For a long time he stood there, content to take in the scene,and gradually falling under its drowsy spell;but at length he roused himself to the sense of the passing time.Should he look his fill and then drive away?He stood irresolute, wishing suddenly to see the inside of the house,so that he might picture the room that Madame Olenska sat in.There was nothing to prevent his walking up to the door and ringing the bell; if, as he supposed,she was away with the rest of the party, he could easily give his name,and ask permission to go into the sitting-room to write a message.
But instead, he crossed the lawn and turned toward the box-garden.As he entered it he caught sight of something bright-coloured in the summer-house,and presently made it out to be a pink parasol. The parasol drew him like a magnet:he was sure it was hers. He went into the summer-house,and sitting down on the rickety seat picked up the silken thing and looked at its carved handle,which was made of some rare wood that gave out an aromatic scent. Archer lifted the handle to his lips.
He heard a rustle of skirts against the box, and sat motionless,leaning on the parasol handle with clasped hands,and letting the rustle come nearer without lifting his eyes.He had always known that this must happen ...
"Oh, Mr. Archer!" exclaimed a loud young voice; and looking up he saw before him the youngest and largest of the Blenker girls,blonde and blowsy, in bedraggled muslin.A red blotch on one of her cheeks seemed to show that it had recently been pressed against a pillow,and her half-awakened eyes stared at him hospitably but confusedly.
"Gracious--where did you drop from?I must have been sound asleep in the hammock. Everybody else has gone to Newport. Did you ring?" she incoherently enquired.
Archer's confusion was greater than hers. "I--no--that is, I was just going to.I had to come up the island to see about a horse, and I drove over on a chance of finding Mrs.Blenker and your visitors. But the house seemed empty--so I sat down to wait."
Miss Blenker, shaking off the fumes of sleep, looked at him with increasing interest."The house _is_ empty. Mother's not here, or the Marchioness--or anybody but me." Her glance became faintly reproachful."Didn't you know that Professor and Mrs.Sillerton are giving a garden-party for mother and all of us this afternoon?It was too unlucky that I couldn't go; but I've had a sore throat,and mother was afraid of the drive home this evening. Did you ever know anything so disappointing?Of course," she added gaily, "I shouldn't have minded half as much if I'd known you were coming."
Symptoms of a lumbering coquetry became visible in her, and Archer found the strength to break in:"But Madame Olenska--has she gone to Newport too?"
Miss Blenker looked at him with surprise. "Madame Olenska--didn't you know she'd been called away?"
"Called away?--"
"Oh, my best parasol!I lent it to that goose of a Katie, because it matched her ribbons,and the careless thing must have dropped it here. We Blenkers are all like that ... real Bohemians!" Recovering the sunshade with a powerful hand she unfurled it and suspended its rosy dome above her head."Yes, Ellen was called away yesterday: she lets us call her Ellen, you know.A telegram came from Boston: she said she might be gone for two days.I do _love_ the way she does her hair, don't you?" Miss Blenker rambled on.
Archer continued to stare through her as though she had been transparent.All he saw was the trumpery parasol that arched its pinkness above her giggling head.
After a moment he ventured: "You don't happen to know why Madame Olenska went to Boston?I hope it was not on account of bad news?"
Miss Blenker took this with a cheerful incredulity. "Oh, I don't believe so.She didn't tell us what was in the telegram. I think she didn't want the Marchioness to know. She's so romantic-looking, isn't she?Doesn't she remind you of Mrs. Scott-Siddons when she reads 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship'?Did you never hear her?"
Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts.His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him;and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.He glanced about him at the unpruned garden, the tumble-down house,and the oak-grove under which the dusk was gathering.It had seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to have found Madame Olenska;and she was far away, and even the pink sunshade was not hers...
He frowned and hesitated. "You don't know, I suppose--I shall be in Boston tomorrow. If I could manage to see her--"
He felt that Miss Blenker was losing interest in him, though her smile persisted. "Oh, of course; how lovely of you!She's staying at the Parker House; it must be horrible there in this weather."
