The Age of Innocence
_How on earth can I keep you?_ crying out to her beneath his words.
She sat motionless, with lowered lids. "Oh--I shan't go yet!"
"Not yet? Some time, then? Some time that you already foresee?"
At that she raised her clearest eyes. "I promise you: not as long as
you hold out. Not as long as we can look straight at each other like
this."
He dropped into his chair. What her answer really said was: "If you
lift a finger you'll drive me back: back to all the abominations
you know of, and all the temptations you half guess." He understood
it as clearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept
him anchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred
submission.
"What a life for you!--" he groaned.
"Oh--as long as it's a part of yours."
"And mine a part of yours?"
She nodded.
"And that's to be all--for either of us?"
"Well; it _is_ all, isn't it?"
At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of her
face. She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but
quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only
to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands
acted not as a check but as a guide to him. They fell into his, while
her arms, extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let her
surrendered face say the rest.
They may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a few
moments; but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all she
had to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered. He must
do nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their future
in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it.
"Don't--don't be unhappy," she said, with a break in her voice, as she
drew her hands away; and he answered: "You won't go back--you won't go
back?" as if it were the one possibility he could not bear.
"I won't go back," she said; and turning away she opened the door and
led the way into the public dining-room.
The strident school-teachers were gathering up their possessions
preparatory to a straggling flight to the wharf; across the beach lay
the white steam-boat at the pier; and over the sunlit waters Boston
loomed in a line of haze.
XXV.
Once more on the boat, and in the presence of others, Archer felt a
tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him.
The day, according to any current valuation, had been a rather
ridiculous failure; he had not so much as touched Madame Olenska's hand
with his lips, or extracted one word from her that gave promise of
farther opportunities. Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied
love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his
passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted.
It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to
others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet
tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears
and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed
sincerity. It filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over,
and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of
playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt
her. Even after they had clasped hands for good-bye at the Fall River
station, and he had turned away alone, the conviction remained with him
of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed.
He wandered back to the club, and went and sat alone in the deserted
library, turning and turning over in his thoughts every separate second
of their hours together. It was clear to him, and it grew more clear
under closer scrutiny, that if she should finally decide on returning
to Europe--returning to her husband--it would not be because her old
life tempted her, even on the new terms offered. No: she would go only
if she felt herself becoming a temptation to Archer, a temptation to
fall away from the standard they had both set up. Her choice would be
to stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer; and it
depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded.
In the train these thoughts were still with him. They enclosed him
in a kind of golden haze, through which the faces about him looked
remote and indistinct: he had a feeling that if he spoke to his
fellow-travellers they would not understand what he was saying. In this
state of abstraction he found himself, the following morning, waking to
the reality of a stifling September day in New York. The heat-withered
faces in the long train streamed past him, and he continued to stare
at them through the same golden blur; but suddenly, as he left the
station, one of the faces detached itself, came closer and forced
itself upon his consciousness. It was, as he instantly recalled, the
face of the young man he had seen, the day before, passing out of the
Parker House, and had noted as not conforming to type, as not having an
American hotel face.
The same thing struck him now; and again he became aware of a dim stir
of former associations. The young man stood looking about him with the
dazed air of the foreigner flung upon the harsh mercies of American
travel; then he advanced toward Archer, lifted his hat, and said in
English: "Surely, Monsieur, we met in London?"
"Ah, to be sure: in London!" Archer grasped his hand with curiosity
and sympathy. "So you _did_ get here, after all?" he exclaimed, casting
a wondering eye on the astute and haggard little countenance of young
Carfry's French tutor.
"Oh, I got here--yes," M. Rivière smiled with drawn lips. "But not for
long; I return the day after tomorrow." He stood grasping his light
valise in one neatly gloved hand, and gazing anxiously, perplexedly,
almost appealingly, into Archer's face.
"I wonder, Monsieur, since I've had the good luck to run across you, if
I might--"
"I was just going to suggest it: come to luncheon, won't you? Down
town, I mean: if you'll look me up in my office I'll take you to a very
decent restaurant in that quarter."
M. Rivière was visibly touched and surprised. "You're too kind. But I
was only going to ask if you would tell me how to reach some sort of
conveyance. There are no porters, and no one here seems to listen--"
"I know: our American stations must surprise you. When you ask for
a porter they give you chewing-gum. But if you'll come along I'll
extricate you; and you must really lunch with me, you know."
