A groom took the cutter to the stables, and Archer struck through the park to the high-road.The village of Skuytercliff was only a mile and a half away, but he knew that Mrs.van der Luyden never walked, and that he must keep to the road to meet the carriage. Presently,however, coming down a foot-path that crossed the highway,he caught sight of a slight figure in a red cloak, with a big dog running ahead.He hurried forward, and Madame Olenska stopped short with a smile of welcome.
"Ah, you've come!" she said, and drew her hand from her muff.
The red cloak made her look gay and vivid, like the Ellen Mingott of old days;and he laughed as he took her hand, and answered: "I came to see what you were running away from."
Her face clouded over, but she answered: "Ah, well--you will see, presently."
The answer puzzled him. "Why--do you mean that you've been overtaken?"
She shrugged her shoulders, with a little movement like Nastasia's, and rejoined in a lighter tone: "Shall we walk on?I'm so cold after the sermon. And what does it matter, now you're here to protect me?"
The blood rose to his temples and he caught a fold of her cloak."Ellen--what is it?You must tell me."
"Oh, presently--let's run a race first: my feet are freezing to the ground," she cried;and gathering up the cloak she fled away across the snow,the dog leaping about her with challenging barks. For a moment Archer stood watching,his gaze delighted by the flash of the red meteor against the snow; then he started after her,and they met, panting and laughing, at a wicket that led into the park.
She looked up at him and smiled. "I knew you'd come!"
"That shows you wanted me to," he returned, with a disproportionate joy in their nonsense.The white glitter of the trees filled the air with its own mysterious brightness,and as they walked on over the snow the ground seemed to sing under their feet.
"Where did you come from?" Madame Olenska asked.
He told her, and added: "It was because I got your note."
After a pause she said, with a just perceptible chill in her voice: "May asked you to take care of me."
"I didn't need any asking."
"You mean--I'm so evidently helpless and defenceless?What a poor thing you must all think me!But women here seem not--seem never to feel the need: any more than the blessed in heaven."
He lowered his voice to ask: "What sort of a need?"
"Ah, don't ask me!I don't speak your language," she retorted petulantly.
The answer smote him like a blow, and he stood still in the path, looking down at her.
"What did I come for, if I don't speak yours?"
"Oh, my friend--!" She laid her hand lightly on his arm, and he pleaded earnestly:"Ellen--why won't you tell me what's happened?"
She shrugged again. "Does anything ever happen in heaven?"
He was silent, and they walked on a few yards without exchanging a word. Finally she said:"I will tell you--but where, where, where?One can't be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with all the doors wide open,and always a servant bringing tea, or a log for the fire, or the newspaper!Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?You're so shy, and yet you're so public.I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage,before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds."
"Ah, you don't like us!" Archer exclaimed.
They were walking past the house of the old Patroon,with its squat walls and small square windows compactly grouped about a central chimney.The shutters stood wide, and through one of the newly-washed windows Archer caught the light of a fire.
"Why--the house is open!" he said.
She stood still. "No; only for today, at least. I wanted to see it, and Mr.van der Luyden had the fire lit and the windows opened,so that we might stop there on the way back from church this morning." She ran up the steps and tried the door. "It's still unlocked--what luck!Come in and we can have a quiet talk. Mrs.van der Luyden has driven over to see her old aunts at Rhinebeck and we shan't be missed at the house for another hour. "
He followed her into the narrow passage. His spirits, which had dropped at her last words,rose with an irrational leap. The homely little house stood there,its panels and brasses shining in the firelight, as if magically created to receive them.A big bed of embers still gleamed in the kitchen chimney,under an iron pot hung from an ancient crane.Rush-bottomed arm-chairs faced each other across the tiled hearth,and rows of Delft plates stood on shelves against the walls.Archer stooped over and threw a log upon the embers.
Madame Olenska, dropping her cloak, sat down in one of the chairs.Archer leaned against the chimney and looked at her.
"You're laughing now; but when you wrote me you were unhappy," he said.
"Yes." She paused. "But I can't feel unhappy when you're here."
"I sha'n't be here long," he rejoined, his lips stiffening with the effort to say just so much and no more.
"No; I know. But I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy."
The words stole through him like a temptation,and to close his senses to it he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black tree-boles against the snow.But it was as if she too had shifted her place, and he still saw her,between himself and the trees, drooping over the fire with her indolent smile.Archer's heart was beating insubordinately.What if it were from him that she had been running away,and if she had waited to tell him so till they were here alone together in this secret room?
