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Title: The Garotters
Author: William D. Howells
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I.
On a January evening of the early seventies,
Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
Though there was already talk of the erection,
in remote metropolitan distances
"above the Forties,"
of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour
with those of the great European capitals,
the world of fashion was still content
to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy.
Conservatives cherished it
for being small and inconvenient,
and thus keeping out the
"new people"
whom New York was beginning
to dread and yet be drawn to;
and the sentimental clung
to it
for its historic associations,
and the musical
for its excellent acoustics,
always so problematic a quality in halls built
for the hearing of music.
It was Madame Nilsson's first appearance that winter,
and what the daily press had already learned
to describe as
"an exceptionally brilliant audience"
had gathered
to hear her,
transported through the slippery,
snowy streets in private broughams,
in the spacious family landau,
or in the humbler but more convenient
"Brown coupe"
To come
to the Opera in a Brown coupe was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one's own carriage;
and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one
(with a playful allusion
to democratic principles)
to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line,
instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of one's own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy.
It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions
to have discovered that Americans want
to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want
to get
to it.
When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the club box the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene.
There was no reason why the young man should not have come earlier,
for he had dined at seven,
alone
with his mother and sister,
and had lingered afterward over a cigar in the Gothic library
with glazed black-walnut bookcases and finial-topped chairs which was the only room in the house where Mrs. Archer allowed smoking.
But,
in the first place,
New York was a metropolis,
and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was
"not the thing"
to arrive early at the opera;
and what was or was not
"the thing"
played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.
The second reason
for his delay was a personal one.
He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante,
and thinking over a pleasure
to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.
This was especially the case when the pleasure was a delicate one,
as his pleasures mostly were;
and on this occasion the moment he looked forward
to was so rare and exquisite in quality that--well,
if he had timed his arrival in accord
with the prima donna's stage-manager he could not have entered the Academy at a more significant moment than just as she was singing:
"He loves me--he loves me not--HE LOVES ME!--"
and sprinkling the falling daisy petals
with notes as clear as dew.
She sang,
of course,
"M'ama!"
and not
"he loves me,"
since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian
for the clearer understanding of English- speaking audiences.
This seemed as natural
to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded:
such as the duty of using two silver- backed brushes
with his monogram in blue enamel
to part his hair,
and of never appearing in society without a flower
(preferably a gardenia)
in his buttonhole.
"M'ama .
non m'ama .
"
the prima donna sang,
and
"M'ama!"
,
with a final burst of love triumphant,
as she pressed the dishevelled daisy
to her lips and lifted her large eyes
to the sophisticated countenance of the little brown Faust-Capoul,
who was vainly trying,
in a tight purple velvet doublet and plumed cap,
to look as pure and true as his artless victim.
Newland Archer,
leaning against the wall at the back of the club box,
turned his eyes from the stage and scanned the opposite side of the house.
Directly facing him was the box of old Mrs. Manson Mingott,
whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible
for her
to attend the Opera,
but who was always represented on fashionable nights by some of the younger members of the family.
On this occasion,
the front of the box was filled by her daughter-in-law,
Mrs.Lovell Mingott,
and her daughter,
Mrs.Welland;
and slightly withdrawn behind these brocaded matrons sat a young girl in white
with eyes ecstatically fixed on the stagelovers.
As Madame Nilsson's
"M'ama!"
thrilled out above the silent house
(the boxes always stopped talking during the Daisy Song)
a warm pink mounted
to the girl's cheek,
mantled her brow
to the roots of her fair braids,
and suffused the young slope of her breast
to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened
with a single gardenia.
She dropped her eyes
to the immense bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her knee,
and Newland Archer saw her white-gloved finger-tips touch the flowers softly.
He drew a breath of satisfied vanity and his eyes returned
to the stage.
No expense had been spared on the setting,
which was acknowledged
to be very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance
with the Opera houses of Paris and Vienna.
The foreground,
to the footlights,
was covered
with emerald green cloth.
In the middle distance symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded
with large pink and red roses.
Gigantic pansies,
considerably larger than the roses,
and closely resembling the floral pen- wipers made by female parishioners
for fashionable clergymen,
sprang from the moss beneath the rose- trees;
and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose- branch flowered
with a luxuriance prophetic of Mr. Luther Burbank's far-off prodigies.
In the centre of this enchanted garden Madame Nilsson,
in white cashmere slashed
with pale blue satin,
a reticule dangling from a blue girdle,
and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side of her muslin chemisette,
listened
with downcast eyes
to M.
Capoul's impassioned wooing,
and affected a guileless incomprehension of his designs whenever,
by word or glance,
he persuasively indicated the ground floor window of the neat brick villa projecting obliquely from the right wing.
"The darling!"
thought Newland Archer,
his glance flitting back
to the young girl
with the lilies-of-the- valley.
"She doesn't even guess what it's all about."
And he contemplated her absorbed young face
with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled
with a tender reverence
for her abysmal purity.
"We'll read Faust together .
by the Italian lakes .."
he thought,
somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honey-moon
with the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege
to reveal
to his bride.
It was only that afternoon that May Welland had let him guess that she
"cared"
(New York's consecrated phrase of maiden avowal),
and already his imagination,
leaping ahead of the engagement ring,
the betrothal kiss and the march from Lohengrin,
pictured her at his side in some scene of old European witchery.
He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer
to be a simpleton.
He meant her
(thanks
to his enlightening companionship)
to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her
to hold her own
with the most popular married women of the
"younger set,"
in which it was the recognised custom
to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it.
If he had probed
to the bottom of his vanity
(as he sometimes nearly did)
he would have found there the wish that his wife should be as worldly-wise and as eager
to please as the married lady whose charms had held his fancy through two mildly agitated years;
without,
of course,
any hint of the frailty which had so nearly marred that unhappy being's life,
and had disarranged his own plans
for a whole winter.
How this miracle of fire and ice was
to be created,
and
to sustain itself in a harsh world,
he had never taken the time
to think out;
but he was content
to hold his view without analysing it,
since he knew it was that of all the carefully-brushed,
white-waistcoated,
button- hole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box,
exchanged friendly greetings
with him,
and turned their opera-glasses critically on the circle of ladies who were the product of the system.
In matters intellectual and artistic Newland Archer felt himself distinctly the superior of these chosen specimens of old New York gentility;
he had probably read more,
thought more,
and even seen a good deal more of the world,
than any other man of the number.
Singly they betrayed their inferiority;
but grouped together they represented
"New York,"
and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral.
He instinctively felt that in this respect it would be troublesome--and also rather bad form--to strike out
for himself.
"Well--upon my soul!"
exclaimed Lawrence Lefferts,
turning his opera-glass abruptly away from the stage.
Lawrence Lefferts was,
on the whole,
the foremost authority on
"form"
in New York.
He had probably devoted more time than any one else
to the study of this intricate and fascinating question;
but study alone could not account
for his complete and easy competence.
One had only
to look at him,
from the slant of his bald forehead and the curve of his beautiful fair moustache
to the long patent-leather feet at the other end of his lean and elegant person,
to feel that the knowledge of
"form"
must be congenital in any one who knew how
to wear such good clothes so carelessly and carry such height
with so much lounging grace.
As a young admirer had once said of him:
"If anybody can tell a fellow just when
to wear a black tie
with evening clothes and when not to,
it's Larry Lefferts."
And on the question of pumps versus patent-leather
"Oxfords"
his authority had never been disputed.
"My God!"
he said;
and silently handed his glass
to old Sillerton Jackson.
Newland Archer,
following Lefferts's glance,
saw
with surprise that his exclamation had been occasioned by the entry of a new figure into old Mrs. Mingott's box.
It was that of a slim young woman,
a little less tall than May Welland,
with brown hair growing in close curls about her temples and held in place by a narrow band of diamonds.
The suggestion of this headdress,
which gave her what was then called a
"Josephine look,"
was carried out in the cut of the dark blue velvet gown rather theatrically caught up under her bosom by a girdle
with a large old-fashioned clasp.
The wearer of this unusual dress,
who seemed quite unconscious of the attention it was attracting,
stood a moment in the centre of the box,
discussing
with Mrs. Welland the propriety of taking the latter's place in the front right- hand corner;
then she yielded
with a slight smile,
and seated herself in line
with Mrs. Welland's sister-in-law,
Mrs.Lovell Mingott,
who was installed in the opposite corner.
Mr.Sillerton Jackson had returned the opera-glass
to Lawrence Lefferts.
The whole of the club turned instinctively,
waiting
to hear what the old man had
to say;
for old Mr. Jackson was as great an authority on
"family"
as Lawrence Lefferts was on
"form."
He knew all the ramifications of New York's cousinships;
and could not only elucidate such complicated questions as that of the connection between the Mingotts
(through the Thorleys)
with the Dallases of South Carolina,
and that of the relationship of the elder branch of Philadelphia Thorleys
to the Albany Chiverses
(on no account
to be confused
with the Manson Chiverses of University Place),
but could also enumerate the leading characteristics of each family:
as,
for instance,
the fabulous stinginess of the younger lines of Leffertses
(the Long Island ones);
or the fatal tendency of the Rushworths
to make foolish matches;
or the insanity recurring in every second generation of the Albany Chiverses,
with whom their New York cousins had always refused
to intermarry--with the disastrous exception of poor Medora Manson,
who,
as everybody knew .
but then her mother was a Rushworth.
In addition
to this forest of family trees,
Mr.Sillerton Jackson carried between his narrow hollow temples,
and under his soft thatch of silver hair,
a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the last fifty years.
So far indeed did his information extend,
and so acutely retentive was his memory,
that he was supposed
to be the only man who could have told you who Julius Beaufort,
the banker,
really was,
and what had become of handsome Bob Spicer,
old Mrs. Manson Mingott's father,
who had disappeared so mysteriously
(with a large sum of trust money)
less than a year after his marriage,
on the very day that a beautiful Spanish dancer who had been delighting thronged audiences in the old Opera-house on the Battery had taken ship
for Cuba.
But these mysteries,
and many others,
were closely locked in Mr. Jackson's breast;
for not only did his keen sense of honour forbid his repeating anything privately imparted,
but he was fully aware that his reputation
for discretion increased his opportunities of finding out what he wanted
to know.
The club box,
therefore,
waited in visible suspense while Mr. Sillerton Jackson handed back Lawrence Lefferts's opera-glass.
For a moment he silently scrutinised the attentive group out of his filmy blue eyes overhung by old veined lids;
then he gave his moustache a thoughtful twist,
and said simply:
"I didn't think the Mingotts would have tried it on."
II.
Newland Archer,
during this brief episode,
had been thrown into a strange state of embarrassment.
It was annoying that the box which was thus attracting the undivided attention of masculine New York should be that in which his betrothed was seated between her mother and aunt;
and
for a moment he could not identify the lady in the Empire dress,
nor imagine why her presence created such excitement among the initiated.
Then light dawned on him,
and
with it came a momentary rush of indignation.
No,
indeed;
no one would have thought the Mingotts would have tried it on! But they had;
they undoubtedly had;
for the low- toned comments behind him left no doubt in Archer's mind that the young woman was May Welland's cousin,
the cousin always referred
to in the family as
"poor Ellen Olenska."
Archer knew that she had suddenly arrived from Europe a day or two previously;
he had even heard from Miss Welland
(not disapprovingly)
that she had been
to see poor Ellen,
who was staying
with old Mrs. Mingott.
Archer entirely approved of family solidarity,
and one of the qualities he most admired in the Mingotts was their resolute championship of the few black sheep that their blameless stock had produced.
There was nothing mean or ungenerous in the young man's heart,
and he was glad that his future wife should not be restrained by false prudery from being kind
(in private)
to her unhappy cousin;
but
to receive Countess Olenska in the family circle was a different thing from producing her in public,
at the Opera of all places,
and in the very box
with the young girl whose engagement
to him,
Newland Archer,
was
to be announced within a few weeks.
No,
he felt as old Sillerton Jackson felt;
he did not think the Mingotts would have tried it on! He knew,
of course,
that whatever man dared
(within Fifth Avenue's limits)
that old Mrs. Manson Mingott,
the Matriarch of the line,
would dare.
He had always admired the high and mighty old lady,
who,
in spite of having been only Catherine Spicer of Staten Island,
with a father mysteriously discredited,
and neither money nor position enough
to make people forget it,
had allied herself
with the head of the wealthy Mingott line,
married two of her daughters to
"foreigners"
(an Italian marquis and an English banker),
and put the crowning touch
to her audacities by building a large house of pale cream-coloured stone
(when brown sandstone seemed as much the only wear as a frock-coat in the afternoon)
in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.
Old Mrs. Mingott's foreign daughters had become a legend.
They never came back
to see their mother,
and the latter being,
like many persons of active mind and dominating will,
sedentary and corpulent in her habit,
had philosophically remained at home.
But the cream- coloured house
(supposed
to be modelled on the private hotels of the Parisian aristocracy)
was there as a visible proof of her moral courage;
and she throned in it,
among pre-Revolutionary furniture and souvenirs of the Tuileries of Louis Napoleon
(where she had shone in her middle age),
as placidly as if there were nothing peculiar in living above Thirty-fourth Street,
or in having French windows that opened like doors instead of sashes that pushed up.
Every one
(including Mr. Sillerton Jackson)
was agreed that old Catherine had never had beauty--a gift which,
in the eyes of New York,
justified every success,
and excused a certain number of failings.
Unkind people said that,
like her Imperial namesake,
she had won her way
to success by strength of will and hardness of heart,
and a kind of haughty effrontery that was somehow justified by the extreme decency and dignity of her private life.
Mr.Manson Mingott had died when she was only twenty-eight,
and had
"tied up"
the money
with an additional caution born of the general distrust of the Spicers;
but his bold young widow went her way fearlessly,
mingled freely in foreign society,
married her daughters in heaven knew what corrupt and fashionable circles,
hobnobbed
with Dukes and Ambassadors,
associated familiarly
with Papists,
entertained Opera singers,
and was the intimate friend of Mme.
Taglioni;
and all the while
(as Sillerton Jackson was the first
to proclaim)
there had never been a breath on her reputation;
the only respect,
he always added,
in which she differed from the earlier Catherine.
Mrs.Manson Mingott had long since succeeded in untying her husband's fortune,
and had lived in affluence
for half a century;
but memories of her early straits had made her excessively thrifty,
and though,
when she bought a dress or a piece of furniture,
she took care that it should be of the best,
she could not bring herself
to spend much on the transient pleasures of the table.
Therefore,
for totally different reasons,
her food was as poor as Mrs. Archer's,
and her wines did nothing
to redeem it.
Her relatives considered that the penury of her table discredited the Mingott name,
which had always been associated
with good living;
but people continued
to come
to her in spite of the
"made dishes"
and flat champagne,
and in reply
to the remonstrances of her son Lovell
(who tried
to retrieve the family credit by having the best chef in New York)
she used
to say laughingly:
"What's the use of two good cooks in one family,
now that I've married the girls and can't eat sauces?"
Newland Archer,
as he mused on these things,
had once more turned his eyes toward the Mingott box.
He saw that Mrs. Welland and her sister-in-law were facing their semicircle of critics
with the Mingottian APLOMB which old Catherine had inculcated in all her tribe,
and that only May Welland betrayed,
by a heightened colour
(perhaps due
to the knowledge that he was watching her)
a sense of the gravity of the situation.
As
for the cause of the commotion,
she sat gracefully in her corner of the box,
her eyes fixed on the stage,
and revealing,
as she leaned forward,
a little more shoulder and bosom than New York was accustomed
to seeing,
at least in ladies who had reasons
for wishing
to pass unnoticed.
Few things seemed
to Newland Archer more awful than an offence against
"Taste,"
that far-off divinity of whom
"Form"
was the mere visible representative and vicegerent.
Madame Olenska's pale and serious face appealed
to his fancy as suited
to the occasion and
to her unhappy situation;
but the way her dress
(which had no tucker)
sloped away from her thin shoulders shocked and troubled him.
He hated
to think of May Welland's being exposed
to the influence of a young woman so careless of the dictates of Taste.
"After all,"
he heard one of the younger men begin behind him
(everybody talked through the Mephistopheles- and-Martha scenes),
"after all,
just WHAT happened?"
"Well--she left him;
nobody attempts
to deny that."
"He's an awful brute,
isn't he?"
continued the young enquirer,
a candid Thorley,
who was evidently preparing
to enter the lists as the lady's champion.
"The very worst;
I knew him at Nice,"
said Lawrence Lefferts
with authority.
"A half-paralysed white sneering fellow--rather handsome head,
but eyes
with a lot of lashes.
Well,
I'll tell you the sort:
when he wasn't
with women he was collecting china.
Paying any price
for both,
I understand."
There was a general laugh,
and the young champion said:
"Well,
then----?"
"Well,
then;
she bolted
with his secretary."
"Oh,
I see."
The champion's face fell.
"It didn't last long,
though:
I heard of her a few months later living alone in Venice.
I believe Lovell Mingott went out
to get her.
He said she was desperately unhappy.
That's all right--but this parading her at the Opera's another thing."
"Perhaps,"
young Thorley hazarded,
"she's too unhappy
to be left at home."
This was greeted
with an irreverent laugh,
and the youth blushed deeply,
and tried
to look as if he had meant
to insinuate what knowing people called a
"double entendre."
"Well--it's queer
to have brought Miss Welland,
anyhow,"
some one said in a low tone,
with a side- glance at Archer.
"Oh,
that's part of the campaign:
Granny's orders,
no doubt,"
Lefferts laughed.
"When the old lady does a thing she does it thoroughly."
The act was ending,
and there was a general stir in the box.
Suddenly Newland Archer felt himself impelled
to decisive action.
The desire
to be the first man
to enter Mrs. Mingott's box,
to proclaim
to the waiting world his engagement
to May Welland,
and
to see her through whatever difficulties her cousin's anomalous situation might involve her in;
this impulse had abruptly overruled all scruples and hesitations,
and sent him hurrying through the red corridors
to the farther side of the house.
As he entered the box his eyes met Miss Welland's,
and he saw that she had instantly understood his motive,
though the family dignity which both considered so high a virtue would not permit her
to tell him so.
The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies,
and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed
to the young man
to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.
Her eyes said:
"You see why Mamma brought me,"
and his answered:
"I would not
for the world have had you stay away."
"You know my niece Countess Olenska?"
Mrs.Welland enquired as she shook hands
with her future son- in-law.
Archer bowed without extending his hand,
as was the custom on being introduced
to a lady;
and Ellen Olenska bent her head slightly,
keeping her own pale-gloved hands clasped on her huge fan of eagle feathers.
Having greeted Mrs. Lovell Mingott,
a large blonde lady in creaking satin,
he sat down beside his betrothed,
and said in a low tone:
"I hope you've told Madame Olenska that we're engaged?
I want everybody
to know--I want you
to let me announce it this evening at the ball."
Miss Welland's face grew rosy as the dawn,
and she looked at him
with radiant eyes.
"If you can persuade Mamma,"
she said;
"but why should we change what is already settled?"
He made no answer but that which his eyes returned,
and she added,
still more confidently smiling:
"Tell my cousin yourself:
I give you leave.
She says she used
to play
with you when you were children."
She made way
for him by pushing back her chair,
and promptly,
and a little ostentatiously,
with the desire that the whole house should see what he was doing,
Archer seated himself at the Countess Olenska's side.
"We DID use
to play together,
didn't we?"
she asked,
turning her grave eyes
to his.
"You were a horrid boy,
and kissed me once behind a door;
but it was your cousin Vandie Newland,
who never looked at me,
that I was in love with."
Her glance swept the horse-shoe curve of boxes.
"Ah,
how this brings it all back
to me--I see everybody here in knickerbockers and pantalettes,"
she said,
with her trailing slightly foreign accent,
her eyes returning
to his face.
Agreeable as their expression was,
the young man was shocked that they should reflect so unseemly a picture of the august tribunal before which,
at that very moment,
her case was being tried.
Nothing could be in worse taste than misplaced flippancy;
and he answered somewhat stiffly:
"Yes,
you have been away a very long time."
"Oh,
centuries and centuries;
so long,"
she said,
"that I'm sure I'm dead and buried,
and this dear old place is heaven;"
which,
for reasons he could not define,
struck Newland Archer as an even more disrespectful way of describing New York society.
III.
It invariably happened in the same way.
Mrs.Julius Beaufort,
on the night of her annual ball,
never failed
to appear at the Opera;
indeed,
she always gave her ball on an Opera night in order
to emphasise her complete superiority
to household cares,
and her possession of a staff of servants competent
to organise every detail of the entertainment in her absence.
The Beauforts'
house was one of the few in New York that possessed a ball-room
(it antedated even Mrs. Manson Mingott's and the Headly Chiverses');
and at a time when it was beginning
to be thought
"provincial"
to put a
"crash"
over the drawing-room floor and move the furniture upstairs,
the possession of a ball-room that was used
for no other purpose,
and left
for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the year
to shuttered darkness,
with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its chandelier in a bag;
this undoubted superiority was felt
to compensate
for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort past.
Mrs.Archer,
who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms,
had once said:
"We all have our pet common people--"
and though the phrase was a daring one,
its truth was secretly admitted in many an exclusive bosom.
But the Beauforts were not exactly common;
some people said they were even worse.
Mrs.Beaufort belonged indeed
to one of America's most honoured families;
she had been the lovely Regina Dallas
(of the South Carolina branch),
a penniless beauty introduced
to New York society by her cousin,
the imprudent Medora Manson,
who was always doing the wrong thing from the right motive.
When one was related
to the Mansons and the Rushworths one had a
"droit de cite"
(as Mr. Sillerton Jackson,
who had frequented the Tuileries,
called it)
in New York society;
but did one not forfeit it in marrying Julius Beaufort?
The question was:
who was Beaufort?
He passed
for an Englishman,
was agreeable,
handsome,
ill-tempered,
hospitable and witty.
He had come
to America
with letters of recommendation from old Mrs. Manson Mingott's English son-in-law,
the banker,
and had speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs;
but his habits were dissipated,
his tongue was bitter,
his antecedents were mysterious;
and when Medora Manson announced her cousin's engagement
to him it was felt
to be one more act of folly in poor Medora's long record of imprudences.
But folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom,
and two years after young Mrs. Beaufort's marriage it was admitted that she had the most distinguished house in New York.
No one knew exactly how the miracle was accomplished.
She was indolent,
passive,
the caustic even called her dull;
but dressed like an idol,
hung
with pearls,
growing younger and blonder and more beautiful each year,
she throned in Mr. Beaufort's heavy brown-stone palace,
and drew all the world there without lifting her jewelled little finger.
The knowing people said it was Beaufort himself who trained the servants,
taught the chef new dishes,
told the gardeners what hot-house flowers
to grow
for the dinner-table and the drawing-rooms,
selected the guests,
brewed the after-dinner punch and dictated the little notes his wife wrote
to her friends.
If he did,
these domestic activities were privately performed,
and he presented
to the world the appearance of a careless and hospitable millionaire strolling into his own drawing-room
with the detachment of an invited guest,
and saying:
"My wife's gloxinias are a marvel,
aren't they?
I believe she gets them out from Kew."
Mr.Beaufort's secret,
people were agreed,
was the way he carried things off.
It was all very well
to whisper that he had been
"helped"
to leave England by the international banking-house in which he had been employed;
he carried off that rumour as easily as the rest--though New York's business conscience was no less sensitive than its moral standard--he carried everything before him,
and all New York into his drawing- rooms,
and
for over twenty years now people had said they were
"going
to the Beauforts'"
with the same tone of security as if they had said they were going
to Mrs. Manson Mingott's,
and
with the added satisfaction of knowing they would get hot canvas-back ducks and vintage wines,
instead of tepid Veuve Clicquot without a year and warmed-up croquettes from Philadelphia.
Mrs.Beaufort,
then,
had as usual appeared in her box just before the Jewel Song;
and when,
again as usual,
she rose at the end of the third act,
drew her opera cloak about her lovely shoulders,
and disappeared,
New York knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin.
The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were proud
to show
to foreigners,
especially on the night of the annual ball.
The Beauforts had been among the first people in New York
to own their own red velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen,
under their own awning,
instead of hiring it
with the supper and the ball-room chairs.
They had also inaugurated the custom of letting the ladies take their cloaks off in the hall,
instead of shuffling up
to the hostess's bedroom and recurling their hair
with the aid of the gas-burner;
Beaufort was understood
to have said that he supposed all his wife's friends had maids who saw
to it that they were properly coiffees when they left home.
Then the house had been boldly planned
with a ball-room,
so that,
instead of squeezing through a narrow passage
to get
to it
(as at the Chiverses')
one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing- rooms
(the sea-green,
the crimson and the bouton d'or),
seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry,
and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.
Newland Archer,
as became a young man of his position,
strolled in somewhat late.
He had left his overcoat
with the silk-stockinged footmen
(the stockings were one of Beaufort's few fatuities),
had dawdled a while in the library hung
with Spanish leather and furnished
with Buhl and malachite,
where a few men were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves,
and had finally joined the line of guests whom Mrs. Beaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson drawing-room.
Archer was distinctly nervous.
He had not gone back
to his club after the Opera
(as the young bloods usually did),
but,
the night being fine,
had walked
for some distance up Fifth Avenue before turning back in the direction of the Beauforts'
house.
He was definitely afraid that the Mingotts might be going too far;
that,
in fact,
they might have Granny Mingott's orders
to bring the Countess Olenska
to the ball.
From the tone of the club box he had perceived how grave a mistake that would be;
and,
though he was more than ever determined to
"see the thing through,"
he felt less chivalrously eager
to champion his betrothed's cousin than before their brief talk at the Opera.
Wandering on
to the bouton d'or drawing-room
(where Beaufort had had the audacity
to hang
"Love Victorious,"
the much-discussed nude of Bouguereau)
Archer found Mrs. Welland and her daughter standing near the ball-room door.
Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond:
the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts,
on girlish heads wreathed
with modest blossoms,
on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women's coiffures,
and on the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glace gloves.
Miss Welland,
evidently about
to join the dancers,
hung on the threshold,
her lilies-of-the-valley in her hand
(she carried no other bouquet),
her face a little pale,
her eyes burning
with a candid excitement.
A group of young men and girls were gathered about her,
and there was much hand-clasping,
laughing and pleasantry on which Mrs. Welland,
standing slightly apart,
shed the beam of a qualified approval.
It was evident that Miss Welland was in the act of announcing her engagement,
while her mother affected the air of parental reluctance considered suitable
to the occasion.
Archer paused a moment.
It was at his express wish that the announcement had been made,
and yet it was not thus that he would have wished
to have his happiness known.
To proclaim it in the heat and noise of a crowded ball-room was
to rob it of the fine bloom of privacy which should belong
to things nearest the heart.
His joy was so deep that this blurring of the surface left its essence untouched;
but he would have liked
to keep the surface pure too.
It was something of a satisfaction
to find that May Welland shared this feeling.
Her eyes fled
to his beseechingly,
and their look said:
"Remember,
we're doing this because it's right."
No appeal could have found a more immediate response in Archer's breast;
but he wished that the necessity of their action had been represented by some ideal reason,
and not simply by poor Ellen Olenska.
The group about Miss Welland made way
for him
with significant smiles,
and after taking his share of the felicitations he drew his betrothed into the middle of the ball-room floor and put his arm about her waist.
"Now we shan't have
to talk,"
he said,
smiling into her candid eyes,
as they floated away on the soft waves of the Blue Danube.
She made no answer.
Her lips trembled into a smile,
but the eyes remained distant and serious,
as if bent on some ineffable vision.
"Dear,"
Archer whispered,
pressing her
to him:
it was borne in on him that the first hours of being engaged,
even if spent in a ball-room,
had in them something grave and sacramental.
What a new life it was going
to be,
with this whiteness,
radiance,
goodness at one's side! The dance over,
the two,
as became an affianced couple,
wandered into the conservatory;
and sitting behind a tall screen of tree-ferns and camellias Newland pressed her gloved hand
to his lips.
"You see I did as you asked me to,"
she said.
"Yes:
I couldn't wait,"
he answered smiling.
After a moment he added:
"Only I wish it hadn't had
to be at a ball."
"Yes,
I know."
She met his glance comprehendingly.
"But after all--even here we're alone together,
aren't we?"
"Oh,
dearest--always!"
Archer cried.
Evidently she was always going
to understand;
she was always going
to say the right thing.
The discovery made the cup of his bliss overflow,
and he went on gaily:
"The worst of it is that I want
to kiss you and I can't."
As he spoke he took a swift glance about the conservatory,
assured himself of their momentary privacy,
and catching her
to him laid a fugitive pressure on her lips.
To counteract the audacity of this proceeding he led her
to a bamboo sofa in a less secluded part of the conservatory,
and sitting down beside her broke a lily-of-the-valley from her bouquet.
She sat silent,
and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet.
"Did you tell my cousin Ellen?"
she asked presently,
as if she spoke through a dream.
He roused himself,
and remembered that he had not done so.
Some invincible repugnance
to speak of such things
to the strange foreign woman had checked the words on his lips.
"No--I hadn't the chance after all,"
he said,
fibbing hastily.
"Ah."
She looked disappointed,
but gently resolved on gaining her point.
"You must,
then,
for I didn't either;
and I shouldn't like her
to think--"
"Of course not.
But aren't you,
after all,
the person
to do it?"
She pondered on this.
"If I'd done it at the right time,
yes:
but now that there's been a delay I think you must explain that I'd asked you
to tell her at the Opera,
before our speaking about it
to everybody here.
Otherwise she might think I had forgotten her.
You see,
she's one of the family,
and she's been away so long that she's rather--sensitive."
Archer looked at her glowingly.
"Dear and great angel! Of course I'll tell her."
He glanced a trifle apprehensively toward the crowded ball-room.
"But I haven't seen her yet.
Has she come?"
"No;
at the last minute she decided not to."
"At the last minute?"
he echoed,
betraying his surprise that she should ever have considered the alternative possible.
"Yes.
She's awfully fond of dancing,"
the young girl answered simply.
"But suddenly she made up her mind that her dress wasn't smart enough
for a ball,
though we thought it so lovely;
and so my aunt had
to take her home."
"Oh,
well--"
said Archer
with happy indifference.
Nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination
to carry
to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the
"unpleasant"
in which they had both been brought up.
"She knows as well as I do,"
he reflected,
"the real reason of her cousin's staying away;
but I shall never let her see by the least sign that I am conscious of there being a shadow of a shade on poor Ellen Olenska's reputation."
IV.
In the course of the next day the first of the usual betrothal visits were exchanged.
The New York ritual was precise and inflexible in such matters;
and in conformity
with it Newland Archer first went
with his mother and sister
to call on Mrs. Welland,
after which he and Mrs. Welland and May drove out
to old Mrs. Manson Mingott's
to receive that venerable ancestress's blessing.
A visit
to Mrs. Manson Mingott was always an amusing episode
to the young man.
The house in itself was already an historic document,
though not,
of course,
as venerable as certain other old family houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue.
Those were of the purest 1830,
with a grim harmony of cabbage- rose-garlanded carpets,
rosewood consoles,
round-arched fire-places
with black marble mantels,
and immense glazed book-cases of mahogany;
whereas old Mrs. Mingott,
who had built her house later,
had bodily cast out the massive furniture of her prime,
and mingled
with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the Second Empire.
It was her habit
to sit in a window of her sitting-room on the ground floor,
as if watching calmly
for life and fashion
to flow northward
to her solitary doors.
She seemed in no hurry
to have them come,
for her patience was equalled by her confidence.
She was sure that presently the hoardings,
the quarries,
the one-story saloons,
the wooden green-houses in ragged gardens,
and the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene,
would vanish before the advance of residences as stately as her own--perhaps
(for she was an impartial woman)
even statelier;
and that the cobble- stones over which the old clattering omnibuses bumped would be replaced by smooth asphalt,
such as people reported having seen in Paris.
Meanwhile,
as every one she cared
to see came
to HER
(and she could fill her rooms as easily as the Beauforts,
and without adding a single item
to the menu of her suppers),
she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman
with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon.
She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials,
and now,
in extreme old age,
was rewarded by presenting
to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh,
in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.
A flight of smooth double chins led down
to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott;
and around and below,
wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair,
with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.
