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.