After that Archer was but intermittently aware of the remarks they exchanged.He could only remember stoutly resisting her entreaty that he should await the returning family and have high tea with them before he drove home.At length, with his hostess still at his side, he passed out of range of the wooden Cupid,unfastened his horses and drove off. At the turn of the lane he saw Miss Blenker standing at the gate and waving the pink parasol.
XXIII.
The next morning, when Archer got out of the Fall River train,he emerged upon a steaming midsummer Boston.The streets near the station were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage to the bathroom.
Archer found a cab and drove to the Somerset Club for breakfast.Even the fashionable quarters had the air of untidy domesticity to which no excess of heat ever degrades the European cities.Care-takers in calico lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy,and the Common looked like a pleasure-ground on the morrow of a Masonic picnic.If Archer had tried to imagine Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes he could not have called up any into which it was more difficult to fit her than this heat-prostrated and deserted Boston.
He breakfasted with appetite and method, beginning with a slice of melon,and studying a morning paper while he waited for his toast and scrambled eggs.A new sense of energy and activity had possessed him ever since he had announced to May the night before that he had business in Boston,and should take the Fall River boat that night and go on to New York the following evening.It had always been understood that he would return to town early in the week,and when he got back from his expedition to Portsmouth a letter from the office,which fate had conspicuously placed on a corner of the hall table,sufficed to justify his sudden change of plan.He was even ashamed of the ease with which the whole thing had been done: it reminded him,for an uncomfortable moment, of Lawrence Lefferts's masterly contrivances for securing his freedom.But this did not long trouble him, for he was not in an analytic mood.
After breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced over the Commercial Advertiser.While he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came in, and the usual greetings were exchanged:it was the same world after all, though he had such a queer sense of having slipped through the meshes of time and space.
He looked at his watch, and finding that it was half-past nine got up and went into the writing-room.There he wrote a few lines, and ordered a messenger to take a cab to the Parker House and wait for the answer.He then sat down behind another newspaper and tried to calculate how long it would take a cab to get to the Parker House.
"The lady was out, sir," he suddenly heard a waiter's voice at his elbow; and he stammered: "Out?--" as if it were a word in a strange language.
He got up and went into the hall. It must be a mistake: she could not be out at that hour.He flushed with anger at his own stupidity: why had he not sent the note as soon as he arrived?
He found his hat and stick and went forth into the street.The city had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty as if he were a traveller from distant lands.For a moment he stood on the door-step hesitating; then he decided to go to the Parker House.What if the messenger had been misinformed, and she were still there?
He started to walk across the Common; and on the first bench, under a tree, he saw her sitting.She had a grey silk sunshade over her head--how could he ever have imagined her with a pink one?As he approached he was struck by her listless attitude:she sat there as if she had nothing else to do. He saw her drooping profile,and the knot of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat,and the long wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade. He came a step or two nearer, and she turned and looked at him.
"Oh"--she said; and for the first time he noticed a startled look on her face;but in another moment it gave way to a slow smile of wonder and contentment.
"Oh"--she murmured again, on a different note, as he stood looking down at her;and without rising she made a place for him on the bench.
"I'm here on business--just got here," Archer explained; and, without knowing why,he suddenly began to feign astonishment at seeing her."But what on earth are you doing in this wilderness?" He had really no idea what he was saying:he felt as if he were shouting at her across endless distances,and she might vanish again before he could overtake her.
"I?Oh, I'm here on business too," she answered,turning her head toward him so that they were face to face. The words hardly reached him:he was aware only of her voice, and of the startling fact that not an echo of it had remained in his memory.He had not even remembered that it was low-pitched, with a faint roughness on the consonants.
"You do your hair differently," he said,his heart beating as if he had uttered something irrevocable.
"Differently?No--it's only that I do it as best I can when I'm without Nastasia."
"Nastasia; but isn't she with you?"
"No; I'm alone. For two days it was not worth while to bring her."
"You're alone--at the Parker House?"
She looked at him with a flash of her old malice. "Does it strike you as dangerous?"