The burden of Mrs. Manson Mingott's flesh had long since made it impossible
for her
to go up and down stairs,
and
with characteristic independence she had made her reception rooms upstairs and established herself
(in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties)
on the ground floor of her house;
so that,
as you sat in her sitting-room window
with her,
you caught
(through a door that was always open,
and a looped- back yellow damask portiere)
the unexpected vista of a bedroom
with a huge low bed upholstered like a sofa,
and a toilet-table
with frivolous lace flounces and a gilt-framed mirror.
Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this arrangement,
which recalled scenes in French fiction,
and architectural incentives
to immorality such as the simple American had never dreamed of.
That was how women
with lovers lived in the wicked old societies,
in apartments
with all the rooms on one floor,
and all the indecent propinquities that their novels described.
It amused Newland Archer
(who had secretly situated the love-scenes of
"Monsieur de Camors"
in Mrs. Mingott's bedroom)
to picture her blameless life led in the stage-setting of adultery;
but he said
to himself,
with considerable admiration,
that if a lover had been what she wanted,
the intrepid woman would have had him too.
To the general relief the Countess Olenska was not present in her grandmother's drawing-room during the visit of the betrothed couple.
Mrs.Mingott said she had gone out;
which,
on a day of such glaring sunlight,
and at the
"shopping hour,"
seemed in itself an indelicate thing
for a compromised woman
to do.
But at any rate it spared them the embarrassment of her presence,
and the faint shadow that her unhappy past might seem
to shed on their radiant future.
The visit went off successfully,
as was
to have been expected.
Old Mrs. Mingott was delighted
with the engagement,
which,
being long foreseen by watchful relatives,
had been carefully passed upon in family council;
and the engagement ring,
a large thick sapphire set in invisible claws,
met
with her unqualified admiration.
"It's the new setting:
of course it shows the stone beautifully,
but it looks a little bare
to old-fashioned eyes,"
Mrs.Welland had explained,
with a conciliatory side-glance at her future son-in-law.
"Old-fashioned eyes?
I hope you don't mean mine,
my dear?
I like all the novelties,"
said the ancestress,
lifting the stone
to her small bright orbs,
which no glasses had ever disfigured.
"Very handsome,"
she added,
returning the jewel;
"very liberal.
In my time a cameo set in pearls was thought sufficient.
But it's the hand that sets off the ring,
isn't it,
my dear Mr. Archer?"
and she waved one of her tiny hands,
with small pointed nails and rolls of aged fat encircling the wrist like ivory bracelets.
"Mine was modelled in Rome by the great Ferrigiani.
You should have May's done:
no doubt he'll have it done,
my child.
Her hand is large--it's these modern sports that spread the joints--but the skin is white.--And when's the wedding
to be?"
she broke off,
fixing her eyes on Archer's face.
"Oh--"
Mrs.Welland murmured,
while the young man,
smiling at his betrothed,
replied:
"As soon as ever it can,
if only you'll back me up,
Mrs.Mingott."
"We must give them time
to get
to know each other a little better,
mamma,"
Mrs.Welland interposed,
with the proper affectation of reluctance;
to which the ancestress rejoined:
"Know each other?
Fiddlesticks! Everybody in New York has always known everybody.
Let the young man have his way,
my dear;
don't wait till the bubble's off the wine.
Marry them before Lent;
I may catch pneumonia any winter now,
and I want
to give the wedding-breakfast."
These successive statements were received
with the proper expressions of amusement,
incredulity and gratitude;
and the visit was breaking up in a vein of mild pleasantry when the door opened
to admit the Countess Olenska,
who entered in bonnet and mantle followed by the unexpected figure of Julius Beaufort.
There was a cousinly murmur of pleasure between the ladies,
and Mrs. Mingott held out Ferrigiani's model
to the banker.
"Ha! Beaufort,
this is a rare favour!"
(She had an odd foreign way of addressing men by their surnames.)
"Thanks.
I wish it might happen oftener,"
said the visitor in his easy arrogant way.
"I'm generally so tied down;
but I met the Countess Ellen in Madison Square,
and she was good enough
to let me walk home
with her."
"Ah--I hope the house will be gayer,
now that Ellen's here!"
cried Mrs. Mingott
with a glorious effrontery.
"Sit down--sit down,
Beaufort:
push up the yellow armchair;
now I've got you I want a good gossip.
I hear your ball was magnificent;
and I understand you invited Mrs. Lemuel Struthers?
Well--I've a curiosity
to see the woman myself."
She had forgotten her relatives,
who were drifting out into the hall under Ellen Olenska's guidance.
Old Mrs. Mingott had always professed a great admiration
for Julius Beaufort,
and there was a kind of kinship in their cool domineering way and their short-cuts through the conventions.
Now she was eagerly curious
to know what had decided the Beauforts
to invite
(for the first time)
Mrs.Lemuel Struthers,
the widow of Struthers's Shoe-polish,
who had returned the previous year from a long initiatory sojourn in Europe
to lay siege
to the tight little citadel of New York.
"Of course if you and Regina invite her the thing is settled.
Well,
we need new blood and new money--and I hear she's still very good-looking,"
the carnivorous old lady declared.
In the hall,
while Mrs. Welland and May drew on their furs,
Archer saw that the Countess Olenska was looking at him
with a faintly questioning smile.
"Of course you know already--about May and me,"
he said,
answering her look
with a shy laugh.
"She scolded me
for not giving you the news last night at the Opera:
I had her orders
to tell you that we were engaged--but I couldn't,
in that crowd."
The smile passed from Countess Olenska's eyes
to her lips:
she looked younger,
more like the bold brown Ellen Mingott of his boyhood.
"Of course I know;
yes.
And I'm so glad.
But one doesn't tell such things first in a crowd."
The ladies were on the threshold and she held out her hand.
"Good-bye;
come and see me some day,"
she said,
still looking at Archer.
In the carriage,
on the way down Fifth Avenue,
they talked pointedly of Mrs. Mingott,
of her age,
her spirit,
and all her wonderful attributes.
No one alluded
to Ellen Olenska;
but Archer knew that Mrs. Welland was thinking:
"It's a mistake
for Ellen
to be seen,
the very day after her arrival,
parading up Fifth Avenue at the crowded hour
with Julius Beaufort--"
and the young man himself mentally added:
"And she ought
to know that a man who's just engaged doesn't spend his time calling on married women.
But I daresay in the set she's lived in they do--they never do anything else."
And,
in spite of the cosmopolitan views on which he prided himself,
he thanked heaven that he was a New Yorker,
and about
to ally himself
with one of his own kind.
V.
The next evening old Mr. Sillerton Jackson came
to dine
with the Archers.
Mrs.Archer was a shy woman and shrank from society;
but she liked
to be well-informed as
to its doings.
Her old friend Mr. Sillerton Jackson applied
to the investigation of his friends'
affairs the patience of a collector and the science of a naturalist;
and his sister,
Miss Sophy Jackson,
who lived
with him,
and was entertained by all the people who could not secure her much-sought-after brother,
brought home bits of minor gossip that filled out usefully the gaps in his picture.
Therefore,
whenever anything happened that Mrs. Archer wanted
to know about,
she asked Mr. Jackson
to dine;
and as she honoured few people
with her invitations,
and as she and her daughter Janey were an excellent audience,
Mr.Jackson usually came himself instead of sending his sister.
If he could have dictated all the conditions,
he would have chosen the evenings when Newland was out;
not because the young man was uncongenial
to him
(the two got on capitally at their club)
but because the old anecdotist sometimes felt,
on Newland's part,
a tendency
to weigh his evidence that the ladies of the family never showed.
Mr.Jackson,
if perfection had been attainable on earth,
would also have asked that Mrs. Archer's food should be a little better.
But then New York,
as far back as the mind of man could travel,
had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan,
who cared about eating and clothes and money,
and the Archer-Newland- van-der-Luyden tribe,
who were devoted
to travel,
horticulture and the best fiction,
and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure.
You couldn't have everything,
after all.
If you dined
with the Lovell Mingotts you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines;
at Adeline Archer's you could talk about Alpine scenery and
"The Marble Faun";
and luckily the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape.
Therefore when a friendly summons came from Mrs. Archer,
Mr.Jackson,
who was a true eclectic,
would usually say
to his sister:
"I've been a little gouty since my last dinner at the Lovell Mingotts'--it will do me good
to diet at Adeline's."
Mrs.Archer,
who had long been a widow,
lived
with her son and daughter in West Twenty-eighth Street.
An upper floor was dedicated
to Newland,
and the two women squeezed themselves into narrower quarters below.
In an unclouded harmony of tastes and interests they cultivated ferns in Wardian cases,
made macrame lace and wool embroidery on linen,
collected American revolutionary glazed ware,
subscribed to
"Good Words,"
and read Ouida's novels
for the sake of the Italian atmosphere.
(They preferred those about peasant life,
because of the descriptions of scenery and the pleasanter sentiments,
though in general they liked novels about people in society,
whose motives and habits were more comprehensible,
spoke severely of Dickens,
who
"had never drawn a gentleman,"
and considered Thackeray less at home in the great world than Bulwer--who,
however,
was beginning
to be thought old-fashioned.)
Mrs.and Miss Archer were both great lovers of scenery.
It was what they principally sought and admired on their occasional travels abroad;
considering architecture and painting as subjects
for men,
and chiefly
for learned persons who read Ruskin.
Mrs.Archer had been born a Newland,
and mother and daughter,
who were as like as sisters,
were both,
as people said,
"true Newlands";
tall,
pale,
and slightly round-shouldered,
with long noses,
sweet smiles and a kind of drooping distinction like that in certain faded Reynolds portraits.
Their physical resemblance would have been complete if an elderly embonpoint had not stretched Mrs. Archer's black brocade,
while Miss Archer's brown and purple poplins hung,
as the years went on,
more and more slackly on her virgin frame.
Mentally,
the likeness between them,
as Newland was aware,
was less complete than their identical mannerisms often made it appear.
The long habit of living together in mutually dependent intimacy had given them the same vocabulary,
and the same habit of beginning their phrases
"Mother thinks"
or
"Janey thinks,"
according as one or the other wished
to advance an opinion of her own;
but in reality,
while Mrs. Archer's serene unimaginativeness rested easily in the accepted and familiar,
Janey was subject
to starts and aberrations of fancy welling up from springs of suppressed romance.
Mother and daughter adored each other and revered their son and brother;
and Archer loved them
with a tenderness made compunctious and uncritical by the sense of their exaggerated admiration,
and by his secret satisfaction in it.
After all,
he thought it a good thing
for a man
to have his authority respected in his own house,
even if his sense of humour sometimes made him question the force of his mandate.
On this occasion the young man was very sure that Mr. Jackson would rather have had him dine out;
but he had his own reasons
for not doing so.
Of course old Jackson wanted
to talk about Ellen Olenska,
and of course Mrs. Archer and Janey wanted
to hear what he had
to tell.
All three would be slightly embarrassed by Newland's presence,
now that his prospective relation
to the Mingott clan had been made known;
and the young man waited
with an amused curiosity
to see how they would turn the difficulty.
They began,
obliquely,
by talking about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers.
"It's a pity the Beauforts asked her,"
Mrs.Archer said gently.
"But then Regina always does what he tells her;
and BEAUFORT--"
"Certain nuances escape Beaufort,"
said Mr. Jackson,
cautiously inspecting the broiled shad,
and wondering
for the thousandth time why Mrs. Archer's cook always burnt the roe
to a cinder.
(Newland,
who had long shared his wonder,
could always detect it in the older man's expression of melancholy disapproval.)
"Oh,
necessarily;
Beaufort is a vulgar man,"
said Mrs. Archer.
"My grandfather Newland always used
to say
to my mother:
`Whatever you do,
don't let that fellow Beaufort be introduced
to the girls.'
But at least he's had the advantage of associating
with gentlemen;
in England too,
they say.
It's all very mysterious--"
She glanced at Janey and paused.
She and Janey knew every fold of the Beaufort mystery,
but in public Mrs. Archer continued
to assume that the subject was not one
for the unmarried.
"But this Mrs. Struthers,"
Mrs.Archer continued;
"what did you say SHE was,
Sillerton?"
"Out of a mine:
or rather out of the saloon at the head of the pit.
Then
with Living Wax-Works,
touring New England.
After the police broke THAT up,
they say she lived--"
Mr.Jackson in his turn glanced at Janey,
whose eyes began
to bulge from under her prominent lids.
There were still hiatuses
for her in Mrs. Struthers's past.
"Then,"
Mr.Jackson continued
(and Archer saw he was wondering why no one had told the butler never
to slice cucumbers
with a steel knife),
"then Lemuel Struthers came along.
They say his advertiser used the girl's head
for the shoe-polish posters;
her hair's intensely black,
you know--the Egyptian style.
Anyhow,
he-- eventually--married her."
There were volumes of innuendo in the way the
"eventually"
was spaced,
and each syllable given its due stress.
"Oh,
well--at the pass we've come
to nowadays,
it doesn't matter,"
said Mrs. Archer indifferently.
The ladies were not really interested in Mrs. Struthers just then;
the subject of Ellen Olenska was too fresh and too absorbing
to them.
Indeed,
Mrs.Struthers's name had been introduced by Mrs. Archer only that she might presently be able
to say:
"And Newland's new cousin--Countess Olenska?
Was SHE at the ball too?"
There was a faint touch of sarcasm in the reference
to her son,
and Archer knew it and had expected it.
Even Mrs. Archer,
who was seldom unduly pleased
with human events,
had been altogether glad of her son's engagement.
("Especially after that silly business
with Mrs. Rushworth,"
as she had remarked
to Janey,
alluding
to what had once seemed
to Newland a tragedy of which his soul would always bear the scar.)
There was no better match in New York than May Welland,
look at the question from whatever point you chose.
Of course such a marriage was only what Newland was entitled to;
but young men are so foolish and incalculable--and some women so ensnaring and unscrupulous--that it was nothing short of a miracle
to see one's only son safe past the Siren Isle and in the haven of a blameless domesticity.
All this Mrs. Archer felt,
and her son knew she felt;
but he knew also that she had been perturbed by the premature announcement of his engagement,
or rather by its cause;
and it was
for that reason--because on the whole he was a tender and indulgent master--that he had stayed at home that evening.
"It's not that I don't approve of the Mingotts'
esprit de corps;
but why Newland's engagement should be mixed up
with that Olenska woman's comings and goings I don't see,"
Mrs.Archer grumbled
to Janey,
the only witness of her slight lapses from perfect sweetness.
She had behaved beautifully--and in beautiful behaviour she was unsurpassed--during the call on Mrs. Welland;
but Newland knew
(and his betrothed doubtless guessed)
that all through the visit she and Janey were nervously on the watch
for Madame Olenska's possible intrusion;
and when they left the house together she had permitted herself
to say
to her son:
"I'm thankful that Augusta Welland received us alone."
These indications of inward disturbance moved Archer the more that he too felt that the Mingotts had gone a little too far.
But,
as it was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude
to what was uppermost in their thoughts,
he simply replied:
"Oh,
well,
there's always a phase of family parties
to be gone through when one gets engaged,
and the sooner it's over the better."
At which his mother merely pursed her lips under the lace veil that hung down from her grey velvet bonnet trimmed
with frosted grapes.
Her revenge,
he felt--her lawful revenge--would be to
"draw"
Mr.Jackson that evening on the Countess Olenska;
and,
having publicly done his duty as a future member of the Mingott clan,
the young man had no objection
to hearing the lady discussed in private--except that the subject was already beginning
to bore him.
Mr.Jackson had helped himself
to a slice of the tepid filet which the mournful butler had handed him
with a look as sceptical as his own,
and had rejected the mushroom sauce after a scarcely perceptible sniff.
He looked baffled and hungry,
and Archer reflected that he would probably finish his meal on Ellen Olenska.
Mr.Jackson leaned back in his chair,
and glanced up at the candlelit Archers,
Newlands and van der Luydens hanging in dark frames on the dark walls.
"Ah,
how your grandfather Archer loved a good dinner,
my dear Newland!"
he said,
his eyes on the portrait of a plump full-chested young man in a stock and a blue coat,
with a view of a white-columned country-house behind him.
"Well--well--well .
.
.
I wonder what he would have said
to all these foreign marriages!"
Mrs.Archer ignored the allusion
to the ancestral cuisine and Mr. Jackson continued
with deliberation:
"No,
she was NOT at the ball."
"Ah--"
Mrs.Archer murmured,
in a tone that implied:
"She had that decency."
"Perhaps the Beauforts don't know her,"
Janey suggested,
with her artless malice.
Mr.Jackson gave a faint sip,
as if he had been tasting invisible Madeira.
"Mrs.
Beaufort may not--but Beaufort certainly does,
for she was seen walking up Fifth Avenue this afternoon
with him by the whole of New York."
"Mercy--"
moaned Mrs. Archer,
evidently perceiving the uselessness of trying
to ascribe the actions of foreigners
to a sense of delicacy.
"I wonder if she wears a round hat or a bonnet in the afternoon,"
Janey speculated.
"At the Opera I know she had on dark blue velvet,
perfectly plain and flat-- like a night-gown."
"Janey!"
said her mother;
and Miss Archer blushed and tried
to look audacious.
"It was,
at any rate,
in better taste not
to go
to the ball,"
Mrs.Archer continued.
A spirit of perversity moved her son
to rejoin:
"I don't think it was a question of taste
with her.
May said she meant
to go,
and then decided that the dress in question wasn't smart enough."
Mrs.Archer smiled at this confirmation of her inference.
"Poor Ellen,"
she simply remarked;
adding compassionately:
"We must always bear in mind what an eccentric bringing-up Medora Manson gave her.
What can you expect of a girl who was allowed
to wear black satin at her coming-out ball?"
"Ah--don't I remember her in it!"
said Mr. Jackson;
adding:
"Poor girl!"
in the tone of one who,
while enjoying the memory,
had fully understood at the time what the sight portended.
"It's odd,"
Janey remarked,
"that she should have kept such an ugly name as Ellen.
I should have changed it
to Elaine."
She glanced about the table
to see the effect of this.
Her brother laughed.
"Why Elaine?"
"I don't know;
it sounds more--more Polish,"
said Janey,
blushing.
"It sounds more conspicuous;
and that can hardly be what she wishes,"
said Mrs. Archer distantly.
"Why not?"
broke in her son,
growing suddenly argumentative.
"Why shouldn't she be conspicuous if she chooses?
Why should she slink about as if it were she who had disgraced herself?
She's `poor Ellen'
certainly,
because she had the bad luck
to make a wretched marriage;
but I don't see that that's a reason
for hiding her head as if she were the culprit."
"That,
I suppose,"
said Mr. Jackson,
speculatively,
"is the line the Mingotts mean
to take."
The young man reddened.
"I didn't have
to wait
for their cue,
if that's what you mean,
sir.
Madame Olenska has had an unhappy life:
that doesn't make her an outcast."
"There are rumours,"
began Mr. Jackson,
glancing at Janey.
"Oh,
I know:
the secretary,"
the young man took him up.
"Nonsense,
mother;
Janey's grown-up.
They say,
don't they,"
he went on,
"that the secretary helped her
to get away from her brute of a husband,
who kept her practically a prisoner?
Well,
what if he did?
I hope there isn't a man among us who wouldn't have done the same in such a case."
Mr.Jackson glanced over his shoulder
to say
to the sad butler:
"Perhaps .
.
.
that sauce .
.
.
just a little,
after all--";
then,
having helped himself,
he remarked:
"I'm told she's looking
for a house.
She means
to live here."
"I hear she means
to get a divorce,"
said Janey boldly.
"I hope she will!"
Archer exclaimed.
The word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil atmosphere of the Archer dining-room.
Mrs.Archer raised her delicate eye-brows in the particular curve that signified:
"The butler--"
and the young man,
himself mindful of the bad taste of discussing such intimate matters in public,
hastily branched off into an account of his visit
to old Mrs. Mingott.
After dinner,
according
to immemorial custom,
Mrs.Archer and Janey trailed their long silk draperies up
to the drawing-room,
where,
while the gentlemen smoked below stairs,
they sat beside a Carcel lamp
with an engraved globe,
facing each other across a rosewood work-table
with a green silk bag under it,
and stitched at the two ends of a tapestry band of field-flowers destined
to adorn an
"occasional"
chair in the drawing- room of young Mrs. Newland Archer.
While this rite was in progress in the drawing-room,
Archer settled Mr. Jackson in an armchair near the fire in the Gothic library and handed him a cigar.
Mr.Jackson sank into the armchair
with satisfaction,
lit his cigar
with perfect confidence
(it was Newland who bought them),
and stretching his thin old ankles
to the coals,
said:
"You say the secretary merely helped her
to get away,
my dear fellow?
Well,
he was still helping her a year later,
then;
for somebody met
'em living at Lausanne together."
Newland reddened.
"Living together?
Well,
why not?
Who had the right
to make her life over if she hadn't?
I'm sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers
to live
with harlots."
He stopped and turned away angrily
to light his cigar.
"Women ought
to be free--as free as we are,"
he declared,
making a discovery of which he was too irritated
to measure the terrific consequences.
Mr.Sillerton Jackson stretched his ankles nearer the coals and emitted a sardonic whistle.
"Well,"
he said after a pause,
"apparently Count Olenski takes your view;
for I never heard of his having lifted a finger
to get his wife back."
VI.
That evening,
after Mr. Jackson had taken himself away,
and the ladies had retired
to their chintz- curtained bedroom,
Newland Archer mounted thoughtfully
to his own study.
A vigilant hand had,
as usual,
kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed;
and the room,
with its rows and rows of books,
its bronze and steel statuettes of
"The Fencers"
on the mantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures,
looked singularly home-like and welcoming.
As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes rested on a large photograph of May Welland,
which the young girl had given him in the first days of their romance,
and which had now displaced all the other portraits on the table.
With a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead,
serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul's custodian he was
to be.
That terrifying product of the social system he belonged
to and believed in,
the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything,
looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland's familiar features;
and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught
to think,
but a voyage on uncharted seas.
The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled convictions and set them drifting dangerously through his mind.
His own exclamation:
"Women should be free--as free as we are,"
struck
to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world
to regard as non-existent.
"Nice"
women,
however wronged,
would never claim the kind of freedom he meant,
and generous- minded men like himself were therefore--in the heat of argument--the more chivalrously ready
to concede it
to them.
Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down
to the old pattern.
But here he was pledged
to defend,
on the part of his betrothed's cousin,
conduct that,
on his own wife's part,
would justify him in calling down on her all the thunders of Church and State.
Of course the dilemma was purely hypothetical;
since he wasn't a blackguard Polish nobleman,
it was absurd
to speculate what his wife's rights would be if he WERE.
But Newland Archer was too imaginative not
to feel that,
in his case and May's,
the tie might gall
for reasons far less gross and palpable.
What could he and she really know of each other,
since it was his duty,
as a
"decent"
fellow,
to conceal his past from her,
and hers,
as a marriageable girl,
to have no past
to conceal?
What if,
for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell
with both of them,
they should tire of each other,
misunderstand or irritate each other?
He reviewed his friends'
marriages-- the supposedly happy ones--and saw none that answered,
even remotely,
to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation
with May Welland.
He perceived that such a picture presupposed,
on her part,
the experience,
the versatility,
the freedom of judgment,
which she had been carefully trained not
to possess;
and
with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were:
a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.
Lawrence Lefferts occurred
to him as the husband who had most completely realised this enviable ideal.
As became the high-priest of form,
he had formed a wife so completely
to his own convenience that,
in the most conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs
with other men's wives,
she went about in smiling unconsciousness,
saying that
"Lawrence was so frightfully strict";
and had been known
to blush indignantly,
and avert her gaze,
when some one alluded in her presence
to the fact that Julius Beaufort
(as became a
"foreigner"
of doubtful origin)
had what was known in New York as
"another establishment."
Archer tried
to console himself
with the thought that he was not quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts,
nor May such a simpleton as poor Gertrude;
but the difference was after all one of intelligence and not of standards.
In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world,
where the real thing was never said or done or even thought,
but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs;
as when Mrs. Welland,
who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her
to announce her daughter's engagement at the Beaufort ball
(and had indeed expected him
to do no less),
yet felt obliged
to simulate reluctance,
and the air of having had her hand forced,
quite as,
in the books on Primitive Man that people of advanced culture were beginning
to read,
the savage bride is dragged
with shrieks from her parents'
tent.
The result,
of course,
was that the young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable
for her very frankness and assurance.
She was frank,
poor darling,
because she had nothing
to conceal,
assured because she knew of nothing
to be on her guard against;
and
with no better preparation than this,
she was
to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called
"the facts of life."
The young man was sincerely but placidly in love.
He delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed,
in her health,
her horsemanship,
her grace and quickness at games,
and the shy interest in books and ideas that she was beginning
to develop under his guidance.
(She had advanced far enough
to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King,
but not
to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.)
She was straightforward,
loyal and brave;
she had a sense of humour
(chiefly proved by her laughing at HIS jokes);
and he suspected,
in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul,
a glow of feeling that it would be a joy
to waken.
But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product.
Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent;
it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile.
And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity,
so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses,
because it was supposed
to be what he wanted,
what he had a right to,
in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
There was a certain triteness in these reflections:
they were those habitual
to young men on the approach of their wedding day.
But they were generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and self-abasement of which Newland Archer felt no trace.
He could not deplore
(as Thackeray's heroes so often exasperated him by doing)
that he had not a blank page
to offer his bride in exchange
for the unblemished one she was
to give
to him.
He could not get away from the fact that if he had been brought up as she had they would have been no more fit
to find their way about than the Babes in the Wood;
nor could he,
for all his anxious cogitations,
see any honest reason
(any,
that is,
unconnected
with his own momentary pleasure,
and the passion of masculine vanity)
why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom of experience as himself.
Such questions,
at such an hour,
were bound
to drift through his mind;
but he was conscious that their uncomfortable persistence and precision were due
to the inopportune arrival of the Countess Olenska.
Here he was,
at the very moment of his betrothal--a moment
for pure thoughts and cloudless hopes--pitchforked into a coil of scandal which raised all the special problems he would have preferred
to let lie.
"Hang Ellen Olenska!"
he grumbled,
as he covered his fire and began
to undress.
He could not really see why her fate should have the least bearing on his;
yet he dimly felt that he had only just begun
to measure the risks of the championship which his engagement had forced upon him.
A few days later the bolt fell.
The Lovell Mingotts had sent out cards
for what was known as
"a formal dinner"
(that is,
three extra footmen,
two dishes
for each course,
and a Roman punch in the middle),
and had headed their invitations
with the words
"To meet the Countess Olenska,"
in accordance
with the hospitable American fashion,
which treats strangers as if they were royalties,
or at least as their ambassadors.
The guests had been selected
with a boldness and discrimination in which the initiated recognised the firm hand of Catherine the Great.
Associated
with such immemorial standbys as the Selfridge Merrys,
who were asked everywhere because they always had been,
the Beauforts,
on whom there was a claim of relationship,
and Mr. Sillerton Jackson and his sister Sophy
(who went wherever her brother told her to),
were some of the most fashionable and yet most irreproachable of the dominant
"young married"
set;
the Lawrence Leffertses,
Mrs.Lefferts Rushworth
(the lovely widow),
the Harry Thorleys,
the Reggie Chiverses and young Morris Dagonet and his wife
(who was a van der Luyden).
The company indeed was perfectly assorted,
since all the members belonged
to the little inner group of people who,
during the long New York season,
disported themselves together daily and nightly
with apparently undiminished zest.
Forty-eight hours later the unbelievable had happened;
every one had refused the Mingotts'
invitation except the Beauforts and old Mr. Jackson and his sister.
The intended slight was emphasised by the fact that even the Reggie Chiverses,
who were of the Mingott clan,
were among those inflicting it;
and by the uniform wording of the notes,
in all of which the writers
"regretted that they were unable
to accept,"
without the mitigating plea of a
"previous engagement"
that ordinary courtesy prescribed.
New York society was,
in those days,
far too small,
and too scant in its resources,
for every one in it
(including livery-stable-keepers,
butlers and cooks)
not
to know exactly on which evenings people were free;
and it was thus possible
for the recipients of Mrs. Lovell Mingott's invitations
to make cruelly clear their determination not
to meet the Countess Olenska.
The blow was unexpected;
but the Mingotts,
as their way was,
met it gallantly.
Mrs.Lovell Mingott confided the case
to Mrs. Welland,
who confided it
to Newland Archer;
who,
aflame at the outrage,
appealed passionately and authoritatively
to his mother;
who,
after a painful period of inward resistance and outward temporising,
succumbed
to his instances
(as she always did),
and immediately embracing his cause
with an energy redoubled by her previous hesitations,
put on her grey velvet bonnet and said:
"I'll go and see Louisa van der Luyden."
The New York of Newland Archer's day was a small and slippery pyramid,
in which,
as yet,
hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained.
At its base was a firm foundation of what Mrs. Archer called
"plain people";
an honourable but obscure majority of respectable families who
(as in the case of the Spicers or the Leffertses or the Jacksons)
had been raised above their level by marriage
with one of the ruling clans.
People,
Mrs.Archer always said,
were not as particular as they used
to be;
and
with old Catherine Spicer ruling one end of Fifth Avenue,
and Julius Beaufort the other,
you couldn't expect the old traditions
to last much longer.
Firmly narrowing upward from this wealthy but inconspicuous substratum was the compact and dominant group which the Mingotts,
Newlands,
Chiverses and Mansons so actively represented.
Most people imagined them
to be the very apex of the pyramid;
but they themselves
(at least those of Mrs. Archer's generation)
were aware that,
in the eyes of the professional genealogist,
only a still smaller number of families could lay claim
to that eminence.
"Don't tell me,"
Mrs.Archer would say
to her children,
"all this modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy.
If there is one,
neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong
to it;
no,
nor the Newlands or the Chiverses either.
Our grandfathers and great- grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants,
who came
to the colonies
to make their fortune,
and stayed here because they did so well.
One of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration,
and another was a general on Washington's staff,
and received General Burgoyne's sword after the battle of Saratoga.
These are things
to be proud of,
but they have nothing
to do
with rank or class.
New York has always been a commercial community,
and there are not more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word."
Mrs.Archer and her son and daughter,
like every one else in New York,
knew who these privileged beings were:
the Dagonets of Washington Square,
who came of an old English county family allied
with the Pitts and Foxes;
the Lannings,
who had intermarried
with the descendants of Count de Grasse,
and the van der Luydens,
direct descendants of the first Dutch governor of Manhattan,
and related by pre-revolutionary marriages
to several members of the French and British aristocracy.
The Lannings survived only in the person of two very old but lively Miss Lannings,
who lived cheerfully and reminiscently among family portraits and Chippendale;
the Dagonets were a considerable clan,
allied
to the best names in Baltimore and Philadelphia;
but the van der Luydens,
who stood above all of them,
had faded into a kind of super-terrestrial twilight,
from which only two figures impressively emerged;
those of Mr. and Mrs. Henry van der Luyden.
Mrs.Henry van der Luyden had been Louisa Dagonet,
and her mother had been the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac,
of an old Channel Island family,
who had fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland,
after the war,
with his bride,
Lady Angelica Trevenna,
fifth daughter of the Earl of St. Austrey.
The tie between the Dagonets,
the du Lacs of Maryland,
and their aristocratic Cornish kinsfolk,
the Trevennas,
had always remained close and cordial.
Mr.and Mrs. van der Luyden had more than once paid long visits
to the present head of the house of Trevenna,
the Duke of St. Austrey,
at his country-seat in Cornwall and at St. Austrey in Gloucestershire;
and his Grace had frequently announced his intention of some day returning their visit
(without the Duchess,
who feared the Atlantic).
Mr.and Mrs. van der Luyden divided their time between Trevenna,
their place in Maryland,
and Skuytercliff,
the great estate on the Hudson which had been one of the colonial grants of the Dutch government
to the famous first Governor,
and of which Mr. van der Luyden was still
"Patroon."
Their large solemn house in Madison Avenue was seldom opened,
and when they came
to town they received in it only their most intimate friends.
"I wish you would go
with me,
Newland,"
his mother said,
suddenly pausing at the door of the Brown coupe.
"Louisa is fond of you;
and of course it's on account of dear May that I'm taking this step--and also because,
if we don't all stand together,
there'll be no such thing as Society left."
VII.
Mrs.Henry van der Luyden listened in silence
to her cousin Mrs. Archer's narrative.
It was all very well
to tell yourself in advance that Mrs. van der Luyden was always silent,
and that,
though non-committal by nature and training,
she was very kind
to the people she really liked.
