The Age of Innocence
fluttered out of the drawing-room window. As usual, she was
extraordinarily festooned and bedizened, with a limp Leghorn hat
anchored to her head by many windings of faded gauze, and a little
black velvet parasol on a carved ivory handle absurdly balanced over
her much larger hatbrim.
"My dear Newland, I had no idea that you and May had
arrived! You yourself came only yesterday, you say? Ah,
business--business--professional duties ... I understand. Many
husbands, I know, find it impossible to join their wives here except
for the week-end." She cocked her head on one side and languished at
him through screwed-up eyes. "But marriage is one long sacrifice, as I
used often to remind my Ellen--"
Archer's heart stopped with the queer jerk which it had given once
before, and which seemed suddenly to slam a door between himself and
the outer world; but this break of continuity must have been of the
briefest, for he presently heard Medora answering a question he had
apparently found voice to put.
"No, I am not staying here, but with the Blenkers, in their delicious
solitude at Portsmouth. Beaufort was kind enough to send his famous
trotters for me this morning, so that I might have at least a glimpse
of one of Regina's garden-parties; but this evening I go back to rural
life. The Blenkers, dear original beings, have hired a primitive old
farm-house at Portsmouth where they gather about them representative
people ..." She drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim, and added
with a faint blush: "This week Dr. Agathon Carver is holding a series
of Inner Thought meetings there. A contrast indeed to this gay scene
of worldly pleasure--but then I have always lived on contrasts! To me
the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware of monotony;
it's the mother of all the deadly sins. But my poor child is going
through a phase of exaltation, of abhorrence of the world. You know,
I suppose, that she has declined all invitations to stay at Newport,
even with her grandmother Mingott? I could hardly persuade her to come
with me to the Blenkers', if you will believe it! The life she leads is
morbid, unnatural. Ah, if she had only listened to me when it was still
possible ... When the door was still open ... But shall we go down and
watch this absorbing match? I hear your May is one of the competitors."
Strolling toward them from the tent Beaufort advanced over the lawn,
tall, heavy, too tightly buttoned into a London frock-coat, with one of
his own orchids in its buttonhole. Archer, who had not seen him for two
or three months, was struck by the change in his appearance. In the hot
summer light his floridness seemed heavy and bloated, and but for his
erect square-shouldered walk he would have looked like an over-fed and
over-dressed old man.
There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Beaufort. In the spring
he had gone off on a long cruise to the West Indies in his new
steam-yacht, and it was reported that, at various points where he
had touched, a lady resembling Miss Fanny Ring had been seen in his
company. The steam-yacht, built in the Clyde, and fitted with tiled
bath-rooms and other unheard-of luxuries, was said to have cost him
half a million; and the pearl necklace which he had presented to his
wife on his return was as magnificent as such expiatory offerings
are apt to be. Beaufort's fortune was substantial enough to stand
the strain; and yet the disquieting rumours persisted, not only in
Fifth Avenue but in Wall Street. Some people said he had speculated
unfortunately in railways, others that he was being bled by one of
the most insatiable members of her profession; and to every report of
threatened insolvency Beaufort replied by a fresh extravagance: the
building of a new row of orchid-houses, the purchase of a new string
of race-horses, or the addition of a new Meissonnier or Cabanel to his
picture-gallery.
He advanced toward the Marchioness and Newland with his usual
half-sneering smile. "Hullo, Medora! Did the trotters do their
business? Forty minutes, eh? ... Well, that's not so bad, considering
your nerves had to be spared." He shook hands with Archer, and then,
turning back with them, placed himself on Mrs. Manson's other side, and
said, in a low voice, a few words which their companion did not catch.
The Marchioness replied by one of her queer foreign jerks, and a "_Que
voulez-vous?_" which deepened Beaufort's frown; but he produced a good
semblance of a congratulatory smile as he glanced at Archer to say:
"You know May's going to carry off the first prize."
"Ah, then it remains in the family," Medora rippled; and at that moment
they reached the tent and Mrs. Beaufort met them in a girlish cloud of
mauve muslin and floating veils.
May Welland was just coming out of the tent. In her white dress, with a
pale green ribbon about the waist and a wreath of ivy on her hat, she
had the same Diana-like aloofness as when she had entered the Beaufort
ball-room on the night of her engagement. In the interval not a thought
seemed to have passed behind her eyes or a feeling through her heart;
and though her husband knew that she had the capacity for both he
marvelled afresh at the way in which experience dropped away from her.
She had her bow and arrow in her hand, and placing herself on the
chalk-mark traced on the turf she lifted the bow to her shoulder and
took aim. The attitude was so full of a classic grace that a murmur
of appreciation followed her appearance, and Archer felt the glow of
proprietorship that so often cheated him into momentary well-being. Her
rivals--Mrs. Reggie Chivers, the Merry girls, and divers rosy Thorleys,
Dagonets and Mingotts, stood behind her in a lovely anxious group,
brown heads and golden bent above the scores, and pale muslins and
flower-wreathed hats mingled in a tender rainbow. All were young and
pretty, and bathed in summer bloom; but not one had the nymph-like ease
of his wife, when, with tense muscles and happy frown, she bent her
soul upon some feat of strength.
