"Augusta," he said, turning pale and laying down his fork,"have you any other reason for thinking that Bencomb is less to be relied on than he was?Have you noticed that he has been less conscientious than usual in following up my case or your mother's?"
It was Mrs. Welland's turn to grow pale as the endless consequences of her blunder unrolled themselves before her;but she managed to laugh, and take a second helping of scalloped oysters, before she said,struggling back into her old armour of cheerfulness: "My dear, how could you imagine such a thing?I only meant that, after the decided stand Mamma took about its being Ellen's duty to go back to her husband,it seems strange that she should be seized with this sudden whim to see her,when there are half a dozen other grandchildren that she might have asked for.But we must never forget that Mamma, in spite of her wonderful vitality, is a very old woman."
Mr. Welland's brow remained clouded, and it was evident that his perturbed imagination had fastened at once on this last remark."Yes: your mother's a very old woman; and for all we know Bencomb may not be as successful with very old people.As you say, my dear, it's always one thing after another;and in another ten or fifteen years I suppose I shall have the pleasing duty of looking about for a new doctor.It's always better to make such a change before it's absolutely necessary." And having arrived at this Spartan decision Mr. Welland firmly took up his fork.
"But all the while," Mrs. Welland began again, as she rose from the luncheon-table,and led the way into the wilderness of purple satin and malachite known as the back drawing-room,"I don't see how Ellen's to be got here tomorrow evening;and I do like to have things settled for at least twenty-four hours ahead."
Archer turned from the fascinated contemplation of a small painting representing two Cardinals carousing,in an octagonal ebony frame set with medallions of onyx.
"Shall I fetch her?" he proposed. "I can easily get away from the office in time to meet the brougham at the ferry,if May will send it there." His heart was beating excitedly as he spoke.
Mrs. Welland heaved a sigh of gratitude, and May, who had moved away to the window,turned to shed on him a beam of approval. "So you see, Mamma,everything _will_ be settled twenty-four hours in advance," she said,stooping over to kiss her mother's troubled forehead.
May's brougham awaited her at the door, and she was to drive Archer to Union Square,where he could pick up a Broadway car to carry him to the office.As she settled herself in her corner she said:"I didn't want to worry Mamma by raising fresh obstacles; but how can you meet Ellen tomorrow,and bring her back to New York, when you're going to Washington?"
"Oh, I'm not going," Archer answered.
"Not going?Why, what's happened?" Her voice was as clear as a bell, and full of wifely solicitude.
"The case is off--postponed."
"Postponed?How odd!I saw a note this morning from Mr. Letterblair to Mamma saying that he was going to Washington tomorrow for the big patent case that he was to argue before the Supreme Court. You said it was a patent case, didn't you?"
"Well--that's it: the whole office can't go. Letterblair decided to go this morning."
"Then it's _not_ postponed?" she continued, with an insistence so unlike her that he felt the blood rising to his face,as if he were blushing for her unwonted lapse from all the traditional delicacies.
"No: but my going is," he answered, cursing the unnecessary explanations that he had given when he had announced his intention of going to Washington,and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.It did not hurt him half as much to tell May an untruth as to see her trying to pretend that she had not detected him.
"I'm not going till later on: luckily for the convenience of your family," he continued,taking base refuge in sarcasm. As he spoke he felt that she was looking at him,and he turned his eyes to hers in order not to appear to be avoiding them.Their glances met for a second, and perhaps let them into each other's meanings more deeply than either cared to go.
"Yes; it _is_ awfully convenient," May brightly agreed,"that you should be able to meet Ellen after all;you saw how much Mamma appreciated your offering to do it."
"Oh, I'm delighted to do it." The carriage stopped,and as he jumped out she leaned to him and laid her hand on his. "Good-bye, dearest," she said,her eyes so blue that he wondered afterward if they had shone on him through tears.
He turned away and hurried across Union Square, repeating to himself, in a sort of inward chant:"It's all of two hours from Jersey City to old Catherine's.It's all of two hours--and it may be more."
XXIX.
His wife's dark blue brougham (with the wedding varnish still on it) met Archer at the ferry,and conveyed him luxuriously to the Pennsylvania terminus in Jersey City.
It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station.As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express,he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Night marvels.
"I don't care which of their visions comes true," Archer mused,"as long as the tunnel isn't built yet." In his senseless school-boy happiness he pictured Madame Olenska's descent from the train,his discovery of her a long way off, among the throngs of meaningless faces,her clinging to his arm as he guided her to the carriage,their slow approach to the wharf among slipping horses, laden carts, vociferating teamsters,and then the startling quiet of the ferry-boat, where they would sit side by side under the snow,in the motionless carriage, while the earth seemed to glide away under them,rolling to the other side of the sun. It was incredible, the number of things he had to say to her,and in what eloquent order they were forming themselves on his lips ...