Even personal experience of these facts was not always a protection from the chill that descended on one in the high-ceilinged white-walled Madison Avenue drawing-room,
with the pale brocaded armchairs so obviously uncovered
for the occasion,
and the gauze still veiling the ormolu mantel ornaments and the beautiful old carved frame of Gainsborough's
"Lady Angelica du Lac."
Mrs.van der Luyden's portrait by Huntington
(in black velvet and Venetian point)
faced that of her lovely ancestress.
It was generally considered
"as fine as a Cabanel,"
and,
though twenty years had elapsed since its execution,
was still
"a perfect likeness."
Indeed the Mrs. van der Luyden who sat beneath it listening
to Mrs. Archer might have been the twin-sister of the fair and still youngish woman drooping against a gilt armchair before a green rep curtain.
Mrs.van der Luyden still wore black velvet and Venetian point when she went into society--or rather
(since she never dined out)
when she threw open her own doors
to receive it.
Her fair hair,
which had faded without turning grey,
was still parted in flat overlapping points on her forehead,
and the straight nose that divided her pale blue eyes was only a little more pinched about the nostrils than when the portrait had been painted.
She always,
indeed,
struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence,
as bodies caught in glaciers keep
for years a rosy life-in-death.
Like all his family,
he esteemed and admired Mrs. van der Luyden;
but he found her gentle bending sweetness less approachable than the grimness of some of his mother's old aunts,
fierce spinsters who said
"No"
on principle before they knew what they were going
to be asked.
Mrs.van der Luyden's attitude said neither yes nor no,
but always appeared
to incline
to clemency till her thin lips,
wavering into the shadow of a smile,
made the almost invariable reply:
"I shall first have
to talk this over
with my husband."
She and Mr. van der Luyden were so exactly alike that Archer often wondered how,
after forty years of the closest conjugality,
two such merged identities ever separated themselves enough
for anything as controversial as a talking-over.
But as neither had ever reached a decision without prefacing it by this mysterious conclave,
Mrs.Archer and her son,
having set forth their case,
waited resignedly
for the familiar phrase.
Mrs.van der Luyden,
however,
who had seldom surprised any one,
now surprised them by reaching her long hand toward the bell-rope.
"I think,"
she said,
"I should like Henry
to hear what you have told me."
A footman appeared,
to whom she gravely added:
"If Mr. van der Luyden has finished reading the newspaper,
please ask him
to be kind enough
to come."
She said
"reading the newspaper"
in the tone in which a Minister's wife might have said:
"Presiding at a Cabinet meeting"--not from any arrogance of mind,
but because the habit of a life-time,
and the attitude of her friends and relations,
had led her
to consider Mr. van der Luyden's least gesture as having an almost sacerdotal importance.
Her promptness of action showed that she considered the case as pressing as Mrs. Archer;
but,
lest she should be thought
to have committed herself in advance,
she added,
with the sweetest look:
"Henry always enjoys seeing you,
dear Adeline;
and he will wish
to congratulate Newland."
The double doors had solemnly reopened and between them appeared Mr. Henry van der Luyden,
tall,
spare and frock-coated,
with faded fair hair,
a straight nose like his wife's and the same look of frozen gentleness in eyes that were merely pale grey instead of pale blue.
Mr.van der Luyden greeted Mrs. Archer
with cousinly affability,
proffered
to Newland low-voiced congratulations couched in the same language as his wife's,
and seated himself in one of the brocade armchairs
with the simplicity of a reigning sovereign.
"I had just finished reading the Times,"
he said,
laying his long finger-tips together.
"In town my mornings are so much occupied that I find it more convenient
to read the newspapers after luncheon."
"Ah,
there's a great deal
to be said
for that plan-- indeed I think my uncle Egmont used
to say he found it less agitating not
to read the morning papers till after dinner,"
said Mrs. Archer responsively.
"Yes:
my good father abhorred hurry.
But now we live in a constant rush,"
said Mr. van der Luyden in measured tones,
looking
with pleasant deliberation about the large shrouded room which
to Archer was so complete an image of its owners.
"But I hope you HAD finished your reading,
Henry?"
his wife interposed.
"Quite--quite,"
he reassured her.
"Then I should like Adeline
to tell you--"
"Oh,
it's really Newland's story,"
said his mother smiling;
and proceeded
to rehearse once more the monstrous tale of the affront inflicted on Mrs. Lovell Mingott.
"Of course,"
she ended,
"Augusta Welland and Mary Mingott both felt that,
especially in view of Newland's engagement,
you and Henry OUGHT
to KNOW."
"Ah--"
said Mr. van der Luyden,
drawing a deep breath.
There was a silence during which the tick of the monumental ormolu clock on the white marble mantelpiece grew as loud as the boom of a minute-gun.
Archer contemplated
with awe the two slender faded figures,
seated side by side in a kind of viceregal rigidity,
mouthpieces of some remote ancestral authority which fate compelled them
to wield,
when they would so much rather have lived in simplicity and seclusion,
digging invisible weeds out of the perfect lawns of Skuytercliff,
and playing Patience together in the evenings.
Mr.van der Luyden was the first
to speak.
"You really think this is due
to some--some intentional interference of Lawrence Lefferts's?"
he enquired,
turning
to Archer.
"I'm certain of it,
sir.
Larry has been going it rather harder than usual lately--if cousin Louisa won't mind my mentioning it--having rather a stiff affair
with the postmaster's wife in their village,
or some one of that sort;
and whenever poor Gertrude Lefferts begins
to suspect anything,
and he's afraid of trouble,
he gets up a fuss of this kind,
to show how awfully moral he is,
and talks at the top of his voice about the impertinence of inviting his wife
to meet people he doesn't wish her
to know.
He's simply using Madame Olenska as a lightning-rod;
I've seen him try the same thing often before."
"The LEFFERTSES!--"
said Mrs. van der Luyden.
"The LEFFERTSES!--"
echoed Mrs. Archer.
"What would uncle Egmont have said of Lawrence Lefferts's pronouncing on anybody's social position?
It shows what Society has come to."
"We'll hope it has not quite come
to that,"
said Mr. van der Luyden firmly.
"Ah,
if only you and Louisa went out more!"
sighed Mrs. Archer.
But instantly she became aware of her mistake.
The van der Luydens were morbidly sensitive
to any criticism of their secluded existence.
They were the arbiters of fashion,
the Court of last Appeal,
and they knew it,
and bowed
to their fate.
But being shy and retiring persons,
with no natural inclination
for their part,
they lived as much as possible in the sylvan solitude of Skuytercliff,
and when they came
to town,
declined all invitations on the plea of Mrs. van der Luyden's health.
Newland Archer came
to his mother's rescue.
"Everybody in New York knows what you and cousin Louisa represent.
That's why Mrs. Mingott felt she ought not
to allow this slight on Countess Olenska
to pass without consulting you."
Mrs.van der Luyden glanced at her husband,
who glanced back at her.
"It is the principle that I dislike,"
said Mr. van der Luyden.
"As long as a member of a well-known family is backed up by that family it should be considered-- final."
"It seems so
to me,"
said his wife,
as if she were producing a new thought.
"I had no idea,"
Mr.van der Luyden continued,
"that things had come
to such a pass."
He paused,
and looked at his wife again.
"It occurs
to me,
my dear,
that the Countess Olenska is already a sort of relation-- through Medora Manson's first husband.
At any rate,
she will be when Newland marries."
He turned toward the young man.
"Have you read this morning's Times,
Newland?"
"Why,
yes,
sir,"
said Archer,
who usually tossed off half a dozen papers
with his morning coffee.
Husband and wife looked at each other again.
Their pale eyes clung together in prolonged and serious consultation;
then a faint smile fluttered over Mrs. van der Luyden's face.
She had evidently guessed and approved.
Mr.van der Luyden turned
to Mrs. Archer.
"If Louisa's health allowed her
to dine out--I wish you would say
to Mrs. Lovell Mingott--she and I would have been happy to--er--fill the places of the Lawrence Leffertses at her dinner."
He paused
to let the irony of this sink in.
"As you know,
this is impossible."
Mrs.Archer sounded a sympathetic assent.
"But Newland tells me he has read this morning's Times;
therefore he has probably seen that Louisa's relative,
the Duke of St. Austrey,
arrives next week on the Russia.
He is coming
to enter his new sloop,
the Guinevere,
in next summer's International Cup Race;
and also
to have a little canvasback shooting at Trevenna."
Mr.van der Luyden paused again,
and continued
with increasing benevolence:
"Before taking him down
to Maryland we are inviting a few friends
to meet him here--only a little dinner--with a reception afterward.
I am sure Louisa will be as glad as I am if Countess Olenska will let us include her among our guests."
He got up,
bent his long body
with a stiff friendliness toward his cousin,
and added:
"I think I have Louisa's authority
for saying that she will herself leave the invitation
to dine when she drives out presently:
with our cards--of course
with our cards."
Mrs.Archer,
who knew this
to be a hint that the seventeen-hand chestnuts which were never kept waiting were at the door,
rose
with a hurried murmur of thanks.
Mrs.van der Luyden beamed on her
with the smile of Esther interceding
with Ahasuerus;
but her husband raised a protesting hand.
"There is nothing
to thank me for,
dear Adeline;
nothing whatever.
This kind of thing must not happen in New York;
it shall not,
as long as I can help it,"
he pronounced
with sovereign gentleness as he steered his cousins
to the door.
Two hours later,
every one knew that the great C-spring barouche in which Mrs. van der Luyden took the air at all seasons had been seen at old Mrs. Mingott's door,
where a large square envelope was handed in;
and that evening at the Opera Mr. Sillerton Jackson was able
to state that the envelope contained a card inviting the Countess Olenska
to the dinner which the van der Luydens were giving the following week
for their cousin,
the Duke of St. Austrey.
Some of the younger men in the club box exchanged a smile at this announcement,
and glanced sideways at Lawrence Lefferts,
who sat carelessly in the front of the box,
pulling his long fair moustache,
and who remarked
with authority,
as the soprano paused:
"No one but Patti ought
to attempt the Sonnambula."
VIII.
It was generally agreed in New York that the Countess Olenska had
"lost her looks."
She had appeared there first,
in Newland Archer's boyhood,
as a brilliantly pretty little girl of nine or ten,
of whom people said that she
"ought
to be painted."
Her parents had been continental wanderers,
and after a roaming babyhood she had lost them both,
and been taken in charge by her aunt,
Medora Manson,
also a wanderer,
who was herself returning
to New York to
"settle down."
Poor Medora,
repeatedly widowed,
was always coming home
to settle down
(each time in a less expensive house),
and bringing
with her a new husband or an adopted child;
but after a few months she invariably parted from her husband or quarrelled
with her ward,
and,
having got rid of her house at a loss,
set out again on her wanderings.
As her mother had been a Rushworth,
and her last unhappy marriage had linked her
to one of the crazy Chiverses,
New York looked indulgently on her eccentricities;
but when she returned
with her little orphaned niece,
whose parents had been popular in spite of their regrettable taste
for travel,
people thought it a pity that the pretty child should be in such hands.
Every one was disposed
to be kind
to little Ellen Mingott,
though her dusky red cheeks and tight curls gave her an air of gaiety that seemed unsuitable in a child who should still have been in black
for her parents.
It was one of the misguided Medora's many peculiarities
to flout the unalterable rules that regulated American mourning,
and when she stepped from the steamer her family were scandalised
to see that the crape veil she wore
for her own brother was seven inches shorter than those of her sisters-in-law,
while little Ellen was in crimson merino and amber beads,
like a gipsy foundling.
But New York had so long resigned itself
to Medora that only a few old ladies shook their heads over Ellen's gaudy clothes,
while her other relations fell under the charm of her high colour and high spirits.
She was a fearless and familiar little thing,
who asked disconcerting questions,
made precocious comments,
and possessed outlandish arts,
such as dancing a Spanish shawl dance and singing Neapolitan love-songs
to a guitar.
Under the direction of her aunt
(whose real name was Mrs. Thorley Chivers,
but who,
having received a Papal title,
had resumed her first husband's patronymic,
and called herself the Marchioness Manson,
because in Italy she could turn it into Manzoni)
the little girl received an expensive but incoherent education,
which included
"drawing from the model,"
a thing never dreamed of before,
and playing the piano in quintets
with professional musicians.
Of course no good could come of this;
and when,
a few years later,
poor Chivers finally died in a mad- house,
his widow
(draped in strange weeds)
again pulled up stakes and departed
with Ellen,
who had grown into a tall bony girl
with conspicuous eyes.
For some time no more was heard of them;
then news came of Ellen's marriage
to an immensely rich Polish nobleman of legendary fame,
whom she had met at a ball at the Tuileries,
and who was said
to have princely establishments in Paris,
Nice and Florence,
a yacht at Cowes,
and many square miles of shooting in Transylvania.
She disappeared in a kind of sulphurous apotheosis,
and when a few years later Medora again came back
to New York,
subdued,
impoverished,
mourning a third husband,
and in quest of a still smaller house,
people wondered that her rich niece had not been able
to do something
for her.
Then came the news that Ellen's own marriage had ended in disaster,
and that she was herself returning home
to seek rest and oblivion among her kinsfolk.
These things passed through Newland Archer's mind a week later as he watched the Countess Olenska enter the van der Luyden drawing-room on the evening of the momentous dinner.
The occasion was a solemn one,
and he wondered a little nervously how she would carry it off.
She came rather late,
one hand still ungloved,
and fastening a bracelet about her wrist;
yet she entered without any appearance of haste or embarrassment the drawing-room in which New York's most chosen company was somewhat awfully assembled.
In the middle of the room she paused,
looking about her
with a grave mouth and smiling eyes;
and in that instant Newland Archer rejected the general verdict on her looks.
It was true that her early radiance was gone.
The red cheeks had paled;
she was thin,
worn,
a little older-looking than her age,
which must have been nearly thirty.
But there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty,
a sureness in the carriage of the head,
the movement of the eyes,
which,
without being in the least theatrical,
struck his as highly trained and full of a conscious power.
At the same time she was simpler in manner than most of the ladies present,
and many people
(as he heard afterward from Janey)
were disappointed that her appearance was not more
"stylish"
--for stylishness was what New York most valued.
It was,
perhaps,
Archer reflected,
because her early vivacity had disappeared;
because she was so quiet--quiet in her movements,
her voice,
and the tones of her low- pitched voice.
New York had expected something a good deal more reasonant in a young woman
with such a history.
The dinner was a somewhat formidable business.
Dining
with the van der Luydens was at best no light matter,
and dining there
with a Duke who was their cousin was almost a religious solemnity.
It pleased Archer
to think that only an old New Yorker could perceive the shade of difference
(to New York)
between being merely a Duke and being the van der Luydens'
Duke.
New York took stray noblemen calmly,
and even
(except in the Struthers set)
with a certain distrustful hauteur;
but when they presented such credentials as these they were received
with an old-fashioned cordiality that they would have been greatly mistaken in ascribing solely
to their standing in Debrett.
It was
for just such distinctions that the young man cherished his old New York even while he smiled at it.
The van der Luydens had done their best
to emphasise the importance of the occasion.
The du Lac Sevres and the Trevenna George II plate were out;
so was the van der Luyden
"Lowestoft"
(East India Company)
and the Dagonet Crown Derby.
Mrs.van der Luyden looked more than ever like a Cabanel,
and Mrs. Archer,
in her grandmother's seed-pearls and emeralds,
reminded her son of an Isabey miniature.
All the ladies had on their handsomest jewels,
but it was characteristic of the house and the occasion that these were mostly in rather heavy old-fashioned settings;
and old Miss Lanning,
who had been persuaded
to come,
actually wore her mother's cameos and a Spanish blonde shawl.
The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner;
yet,
as Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers,
they struck him as curiously immature compared
with hers.
It frightened him
to think what must have gone
to the making of her eyes.
The Duke of St. Austrey,
who sat at his hostess's right,
was naturally the chief figure of the evening.
But if the Countess Olenska was less conspicuous than had been hoped,
the Duke was almost invisible.
Being a well-bred man he had not
(like another recent ducal visitor)
come
to the dinner in a shooting-jacket;
but his evening clothes were so shabby and baggy,
and he wore them
with such an air of their being homespun,
that
(with his stooping way of sitting,
and the vast beard spreading over his shirt-front)
he hardly gave the appearance of being in dinner attire.
He was short,
round-shouldered,
sunburnt,
with a thick nose,
small eyes and a sociable smile;
but he seldom spoke,
and when he did it was in such low tones that,
despite the frequent silences of expectation about the table,
his remarks were lost
to all but his neighbours.
When the men joined the ladies after dinner the Duke went straight up
to the Countess Olenska,
and they sat down in a corner and plunged into animated talk.
Neither seemed aware that the Duke should first have paid his respects
to Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Headly Chivers,
and the Countess have conversed
with that amiable hypochondriac,
Mr.Urban Dagonet of Washington Square,
who,
in order
to have the pleasure of meeting her,
had broken through his fixed rule of not dining out between January and April.
The two chatted together
for nearly twenty minutes;
then the Countess rose and,
walking alone across the wide drawing-room,
sat down at Newland Archer's side.
It was not the custom in New York drawing-rooms
for a lady
to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order
to seek the company of another.
Etiquette required that she should wait,
immovable as an idol,
while the men who wished
to converse
with her succeeded each other at her side.
But the Countess was apparently unaware of having broken any rule;
she sat at perfect ease in a corner of the sofa beside Archer,
and looked at him
with the kindest eyes.
"I want you
to talk
to me about May,"
she said.
Instead of answering her he asked:
"You knew the Duke before?"
"Oh,
yes--we used
to see him every winter at Nice.
He's very fond of gambling--he used
to come
to the house a great deal."
She said it in the simplest manner,
as if she had said:
"He's fond of wild-flowers";
and after a moment she added candidly:
"I think he's the dullest man I ever met."
This pleased her companion so much that he forgot the slight shock her previous remark had caused him.
It was undeniably exciting
to meet a lady who found the van der Luydens'
Duke dull,
and dared
to utter the opinion.
He longed
to question her,
to hear more about the life of which her careless words had given him so illuminating a glimpse;
but he feared
to touch on distressing memories,
and before he could think of anything
to say she had strayed back
to her original subject.
"May is a darling;
I've seen no young girl in New York so handsome and so intelligent.
Are you very much in love
with her?"
Newland Archer reddened and laughed.
"As much as a man can be."
She continued
to consider him thoughtfully,
as if not
to miss any shade of meaning in what he said,
"Do you think,
then,
there is a limit?"
"To being in love?
If there is,
I haven't found it!"
She glowed
with sympathy.
"Ah--it's really and truly a romance?"
"The most romantic of romances!"
"How delightful! And you found it all out
for yourselves--it was not in the least arranged
for you?"
Archer looked at her incredulously.
"Have you forgotten,"
he asked
with a smile,
"that in our country we don't allow our marriages
to be arranged
for us?"
A dusky blush rose
to her cheek,
and he instantly regretted his words.
"Yes,"
she answered,
"I'd forgotten.
You must forgive me if I sometimes make these mistakes.
I don't always remember that everything here is good that was--that was bad where I've come from."
She looked down at her Viennese fan of eagle feathers,
and he saw that her lips trembled.
"I'm so sorry,"
he said impulsively;
"but you ARE among friends here,
you know."
"Yes--I know.
Wherever I go I have that feeling.
That's why I came home.
I want
to forget everything else,
to become a complete American again,
like the Mingotts and Wellands,
and you and your delightful mother,
and all the other good people here tonight.
Ah,
here's May arriving,
and you will want
to hurry away
to her,"
she added,
but without moving;
and her eyes turned back from the door
to rest on the young man's face.
The drawing-rooms were beginning
to fill up
with after-dinner guests,
and following Madame Olenska's glance Archer saw May Welland entering
with her mother.
In her dress of white and silver,
with a wreath of silver blossoms in her hair,
the tall girl looked like a Diana just alight from the chase.
"Oh,"
said Archer,
"I have so many rivals;
you see she's already surrounded.
There's the Duke being introduced."
"Then stay
with me a little longer,"
Madame Olenska said in a low tone,
just touching his knee
with her plumed fan.
It was the lightest touch,
but it thrilled him like a caress.
"Yes,
let me stay,"
he answered in the same tone,
hardly knowing what he said;
but just then Mr. van der Luyden came up,
followed by old Mr. Urban Dagonet.
The Countess greeted them
with her grave smile,
and Archer,
feeling his host's admonitory glance on him,
rose and surrendered his seat.
Madame Olenska held out her hand as if
to bid him goodbye.
"Tomorrow,
then,
after five--I shall expect you,"
she said;
and then turned back
to make room
for Mr. Dagonet.
"Tomorrow--"
Archer heard himself repeating,
though there had been no engagement,
and during their talk she had given him no hint that she wished
to see him again.
As he moved away he saw Lawrence Lefferts,
tall and resplendent,
leading his wife up
to be introduced;
and heard Gertrude Lefferts say,
as she beamed on the Countess
with her large unperceiving smile:
"But I think we used
to go
to dancing-school together when we were children--."
Behind her,
waiting their turn
to name themselves
to the Countess,
Archer noticed a number of the recalcitrant couples who had declined
to meet her at Mrs. Lovell Mingott's.
As Mrs. Archer remarked:
when the van der Luydens chose,
they knew how
to give a lesson.
The wonder was that they chose so seldom.
The young man felt a touch on his arm and saw Mrs. van der Luyden looking down on him from the pure eminence of black velvet and the family diamonds.
"It was good of you,
dear Newland,
to devote yourself so unselfishly
to Madame Olenska.
I told your cousin Henry he must really come
to the rescue."
He was aware of smiling at her vaguely,
and she added,
as if condescending
to his natural shyness:
"I've never seen May looking lovelier.
The Duke thinks her the handsomest girl in the room."
IX.
The Countess Olenska had said
"after five";
and at half after the hour Newland Archer rang the bell of the peeling stucco house
with a giant wisteria throttling its feeble cast-iron balcony,
which she had hired,
far down West Twenty-third Street,
from the vagabond Medora.
It was certainly a strange quarter
to have settled in.
Small dress-makers,
bird-stuffers and
"people who wrote"
were her nearest neighbours;
and further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised a dilapidated wooden house,
at the end of a paved path,
in which a writer and journalist called Winsett,
whom he used
to come across now and then,
had mentioned that he lived.
Winsett did not invite people
to his house;
but he had once pointed it out
to Archer in the course of a nocturnal stroll,
and the latter had asked himself,
with a little shiver,
if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals.
Madame Olenska's own dwelling was redeemed from the same appearance only by a little more paint about the window-frames;
and as Archer mustered its modest front he said
to himself that the Polish Count must have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.
The young man had spent an unsatisfactory day.
He had lunched
with the Wellands,
hoping afterward
to carry off May
for a walk in the Park.
He wanted
to have her
to himself,
to tell her how enchanting she had looked the night before,
and how proud he was of her,
and
to press her
to hasten their marriage.
But Mrs. Welland had firmly reminded him that the round of family visits was not half over,
and,
when he hinted at advancing the date of the wedding,
had raised reproachful eye-brows and sighed out:
"Twelve dozen of everything--hand-embroidered--"
Packed in the family landau they rolled from one tribal doorstep
to another,
and Archer,
when the afternoon's round was over,
parted from his betrothed
with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped.
He supposed that his readings in anthropology caused him
to take such a coarse view of what was after all a simple and natural demonstration of family feeling;
but when he remembered that the Wellands did not expect the wedding
to take place till the following autumn,
and pictured what his life would be till then,
a dampness fell upon his spirit.
"Tomorrow,"
Mrs.Welland called after him,
"we'll do the Chiverses and the Dallases";
and he perceived that she was going through their two families alphabetically,
and that they were only in the first quarter of the alphabet.
He had meant
to tell May of the Countess Olenska's request--her command,
rather--that he should call on her that afternoon;
but in the brief moments when they were alone he had had more pressing things
to say.
Besides,
it struck him as a little absurd
to allude
to the matter.
He knew that May most particularly wanted him
to be kind
to her cousin;
was it not that wish which had hastened the announcement of their engagement?
It gave him an odd sensation
to reflect that,
but
for the Countess's arrival,
he might have been,
if not still a free man,
at least a man less irrevocably pledged.
But May had willed it so,
and he felt himself somehow relieved of further responsibility--and therefore at liberty,
if he chose,
to call on her cousin without telling her.
As he stood on Madame Olenska's threshold curiosity was his uppermost feeling.
He was puzzled by the tone in which she had summoned him;
he concluded that she was less simple than she seemed.
The door was opened by a swarthy foreign-looking maid,
with a prominent bosom under a gay neckerchief,
whom he vaguely fancied
to be Sicilian.
She welcomed him
with all her white teeth,
and answering his enquiries by a head-shake of incomprehension led him through the narrow hall into a low firelit drawing- room.
The room was empty,
and she left him,
for an appreciable time,
to wonder whether she had gone
to find her mistress,
or whether she had not understood what he was there for,
and thought it might be
to wind the clock--of which he perceived that the only visible specimen had stopped.
He knew that the southern races communicated
with each other in the language of pantomime,
and was mortified
to find her shrugs and smiles so unintelligible.
At length she returned
with a lamp;
and Archer,
having meanwhile put together a phrase out of Dante and Petrarch,
evoked the answer:
"La signora e fuori;
ma verra subito";
which he took
to mean:
"She's out--but you'll soon see."
What he saw,
meanwhile,
with the help of the lamp,
was the faded shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known.
He knew that the Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions
with her--bits of wreckage,
she called them--and these,
he supposed,
were represented by some small slender tables of dark wood,
a delicate little Greek bronze on the chimney- piece,
and a stretch of red damask nailed on the discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking pictures in old frames.
Newland Archer prided himself on his knowledge of Italian art.
His boyhood had been saturated
with Ruskin,
and he had read all the latest books:
John Addington Symonds,
Vernon Lee's
"Euphorion,"
the essays of P.
G.
Hamerton,
and a wonderful new volume called
"The Renaissance"
by Walter Pater.
He talked easily of Botticelli,
and spoke of Fra Angelico
with a faint condescension.
But these pictures bewildered him,
for they were like nothing that he was accustomed
to look at
(and therefore able
to see)
when he travelled in Italy;
and perhaps,
also,
his powers of observation were impaired by the oddness of finding himself in this strange empty house,
where apparently no one expected him.
He was sorry that he had not told May Welland of Countess Olenska's request,
and a little disturbed by the thought that his betrothed might come in
to see her cousin.
What would she think if she found him sitting there
with the air of intimacy implied by waiting alone in the dusk at a lady's fireside?
But since he had come he meant
to wait;
and he sank into a chair and stretched his feet
to the logs.
It was odd
to have summoned him in that way,
and then forgotten him;
but Archer felt more curious than mortified.
The atmosphere of the room was so different from any he had ever breathed that self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adventure.
He had been before in drawing-rooms hung
with red damask,
with pictures
"of the Italian school";
what struck him was the way in which Medora Manson's shabby hired house,
with its blighted background of pampas grass and Rogers statuettes,
had,
by a turn of the hand,
and the skilful use of a few properties,
been transformed into something intimate,
"foreign,"
subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments.
He tried
to analyse the trick,
to find a clue
to it in the way the chairs and tables were grouped,
in the fact that only two Jacqueminot roses
(of which nobody ever bought less than a dozen)
had been placed in the slender vase at his elbow,
and in the vague pervading perfume that was not what one put on handkerchiefs,
but rather like the scent of some far-off bazaar,
a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses.
His mind wandered away
to the question of what May's drawing-room would look like.
He knew that Mr. Welland,
who was behaving
"very handsomely,"
already had his eye on a newly built house in East Thirty-ninth Street.
The neighbourhood was thought remote,
and the house was built in a ghastly greenish- yellow stone that the younger architects were beginning
to employ as a protest against the brownstone of which the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate sauce;
but the plumbing was perfect.
Archer would have liked
to travel,
to put off the housing question;
but,
though the Wellands approved of an extended European honeymoon
(perhaps even a winter in Egypt),
they were firm as
to the need of a house
for the returning couple.
The young man felt that his fate was sealed:
for the rest of his life he would go up every evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish- yellow doorstep,
and pass through a Pompeian vestibule into a hall
with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood.
But beyond that his imagination could not travel.
He knew the drawing-room above had a bay window,
but he could not fancy how May would deal
with it.
She submitted cheerfully
to the purple satin and yellow tuftings of the Welland drawing-room,
to its sham Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe.
He saw no reason
to suppose that she would want anything different in her own house;
and his only comfort was
to reflect that she would probably let him arrange his library as he pleased--which would be,
of course,
with
"sincere"
Eastlake furniture,
and the plain new bookcases without glass doors.
The round-bosomed maid came in,
drew the curtains,
pushed back a log,
and said consolingly:
"Verra--verra."
When she had gone Archer stood up and began
to wander about.
Should he wait any longer?
His position was becoming rather foolish.
Perhaps he had misunderstood Madame Olenska--perhaps she had not invited him after all.
Down the cobblestones of the quiet street came the ring of a stepper's hoofs;
they stopped before the house,
and he caught the opening of a carriage door.
Parting the curtains he looked out into the early dusk.
A street- lamp faced him,
and in its light he saw Julius Beaufort's compact English brougham,
drawn by a big roan,
and the banker descending from it,
and helping out Madame Olenska.
Beaufort stood,
hat in hand,
saying something which his companion seemed
to negative;
then they shook hands,
and he jumped into his carriage while she mounted the steps.
When she entered the room she showed no surprise at seeing Archer there;
surprise seemed the emotion that she was least addicted to.
"How do you like my funny house?"
she asked.
"To me it's like heaven."
As she spoke she untied her little velvet bonnet and tossing it away
with her long cloak stood looking at him
with meditative eyes.
"You've arranged it delightfully,"
he rejoined,
alive
to the flatness of the words,
but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire
to be simple and striking.
"Oh,
it's a poor little place.
My relations despise it.
But at any rate it's less gloomy than the van der Luydens'."
The words gave him an electric shock,
for few were the rebellious spirits who would have dared
to call the stately home of the van der Luydens gloomy.
Those privileged
to enter it shivered there,
and spoke of it as
"handsome."
But suddenly he was glad that she had given voice
to the general shiver.
"It's delicious--what you've done here,"
he repeated.
"I like the little house,"
she admitted;
"but I suppose what I like is the blessedness of its being here,
in my own country and my own town;
and then,
of being alone in it."
She spoke so low that he hardly heard the last phrase;
but in his awkwardness he took it up.
"You like so much
to be alone?"
"Yes;
as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely."
She sat down near the fire,
said:
"Nastasia will bring the tea presently,"
and signed
to him
to return
to his armchair,
adding:
"I see you've already chosen your corner."
Leaning back,
she folded her arms behind her head,
and looked at the fire under drooping lids.
"This is the hour I like best--don't you?"
A proper sense of his dignity caused him
to answer:
"I was afraid you'd forgotten the hour.
Beaufort must have been very engrossing."
She looked amused.
"Why--have you waited long?
Mr.Beaufort took me
to see a number of houses-- since it seems I'm not
to be allowed
to stay in this one."
She appeared
to dismiss both Beaufort and himself from her mind,
and went on:
"I've never been in a city where there seems
to be such a feeling against living in des quartiers excentriques.
What does it matter where one lives?
I'm told this street is respectable."
"It's not fashionable."
"Fashionable! Do you all think so much of that?
Why not make one's own fashions?
But I suppose I've lived too independently;
at any rate,
I want
to do what you all do--I want
to feel cared
for and safe."
He was touched,
as he had been the evening before when she spoke of her need of guidance.
"That's what your friends want you
to feel.
New York's an awfully safe place,"
he added
with a flash of sarcasm.
"Yes,
isn't it?
One feels that,"
she cried,
missing the mockery.
"Being here is like--like--being taken on a holiday when one has been a good little girl and done all one's lessons."
The analogy was well meant,
but did not altogether please him.
He did not mind being flippant about New York,
but disliked
to hear any one else take the same tone.
He wondered if she did not begin
to see what a powerful engine it was,
and how nearly it had crushed her.
The Lovell Mingotts'
dinner,
patched up in extremis out of all sorts of social odds and ends,
ought
to have taught her the narrowness of her escape;
but either she had been all along unaware of having skirted disaster,
or else she had lost sight of it in the triumph of the van der Luyden evening.
Archer inclined
to the former theory;
he fancied that her New York was still completely undifferentiated,
and the conjecture nettled him.
"Last night,"
he said,
"New York laid itself out
for you.
The van der Luydens do nothing by halves."
"No:
how kind they are! It was such a nice party.
