The Reef

by Edith Wharton

  XXI

  Down the avenue there came to them, with the opening of the door, thevoice of Owen's motor. It was the signal which had interrupted theirfirst talk, and again, instinctively, they drew apart at the sound.Without a word Darrow turned back into the room, while Sophy Viner wentdown the steps and walked back alone toward the court.

  At luncheon the presence of the surgeon, and the non-appearanceof Madame de Chantelle--who had excused herself on the plea of aheadache--combined to shift the conversational centre of gravity; andDarrow, under shelter of the necessarily impersonal talk, had time toadjust his disguise and to perceive that the others were engaged in thesame re-arrangement. It was the first time that he had seen young Leathand Sophy Viner together since he had learned of their engagement; butneither revealed more emotion than befitted the occasion. It was evidentthat Owen was deeply under the girl's charm, and that at the leastsign from her his bliss would have broken bounds; but her reticencewas justified by the tacitly recognized fact of Madame de Chantelle'sdisapproval. This also visibly weighed on Anna's mind, making her mannerto Sophy, if no less kind, yet a trifle more constrained than if themoment of final understanding had been reached. So Darrow interpretedthe tension perceptible under the fluent exchange of commonplaces inwhich he was diligently sharing. But he was more and more aware of hisinability to test the moral atmosphere about him: he was like a man infever testing another's temperature by the touch.

  After luncheon Anna, who was to motor the surgeon home, suggested toDarrow that he should accompany them. Effie was also of the party; andDarrow inferred that Anna wished to give her step-son a chance to bealone with his betrothed. On the way back, after the surgeon had beenleft at his door, the little girl sat between her mother and Darrow, andher presence kept their talk from taking a personal turn. Darrow knewthat Mrs. Leath had not yet told Effie of the relation in which he wasto stand to her. The premature divulging of Owen's plans had throwntheir own into the background, and by common consent they continued, inthe little girl's presence, on terms of an informal friendliness.

  The sky had cleared after luncheon, and to prolong their excursion theyreturned by way of the ivy-mantled ruin which was to have been the sceneof the projected picnic. This circuit brought them back to the parkgates not long before sunset, and as Anna wished to stop at the lodgefor news of the injured child Darrow left her there with Effie andwalked on alone to the house. He had the impression that shewas slightly surprised at his not waiting for her; but his innerrestlessness vented itself in an intense desire for bodily movement. Hewould have liked to walk himself into a state of torpor; to tramp onfor hours through the moist winds and the healing darkness and comeback staggering with fatigue and sleep. But he had no pretext for sucha flight, and he feared that, at such a moment, his prolonged absencemight seem singular to Anna.

  As he approached the house, the thought of her nearness produced a swiftreaction of mood. It was as if an intenser vision of her had scatteredhis perplexities like morning mists. At this moment, wherever she was,he knew he was safely shut away in her thoughts, and the knowledge madeevery 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 itssunlit spaces there was no cranny for a fear to lurk. In a few minuteshe would be in her presence and would read his reassurance in her eyes.And presently, before dinner, she would contrive that they should havean hour by themselves in her sitting-room, and he would sit by thehearth and watch her quiet movements, and the way the bluish lustre onher hair purpled a little as she bent above the fire.

  A carriage drove out of the court as he entered it, and in the hall hisvision was dispelled by the exceedingly substantial presence of a ladyin a waterproof and a tweed hat, who stood firmly planted in the centreof a pile of luggage, as to which she was giving involved but luciddirections to the footman who had just admitted her. She went on withthese directions regardless of Darrow's entrance, merely fixing hersmall pale eyes on him while she proceeded, in a deep contralto voice,and a fluent French pronounced with the purest Boston accent, to specifythe destination of her bags; and this enabled Darrow to give her back agaze protracted enough to take in all the details of her plain thick-setperson, from the square sallow face beneath bands of grey hair to theblunt boot-toes protruding under her wide walking skirt.

  She submitted to this scrutiny with no more evidence of surprise thana monument examined by a tourist; but when the fate of her luggage hadbeen settled she turned suddenly to Darrow and, dropping her eyes fromhis face to his feet, asked in trenchant accents: "What sort of bootshave you got on?"

  Before he could summon his wits to the consideration of this questionshe continued in a tone of suppressed indignation: "Until Americans getused to the fact that France is under water for half the year they'reperpetually risking their lives by not being properly protected. Isuppose you've been tramping through all this nasty clammy mud as ifyou'd been taking a stroll on Boston Common."

