The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton [red novels .txt] 📗
- Author: Edith Wharton
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planted heron wing in her fur cap, and the way a dark
curl lay like a flattened vine spiral on each cheek above
the ear. His mind, as always when they first met, was
wholly absorbed in the delicious details that made her
herself and no other. Presently he rose and approached
the case before which she stood. Its glass shelves were
crowded with small broken objects—hardly recognisable
domestic utensils, ornaments and personal trifles—made
of glass, of clay, of discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances.
“It seems cruel,” she said, “that after a while nothing
matters … any more than these little things, that used
to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and
now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass
and labelled: `Use unknown.’”
“Yes; but meanwhile—”
“Ah, meanwhile—”
As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her
hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn
down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose,
and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring
with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that
this pure harmony of line and colour should ever suffer
the stupid law of change.
“Meanwhile everything matters—that concerns you,”
he said.
She looked at him thoughtfully, and turned back to
the divan. He sat down beside her and waited; but
suddenly he heard a step echoing far off down the
empty rooms, and felt the pressure of the minutes.
“What is it you wanted to tell me?” she asked, as if
she had received the same warning.
“What I wanted to tell you?” he rejoined. “Why,
that I believe you came to New York because you were
afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Of my coming to Washington.”
She looked down at her muff, and he saw her hands
stir in it uneasily.
“Well—?”
“Well—yes,” she said.
“You WERE afraid? You knew—?”
“Yes: I knew …”
“Well, then?” he insisted.
“Well, then: this is better, isn’t it?” she returned with
a long questioning sigh.
“Better—?”
“We shall hurt others less. Isn’t it, after all, what you
always wanted?”
“To have you here, you mean—in reach and yet out
of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It’s the
very reverse of what I want. I told you the other day
what I wanted.”
She hesitated. “And you still think this—worse?”
“A thousand times!” He paused. “It would be easy
to lie to you; but the truth is I think it detestable.”
“Oh, so do I!” she cried with a deep breath of relief.
He sprang up impatiently. “Well, then—it’s my turn
to ask: what is it, in God’s name, that you think
better?”
She hung her head and continued to clasp and unclasp
her hands in her muff. The step drew nearer, and
a guardian in a braided cap walked listlessly through
the room like a ghost stalking through a necropolis.
They fixed their eyes simultaneously on the case opposite
them, and when the official figure had vanished
down a vista of mummies and sarcophagi Archer spoke
again.
“What do you think better?”
Instead of answering she murmured: “I promised
Granny to stay with her because it seemed to me that
here I should be safer.”
“From me?”
She bent her head slightly, without looking at him.
“Safer from loving me?”
Her profile did not stir, but he saw a tear overflow
on her lashes and hang in a mesh of her veil.
“Safer from doing irreparable harm. Don’t let us be
like all the others!” she protested.
“What others? I don’t profess to be different from
my kind. I’m consumed by the same wants and the
same longings.”
She glanced at him with a kind of terror, and he saw
a faint colour steal into her cheeks.
“Shall I—once come to you; and then go home?” she
suddenly hazarded in a low clear voice.
The blood rushed to the young man’s forehead.
“Dearest!” he said, without moving. It seemed as if he
held his heart in his hands, like a full cup that the least
motion might overbrim.
Then her last phrase struck his ear and his face
clouded. “Go home? What do you mean by going
home?”
“Home to my husband.”
“And you expect me to say yes to that?”
She raised her troubled eyes to his. “What else is
there? I can’t stay here and lie to the people who’ve
been good to me.”
“But that’s the very reason why I ask you to come
away!”
“And destroy their lives, when they’ve helped me to
remake mine?”
Archer sprang to his feet and stood looking down on
her in inarticulate despair. It would have been easy to
say: “Yes, come; come once.” He knew the power she
would put in his hands if she consented; there would
be no difficulty then in persuading her not to go back
to her husband.
But something silenced the word on his lips. A sort
of passionate honesty in her made it inconceivable that
he should try to draw her into that familiar trap. “If I
were to let her come,” he said to himself, “I should
have to let her go again.” And that was not to be
imagined.
But he saw the shadow of the lashes on her wet
cheek, and wavered.
“After all,” he began again, “we have lives of our
own… . There’s no use attempting the impossible.
You’re so unprejudiced about some things, so used, as
you say, to looking at the Gorgon, that I don’t know
why you’re afraid to face our case, and see it as it
really is—unless you think the sacrifice is not worth
making.”
She stood up also, her lips tightening under a rapid
frown.
“Call it that, then—I must go,” she said, drawing her
little watch from her bosom.