Every one seems
to have such an esteem
for them."
The terms were hardly adequate;
she might have spoken in that way of a tea-party at the dear old Miss Lannings'.
"The van der Luydens,"
said Archer,
feeling himself pompous as he spoke,
"are the most powerful influence in New York society.
Unfortunately--owing
to her health--they receive very seldom."
She unclasped her hands from behind her head,
and looked at him meditatively.
"Isn't that perhaps the reason?"
"The reason--?"
"For their great influence;
that they make themselves so rare."
He coloured a little,
stared at her--and suddenly felt the penetration of the remark.
At a stroke she had pricked the van der Luydens and they collapsed.
He laughed,
and sacrificed them.
Nastasia brought the tea,
with handleless Japanese cups and little covered dishes,
placing the tray on a low table.
"But you'll explain these things
to me--you'll tell me all I ought
to know,"
Madame Olenska continued,
leaning forward
to hand him his cup.
"It's you who are telling me;
opening my eyes
to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased
to see them."
She detached a small gold cigarette-case from one of her bracelets,
held it out
to him,
and took a cigarette herself.
On the chimney were long spills
for lighting them.
"Ah,
then we can both help each other.
But I want help so much more.
You must tell me just what
to do."
It was on the tip of his tongue
to reply:
"Don't be seen driving about the streets
with Beaufort--"
but he was being too deeply drawn into the atmosphere of the room,
which was her atmosphere,
and
to give advice of that sort would have been like telling some one who was bargaining
for attar-of-roses in Samarkand that one should always be provided
with arctics
for a New York winter.
New York seemed much farther off than Samarkand,
and if they were indeed
to help each other she was rendering what might prove the first of their mutual services by making him look at his native city objectively.
Viewed thus,
as through the wrong end of a telescope,
it looked disconcertingly small and distant;
but then from Samarkand it would.
A flame darted from the logs and she bent over the fire,
stretching her thin hands so close
to it that a faint halo shone about the oval nails.
The light touched
to russet the rings of dark hair escaping from her braids,
and made her pale face paler.
"There are plenty of people
to tell you what
to do,"
Archer rejoined,
obscurely envious of them.
"Oh--all my aunts?
And my dear old Granny?"
She considered the idea impartially.
"They're all a little vexed
with me
for setting up
for myself--poor Granny especially.
She wanted
to keep me
with her;
but I had
to be free--"
He was impressed by this light way of speaking of the formidable Catherine,
and moved by the thought of what must have given Madame Olenska this thirst
for even the loneliest kind of freedom.
But the idea of Beaufort gnawed him.
"I think I understand how you feel,"
he said.
"Still,
your family can advise you;
explain differences;
show you the way."
She lifted her thin black eyebrows.
"Is New York such a labyrinth?
I thought it so straight up and down-- like Fifth Avenue.
And
with all the cross streets numbered!"
She seemed
to guess his faint disapproval of this,
and added,
with the rare smile that enchanted her whole face:
"If you knew how I like it
for just THAT-- the straight-up-and-downness,
and the big honest labels on everything!"
He saw his chance.
"Everything may be labelled-- but everybody is not."
"Perhaps.
I may simplify too much--but you'll warn me if I do."
She turned from the fire
to look at him.
"There are only two people here who make me feel as if they understood what I mean and could explain things
to me:
you and Mr. Beaufort."
Archer winced at the joining of the names,
and then,
with a quick readjustment,
understood,
sympathised and pitied.
So close
to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.
But since she felt that he understood her also,
his business would be
to make her see Beaufort as he really was,
with all he represented--and abhor it.
He answered gently:
"I understand.
But just at first don't let go of your old friends'
hands:
I mean the older women,
your Granny Mingott,
Mrs.Welland,
Mrs.van der Luyden.
They like and admire you--they want
to help you."
She shook her head and sighed.
"Oh,
I know--I know! But on condition that they don't hear anything unpleasant.
Aunt Welland put it in those very words when I tried.
.
.
.
Does no one want
to know the truth here,
Mr.Archer?
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one
to pretend!"
She lifted her hands
to her face,
and he saw her thin shoulders shaken by a sob.
"Madame Olenska!--Oh,
don't,
Ellen,"
he cried,
starting up and bending over her.
He drew down one of her hands,
clasping and chafing it like a child's while he murmured reassuring words;
but in a moment she freed herself,
and looked up at him
with wet lashes.
"Does no one cry here,
either?
I suppose there's no need to,
in heaven,"
she said,
straightening her loosened braids
with a laugh,
and bending over the tea- kettle.
It was burnt into his consciousness that he had called her
"Ellen"--called her so twice;
and that she had not noticed it.
Far down the inverted telescope he saw the faint white figure of May Welland--in New York.
Suddenly Nastasia put her head in
to say something in her rich Italian.
Madame Olenska,
again
with a hand at her hair,
uttered an exclamation of assent--a flashing
"Gia-- gia"--and the Duke of St. Austrey entered,
piloting a tremendous blackwigged and red-plumed lady in overflowing furs.
"My dear Countess,
I've brought an old friend of mine
to see you--Mrs.
Struthers.
She wasn't asked
to the party last night,
and she wants
to know you."
The Duke beamed on the group,
and Madame Olenska advanced
with a murmur of welcome toward the queer couple.
She seemed
to have no idea how oddly matched they were,
nor what a liberty the Duke had taken in bringing his companion--and
to do him justice,
as Archer perceived,
the Duke seemed as unaware of it himself.
"Of course I want
to know you,
my dear,"
cried Mrs. Struthers in a round rolling voice that matched her bold feathers and her brazen wig.
"I want
to know everybody who's young and interesting and charming.
And the Duke tells me you like music--didn't you,
Duke?
You're a pianist yourself,
I believe?
Well,
do you want
to hear Sarasate play tomorrow evening at my house?
You know I've something going on every Sunday evening--it's the day when New York doesn't know what
to do
with itself,
and so I say
to it:
`Come and be amused.'
And the Duke thought you'd be tempted by Sarasate.
You'll find a number of your friends."
Madame Olenska's face grew brilliant
with pleasure.
"How kind! How good of the Duke
to think of me!"
She pushed a chair up
to the tea-table and Mrs. Struthers sank into it delectably.
"Of course I shall be too happy
to come."
"That's all right,
my dear.
And bring your young gentleman
with you."
Mrs.Struthers extended a hail- fellow hand
to Archer.
"I can't put a name
to you--but I'm sure I've met you--I've met everybody,
here,
or in Paris or London.
Aren't you in diplomacy?
All the diplomatists come
to me.
You like music too?
Duke,
you must be sure
to bring him."
The Duke said
"Rather"
from the depths of his beard,
and Archer withdrew
with a stiffly circular bow that made him feel as full of spine as a self-conscious school-boy among careless and unnoticing elders.
He was not sorry
for the denouement of his visit:
he only wished it had come sooner,
and spared him a certain waste of emotion.
As he went out into the wintry night,
New York again became vast and imminent,
and May Welland the loveliest woman in it.
He turned into his florist's
to send her the daily box of lilies-of-the-valley which,
to his confusion,
he found he had forgotten that morning.
As he wrote a word on his card and waited
for an envelope he glanced about the embowered shop,
and his eye lit on a cluster of yellow roses.
He had never seen any as sun-golden before,
and his first impulse was
to send them
to May instead of the lilies.
But they did not look like her--there was something too rich,
too strong,
in their fiery beauty.
In a sudden revulsion of mood,
and almost without knowing what he did,
he signed
to the florist
to lay the roses in another long box,
and slipped his card into a second envelope,
on which he wrote the name of the Countess Olenska;
then,
just as he was turning away,
he drew the card out again,
and left the empty envelope on the box.
"They'll go at once?"
he enquired,
pointing
to the roses.
The florist assured him that they would.
X.
The next day he persuaded May
to escape
for a walk in the Park after luncheon.
As was the custom in old-fashioned Episcopalian New York,
she usually accompanied her parents
to church on Sunday afternoons;
but Mrs. Welland condoned her truancy,
having that very morning won her over
to the necessity of a long engagement,
with time
to prepare a hand-embroidered trousseau containing the proper number of dozens.
The day was delectable.
The bare vaulting of trees along the Mall was ceiled
with lapis lazuli,
and arched above snow that shone like splintered crystals.
It was the weather
to call out May's radiance,
and she burned like a young maple in the frost.
Archer was proud of the glances turned on her,
and the simple joy of possessorship cleared away his underlying perplexities.
"It's so delicious--waking every morning
to smell lilies-of-the-valley in one's room!"
she said.
"Yesterday they came late.
I hadn't time in the morning--"
"But your remembering each day
to send them makes me love them so much more than if you'd given a standing order,
and they came every morning on the minute,
like one's music-teacher--as I know Gertrude Lefferts's did,
for instance,
when she and Lawrence were engaged."
"Ah--they would!"
laughed Archer,
amused at her keenness.
He looked sideways at her fruit-like cheek and felt rich and secure enough
to add:
"When I sent your lilies yesterday afternoon I saw some rather gorgeous yellow roses and packed them off
to Madame Olenska.
Was that right?"
"How dear of you! Anything of that kind delights her.
It's odd she didn't mention it:
she lunched
with us today,
and spoke of Mr. Beaufort's having sent her wonderful orchids,
and cousin Henry van der Luyden a whole hamper of carnations from Skuytercliff.
She seems so surprised
to receive flowers.
Don't people send them in Europe?
She thinks it such a pretty custom."
"Oh,
well,
no wonder mine were overshadowed by Beaufort's,"
said Archer irritably.
Then he remembered that he had not put a card
with the roses,
and was vexed at having spoken of them.
He wanted
to say:
"I called on your cousin yesterday,"
but hesitated.
If Madame Olenska had not spoken of his visit it might seem awkward that he should.
Yet not
to do so gave the affair an air of mystery that he disliked.
To shake off the question he began
to talk of their own plans,
their future,
and Mrs. Welland's insistence on a long engagement.
"If you call it long! Isabel Chivers and Reggie were engaged
for two years:
Grace and Thorley
for nearly a year and a half.
Why aren't we very well off as we are?"
It was the traditional maidenly interrogation,
and he felt ashamed of himself
for finding it singularly childish.
No doubt she simply echoed what was said
for her;
but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday,
and he wondered at what age
"nice"
women began
to speak
for themselves.
"Never,
if we won't let them,
I suppose,"
he mused,
and recalled his mad outburst
to Mr. Sillerton Jackson:
"Women ought
to be as free as we are--"
It would presently be his task
to take the bandage from this young woman's eyes,
and bid her look forth on the world.
But how many generations of the women who had gone
to her making had descended bandaged
to the family vault?
He shivered a little,
remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books,
and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish,
which had ceased
to develop eyes because they had no use
for them.
What if,
when he had bidden May Welland
to open hers,
they could only look out blankly at blankness?
"We might be much better off.
We might be altogether together--we might travel."
Her face lit up.
"That would be lovely,"
she owned:
she would love
to travel.
But her mother would not understand their wanting
to do things so differently.
"As if the mere `differently'
didn't account
for it!"
the wooer insisted.
"Newland! You're so original!"
she exulted.
His heart sank,
for he saw that he was saying all the things that young men in the same situation were expected
to say,
and that she was making the answers that instinct and tradition taught her
to make--even
to the point of calling him original.
"Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper.
We're like patterns stencilled on a wall.
Can't you and I strike out
for ourselves,
May?"
He had stopped and faced her in the excitement of their discussion,
and her eyes rested on him
with a bright unclouded admiration.
"Mercy--shall we elope?"
she laughed.
"If you would--"
"You DO love me,
Newland! I'm so happy."
"But then--why not be happier?"
"We can't behave like people in novels,
though,
can we?"
"Why not--why not--why not?"
She looked a little bored by his insistence.
She knew very well that they couldn't,
but it was troublesome
to have
to produce a reason.
"I'm not clever enough
to argue
with you.
But that kind of thing is rather--vulgar,
isn't it?"
she suggested,
relieved
to have hit on a word that would assuredly extinguish the whole subject.
"Are you so much afraid,
then,
of being vulgar?"
She was evidently staggered by this.
"Of course I should hate it--so would you,"
she rejoined,
a trifle irritably.
He stood silent,
beating his stick nervously against his boot-top;
and feeling that she had indeed found the right way of closing the discussion,
she went on light- heartedly:
"Oh,
did I tell you that I showed Ellen my ring?
She thinks it the most beautiful setting she ever saw.
There's nothing like it in the rue de la Paix,
she said.
I do love you,
Newland,
for being so artistic!"
The next afternoon,
as Archer,
before dinner,
sat smoking sullenly in his study,
Janey wandered in on him.
He had failed
to stop at his club on the way up from the office where he exercised the profession of the law in the leisurely manner common
to well-to-do New Yorkers of his class.
He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper,
and a haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.
"Sameness--sameness!"
he muttered,
the word running through his head like a persecuting tune as he saw the familiar tall-hatted figures lounging behind the plate- glass;
and because he usually dropped in at the club at that hour he had gone home instead.
He knew not only what they were likely
to be talking about,
but the part each one would take in the discussion.
The Duke of course would be their principal theme;
though the appearance in Fifth Avenue of a golden-haired lady in a small canary-coloured brougham
with a pair of black cobs
(for which Beaufort was generally thought responsible)
would also doubtless be thoroughly gone into.
Such
"women"
(as they were called)
were few in New York,
those driving their own carriages still fewer,
and the appearance of Miss Fanny Ring in Fifth Avenue at the fashionable hour had profoundly agitated society.
Only the day before,
her carriage had passed Mrs. Lovell Mingott's,
and the latter had instantly rung the little bell at her elbow and ordered the coachman
to drive her home.
"What if it had happened
to Mrs. van der Luyden?"
people asked each other
with a shudder.
Archer could hear Lawrence Lefferts,
at that very hour,
holding forth on the disintegration of society.
He raised his head irritably when his sister Janey entered,
and then quickly bent over his book
(Swinburne's
"Chastelard"--just out)
as if he had not seen her.
She glanced at the writing-table heaped
with books,
opened a volume of the
"Contes Drolatiques,"
made a wry face over the archaic French,
and sighed:
"What learned things you read!"
"Well--?"
he asked,
as she hovered Cassandra-like before him.
"Mother's very angry."
"Angry?
With whom?
About what?"
"Miss Sophy Jackson has just been here.
She brought word that her brother would come in after dinner:
she couldn't say very much,
because he forbade her to:
he wishes
to give all the details himself.
He's
with cousin Louisa van der Luyden now."
"For heaven's sake,
my dear girl,
try a fresh start.
It would take an omniscient Deity
to know what you're talking about."
"It's not a time
to be profane,
Newland.
.
.
.
Mother feels badly enough about your not going
to church .
.
."
With a groan he plunged back into his book.
"NEWLAND! Do listen.
Your friend Madame Olenska was at Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's party last night:
she went there
with the Duke and Mr. Beaufort."
At the last clause of this announcement a senseless anger swelled the young man's breast.
To smother it he laughed.
"Well,
what of it?
I knew she meant to."
Janey paled and her eyes began
to project.
"You knew she meant to--and you didn't try
to stop her?
To warn her?"
"Stop her?
Warn her?"
He laughed again.
"I'm not engaged
to be married
to the Countess Olenska!"
The words had a fantastic sound in his own ears.
"You're marrying into her family."
"Oh,
family--family!"
he jeered.
"Newland--don't you care about Family?"
"Not a brass farthing."
"Nor about what cousin Louisa van der Luyden will think?"
"Not the half of one--if she thinks such old maid's rubbish."
"Mother is not an old maid,"
said his virgin sister
with pinched lips.
He felt like shouting back:
"Yes,
she is,
and so are the van der Luydens,
and so we all are,
when it comes
to being so much as brushed by the wing-tip of Reality."
But he saw her long gentle face puckering into tears,
and felt ashamed of the useless pain he was inflicting.
"Hang Countess Olenska! Don't be a goose,
Janey-- I'm not her keeper."
"No;
but you DID ask the Wellands
to announce your engagement sooner so that we might all back her up;
and if it hadn't been
for that cousin Louisa would never have invited her
to the dinner
for the Duke."
"Well--what harm was there in inviting her?
She was the best-looking woman in the room;
she made the dinner a little less funereal than the usual van der Luyden banquet."
"You know cousin Henry asked her
to please you:
he persuaded cousin Louisa.
And now they're so upset that they're going back
to Skuytercliff tomorrow.
I think,
Newland,
you'd better come down.
You don't seem
to understand how mother feels."
In the drawing-room Newland found his mother.
She raised a troubled brow from her needlework
to ask:
"Has Janey told you?"
"Yes."
He tried
to keep his tone as measured as her own.
"But I can't take it very seriously."
"Not the fact of having offended cousin Louisa and cousin Henry?"
"The fact that they can be offended by such a trifle as Countess Olenska's going
to the house of a woman they consider common."
"Consider--!"
"Well,
who is;
but who has good music,
and amuses people on Sunday evenings,
when the whole of New York is dying of inanition."
"Good music?
All I know is,
there was a woman who got up on a table and sang the things they sing at the places you go
to in Paris.
There was smoking and champagne."
"Well--that kind of thing happens in other places,
and the world still goes on."
"I don't suppose,
dear,
you're really defending the French Sunday?"
"I've heard you often enough,
mother,
grumble at the English Sunday when we've been in London."
"New York is neither Paris nor London."
"Oh,
no,
it's not!"
her son groaned.
"You mean,
I suppose,
that society here is not as brilliant?
You're right,
I daresay;
but we belong here,
and people should respect our ways when they come among us.
Ellen Olenska especially:
she came back
to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies."
Newland made no answer,
and after a moment his mother ventured:
"I was going
to put on my bonnet and ask you
to take me
to see cousin Louisa
for a moment before dinner."
He frowned,
and she continued:
"I thought you might explain
to her what you've just said:
that society abroad is different .
.
.
that people are not as particular,
and that Madame Olenska may not have realised how we feel about such things.
It would be,
you know,
dear,"
she added
with an innocent adroitness,
"in Madame Olenska's interest if you did."
"Dearest mother,
I really don't see how we're concerned in the matter.
The Duke took Madame Olenska
to Mrs. Struthers's--in fact he brought Mrs. Struthers
to call on her.
I was there when they came.
If the van der Luydens want
to quarrel
with anybody,
the real culprit is under their own roof."
"Quarrel?
Newland,
did you ever know of cousin Henry's quarrelling?
Besides,
the Duke's his guest;
and a stranger too.
Strangers don't discriminate:
how should they?
Countess Olenska is a New Yorker,
and should have respected the feelings of New York."
"Well,
then,
if they must have a victim,
you have my leave
to throw Madame Olenska
to them,"
cried her son,
exasperated.
"I don't see myself--or you either-- offering ourselves up
to expiate her crimes."
"Oh,
of course you see only the Mingott side,"
his mother answered,
in the sensitive tone that was her nearest approach
to anger.
The sad butler drew back the drawing-room portieres and announced:
"Mr.
Henry van der Luyden."
Mrs.Archer dropped her needle and pushed her chair back
with an agitated hand.
"Another lamp,"
she cried
to the retreating servant,
while Janey bent over
to straighten her mother's cap.
Mr.van der Luyden's figure loomed on the threshold,
and Newland Archer went forward
to greet his cousin.
"We were just talking about you,
sir,"
he said.
Mr.van der Luyden seemed overwhelmed by the announcement.
He drew off his glove
to shake hands
with the ladies,
and smoothed his tall hat shyly,
while Janey pushed an arm-chair forward,
and Archer continued:
"And the Countess Olenska."
Mrs.Archer paled.
"Ah--a charming woman.
I have just been
to see her,"
said Mr. van der Luyden,
complacency restored
to his brow.
He sank into the chair,
laid his hat and gloves on the floor beside him in the old-fashioned way,
and went on:
"She has a real gift
for arranging flowers.
I had sent her a few carnations from Skuytercliff,
and I was astonished.
Instead of massing them in big bunches as our head-gardener does,
she had scattered them about loosely,
here and there .
.
.
I can't say how.
The Duke had told me:
he said:
`Go and see how cleverly she's arranged her drawing-room.'
And she has.
I should really like
to take Louisa
to see her,
if the neighbourhood were not so--unpleasant."
A dead silence greeted this unusual flow of words from Mr. van der Luyden.
Mrs.Archer drew her embroidery out of the basket into which she had nervously tumbled it,
and Newland,
leaning against the chimney-place and twisting a humming-bird-feather screen in his hand,
saw Janey's gaping countenance lit up by the coming of the second lamp.
"The fact is,"
Mr.van der Luyden continued,
stroking his long grey leg
with a bloodless hand weighed down by the Patroon's great signet-ring,
"the fact is,
I dropped in
to thank her
for the very pretty note she wrote me about my flowers;
and also--but this is between ourselves,
of course--to give her a friendly warning about allowing the Duke
to carry her off
to parties
with him.
I don't know if you've heard--"
Mrs.Archer produced an indulgent smile.
"Has the Duke been carrying her off
to parties?"
"You know what these English grandees are.
They're all alike.
Louisa and I are very fond of our cousin--but it's hopeless
to expect people who are accustomed
to the European courts
to trouble themselves about our little republican distinctions.
The Duke goes where he's amused."
Mr.van der Luyden paused,
but no one spoke.
"Yes--it seems he took her
with him last night
to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's.
Sillerton Jackson has just been
to us
with the foolish story,
and Louisa was rather troubled.
So I thought the shortest way was
to go straight
to Countess Olenska and explain--by the merest hint,
you know--how we feel in New York about certain things.
I felt I might,
without indelicacy,
because the evening she dined
with us she rather suggested .
.
.
rather let me see that she would be grateful
for guidance.
And she WAS."
Mr.van der Luyden looked about the room
with what would have been self-satisfaction on features less purged of the vulgar passions.
On his face it became a mild benevolence which Mrs. Archer's countenance dutifully reflected.
"How kind you both are,
dear Henry--always! Newland will particularly appreciate what you have done because of dear May and his new relations."
She shot an admonitory glance at her son,
who said:
"Immensely,
sir.
But I was sure you'd like Madame Olenska."
Mr.van der Luyden looked at him
with extreme gentleness.
"I never ask
to my house,
my dear Newland,"
he said,
"any one whom I do not like.
And so I have just told Sillerton Jackson."
With a glance at the clock he rose and added:
"But Louisa will be waiting.
We are dining early,
to take the Duke
to the Opera."
After the portieres had solemnly closed behind their visitor a silence fell upon the Archer family.
"Gracious--how romantic!"
at last broke explosively from Janey.
No one knew exactly what inspired her elliptic comments,
and her relations had long since given up trying
to interpret them.
Mrs.Archer shook her head
with a sigh.
"Provided it all turns out
for the best,"
she said,
in the tone of one who knows how surely it will not.
"Newland,
you must stay and see Sillerton Jackson when he comes this evening:
I really shan't know what
to say
to him."
"Poor mother! But he won't come--"
her son laughed,
stooping
to kiss away her frown.
XI.
Some two weeks later,
Newland Archer,
sitting in abstracted idleness in his private compartment of the office of Letterblair,
Lamson and Low,
attorneys at law,
was summoned by the head of the firm.
Old Mr. Letterblair,
the accredited legal adviser of three generations of New York gentility,
throned behind his mahogany desk in evident perplexity.
As he stroked his closeclipped white whiskers and ran his hand through the rumpled grey locks above his jutting brows,
his disrespectful junior partner thought how much he looked like the Family Physician annoyed
with a patient whose symptoms refuse
to be classified.
"My dear sir--"
he always addressed Archer as
"sir"--"I have sent
for you
to go into a little matter;
a matter which,
for the moment,
I prefer not
to mention either
to Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood."
The gentlemen he spoke of were the other senior partners of the firm;
for,
as was always the case
with legal associations of old standing in New York,
all the partners named on the office letter-head were long since dead;
and Mr. Letterblair,
for example,
was,
professionally speaking,
his own grandson.
He leaned back in his chair
with a furrowed brow.
"For family reasons--"
he continued.
Archer looked up.
"The Mingott family,"
said Mr. Letterblair
with an explanatory smile and bow.
"Mrs.
Manson Mingott sent
for me yesterday.
Her grand-daughter the Countess Olenska wishes
to sue her husband
for divorce.
Certain papers have been placed in my hands."
He paused and drummed on his desk.
"In view of your prospective alliance
with the family I should like
to consult you--to consider the case
with you--before taking any farther steps."
Archer felt the blood in his temples.
He had seen the Countess Olenska only once since his visit
to her,
and then at the Opera,
in the Mingott box.
During this interval she had become a less vivid and importunate image,
receding from his foreground as May Welland resumed her rightful place in it.
He had not heard her divorce spoken of since Janey's first random allusion
to it,
and had dismissed the tale as unfounded gossip.
Theoretically,
the idea of divorce was almost as distasteful
to him as
to his mother;
and he was annoyed that Mr. Letterblair
(no doubt prompted by old Catherine Mingott)
should be so evidently planning
to draw him into the affair.
After all,
there were plenty of Mingott men
for such jobs,
and as yet he was not even a Mingott by marriage.
He waited
for the senior partner
to continue.
Mr.Letterblair unlocked a drawer and drew out a packet.
"If you will run your eye over these papers--"
Archer frowned.
"I beg your pardon,
sir;
but just because of the prospective relationship,
I should prefer your consulting Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood."
Mr.Letterblair looked surprised and slightly offended.
It was unusual
for a junior
to reject such an opening.
He bowed.
"I respect your scruple,
sir;
but in this case I believe true delicacy requires you
to do as I ask.
Indeed,
the suggestion is not mine but Mrs. Manson Mingott's and her son's.
I have seen Lovell Mingott;
and also Mr. Welland.
They all named you."
Archer felt his temper rising.
He had been somewhat languidly drifting
with events
for the last fortnight,
and letting May's fair looks and radiant nature obliterate the rather importunate pressure of the Mingott claims.
But this behest of old Mrs. Mingott's roused him
to a sense of what the clan thought they had the right
to exact from a prospective son-in-law;
and he chafed at the role.
"Her uncles ought
to deal
with this,"
he said.
"They have.
The matter has been gone into by the family.
They are opposed
to the Countess's idea;
but she is firm,
and insists on a legal opinion."
The young man was silent:
he had not opened the packet in his hand.
"Does she want
to marry again?"
"I believe it is suggested;
but she denies it."
"Then--"
"Will you oblige me,
Mr.Archer,
by first looking through these papers?
Afterward,
when we have talked the case over,
I will give you my opinion."
Archer withdrew reluctantly
with the unwelcome documents.
Since their last meeting he had half-unconsciously collaborated
with events in ridding himself of the burden of Madame Olenska.
His hour alone
with her by the firelight had drawn them into a momentary intimacy on which the Duke of St. Austrey's intrusion
with Mrs. Lemuel Struthers,
and the Countess's joyous greeting of them,
had rather providentially broken.
Two days later Archer had assisted at the comedy of her reinstatement in the van der Luydens'
favour,
and had said
to himself,
with a touch of tartness,
that a lady who knew how
to thank all-powerful elderly gentlemen
to such good purpose
for a bunch of flowers did not need either the private consolations or the public championship of a young man of his small compass.
To look at the matter in this light simplified his own case and surprisingly furbished up all the dim domestic virtues.
He could not picture May Welland,
in whatever conceivable emergency,
hawking about her private difficulties and lavishing her confidences on strange men;
and she had never seemed
to him finer or fairer than in the week that followed.
He had even yielded
to her wish
for a long engagement,
since she had found the one disarming answer
to his plea
for haste.
"You know,
when it comes
to the point,
your parents have always let you have your way ever since you were a little girl,"
he argued;
and she had answered,
with her clearest look:
"Yes;
and that's what makes it so hard
to refuse the very last thing they'll ever ask of me as a little girl."
That was the old New York note;
that was the kind of answer he would like always
to be sure of his wife's making.
If one had habitually breathed the New York air there were times when anything less crystalline seemed stifling.
The papers he had retired
to read did not tell him much in fact;
but they plunged him into an atmosphere in which he choked and spluttered.
They consisted mainly of an exchange of letters between Count Olenski's solicitors and a French legal firm
to whom the Countess had applied
for the settlement of her financial situation.
There was also a short letter from the Count
to his wife:
after reading it,
Newland Archer rose,
jammed the papers back into their envelope,
and reentered Mr. Letterblair's office.
"Here are the letters,
sir.
If you wish,
I'll see Madame Olenska,"
he said in a constrained voice.
"Thank you--thank you,
Mr.Archer.
Come and dine
with me tonight if you're free,
and we'll go into the matter afterward:
in case you wish
to call on our client tomorrow."
Newland Archer walked straight home again that afternoon.
It was a winter evening of transparent clearness,
with an innocent young moon above the house- tops;
and he wanted
to fill his soul's lungs
with the pure radiance,
and not exchange a word
with any one till he and Mr. Letterblair were closeted together after dinner.
It was impossible
to decide otherwise than he had done:
he must see Madame Olenska himself rather than let her secrets be bared
to other eyes.
A great wave of compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience:
she stood before him as an exposed and pitiful figure,
to be saved at all costs from farther wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate.
He remembered what she had told him of Mrs. Welland's request
to be spared whatever was
"unpleasant"
in her history,
and winced at the thought that it was perhaps this attitude of mind which kept the New York air so pure.
"Are we only Pharisees after all?"
he wondered,
puzzled by the effort
to reconcile his instinctive disgust at human vileness
with his equally instinctive pity
for human frailty.
For the first time he perceived how elementary his own principles had always been.
He passed
for a young man who had not been afraid of risks,
and he knew that his secret love-affair
with poor silly Mrs. Thorley Rushworth had not been too secret
to invest him
with a becoming air of adventure.
But Mrs. Rushworth was
"that kind of woman";
foolish,
vain,
clandestine by nature,
and far more attracted by the secrecy and peril of the affair than by such charms and qualities as he possessed.
When the fact dawned on him it nearly broke his heart,
but now it seemed the redeeming feature of the case.
The affair,
in short,
had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through,
and emerged from
with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed--and pitied.
In this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers,
aunts and other elderly female relatives,
who all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that when
"such things happened"
it was undoubtedly foolish of the man,
but somehow always criminal of the woman.
All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing,
and mere simple- minded man as powerless in her clutches.
The only thing
to do was
to persuade him,
as early as possible,
to marry a nice girl,
and then trust
to her
to look after him.
In the complicated old European communities,
Archer began
to guess,
love-problems might be less simple and less easily classified.
Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations;
and there might even be one in which a woman naturally sensitive and aloof would yet,
from the force of circumstances,
from sheer defencelessness and loneliness,
be drawn into a tie inexcusable by conventional standards.
On reaching home he wrote a line
to the Countess Olenska,
asking at what hour of the next day she could receive him,
and despatched it by a messenger-boy,
who returned presently
with a word
to the effect that she was going
to Skuytercliff the next morning
to stay over Sunday
with the van der Luydens,
but that he would find her alone that evening after dinner.
The note was written on a rather untidy half-sheet,
without date or address,
but her hand was firm and free.
He was amused at the idea of her week-ending in the stately solitude of Skuytercliff,
but immediately afterward felt that there,
of all places,
she would most feel the chill of minds rigorously averted from the
"unpleasant."
He was at Mr. Letterblair's punctually at seven,
glad of the pretext
for excusing himself soon after dinner.
He had formed his own opinion from the papers entrusted
to him,
and did not especially want
to go into the matter
with his senior partner.
Mr.Letterblair was a widower,
and they dined alone,
copiously and slowly,
in a dark shabby room hung
with yellowing prints of
"The Death of Chatham"
and
"The Coronation of Napoleon."
On the sideboard,
between fluted Sheraton knife-cases,
stood a decanter of Haut Brion,
and another of the old Lanning port
(the gift of a client),
which the wastrel Tom Lanning had sold off a year or two before his mysterious and discreditable death in San Francisco--an incident less publicly humiliating
to the family than the sale of the cellar.
After a velvety oyster soup came shad and cucumbers,
then a young broiled turkey
with corn fritters,
followed by a canvas-back
with currant jelly and a celery mayonnaise.
Mr.Letterblair,
who lunched on a sandwich and tea,
dined deliberately and deeply,
and insisted on his guest's doing the same.
Finally,
when the closing rites had been accomplished,
the cloth was removed,
cigars were lit,
and Mr. Letterblair,
leaning back in his chair and pushing the port westward,
said,
spreading his back agreeably
to the coal fire behind him:
"The whole family are against a divorce.
