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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XV.
Newland Archer arrived at the Chiverses' on Friday evening, and on Saturday went
conscientiously through all the rites appertaining to a week-end at Highbank.
In the morning he had a spin in the ice- boat with his hostess and a few of the
hardier guests; in the afternoon he "went over the farm" with Reggie, and listened,
in the elaborately appointed stables, to
long and impressive disquisitions on the horse; after tea he talked in a corner of
the firelit hall with a young lady who had professed herself broken-hearted when his
engagement was announced, but was now eager
to tell him of her own matrimonial hopes; and finally, about midnight, he assisted in
putting a gold-fish in one visitor's bed, dressed up a burglar in the bath-room of a
nervous aunt, and saw in the small hours by
joining in a pillow-fight that ranged from the nurseries to the basement.
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.
The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the
"grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa
Dagonet.
It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale
green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows.
From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades
and urns descended in the steel-engraving style to a small irregular lake with an
asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers.
To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees (each
of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate
cast-iron ornaments; and below, in a
hollow, lay the four-roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the
land granted him in 1612.
Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed
up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed
had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front.
Now, as Archer rang the bell, the long *** seemed to echo through a mausoleum;
and the surprise of the butler who at length responded to the call was as great
as though he had been summoned from his final sleep.
Happily Archer was of the family, and therefore, irregular though his arrival
was, entitled to be informed that the Countess Olenska was out, having driven to
afternoon service with Mrs. van der Luyden exactly three quarters of an hour earlier.
"Mr. van der Luyden," the butler continued, "is in, sir; but my impression is that he
is either finishing his nap or else reading yesterday's Evening Post.
I heard him say, sir, on his return from church this morning, that he intended to
look through the Evening Post after luncheon; if you like, sir, I might go to
the library door and listen--"
But Archer, thanking him, said that he would go and meet the ladies; and the
butler, obviously relieved, closed the door on him majestically.
A groom took the cutter to the stables, and Archer struck through the park to the high-
road.
The village of Skuytercliff was only a mile and a half away, but he knew that Mrs. van
der Luyden never walked, and that he must keep to the road to meet the carriage.
Presently, however, coming down a foot-path that crossed the highway, he caught sight
of a slight figure in a red cloak, with a big dog running ahead.
He hurried forward, and Madame Olenska stopped short with a smile of welcome.
"Ah, you've come!" she said, and drew her hand from her ***.
The red cloak made her look gay and vivid, like the Ellen Mingott of old days; and he
laughed as he took her hand, and answered: "I came to see what you were running away
from."
Her face clouded over, but she answered: "Ah, well--you will see, presently."
The answer puzzled him. "Why--do you mean that you've been
overtaken?"
She shrugged her shoulders, with a little movement like Nastasia's, and rejoined in a
lighter tone: "Shall we walk on? I'm so cold after the sermon.
And what does it matter, now you're here to protect me?"
The blood rose to his temples and he caught a fold of her cloak.
"Ellen--what is it?
You must tell me."
"Oh, presently--let's run a race first: my feet are freezing to the ground," she
cried; and gathering up the cloak she fled away across the snow, the dog leaping about
her with challenging barks.
For a moment Archer stood watching, his gaze delighted by the flash of the red
meteor against the snow; then he started after her, and they met, panting and
laughing, at a wicket that led into the park.
She looked up at him and smiled. "I knew you'd come!"
"That shows you wanted me to," he returned, with a disproportionate joy in their
nonsense.
The white glitter of the trees filled the air with its own mysterious brightness, and
as they walked on over the snow the ground seemed to sing under their feet.
"Where did you come from?"
Madame Olenska asked. He told her, and added: "It was because I
got your note."
After a pause she said, with a just perceptible chill in her voice: "May asked
you to take care of me." "I didn't need any asking."
"You mean--I'm so evidently helpless and defenceless?
What a poor thing you must all think me!
But women here seem not--seem never to feel the need: any more than the blessed in
heaven." He lowered his voice to ask: "What sort of
a need?"
"Ah, don't ask me! I don't speak your language," she retorted
petulantly.
The answer smote him like a blow, and he stood still in the path, looking down at
her. "What did I come for, if I don't speak
yours?"