"Ellen, if I'm really a help to you--if you really wanted me to come--tell me what's wrong,tell me what it is you're running away from," he insisted.
He spoke without shifting his position, without even turning to look at her:if the thing was to happen, it was to happen in this way,with the whole width of the room between them, and his eyes still fixed on the outer snow.
For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment Archer imagined her, almost heard her,stealing up behind him to throw her light arms about his neck. While he waited,soul and body throbbing with the miracle to come,his eyes mechanically received the image of a heavily-coated man with his fur collar turned up who was advancing along the path to the house. The man was Julius Beaufort.
"Ah--!" Archer cried, bursting into a laugh.
Madame Olenska had sprung up and moved to his side, slipping her hand into his;but after a glance through the window her face paled and she shrank back.
"So that was it?" Archer said derisively.
"I didn't know he was here," Madame Olenska murmured. Her hand still clung to Archer's;but he drew away from her, and walking out into the passage threw open the door of the house.
"Hallo, Beaufort--this way!Madame Olenska was expecting you," he said.
During his journey back to New York the next morning,Archer relived with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at Skuytercliff.
Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska, had, as usual,carried off the situation high-handedly.His way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them,if they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of nonexistence. Archer,as the three strolled back through the park, was aware of this odd sense of disembodiment;and humbling as it was to his vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved.
Beaufort had entered the little house with his usual easy assurance;but he could not smile away the vertical line between his eyes.It was fairly clear that Madame Olenska had not known that he was coming,though her words to Archer had hinted at the possibility; at any rate,she had evidently not told him where she was going when she left New York,and her unexplained departure had exasperated him.The ostensible reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very night before,of a "perfect little house," not in the market, which was really just the thing for her,but would be snapped up instantly if she didn't take it;and he was loud in mock-reproaches for the dance she had led him in running away just as he had found it.
"If only this new dodge for talking along a wire had been a little bit nearer perfection I might have told you all this from town,and been toasting my toes before the club fire at this minute,instead of tramping after you through the snow," he grumbled,disguising a real irritation under the pretence of it;and at this opening Madame Olenska twisted the talk away to the fantastic possibility that they might one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or even--incredible dream!--from one town to another. This struck from all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne,and such platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking against time,and dealing with a new invention in which it would seem ingenuous to believe too soon;and the question of the telephone carried them safely back to the big house.
Mrs. van der Luyden had not yet returned;and Archer took his leave and walked off to fetch the cutter,while Beaufort followed the Countess Olenska indoors. It was probable that,little as the van der Luydens encouraged unannounced visits, he could count on being asked to dine,and sent back to the station to catch the nine o'clock train;but more than that he would certainly not get,for it would be inconceivable to his hosts that a gentleman travelling without luggage should wish to spend the night,and distasteful to them to propose it to a person with whom they were on terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.
Beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it;and his taking the long journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience.He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska;and Beaufort had only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women.His dull and childless home had long since palled on him;and in addition to more permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in his own set.This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly flying:the question was whether she had fled because his importunities displeased her,or because she did not wholly trust herself to resist them; unless, indeed,all her talk of flight had been a blind, and her departure no more than a manœuvre.
Archer did not really believe this. Little as he had actually seen of Madame Olenska,he was beginning to think that he could read her face, and if not her face, her voice;and both had betrayed annoyance, and even dismay, at Beaufort's sudden appearance. But, after all,if this were the case, was it not worse than if she had left New York for the express purpose of meeting him?If she had done that, she ceased to be an object of interest,she threw in her lot with the vulgarest of dissemblers:a woman engaged in a love affair with Beaufort "classed" herself irretrievably.
No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging Beaufort, and probably despising him,she was yet drawn to him by all that gave him an advantage over the other men about her:his habit of two continents and two societies,his familiar association with artists and actors and people generally in the world's eye,and his careless contempt for local prejudices. Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated,he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness,made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters,whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park.How should any one coming from a wider world not feel the difference and be attracted by it?
Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation,had said to Archer that he and she did not talk the same language;and the young man knew that in some respects this was true.But Beaufort understood every turn of her dialect, and spoke it fluently: his view of life,his tone, his attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in Count Olenski's letter.This might seem to be to his disadvantage with Count Olenski's wife;but Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past.She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it;but what had charmed her in it would still charm her, even though it were against her will.
Thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man make out the case for Beaufort,and for Beaufort's victim. A longing to enlighten her was strong in him;and there were moments when he imagined that all she asked was to be enlightened.
That evening he unpacked his books from London.The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of Herbert Spencer,another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant tales,and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews.He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast;but though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover,he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly,among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him:"The House of Life." He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books;so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender,that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.All through the night he pursued through those enchanted pages the vision of a woman who had the face of Ellen Olenska;but when he woke the next morning, and looked out at the brownstone houses across the street,and thought of his desk in Mr. Letterblair's office, and the family pew in Grace Church,his hour in the park of Skuytercliff became as far outside the pale of probability as the visions of the night.
"Mercy, how pale you look, Newland!" Janey commented over the coffee-cups at breakfast; and his mother added: "Newland, dear,I've noticed lately that you've been coughing; I do hope you're not letting yourself be overworked?" For it was the conviction of both ladies that, under the iron despotism of his senior partners,the young man's life was spent in the most exhausting professional labours--and he had never thought it necessary to undeceive them.
The next two or three days dragged by heavily. The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth,and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.He heard nothing of the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house,and though he met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the whist-tables.It was not till the fourth evening that he found a note awaiting him on his return home."Come late tomorrow: I must explain to you. Ellen." These were the only words it contained.
The young man, who was dining out, thrust the note into his pocket,smiling a little at the Frenchness of the "to you." After dinner he went to a play;and it was not until his return home, after midnight,that he drew Madame Olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a number of times.There were several ways of answering it,and he gave considerable thought to each one during the watches of an agitated night.That on which, when morning came, he finally decided was to pitch some clothes into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was leaving that very afternoon for St. Augustine.
XVI.
When Archer walked down the sandy main street of St.Augustine to the house which had been pointed out to him as Mr. Welland's,and saw May Welland standing under a magnolia with the sun in her hair,he wondered why he had waited so long to come.
Here was the truth, here was reality, here was the life that belonged to him; and he,who fancied himself so scornful of arbitrary restraints,had been afraid to break away from his desk because of what people might think of his stealing a holiday!
Her first exclamation was: "Newland--has anything happened?" and it occurred to him that it would have been more "feminine" if she had instantly read in his eyes why he had come.But when he answered:"Yes--I found I had to see you," her happy blushes took the chill from her surprise, and he saw how easily he would be forgiven,and how soon even Mr. Letterblair's mild disapproval would be smiled away by a tolerant family.
Early as it was, the main street was no place for any but formal greetings,and Archer longed to be alone with May, and to pour out all his tenderness and his impatience.It still lacked an hour to the late Welland breakfast-time,and instead of asking him to come in she proposed that they should walk out to an old orange-garden beyond the town.She had just been for a row on the river,and the sun that netted the little waves with gold seemed to have caught her in its meshes.Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered like silver wire;and her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity.As she walked beside Archer with her long swinging gait her face wore the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete.
To Archer's strained nerves the vision was as soothing as the sight of the blue sky and the lazy river.They sat down on a bench under the orange-trees and he put his arm about her and kissed her.It was like drinking at a cold spring with the sun on it;but his pressure may have been more vehement than he had intended,for the blood rose to her face and she drew back as if he had startled her.
"What is it?" he asked, smiling; and she looked at him with surprise, and answered: "Nothing."
A slight embarrassment fell on them, and her hand slipped out of his.It was the only time that he had kissed her on the lips except for their fugitive embrace in the Beaufort conservatory,and he saw that she was disturbed, and shaken out of her cool boyish composure.
"Tell me what you do all day," he said, crossing his arms under his tilted-back head,and pushing his hat forward to screen the sun-dazzle.To let her talk about familiar and simple things was the easiest way of carrying on his own independent train of thought;and he sat listening to her simple chronicle of swimming, sailing and riding,varied by an occasional dance at the primitive inn when a man-of-war came in.A few pleasant people from Philadelphia and Baltimore were picknicking at the inn,and the Selfridge Merrys had come down for three weeks because Kate Merry had had bronchitis.They were planning to lay out a lawn tennis court on the sands;but no one but Kate and May had racquets, and most of the people had not even heard of the game.