And I think rightly."
Archer instantly felt himself on the other side of the argument.
"But why,
sir?
If there ever was a case--"
"Well--what's the use?
SHE'S here--he's there;
the Atlantic's between them.
She'll never get back a dollar more of her money than what he's voluntarily returned
to her:
their damned heathen marriage settlements take precious good care of that.
As things go over there,
Olenski's acted generously:
he might have turned her out without a penny."
The young man knew this and was silent.
"I understand,
though,"
Mr.Letterblair continued,
"that she attaches no importance
to the money.
Therefore,
as the family say,
why not let well enough alone?"
Archer had gone
to the house an hour earlier in full agreement
with Mr. Letterblair's view;
but put into words by this selfish,
well-fed and supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant.
"I think that's
for her
to decide."
"H'm--have you considered the consequences if she decides
for divorce?"
"You mean the threat in her husband's letter?
What weight would that carry?
It's no more than the vague charge of an angry blackguard."
"Yes;
but it might make some unpleasant talk if he really defends the suit."
"Unpleasant--!"
said Archer explosively.
Mr.Letterblair looked at him from under enquiring eyebrows,
and the young man,
aware of the uselessness of trying
to explain what was in his mind,
bowed acquiescently while his senior continued:
"Divorce is always unpleasant."
"You agree
with me?"
Mr.Letterblair resumed,
after a waiting silence.
"Naturally,"
said Archer.
"Well,
then,
I may count on you;
the Mingotts may count on you;
to use your influence against the idea?"
Archer hesitated.
"I can't pledge myself till I've seen the Countess Olenska,"
he said at length.
"Mr.
Archer,
I don't understand you.
Do you want
to marry into a family
with a scandalous divorce-suit hanging over it?"
"I don't think that has anything
to do
with the case."
Mr.Letterblair put down his glass of port and fixed on his young partner a cautious and apprehensive gaze.
Archer understood that he ran the risk of having his mandate withdrawn,
and
for some obscure reason he disliked the prospect.
Now that the job had been thrust on him he did not propose
to relinquish it;
and,
to guard against the possibility,
he saw that he must reassure the unimaginative old man who was the legal conscience of the Mingotts.
"You may be sure,
sir,
that I shan't commit myself till I've reported
to you;
what I meant was that I'd rather not give an opinion till I've heard what Madame Olenska has
to say."
Mr.Letterblair nodded approvingly at an excess of caution worthy of the best New York tradition,
and the young man,
glancing at his watch,
pleaded an engagement and took leave.
XII.
Old-fashioned New York dined at seven,
and the habit of after-dinner calls,
though derided in Archer's set,
still generally prevailed.
As the young man strolled up Fifth Avenue from Waverley Place,
the long thoroughfare was deserted but
for a group of carriages standing before the Reggie Chiverses'
(where there was a dinner
for the Duke),
and the occasional figure of an elderly gentleman in heavy overcoat and muffler ascending a brownstone doorstep and disappearing into a gas-lit hall.
Thus,
as Archer crossed Washington Square,
he remarked that old Mr. du Lac was calling on his cousins the Dagonets,
and turning down the corner of West Tenth Street he saw Mr. Skipworth,
of his own firm,
obviously bound on a visit
to the Miss Lannings.
A little farther up Fifth Avenue,
Beaufort appeared on his doorstep,
darkly projected against a blaze of light,
descended
to his private brougham,
and rolled away
to a mysterious and probably unmentionable destination.
It was not an Opera night,
and no one was giving a party,
so that Beaufort's outing was undoubtedly of a clandestine nature.
Archer connected it in his mind
with a little house beyond Lexington Avenue in which beribboned window curtains and flower-boxes had recently appeared,
and before whose newly painted door the canary-coloured brougham of Miss Fanny Ring was frequently seen
to wait.
Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer's world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists,
musicians and
"people who wrote."
These scattered fragments of humanity had never shown any desire
to be amalgamated
with the social structure.
In spite of odd ways they were said
to be,
for the most part,
quite respectable;
but they preferred
to keep
to themselves.
Medora Manson,
in her prosperous days,
had inaugurated a
"literary salon";
but it had soon died out owing
to the reluctance of the literary
to frequent it.
Others had made the same attempt,
and there was a household of Blenkers--an intense and voluble mother,
and three blowsy daughters who imitated her--where one met Edwin Booth and Patti and William Winter,
and the new Shakespearian actor George Rignold,
and some of the magazine editors and musical and literary critics.
Mrs.Archer and her group felt a certain timidity concerning these persons.
They were odd,
they were uncertain,
they had things one didn't know about in the background of their lives and minds.
Literature and art were deeply respected in the Archer set,
and Mrs. Archer was always at pains
to tell her children how much more agreeable and cultivated society had been when it included such figures as Washington Irving,
Fitz-Greene Halleck and the poet of
"The Culprit Fay."
The most celebrated authors of that generation had been
"gentlemen";
perhaps the unknown persons who succeeded them had gentlemanly sentiments,
but their origin,
their appearance,
their hair,
their intimacy
with the stage and the Opera,
made any old New York criterion inapplicable
to them.
"When I was a girl,"
Mrs.Archer used
to say,
"we knew everybody between the Battery and Canal Street;
and only the people one knew had carriages.
It was perfectly easy
to place any one then;
now one can't tell,
and I prefer not
to try."
Only old Catherine Mingott,
with her absence of moral prejudices and almost parvenu indifference
to the subtler distinctions,
might have bridged the abyss;
but she had never opened a book or looked at a picture,
and cared
for music only because it reminded her of gala nights at the Italiens,
in the days of her triumph at the Tuileries.
Possibly Beaufort,
who was her match in daring,
would have succeeded in bringing about a fusion;
but his grand house and silk-stockinged footmen were an obstacle
to informal sociability.
Moreover,
he was as illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott,
and considered
"fellows who wrote"
as the mere paid purveyors of rich men's pleasures;
and no one rich enough
to influence his opinion had ever questioned it.
Newland Archer had been aware of these things ever since he could remember,
and had accepted them as part of the structure of his universe.
He knew that there were societies where painters and poets and novelists and men of science,
and even great actors,
were as sought after as Dukes;
he had often pictured
to himself what it would have been
to live in the intimacy of drawing-rooms dominated by the talk of Merimee
(whose
"Lettres a une Inconnue"
was one of his inseparables),
of Thackeray,
Browning or William Morris.
But such things were inconceivable in New York,
and unsettling
to think of.
Archer knew most of the
"fellows who wrote,"
the musicians and the painters:
he met them at the Century,
or at the little musical and theatrical clubs that were beginning
to come into existence.
He enjoyed them there,
and was bored
with them at the Blenkers',
where they were mingled
with fervid and dowdy women who passed them about like captured curiosities;
and even after his most exciting talks
with Ned Winsett he always came away
with the feeling that if his world was small,
so was theirs,
and that the only way
to enlarge either was
to reach a stage of manners where they would naturally merge.
He was reminded of this by trying
to picture the society in which the Countess Olenska had lived and suffered,
and also--perhaps--tasted mysterious joys.
He remembered
with what amusement she had told him that her grandmother Mingott and the Wellands objected
to her living in a
"Bohemian"
quarter given over to
"people who wrote."
It was not the peril but the poverty that her family disliked;
but that shade escaped her,
and she supposed they considered literature compromising.
She herself had no fears of it,
and the books scattered about her drawing-room
(a part of the house in which books were usually supposed
to be
"out of place"),
though chiefly works of fiction,
had whetted Archer's interest
with such new names as those of Paul Bourget,
Huysmans,
and the Goncourt brothers.
Ruminating on these things as he approached her door,
he was once more conscious of the curious way in which she reversed his values,
and of the need of thinking himself into conditions incredibly different from any that he knew if he were
to be of use in her present difficulty.
Nastasia opened the door,
smiling mysteriously.
On the bench in the hall lay a sable-lined overcoat,
a folded opera hat of dull silk
with a gold J.
B.
on the lining,
and a white silk muffler:
there was no mistaking the fact that these costly articles were the property of Julius Beaufort.
Archer was angry:
so angry that he came near scribbling a word on his card and going away;
then he remembered that in writing
to Madame Olenska he had been kept by excess of discretion from saying that he wished
to see her privately.
He had therefore no one but himself
to blame if she had opened her doors
to other visitors;
and he entered the drawing-room
with the dogged determination
to make Beaufort feel himself in the way,
and
to outstay him.
The banker stood leaning against the mantelshelf,
which was draped
with an old embroidery held in place by brass candelabra containing church candies of yellowish wax.
He had thrust his chest out,
supporting his shoulders against the mantel and resting his weight on one large patent-leather foot.
As Archer entered he was smiling and looking down on his hostess,
who sat on a sofa placed at right angles
to the chimney.
A table banked
with flowers formed a screen behind it,
and against the orchids and azaleas which the young man recognised as tributes from the Beaufort hot-houses,
Madame Olenska sat half-reclined,
her head propped on a hand and her wide sleeve leaving the arm bare
to the elbow.
It was usual
for ladies who received in the evenings
to wear what were called
"simple dinner dresses":
a close-fitting armour of whale-boned silk,
slightly open in the neck,
with lace ruffles filling in the crack,
and tight sleeves
with a flounce uncovering just enough wrist
to show an Etruscan gold bracelet or a velvet band.
But Madame Olenska,
heedless of tradition,
was attired in a long robe of red velvet bordered about the chin and down the front
with glossy black fur.
Archer remembered,
on his last visit
to Paris,
seeing a portrait by the new painter,
Carolus Duran,
whose pictures were the sensation of the Salon,
in which the lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes
with her chin nestling in fur.
There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing-room,
and in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms;
but the effect was undeniably pleasing.
"Lord love us--three whole days at Skuytercliff!"
Beaufort was saying in his loud sneering voice as Archer entered.
"You'd better take all your furs,
and a hot-water-bottle."
"Why?
Is the house so cold?"
she asked,
holding out her left hand
to Archer in a way mysteriously suggesting that she expected him
to kiss it.
"No;
but the missus is,"
said Beaufort,
nodding carelessly
to the young man.
"But I thought her so kind.
She came herself
to invite me.
Granny says I must certainly go."
"Granny would,
of course.
And I say it's a shame you're going
to miss the little oyster supper I'd planned
for you at Delmonico's next Sunday,
with Campanini and Scalchi and a lot of jolly people."
She looked doubtfully from the banker
to Archer.
"Ah--that does tempt me! Except the other evening at Mrs. Struthers's I've not met a single artist since I've been here."
"What kind of artists?
I know one or two painters,
very good fellows,
that I could bring
to see you if you'd allow me,"
said Archer boldly.
"Painters?
Are there painters in New York?"
asked Beaufort,
in a tone implying that there could be none since he did not buy their pictures;
and Madame Olenska said
to Archer,
with her grave smile:
"That would be charming.
But I was really thinking of dramatic artists,
singers,
actors,
musicians.
My husband's house was always full of them."
She said the words
"my husband"
as if no sinister associations were connected
with them,
and in a tone that seemed almost
to sigh over the lost delights of her married life.
Archer looked at her perplexedly,
wondering if it were lightness or dissimulation that enabled her
to touch so easily on the past at the very moment when she was risking her reputation in order
to break
with it.
"I do think,"
she went on,
addressing both men,
that the imprevu adds
to one's enjoyment.
It's perhaps a mistake
to see the same people every day."
"It's confoundedly dull,
anyhow;
New York is dying of dullness,"
Beaufort grumbled.
"And when I try
to liven it up
for you,
you go back on me.
Come--think better of it! Sunday is your last chance,
for Campanini leaves next week
for Baltimore and Philadelphia;
and I've a private room,
and a Steinway,
and they'll sing all night
for me."
"How delicious! May I think it over,
and write
to you tomorrow morning?"
She spoke amiably,
yet
with the least hint of dismissal in her voice.
Beaufort evidently felt it,
and being unused
to dismissals,
stood staring at her
with an obstinate line between his eyes.
"Why not now?"
"It's too serious a question
to decide at this late hour."
"Do you call it late?"
She returned his glance coolly.
"Yes;
because I have still
to talk business
with Mr. Archer
for a little while."
"Ah,"
Beaufort snapped.
There was no appeal from her tone,
and
with a slight shrug he recovered his composure,
took her hand,
which he kissed
with a practised air,
and calling out from the threshold:
"I say,
Newland,
if you can persuade the Countess
to stop in town of course you're included in the supper,"
left the room
with his heavy important step.
For a moment Archer fancied that Mr. Letterblair must have told her of his coming;
but the irrelevance of her next remark made him change his mind.
"You know painters,
then?
You live in their milieu?"
she asked,
her eyes full of interest.
"Oh,
not exactly.
I don't know that the arts have a milieu here,
any of them;
they're more like a very thinly settled outskirt."
"But you care
for such things?"
"Immensely.
When I'm in Paris or London I never miss an exhibition.
I try
to keep up."
She looked down at the tip of the little satin boot that peeped from her long draperies.
"I used
to care immensely too:
my life was full of such things.
But now I want
to try not to."
"You want
to try not to?"
"Yes:
I want
to cast off all my old life,
to become just like everybody else here."
Archer reddened.
"You'll never be like everybody else,"
he said.
She raised her straight eyebrows a little.
"Ah,
don't say that.
If you knew how I hate
to be different!"
Her face had grown as sombre as a tragic mask.
She leaned forward,
clasping her knee in her thin hands,
and looking away from him into remote dark distances.
"I want
to get away from it all,"
she insisted.
He waited a moment and cleared his throat.
"I know.
Mr.Letterblair has told me."
"Ah?"
"That's the reason I've come.
He asked me to--you see I'm in the firm."
She looked slightly surprised,
and then her eyes brightened.
"You mean you can manage it
for me?
I can talk
to you instead of Mr. Letterblair?
Oh,
that will be so much easier!"
Her tone touched him,
and his confidence grew
with his self-satisfaction.
He perceived that she had spoken of business
to Beaufort simply
to get rid of him;
and
to have routed Beaufort was something of a triumph.
"I am here
to talk about it,"
he repeated.
She sat silent,
her head still propped by the arm that rested on the back of the sofa.
Her face looked pale and extinguished,
as if dimmed by the rich red of her dress.
She struck Archer,
of a sudden,
as a pathetic and even pitiful figure.
"Now we're coming
to hard facts,"
he thought,
conscious in himself of the same instinctive recoil that he had so often criticised in his mother and her contemporaries.
How little practice he had had in dealing
with unusual situations! Their very vocabulary was unfamiliar
to him,
and seemed
to belong
to fiction and the stage.
In face of what was coming he felt as awkward and embarrassed as a boy.
After a pause Madame Olenska broke out
with unexpected vehemence:
"I want
to be free;
I want
to wipe out all the past."
"I understand that."
Her face warmed.
"Then you'll help me?"
"First--"
he hesitated--"perhaps I ought
to know a little more."
She seemed surprised.
"You know about my husband-- my life
with him?"
He made a sign of assent.
"Well--then--what more is there?
In this country are such things tolerated?
I'm a Protestant--our church does not forbid divorce in such cases."
"Certainly not."
They were both silent again,
and Archer felt the spectre of Count Olenski's letter grimacing hideously between them.
The letter filled only half a page,
and was just what he had described it
to be in speaking of it
to Mr. Letterblair:
the vague charge of an angry blackguard.
But how much truth was behind it?
Only Count Olenski's wife could tell.
"I've looked through the papers you gave
to Mr. Letterblair,"
he said at length.
"Well--can there be anything more abominable?"
"No."
She changed her position slightly,
screening her eyes
with her lifted hand.
"Of course you know,"
Archer continued,
"that if your husband chooses
to fight the case--as he threatens to--"
"Yes--?"
"He can say things--things that might be unpl--might be disagreeable
to you:
say them publicly,
so that they would get about,
and harm you even if--"
"If--?"
"I mean:
no matter how unfounded they were."
She paused
for a long interval;
so long that,
not wishing
to keep his eyes on her shaded face,
he had time
to imprint on his mind the exact shape of her other hand,
the one on her knee,
and every detail of the three rings on her fourth and fifth fingers;
among which,
he noticed,
a wedding ring did not appear.
"What harm could such accusations,
even if he made them publicly,
do me here?"
It was on his lips
to exclaim:
"My poor child--far more harm than anywhere else!"
Instead,
he answered,
in a voice that sounded in his ears like Mr. Letterblair's:
"New York society is a very small world compared
with the one you've lived in.
And it's ruled,
in spite of appearances,
by a few people with--well,
rather old- fashioned ideas."
She said nothing,
and he continued:
"Our ideas about marriage and divorce are particularly old-fashioned.
Our legislation favours divorce--our social customs don't."
"Never?"
"Well--not if the woman,
however injured,
however irreproachable,
has appearances in the least degree against her,
has exposed herself by any unconventional action to--to offensive insinuations--"
She drooped her head a little lower,
and he waited again,
intensely hoping
for a flash of indignation,
or at least a brief cry of denial.
None came.
A little travelling clock ticked purringly at her elbow,
and a log broke in two and sent up a shower of sparks.
The whole hushed and brooding room seemed
to be waiting silently
with Archer.
"Yes,"
she murmured at length,
"that's what my family tell me."
He winced a little.
"It's not unnatural--"
"OUR family,"
she corrected herself;
and Archer coloured.
"For you'll be my cousin soon,"
she continued gently.
"I hope so."
"And you take their view?"
He stood up at this,
wandered across the room,
stared
with void eyes at one of the pictures against the old red damask,
and came back irresolutely
to her side.
How could he say:
"Yes,
if what your husband hints is true,
or if you've no way of disproving it?"
"Sincerely--"
she interjected,
as he was about
to speak.
He looked down into the fire.
"Sincerely,
then--what should you gain that would compensate
for the possibility-- the certainty--of a lot of beastly talk?"
"But my freedom--is that nothing?"
It flashed across him at that instant that the charge in the letter was true,
and that she hoped
to marry the partner of her guilt.
How was he
to tell her that,
if she really cherished such a plan,
the laws of the State were inexorably opposed
to it?
The mere suspicion that the thought was in her mind made him feel harshly and impatiently toward her.
"But aren't you as free as air as it is?"
he returned.
"Who can touch you?
Mr.Letterblair tells me the financial question has been settled--"
"Oh,
yes,"
she said indifferently.
"Well,
then:
is it worth while
to risk what may be infinitely disagreeable and painful?
Think of the newspapers--their vileness! It's all stupid and narrow and unjust--but one can't make over society."
"No,"
she acquiesced;
and her tone was so faint and desolate that he felt a sudden remorse
for his own hard thoughts.
"The individual,
in such cases,
is nearly always sacrificed
to what is supposed
to be the collective interest:
people cling
to any convention that keeps the family together--protects the children,
if there are any,"
he rambled on,
pouring out all the stock phrases that rose
to his lips in his intense desire
to cover over the ugly reality which her silence seemed
to have laid bare.
Since she would not or could not say the one word that would have cleared the air,
his wish was not
to let her feel that he was trying
to probe into her secret.
Better keep on the surface,
in the prudent old New York way,
than risk uncovering a wound he could not heal.
"It's my business,
you know,"
he went on,
"to help you
to see these things as the people who are fondest of you see them.
The Mingotts,
the Wellands,
the van der Luydens,
all your friends and relations:
if I didn't show you honestly how they judge such questions,
it wouldn't be fair of me,
would it?"
He spoke insistently,
almost pleading
with her in his eagerness
to cover up that yawning silence.
She said slowly:
"No;
it wouldn't be fair."
The fire had crumbled down
to greyness,
and one of the lamps made a gurgling appeal
for attention.
Madame Olenska rose,
wound it up and returned
to the fire,
but without resuming her seat.
Her remaining on her feet seemed
to signify that there was nothing more
for either of them
to say,
and Archer stood up also.
"Very well;
I will do what you wish,"
she said abruptly.
The blood rushed
to his forehead;
and,
taken aback by the suddenness of her surrender,
he caught her two hands awkwardly in his.
"I--I do want
to help you,"
he said.
"You do help me.
Good night,
my cousin."
He bent and laid his lips on her hands,
which were cold and lifeless.
She drew them away,
and he turned
to the door,
found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall,
and plunged out into the winter night bursting
with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.
XIII.
It was a crowded night at Wallack's theatre.
The play was
"The Shaughraun,"
with Dion Boucicault in the title role and Harry Montague and Ada Dyas as the lovers.
The popularity of the admirable English company was at its height,
and the Shaughraun always packed the house.
In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved;
in the stalls and boxes,
people smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and clap- trap situations,
and enjoyed the play as much as the galleries did.
There was one episode,
in particular,
that held the house from floor
to ceiling.
It was that in which Harry Montague,
after a sad,
almost monosyllabic scene of parting
with Miss Dyas,
bade her good-bye,
and turned
to go.
The actress,
who was standing near the mantelpiece and looking down into the fire,
wore a gray cashmere dress without fashionable loopings or trimmings,
moulded
to her tall figure and flowing in long lines about her feet.
Around her neck was a narrow black velvet ribbon
with the ends falling down her back.
When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms against the mantel-shelf and bowed her face in her hands.
On the threshold he paused
to look at her;
then he stole back,
lifted one of the ends of velvet ribbon,
kissed it,
and left the room without her hearing him or changing her attitude.
And on this silent parting the curtain fell.
It was always
for the sake of that particular scene that Newland Archer went
to see
"The Shaughraun."
He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada Dyas as fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant do in Paris,
or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London;
in its reticence,
its dumb sorrow,
it moved him more than the most famous histrionic outpourings.
On the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy by reminding him--he could not have said why--of his leave-taking from Madame Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier.
It would have been as difficult
to discover any resemblance between the two situations as between the appearance of the persons concerned.
Newland Archer could not pretend
to anything approaching the young English actor's romantic good looks,
and Miss Dyas was a tall red-haired woman of monumental build whose pale and pleasantly ugly face was utterly unlike Ellen Olenska's vivid countenance.
Nor were Archer and Madame Olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken silence;
they were client and lawyer separating after a talk which had given the lawyer the worst possible impression of the client's case.
Wherein,
then,
lay the resemblance that made the young man's heart beat
with a kind of retrospective excitement?
It seemed
to be in Madame Olenska's mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic and moving possibilities outside the daily run of experience.
She had hardly ever said a word
to him
to produce this impression,
but it was a part of her,
either a projection of her mysterious and outlandish background or of something inherently dramatic,
passionate and unusual in herself.
Archer had always been inclined
to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared
with their innate tendency
to have things happen
to them.
This tendency he had felt from the first in Madame Olenska.
The quiet,
almost passive young woman struck him as exactly the kind of person
to whom things were bound
to happen,
no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way
to avoid them.
The exciting fact was her having lived in an atmosphere so thick
with drama that her own tendency
to provoke it had apparently passed unperceived.
It was precisely the odd absence of surprise in her that gave him the sense of her having been plucked out of a very maelstrom:
the things she took
for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.
Archer had left her
with the conviction that Count Olenski's accusation was not unfounded.
The mysterious person who figured in his wife's past as
"the secretary"
had probably not been unrewarded
for his share in her escape.
The conditions from which she had fled were intolerable,
past speaking of,
past believing:
she was young,
she was frightened,
she was desperate-- what more natural than that she should be grateful
to her rescuer?
The pity was that her gratitude put her,
in the law's eyes and the world's,
on a par
with her abominable husband.
Archer had made her understand this,
as he was bound
to do;
he had also made her understand that simplehearted kindly New York,
on whose larger charity she had apparently counted,
was precisely the place where she could least hope
for indulgence.
To have
to make this fact plain
to her--and
to witness her resigned acceptance of it--had been intolerably painful
to him.
He felt himself drawn
to her by obscure feelings of jealousy and pity,
as if her dumbly- confessed error had put her at his mercy,
humbling yet endearing her.
He was glad it was
to him she had revealed her secret,
rather than
to the cold scrutiny of Mr. Letterblair,
or the embarrassed gaze of her family.
He immediately took it upon himself
to assure them both that she had given up her idea of seeking a divorce,
basing her decision on the fact that she had understood the uselessness of the proceeding;
and
with infinite relief they had all turned their eyes from the
"unpleasantness"
she had spared them.
"I was sure Newland would manage it,"
Mrs.Welland had said proudly of her future son-in-law;
and old Mrs. Mingott,
who had summoned him
for a confidential interview,
had congratulated him on his cleverness,
and added impatiently:
"Silly goose! I told her myself what nonsense it was.
Wanting
to pass herself off as Ellen Mingott and an old maid,
when she has the luck
to be a married woman and a Countess!"
These incidents had made the memory of his last talk
with Madame Olenska so vivid
to the young man that as the curtain fell on the parting of the two actors his eyes filled
with tears,
and he stood up
to leave the theatre.
In doing so,
he turned
to the side of the house behind him,
and saw the lady of whom he was thinking seated in a box
with the Beauforts,
Lawrence Lefferts and one or two other men.
He had not spoken
with her alone since their evening together,
and had tried
to avoid being
with her in company;
but now their eyes met,
and as Mrs. Beaufort recognised him at the same time,
and made her languid little gesture of invitation,
it was impossible not
to go into the box.
Beaufort and Lefferts made way
for him,
and after a few words
with Mrs. Beaufort,
who always preferred
to look beautiful and not have
to talk,
Archer seated himself behind Madame Olenska.
There was no one else in the box but Mr. Sillerton Jackson,
who was telling Mrs. Beaufort in a confidential undertone about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's last Sunday reception
(where some people reported that there had been dancing).
Under cover of this circumstantial narrative,
to which Mrs. Beaufort listened
with her perfect smile,
and her head at just the right angle
to be seen in profile from the stalls,
Madame Olenska turned and spoke in a low voice.
"Do you think,"
she asked,
glancing toward the stage,
"he will send her a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow morning?"
Archer reddened,
and his heart gave a leap of surprise.
He had called only twice on Madame Olenska,
and each time he had sent her a box of yellow roses,
and each time without a card.
She had never before made any allusion
to the flowers,
and he supposed she had never thought of him as the sender.
Now her sudden recognition of the gift,
and her associating it
with the tender leave-taking on the stage,
filled him
with an agitated pleasure.
"I was thinking of that too--I was going
to leave the theatre in order
to take the picture away
with me,"
he said.
To his surprise her colour rose,
reluctantly and duskily.
She looked down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass in her smoothly gloved hands,
and said,
after a pause:
"What do you do while May is away?"
"I stick
to my work,"
he answered,
faintly annoyed by the question.
In obedience
to a long-established habit,
the Wellands had left the previous week
for St. Augustine,
where,
out of regard
for the supposed susceptibility of Mr. Welland's bronchial tubes,
they always spent the latter part of the winter.
Mr.Welland was a mild and silent man,
with no opinions but
with many habits.
With these habits none might interfere;
and one of them demanded that his wife and daughter should always go
with him on his annual journey
to the south.
To preserve an unbroken domesticity was essential
to his peace of mind;
he would not have known where his hair-brushes were,
or how
to provide stamps
for his letters,
if Mrs. Welland had not been there
to tell him.
As all the members of the family adored each other,
and as Mr. Welland was the central object of their idolatry,
it never occurred
to his wife and May
to let him go
to St. Augustine alone;
and his sons,
who were both in the law,
and could not leave New York during the winter,
always joined him
for Easter and travelled back
with him.
It was impossible
for Archer
to discuss the necessity of May's accompanying her father.
The reputation of the Mingotts'
family physician was largely based on the attack of pneumonia which Mr. Welland had never had;
and his insistence on St. Augustine was therefore inflexible.
Originally,
it had been intended that May's engagement should not be announced till her return from Florida,
and the fact that it had been made known sooner could not be expected
to alter Mr. Welland's plans.
Archer would have liked
to join the travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating
with his betrothed;
but he too was bound by custom and conventions.
Little arduous as his professional duties were,
he would have been convicted of frivolity by the whole Mingott clan if he had suggested asking
for a holiday in mid-winter;
and he accepted May's departure
with the resignation which he perceived would have
to be one of the principal constituents of married life.
He was conscious that Madame Olenska was looking at him under lowered lids.
"I have done what you wished--what you advised,"
she said abruptly.
"Ah--I'm glad,"
he returned,
embarrassed by her broaching the subject at such a moment.
"I understand--that you were right,"
she went on a little breathlessly;
"but sometimes life is difficult .
.
.
perplexing.
.
."
"I know."
"And I wanted
to tell you that I DO feel you were right;
and that I'm grateful
to you,"
she ended,
lifting her opera-glass quickly
to her eyes as the door of the box opened and Beaufort's resonant voice broke in on them.
Archer stood up,
and left the box and the theatre.
Only the day before he had received a letter from May Welland in which,
with characteristic candour,
she had asked him to
"be kind
to Ellen"
in their absence.
"She likes you and admires you so much--and you know,
though she doesn't show it,
she's still very lonely and unhappy.
I don't think Granny understands her,
or uncle Lovell Mingott either;
they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society than she is.
And I can quite see that New York must seem dull
to her,
though the family won't admit it.
I think she's been used
to lots of things we haven't got;
wonderful music,
and picture shows,
and celebrities--artists and authors and all the clever people you admire.
Granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and clothes--but I can see that you're almost the only person in New York who can talk
to her about what she really cares for."
His wise May--how he had loved her
for that letter! But he had not meant
to act on it;
he was too busy,
to begin with,
and he did not care,
as an engaged man,
to play too conspicuously the part of Madame Olenska's champion.
He had an idea that she knew how
to take care of herself a good deal better than the ingenuous May imagined.
She had Beaufort at her feet,
Mr.van der Luyden hovering above her like a protecting deity,
and any number of candidates
(Lawrence Lefferts among them)
waiting their opportunity in the middle distance.
Yet he never saw her,
or exchanged a word
with her,
without feeling that,
after all,
May's ingenuousness almost amounted
to a gift of divination.
Ellen Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.
XIV.
As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett,
the only one among what Janey called his
"clever people"
with whom he cared
to probe into things a little deeper than the average level of club and chop-house banter.
He had caught sight,
across the house,
of Winsett's shabby round-shouldered back,
and had once noticed his eyes turned toward the Beaufort box.
The two men shook hands,
and Winsett proposed a bock at a little German restaurant around the corner.
Archer,
who was not in the mood
for the kind of talk they were likely
to get there,
declined on the plea that he had work
to do at home;
and Winsett said:
"Oh,
well so have I
for that matter,
and I'll be the Industrious Apprentice too."
They strolled along together,
and presently Winsett said:
"Look here,
what I'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box of yours--with the Beauforts,
wasn't she?
The one your friend Lefferts seems so smitten by."
Archer,
he could not have said why,
was slightly annoyed.
What the devil did Ned Winsett want
with Ellen Olenska's name?
And above all,
why did he couple it
with Lefferts's?
It was unlike Winsett
to manifest such curiosity;
but after all,
Archer remembered,
he was a journalist.
"It's not
for an interview,
I hope?"
he laughed.
"Well--not
for the press;
just
for myself,"
Winsett rejoined.
"The fact is she's a neighbour of mine--queer quarter
for such a beauty
to settle in--and she's been awfully kind
to my little boy,
who fell down her area chasing his kitten,
and gave himself a nasty cut.
She rushed in bareheaded,
carrying him in her arms,
with his knee all beautifully bandaged,
and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too dazzled
to ask her name."
A pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart.
There was nothing extraordinary in the tale:
any woman would have done as much
for a neighbour's child.
But it was just like Ellen,
he felt,
to have rushed in bareheaded,
carrying the boy in her arms,
and
to have dazzled poor Mrs. Winsett into forgetting
to ask who she was.
"That is the Countess Olenska--a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."
"Whew--a Countess!"
whistled Ned Winsett.
"Well,
I didn't know Countesses were so neighbourly.
Mingotts ain't."
"They would be,
if you'd let them."
"Ah,
well--"
It was their old interminable argument as
to the obstinate unwillingness of the
"clever people"
to frequent the fashionable,
and both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it.
"I wonder,"
Winsett broke off,
"how a Countess happens
to live in our slum?"
"Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any of our little social sign-posts,"
said Archer,
with a secret pride in his own picture of her.
"H'm--been in bigger places,
I suppose,"
the other commented.
"Well,
here's my corner."
He slouched off across Broadway,
and Archer stood looking after him and musing on his last words.
Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration;
they were the most interesting thing about him,
and always made Archer wonder why they had allowed him
to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are still struggling.
Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child,
but he had never seen them.
The two men always met at the Century,
or at some haunt of journalists and theatrical people,
such as the restaurant where Winsett had proposed
to go
for a bock.
