Archer listened in silence, and she went on: "They'd talked me over, as no doubt you know:persuaded me, Lovell, and Letterblair, and Augusta Welland, and all the rest of them,that I must hold out and cut off her allowance,till she was made to see that it was her duty to go back to Olenski.They thought they'd convinced me when the secretary, or whatever he was,came out with the last proposals: handsome proposals I confess they were. After all,marriage is marriage, and money's money--both useful things in their way ...and I didn't know what to answer--" She broke off and drew a long breath,as if speaking had become an effort. "But the minute I laid eyes on her, I said: 'You sweet bird, you!Shut you up in that cage again?Never!' And now it's settled that she's to stay here and nurse her Granny as long as there's a Granny to nurse.It's not a gay prospect, but she doesn't mind;and of course I've told Letterblair that she's to be given her proper allowance."
The young man heard her with veins aglow;but in his confusion of mind he hardly knew whether her news brought joy or pain.He had so definitely decided on the course he meant to pursue that for the moment he could not readjust his thoughts.But gradually there stole over him the delicious sense of difficulties deferred and opportunities miraculously provided.If Ellen had consented to come and live with her grandmother it must surely be because she had recognised the impossibility of giving him up.This was her answer to his final appeal of the other day:if she would not take the extreme step he had urged, she had at last yielded to half-measures.He sank back into the thought with the involuntary relief of a man who has been ready to risk everything,and suddenly tastes the dangerous sweetness of security.
"She couldn't have gone back--it was impossible!" he exclaimed.
"Ah, my dear, I always knew you were on her side; and that's why I sent for you today,and why I said to your pretty wife, when she proposed to come with you: 'No, my dear,I'm pining to see Newland, and I don't want anybody to share our transports.' For you see,my dear--" she drew her head back as far as its tethering chins permitted,and looked him full in the eyes--"you see, we shall have a fight yet.The family don't want her here, and they'll say it's because I've been ill,because I'm a weak old woman, that she's persuaded me.I'm not well enough yet to fight them one by one, and you've got to do it for me."
"I?" he stammered.
"You. Why not?" she jerked back at him, her round eyes suddenly as sharp as pen-knives.Her hand fluttered from its chair-arm and lit on his with a clutch of little pale nails like bird-claws. "Why not?" she searchingly repeated.
Archer, under the exposure of her gaze, had recovered his self-possession.
"Oh, I don't count--I'm too insignificant."
"Well, you're Letterblair's partner, ain't you?You've got to get at them through Letterblair. Unless you've got a reason," she insisted.
"Oh, my dear, I back you to hold your own against them all without my help;but you shall have it if you need it," he reassured her.
"Then we're safe!" she sighed; and smiling on him with all her ancient cunning she added,as she settled her head among the cushions: "I always knew you'd back us up,because they never quote you when they talk about its being her duty to go home."
He winced a little at her terrifying perspicacity, and longed to ask:"And May--do they quote her?" But he judged it safer to turn the question.
"And Madame Olenska?When am I to see her?" he said.
The old lady chuckled, crumpled her lids, and went through the pantomime of archness. "Not today.One at a time, please. Madame Olenska's gone out."
He flushed with disappointment, and she went on: "She's gone out, my child:gone in my carriage to see Regina Beaufort."
She paused for this announcement to produce its effect. "That's what she's reduced me to already.The day after she got here she put on her best bonnet, and told me, as cool as a cucumber,that she was going to call on Regina Beaufort. 'I don't know her; who is she?' says I. 'She's your grand-niece, and a most unhappy woman,' she says.'She's the wife of a scoundrel,' I answered. 'Well,' she says, 'and so am I,and yet all my family want me to go back to him.' Well, that floored me, and I let her go;and finally one day she said it was raining too hard to go out on foot,and she wanted me to lend her my carriage. 'What for?' I asked her; and she said: 'To go and see cousin Regina'--_cousin_!Now, my dear, I looked out of the window, and saw it wasn't raining a drop; but I understood her,and I let her have the carriage.... After all, Regina's a brave woman, and so is she;and I've always liked courage above everything."
