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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XVII.
"Your cousin the Countess called on mother while you were away," Janey Archer
announced to her brother on the evening of his return.
The young man, who was dining alone with his mother and sister, glanced up in
surprise and saw Mrs. Archer's gaze demurely bent on her plate.
Mrs. Archer did not regard her seclusion from the world as a reason for being
forgotten by it; and Newland guessed that she was slightly annoyed that he should be
surprised by Madame Olenska's visit.
"She had on a black velvet polonaise with jet buttons, and a tiny green monkey ***;
I never saw her so stylishly dressed," Janey continued.
"She came alone, early on Sunday afternoon; luckily the fire was lit in the drawing-
room. She had one of those new card-cases.
She said she wanted to know us because you'd been so good to her."
Newland laughed. "Madame Olenska always takes that tone
about her friends.
She's very happy at being among her own people again."
"Yes, so she told us," said Mrs. Archer. "I must say she seems thankful to be here."
"I hope you liked her, mother."
Mrs. Archer drew her lips together. "She certainly lays herself out to please,
even when she is calling on an old lady."
"Mother doesn't think her simple," Janey interjected, her eyes screwed upon her
brother's face. "It's just my old-fashioned feeling; dear
May is my ideal," said Mrs. Archer.
"Ah," said her son, "they're not alike." Archer had left St. Augustine charged with
many messages for old Mrs. Mingott; and a day or two after his return to town he
called on her.
The old lady received him with unusual warmth; she was grateful to him for
persuading the Countess Olenska to give up the idea of a divorce; and when he told her
that he had deserted the office without
leave, and rushed down to St. Augustine simply because he wanted to see May, she
gave an adipose chuckle and patted his knee with her puff-ball hand.
"Ah, ah--so you kicked over the traces, did you?
And I suppose Augusta and Welland pulled long faces, and behaved as if the end of
the world had come?
But little May--she knew better, I'll be bound?"
"I hoped she did; but after all she wouldn't agree to what I'd gone down to ask
for."
"Wouldn't she indeed? And what was that?"
"I wanted to get her to promise that we should be married in April.
What's the use of our wasting another year?"
Mrs. Manson Mingott screwed up her little mouth into a grimace of mimic prudery and
twinkled at him through malicious lids.
"'Ask Mamma,' I suppose--the usual story. Ah, these Mingotts--all alike!
Born in a rut, and you can't root 'em out of it.
When I built this house you'd have thought I was moving to California!
Nobody ever HAD built above Fortieth Street--no, says I, nor above the Battery
either, before Christopher Columbus discovered America.
No, no; not one of them wants to be different; they're as scared of it as the
small-pox.
Ah, my dear Mr. Archer, I thank my stars I'm nothing but a vulgar Spicer; but
there's not one of my own children that takes after me but my little Ellen."
She broke off, still twinkling at him, and asked, with the casual irrelevance of old
age: "Now, why in the world didn't you marry my little Ellen?"
Archer laughed.
"For one thing, she wasn't there to be married."
"No--to be sure; more's the pity. And now it's too late; her life is
finished."
She spoke with the cold-blooded complacency of the aged throwing earth into the grave
of young hopes.
The young man's heart grew chill, and he said hurriedly: "Can't I persuade you to
use your influence with the Wellands, Mrs. Mingott?
I wasn't made for long engagements."
Old Catherine beamed on him approvingly. "No; I can see that.
You've got a quick eye. When you were a little boy I've no doubt
you liked to be helped first."
She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
"Ah, here's my Ellen now!" she exclaimed, as the portieres parted behind her.
Madame Olenska came forward with a smile.
Her face looked vivid and happy, and she held out her hand gaily to Archer while she
stooped to her grandmother's kiss. "I was just saying to him, my dear: 'Now,
why didn't you marry my little Ellen?'"
Madame Olenska looked at Archer, still smiling.
"And what did he answer?" "Oh, my darling, I leave you to find that
out!
He's been down to Florida to see his sweetheart."
"Yes, I know." She still looked at him.
"I went to see your mother, to ask where you'd gone.
I sent a note that you never answered, and I was afraid you were ill."
He muttered something about leaving unexpectedly, in a great hurry, and having
intended to write to her from St. Augustine.
"And of course once you were there you never thought of me again!"
She continued to beam on him with a gaiety that might have been a studied assumption
of indifference.
"If she still needs me, she's determined not to let me see it," he thought, stung by
her manner.
He wanted to thank her for having been to see his mother, but under the ancestress's
malicious eye he felt himself tongue-tied and constrained.
"Look at him--in such hot haste to get married that he took French leave and
rushed down to implore the silly girl on his knees!
That's something like a lover--that's the way handsome Bob Spicer carried off my poor
mother; and then got tired of her before I was weaned--though they only had to wait
eight months for me!
But there--you're not a Spicer, young man; luckily for you and for May.
It's only my poor Ellen that has kept any of their wicked blood; the rest of them are
all model Mingotts," cried the old lady scornfully.
Archer was aware that Madame Olenska, who had seated herself at her grandmother's
side, was still thoughtfully scrutinising him.
The gaiety had faded from her eyes, and she said with great gentleness: "Surely,
Granny, we can persuade them between us to do as he wishes."
Archer rose to go, and as his hand met Madame Olenska's he felt that she was
waiting for him to make some allusion to her unanswered letter.
"When can I see you?" he asked, as she walked with him to the door of the room.
"Whenever you like; but it must be soon if you want to see the little house again.
I am moving next week."
A pang shot through him at the memory of his lamplit hours in the low-studded
drawing-room. Few as they had been, they were thick with
memories.
"Tomorrow evening?" She nodded.
"Tomorrow; yes; but early. I'm going out."
The next day was a Sunday, and if she were "going out" on a Sunday evening it could,
of course, be only to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's.
He felt a slight movement of annoyance, not so much at her going there (for he rather
liked her going where she pleased in spite of the van der Luydens), but because it was
the kind of house at which she was sure to
meet Beaufort, where she must have known beforehand that she would meet him--and
where she was probably going for that purpose.
"Very well; tomorrow evening," he repeated, inwardly resolved that he would not go
early, and that by reaching her door late he would either prevent her from going to
Mrs. Struthers's, or else arrive after she
had started--which, all things considered, would no doubt be the simplest solution.
It was only half-past eight, after all, when he rang the bell under the wisteria;
not as late as he had intended by half an hour--but a singular restlessness had
driven him to her door.
He reflected, however, that Mrs. Struthers's Sunday evenings were not like a
ball, and that her guests, as if to minimise their delinquency, usually went
early.
The one thing he had not counted on, in entering Madame Olenska's hall, was to find
hats and overcoats there. Why had she bidden him to come early if she
was having people to dine?
On a closer inspection of the garments besides which Nastasia was laying his own,
his resentment gave way to curiosity.
The overcoats were in fact the very strangest he had ever seen under a polite
roof; and it took but a glance to assure himself that neither of them belonged to
Julius Beaufort.
One was a shaggy yellow ulster of "reach- me-down" cut, the other a very old and
rusty cloak with a cape--something like what the French called a "Macfarlane."
This garment, which appeared to be made for a person of prodigious size, had evidently
seen long and hard wear, and its greenish- black folds gave out a moist sawdusty smell
suggestive of prolonged sessions against bar-room walls.
On it lay a ragged grey scarf and an odd felt hat of semiclerical shape.
Archer raised his eyebrows enquiringly at Nastasia, who raised hers in return with a
fatalistic "Gia!" as she threw open the drawing-room door.
The young man saw at once that his hostess was not in the room; then, with surprise,
he discovered another lady standing by the fire.
This lady, who was long, lean and loosely put together, was clad in raiment
intricately looped and fringed, with plaids and stripes and bands of plain colour
disposed in a design to which the clue seemed missing.
Her hair, which had tried to turn white and only succeeded in fading, was surmounted by
a Spanish comb and black lace scarf, and silk mittens, visibly darned, covered her
rheumatic hands.
Beside her, in a cloud of cigar-smoke, stood the owners of the two overcoats, both
in morning clothes that they had evidently not taken off since morning.
In one of the two, Archer, to his surprise, recognised Ned Winsett; the other and
older, who was unknown to him, and whose gigantic frame declared him to be the
wearer of the "Macfarlane," had a feebly
leonine head with crumpled grey hair, and moved his arms with large pawing gestures,
as though he were distributing lay blessings to a kneeling multitude.
These three persons stood together on the hearth-rug, their eyes fixed on an
extraordinarily large bouquet of crimson roses, with a knot of purple pansies at
their base, that lay on the sofa where Madame Olenska usually sat.
"What they must have cost at this season-- though of course it's the sentiment one
cares about!" the lady was saying in a sighing staccato as Archer came in.
The three turned with surprise at his appearance, and the lady, advancing, held
out her hand. "Dear Mr. Archer--almost my cousin
Newland!" she said.
"I am the Marchioness Manson." Archer bowed, and she continued: "My Ellen
has taken me in for a few days.
I came from Cuba, where I have been spending the winter with Spanish friends--
such delightful distinguished people: the highest nobility of old Castile--how I wish
you could know them!
But I was called away by our dear great friend here, Dr. Carver.
You don't know Dr. Agathon Carver, founder of the Valley of Love Community?"
Dr. Carver inclined his leonine head, and the Marchioness continued: "Ah, New York--
New York--how little the life of the spirit has reached it!
But I see you do know Mr. Winsett."
"Oh, yes--I reached him some time ago; but not by that route," Winsett said with his
dry smile. The Marchioness shook her head reprovingly.
"How do you know, Mr. Winsett?
The spirit bloweth where it listeth." "List--oh, list!" interjected Dr. Carver in
a stentorian murmur. "But do sit down, Mr. Archer.
We four have been having a delightful little dinner together, and my child has
gone up to dress. She expects you; she will be down in a
moment.
We were just admiring these marvellous flowers, which will surprise her when she
reappears." Winsett remained on his feet.
"I'm afraid I must be off.
Please tell Madame Olenska that we shall all feel lost when she abandons our street.
This house has been an oasis." "Ah, but she won't abandon YOU.
Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
It IS poetry you write, Mr. Winsett?"
"Well, no; but I sometimes read it," said Winsett, including the group in a general
nod and slipping out of the room. "A caustic spirit--un peu sauvage.
But so witty; Dr. Carver, you DO think him witty?"
"I never think of wit," said Dr. Carver severely.
"Ah--ah--you never think of wit!
How merciless he is to us weak mortals, Mr. Archer!
But he lives only in the life of the spirit; and tonight he is mentally
preparing the lecture he is to deliver presently at Mrs. Blenker's.
Dr. Carver, would there be time, before you start for the Blenkers' to explain to Mr.
Archer your illuminating discovery of the Direct Contact?
But no; I see it is nearly nine o'clock, and we have no right to detain you while so
many are waiting for your message."
Dr. Carver looked slightly disappointed at this conclusion, but, having compared his
ponderous gold time-piece with Madame Olenska's little travelling-clock, he
reluctantly gathered up his mighty limbs for departure.
"I shall see you later, dear friend?" he suggested to the Marchioness, who replied
with a smile: "As soon as Ellen's carriage comes I will join you; I do hope the
lecture won't have begun."
Dr. Carver looked thoughtfully at Archer. "Perhaps, if this young gentleman is
interested in my experiences, Mrs. Blenker might allow you to bring him with you?"
"Oh, dear friend, if it were possible--I am sure she would be too happy.
But I fear my Ellen counts on Mr. Archer herself."
"That," said Dr. Carver, "is unfortunate-- but here is my card."