The young man, after a just perceptible hesitation, replied, with
profuse thanks, and in a tone that did not carry complete conviction,
that he was already engaged; but when they had reached the comparative
reassurance of the street he asked if he might call that afternoon.
Archer, at ease in the midsummer leisure of the office, fixed an hour
and scribbled his address, which the Frenchman pocketed with reiterated
thanks and a wide flourish of his hat. A horse-car received him, and
Archer walked away.
Punctually at the hour M. Rivière appeared, shaved, smoothed-out, but
still unmistakably drawn and serious. Archer was alone in his office,
and the young man, before accepting the seat he proffered, began
abruptly: "I believe I saw you, sir, yesterday in Boston."
The statement was insignificant enough, and Archer was about to frame
an assent when his words were checked by something mysterious yet
illuminating in his visitor's insistent gaze.
"It is extraordinary, very extraordinary," M. Rivière continued, "that
we should have met in the circumstances in which I find myself."
"What circumstances?" Archer asked, wondering a little crudely if he
needed money.
M. Rivière continued to study him with tentative eyes. "I have come,
not to look for employment, as I spoke of doing when we last met, but
on a special mission--"
"Ah--!" Archer exclaimed. In a flash the two meetings had connected
themselves in his mind. He paused to take in the situation thus
suddenly lighted up for him, and M. Rivière also remained silent, as if
aware that what he had said was enough.
"A special mission," Archer at length repeated.
The young Frenchman, opening his palms, raised them slightly, and the
two men continued to look at each other across the office-desk till
Archer roused himself to say: "Do sit down"; whereupon M. Rivière
bowed, took a distant chair, and again waited.
"It was about this mission that you wanted to consult me?" Archer
finally asked.
M. Rivière bent his head. "Not in my own behalf: on that score I--I
have fully dealt with myself. I should like--if I may--to speak to you
about the Countess Olenska."
Archer had known for the last few minutes that the words were coming;
but when they came they sent the blood rushing to his temples as if he
had been caught by a bent-back branch in a thicket.
"And on whose behalf," he said, "do you wish to do this?"
M. Rivière met the question sturdily. "Well--I might say _hers_, if
it did not sound like a liberty. Shall I say instead: on behalf of
abstract justice?"
Archer considered him ironically. "In other words: you are Count
Olenski's messenger?"
He saw his blush more darkly reflected in M. Rivière's sallow
countenance. "Not to _you_, Monsieur. If I come to you, it is on quite
other grounds."
"What right have you, in the circumstances, to _be_ on any other ground?"
Archer retorted. "If you're an emissary you're an emissary."
The young man considered. "My mission is over: as far as the Countess
Olenska goes, it has failed."
"I can't help that," Archer rejoined on the same note of irony.
"No: but you can help--" M. Rivière paused, turned his hat about in
his still carefully gloved hands, looked into its lining and then back
at Archer's face. "You can help, Monsieur, I am convinced, to make it
equally a failure with her family."
Archer pushed back his chair and stood up. "Well--and by God I will!"
he exclaimed. He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring down
wrathfully at the little Frenchman, whose face, though he too had
risen, was still an inch or two below the line of Archer's eyes.
M. Rivière paled to his normal hue: paler than that his complexion
could hardly turn.
"Why the devil," Archer explosively continued, "should you have
thought--since I suppose you're appealing to me on the ground of my
relationship to Madame Olenska--that I should take a view contrary to
the rest of her family?"
The change of expression in M. Rivière's face was for a time his only
answer. His look passed from timidity to absolute distress: for a young
man of his usually resourceful mien it would have been difficult to
appear more disarmed and defenceless. "Oh, Monsieur--"
"I can't imagine," Archer continued, "why you should have come to me
when there are others so much nearer to the Countess; still less why
you thought I should be more accessible to the arguments I suppose you
were sent over with."
M. Rivière took this onslaught with a disconcerting humility. "The
arguments I want to present to you, Monsieur, are my own and not those
I was sent over with."
"Then I see still less reason for listening to them."
M. Rivière again looked into his hat, as if considering whether these
last words were not a sufficiently broad hint to put it on and be gone.
Then he spoke with sudden decision. "Monsieur--will you tell me one
thing? Is it my right to be here that you question? Or do you perhaps
believe the whole matter to be already closed?"
His quiet insistence made Archer feel the clumsiness of his own
bluster. M. Rivière had succeeded in imposing himself: Archer,
reddening slightly, dropped into his chair again, and signed to the
young man to be seated.
"I beg your pardon: but why isn't the matter closed?"