Archer bent down and pressed his lips on the little hand that still lay on his.
"Eh--eh--eh!Whose hand did you think you were kissing, young man--your wife's, I hope?" the old lady snapped out with her mocking cackle; and as he rose to go she called out after him:"Give her her Granny's love; but you'd better not say anything about our talk."
XXXI.
Archer had been stunned by old Catherine's news.It was only natural that Madame Olenska should have hastened from Washington in response to her grandmother's summons;but that she should have decided to remain under her roof--especially now that Mrs.Mingott had almost regained her health--was less easy to explain.
Archer was sure that Madame Olenska's decision had not been influenced by the change in her financial situation.He knew the exact figure of the small income which her husband had allowed her at their separation.Without the addition of her grandmother's allowance it was hardly enough to live on,in any sense known to the Mingott vocabulary; and now that Medora Manson, who shared her life,had been ruined, such a pittance would barely keep the two women clothed and fed.Yet Archer was convinced that Madame Olenska had not accepted her grandmother's offer from interested motives.
She had the heedless generosity and the spasmodic extravagance of persons used to large fortunes,and indifferent to money; but she could go without many things which her relations considered indispensable,and Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Welland had often been heard to deplore that any one who had enjoyed the cosmopolitan luxuries of Count Olenski's establishments should care so little about "how things were done." Moreover, as Archer knew, several months had passed since her allowance had been cut off; yet in the interval she had made no effort to regain her grandmother's favour. Therefore if she had changed her course it must be for a different reason.
He did not have far to seek for that reason.On the way from the ferry she had told him that he and she must remain apart;but she had said it with her head on his breast.He knew that there was no calculated coquetry in her words;she was fighting her fate as he had fought his,and clinging desperately to her resolve that they should not break faith with the people who trusted them.But during the ten days which had elapsed since her return to New York she had perhaps guessed from his silence,and from the fact of his making no attempt to see her, that he was meditating a decisive step,a step from which there was no turning back. At the thought,a sudden fear of her own weakness might have seized her, and she might have felt that, after all,it was better to accept the compromise usual in such cases,and follow the line of least resistance.
An hour earlier, when he had rung Mrs. Mingott's bell,Archer had fancied that his path was clear before him.He had meant to have a word alone with Madame Olenska, and failing that,to learn from her grandmother on what day, and by which train, she was returning to Washington.In that train he intended to join her, and travel with her to Washington,or as much farther as she was willing to go. His own fancy inclined to Japan.At any rate she would understand at once that, wherever she went, he was going.He meant to leave a note for May that should cut off any other alternative.
He had fancied himself not only nerved for this plunge but eager to take it;yet his first feeling on hearing that the course of events was changed had been one of relief. Now,however, as he walked home from Mrs. Mingott's,he was conscious of a growing distaste for what lay before him.There was nothing unknown or unfamiliar in the path he was presumably to tread;but when he had trodden it before it was as a free man,who was accountable to no one for his actions,and could lend himself with an amused detachment to the game of precautions and prevarications,concealments and compliances, that the part required.This procedure was called "protecting a woman's honour"; and the best fiction,combined with the after-dinner talk of his elders,had long since initiated him into every detail of its code.
Now he saw the matter in a new light, and his part in it seemed singularly diminished. It was,in fact, that which, with a secret fatuity, he had watched Mrs.Thorley Rushworth play toward a fond and unperceiving husband: a smiling, bantering, humouring,watchful and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look;a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence.
It was easier, and less dastardly on the whole, for a wife to play such a part toward her husband.A woman's standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be lower: she was the subject creature,and versed in the arts of the enslaved. Then she could always plead moods and nerves,and the right not to be held too strictly to account;and even in the most strait-laced societies the laugh was always against the husband.
But in Archer's little world no one laughed at a wife deceived,and a certain measure of contempt was attached to men who continued their philandering after marriage.In the rotation of crops there was a recognised season for wild oats;but they were not to be sown more than once.