He handed it to Archer, who read on it, in Gothic characters:
+---------------------------+ Agathon Carver
The Valley of Love Kittasquattamy, N. Y. +--------
-------------------+
Dr. Carver bowed himself out, and Mrs. Manson, with a sigh that might have been
either of regret or relief, again waved Archer to a seat.
"Ellen will be down in a moment; and before she comes, I am so glad of this quiet
moment with you."
Archer murmured his pleasure at their meeting, and the Marchioness continued, in
her low sighing accents: "I know everything, dear Mr. Archer--my child has
told me all you have done for her.
Your wise advice: your courageous firmness- -thank heaven it was not too late!"
The young man listened with considerable embarrassment.
Was there any one, he wondered, to whom Madame Olenska had not proclaimed his
intervention in her private affairs? "Madame Olenska exaggerates; I simply gave
her a legal opinion, as she asked me to."
"Ah, but in doing it--in doing it you were the unconscious instrument of--of--what
word have we moderns for Providence, Mr. Archer?" cried the lady, tilting her head
on one side and drooping her lids mysteriously.
"Little did you know that at that very moment I was being appealed to: being
approached, in fact--from the other side of the Atlantic!"
She glanced over her shoulder, as though fearful of being overheard, and then,
drawing her chair nearer, and raising a tiny ivory fan to her lips, breathed behind
it: "By the Count himself--my poor, mad,
foolish Olenski; who asks only to take her back on her own terms."
"Good God!" Archer exclaimed, springing up.
"You are horrified?
Yes, of course; I understand. I don't defend poor Stanislas, though he
has always called me his best friend. He does not defend himself--he casts
himself at her feet: in my person."
She tapped her emaciated ***. "I have his letter here."
"A letter?--Has Madame Olenska seen it?" Archer stammered, his brain whirling with
the shock of the announcement.
The Marchioness Manson shook her head softly.
"Time--time; I must have time. I know my Ellen--haughty, intractable;
shall I say, just a shade unforgiving?"
"But, good heavens, to forgive is one thing; to go back into that hell--"
"Ah, yes," the Marchioness acquiesced. "So she describes it--my sensitive child!
But on the material side, Mr. Archer, if one may stoop to consider such things; do
you know what she is giving up?
Those roses there on the sofa--acres like them, under glass and in the open, in his
matchless terraced gardens at Nice!
Jewels--historic pearls: the Sobieski emeralds--sables,--but she cares nothing
for all these!
Art and beauty, those she does care for, she lives for, as I always have; and those
also surrounded her.
Pictures, priceless furniture, music, brilliant conversation--ah, that, my dear
young man, if you'll excuse me, is what you've no conception of here!
And she had it all; and the homage of the greatest.
She tells me she is not thought handsome in New York--good heavens!
Her portrait has been painted nine times; the greatest artists in Europe have begged
for the privilege. Are these things nothing?
And the remorse of an adoring husband?"
As the Marchioness Manson rose to her climax her face assumed an expression of
ecstatic retrospection which would have moved Archer's mirth had he not been numb
with amazement.
He would have laughed if any one had foretold to him that his first sight of
poor Medora Manson would have been in the guise of a messenger of Satan; but he was
in no mood for laughing now, and she seemed
to him to come straight out of the hell from which Ellen Olenska had just escaped.
"She knows nothing yet--of all this?" he asked abruptly.
Mrs. Manson laid a purple finger on her lips.
"Nothing directly--but does she suspect? Who can tell?
The truth is, Mr. Archer, I have been waiting to see you.
From the moment I heard of the firm stand you had taken, and of your influence over
her, I hoped it might be possible to count on your support--to convince you..."
"That she ought to go back?
I would rather see her dead!" cried the young man violently.
"Ah," the Marchioness murmured, without visible resentment.
For a while she sat in her arm-chair, opening and shutting the absurd ivory fan
between her mittened fingers; but suddenly she lifted her head and listened.
"Here she comes," she said in a rapid whisper; and then, pointing to the bouquet
on the sofa: "Am I to understand that you prefer THAT, Mr. Archer?
After all, marriage is marriage...and my niece is still a wife..."
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XVIII.
"What are you two plotting together, aunt Medora?"
Madame Olenska cried as she came into the room.
She was dressed as if for a ball.
Everything about her shimmered and glimmered softly, as if her dress had been
woven out of candle-beams; and she carried her head high, like a pretty woman
challenging a roomful of rivals.
"We were saying, my dear, that here was something beautiful to surprise you with,"
Mrs. Manson rejoined, rising to her feet and pointing archly to the flowers.
Madame Olenska stopped short and looked at the bouquet.
Her colour did not change, but a sort of white radiance of anger ran over her like
summer lightning.
"Ah," she exclaimed, in a shrill voice that the young man had never heard, "who is
ridiculous enough to send me a bouquet? Why a bouquet?
And why tonight of all nights?
I am not going to a ball; I am not a girl engaged to be married.
But some people are always ridiculous." She turned back to the door, opened it, and
called out: "Nastasia!"
The ubiquitous handmaiden promptly appeared, and Archer heard Madame Olenska
say, in an Italian that she seemed to pronounce with intentional deliberateness
in order that he might follow it: "Here--
throw this into the dustbin!" and then, as Nastasia stared protestingly: "But no--
it's not the fault of the poor flowers.
Tell the boy to carry them to the house three doors away, the house of Mr. Winsett,
the dark gentleman who dined here. His wife is ill--they may give her
pleasure...
The boy is out, you say? Then, my dear one, run yourself; here, put
my cloak over you and fly. I want the thing out of the house
immediately!
And, as you live, don't say they come from me!"
She flung her velvet opera cloak over the maid's shoulders and turned back into the
drawing-room, shutting the door sharply.
Her *** was rising high under its lace, and for a moment Archer thought she was
about to cry; but she burst into a laugh instead, and looking from the Marchioness
to Archer, asked abruptly: "And you two-- have you made friends!"
"It's for Mr. Archer to say, darling; he has waited patiently while you were
dressing."
"Yes--I gave you time enough: my hair wouldn't go," Madame Olenska said, raising
her hand to the heaped-up curls of her chignon.
"But that reminds me: I see Dr. Carver is gone, and you'll be late at the Blenkers'.
Mr. Archer, will you put my aunt in the carriage?"
She followed the Marchioness into the hall, saw her fitted into a miscellaneous heap of
overshoes, shawls and tippets, and called from the doorstep: "Mind, the carriage is
to be back for me at ten!"
Then she returned to the drawing-room, where Archer, on re-entering it, found her
standing by the mantelpiece, examining herself in the mirror.
It was not usual, in New York society, for a lady to address her parlour-maid as "my
dear one," and send her out on an errand wrapped in her own opera-cloak; and Archer,
through all his deeper feelings, tasted the
pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action followed on emotion with such
Olympian speed.
Madame Olenska did not move when he came up behind her, and for a second their eyes met
in the mirror; then she turned, threw herself into her sofa-corner, and sighed
out: "There's time for a cigarette."
He handed her the box and lit a spill for her; and as the flame flashed up into her
face she glanced at him with laughing eyes and said: "What do you think of me in a
temper?"
Archer paused a moment; then he answered with sudden resolution: "It makes me
understand what your aunt has been saying about you."
"I knew she'd been talking about me.
Well?" "She said you were used to all kinds of
things--splendours and amusements and excitements--that we could never hope to
give you here."
Madame Olenska smiled faintly into the circle of smoke about her lips.
"Medora is incorrigibly romantic. It has made up to her for so many things!"
Archer hesitated again, and again took his risk.
"Is your aunt's romanticism always consistent with accuracy?"
"You mean: does she speak the truth?"
Her niece considered. "Well, I'll tell you: in almost everything
she says, there's something true and something untrue.
But why do you ask?
What has she been telling you?" He looked away into the fire, and then back
at her shining presence.
His heart tightened with the thought that this was their last evening by that
fireside, and that in a moment the carriage would come to carry her away.
"She says--she pretends that Count Olenski has asked her to persuade you to go back to
him." Madame Olenska made no answer.
She sat motionless, holding her cigarette in her half-lifted hand.
The expression of her face had not changed; and Archer remembered that he had before
noticed her apparent incapacity for surprise.
"You knew, then?" he broke out.
She was silent for so long that the ash dropped from her cigarette.
She brushed it to the floor. "She has hinted about a letter: poor
darling!
Medora's hints--" "Is it at your husband's request that she
has arrived here suddenly?" Madame Olenska seemed to consider this
question also.
"There again: one can't tell. She told me she had had a 'spiritual
summons,' whatever that is, from Dr. Carver.
I'm afraid she's going to marry Dr. Carver...poor Medora, there's always some
one she wants to marry. But perhaps the people in Cuba just got
tired of her!
I think she was with them as a sort of paid companion.
Really, I don't know why she came." "But you do believe she has a letter from
your husband?"
Again Madame Olenska brooded silently; then she said: "After all, it was to be
expected." The young man rose and went to lean against
the fireplace.
A sudden restlessness possessed him, and he was tongue-tied by the sense that their
minutes were numbered, and that at any moment he might hear the wheels of the
returning carriage.
"You know that your aunt believes you will go back?"
Madame Olenska raised her head quickly. A deep blush rose to her face and spread
over her neck and shoulders.
She blushed seldom and painfully, as if it hurt her like a burn.
"Many cruel things have been believed of me," she said.
"Oh, Ellen--forgive me; I'm a fool and a brute!"
She smiled a little. "You are horribly nervous; you have your
own troubles.
I know you think the Wellands are unreasonable about your marriage, and of
course I agree with you.
In Europe people don't understand our long American engagements; I suppose they are
not as calm as we are." She pronounced the "we" with a faint
emphasis that gave it an ironic sound.
Archer felt the irony but did not dare to take it up.
After all, she had perhaps purposely deflected the conversation from her own
affairs, and after the pain his last words had evidently caused her he felt that all
he could do was to follow her lead.
But the sense of the waning hour made him desperate: he could not bear the thought
that a barrier of words should drop between them again.
"Yes," he said abruptly; "I went south to ask May to marry me after Easter.
There's no reason why we shouldn't be married then."
"And May adores you--and yet you couldn't convince her?
I thought her too intelligent to be the slave of such absurd superstitions."
"She IS too intelligent--she's not their slave."
Madame Olenska looked at him. "Well, then--I don't understand."
Archer reddened, and hurried on with a rush.
"We had a frank talk--almost the first. She thinks my impatience a bad sign."
"Merciful heavens--a bad sign?"
"She thinks it means that I can't trust myself to go on caring for her.
She thinks, in short, I want to marry her at once to get away from some one that I--
care for more."
Madame Olenska examined this curiously. "But if she thinks that--why isn't she in a
hurry too?" "Because she's not like that: she's so much
nobler.
She insists all the more on the long engagement, to give me time--"
"Time to give her up for the other woman?" "If I want to."
Madame Olenska leaned toward the fire and gazed into it with fixed eyes.
Down the quiet street Archer heard the approaching trot of her horses.
"That IS noble," she said, with a slight break in her voice.
"Yes. But it's ridiculous." "Ridiculous?
Because you don't care for any one else?"
"Because I don't mean to marry any one else."
"Ah." There was another long interval.
At length she looked up at him and asked: "This other woman--does she love you?"
"Oh, there's no other woman; I mean, the person that May was thinking of is--was
never--"
"Then, why, after all, are you in such haste?"
"There's your carriage," said Archer. She half-rose and looked about her with
absent eyes.
Her fan and gloves lay on the sofa beside her and she picked them up mechanically.