He had given Archer
to understand that his wife was an invalid;
which might be true of the poor lady,
or might merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes,
or in both.
Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social observances:
Archer,
who dressed in the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable
to do so,
and who had never stopped
to consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest budget,
regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring
"Bohemian"
pose that always made fashionable people,
who changed their clothes without talking about it,
and were not forever harping on the number of servants one kept,
seem so much simpler and less self-conscious than the others.
Nevertheless,
he was always stimulated by Winsett,
and whenever he caught sight of the journalist's lean bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner and carry him off
for a long talk.
Winsett was not a journalist by choice.
He was a pure man of letters,
untimely born in a world that had no need of letters;
but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations,
of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold,
thirty given away,
and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers
(as per contract)
to make room
for more marketable material,
he had abandoned his real calling,
and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly,
where fashion- plates and paper patterns alternated
with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On the subject of
"Hearth-fires"
(as the paper was called)
he was inexhaustibly entertaining;
but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up.
His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life,
and feel how little it contained;
but Winsett's,
after all,
contained still less,
and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made their talks exhilarating,
their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.
"The fact is,
life isn't much a fit
for either of us,"
Winsett had once said.
"I'm down and out;
nothing
to be done about it.
I've got only one ware
to produce,
and there's no market
for it here,
and won't be in my time.
But you're free and you're well-off.
Why don't you get into touch?
There's only one way
to do it:
to go into politics."
Archer threw his head back and laughed.
There one saw at a flash the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the others--Archer's kind.
Every one in polite circles knew that,
in America,
"a gentleman couldn't go into politics."
But,
since he could hardly put it in that way
to Winsett,
he answered evasively:
"Look at the career of the honest man in American politics! They don't want us."
"Who's `they'?
Why don't you all get together and be `they'
yourselves?"
Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile.
It was useless
to prolong the discussion:
everybody knew the melancholy fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal or state politics in New York.
The day was past when that sort of thing was possible:
the country was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant,
and decent people had
to fall back on sport or culture.
"Culture! Yes--if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches,
dying out here and there
for lack of--well,
hoeing and cross-fertilising:
the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought
with them.
But you're in a pitiful little minority:
you've got no centre,
no competition,
no audience.
You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house:
`The Portrait of a Gentleman.'
You'll never amount
to anything,
any of you,
till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck.
That,
or emigrate .
.
.
God! If I could emigrate .
.
."
Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back
to books,
where Winsett,
if uncertain,
was always interesting.
Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into the muck.
A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained.
But you couldn't make a man like Winsett see that;
and that was why the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants,
though a first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope,
turned out,
in the end,
to be a smaller box,
with a more monotonous pattern,
than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue.
The next morning Archer scoured the town in vain
for more yellow roses.
In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office,
perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever
to any one,
and was filled
with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life.
Why should he not be,
at that moment,
on the sands of St. Augustine
with May Welland?
No one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity.
In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr. Letterblair was the head,
and which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates and
"conservative"
investments,
there were always two or three young men,
fairly well-off,
and without professional ambition,
who,
for a certain number of hours of each day,
sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks,
or simply reading the newspapers.
Though it was supposed
to be proper
for them
to have an occupation,
the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as derogatory,
and the law,
being a profession,
was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business.
But none of these young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession,
or any earnest desire
to do so;
and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading.
It made Archer shiver
to think that it might be spreading over him too.
He had,
to be sure,
other tastes and interests;
he spent his vacations in European travel,
cultivated the
"clever people"
May spoke of,
and generally tried to
"keep up,"
as he had somewhat wistfully put it
to Madame Olenska.
But once he was married,
what would become of this narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived?
He had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream,
though perhaps less ardently,
and who had gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of their elders.
From the office he sent a note by messenger
to Madame Olenska,
asking if he might call that afternoon,
and begging her
to let him find a reply at his club;
but at the club he found nothing,
nor did he receive any letter the following day.
This unexpected silence mortified him beyond reason,
and though the next morning he saw a glorious cluster of yellow roses behind a florist's window-pane,
he left it there.
It was only on the third morning that he received a line by post from the Countess Olenska.
To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff,
whither the van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting the Duke on board his steamer.
"I ran away,"
the writer began abruptly
(without the usual preliminaries),
"the day after I saw you at the play,
and these kind friends have taken me in.
I wanted
to be quiet,
and think things over.
You were right in telling me how kind they were;
I feel myself so safe here.
I wish that you were
with us."
She ended
with a conventional
"Yours sincerely,"
and without any allusion
to the date of her return.
The tone of the note surprised the young man.
What was Madame Olenska running away from,
and why did she feel the need
to be safe?
His first thought was of some dark menace from abroad;
then he reflected that he did not know her epistolary style,
and that it might run
to picturesque exaggeration.
Women always exaggerated;
and moreover she was not wholly at her ease in English,
which she often spoke as if she were translating from the French.
"Je me suis evadee--"
put in that way,
the opening sentence immediately suggested that she might merely have wanted
to escape from a boring round of engagements;
which was very likely true,
for he judged her
to be capricious,
and easily wearied of the pleasure of the moment.
It amused him
to think of the van der Luydens'
having carried her off
to Skuytercliff on a second visit,
and this time
for an indefinite period.
The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened
to visitors,
and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered
to the few thus privileged.
But Archer had seen,
on his last visit
to Paris,
the delicious play of Labiche,
"Le Voyage de M.
Perrichon,"
and he remembered M.
Perrichon's dogged and undiscouraged attachment
to the young man whom he had pulled out of the glacier.
The van der Luydens had rescued Madame Olenska from a doom almost as icy;
and though there were many other reasons
for being attracted
to her,
Archer knew that beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination
to go on rescuing her.
He felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away;
and almost immediately remembered that,
only the day before,
he had refused an invitation
to spend the following Sunday
with the Reggie Chiverses at their house on the Hudson,
a few miles below Skuytercliff.
He had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at Highbank,
with coasting,
ice-boating,
sleighing,
long tramps in the snow,
and a general flavour of mild flirting and milder practical jokes.
He had just received a box of new books from his London book- seller,
and had preferred the prospect of a quiet Sunday at home
with his spoils.
But he now went into the club writing-room,
wrote a hurried telegram,
and told the servant
to send it immediately.
He knew that Mrs. Reggie didn't object
to her visitors'
suddenly changing their minds,
and that there was always a room
to spare in her elastic house.
XV.
Newland Archer arrived at the Chiverses'
on Friday evening,
and on Saturday went conscientiously through all the rites appertaining
to a week-end at Highbank.
In the morning he had a spin in the ice-boat
with his hostess and a few of the hardier guests;
in the afternoon he
"went over the farm"
with Reggie,
and listened,
in the elaborately appointed stables,
to long and impressive disquisitions on the horse;
after tea he talked in a corner of the firelit hall
with a young lady who had professed herself broken-hearted when his engagement was announced,
but was now eager
to tell him of her own matrimonial hopes;
and finally,
about midnight,
he assisted in putting a gold-fish in one visitor's bed,
dressed up a burglar in the bath-room of a nervous aunt,
and saw in the small hours by joining in a pillow-fight that ranged from the nurseries
to the basement.
But on Sunday after luncheon he borrowed a cutter,
and drove over
to Skuytercliff.
People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa.
Those who had never been
to Italy believed it;
so did some who had.
The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth,
on his return from the
"grand tour,"
and in anticipation of his approaching marriage
with Miss Louisa Dagonet.
It was a large square wooden structure,
with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white,
a Corinthian portico,
and fluted pilasters between the windows.
From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel-engraving style
to a small irregular lake
with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers.
To the right and left,
the famous weedless lawns studded with
"specimen"
trees
(each of a different variety)
rolled away
to long ranges of grass crested
with elaborate cast-iron ornaments;
and below,
in a hollow,
lay the four-roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612.
Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly;
even in summer it kept its distance,
and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front.
Now,
as Archer rang the bell,
the long tinkle seemed
to echo through a mausoleum;
and the surprise of the butler who at length responded
to the call was as great as though he had been summoned from his final sleep.
Happily Archer was of the family,
and therefore,
irregular though his arrival was,
entitled
to be informed that the Countess Olenska was out,
having driven
to afternoon service
with Mrs. van der Luyden exactly three quarters of an hour earlier.
"Mr.
van der Luyden,"
the butler continued,
"is in,
sir;
but my impression is that he is either finishing his nap or else reading yesterday's Evening Post.
I heard him say,
sir,
on his return from church this morning,
that he intended
to look through the Evening Post after luncheon;
if you like,
sir,
I might go
to the library door and listen--"
But Archer,
thanking him,
said that he would go and meet the ladies;
and the butler,
obviously relieved,
closed the door on him majestically.
A groom took the cutter
to the stables,
and Archer struck through the park
to the high-road.
The village of Skuytercliff was only a mile and a half away,
but he knew that Mrs. van der Luyden never walked,
and that he must keep
to the road
to meet the carriage.
Presently,
however,
coming down a foot-path that crossed the highway,
he caught sight of a slight figure in a red cloak,
with a big dog running ahead.
He hurried forward,
and Madame Olenska stopped short
with a smile of welcome.
"Ah,
you've come!"
she said,
and drew her hand from her muff.
The red cloak made her look gay and vivid,
like the Ellen Mingott of old days;
and he laughed as he took her hand,
and answered:
"I came
to see what you were running away from."
Her face clouded over,
but she answered:
"Ah,
well-- you will see,
presently."
The answer puzzled him.
"Why--do you mean that you've been overtaken?"
She shrugged her shoulders,
with a little movement like Nastasia's,
and rejoined in a lighter tone:
"Shall we walk on?
I'm so cold after the sermon.
And what does it matter,
now you're here
to protect me?"
The blood rose
to his temples and he caught a fold of her cloak.
"Ellen--what is it?
You must tell me."
"Oh,
presently--let's run a race first:
my feet are freezing
to the ground,"
she cried;
and gathering up the cloak she fled away across the snow,
the dog leaping about her
with challenging barks.
For a moment Archer stood watching,
his gaze delighted by the flash of the red meteor against the snow;
then he started after her,
and they met,
panting and laughing,
at a wicket that led into the park.
She looked up at him and smiled.
"I knew you'd come!"
"That shows you wanted me to,"
he returned,
with a disproportionate joy in their nonsense.
The white glitter of the trees filled the air
with its own mysterious brightness,
and as they walked on over the snow the ground seemed
to sing under their feet.
"Where did you come from?"
Madame Olenska asked.
He told her,
and added:
"It was because I got your note."
After a pause she said,
with a just perceptible chill in her voice:
"May asked you
to take care of me."
"I didn't need any asking."
"You mean--I'm so evidently helpless and defenceless?
What a poor thing you must all think me! But women here seem not--seem never
to feel the need:
any more than the blessed in heaven."
He lowered his voice
to ask:
"What sort of a need?"
"Ah,
don't ask me! I don't speak your language,"
she retorted petulantly.
The answer smote him like a blow,
and he stood still in the path,
looking down at her.
"What did I come for,
if I don't speak yours?"
"Oh,
my friend--!"
She laid her hand lightly on his arm,
and he pleaded earnestly:
"Ellen--why won't you tell me what's happened?"
She shrugged again.
"Does anything ever happen in heaven?"
He was silent,
and they walked on a few yards without exchanging a word.
Finally she said:
"I will tell you--but where,
where,
where?
One can't be alone
for a minute in that great seminary of a house,
with all the doors wide open,
and always a servant bringing tea,
or a log
for the fire,
or the newspaper! Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?
You're so shy,
and yet you're so public.
I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage,
before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds."
"Ah,
you don't like us!"
Archer exclaimed.
They were walking past the house of the old Patroon,
with its squat walls and small square windows compactly grouped about a central chimney.
The shutters stood wide,
and through one of the newly-washed windows Archer caught the light of a fire.
"Why--the house is open!"
he said.
She stood still.
"No;
only
for today,
at least.
I wanted
to see it,
and Mr. van der Luyden had the fire lit and the windows opened,
so that we might stop there on the way back from church this morning."
She ran up the steps and tried the door.
"It's still unlocked--what luck! Come in and we can have a quiet talk.
Mrs.van der Luyden has driven over
to see her old aunts at Rhinebeck and we shan't be missed at the house
for another hour."
He followed her into the narrow passage.
His spirits,
which had dropped at her last words,
rose
with an irrational leap.
The homely little house stood there,
its panels and brasses shining in the firelight,
as if magically created
to receive them.
A big bed of embers still gleamed in the kitchen chimney,
under an iron pot hung from an ancient crane.
Rush-bottomed arm-chairs faced each other across the tiled hearth,
and rows of Delft plates stood on shelves against the walls.
Archer stooped over and threw a log upon the embers.
Madame Olenska,
dropping her cloak,
sat down in one of the chairs.
Archer leaned against the chimney and looked at her.
"You're laughing now;
but when you wrote me you were unhappy,"
he said.
"Yes."
She paused.
"But I can't feel unhappy when you're here."
"I sha'n't be here long,"
he rejoined,
his lips stiffening
with the effort
to say just so much and no more.
"No;
I know.
But I'm improvident:
I live in the moment when I'm happy."
The words stole through him like a temptation,
and
to close his senses
to it he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black tree-boles against the snow.
But it was as if she too had shifted her place,
and he still saw her,
between himself and the trees,
drooping over the fire
with her indolent smile.
Archer's heart was beating insubordinately.
What if it were from him that she had been running away,
and if she had waited
to tell him so till they were here alone together in this secret room?
"Ellen,
if I'm really a help
to you--if you really wanted me
to come--tell me what's wrong,
tell me what it is you're running away from,"
he insisted.
He spoke without shifting his position,
without even turning
to look at her:
if the thing was
to happen,
it was
to happen in this way,
with the whole width of the room between them,
and his eyes still fixed on the outer snow.
For a long moment she was silent;
and in that moment Archer imagined her,
almost heard her,
stealing up behind him
to throw her light arms about his neck.
While he waited,
soul and body throbbing
with the miracle
to come,
his eyes mechanically received the image of a heavily-coated man
with his fur collar turned up who was advancing along the path
to the house.
The man was Julius Beaufort.
"Ah--!"
Archer cried,
bursting into a laugh.
Madame Olenska had sprung up and moved
to his side,
slipping her hand into his;
but after a glance through the window her face paled and she shrank back.
"So that was it?"
Archer said derisively.
"I didn't know he was here,"
Madame Olenska murmured.
Her hand still clung
to Archer's;
but he drew away from her,
and walking out into the passage threw open the door of the house.
"Hallo,
Beaufort--this way! Madame Olenska was expecting you,"
he said.
During his journey back
to New York the next morning,
Archer relived
with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at Skuytercliff.
Beaufort,
though clearly annoyed at finding him
with Madame Olenska,
had,
as usual,
carried off the situation high-handedly.
His way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them,
if they were sensitive
to it,
a feeling of invisibility,
of nonexistence.
Archer,
as the three strolled back through the park,
was aware of this odd sense of disembodiment;
and humbling as it was
to his vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved.
Beaufort had entered the little house
with his usual easy assurance;
but he could not smile away the vertical line between his eyes.
It was fairly clear that Madame Olenska had not known that he was coming,
though her words
to Archer had hinted at the possibility;
at any rate,
she had evidently not told him where she was going when she left New York,
and her unexplained departure had exasperated him.
The ostensible reason of his appearance was the discovery,
the very night before,
of a
"perfect little house,"
not in the market,
which was really just the thing
for her,
but would be snapped up instantly if she didn't take it;
and he was loud in mock-reproaches
for the dance she had led him in running away just as he had found it.
"If only this new dodge
for talking along a wire had been a little bit nearer perfection I might have told you all this from town,
and been toasting my toes before the club fire at this minute,
instead of tramping after you through the snow,"
he grumbled,
disguising a real irritation under the pretence of it;
and at this opening Madame Olenska twisted the talk away
to the fantastic possibility that they might one day actually converse
with each other from street
to street,
or even-- incredible dream!--from one town
to another.
This struck from all three allusions
to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne,
and such platitudes as naturally rise
to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking against time,
and dealing
with a new invention in which it would seem ingenuous
to believe too soon;
and the question of the telephone carried them safely back
to the big house.
Mrs.van der Luyden had not yet returned;
and Archer took his leave and walked off
to fetch the cutter,
while Beaufort followed the Countess Olenska indoors.
It was probable that,
little as the van der Luydens encouraged unannounced visits,
he could count on being asked
to dine,
and sent back
to the station
to catch the nine o'clock train;
but more than that he would certainly not get,
for it would be inconceivable
to his hosts that a gentleman travelling without luggage should wish
to spend the night,
and distasteful
to them
to propose it
to a person
with whom they were on terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.
Beaufort knew all this,
and must have foreseen it;
and his taking the long journey
for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience.
He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska;
and Beaufort had only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women.
His dull and childless home had long since palled on him;
and in addition
to more permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in his own set.
This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly flying:
the question was whether she had fled because his importunities displeased her,
or because she did not wholly trust herself
to resist them;
unless,
indeed,
all her talk of flight had been a blind,
and her departure no more than a manoeuvre.
Archer did not really believe this.
Little as he had actually seen of Madame Olenska,
he was beginning
to think that he could read her face,
and if not her face,
her voice;
and both had betrayed annoyance,
and even dismay,
at Beaufort's sudden appearance.
But,
after all,
if this were the case,
was it not worse than if she had left New York
for the express purpose of meeting him?
If she had done that,
she ceased
to be an object of interest,
she threw in her lot
with the vulgarest of dissemblers:
a woman engaged in a love affair
with Beaufort
"classed"
herself irretrievably.
No,
it was worse a thousand times if,
judging Beaufort,
and probably despising him,
she was yet drawn
to him by all that gave him an advantage over the other men about her:
his habit of two continents and two societies,
his familiar association
with artists and actors and people generally in the world's eye,
and his careless contempt
for local prejudices.
Beaufort was vulgar,
he was uneducated,
he was purse-proud;
but the circumstances of his life,
and a certain native shrewdness,
made him better worth talking
to than many men,
morally and socially his betters,
whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park.
How should any one coming from a wider world not feel the difference and be attracted by it?
Madame Olenska,
in a burst of irritation,
had said
to Archer that he and she did not talk the same language;
and the young man knew that in some respects this was true.
But Beaufort understood every turn of her dialect,
and spoke it fluently:
his view of life,
his tone,
his attitude,
were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in Count Olenski's letter.
This might seem
to be
to his disadvantage
with Count Olenski's wife;
but Archer was too intelligent
to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past.
She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it;
but what had charmed her in it would still charm her,
even though it were against her will.
Thus,
with a painful impartiality,
did the young man make out the case
for Beaufort,
and
for Beaufort's victim.
A longing
to enlighten her was strong in him;
and there were moments when he imagined that all she asked was
to be enlightened.
That evening he unpacked his books from London.
The box was full of things he had been waiting
for impatiently;
a new volume of Herbert Spencer,
another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant tales,
and a novel called
"Middlemarch,"
as
to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews.
He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast;
but though he turned the pages
with the sensuous joy of the book-lover,
he did not know what he was reading,
and one book after another dropped from his hand.
Suddenly,
among them,
he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him:
"The House of Life."
He took it up,
and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books;
so warm,
so rich,
and yet so ineffably tender,
that it gave a new and haunting beauty
to the most elementary of human passions.
All through the night he pursued through those enchanted pages the vision of a woman who had the face of Ellen Olenska;
but when he woke the next morning,
and looked out at the brownstone houses across the street,
and thought of his desk in Mr. Letterblair's office,
and the family pew in Grace Church,
his hour in the park of Skuytercliff became as far outside the pale of probability as the visions of the night.
"Mercy,
how pale you look,
Newland!"
Janey commented over the coffee-cups at breakfast;
and his mother added:
"Newland,
dear,
I've noticed lately that you've been coughing;
I do hope you're not letting yourself be overworked?"
For it was the conviction of both ladies that,
under the iron despotism of his senior partners,
the young man's life was spent in the most exhausting professional labours--and he had never thought it necessary
to undeceive them.
The next two or three days dragged by heavily.
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth,
and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
He heard nothing of the Countess Olenska,
or of the perfect little house,
and though he met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the whist-tables.
It was not till the fourth evening that he found a note awaiting him on his return home.
"Come late tomorrow:
I must explain
to you.
Ellen."
These were the only words it contained.
The young man,
who was dining out,
thrust the note into his pocket,
smiling a little at the Frenchness of the
"to you."
After dinner he went
to a play;
and it was not until his return home,
after midnight,
that he drew Madame Olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a number of times.
There were several ways of answering it,
and he gave considerable thought
to each one during the watches of an agitated night.
That on which,
when morning came,
he finally decided was
to pitch some clothes into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was leaving that very afternoon
for St. Augustine.
XVI.
When Archer walked down the sandy main street of St. Augustine
to the house which had been pointed out
to him as Mr. Welland's,
and saw May Welland standing under a magnolia
with the sun in her hair,
he wondered why he had waited so long
to come.
Here was the truth,
here was reality,
here was the life that belonged
to him;
and he,
who fancied himself so scornful of arbitrary restraints,
had been afraid
to break away from his desk because of what people might think of his stealing a holiday! Her first exclamation was:
"Newland--has anything happened?"
and it occurred
to him that it would have been more
"feminine"
if she had instantly read in his eyes why he had come.
But when he answered:
"Yes--I found I had
to see you,"
her happy blushes took the chill from her surprise,
and he saw how easily he would be forgiven,
and how soon even Mr. Letterblair's mild disapproval would be smiled away by a tolerant family.
Early as it was,
the main street was no place
for any but formal greetings,
and Archer longed
to be alone
with May,
and
to pour out all his tenderness and his impatience.
It still lacked an hour
to the late Welland breakfast-time,
and instead of asking him
to come in she proposed that they should walk out
to an old orange-garden beyond the town.
She had just been
for a row on the river,
and the sun that netted the little waves
with gold seemed
to have caught her in its meshes.
Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered like silver wire;
and her eyes too looked lighter,
almost pale in their youthful limpidity.
As she walked beside Archer
with her long swinging gait her face wore the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete.
To Archer's strained nerves the vision was as soothing as the sight of the blue sky and the lazy river.
They sat down on a bench under the orange-trees and he put his arm about her and kissed her.
It was like drinking at a cold spring
with the sun on it;
but his pressure may have been more vehement than he had intended,
for the blood rose
to her face and she drew back as if he had startled her.
"What is it?"
he asked,
smiling;
and she looked at him
with surprise,
and answered:
"Nothing."
A slight embarrassment fell on them,
and her hand slipped out of his.
It was the only time that he had kissed her on the lips except
for their fugitive embrace in the Beaufort conservatory,
and he saw that she was disturbed,
and shaken out of her cool boyish composure.
"Tell me what you do all day,"
he said,
crossing his arms under his tilted-back head,
and pushing his hat forward
to screen the sun-dazzle.
To let her talk about familiar and simple things was the easiest way of carrying on his own independent train of thought;
and he sat listening
to her simple chronicle of swimming,
sailing and riding,
varied by an occasional dance at the primitive inn when a man-of-war came in.
A few pleasant people from Philadelphia and Baltimore were picknicking at the inn,
and the Selfridge Merrys had come down
for three weeks because Kate Merry had had bronchitis.
They were planning
to lay out a lawn tennis court on the sands;
but no one but Kate and May had racquets,
and most of the people had not even heard of the game.
All this kept her very busy,
and she had not had time
to do more than look at the little vellum book that Archer had sent her the week before
(the
"Sonnets from the Portuguese");
but she was learning by heart
"How they brought the Good News from Ghent
to Aix,"
because it was one of the first things he had ever read
to her;
and it amused her
to be able
to tell him that Kate Merry had never even heard of a poet called Robert Browning.
Presently she started up,
exclaiming that they would be late
for breakfast;
and they hurried back
to the tumble-down house
with its pointless porch and unpruned hedge of plumbago and pink geraniums where the Wellands were installed
for the winter.
Mr.Welland's sensitive domesticity shrank from the discomforts of the slovenly southern hotel,
and at immense expense,
and in face of almost insuperable difficulties,
Mrs.Welland was obliged,
year after year,
to improvise an establishment partly made up of discontented New York servants and partly drawn from the local African supply.
"The doctors want my husband
to feel that he is in his own home;
otherwise he would be so wretched that the climate would not do him any good,"
she explained,
winter after winter,
to the sympathising Philadelphians and Baltimoreans;
and Mr. Welland,
beaming across a breakfast table miraculously supplied
with the most varied delicacies,
was presently saying
to Archer:
"You see,
my dear fellow,
we camp--we literally camp.
I tell my wife and May that I want
to teach them how
to rough it."
Mr.and Mrs. Welland had been as much surprised as their daughter by the young man's sudden arrival;
but it had occurred
to him
to explain that he had felt himself on the verge of a nasty cold,
and this seemed
to Mr. Welland an all-sufficient reason
for abandoning any duty.
"You can't be too careful,
especially toward spring,"
he said,
heaping his plate
with straw-coloured griddle- cakes and drowning them in golden syrup.
"If I'd only been as prudent at your age May would have been dancing at the Assemblies now,
instead of spending her winters in a wilderness
with an old invalid."
"Oh,
but I love it here,
Papa;
you know I do.
If only Newland could stay I should like it a thousand times better than New York."
"Newland must stay till he has quite thrown off his cold,"
said Mrs. Welland indulgently;
and the young man laughed,
and said he supposed there was such a thing as one's profession.
He managed,
however,
after an exchange of telegrams
with the firm,
to make his cold last a week;
and it shed an ironic light on the situation
to know that Mr. Letterblair's indulgence was partly due
to the satisfactory way in which his brilliant young junior partner had settled the troublesome matter of the Olenski divorce.
Mr.Letterblair had let Mrs. Welland know that Mr. Archer had
"rendered an invaluable service"
to the whole family,
and that old Mrs. Manson Mingott had been particularly pleased;
and one day when May had gone
for a drive
with her father in the only vehicle the place produced Mrs. Welland took occasion
to touch on a topic which she always avoided in her daughter's presence.
"I'm afraid Ellen's ideas are not at all like ours.
She was barely eighteen when Medora Manson took her back
to Europe--you remember the excitement when she appeared in black at her coming-out ball?
Another of Medora's fads--really this time it was almost prophetic! That must have been at least twelve years ago;
and since then Ellen has never been
to America.
No wonder she is completely Europeanised."
"But European society is not given
to divorce:
Countess Olenska thought she would be conforming
to American ideas in asking
for her freedom."
It was the first time that the young man had pronounced her name since he had left Skuytercliff,
and he felt the colour rise
to his cheek.
Mrs.Welland smiled compassionately.
"That is just like the extraordinary things that foreigners invent about us.
They think we dine at two o'clock and countenance divorce! That is why it seems
to me so foolish
to entertain them when they come
to New York.
They accept our hospitality,
and then they go home and repeat the same stupid stories."
Archer made no comment on this,
and Mrs. Welland continued:
"But we do most thoroughly appreciate your persuading Ellen
to give up the idea.
Her grandmother and her uncle Lovell could do nothing
with her;
both of them have written that her changing her mind was entirely due
to your influence--in fact she said so
to her grandmother.
She has an unbounded admiration
for you.
Poor Ellen--she was always a wayward child.
I wonder what her fate will be?"
"What we've all contrived
to make it,"
he felt like answering.
"if you'd all of you rather she should be Beaufort's mistress than some decent fellow's wife you've certainly gone the right way about it."
He wondered what Mrs. Welland would have said if he had uttered the words instead of merely thinking them.
He could picture the sudden decomposure of her firm placid features,
to which a lifelong mastery over trifles had given an air of factitious authority.
Traces still lingered on them of a fresh beauty like her daughter's;
and he asked himself if May's face was doomed
to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence.
Ah,
no,
he did not want May
to have that kind of innocence,
the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!
"I verily believe,"
Mrs.Welland continued,
"that if the horrible business had come out in the newspapers it would have been my husband's death-blow.
I don't know any of the details;
I only ask not to,
as I told poor Ellen when she tried
to talk
to me about it.
Having an invalid
to care for,
I have
to keep my mind bright and happy.
But Mr. Welland was terribly upset;
he had a slight temperature every morning while we were waiting
to hear what had been decided.
It was the horror of his girl's learning that such things were possible--but of course,
dear Newland,
you felt that too.
We all knew that you were thinking of May."
"I'm always thinking of May,"
the young man rejoined,
rising
to cut short the conversation.
He had meant
to seize the opportunity of his private talk
with Mrs. Welland
to urge her
to advance the date of his marriage.
But he could think of no arguments that would move her,
and
with a sense of relief he saw Mr. Welland and May driving up
to the door.
His only hope was
to plead again
with May,
and on the day before his departure he walked
with her
to the ruinous garden of the Spanish Mission.
The background lent itself
to allusions
to European scenes;
and May,
who was looking her loveliest under a wide-brimmed hat that cast a shadow of mystery over her too-clear eyes,
kindled into eagerness as he spoke of Granada and the Alhambra.
"We might be seeing it all this spring--even the Easter ceremonies at Seville,"
he urged,
exaggerating his demands in the hope of a larger concession.
"Easter in Seville?
And it will be Lent next week!"
she laughed.
"Why shouldn't we be married in Lent?"
he rejoined;
but she looked so shocked that he saw his mistake.
"Of course I didn't mean that,
dearest;
but soon after Easter--so that we could sail at the end of April.
I know I could arrange it at the office."
She smiled dreamily upon the possibility;
but he perceived that
to dream of it sufficed her.
It was like hearing him read aloud out of his poetry books the beautiful things that could not possibly happen in real life.
"Oh,
do go on,
Newland;
I do love your descriptions."
"But why should they be only descriptions?
Why shouldn't we make them real?"
"We shall,
dearest,
of course;
next year."
Her voice lingered over it.
"Don't you want them
to be real sooner?
Can't I persuade you
to break away now?"
She bowed her head,
vanishing from him under her conniving hat-brim.
"Why should we dream away another year?
Look at me,
dear! Don't you understand how I want you
for my wife?"
For a moment she remained motionless;
then she raised on him eyes of such despairing dearness that he half-released her waist from his hold.
But suddenly her look changed and deepened inscrutably.
"I'm not sure if I DO understand,"
she said.
"Is it--is it because you're not certain of continuing
to care
for me?"
Archer sprang up from his seat.
"My God--perhaps--I don't know,"
he broke out angrily.
May Welland rose also;
as they faced each other she seemed
to grow in womanly stature and dignity.
Both were silent
for a moment,
as if dismayed by the unforeseen trend of their words:
then she said in a low voice:
"If that is it--is there some one else?"
"Some one else--between you and me?"
He echoed her words slowly,
as though they were only half- intelligible and he wanted time
to repeat the question
to himself.
She seemed
to catch the uncertainty of his voice,
for she went on in a deepening tone:
"Let us talk frankly,
Newland.
Sometimes I've felt a difference in you;
especially since our engagement has been announced."
"Dear--what madness!"
he recovered himself
to exclaim.
She met his protest
with a faint smile.
"If it is,
it won't hurt us
to talk about it."
She paused,
and added,
lifting her head
with one of her noble movements:
"Or even if it's true:
why shouldn't we speak of it?
You might so easily have made a mistake."
He lowered his head,
staring at the black leaf-pattern on the sunny path at their feet.
"Mistakes are always easy
to make;
but if I had made one of the kind you suggest,
is it likely that I should be imploring you
to hasten our marriage?"
She looked downward too,
disturbing the pattern
with the point of her sunshade while she struggled
for expression.
"Yes,"
she said at length.
"You might want-- once
for all--to settle the question:
it's one way."
Her quiet lucidity startled him,
but did not mislead him into thinking her insensible.
Under her hat-brim he saw the pallor of her profile,
and a slight tremor of the nostril above her resolutely steadied lips.
"Well--?"
he questioned,
sitting down on the bench,
and looking up at her
with a frown that he tried
to make playful.
She dropped back into her seat and went on:
"You mustn't think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine.
One hears and one notices--one has one's feelings and ideas.
And of course,
long before you told me that you cared
for me,
I'd known that there was some one else you were interested in;
every one was talking about it two years ago at Newport.
And once I saw you sitting together on the verandah at a dance-- and when she came back into the house her face was sad,
and I felt sorry
for her;
I remembered it afterward,
when we were engaged."
Her voice had sunk almost
to a whisper,
and she sat clasping and unclasping her hands about the handle of her sunshade.
