The Age of Innocence
"_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 simple-hearted 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