The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (story read aloud TXT) 📕

to be sure: in London!” Archer grasped his

hand with curiosity and sympathy. “So you DID get

here, after all?” he exclaimed, casting a wondering eye

on the astute and haggard little countenance of young

Carfry’s French tutor.

 

“Oh, I got here—yes,” M. Riviere smiled with drawn

lips. “But not for long; I return the day after tomorrow.”

He stood grasping his light valise in one neatly

gloved hand, and gazing anxiously, perplexedly, almost

appealingly, into Archer’s face.

 

“I wonder, Monsieur, since I’ve had the good luck to

run across you, if I might—”

 

“I was just going to suggest it: come to luncheon,

won’t you? Down town, I mean: if you’ll look me up in

my office I’ll take you to a very decent restaurant in

that quarter.”

 

M. Riviere was visibly touched and surprised. “You’re

too kind. But I was only going to ask if you would tell

me how to reach some sort of conveyance. There are

no porters, and no one here seems to listen—”

 

“I know: our American stations must surprise you.

When you ask for a porter they give you chewing-gum.

But if you’ll come along I’ll extricate you; and you

must really lunch with me, you know.”

 

The young man, after a just perceptible hesitation,

replied, with profuse thanks, and in a tone that did not

carry complete conviction, that he was already engaged;

but when they had reached the comparative

reassurance of the street he asked if he might call that

afternoon.

 

Archer, at ease in the midsummer leisure of the

office, fixed an hour and scribbled his address, which the

Frenchman pocketed with reiterated thanks and a wide

flourish of his hat. A horse-car received him, and Archer

walked away.

 

Punctually at the hour M. Riviere appeared, shaved,

smoothed-out, but still unmistakably drawn and serious.

Archer was alone in his office, and the young man,

before accepting the seat he proffered, began abruptly:

“I believe I saw you, sir, yesterday in Boston.”

 

The statement was insignificant enough, and Archer

was about to frame an assent when his words were

checked by something mysterious yet illuminating in

his visitor’s insistent gaze.

 

“It is extraordinary, very extraordinary,” M. Riviere

continued, “that we should have met in the circumstances

in which I find myself.”

 

“What circumstances?” Archer asked, wondering a

little crudely if he needed money.

 

M. Riviere continued to study him with tentative

eyes. “I have come, not to look for employment, as I

spoke of doing when we last met, but on a special

mission—”

 

“Ah—!” Archer exclaimed. In a flash the two

meetings had connected themselves in his mind. He paused

to take in the situation thus suddenly lighted up for

him, and M. Riviere also remained silent, as if aware

that what he had said was enough.

 

“A special mission,” Archer at length repeated.

 

The young Frenchman, opening his palms, raised

them slightly, and the two men continued to look at

each other across the office-desk till Archer roused

himself to say: “Do sit down”; whereupon M. Riviere

bowed, took a distant chair, and again waited.

 

“It was about this mission that you wanted to

consult me?” Archer finally asked.

 

M. Riviere bent his head. “Not in my own behalf:

on that score I—I have fully dealt with myself. I should

like—if I may—to speak to you about the Countess

Olenska.”

 

Archer had known for the last few minutes that the

words were coming; but when they came they sent the

blood rushing to his temples as if he had been caught

by a bent-back branch in a thicket.

 

“And on whose behalf,” he said, “do you wish to do

this?”

 

M. Riviere met the question sturdily. “Well—I might

say HERS, if it did not sound like a liberty. Shall I say

instead: on behalf of abstract justice?”

 

Archer considered him ironically. “In other words:

you are Count Olenski’s messenger?”

 

He saw his blush more darkly reflected in M. Riviere’s

sallow countenance. “Not to YOU, Monsieur. If I come

to you, it is on quite other grounds.”

 

“What right have you, in the circumstances, to BE on

any other ground?” Archer retorted. “If you’re an

emissary you’re an emissary.”

 

The young man considered. “My mission is over: as

far as the Countess Olenska goes, it has failed.”

 

“I can’t help that,” Archer rejoined on the same note

of irony.

 

“No: but you can help—” M. Riviere paused, turned

his hat about in his still carefully gloved hands, looked

into its lining and then back at Archer’s face. “You can

help, Monsieur, I am convinced, to make it equally a

failure with her family.”

 

Archer pushed back his chair and stood up. “Well—

and by God I will!” he exclaimed. He stood with his

hands in his pockets, staring down wrathfully at the

little Frenchman, whose face, though he too had risen,

was still an inch or two below the line of Archer’s eyes.

 

M. Riviere paled to his normal hue: paler than that

his complexion could hardly turn.

 

“Why the devil,” Archer explosively continued,

“should you have thought—since I suppose you’re

appealing to me on the ground of my relationship to

Madame Olenska—that I should take a view contrary

to the rest of her family?”

 

The change of expression in M. Riviere’s face was

for a time his only answer. His look passed from timidity

to absolute distress: for a young man of his usually

resourceful mien it would have been difficult to appear

more disarmed and defenceless. “Oh, Monsieur—”

 

“I can’t imagine,” Archer continued, “why you should

have come to me when there are others so much nearer

to the Countess; still less why you thought I should be

more accessible to the arguments I suppose you were

sent over with.”

