For a long time he stood there, content to take in the scene, and gradually falling under its drowsy spell; but at length he roused himself to the sense of the passing time. Should he look his fill and then drive away? He stood irresolute, wishing suddenly to see the inside of the house, so that he might picture the room that Madame Olenska sat in. There was nothing to prevent his walking up to the door and ringing the bell; if, as he supposed, she was away with the rest of the party, he could easily give his name, and ask permission to go into the sitting-room to write a message.
But instead, he crossed the lawn and turned toward the box-garden. As he entered it he caught sight of something bright-coloured in the summerhouse, and presently made it out to be a pink parasol. The parasol drew him like a magnet: he was sure it was hers. He went into the summerhouse, and sitting down on the rickety seat picked up the silken thing and looked at its carved handle, which was made of some rare wood that gave out an aromatic scent. Archer lifted the handle to his lips.
He heard a rustle of skirts against the box, and sat motionless, leaning on the parasol handle with clasped hands, and letting the rustle come nearer without lifting his eyes. He had always known that this must happen …
Newland’s back was to the Countess as she slowly approached him. He had caught a glimpse of her through the reflection in his timepiece before he closed it and placed it into his pocket. He neither glanced over his shoulder, nor spoke, but waited, hoping to feel her touch.
She could easily have turned away from him just as he had when she waited by the water. And perhaps he deserved her disdain, but he still prayed that she would come to him. His heart began to pound as he anticipated the sound of her voice. A moment later, he felt her hand on his back. The touch was gentle, familiar, and comforting. Her slender fingers traveled down the length of his spine. She stopped at his waist, circled her arm around to his stomach, and stepped closer to him, pressing her body against his. Then she wrapped her other arm around him so that she clung to him.
“Oh, Ellen,” he said. “How I have dreamed of you.”
“And I you, my dearest man.”
“Every morning, I dream of making love to you. Every noon, of tasting you. Every evening, of your head resting upon my shoulder.” He exhaled deeply, lost in his images. “Why must we be apart?”
She pressed her face between his shoulder blades and moved her arms up his chest. Newland had never known a more tantalizing woman than Ellen Olenska. Her allure was hypnotic and irresistible. She was exactly the type of woman that would drive him to accomplish impossible feats—all she had to do was whisper his name and he would get to her. He would swim oceans, walk through fires, or scale the highest mountains.
“Dear Newland, don’t say these things, my darling man.”
He turned, took her into his arms, and stared deeply into her eyes. “Why not? We could run, just disappear. We needn’t look back. Don’t you see? We could live a life of complete happiness.”
“And where shall we go that we will not be discovered?”
“Across the world. To China, India. As far away from here as possible.”
“You are so romantic, Newland. So very romantic. How I want to love you.”
“But you do love me, and I you.”
She frowned and lowered her eyes in regret.
“Tell me that you love me,” he said.
“You will never be far. You will always be inside of me.”
Newland felt the tears welling—unmanly certainly, but genuine. What could he say to change their circumstances? Why must life be so cruel that those in love cannot be together?
“Come,” she said. She grasped his hand and led him to the swing. They sat down. “I want you to kiss me.” She lowered herself into his arms.
Newland’s heart accelerated anew. Her words and the sound of her voice intoxicated him. But to hold her in his arms was heavensent bliss. They stared into each other’s eyes, their silent communication more meaningful than any speech could be.
Newland held her near, and as he closed his eyes, he lowered his lips to hers. The touch was electric, and he felt as if his spirit had lifted from his body. And as soon as their tongues met, they began to swirl as if engaged in a celestial dance of the gods. He wanted her, all of her. Now. His heart beat out of control, his breath hastened, and his manhood throbbed with intense yearning.
When they broke the kiss, there was no denying that they both had the same desires. She rose from his arms, stood, and unfastened his trousers. “Let me,” she said, and quickly found his rampant member, awaiting her touch. She kissed his lips lightly as she stroked the length of his staff, and then stopped to circle the corona with her fingertips.
Lost in lust, Newland kept his eyes closed.
She dropped to her knees, grasped his thighs, and lowered her head to the crown of his staff and began licking it. She circled the top, and then urgently began to explore. Newland groaned from deep within his chest, grinding his hips to her touch. She grasped the staff with a hand and took his full crown inside her mouth, swirled her tongue, and began to suck.
“You’re divine,” he said.
She pulled away, stood, and raised the skirts of her dress to reveal that she wore no undergarments. Then she eased one leg beside him, balanced, and pulled up the other leg so that she sat above him, straddling him. She placed her hands upon his shoulders and curled her lips into a soft, telling smile. She leaned down and kissed his face, from his lips to his cheeks, and then from his cheeks to his forehead. And when the moment was right, she slowly sank down so that the entrance to her sheath touched the crown of his staff.
Newland groaned with extreme pleasure as her impassioned vessel consumed his crown first and then the full length of his staff. He grasped her hips and anxiously waited for her to begin the dance.