Archer had always shared this view: in his heart he thought Lefferts despicable.But to love Ellen Olenska was not to become a man like Lefferts:for the first time Archer found himself face to face with the dread argument of the individual case.Ellen Olenska was like no other woman, he was like no other man: their situation, therefore,resembled no one else's, and they were answerable to no tribunal but that of their own judgment.
Yes, but in ten minutes more he would be mounting his own doorstep; and there were May, and habit,and honour, and all the old decencies that he and his people had always believed in ...
At his corner he hesitated, and then walked on down Fifth Avenue.
Ahead of him, in the winter night, loomed a big unlit house.As he drew near he thought how often he had seen it blazing with lights,its steps awninged and carpeted, and carriages waiting in double line to draw up at the curbstone.It was in the conservatory that stretched its dead-black bulk down the side street that he had taken his first kiss from May;it was under the myriad candles of the ball-room that he had seen her appear,tall and silver-shining as a young Diana.
Now the house was as dark as the grave, except for a faint flare of gas in the basement,and a light in one upstairs room where the blind had not been lowered.As Archer reached the corner he saw that the carriage standing at the door was Mrs.Manson Mingott's. What an opportunity for Sillerton Jackson, if he should chance to pass!Archer had been greatly moved by old Catherine's account of Madame Olenska's attitude toward Mrs.Beaufort; it made the righteous reprobation of New York seem like a passing by on the other side.But he knew well enough what construction the clubs and drawing-rooms would put on Ellen Olenska's visits to her cousin.
He paused and looked up at the lighted window.No doubt the two women were sitting together in that room:Beaufort had probably sought consolation elsewhere.There were even rumours that he had left New York with Fanny Ring; but Mrs.Beaufort's attitude made the report seem improbable.
Archer had the nocturnal perspective of Fifth Avenue almost to himself.At that hour most people were indoors, dressing for dinner;and he was secretly glad that Ellen's exit was likely to be unobserved.As the thought passed through his mind the door opened, and she came out.Behind her was a faint light, such as might have been carried down the stairs to show her the way.She turned to say a word to some one; then the door closed, and she came down the steps.
"Ellen," he said in a low voice, as she reached the pavement.
She stopped with a slight start, and just then he saw two young men of fashionable cut approaching.There was a familiar air about their overcoats and the way their smart silk mufflers were folded over their white ties;and he wondered how youths of their quality happened to be dining out so early.Then he remembered that the Reggie Chiverses, whose house was a few doors above,were taking a large party that evening to see Adelaide Neilson in Romeo and Juliet,and guessed that the two were of the number. They passed under a lamp,and he recognised Lawrence Lefferts and a young Chivers.
A mean desire not to have Madame Olenska seen at the Beauforts' door vanished as he felt the penetrating warmth of her hand.
"I shall see you now--we shall be together," he broke out, hardly knowing what he said.
"Ah," she answered, "Granny has told you?"
While he watched her he was aware that Lefferts and Chivers,on reaching the farther side of the street corner, had discreetly struck away across Fifth Avenue.It was the kind of masculine solidarity that he himself often practised;now he sickened at their connivance. Did she really imagine that he and she could live like this?And if not, what else did she imagine?
"Tomorrow I must see you--somewhere where we can be alone," he said,in a voice that sounded almost angry to his own ears.
She wavered, and moved toward the carriage.
"But I shall be at Granny's--for the present that is," she added,as if conscious that her change of plans required some explanation.
"Somewhere where we can be alone," he insisted.
She gave a faint laugh that grated on him.
"In New York?But there are no churches ... no monuments."
"There's the Art Museum--in the Park," he explained, as she looked puzzled. "At half-past two. I shall be at the door ..."
She turned away without answering and got quickly into the carriage.As it drove off she leaned forward, and he thought she waved her hand in the obscurity.He stared after her in a turmoil of contradictory feelings.It seemed to him that he had been speaking not to the woman he loved but to another,a woman he was indebted to for pleasures already wearied of:it was hateful to find himself the prisoner of this hackneyed vocabulary.
"She'll come!" he said to himself, almost contemptuously.
