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BOOK V: CHAPTER XXXV
The next morning the dread was still there, and she
understood that she must snatch herself out of the torpor of
the will into which she had been gradually sinking, and tell
Darrow that she could not be his wife.
The knowledge came to her in the watches of a sleepless
night, when, through the tears of disenchanted passion, she
stared back upon her past. There it lay before her, her
sole romance, in all its paltry poverty, the cheapest of
cheap adventures, the most pitiful of sentimental blunders.
She looked about her room, the room where, for so many
years, if her heart had been quiescent her thoughts had been
alive, and pictured herself henceforth cowering before a
throng of mean suspicions, of unavowed compromises and
concessions. In that moment of self-searching she saw that
Sophy Viner had chosen the better part, and that certain
renunciations might enrich where possession would have left
a desert.
Passionate reactions of instinct fought against these
efforts of her will. Why should past or future coerce her,
when the present was so securely hers? Why insanely
surrender what the other would after all never have? Her
sense of irony whispered that if she sent away Darrow it
would not be to Sophy Viner, but to the first woman who
crossed his path--as, in a similar hour, Sophy Viner herself
had crossed it...But the mere fact that she could think such
things of him sent her shuddering back to the opposite pole.
She pictured herself gradually subdued to such a conception
of life and love, she pictured Effie growing up under the
influence of the woman she saw herself becoming--and she hid
her eyes from the humiliation of the picture...
They were at luncheon when the summons that Darrow expected
was brought to him. He handed the telegram to Anna, and she
learned that his Ambassador, on the way to a German cure,
was to be in Paris the next evening and wished to confer
with him there before he went back to London. The idea that
the decisive moment was at hand was so agitating to her that
when luncheon was over she slipped away to the terrace and
thence went down alone to the garden. The day was grey but
mild, with the heaviness of decay in the air. She rambled
on aimlessly, following under the denuded boughs the path
she and Darrow had taken on their first walk to the river.
She was sure he would not try to overtake her: sure he would
guess why she wished to be alone. There were moments when
it seemed to double her loneliness to be so certain of his
reading her heart while she was so desperately ignorant of
his...
She wandered on for more than an hour, and when she returned
to the house she saw, as she entered the hall, that Darrow
was seated at the desk in Owen's study. He heard her step,
and looking up turned in his chair without rising. Their
eyes met, and she saw that his were clear and smiling. He
had a heap of papers at his elbow and was evidently engaged
in some official correspondence. She wondered that he could
address himself so composedly to his task, and then
ironically reflected that such detachment was a sign of his
superiority. She crossed the threshold and went toward him;
but as she advanced she had a sudden vision of Owen,
standing outside in the cold autumn dusk and watching Darrow
and Sophy Viner as they faced each other across the lamplit
desk...The evocation was so vivid that it caught her breath
like a blow, and she sank down helplessly on the divan among
the piled-up books. Distinctly, at the moment, she
understood that the end had come. "When he speaks to me I
will tell him!" she thought...
Darrow, laying aside his pen, looked at her for a moment in
silence; then he stood up and shut the door.
"I must go to-morrow early," he said, sitting down beside
her. His voice was grave, with a slight tinge of sadness.
She said to herself: "He knows what I am feeling..." and now
the thought made her feel less alone. The expression of his
face was stern and yet tender: for the first time she
understood what he had suffered.
She had no doubt as to the necessity of giving him up, but
it was impossible to tell him so then. She stood up and
said: "I'll leave you to your letters." He made no protest,
but merely answered: "You'll come down presently for a
walk?" and it occurred to her at once that she would walk
down to the river with him, and give herself for the last
time the tragic luxury of sitting at his side in the little
pavilion. "Perhaps," she thought, "it will be easier to
tell him there."
It did not, on the way home from their walk, become any
easier to tell him; but her secret decision to do so before
he left gave her a kind of factitious calm and laid a
melancholy ecstasy upon the hour. Still skirting the
subject that fanned their very faces with its flame, they
clung persistently to other topics, and it seemed to Anna
that their minds had never been nearer together than in this
hour when their hearts were so separate. In the glow of
interchanged love she had grown less conscious of that other
glow of interchanged thought which had once illumined her
mind. She had forgotten how Darrow had widened her world
and lengthened out all her perspectives, and with a pang of
double destitution she saw herself alone among her shrunken
thoughts.
For the first time, then, she had a clear vision of what her
life would be without him. She imagined herself trying to
take up the daily round, and all that had lightened and
animated it seemed equally lifeless and vain. She tried to
think of herself as wholly absorbed in her daughter's
development, like other mothers she had seen; but she
supposed those mothers must have had stored memories of
happiness to nourish them. She had had nothing, and all her
starved youth still claimed its due.
When she went up to dress for dinner she said to herself:
"I'll have my last evening with him, and then, before we say
good night, I'll tell him."
This postponement did not seem unjustified. Darrow had
shown her how he dreaded vain words, how resolved he was to
avoid all fruitless discussion. He must have been intensely
aware of what had been going on in her mind since his
return, yet when she had attempted to reveal it to him he
had turned from the revelation. She was therefore merely
following the line he had traced in behaving, till the final
moment came, as though there were nothing more to say...
That moment seemed at last to be at hand when, at her usual
hour after dinner, Madame de Chantelle rose to go upstairs.
She lingered a little to bid good-bye to Darrow, whom she
was not likely to see in the morning; and her affable
allusions to his prompt return sounded in Anna's ear like
the note of destiny.
A cold rain had fallen all day, and for greater warmth and
intimacy they had gone after dinner to the oak-room,
shutting out the chilly vista of the farther drawing-rooms.
The autumn wind, coming up from the river, cried about the
house with a voice of loss and separation; and Anna and
Darrow sat silent, as if they feared to break the hush that
shut them in. The solitude, the fire-light, the harmony of
soft hangings and old dim pictures, wove about them a spell
of security through which Anna felt, far down in her heart,
the muffled beat of an inextinguishable bliss. How could she
have thought that this last moment would be the moment to
speak to him, when it seemed to have gathered up into its
flight all the scattered splendours of her dream?
Content of BOOK V: CHAPTER XXXV [Edith Wharton's novel: The Reef]
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