“Ah, well–” Mrs. Archer sighed again.
Everybody knew that the Countess Olenska was no longer in the good graces of her family. Even her devoted champion, old Mrs. Manson Mingott, had been unable to defend her refusal to return to her husband. The Mingotts had not proclaimed their disapproval aloud: their sense of solidarity was too strong. They had simply, as Mrs. Welland said, “let poor Ellen find her own level”–and that, mortifyingly and incomprehensibly, was in the dim depths where the Blenkers prevailed, and “people who wrote” celebrated their untidy rites. It was incredible, but it was a fact, that Ellen, in spite of all her opportunities and her privileges, had become simply “Bohemian.” The fact enforced the contention that she had made a fatal mistake in not returning to Count Olenski. After all, a young woman’s place was under her husband’s roof, especially when she had left it in circumstances that . . . well . . . if one had cared to look into them . . .
“Madame Olenska is a great favourite with the gentlemen,” said Miss Sophy, with her air of wishing to put forth something conciliatory when she knew that she was planting a dart.
“Ah, that’s the danger that a young woman like Madame Olenska is always exposed to,” Mrs. Archer mournfully agreed; and the ladies, on this conclusion, gathered up their trains to seek the carcel globes of the drawing-room, while Archer and Mr. Sillerton Jackson withdrew to the Gothic library.
Once established before the grate, and consoling himself for the inadequacy of the dinner by the perfection of his cigar, Mr. Jackson became portentous and communicable.
“If the Beaufort smash comes,” he announced, “there are going to be disclosures.”
Archer raised his head quickly: he could never hear the name without the sharp vision of Beaufort’s heavy figure, opulently furred and shod, advancing through the snow at Skuytercliff.
“There’s bound to be,” Mr. Jackson continued, “the nastiest kind of a cleaning up. He hasn’t spent all his money on Regina.”
“Oh, well–that’s discounted, isn’t it? My belief is he’ll pull out yet,” said the young man, wanting to change the subject.
“Perhaps–perhaps. I know he was to see some of the influential people today. Of course,” Mr. Jackson reluctantly conceded, “it’s to be hoped they can tide him over–this time anyhow. I shouldn’t like to think of poor Regina’s spending the rest of her life in some shabby foreign watering-place for bankrupts.”
Archer said nothing. It seemed to him so natural– however tragic–that money ill-gotten should be cruelly expiated, that his mind, hardly lingering over Mrs. Beaufort’s doom, wandered back to closer questions. What was the meaning of May’s blush when the Countess Olenska had been mentioned?
Four months had passed since the midsummer day that he and Madame Olenska had spent together; and since then he had not seen her. He knew that she had returned to Washington, to the little house which she and Medora Manson had taken there: he had written to her once–a few words, asking when they were to meet again–and she had even more briefly replied: “Not yet.”
Since then there had been no farther communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent–that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.
He became aware that Mr. Jackson was clearing his throat preparatory to farther revelations.
“I don’t know, of course, how far your wife’s family are aware of what people say about–well, about Madame Olenska’s refusal to accept her husband’s latest offer.”