Avoiding the popular "Wolfe collection," whose anecdotic canvases filled one of the main galleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum, they had wandered down a passage to the room where the "Cesnola antiquities" mouldered in unvisited loneliness.
They had this melancholy retreat to themselves,and seated on the divan enclosing the central steam-radiator,they were staring silently at the glass cabinets mounted in ebonised wood which contained the recovered fragments of Ilium.
"It's odd," Madame Olenska said, "I never came here before."
"Ah, well--. Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum."
"Yes," she assented absently.
She stood up and wandered across the room. Archer, remaining seated,watched the light movements of her figure, so girlish even under its heavy furs,the cleverly planted heron wing in her fur cap,and the way a dark curl lay like a flattened vine spiral on each cheek above the ear. His mind,as always when they first met, was wholly absorbed in the delicious details that made her herself and no other.Presently he rose and approached the case before which she stood.Its glass shelves were crowded with small broken objects--hardly recognisable domestic utensils,ornaments and personal trifles--made of glass, of clay,of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances.
"It seems cruel," she said, "that after a while nothing matters ...any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people,and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: 'Use unknown.'"
"Yes; but meanwhile--"
"Ah, meanwhile--"
As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff,her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose,and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath,it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and colour should ever suffer the stupid law of change.
"Meanwhile everything matters--that concerns you," he said.
She looked at him thoughtfully, and turned back to the divan. He sat down beside her and waited;but suddenly he heard a step echoing far off down the empty rooms, and felt the pressure of the minutes.
"What is it you wanted to tell me?" she asked, as if she had received the same warning.
"What I wanted to tell you?" he rejoined. "Why, that I believe you came to New York because you were afraid."
"Afraid?"
"Of my coming to Washington."
She looked down at her muff, and he saw her hands stir in it uneasily.
"Well--?"
"Well--yes," she said.
"You _were_ afraid?You knew--?"
"Yes: I knew ..."
"Well, then?" he insisted.
"Well, then: this is better, isn't it?" she returned with a long questioning sigh.
"Better--?"
"We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?"
"To have you here, you mean--in reach and yet out of reach?To meet you in this way, on the sly?It's the very reverse of what I want. I told you the other day what I wanted."
She hesitated. "And you still think this--worse?"
"A thousand times!" He paused. "It would be easy to lie to you; but the truth is I think it detestable."
"Oh, so do I!" she cried with a deep breath of relief.
He sprang up impatiently. "Well, then--it's my turn to ask: what is it, in God's name, that you think better?"
She hung her head and continued to clasp and unclasp her hands in her muff. The step drew nearer,and a guardian in a braided cap walked listlessly through the room like a ghost stalking through a necropolis.They fixed their eyes simultaneously on the case opposite them,and when the official figure had vanished down a vista of mummies and sarcophagi Archer spoke again.
"What do you think better?"
Instead of answering she murmured: "I promised Granny to stay with her because it seemed to me that here I should be safer. "
"From me?"
She bent her head slightly, without looking at him.
"Safer from loving me?"
Her profile did not stir, but he saw a tear overflow on her lashes and hang in a mesh of her veil.
"Safer from doing irreparable harm. Don't let us be like all the others!" she protested.
"What others?I don't profess to be different from my kind. I'm consumed by the same wants and the same longings."
She glanced at him with a kind of terror, and he saw a faint colour steal into her cheeks.
"Shall I--once come to you; and then go home?" she suddenly hazarded in a low clear voice.
The blood rushed to the young man's forehead. "Dearest!" he said, without moving. It seemed as if he held his heart in his hands,like a full cup that the least motion might overbrim.
Then her last phrase struck his ear and his face clouded. "Go home?What do you mean by going home?"
"Home to my husband."
"And you expect me to say yes to that?"
She raised her troubled eyes to his. "What else is there?I can't stay here and lie to the people who've been good to me."
"But that's the very reason why I ask you to come away!"
"And destroy their lives, when they've helped me to remake mine?"
Archer sprang to his feet and stood looking down on her in inarticulate despair.It would have been easy to say: "Yes, come; come once." He knew the power she would put in his hands if she consented;there would be no difficulty then in persuading her not to go back to her husband.
