The Age of Innocence
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 portières 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 close-clipped 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