She touched her lips to his, giving him a soft kiss, and then clasped his lower lip between her teeth. She gently pulled the lip inside her mouth and began to suck. A moment later, she began to move, raising and lowering her body against his. The swing began to sway as she built a rhythm, and they continued to make love at a leisurely pace.
Newland would have stayed right there forever, sharing breaths with Ellen for all of eternity. When a man’s heart, body, and soul is rich with love, he needs no more—not food, nor water, nor the warmth of the sun. He had all that he would ever need.
He had always known that this must happen …
“Oh, Mr. Archer!” exclaimed a loud young voice; and looking up he saw before him the youngest and largest of the Blenker girls, blonde and blowsy, in bedraggled muslin. A red blotch on one of her cheeks seemed to show that it had recently been pressed against a pillow, and her half-awakened eyes stared at him hospitably but confusedly.
“Gracious—where did you drop from? I must have been sound asleep in the hammock. Everybody else has gone to Newport. Did you ring?” she incoherently enquired.
Archer’s confusion was greater than hers. “I—no—that is, I was just going to. I had to come up the island to see about a horse, and I drove over on a chance of finding Mrs. Blenker and your visitors. But the house seemed empty—so I sat down to wait.”
Miss Blenker, shaking off the fumes of sleep, looked at him with increasing interest. “The house IS empty. Mother’s not here, or the Marchioness—or anybody but me.” Her glance became faintly reproachful. “Didn’t you know that Professor and Mrs. Sillerton are giving a garden-party for mother and all of us this afternoon? It was too unlucky that I couldn’t go; but I’ve had a sore throat, and mother was afraid of the drive home this evening. Did you ever know anything so disappointing? Of course,” she added gaily, “I shouldn’t have minded half as much if I’d known you were coming.”
Symptoms of a lumbering coquetry became visible in her, and Archer found the strength to break in: “But Madame Olenska—has she gone to Newport too?”
Miss Blenker looked at him with surprise. “Madame Olenska—didn’t you know she’d been called
away?”
“Called away?—”
“Oh, my best parasol! I lent it to that goose of a Katie, because it matched her ribbons, and the careless thing must have dropped it here. We Blenkers are all like that … real Bohemians!” Recovering the sunshade with a powerful hand she unfurled it and suspended its rosy dome above her head. “Yes, Ellen was called away yesterday: she lets us call her Ellen, you know. A telegram came from Boston: she said she might be gone for two days. I do LOVE the way she does her hair, don’t you?” Miss Blenker rambled on.
Archer continued to stare through her as though she had been transparent. All he saw was the trumpery parasol that arched its pinkness above her giggling head.
After a moment he ventured: “You don’t happen to know why Madame Olenska went to Boston? I hope it was not on account of bad news?”
Miss Blenker took this with a cheerful incredulity. “Oh, I don’t believe so. She didn’t tell us what was in the telegram. I think she didn’t want the Marchioness to know. She’s so romantic-looking, isn’t she? Doesn’t she remind you of Mrs. Scott-Siddons when she reads `Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’? Did you never hear her?”
Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts. His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen. He glanced about him at the unpruned garden, the tumble-down house, and the oak-grove under which the dusk was gathering. It had seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to have found Madame Olenska; and she was far away, and even the pink sunshade was not hers …
He frowned and hesitated. “You don’t know, I suppose—I shall be in Boston tomorrow. If I could manage to see her—”
He felt that Miss Blenker was losing interest in him, though her smile persisted. “Oh, of course; how lovely of you! She’s staying at the Parker House; it must be horrible there in this weather.”
After that Archer was but intermittently aware of the remarks they exchanged. He could only remember stoutly resisting her entreaty that he should await the returning family and have high tea with them before he drove home. At length, with his hostess still at his side, he passed out of range of the wooden Cupid, unfastened his horses and drove off. At the turn of the lane he saw Miss Blenker standing at the gate and waving the pink parasol.
Chapter 5
The next morning, when Archer got out of the Fall River train, he emerged upon a steaming midsummer Boston. The streets near the station were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a shirtsleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage to the bathroom.
Archer found a cab and drove to the Somerset Club for breakfast. Even the fashionable quarters had the air of untidy domesticity to which no excess of heat ever degrades the European cities. Care-takers in calico lounged on the doorsteps of the wealthy, and the Common looked like a pleasure-ground on the morrow of a Masonic picnic. If Archer had tried to imagine Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes he could not have called up any into which it was more difficult to fit her than this heat-prostrated and deserted Boston.
