“At any rate, I won’t say good-bye,” she stammered, feeling the tears beneath her veil.
“No, no; rather not!” he declared; but he made no movement, and she went up and threw her arms about him. “You’ll write me, won’t you?”
“Of course, of course—-”
Her hands slipped down into his, and for a minute they held each other dumbly in the darkness; then he gave a vague laugh and said: “It’s really time to light up.” He pressed the electric button with one hand while with the other he opened the door; and she passed out without daring to turn back, lest the light on his face should show her what she feared to see.
Chapter XXXVIII
Anna drove to the chemist’s for Owen’s remedy. On the way she stopped her cab at a book-shop, and emerged from it laden with literature. She knew what would interest Owen, and what he was likely to have read, and she had made her choice among the newest publications with the promptness of a discriminating reader. But on the way back to the hotel she was overcome by the irony of adding this mental panacea to the other. There was something grotesque and almost mocking in the idea of offering a judicious selection of literature to a man setting out on such a journey. “He knows…he knows…” she kept on repeating; and giving the porter the parcel from the chemist’s she drove away without leaving the books. She went to her apartment, whither her maid had preceded her. There was a fire in the drawing-room and the tea-table stood ready by the hearth. The stormy rain beat against the uncurtained windows, and she thought of Owen, who would soon be driving through it to the station, alone with his bitter thoughts. She had been proud of the fact that he had always sought her help in difficult hours; and now, in the most difficult of all, she was the one being to whom he could not turn. Between them, henceforth, there would always be the wall of an insurmountable silence…She strained her aching thoughts to guess how the truth had come to him. Had he seen the girl, and had she told him? Instinctively, Anna rejected this conjecture. But what need was there of assuming an explicit statement, when every breath they had drawn for the last weeks had been charged with the immanent secret? As she looked back over the days since Darrow’s first arrival at Givre she perceived that at no time had any one deliberately spoken, or anything been accidentally disclosed. The truth had come to light by the force of its irresistible pressure; and the perception gave her a startled sense of hidden powers, of a chaos of attractions and repulsions far beneath the ordered surfaces of intercourse. She looked back with melancholy derision on her old conception of life, as a kind of well-lit and well policed suburb to dark places one need never know about. Here they were, these dark places, in her own bosom, and henceforth she would always have to traverse them to reach the beings she loved best!
She was still sitting beside the untouched tea-table when she heard Darrow’s voice in the hall. She started up, saying to herself: “I must tell him that Owen knows…” but when the door opened and she saw his face, still lit by the same smile of boyish triumph, she felt anew the uselessness of speaking…Had he ever supposed that Owen would not know? Probably, from the height of his greater experience, he had seen long since that all that happened was inevitable; and the thought of it, at any rate, was clearly not weighing on him now.
He was already dressed for the evening, and as he came toward her he said: “The Ambassador’s booked for an official dinner and I’m free after all. Where shall we dine?”
Anna had pictured herself sitting alone all the evening with her wretched thoughts, and the fact of having to put them out of her mind for the next few hours gave her an immediate sensation of relief. Already her pulses were dancing to the tune of Darrow’s, and as they smiled at each other she thought: “Nothing can ever change the fact that I belong to him.”