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Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish
winter sky the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept
its distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than
thirty feet from its awful front. Now,
as Archer rang the bell, the long tinkle seemed to echo through a mausoleum;
and the surprise of the butler who at length responded to the call was as
great as though he had been summoned from his final sleep.
Happily Archer was of the family, and therefore,
irregular though his arrival was, entitled to be informed that the Countess
Olenska was out, having driven to afternoon service with Mrs. van der Luyden
exactly three quarters of an hour earlier.
"Mr. van der Luyden," the butler continued,
"is in, sir; but my impression is that he is either finishing his nap
or else reading yesterday's Evening Post.
I heard him say, sir, on his return from church this morning, that he
intended to look through the Evening Post after luncheon; if you like, sir,
I might go to the library door and listen--"
But Archer, thanking him, said that he would go and
meet the ladies; and the butler, obviously relieved, closed the door on him
majestically.
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
manoeuvre.
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.
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