  Darrow, with a laugh, affirmed his previous experience of Frenchdampness, and the degree to which he was on his guard against it; butthe lady, with a contemptuous snort, rejoined: "You young men are allalike----"; to which she appended, after another hard look at him:"I suppose you're George Darrow? I used to know one of your mother'scousins, who married a Tunstall of Mount Vernon Street. My name isAdelaide Painter. Have you been in Boston lately? No? I'm sorry forthat. I hear there have been several new houses built at the lowerend of Commonwealth Avenue and I hoped you could tell me about them. Ihaven't been there for thirty years myself."

  Miss Painter's arrival at Givre produced the same effect as the wind'shauling around to the north after days of languid weather. When Darrowjoined the group about the tea-table she had already given a tingle tothe air. Madame de Chantelle still remained invisible above stairs;but Darrow had the impression that even through her drawn curtains andbolted doors a stimulating whiff must have entered.

  Anna was in her usual seat behind the tea-tray, and Sophy Vinerpresently led in her pupil. Owen was also there, seated, as usual,a little apart from the others, and following Miss Painter's massivemovements and equally substantial utterances with a smile of secretintelligence which gave Darrow the idea of his having been inclandestine parley with the enemy. Darrow further took note that thegirl and her suitor perceptibly avoided each other; but this might be anatural result of the tension Miss Painter had been summoned to relieve.

  Sophy Viner would evidently permit no recognition of the situation savethat which it lay with Madame de Chantelle to accord; but meanwhile MissPainter had proclaimed her tacit sense of it by summoning the girl to aseat at her side.

  Darrow, as he continued to observe the newcomer, who was perched on herarm-chair like a granite image on the edge of a cliff, was awarethat, in a more detached frame of mind, he would have found an extremeinterest in studying and classifying Miss Painter. It was not that shesaid anything remarkable, or betrayed any of those unspoken perceptionswhich give significance to the most commonplace utterances. She talkedof the lateness of her train, of an impending crisis in internationalpolitics, of the difficulty of buying English tea in Paris and of theenormities of which French servants were capable; and her views on thesesubjects were enunciated with a uniformity of emphasis implying completeunconsciousness of any difference in their interest and importance. Shealways 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, financialdifficulties and private complications of various persons of socialimportance. Yet, as she evidently felt no incongruity in herattitude, so she revealed no desire to parade her familiarity with thefashionable, or indeed any sense of it as a fact to be paraded. It wasevident that the titled ladies whom she spoke of as Mimi or Simone orOdette were as much "those people" to her as the bonne who tampered withher 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 vastgrim tolerance of things-as-they-came, as though she had been somewonderful automatic machine which recorded facts but had not yet beenperfected to the point of sorting or labelling them.

  All this, as Darrow was aware, still fell short of accounting for theinfluence 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 nogrimaces, but rather the freshness of a simpler mental state. Afterliving, as he had, as they all had, for the last few days, in anatmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it wasrestful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank area of MissPainter's mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so echolessfor all its vacuity.

  His hope of a word with Anna before dinner was dispelled by her risingto take Miss Painter up to Madame de Chantelle; and he wandered awayto his own room, leaving Owen and Miss Viner engaged in working out apicture-puzzle for Effie.

  Madame de Chantelle--possibly as the result of her friend'sministrations--was able to appear at the dinner-table, rather pale andpink-nosed, and casting tenderly reproachful glances at her grandson,who faced them with impervious serenity; and the situation was relievedby the fact that Miss Viner, as usual, had remained in the school-roomwith her pupil.

  Darrow conjectured that the real clash of arms would not take place tillthe morrow; and wishing to leave the field open to the contestants heset out early on a solitary walk. It was nearly luncheon-time when hereturned from it and came upon Anna just emerging from the house. Shehad 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 dosomething." She added with a smile: "Whatever it is, let's have itover!"

  Darrow, through his rising sense of apprehension, wondered why, insteadof merely going for a walk, he had not jumped into the first train andgot out of the way till Owen's affairs were finally settled.

  "But what in the name of goodness can I do?" he protested, followingAnna 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 appearedto think; and once more he had a movement of recoil. "There's nopossible reason for my being mixed up in this affair!"

  Anna gave him a reproachful glance. "Not the fact that I am?" shereminded 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 besure they had it to themselves; and then, in a lowered voice: "I don'tknow," she suddenly confessed; "but, somehow, if THEY'RE not happy Ifeel as if we shouldn't be."

  "Oh, well--" Darrow acquiesced, in the tone of the man who perforceyields to so lovely an unreasonableness. Escape was, after all,impossible, and he could only resign himself to being led to Madame deChantelle's door.