"Yes; I suppose I must be going." "You're going to Mrs. Struthers's?"
"Yes."
She smiled and added: "I must go where I am invited, or I should be too lonely.
Why not come with me?"
Archer felt that at any cost he must keep her beside him, must make her give him the
rest of her evening.
Ignoring her question, he continued to lean against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed
on the hand in which she held her gloves and fan, as if watching to see if he had
the power to make her drop them.
"May guessed the truth," he said. "There is another woman--but not the one
she thinks." Ellen Olenska made no answer, and did not
move.
After a moment he sat down beside her, and, taking her hand, softly unclasped it, so
that the gloves and fan fell on the sofa between them.
She started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other side of the
hearth. "Ah, don't make love to me!
Too many people have done that," she said, frowning.
Archer, changing colour, stood up also: it was the bitterest rebuke she could have
given him.
"I have never made love to you," he said, "and I never shall.
But you are the woman I would have married if it had been possible for either of us."
"Possible for either of us?"
She looked at him with unfeigned astonishment.
"And you say that--when it's you who've made it impossible?"
He stared at her, groping in a blackness through which a single arrow of light tore
its blinding way. "I'VE made it impossible--?"
"You, you, YOU!" she cried, her lip trembling like a child's on the verge of
tears.
"Isn't it you who made me give up divorcing--give it up because you showed me
how selfish and wicked it was, how one must sacrifice one's self to preserve the
dignity of marriage...and to spare one's family the publicity, the scandal?
And because my family was going to be your family--for May's sake and for yours--I did
what you told me, what you proved to me that I ought to do.
Ah," she broke out with a sudden laugh, "I've made no secret of having done it for
you!"
She sank down on the sofa again, crouching among the festive ripples of her dress like
a stricken masquerader; and the young man stood by the fireplace and continued to
gaze at her without moving.
"Good God," he groaned. "When I thought--"
"You thought?" "Ah, don't ask me what I thought!"
Still looking at her, he saw the same burning flush creep up her neck to her
face. She sat upright, facing him with a rigid
dignity.
"I do ask you." "Well, then: there were things in that
letter you asked me to read--" "My husband's letter?"
"Yes."
"I had nothing to fear from that letter: absolutely nothing!
All I feared was to bring notoriety, scandal, on the family--on you and May."
"Good God," he groaned again, bowing his face in his hands.
The silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final and irrevocable.
It seemed to Archer to be crushing him down like his own grave-stone; in all the wide
future he saw nothing that would ever lift that load from his heart.
He did not move from his place, or raise his head from his hands; his hidden
eyeballs went on staring into utter darkness.
"At least I loved you--" he brought out.
On the other side of the hearth, from the sofa-corner where he supposed that she
still crouched, he heard a faint stifled crying like a child's.
He started up and came to her side.
"Ellen! What madness!
Why are you crying? Nothing's done that can't be undone.
I'm still free, and you're going to be."
He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain
terrors shrivelling up like ghosts at sunrise.
The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes
arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made
everything so simple.
She gave him back all his kiss, but after a moment he felt her stiffening in his arms,
and she put him aside and stood up. "Ah, my poor Newland--I suppose this had to
be.
But it doesn't in the least alter things," she said, looking down at him in her turn
from the hearth. "It alters the whole of life for me."
"No, no--it mustn't, it can't.
You're engaged to May Welland; and I'm married."
He stood up too, flushed and resolute. "Nonsense!
It's too late for that sort of thing.
We've no right to lie to other people or to ourselves.
We won't talk of your marriage; but do you see me marrying May after this?"
She stood silent, resting her thin elbows on the mantelpiece, her profile reflected
in the glass behind her.
One of the locks of her chignon had become loosened and hung on her neck; she looked
haggard and almost old. "I don't see you," she said at length,
"putting that question to May. Do you?"
He gave a reckless shrug. "It's too late to do anything else."
"You say that because it's the easiest thing to say at this moment--not because
it's true.
In reality it's too late to do anything but what we'd both decided on."
"Ah, I don't understand you!" She forced a pitiful smile that pinched her
face instead of smoothing it.
"You don't understand because you haven't yet guessed how you've changed things for
me: oh, from the first--long before I knew all you'd done."
"All I'd done?"
"Yes. I was perfectly unconscious at first that people here were shy of me--that they
thought I was a dreadful sort of person. It seems they had even refused to meet me
at dinner.
I found that out afterward; and how you'd made your mother go with you to the van der
Luydens'; and how you'd insisted on announcing your engagement at the Beaufort
ball, so that I might have two families to stand by me instead of one--"
At that he broke into a laugh. "Just imagine," she said, "how stupid and
unobservant I was!
I knew nothing of all this till Granny blurted it out one day.
New York simply meant peace and freedom to me: it was coming home.
And I was so happy at being among my own people that every one I met seemed kind and
good, and glad to see me.
But from the very beginning," she continued, "I felt there was no one as kind
as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed
so hard and--unnecessary.
The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted.
But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all
its golden hands--and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness
bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference.
That was what I'd never known before--and it's better than anything I've known."
She spoke in a low even voice, without tears or visible agitation; and each word,
as it dropped from her, fell into his breast like burning lead.
He sat bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the hearthrug, and at the
tip of the satin shoe that showed under her dress.
Suddenly he knelt down and kissed the shoe.
She bent over him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and looking at him with eyes so
deep that he remained motionless under her gaze.
"Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!" she cried.
"I can't go back now to that other way of thinking.
I can't love you unless I give you up."
His arms were yearning up to her; but she drew away, and they remained facing each
other, divided by the distance that her words had created.
Then, abruptly, his anger overflowed.
"And Beaufort? Is he to replace me?"
As the words sprang out he was prepared for an answering flare of anger; and he would
have welcomed it as fuel for his own.
But Madame Olenska only grew a shade paler, and stood with her arms hanging down before
her, and her head slightly bent, as her way was when she pondered a question.
"He's waiting for you now at Mrs. Struthers's; why don't you go to him?"
Archer sneered. She turned to ring the bell.
"I shall not go out this evening; tell the carriage to go and fetch the Signora
Marchesa," she said when the maid came. After the door had closed again Archer
continued to look at her with bitter eyes.
"Why this sacrifice? Since you tell me that you're lonely I've
no right to keep you from your friends." She smiled a little under her wet lashes.
"I shan't be lonely now.
I WAS lonely; I WAS afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are
gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room
where there's always a light."
Her tone and her look still enveloped her in a soft inaccessibility, and Archer
groaned out again: "I don't understand you!"
"Yet you understand May!"
He reddened under the retort, but kept his eyes on her.
"May is ready to give me up." "What!
Three days after you've entreated her on your knees to hasten your marriage?"
"She's refused; that gives me the right--" "Ah, you've taught me what an ugly word
that is," she said.
He turned away with a sense of utter weariness.
He felt as though he had been struggling for hours up the face of a steep precipice,
and now, just as he had fought his way to the top, his hold had given way and he was
pitching down headlong into darkness.
If he could have got her in his arms again he might have swept away her arguments; but
she still held him at a distance by something inscrutably aloof in her look and
attitude, and by his own awed sense of her sincerity.
At length he began to plead again. "If we do this now it will be worse
afterward--worse for every one--"
"No--no--no!" she almost screamed, as if he frightened her.
At that moment the bell sent a long *** through the house.
They had heard no carriage stopping at the door, and they stood motionless, looking at
each other with startled eyes.
Outside, Nastasia's step crossed the hall, the outer door opened, and a moment later
she came in carrying a telegram which she handed to the Countess Olenska.
"The lady was very happy at the flowers," Nastasia said, smoothing her apron.
"She thought it was her signor marito who had sent them, and she cried a little and
said it was a folly."
Her mistress smiled and took the yellow envelope.
She tore it open and carried it to the lamp; then, when the door had closed again,
she handed the telegram to Archer.
It was dated from St. Augustine, and addressed to the Countess Olenska.
In it he read: "Granny's telegram successful.
Papa and Mamma agree marriage after Easter.
Am telegraphing Newland. Am too happy for words and love you dearly.
Your grateful May."
Half an hour later, when Archer unlocked his own front-door, he found a similar
envelope on the hall-table on top of his pile of notes and letters.
The message inside the envelope was also from May Welland, and ran as follows:
"Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at twelve Grace Church eight
bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love May."
Archer crumpled up the yellow sheet as if the gesture could annihilate the news it
contained.
Then he pulled out a small pocket-diary and turned over the pages with trembling
fingers; but he did not find what he wanted, and cramming the telegram into his
pocket he mounted the stairs.
A light was shining through the door of the little hall-room which served Janey as a
dressing-room and boudoir, and her brother rapped impatiently on the panel.
The door opened, and his sister stood before him in her immemorial purple flannel
dressing-gown, with her hair "on pins." Her face looked pale and apprehensive.
"Newland!
I hope there's no bad news in that telegram?
I waited on purpose, in case--" (No item of his correspondence was safe from Janey.)
He took no notice of her question.
"Look here--what day is Easter this year?" She looked shocked at such unchristian
ignorance. "Easter?
Newland!
Why, of course, the first week in April. Why?"
"The first week?" He turned again to the pages of his diary,
calculating rapidly under his breath.
"The first week, did you say?" He threw back his head with a long laugh.
"For mercy's sake what's the matter?" "Nothing's the matter, except that I'm
going to be married in a month."
Janey fell upon his neck and pressed him to her purple flannel breast.
"Oh Newland, how wonderful! I'm so glad!
But, dearest, why do you keep on laughing?
Do hush, or you'll wake Mamma."
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XIX.
The day was fresh, with a lively spring wind full of dust.
All the old ladies in both families had got out their faded sables and yellowing
ermines, and the smell of camphor from the front pews almost smothered the faint
spring scent of the lilies banking the altar.
Newland Archer, at a signal from the sexton, had come out of the vestry and
placed himself with his best man on the chancel step of Grace Church.
The signal meant that the brougham bearing the bride and her father was in sight; but
there was sure to be a considerable interval of adjustment and consultation in
the lobby, where the bridesmaids were
already hovering like a cluster of Easter blossoms.
During this unavoidable lapse of time the bridegroom, in proof of his eagerness, was
expected to expose himself alone to the gaze of the assembled company; and Archer
had gone through this formality as
resignedly as through all the others which made of a nineteenth century New York
wedding a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history.
Everything was equally easy--or equally painful, as one chose to put it--in the
path he was committed to tread, and he had obeyed the flurried injunctions of his best
man as piously as other bridegrooms had
obeyed his own, in the days when he had guided them through the same labyrinth.
So far he was reasonably sure of having fulfilled all his obligations.
The bridesmaids' eight bouquets of white lilac and lilies-of-the-valley had been
sent in due time, as well as the gold and sapphire sleeve-links of the eight ushers
and the best man's cat's-eye scarf-pin;
Archer had sat up half the night trying to vary the wording of his thanks for the last
batch of presents from men friends and ex- lady-loves; the fees for the Bishop and the
Rector were safely in the pocket of his
best man; his own luggage was already at Mrs. Manson Mingott's, where the wedding-
breakfast was to take place, and so were the travelling clothes into which he was to
change; and a private compartment had been
engaged in the train that was to carry the young couple to their unknown destination--
concealment of the spot in which the bridal night was to be spent being one of the most
sacred taboos of the prehistoric ritual.
"Got the ring all right?" whispered young van der Luyden Newland, who was
inexperienced in the duties of a best man, and awed by the weight of his
responsibility.
