第68章

From the brink of estranging confidences, and from the risk of unfavourable comparisons, his gesture had snatched her back to safety; and as soon as he had kissed her he felt that she would never bore him again.She was one of the elemental creatures whose emotion is all in their pulses, and who become inexpressive or sentimental when they try to turn sensation into speech.His caress had restored her to her natural place in the scheme of things, and Darrow felt as if he had clasped a tree and a nymph had bloomed from it...

The mere fact of not having to listen to her any longer added immensely to her charm.She continued, of course, to talk to him, but it didn't matter, because he no longer made any effort to follow her words, but let her voice run on as a musical undercurrent to his thoughts.

She hadn't a drop of poetry in her, but she had some of the qualities that create it in others; and in moments of heat the imagination does not always feel the difference...

Lying beside her in the shade, Darrow felt her presence as a part of the charmed stillness of the summer woods, as the element of vague well-being that suffused his senses and lulled to sleep the ache of wounded pride.All he asked of her, as yet, was a touch on the hand or on the lips--and that she should let him go on lying there through the long warm hours, while a black-bird's song throbbed like a fountain, and the summer wind stirred in the trees, and close by, between the nearest branches and the brim of his tilted hat, a slight white figure gathered up all the floating threads of joy...

He recalled, too, having noticed, as he lay staring at a break in the tree-tops, a stream of mares'-tails coming up the sky.He had said to himself: "It will rain to-morrow,"and the thought had made the air seem warmer and the sun more vivid on her hair...Perhaps if the mares'-tails had not come up the sky their adventure might have had no sequel.

But the cloud brought rain, and next morning he looked out of his window into a cold grey blur.They had planned an all-day excursion down the Seine, to the two Andelys and Rouen, and now, with the long hours on their hands, they were both a little at a loss...There was the Louvre, of course, and the Luxembourg; but he had tried looking at pictures with her, she had first so persistently admired the worst things, and then so frankly lapsed into indifference, that he had no wish to repeat the experiment.So they went out, aimlessly, and took a cold wet walk, turning at length into the deserted arcades of the Palais Royal, and finally drifting into one of its equally deserted restaurants, where they lunched alone and somewhat dolefully, served by a wan old waiter with the look of a castaway who has given up watching for a sail...It was odd how the waiter's face came back to him...

Perhaps but for the rain it might never have happened; but what was the use of thinking of that now? He tried to turn his thoughts to more urgent issues; but, by a strange perversity of association, every detail of the day was forcing itself on his mind with an insistence from which there was no escape.Reluctantly he relived the long wet walk back to the hotel, after a tedious hour at a cinematograph show on the Boulevard.It was still raining when they withdrew from this stale spectacle, but she had obstinately refused to take a cab, had even, on the way, insisted on loitering under the dripping awnings of shop-windows and poking into draughty passages, and finally, when they had nearly reached their destination, had gone so far as to suggest that they should turn back to hunt up some show she had heard of in a theatre at the Batignolles.But at that he had somewhat irritably protested: he remembered that, for the first time, they were both rather irritable, and vaguely disposed to resist one another's suggestions.

His feet were wet, and he was tired of walking, and sick of the smell of stuffy unaired theatres, and he had said he must really get back to write some letters--and so they had kept on to the hotel...

XXVII

Darrow had no idea how long he had sat there when he heard Anna's hand on the door.The effort of rising, and of composing his face to meet her, gave him a factitious sense of self-control.He said to himself: "I must decide on something----" and that lifted him a hair's breadth above the whirling waters.

She came in with a lighter step, and he instantly perceived that something unforeseen and reassuring had happened.

"She's been with me.She came and found me on the terrace.

We've had a long talk and she's explained everything.Ifeel as if I'd never known her before!"

Her voice was so moved and tender that it checked his start of apprehension.

"She's explained----?"

"It's natural, isn't it, that she should have felt a little sore at the kind of inspection she's been subjected to? Oh, not from you--I don't mean that! But Madame de Chantelle's opposition--and her sending for Adelaide Painter! She told me frankly she didn't care to owe her husband to Adelaide Painter...She thinks now that her annoyance at feeling herself so talked over and scrutinized may have shown itself in her manner to Owen, and set him imagining the insane things he did...I understand all she must have felt, and Iagree with her that it's best she should go away for a while.She's made me," Anna summed up, "feel as if I'd been dreadfully thick-skinned and obtuse!""YOU?"

"Yes.As if I'd treated her like the bric-a-brac that used to be sent down here 'on approval,' to see if it would look well with the other pieces." She added, with a sudden flush of enthusiasm: "I'm glad she's got it in her to make one feel like that!"She seemed to wait for Darrow to agree with her, or to put some other question, and he finally found voice to ask:

"Then you think it's not a final break?"