"Oh, my friend--!" She laid her hand lightly on his arm, and
he pleaded earnestly: "Ellen--why won't you tell me what's happened?"
She shrugged again.
"Does anything ever happen in heaven?" He was silent, and they walked on a few
yards without exchanging a word. Finally she said: "I will tell you--but
where, where, where?
One can't be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with all the
doors wide open, and always a servant bringing tea, or a log for the fire, or the
newspaper!
Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?
You're so shy, and yet you're so public.
I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage, before a dreadfully
polite audience that never applauds." "Ah, you don't like us!"
Archer exclaimed.
They were walking past the house of the old Patroon, with its squat walls and small
square windows compactly grouped about a central chimney.
The shutters stood wide, and through one of the newly-washed windows Archer caught the
light of a fire. "Why--the house is open!" he said.
She stood still.
"No; only for today, at least. I wanted to see it, and Mr. van der Luyden
had the fire lit and the windows opened, so that we might stop there on the way back
from church this morning."
She ran up the steps and tried the door. "It's still unlocked--what luck!
Come in and we can have a quiet talk.
Mrs. van der Luyden has driven over to see her old aunts at Rhinebeck and we shan't be
missed at the house for another hour." He followed her into the narrow passage.
His spirits, which had dropped at her last words, rose with an irrational leap.
The homely little house stood there, its panels and brasses shining in the
firelight, as if magically created to receive them.
A big bed of embers still gleamed in the kitchen chimney, under an iron pot hung
from an ancient crane.
Rush-bottomed arm-chairs faced each other across the tiled hearth, and rows of Delft
plates stood on shelves against the walls. Archer stooped over and threw a log upon
the embers.
Madame Olenska, dropping her cloak, sat down in one of the chairs.
Archer leaned against the chimney and looked at her.
"You're laughing now; but when you wrote me you were unhappy," he said.
"Yes." She paused.
"But I can't feel unhappy when you're here."
"I sha'n't be here long," he rejoined, his lips stiffening with the effort to say just
so much and no more.
"No; I know. But I'm improvident: I live in the moment
when I'm happy."
The words stole through him like a temptation, and to close his senses to it
he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black tree-boles against
the snow.
But it was as if she too had shifted her place, and he still saw her, between
himself and the trees, drooping over the fire with her indolent smile.
Archer's heart was beating insubordinately.
What if it were from him that she had been running away, and if she had waited to tell
him so till they were here alone together in this secret room?
"Ellen, if I'm really a help to you--if you really wanted me to come--tell me what's
wrong, tell me what it is you're running away from," he insisted.
He spoke without shifting his position, without even turning to look at her: if the
thing was to happen, it was to happen in this way, with the whole width of the room
between them, and his eyes still fixed on the outer snow.
For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment Archer imagined her, almost
heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light arms about his neck.
While he waited, soul and body throbbing with the miracle to come, his eyes
mechanically received the image of a heavily-coated man with his fur collar
turned up who was advancing along the path to the house.
The man was Julius Beaufort. "Ah--!"
Archer cried, bursting into a laugh.
Madame Olenska had sprung up and moved to his side, slipping her hand into his; but
after a glance through the window her face paled and she shrank back.
"So that was it?"
Archer said derisively. "I didn't know he was here," Madame Olenska
murmured.
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.
Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska, had, as usual,
carried off the situation high-handedly.
His way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them, if
they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of nonexistence.
Archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was aware of this odd sense of
disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his vanity it gave him the ghostly
advantage of observing unobserved.
Beaufort had entered the little house with his usual easy assurance; but he could not
smile away the vertical line between his eyes.
It was fairly clear that Madame Olenska had not known that he was coming, though her
words to Archer had hinted at the possibility; at any rate, she had evidently
not told him where she was going when she
left New York, and her unexplained departure had exasperated him.
The ostensible reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very night before, of a
"perfect little house," not in the market, which was really just the thing for her,
but would be snapped up instantly if she
didn't take it; and he was loud in mock- reproaches for the dance she had led him in
running away just as he had found it.
