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 again 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 more.” 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 finally 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 more,” 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—goodbye. 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, Miranda, hearing his step, ran up the stairs to light the gas on the upper landing.
“Is Mrs. Archer in?” he asked.
“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.
“You are worried,” Miranda said.
“No.” He looked away from her, not wanting to invite her affection.
She neared him, walked behind his chair, and began massaging his shoulders.
“No, Miranda. Not tonight,” he said, sounding irascible.
She didn’t stop, but smoothed her hands down his chest. “Let me—”
He caught her hands, and then stood. “Thank you, but no.”
“Then at least let me massage your feet.” Her tone was almost pleading, and it softened his resolve.
“Very well, perhaps for a bit.”
Miranda went to fetch a basin of heated water, and returned to his study. She lowered herself to the floor and removed his shoes and socks, and then placed his feet in the hot water scented with eucalyptus.
“Ah, that’s is much better,” he said, although his mind was still plagued with what he would say to Ellen tomorrow. She would come, she would, he thought.
Miranda massaged one of his feet, and then the other, and before long Newland was dozing lightly. He awoke to the glorious tickling sensation of Miranda’s long tongue sliding among his toes. He immediately felt the sensation shoot to his loins, arousing him with manly desires. His breathing suddenly increased and unable to control the urge, his staff began to harden. He opened his eyes and looked down at his favorite, nurturing chambermaid. She was gazing up at him with hooded eyes and a wicked smile. She had removed her dress, and her breasts were exposed outside of her brassiere, pushed up so that her erect nipples pointed at him invitingly. She wore no undergarment to conceal her womanly flesh, and her legs were spread wide open so that her dewy orchid was fully revealed to him.
“Ah, you tease me, Miranda,” he said to her.
She did not respond, but only licked her tongue between his toes. She smiled, and then brought one of her erect nipples to his foot and began rubbing the tip of it against the length of his toes.
Newland thought about how Miranda had served him all these years, pleasured him, and had never let him down. “Miranda, why do you have no husband?” he asked.
She looked at him sadly. “Because the man I love will never have me as a wife. I am not good enough for him.”
He thought for a moment. “Let me pleasure you, Miranda. What pleases you?”
She looked at him in surprise. He had never asked her that question.
“Your touch pleases me, sir,” she said. Then she rose, took his wrist, and guided his hand down to her orchid.
He slid his fingers through her creamy and readied passion. She writhed with excitement.
“And also, sir…”
“Yes? Whatever you want, Miranda.”
She smiled, turned her back on him, bent over, and exposed herself from behind. “Like this, sir. It’s my favorite,” she said.
“Ah, yes. Delightful.”
While he unfastened his trousers, she massaged her pearl, heightening her excitement, which Newland enjoyed with lustful eyes.
He brought his staff to her folds, ran it through her slick cream, hurriedly grasped the tips of her nipples, and squeezed. She moaned in more pleasure than he had ever heard from her, which had the effect of arousing him all the more. Her cream overflowed her banks not unlike a raging river, and it was all too clear that she was ready. She raised her hips and invited him to enter. So Newland clasped her cheeks, held them open, and then pushed inside the full length of her nether cavity. Immediately, he began to thrust. He pumped and thrust, let
ting his carnal desires set the pace. Then he grasped one of her breasts with a hand, and moved the other to her sheath, where he began thrusting a set of fingers inside of her velvety case at the same beat he worked his staff.
“Yes, how perfect, sir.” Her words came out as a sensual hiss.
Newland knew that in Miranda’s mind, they were making passionate love, but the most he could ever admit was that he had given her the gift of his attention.
“I … I …” Miranda said as she released, her vessel contracting fully around his member. And then suddenly, she raised her head to listen. “I hear the front door,” she said anxiously.
“Don’t move,” he said, and continued to thrust harder and faster, until a moment later, he released with a massive explosion. He continued to thrust in and out of her vessel, Miranda circling her hips, until his seed was fully spilled.
Then he withdrew his staff, kissed the back of her head, and said, “You must leave at once before we are discovered.”
She picked up her clothing and started for the door, but before she left, she ran up to him and kissed him on the lips. “That was wonderful, sir. Lovely.”
When she left he flung himself back to the dull comfort of the chair and 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. His thoughts soon returned to Ellen and what he would say to her tomorrow. She would come, he thought repeatedly to himself. “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.
Chapter 14
“At the court of the Tuileries,” said Mr. Sillerton Jackson with his reminiscent smile, “such things were pretty openly tolerated.”