 

M. Riviere took this onslaught with a disconcerting

humility. “The arguments I want to present to you,

Monsieur, are my own and not those I was sent over

with.”

 

“Then I see still less reason for listening to them.”

 

M. Riviere again looked into his hat, as if considering

whether these last words were not a sufficiently

broad hint to put it on and be gone. Then he spoke

with sudden decision. “Monsieur—will you tell me one

thing? Is it my right to be here that you question? Or

do you perhaps believe the whole matter to be already

closed?”

 

His quiet insistence made Archer feel the clumsiness

of his own bluster. M. Riviere had succeeded in imposing

himself: Archer, reddening slightly, dropped into

his chair again, and signed to the young man to be

seated.

 

“I beg your pardon: but why isn’t the matter closed?”

 

M. Riviere gazed back at him with anguish. “You

do, then, agree with the rest of the family that, in face

of the new proposals I have brought, it is hardly possible

for Madame Olenska not to return to her husband?”

 

“Good God!” Archer exclaimed; and his visitor gave

out a low murmur of confirmation.

 

“Before seeing her, I saw—at Count Olenski’s

request—Mr. Lovell Mingott, with whom I had several

talks before going to Boston. I understand that he

represents his mother’s view; and that Mrs. Manson

Mingott’s influence is great throughout her family.”

 

Archer sat silent, with the sense of clinging to the

edge of a sliding precipice. The discovery that he had

been excluded from a share in these negotiations, and

even from the knowledge that they were on foot, caused

him a surprise hardly dulled by the acuter wonder of

what he was learning. He saw in a flash that if the

family had ceased to consult him it was because some

deep tribal instinct warned them that he was no longer

on their side; and he recalled, with a start of comprehension,

a remark of May’s during their drive home

from Mrs. Manson Mingott’s on the day of the Archery

Meeting: “Perhaps, after all, Ellen would be happier

with her husband.”

 

Even in the tumult of new discoveries Archer remembered

his indignant exclamation, and the fact that since

then his wife had never named Madame Olenska to

him. Her careless allusion had no doubt been the straw

held up to see which way the wind blew; the result had

been reported to the family, and thereafter Archer had

been tacitly omitted from their counsels. He admired

the tribal discipline which made May bow to this decision.

She would not have done so, he knew, had her

conscience protested; but she probably shared the family

view that Madame Olenska would be better off as

an unhappy wife than as a separated one, and that

there was no use in discussing the case with Newland,

who had an awkward way of suddenly not seeming to

take the most fundamental things for granted.

 

Archer looked up and met his visitor’s anxious gaze.

“Don’t you know, Monsieur—is it possible you don’t

know—that the family begin to doubt if they have the

right to advise the Countess to refuse her husband’s

last proposals?”

 

“The proposals you brought?”

 

“The proposals I brought.”

 

It was on Archer’s lips to exclaim that whatever he

knew or did not know was no concern of M. Riviere’s;

but something in the humble and yet courageous tenacity

of M. Riviere’s gaze made him reject this conclusion,

and he met the young man’s question with another.

“What is your object in speaking to me of this?”

 

He had not to wait a moment for the answer. “To

beg you, Monsieur—to beg you with all the force I’m

capable of—not to let her go back.—Oh, don’t let

her!” M. Riviere exclaimed.

 

Archer looked at him with increasing astonishment.

There was no mistaking the sincerity of his distress or

the strength of his determination: he had evidently

resolved to let everything go by the board but the

supreme need of thus putting himself on record. Archer

considered.

 

“May I ask,” he said at length, “if this is the line you

took with the Countess Olenska?”

 

M. Riviere reddened, but his eyes did not falter.

“No, Monsieur: I accepted my mission in good faith. I

really believed—for reasons I need not trouble you

with—that it would be better for Madame Olenska to

recover her situation, her fortune, the social consideration

that her husband’s standing gives her.”

 

“So I supposed: you could hardly have accepted such

a mission otherwise.”

 

“I should not have accepted it.”

 

“Well, then—?” Archer paused again, and their eyes

met in another protracted scrutiny.

 

“Ah, Monsieur, after I had seen her, after I had

listened to her, I knew she was better off here.”

 

“You knew—?”

 

“Monsieur, I discharged my mission faithfully: I put

the Count’s arguments, I stated his offers, without adding

any comment of my own. The Countess was good

enough to listen patiently; she carried her goodness so

far as to see me twice; she considered impartially all I

had come to say. And it was in the course of these two

talks that I changed my mind, that I came to see things

differently.”

 

“May I ask what led to this change?”

 

“Simply seeing the change in HER,” M. Riviere replied.

 

“The change in her? Then you knew her before?”

 

The young man’s colour again rose. “I used to see

her in her husband’s house. I have known Count Olenski

for many years. You can imagine that he would not

have sent a stranger on such a mission.”

 

Archer’s gaze, wandering away to the blank walls of

the office, rested on a hanging calendar surmounted by

the rugged features of the President of the United States.

That such a conversation should be going on anywhere

within