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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.
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