"If only this new dodge for talking along a wire had been a little bit nearer
perfection I might have told you all this from town, and been toasting my toes before
the club fire at this minute, instead of
tramping after you through the snow," he grumbled, disguising a real irritation
under the pretence of it; and at this opening Madame Olenska twisted the talk
away to the fantastic possibility that they
might one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or even--
incredible dream!--from one town to another.
This struck from all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such
platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking
against time, and dealing with a new
invention in which it would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of
the telephone carried them safely back to the big house.
Mrs. van der Luyden had not yet returned; and Archer took his leave and walked off to
fetch the cutter, while Beaufort followed the Countess Olenska indoors.
It was probable that, little as the van der Luydens encouraged unannounced visits, he
could count on being asked to dine, and sent back to the station to catch the nine
o'clock train; but more than that he would
certainly not get, for it would be inconceivable to his hosts that a gentleman
travelling without luggage should wish to spend the night, and distasteful to them to
propose it to a person with whom they were
on terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.
Beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it; and his taking the long
journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience.
He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had only one
object in view in his pursuit of pretty women.
His dull and childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more
permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in his own set.
This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly flying: the question was
whether she had fled because his importunities displeased her, or because
she did not wholly trust herself to resist
them; unless, indeed, all her talk of flight had been a blind, and her departure
no more than a manoeuvre. Archer did not really believe this.
Little as he had actually seen of Madame Olenska, he was beginning to think that he
could read her face, and if not her face, her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance,
and even dismay, at Beaufort's sudden appearance.
But, after all, if this were the case, was it not worse than if she had left New York
for the express purpose of meeting him?
If she had done that, she ceased to be an object of interest, she threw in her lot
with the vulgarest of dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with Beaufort
"classed" herself irretrievably.
No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging Beaufort, and probably despising
him, she was yet drawn to him by all that gave him an advantage over the other men
about her: his habit of two continents and
two societies, his familiar association with artists and actors and people
generally in the world's eye, and his careless contempt for local prejudices.
Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of
his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many
men, morally and socially his betters,
whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park.
How should any one coming from a wider world not feel the difference and be
attracted by it?
Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to Archer that he and she did not
talk the same language; and the young man knew that in some respects this was true.
But Beaufort understood every turn of her dialect, and spoke it fluently: his view of
life, his tone, his attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in
Count Olenski's letter.
This might seem to be to his disadvantage with Count Olenski's wife; but Archer was
too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil
from everything that reminded her of her past.
She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it
would still charm her, even though it were against her will.
Thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man make out the case for Beaufort,
and for Beaufort's victim.
A longing to enlighten her was strong in him; and there were moments when he
imagined that all she asked was to be enlightened.
That evening he unpacked his books from London.
The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of
Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant tales,
and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to
which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews.
He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast; but though he turned
the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was
reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand.
Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered
because the name had attracted him: "The House of Life."
He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever
breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new
and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.
All through the night he pursued through those enchanted pages the vision of a woman
who had the face of Ellen Olenska; but when he woke the next morning, and looked out at
the brownstone houses across the street,
and thought of his desk in Mr. Letterblair's office, and the family pew in
Grace Church, his hour in the park of Skuytercliff became as far outside the pale
of probability as the visions of the night.
"Mercy, how pale you look, Newland!"
Janey commented over the coffee-cups at breakfast; and his mother added: "Newland,
dear, I've noticed lately that you've been coughing; I do hope you're not letting
yourself be overworked?"
For it was the conviction of both ladies that, under the iron despotism of his
senior partners, the young man's life was spent in the most exhausting professional
labours--and he had never thought it necessary to undeceive them.
The next two or three days dragged by heavily.
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he
felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
He heard nothing of the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and though
he met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the whist-
tables.
It was not till the fourth evening that he found a note awaiting him on his return
home. "Come late tomorrow: I must explain to you.
Ellen."
These were the only words it contained. The young man, who was dining out, thrust
the note into his pocket, smiling a little at the Frenchness of the "to you."
After dinner he went to a play; and it was not until his return home, after midnight,
that he drew Madame Olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a number of
times.
There were several ways of answering it, and he gave considerable thought to each
one during the watches of an agitated night.
That on which, when morning came, he finally decided was to pitch some clothes
into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was leaving that very afternoon for
St. Augustine.