But something silenced the word on his lips.A sort of passionate honesty in her made it inconceivable that he should try to draw her into that familiar trap."If I were to let her come," he said to himself, "I should have to let her go again. " And that was not to be imagined.
But he saw the shadow of the lashes on her wet cheek, and wavered.
"After all," he began again, "we have lives of our own.... There's no use attempting the impossible.You're so unprejudiced about some things, so used, as you say, to looking at the Gorgon,that I don't know why you're afraid to face our case,and see it as it really is--unless you think the sacrifice is not worth making."
She stood up also, her lips tightening under a rapid frown.
"Call it that, then--I must go," she said, drawing her little watch from her bosom.
She turned away, and he followed and caught her by the wrist. "Well, then: come to me once," he said, his head turning suddenly at the thought of losing her;and for a second or two they looked at each other almost like enemies.
"When?" he insisted. "Tomorrow?"
She hesitated. "The day after."
"Dearest--!" he said again.
She had disengaged her wrist; but for a moment they continued to hold each other's eyes,and he saw that her face, which had grown very pale, was flooded with a deep inner radiance.His heart beat with awe: he felt that he had never before beheld love visible.
"Oh, I shall be late--good-bye. No, don't come any farther than this," she cried,walking hurriedly away down the long room,as if the reflected radiance in his eyes had frightened her.When she reached the door she turned for a moment to wave a quick farewell.
Archer walked home alone. Darkness was falling when he let himself into his house,and he looked about at the familiar objects in the hall as if he viewed them from the other side of the grave.
The parlour-maid, hearing his step, ran up the stairs to light the gas on the upper landing.
"Is Mrs. Archer in?"
"No, sir; Mrs. Archer went out in the carriage after luncheon, and hasn't come back."
With a sense of relief he entered the library and flung himself down in his armchair.The parlour-maid followed, bringing the student lamp and shaking some coals onto the dying fire.When she left he continued to sit motionless, his elbows on his knees,his chin on his clasped hands, his eyes fixed on the red grate.
He sat there without conscious thoughts, without sense of the lapse of time,in a deep and grave amazement that seemed to suspend life rather than quicken it."This was what had to be, then ... this was what had to be," he kept repeating to himself,as if he hung in the clutch of doom. What he had dreamed of had been so different that there was a mortal chill in his rapture.
The door opened and May came in.
"I'm dreadfully late--you weren't worried, were you?" she asked, laying her hand on his shoulder with one of her rare caresses.
He looked up astonished. "Is it late?"
"After seven. I believe you've been asleep!" She laughed, and drawing out her hat pins tossed her velvet hat on the sofa.She looked paler than usual, but sparkling with an unwonted animation.
"I went to see Granny, and just as I was going away Ellen came in from a walk;so I stayed and had a long talk with her. It was ages since we'd had a real talk...." She had dropped into her usual armchair, facing his,and was running her fingers through her rumpled hair. He fancied she expected him to speak.
"A really good talk," she went on, smiling with what seemed to Archer an unnatural vividness."She was so dear--just like the old Ellen. I'm afraid I haven't been fair to her lately. I've sometimes thought--"
Archer stood up and leaned against the mantelpiece, out of the radius of the lamp.
"Yes, you've thought--?" he echoed as she paused.
"Well, perhaps I haven't judged her fairly. She's so different--at least on the surface.She takes up such odd people--she seems to like to make herself conspicuous.I suppose it's the life she's led in that fast European society;no doubt we seem dreadfully dull to her. But I don't want to judge her unfairly."
She paused again, a little breathless with the unwonted length of her speech,and sat with her lips slightly parted and a deep blush on her cheeks.
Archer, as he looked at her, was reminded of the glow which had suffused her face in the Mission Garden at St.Augustine. He became aware of the same obscure effort in her,the same reaching out toward something beyond the usual range of her vision.
"She hates Ellen," he thought, "and she's trying to overcome the feeling,and to get me to help her to overcome it."