He breakfasted with appetite and method, beginning with a slice of melon, and studying a morning paper while he waited for his toast and scrambled eggs. A new sense of energy and activity had possessed him ever since he had announced to May the night before that he had business in Boston, and should take the Fall River boat that night and go on to New York the following evening. It had always been understood that he would return to town early in the week, and when he got back from his expedition to Portsmouth a letter from the office, which fate had conspicuously placed on a corner of the hall table, sufficed to justify his sudden change of plan. He was even ashamed of the ease with which the whole thing had been done: it reminded him, for an uncomfortable moment, of Lawrence Lefferts’s masterly contrivances for securing his freedom. But this did not long trouble him, for he was not in an analytic mood.
After breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced over the Commercial Advertiser. While he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came in, and the usual greetings were exchanged: it was the same world after all, though he had such a queer sense of having slipped through the meshes of time and space.
He looked at his watch, and finding that it was half-past nine got up and went into the writing-room. There he wrote a few lines, and ordered a messenger to take a cab to the Parker House and wait for the answer. He then sat down behind another newspaper and tried to calculate how long it would take a cab to get to the Parker House.
“The lady was out, sir,” he suddenly heard a waiter’s voice at his elbow; and he stammered: “Out?—” as if it were a word in a strange language.
He got up and went into the hall. It must be a mistake: she could not be out at that hour. He flushed with anger at his own stupidity: why had he not sent the note as soon as he arrived?
He found his hat and stick and went forth into the street. The city had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty as if he were a traveller from distant lands. For a moment he stood on the doorstep hesitating; then he decided to go to the Parker House. What if the messenger had been misinformed, and she were still there?
He started to walk across the Common; and on the first bench, under a tree, he saw her sitting. She had a grey silk sunshade over her head—how could he ever have imagined her with a pink one? As he approached he was struck by her listless attitude: she sat there as if she had nothing else to do. He saw her drooping profile, and the knot of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat, and the long wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade. He came a step or two nearer, and she turned and looked at him.
“Oh”—she said; and for the first time he noticed a startled look on her face; but in another moment it gave way to a slow smile of wonder and contentment.
“Oh”—she murmured again, on a different note, as he stood looking down at her; and without rising she made a place for him on the bench.
“I’m here on business—just got here,” Archer explained; and, without knowing why, he suddenly began to feign astonishment at seeing her. “But what on earth are you doing in this wilderness?” He had really no idea what he was saying: he felt as if he were shouting at her across endless distances, and she might vanish again before he could overtake her.
“I? Oh, I’m here on business too,” she answered, turning her head toward him so that they were face to face. The words hardly reached him: he was aware only of her voice, and of the startling fact that not an echo of it had remained in his memory. He had not even remembered that it was low-pitched, with a faint roughness on the consonants.
“You do your hair differently,” he said, his heart beating as if he had uttered something irrevocable.
“Differently? No—it’s only that I do it as best I can when I’m without Nastasia.”
“Nastasia; but isn’t she with you?”
“No; I’m alone. For two days it was not worth while to bring her.”
“You’re alone—at the Parker House?”
She looked at him with a flash of her old malice. “Does it strike you as dangerous?”
“No; not dangerous—”
“But unconventional? I see; I suppose it is.” She considered a moment. “I hadn’t thought of it, because I’ve just done something so much more unconventional.” The faint tinge of irony lingered in her eyes. “I’ve just refused to take back a sum of money—that belonged to me.”
Archer sprang up and moved a step or two away. She had furled her parasol and sat absently drawing patterns on the gravel. Presently he came back and stood before her.
“Some one—has come here to meet you?”
“Yes.”
“With this offer?”
She nodded.
“And you refused—because of the conditions?”
“I refused,” she said after a moment.
He sat down by her again. “What were the con
ditions?”
“Oh, they were not onerous: just to sit at the head of his table now and then.”
There was another interval of silence. Archer’s heart had slammed itself shut in the queer way it had, and he sat vainly groping for a word.
“He wants you back—at any price?”
“Well—a considerable price. At least the sum is considerable for me.”
He paused again, beating about the question he felt he must put.
“It was to meet him here that you came?”
She stared, and then burst into a laugh. “Meet him—my husband? HERE? At this season he’s always at Cowes or Baden.”
“He sent some one?”
“Yes.”
“With a letter?”
She shook her head. “No; just a message. He never writes. I don’t think I’ve had more than one letter from him.” The allusion brought the colour to her cheek, and it reflected itself in Archer’s vivid blush.
“Why does he never write?”
“Why should he? What does one have secretaries for?”
The young man’s blush deepened. She had pronounced the word as if it had no more significance than any other in her vocabulary. For a moment it was on the tip of his tongue to ask: “Did he send his secretary, then?” But the remembrance of Count Olenska’s only letter to his wife was too present to him. He paused again, and then took another plunge.
“And the person?”—
“The emissary? The emissary,” Madame Olenska rejoined, still smiling, “might, for all I care, have left already; but he has insisted on waiting till this evening … in case … on the chance … “
“And you came out here to think the chance over?”
“I came out to get a breath of air. The hotel’s too stifling. I’m taking the afternoon train back to Portsmouth.”
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