Archer made the gesture which he had seen so many bridegrooms make: with his ungloved
right hand he felt in the pocket of his dark grey waistcoat, and assured himself
that the little gold circlet (engraved
inside: Newland to May, April ---, 187-) was in its place; then, resuming his former
attitude, his tall hat and pearl-grey gloves with black stitchings grasped in his
left hand, he stood looking at the door of the church.
Overhead, Handel's March swelled pompously through the imitation stone vaulting,
carrying on its waves the faded drift of the many weddings at which, with cheerful
indifference, he had stood on the same
chancel step watching other brides float up the nave toward other bridegrooms.
"How like a first night at the Opera!" he thought, recognising all the same faces in
the same boxes (no, pews), and wondering if, when the Last Trump sounded, Mrs.
Selfridge Merry would be there with the
same towering ostrich feathers in her bonnet, and Mrs. Beaufort with the same
diamond earrings and the same smile--and whether suitable proscenium seats were
already prepared for them in another world.
After that there was still time to review, one by one, the familiar countenances in
the first rows; the women's sharp with curiosity and excitement, the men's sulky
with the obligation of having to put on
their frock-coats before luncheon, and fight for food at the wedding-breakfast.
"Too bad the breakfast is at old Catherine's," the bridegroom could fancy
Reggie Chivers saying.
"But I'm told that Lovell Mingott insisted on its being cooked by his own chef, so it
ought to be good if one can only get at it."
And he could imagine Sillerton Jackson adding with authority: "My dear fellow,
haven't you heard? It's to be served at small tables, in the
new English fashion."
Archer's eyes lingered a moment on the left-hand pew, where his mother, who had
entered the church on Mr. Henry van der Luyden's arm, sat weeping softly under her
Chantilly veil, her hands in her grandmother's ermine ***.
"Poor Janey!" he thought, looking at his sister, "even by screwing her head around
she can see only the people in the few front pews; and they're mostly dowdy
Newlands and Dagonets."
On the hither side of the white ribbon dividing off the seats reserved for the
families he saw Beaufort, tall and redfaced, scrutinising the women with his
arrogant stare.
Beside him sat his wife, all silvery chinchilla and violets; and on the far side
of the ribbon, Lawrence Lefferts's sleekly brushed head seemed to mount guard over the
invisible deity of "Good Form" who presided at the ceremony.
Archer wondered how many flaws Lefferts's keen eyes would discover in the ritual of
his divinity; then he suddenly recalled that he too had once thought such questions
important.
The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like
the wrangles of mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever
understood.
A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding presents should be "shown" had
darkened the last hours before the wedding; and it seemed inconceivable to Archer that
grown-up people should work themselves into
a state of agitation over such trifles, and that the matter should have been decided
(in the negative) by Mrs. Welland's saying, with indignant tears: "I should as soon
turn the reporters loose in my house."
Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on
all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his
little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance.
"And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and
real things happening to them..."
"THERE THEY COME!" breathed the best man excitedly; but the bridegroom knew better.
The cautious opening of the door of the church meant only that Mr. Brown the
livery-stable keeper (gowned in black in his intermittent character of sexton) was
taking a preliminary survey of the scene before marshalling his forces.
The door was softly shut again; then after another interval it swung majestically
open, and a murmur ran through the church: "The family!"
Mrs. Welland came first, on the arm of her eldest son.
Her large pink face was appropriately solemn, and her plum-coloured satin with
pale blue side-panels, and blue ostrich plumes in a small satin bonnet, met with
general approval; but before she had
settled herself with a stately rustle in the pew opposite Mrs. Archer's the
spectators were craning their necks to see who was coming after her.
Wild rumours had been abroad the day before to the effect that Mrs. Manson Mingott, in
spite of her physical disabilities, had resolved on being present at the ceremony;
and the idea was so much in keeping with
her sporting character that bets ran high at the clubs as to her being able to walk
up the nave and squeeze into a seat.
It was known that she had insisted on sending her own carpenter to look into the
possibility of taking down the end panel of the front pew, and to measure the space
between the seat and the front; but the
result had been discouraging, and for one anxious day her family had watched her
dallying with the plan of being wheeled up the nave in her enormous Bath chair and
sitting enthroned in it at the foot of the chancel.
The idea of this monstrous exposure of her person was so painful to her relations that
they could have covered with gold the ingenious person who suddenly discovered
that the chair was too wide to pass between
the iron uprights of the awning which extended from the church door to the
curbstone.
The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of
dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the
joints of the canvas, exceeded even old
Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility.
"Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!"
Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this
unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder.
The ancestress had had to give in; but her concession was bought only by the promise
that the wedding-breakfast should take place under her roof, though (as the
Washington Square connection said) with the
Wellands' house in easy reach it was hard to have to make a special price with Brown
to drive one to the other end of nowhere.
Though all these transactions had been widely reported by the Jacksons a sporting
minority still clung to the belief that old Catherine would appear in church, and there
was a distinct lowering of the temperature
when she was found to have been replaced by her daughter-in-law.
Mrs. Lovell Mingott had the high colour and glassy stare induced in ladies of her age
and habit by the effort of getting into a new dress; but once the disappointment
occasioned by her mother-in-law's non-
appearance had subsided, it was agreed that her black Chantilly over lilac satin, with
a bonnet of Parma violets, formed the happiest contrast to Mrs. Welland's blue
and plum-colour.
Far different was the impression produced by the gaunt and mincing lady who followed
on Mr. Mingott's arm, in a wild dishevelment of stripes and fringes and
floating scarves; and as this last
apparition glided into view Archer's heart contracted and stopped beating.
He had taken it for granted that the Marchioness Manson was still in Washington,
where she had gone some four weeks previously with her niece, Madame Olenska.
It was generally understood that their abrupt departure was due to Madame
Olenska's desire to remove her aunt from the baleful eloquence of Dr. Agathon
Carver, who had nearly succeeded in
enlisting her as a recruit for the Valley of Love; and in the circumstances no one
had expected either of the ladies to return for the wedding.
For a moment Archer stood with his eyes fixed on Medora's fantastic figure,
straining to see who came behind her; but the little procession was at an end, for
all the lesser members of the family had
taken their seats, and the eight tall ushers, gathering themselves together like
birds or insects preparing for some migratory manoeuvre, were already slipping
through the side doors into the lobby.
"Newland--I say: SHE'S HERE!" the best man whispered.
Archer roused himself with a start.
A long time had apparently passed since his heart had stopped beating, for the white
and rosy procession was in fact half way up the nave, the Bishop, the Rector and two
white-winged assistants were hovering about
the flower-banked altar, and the first chords of the Spohr symphony were strewing
their flower-like notes before the bride.
Archer opened his eyes (but could they really have been shut, as he imagined?),
and felt his heart beginning to resume its usual task.
The music, the scent of the lilies on the altar, the vision of the cloud of tulle and
orange-blossoms floating nearer and nearer, the sight of Mrs. Archer's face suddenly
convulsed with happy sobs, the low
benedictory murmur of the Rector's voice, the ordered evolutions of the eight pink
bridesmaids and the eight black ushers: all these sights, sounds and sensations, so
familiar in themselves, so unutterably
strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his
brain.
"My God," he thought, "HAVE I got the ring?"--and once more he went through the
bridegroom's convulsive gesture.
Then, in a moment, May was beside him, such radiance streaming from her that it sent a
faint warmth through his numbness, and he straightened himself and smiled into her
eyes.
"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here," the Rector began...
The ring was on her hand, the Bishop's benediction had been given, the bridesmaids
were a-poise to resume their place in the procession, and the organ was showing
preliminary symptoms of breaking out into
the Mendelssohn March, without which no newly-wedded couple had ever emerged upon
New York.
"Your arm--I SAY, GIVE HER YOUR ARM!" young Newland nervously hissed; and once more
Archer became aware of having been adrift far off in the unknown.
What was it that had sent him there, he wondered?
Perhaps the glimpse, among the anonymous spectators in the transept, of a dark coil
of hair under a hat which, a moment later, revealed itself as belonging to an unknown
lady with a long nose, so laughably unlike
the person whose image she had evoked that he asked himself if he were becoming
subject to hallucinations.
And now he and his wife were pacing slowly down the nave, carried forward on the light
Mendelssohn ripples, the spring day beckoning to them through widely opened
doors, and Mrs. Welland's chestnuts, with
big white favours on their frontlets, curvetting and showing off at the far end
of the canvas tunnel.
The footman, who had a still bigger white favour on his lapel, wrapped May's white
cloak about her, and Archer jumped into the brougham at her side.
She turned to him with a triumphant smile and their hands clasped under her veil.
"Darling!"
Archer said--and suddenly the same black abyss yawned before him and he felt himself
sinking into it, deeper and deeper, while his voice rambled on smoothly and
cheerfully: "Yes, of course I thought I'd
lost the ring; no wedding would be complete if the poor devil of a bridegroom didn't go
through that. But you DID keep me waiting, you know!
I had time to think of every horror that might possibly happen."
She surprised him by turning, in full Fifth Avenue, and flinging her arms about his
neck.
"But none ever CAN happen now, can it, Newland, as long as we two are together?"
Every detail of the day had been so carefully thought out that the young
couple, after the wedding-breakfast, had ample time to put on their travelling-
clothes, descend the wide Mingott stairs
between laughing bridesmaids and weeping parents, and get into the brougham under
the traditional shower of rice and satin slippers; and there was still half an hour
left in which to drive to the station, buy
the last weeklies at the bookstall with the air of seasoned travellers, and settle
themselves in the reserved compartment in which May's maid had already placed her
dove-coloured travelling cloak and glaringly new dressing-bag from London.
The old du Lac aunts at Rhinebeck had put their house at the disposal of the bridal
couple, with a readiness inspired by the prospect of spending a week in New York
with Mrs. Archer; and Archer, glad to
escape the usual "bridal suite" in a Philadelphia or Baltimore hotel, had
accepted with an equal alacrity.
May was enchanted at the idea of going to the country, and childishly amused at the
vain efforts of the eight bridesmaids to discover where their mysterious retreat was
situated.
It was thought "very English" to have a country-house lent to one, and the fact
gave a last touch of distinction to what was generally conceded to be the most
brilliant wedding of the year; but where
the house was no one was permitted to know, except the parents of bride and groom, who,
when taxed with the knowledge, pursed their lips and said mysteriously: "Ah, they
didn't tell us--" which was manifestly true, since there was no need to.
Once they were settled in their compartment, and the train, shaking off the
endless wooden suburbs, had pushed out into the pale landscape of spring, talk became
easier than Archer had expected.
May was still, in look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday, eager to compare notes
with him as to the incidents of the wedding, and discussing them as impartially
as a bridesmaid talking it all over with an usher.
At first Archer had fancied that this detachment was the disguise of an inward
tremor; but her clear eyes revealed only the most tranquil unawareness.
She was alone for the first time with her husband; but her husband was only the
charming comrade of yesterday.
There was no one whom she liked as much, no one whom she trusted as completely, and the
culminating "lark" of the whole delightful adventure of engagement and marriage was to
be off with him alone on a journey, like a
grownup person, like a "married woman," in fact.
It was wonderful that--as he had learned in the Mission garden at St. Augustine--such
depths of feeling could coexist with such absence of imagination.
But he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him by dropping back to
inexpressive girlishness as soon as her conscience had been eased of its burden;
and he saw that she would probably go
through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as it came,
but never anticipating any by so much as a stolen glance.
Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and
her face the look of representing a type rather than a person; as if she might have
been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess.
The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid
rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made
her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure.
In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with
the startled gaze of a stranger, and plunged into a reminiscence of the wedding-
breakfast and of Granny Mingott's immense and triumphant pervasion of it.
