The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton [red novels .txt] 📗
- Author: Edith Wharton
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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 dressmakers, 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
eyebrows 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
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