She turned away, and he followed and caught her by
the wrist. “Well, then: come to me once,” he said, his
head turning suddenly at the thought of losing her; and
for a second or two they looked at each other almost
like enemies.
“When?” he insisted. “Tomorrow?”
She hesitated. “The day after.”
“Dearest—!” he said again.
She had disengaged her wrist; but for a moment they
continued to hold each other’s eyes, and he saw that
her face, which had grown very pale, was flooded with
a deep inner radiance. His heart beat with awe: he felt
that he had never before beheld love visible.
“Oh, I shall be late—goodbye. No, don’t come any
farther than this,” she cried, walking hurriedly away
down the long room, as if the reflected radiance in his
eyes had frightened her. When she reached the door she
turned for a moment to wave a quick farewell.
Archer walked home alone. Darkness was falling when
he let himself into his house, and he looked about at
the familiar objects in the hall as if he viewed them
from the other side of the grave.
The parlour-maid, hearing his step, ran up the stairs
to light the gas on the upper landing.
“Is Mrs. Archer in?”
“No, sir; Mrs. Archer went out in the carriage after
luncheon, and hasn’t come back.”
With a sense of relief he entered the library and flung
himself down in his armchair. The parlour-maid followed,
bringing the student lamp and shaking some
coals onto the dying fire. When she left he continued to
sit motionless, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his
clasped hands, his eyes fixed on the red grate.
He sat there without conscious thoughts, without
sense of the lapse of time, in a deep and grave amazement
that seemed to suspend life rather than quicken it.
“This was what had to be, then … this was what had
to be,” he kept repeating to himself, as if he hung in
the clutch of doom. What he had dreamed of had been
so different that there was a mortal chill in his rapture.
The door opened and May came in.
“I’m dreadfully late—you weren’t worried, were you?”
she asked, laying her hand on his shoulder with one of
her rare caresses.
He looked up astonished. “Is it late?”
“After seven. I believe you’ve been asleep!” She
laughed, and drawing out her hat pins tossed her velvet
hat on the sofa. She looked paler than usual, but sparkling
with an unwonted animation.
“I went to see Granny, and just as I was going away
Ellen came in from a walk; so I stayed and had a long
talk with her. It was ages since we’d had a real talk… .”
She had dropped into her usual armchair, facing his,
and was running her fingers through her rumpled hair.
He fancied she expected him to speak.
“A really good talk,” she went on, smiling with what
seemed to Archer an unnatural vividness. “She was so
dear—just like the old Ellen. I’m afraid I haven’t been
fair to her lately. I’ve sometimes thought—”
Archer stood up and leaned against the mantelpiece,
out of the radius of the lamp.
“Yes, you’ve thought—?” he echoed as she paused.
“Well, perhaps I haven’t judged her fairly. She’s so
different—at least on the surface. She takes up such
odd people—she seems to like to make herself conspicuous.
I suppose it’s the life she’s led in that fast European
society; no doubt we seem dreadfully dull to her.
But I don’t want to judge her unfairly.”
She paused again, a little breathless with the
unwonted length of her speech, and sat with her lips
slightly parted and a deep blush on her cheeks.
Archer, as he looked at her, was reminded of the
glow which had suffused her face in the Mission Garden
at St. Augustine. He became aware of the same
obscure effort in her, the same reaching out toward
something beyond the usual range of her vision.
“She hates Ellen,” he thought, “and she’s trying to
overcome the feeling, and to get me to help her to
overcome it.”
The thought moved him, and for a moment he was
on the point of breaking the silence between them, and
throwing himself on her mercy.
“You understand, don’t you,” she went on, “why
the family have sometimes been annoyed? We all did
what we could for her at first; but she never seemed to
understand. And now this idea of going to see Mrs.
Beaufort, of going there in Granny’s carriage! I’m afraid
she’s quite alienated the van der Luydens …”
“Ah,” said Archer with an impatient laugh. The
open door had closed between them again.
“It’s time to dress; we’re dining out, aren’t we?” he
asked, moving from the fire.
She rose also, but lingered near the hearth. As he
walked past her she moved forward impulsively, as
though to detain him: their eyes met, and he saw that
hers were of the same swimming blue as when he had
left her to drive to Jersey City.
She flung her arms about his neck and pressed her
cheek to his.
“You haven’t kissed me today,” she said in a whisper;
and he felt her tremble in his arms.
XXXII.
At the court of the Tuileries,” said Mr. Sillerton
Jackson with his reminiscent smile, “such things
were pretty openly tolerated.”
The scene was the van der Luydens’ black walnut
dining-room in Madison Avenue, and the time the evening
after Newland Archer’s visit to the Museum of
Art. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had
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