"No; not dangerous--"
"But unconventional?I see; I suppose it is." She considered a moment."I hadn't thought of it,because I've just done something so much more unconventional." The faint tinge of irony lingered in her eyes."I've just refused to take back a sum of money--that belonged to me."
Archer sprang up and moved a step or two away.She had furled her parasol and sat absently drawing patterns on the gravel.Presently he came back and stood before her.
"Some one--has come here to meet you?"
"Yes."
"With this offer?"
She nodded.
"And you refused--because of the conditions?"
"I refused," she said after a moment.
He sat down by her again. "What were the conditions?"
"Oh, they were not onerous: just to sit at the head of his table now and then."
There was another interval of silence. Archer's heart had slammed itself shut in the queer way it had, and he sat vainly groping for a word.
"He wants you back--at any price?"
"Well--a considerable price. At least the sum is considerable for me."
He paused again, beating about the question he felt he must put.
"It was to meet him here that you came?"
She stared, and then burst into a laugh. "Meet him--my husband?_Here_?At this season he's always at Cowes or Baden."
"He sent some one?"
"Yes."
"With a letter?"
She shook her head. "No; just a message. He never writes.I don't think I've had more than one letter from him." The allusion brought the colour to her cheek, and it reflected itself in Archer's vivid blush.
"Why does he never write?"
"Why should he?What does one have secretaries for?"
The young man's blush deepened. She had pronounced the word as if it had no more significance than any other in her vocabulary.For a moment it was on the tip of his tongue to ask: "Did he send his secretary, then?" But the remembrance of Count Olenski's only letter to his wife was too present to him.He paused again, and then took another plunge.
"And the person?"--
"The emissary?The emissary," Madame Olenska rejoined, still smiling,"might, for all I care, have left already;but he has insisted on waiting till this evening ... in case ... on the chance ..."
"And you came out here to think the chance over?"
"I came out to get a breath of air. The hotel's too stifling.I'm taking the afternoon train back to Portsmouth."
They sat silent, not looking at each other, but straight ahead at the people passing along the path.Finally she turned her eyes again to his face and said: "You're not changed."
He felt like answering: "I was, till I saw you again;" but instead he stood up abruptly and glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park.
"This is horrible. Why shouldn't we go out a little on the bay?There's a breeze, and it will be cooler. We might take the steamboat down to Point Arley." She glanced up at him hesitatingly and he went on:"On a Monday morning there won't be anybody on the boat. My train doesn't leave till evening:I'm going back to New York. Why shouldn't we?" he insisted, looking down at her; and suddenly he broke out: "Haven't we done all we could?"
"Oh"--she murmured again. She stood up and reopened her sunshade,glancing about her as if to take counsel of the scene,and assure herself of the impossibility of remaining in it. Then her eyes returned to his face."You mustn't say things like that to me," she said.
"I'll say anything you like; or nothing. I won't open my mouth unless you tell me to. What harm can it do to anybody?All I want is to listen to you," he stammered.
She drew out a little gold-faced watch on an enamelled chain. "Oh, don't calculate," he broke out; "give me the day!I want to get you away from that man. At what time was he coming?"
Her colour rose again. "At eleven."
"Then you must come at once."
"You needn't be afraid--if I don't come."
"Nor you either--if you do. I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing.It's a hundred years since we've met--it may be another hundred before we meet again."
She still wavered, her anxious eyes on his face. "Why didn't you come down to the beach to fetch me, the day I was at Granny's?" she asked.
"Because you didn't look round--because you didn't know I was there.I swore I wouldn't unless you looked round." He laughed as the childishness of the confession struck him.
"But I didn't look round on purpose."
"On purpose?"
"I knew you were there; when you drove in I recognised the ponies. So I went down to the beach."
"To get away from me as far as you could?"
She repeated in a low voice: "To get away from you as far as I could."
He laughed out again, this time in boyish satisfaction. "Well, you see it's no use.I may as well tell you," he added, "that the business I came here for was just to find you. But,look here, we must start or we shall miss our boat."