The young man laid his upon them
with a gentle pressure;
his heart dilated
with an inexpressible relief.
"My dear child--was THAT it?
If you only knew the truth!"
She raised her head quickly.
"Then there is a truth I don't know?"
He kept his hand over hers.
"I meant,
the truth about the old story you speak of."
"But that's what I want
to know,
Newland--what I ought
to know.
I couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong--an unfairness--to somebody else.
And I want
to believe that it would be the same
with you.
What sort of a life could we build on such foundations?"
Her face had taken on a look of such tragic courage that he felt like bowing himself down at her feet.
"I've wanted
to say this
for a long time,"
she went on.
"I've wanted
to tell you that,
when two people really love each other,
I understand that there may be situations which make it right that they should--should go against public opinion.
And if you feel yourself in any way pledged .
.
.
pledged
to the person we've spoken of .
.
.
and if there is any way .
.
.
any way in which you can fulfill your pledge .
.
.
even by her getting a divorce .
.
.
Newland,
don't give her up because of me!"
His surprise at discovering that her fears had fastened upon an episode so remote and so completely of the past as his love-affair
with Mrs. Thorley Rushworth gave way
to wonder at the generosity of her view.
There was something superhuman in an attitude so recklessly unorthodox,
and if other problems had not pressed on him he would have been lost in wonder at the prodigy of the Wellands'
daughter urging him
to marry his former mistress.
But he was still dizzy
with the glimpse of the precipice they had skirted,
and full of a new awe at the mystery of young-girlhood.
For a moment he could not speak;
then he said:
"There is no pledge--no obligation whatever--of the kind you think.
Such cases don't always--present themselves quite as simply as .
.
.
But that's no matter .
.
.
I love your generosity,
because I feel as you do about those things .
.
.
I feel that each case must be judged individually,
on its own merits .
.
.
irrespective of stupid conventionalities .
.
.
I mean,
each woman's right
to her liberty--"
He pulled himself up,
startled by the turn his thoughts had taken,
and went on,
looking at her
with a smile:
"Since you understand so many things,
dearest,
can't you go a little farther,
and understand the uselessness of our submitting
to another form of the same foolish conventionalities?
If there's no one and nothing between us,
isn't that an argument
for marrying quickly,
rather than
for more delay?"
She flushed
with joy and lifted her face
to his;
as he bent
to it he saw that her eyes were full of happy tears.
But in another moment she seemed
to have descended from her womanly eminence
to helpless and timorous girlhood;
and he understood that her courage and initiative were all
for others,
and that she had none
for herself.
It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed,
and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual,
as a too-adventurous child takes refuge in its mother's arms.
Archer had no heart
to go on pleading
with her;
he was too much disappointed at the vanishing of the new being who had cast that one deep look at him from her transparent eyes.
May seemed
to be aware of his disappointment,
but without knowing how
to alleviate it;
and they stood up and walked silently home.
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 muff;
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 Carter | | 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 bosom.
"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.
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 bosom 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 tinkle 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."
Book II 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 muff.
"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 sidedishes.
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!"
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 tramp 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 queer 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 queer 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.
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 queer 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 Fanny 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 queer 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 bosom 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 bosom 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 queer 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.
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.
XXIII.
The next morning,
when Archer got out of the Fall River train,
he emerged upon a steaming midsummer Boston.
The streets near the station were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a shirt- sleeved populace moved through them
with the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage
to the bathroom.
Archer found a cab and drove
to the Somerset Club
for breakfast.
Even the fashionable quarters had the air of untidy domesticity
to which no excess of heat ever degrades the European cities.
Care-takers in calico lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy,
and the Common looked like a pleasure-ground on the morrow of a Masonic picnic.
If Archer had tried
to imagine Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes he could not have called up any into which it was more difficult
to fit her than this heat-prostrated and deserted Boston.
He breakfasted
with appetite and method,
beginning
with a slice of melon,
and studying a morning paper while he waited
for his toast and scrambled eggs.
A new sense of energy and activity had possessed him ever since he had announced
to May the night before that he had business in Boston,
and should take the Fall River boat that night and go on
to New York the following evening.
It had always been understood that he would return
to town early in the week,
and when he got back from his expedition
to Portsmouth a letter from the office,
which fate had conspicuously placed on a corner of the hall table,
sufficed
to justify his sudden change of plan.
He was even ashamed of the ease
with which the whole thing had been done:
it reminded him,
for an uncomfortable moment,
of Lawrence Lefferts's masterly contrivances
for securing his freedom.
But this did not long trouble him,
for he was not in an analytic mood.
After breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced over the Commercial Advertiser.
While he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came in,
and the usual greetings were exchanged:
it was the same world after all,
though he had such a queer sense of having slipped through the meshes of time and space.
He looked at his watch,
and finding that it was half-past nine got up and went into the writing-room.
There he wrote a few lines,
and ordered a messenger
to take a cab
to the Parker House and wait
for the answer.
He then sat down behind another newspaper and tried
to calculate how long it would take a cab
to get
to the Parker House.
"The lady was out,
sir,"
he suddenly heard a waiter's voice at his elbow;
and he stammered:
"Out?--"
as if it were a word in a strange language.
He got up and went into the hall.
It must be a mistake:
she could not be out at that hour.
He flushed
with anger at his own stupidity:
why had he not sent the note as soon as he arrived?
He found his hat and stick and went forth into the street.
The city had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty as if he were a traveller from distant lands.
For a moment he stood on the door-step hesitating;
then he decided
to go
to the Parker House.
What if the messenger had been misinformed,
and she were still there?
He started
to walk across the Common;
and on the first bench,
under a tree,
he saw her sitting.
She had a grey silk sunshade over her head--how could he ever have imagined her
with a pink one?
As he approached he was struck by her listless attitude:
she sat there as if she had nothing else
to do.
He saw her drooping profile,
and the knot of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat,
and the long wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade.
He came a step or two nearer,
and she turned and looked at him.
"Oh"--she said;
and
for the first time he noticed a startled look on her face;
but in another moment it gave way
to a slow smile of wonder and contentment.
"Oh"--she murmured again,
on a different note,
as he stood looking down at her;
and without rising she made a place
for him on the bench.
"I'm here on business--just got here,"
Archer explained;
and,
without knowing why,
he suddenly began
to feign astonishment at seeing her.
"But what on earth are you doing in this wilderness?"
He had really no idea what he was saying:
he felt as if he were shouting at her across endless distances,
and she might vanish again before he could overtake her.
"I?
Oh,
I'm here on business too,"
she answered,
turning her head toward him so that they were face
to face.
The words hardly reached him:
he was aware only of her voice,
and of the startling fact that not an echo of it had remained in his memory.
He had not even remembered that it was low-pitched,
with a faint roughness on the consonants.
"You do your hair differently,"
he said,
his heart beating as if he had uttered something irrevocable.
"Differently?
No--it's only that I do it as best I can when I'm without Nastasia."
"Nastasia;
but isn't she
with you?"
"No;
I'm alone.
For two days it was not worth while
to bring her."
"You're alone--at the Parker House?"
She looked at him
with a flash of her old malice.
"Does it strike you as dangerous?"
"No;
not dangerous--"
"But unconventional?
I see;
I suppose it is."
She considered a moment.
"I hadn't thought of it,
because I've just done something so much more unconventional."
The faint tinge of irony lingered in her eyes.
"I've just refused
to take back a sum of money--that belonged
to me."
Archer sprang up and moved a step or two away.
She had furled her parasol and sat absently drawing patterns on the gravel.
Presently he came back and stood before her.
"Some one--has come here
to meet you?"
"Yes."
"With this offer?"
She nodded.
"And you refused--because of the conditions?"
"I refused,"
she said after a moment.
He sat down by her again.
"What were the conditions?"
"Oh,
they were not onerous:
just
to sit at the head of his table now and then."
There was another interval of silence.
Archer's heart had slammed itself shut in the queer way it had,
and he sat vainly groping
for a word.
"He wants you back--at any price?"
"Well--a considerable price.
At least the sum is considerable
for me."
He paused again,
beating about the question he felt he must put.
"It was
to meet him here that you came?"
She stared,
and then burst into a laugh.
"Meet him--my husband?
HERE?
At this season he's always at Cowes or Baden."
"He sent some one?"
"Yes."
"With a letter?"
She shook her head.
"No;
just a message.
He never writes.
I don't think I've had more than one letter from him."
The allusion brought the colour
to her cheek,
and it reflected itself in Archer's vivid blush.
"Why does he never write?"
"Why should he?
What does one have secretaries for?"
The young man's blush deepened.
She had pronounced the word as if it had no more significance than any other in her vocabulary.
For a moment it was on the tip of his tongue
to ask:
"Did he send his secretary,
then?"
But the remembrance of Count Olenski's only letter
to his wife was too present
to him.
He paused again,
and then took another plunge.
"And the person?"
--
"The emissary?
The emissary,"
Madame Olenska rejoined,
still smiling,
"might,
for all I care,
have left already;
but he has insisted on waiting till this evening .
.
.
in case .
.
.
on the chance .
.
."
"And you came out here
to think the chance over?"
"I came out
to get a breath of air.
The hotel's too stifling.
I'm taking the afternoon train back
to Portsmouth."
They sat silent,
not looking at each other,
but straight ahead at the people passing along the path.
Finally she turned her eyes again
to his face and said:
"You're not changed."
He felt like answering:
"I was,
till I saw you again;"
but instead he stood up abruptly and glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park.
"This is horrible.
Why shouldn't we go out a little on the bay?
There's a breeze,
and it will be cooler.
We might take the steamboat down
to Point Arley."
She glanced up at him hesitatingly and he went on:
"On a Monday morning there won't be anybody on the boat.
My train doesn't leave till evening:
I'm going back
to New York.
Why shouldn't we?"
he insisted,
looking down at her;
and suddenly he broke out:
"Haven't we done all we could?"
"Oh"--she murmured again.
She stood up and reopened her sunshade,
glancing about her as if
to take counsel of the scene,
and assure herself of the impossibility of remaining in it.
Then her eyes returned
to his face.
"You mustn't say things like that
to me,"
she said.
"I'll say anything you like;
or nothing.
I won't open my mouth unless you tell me to.
What harm can it do
to anybody?
All I want is
to listen
to you,"
he stammered.
She drew out a little gold-faced watch on an enamelled chain.
"Oh,
don't calculate,"
he broke out;
"give me the day! I want
to get you away from that man.
At what time was he coming?"
Her colour rose again.
"At eleven."
"Then you must come at once."
"You needn't be afraid--if I don't come."
"Nor you either--if you do.
I swear I only want
to hear about you,
to know what you've been doing.
It's a hundred years since we've met--it may be another hundred before we meet again."
She still wavered,
her anxious eyes on his face.
"Why didn't you come down
to the beach
to fetch me,
the day I was at Granny's?"
she asked.
"Because you didn't look round--because you didn't know I was there.
I swore I wouldn't unless you looked round."
He laughed as the childishness of the confession struck him.
"But I didn't look round on purpose."
"On purpose?"
"I knew you were there;
when you drove in I recognised the ponies.
So I went down
to the beach."
"To get away from me as far as you could?"
She repeated in a low voice:
"To get away from you as far as I could."
He laughed out again,
this time in boyish satisfaction.
"Well,
you see it's no use.
I may as well tell you,"
he added,
"that the business I came here
for was just
to find you.
But,
look here,
we must start or we shall miss our boat."
"Our boat?"
She frowned perplexedly,
and then smiled.
"Oh,
but I must go back
to the hotel first:
I must leave a note--"
"As many notes as you please.
You can write here."
He drew out a note-case and one of the new stylographic pens.
"I've even got an envelope--you see how everything's predestined! There--steady the thing on your knee,
and I'll get the pen going in a second.
They have
to be humoured;
wait--"
He banged the hand that held the pen against the back of the bench.
"It's like jerking down the mercury in a thermometer:
just a trick.
Now try--"
She laughed,
and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on his note-case,
began
to write.
Archer walked away a few steps,
staring
with radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby,
who,
in their turn,
paused
to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably- dressed lady writing a note on her knee on a bench in the Common.
Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope,
wrote a name on it,
and put it into her pocket.
Then she too stood up.
They walked back toward Beacon Street,
and near the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined
"herdic"
which had carried his note
to the Parker House,
and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant.
"I told you everything was predestined! Here's a cab
for us.
You see!"
They laughed,
astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour,
and in that unlikely spot,
in a city where cab-stands were still a
"foreign"
novelty.
Archer,
looking at his watch,
saw that there was time
to drive
to the Parker House before going
to the steamboat landing.
They rattled through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel.
Archer held out his hand
for the letter.
"Shall I take it in?"
he asked;
but Madame Olenska,
shaking her head,
sprang out and disappeared through the glazed doors.
It was barely half-past ten;
but what if the emissary,
impatient
for her reply,
and not knowing how else
to employ his time,
were already seated among the travellers
with cooling drinks at their elbows of whom Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in?
He waited,
pacing up and down before the herdic.
A Sicilian youth
with eyes like Nastasia's offered
to shine his boots,
and an Irish matron
to sell him peaches;
and every few moments the doors opened
to let out hot men
with straw hats tilted far back,
who glanced at him as they went by.
He marvelled that the door should open so often,
and that all the people it let out should look so like each other,
and so like all the other hot men who,
at that hour,
through the length and breadth of the land,
were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of hotels.
And then,
suddenly,
came a face that he could not relate
to the other faces.
He caught but a flash of it,
for his pacings had carried him
to the farthest point of his beat,
and it was in turning back
to the hotel that he saw,
in a group of typical countenances--the lank and weary,
the round and surprised,
the lantern-jawed and mild--this other face that was so many more things at once,
and things so different.
It was that of a young man,
pale too,
and half-extinguished by the heat,
or worry,
or both,
but somehow,
quicker,
vivider,
more conscious;
or perhaps seeming so because he was so different.
Archer hung a moment on a thin thread of memory,
but it snapped and floated off
with the disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign business man,
looking doubly foreign in such a setting.
He vanished in the stream of passersby,
and Archer resumed his patrol.
He did not care
to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel,
and his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him
to conclude that,
if Madame Olenska was so long in reappearing,
it could only be because she had met the emissary and been waylaid by him.
At the thought Archer's apprehension rose
to anguish.
"If she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her,"
he said.
The doors swung open again and she was at his side.
They got into the herdic,
and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had been absent just three minutes.
In the clatter of loose windows that made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones
to the wharf.
Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything
to say
to each other,
or rather that what they had
to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation.
As the paddle-wheels began
to turn,
and wharves and shipping
to recede through the veil of heat,
it seemed
to Archer that everything in the old familiar world of habit was receding also.
He longed
to ask Madame Olenska if she did not have the same feeling:
the feeling that they were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return.
But he was afraid
to say it,
or anything else that might disturb the delicate balance of her trust in him.
In reality he had no wish
to betray that trust.
There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips;
the day before even,
on the drive
to Portsmouth,
the thought of her had run through him like fire;
but now that she was beside him,
and they were drifting forth into this unknown world,
they seemed
to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder.
As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations,
then into ripples tipped
with spray.
The fog of sultriness still hung over the city,
but ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters,
and distant promontories
with light-houses in the sun.
Madame Olenska,
leaning back against the boat-rail,
drank in the coolness between parted lips.
She had wound a long veil about her hat,
but it left her face uncovered,
and Archer was struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression.
She seemed
to take their adventure as a matter of course,
and
to be neither in fear of unexpected encounters,
nor
(what was worse)
unduly elated by their possibility.
In the bare dining-room of the inn,
which he had hoped they would have
to themselves,
they found a strident party of innocent-looking young men and women--school-teachers on a holiday,
the landlord told them--and Archer's heart sank at the idea of having
to talk through their noise.
"This is hopeless--I'll ask
for a private room,"
he said;
and Madame Olenska,
without offering any objection,
waited while he went in search of it.
The room opened on a long wooden verandah,
with the sea coming in at the windows.
It was bare and cool,
with a table covered
with a coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles and a blueberry pie under a cage.
No more guileless-looking cabinet particulier ever offered its shelter
to a clandestine couple:
Archer fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile
with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite
to him.
A woman who had run away from her husband-- and reputedly
with another man--was likely
to have mastered the art of taking things
for granted;
but something in the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony.
By being so quiet,
so unsurprised and so simple she had managed
to brush away the conventions and make him feel that
to seek
to be alone was the natural thing
for two old friends who had so much
to say
to each other.
.
.
.
XXIV.
They lunched slowly and meditatively,
with mute intervals between rushes of talk;
for,
the spell once broken,
they had much
to say,
and yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment
to long duologues of silence.
Archer kept the talk from his own affairs,
not
with conscious intention but because he did not want
to miss a word of her history;
and leaning on the table,
her chin resting on her clasped hands,
she talked
to him of the year and a half since they had met.
She had grown tired of what people called
"society";
New York was kind,
it was almost oppressively hospitable;
she should never forget the way in which it had welcomed her back;
but after the first flush of novelty she had found herself,
as she phrased it,
too
"different"
to care
for the things it cared about--and so she had decided
to try Washington,
where one was supposed
to meet more varieties of people and of opinion.
And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington,
and make a home there
for poor Medora,
who had worn out the patience of all her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after and protecting from matrimonial perils.
"But Dr. Carver--aren't you afraid of Dr. Carver?
I hear he's been staying
with you at the Blenkers'."
She smiled.
"Oh,
the Carver danger is over.
Dr.Carver is a very clever man.
He wants a rich wife
to finance his plans,
and Medora is simply a good advertisement as a convert."
"A convert
to what?"
"To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes.
But,
do you know,
they interest me more than the blind conformity
to tradition--somebody else's tradition--that I see among our own friends.
It seems stupid
to have discovered America only
to make it into a copy of another country."
She smiled across the table.
"Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just
to go
to the Opera
with the Selfridge Merrys?"
Archer changed colour.
"And Beaufort--do you say these things
to Beaufort?"
he asked abruptly.
"I haven't seen him
for a long time.
But I used to;
and he understands."
"Ah,
it's what I've always told you;
you don't like us.
And you like Beaufort because he's so unlike us."
He looked about the bare room and out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung along the shore.
"We're damnably dull.
We've no character,
no colour,
no variety.--I wonder,"
he broke out,
"why you don't go back?"
Her eyes darkened,
and he expected an indignant rejoinder.
But she sat silent,
as if thinking over what he had said,
and he grew frightened lest she should answer that she wondered too.
At length she said:
"I believe it's because of you."
It was impossible
to make the confession more dispassionately,
or in a tone less encouraging
to the vanity of the person addressed.
Archer reddened
to the temples,
but dared not move or speak:
it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings,
but that might gather a flock about it if it were left undisturbed.
"At least,"
she continued,
"it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared
for in my other life look cheap in comparison.
I don't know how
to explain myself"--she drew together her troubled brows--
"but it seems as if I'd never before understood
with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid."
"Exquisite pleasures--it's something
to have had them!"
he felt like retorting;
but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent.
"I want,"
she went on,
"to be perfectly honest
with you--and
with myself.
For a long time I've hoped this chance would come:
that I might tell you how you've helped me,
what you've made of me--"
Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows.
He interrupted her
with a laugh.
"And what do you make out that you've made of me?"
She paled a little.
"Of you?"
"Yes:
for I'm of your making much more than you ever were of mine.
I'm the man who married one woman because another one told him to."
Her paleness turned
to a fugitive flush.
"I thought-- you promised--you were not
to say such things today."
"Ah--how like a woman! None of you will ever see a bad business through!"
She lowered her voice.
"IS it a bad business--for May?"
He stood in the window,
drumming against the raised sash,
and feeling in every fibre the wistful tenderness
with which she had spoken her cousin's name.
"For that's the thing we've always got
to think of-- haven't we--by your own showing?"
she insisted.
"My own showing?"
he echoed,
his blank eyes still on the sea.
"Or if not,"
she continued,
pursuing her own thought
with a painful application,
"if it's not worth while
to have given up,
to have missed things,
so that others may be saved from disillusionment and misery--then everything I came home for,
everything that made my other life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there took account of them--all these things are a sham or a dream--"
He turned around without moving from his place.
"And in that case there's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back?"
he concluded
for her.
Her eyes were clinging
to him desperately.
"Oh,
IS there no reason?"
"Not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage.
My marriage,"
he said savagely,
"isn't going
to be a sight
to keep you here."
She made no answer,
and he went on:
"What's the use?
You gave me my first glimpse of a real life,
and at the same moment you asked me
to go on
with a sham one.
It's beyond human enduring--that's all."
"Oh,
don't say that;
when I'm enduring it!"
she burst out,
her eyes filling.
Her arms had dropped along the table,
and she sat
with her face abandoned
to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril.
The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person,
with the soul behind it:
Archer stood dumb,
overwhelmed by what it suddenly told him.
"You too--oh,
all this time,
you too?"
For answer,
she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly downward.
Half the width of the room was still between them,
and neither made any show of moving.
Archer was conscious of a curious indifference
to her bodily presence:
he would hardly have been aware of it if one of the hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the occasion when,
in the little Twenty- third Street house,
he had kept his eye on it in order not
to look at her face.
Now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex;
but still he made no effort
to draw nearer.
He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them;
but this passion that was closer than his bones was not
to be superficially satisfied.
His one terror was
to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words;
his one thought,
that he should never again feel quite alone.
But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him.
There they were,
close together and safe and shut in;
yet so chained
to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart.
"What's the use--when you will go back?"
he broke out,
a great hopeless HOW ON EARTH CAN I KEEP YOU?
crying out
to her beneath his words.
She sat motionless,
with lowered lids.
"Oh--I shan't go yet!"
"Not yet?
Some time,
then?
Some time that you already foresee?"
At that she raised her clearest eyes.
"I promise you:
not as long as you hold out.
Not as long as we can look straight at each other like this."
He dropped into his chair.
What her answer really said was:
"If you lift a finger you'll drive me back:
back
to all the abominations you know of,
and all the temptations you half guess."
He understood it as clearly as if she had uttered the words,
and the thought kept him anchored
to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred submission.
"What a life
for you!--"
he groaned.
"Oh--as long as it's a part of yours."
"And mine a part of yours?"
She nodded.
"And that's
to be all--for either of us?"
"Well;
it IS all,
isn't it?"
At that he sprang up,
forgetting everything but the sweetness of her face.
She rose too,
not as if
to meet him or
to flee from him,
but quietly,
as though the worst of the task were done and she had only
to wait;
so quietly that,
as he came close,
her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide
to him.
They fell into his,
while her arms,
extended but not rigid,
kept him far enough off
to let her surrendered face say the rest.
They may have stood in that way
for a long time,
or only
for a few moments;
but it was long enough
for her silence
to communicate all she had
to say,
and
for him
to feel that only one thing mattered.
He must do nothing
to make this meeting their last;
he must leave their future in her care,
asking only that she should keep fast hold of it.
"Don't--don't be unhappy,"
she said,
with a break in her voice,
as she drew her hands away;
and he answered:
"You won't go back--you won't go back?"
as if it were the one possibility he could not bear.
"I won't go back,"
she said;
and turning away she opened the door and led the way into the public dining-room.
The strident school-teachers were gathering up their possessions preparatory
to a straggling flight
to the wharf;
across the beach lay the white steam-boat at the pier;
and over the sunlit waters Boston loomed in a line of haze.
XXV.
Once more on the boat,
and in the presence of others,
Archer felt a tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him.
The day,
according
to any current valuation,
had been a rather ridiculous failure;
he had not so much as touched Madame Olenska's hand
with his lips,
or extracted one word from her that gave promise of farther opportunities.
Nevertheless,
for a man sick
with unsatisfied love,
and parting
for an indefinite period from the object of his passion,
he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted.
It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty
to others and their honesty
to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquillized him;
a balance not artfully calculated,
as her tears and her falterings showed,
but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity.
It filled him
with a tender awe,
now the danger was over,
and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity,
no sense of playing a part before sophisticated witnesses,
had tempted him
to tempt her.
Even after they had clasped hands
for good-bye at the Fall River station,
and he had turned away alone,
the conviction remained
with him of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed.
He wandered back
to the club,
and went and sat alone in the deserted library,
turning and turning over in his thoughts every separate second of their hours together.
It was clear
to him,
and it grew more clear under closer scrutiny,
that if she should finally decide on returning
to Europe--returning
to her husband--it would not be because her old life tempted her,
even on the new terms offered.
No:
she would go only if she felt herself becoming a temptation
to Archer,
a temptation
to fall away from the standard they had both set up.
Her choice would be
to stay near him as long as he did not ask her
to come nearer;
and it depended on himself
to keep her just there,
safe but secluded.
In the train these thoughts were still
with him.
They enclosed him in a kind of golden haze,
through which the faces about him looked remote and indistinct:
he had a feeling that if he spoke
to his fellow-travellers they would not understand what he was saying.
In this state of abstraction he found himself,
the following morning,
waking
to the reality of a stifling September day in New York.
The heat-withered faces in the long train streamed past him,
and he continued
to stare at them through the same golden blur;
but suddenly,
as he left the station,
one of the faces detached itself,
came closer and forced itself upon his consciousness.
It was,
as he instantly recalled,
the face of the young man he had seen,
the day before,
passing out of the Parker House,
and had noted as not conforming
to type,
as not having an American hotel face.
The same thing struck him now;
and again he became aware of a dim stir of former associations.
The young man stood looking about him
with the dazed air of the foreigner flung upon the harsh mercies of American travel;
then he advanced toward Archer,
lifted his hat,
and said in English:
"Surely,
Monsieur,
we met in London?"
"Ah,
to be sure:
in London!"
Archer grasped his hand
with curiosity and sympathy.
"So you DID get here,
after all?"
he exclaimed,
casting a wondering eye on the astute and haggard little countenance of young Carfry's French tutor.
"Oh,
I got here--yes,"
M.
Riviere smiled
with drawn lips.
"But not
for long;
I return the day after tomorrow."
He stood grasping his light valise in one neatly gloved hand,
and gazing anxiously,
perplexedly,
almost appealingly,
into Archer's face.
"I wonder,
Monsieur,
since I've had the good luck
to run across you,
if I might--"
"I was just going
to suggest it:
come
to luncheon,
won't you?
Down town,
I mean:
if you'll look me up in my office I'll take you
to a very decent restaurant in that quarter."
M.
Riviere was visibly touched and surprised.
"You're too kind.
But I was only going
to ask if you would tell me how
to reach some sort of conveyance.
There are no porters,
and no one here seems
to listen--"
"I know:
our American stations must surprise you.
When you ask
for a porter they give you chewing-gum.
But if you'll come along I'll extricate you;
and you must really lunch
with me,
you know."
The young man,
after a just perceptible hesitation,
replied,
with profuse thanks,
and in a tone that did not carry complete conviction,
that he was already engaged;
but when they had reached the comparative reassurance of the street he asked if he might call that afternoon.
Archer,
at ease in the midsummer leisure of the office,
fixed an hour and scribbled his address,
which the Frenchman pocketed
with reiterated thanks and a wide flourish of his hat.
A horse-car received him,
and Archer walked away.
Punctually at the hour M.
Riviere appeared,
shaved,
smoothed-out,
but still unmistakably drawn and serious.
Archer was alone in his office,
and the young man,
before accepting the seat he proffered,
began abruptly:
"I believe I saw you,
sir,
yesterday in Boston."
The statement was insignificant enough,
and Archer was about
to frame an assent when his words were checked by something mysterious yet illuminating in his visitor's insistent gaze.
"It is extraordinary,
very extraordinary,"
M.
Riviere continued,
"that we should have met in the circumstances in which I find myself."
"What circumstances?"
Archer asked,
wondering a little crudely if he needed money.
M.
Riviere continued
to study him
with tentative eyes.
"I have come,
not
to look
for employment,
as I spoke of doing when we last met,
but on a special mission--"
"Ah--!"
Archer exclaimed.
In a flash the two meetings had connected themselves in his mind.
He paused
to take in the situation thus suddenly lighted up
for him,
and M.
Riviere also remained silent,
as if aware that what he had said was enough.
"A special mission,"
Archer at length repeated.
The young Frenchman,
opening his palms,
raised them slightly,
and the two men continued
to look at each other across the office-desk till Archer roused himself
to say:
"Do sit down";
whereupon M.
Riviere bowed,
took a distant chair,
and again waited.
"It was about this mission that you wanted
to consult me?"
Archer finally asked.
M.
Riviere bent his head.
"Not in my own behalf:
on that score I--I have fully dealt
with myself.
I should like--if I may--to speak
to you about the Countess Olenska."
Archer had known
for the last few minutes that the words were coming;
but when they came they sent the blood rushing
to his temples as if he had been caught by a bent-back branch in a thicket.
"And on whose behalf,"
he said,
"do you wish
to do this?"
M.
Riviere met the question sturdily.
"Well--I might say HERS,
if it did not sound like a liberty.
Shall I say instead:
on behalf of abstract justice?"
Archer considered him ironically.
"In other words:
you are Count Olenski's messenger?"
He saw his blush more darkly reflected in M.
Riviere's sallow countenance.
"Not
to YOU,
Monsieur.
If I come
to you,
it is on quite other grounds."
"What right have you,
in the circumstances,
to BE on any other ground?"
Archer retorted.
"If you're an emissary you're an emissary."
The young man considered.
"My mission is over:
as far as the Countess Olenska goes,
it has failed."
"I can't help that,"
Archer rejoined on the same note of irony.
"No:
but you can help--"
M.
Riviere paused,
turned his hat about in his still carefully gloved hands,
looked into its lining and then back at Archer's face.
"You can help,
Monsieur,
I am convinced,
to make it equally a failure
with her family."
Archer pushed back his chair and stood up.
"Well-- and by God I will!"
he exclaimed.
He stood
with his hands in his pockets,
staring down wrathfully at the little Frenchman,
whose face,
though he too had risen,
was still an inch or two below the line of Archer's eyes.
M.
Riviere paled
to his normal hue:
paler than that his complexion could hardly turn.
"Why the devil,"
Archer explosively continued,
"should you have thought--since I suppose you're appealing
to me on the ground of my relationship
to Madame Olenska--that I should take a view contrary
to the rest of her family?"
The change of expression in M.
Riviere's face was
for a time his only answer.
His look passed from timidity
to absolute distress:
for a young man of his usually resourceful mien it would have been difficult
to appear more disarmed and defenceless.
"Oh,
Monsieur--"
"I can't imagine,"
Archer continued,
"why you should have come
to me when there are others so much nearer
to the Countess;
still less why you thought I should be more accessible
to the arguments I suppose you were sent over with."
M.
Riviere took this onslaught
with a disconcerting humility.
"The arguments I want
to present
to you,
Monsieur,
are my own and not those I was sent over with."
"Then I see still less reason
for listening
to them."
M.
Riviere again looked into his hat,
as if considering whether these last words were not a sufficiently broad hint
to put it on and be gone.
Then he spoke
with sudden decision.
"Monsieur--will you tell me one thing?
Is it my right
to be here that you question?
Or do you perhaps believe the whole matter
to be already closed?"
His quiet insistence made Archer feel the clumsiness of his own bluster.
M.
Riviere had succeeded in imposing himself:
Archer,
reddening slightly,
dropped into his chair again,
and signed
to the young man
to be seated.
"I beg your pardon:
but why isn't the matter closed?"
M.
Riviere gazed back at him
with anguish.
"You do,
then,
agree
with the rest of the family that,
in face of the new proposals I have brought,
it is hardly possible
for Madame Olenska not
to return
to her husband?"
"Good God!"
Archer exclaimed;
and his visitor gave out a low murmur of confirmation.
"Before seeing her,
I saw--at Count Olenski's request--Mr.
Lovell Mingott,
with whom I had several talks before going
to Boston.
I understand that he represents his mother's view;
and that Mrs. Manson Mingott's influence is great throughout her family."
Archer sat silent,
with the sense of clinging
to the edge of a sliding precipice.
The discovery that he had been excluded from a share in these negotiations,
and even from the knowledge that they were on foot,
caused him a surprise hardly dulled by the acuter wonder of what he was learning.
He saw in a flash that if the family had ceased
to consult him it was because some deep tribal instinct warned them that he was no longer on their side;
and he recalled,
with a start of comprehension,
a remark of May's during their drive home from Mrs. Manson Mingott's on the day of the Archery Meeting:
"Perhaps,
after all,
Ellen would be happier
with her husband."
Even in the tumult of new discoveries Archer remembered his indignant exclamation,
and the fact that since then his wife had never named Madame Olenska
to him.