The clanging and groaning of the train came nearer,and it staggered slowly into the station like a prey-laden monster into its lair.Archer pushed forward, elbowing through the crowd,and staring blindly into window after window of the high-hung carriages. And then, suddenly,he saw Madame Olenska's pale and surprised face close at hand,and had again the mortified sensation of having forgotten what she looked like.
They reached each other, their hands met, and he drew her arm through his."This way--I have the carriage," he said.
After that it all happened as he had dreamed. He helped her into the brougham with her bags,and had afterward the vague recollection of having properly reassured her about her grandmother and given her a summary of the Beaufort situation (he was struck by the softness of her: "Poor Regina!"). Meanwhile the carriage had worked its way out of the coil about the station,and they were crawling down the slippery incline to the wharf, menaced by swaying coal-carts,bewildered horses, dishevelled express-wagons, and an empty hearse--ah, that hearse!She shut her eyes as it passed, and clutched at Archer's hand.
"If only it doesn't mean--poor Granny!"
"Oh, no, no--she's much better--she's all right, really. There--we've passed it!" he exclaimed, as if that made all the difference. Her hand remained in his,and as the carriage lurched across the gang-plank onto the ferry he bent over,unbuttoned her tight brown glove, and kissed her palm as if he had kissed a relic.She disengaged herself with a faint smile, and he said: "You didn't expect me today?"
"Oh, no."
"I meant to go to Washington to see you.I'd made all my arrangements--I very nearly crossed you in the train."
"Oh--" she exclaimed, as if terrified by the narrowness of their escape.
"Do you know--I hardly remembered you?"
"Hardly remembered me?"
"I mean: how shall I explain?I--it's always so. _Each time you happen to me all over again._"
"Oh, yes: I know!I know!"
"Does it--do I too: to you?" he insisted.
She nodded, looking out of the window.
"Ellen--Ellen--Ellen!"
She made no answer, and he sat in silence,watching her profile grow indistinct against the snow-streaked dusk beyond the window.What had she been doing in all those four long months, he wondered?How little they knew of each other, after all!The precious moments were slipping away,but he had forgotten everything that he had meant to say to her and could only helplessly brood on the mystery of their remoteness and their proximity,which seemed to be symbolised by the fact of their sitting so close to each other,and yet being unable to see each other's faces.
"What a pretty carriage!Is it May's?" she asked, suddenly turning her face from the window.
"Yes."
"It was May who sent you to fetch me, then?How kind of her!"
He made no answer for a moment; then he said explosively:"Your husband's secretary came to see me the day after we met in Boston."
In his brief letter to her he had made no allusion to M. Rivière's visit,and his intention had been to bury the incident in his bosom.But her reminder that they were in his wife's carriage provoked him to an impulse of retaliation.He would see if she liked his reference to Rivière any better than he liked hers to May!As on certain other occasions when he had expected to shake her out of her usual composure,she betrayed no sign of surprise: and at once he concluded: "He writes to her, then."
"M. Rivière went to see you?"
"Yes: didn't you know?"
"No," she answered simply.
"And you're not surprised?"
She hesitated. "Why should I be?He told me in Boston that he knew you; that he'd met you in England I think."
"Ellen--I must ask you one thing."
"Yes."
"I wanted to ask it after I saw him, but I couldn't put it in a letter.It was Rivière who helped you to get away--when you left your husband?"
His heart was beating suffocatingly. Would she meet this question with the same composure?
"Yes: I owe him a great debt," she answered, without the least tremor in her quiet voice.
Her tone was so natural, so almost indifferent, that Archer's turmoil subsided.Once more she had managed, by her sheer simplicity,to make him feel stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging convention to the winds.
"I think you're the most honest woman I ever met!" he exclaimed.
"Oh, no--but probably one of the least fussy," she answered, a smile in her voice.
"Call it what you like: you look at things as they are."
"Ah--I've had to. I've had to look at the Gorgon."
"Well--it hasn't blinded you!You've seen that she's just an old bogey like all the others."
"She doesn't blind one; but she dries up one's tears."
The answer checked the pleading on Archer's lips:it seemed to come from depths of experience beyond his reach.The slow advance of the ferry-boat had ceased,and her bows bumped against the piles of the slip with a violence that made the brougham stagger,and flung Archer and Madame Olenska against each other. The young man, trembling,felt the pressure of her shoulder, and passed his arm about her.
