XXV.

Once more on the boat, and in the presence of others, Archer felt a

tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him.

The day, according to any current valuation, had been a rather

ridiculous failure; he had not so much as touched Madame Olenska's hand

with his lips, or extracted one word from her that gave promise of

farther opportunities. Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied

love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his

passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted.

It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to

others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet

tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears

and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed

sincerity. It filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over,

and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of

playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt

her. Even after they had clasped hands for good-bye at the Fall River

station, and he had turned away alone, the conviction remained with him

of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed.

He wandered back to the club, and went and sat alone in the deserted

library, turning and turning over in his thoughts every separate second

of their hours together. It was clear to him, and it grew more clear

under closer scrutiny, that if she should finally decide on returning

to Europe--returning to her husband--it would not be because her old

life tempted her, even on the new terms offered. No: she would go only

if she felt herself becoming a temptation to Archer, a temptation to

fall away from the standard they had both set up. Her choice would be

to stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer; and it

depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded.

In the train these thoughts were still with him. They enclosed him

in a kind of golden haze, through which the faces about him looked

remote and indistinct: he had a feeling that if he spoke to his

fellow-travellers they would not understand what he was saying. In this

state of abstraction he found himself, the following morning, waking to

the reality of a stifling September day in New York. The heat-withered

faces in the long train streamed past him, and he continued to stare

at them through the same golden blur; but suddenly, as he left the

station, one of the faces detached itself, came closer and forced

itself upon his consciousness. It was, as he instantly recalled, the

face of the young man he had seen, the day before, passing out of the

Parker House, and had noted as not conforming to type, as not having an

American hotel face.

The same thing struck him now; and again he became aware of a dim stir

of former associations. The young man stood looking about him with the

dazed air of the foreigner flung upon the harsh mercies of American

travel; then he advanced toward Archer, lifted his hat, and said in

English: "Surely, Monsieur, we met in London?"

"Ah, to be sure: in London!" Archer grasped his hand with curiosity

and sympathy. "So you _did_ get here, after all?" he exclaimed, casting

a wondering eye on the astute and haggard little countenance of young

Carfry's French tutor.

"Oh, I got here--yes," M. Rivière smiled with drawn lips. "But not for

long; I return the day after tomorrow." He stood grasping his light

valise in one neatly gloved hand, and gazing anxiously, perplexedly,

almost appealingly, into Archer's face.

"I wonder, Monsieur, since I've had the good luck to run across you, if

I might--"

"I was just going to suggest it: come to luncheon, won't you? Down

town, I mean: if you'll look me up in my office I'll take you to a very

decent restaurant in that quarter."

M. Rivière was visibly touched and surprised. "You're too kind. But I

was only going to ask if you would tell me how to reach some sort of

conveyance. There are no porters, and no one here seems to listen--"

"I know: our American stations must surprise you. When you ask for

a porter they give you chewing-gum. But if you'll come along I'll

extricate you; and you must really lunch with me, you know."

The young man, after a just perceptible hesitation, replied, with

profuse thanks, and in a tone that did not carry complete conviction,

that he was already engaged; but when they had reached the comparative

reassurance of the street he asked if he might call that afternoon.

Archer, at ease in the midsummer leisure of the office, fixed an hour

and scribbled his address, which the Frenchman pocketed with reiterated

thanks and a wide flourish of his hat. A horse-car received him, and

Archer walked away.

Punctually at the hour M. Rivière appeared, shaved, smoothed-out, but

still unmistakably drawn and serious. Archer was alone in his office,

and the young man, before accepting the seat he proffered, began

abruptly: "I believe I saw you, sir, yesterday in Boston."

The statement was insignificant enough, and Archer was about to frame

an assent when his words were checked by something mysterious yet

illuminating in his visitor's insistent gaze.

"It is extraordinary, very extraordinary," M. Rivière continued, "that

we should have met in the circumstances in which I find myself."

"What circumstances?" Archer asked, wondering a little crudely if he

needed money.

M. Rivière continued to study him with tentative eyes. "I have come,

not to look for employment, as I spoke of doing when we last met, but

on a special mission--"

"Ah--!" Archer exclaimed. In a flash the two meetings had connected

themselves in his mind. He paused to take in the situation thus

suddenly lighted up for him, and M. Rivière also remained silent, as if

aware that what he had said was enough.