"Gad," Archer heard Lawrence Lefferts say, "not one of the lot holds
the bow as she does"; and Beaufort retorted: "Yes; but that's the only
kind of target she'll ever hit."
Archer felt irrationally angry. His host's contemptuous tribute to
May's "niceness" was just what a husband should have wished to hear
said of his wife. The fact that a coarse-minded man found her lacking
in attraction was simply another proof of her quality; yet the words
sent a faint shiver through his heart. What if "niceness" carried to
that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before
an emptiness? As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her
final bull's-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted that
curtain.
She took the congratulations of her rivals and of the rest of the
company with the simplicity that was her crowning grace. No one could
ever be jealous of her triumphs because she managed to give the feeling
that she would have been just as serene if she had missed them. But
when her eyes met her husband's her face glowed with the pleasure she
saw in his.
Mrs. Welland's basket-work pony-carriage was waiting for them, and they
drove off among the dispersing carriages, May handling the reins and
Archer sitting at her side.
The afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright lawns and
shrubberies, and up and down Bellevue Avenue rolled a double line of
victorias, dog-carts, landaus and "vis-à-vis," carrying well-dressed
ladies and gentlemen away from the Beaufort garden-party, or homeward
from their daily afternoon turn along the Ocean Drive.
"Shall we go to see Granny?" May suddenly proposed. "I should like to
tell her myself that I've won the prize. There's lots of time before
dinner."
Archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down Narragansett Avenue,
crossed Spring Street and drove out toward the rocky moorland beyond.
In this unfashionable region Catherine the Great, always indifferent
to precedent and thrifty of purse, had built herself in her youth
a many-peaked and cross-beamed _cottage-orné_ on a bit of cheap land
overlooking the bay. Here, in a thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs
spread themselves above the island-dotted waters. A winding drive
led up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of
geraniums to a front door of highly-varnished walnut under a striped
verandah-roof; and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and yellow
star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square
rooms with heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an Italian
house-painter had lavished all the divinities of Olympus. One of these
rooms had been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott when the burden of
flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining one she spent her days,
enthroned in a large armchair between the open door and window, and
perpetually waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious projection
of her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person that the air it
set in motion stirred only the fringe of the anti-macassars on the
chair-arms.
Since she had been the means of hastening his marriage old Catherine
had shown to Archer the cordiality which a service rendered excites
toward the person served. She was persuaded that irrepressible
passion was the cause of his impatience; and being an ardent admirer
of impulsiveness (when it did not lead to the spending of money) she
always received him with a genial twinkle of complicity and a play of
allusion to which May seemed fortunately impervious.
She examined and appraised with much interest the diamond-tipped
arrow which had been pinned on May's bosom at the conclusion of the
match, remarking that in her day a filigree brooch would have been
thought enough, but that there was no denying that Beaufort did things
handsomely.
"Quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear," the old lady chuckled. "You
must leave it in fee to your eldest girl." She pinched May's white
arm and watched the colour flood her face. "Well, well, what have I
said to make you shake out the red flag? Ain't there going to be any
daughters--only boys, eh? Good gracious, look at her blushing again
all over her blushes! What--can't I say that either? Mercy me--when
my children beg me to have all those gods and goddesses painted out
overhead I always say I'm too thankful to have somebody about me that
_nothing_ can shock!"
Archer burst into a laugh, and May echoed it, crimson to the eyes.
"Well, now tell me all about the party, please, my dears, for I shall
never get a straight word about it out of that silly Medora," the
ancestress continued; and, as May exclaimed: "Cousin Medora? But I
thought she was going back to Portsmouth?" she answered placidly: "So
she is--but she's got to come here first to pick up Ellen. Ah--you
didn't know Ellen had come to spend the day with me? Such fol-de-rol,
her not coming for the summer; but I gave up arguing with young people
about fifty years ago. Ellen--_Ellen_!" she cried in her shrill old
voice, trying to bend forward far enough to catch a glimpse of the lawn
beyond the verandah.
There was no answer, and Mrs. Mingott rapped impatiently with her stick
on the shiny floor. A mulatto maid-servant in a bright turban, replying
to the summons, informed her mistress that she had seen "Miss Ellen"
going down the path to the shore; and Mrs. Mingott turned to Archer.
"Run down and fetch her, like a good grandson; this pretty lady will
describe the party to me," she said; and Archer stood up as if in a
dream.
He had heard the Countess Olenska's name pronounced often enough during
the year and a half since they had last met, and was even familiar
with the main incidents of her life in the interval. He knew that