Two brown blurs emerging from the farther end of the wood-vista gradually defined themselves as her step-son and anattendant game-keeper. They grew slowly upon the bluishbackground, with occasional delays and re-effacements, andshe sat still, waiting till they should reach the gate atthe end of the drive, where the keeper would turn off to hiscottage and Owen continue on to the house.
She watched his approach with a smile. From the first daysof her marriage she had been drawn to the boy, but it wasnot until after Effie's birth that she had really begun toknow him. The eager observation of her own child had shownher how much she had still to learn about the slight fairboy whom the holidays periodically restored to Givre. Owen,even then, both physically and morally, furnished her withthe oddest of commentaries on his father's mien and mind.
He would never, the family sighingly recognized, be nearlyas handsome as Mr. Leath; but his rather charminglyunbalanced face, with its brooding forehead and petulantboyish smile, suggested to Anna what his father'scountenance might have been could one have pictured its neatfeatures disordered by a rattling breeze. She even pushedthe analogy farther, and descried in her step-son's mind aquaintly-twisted reflection of her husband's. With hisbursts of door-slamming activity, his fits of bookishindolence, his crude revolutionary dogmatizing and hisflashes of precocious irony, the boy was not unlike aboisterous embodiment of his father's theories. It was asthough Fraser Leath's ideas, accustomed to hang likemarionettes on their pegs, should suddenly come down andwalk. There were moments, indeed, when Owen's humours musthave suggested to his progenitor the gambols of an infantFrankenstein; but to Anna they were the voice of her secretrebellions, and her tenderness to her step-son was partlybased on her severity toward herself. As he had the courageshe had lacked, so she meant him to have the chances she hadmissed; and every effort she made for him helped to keep herown hopes alive.
Her interest in Owen led her to think more often of hismother, and sometimes she would slip away and stand alonebefore her predecessor's portrait. Since her arrival atGivre the picture--a "full-length" by a once fashionableartist--had undergone the successive displacements of anexiled consort removed farther and farther from the throne;and Anna could not help noting that these stages coincidedwith the gradual decline of the artist's fame. She had afancy that if his credit had been in the ascendant the firstMrs. Leath might have continued to throne over the drawing-room mantel- piece, even to the exclusion of her successor'seffigy. Instead of this, her peregrinations had finallylanded her in the shrouded solitude of the billiard-room, anapartment which no one ever entered, but where it wasunderstood that "the light was better," or might have beenif the shutters had not been always closed.
Here the poor lady, elegantly dressed, and seated in themiddle of a large lonely canvas, in the blank contemplationof a gilt console, had always seemed to Anna to be waitingfor visitors who never came.
"Of course they never came, you poor thing! I wonder howlong it took you to find out that they never would?" Annahad more than once apostrophized her, with a derisionaddressed rather to herself than to the dead; but it wasonly after Effie's birth that it occurred to her to studymore closely the face in the picture, and speculate on thekind of visitors that Owen's mother might have hoped for.
"She certainly doesn't look as if they would have been thesame kind as mine: but there's no telling, from a portraitthat was so obviously done 'to please the family', and thatleaves Owen so unaccounted for. Well, they never came, thevisitors; they never came; and she died of it. She died ofit long before they buried her: I'm certain of that. Thoseare stone-dead eyes in the picture...The loneliness musthave been awful, if even Owen couldn't keep her from dyingof it. And to feel it so she must have HAD feelings--real live ones, the kind that twitch and tug. And all shehad to look at all her life was a gilt console--yes, that'sit, a gilt console screwed to the wall! That's exactly andabsolutely what he is!"She did not mean, if she could help it, that either Effie orOwen should know that loneliness, or let her know it again.
They were three, now, to keep each other warm, and sheembraced both children in the same passion of motherhood, asthough one were not enough to shield her from herpredecessor's fate.
Sometimes she fancied that Owen Leath's response was warmerthan that of her own child. But then Effie was still hardlymore than a baby, and Owen, from the first, had been almost"old enough to understand": certainly DID understandnow, in a tacit way that yet perpetually spoke to her. Thissense of his understanding was the deepest element in theirfeeling for each other. There were so many things betweenthem that were never spoken of, or even indirectly alludedto, yet that, even in their occasional discussions anddifferences, formed the unadduced arguments making for finalagreement...
Musing on this, she continued to watch his approach; and herheart began to beat a little faster at the thought of whatshe had to say to him. But when he reached the gate she sawhim pause, and after a moment he turned aside as if to gaina cross-road through the park.
She started up and waved her sunshade, but he did not seeher. No doubt he meant to go back with the gamekeeper,perhaps to the kennels, to see a retriever who had hurt hisleg. Suddenly she was seized by the whim to overtake him.
She threw down the parasol, thrust her letter into herbodice, and catching up her skirts began to run.
She was slight and light, with a natural ease and quicknessof gait, but she could not recall having run a yard sinceshe had romped with Owen in his school-days; nor did sheknow what impulse moved her now. She only knew that run shemust, that no other motion, short of flight, would have beenbuoyant enough for her humour. She seemed to be keepingpace with some inward rhythm, seeking to give bodilyexpression to the lyric rush of her thoughts. The earthalways felt elastic under her, and she had a conscious joyin treading it; but never had it been as soft and springy astoday. It seemed actually to rise and meet her as she went,so that she had the feeling, which sometimes came to her indreams, of skimming miraculously over short bright waves.
The air, too, seemed to break in waves against her, sweepingby on its current all the slanted lights and moist sharpperfumes of the failing day. She panted to herself: "Thisis nonsense!" her blood hummed back: "But it's glorious!"and she sped on till she saw that Owen had caught sight ofher and was striding back in her direction.
Then she stopped and waited, flushed and laughing, her handsclasped against the letter in her breast.
"No, I'm not mad," she called out; "but there's something inthe air today--don't you feel it?--And I wanted to have alittle talk with you," she added as he came up to her,smiling at him and linking her arm in his.
He smiled back, but above the smile she saw the shade ofanxiety which, for the last two months, had kept its fixedline between his handsome eyes.
"Owen, don't look like that! I don't want you to!" she saidimperiously.
He laughed. "You said that exactly like Effie. What do youwant me to do? To race with you as I do Effie? But Ishouldn't have a show!" he protested, still with the littlefrown between his eyes.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"To the kennels. But there's not the least need. The ............