Her careless allusion had no doubt been the straw held up
to see which way the wind blew;
the result had been reported
to the family,
and thereafter Archer had been tacitly omitted from their counsels.
He admired the tribal discipline which made May bow
to this decision.
She would not have done so,
he knew,
had her conscience protested;
but she probably shared the family view that Madame Olenska would be better off as an unhappy wife than as a separated one,
and that there was no use in discussing the case
with Newland,
who had an awkward way of suddenly not seeming
to take the most fundamental things
for granted.
Archer looked up and met his visitor's anxious gaze.
"Don't you know,
Monsieur--is it possible you don't know--that the family begin
to doubt if they have the right
to advise the Countess
to refuse her husband's last proposals?"
"The proposals you brought?"
"The proposals I brought."
It was on Archer's lips
to exclaim that whatever he knew or did not know was no concern of M.
Riviere's;
but something in the humble and yet courageous tenacity of M.
Riviere's gaze made him reject this conclusion,
and he met the young man's question
with another.
"What is your object in speaking
to me of this?"
He had not
to wait a moment
for the answer.
"To beg you,
Monsieur--to beg you
with all the force I'm capable of--not
to let her go back.--Oh,
don't let her!"
M.
Riviere exclaimed.
Archer looked at him
with increasing astonishment.
There was no mistaking the sincerity of his distress or the strength of his determination:
he had evidently resolved
to let everything go by the board but the supreme need of thus putting himself on record.
Archer considered.
"May I ask,"
he said at length,
"if this is the line you took
with the Countess Olenska?"
M.
Riviere reddened,
but his eyes did not falter.
"No,
Monsieur:
I accepted my mission in good faith.
I really believed--for reasons I need not trouble you with--that it would be better
for Madame Olenska
to recover her situation,
her fortune,
the social consideration that her husband's standing gives her."
"So I supposed:
you could hardly have accepted such a mission otherwise."
"I should not have accepted it."
"Well,
then--?"
Archer paused again,
and their eyes met in another protracted scrutiny.
"Ah,
Monsieur,
after I had seen her,
after I had listened
to her,
I knew she was better off here."
"You knew--?"
"Monsieur,
I discharged my mission faithfully:
I put the Count's arguments,
I stated his offers,
without adding any comment of my own.
The Countess was good enough
to listen patiently;
she carried her goodness so far as
to see me twice;
she considered impartially all I had come
to say.
And it was in the course of these two talks that I changed my mind,
that I came
to see things differently."
"May I ask what led
to this change?"
"Simply seeing the change in HER,"
M.
Riviere replied.
"The change in her?
Then you knew her before?"
The young man's colour again rose.
"I used
to see her in her husband's house.
I have known Count Olenski
for many years.
You can imagine that he would not have sent a stranger on such a mission."
Archer's gaze,
wandering away
to the blank walls of the office,
rested on a hanging calendar surmounted by the rugged features of the President of the United States.
That such a conversation should be going on anywhere within the millions of square miles subject
to his rule seemed as strange as anything that the imagination could invent.
"The change--what sort of a change?"
"Ah,
Monsieur,
if I could tell you!"
M.
Riviere paused.
"Tenez--the discovery,
I suppose,
of what I'd never thought of before:
that she's an American.
And that if you're an American of HER kind--of your kind--things that are accepted in certain other societies,
or at least put up
with as part of a general convenient give-and- take--become unthinkable,
simply unthinkable.
If Madame Olenska's relations understood what these things were,
their opposition
to her returning would no doubt be as unconditional as her own;
but they seem
to regard her husband's wish
to have her back as proof of an irresistible longing
for domestic life."
M.
Riviere paused,
and then added:
"Whereas it's far from being as simple as that."
Archer looked back
to the President of the United States,
and then down at his desk and at the papers scattered on it.
For a second or two he could not trust himself
to speak.
During this interval he heard M.
Riviere's chair pushed back,
and was aware that the young man had risen.
When he glanced up again he saw that his visitor was as moved as himself.
"Thank you,"
Archer said simply.
"There's nothing
to thank me for,
Monsieur:
it is I,
rather--"
M.
Riviere broke off,
as if speech
for him too were difficult.
"I should like,
though,"
he continued in a firmer voice,
"to add one thing.
You asked me if I was in Count Olenski's employ.
I am at this moment:
I returned
to him,
a few months ago,
for reasons of private necessity such as may happen
to any one who has persons,
ill and older persons,
dependent on him.
But from the moment that I have taken the step of coming here
to say these things
to you I consider myself discharged,
and I shall tell him so on my return,
and give him the reasons.
That's all,
Monsieur."
M.
Riviere bowed and drew back a step.
"Thank you,"
Archer said again,
as their hands met.
XXVI.
Every year on the fifteenth of October Fifth Avenue opened its shutters,
unrolled its carpets and hung up its triple layer of window-curtains.
By the first of November this household ritual was over,
and society had begun
to look about and take stock of itself.
By the fifteenth the season was in full blast,
Opera and theatres were putting forth their new attractions,
dinner-engagements were accumulating,
and dates
for dances being fixed.
And punctually at about this time Mrs. Archer always said that New York was very much changed.
Observing it from the lofty stand-point of a non- participant,
she was able,
with the help of Mr. Sillerton Jackson and Miss Sophy,
to trace each new crack in its surface,
and all the strange weeds pushing up between the ordered rows of social vegetables.
It had been one of the amusements of Archer's youth
to wait
for this annual pronouncement of his mother's,
and
to hear her enumerate the minute signs of disintegration that his careless gaze had overlooked.
For New York,
to Mrs. Archer's mind,
never changed without changing
for the worse;
and in this view Miss Sophy Jackson heartily concurred.
Mr.Sillerton Jackson,
as became a man of the world,
suspended his judgment and listened
with an amused impartiality
to the lamentations of the ladies.
But even he never denied that New York had changed;
and Newland Archer,
in the winter of the second year of his marriage,
was himself obliged
to admit that if it had not actually changed it was certainly changing.
These points had been raised,
as usual,
at Mrs. Archer's Thanksgiving dinner.
At the date when she was officially enjoined
to give thanks
for the blessings of the year it was her habit
to take a mournful though not embittered stock of her world,
and wonder what there was
to be thankful for.
At any rate,
not the state of society;
society,
if it could be said
to exist,
was rather a spectacle on which
to call down Biblical imprecations-- and in fact,
every one knew what the Reverend Dr. Ashmore meant when he chose a text from Jeremiah
(chap.
ii.,
verse 25)
for his Thanksgiving sermon.
Dr.Ashmore,
the new Rector of St. Matthew's,
had been chosen because he was very
"advanced":
his sermons were considered bold in thought and novel in language.
When he fulminated against fashionable society he always spoke of its
"trend";
and
to Mrs. Archer it was terrifying and yet fascinating
to feel herself part of a community that was trending.
"There's no doubt that Dr. Ashmore is right:
there IS a marked trend,"
she said,
as if it were something visible and measurable,
like a crack in a house.
"It was odd,
though,
to preach about it on Thanksgiving,"
Miss Jackson opined;
and her hostess drily rejoined:
"Oh,
he means us
to give thanks
for what's left."
Archer had been wont
to smile at these annual vaticinations of his mother's;
but this year even he was obliged
to acknowledge,
as he listened
to an enumeration of the changes,
that the
"trend"
was visible.
"The extravagance in dress--"
Miss Jackson began.
"Sillerton took me
to the first night of the Opera,
and I can only tell you that Jane Merry's dress was the only one I recognised from last year;
and even that had had the front panel changed.
Yet I know she got it out from Worth only two years ago,
because my seamstress always goes in
to make over her Paris dresses before she wears them."
"Ah,
Jane Merry is one of US,"
said Mrs. Archer sighing,
as if it were not such an enviable thing
to be in an age when ladies were beginning
to flaunt abroad their Paris dresses as soon as they were out of the Custom House,
instead of letting them mellow under lock and key,
in the manner of Mrs. Archer's contemporaries.
"Yes;
she's one of the few.
In my youth,"
Miss Jackson rejoined,
"it was considered vulgar
to dress in the newest fashions;
and Amy Sillerton has always told me that in Boston the rule was
to put away one's Paris dresses
for two years.
Old Mrs. Baxter Pennilow,
who did everything handsomely,
used
to import twelve a year,
two velvet,
two satin,
two silk,
and the other six of poplin and the finest cashmere.
It was a standing order,
and as she was ill
for two years before she died they found forty-eight Worth dresses that had never been taken out of tissue paper;
and when the girls left off their mourning they were able
to wear the first lot at the Symphony concerts without looking in advance of the fashion."
"Ah,
well,
Boston is more conservative than New York;
but I always think it's a safe rule
for a lady
to lay aside her French dresses
for one season,"
Mrs.Archer conceded.
"It was Beaufort who started the new fashion by making his wife clap her new clothes on her back as soon as they arrived:
I must say at times it takes all Regina's distinction not
to look like .
.
.
like .
.
."
Miss Jackson glanced around the table,
caught Janey's bulging gaze,
and took refuge in an unintelligible murmur.
"Like her rivals,"
said Mr. Sillerton Jackson,
with the air of producing an epigram.
"Oh,--"
the ladies murmured;
and Mrs. Archer added,
partly
to distract her daughter's attention from forbidden topics:
"Poor Regina! Her Thanksgiving hasn't been a very cheerful one,
I'm afraid.
Have you heard the rumours about Beaufort's speculations,
Sillerton?"
Mr.Jackson nodded carelessly.
Every one had heard the rumours in question,
and he scorned
to confirm a tale that was already common property.
A gloomy silence fell upon the party.
No one really liked Beaufort,
and it was not wholly unpleasant
to think the worst of his private life;
but the idea of his having brought financial dishonour on his wife's family was too shocking
to be enjoyed even by his enemies.
Archer's New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations;
but in business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty.
It was a long time since any well- known banker had failed discreditably;
but every one remembered the social extinction visited on the heads of the firm when the last event of the kind had happened.
It would be the same
with the Beauforts,
in spite of his power and her popularity;
not all the leagued strength of the Dallas connection would save poor Regina if there were any truth in the reports of her husband's unlawful speculations.
The talk took refuge in less ominous topics;
but everything they touched on seemed
to confirm Mrs. Archer's sense of an accelerated trend.
"Of course,
Newland,
I know you let dear May go
to Mrs. Struthers's Sunday evenings--"
she began;
and May interposed gaily:
"Oh,
you know,
everybody goes
to Mrs. Struthers's now;
and she was invited
to Granny's last reception."
It was thus,
Archer reflected,
that New York managed its transitions:
conspiring
to ignore them till they were well over,
and then,
in all good faith,
imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.
There was always a traitor in the citadel;
and after he
(or generally she)
had surrendered the keys,
what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable?
Once people had tasted of Mrs. Struthers's easy Sunday hospitality they were not likely
to sit at home remembering that her champagne was transmuted Shoe-Polish.
"I know,
dear,
I know,"
Mrs.Archer sighed.
"Such things have
to be,
I suppose,
as long as AMUSEMENT is what people go out for;
but I've never quite forgiven your cousin Madame Olenska
for being the first person
to countenance Mrs. Struthers."
A sudden blush rose
to young Mrs. Archer's face;
it surprised her husband as much as the other guests about the table.
"Oh,
ELLEN--"
she murmured,
much in the same accusing and yet deprecating tone in which her parents might have said:
"Oh,
THE BLENKERS--."
It was the note which the family had taken
to sounding on the mention of the Countess Olenska's name,
since she had surprised and inconvenienced them by remaining obdurate
to her husband's advances;
but on May's lips it gave food
for thought,
and Archer looked at her
with the sense of strangeness that sometimes came over him when she was most in the tone of her environment.
His mother,
with less than her usual sensitiveness
to atmosphere,
still insisted:
"I've always thought that people like the Countess Olenska,
who have lived in aristocratic societies,
ought
to help us
to keep up our social distinctions,
instead of ignoring them."
May's blush remained permanently vivid:
it seemed
to have a significance beyond that implied by the recognition of Madame Olenska's social bad faith.
"I've no doubt we all seem alike
to foreigners,"
said Miss Jackson tartly.
"I don't think Ellen cares
for society;
but nobody knows exactly what she does care for,"
May continued,
as if she had been groping
for something noncommittal.
"Ah,
well--"
Mrs.Archer sighed again.
Everybody knew that the Countess Olenska was no longer in the good graces of her family.
Even her devoted champion,
old Mrs. Manson Mingott,
had been unable
to defend her refusal
to return
to her husband.
The Mingotts had not proclaimed their disapproval aloud:
their sense of solidarity was too strong.
They had simply,
as Mrs. Welland said,
"let poor Ellen find her own level"--and that,
mortifyingly and incomprehensibly,
was in the dim depths where the Blenkers prevailed,
and
"people who wrote"
celebrated their untidy rites.
It was incredible,
but it was a fact,
that Ellen,
in spite of all her opportunities and her privileges,
had become simply
"Bohemian."
The fact enforced the contention that she had made a fatal mistake in not returning
to Count Olenski.
After all,
a young woman's place was under her husband's roof,
especially when she had left it in circumstances that .
.
.
well .
.
.
if one had cared
to look into them .
.
.
"Madame Olenska is a great favourite
with the gentlemen,"
said Miss Sophy,
with her air of wishing
to put forth something conciliatory when she knew that she was planting a dart.
"Ah,
that's the danger that a young woman like Madame Olenska is always exposed to,"
Mrs.Archer mournfully agreed;
and the ladies,
on this conclusion,
gathered up their trains
to seek the carcel globes of the drawing-room,
while Archer and Mr. Sillerton Jackson withdrew
to the Gothic library.
Once established before the grate,
and consoling himself
for the inadequacy of the dinner by the perfection of his cigar,
Mr.Jackson became portentous and communicable.
"If the Beaufort smash comes,"
he announced,
"there are going
to be disclosures."
Archer raised his head quickly:
he could never hear the name without the sharp vision of Beaufort's heavy figure,
opulently furred and shod,
advancing through the snow at Skuytercliff.
"There's bound
to be,"
Mr.Jackson continued,
"the nastiest kind of a cleaning up.
He hasn't spent all his money on Regina."
"Oh,
well--that's discounted,
isn't it?
My belief is he'll pull out yet,"
said the young man,
wanting
to change the subject.
"Perhaps--perhaps.
I know he was
to see some of the influential people today.
Of course,"
Mr.Jackson reluctantly conceded,
"it's
to be hoped they can tide him over--this time anyhow.
I shouldn't like
to think of poor Regina's spending the rest of her life in some shabby foreign watering-place
for bankrupts."
Archer said nothing.
It seemed
to him so natural-- however tragic--that money ill-gotten should be cruelly expiated,
that his mind,
hardly lingering over Mrs. Beaufort's doom,
wandered back
to closer questions.
What was the meaning of May's blush when the Countess Olenska had been mentioned?
Four months had passed since the midsummer day that he and Madame Olenska had spent together;
and since then he had not seen her.
He knew that she had returned
to Washington,
to the little house which she and Medora Manson had taken there:
he had written
to her once--a few words,
asking when they were
to meet again--and she had even more briefly replied:
"Not yet."
Since then there had been no farther communication between them,
and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings.
Little by little it became the scene of his real life,
of his only rational activities;
thither he brought the books he read,
the ideas and feelings which nourished him,
his judgments and his visions.
Outside it,
in the scene of his actual life,
he moved
with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency,
blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room.
Absent--that was what he was:
so absent from everything most densely real and near
to those about him that it sometimes startled him
to find they still imagined he was there.
He became aware that Mr. Jackson was clearing his throat preparatory
to farther revelations.
"I don't know,
of course,
how far your wife's family are aware of what people say about--well,
about Madame Olenska's refusal
to accept her husband's latest offer."
Archer was silent,
and Mr. Jackson obliquely continued:
"It's a pity--it's certainly a pity--that she refused it."
"A pity?
In God's name,
why?"
Mr.Jackson looked down his leg
to the unwrinkled sock that joined it
to a glossy pump.
"Well--to put it on the lowest ground--what's she going
to live on now?"
"Now--?"
"If Beaufort--"
Archer sprang up,
his fist banging down on the black walnut-edge of the writing-table.
The wells of the brass double-inkstand danced in their sockets.
"What the devil do you mean,
sir?"
Mr.Jackson,
shifting himself slightly in his chair,
turned a tranquil gaze on the young man's burning face.
"Well--I have it on pretty good authority--in fact,
on old Catherine's herself--that the family reduced Countess Olenska's allowance considerably when she definitely refused
to go back
to her husband;
and as,
by this refusal,
she also forfeits the money settled on her when she married--which Olenski was ready
to make over
to her if she returned--why,
what the devil do YOU mean,
my dear boy,
by asking me what I mean?"
Mr.Jackson good-humouredly retorted.
Archer moved toward the mantelpiece and bent over
to knock his ashes into the grate.
"I don't know anything of Madame Olenska's private affairs;
but I don't need to,
to be certain that what you insinuate--"
"Oh,
I don't:
it's Lefferts,
for one,"
Mr.Jackson interposed.
"Lefferts--who made love
to her and got snubbed
for it!"
Archer broke out contemptuously.
"Ah--DID he?"
snapped the other,
as if this were exactly the fact he had been laying a trap for.
He still sat sideways from the fire,
so that his hard old gaze held Archer's face as if in a spring of steel.
"Well,
well:
it's a pity she didn't go back before Beaufort's cropper,"
he repeated.
"If she goes NOW,
and if he fails,
it will only confirm the general impression:
which isn't by any means peculiar
to Lefferts,
by the way.
"Oh,
she won't go back now:
less than ever!"
Archer had no sooner said it than he had once more the feeling that it was exactly what Mr. Jackson had been waiting for.
The old gentleman considered him attentively.
"That's your opinion,
eh?
Well,
no doubt you know.
But everybody will tell you that the few pennies Medora Manson has left are all in Beaufort's hands;
and how the two women are
to keep their heads above water unless he does,
I can't imagine.
Of course,
Madame Olenska may still soften old Catherine,
who's been the most inexorably opposed
to her staying;
and old Catherine could make her any allowance she chooses.
But we all know that she hates parting
with good money;
and the rest of the family have no particular interest in keeping Madame Olenska here."
Archer was burning
with unavailing wrath:
he was exactly in the state when a man is sure
to do something stupid,
knowing all the while that he is doing it.
He saw that Mr. Jackson had been instantly struck by the fact that Madame Olenska's differences
with her grandmother and her other relations were not known
to him,
and that the old gentleman had drawn his own conclusions as
to the reasons
for Archer's exclusion from the family councils.
This fact warned Archer
to go warily;
but the insinuations about Beaufort made him reckless.
He was mindful,
however,
if not of his own danger,
at least of the fact that Mr. Jackson was under his mother's roof,
and consequently his guest.
Old New York scrupulously observed the etiquette of hospitality,
and no discussion
with a guest was ever allowed
to degenerate into a disagreement.
"Shall we go up and join my mother?"
he suggested curtly,
as Mr. Jackson's last cone of ashes dropped into the brass ashtray at his elbow.
On the drive homeward May remained oddly silent;
through the darkness,
he still felt her enveloped in her menacing blush.
What its menace meant he could not guess:
but he was sufficiently warned by the fact that Madame Olenska's name had evoked it.
They went upstairs,
and he turned into the library.
She usually followed him;
but he heard her passing down the passage
to her bedroom.
"May!"
he called out impatiently;
and she came back,
with a slight glance of surprise at his tone.
"This lamp is smoking again;
I should think the servants might see that it's kept properly trimmed,"
he grumbled nervously.
"I'm so sorry:
it shan't happen again,"
she answered,
in the firm bright tone she had learned from her mother;
and it exasperated Archer
to feel that she was already beginning
to humour him like a younger Mr. Welland.
She bent over
to lower the wick,
and as the light struck up on her white shoulders and the clear curves of her face he thought:
"How young she is!
for what endless years this life will have
to go on!"
He felt,
with a kind of horror,
his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.
"Look here,"
he said suddenly,
"I may have
to go
to Washington
for a few days--soon;
next week perhaps."
Her hand remained on the key of the lamp as she turned
to him slowly.
The heat from its flame had brought back a glow
to her face,
but it paled as she looked up.
"On business?"
she asked,
in a tone which implied that there could be no other conceivable reason,
and that she had put the question automatically,
as if merely
to finish his own sentence.
"On business,
naturally.
There's a patent case coming up before the Supreme Court--"
He gave the name of the inventor,
and went on furnishing details
with all Lawrence Lefferts's practised glibness,
while she listened attentively,
saying at intervals:
"Yes,
I see."
"The change will do you good,"
she said simply,
when he had finished;
"and you must be sure
to go and see Ellen,"
she added,
looking him straight in the eyes
with her cloudless smile,
and speaking in the tone she might have employed in urging him not
to neglect some irksome family duty.
It was the only word that passed between them on the subject;
but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant:
"Of course you understand that I know all that people have been saying about Ellen,
and heartily sympathise
with my family in their effort
to get her
to return
to her husband.
I also know that,
for some reason you have not chosen
to tell me,
you have advised her against this course,
which all the older men of the family,
as well as our grandmother,
agree in approving;
and that it is owing
to your encouragement that Ellen defies us all,
and exposes herself
to the kind of criticism of which Mr. Sillerton Jackson probably gave you,
this evening,
the hint that has made you so irritable.
.
.
.
Hints have indeed not been wanting;
but since you appear unwilling
to take them from others,
I offer you this one myself,
in the only form in which well-bred people of our kind can communicate unpleasant things
to each other:
by letting you understand that I know you mean
to see Ellen when you are in Washington,
and are perhaps going there expressly
for that purpose;
and that,
since you are sure
to see her,
I wish you
to do so
with my full and explicit approval-- and
to take the opportunity of letting her know what the course of conduct you have encouraged her in is likely
to lead to."
Her hand was still on the key of the lamp when the last word of this mute message reached him.
She turned the wick down,
lifted off the globe,
and breathed on the sulky flame.
"They smell less if one blows them out,"
she explained,
with her bright housekeeping air.
On the threshold she turned and paused
for his kiss.
XXVII.
Wall Street,
the next day,
had more reassuring reports of Beaufort's situation.
They were not definite,
but they were hopeful.
It was generally understood that he could call on powerful influences in case of emergency,
and that he had done so
with success;
and that evening,
when Mrs. Beaufort appeared at the Opera wearing her old smile and a new emerald necklace,
society drew a breath of relief.
New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities.
So far there had been no exception
to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of probity must pay;
and every one was aware that even Beaufort and Beaufort's wife would be offered up unflinchingly
to this principle.
But
to be obliged
to offer them up would be not only painful but inconvenient.
The disappearance of the Beauforts would leave a considerable void in their compact little circle;
and those who were too ignorant or too careless
to shudder at the moral catastrophe bewailed in advance the loss of the best ball-room in New York.
Archer had definitely made up his mind
to go
to Washington.
He was waiting only
for the opening of the law-suit of which he had spoken
to May,
so that its date might coincide
with that of his visit;
but on the following Tuesday he learned from Mr. Letterblair that the case might be postponed
for several weeks.
Nevertheless,
he went home that afternoon determined in any event
to leave the next evening.
The chances were that May,
who knew nothing of his professional life,
and had never shown any interest in it,
would not learn of the postponement,
should it take place,
nor remember the names of the litigants if they were mentioned before her;
and at any rate he could no longer put off seeing Madame Olenska.
There were too many things that he must say
to her.
On the Wednesday morning,
when he reached his office,
Mr.Letterblair met him
with a troubled face.
Beaufort,
after all,
had not managed to
"tide over";
but by setting afloat the rumour that he had done so he had reassured his depositors,
and heavy payments had poured into the bank till the previous evening,
when disturbing reports again began
to predominate.
In consequence,
a run on the bank had begun,
and its doors were likely
to close before the day was over.
The ugliest things were being said of Beaufort's dastardly manoeuvre,
and his failure promised
to be one of the most discreditable in the history of Wall Street.
The extent of the calamity left Mr. Letterblair white and incapacitated.
"I've seen bad things in my time;
but nothing as bad as this.
Everybody we know will be hit,
one way or another.
And what will be done about Mrs. Beaufort?
What CAN be done about her?
I pity Mrs. Manson Mingott as much as anybody:
coming at her age,
there's no knowing what effect this affair may have on her.
She always believed in Beaufort--she made a friend of him! And there's the whole Dallas connection:
poor Mrs. Beaufort is related
to every one of you.
Her only chance would be
to leave her husband--yet how can any one tell her so?
Her duty is at his side;
and luckily she seems always
to have been blind
to his private weaknesses."
There was a knock,
and Mr. Letterblair turned his head sharply.
"What is it?
I can't be disturbed."
A clerk brought in a letter
for Archer and withdrew.
Recognising his wife's hand,
the young man opened the envelope and read:
"Won't you please come up town as early as you can?
Granny had a slight stroke last night.
In some mysterious way she found out before any one else this awful news about the bank.
Uncle Lovell is away shooting,
and the idea of the disgrace has made poor Papa so nervous that he has a temperature and can't leave his room.
Mamma needs you dreadfully,
and I do hope you can get away at once and go straight
to Granny's."
Archer handed the note
to his senior partner,
and a few minutes later was crawling northward in a crowded horse-car,
which he exchanged at Fourteenth Street
for one of the high staggering omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line.
It was after twelve o'clock when this laborious vehicle dropped him at old Catherine's.
The sitting-room window on the ground floor,
where she usually throned,
was tenanted by the inadequate figure of her daughter,
Mrs.Welland,
who signed a haggard welcome as she caught sight of Archer;
and at the door he was met by May.
The hall wore the unnatural appearance peculiar
to well-kept houses suddenly invaded by illness:
wraps and furs lay in heaps on the chairs,
a doctor's bag and overcoat were on the table,
and beside them letters and cards had already piled up unheeded.
May looked pale but smiling:
Dr.Bencomb,
who had just come
for the second time,
took a more hopeful view,
and Mrs. Mingott's dauntless determination
to live and get well was already having an effect on her family.
May led Archer into the old lady's sitting-room,
where the sliding doors opening into the bedroom had been drawn shut,
and the heavy yellow damask portieres dropped over them;
and here Mrs. Welland communicated
to him in horrified undertones the details of the catastrophe.
It appeared that the evening before something dreadful and mysterious had happened.
At about eight o'clock,
just after Mrs. Mingott had finished the game of solitaire that she always played after dinner,
the door-bell had rung,
and a lady so thickly veiled that the servants did not immediately recognise her had asked
to be received.
The butler,
hearing a familiar voice,
had thrown open the sitting-room door,
announcing:
"Mrs.
Julius Beaufort"--and had then closed it again on the two ladies.
They must have been together,
he thought,
about an hour.
When Mrs. Mingott's bell rang Mrs. Beaufort had already slipped away unseen,
and the old lady,
white and vast and terrible,
sat alone in her great chair,
and signed
to the butler
to help her into her room.
She seemed,
at that time,
though obviously distressed,
in complete control of her body and brain.
The mulatto maid put her
to bed,
brought her a cup of tea as usual,
laid everything straight in the room,
and went away;
but at three in the morning the bell rang again,
and the two servants,
hastening in at this unwonted summons
(for old Catherine usually slept like a baby),
had found their mistress sitting up against her pillows
with a crooked smile on her face and one little hand hanging limp from its huge arm.
The stroke had clearly been a slight one,
for she was able
to articulate and
to make her wishes known;
and soon after the doctor's first visit she had begun
to regain control of her facial muscles.
But the alarm had been great;
and proportionately great was the indignation when it was gathered from Mrs. Mingott's fragmentary phrases that Regina Beaufort had come
to ask her--incredible effrontery!--to back up her husband,
see them through--not to
"desert"
them,
as she called it--in fact
to induce the whole family
to cover and condone their monstrous dishonour.
"I said
to her:
"Honour's always been honour,
and honesty honesty,
in Manson Mingott's house,
and will be till I'm carried out of it feet first,'"
the old woman had stammered into her daughter's ear,
in the thick voice of the partly paralysed.
"And when she said:
`But my name,
Auntie--my name's Regina Dallas,'
I said:
`It was Beaufort when he covered you
with jewels,
and it's got
to stay Beaufort now that he's covered you
with shame.'
"
So much,
with tears and gasps of horror,
Mrs.Welland imparted,
blanched and demolished by the unwonted obligation of having at last
to fix her eyes on the unpleasant and the discreditable.
"If only I could keep it from your father-in-law:
he always says:
`Augusta,
for pity's sake,
don't destroy my last illusions'
--and how am I
to prevent his knowing these horrors?"
the poor lady wailed.
"After all,
Mamma,
he won't have SEEN them,"
her daughter suggested;
and Mrs. Welland sighed:
"Ah,
no;
thank heaven he's safe in bed.
And Dr. Bencomb has promised
to keep him there till poor Mamma is better,
and Regina has been got away somewhere."
Archer had seated himself near the window and was gazing out blankly at the deserted thoroughfare.
It was evident that he had been summoned rather
for the moral support of the stricken ladies than because of any specific aid that he could render.
Mr.Lovell Mingott had been telegraphed for,
and messages were being despatched by hand
to the members of the family living in New York;
and meanwhile there was nothing
to do but
to discuss in hushed tones the consequences of Beaufort's dishonour and of his wife's unjustifiable action.
Mrs.Lovell Mingott,
who had been in another room writing notes,
presently reappeared,
and added her voice
to the discussion.
In THEIR day,
the elder ladies agreed,
the wife of a man who had done anything disgraceful in business had only one idea:
to efface herself,
to disappear
with him.
"There was the case of poor Grandmamma Spicer;
your great-grandmother,
May.
Of course,"
Mrs.Welland hastened
to add,
"your great- grandfather's money difficulties were private--losses at cards,
or signing a note
for somebody--I never quite knew,
because Mamma would never speak of it.
But she was brought up in the country because her mother had
to leave New York after the disgrace,
whatever it was:
they lived up the Hudson alone,
winter and summer,
till Mamma was sixteen.
It would never have occurred
to Grandmamma Spicer
to ask the family
to `countenance'
her,
as I understand Regina calls it;
though a private disgrace is nothing compared
to the scandal of ruining hundreds of innocent people."
"Yes,
it would be more becoming in Regina
to hide her own countenance than
to talk about other people's,"
Mrs.Lovell Mingott agreed.
"I understand that the emerald necklace she wore at the Opera last Friday had been sent on approval from Ball and Black's in the afternoon.
I wonder if they'll ever get it back?"
Archer listened unmoved
to the relentless chorus.
The idea of absolute financial probity as the first law of a gentleman's code was too deeply ingrained in him
for sentimental considerations
to weaken it.
An adventurer like Lemuel Struthers might build up the millions of his Shoe Polish on any number of shady dealings;
but unblemished honesty was the noblesse oblige of old financial New York.
Nor did Mrs. Beaufort's fate greatly move Archer.
He felt,
no doubt,
more sorry
for her than her indignant relatives;
but it seemed
to him that the tie between husband and wife,
even if breakable in prosperity,
should be indissoluble in misfortune.
As Mr. Letterblair had said,
a wife's place was at her husband's side when he was in trouble;
but society's place was not at his side,
and Mrs. Beaufort's cool assumption that it was seemed almost
to make her his accomplice.
The mere idea of a woman's appealing
to her family
to screen her husband's business dishonour was inadmissible,
since it was the one thing that the Family,
as an institution,
could not do.
The mulatto maid called Mrs. Lovell Mingott into the hall,
and the latter came back in a moment
with a frowning brow.
"She wants me
to telegraph
for Ellen Olenska.
I had written
to Ellen,
of course,
and
to Medora;
but now it seems that's not enough.
I'm
to telegraph
to her immediately,
and
to tell her that she's
to come alone."
The announcement was received in silence.
Mrs.Welland sighed resignedly,
and May rose from her seat and went
to gather up some newspapers that had been scattered on the floor.
"I suppose it must be done,"
Mrs.Lovell Mingott continued,
as if hoping
to be contradicted;
and May turned back toward the middle of the room.
"Of course it must be done,"
she said.
"Granny knows what she wants,
and we must carry out all her wishes.
Shall I write the telegram
for you,
Auntie?
If it goes at once Ellen can probably catch tomorrow morning's train."
She pronounced the syllables of the name
with a peculiar clearness,
as if she had tapped on two silver bells.
"Well,
it can't go at once.
Jasper and the pantry-boy are both out
with notes and telegrams."
May turned
to her husband
with a smile.
"B