May settled down to frank enjoyment of the subject.
"I was surprised, though--weren't you?-- that aunt Medora came after all.
Ellen wrote that they were neither of them well enough to take the journey; I do wish
it had been she who had recovered!
Did you see the exquisite old lace she sent me?"
He had known that the moment must come sooner or later, but he had somewhat
imagined that by force of willing he might hold it at bay.
"Yes--I--no: yes, it was beautiful," he said, looking at her blindly, and wondering
if, whenever he heard those two syllables, all his carefully built-up world would
tumble about him like a house of cards.
"Aren't you tired?
It will be good to have some tea when we arrive--I'm sure the aunts have got
everything beautifully ready," he rattled on, taking her hand in his; and her mind
rushed away instantly to the magnificent
tea and coffee service of Baltimore silver which the Beauforts had sent, and which
"went" so perfectly with uncle Lovell Mingott's trays and side-dishes.
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.
"I'm extremely sorry, sir," said this emissary, "that a little accident has
occurred at the Miss du Lacs': a leak in the water-tank.
It happened yesterday, and Mr. van der Luyden, who heard of it this morning, sent
a housemaid up by the early train to get the Patroon's house ready.
It will be quite comfortable, I think you'll find, sir; and the Miss du Lacs have
sent their cook over, so that it will be exactly the same as if you'd been at
Rhinebeck."
Archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he repeated in still more apologetic
accents: "It'll be exactly the same, sir, I do assure you--" and May's eager voice
broke out, covering the embarrassed silence: "The same as Rhinebeck?
The Patroon's house? But it will be a hundred thousand times
better--won't it, Newland?
It's too dear and kind of Mr. van der Luyden to have thought of it."
And as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman, and their shining bridal bags
on the seat before them, she went on excitedly: "Only fancy, I've never been
inside it--have you?
The van der Luydens show it to so few people.
But they opened it for Ellen, it seems, and she told me what a darling little place it
was: she says it's the only house she's seen in America that she could imagine
being perfectly happy in."
"Well--that's what we're going to be, isn't it?" cried her husband gaily; and she
answered with her boyish smile: "Ah, it's just our luck beginning--the wonderful luck
we're always going to have together!"
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XX.
"Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," Archer said; and his wife looked
at him with an anxious frown across the monumental Britannia ware of their lodging
house breakfast-table.
In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two people whom the Newland
Archers knew; and these two they had sedulously avoided, in conformity with the
old New York tradition that it was not
"dignified" to force one's self on the notice of one's acquaintances in foreign
countries.
Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had so
unflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advances of their
fellow-travellers with an air of such
impenetrable reserve, that they had almost achieved the record of never having
exchanged a word with a "foreigner" other than those employed in hotels and railway-
stations.
Their own compatriots--save those previously known or properly accredited--
they treated with an even more pronounced disdain; so that, unless they ran across a
Chivers, a Dagonet or a Mingott, their
months abroad were spent in an unbroken tete-a-tete.
But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night at Botzen one of
the two English ladies in the room across the passage (whose names, dress and social
situation were already intimately known to
Janey) had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottle of liniment.
The other lady--the intruder's sister, Mrs. Carfry--had been seized with a sudden
attack of bronchitis; and Mrs. Archer, who never travelled without a complete family
pharmacy, was fortunately able to produce the required remedy.
Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister Miss Harle were travelling alone
they were profoundly grateful to the Archer ladies, who supplied them with ingenious
comforts and whose efficient maid helped to nurse the invalid back to health.
When the Archers left Botzen they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs. Carfry and Miss
Harle again.
Nothing, to Mrs. Archer's mind, would have been more "undignified" than to force one's
self on the notice of a "foreigner" to whom one had happened to render an accidental
service.
But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown, and who
would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves linked by
an eternal gratitude to the "delightful Americans" who had been so kind at Botzen.
With touching fidelity they seized every chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in
the course of their continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in
finding out when they were to pass through London on their way to or from the States.
The intimacy became indissoluble, and Mrs. Archer and Janey, whenever they alighted at
Brown's Hotel, found themselves awaited by two affectionate friends who, like
themselves, cultivated ferns in Wardian
cases, made macrame lace, read the memoirs of the Baroness Bunsen and had views about
the occupants of the leading London pulpits.
As Mrs. Archer said, it made "another thing of London" to know Mrs. Carfry and Miss
Harle; and by the time that Newland became engaged the tie between the families was so
firmly established that it was thought
"only right" to send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies, who sent, in
return, a pretty bouquet of pressed Alpine flowers under glass.
And on the dock, when Newland and his wife sailed for England, Mrs. Archer's last word
had been: "You must take May to see Mrs. Carfry."
Newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying this injunction; but Mrs. Carfry,
with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent them an invitation to dine; and it
was over this invitation that May Archer
was wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins.
"It's all very well for you, Newland; you KNOW them.
But I shall feel so shy among a lot of people I've never met.
And what shall I wear?" Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled
at her.
She looked handsomer and more Diana-like than ever.
The moist English air seemed to have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and
softened the slight hardness of her virginal features; or else it was simply
the inner glow of happiness, shining through like a light under ice.
"Wear, dearest? I thought a trunkful of things had come
from Paris last week."
"Yes, of course. I meant to say that I shan't know WHICH to
wear." She pouted a little.
"I've never dined out in London; and I don't want to be ridiculous."
He tried to enter into her perplexity. "But don't Englishwomen dress just like
everybody else in the evening?"
"Newland! How can you ask such funny questions?
When they go to the theatre in old ball- dresses and bare heads."
"Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate Mrs. Carfry and
Miss Harle won't. They'll wear caps like my mother's--and
shawls; very soft shawls."
"Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?"
"Not as well as you, dear," he rejoined, wondering what had suddenly developed in
her Janey's morbid interest in clothes.
She pushed back her chair with a sigh. "That's dear of you, Newland; but it
doesn't help me much." He had an inspiration.
"Why not wear your wedding-dress?
That can't be wrong, can it?" "Oh, dearest!
If I only had it here!
But it's gone to Paris to be made over for next winter, and Worth hasn't sent it
back." "Oh, well--" said Archer, getting up.
"Look here--the fog's lifting.
If we made a dash for the National Gallery we might manage to catch a glimpse of the
pictures."
The Newland Archers were on their way home, after a three months' wedding-tour which
May, in writing to her girl friends, vaguely summarised as "blissful."
They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection, Archer had not been able to
picture his wife in that particular setting.
Her own inclination (after a month with the Paris dressmakers) was for mountaineering
in July and swimming in August.
This plan they punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and
Grindelwald, and August at a little place called Etretat, on the Normandy coast,
which some one had recommended as quaint and quiet.
Once or twice, in the mountains, Archer had pointed southward and said: "There's
Italy"; and May, her feet in a gentian-bed, had smiled cheerfully, and replied: "It
would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn't have to be in New York."
But in reality travelling interested her even less than he had expected.
She regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely an enlarged opportunity
for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand at the fascinating new game of
lawn tennis; and when they finally got back
to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered HIS clothes) she
no longer concealed the eagerness with which she looked forward to sailing.
In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops; and she found the
theatres less exciting than the Paris cafes chantants where, under the blossoming
horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees, she
had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant terrace on an
audience of "cocottes," and having her husband interpret to her as much of the
songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.
Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage.
It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his
friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which
his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that
she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May's only use of the
liberty she supposed herself to possess
would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration.
Her innate dignity would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day
might even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it altogether
back if she thought she were doing it for his own good.
But with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers such a
crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous in his own
conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him made that unthinkable.
Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful;
and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues.
All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind.
If her simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed and
rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were on the same
fine mould as her face, she became the
tutelary divinity of all his old traditions and reverences.
Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel, though they made
her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at once how they would fall into
place in their proper setting.
He had no fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life
would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within it there would
be nothing small and stifling--coming back
to his wife would never be like entering a stuffy room after a *** in the open.
And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would be
filled.
All these things went through his mind during their long slow drive from Mayfair
to South Kensington, where Mrs. Carfry and her sister lived.
Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends' hospitality: in conformity
with the family tradition he had always travelled as a sight-seer and looker-on,
affecting a haughty unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings.
Once only, just after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of
*** Europeanised Americans, dancing all night with titled ladies in palaces, and
gambling half the day with the rakes and
dandies of the fashionable club; but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest fun
in the world, as unreal as a carnival.
These *** cosmopolitan women, deep in complicated love-affairs which they
appeared to feel the need of retailing to every one they met, and the magnificent
young officers and elderly dyed wits who
were the subjects or the recipients of their confidences, were too different from
the people Archer had grown up among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous
hot-house exotics, to detain his imagination long.
To introduce his wife into such a society was out of the question; and in the course
of his travels no other had shown any marked eagerness for his company.
Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of St. Austrey, and
the Duke, instantly and cordially recognising him, had said: "Look me up,
won't you?"--but no proper-spirited
American would have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting
was without a sequel.
They had even managed to avoid May's English aunt, the banker's wife, who was
still in Yorkshire; in fact, they had purposely postponed going to London till
the autumn in order that their arrival
during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to these unknown relatives.
"Probably there'll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry's--London's a desert at this season,
and you've made yourself much too beautiful," Archer said to May, who sat at
his side in the hansom so spotlessly
splendid in her sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose
her to the London grime.
"I don't want them to think that we dress like savages," she replied, with a scorn
that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence
of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.
"It's their armour," he thought, "their defence against the unknown, and their
defiance of it."
And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was
incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite
of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.
He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry's to be a small one.
Besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the long chilly drawing-room,
only another shawled lady, a genial Vicar who was her husband, a silent lad whom Mrs.
Carfry named as her nephew, and a small
dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor, pronouncing a
French name as she did so.
Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer floated like a swan with the
sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, more voluminously rustling than her husband
had ever seen her; and he perceived that
the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an extreme and infantile shyness.
"What on earth will they expect me to talk about?" her helpless eyes implored him, at
the very moment that her dazzling apparition was calling forth the same
anxiety in their own bosoms.
But beauty, even when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly
heart; and the Vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May their
desire to put her at her ease.
In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing affair.
Archer noticed that his wife's way of showing herself at her ease with foreigners
was to become more uncompromisingly local in her references, so that, though her
loveliness was an encouragement to
admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee.
The Vicar soon abandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and
accomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until the ladies, to
the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the drawing-room.
The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a meeting, and the
shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packed off to bed.
But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine, and suddenly Archer found
himself talking as he had not done since his last symposium with Ned Winsett.
The Carfry nephew, it turned out, had been threatened with consumption, and had had to
leave Harrow for Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake
Leman.
Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Riviere, who had brought
him back to England, and was to remain with him till he went up to Oxford the following
spring; and M. Riviere added with
simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.
It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without one, so varied
were his interests and so many his gifts.
He was a man of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called
him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense expressiveness;
but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his animation.
His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and it had been
intended that the son should follow the same career; but an insatiable taste for
letters had thrown the young man into
journalism, then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at length--
after other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--into tutoring
English youths in Switzerland.
Before that, however, he had lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt grenier,
been advised by Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a
dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Merimee in his mother's house.
He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious (having a mother and an
unmarried sister to provide for), and it was apparent that his literary ambitions
had failed.
His situation, in fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned
Winsett's; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas
need hunger mentally.
As it was precisely of that love that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer
looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had
fared so richly in his poverty.
"You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual
liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence?
It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, and took to so much duller
work: tutoring and private secretaryship.
