gesture or intonation of the girl’s had lit up a little spot in the night.
She had said: “I wonder what your feeling for me was?” and he found himself wondering too…He remembered distinctly enough that he had not meant the perilous passion—even in its most transient form—to play a part in their relation. In that respect his attitude had been above reproach. She was an unusually original and attractive creature, to whom he had wanted to give a few days of harmless pleasuring, and who was alert and expert enough to understand his intention and spare him the boredom of hesitations and misinterpretations. That had been his first impression, and her subsequent demeanour had justified it. She had been, from the outset, just the frank and easy comrade he had expected to find her. Was it he, then, who, in the sequel, had grown impatient of the bounds he had set himself? Was it his wounded vanity that, seeking balm for its hurt, yearned to dip deeper into the healing pool of her compassion? In his confused memory of the situation he seemed not to have been guiltless of such yearnings…Yet for the first few days the experiment had been perfectly successful. Her enjoyment had been unclouded and his pleasure in it undisturbed. It was very gradually—he seemed to see—that a shade of lassitude had crept over their intercourse. Perhaps it was because, when her light chatter about people failed, he found she had no other fund to draw on, or perhaps simply because of the sweetness of her laugh, or of the charm of the gesture with which, one day in the woods of Marly, she had tossed off her hat and tilted back her head at the call of a cuckoo; or because, whenever he looked at her unexpectedly, he found that she was looking at him and did not want him to know it; or perhaps, in varying degrees, because of all these things, that there had come a moment when no word seemed to fly high enough or dive deep enough to utter the sense of well-being each gave to the other, and the natural substitute for speech had been a kiss.