He was silent, and they walked on a few yards without exchanging a
word. Finally she said: "I will tell you--but where, where, where? One
can't be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with all
the doors wide open, and always a servant bringing tea, or a log for
the fire, or the newspaper! Is there nowhere in an American house where
one may be by one's self? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I
always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage, before
a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds."
"Ah, you don't like us!" Archer exclaimed.
They were walking past the house of the old Patroon, with its squat
walls and small square windows compactly grouped about a central
chimney. The shutters stood wide, and through one of the newly-washed
windows Archer caught the light of a fire.
"Why--the house is open!" he said.
She stood still. "No; only for today, at least. I wanted to see it, and
Mr. van der Luyden had the fire lit and the windows opened, so that we
might stop there on the way back from church this morning." She ran up
the steps and tried the door. "It's still unlocked--what luck! Come in
and we can have a quiet talk. Mrs. van der Luyden has driven over to
see her old aunts at Rhinebeck and we shan't be missed at the house for
another hour."
He followed her into the narrow passage. His spirits, which had dropped
at her last words, rose with an irrational leap. The homely little
house stood there, its panels and brasses shining in the firelight, as
if magically created to receive them. A big bed of embers still gleamed
in the kitchen chimney, under an iron pot hung from an ancient crane.
Rush-bottomed arm-chairs faced each other across the tiled hearth, and
rows of Delft plates stood on shelves against the walls. Archer stooped
over and threw a log upon the embers.
Madame Olenska, dropping her cloak, sat down in one of the chairs.
Archer leaned against the chimney and looked at her.
"You're laughing now; but when you wrote me you were unhappy," he said.
"Yes." She paused. "But I can't feel unhappy when you're here."
"I sha'n't be here long," he rejoined, his lips stiffening with the
effort to say just so much and no more.
"No; I know. But I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy."
The words stole through him like a temptation, and to close his senses
to it he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black
tree-boles against the snow. But it was as if she too had shifted her
place, and he still saw her, between himself and the trees, drooping
over the fire with her indolent smile. Archer's heart was beating
insubordinately. What if it were from him that she had been running
away, and if she had waited to tell him so till they were here alone
together in this secret room?
"Ellen, if I'm really a help to you--if you really wanted me to
come--tell me what's wrong, tell me what it is you're running away
from," he insisted.
He spoke without shifting his position, without even turning to look at
her: if the thing was to happen, it was to happen in this way, with the
whole width of the room between them, and his eyes still fixed on the
outer snow.
For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment Archer imagined
her, almost heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light
arms about his neck. While he waited, soul and body throbbing with
the miracle to come, his eyes mechanically received the image of a
heavily-coated man with his fur collar turned up who was advancing
along the path to the house. The man was Julius Beaufort.
"Ah--!" Archer cried, bursting into a laugh.
Madame Olenska had sprung up and moved to his side, slipping her hand
into his; but after a glance through the window her face paled and she
shrank back.
"So that was it?" Archer said derisively.
"I didn't know he was here," Madame Olenska murmured. Her hand still
clung to Archer's; but he drew away from her, and walking out into the
passage threw open the door of the house.
"Hallo, Beaufort--this way! Madame Olenska was expecting you," he said.
During his journey back to New York the next morning, Archer relived
with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at Skuytercliff.
Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska,
had, as usual, carried off the situation high-handedly. His way of
ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave
them, if they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of
nonexistence. Archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was
aware of this odd sense of disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his
vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved.
Beaufort had entered the little house with his usual easy assurance;
but he could not smile away the vertical line between his eyes. It was
fairly clear that Madame Olenska had not known that he was coming,
though her words to Archer had hinted at the possibility; at any rate,
she had evidently not told him where she was going when she left New
York, and her unexplained departure had exasperated him. The ostensible
reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very night before, of
a "perfect little house," not in the market, which was really just the
thing for her, but would be snapped up instantly if she didn't take it;
and he was loud in mock-reproaches for the dance she had led him in
running away just as he had found it.
