The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [105]
Punctually at the hour M. Rivière 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. Rivière 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. Rivière 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—”
“A—!” 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. Rivière 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. Rivière bowed, took a distant chair, and again waited.
“It was about this mission that you wanted to consult me?” Archer finally asked.
M. Rivière 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. Rivière 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. Rivière’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 emis sary.”
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. Rivière 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. Rivière 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. Rivière’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 defenseless. “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. Rivière took this onslaught with a disconcerting humility. “The arguments I want to present to you, Monsieur, are my own and not those I was