to see her privately. He had therefore no one but himself to blame if she had opened her doors to other visitors; and he entered the drawingroom with the dogged determination to make Beaufort feel himself in the way, and to outstay him.
The banker stood leaning against the mantelshelf, which was draped with an old embroidery held in place by brass candelabra containing church candies of yellowish wax. He had thrust his chest out, supporting his shoulders against the mantel and resting his weight on one large patent-leather foot. As Archer entered he was smiling and looking down on his hostess, who sat on a sofa placed at right angles to the chimney. A table banked with flowers formed a screen behind it, and against the orchids and azaleas which the young man recognised as tributes from the Beaufort hothouses, Madame Olenska sat half-reclined, her head propped on a hand and her wide sleeve leaving the arm bare to the elbow.
It was usual for ladies who received in the evenings to wear what were called “simple dinner dresses”: a close-fitting armour of whaleboned silk, slightly open in the neck, with lace ruffles filling in the crack, and tight sleeves with a flounce uncovering just enough wrist to show an Etruscan gold bracelet or a velvet band. But Madame Olenska, heedless of tradition, was attired in a long robe of red velvet bordered about the chin and down the front with glossy black fur. Archer remembered, on his last visit to Paris, seeing a portrait by the new painter, Carolus Duran, whose pictures were the sensation of the Salon, in which the lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes with her chin nestling in fur. There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawingroom, and in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect was undeniably pleasing.
“Lord love us—three whole days at Skuytercliff!” Beaufort was saying in his loud sneering voice as Archer entered. “You’d better take all your furs, and a hot-water-bottle.”
“Why? Is the house so cold?” she asked, holding out her left hand to Archer in a way mysteriously suggesting that she expected him to kiss it.
“No; but the missus is,” said Beaufort, nodding carelessly to the young man.
“But I thought her so kind. She came herself to invite me. Granny says I must certainly go.”
“Granny would, of course. And I say it’s a shame you’re going to miss the little oyster supper I’d planned for you at Delmonico’s next Sunday, with Campanini and Scalchi and a lot of jolly people.”
She looked doubtfully from the banker to Archer.
“Ah—that does tempt me! Except the other evening at Mrs. Struthers’s I’ve not met a single artist since I’ve been here.”
“What kind of artists? I know one or two painters, very good fellows, that I could bring to see you if you’d allow me,” said Archer boldly.
“Painters? Are there painters in New York?” asked Beaufort, in a tone implying that there could be none since he did not buy their pictures; and Madame Olenska said to Archer, with her grave smile: “That would be charming. But I was really thinking of dramatic artists, singers, actors, musicians. My husband’s house was always full of them.”
She said the words “my husband” as if no sinister associations were connected with them, and in a tone that seemed almost to sigh over the lost delights of her married life. Archer looked at her perplexedly, wondering if it were lightness or dissimulation that enabled her to touch so easily on the past at the very moment when she was risking her reputation in order to break with it.
“I do think,” she went on, addressing both men, that the imprevu adds to one’s enjoyment. It’s perhaps a mistake to see the same people every day.”
“It’s confoundedly dull, anyhow; New York is dying of dullness,” Beaufort grumbled. “And when I try to liven it up for you, you go back on me. Come—think better of it! Sunday is your last chance, for Campanini leaves next week for Baltimore and Philadelphia; and I’ve a private room, and a Steinway, and they’ll sing all night for me.”
“How delicious! May I think it over, and write to you tomorrow morning?”
She spoke amiably, yet with the least hint of dismissal in her voice. Beaufort evidently felt it, and being unused to dismissals, stood staring at her with an obstinate line between his eyes.
“Why not now?”
“It’s too serious a question to decide at this late hour.”
“Do you call it late?”
She returned his glance coolly. “Yes; because I have still to talk business with Mr. Archer for a little while.”
“Ah,” Beaufort snapped. There was no appeal from her tone, and with a slight shrug he recovered his composure, took her hand, which he kissed with a practised air, and calling out from the threshold: “I say, Newland, if you can persuade the Countess to stop in town of course you’re included in the supper,” left the room with his heavy important step.
For a moment Archer fancied that Mr. Letterblair must have told her of his coming; but the irrelevance of her next remark made him change his mind.
“You know painters, then? You live in their milieu?” she asked, her eyes full of interest.
“Oh, not exactly. I don’t know that the arts have a milieu here, any of them; they’re more like a very thinly settled outskirt.”
“But you care for such things?”
“Immensely. When I’m in Paris or London I never miss an exhibition. I try to keep up.”
She looked down at the tip of the little satin boot that peeped from her long draperies.
“I used to care immensely too: my life was full of such things. But now I want to try not to.”
“You want to try not to?”
“Yes: I want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody else here.”
Archer reddened. “You’ll never be like everybody else,” he said.
She raised her straight eyebrows a little. “Ah, don’t say that. If you knew how I hate to be different!”
Her face had grown as sombre as a tragic mask. She leaned forward, clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him into remote dark distances.
“I want to get away from it all,” she insisted.
He waited a moment and cleared his throat. “I know. Mr. Letterblair has told me.”
“Ah?”
“That’s the reason I’ve come. He asked me to—you see I’m in the firm.”
She looked slightly surprised, and then her eyes brightened. “You mean you can manage it for me? I can talk to you instead of Mr. Letterblair? Oh, that will be so much easier!”
Her tone touched him, and his confidence grew with his self-satisfaction. He perceived that she had spoken of business to Beaufort simply to get rid of him; and to have routed Beaufort was something of a triumph.
“I am here to talk about it,” he repeated.
She sat silent, her head still propped by the arm that rested on the back of the sofa. Her face looked pale and extinguished, as if dimmed by the rich red of her dress. She struck Archer, of a sudden, as a pathetic and even pitiful figure.
“Now we’re coming to hard facts,” he thought, conscious in himself of the same instinctive recoil that he had so often criticised in his mother and her contemporaries. How little practice he had had in dealing with unusual situations! Their very vocabulary was unfamiliar to him, and seemed to belong to fiction and the stage. In face of what was coming he felt as awkward and embarrassed as a boy.
After a pause Madame Olenska broke out with unexpected vehemence: “I want to be free; I want to wipe out all the past.”
“I understand that.”
Her face warmed.