The scene was the van der Luydens’ black walnut dining-room in Madison Avenue, and the time the evening after Newland Archer’s visit to the Museum of Art. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had come to town for a few days from Skuytercliff, whither they had precipitately fled at the announcement of Beaufort’s failure. It had been represented to them that the disarray into which society had been thrown by this deplorable affair made their presence in town more necessary than ever. It was one of the occasions when, as Mrs. Archer put it, they “owed it to society” to show themselves at the Opera, and even to open their own doors.
“It will never do, my dear Louisa, to let people like Mrs. Lemuel Struthers think they can step into Regina’s shoes. It is just at such times that new people push in and get a footing. It was owing to the epidemic of chicken-pox in New York the winter Mrs. Struthers first appeared that the married men slipped away to her house while their wives were in the nursery. You and dear Henry, Louisa, must stand in the breach as you always have.”
Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden could not remain deaf to such a call, and reluctantly but heroically they had come to town, unmuffled the house, and sent out invitations for two dinners and an evening reception.
On this particular evening they had invited Sillerton Jackson, Mrs. Archer and Newland and his wife to go with them to the Opera, where Faust was being sung for the first time that winter. Nothing was done without ceremony under the van der Luyden roof, and though there were but four guests the repast had begun at seven punctually, so that the proper sequence of courses might be served without haste before the gentlemen settled down to their cigars.
Archer had not seen his wife since the evening before. He had left early for the office, where he had plunged into an accumulation of unimportant business. In the afternoon one of the senior partners had made an unexpected call on his time; and he had reached home so late that May had preceded him to the van der Luydens’, and sent back the carriage.
Now, across the Skuytercliff carnations and the massive plate, she struck him as pale and languid; but her eyes shone, and she talked with exaggerated animation.
The subject which had called forth Mr. Sillerton Jackson’s favourite allusion had been brought up (Archer fancied not without intention) by their hostess. The Beaufort failure, or rather the Beaufort attitude since the failure, was still a fruitful theme for the drawing-room moralist; and after it had been thoroughly examined and condemned Mrs. van der Luyden had turned her scrupulous eyes on May Archer.
“Is it possible, dear, that what I hear is true? I was told your grandmother Mingott’s carriage was seen standing at Mrs. Beaufort’s door.” It was noticeable that she no longer called the offending lady by her Christian name.
May’s colour rose, and Mrs. Archer put in hastily: “If it was, I’m convinced it was there without Mrs. Mingott’s knowledge.”
“Ah, you think—?” Mrs. van der Luyden paused, sighed, and glanced at her husband.
“I’m afraid,” Mr. van der Luyden said, “that Madame Olenska’s kind heart may have le
d her into the imprudence of calling on Mrs. Beaufort.”
“Or her taste for peculiar people,” put in Mrs. Archer in a dry tone, while her eyes dwelt innocently on her son’s.
“I’m sorry to think it of Madame Olenska,” said Mrs. van der Luyden; and Mrs. Archer murmured: “Ah, my dear—and after you’d had her twice at Skuytercliff!”
It was at this point that Mr. Jackson seized the chance to place his favourite allusion.
“At the Tuileries,” he repeated, seeing the eyes of the company expectantly turned on him, “the standard was excessively lax in some respects; and if you’d asked where Morny’s money came from—! Or who paid the debts of some of the Court beauties … “
“I hope, dear Sillerton,” said Mrs. Archer, “you are not suggesting that we should adopt such standards?”
“I never suggest,” returned Mr. Jackson imperturbably. “But Madame Olenska’s foreign bringing-up may make her less particular—”
“Ah,” the two elder ladies sighed.
“Still, to have kept her grandmother’s carriage at a defaulter’s door!” Mr. van der Luyden protested; and Archer guessed that he was remembering, and resenting, the hampers of carnations he had sent to the little house in Twenty-third Street.
“Of course I’ve always said that she looks at things quite differently,” Mrs. Archer summed up.
A flush rose to May’s forehead. She looked across the table at her husband, and said precipitately: “I’m sure Ellen meant it kindly.”
“Imprudent people are often kind,” said Mrs. Archer, as if the fact were scarcely an extenuation; and Mrs. van der Luyden murmured: “If only she had consulted some one—”
“Ah, that she never did!” Mrs. Archer rejoined.
At this point Mr. van der Luyden glanced at his wife, who bent her head slightly in the direction of Mrs. Archer; and the glimmering trains of the three ladies swept out of the door while the gentlemen settled down to their cigars. Mr. van der Luyden supplied short ones on Opera nights; but they were so good that they made his guests deplore his inexorable punctuality.
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