"Oh, didn't I tell you?" Dallas pursued. "Fanny made me swear to do three things while I was in Paris:get her the score of the last Debussy songs,go to the Grand-Guignol and see Madame Olenska.You know she was awfully good to Fanny when Mr.Beaufort sent her over from Buenos Ayres to the Assomption.Fanny hadn't any friends in Paris,and Madame Olenska used to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays.I believe she was a great friend of the first Mrs.Beaufort's. And she's our cousin, of course.So I rang her up this morning, before I went out,and told her you and I were here for two days and wanted to see her. "
Archer continued to stare at him."You told her I was here?"
"Of course--why not?" Dallas's eye brows went up whimsically. Then,getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father's with a confidential pressure.
"I say, father: what was she like?"
Archer felt his colour rise under his son's unabashed gaze."Come, own up: you and she were great pals, weren't you?Wasn't she most awfully lovely?"
"Lovely?I don't know. She was different."
"Ah--there you have it!That's what it always comes to, doesn't it?When she comes, _she's different_--and one doesn't know why.It's exactly what I feel about Fanny."
His father drew back a step, releasing his arm. "About Fanny?But, my dear fellow--I should hope so!Only I don't see--"
"Dash it, Dad, don't be prehistoric!Wasn't she--once--your Fanny?"
Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation.He was the first-born of Newland and May Archer,yet it had never been possible to inculcate in him even the rudiments of reserve. "What's the use of making mysteries?It only makes people want to nose 'em out," he always objected when enjoined to discretion.But Archer, meeting his eyes,saw the filial light under their banter.
"My Fanny?"
"Well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for:only you didn't," continued his surprising son.
"I didn't," echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.
"No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said--"
"Your mother?"
"Yes: the day before she died.It was when she sent for me alone--you remember?She said she knew we were safe with you,and always would be, because once,when she asked you to,you'd given up the thing you most wanted."
Archer received this strange communication in silence.His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."
"No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you?And you never told each other anything.You just sat and watched each other,and guessed at what was going on underneath.A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact!Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.--I say, Dad," Dallas broke off, "you're not angry with me?If you are, let's make it up and go and lunch at Henri's.I've got to rush out to Versailles afterward."
Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles.He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris.He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
After a little while he did not regret Dallas's indiscretion.It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that,after all, some one had guessed and pitied....And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably.Dallas, for all his affectionate insight,would not have understood that. To the boy, no doubt,the episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration,of wasted forces. But was it really no more?For a long time Archer sat on a bench in the Champs Élysées and wondered,while the stream of life rolled by....
A few streets away, a few hours away,Ellen Olenska waited.She had never gone back to her husband,and when he had died, some years before,she had made no change in her way of living.There was nothing now to keep her and Archer apart--and that afternoon he was to see her.
He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries gardens to the Louvre. She had once told him that she often went there, and he had a fancy to spend the intervening time in a place where he could think of her as perhaps having lately been. For an hour or more he wandered from gallery to gallery through the dazzle of afternoon light, and one by one the pictures burst on him in their half-forgotten splendour, filling his soul with the long echoes of beauty. After all, his life had been too starved....
Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian,he found himself saying:"But I'm only fifty-seven--" and then he turned away.For such summer dreams it was too late;but surely not for a quiet harvest of friendship,of comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.
He went back to the hotel,where he and Dallas were to meet;and together they walked again across the Place de la Concorde and over the bridge that leads to the Chamber of Deputies.
Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his father's mind,was talking excitedly and abundantly of Versailles.He had had but one previous glimpse of it,during a holiday trip in which he had tried to pack all the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to go with the family to Switzerland; and tumultuous enthusiasm and cock-sure criticism tripped each other up on his lips.
As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness increased.The boy was not insensitive, he knew;but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal. "That's it: they feel equal to things--they know their way about," he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.
Suddenly Dallas stopped short,grasping his father's arm. "Oh, by Jove," he exclaimed.
They had come out into the great tree-planted space before the Invalides.The dome of Mansart floated ethereally above the budding trees and the long grey front of the building: drawing up into itself all the rays of afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbol of the race's glory.
Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square near one of the avenues radiating from the Invalides; and he had pictured the quarter as quiet and almost obscure, forgetting the central splendour that lit it up. Now, by some queer process of association, that golden light became for him the pervading illumination in which she lived. For nearly thirty years, her life--of which he knew so strangely little--had been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt to be too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs. He thought of the theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at, the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the young Frenchman who had once said to him: "Ah, good conversation--there is nothing like it, is there?"
Archer had not seen M. Rivière, or heard of him,for nearly thirty years;and that fact gave the measure of his ignorance of Madame Olenska's existence.More than half a lifetime divided them,and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know,in a society he but faintly guessed at,in conditions he would never wholly understand.During that time he had been living with his youthful memory of her;but she had doubtless had other and more tangible companionship.Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something apart;but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel,where there was not time to pray every day....