"A special mission," Archer at length repeated.

The young Frenchman, opening his palms, raised them slightly, and the

two men continued to look at each other across the office-desk till

Archer roused himself to say: "Do sit down"; whereupon M. Rivière

bowed, took a distant chair, and again waited.

"It was about this mission that you wanted to consult me?" Archer

finally asked.

M. Rivière bent his head. "Not in my own behalf: on that score I--I

have fully dealt with myself. I should like--if I may--to speak to you

about the Countess Olenska."

Archer had known for the last few minutes that the words were coming;

but when they came they sent the blood rushing to his temples as if he

had been caught by a bent-back branch in a thicket.

"And on whose behalf," he said, "do you wish to do this?"

M. Rivière met the question sturdily. "Well--I might say _hers_, if

it did not sound like a liberty. Shall I say instead: on behalf of

abstract justice?"

Archer considered him ironically. "In other words: you are Count

Olenski's messenger?"

He saw his blush more darkly reflected in M. Rivière's sallow

countenance. "Not to _you_, Monsieur. If I come to you, it is on quite

other grounds."

"What right have you, in the circumstances, to _be_ on any other ground?"

Archer retorted. "If you're an emissary you're an emissary."

The young man considered. "My mission is over: as far as the Countess

Olenska goes, it has failed."

"I can't help that," Archer rejoined on the same note of irony.

"No: but you can help--" M. Rivière paused, turned his hat about in

his still carefully gloved hands, looked into its lining and then back

at Archer's face. "You can help, Monsieur, I am convinced, to make it

equally a failure with her family."

Archer pushed back his chair and stood up. "Well--and by God I will!"

he exclaimed. He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring down

wrathfully at the little Frenchman, whose face, though he too had

risen, was still an inch or two below the line of Archer's eyes.

M. Rivière paled to his normal hue: paler than that his complexion

could hardly turn.

"Why the devil," Archer explosively continued, "should you have

thought--since I suppose you're appealing to me on the ground of my

relationship to Madame Olenska--that I should take a view contrary to

the rest of her family?"

The change of expression in M. Rivière's face was for a time his only

answer. His look passed from timidity to absolute distress: for a young

man of his usually resourceful mien it would have been difficult to

appear more disarmed and defenceless. "Oh, Monsieur--"

"I can't imagine," Archer continued, "why you should have come to me

when there are others so much nearer to the Countess; still less why

you thought I should be more accessible to the arguments I suppose you

were sent over with."

M. Rivière took this onslaught with a disconcerting humility. "The

arguments I want to present to you, Monsieur, are my own and not those

I was sent over with."

"Then I see still less reason for listening to them."

M. Rivière again looked into his hat, as if considering whether these

last words were not a sufficiently broad hint to put it on and be gone.

Then he spoke with sudden decision. "Monsieur--will you tell me one

thing? Is it my right to be here that you question? Or do you perhaps

believe the whole matter to be already closed?"

His quiet insistence made Archer feel the clumsiness of his own

bluster. M. Rivière had succeeded in imposing himself: Archer,

reddening slightly, dropped into his chair again, and signed to the

young man to be seated.

"I beg your pardon: but why isn't the matter closed?"

M. Rivière gazed back at him with anguish. "You do, then, agree with

the rest of the family that, in face of the new proposals I have

brought, it is hardly possible for Madame Olenska not to return to her

husband?"

"Good God!" Archer exclaimed; and his visitor gave out a low murmur of

confirmation.

"Before seeing her, I saw--at Count Olenski's request--Mr. Lovell

Mingott, with whom I had several talks before going to Boston. I

understand that he represents his mother's view; and that Mrs. Manson

Mingott's influence is great throughout her family."

Archer sat silent, with the sense of clinging to the edge of a sliding

precipice. The discovery that he had been excluded from a share in

these negotiations, and even from the knowledge that they were on foot,

caused him a surprise hardly dulled by the acuter wonder of what he was

learning. He saw in a flash that if the family had ceased to consult

him it was because some deep tribal instinct warned them that he was no

longer on their side; and he recalled, with a start of comprehension,

a remark of May's during their drive home from Mrs. Manson Mingott's

on the day of the Archery Meeting: "Perhaps, after all, Ellen would be

happier with her husband."

