“Madame Olenska exaggerates; I simply gave her a legal opinion, as she asked me to.”
“Ah, but in doing it–in doing it you were the unconscious instrument of–of–what word have we moderns for Providence, Mr. Archer?” cried the lady, tilting her head on one side and drooping her lids mysteriously. “Little did you know that at that very moment I was being appealed to: being approached, in fact–from the other side of the Atlantic!”
She glanced over her shoulder, as though fearful of being overheard, and then, drawing her chair nearer, and raising a tiny ivory fan to her lips, breathed behind it: “By the Count himself–my poor, mad, foolish Olenski; who asks only to take her back on her own terms.”
“Good God!” Archer exclaimed, springing up.
“You are horrified? Yes, of course; I understand. I don’t defend poor Stanislas, though he has always called me his best friend. He does not defend himself–he casts himself at her feet: in my person.” She tapped her emaciated bosom. “I have his letter here.”
“A letter?–Has Madame Olenska seen it?” Archer stammered, his brain whirling with the shock of the announcement.
The Marchioness Manson shook her head softly. “Time–time; I must have time. I know my Ellen– haughty, intractable; shall I say, just a shade unforgiving?”
“But, good heavens, to forgive is one thing; to go back into that hell–”
“Ah, yes,” the Marchioness acquiesced. “So she describes it–my sensitive child! But on the material side, Mr. Archer, if one may stoop to consider such things; do you know what she is giving up? Those roses there on the sofa–acres like them, under glass and in the open, in his matchless terraced gardens at Nice! Jewels– historic pearls: the Sobieski emeralds–sables,–but she cares nothing for all these! Art and beauty, those she does care for, she lives for, as I always have; and those also surrounded her. Pictures, priceless furniture, music, brilliant conversation–ah, that, my dear young man, if you’ll excuse me, is what you’ve no conception of here! And she had it all; and the homage of the greatest. She tells me she is not thought handsome in New York–good heavens! Her portrait has been painted nine times; the greatest artists in Europe have begged for the privilege. Are these things nothing? And the remorse of an adoring husband?”
As the Marchioness Manson rose to her climax her face assumed an expression of ecstatic retrospection which would have moved Archer’s mirth had he not been numb with amazement.
He would have laughed if any one had foretold to him that his first sight of poor Medora Manson would have been in the guise of a messenger of Satan; but he was in no mood for laughing now, and she seemed to him to come straight out of the hell from which Ellen Olenska had just escaped.
“She knows nothing yet–of all this?” he asked abruptly.
Mrs. Manson laid a purple finger on her lips. “Nothing directly–but does she suspect? Who can tell? The truth is, Mr. Archer, I have been waiting to see you. From the moment I heard of the firm stand you had taken, and of your influence over her, I hoped it might be possible to count on your support–to convince you . . .”
“That she ought to go back? I would rather see her dead!” cried the young man violently.
“Ah,” the Marchioness murmured, without visible resentment. For a while she sat in her arm-chair, opening and shutting the absurd ivory fan between her mittened fingers; but suddenly she lifted her head and listened.
“Here she comes,” she said in a rapid whisper; and then, pointing to the bouquet on the sofa: “Am I to understand that you prefer THAT, Mr. Archer? After all, marriage is marriage . . . and my niece is still a wife. . .
XVIII.
What are you two plotting together, aunt Medora?” Madame Olenska cried as she came into the room.
She was dressed as if for a ball. Everything about her shimmered and glimmered softly, as if her dress had been woven out of candle-beams; and she carried her head high, like a pretty woman challenging a roomful of rivals.