There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one preserves one's moral
freedom, what we call in French one's quant a soi.
And when one hears good talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but
one's own; or one can listen, and answer it inwardly.
Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there?
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two
different forms of the same self- abdication."
He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette.
"Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a
garret for, isn't it?
But, after all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to grow
old as a private tutor--or a 'private' anything--is almost as chilling to the
imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest.
Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge.
Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America--in New
York?" Archer looked at him with startled eyes.
New York, for a young man who had frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert, and
who thought the life of ideas the only one worth living!
He continued to stare at M. Riviere perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that
his very superiorities and advantages would be the surest hindrance to success.
"New York--New York--but must it be especially New York?" he stammered, utterly
unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could offer to a young man
to whom good conversation appeared to be the only necessity.
A sudden flush rose under M. Riviere's sallow skin.
"I--I thought it your metropolis: is not the intellectual life more active there?"
he rejoined; then, as if fearing to give his hearer the impression of having asked a
favour, he went on hastily: "One throws
out random suggestions--more to one's self than to others.
In reality, I see no immediate prospect--" and rising from his seat he added, without
a trace of constraint: "But Mrs. Carfry will think that I ought to be taking you
upstairs."
During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode.
His hour with M. Riviere had put new air into his lungs, and his first impulse had
been to invite him to dine the next day; but he was beginning to understand why
married men did not always immediately yield to their first impulses.
"That young tutor is an interesting fellow: we had some awfully good talk after dinner
about books and things," he threw out tentatively in the hansom.
May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he had read so many
meanings before six months of marriage had given him the key to them.
"The little Frenchman?
Wasn't he dreadfully common?" she questioned coldly; and he guessed that she
nursed a secret disappointment at having been invited out in London to meet a
clergyman and a French tutor.
The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment ordinarily defined as
snobbishness, but by old New York's sense of what was due to it when it risked its
dignity in foreign lands.
If May's parents had entertained the Carfrys in Fifth Avenue they would have
offered them something more substantial than a parson and a schoolmaster.
But Archer was on edge, and took her up.
"Common--common WHERE?" he queried; and she returned with unusual readiness: "Why, I
should say anywhere but in his school-room. Those people are always awkward in society.
But then," she added disarmingly, "I suppose I shouldn't have known if he was
clever."
Archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her use of the
word "common"; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he
disliked in her.
After all, her point of view had always been the same.
It was that of all the people he had grown up among, and he had always regarded it as
necessary but negligible.
Until a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked at life
differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice.
"Ah--then I won't ask him to dine!" he concluded with a laugh; and May echoed,
bewildered: "Goodness--ask the Carfrys' tutor?"
"Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys, if you prefer I shouldn't.
But I did rather want another talk with him.
He's looking for a job in New York."
Her surprise increased with her indifference: he almost fancied that she
suspected him of being tainted with "foreignness."
"A job in New York?
What sort of a job? People don't have French tutors: what does
he want to do?"
"Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand," her husband retorted
perversely; and she broke into an appreciative laugh.
"Oh, Newland, how funny!
Isn't that FRENCH?" On the whole, he was glad to have the
matter settled for him by her refusing to take seriously his wish to invite M.
Riviere.
Another after-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question of New
York; and the more Archer considered it the less he was able to fit M. Riviere into any
conceivable picture of New York as he knew it.
He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future many problems would
be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the hansom and followed his wife's
long train into the house he took refuge in
the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in
marriage.
"After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's
angles," he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing
on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XXI.
The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea.
The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and cast-iron vases
painted in chocolate colour, standing at intervals along the winding path that led
to the sea, looped their garlands of
petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.
Half way between the edge of the cliff and the square wooden house (which was also
chocolate-coloured, but with the tin roof of the verandah striped in yellow and brown
to represent an awning) two large targets
had been placed against a background of shrubbery.
On the other side of the lawn, facing the targets, was pitched a real tent, with
benches and garden-seats about it.
A number of ladies in summer dresses and gentlemen in grey frock-coats and tall hats
stood on the lawn or sat upon the benches; and every now and then a slender girl in
starched muslin would step from the tent,
bow in hand, and speed her shaft at one of the targets, while the spectators
interrupted their talk to watch the result.
Newland Archer, standing on the verandah of the house, looked curiously down upon this
scene.
On each side of the shiny painted steps was a large blue china flower-pot on a bright
yellow china stand.
A spiky green plant filled each pot, and below the verandah ran a wide border of
blue hydrangeas edged with more red geraniums.
Behind him, the French windows of the drawing-rooms through which he had passed
gave glimpses, between swaying lace curtains, of glassy parquet floors islanded
with chintz poufs, dwarf armchairs, and
velvet tables covered with trifles in silver.
The Newport Archery Club always held its August meeting at the Beauforts'.
The sport, which had hitherto known no rival but croquet, was beginning to be
discarded in favour of lawn-tennis; but the latter game was still considered too rough
and inelegant for social occasions, and as
an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes the bow and arrow
held their own. Archer looked down with wonder at the
familiar spectacle.
It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to
it had so completely changed. It was Newport that had first brought home
to him the extent of the change.
In New York, during the previous winter, after he and May had settled down in the
new greenish-yellow house with the bow- window and the Pompeian vestibule, he had
dropped back with relief into the old
routine of the office, and the renewal of this daily activity had served as a link
with his former self.
Then there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey stepper
for May's brougham (the Wellands had given the carriage), and the abiding occupation
and interest of arranging his new library,
which, in spite of family doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out as he
had dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake book-cases and "sincere" arm-
chairs and tables.
At the Century he had found Winsett again, and at the Knickerbocker the fashionable
young men of his own set; and what with the hours dedicated to the law and those given
to dining out or entertaining friends at
home, with an occasional evening at the Opera or the play, the life he was living
had still seemed a fairly real and inevitable sort of business.
But Newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of unmitigated
holiday-making.
Archer had tried to persuade May to spend the summer on a remote island off the coast
of Maine (called, appropriately enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy Bostonians
and Philadelphians were camping in "native"
cottages, and whence came reports of enchanting scenery and a wild, almost
trapper-like existence amid woods and waters.
But the Wellands always went to Newport, where they owned one of the square boxes on
the cliffs, and their son-in-law could adduce no good reason why he and May should
not join them there.
As Mrs. Welland rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for May to have
worn herself out trying on summer clothes in Paris if she was not to be allowed to
wear them; and this argument was of a kind to which Archer had as yet found no answer.
May herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with so
reasonable and pleasant a way of spending the summer.
She reminded him that he had always liked Newport in his bachelor days, and as this
was indisputable he could only profess that he was sure he was going to like it better
than ever now that they were to be there together.
But as he stood on the Beaufort verandah and looked out on the brightly peopled lawn
it came home to him with a shiver that he was not going to like it at all.
It was not May's fault, poor dear.
If, now and then, during their travels, they had fallen slightly out of step,
harmony had been restored by their return to the conditions she was used to.
He had always foreseen that she would not disappoint him; and he had been right.
He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming
girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending
in premature disgust; and she had
represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable
duty.
He could not say that he had been mistaken in his choice, for she had fulfilled all
that he had expected.
It was undoubtedly gratifying to be the husband of one of the handsomest and most
popular young married women in New York, especially when she was also one of the
sweetest-tempered and most reasonable of
wives; and Archer had never been insensible to such advantages.
As for the momentary madness which had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage,
he had trained himself to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments.
The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess
Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the
most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.
But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather empty and echoing
place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons why the busy animated people on the
Beaufort lawn shocked him as if they had been children playing in a grave-yard.
He heard a murmur of skirts beside him, and the Marchioness Manson fluttered out of the
drawing-room window.
As usual, she was extraordinarily festooned and bedizened, with a limp Leghorn hat
anchored to her head by many windings of faded gauze, and a little black velvet
parasol on a carved ivory handle absurdly balanced over her much larger hatbrim.
"My dear Newland, I had no idea that you and May had arrived!
You yourself came only yesterday, you say?
Ah, business--business--professional duties...
I understand.
Many husbands, I know, find it impossible to join their wives here except for the
week-end." She cocked her head on one side and
languished at him through screwed-up eyes.
"But marriage is one long sacrifice, as I used often to remind my Ellen--"
Archer's heart stopped with the *** jerk which it had given once before, and which
seemed suddenly to slam a door between himself and the outer world; but this break
of continuity must have been of the
briefest, for he presently heard Medora answering a question he had apparently
found voice to put.
"No, I am not staying here, but with the Blenkers, in their delicious solitude at
Portsmouth.
Beaufort was kind enough to send his famous trotters for me this morning, so that I
might have at least a glimpse of one of Regina's garden-parties; but this evening I
go back to rural life.
The Blenkers, dear original beings, have hired a primitive old farm-house at
Portsmouth where they gather about them representative people..."
She drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim, and added with a faint blush: "This
week Dr. Agathon Carver is holding a series of Inner Thought meetings there.
A contrast indeed to this gay scene of worldly pleasure--but then I have always
lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony.
I always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.
But my poor child is going through a phase of exaltation, of abhorrence of the world.
You know, I suppose, that she has declined all invitations to stay at Newport, even
with her grandmother Mingott? I could hardly persuade her to come with me
to the Blenkers', if you will believe it!
The life she leads is morbid, unnatural. Ah, if she had only listened to me when it
was still possible... When the door was still open...
But shall we go down and watch this absorbing match?
I hear your May is one of the competitors."
Strolling toward them from the tent Beaufort advanced over the lawn, tall,
heavy, too tightly buttoned into a London frock-coat, with one of his own orchids in
its buttonhole.
Archer, who had not seen him for two or three months, was struck by the change in
his appearance.
In the hot summer light his floridness seemed heavy and bloated, and but for his
erect square-shouldered walk he would have looked like an over-fed and over-dressed
old man.
There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Beaufort.
In the spring he had gone off on a long cruise to the West Indies in his new steam-
yacht, and it was reported that, at various points where he had touched, a lady
resembling Miss *** Ring had been seen in his company.
The steam-yacht, built in the Clyde, and fitted with tiled bath-rooms and other
unheard-of luxuries, was said to have cost him half a million; and the pearl necklace
which he had presented to his wife on his
return was as magnificent as such expiatory offerings are apt to be.
Beaufort's fortune was substantial enough to stand the strain; and yet the
disquieting rumours persisted, not only in Fifth Avenue but in Wall Street.
Some people said he had speculated unfortunately in railways, others that he
was being bled by one of the most insatiable members of her profession; and
to every report of threatened insolvency
Beaufort replied by a fresh extravagance: the building of a new row of orchid-houses,
the purchase of a new string of race- horses, or the addition of a new
Meissonnier or Cabanel to his picture- gallery.
He advanced toward the Marchioness and Newland with his usual half-sneering smile.
"Hullo, Medora!
Did the trotters do their business? Forty minutes, eh?...
Well, that's not so bad, considering your nerves had to be spared."
He shook hands with Archer, and then, turning back with them, placed himself on
Mrs. Manson's other side, and said, in a low voice, a few words which their
companion did not catch.
The Marchioness replied by one of her *** foreign jerks, and a "Que voulez-vous?"
which deepened Beaufort's frown; but he produced a good semblance of a
congratulatory smile as he glanced at
Archer to say: "You know May's going to carry off the first prize."
"Ah, then it remains in the family," Medora rippled; and at that moment they reached
the tent and Mrs. Beaufort met them in a girlish cloud of mauve muslin and floating
veils.
May Welland was just coming out of the tent.
