The Reef

by Edith Wharton

  XXXV

  The next morning the dread was still there, and she understood that shemust snatch herself out of the torpor of the will into which she hadbeen 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 herpast. There it lay before her, her sole romance, in all its paltrypoverty, the cheapest of cheap adventures, the most pitiful ofsentimental blunders. She looked about her room, the room where, for somany years, if her heart had been quiescent her thoughts had beenalive, and pictured herself henceforth cowering before a throng of meansuspicions, of unavowed compromises and concessions. In that moment ofself-searching she saw that Sophy Viner had chosen the better part, andthat certain renunciations might enrich where possession would have lefta desert.

  Passionate reactions of instinct fought against these efforts of herwill. Why should past or future coerce her, when the present was sosecurely hers? Why insanely surrender what the other would after allnever have? Her sense of irony whispered that if she sent away Darrowit would not be to Sophy Viner, but to the first woman who crossed hispath--as, in a similar hour, Sophy Viner herself had crossed it...Butthe mere fact that she could think such things of him sent hershuddering back to the opposite pole. She pictured herself graduallysubdued to such a conception of life and love, she picturedEffie growing up under the influence of the woman she saw herselfbecoming--and she hid her eyes from the humiliation of the picture...

  They were at luncheon when the summons that Darrow expected was broughtto him. He handed the telegram to Anna, and she learned that hisAmbassador, on the way to a German cure, was to be in Paris the nextevening and wished to confer with him there before he went back toLondon. The idea that the decisive moment was at hand was so agitatingto her that when luncheon was over she slipped away to the terrace andthence went down alone to the garden. The day was grey but mild, withthe heaviness of decay in the air. She rambled on aimlessly, followingunder the denuded boughs the path she and Darrow had taken on theirfirst 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 whenit seemed to double her loneliness to be so certain of his reading herheart while she was so desperately ignorant of his...

  She wandered on for more than an hour, and when she returned to thehouse she saw, as she entered the hall, that Darrow was seated at thedesk in Owen's study. He heard her step, and looking up turned in hischair without rising. Their eyes met, and she saw that his were clearand smiling. He had a heap of papers at his elbow and was evidentlyengaged in some official correspondence. She wondered that he couldaddress himself so composedly to his task, and then ironically reflectedthat such detachment was a sign of his superiority. She crossed thethreshold and went toward him; but as she advanced she had a suddenvision of Owen, standing outside in the cold autumn dusk and watchingDarrow and Sophy Viner as they faced each other across the lamplitdesk...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. "Whenhe 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 voicewas grave, with a slight tinge of sadness. She said to herself: "Heknows what I am feeling..." and now the thought made her feel lessalone. The expression of his face was stern and yet tender: for thefirst time she understood what he had suffered.

  She had no doubt as to the necessity of giving him up, but it wasimpossible to tell him so then. She stood up and said: "I'll leave youto your letters." He made no protest, but merely answered: "You'll comedown presently for a walk?" and it occurred to her at once that shewould walk down to the river with him, and give herself for the lasttime 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 tellhim; but her secret decision to do so before he left gave her a kindof factitious calm and laid a melancholy ecstasy upon the hour. Stillskirting the subject that fanned their very faces with its flame, theyclung persistently to other topics, and it seemed to Anna that theirminds had never been nearer together than in this hour when their heartswere so separate. In the glow of interchanged love she had grown lessconscious of that other glow of interchanged thought which had onceillumined her mind. She had forgotten how Darrow had widened her worldand lengthened out all her perspectives, and with a pang of doubledestitution she saw herself alone among her shrunken thoughts.

  For the first time, then, she had a clear vision of what her life wouldbe without him. She imagined herself trying to take up the daily round,and all that had lightened and animated it seemed equally lifeless andvain. She tried to think of herself as wholly absorbed in her daughter'sdevelopment, like other mothers she had seen; but she supposed thosemothers must have had stored memories of happiness to nourish them. Shehad 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 havemy last evening with him, and then, before we say good night, I'll tellhim."

  This postponement did not seem unjustified. Darrow had shown her howhe dreaded vain words, how resolved he was to avoid all fruitlessdiscussion. He must have been intensely aware of what had been going onin her mind since his return, yet when she had attempted to reveal itto him he had turned from the revelation. She was therefore merelyfollowing the line he had traced in behaving, till the final momentcame, as though there were nothing more to say...

  That moment seemed at last to be at hand when, at her usual hour afterdinner, Madame de Chantelle rose to go upstairs. She lingered a littleto bid good-bye to Darrow, whom she was not likely to see in themorning; and her affable allusions to his prompt return sounded inAnna's ear like the note of destiny.

  A cold rain had fallen all day, and for greater warmth and intimacy theyhad gone after dinner to the oak-room, shutting out the chilly vista ofthe farther drawing-rooms. The autumn wind, coming up from the river,cried about the house with a voice of loss and separation; and Anna andDarrow sat silent, as if they feared to break the hush that shut themin. The solitude, the fire-light, the harmony of soft hangings and olddim pictures, wove about them a spell of security through which Annafelt, far down in her heart, the muffled beat of an inextinguishablebliss. How could she have thought that this last moment would be themoment to speak to him, when it seemed to have gathered up into itsflight all the scattered splendours of her dream?