Dinner's been announced.Won't you please take Ellen in?"Madame Olenska put her hand on his arm, and he noticed that the hand was ungloved, and remembered how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the evening that he had sat with her in the little Twenty-third Street drawing-room.All the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed to have taken refuge in the long pale fingers and faintly dimpled knuckles on his sleeve, and he said to himself:
"If it were only to see her hand again I should have to follow her--."It was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to a "foreign visitor" that Mrs.van der Luyden could suffer the diminution of being placed on her host's left.
The fact of Madame Olenska's "foreignness" could hardly have been more adroitly emphasised than by this farewell tribute; and Mrs.van der Luyden accepted her displacement with an affability which left no doubt as to her approval.There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.There was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now that her passage for Europe was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his table, sat marvelling at the silent untiring activity with which her popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her silenced, her past countenanced, and her present irradiated by the family approval.Mrs.van der Luyden shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her nearest approach to cordiality, and Mr.van der Luyden, from his seat at May's right, cast down the table glances plainly intended to justify all the carnations he had sent from Skuytercliff.
Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings.
As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May's canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy.And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to "foreign"vocabularies.He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.
It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.
As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a prisoner in the centre of an armed camp.He looked about the table, and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which, over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort and his wife."It's to show me," he thought, "what would happen to ME--" and a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the family vault.
He laughed, and met Mrs.van der Luyden's startled eyes.
"You think it laughable?" she said with a pinched smile."Of course poor Regina's idea of remaining in New York has its ridiculous side, I suppose;" and Archer muttered: "Of course."At this point, he became conscious that Madame Olenska's other neighbour had been engaged for some time with the lady on his right.At the same moment he saw that May, serenely enthroned between Mr.van der Luyden and Mr.Selfridge Merry, had cast a quick glance down the table.It was evident that the host and the lady on his right could not sit through the whole meal in silence.He turned to Madame Olenska, and her pale smile met him."Oh, do let's see it through," it seemed to say.
"Did you find the journey tiring?" he asked in a voice that surprised him by its naturalness; and she answered that, on the contrary, she had seldom travelled with fewer discomforts.
"Except, you know, the dreadful heat in the train,"she added; and he remarked that she would not suffer from that particular hardship in the country she was going to.
"I never," he declared with intensity, "was more nearly frozen than once, in April, in the train between Calais and Paris."She said she did not wonder, but remarked that, after all, one could always carry an extra rug, and that every form of travel had its hardships; to which he abruptly returned that he thought them all of no account compared with the blessedness of getting away.
She changed colour, and he added, his voice suddenly rising in pitch: "I mean to do a lot of travelling myself before long." A tremor crossed her face, and leaning over to Reggie Chivers, he cried out: "I say, Reggie, what do you say to a trip round the world: now, next month, I mean? I'm game if you are--" at which Mrs.
Reggie piped up that she could not think of letting Reggie go till after the Martha Washington Ball she was getting up for the Blind Asylum in Easter week;and her husband placidly observed that by that time he would have to be practising for the International Polo match.
