The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton [red novels .txt] 📗

lashes. She was still extremely pale, but her face

had a curious tranquillity of expression that seemed

drawn from some secret inner source.

 

Archer checked the conventional phrases of self-accusal

that were crowding to his lips. He was determined to

put the case baldly, without vain recrimination or excuse.

 

“Madame Olenska—” he said; but at the name his

wife raised her hand as if to silence him. As she did so

the gaslight struck on the gold of her wedding-ring,

 

“Oh, why should we talk about Ellen tonight?” she

asked, with a slight pout of impatience.

 

“Because I ought to have spoken before.”

 

Her face remained calm. “Is it really worth while,

dear? I know I’ve been unfair to her at times—perhaps

we all have. You’ve understood her, no doubt, better

than we did: you’ve always been kind to her. But what

does it matter, now it’s all over?”

 

Archer looked at her blankly. Could it be possible

that the sense of unreality in which he felt himself

imprisoned had communicated itself to his wife?

 

“All over—what do you mean?” he asked in an

indistinct stammer.

 

May still looked at him with transparent eyes. “Why—

since she’s going back to Europe so soon; since Granny

approves and understands, and has arranged to make

her independent of her husband—”

 

She broke off, and Archer, grasping the corner of the

mantelpiece in one convulsed hand, and steadying himself

against it, made a vain effort to extend the same

control to his reeling thoughts.

 

“I supposed,” he heard his wife’s even voice go on,

“that you had been kept at the office this evening

about the business arrangements. It was settled this

morning, I believe.” She lowered her eyes under his

unseeing stare, and another fugitive flush passed over

her face.

 

He understood that his own eyes must be unbearable,

and turning away, rested his elbows on the mantelshelf and covered his face. Something drummed and

clanged furiously in his ears; he could not tell if it were

the blood in his veins, or the tick of the clock on the

mantel.

 

May sat without moving or speaking while the clock

slowly measured out five minutes. A lump of coal fell

forward in the grate, and hearing her rise to push it

back, Archer at length turned and faced her.

 

“It’s impossible,” he exclaimed.

 

“Impossible—?”

 

“How do you know—what you’ve just told me?”

 

“I saw Ellen yesterday—I told you I’d seen her at

Granny’s.”

 

“It wasn’t then that she told you?”

 

“No; I had a note from her this afternoon.—Do you

want to see it?”

 

He could not find his voice, and she went out of the

room, and came back almost immediately.

 

“I thought you knew,” she said simply.

 

She laid a sheet of paper on the table, and Archer put

out his hand and took it up. The letter contained only a

few lines.

 

“May dear, I have at last made Granny understand

that my visit to her could be no more than a visit; and

she has been as kind and generous as ever. She sees

now that if I return to Europe I must live by myself, or

rather with poor Aunt Medora, who is coming with

me. I am hurrying back to Washington to pack up, and

we sail next week. You must be very good to Granny

when I’m gone—as good as you’ve always been to me.

Ellen.

 

“If any of my friends wish to urge me to change my

mind, please tell them it would be utterly useless.”

 

Archer read the letter over two or three times; then

he flung it down and burst out laughing.

 

The sound of his laugh startled him. It recalled Janey’s

midnight fright when she had caught him rocking with

incomprehensible mirth over May’s telegram announcing

that the date of their marriage had been advanced.

 

“Why did she write this?” he asked, checking his

laugh with a supreme effort.

 

May met the question with her unshaken candour. “I

suppose because we talked things over yesterday—”

 

“What things?”

 

“I told her I was afraid I hadn’t been fair to her—

hadn’t always understood how hard it must have been

for her here, alone among so many people who were

relations and yet strangers; who felt the right to criticise,

and yet didn’t always know the circumstances.”

She paused. “I knew you’d been the one friend she

could always count on; and I wanted her to know that

you and I were the same—in all our feelings.”

 

She hesitated, as if waiting for him to speak, and

then added slowly: “She understood my wishing to tell

her this. I think she understands everything.”

 

She went up to Archer, and taking one of his cold

hands pressed it quickly against her cheek.

 

“My head aches too; good-night, dear,” she said,

and turned to the door, her torn and muddy wedding-dress dragging after her across the room.

 

XXXIII.

 

It was, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland,

a great event for a young couple to give their first

big dinner.

 

The Newland Archers, since they had set up their

household, had received a good deal of company in an

informal way. Archer was fond of having three or four

friends to dine, and May welcomed them with the

beaming readiness of which her mother had set her the

example in conjugal affairs. Her husband questioned

whether, if left to herself, she would ever have asked

any one to the house; but he had long given up trying

to disengage her real self from the shape into which

tradition and training had moulded her. It was

expected that well-off young couples in New York should

do a good deal of informal entertaining, and a Welland

married to an Archer was doubly pledged to the

tradition.

 

But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two

borrowed footmen, with Roman punch, roses from

Henderson’s, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was a different

affair, and not to be lightly undertaken. As Mrs. Archer

remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference;

not in itself but by its manifold implications—since it

signified either canvasbacks or terrapin, two soups, a

hot and a cold sweet, full decolletage with short sleeves,

and guests of a proportionate importance.

