“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 school-teachers were gathering up their
possessions preparatory to a straggling flight to the
wharf; across the beach lay the white steam-boat at
the pier; and over the sunlit waters Boston loomed
in a line of haze.
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 good-bye 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.