Even in the tumult of new discoveries Archer remembered his indignant

exclamation, and the fact that since then his wife had never named

Madame Olenska to him. Her careless allusion had no doubt been the

straw held up to see which way the wind blew; the result had been

reported to the family, and thereafter Archer had been tacitly omitted

from their counsels. He admired the tribal discipline which made

May bow to this decision. She would not have done so, he knew, had

her conscience protested; but she probably shared the family view

that Madame Olenska would be better off as an unhappy wife than as a

separated one, and that there was no use in discussing the case with

Newland, who had an awkward way of suddenly not seeming to take the

most fundamental things for granted.

Archer looked up and met his visitor's anxious gaze. "Don't you know,

Monsieur--is it possible you don't know--that the family begin to doubt

if they have the right to advise the Countess to refuse her husband's

last proposals?"

"The proposals you brought?"

"The proposals I brought."

It was on Archer's lips to exclaim that whatever he knew or did not

know was no concern of M. Rivière's; but something in the humble and

yet courageous tenacity of M. Rivière's gaze made him reject this

conclusion, and he met the young man's question with another. "What is

your object in speaking to me of this?"

He had not to wait a moment for the answer. "To beg you, Monsieur--to

beg you with all the force I'm capable of--not to let her go back.--Oh,

don't let her!" M. Rivière exclaimed.

Archer looked at him with increasing astonishment. There was no

mistaking the sincerity of his distress or the strength of his

determination: he had evidently resolved to let everything go by the

board but the supreme need of thus putting himself on record. Archer

considered.

"May I ask," he said at length, "if this is the line you took with the

Countess Olenska?"

M. Rivière reddened, but his eyes did not falter. "No, Monsieur: I

accepted my mission in good faith. I really believed--for reasons I

need not trouble you with--that it would be better for Madame Olenska

to recover her situation, her fortune, the social consideration that

her husband's standing gives her."

"So I supposed: you could hardly have accepted such a mission

otherwise."

"I should not have accepted it."

"Well, then--?" Archer paused again, and their eyes met in another

protracted scrutiny.

"Ah, Monsieur, after I had seen her, after I had listened to her, I

knew she was better off here."

"You knew--?"

"Monsieur, I discharged my mission faithfully: I put the Count's

arguments, I stated his offers, without adding any comment of my own.

The Countess was good enough to listen patiently; she carried her

goodness so far as to see me twice; she considered impartially all I

had come to say. And it was in the course of these two talks that I

changed my mind, that I came to see things differently."

"May I ask what led to this change?"

"Simply seeing the change in _her_," M. Rivière replied.

"The change in her? Then you knew her before?"

The young man's colour again rose. "I used to see her in her husband's

house. I have known Count Olenski for many years. You can imagine that

he would not have sent a stranger on such a mission."

Archer's gaze, wandering away to the blank walls of the office,

rested on a hanging calendar surmounted by the rugged features of the

President of the United States. That such a conversation should be

going on anywhere within the millions of square miles subject to his

rule seemed as strange as anything that the imagination could invent.

"The change--what sort of a change?"

"Ah, Monsieur, if I could tell you!" M. Rivière paused. "_Tenez_--the

discovery, I suppose, of what I'd never thought of before: that she's

an American. And that if you're an American of _her_ kind--of your

kind--things that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least

put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take--become

unthinkable, simply unthinkable. If Madame Olenska's relations

understood what these things were, their opposition to her returning

would no doubt be as unconditional as her own; but they seem to regard

her husband's wish to have her back as proof of an irresistible longing

for domestic life." M. Rivière paused, and then added: "Whereas it's

far from being as simple as that."

Archer looked back to the President of the United States, and then

down at his desk and at the papers scattered on it. For a second or

two he could not trust himself to speak. During this interval he heard

M. Rivière's chair pushed back, and was aware that the young man had

risen. When he glanced up again he saw that his visitor was as moved as

himself.

"Thank you," Archer said simply.

"There's nothing to thank me for, Monsieur: it is I, rather--" M.

Rivière broke off, as if speech for him too were difficult. "I should

like, though," he continued in a firmer voice, "to add one thing. You

asked me if I was in Count Olenski's employ. I am at this moment: I

returned to him, a few months ago, for reasons of private necessity

such as may happen to any one who has persons, ill and older persons,

dependent on him. But from the moment that I have taken the step of

coming here to say these things to you I consider myself discharged,

and I shall tell him so on my return, and give him the reasons. That's

all, Monsieur."