The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (8 ebook reader .txt) 📗

her whole person, with the soul behind it: Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenly told him.

“You too⁠—oh, all this time, you too?”

For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly downward.

Half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made any show of moving. Archer was conscious of a curious indifference to her bodily presence: he would hardly have been aware of it if one of the hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the occasion when, in the little Twenty-third Street house, he had kept his eye on it in order not to look at her face. Now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no effort to draw nearer. He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied. His one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone.

But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart.

“What’s the use⁠—when you will go back?” he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words.

She sat motionless, with lowered lids. “Oh⁠—I shan’t go yet!”

“Not yet? Some time, then? Some time that you already foresee?”

At that she raised her clearest eyes. “I promise you: not as long as you hold out. Not as long as we can look straight at each other like this.”

He dropped into his chair. What her answer really said was: “If you lift a finger you’ll drive me back: back to all the abominations you know of, and all the temptations you half guess.” He understood it as clearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept him anchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred submission.

“What a life for you!⁠—” he groaned.

“Oh⁠—as long as it’s a part of yours.”

“And mine a part of yours?”

She nodded.

“And that’s to be all⁠—for either of us?”

“Well; it is all, isn’t it?”

At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of her face. She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him. They fell into his, while her arms, extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let her surrendered face say the rest.

They may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a few moments; but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all she had to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered. He must do nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their future in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it.

“Don’t⁠—don’t be unhappy,” she said, with a break in her voice, as she drew her hands away; and he answered: “You won’t go back⁠—you won’t go back?” as if it were the one possibility he could not bear.

“I won’t go back,” she said; and turning away she opened the door and led the way into the public dining-room.

The strident schoolteachers were gathering up their possessions preparatory to a straggling flight to the wharf; across the beach lay the white steamboat at the pier; and over the sunlit waters Boston loomed in a line of haze.

XXV

Once more on the boat, and in the presence of others, Archer felt a tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him.

The day, according to any current valuation, had been a rather ridiculous failure; he had not so much as touched Madame Olenska’s hand with his lips, or extracted one word from her that gave promise of farther opportunities. Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted. It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity. It filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over, and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt her. Even after they had clasped hands for goodbye at the Fall River station, and he had turned away alone, the conviction remained with him of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed.

He wandered back to the club, and went and sat alone in the deserted library, turning and turning over in his thoughts every separate second of their hours together. It was clear to him, and it grew more clear under closer scrutiny, that if she should finally decide on returning to Europe⁠—returning to her husband⁠—it would not be because her old life tempted her, even on the new terms offered. No: she would go only if she felt herself becoming a temptation to Archer, a temptation to fall away from the standard they had both set up. Her choice would be to stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer; and it depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded.

In the train these thoughts were