  Within, among the bric-a-brac and furbelows, he found Miss Painterseated in a redundant purple armchair with the incongruous air of ahorseman bestriding a heavy mount. Madame de Chantelle sat opposite,still a little wan and disordered under her elaborate hair, and claspingthe handkerchief whose visibility symbolized her distress. On theyoung man's entrance she sighed out a plaintive welcome, to which sheimmediately appended: "Mr. Darrow, I can't help feeling that at heartyou'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 soscrupulous. Every evidence of feminine inconsequence in Anna seemed toattest her deeper subjection to the most inconsequent of passions. Hehad certainly promised her his help--but before he knew what he waspromising.

  He met Madame de Chantelle's appeal by replying: "If there were anythingI 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 againsther. I've already said that I know nothing of her except that she'scharming."

  "As if that weren't enough--weren't all there OUGHT to be!" Miss Painterput in impatiently. She seemed to address herself to Darrow, though hersmall eyes were fixed on her friend.

  "Madame de Chantelle seems to imagine," she pursued, "that a youngAmerican girl ought to have a dossier--a police-record, or whatever youcall it: what those awful women in the streets have here. In our countryit's enough to know that a young girl's pure and lovely: people don'timmediately ask her to show her bank-account and her visiting-list."

  Madame de Chantelle looked plaintively at her sturdy monitress. "Youdon'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 anorphan ought, with your ideas, to be a merit. You won't have to inviteher father and mother to Givre!"

  "Adelaide--Adelaide!" the mistress of Givre lamented.

  "Lucretia Mary," the other returned--and Darrow spared an instant'samusement to the quaint incongruity of the name--"you know you sent forMr. 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 knownothing about?"

  "No; but I don't think it's perfectly simple to prevent him."

  The shrewdness of the answer increased Darrow's interest in MissPainter. She had not hitherto struck him as being a person of muchpenetration, but he now felt sure that her gimlet gaze might bore to theheart 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 aboutso, as it's called, that she must have been mixed up with some ratherdreadful people. If only Owen could be made to see that--if one couldget at a few facts, I mean. She says, for instance, that she has asister; 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'sone of the dreadful people. I've no doubt that with a little time youcould rake up dozens of them: have her 'traced', as they call it indetective stories. I don't think you'd frighten Owen, but you might:it's natural enough he should have been corrupted by those foreignideas. You might even manage to part him from the girl; but you couldn'tkeep him from being in love with her. I saw that when I looked themover last evening. I said to myself: 'It's a real old-fashioned Americancase, as sweet and sound as home-made bread.' Well, if you take his loafaway from him, what are you going to feed him with instead? Which ofyour nasty Paris poisons do you think he'll turn to? Supposing yousucceed in keeping him out of a really bad mess--and, knowing the youngman as I do, I rather think that, at this crisis, the only way to do itwould be to marry him slap off to somebody else--well, then, who, may Iask, 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. Youmight hustle him into that kind of marriage; I daresay you could--butif I know Owen, the natural thing would happen before the first baby wasweaned."

  "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 whenhe'd been forcibly parted from her? At any rate, it's what your Frenchfriends do, every one of them! Only they don't generally have the graceto go back to an old love; and I believe, upon my word, Owen would!"

  Ma
dame de Chantelle looked at her with a mixture of awe and exultation."Of course you realize, Adelaide, that in suggesting this you'reinsinuating the most shocking things against Miss Viner?"

  "When I say that if you part two young things who are dying to be happyin the lawful way it's ten to one they'll come together in an unlawfulone? I'm insinuating shocking things against YOU, Lucretia Mary, insuggesting for a moment that you'll care to assume such a responsibilitybefore your Maker. And you wouldn't, if you talked things straight outwith him, instead of merely sending him messages through a miserablesinner like yourself!"

  Darrow expected this assault on her adopted creed to provoke in Madamede Chantelle an explosion of pious indignation; but to his surprise shemerely murmured: "I don't know what Mr. Darrow'll think of you!"

  "Mr. Darrow probably knows his Bible as well as I do," Miss Paintercalmly rejoined; adding a moment later, without the least perceptiblechange of voice or expression: "I suppose you've heard that Giselede Folembray's husband accuses her of being mixed up with the Ducd'Arcachon in that business of trying to sell a lot of imitation pearlsto Mrs. Homer Pond, the Chicago woman the Duke's engaged to? It seemsthe jeweller says Gisele brought Mrs. Pond there, and got twenty-fiveper cent--which of course she passed on to d'Arcachon. The poor oldDuchess is in a fearful state--so afraid her son'll lose Mrs. Pond!When I think that Gisele is old Bradford Wagstaff's grand-daughter, I'mthankful he's safe in Mount Auburn!"