In her white dress, with a pale green ribbon about the waist and a wreath of ivy
on her hat, she had the same Diana-like aloofness as when she had entered the
Beaufort ball-room on the night of her engagement.
In the interval not a thought seemed to have passed behind her eyes or a feeling
through her heart; and though her husband knew that she had the capacity for both he
marvelled afresh at the way in which experience dropped away from her.
She had her bow and arrow in her hand, and placing herself on the chalk-mark traced on
the turf she lifted the bow to her shoulder and took aim.
The attitude was so full of a classic grace that a murmur of appreciation followed her
appearance, and Archer felt the glow of proprietorship that so often cheated him
into momentary well-being.
Her rivals--Mrs. Reggie Chivers, the Merry girls, and divers rosy Thorleys, Dagonets
and Mingotts, stood behind her in a lovely anxious group, brown heads and golden bent
above the scores, and pale muslins and
flower-wreathed hats mingled in a tender rainbow.
All were young and pretty, and bathed in summer bloom; but not one had the nymph-
like ease of his wife, when, with tense muscles and happy frown, she bent her soul
upon some feat of strength.
"Gad," Archer heard Lawrence Lefferts say, "not one of the lot holds the bow as she
does"; and Beaufort retorted: "Yes; but that's the only kind of target she'll ever
hit."
Archer felt irrationally angry. His host's contemptuous tribute to May's
"niceness" was just what a husband should have wished to hear said of his wife.
The fact that a coarseminded man found her lacking in attraction was simply another
proof of her quality; yet the words sent a faint shiver through his heart.
What if "niceness" carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain
dropped before an emptiness?
As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her final bull's-eye, he had the
feeling that he had never yet lifted that curtain.
She took the congratulations of her rivals and of the rest of the company with the
simplicity that was her crowning grace.
No one could ever be jealous of her triumphs because she managed to give the
feeling that she would have been just as serene if she had missed them.
But when her eyes met her husband's her face glowed with the pleasure she saw in
his.
Mrs. Welland's basket-work pony-carriage was waiting for them, and they drove off
among the dispersing carriages, May handling the reins and Archer sitting at
her side.
The afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright lawns and shrubberies, and up
and down Bellevue Avenue rolled a double line of victorias, dog-carts, landaus and
"vis-a-vis," carrying well-dressed ladies
and gentlemen away from the Beaufort garden-party, or homeward from their daily
afternoon turn along the Ocean Drive. "Shall we go to see Granny?"
May suddenly proposed.
"I should like to tell her myself that I've won the prize.
There's lots of time before dinner."
Archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down Narragansett Avenue, crossed
Spring Street and drove out toward the rocky moorland beyond.
In this unfashionable region Catherine the Great, always indifferent to precedent and
thrifty of purse, had built herself in her youth a many-peaked and cross-beamed
cottage-orne on a bit of cheap land overlooking the bay.
Here, in a thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs spread themselves above the
island-dotted waters.
A winding drive led up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of
geraniums to a front door of highly- varnished walnut under a striped verandah-
roof; and behind it ran a narrow hall with
a black and yellow star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square
rooms with heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an Italian house-painter
had lavished all the divinities of Olympus.
One of these rooms had been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott when the burden of
flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining one she spent her days, enthroned
in a large armchair between the open door
and window, and perpetually waving a palm- leaf fan which the prodigious projection of
her *** kept so far from the rest of her person that the air it set in motion
stirred only the fringe of the anti- macassars on the chair-arms.
Since she had been the means of hastening his marriage old Catherine had shown to
Archer the cordiality which a service rendered excites toward the person served.
She was persuaded that irrepressible passion was the cause of his impatience;
and being an ardent admirer of impulsiveness (when it did not lead to the
spending of money) she always received him
with a genial twinkle of complicity and a play of allusion to which May seemed
fortunately impervious.
She examined and appraised with much interest the diamond-tipped arrow which had
been pinned on May's *** at the conclusion of the match, remarking that in
her day a filigree brooch would have been
thought enough, but that there was no denying that Beaufort did things
handsomely. "Quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear," the
old lady chuckled.
"You must leave it in fee to your eldest girl."
She pinched May's white arm and watched the colour flood her face.
"Well, well, what have I said to make you shake out the red flag?
Ain't there going to be any daughters--only boys, eh?
Good gracious, look at her blushing again all over her blushes!
What--can't I say that either?
Mercy me--when my children beg me to have all those gods and goddesses painted out
overhead I always say I'm too thankful to have somebody about me that NOTHING can
shock!"
Archer burst into a laugh, and May echoed it, crimson to the eyes.
"Well, now tell me all about the party, please, my dears, for I shall never get a
straight word about it out of that silly Medora," the ancestress continued; and, as
May exclaimed: "Cousin Medora?
But I thought she was going back to Portsmouth?" she answered placidly: "So she
is--but she's got to come here first to pick up Ellen.
Ah--you didn't know Ellen had come to spend the day with me?
Such fol-de-rol, her not coming for the summer; but I gave up arguing with young
people about fifty years ago.
Ellen--ELLEN!" she cried in her shrill old voice, trying to bend forward far enough to
catch a glimpse of the lawn beyond the verandah.
There was no answer, and Mrs. Mingott rapped impatiently with her stick on the
shiny floor.
A mulatto maid-servant in a bright turban, replying to the summons, informed her
mistress that she had seen "Miss Ellen" going down the path to the shore; and Mrs.
Mingott turned to Archer.
"Run down and fetch her, like a good grandson; this pretty lady will describe
the party to me," she said; and Archer stood up as if in a dream.
He had heard the Countess Olenska's name pronounced often enough during the year and
a half since they had last met, and was even familiar with the main incidents of
her life in the interval.
He knew that she had spent the previous summer at Newport, where she appeared to
have gone a great deal into society, but that in the autumn she had suddenly sub-let
the "perfect house" which Beaufort had been
at such pains to find for her, and decided to establish herself in Washington.
There, during the winter, he had heard of her (as one always heard of pretty women in
Washington) as shining in the "brilliant diplomatic society" that was supposed to
make up for the social short-comings of the Administration.
He had listened to these accounts, and to various contradictory reports on her
appearance, her conversation, her point of view and her choice of friends, with the
detachment with which one listens to
reminiscences of some one long since dead; not till Medora suddenly spoke her name at
the archery match had Ellen Olenska become a living presence to him again.
The Marchioness's foolish lisp had called up a vision of the little fire-lit drawing-
room and the sound of the carriage-wheels returning down the deserted street.
He thought of a story he had read, of some peasant children in Tuscany lighting a
bunch of straw in a wayside cavern, and revealing old silent images in their
painted tomb...
The way to the shore descended from the bank on which the house was perched to a
walk above the water planted with weeping willows.
Through their veil Archer caught the glint of the Lime Rock, with its white-washed
turret and the tiny house in which the heroic light-house keeper, Ida Lewis, was
living her last venerable years.
Beyond it lay the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys of Goat Island, the bay
spreading northward in a shimmer of gold to Prudence Island with its low growth of
oaks, and the shores of Conanicut faint in the sunset haze.
From the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier ending in a sort of pagoda-like
summer-house; and in the pagoda a lady stood, leaning against the rail, her back
to the shore.
Archer stopped at the sight as if he had waked from sleep.
That vision of the past was a dream, and the reality was what awaited him in the
house on the bank overhead: was Mrs. Welland's pony-carriage circling around and
around the oval at the door, was May
sitting under the shameless Olympians and glowing with secret hopes, was the Welland
villa at the far end of Bellevue Avenue, and Mr. Welland, already dressed for
dinner, and pacing the drawing-room floor,
watch in hand, with dyspeptic impatience-- for it was one of the houses in which one
always knew exactly what is happening at a given hour.
"What am I?
A son-in-law--" Archer thought. The figure at the end of the pier had not
moved.
For a long moment the young man stood half way down the bank, gazing at the bay
furrowed with the coming and going of sailboats, yacht-launches, fishing-craft
and the trailing black coal-barges hauled by noisy tugs.
The lady in the summer-house seemed to be held by the same sight.
Beyond the grey bastions of Fort Adams a long-drawn sunset was splintering up into a
thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a catboat as it beat out through
the channel between the Lime Rock and the shore.
Archer, as he watched, remembered the scene in the Shaughraun, and Montague lifting Ada
Dyas's ribbon to his lips without her knowing that he was in the room.
"She doesn't know--she hasn't guessed.
Shouldn't I know if she came up behind me, I wonder?" he mused; and suddenly he said
to himself: "If she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I'll
go back."
The boat was gliding out on the receding tide.
It slid before the Lime Rock, blotted out Ida Lewis's little house, and passed across
the turret in which the light was hung.
Archer waited till a wide space of water sparkled between the last reef of the
island and the stern of the boat; but still the figure in the summer-house did not
move.
He turned and walked up the hill. "I'm sorry you didn't find Ellen--I should
have liked to see her again," May said as they drove home through the dusk.
"But perhaps she wouldn't have cared--she seems so changed."
"Changed?" echoed her husband in a colourless voice, his eyes fixed on the
ponies' twitching ears.
"So indifferent to her friends, I mean; giving up New York and her house, and
spending her time with such *** people. Fancy how hideously uncomfortable she must
be at the Blenkers'!
She says she does it to keep cousin Medora out of mischief: to prevent her marrying
dreadful people. But I sometimes think we've always bored
her."
Archer made no answer, and she continued, with a tinge of hardness that he had never
before noticed in her frank fresh voice: "After all, I wonder if she wouldn't be
happier with her husband."
He burst into a laugh. "Sancta simplicitas!" he exclaimed; and as
she turned a puzzled frown on him he added: "I don't think I ever heard you say a cruel
thing before."
"Cruel?" "Well--watching the contortions of the
damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they
don't think people happier in hell."
"It's a pity she ever married abroad then," said May, in the placid tone with which her
mother met Mr. Welland's vagaries; and Archer felt himself gently relegated to the
category of unreasonable husbands.
They drove down Bellevue Avenue and turned in between the chamfered wooden gate-posts
surmounted by cast-iron lamps which marked the approach to the Welland villa.
Lights were already shining through its windows, and Archer, as the carriage
stopped, caught a glimpse of his father-in- law, exactly as he had pictured him, pacing
the drawing-room, watch in hand and wearing
the pained expression that he had long since found to be much more efficacious
than anger.
The young man, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious of a curious
reversal of mood.
There was something about the luxury of the Welland house and the density of the
Welland atmosphere, so charged with minute observances and exactions, that always
stole into his system like a narcotic.
The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding tick of
disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall
table, the whole chain of tyrannical
trifles binding one hour to the next, and each member of the household to all the
others, made any less systematised and affluent existence seem unreal and
precarious.
But now it was the Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that
had become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he had stood
irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins.
All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at May's side, watching the
moonlight slant along the carpet, and thinking of Ellen Olenska driving home
across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort's trotters.
>
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XXII.
"A party for the Blenkers--the Blenkers?"
Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and incredulously
across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her gold eye-glasses, read aloud,
in the tone of high comedy:
"Professor and Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of Mr. and Mrs.
Welland's company at the meeting of the Wednesday Afternoon Club on August 25th at
3 o'clock punctually.
To meet Mrs. and the Misses Blenker. "Red Gables, Catherine Street.
R. S. V. P."
"Good gracious--" Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second reading had been necessary to
bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him.
"Poor Amy Sillerton--you never can tell what her husband will do next," Mrs.
Welland sighed. "I suppose he's just discovered the
Blenkers."
Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport society; and a thorn
that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a venerable and venerated family tree.
He was, as people said, a man who had had "every advantage."