"If you're not blind, then, you must see that this can't last."
"What can't?"
"Our being together--and not together."
"No. You ought not to have come today," she said in an altered voice; and suddenly she turned,flung her arms about him and pressed her lips to his.At the same moment the carriage began to move,and a gas-lamp at the head of the slip flashed its light into the window. She drew away,and they sat silent and motionless while the brougham struggled through the congestion of carriages about the ferry-landing.As they gained the street Archer began to speak hurriedly.
"Don't be afraid of me: you needn't squeeze yourself back into your corner like that.A stolen kiss isn't what I want. Look: I'm not even trying to touch the sleeve of your jacket.Don't suppose that I don't understand your reasons for not wanting to let this feeling between us dwindle into an ordinary hole-and-corner love-affair.I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart,and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame.But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered,and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then,with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this,with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true."
For a moment she made no reply; then she asked, hardly above a whisper:"What do you mean by trusting to it to come true?"
"Why--you know it will, don't you?"
"Your vision of you and me together?" She burst into a sudden hard laugh. "You choose your place well to put it to me!"
"Do you mean because we're in my wife's brougham?Shall we get out and walk, then?I don't suppose you mind a little snow?"
She laughed again, more gently. "No; I shan't get out and walk,because my business is to get to Granny's as quickly as I can. And you'll sit beside me,and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities."
"I don't know what you mean by realities. The only reality to me is this."
She met the words with a long silence, during which the carriage rolled down an obscure side-street and then turned into the searching illumination of Fifth Avenue.
"Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress--since I can't be your wife?" she asked.
The crudeness of the question startled him: the word was one that women of his class fought shy of,even when their talk flitted closest about the topic.He noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a recognised place in her vocabulary,and he wondered if it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from.Her question pulled him up with a jerk, and he floundered.
"I want--I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that--categories like that--won't exist.Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other,who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter."
She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. "Oh, my dear--where is that country?Have you ever been there?" she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: "I know so many who've tried to find it;and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa,or Monte Carlo--and it wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left,but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous."
He had never heard her speak in such a tone,and he remembered the phrase she had used a little while before.
"Yes, the Gorgon _has_ dried your tears," he said.
"Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people.What she does is just the contrary--she fastens their eyelids open,so that they're never again in the blessed darkness. Isn't there a Chinese torture like that?There ought to be. Ah, believe me, it's a miserable little country!"
The carriage had crossed Forty-second Street:May's sturdy brougham-horse was carrying them northward as if he had been a Kentucky trotter.Archer choked with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.
"Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?" he asked.
"For _us_?But there's no _us_ in that sense!We're near each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves.Otherwise we're only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska's cousin, and Ellen Olenska,the cousin of Newland Archer's wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them. "
"Ah, I'm beyond that," he groaned.
"No, you're not!You've never been beyond. And I have," she said, in a strange voice, "and I know what it looks like there."
He sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain.Then he groped in the darkness of the carriage for the little bell that signalled orders to the coachman.He remembered that May rang twice when she wished to stop. He pressed the bell,and the carriage drew up beside the curbstone.
"Why are we stopping?This is not Granny's," Madame Olenska exclaimed.
"No: I shall get out here," he stammered, opening the door and jumping to the pavement.By the light of a street-lamp he saw her startled face,and the instinctive motion she made to detain him. He closed the door, and leaned for a moment in the window.
"You're right: I ought not to have come today," he said,lowering his voice so that the coachman should not hear. She bent forward,and seemed about to speak; but he had already called out the order to drive on,and the carriage rolled away while he stood on the corner. The snow was over,and a tingling wind had sprung up, that lashed his face as he stood gazing.Suddenly he felt something stiff and cold on his lashes, and perceived that he had been crying, and that the wind had frozen his tears.
He thrust his hands in his pockets, and walked at a sharp pace down Fifth Avenue to his own house.
XXX.
That evening when Archer came down before dinner he found the drawing-room empty.
He and May were dining alone, all the family engagements having been postponed since Mrs.Manson Mingott's illness; and as May was the more punctual of the two he was surprised that she had not preceded him.He knew that she was at home, for while he dressed he had heard her moving about in her room; and he wondered what had delayed her.
He had fallen into the way of dwelling on such conjectures as a means of tying his thoughts fast to reality.Sometimes he felt as if he had found the clue to his father-in-law's absorption in trifles;perhaps even Mr. Welland, long ago, had had escapes and visions,and had conjured up all the hosts of domesticity to defend himself against them.
