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To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff, whither the van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting the Duke on board his steamer. I wanted to be quiet, and think things over. You were right in telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safe here. I wish that you were with us." She ended with a conventional "Yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the date of her return.
But on Sunday after luncheon he borrowed a cutter, and drove over to Skuytercliff. People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had.
On the piano stood a large basket of orchids which Mr. van der Luyden had had sent from Skuytercliff. Everything was, in short, as it should be on the approach of so considerable an event. Mrs. Archer ran thoughtfully over the list, checking off each name with her sharp gold pen. Mrs. Welland surveyed her son-in-law affectionately.
There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing-room, and in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect was undeniably pleasing. "Lord love us three whole days at Skuytercliff!" Beaufort was saying in his loud sneering voice as Archer entered. "You'd better take all your furs, and a hot-water-bottle." "Why?
Archer murmured: "Ah, my dear and after you'd had her twice at Skuytercliff!" It was at this point that Mr. Jackson seized the chance to place his favourite allusion.
"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."
He sank into the chair, laid his hat and gloves on the floor beside him in the old-fashioned way, and went on: "She has a real gift for arranging flowers. I had sent her a few carnations from Skuytercliff, and I was astonished. Instead of massing them in big bunches as our head-gardener does, she had scattered them about loosely, here and there ... I can't say how.
"But European society is not given to divorce: Countess Olenska thought she would be conforming to American ideas in asking for her freedom." It was the first time that the young man had pronounced her name since he had left Skuytercliff, and he felt the colour rise to his cheek. Mrs. Welland smiled compassionately. "That is just like the extraordinary things that foreigners invent about us.
In the spring twilight the train stopped at the Rhinebeck station, and they walked along the platform to the waiting carriage. "Ah, how awfully kind of the van der Luydens they've sent their man over from Skuytercliff to meet us," Archer exclaimed, as a sedate person out of livery approached them and relieved the maid of her bags.
Her hand still clung to Archer's; but he drew away from her, and walking out into the passage threw open the door of the house. "Hallo, Beaufort this way! Madame Olenska was expecting you," he said. During his journey back to New York the next morning, Archer relived with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at Skuytercliff.
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