"Our boat?" She frowned perplexedly, and then smiled. "Oh, but I must go back to the hotel first: I must leave a note--"
"As many notes as you please. You can write here." He drew out a note-case and one of the new stylographic pens."I've even got an envelope--you see how everything's predestined!There--steady the thing on your knee, and I'll get the pen going in a second.They have to be humoured; wait--" He banged the hand that held the pen against the back of the bench."It's like jerking down the mercury in a thermometer: just a trick. Now try--"
She laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on his note-case, began to write.Archer walked away a few steps, staring with radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby, who,in their turn, paused to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably-dressed lady writing a note on her knee on a bench in the Common.
Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it, and put it into her pocket. Then she too stood up.
They walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the Parker House,and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant.
"I told you everything was predestined!Here's a cab for us. You see!" They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour,and in that unlikely spot, in a city where cab-stands were still a "foreign" novelty.
Archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to the Parker House before going to the steamboat landing.They rattled through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel.
Archer held out his hand for the letter. "Shall I take it in?" he asked; but Madame Olenska, shaking her head,sprang out and disappeared through the glazed doors. It was barely half-past ten;but what if the emissary, impatient for her reply, and not knowing how else to employ his time,were already seated among the travellers with cooling drinks at their elbows of whom Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in?
He waited, pacing up and down before the herdic.A Sicilian youth with eyes like Nastasia's offered to shine his boots,and an Irish matron to sell him peaches;and every few moments the doors opened to let out hot men with straw hats tilted far back,who glanced at him as they went by. He marvelled that the door should open so often,and that all the people it let out should look so like each other,and so like all the other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of the land,were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of hotels.
And then, suddenly, came a face that he could not relate to the other faces.He caught but a flash of it, for his pacings had carried him to the farthest point of his beat,and it was in turning back to the hotel that he saw,in a group of typical countenances--the lank and weary, the round and surprised,the lantern-jawed and mild--this other face that was so many more things at once,and things so different. It was that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat,or worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious;or perhaps seeming so because he was so different. Archer hung a moment on a thin thread of memory,but it snapped and floated off with the disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign business man,looking doubly foreign in such a setting. He vanished in the stream of passersby, and Archer resumed his patrol.
He did not care to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel,and his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that,if Madame Olenska was so long in reappearing,it could only be because she had met the emissary and been waylaid by him.At the thought Archer's apprehension rose to anguish.
"If she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her," he said.
The doors swung open again and she was at his side. They got into the herdic,and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had been absent just three minutes.In the clatter of loose windows that made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to the wharf.
Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other,or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation.
As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede through the veil of heat,it seemed to Archer that everything in the old familiar world of habit was receding also.He longed to ask Madame Olenska if she did not have the same feeling:the feeling that they were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return.But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the delicate balance of her trust in him.In reality he had no wish to betray that trust.There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips;the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire;but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth into this unknown world,they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder.
As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations,then into ripples tipped with spray. The fog of sultriness still hung over the city,but ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters,and distant promontories with light-houses in the sun. Madame Olenska,leaning back against the boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips.She had wound a long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered,and Archer was struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression.She seemed to take their adventure as a matter of course,and to be neither in fear of unexpected encounters,nor (what was worse) unduly elated by their possibility.
In the bare dining-room of the inn, which he had hoped they would have to themselves,they found a strident party of innocent-looking young men and women--school-teachers on a holiday,the landlord told them--and Archer's heart sank at the idea of having to talk through their noise.
"This is hopeless--I'll ask for a private room," he said; and Madame Olenska,without offering any objection, waited while he went in search of it.The room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea coming in at the windows.It was bare and cool, with a table covered with a coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles and a blueberry pie under a cage.No more guileless-looking _cabinet particulier_ ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple:Archer fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him.A woman who had run away from her husband--and reputedly with another man--was likely to have mastered the art of taking things for granted;but something in the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony. By being so quiet,so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other....
XXIV.