When May appeared he thought she looked tired.She had put on the low-necked and tightly-laced dinner-dress which the Mingott ceremonial exacted on the most informal occasions,and had built her fair hair into its usual accumulated coils; and her face, in contrast,was wan and almost faded. But she shone on him with her usual tenderness,and her eyes had kept the blue dazzle of the day before.
"What became of you, dear?" she asked. "I was waiting at Granny's, and Ellen came alone,and said she had dropped you on the way because you had to rush off on business. There's nothing wrong?"
"Only some letters I'd forgotten, and wanted to get off before dinner."
"Ah--" she said; and a moment afterward:"I'm sorry you didn't come to Granny's--unless the letters were urgent."
"They were," he rejoined, surprised at her insistence. "Besides,I don't see why I should have gone to your grandmother's. I didn't know you were there."
She turned and moved to the looking-glass above the mantel-piece. As she stood there,lifting her long arm to fasten a puff that had slipped from its place in her intricate hair,Archer was struck by something languid and inelastic in her attitude,and wondered if the deadly monotony of their lives had laid its weight on her also.Then he remembered that, as he had left the house that morning,she had called over the stairs that she would meet him at her grandmother's so that they might drive home together. He had called back a cheery "Yes!" and then, absorbed in other visions, had forgotten his promise.Now he was smitten with compunction, yet irritated that so trifling an omission should be stored up against him after nearly two years of marriage.He was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon,without the temperature of passion yet with all its exactions.If May had spoken out her grievances (he suspected her of many) he might have laughed them away;but she was trained to conceal imaginary wounds under a Spartan smile.
To disguise his own annoyance he asked how her grandmother was, and she answered that Mrs.Mingott was still improving, but had been rather disturbed by the last news about the Beauforts.
"What news?"
"It seems they're going to stay in New York. I believe he's going into an insurance business,or something. They're looking about for a small house."
The preposterousness of the case was beyond discussion, and they went in to dinner.During dinner their talk moved in its usual limited circle;but Archer noticed that his wife made no allusion to Madame Olenska,nor to old Catherine's reception of her. He was thankful for the fact, yet felt it to be vaguely ominous.
They went up to the library for coffee, and Archer lit a cigar and took down a volume of Michelet.He had taken to history in the evenings since May had shown a tendency to ask him to read aloud whenever she saw him with a volume of poetry:not that he disliked the sound of his own voice,but because he could always foresee her comments on what he read.In the days of their engagement she had simply (as he now perceived) echoed what he told her;but since he had ceased to provide her with opinions she had begun to hazard her own,with results destructive to his enjoyment of the works commented on.
Seeing that he had chosen history she fetched her workbasket,drew up an arm-chair to the green-shaded student lamp,and uncovered a cushion she was embroidering for his sofa. She was not a clever needle-woman;her large capable hands were made for riding, rowing and open-air activities;but since other wives embroidered cushions for their husbands she did not wish to omit this last link in her devotion.
She was so placed that Archer, by merely raising his eyes, could see her bent above her work-frame,her ruffled elbow-sleeves slipping back from her firm round arms,the betrothal sapphire shining on her left hand above her broad gold wedding-ring,and the right hand slowly and laboriously stabbing the canvas. As she sat thus,the lamplight full on her clear brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it,that never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea,a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion. She had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting:the function was exhausted because the need was past.Now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the very process,trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland. He laid down his book and stood up impatiently; and at once she raised her head.
"What's the matter?"
"The room is stifling: I want a little air."
He had insisted that the library curtains should draw backward and forward on a rod,so that they might be closed in the evening, instead of remaining nailed to a gilt cornice,and immovably looped up over layers of lace, as in the drawing-room;and he pulled them back and pushed up the sash, leaning out into the icy night.The mere fact of not looking at May, seated beside his table, under his lamp,the fact of seeing other houses, roofs, chimneys,of getting the sense of other lives outside his own, other cities beyond New York,and a whole world beyond his world, cleared his brain and made it easier to breathe.
After he had leaned out into the darkness for a few minutes he heard her say: "Newland!Do shut the window. You'll catch your death."
He pulled the sash down and turned back. "Catch my death!" he echoed; and he felt like adding: "But I've caught it already.I _am_ dead--I've been dead for months and months."
And suddenly the play of the word flashed up a wild suggestion. What if it were _she_ who was dead!If she were going to die--to die soon--and leave him free!The sensation of standing there, in that warm familiar room, and looking at her,and wishing her dead, was so strange, so fascinating and overmastering,that its enormity did not immediately strike him.He simply felt that chance had given him a new possibility to which his sick soul might cling. Yes,May might die--people did: young people, healthy people like herself: she might die, and set him suddenly free.