All this kept her very busy, and she had not had time to do more than look at the little vellum book that Archer had sent her the week before (the "Sonnets from the Portuguese"); but she was learning by heart"How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," because it was one of the first things he had ever read to her; and it amused her to be able to tell him that Kate Merry had never even heard of a poet called Robert Browning.
Presently she started up, exclaiming that they would be late for breakfast;and they hurried back to the tumble-down house with its pointless porch and unpruned hedge of plumbago and pink geraniums where the Wellands were installed for the winter. Mr. Welland's sensitive domesticity shrank from the discomforts of the slovenly southern hotel, and at immense expense, and in face of almost insuperable difficulties, Mrs. Welland was obliged, year after year, to improvise an establishment partly made up of discontented New York servants and partly drawn from the local African supply.
"The doctors want my husband to feel that he is in his own home;otherwise he would be so wretched that the climate would not do him any good," she explained,winter after winter, to the sympathising Philadelphians and Baltimoreans; and Mr. Welland,beaming across a breakfast table miraculously supplied with the most varied delicacies,was presently saying to Archer: "You see, my dear fellow, we camp--we literally camp.I tell my wife and May that I want to teach them how to rough it."
Mr. and Mrs. Welland had been as much surprised as their daughter by the young man's sudden arrival;but it had occurred to him to explain that he had felt himself on the verge of a nasty cold,and this seemed to Mr. Welland an all-sufficient reason for abandoning any duty.
"You can't be too careful, especially toward spring," he said,heaping his plate with straw-coloured griddle-cakes and drowning them in golden syrup."If I'd only been as prudent at your age May would have been dancing at the Assemblies now,instead of spending her winters in a wilderness with an old invalid."
"Oh, but I love it here, Papa; you know I do.If only Newland could stay I should like it a thousand times better than New York."
"Newland must stay till he has quite thrown off his cold," said Mrs. Welland indulgently;and the young man laughed, and said he supposed there was such a thing as one's profession.
He managed, however, after an exchange of telegrams with the firm, to make his cold last a week;and it shed an ironic light on the situation to know that Mr.Letterblair's indulgence was partly due to the satisfactory way in which his brilliant young junior partner had settled the troublesome matter of the Olenski divorce. Mr. Letterblair had let Mrs. Welland know that Mr. Archer had "rendered an invaluable service" to the whole family, and that old Mrs. Manson Mingott had been particularly pleased; and one day when May had gone for a drive with her father in the only vehicle the place produced Mrs. Welland took occasion to touch on a topic which she always avoided in her daughter's presence.
"I'm afraid Ellen's ideas are not at all like ours.She was barely eighteen when Medora Manson took her back to Europe--you remember the excitement when she appeared in black at her coming-out ball?Another of Medora's fads--really this time it was almost prophetic!That must have been at least twelve years ago; and since then Ellen has never been to America.No wonder she is completely Europeanised."
"But European society is not given to divorce:Countess Olenska thought she would be conforming to American ideas in asking for her freedom." It was the first time that the young man had pronounced her name since he had left Skuytercliff,and he felt the colour rise to his cheek.
Mrs. Welland smiled compassionately. "That is just like the extraordinary things that foreigners invent about us.They think we dine at two o'clock and countenance divorce!That is why it seems to me so foolish to entertain them when they come to New York.They accept our hospitality, and then they go home and repeat the same stupid stories."
Archer made no comment on this, and Mrs. Welland continued:"But we do most thoroughly appreciate your persuading Ellen to give up the idea.Her grandmother and her uncle Lovell could do nothing with her;both of them have written that her changing her mind was entirely due to your influence--in fact she said so to her grandmother.She has an unbounded admiration for you. Poor Ellen--she was always a wayward child. I wonder what her fate will be?"
"What we've all contrived to make it," he felt like answering."If you'd all of you rather she should be Beaufort's mistress than some decent fellow's wife you've certainly gone the right way about it. "
He wondered what Mrs. Welland would have said if he had uttered the words instead of merely thinking them.He could picture the sudden decomposure of her firm placid features,to which a lifelong mastery over trifles had given an air of factitious authority.Traces still lingered on them of a fresh beauty like her daughter's;and he asked himself if May's face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence.
Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence,the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!
"I verily believe," Mrs. Welland continued,"that if the horrible business had come out in the newspapers it would have been my husband's death-blow.I don't know any of the details; I only ask not to,as I told poor Ellen when she tried to talk to me about it. Having an invalid to care for,I have to keep my mind bright and happy. But Mr. Welland was terribly upset;he had a slight temperature every morning while we were waiting to hear what had been decided.It was the horror of his girl's learning that such things were possible--but of course,dear Newland, you felt that too. We all knew that you were thinking of May."