 

It was always an interesting occasion when a young

pair launched their first invitations in the third person,

and their summons was seldom refused even by the

seasoned and sought-after. Still, it was admittedly a

triumph that the van der Luydens, at May’s request,

should have stayed over in order to be present at her

farewell dinner for the Countess Olenska.

 

The two mothers-in-law sat in May’s drawing-room

on the afternoon of the great day, Mrs. Archer writing

out the menus on Tiffany’s thickest gilt-edged bristol,

while Mrs. Welland superintended the placing of the

palms and standard lamps.

 

Archer, arriving late from his office, found them still

there. Mrs. Archer had turned her attention to the

name-cards for the table, and Mrs. Welland was

considering the effect of bringing forward the large gilt

sofa, so that another “corner” might be created

between the piano and the window.

 

May, they told him, was in the dining-room inspecting

the mound of Jacqueminot roses and maidenhair in

the centre of the long table, and the placing of the

Maillard bonbons in openwork silver baskets between

the candelabra. On the piano stood a large basket of

orchids which Mr. van der Luyden had had sent from

Skuytercliff. Everything was, in short, as it should be

on the approach of so considerable an event.

 

Mrs. Archer ran thoughtfully over the list, checking

off each name with her sharp gold pen.

 

“Henry van der Luyden—Louisa—the Lovell Mingotts

—the Reggie Chiverses—Lawrence Lefferts and

Gertrude—(yes, I suppose May was right to have

them)—the Selfridge Merrys, Sillerton Jackson, Van

Newland and his wife. (How time passes! It seems only

yesterday that he was your best man, Newland)—and

Countess Olenska—yes, I think that’s all… .”

 

Mrs. Welland surveyed her son-in-law affectionately.

“No one can say, Newland, that you and May are not

giving Ellen a handsome send-off.”

 

“Ah, well,” said Mrs. Archer, “I understand May’s

wanting her cousin to tell people abroad that we’re not

quite barbarians.”

 

“I’m sure Ellen will appreciate it. She was to arrive

this morning, I believe. It will make a most charming

last impression. The evening before sailing is usually so

dreary,” Mrs. Welland cheerfully continued.

 

Archer turned toward the door, and his mother-in-law called to him: “Do go in and have a peep at the

table. And don’t let May tire herself too much.” But he

affected not to hear, and sprang up the stairs to his

library. The room looked at him like an alien countenance

composed into a polite grimace; and he perceived

that it had been ruthlessly “tidied,” and prepared,

by a judicious distribution of ashtrays and cedar-wood

boxes, for the gentlemen to smoke in.

 

“Ah, well,” he thought, “it’s not for long—” and he

went on to his dressing-room.

 

Ten days had passed since Madame Olenska’s departure

from New York. During those ten days Archer

had had no sign from her but that conveyed by the

return of a key wrapped in tissue paper, and sent to his

office in a sealed envelope addressed in her hand. This

retort to his last appeal might have been interpreted as

a classic move in a familiar game; but the young man

chose to give it a different meaning. She was still fighting

against her fate; but she was going to Europe, and

she was not returning to her husband. Nothing, therefore,

was to prevent his following her; and once he had

taken the irrevocable step, and had proved to her that

it was irrevocable, he believed she would not send him

away.

 

This confidence in the future had steadied him to

play his part in the present. It had kept him from

writing to her, or betraying, by any sign or act, his

misery and mortification. It seemed to him that in the

deadly silent game between them the trumps were still

in his hands; and he waited.

 

There had been, nevertheless, moments sufficiently

difficult to pass; as when Mr. Letterblair, the day after

Madame Olenska’s departure, had sent for him to go

over the details of the trust which Mrs. Manson Mingott

wished to create for her granddaughter. For a couple of

hours Archer had examined the terms of the deed with

his senior, all the while obscurely feeling that if he had

been consulted it was for some reason other than the

obvious one of his cousinship; and that the close of the

conference would reveal it.

 

“Well, the lady can’t deny that it’s a handsome

arrangement,” Mr. Letterblair had summed up, after

mumbling over a summary of the settlement. “In fact

I’m bound to say she’s been treated pretty handsomely

all round.”

 

“All round?” Archer echoed with a touch of

derision. “Do you refer to her husband’s proposal to give

her back her own money?”

 

Mr. Letterblair’s bushy eyebrows went up a fraction

of an inch. “My dear sir, the law’s the law; and your

wife’s cousin was married under the French law. It’s to

be presumed she knew what that meant.”

 

“Even if she did, what happened subsequently—.”

But Archer paused. Mr. Letterblair had laid his pen-handle against his big corrugated nose, and was looking

down it with the expression assumed by virtuous

elderly gentlemen when they wish their youngers to

understand that virtue is not synonymous with ignorance.

 

“My dear sir, I’ve no wish to extenuate the Count’s

transgressions; but—but on the other side …