They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between rushes of talk; for,the spell once broken, they had much to say,and yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologues of silence.Archer kept the talk from his own affairs,not with conscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of her history;and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped hands,she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met.
She had grown tired of what people called "society"; New York was kind,it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the way in which it had welcomed her back;but after the first flush of novelty she had found herself, as she phrased it,too "different" to care for the things it cared about--and so she had decided to try Washington,where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion.And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington,and make a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of all her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after and protecting from matrimonial perils.
"But Dr. Carver--aren't you afraid of Dr. Carver?I hear he's been staying with you at the Blenkers'."
She smiled. "Oh, the Carver danger is over. Dr. Carver is a very clever man.He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora is simply a good advertisement as a convert."
"A convert to what?"
"To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. But, do you know,they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebody else's tradition--that I see among our own friends.It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country." She smiled across the table. "Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?"
Archer changed colour. "And Beaufort--do you say these things to Beaufort?" he asked abruptly.
"I haven't seen him for a long time. But I used to; and he understands."
"Ah, it's what I've always told you; you don't like us.And you like Beaufort because he's so unlike us." He looked about the bare room and out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung along the shore."We're damnably dull. We've no character, no colour, no variety.--I wonder," he broke out, "why you don't go back?"
Her eyes darkened, and he expected an indignant rejoinder. But she sat silent,as if thinking over what he had said, and he grew frightened lest she should answer that she wondered too.
At length she said: "I believe it's because of you."
It was impossible to make the confession more dispassionately,or in a tone less encouraging to the vanity of the person addressed.Archer reddened to the temples, but dared not move or speak:it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings,but that might gather a flock about it if it were left undisturbed.
"At least," she continued, "it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself"--she drew together her troubled brows--"but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid."
"Exquisite pleasures--it's something to have had them!" he felt like retorting; but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent.
"I want," she went on, "to be perfectly honest with you--and with myself.For a long time I've hoped this chance would come: that I might tell you how you've helped me, what you've made of me--"
Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows. He interrupted her with a laugh."And what do you make out that you've made of me?"
She paled a little. "Of you?"
"Yes: for I'm of your making much more than you ever were of mine.I'm the man who married one woman because another one told him to."
Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush."I thought--you promised--you were not to say such things today."
"Ah--how like a woman!None of you will ever see a bad business through!"
She lowered her voice. "_is_ it a bad business--for May?"
He stood in the window, drumming against the raised sash,and feeling in every fibre the wistful tenderness with which she had spoken her cousin's name.
"For that's the thing we've always got to think of--haven't we--by your own showing?" she insisted.
"My own showing?" he echoed, his blank eyes still on the sea.
"Or if not," she continued, pursuing her own thought with a painful application,"if it's not worth while to have given up, to have missed things,so that others may be saved from disillusionment and misery--then everything I came home for,everything that made my other life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there took account of them--all these things are a sham or a dream--"
He turned around without moving from his place."And in that case there's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back?" he concluded for her.
Her eyes were clinging to him desperately. "Oh, _is_ there no reason?"
"Not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage. My marriage," he said savagely,"isn't going to be a sight to keep you here." She made no answer, and he went on: "What's the use?You gave me my first glimpse of a real life,and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one.It's beyond human enduring--that's all."
"Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!" she burst out, her eyes filling.
Her arms had dropped along the table, and she sat with her face abandoned to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril.The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person, with the soul behind it:Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenly told him.
"You too--oh, all this time, you too?"
For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly downward.
Half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made any show of moving.Archer was conscious of a curious indifference to her bodily presence:he would hardly have been aware of it if one of the hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the occasion when,in the little Twenty-third Street house,he had kept his eye on it in order not to look at her face.Now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex;but still he made no effort to draw nearer.He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them;but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.His one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words;his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone.
But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were,close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart.
"What's the use--when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless _How on earth can I keep you?_ crying out to her beneath his words.
She sat motionless, with lowered lids. "Oh--I shan't go yet!"
"Not yet?Some time, then?Some time that you already foresee?"