"If only this new dodge for talking along a wire had been a little
bit nearer perfection I might have told you all this from town, and
been toasting my toes before the club fire at this minute, instead of
tramping after you through the snow," he grumbled, disguising a real
irritation under the pretence of it; and at this opening Madame Olenska
twisted the talk away to the fantastic possibility that they might
one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or
even--incredible dream!--from one town to another. This struck from
all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such platitudes
as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are
talking against time, and dealing with a new invention in which it
would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of the
telephone carried them safely back to the big house.
Mrs. van der Luyden had not yet returned; and Archer took his leave and
walked off to fetch the cutter, while Beaufort followed the Countess
Olenska indoors. It was probable that, little as the van der Luydens
encouraged unannounced visits, he could count on being asked to dine,
and sent back to the station to catch the nine o'clock train; but more
than that he would certainly not get, for it would be inconceivable to
his hosts that a gentleman travelling without luggage should wish to
spend the night, and distasteful to them to propose it to a person with
whom they were on terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.
Beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it; and his taking the
long journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience.
He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had
only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women. His dull and
childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more
permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in
his own set. This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly
flying: the question was whether she had fled because his importunities
displeased her, or because she did not wholly trust herself to resist
them; unless, indeed, all her talk of flight had been a blind, and her
departure no more than a manœuvre.
Archer did not really believe this. Little as he had actually seen of
Madame Olenska, he was beginning to think that he could read her face,
and if not her face, her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance, and
even dismay, at Beaufort's sudden appearance. But, after all, if this
were the case, was it not worse than if she had left New York for the
express purpose of meeting him? If she had done that, she ceased to
be an object of interest, she threw in her lot with the vulgarest of
dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with Beaufort "classed"
herself irretrievably.
No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging Beaufort, and probably
despising him, she was yet drawn to him by all that gave him an
advantage over the other men about her: his habit of two continents
and two societies, his familiar association with artists and actors
and people generally in the world's eye, and his careless contempt
for local prejudices. Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was
purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native
shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and
socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the
Central Park. How should any one coming from a wider world not feel the
difference and be attracted by it?
Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to Archer that he
and she did not talk the same language; and the young man knew that
in some respects this was true. But Beaufort understood every turn of
her dialect, and spoke it fluently: his view of life, his tone, his
attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in Count
Olenski's letter. This might seem to be to his disadvantage with Count
Olenski's wife; but Archer was too intelligent to think that a young
woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that
reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt
against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her, even
though it were against her will.
Thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man make out the case
for Beaufort, and for Beaufort's victim. A longing to enlighten her was
strong in him; and there were moments when he imagined that all she
asked was to be enlightened.
That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of
things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of Herbert
Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant
tales, and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to which there had lately
been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three
dinner invitations in favour of this feast; but though he turned the
pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what
he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand.
Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had
ordered because the name had attracted him: "The House of Life." He
took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he
had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably
tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary
of human passions. All through the night he pursued through those
enchanted pages the vision of a woman who had the face of Ellen
Olenska; but when he woke the next morning, and looked out at the
brownstone houses across the street, and thought of his desk in Mr.
Letterblair's office, and the family pew in Grace Church, his hour in
the park of Skuytercliff became as far outside the pale of probability
as the visions of the night.
"Mercy, how pale you look, Newland!" Janey commented over the
coffee-cups at breakfast; and his mother added: "Newland, dear, I've
noticed lately that you've been coughing; I do hope you're not letting
yourself be overworked?" For it was the conviction of both ladies that,
under the iron despotism of his senior partners, the young man's life
was spent in the most exhausting professional labours--and he had never
thought it necessary to undeceive them.
The next two or three days dragged by heavily. The taste of the usual
was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as
if he were being buried alive under his future. He heard nothing of
the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and though he
met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the
whist-tables. It was not till the fourth evening that he found a note
awaiting him on his return home. "Come late tomorrow: I must explain to
you. Ellen." These were the only words it contained.
The young man, who was dining out, thrust the note into his pocket,
smiling a little at the Frenchness of the "to you." After dinner he
went to a play; and it was not until his return home, after midnight,
that he drew Madame Olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a
number of times. There were several ways of answering it, and he gave
considerable thought to each one during the watches of an agitated
night. That on which, when morning came, he finally decided was to
pitch some clothes into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was
leaving that very afternoon for St. Augustine.