The Reef by Edith Wharton

Author:Edith Wharton [Wharton, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: epubBooks (www.epubbooks.com)
Published: 1912-09-06T05:00:00+00:00

XIX

He left her at the door of Madame de Chantelle’s sitting–room, and plunged out alone into the rain.

The wind flung about the stripped tree–tops of the avenue and dashed the stinging streams into his face. He walked to the gate and then turned into the high–road and strode along in the open, buffeted by slanting gusts. The evenly ridged fields were a blurred waste of mud, and the russet coverts which he and Owen had shot through the day before shivered desolately against a driving sky.

Darrow walked on and on, indifferent to the direction he was taking. His thoughts were tossing like the tree–tops. Anna’s announcement had not come to him as a complete surprise: that morning, as he strolled back to the house with Owen Leath and Miss Viner, he had had a momentary intuition of the truth. But it had been no more than an intuition, the merest faint cloud–puff of surmise; and now it was an attested fact, darkening over the whole sky.

In respect of his own attitude, he saw at once that the discovery made no appreciable change. If he had been bound to silence before, he was no less bound to it now; the only difference lay in the fact that what he had just learned had rendered his bondage more intolerable. Hitherto he had felt for Sophy Viner’s defenseless state a sympathy profoundly tinged with compunction. But now he was half–conscious of an obscure indignation against her. Superior as he had fancied himself to ready–made judgments, he was aware of cherishing the common doubt as to the disinterestedness of the woman who tries to rise above her past. No wonder she had been sick with fear on meeting him! It was in his power to do her more harm than he had dreamed…

Assuredly he did not want to harm her; but he did desperately want to prevent her marrying Owen Leath. He tried to get away from the feeling, to isolate and exteriorize it sufficiently to see what motives it was made of; but it remained a mere blind motion of his blood, the instinctive recoil from the thing that no amount of arguing can make "straight." His tramp, prolonged as it was, carried him no nearer to enlightenment; and after trudging through two or three sallow mud–stained villages he turned about and wearily made his way back to Givre. As he walked up the black avenue, making for the lights that twinkled through its pitching branches, he had a sudden realisation of his utter helplessness. He might think and combine as he would; but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do…

He dropped his wet coat in the vestibule and began to mount the stairs to his room. But on the landing he was overtaken by a sober–faced maid who, in tones discreetly lowered, begged him to be so kind as to step, for a moment, into the Marquise’s sitting–room. Somewhat disconcerted by the summons, he followed its bearer to the door at which, a couple of hours earlier, he had taken leave of Mrs.

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