"I'm always thinking of May," the young man rejoined, rising to cut short the conversation.
He had meant to seize the opportunity of his private talk with Mrs.Welland to urge her to advance the date of his marriage.But he could think of no arguments that would move her, and with a sense of relief he saw Mr. Welland and May driving up to the door.
His only hope was to plead again with May,and on the day before his departure he walked with her to the ruinous garden of the Spanish Mission.The background lent itself to allusions to European scenes; and May,who was looking her loveliest under a wide-brimmed hat that cast a shadow of mystery over her too-clear eyes,kindled into eagerness as he spoke of Granada and the Alhambra.
"We might be seeing it all this spring--even the Easter ceremonies at Seville," he urged,exaggerating his demands in the hope of a larger concession.
"Easter in Seville?And it will be Lent next week!" she laughed.
"Why shouldn't we be married in Lent?" he rejoined; but she looked so shocked that he saw his mistake.
"Of course I didn't mean that, dearest; but soon after Easter--so that we could sail at the end of April.I know I could arrange it at the office."
She smiled dreamily upon the possibility; but he perceived that to dream of it sufficed her.It was like hearing him read aloud out of his poetry books the beautiful things that could not possibly happen in real life.
"Oh, do go on, Newland; I do love your descriptions."
"But why should they be only descriptions?Why shouldn't we make them real?"
"We shall, dearest, of course; next year." Her voice lingered over it.
"Don't you want them to be real sooner?Can't I persuade you to break away now?"
She bowed her head, vanishing from him under her conniving hat-brim.
"Why should we dream away another year?Look at me, dear!Don't you understand how I want you for my wife?"
For a moment she remained motionless; then she raised on him eyes of such despairing clearness that he half-released her waist from his hold.But suddenly her look changed and deepened inscrutably. "I'm not sure if I _do_ understand," she said. "Is it--is it because you're not certain of continuing to care for me?"
Archer sprang up from his seat. "My God--perhaps--I don't know," he broke out angrily.
May Welland rose also; as they faced each other she seemed to grow in womanly stature and dignity.Both were silent for a moment, as if dismayed by the unforeseen trend of their words:then she said in a low voice: "If that is it--is there some one else?"
"Some one else--between you and me?" He echoed her words slowly, as though they were only half-intelligible and he wanted time to repeat the question to himself.She seemed to catch the uncertainty of his voice, for she went on in a deepening tone:"Let us talk frankly, Newland. Sometimes I've felt a difference in you;especially since our engagement has been announced."
"Dear--what madness!" he recovered himself to exclaim.
She met his protest with a faint smile. "If it is, it won't hurt us to talk about it." She paused,and added, lifting her head with one of her noble movements: "Or even if it's true: why shouldn't we speak of it?You might so easily have made a mistake."
He lowered his head, staring at the black leaf-pattern on the sunny path at their feet."Mistakes are always easy to make; but if I had made one of the kind you suggest,is it likely that I should be imploring you to hasten our marriage?"
She looked downward too, disturbing the pattern with the point of her sunshade while she struggled for expression."Yes," she said at length."You might want--once for all--to settle the question: it's one way."
Her quiet lucidity startled him, but did not mislead him into thinking her insensible.Under her hat-brim he saw the pallor of her profile,and a slight tremor of the nostril above her resolutely steadied lips.
"Well--?" he questioned, sitting down on the bench,and looking up at her with a frown that he tried to make playful.
She dropped back into her seat and went on:"You mustn't think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine.One hears and one notices--one has one's feelings and ideas. And of course,long before you told me that you cared for me,I'd known that there was some one else you were interested in;every one was talking about it two years ago at Newport.And once I saw you sitting together on the verandah at a dance--and when she came back into the house her face was sad,and I felt sorry for her; I remembered it afterward, when we were engaged."
Her voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and she sat clasping and unclasping her hands about the handle of her sunshade.The young man laid his upon them with a gentle pressure;his heart dilated with an inexpressible relief.
"My dear child--was _that_ it?If you only knew the truth!"
She raised her head quickly. "Then there is a truth I don't know?"
He kept his hand over hers. "I meant, the truth about the old story you speak of."