The door-handle turned, and Anna heard her go.
Chapter XXIX
Her first thought was: “He’s going too in a few hours–I needn’t see him again before he leaves…” At that moment the possibility of having to look in Darrow’s face and hear him speak seemed to her more unendurable than anything else she could imagine. Then, on the next wave of feeling, came the desire to confront him at once and wring from him she knew not what: avowal, denial, justification, anything that should open some channel of escape to the flood of her pent- up anguish.
She had told Owen she was tired, and this seemed a sufficient reason for remaining upstairs when the motor came to the door and Miss Painter and Sophy Viner were borne off in it; sufficient also for sending word to Madame de Chantelle that she would not come down till after luncheon. Having despatched her maid with this message, she lay down on her sofa and stared before her into darkness…
She had been unhappy before, and the vision of old miseries flocked like hungry ghosts about her fresh pain: she recalled her youthful disappointment, the failure of her marriage, the wasted years that followed; but those were negative sorrows, denials and postponements of life. She seemed in no way related to their shadowy victim, she who was stretched on this fiery rack of the irreparable. She had suffered before–yes, but lucidly, reflectively, elegiacally: now she was suffering as a hurt animal must, blindly, furiously, with the single fierce animal longing that the awful pain should stop…
She heard her maid knock, and she hid her face and made no answer. The knocking continued, and the discipline of habit at length made her lift her head, compose her face and hold out her hand to the note the woman brought her. It was a word from Darrow–“May I see you?”–and she said at once, in a voice that sounded thin and empty: “Ask Mr. Darrow to come up.”
The maid enquired if she wished to have her hair smoothed first, and she answered that it didn’t matter; but when the door had closed, the instinct of pride drew her to her feet and she looked at herself in the glass above the mantelpiece and passed her hands over her hair. Her eyes were burning and her face looked tired and thinner; otherwise she could see no change in her appearance, and she wondered that at such a moment her body should seem as unrelated to the self that writhed within her as if it had been a statue or a picture.
The maid reopened the door to show in Darrow, and he paused a moment on the threshold, as if waiting for Anna to speak. He was extremely pale, but he looked neither ashamed nor uncertain, and she said to herself, with a perverse thrill of appreciation: “He’s as proud as I am.”
Aloud she asked: “You wanted to see me?”
“Naturally,” he replied in a grave voice.
“Don’t! It’s useless. I know everything. Nothing you can say will help.”
At the direct affirmation he turned even paler, and his eyes, which he kept resolutely fixed on her, confessed his misery.
“You allow me no voice in deciding that?”
“Deciding what?”
“That there’s nothing more to be said?” He waited for her to answer, and then went on: “I don’t even know what you mean by ‘everything’.”
“Oh, I don’t know what more there is! I know enough. I implored her to deny it, and she couldn’t…What can you and I have to say to each other?” Her voice broke into a sob. The animal anguish was upon her again–just a blind cry against her pain!
Darrow kept his head high and his eyes steady. “It must be as you wish; and yet it’s not like you to be afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“To talk things out–to face them.”
“It’s for you to face this–not me!”
“All I ask is to face it–but with you.” Once more he paused. “Won’t you tell me what Miss Viner told you?”
“Oh, she’s generous–to the utmost!” The pain caught her like a physical throe. It suddenly came to her how the girl must have loved him to be so generous–what memories there must be between them!