His father was Sillerton Jackson's uncle, his mother a Pennilow of Boston; on each
side there was wealth and position, and mutual suitability.
Nothing--as Mrs. Welland had often remarked--nothing on earth obliged Emerson
Sillerton to be an archaeologist, or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to live in
Newport in winter, or do any of the other revolutionary things that he did.
But at least, if he was going to break with tradition and flout society in the face, he
need not have married poor Amy Dagonet, who had a right to expect "something
different," and money enough to keep her own carriage.
No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy Sillerton had submitted so tamely
to the eccentricities of a husband who filled the house with long-haired men and
short-haired women, and, when he travelled,
took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to Paris or Italy.
But there they were, set in their ways, and apparently unaware that they were different
from other people; and when they gave one of their dreary annual garden-parties every
family on the Cliffs, because of the
Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet connection, had to draw lots and send an unwilling
representative. "It's a wonder," Mrs. Welland remarked,
"that they didn't choose the Cup Race day!
Do you remember, two years ago, their giving a party for a black man on the day
of Julia Mingott's the dansant?
Luckily this time there's nothing else going on that I know of--for of course some
of us will have to go." Mr. Welland sighed nervously.
"'Some of us,' my dear--more than one?
Three o'clock is such a very awkward hour.
I have to be here at half-past three to take my drops: it's really no use trying to
follow Bencomb's new treatment if I don't do it systematically; and if I join you
later, of course I shall miss my drive."
At the thought he laid down his knife and fork again, and a flush of anxiety rose to
his finely-wrinkled cheek.
"There's no reason why you should go at all, my dear," his wife answered with a
cheerfulness that had become automatic.
"I have some cards to leave at the other end of Bellevue Avenue, and I'll drop in at
about half-past three and stay long enough to make poor Amy feel that she hasn't been
slighted."
She glanced hesitatingly at her daughter. "And if Newland's afternoon is provided for
perhaps May can drive you out with the ponies, and try their new russet harness."
It was a principle in the Welland family that people's days and hours should be what
Mrs. Welland called "provided for."
The melancholy possibility of having to "kill time" (especially for those who did
not care for whist or solitaire) was a vision that haunted her as the spectre of
the unemployed haunts the philanthropist.
Another of her principles was that parents should never (at least visibly) interfere
with the plans of their married children; and the difficulty of adjusting this
respect for May's independence with the
exigency of Mr. Welland's claims could be overcome only by the exercise of an
ingenuity which left not a second of Mrs. Welland's own time unprovided for.
"Of course I'll drive with Papa--I'm sure Newland will find something to do," May
said, in a tone that gently reminded her husband of his lack of response.
It was a cause of constant distress to Mrs. Welland that her son-in-law showed so
little foresight in planning his days.
Often already, during the fortnight that he had passed under her roof, when she
enquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had answered paradoxically:
"Oh, I think for a change I'll just save it
instead of spending it--" and once, when she and May had had to go on a long-
postponed round of afternoon calls, he had confessed to having lain all the afternoon
under a rock on the beach below the house.
"Newland never seems to look ahead," Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her
daughter; and May answered serenely: "No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when
there's nothing particular to do he reads a book."
"Ah, yes--like his father!"
Mrs. Welland agreed, as if allowing for an inherited oddity; and after that the
question of Newland's unemployment was tacitly dropped.
Nevertheless, as the day for the Sillerton reception approached, May began to show a
natural solicitude for his welfare, and to suggest a tennis match at the Chiverses',
or a sail on Julius Beaufort's cutter, as a
means of atoning for her temporary desertion.
"I shall be back by six, you know, dear: Papa never drives later than that--" and
she was not reassured till Archer said that he thought of hiring a run-about and
driving up the island to a stud-farm to look at a second horse for her brougham.
They had been looking for this horse for some time, and the suggestion was so
acceptable that May glanced at her mother as if to say: "You see he knows how to
plan out his time as well as any of us."
The idea of the stud-farm and the brougham horse had germinated in Archer's mind on
the very day when the Emerson Sillerton invitation had first been mentioned; but he
had kept it to himself as if there were
something clandestine in the plan, and discovery might prevent its execution.
He had, however, taken the precaution to engage in advance a runabout with a pair of
old livery-stable trotters that could still do their eighteen miles on level roads; and
at two o'clock, hastily deserting the
luncheon-table, he sprang into the light carriage and drove off.
The day was perfect.
A breeze from the north drove little puffs of white cloud across an ultramarine sky,
with a bright sea running under it.
Bellevue Avenue was empty at that hour, and after dropping the stable-lad at the corner
of Mill Street Archer turned down the Old Beach Road and drove across Eastman's
Beach.
He had the feeling of unexplained excitement with which, on half-holidays at
school, he used to start off into the unknown.
Taking his pair at an easy gait, he counted on reaching the stud-farm, which was not
far beyond Paradise Rocks, before three o'clock; so that, after looking over the
horse (and trying him if he seemed
promising) he would still have four golden hours to dispose of.
As soon as he heard of the Sillerton's party he had said to himself that the
Marchioness Manson would certainly come to Newport with the Blenkers, and that Madame
Olenska might again take the opportunity of spending the day with her grandmother.
At any rate, the Blenker habitation would probably be deserted, and he would be able,
without indiscretion, to satisfy a vague curiosity concerning it.
He was not sure that he wanted to see the Countess Olenska again; but ever since he
had looked at her from the path above the bay he had wanted, irrationally and
indescribably, to see the place she was
living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the
real one in the summer-house.
The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the
sudden whim of a sick man for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten.
He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was
not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice.
He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked
on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less
empty.
When he reached the stud-farm a glance showed him that the horse was not what he
wanted; nevertheless he took a turn behind it in order to prove to himself that he was
not in a hurry.
But at three o'clock he shook out the reins over the trotters and turned into the by-
roads leading to Portsmouth.
The wind had dropped and a faint haze on the horizon showed that a fog was waiting
to steal up the Saconnet on the turn of the tide; but all about him fields and woods
were steeped in golden light.
He drove past grey-shingled farm-houses in orchards, past hay-fields and groves of
oak, past villages with white steeples rising sharply into the fading sky; and at
last, after stopping to ask the way of some
men at work in a field, he turned down a lane between high banks of goldenrod and
brambles.
At the end of the lane was the blue glimmer of the river; to the left, standing in
front of a clump of oaks and maples, he saw a long tumble-down house with white paint
peeling from its clapboards.
On the road-side facing the gateway stood one of the open sheds in which the New
Englander shelters his farming implements and visitors "hitch" their "teams."
Archer, jumping down, led his pair into the shed, and after tying them to a post turned
toward the house.
The patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hay-field; but to the left an
overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled a ghostly
summer-house of trellis-work that had once
been white, surmounted by a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but
continued to take ineffectual aim. Archer leaned for a while against the gate.
No one was in sight, and not a sound came from the open windows of the house: a
grizzled Newfoundland dozing before the door seemed as ineffectual a guardian as
the arrowless Cupid.
It was strange to think that this place of silence and decay was the home of the
turbulent Blenkers; yet Archer was sure that he was not mistaken.
For a long time he stood there, content to take in the scene, and gradually falling
under its drowsy spell; but at length he roused himself to the sense of the passing
time.
Should he look his fill and then drive away?
He stood irresolute, wishing suddenly to see the inside of the house, so that he
might picture the room that Madame Olenska sat in.
There was nothing to prevent his walking up to the door and ringing the bell; if, as he
supposed, she was away with the rest of the party, he could easily give his name, and
ask permission to go into the sitting-room to write a message.
But instead, he crossed the lawn and turned toward the box-garden.
As he entered it he caught sight of something bright-coloured in the summer-
house, and presently made it out to be a pink parasol.
The parasol drew him like a magnet: he was sure it was hers.
He went into the summer-house, and sitting down on the rickety seat picked up the
silken thing and looked at its carved handle, which was made of some rare wood
that gave out an aromatic scent.
Archer lifted the handle to his lips.
He heard a rustle of skirts against the box, and sat motionless, leaning on the
parasol handle with clasped hands, and letting the rustle come nearer without
lifting his eyes.
He had always known that this must happen...
"Oh, Mr. Archer!" exclaimed a loud young voice; and looking up he saw before him the
youngest and largest of the Blenker girls, blonde and blowsy, in bedraggled muslin.
A red blotch on one of her cheeks seemed to show that it had recently been pressed
against a pillow, and her half-awakened eyes stared at him hospitably but
confusedly.
"Gracious--where did you drop from? I must have been sound asleep in the
hammock. Everybody else has gone to Newport.
Did you ring?" she incoherently enquired.
Archer's confusion was greater than hers. "I--no--that is, I was just going to.
I had to come up the island to see about a horse, and I drove over on a chance of
finding Mrs. Blenker and your visitors.
But the house seemed empty--so I sat down to wait."
Miss Blenker, shaking off the fumes of sleep, looked at him with increasing
interest.
"The house IS empty. Mother's not here, or the Marchioness--or
anybody but me." Her glance became faintly reproachful.
"Didn't you know that Professor and Mrs. Sillerton are giving a garden-party for
mother and all of us this afternoon?
It was too unlucky that I couldn't go; but I've had a sore throat, and mother was
afraid of the drive home this evening. Did you ever know anything so
disappointing?
Of course," she added gaily, "I shouldn't have minded half as much if I'd known you
were coming."
Symptoms of a lumbering coquetry became visible in her, and Archer found the
strength to break in: "But Madame Olenska- -has she gone to Newport too?"
Miss Blenker looked at him with surprise.
"Madame Olenska--didn't you know she'd been called away?"
"Called away?--" "Oh, my best parasol!
I lent it to that goose of a Katie, because it matched her ribbons, and the careless
thing must have dropped it here. We Blenkers are all like that...real
Bohemians!"
Recovering the sunshade with a powerful hand she unfurled it and suspended its rosy
dome above her head. "Yes, Ellen was called away yesterday: she
lets us call her Ellen, you know.
A telegram came from Boston: she said she might be gone for two days.
I do LOVE the way she does her hair, don't you?"
Miss Blenker rambled on.
Archer continued to stare through her as though she had been transparent.
All he saw was the trumpery parasol that arched its pinkness above her giggling
head.
After a moment he ventured: "You don't happen to know why Madame Olenska went to
Boston? I hope it was not on account of bad news?"
Miss Blenker took this with a cheerful incredulity.
"Oh, I don't believe so. She didn't tell us what was in the
telegram.
I think she didn't want the Marchioness to know.
She's so romantic-looking, isn't she?
Doesn't she remind you of Mrs. Scott- Siddons when she reads 'Lady Geraldine's
Courtship'? Did you never hear her?"
Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts.
His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its
endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to
happen.
He glanced about him at the unpruned garden, the tumble-down house, and the oak-
grove under which the dusk was gathering.
It had seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to have found Madame Olenska; and
she was far away, and even the pink sunshade was not hers...
He frowned and hesitated.
"You don't know, I suppose--I shall be in Boston tomorrow.
If I could manage to see her--"
He felt that Miss Blenker was losing interest in him, though her smile
persisted. "Oh, of course; how lovely of you!
She's staying at the Parker House; it must be horrible there in this weather."
After that Archer was but intermittently aware of the remarks they exchanged.
He could only remember stoutly resisting her entreaty that he should await the
returning family and have high tea with them before he drove home.
At length, with his hostess still at his side, he passed out of range of the wooden
Cupid, unfastened his horses and drove off.
At the turn of the lane he saw Miss Blenker standing at the gate and waving the pink
parasol.
>