The spectral projection of this little daily scene hung but for a moment before Anna, but in that moment she had time to fling a wondering glance across the distance between her past and present.Then the footsteps of the present came close, and she had to drop the geraniums to give her hand to Darrow...
"Yes, let us walk down to the river."
They had neither of them, as yet, found much to say to each other.Darrow had arrived late on the previous afternoon, and during the evening they had had between them Owen Leath and their own thoughts.Now they were alone for the first time and the fact was enough in itself.Yet Anna was intensely aware that as soon as they began to talk more intimately they would feel that they knew each other less well.
They passed out onto the terrace and down the steps to the gravel walk below.The delicate frosting of dew gave the grass a bluish shimmer, and the sunlight, sliding in emerald streaks along the tree-boles, gathered itself into great luminous blurs at the end of the wood-walks, and hung above the fields a watery glory like the ring about an autumn moon.
"It's good to be here," Darrow said.
They took a turn to the left and stopped for a moment to look back at the long pink house-front, plainer, friendlier, less adorned than on the side toward the court.So prolonged yet delicate had been the friction of time upon its bricks that certain expanses had the bloom and texture of old red velvet, and the patches of gold lichen spreading over them looked like the last traces of a dim embroidery.
The dome of the chapel, with its gilded cross, rose above one wing, and the other ended in a conical pigeon-house, above which the birds were flying, lustrous and slatey, their breasts merged in the blue of the roof when they dropped down on it.
"And this is where you've been all these years."They turned away and began to walk down a long tunnel of yellowing trees.Benches with mossy feet stood against the mossy edges of the path, and at its farther end it widened into a circle about a basin rimmed with stone, in which the opaque water strewn with leaves looked like a slab of gold-flecked agate.The path, growing narrower, wound on circuitously through the woods, between slender serried trunks twined with ivy.Patches of blue appeared above them through the dwindling leaves, and presently the trees drew back and showed the open fields along the river.
They walked on across the fields to the tow-path.In a curve of the wall some steps led up to a crumbling pavilion with openings choked with ivy.Anna and Darrow seated themselves on the bench projecting from the inner wall of the pavilion and looked across the river at the slopes divided into blocks of green and fawn-colour, and at the chalk-tinted village lifting its squat church-tower and grey roofs against the precisely drawn lines of the landscape.
Anna sat silent, so intensely aware of Darrow's nearness that there was no surprise in the touch he laid on her hand.
They looked at each other, and he smiled and said: "There are to be no more obstacles now.""Obstacles?" The word startled her."What obstacles?""Don't you remember the wording of the telegram that turned me back last May? 'Unforeseen obstacle': that was it.What was the earth-shaking problem, by the way? Finding a governess for Effie, wasn't it?""But I gave you my reason: the reason why it was an obstacle.I wrote you fully about it.""Yes, I know you did." He lifted her hand and kissed it.
"How far off it all seems, and how little it all matters today!"She looked at him quickly."Do you feel that? I suppose I'm different.I want to draw all those wasted months into today--to make them a part of it.""But they are, to me.You reach back and take everything--back to the first days of all."
She frowned a little, as if struggling with an inarticulate perplexity."It's curious how, in those first days, too, something that I didn't understand came between us.""Oh, in those days we neither of us understood, did we? It's part of what's called the bliss of being young.""Yes, I thought that, too: thought it, I mean, in looking back.But it couldn't, even then, have been as true of you as of me; and now----""Now," he said, "the only thing that matters is that we're sitting here together."He dismissed the rest with a lightness that might have seemed conclusive evidence of her power over him.But she took no pride in such triumphs.It seemed to her that she wanted his allegiance and his adoration not so much for herself as for their mutual love, and that in treating lightly any past phase of their relation he took something from its present beauty.The colour rose to her face.
"Between you and me everything matters."
"Of course!" She felt the unperceiving sweetness of his smile."That's why," he went on, "'everything,' for me, is here and now: on this bench, between you and me."She caught at the phrase."That's what I meant: it's here and now; we can't get away from it.""Get away from it? Do you want to? AGAIN?"Her heart was beating unsteadily.Something in her, fitfully and with reluctance, struggled to free itself, but the warmth of his nearness penetrated every sense as the sunlight steeped the landscape.Then, suddenly, she felt that she wanted no less than the whole of her happiness.
"'Again'? But wasn't it YOU, the last time----?"She paused, the tremor in her of Psyche holding up the lamp.
But in the interrogative light of her pause her companion's features underwent no change.
"The last time? Last spring? But it was you who--for the best of reasons, as you've told me--turned me back from your very door last spring!"She saw that he was good-humouredly ready to "thresh out,"for her sentimental satisfaction, a question which, for his own, Time had so conclusively dealt with; and the sense of his readiness reassured her.