She glanced up, and he saw by her widening eyes that there must be something strange in his own.
"Newland!Are you ill?"
He shook his head and turned toward his arm-chair. She bent over her work-frame,and as he passed he laid his hand on her hair. "Poor May!" he said.
"Poor?Why poor?" she echoed with a strained laugh.
"Because I shall never be able to open a window without worrying you," he rejoined, laughing also.
For a moment she was silent; then she said very low, her head bowed over her work: "I shall never worry if you're happy."
"Ah, my dear; and I shall never be happy unless I can open the windows!"
"In _this_ weather?" she remonstrated; and with a sigh he buried his head in his book.
Six or seven days passed. Archer heard nothing from Madame Olenska,and became aware that her name would not be mentioned in his presence by any member of the family.He did not try to see her; to do so while she was at old Catherine's guarded bedside would have been almost impossible.In the uncertainty of the situation he let himself drift, conscious,somewhere below the surface of his thoughts,of a resolve which had come to him when he had leaned out from his library window into the icy night.The strength of that resolve made it easy to wait and make no sign.
Then one day May told him that Mrs. Manson Mingott had asked to see him.There was nothing surprising in the request, for the old lady was steadily recovering,and she had always openly declared that she preferred Archer to any of her other grandsons-in-law.May gave the message with evident pleasure:she was proud of old Catherine's appreciation of her husband.
There was a moment's pause, and then Archer felt it incumbent on him to say: "All right. Shall we go together this afternoon?"
His wife's face brightened, but she instantly answered: "Oh, you'd much better go alone.It bores Granny to see the same people too often."
Archer's heart was beating violently when he rang old Mrs. Mingott's bell.He had wanted above all things to go alone,for he felt sure the visit would give him the chance of saying a word in private to the Countess Olenska.He had determined to wait till the chance presented itself naturally; and here it was,and here he was on the doorstep. Behind the door,behind the curtains of the yellow damask room next to the hall, she was surely awaiting him;in another moment he should see her, and be able to speak to her before she led him to the sick-room.
He wanted only to put one question: after that his course would be clear.What he wished to ask was simply the date of her return to Washington;and that question she could hardly refuse to answer.
But in the yellow sitting-room it was the mulatto maid who waited.Her white teeth shining like a keyboard,she pushed back the sliding doors and ushered him into old Catherine's presence.
The old woman sat in a vast throne-like arm-chair near her bed.Beside her was a mahogany stand bearing a cast bronze lamp with an engraved globe,over which a green paper shade had been balanced. There was not a book or a newspaper in reach,nor any evidence of feminine employment: conversation had always been Mrs. Mingott's sole pursuit,and she would have scorned to feign an interest in fancywork.
Archer saw no trace of the slight distortion left by her stroke. She merely looked paler,with darker shadows in the folds and recesses of her obesity; and,in the fluted mob-cap tied by a starched bow between her first two chins,and the muslin kerchief crossed over her billowing purple dressing-gown,she seemed like some shrewd and kindly ancestress of her own who might have yielded too freely to the pleasures of the table.
She held out one of the little hands that nestled in a hollow of her huge lap like pet animals,and called to the maid: "Don't let in any one else. If my daughters call, say I'm asleep."
The maid disappeared, and the old lady turned to her grandson.
"My dear, am I perfectly hideous?" she asked gaily, launching out one hand in search of the folds of muslin on her inaccessible bosom."My daughters tell me it doesn't matter at my age--as if hideousness didn't matter all the more the harder it gets to conceal!"
"My dear, you're handsomer than ever!" Archer rejoined in the same tone; and she threw back her head and laughed.
"Ah, but not as handsome as Ellen!" she jerked out, twinkling at him maliciously; and before he could answer she added:"Was she so awfully handsome the day you drove her up from the ferry?"
He laughed, and she continued: "Was it because you told her so that she had to put you out on the way?In my youth young men didn't desert pretty women unless they were made to!" She gave another chuckle, and interrupted it to say almost querulously:"It's a pity she didn't marry you; I always told her so. It would have spared me all this worry.But who ever thought of sparing their grandmother worry?"
Archer wondered if her illness had blurred her faculties; but suddenly she broke out: "Well,it's settled, anyhow: she's going to stay with me, whatever the rest of the family say!She hadn't been here five minutes before I'd have gone down on my knees to keep her--if only,for the last twenty years, I'd been able to see where the floor was!"