The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [95]
“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—its 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 conditions?”
“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.”ak
“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 color 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 Olenski’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.”
They sat silent, not looking at each other, but straight ahead at the people passing along the path. Finally she turned her eyes again to his face and said: “You’re not changed.”
He felt like answering: “I was, till I saw you again”; but instead he stood up abruptly and glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park.
“This is horrible. Why shouldn’t we go out a little on the bay? There