The thought moved him, and for a moment he was on the point of breaking the silence between them, and throwing himself on her mercy.
"You understand, don't you," she went on, "why the family have sometimes been annoyed?We all did what we could for her at first; but she never seemed to understand.And now this idea of going to see Mrs. Beaufort, of going there in Granny's carriage!I'm afraid she's quite alienated the van der Luydens ..."
"Ah," said Archer with an impatient laugh. The open door had closed between them again.
"It's time to dress; we're dining out, aren't we?" he asked, moving from the fire.
She rose also, but lingered near the hearth. As he walked past her she moved forward impulsively,as though to detain him: their eyes met,and he saw that hers were of the same swimming blue as when he had left her to drive to Jersey City.
She flung her arms about his neck and pressed her cheek to his.
"You haven't kissed me today," she said in a whisper; and he felt her tremble in his arms.
XXXII.
"At the court of the Tuileries," said Mr. Sillerton Jackson with his reminiscent smile,"such things were pretty openly tolerated."
The scene was the van der Luydens' black walnut dining-room in Madison Avenue,and the time the evening after Newland Archer's visit to the Museum of Art. Mr. and Mrs.van der Luyden had come to town for a few days from Skuytercliff,whither they had precipitately fled at the announcement of Beaufort's failure.It had been represented to them that the disarray into which society had been thrown by this deplorable affair made their presence in town more necessary than ever. It was one of the occasions when, as Mrs. Archer put it, they "owed it to society" to show themselves at the Opera, and even to open their own doors.
"It will never do, my dear Louisa, to let people like Mrs.Lemuel Struthers think they can step into Regina's shoes.It is just at such times that new people push in and get a footing.It was owing to the epidemic of chicken-pox in New York the winter Mrs.Struthers first appeared that the married men slipped away to her house while their wives were in the nursery.You and dear Henry, Louisa, must stand in the breach as you always have."
Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden could not remain deaf to such a call,and reluctantly but heroically they had come to town, unmuffled the house,and sent out invitations for two dinners and an evening reception.
On this particular evening they had invited Sillerton Jackson, Mrs.Archer and Newland and his wife to go with them to the Opera,where Faust was being sung for the first time that winter.Nothing was done without ceremony under the van der Luyden roof,and though there were but four guests the repast had begun at seven punctually,so that the proper sequence of courses might be served without haste before the gentlemen settled down to their cigars.
Archer had not seen his wife since the evening before. He had left early for the office,where he had plunged into an accumulation of unimportant business.In the afternoon one of the senior partners had made an unexpected call on his time;and he had reached home so late that May had preceded him to the van der Luydens', and sent back the carriage.
Now, across the Skuytercliff carnations and the massive plate, she struck him as pale and languid;but her eyes shone, and she talked with exaggerated animation.
The subject which had called forth Mr. Sillerton Jackson's favourite allusion had been brought up (Archer fancied not without intention) by their hostess.The Beaufort failure, or rather the Beaufort attitude since the failure,was still a fruitful theme for the drawing-room moralist;and after it had been thoroughly examined and condemned Mrs.van der Luyden had turned her scrupulous eyes on May Archer.
"Is it possible, dear, that what I hear is true?I was told your grandmother Mingott's carriage was seen standing at Mrs. Beaufort's door." It was noticeable that she no longer called the offending lady by her Christian name.
May's colour rose, and Mrs. Archer put in hastily: "If it was,I'm convinced it was there without Mrs. Mingott's knowledge."
"Ah, you think--?" Mrs. van der Luyden paused, sighed, and glanced at her husband.
"I'm afraid," Mr. van der Luyden said, "that Madame Olenska's kind heart may have led her into the imprudence of calling on Mrs. Beaufort."
"Or her taste for peculiar people," put in Mrs. Archer in a dry tone,while her eyes dwelt innocently on her son's.
"I'm sorry to think it of Madame Olenska," said Mrs. van der Luyden; and Mrs. Archer murmured: "Ah,my dear--and after you'd had her twice at Skuytercliff!"
It was at this point that Mr. Jackson seized the chance to place his favourite allusion.