He understood her then, and stammered: “You?”
“Forgive me! And let me tell you!…It will help you to understand Owen…There were little things…little signs…once I had begun to watch for them: your reluctance to speak about her…her reserve with you…a sort of constraint we’d never seen in her before…”
She laughed up at him, and with her hands in his he contrived to say: “NOW you understand why?”
“Oh, I understand; of course I understand; and I want you to laugh at me–with me! Because there were other things too…crazier things still…There was even–last night on the terrace–her pink cloak…”
“Her pink cloak?” Now he honestly wondered, and as she saw it she blushed.
“You’ve forgotten about the cloak? The pink cloak that Owen saw you with at the play in Paris? Yes…yes…I was mad enough for that!…It does me good to laugh about it now! But you ought to know that I’m going to be a jealous woman…a ridiculously jealous woman…you ought to be warned of it in time…”
He had dropped her hands, and she leaned close and lifted her arms to his neck with one of her rare gestures of surrender.
“I don’t know why it is; but it makes me happier now to have been so foolish!”
Her lips were parted in a noiseless laugh and the tremor of her lashes made their shadow move on her cheek. He looked at her through a mist of pain and saw all her offered beauty held up like a cup to his lips; but as he stooped to it a darkness seemed to fall between them, her arms slipped from his shoulders and she drew away from him abruptly.
“But she was with you, then?” she exclaimed; and then, as he stared at her: “Oh, don’t say no! Only go and look at your eyes!”
He stood speechless, and she pressed on: “Don’t deny it–oh, don’t deny it! What will be left for me to imagine if you do? Don’t you see how every single thing cries it out? Owen sees it–he saw it again just now! When I told him she’d relented, and would see him, he said: ‘Is that Darrow’s doing too?'”
Darrow took the onslaught in silence. He might have spoken, have summoned up the usual phrases of banter and denial; he was not even certain that they might not, for the moment, have served their purpose if he could have uttered them without being seen. But he was as conscious of what had happened to his face as if he had obeyed Anna’s bidding and looked at himself in the glass. He knew he could no more hide from her what was written there than he could efface from his soul the fiery record of what he had just lived through. There before him, staring him in the eyes, and reflecting itself in all his lineaments, was the overwhelming fact of Sophy Viner’s passion and of the act by which she had attested it.
Anna was talking again, hurriedly, feverishly, and his soul was wrung by the anguish in her voice. “Do speak at last– you must speak! I don’t want to ask you to harm the girl; but you must see that your silence is doing her more harm than your answering my questions could. You’re leaving me only the worst things to think of her…she’d see that herself if she were here. What worse injury can you do her than to make me hate her–to make me feel she’s plotted with you to deceive us?”
“Oh, not that!” Darrow heard his own voice before he was aware that he meant to speak. “Yes; I did see her in Paris,” he went on after a pause; “but I was bound to respect her reason for not wanting it known.”
Anna paled. “It was she at the theatre that night?”
“I was with her at the theatre one night.”
“Why should she have asked you not to say so?”
“She didn’t wish it known that I’d met her.”
“Why shouldn’t she have wished it known?”
“She had quarrelled with Mrs. Murrett and come over suddenly to Paris, and she didn’t want the Farlows to hear of it. I came across her by accident, and she asked me not to speak of having seen her.”